A Table By the Window (17 page)

****

The best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray,
Dale thought, frowning. Faintly he could hear the engine roar of an advancing log truck. He touched the keypad of the dash-mounted Stalker ATR police radar to measure oncoming-vehicle speed. He had a feeling he would use up his ticket book today. It was either this or give vent to frustration by going home and screaming into his pillow. Which did absolutely no earthly good. How well he knew!

****

Not only did Kay Chapman bring a contract in the morning—she also brought a sign for the front yard.

Well, that's done,
Carley thought as Kay's Lexus pulled out of the driveway. Ruby Moore, checking her mailbox, crossed the street.

“Oh dear, are you leaving soon?”

“Next Monday. Thursday I'll be moving in with my aunt and uncle.”

“Then I insist you come for supper tonight.”

“You've already done enough,” Carley protested.

Ruby waved a hand. “I have to eat anyway. I'm just going to bake a chicken in my clay roaster and steam some broccoli.”

But she also prepared something new to Carley's experience: grits. Not served with butter, as she would have supposed, but in a casserole with melted cheddar and garlic. They were quite good, once Carley became used to the texture. They played UNO afterward, something Carley had not done since leaving the Redding group home.

Mrs. Templeton brought over another jar of figs the following morning. Carley gave her a paisley silk scarf she had decided should go next door instead of in the Salvation Army box. And Gayle Payne telephoned her at Grandma's Attic with an invitation to supper.

The rest of the week sailed by. A truck from Van Dyke Freight came for the four pieces of furniture and two boxes on Thursday morning. Carley moved in with Aunt Helen and Uncle Rory after work, returning to the house Friday morning to meet the truck from Renaissance Consignment. The two workers carted off everything but the appliances, as Kay had advised keeping them would make the house more marketable.

Tallulah lost to Oak Grove by one point that evening. Voices were hoarse from yelling, spirits subdued as Carley helped the Beta Club parents clean the concession stand. She had volunteered simply in the hopes of making amends with Blake. To her relief, he was cordial. But he did not apologize for the harsh things he had said. Perhaps he was embarrassed.

And perhaps that was the real reason for his not coming over to the Hudsons' the next evening for Carley's lasagna.

“He has a little headache,” Sherry said, not quite meeting Carley's eyes.

Even though Jenna had already given Carley a paycheck the day before, she brought over a coral necklace Sunday afternoon as a thank-you gift, and Stanley and Loretta Malone stopped by to wish her a safe flight.

As Uncle Rory backed the Roadmaster out of the driveway Monday morning, Carley opened her mouth to ask him to drive over to Third Street before leaving town. She closed it again. That was already his intention, she realized instinctively as Main Street's stop sign drew closer. And sure enough, he turned right instead of left.

Aunt Helen did not ask why they were heading south, nor did she seem surprised.

So that's what it means to have a family, Carley thought, eyes filling. People who knew the desires of her heart, because they cared enough to imagine what they might be.

“Don't pull in,” she asked as they neared the house. She wanted to see it all and, from a distance, have a picture in her mind to go with the one Kay Chapman had promised to send from the listing. But there was no point to getting out of the car. As her bond with the house grew, she had kept in the back of her mind that she would have to let it go. Another lesson from childhood. However deep she allowed affection to go, would be how deep she'd feel the pain later. One fond look and then detach.

Detaching from her aunt and uncle proved more difficult. As she embraced both dear old souls, she found herself promising to come back for a visit in a year or so.

“I'm praying for your safe trip, Carley,” Aunt Helen said.

Carley did not mind. If God indeed listened to prayers, surely those of Aunt Helen found His ear.

“Did you have a nice holiday?” Mrs. Kordalewski called from the mail alcove after Carley wheeled her carryon into the lobby on Monday afternoon.

“Very nice, thank you,” Carley called back.

“Wait and I will go up with you—so we can visit.”

At this final leg of the long journey, Carley desired nothing more than to get up to her apartment. But she waited.

“We have missed our schoolteacher friend,” the old woman said when the elevator doors closed.

Feeling guilty for her impatience, Carley thanked her and asked, “How is your husband?”

“Ah, that man! He bought four of the movies called
Rocky
at the synagogue rummage sale for fifty cents each, and so he asked our granddaughter to find us a good deal on a VCR.”

“Why don't you just borrow mine? I never use it.”

“Thank you, but we would not like to do that. What if it breaks? And anyway, Julie bought the VCR already. Only she tried to get Shimon to get a new kind of machine she says is better.”

“A DVD player?”

Mrs. Kordalewski nodded. “Shimon asked if he could watch his
Rocky
movies on the DVD, and Julie said no, but we could buy the same ones better on…”

“Disks,” Carley supplied.

“Yes, that was it.” The elevator doors parted, and they stepped out into the hall. “And then Shimon asked what he would do with the movies he bought, and Julie said they were cheap, just to throw them away. He said that was no good, such a waste, just get the VCR.”

She passed a spotted hand over her face. “He wanted to fight in the ring when he was a young man, but his father made him go to pharmaceutical school. And so now he watches the
Rocky
movies, sometimes two in the same day. He is hard of hearing, you know. I already came to check the mail two times, even though I knew it was too early, just to get away from the noise.”

Carley would have found the situation comical if not for the distress in Mrs. Kordalewski's face. An idea popped into her head. “Did you know that you can buy earphones for televisions? He would be the only person able to hear it.”

The sparse brows raised hopefully. “And where can you buy such things?”

“Any electronics store. I tell you what, I have to run errands tomorrow. I'll pick up a set.”

“How much do they cost?”

“They're very cheap. Not more than two or three dollars.”

You're such a liar,
Carley chided herself inside her living room. She was discovering that the best thing about having money was the freedom it gave her to do something for someone else. But she understood Mrs. Kordalewski's pride, that she would insist upon repaying her.

