A Face in Every Window (3 page)

Mam closed the door, and I stuffed my hands down in my back pockets. I didn't want her dragging me somewhere else that I didn't want to go.

"We need a fresh start, JP, and I have a plan. A really marvelous plan."

"I
'LL BE RIGHT BACK
," Mam said, leaving me standing in front of the living room closet. I closed the door and waited for Mam. When she returned she had in her hands the
Philadelphia
magazine she'd thumbed to death back at the hospital. She flipped it open to a page in the back. "Read this," she said, handing it to me.

^*
CONTEST.
Send $200 and a 500-word essay: Why I want to own this house. 1840s stone farmhouse, slate roof, 6 bedrooms, 4 fireplaces, country kitchen, LR, DR, parlor, two-story sunporch all glass, some repair required, overlooking woods, small cabin, close to town—New Hope, PA. Winner announced Aug. 1.

I looked up from the ad. Mam's eyes danced, her face beamed like a child's. And I felt old, as old as Grandma Mary.

I handed her back the magazine. "This isn't real, Mam. This is one of those come-ons. You'd just be throwing two hundred dollars down the drain. Sorry. We'll get used to it here. I'll move into Grandma Mary's room and we'll be all right again, you'll see. You can learn to cook. All of the recipes are in her file, and—"

"No, JP," Mam interrupted. "No! I've already mailed off my essay. I mailed it yesterday, with the two hundred dollars. I wrote it in the hospital." Mam blushed. "Mike helped me. See, I've already made plans. That's what I wanted to tell you, what I couldn't talk to Mike about over the phone because I hadn't told you yet. He's going to send out a real estate agent tomorrow. He's going to help us sell this place, and we're going to move into that farmhouse."

"Mam! That's crazy. I can't believe Dr. Mike didn't stop you. Even if this thing's for real, what makes you think you'll win? You've just thrown away two hundred dollars. And what do you think 'some repair required' means? The place is a dump!" I spun away from her. "I can't believe this! I can't believe this! What are we going to do way out in New Hope? My school is here, your work's in Philadelphia. New Hope's at least an hour away from here. I can't believe this!"

Mam let me rant on, and the next day and the day after she let me sulk—while a couple of real estate agents walked through our home, while one man came out to make an estimate on the cost of fixing up the yard and another to make an estimate on painting the house. She told Pap her plans and the two of them locked arms and jumped up and down in the kitchen, and for the millionth time I wished Grandma Mary were still alive. They thought nothing about the reality
of the situation. Mam acted as if she already owned the farmhouse, telling neighbors where we were moving, describing the house but not showing them the ad or the picture; she didn't want any more competition. She began to clean out our rooms, all except Grandma Mary's bedroom. She said she couldn't bring herself to go through all of that yet, and I said I thought she was probably feeling guilty.

"You go in her room and she's in there. You know it, you can feel it. You know she's angry."

"JP, that's nonsense," Mam said. "That's ghost talk and I don't believe in ghosts. I'm not feeling guilty at all."

Meanwhile the painter came and slopped white paint on our house. The house had always been yellow, but Dr. Mike's real estate agent said white would sell better, so they painted it white. The yardman dug up our whole yard, turning over the earth, planting grass seed, blocking off the area with a foot-high fence and a sign saying
KEEP OFF
. Pap ignored the sign and the fence, walking there often and lying out on the dirt every evening to look at the Nativity. He'd come in later with clumps of dirt dropping off his backside as he walked, and smelling of manure. Mam bought him a folding beach chair and told him to set it out on the sidewalk so the grass could grow; we couldn't live in the big stone farmhouse if the lawn here didn't look nice.

Then Larry Seeley, my good friend Tim's druggie brother, started hanging around Mam. He had been living in the city, but while Mam was in the hospital he'd come back home, claiming he was clean. Then his parents kicked him back out of the house when Mr. Seeley caught him in the bathroom popping some pills. I guess he had nowhere to go, so he came
to our house. He sat in Grandma Mary's kitchen, puffing away on his cigarette, flipping back his long hair, or pulling on the strands of denim around the holes in his jeans, and talked to Mam about vegetarianism as if it were some kind of religion. He talked about cruelty to animals, fats and hormones and other serious problems associated with eating meat, and brought over some vegetarian cookbooks from the library.

