Come Sunday: A Novel (23 page)

One night, when my father was working the graveyard shift and I was supposed to be asleep, I drew near the guest room door. It was the sound of melancholy that had brought me to it, that kept me listening at its side to the awful sound of my mother’s heart breaking. And then, as though speaking to a friend, my mother prayed. “I know I shouldn’t say it, Lord,” she whispered, “but it sounds nice to be dead, to be tied to a stone at the bottom of the lake.” Apart from grace at my grandmother’s table, never had I heard my mother pray, let alone such impossible words to a God who was as remote as the man in the moon.
“Deliver me from this hell,” she bargained, “before I send myself to another.”

It was an admission of intent every bit as intractable as a suicide note. And I had no idea what to do with the hearing of it. Rather than barging into the room and getting her to reverse her words, to extract from her a reassuring promise, I crept into my cold bed and shivered long after the sheets warmed up. I did not tell my father, eating his reheated dinner at the breakfast table the following morning, and I did not ask to borrow the telephone key to call my grandmother and tell her. When my mother handed me my school lunch and money for the bus, I did not even then let on that I knew her secret. “Bye, Ma,” I said as I had a thousand other mornings, careful not to cling to her or cry. Even when my physics teacher snapped at me for not paying attention, I could only respond by imagining my mother wading, Woolf-like, into my grandmother’s wintry lake with rocks pinned neatly into the hem of her dressing gown. The secret I was really keeping was how I was failing to do something to prevent it.

Sometimes I think it is much easier to keep a secret than a promise. As long as they are stored out of sight, secrets give the world a much better chance of making it through the day unscathed. You make a promise, on the other hand, and you are just asking for trouble.

PETAL’S BIG SECRET is that Blossom’s daddy is not Jeff but a Sagittarian from Scotland who promised to be so much more than the onenight stand he ended up being. And, as it turns out, it is no more a secret than it is a surprise.

“I told Sue—the nurse; she’s great. She says what matters is that I’m Blossom’s mommy.”

“Who else knows?” I asked.

“I told Grandma Kay last month, only because she was so sad when Jeff and I broke up.”

“I thought he dumped you.”

“Well, it was more of a mutual agreement.”

“Oh.”

“I suppose she told Granddad already, because he has been more grouchy than usual.”

“Is there anyone who doesn’t know?”

She shrugs.

“It’s not really a secret, then, is it?”

“Well, my dad doesn’t know yet, and Reverend Deighton,” she says.

“And are you planning to tell either of them?”

“I sort of was hoping you could help me with that.”

IT IS DARK when Greg and I get home. In the cupboard above the refrigerator is a bottle of Johnnie Walker someone gave Greg when Cleo was born. It has never been opened. I get it down and pour it in the mug on the draining board.

“You okay?” he asks.

The first swallow is an antiseptic, the second an anesthetic.

Before the third, I lift my cup to him. “A toast,” I say. “To Blossom.”

When Greg gets in the shower and as the fragrance of his shampoo wafts through the room, I kneel down and lift the skirt of the bedcovers. It is a reach for the shoe box, but my hands locate it without me having to look. I pull it out, lift the lid, and stare at the heart-shaped koa box. My hands enfold it. “Baby,” I cry, “my sweet baby,” but all I seem to have are the ashes of a broken promise.

Summer in Hawaii takes forever to end. By the tail end of December it becomes a terminal condition, with its smell of decay—rotting mangoes, mold, sweat—that even the fans cannot dispel. It trudged right through Advent and Christmas, its thermometer never once dipping. There is no relief from the dizzying glare; from the sticky lethargy there is no escape. Today the cloying Kona winds coat the air with grime, obscuring the view of the Waianae Range. And the hours drag on till I get bored with the clocks and their melancholic shuffle. Rinsing the few dishes in the sink, I watch Ronnie—his neck brace no apparent hindrance to the task of pruning the orange tree—and dream of brisk temperatures.

Cleo never knew winter, and it was difficult explaining it to her when we read her Christmas books. To Cleo, cold was swimming in the ocean at Waikiki Beach in January or the chill you get from eating shave ice too quickly. Cold never fell out of the sky like pigeon feathers or stacked up on the fence posts. One Saturday last December, when we were both bored and itchy from the heat and the candy canes had all melted into sticky gobs on our brown Christmas tree, I cut a hole in my old down pillow and ushered Cleo into the middle of the bathroom floor. To her delight, I climbed up on the bathroom counter, stretched my hands up to the ceiling, and shook out the feathers while she twirled and danced beneath them.

“Aden!” she shrieked when the last one floated to the floor. I cut up Greg’s pillows and two old couch pillows with foamy stuffing before she had had enough. Later that night, when we read
The Night Before Christmas
I told her that snow was as soft as mommy kisses, as light as angels’ wings. I told her I loved her more than all the snowflakes in the world.

Greg comes home from church soggy and tired. Heat rash streaks his neck and he walks to the freezer for the ice pack. “How was your day?” he asks.

