Born Under a Lucky Moon (27 page)

I heard the front doorbell ring and knew there was no way that I was going to answer it. Buddy was on the prowl somewhere, and I didn't want another confrontation with super-cop Marv Carson.

“Hel-
lo
,” a voice sing-songed from the hall. It was Grandma. I peeked around the door and saw her ushering Father Whippet in. I had been studiously avoiding him since that day in his office, and I wasn't going to be cornered now. I ran to the basement and pulled wrinkled jeans and a BLT shirt from the dryer. I changed fast, put on some old tennis shoes of Lucy's I found, and pounded up the basement stairs and out to the gazebo.

“Warning: Father Whippet is in the house,” I panted. Then I saw that he wasn't in the house; he was sitting right there with Dad and Evan. Rats.

I tried to recover quickly. “I mean, I wanted to let you know Father Whippet was visiting.”

Father Whippet grimaced at me, his excuse for a smile. “I was explaining that your grandmother called me and asked me over. She felt your father needed comfort during this difficult time.”

I paused. Which difficult time was he referring to?

“Harold”—Father Whippet turned to Dad—“we have job counseling available at the church.” He eyed Dad's rumpled clothes and unshaven face. “You can't let yourself get depressed, hanging around the house and letting everything go to pot.”

Dad was trying to be polite. “It's Saturday, John. I'm not hanging around the house. I live here when I'm not at work. And these are my gardening clothes.”

Father Whippet patted Dad's knee like he was a small child. At that point high-pitched squeals came from the bird feeder. A gray squirrel had managed to get his head into the feeder by hanging over the top of its roof. But then his fat rear quarters had flipped over and landed on the perch, which triggered the Plexiglas shield to come down smack on his shoulders. The more he struggled, the more firmly stuck he was.

“Aw, for Christ's sake.” Dad ignored Father Whippet's horrified look at his taking the Lord's name in vain and hauled himself to his feet. Dad rambled over to the feeder with Father Whippet flapping behind. “Be careful! This is one of God's creatures!”

Dad analyzed the situation with a coffee mug and cigarette in one hand and the other hand on his hip. We watched Dad try to lift the squirrel's butt up off the perch. He couldn't get it with only one hand so he passed his mug and cigarette to Father Whippet. The squirrel was twisting every which way, and Dad was trying to soothe it. “All right, little guy. I'm gonna get you out of there.” He managed to pull the squirrel free. It bolted over Dad's shoulder, down his back, and off toward the nearest tree, where it raced up to a high branch and chattered at us furiously from above.

“Why don't we just feed the birds
and
the squirrels?” I asked Evan. “Mr. Long feeds the ducks.”

“That's so they'll be used to him when duck season opens in the fall.”

I stared at him. “Do you mean to say that Mr. Long—sensitive Mr. Long next door—is luring ducks to their death?”

“Yep.”

“You're not allowed to fire a rifle within city limits,” I protested.

“You can if nobody sees you.”

“What about the noise?” I countered. “Everyone would call the cops.”

“During duck season?” he asked.

He had me there. From late October through early November, far-off rifle shots regularly woke up everyone in town.

“Fath-
er
Whip-
pet.
Yoo hoo!
” Grandma was calling from the sliding doors.

“What's she doing?” Evan asked.

“Beats me.” We sat back to watch the show. She attempted to prance into the yard but had to settle for shuffling. She had on a clean housecoat, but I noticed she had one pink curler dangling from her hair.

She took Father Whippet by the arm. “Would you like to have coffee with me? I have some things I'd like to discuss with you. I hear you're very attentive to older women.” While she batted her eyes at him and led him away, Father Whippet looked over his shoulder directly at me. At that moment, I knew that he knew that I knew. I just didn't know exactly what.

