Blessings (18 page)

“Are you pretty big? Are you? You don’t look so big to me.” Jennifer looked up at him and smiled. “Mr. Mom,” she said.

“That’s me.”

“You have my stuff?”

He closed the garage door over her little car and turned to watch her lope across the lawn with the sling across her chest and a backpack filled with bottles and diapers on her back. Jennifer had come the day before to say hello to Mrs. Blessing’s daughter, whose name was Mrs. Fox. “Charles,” Mrs. Blessing had called as Jennifer was leaving, and she came down the back steps slowly and
carefully to join the two of them. “I told Jennifer there’s too much activity here in the next day or two,” she said quietly. “It might be useful for Faith to stay with her away from here.”

“I can hear the rumors now,” Skip said.

“I won’t leave the property,” Jennifer said. “I know how you feel about that. I can take her way back by the stream, where nobody comes. Otherwise, between Mr. and Mrs. Fox and the roofing crew, somebody’s going to figure out she’s here. Speaking of rumors, there aren’t any. There was a girl at the hospital about six months ago who had a baby and gave it up for adoption, but these people came from Chicago and picked it up. Tracy at the pharmacy on Main Street says the girl’s even gotten pictures from them since. One of the Boatwright girls had twins in June, but they were both boys and she has them both home in the trailer and complains to anyone who’ll listen about how hard it is to have two. And some couple who live in the Foxwoods development had a baby girl near the end of June, but she was born with some terrible birth defects and died the next day.”

“Oh, man,” Skip said.

“So Faith fell from the sky, I guess, right down to Mr. Mom.”

“Mr. Mom.” That was what she called him now. He didn’t kid himself that it meant more than a nice person being nice. Watching her disappear behind the line of tall cedars, her stride springy and sure, Skip thought that Faith would have a nice long day and he would merely have a long one, ripping shingles from an old roof on a clear blue morning with a full sun beating down.

There was one honest roofer in Mount Mason, the rest being beer-drinking thieves who took a couple of thousand dollars and slapped shingles haphazardly along the roofline. Luckily the one honest roofer was Ed’s father, Jim. “Mr. Salzano,” Skip had called him when he hired him, which maybe wasn’t the best way to begin a professional relationship in which he was supposed to be the boss. But he needed the barn reroofed badly now. The lightning had hit the rod, that was for sure, but it had ricocheted onto the asphalt shingles and the wood beneath and feasted, delighted,
on the dry wood and gummy roof cement for at least a few minutes before the rain had doused it. The rain that had poured in over the weeks since then was beginning to rot the timbers and the floor of the hayloft.

“There’s not a whole lot of point in doing this unless we rip it down to the roofline and start over again,” Jim Salzano had said when he came out to look at it the first time. “There’s a lot of rot along the gutters. Nobody’s done anything to this roof for maybe thirty years.”

“Go ahead,” Skip said.

“Big job.”

“I’ll get up there with you. Might as well.”

“That’ll help, then.”

Mrs. Blessing’s daughter came down to watch them work while she was visiting. She was a tall woman, too, in a big hat that kept the sun off her face. He had heard Mrs. Blessing calling from the house, demanding that she come back inside and get something on her head so she would not freckle. By the time she and her husband came back from playing golf and having lunch, old shingles were scattered in heaps around the grass, and a pile of them were on a big flatbed to be taken away. The two lightning rods lay on their sides. She nudged one with the toe of her shoe, then put out her hand to Skip. He could feel the calluses as he shook it.

“It’s criminal, the way this building has been allowed to degenerate,” she said.

“It’s not used for anything.”

“I know. If I had it down at our farm, I’d use it. It’s a wonderful barn, actually, built the way buildings aren’t built anymore.” She laughed, a low unamused chuckle. “I sound like my mother. Nothing is the same as it was. Do you like working for her?”

“She pays a decent wage.”

“I very much doubt that. Maybe a decent wage by the standards of 1955. How does she seem to you?”

“I couldn’t really say. I haven’t known her that long. Did you ask Nadine?”

Mrs. Blessing’s daughter laughed again. Meredith Fox, her name was. That’s what Jennifer had told him. “Nadine tells me a good deal, but only when I don’t ask a direct question. When I asked how Mother was, I believe Nadine said, ‘Ha!’ ” She looked up at the barn. “Four-by-fours instead of two-by-fours.”

“You don’t see that anymore,” Mr. Salzano said from atop a ladder.