Within a few short days, he had convinced Mam that meadess was the way to go. We became lacto-ovo vegetarians, which meant we drank milk and ate eggs but no meat, poultry, or fish. Mam started cooking us all kinds of tofu and seaweed foods Larry recommended, and I couldn't decide if Mam was a bad cook or the food just didn't taste good. But I did know that I didn't appreciate Larry butting into our business.

Mam had bought a wok to cook in instead of using Grandma Mary's frying pans, and a food processor to take the place of Grandma Mary's mixer, and I asked her how we could suddenly afford all these purchases, how we were going to pay the painter and the yardman when she hadn't even gone back to work. Mam said we had lots of insurance money from Grandma Mary.

We were using her money to buy our way out of her house. The whole thing seemed wrong to me.

When Aunt Colleen found out what was going on, she came over to set Mam straight.

"I hate to say it," she said, "but next to marrying Patrick, this has to be the stupidest thing you've ever come up with."

Mam took a sip of her coffee, nibbled on a fortune
cookie, then folded her hands back in her lap. She was giving her the Dear Pap treatment, patient, waiting, letting Aunt Colleen have her say.

"Really! A house in New Hope. Do you think they'll just give you a house for two hundred dollars? The whole thing is rigged. They collect the money from a few thousand people from all over the country, and then they give the house to a relative. Honestly, baby, you haven't got a prayer.

"Now, there are some cute little houses in Langhorne I could show you. Little Capes that are just as charming as can be."

Mam shook her head. "No, I'll take the stone farmhouse in New Hope."

Aunt Colleen stamped her foot. "But that's just it. You can't
take
it. No one's going to
give
it to you. You think it's just that easy? You think people hand over big old farmhouses every day, because you want one? You've got to earn it. You've got to go out and earn the money. You can't just sit here expecting everything to be handed to you. Mary O'Brien's dead. Our parents are dead, and our only brother's a monk locked up miles away from here. You're not going to be coddled anymore, Erin. It's time you woke up."

Dear Pap came into the house then and heard Aunt Colleen's voice. "It's Colleen!" he cried. He shuffle-ran into the living room and hugged Colleen, squeezing her around her arms and waist. Aunt Colleen squirmed in his arms, trying to break free. She made a face as if he smelled bad.

"Patrick, that's enough. I'm so very glad to see you, but that's enough." Pap let go of her and she pulled down her suit jacket and fussed with the bracelets on her wrists. "You need
to learn to control your emotions better, Patrick. Do you know what emotions are?"

Aunt Colleen always tried to teach Pap something when she saw him. I believed she thought if she could just get hold of him for a couple of weeks she could turn him into a genius.

Mam told Pap to have a seat and help himself to a couple of cookies. Pap sat down and dug right in. He loved this new discovery of the fortune cookie. He hated the taste, said they tasted like soap, but he loved the fortunes. One day he got into the cellophane bag and broke open all the cookies, jammed the fortunes down in the pocket of his khakis, and claimed he had the most good luck in all the world. Mam said she wasn't going to buy another bag until every last broken cookie was eaten, so Pap got me to eat them all. Since then I've never cared much for the cookies or the fortunes.

Aunt Colleen watched Pap grab a handful of the cookies, examine them, and then put all but two back. She shook her head and said she had to leave.

"But think about what I said, Erin," she added, scurrying stiff-legged in her narrow skirt to the front door. "You could buy yourself a nice little home, a real step up from this place. I agree with you there, you do need to move. This neighborhood's been going downhill for years."

Even though she was somewhat on my side about the house issue, I felt glad to see her leave, and so did Mam. But still, Aunt Colleen was better than what came after her. The real estate agent set the
FOR SALE
sign up in our yard and we had a steady stream of nosy people touring our home.

I tried to make myself as scarce as possible. School had ended. I had taken my final exams, got my As for the year,
and said good-bye to some teachers I prayed I'd get to see again the next year. I spent a lot of time playing basketball down at the school, or hanging out back at the creek with Tim Seeley, either fishing or pitching stones. When I got hungry or needed a rest, I went to the Seeleys' house, not mine. I felt like Pap, running off every day, but I didn't think anyone would miss me.

