Blessings (2 page)

“I don’t know where you come up with these things,” her mother had said, working on a large piece of floral gros point in the failing light of the living room fire. But her father had smoothed his hair and said, “I get your point, Lyds, my love.” That had been the year when he was drawing up plans for the apple orchard, when he could be heard at every dinner party at their house in the city referring to “our old farm,” his light high drawl rising up the circular stairwell like pipe smoke.

“Why do you think Papa is so nice and Mama is so mean?” she had asked her brother, Sunny, once, when they were in the boat in the center of the pond, where you could say secrets and no one would hear.

“That is a question for the ages,” Sunny had said. Confucius, they called him at school when they studied the religions of antiquity with the chaplain in the third form.

The only way Lydia Blessing could remember the child she had once been was to look at photo albums, and even then she seemed strange to herself, incredible that the seeds of her old age had been germinating within that pink inflated flesh. When she used the mirror every day to fix her silver hair in one of the three pinned-up styles she used, when she rubbed cold cream briskly on the fine skin that had been shirred around the eyes and lips for decades, she was occasionally incredulous, not about the fact that she had gotten old, but about the notion that she had ever been young. There was no longer any thought of snow globes, or the hand of God. The gros point had been made into a pillow; it sat on the chair in the back guest bedroom, the one she had used for house parties only if the house was very full. Every time she saw it, which was very seldom now, she remembered that her mother had complained about the price of having it made up. Those were the sorts of things she remembered nowadays.

And Sunny. She remembered Sunny always, as though he would come walking up the rise from the barn, his cornsilk-colored straw hat in his hand. Sometimes she dreamed about him on nights like this, and he was always young and happy.

A fresh breeze blew across the mountains and dipped down into the valley, and the willows on the banks of the pond, where the muskrats made tunnels between the fingers of the roots. The boy took the cardboard box from the backseat and carried it to the flagstone steps that led upstairs to the second floor of the garage. He stumbled and almost fell as another trout leaped from the black water and fell back with the sound of a slap. He caught himself, and never looked at what he was carrying, even when he put it
down and stepped back to turn away. “Drink Coke,” it said on the box in red letters.

“Not the garage,” the girl hissed frantically, leaning across the seat and almost out the car door as he opened it. “You’re supposed to leave it at the house. The house! Not the garage!”

“Somebody’ll find it,” the boy mumbled, his resolve gone now.

“You can’t leave it at the garage,” she said, her voice trembling, but he had already started to turn the car slowly.

There was a world around them that they never even noticed as they drove back down the drive, the girl weeping, the boy wiping his hand on the leg of his shorts. The moths wheeled and dipped mindlessly around the lights that were always left on on the porch, the lights that had lit the house every evening from nightfall until sunup since the day the Blessings had first moved in. The possums were faint gray ghosts stumbling in their ungainly way behind the garage, their pink tails trailing them like afterthoughts. A male bear, heavy with skunk cabbage, loped across the dark field, but the two people in the car did not see him as they stared ahead. And once again a trout jumped and fell, and as it did the car turned onto Rolling Hills Road, and the headlights jumped to life and lit the surrounding woods as though they were searching for something. Before the circles from the big fish had disappeared on the surface of the water, any trace of the car and the couple was gone as well, and the house and the land around it was as it had been before, apart, unchanged. Except for the box on the steps.

The girl wiped her eyes with a tissue and put gloss on her lips with the end of her little finger from a plastic pot she took from her purse.

“You want to stop and get something to eat?” the boy said.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “The house had those automatic-light things. I couldn’t go too close or I would have woken somebody up.”

“I guess.”

“I can’t believe I did that,” he said, his voice low.

The girl looked back at Blessings through a stand of birches, white and slender shadows at the edge of the black lawn. “I want to go home,” she finally said.

“School home or home home?”

“Home home,” she said.

Maybe it was the last purring of the car engine, or the faint shriek of the nesting bird that one of the barn cats leaped for, clawed, caught, and then lost, that caused Lydia Blessing to turn fretfully in the big cherry bed that had once belonged to her parents. She’d heard her father’s voice for a moment, that voice strangely high-pitched for such a big man, so that he’d sung tenor parts in the St. Stephen’s choir. Elegant Ed, they’d called him at school. The prettiest penmanship at Princeton, he liked to say, looking down at his copperplate cursive. Lyds my love, he called her. The sound of voices in the night was commonplace to her now, more so, even, than in the old days, when there really had been voices, arguments from the guest bedrooms, conversations from the stragglers on the patio, whispers from someone sneaking into the dark waters of the pond long after the house was closed up.

