Come Sunday: A Novel (12 page)

That’s what Sal was. My merry-go-round.

Each time he came by my office, I heard that platform creak as I stepped on it. Each time I put out my foot and gave a tentative push. When he left, everything slowed, everything became so infuriatingly solid, immovable, predictable once again. Things didn’t move. Objects didn’t fly about. Not the cabinets or the desk or the house. Or Greg. Dear bolted-down, rustproof, net-protected Greg.

If Greg was a piece of playground equipment, he would be the sandbox. It is hard to get hurt in the sandbox, and I had loved that about him right from the start. After my father, it was all I ever wanted in a man. If not happy, I might have been content within those boundaries if someone hadn’t had to go pointing out the merry-go-round.

There’s been a death in the family
, is what I thought when Sal and I were in the janitor’s closet. I was expecting sparks, not tears, but tears there were, surprising tears because there was nothing to cry about. A man was holding me with the tenderest of looks. And, not speaking, he reached across the spinning gap and wiped them with his thumb, the way he would wipe his own tears. And there it was again:
There’s been a death in the family
. Shh, he whispered, even though no one was making a sound. Perhaps he was shushing the wind that had gathered speed around us, which was lifting our hair and setting it in arcs. And even when his lips were so close that even the wind couldn’t squeeze through, he called for quiet, so close there was nothing round about his eyes—they had flattened to an escarpment, the end of which I couldn’t see. And I did not make a sound. It was my body who was the family,
and there were bits inside it that had climbed into their graves. Bits that didn’t even have names, so there were no tombstones. But all at once they rose up like the swirling skirt of a girl on a merry-go-round, and I let them rise and rise till modesty spun off and sailed away with the breeze. After his lips left mine I still had my head tilted back, so he came back, and we rode around one last time.

Jostled along the conveyor belt of mourners, Sal is gone. I shake hands and stumble into people’s embraces, and all I can recall is that last stolen moment Sal and I shared—his whisper (“Do I dare hope?”) so faint it might easily have been misheard had it not been offered by his lips in my hair. A thief I was, or worse, because of that moment, stealing what had no business being mine.

Mrs. Avery approaches me. “We will now move the coffin to the hearse, Mrs. Deighton, if you would like to follow us.” Her companion, a man I do not recognize, directs Greg, Rhiaan, Frank, and Chuck to take their places at the four handles. I look around frantically for Jenny but do not see her, and the overwhelming sense of jet lag assails me. Quickly Mrs. Avery reaches out for my arm and I accept her help with dry gratitude.

We follow Cleo, riding on the men’s shoulders, down the long aisle and out the back of the church. Cleo always loved to ride on Greg’s shoulders. Sometimes he forgot to bend when walking through doorways, and her sharp cry would make me want to kill him.

“It’s just not right,” I say, shaking free the tears, watching love walk away.

“No, dear, it certainly isn’t,” Mrs. Avery quietly replies, tightening her grip on my arm. It is a second loss, seeing Cleo put in the hearse, hearing the doors slam behind her. She goes, and I shall not see her again. As the hearse slips quietly into the crowded lane, I hear my grandmother’s voice just as surely as if she were standing behind me and whispering the words: Hold a button, Abbe.

GREG AND I SHUFFLE to the church’s fellowship hall, modestly decorated and overcrowded, just as the rain comes down.

“Who was that?” Greg asks.

“Who?”

“The guy wearing a tie.”

I search Greg’s face as though it might have the answer. Doesn’t he know? Hasn’t he seen a thing?

SOMETIMES I felt as though I had watched too much of my parents, as though they were a never-ending daytime TV drama bound to give me square eyes. But sometimes I think I was not watching closely enough. I cannot say, for example, how long my mother slaked her thirst with the gin bottle. It might have been my entire fourteenth year or it could have been a month. Nor can I say I know the moment she started smiling again. The little things I noticed did not seem like any big deal, certainly nothing that was about to lead to her branding. She no longer took naps at the kitchen counter beside her untouched dinner plate; she started growing her nails; there was the new hairdo (a permanent for her reed-straight hair) and a new dress. And oh, one other thing: her laugh. That was new. She laughed at things that weren’t even funny—my knock-knock jokes, my grandmother’s backfiring Morris Minor when it drove up our street, the cat’s antics with her feather duster. But I never stopped to think about it until I came home from tennis practice one day and found her spilling that laugh all over the phone.