Chapter Twenty-five
August 1986

L
ate August is a magical time in western Michigan. The nights are filled with fireflies and meteor showers and dances at the White Lake Yacht Club. The days slide by while you're watching Sea Scout sailboat races or swimming at the country club pool or windsurfing through Muskegon Channel. For me, it meant that I would soon be done with Grandma and the Bear Lake Tavern. Soon Walker would return to Princeton. I didn't go back to college until mid-September, when MSU started its fall semester.

I wiped down the ketchup bottles fast to hurry and escape the Blit. The lunch crowd had died down and I figured Tommy wouldn't mind if I left a half hour early. Lucy, Chuck, and Elizabeth were due in to Muskegon at the end of the week. In anticipation of their arrival, I had promised Mom I would help her clean up the house after Roxie, the maid, had left. Mom didn't like the way Roxie cleaned, or didn't clean, as the case may be. But every time she attempted to fire her, Roxie would laugh and say, “Oh now, you don't mean that, Mrs. T.”

I wanted to get the cleaning done fast because Walker had asked me out that night. He said it was going to be something special. He seemed to be getting over all the hoopla we had endured over the summer. I filled out my time card and was leaving the Blit when Tommy said casually, “Hey, Jeannie. Time to get out the Squirrel Board.”

Not the Squirrel Board. I closed my eyes. “No way, Tommy. It's too early for the Squirrel Board. We need to wait another couple of weeks.”

“I felt a crisp in the air last night,” Tommy said firmly. “I can't disappoint my customers.”

I trudged to the metal shed across the parking lot. It was full of spiderwebs and dirt and dried-out paint cans on makeshift shelves made out of lumber and cinder blocks. A few times during the summer, during various fits of angst, I had contemplated cleaning it out. But I'd thought better of it after Tommy suggested that, if I had so much energy, I could scrape the eaves on the building too. I found the Squirrel Board way in the back behind a broken neon Budweiser sign. I yanked and tugged and managed to get it out into the parking lot. Dragging it in the door, I yelled, “Where do you want it, Tommy?”

He stared at me from his place at the bar, where he was counting receipts. “How about the same place it's been for about a hundred years?”

I rolled my eyes and cursed him under my breath. I struggled to get it up onto the waiting hooks. Tommy tossed me some chalk and I drew a line vertically down the middle dividing the chalkboard into two halves. On the left side, I wrote
BLACK SQUIRRELS
, and on the right side I wrote
GRAY SQUIRRELS
.

Tommy came over. “Guess I might as well be first,” he said.

He took the chalk from me and wrote his name on the black squirrel side. He wrote, “December 7 at 4:10 a.m.” Then he put a ten-dollar bill in the big empty pickle jar he saved for this occasion.

I have no idea when this tradition began but it was a long time ago. Our town is one of the few on earth that boasts black squirrels along with regular gray squirrels. Squirrels are noted for predicting an early or late winter based on when they start gathering acorns. But townspeople noticed that black squirrels and gray squirrels each started gathering acorns at different times. Sometimes the blacks started gathering first, other times the grays. People began to have arguments over which color of squirrel was predicting the onset of winter correctly.

A not-so-elaborate—or accurate—betting game emerged. If your gut instincts told you that winter was going to come early, you'd back the squirrels that were gathering nuts early in the fall. You'd pick your “team,” meaning the Blacks or the Grays. Then you would write down when you thought the first snowfall would occur. The person closest to the actual date and time won the jar and bragging rights for their squirrel team for a year. Three years running, the person who won had backed the gray squirrels. Last year, the winner took home $2,420. I took my tip money from my apron pocket, deposited ten dollars in the jar, and wrote, “Jeannie Thompson, November 30, 12:00 p.m.” on the gray squirrel side.

“That's a lousy time,” Tommy called after my back. “First snows never start at noon.” I waved him off and kept walking. This was a familiar conversation. Every year, the fall months would be filled with arguments of statistics about past first snowfalls. But right now I didn't want to talk about it. It was sunny and eighty degrees out.