Lydia Blessing pulled the openwork blanket about her shoulders and fell back to sleep as the box on the garage doorstep shuddered, shimmied, and finally was still.

T
he first light of dawn, the color of lemonade, was coming over the Blue Mountains when Skip Cuddy opened his eyes and turned toward the window. He couldn’t remember at first where he was, just knew by the fragile fog of the summer light that it was early, that his alarm clock would sleep longer than he had. That was all right. For his whole life, as far back as his mind could wander, he’d woken up early, easy, as though morning held a nice surprise, which had never been dimly true.

Still, he’d never, ever woken up entirely sure where he was. Joe and Debbie’s trailer, where he’d slept on the pullout couch in the living room, beer bottles and played-out butts on the end tables on either side of his pillow, half of them smeared red-black from Debbie’s lipstick. The county jail, top bunk, with the sprayed concrete ceiling only a foot from his face and the sounds of people hawking and snoring and farting in their sleep. Even his room in the back of his aunt and uncle’s house just off Front Street in Mount Mason, where the maple tree outside had grown so big that the room was dark day and night. Almost four years he’d lived in that room, after his father moved south, and four years he’d woken befuddled and adrift. He thought that maybe he’d known where he was when he’d lived in his parents’ house, before his mother died, when he was little. But he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember anything except that his bed had a quilt with a cowboy on it, riding a horse that was trying to throw the cowboy off. And that his mother hung her stockings to dry over the taps
in the tub. And that his father had a strange little stand-up thing in the bedroom that he hung his shirt and pants on overnight. First the pants, then the shirt. Shoes at the bottom. It wasn’t a whole lot to remember. His whole childhood seemed to have gone up in smoke with the little Cape Cod where he grew up.

Skip’s pants were lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. He tried to get two days of wearing out of a pair of pants, since he wasn’t allowed to use the washer and dryer in the big house, and there wasn’t one in the rooms over the garage. Blessings garage had bays for five cars and a small but complete machine shop in the back, but no washer and dryer. Old Mr. Blessing had had big ideas when he bought the place in 1926 and hired Mr. Foster to run it. He’d had the carpenters build an apartment over the garage, not too big but big enough for Foster to move his family in, so that the caretaker was always around to see that the stone walls stayed straight, the paths stayed mowed, the roofs stayed sound, always around to fix the leaks and the cracks that came with a house with eight bedrooms and ten baths. After that first Foster got arthritis in his hands and gave in to his wife’s nagging about being closer to town, a second Foster, the first’s middle son, took over. His name was Tom, but everyone at Blessings just called him Foster, as they had his father. “Just like a plantation,” Sunny Blessing had murmured once. That Foster liked to work on cars and his wife cooked for Mrs. Blessing, meals that were always described as good plain food, which meant meatloaf, stew, and homemade pie. The couple had had three boys, and Edwin Blessing had died happy, thinking there would always be Fosters to keep the grass trim and the paint fresh. But those three grew up and got jobs in town and later buried their parents and carted some of their stuff away and gave the rest to the Goodwill or just abandoned it in the garage apartment.

Now Skip cooked with Mrs. Foster’s pots and pans, which the sons had left behind. When he cooked, which wasn’t often. Canned soup, mostly, that he ate in front of the little television he’d put in the living room at the end of the hallway, on an old
steamer trunk that actually had hotel stickers on it. If he put his soup bowl dead center, at his right hand was a big blue-and-white sticker that said “Stateroom number,” then an
18
that someone had written in in black ink.

He put on his pants and ate a doughnut that had gone hard around the edges from a box on the kitchen counter. He wanted to get outside, to trim the hedges and weed around the plants in the vegetable garden he’d started behind the barn, to cut some more of the winter’s firewood into just the right length, long enough to stretch from one brass andiron to another in the living room fireplace, or the dining room fireplace, or the library fireplace, or the fireplaces in the bedrooms. He’d discovered that nothing made him feel better than a nice neat stack of wood.