She nodded. “We kept horses here all through my childhood. You should have seen my mother ride. What a seat she had. You should have seen her swim, for that matter. She’d go off the dock and do the breaststroke from one end to the other and then back again. She’d swim like a fish for half an hour. Golf, too. And tennis, doubles, mostly. She stopped almost twenty years ago. Her best friend died and she was never the same.”

“She seems okay to me,” said Skip, thinking about the way Mrs. Blessing barked Nadine’s name when she wanted her, the way she kept watch with her binoculars as though she were on the lookout for some enemy incursion down the driveway, the way she held the baby now and ran her long fingers over Faith’s face. He wished he could tell all this to Mrs. Fox, who seemed so nice, how her mother sat on the porch at night and sometimes commanded him to lift Faith into her arms so that she could rock back and forth in one of the old porch rockers until Faith’s lids dropped, her mouth fell open, and she breathed the slow sibilant baby breath of sleep.

“She needs to get out more, travel,” Mrs. Fox said. “She can afford it. She lives in the past too much. It’s not healthy.”

“I guess it depends on how good the past was,” Skip said, thinking of his bedroom with the bucking bronco on the quilt.

She tilted her head a bit, and Skip flushed because it occurred to him that for an older lady she was really good-looking. Her eyes were the same color as the pond, and they tilted at the corner even more than Jennifer Foster’s.

“May I ask you a personal question?” she said.

“Shoot.”

“Were you really in prison for armed robbery?”

“No, ma’am. I pled to a burglary charge and got less than a year in county. County jail, I mean.”

“Anything else?”

“No, ma’am. I just happened one time to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I can second that,” Mr. Salzano called down from the top of the ladder. “Absolutely. With the wrong bunch of guys, too.” He looked at Skip. “I may be dumb, Skipper, but I’m not stupid.”

“Your reputation is far worse than the reality, then,” Meredith Fox said seriously.

“That’s sort of the way, isn’t it?” Skip replied.

Mrs. Blessing’s daughter took the back path to the pond then, a groundhog and its plump kits scattering in her wake. When he went to the garage to get a crowbar he saw her out in the little boat, rowing hard from one end of the pond to another. He figured the horses must keep her in better shape than most women her age, and he was glad he’d washed down the boat with the hose so she hadn’t found it dusty, full of tattered webs and dead flies. He stopped for a moment to look at her, at the rise of the mountain around the valley, at the slope of the valley around the pond and the house, at the small wooden boat at its center. It was probably tough to buy a wooden boat these days. Fiberglass, aluminum, that’s what they made now. He liked the wood.

“Man,” he said under his breath, thinking there couldn’t be greater happiness than to own a place like this.

Mrs. Fox pulled the boat onto the bare patch of lawn by the dock and went to the garage for one of the old fly-casting rods. Her arm moved back and forth as though she were drawing in the air with the line. A hairy yellow lure flew up and across, then set down solidly on the surface of the water. Skip thought he saw the dark shadow of a trout move toward it below the water. She looked toward him and smiled.

“I could dig you some night crawlers if you’d rather have an easier time of it,” Skip called, walking toward her.

She shook her head. “I like fly casting. I don’t particularly like
catching fish. And Nadine won’t clean them. Apparently she put her foot down about two things: a uniform, and cleaning fish. The uniform was almost the end of it as far as my mother was concerned.”

“I’ll clean fish for you if you want.”

“If I catch anything I’ll take you up on the offer. But I don’t think I’m likely to.”

Skip squinted toward the surface of the pond. At the far end a pair of green herons were hunched over the water, heads low between their folded wings, waiting for slow sunfish to edge into the warm water close to shore. One heron jabbed suddenly, hoisted a wriggling twist of silver aloft, let it slide down his frantically working craw, settled back into position. Mrs. Blessing’s daughter cast out again.

“That lure’s actually for big fish. Shad, maybe, or pike.”

She laughed again. Skip wondered where she’d learned to laugh so easily. So far he’d never heard Mrs. Blessing laugh.

“Well, I said I wouldn’t catch anything.”

“Meredith,” called a man’s voice from the house. “Do you want to have a drink at the club before dinner?”

“Not much,” she called back as a small trout broke the water and leaped into the air a foot from her moving lure. “I’m very contented at the moment.”

Skip liked the sound of that. “I’d better get to work,” he said. “I want to powerwash the inside of the barn before we go any further. But I can stop to clean fish. Or get you bait if you want.”

