Blessings (22 page)

“What would you say was your greatest mistake in life?” she asked Meredith in the car.

“That’s an odd question,” her daughter replied. “Are you thinking of Bill? Of not marrying him?”

“Goodness, no. That would have been disastrous. For him probably. No, I was simply curious.”

Meredith was silent. Finally she said, “I never should have made friends with Betsy Milstone at school. She told all my secrets to the other girls. Especially the really terrible ones, like stealing bits of jewelry and cheating in math.”

“You stole jewelry?”

“Mother, this happened almost fifty years ago. It’s a little late for you to become exercised about it.”

She was right, of course. What a soft patina the passage of time gave to everything, at least once one learned to live in the present. “That’s not much of a mistake,” Lydia said.

“I’m realizing that. I’m happy to say I haven’t made too many terrible mistakes in my life. Quite the contrary. I’ve been lucky.”

“Jess always said we make our own luck,” Lydia said.

“I suppose there’s some truth to that. Jess was always good at cutting to the heart of the matter. In any event, I guess I’ve lived a charmed life.”

“I am happy to hear you say that,” Lydia said.

A silence stretched between them. Lydia rubbed her left arm, which felt stiff and sore. Meredith came around to help her out of the car. “Are you all right?” she said, putting out her hands just as Paul Benjamin had done for the baby, and impatiently Lydia waved her away and used the door of the car to pull herself erect.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Meredith,” she said. “Don’t fuss at me.”

“Remember man that you are dust,” the young minister said at Bill’s graveside. Thou, Lydia thought. Thou art dust. Why did the modern drain all the ceremony from things? And unto dust thou shalt return. She had taken the boat and the box with Sunny’s ashes to the center of the pond one morning just after sunrise. The surface was a mirror. The ashes were unexpectedly heavy and they sluiced out like water, not like dust, and sank heavily except for a light penumbra that rose and held in the air. As she rowed back she had seen Meredith on the dock, wearing a straw hat, her hands crossed over her heart.

“In the air the ashes looked just like glitter,” Meredith had said, and her mother had loved her as completely then as she ever had.

Lydia looked at her sidelong as they drove toward the club for the funeral lunch. Her skin was lined now by the sun but her mouth was relaxed in that way so few women of her daughter’s age could manage. Meredith had arrived earlier than she expected from Virginia the day before. She and Charles and Jennifer and Faith had been out on the long lawn by the pond, sitting in the shadow of the old flowering crabapple. Nadine had called in sick and it was like being free of the dark schoolmistress, really, with cookies from the box and a thermos of sweet iced tea. The field opposite was thick with the last of the milkweed, and the pods had burst and in the breeze the white feathers carrying the seeds floated thick over them, like a summer snowstorm. The child’s eyes seemed to follow them as she sat propped up against Jennifer’s outstretched legs.

“I swear she’s going to sit up by herself in a couple of weeks,” Charles had said. “It’s real early for her to be doing that, but look how strong she is.”

“I still can’t get over how much you’ve learned about babies,”
Jennifer said, handing around the tea in paper cups, which Mrs. Blessing had always loathed.

“I read. Books. Magazines. Whatever.”

“My mother had an enormous set of books about child rearing that are in the house someplace,” Mrs. Blessing said. “Perhaps in the back room. I will see if I can find them. Our nanny thought they were nonsense. She believed there were only three things necessary to raise a healthy child: fresh air, simple food, and quinine. I can’t recall what the quinine was meant to do but we were dosed with it regularly.”

“My father says his uncle said your nanny was a terror,” Jennifer said.

“Dreadful. But so were the Foster boys. She would see them trying to hit down crabapples with a broom or eating tomatoes from the garden and she would come out and give them a piece of her mind. There was a time when she took the broom from one of them and hit him with it on the bottom. But she was just doing my mother’s bidding. She would sit up in her sleeping porch and if she heard a disturbance she would say, ‘Nanny, please take care of that.’ My mother was difficult.”

“Aren’t they all?” said Jennifer.

“Did she use binoculars?” Charles said, squinting up at her from the blanket.

“I can’t recall,” Mrs. Blessing said.

“Your mother called her Nanny instead of her real name?”

“Times were different then,” Mrs. Blessing said.