Mam had started taking driving lessons from Dr. Mike. She had gone back to work, so they met in the evenings three times a week. Mam even managed to squeeze a dinner into the deal, leaving me and Pap to fend for ourselves. Pap never thought about food unless someone called him in to eat, so I didn't concern myself with giving him dinner anymore; it was Mam's problem.

Then one night, coming home from the Seeleys' and feeling good about just sitting around having a real father-son-type conversation with Mr. Seeley, I discovered Pap sitting outside in his beach chair staring up openmouthed at the Nativity set, his back hunched forward, his hands dangling off the armrests. I remembered what he'd said to me the night I'd gone out to talk with him when Mam was in the hospital—"I'm all alone now"—and seeing him sitting there I felt his loneliness, and my own guilt at having been so happy to spend the evening with Tim and his father. I sat down on the concrete next to him. "Have you stopped roaming, Pap?" I asked. "I hope so. I've missed you."

Pap sat quiet for a minute, and then he said, shrugging, "I'm tired is why. That's all. I'm tired."

I looked at his face in the pale light of the Nativity, and he looked so serious, as if he were considering something deep,
as if he were Mr. Seeley, and I felt more guilty than ever because I had wished earlier that night what I had wished a hundred times before, that Mr. Seeley, and not Pap, were my father.

Although Pap claimed he was staying home more because he felt tired, I wondered if Pap felt jealous of the amount of time Mam spent with Dr. Mike. I noticed that he didn't hug Dr. Mike when he saw him, and Pap hugged everybody. He hugged me just about every time he saw me, even if we had been apart for as little as five minutes.

Dr. Mike would ride up in his sporty BMW and honk the horn for Mam. He never came inside our house. At first Pap used to come out to greet him and try to talk to him through his car window. He even asked if the doctor would teach him how to drive.

"I can ride a bicycle, you know."

"Yes, Patrick, I'm sure you can," Dr. Mike said, running his hand over one of his curly eyebrows as though trying to smooth it down.

"Yes, I can, but you don't think so, and I know that you don't, but I can too ride a bike and I'll show you."

Pap ran to fetch his bicycle out of the garage and Mam came out of the house ready for her driving lesson.

Dr. Mike put the car in Drive and I told them to hold on, adding for Mam's benefit that Pap said he wanted to show Dr. Mike that he could ride a bike.

Dr. Mike sighed and Mam, looking first at him and then at me, said, "Tell Pap I'll watch him when we get back. Mike only gets a couple of hours, and it's so nice of him to spend
them teaching me how to drive." Mam set her hand on Dr. Mike's leg—just for a second, but I caught it.

Dr. Mike pulled away with a nod of his head, and out came Pap on his bike. He raced down the street after them, his baseball cards sputtering in the spokes of his wheels. He called, "Hey, wait for me!" and Mam stuck her head out the window and said how great he looked and that she'd be home in a couple of hours.

After that, Pap stopped visiting with Dr. Mike when he drove up, and if Pap happened to be sitting in his beach chair at the time, he didn't bother to turn around and wave. He didn't even startle when Dr. Mike sounded his horn.

I tried to talk to Mam about the driving lessons and dinners, to question her about what was going on between her and Dr. Mike, and Mam said I read too much into things. "You watch too much television," she said.

"I don't watch any television, and you know it. Your saying that just shows how guilty you are. You're reaching, Mam. Pap knows what's going on, and if he knows then so does everyone else."

"What? What do you think is going on?" Before I could answer she said, "I'll tell you what's going on. I'll tell you what it's all about"

She started breathing hard and making this wheezing sound, gulping in air every few words.

"When Mary died, I didn't know—I didn't know what I was going to do. I don't know how to care for your father and you all by myself. I told you that. When I got sick I was so depressed, lying in that hospital bed. I'm always sick, always
lying in some bed. I felt so desperate, I couldn't get well. To tell you the truth, I don't think I really wanted to get well, and then Mike—Mike saw—he knew what was happening, and he brought me the magazine, the one with the contest in it He talked me into entering it He gave me something to look forward to, and I told him I couldn't—I couldn't do it, I didn't know how, and he said, Til be there.' Just like that That's all it was, but I knew he meant it, and not in any wrong or sexual way, JP. He said, Til get you through it. You don't have to worry.' And that's all this is. In a month or so he'll stop coming by altogether. But right now he's teaching me how to drive and he's just being there for me for a while. He's just being a friend."