“When I was a little girl I used to watch those fish jump out of the water, and I used to think they were jumping for joy,” Meredith said. “And then one day when I was older I was walking around the pond and I noticed how they swam back and forth, back and forth. I suppose I finally noticed how small the pond was. And one of them jumped, and all I could think was that he was trying to escape. Except that he would die outside.”

“You’ve got a fish on there,” Skip said, watching her lure disappear.

By the next evening she and her husband were gone, the Chevy Suburban with the horse trailer pull disappearing down the long drive while the lens of the binoculars flashed in the fading light from the upstairs sleeping porch. The old barn roof was ripped off, the new shingles packed in blocks around it ready for the next day. Jennifer had put in two days with Faith and come back to the house, slightly grubby, only minutes after the Foxes’ car, the roofer’s truck, and Nadine’s little compact had all pulled away. Rain was beginning to fall, making a pale gray haze over the pond. “I’m in love,” Jennifer said, lifting Faith’s slack little body from the sling on the back steps.

“Come inside,” Mrs. Blessing called. “You, too, Charles.”

The kitchen was at the east end of the house, and after noon Skip had noticed that it was in a kind of perpetual twilight, although when he made the coffee in the morning the old white stove and yellow cabinets were warmed by the morning light. He looked around at the clean clear countertops, the shining stainless steel sink. A platter covered with a striped cloth was the only dish in sight. Nadine was the cleanest person he’d ever known. She confirmed a suspicion he’d always had that there was some kind of link between cleanliness and meanness. He bet Jennifer Foster wasn’t half as clean as her mother. Little pieces of hair were pulled loose from her ponytail now, and she had a big dirt stain on the seat of her pants.

“I wondered if you would care to join me for something to eat,” Mrs. Blessing said.

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” Jennifer said.

“I probably need to give the baby a bath,” Skip said, rubbing the curve of her back, warm and solid under his hand.

“I put her in the stream,” Jennifer said.

“The stream? It’s freezing!”

“Just her feet. She liked it. She sort of sucked in her breath, then she paddled.”

“Oh, man. You should have asked me about that first.”

“Excuse me,” said Mrs. Blessing, leaning on the counter by the
platter and folding up the cloth over it. “I thought perhaps we could picnic by the pond. There are ham sandwiches and some coleslaw. I had Nadine leave a quilt and a basket on the hall table. I suspect she thinks I’m entering my dotage.”

Skip could hear the rain on the roof, a soft staccato but insistent. “It’s raining,” Jennifer said.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Blessing, cocking her head. “I didn’t notice.”

“What about the side porch?” Jennifer said.

Skip wondered what the hell Mount Mason would say if it could peek in the wall of windows and see them laying the quilt on the polished wood floor, putting Faith down in one corner on a small pink blanket Mrs. Blessing had had ready, sitting with a plate of sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of gold-edged flowered plates so thin and fine that when one touched the other oh-so-lightly it chimed like a doorbell. Mrs. Blessing stayed in an old white wicker chair but he and Jennifer sat practically knee to knee on the quilt. Faith was sleeping on her stomach, smacking her lips from time to time.

“I’ve got a spare bottle left in that bag,” Jennifer said with her mouth full. “She just sucked down the other three. Don’t you think maybe she’s ready for some real food?”

“See, that’s another thing that I’m not sure about. Some of the books say four months, some say six. They’re not real specific about solid food. There’s a lot of stuff about breast-feeding.”

“I tried, but it didn’t work,” said Jennifer, laughing. “Uh-oh, I shocked Mrs. Blessing. Look at her.”

“I’m not sure I’m capable of being shocked at my age,” Mrs. Blessing said.

“You were shocked when you first saw Faith,” Skip said.

“Yes, I was. That’s absolutely true. I was shocked.”

“And delighted,” said Jennifer. “That’s the word. I picked that up from television or something when I was a little kid, and I used to use it all the time. Can you imagine what it was like in first grade when I said something was delightful? There was another word, too, I think.
Zesty,
that was it. That one I got from commercials.
‘This sandwich is very zesty,’ I used to say. My mother learned to speak English from American soldiers. Her big thing, when we first got here, was figuring out which words she’d learned that weren’t words you were supposed to say in polite company. And getting rid of ‘y’all.’ I guess a lot of the guys she knew were Southern. I used to say ‘y’all,’ too. I remember one of my father’s cousins getting a big laugh when he said we must be from South Korea.”