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Authors: Jane Rule

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BOOK: Against the Season
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“Shall I get the phone?” someone asked.

Dina didn’t answer.

“It’s Miss A, Dina,” the same voice said. “She wants to talk to you, if that’s all right.”

Dina put the bottle of beer down carefully between her feet, got up, and backed away from it. To anyone else, if she had bothered to take the call, she would have said, “I don’t
repair
furniture,” but to Miss A, Dina would say yes to whatever request. It was not that she had her eye on pieces of furniture in the house, though there were some she would have loved to buy. Neither Miss B nor Miss A would ever sell anything. It wasn’t, either, that the old Larson ladies were people no one refused, though that was true. Dina liked old people generally, particularly antiques like Ida Setworth. Still, she could say no to Ida Setworth. Miss A was, Dina tried to explain, “one of a kind.” Not her lameness, no, not that. And Dina had seen better faces. Miss A’s tended to pudding when she was tired. She was open and closed, open to know and still complete in herself. What she asked for was all that she ever wanted.

“Yes,” Dina said, “tonight as soon as I’ve closed the shop… No, not for supper, thanks, Miss A, but I’ll have a sherry with you before I go.”

The effort of that kept Dina from getting all the way back to the door. She settled in her old chair instead, a seat left vacant for her even when the shop was crowded. It turned partly away from the stove and the couch, not quite toward a remarkably orderly desk. From it, she could seem to turn her back and still watch the front area of the shop. And she could hear, without getting involved in, the arguments about baseball scores or narcs or how much it didn’t cost to get to Mexico, usually quietly going on under the sounds of the radio.

The street door opened and Grace Hill walked into the shop, a long-boned, expensive woman with migraine eyes and an unalterable mouth. She started a look toward Dina and then veered away. She was too nervous to browse with books. Instead she got very aggressive with chairs, shaking them, turning them upside down, even lifting one or two off the wall where Dina had hung several sets.

“How much are these?” she finally called.

Price is on the bottom,” Dina replied, without looking over or moving.

“I’d like to be shown,” Grace Hill said.

The others by the stove watched Dina for the moment before she moved, knowing it was a contest. Dina got up, walked over, and lifted half a dozen chairs off the wall.

“I don’t really want chairs,” Grace Hill said.

Dina yawned through her ears.

“Couldn’t you come and have a drink?”

“Don’t close the shop until six.”

“Perhaps I’ll come back.”

Dina did not respond one way or the other. Grace Hill waited, then turned and walked out.

“Tight ass,” one of the boys commented.

“Don’t be mouthy about her broads,” another said.

“What’s mouthy?”

“Tight ass,” Dina agreed, and she reached out to pour herself and the others coffee.

If Grace Hill did come back at six, Dina was not there to know it. She had locked up at five-thirty in order to get to Miss A’s to pick up the chest and drink a glass of sherry.

Since Dina had wrecked her sports car two years ago and spent three months in the hospital in traction, she had not owned a car. She drove instead her ancient junk truck, a reliable traffic hazard, built before automobiles became the first self-destruct art object. Sometimes it was reluctant to start, but there was nowhere in town that Dina couldn’t get a push from a gang of kids or a bank manager. And, if she missed the light at M Street and therefore didn’t get a run on the hill, she could always turn the truck around and back up, a sight familiar to local drivers and accepted by the police. This evening she was lucky and arrived at the crest of P Street at a sturdy ten miles an hour, only five or six patient cars behind her. Because of the high hedges around the Larson house, Dina did not see Rosemary Hopwood’s car until she had turned into the drive. She sat in the high seat of her truck for a moment, leaning on the steering wheel. Then she cupped her ears in her hands, incidentally flattening the wings of her dark, strong hair.

“Hi, Dina,” Cole called, coming across the drive from the side garden.

She gave him a minimal salute.

“I came about the chest.”

“It’s in the front hall. I’ll help you carry it out,” Cole said. “Then Cousin A says you’ll stay for sherry.”

“She’s got company,” Dina said.

“Just Miss Hopwood about Kathy.”

“What’s the matter with Kathy?”

“Well, you know, it’s about time…” Cole said.