“Oh, the same. Jean wants me to do a travel feature for the February issue. Buella found a stray kitten she’s named Liberace that she wants to palm off on me. You?”

“Not without a few surprises,” he says. “Mrs. Scribner took me to lunch, for one thing.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Scribner has not invited me to attend church with her again since the incident with Carolyn, but she has dropped off two more hats with hatboxes and the calling card of her Korean hairdresser. Last week she came by to show me her new Maltese poodle, an excitable pup who peed on the carpet when Pilgrim hissed at it.

“She’s decided about Puffy’s ashes,” he says.

“The memorial garden?”

“Nope. She’s going to sprinkle them at the golf course.”

“She can’t do that, can she? Isn’t it illegal?” Mrs. Scribner and her late husband, avid golfers and members of the Honolulu Club since the day it opened, were exempt from the no-pets policy. Some said it was their money, some that it was lifetime membership. Whatever it was, their canine companions were known to travel along in the golf cart, retrieving Mr. Scribner’s ball if it wandered too far from the fairway, which was often, as Mrs. Scribner tells it.

“She’s going to get a cart and dribble a bit of his ashes at each hole.”

“They’re not going to let her do that!”

“That’s why she’s not going to tell them. The plan is to do a leisurely nine holes with her pastor just before closing time.”

I cannot get used to an uninterrupted conversation. Cleo would get so frustrated when Greg and I talked at the table, so intent on
our conversation about work or church or theology. She would get louder or start playing with her food or stand up on her chair and jump. Sometimes she would just holler at us, “Stop talking!” And we would exchange a look of resignation and turn our attention to true north.

“You said ‘a few surprises’; what else?” I ask.

“The district superintendent called today . . . There’s a church they want me to consider.”

“Oh?”

“In California. Just north of Fresno. The guy there just had a heart attack. They’ve got an interim, but they need to fill the position by conference time, so Alex is suggesting we go up and take a look around. See if it’s a community we could get along with. I thought we could go visit Rhiaan and Cicely while we’re at it.”

“I thought you were going to hold out for something here,” I say, irritated at Greg’s obvious excitement. If California is the cool-cat state, then Fresno is its hairball. Air you can gag on, heat that makes turncoats out of shade, ninety-nine square miles of boredom. Come conference six months from now, and it will still be too soon.

“I know,” he sighs. “I told Alex you didn’t want to move. But he’s not sure any appointments are going to open up on Oahu.” My terror must be apparent, because he says, “Tell you what, let’s not worry about the church right now, let’s just plan on a trip to Tahoe.”

“I don’t know. I will have to take time off work . . .” Here we go again, his face seems to say. “Maybe you should go without me; maybe we could do with some time alone.”

This time Greg is adamant. “No, Abbe! I am alone most of the time; I’m sick of being alone. I am doing my best not to lose you altogether. Please, please, let’s go. Together.” I see a drowning man before me, someone who looks vaguely like a man who was once my husband. I nod and whisper, “Okay.”

CHRISTMAS HAS PASSED without trees and twinkle lights, carols or fuss. No magi with their morbid gifts of embalmment. Somewhere beyond
my walls people celebrated the birth of a baby, forgetting it is a stone’s throw from Golgotha. Now it looks as though New Year’s Eve will go without fanfare too. Greg and I watch a foreign film about Japanese samurai and kiss chastely at ten o’clock before going to bed. “Happy New Year,” we each say sadly, and lie waiting for the old year to go quietly to its grave. After a few minutes, Greg’s hand reaches for my waist and he shifts himself into the curve of my back. We are still a long time, side by side, till I feel the small, cold lump of flesh swell against my buttocks. His hand cups my breast and only a stale sense of resignation rises up to meet it. The gesture is doubtful; a question more than a plan. If I wait long enough without moving, Greg’s straining penis will lie back down obediently and he will fall asleep holding no grudges.

Greg’s return to our bed went without comment, just as his departure from it had. After months of retreating to separate rooms, covering our grieving hearts with separate sheets, we once again share the same bed, tucked into our familiar hollows without footnotes. And there are no speeches now, in the pause between my rejection or reception of his advances. Thinking that sleep might be coaxed more quickly, I turn to him, and invite him onto my body. Beyond his measured strains, his face buried in my hair, I watch the east window. It has started to rain. Good. There won’t be many fireworks tonight.

After a quiet shudder, Greg wriggles apart awkwardly and I return to my side. “Sorry,” I hear him whisper, and I smile my okay, even though it is too dark for him to see it. A minute later he snores softly and I think, No need for sorry. I offer a body not meant for loving anymore, a hag’s bony embrace.

THE CLATTER OF PANS wakes me up to the first day of January. Greg is cooking pancakes, and I wonder if we are now expected to return to all our prenatal rituals. When I enter the kitchen the teapot is already full, ready for pouring into the teacups only ever used for company.

“I spoke to Rhiaan—we’re on! And I just booked our tickets—we
have enough frequent flyer miles for one free round-trip.” He seems almost happy.