Telemarketers took up most of the space on Carley's answering machine. But there were two messages from Jan Terris. Weary as she was, Carley picked up the receiver and dialed.

Please let it be good news,
she thought, leaning against the counter, listening to the first, second rings, and the
Rocky
theme song coming through the wall.

“Alton is so happy, back in his old school,” Mrs. Terris said. “He rejoined the choir and the drama club—he was too intimidated to do anything that stood out at Emerson-Wake.”

“I'm so happy to hear that,” Carley said as her fatigue evaporated.

“I promised Alton I would check on you. When you didn't return my calls, I called the school. The secretary said you'd resigned. We've been worried.”

Carley explained where she had been for the past three weeks. “I just walked in a half hour ago. It was kind of you to worry.”

“Well, I'm just glad you're safe and sound. Alton will be too. But what will you do now?”

“Look for a job. And a house across the Bay within commuting distance.”

“I hope you find both,” Mrs. Terris said.

Tuesday, after signing up for the civil service examination at the State Employment Agency, Carley had an excellent turkey avocado sandwich on eight-grain bread at a little café on Hyde Street. She admired the art-deco layout of the menu and the warm colors of the decor, the soothing, unobtrusive background music and relaxed atmosphere.

Tallulah really needs one of these,
she thought, munching on a kosher spear. Surely one day someone besides Blake would come up with the idea.

She bought earphones at RadioShack, groceries at Safeway—and indulged in the luxury of a taxi ride home instead of struggling with bags on the bus. The answering machine blinked with another message from Jan Terris, asking Carley to call.

“A friend of my husband's, a Bruce Temple, is CEO of a software company, and they have a position open for a catalog proofreader. He says it's yours if you want it.”

“Just like that?” Carley said.

Mrs. Terris laughed. “That's how it is in business.”

****

“There are seven people in our catalog department,” said Bruce Temple, a fortyish man with family photographs in his office at Pragmatic Software, Incorporated, on 43
^rd
Avenue. The position paid eighty-seven dollars a month more than teaching at Emerson-Wake, and Carley was assigned a quiet cubicle with only the clicks of fingers against keyboards and piped in soft instrumental music as background. Even if the job—combing software instructions and advertisements for any grammar or punctuation or typographical errors—was boring, at least she did not have the stress of maintaining discipline over anyone but herself.

“You have saved my life!” Mrs. Kordalewski popped in to say with a coconut cake in her hands. “Shimon, he says he hears better with the earphones, and so we are both happy.”

“I'm so glad,” Carley said.

With three and a half months remaining on her lease and no place for the items that would be arriving from Tallulah, she rented a unit in a personal storage facility on the corner of 11th and Mission Streets. And because, in May, she would have to sign another lease for at least six months or move before June first, she spent every free hour house hunting across the Bay.

They were far more expensive than she had imagined. For under two hundred thousand dollars, she could only hope to buy a small condominium unit. By April's end, Whitney Martin, the agent from Tanner & Associates had alerted her to two possibilities in Walnut Creek and Concord. Whitney possessed none of Kay Chapman's constraints against applying pressure, but Carley had made it clear that she would not sign a purchase agreement until her house had sold.

Becoming debt free was the most exhilarating experience she had ever known, and she intended to stay that way for as long as humanly possible. Lodged deep in her memory were the times she had had to screen telephone calls for her mother, lying to collectors and enduring their verbal abuse. Owing money gave other people power over your life. Too many people had held that power in her life. She would be her own woman, or die trying.

There were a few bites on the house, back in Tallulah. A young family signed a purchase agreement but failed to secure a loan because of extensive credit card debt. An older couple made three walk-through appointments, but ended up buying a mobile home on ten acres. A man from Jackson who invested in rural properties bid sixty thousand. Kay did not even bring the offer to Carley.

“I knew you wouldn't want to
give
the house away,” she said over the telephone.

Carley agreed.

“Don't be discouraged,” Aunt Helen consoled on Saturday, the nineteenth of April. They took turns telephoning, every other week or so. Though Carley had called just last Tuesday, she was the one to call again this time.

“Life just moves more slowly down here,” her aunt went on. “People take a long time making up their minds.”

“My real estate agent keeps telling me I should go ahead and buy a condominium, then pay it off when the house sells.”

“Well, that's an option. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“Would you do it?” Carley asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I've lived long enough to look back and regret almost every decision I allowed fear to pressure me into making.”

Carley was about to reply, respectfully, that fear was not the issue, when she realized that it was the
only
issue. Fear of losing the condominiums to another buyer. Fear of how long it might be before any others came on the market that she could afford. Fear of having to extend her apartment lease. Even fear of annoying the real estate agent.

She was not even especially fond of either condominium. The one in Walnut Creek was short on closet space, and the kitchen in the Concord unit was as small as her apartment kitchen and had counter tiles the color of Pepto-Bismol.

“I should wait, shouldn't I?” Carley said. Just the thought unclenched the knot in her stomach.

“Perhaps you should, dear.”

Carley's throat thickened. “I'm so glad I have you in my life, Aunt Helen.”

There was a pause. Perhaps her aunt was experiencing the same emotions, for her voice was softer when she replied, “You're a dear girl, Carley. And it's as if God is giving me a chance to make up for neglecting my sister.”

Whitney Martin called three evenings later. “You've lost out on Concord. The loan officer at Guaranty Bank says you can get a mortgage for the Walnut Creek unit based on the equity on your house with no prepayment penalty, over the telephone in less than a week.”

“I don't want to borrow any money,” Carley reminded her.

“Then, why didn't you wait until
after
you sold your house to start looking?” the agent said crisply.

It was a fair question. Carley admitted, “I should have done that.”