She followed him to the house, and together they carried out the chest either of them could have managed quite easily alone, but because Cole had nothing but goodwill invested in the gesture, Dina accepted it. She felt, with a dim kindness, sorry for Cole Westaway. He let so little out but goodwill. “The kind of guy to grow up to be everybody’s left-hand man,” her cousin Nick said, with some impatience, which Dina couldn’t feel. She swung up on the truck deck and let Cole hand the chest up to her. He waited while she roped it down.

“It’s a nice piece,” she said.

“It’s to be a present for Harriet Jameson.”

Cole consciously did not offer his hand as she came down off the truck, just as he consciously did not offer a hand to Cousin A in any of her gettings up and gettings down. But knowing what not to do only left him doing nothing nervously. He would have liked to make Dina a friend of his, but he saw no clear way of going about it. He dropped in at the shop occasionally. He saw her often at Nick’s, but he felt the distance she kept around herself from everyone, the kids in the shop, the women she drank with.

“Are you going to Nick’s tonight?” Dina asked, making a rare effort at a question.

“Probably. Are you?”

“Don’t know. Probably. There’s a Greek ship in.”

Dina wore nothing Cole could offer to take from her; so he led her at once down the hall to the library. She stood stolidly in the doorway for a moment, like the gardener or plumber; then she moved to the hands Miss A offered up to her.

“Dina,” Amelia said. “Do you know Miss Hopwood?”

“Yes, we know each other,” Rosemary said, offering only her very white smile. “How are you, Dina?”

“Well enough for Saturday,” Dina said.

“Did Cole show you the chest?” Amelia asked.

“Yes, I can have it done for you in about a week. Do you want me to bring it back here or take it over to Miss Jameson’s?”

“Well, yes, that’s a sensible suggestion.”

Cole was pouring her a glass of sherry, protecting himself from the silence in the room. Amelia listened to it as easily as if it were conversation. Rosemary was less comfortable in it, but what occurred to her to say, tested quickly in her head, seemed either false or forward. She reached for her purse and a cigarette, which signaled Dina to produce a pack from somewhere inside the layers of clothes she seemed to wear in all seasons.

“Thank you,” Rosemary said. “I always seem to be smoking yours.”

Dina shrugged, waited, and lighted the cigarette. Then she turned to Cole and her sherry.

“We’ve been talking about what to do when Kathy goes,” Amelia said. “Apparently there are more girls than places just now.”

“Grace Hill was thinking of taking a girl,” Dina said.

“Do you know her?” Rosemary asked. “Well enough, I mean, to know how it would be for a girl in her household?”

“A house full of boys,” Dina said. “A lot of work, probably.”

“She has come to see me,” Rosemary admitted. “She seemed…”

“I don’t think it would be a good idea,” Dina said flatly, to close the conversation.

But Amelia couldn’t accept that, in concern of her own. “Why?”

“Do you know Mrs. Hill?” Rosemary asked.

“No,” Amelia said. “I know who her husband is, of course, but I don’t know her.”

Dina had taken a seat across from Rosemary, her booted feet separately planted on the floor, her glass in a hand between her knees.

“Why, Dina?” Amelia asked again.

“She wants more than she asks for,” Dina said. “These kids … you need to be willing to take less… like you.”

“She said she’d had some training in social work,” Rosemary said.

Dina looked over at Rosemary.

“She’s an awfully nervous person,” Cole said suddenly. “I don’t really know her. I’ve just seen her in the shop a couple of times. But, if I were pregnant …” he stopped, half-amused, half-embarrassed.

Dina’s laugh was like the bark of a deep-throated dog. “I’m with you, Cole,” she said. “But you’re already in the best house for pregnant girls in town.”

For Amelia the conversation was both distressing and reassuring. Dina Pyros was no fool, and she was both young enough herself—probably not much over thirty—and in tune enough with young people to make such a judgment sensibly. Still, Amelia now was not the Amelia of six months or a year ago. She was older and heavier with grief. She was alone, with only the mirror of her sister’s diaries to look into, where before she had been able to look into her sister’s face. Other faces did not do in the same way and never would, much as she liked the two now turned toward her, the shrewd, gray-eyed Greek with her broad-planed face and the bred beauty of Rosemary Hopwood, as nerve-sharp as Dina was willfully bland.

“I don’t know,” Amelia said. “I just don’t know.”

“I don’t have to send Agate to you,” Rosemary said. “There are two other girls.”

“Agate?” Cole asked.