After I changed the sheets on all the beds and cleaned the bathroom, I noticed that Elizabeth's schedule for bedrooms was now posted on the refrigerator. Lucy and Chuck would be staying here until they left for school in a few weeks. My name was not next to “couch,” Evan's was. It got worse. It said:

Lucy and Chuck: guest room

Grandma: pink room

Elizabeth: dessert room

Mom and Dad: Mom and Dad's room

Evan: couch

Jeannie: basement

“Mom!” I was horrified. “There's not even a bed in the basement!” Our basement wasn't finished. It was gray and musty with exposed pipes. Books and boxes and Christmas ornaments were piled everywhere, with only a narrow path to the washer and dryer. I had organized it many times but had given up after it kept going right back to its original mess in no time at all.

“You can switch with Elizabeth,” she said helpfully.

“You know I can't ask a pregnant woman to sleep on a basement floor!” I replied.

Mom hustled off to find Dad's sleeping bag from his stint in the army during the Korean War. She figured that she could make a bed for me out of that. As she rummaged through a closet, I heard her say, “I think there's enough room for you under the ironing board.”

Grandma was flipping her cards down on the table. I looked over her shoulder and saw that the dreaded ace of spades was upside down again. “Didn't you say that means death?” I tapped the card.

Grandma nodded without looking up and continued flipping until the cards were laid out in neat rows. The ace of spades was surrounded again by the jack of diamonds, the queen of hearts, and the queen of diamonds.

“Grandma, that's what came up right before we thought Lucy was dead. What's the probability of that?” I asked.

“It's inevitable,” she said without looking at me. She was giving me the chills on a very hot day.

“Do you mean that card formation will keep coming up because someone is supposed to die?”

“Yes.”

“But it's not what turned up the last time you did a reading.”

“It depends on who you're reading for.”

“Who are you reading these for now?”

Grandma looked up at me. “Your mother.” I backed away from her and ran out into the yard. I tilted my face to the late afternoon sun and thought, She doesn't mean any harm. She is an old woman who doesn't mean what she says. I lowered my head and looked at the house. I didn't believe a word of what I was telling myself. And I felt bad about it.

Dad would be coming home from work soon. Evan should be docking any minute now. Once a week he captained a research vessel for scientists who studied water currents. Mom was trying to figure out what to make for dinner and worrying about what to feed two pregnant women in the coming weeks. “Everything,” I teased her.

I hated when she worried so much. Sometimes, when she was getting into full-scale worry mode, I'd dance her around the kitchen. I'd twirl her in and out, carefully avoiding the refrigerator and the cabinets and Buddy lying on the floor. Once I'd tripped over the open door of the dishwasher and dropped her flat on her bottom when I was trying to dip her. We both laughed, tangled up on the floor. “Oh, Jeannie!” my mom would say, with tears of laughter rolling down her face. That usually snapped her out of herself.

With us, she didn't put up with much self-pity or self-doubt. After listening to and advising on our various complaints (boyfriend broke up with me, got fired from my job, hair turned green in the chlorine), she would eventually announce, “Pull up your bootstraps!”

Now I grabbed her for a quick spin at the stove until she laughed. Then she balanced her cigarette on the side of the counter while she studied the contents of the refrigerator.

“I want that spaghetti you made a while ago,” Grandma said.

Mom said, “Well, all right, I guess that would be easy.” She went to the basement to get a few jars of her homemade tomato sauce. Since Walker was taking me out to dinner, I wasn't worried about having to face the icky sauce. I was thinking about what to wear on my date when I heard Mom's voice from below. “Jeannie?” her voice quavered. I went down the steps and saw Mom standing in the middle of the room. “Do you smell something?” she whispered.

I pulled my T-shirt up over my nose to block the smell. “Omigod, Mom, what is it?”

“Gas,” she said.