For one thing my mother did not spend much time on the phone because my father always clanged on about the bills he had to pay each month. It did not seem to matter when the call was on someone else’s dime. And also, my mother did not have many friends. Any friends, really, except for Auntie Muriel, who only came by when there was no chance of running into my father. But that afternoon my mother giggled like Natalie Chandler did each time she walked up the school stairs while a row of eighth-grade boys lined up below for a view of the valley up her skirt.

My mother was on the phone when I put my racket away, when I
came out of the kitchen with a sandwich, and when I came out of my room after doing my homework, all the while soaking the conversation with that burbling brook of a laugh. She was still on the phone when my father blasted through the front door, plum-faced. We would hear soon enough how he had been trying to call home for two hours to tell her that he had finally gotten the promotion, to cancel dinner because this was a night for Bender’s Grill. But first there was the business of the phone to attend to, and the business of the laugh.

“Who the hell are you gabbing to?” he yelled, my mother pale as her freshly hung wallpaper.

She let the receiver slip from her ear to her heart. “It’s no one, a friend,” she answered.

“Well, which is it?” he spat. My father, apparently, had been watching my mother more closely than I had, because before she could answer he grabbed the phone from her and yelled “Who is this?” in such a manner as to indicate he knew exactly who it was. My mother tried reaching for the cradle to disconnect the line, but he flung her hand aside.

The No-One-Friend evidently answered because my father’s rage blistered like canker sores.

“Listen here, you mealymouthed faggot, don’t think I don’t know what’s going on! I told you before, you talk to my wife and I’ll fuck you up. You hear me?” And then, by way of demonstration, he banged the receiver against the telephone table a few times and replaced it at his ear.

“I am going to say this one more time: You don’t ever, fucking never, talk to my wife again. You stay away from her or, so help me God, she’s going to read about you in the obits. And I’ll be the one laughing then!” The phone, having enjoyed its last moment of function, was ripped from the socket and hurled against the wall.

There was no trace of a laugh on my mother’s face when my father spun around to meet it.

“Dad,” I cried. “Dad, please!” If he knew I was standing at my door on the other end of the hallway, a witness, would he not quit? But there was no quitting: Louise Spenser’s face had to be taught a lesson. The
blow, fierce and hard, was over quickly, but the one word that had accompanied it lingered long.
Whore
.

“ABBE, who was that man?” Greg asks again.

“No one, a friend,” I mumble, grip tightening around the locket. Cutting my hair, and the million other things I have done to keep from becoming my mother, have not worked, it seems.

“What did he give you?”

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“What is it?”

I open my palm and Greg lifts out the locket, pries it open, and peers at his daughter’s face. After a pause he looks at me and, without speaking, returns the locket to my hand. There is no backhander, no name-calling, even though I wish there were. Call me a whore, call me Salomé, call me something! Instead, Greg steps out of my circle to accept a cup of coffee and is instantly pulled into the gravitational field of his parishioners who need consoling, this the day of the Sabbath.

Sparrows carry the souls of the dead, Beauty used to say. Sitting on the rocking chair, looking out the sliding glass door to my balcony and the bird feeder Greg fills now that the storm has passed, I watch the sparrows haggle and jostle around it like old women at a church rummage sale. Why Beauty, whose toothless face is as clear as the sky from which those fidgety birds have descended, must haunt me I cannot fathom. Why her and not the bouncy-haired sparrow of a girl I once, a long time ago, yesterday, called “my child,” I do not know. Nor why I can picture her hands busy at the task of wringing a chicken’s scrawny neck now that her spells are no longer needed.

Their wings flutter and they hop about, sometimes over one another, and there seems to be great injustice in the transaction, for the fat ones feast while the forlorn-looking ones are penned out. I hope the souls of the departed are a little more cordial and accommodating. And suddenly the sparrows are joined by a couple of cardinals, the male sending the others scattering, making room for his mate.

The house is empty, Rhiaan having left before sunrise for his flight back to California. Jenny has returned to her routine of taking care of first-graders and Mr. Finnegan. The roofing contractor (a licensed one this time) and his team have left in their pickup trucks, taking the last of our line of credit with them. Only the smell of decaying bouquets and Greg’s insufferable patience take up space.

“The mortuary called this morning,” Greg announces, walking into the bedroom. “We can pick up Cleo’s cremains tomorrow.”