She could not be certain exactly when times had changed. She knew only that when Meredith had arrived down the drive and walked over to them, Charles had stood up and said to her, “This is my daughter. Her name is Faith.” And Meredith had looked at the baby in his arms, who looked back with her eyelids fluttering and made a loud declarative
“Ah!”
sound. Meredith had smiled and Faith had smiled back, then kicked wildly, using both her arms and her legs. A bootie fell off, and Meredith bent to pick it up.
Mrs. Blessing looked at her old watch. “You must have been speeding on the interstate,” she said.

“I was just under the limit.” Meredith put the bootie back on Faith’s foot herself, then patted it when she was done. “What a pretty baby!” she had said to Skip. “Aren’t you lucky? How old is she?”

“Your new caretaker’s not married, is he?” Meredith said in the car on the way back to Blessings when the funeral lunch was done.

“Certainly not.”

“Well, I guess you can’t have everything. He seems like a very good father.”

“It’s an unusual situation,” Lydia said stiffly, and Meredith grinned.

“Mother, they’re all unusual,” she said, and was surprised when Lydia did not reply.

H
e couldn’t believe he was out of baby Tylenol. Or Motrin. Or whatever. The doctor had said Faith might have a bad reaction to the inoculations, and though it was a week later he should have been ready for the fever and the restlessness. Maybe the problem wasn’t the shots at all, but an ear infection, or a virus, or meningitis or pertussis or one of the other seemingly hundreds of things in the baby book that ended with the laconic sentence “May cause death.” He should have been ready, but there was always so much to do, to remember, to think about, where Faith was concerned. He looked down at her flushed face and put his hand on her forehead. The feel of her hot skin reminded him of smooth stones baked by the summer sun. Hot on a warm night, the perspiration had gathered in the folds of her neck, and when he took her out to the car it ran onto his shirt like tears. He kissed the fold between her small round shoulder and the puffy bend of her elbow and could taste it, salt in his mouth. Rubbing his cheek against her damp hot one, he said, “I love you, little girl.” She bobbed on his chest and made a grunting noise.

“We’re going to bring this fever down,” he said as he buckled her into her car seat, his words sounding loud against the cricket hum of the dark night. The lights in the house were out except for the one in the downstairs hall that stayed on always. He drove slowly down the drive.

There was an all-night drugstore in Bessemer. He’d had to wait in line behind a kid with bad skin buying Trojans and breath mints.
Skip dumped four kinds of baby medicine on the counter, for fever, for congestion, for coughs and colds just in case. The older man behind the counter rang them all up. “It’s always the dads that get sent out on an emergency in the middle of the night,” the man said. “It’s probably nothing to worry about.”

Nothing to worry about, Skip said to himself in the car, nothing to worry about. He was afraid to turn on the radio because he didn’t want the sound to hurt Faith’s ears, just in case it was her ears that were bothering her. Maybe the doctor would have to come back. Maybe he’d ask more questions this time about the grandmother and the traveling parents, a story that even Skip had thought sounded a little lame. As he drove back on the twisty roads over the mountain, Faith whined softly. It was October, and though the air was as warm and still as it had been all summer, the leaves were starting to fall from the black walnuts and the water in the pond to chill almost imperceptibly. The trout had slowed down, and most mornings when he came back up the cellar stairs he saw the bright yellow flash of the school bus through the trees along the road. Maybe someday it would stop at the end of the drive at Blessings. Mrs. Blessing would be eighty-one years old just before Thanksgiving, and he figured with luck she could be living here ten or even fifteen years from now. She still moved really well, although she said the arthritis in the one arm was bothering her, and her mind was still certainly as sharp as anything.

Faith snuffled in the backseat of the car. The doctor had not said a word about congestion. A fever in a few days. That’s all.

Mrs. Blessing’s lawyer had come in a big boxy black car. He carried a black briefcase as thick and square as a tool box. “I am trying to get that child a birth certificate, Charles,” Mrs. Blessing had said when she called him into the house after the man left. It gave him hope, the notion of lawyers, made the future seem more certain. For just a moment he’d been able to see Faith with a pink book bag on her narrow back walking down the long driveway with him, hand in hand, straining to climb the steep steps of the bus, turning at the bleary window to hold up one hand as she settled
in her seat. Mrs. Blessing would watch her from the sleeping porch with her binoculars. “Was that child properly dressed?” she would call down. “The thermometer says it’s not much above freezing.”