I could hear a hissing noise and I frantically moved boxes away from the wall until I found where the gas was seeping in. It was behind the dryer. The gas line had been wrenched apart, and gas was filling the basement. I grabbed a towel and tried to shove it into the broken line but I could still hear it hissing deep inside the wall. “Is your cigarette out?” My voice was squeaky.

Mom was moving a heavy bookcase trying to see if there was another access to the interior of the wall. “I left it on the kitchen counter upstairs. Thank God.” She grunted with the strain of the bookcase.

“Do you know where the gas shutoff is?” I asked her.

“No. Your father always handles things like that.”

“I'll go call the fire department. You should get out of here now.” Then I turned and saw the tiny pilot flame. “Mom! The water heater!” I yelped.

Her eyes widened. “Get your grandmother and run outside. Now!”

I didn't go. I ran around the basement looking for something to douse that flame with before our house became a fireball. I threw the washer open and, sure enough, there were damp clothes inside. I grabbed the first thing handy and sprawled on my belly. I shoved the damp cloth as far under the heater as I could, praying it reached and extinguished the source of certain destruction. I pulled the fabric out carefully and studied the space between the heater and the floor. The flame was out. I laid my head on the concrete floor and sighed.

“Hey, are you guys down there?” Evan shouted. I heard his feet hitting the top steps. Mom ran headlong up the steps and pushed Evan out of the stairwell. When I got upstairs they were picking themselves up off the floor. Evan had a cigarette in his hand. “What the hell?” he sputtered.

“Out, now, out!” Mom gasped. She grabbed Grandma and moved her bodily to the back door.

“Evan, open the windows and doors!” I cranked open every pane of glass I could find. Evan didn't ask what was happening but started helping me. I grabbed the phone and dialed 9-1-1. When the operator answered, I yelled, “Gas leak! We have a gas leak!”

There was a pause and then the operator said quizzically, “Jeannie?”

“Yes! It's Jeannie! Get somebody over here who knows where the hell the gas shutoff is!”

“End of Fourth Street, right?”

“Right!”

The operator said she'd have someone over in a minute and hung up. Evan and I left the house and joined Mom and Grandma in the front yard. We watched the house for signs of imminent explosion. Dad pulled into the driveway. When he saw us all in the front yard, he hurried over to Mom. “What happened?”

“It's a gas leak, Harold. I have no idea how long that hose was pouring gas into the house. We all could have been killed.” Mom was regaining her composure.

“Ah shit, not again.” Dad sighed. Mom, Evan, and I stared at Dad. Grandma turned her head away conspicuously. I heard sirens growing louder. Why they were using sirens I had no idea. The firehouse was only three blocks away. The fire truck came around the corner, closely followed by the paramedic truck and North Muskegon's lone cop car. The volunteer firemen and Marv Carson trooped into our house. I watched the blue and red lights flashing across our neighbors' houses. They were all coming out now to see what the excitement was about. A crowd gathered at a safe distance across the street. Walker jogged across the lawn to me.

“Is everybody all right?” We all nodded yes. He took my hand. “So what happened now?”

“A gas leak,” I said. I looked at my grandmother and decided not to bring up my suspicions.

“I had to park over on Third Street. They've got your entire block cordoned off,” Walker said. I wasn't really listening to him because I was wondering what Marv Carson was carrying out of the house. As he lugged his burden down the front steps, I ran toward him.

“Hey, you can't go near there yet!” a fireman yelled at me. I didn't stop until I was standing in front of Marv at the bottom of the steps. His head was down and the brim of his hat obscured his eyes.

“Officer Carson?” It was a question, and he knew what it meant. When he raised his head I saw his eyes were glistening.

“Ah, Jeannie. Ah, shit. I'm so sorry.”

I stroked the brown fur. “Is he . . . can we . . .” I didn't finish. I knew the answer. Marv walked heavily to a corner of the yard and laid Buddy's body on the grass. He took care that Buddy's feet were not under his body and that his neck wasn't lolling. I sat next to my dog and pulled his head onto my lap. My family gathered around.