“A bright and angry twenty-year-old from downstate,” Rosemary said. “You’d like her well enough, but she’s obviously going to be a handful at times. And maybe …” She turned to Amelia.

“Let me think about it,” Amelia said. “Kathy has another three weeks probably.”

“The doctor today said maybe just another week,” Rosemary said and added, because of the surprise on Amelia’s face, “There’s a family history of complications.”

Dina stood up and put her glass on the table. “Thanks for the sherry.”

“Will you call me or Miss Jameson?” Amelia asked.

“Just as you like.”

“Call her,” Amelia decided.

“Good-bye, Dina,” Rosemary said. “I’ll have to stop in and see you one day soon. I’m looking for a bedside table.”

“Any time,” Dina said. “See you tonight, Cole.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll see you to the door.”

Dina went to Miss A, leaned down, and kissed her, not on the cheek, on the side of her brow, where the old, fine veins made a pattern.

“I like that young woman,” Amelia said, when she and Cole had left the room. “Do you?”

“Why, yes. Why would you ask?” Rosemary said.

“You seemed to have some distaste for her boots,” Amelia said, smiling.

“Sometimes you want me, just for a minute, to be Beatrice,” Rosemary said.

“Yes, it’s the shape of your head, I suppose.”

“But I like Dina’s boots. I like Dina. I confess that for some time I even tried to make friends with her, after I first got back.”

“Did you really? And couldn’t?”

“No more than you see,” Rosemary said.

“She hasn’t much talent for friendship. Cole tries, too. She doesn’t talk long enough.”

“No, though today she said more than I’ve ever heard her say before.”

“You want me to take Agate,” Amelia said.

“Yes, Amelia, I do, but I don’t want to force her on you.”

“What if I can’t handle her?”

“I don’t know,” Rosemary said. “You won’t have to if you can’t, of course.”

“Is Kathy going to have a difficult time?”

“I don’t think so. It’s just a precaution,” Rosemary said. “And, by the way, something I think you
are
getting too old for is the waiting room.”

“Nonsense. It’s the one thing I don’t feel too old for. And don’t you misjudge Kathy. She asks very little, but she’s going to need somebody there, and I’ll do. I always have.”

“Think about Agate. I’ll stop in again later in the week.”

“There’s plenty of dinner,” Amelia said.

“I know … with Kathy there always is, but I must go along.”

Dina and Cole were still in the driveway when Rosemary came out of the house.

“Anything the matter?” she called.

“A flat,” Dina said, “and I’ve left the spare at the shop.”

“Do you want me to drive you down to get it?”

“I can, Miss Hopwood,” Cole said.

“I think Kathy’s already waiting dinner. I’m in no hurry. Come on, Dina.”

“Thanks then. Thanks anyway, Cole. You go on in and have your dinner. I won’t come right back.”

As Dina got into Rosemary’s car, Rosemary said, “I can bring you right back. I really am in no hurry.”

“Neither am I. If you drop me at the shop, I can get Cole to bring me out tonight. He’s coming down anyway, to Nick’s.”

They didn’t say anything else to each other until Rosemary parked in front of George’s.

“Thanks,” Dina said, her hand on the door handle, but she had turned to look at Rosemary. “Are you coming in?”

“Shall I?”

“Up to you,” Dina said, turning away.

It was as much of an invitation as and the only one Rosemary would ever get from Dina. She was not about to refuse it. She followed Dina to the door of the shop and waited while she unlocked it. Then she followed Dina in through the near darkness, cool with scents of wood and cosmetic oils and ashes, into the workshop where stairs led to the second floor. Not until Dina opened the door into her living room did she turn on a light. It was not at all what Rosemary had imagined, this white-walled space, rich with textures and deep colors that came from books and rugs and shawls thrown over tables and chairs. On the windowsill there were fresh daffodils.

“Will you stay for dinner?” Dina asked.

“Yes, thanks.”

Dina went to the kitchen, got things out of a large refrigerator, and turned on the oven.

“Can I help?”

“Nothing much to do,” Dina said. “Nick’s cook sends things over.” She was reading typed instructions, to do with temperatures and times, on several packages, wrapped professionally in foil. “Do you want a drink?”

“Thank you.”

Dina opened a cupboard of bottles and displayed it to Rosemary.

BOOK: Against the Season
13.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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