“It’s not as simple as I had hoped,” Mrs. Blessing had said after the lawyer was gone. “But I have a man working on it.”

Nadine had come in then and cut off the conversation. “This crazy place,” she said. “Too many people come and go.”

On the drive back from the drugstore there were whirling things, in the air, on the road, so that the world seemed strange and vaguely dangerous, and he kept glancing over at the baby, who had fallen asleep pitched to one side in that boneless posture that sleep brought when she was sitting up. Moths flew into, then off, the windshield, and a raccoon trundled across the road. Skip realized that he’d once been a nocturnal animal himself, sleeping with the flat of his hand over his face to keep the sun from waking him, closing McGuire’s with the guys. But always there had been the sense that he was out of place, the same sense he’d had in his aunt and uncle’s house, and sleeping beside Shelly, and in Debbie and Joe’s trailer. He didn’t have that sense anymore.

He drove past the bar on his way down into the valley, saw that part of the neon had burned out, so that it said
MCGU E’S.
Joe’s truck was in the lot, and Shelly’s mother’s car, and for a moment he had that feeling of a mug cold in his fist, the beer cold in his mouth, and the smoke and the bright eyes peering out of it, saying, “Yo, man, you want to buy my brother’s Camaro?” or “Yo, man, you want to buy some really good Hawaiian?” or “Yo, man, you want to crash at my place?” He remembered once when Chris’s mother said that if you missed the soaps for a month or two it was no big deal because by the time you got back to them people might be divorced or have amnesia or whatever but in some way it would all be the same, you could get the drift in a day or two. And that was what it was like in McGuire’s, except without the amnesia. When he got out of the county jail on a Wednesday morning he’d walked in that night and Pat, who was tending bar,
had said, “Beer, Skipper?” exactly the way he’d said “Beer, Skipper?” the night Skip got busted ten months before.

“I just got out,” he’d said to Pat.

“Yeah, it’s cool,” the bartender had replied, pulling the draft handle.

It was a boring life, and Skip had confused it with an orderly one. It turned out that Skip liked an orderly life, too, just like Mrs. Blessing. She’d changed since he’d been working at Blessings, but she still relied on rules so much that she sometimes talked in them, like fortune cookies for the well-behaved. No alcohol before four
P.M.
No mowing after five. Early supper on Sunday, even if it was something Nadine had left with a yellow note in the freezer: put in microwave three minutes. Gutters cleaned in spring and fall. If he was ever tempted to forget that there was still a dividing line between them, each morning he was reminded, when he gave the baby her bottle, burped her, and wound her mobile to play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” while he went across and up the cellar stairs to make the coffee.

“People of her generation are really into routine,” Jennifer Foster had said to him. “That’s why they basically like being in the hospital. The mealtimes are the same, the lights out. They like an orderly life.”

Skip was not sure that Mrs. Blessing liked it, exactly, but that it was necessary to her, that somehow the smell of the coffee and the lunch on a tray and the light in the hallway were a hedge, the way the awnings were there so the upholstery would not fade. He wondered sometimes if she’d ever done anything wild in her life, and then he remembered what Jennifer had told him the doctor had said about the Cadillac in the pond. And maybe the conspiracy around the baby, too, was a piece of wildness. It had certainly made her livelier, livelier, Jennifer said, than she’d ever been before.

When he pulled into the driveway he caught the glitter of eyes in the headlights. It was only the barn cat, with something small and limp and gray in his mouth. A bird cried out at the end of the pond, something like a child’s cry, something like a cat itself, and
the animal raised its head suddenly, dropping its prey. The small thing lay frozen, then began to crawl toward the flower beds, disappearing into a patch of daisies and lavender at the foot of the stone foundation. But the cat sprang after it and emerged again with it in its jaws. A second cry came from across the water, but the cat wasn’t fooled this time and ran off to finish killing and eating. As Skip turned the car toward his space in the garage he saw a languid angular ghost fly toward and then past him, banking over the water and then disappearing into the clouds. The heron, come to find fresh fish.