He’d had the job at Blessings for a month and he liked almost everything about it. He had the inchoate and overwhelming love of the land that a boy has when he lives in the country but in a house in town, barely two arms’ length from the houses on either side. He had the love of the land that a boy has when he rides his bike through forest and fields, past streams and lakes, goes hunting and fishing, and then returns every night to a forty-by-eighty lot on a street where you can hear the guy next door fight with his wife through your wall as clear as if he were sitting on your sofa.

Geography was destiny in Mount Mason. The kids with a little money, whose parents were teachers or contractors or accountants, lived in the neat suburbs that had grown up just outside of town after World War II. The designated dirtbags, who had transitory or seasonal jobs, plowing snow or cleaning houses, lived in one of two places: in the sagging old frame houses ranged around the center of the shabby downtown, or way out on the country roads, in trailers at the end of gravel tracks, with old cars scattered around the patches of dirt and grass like lawn ornaments, and Christmas lights that never came down. Skip had moved from one to the other, from way out to downtown, during the course of his Mount Mason boyhood. Then somehow he’d landed at Blessings, the most beautiful place in town.

He’d never had a job he’d liked before. The drive-through window at Burger King. The night-shift cleaning at the mall, mainly popcorn cemented to the floor of the multiplex with congealing soda and blots of ice cream, or tissues you didn’t even want to look at, much less touch. Laundry at the county jail, better than doing push-ups all day next to the bunks, but it was hell on the hands, cracks in your fingers that burned all the time, so that if you picked up a fry with salt on it your skin sang for an hour after.

He went down the stairs that led from the apartment down the side of the garage and out onto the driveway. There were no cars in the garage except for the old lady’s black Cadillac, ten years old with barely five thousand miles on it. But there was the riding mower, the tractor, the old red truck. “Jesus Christ,” Joe had said when he helped Skip move his four boxes of stuff in. “It looks like the antique farm show at the county fair. Except for the mower, man. That’s a nice mower.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Skip said.

“Fuck you, man. I go reminding you of your mistakes?”

“Don’t go talking around town, either,” Skip had said. He thought about how his uncle always said there were two types of people, leaders and followers. Joe had always been a follower, from the time he started following Chris around in first grade. Chris had called him Snotty then because of Joe’s allergies. Joe still sniffed all the time, and he still told Chris anything he thought would pique his interest. Of the four of them who had been hanging out together since they were kids, Chris was the one who qualified as a leader, Skip knew that for certain and for always.

“How much you getting paid for this job?” Joe said. “Jesus, you stepped in shit with this one.”

“It’s about time,” Skip had said.

He hadn’t had Joe back to the place since, and he hadn’t even seen Ed, or Chris. Especially Chris. The old lady had lousy locks on the door, for all that there was a security system. It would be like meat to a dog for Chris. It was like he couldn’t help himself, even when they were little and there wasn’t a whole lot any of
them wanted anyway, besides Butterfingers and Blow Pops. They’d go into the Newberry’s on Main Street for loose-leaf paper just before Labor Day, quarters from their parents rattling around in their jeans, and when they got to the bench at the bus stop Chris would unload his pockets, and there it would be, his senseless booty: a bottle of cologne, a paper of hairpins, a box of playing cards, plastic earrings, breath mints, baby aspirin.

“Drive us over to the Quik-Stop, man,” he’d said to Skip a year ago Memorial Day weekend, Joe walking behind him, and the next thing Skip knew, he was doing 364 days in county jail and grateful for the deal, because it meant he wouldn’t go to the state prison at Wissahonick. Chris had slid on that old ski mask. That’s how Skip knew, when they pulled into the lot and Chris pulled that mask out of the bag. He’d stolen the mask, too, one day when they’d been in a sporting goods store buying a mitt so they could play in the McGuire’s Tavern summer league. “Don’t even think about driving away,” Chris had said in the lot at the Quik-Stop, with that sudden cold violence to his voice that made people step back from him. So Skip just sat outside, sweating and swearing and thinking about what a chump he was, and the surveillance camera read his license plate as plain as the lottery number at the bottom of your TV screen on Tuesday nights. But Skip didn’t give Chris up, or Joe either, even when the sheriff’s office offered him a walk. He just didn’t think it was right. It was only because he didn’t have any priors that he’d gotten a deal that kept him in county. He’d been let out in just under ten months for good behavior.