Ernie's Ark (11 page)

“I saw the news,” she said softly. “Dan, I barely recognized you.”

His eyes flickered. “You’re not the only one.” Now he held her gaze. “Timmy crossed.”

Timmy was the youngest of all those brothers, his favorite. “Crossed?” Cindy said, half-comprehending. “You mean the picket line?”

Danny nodded, his face puffy with grief. She found that she could still read him like a wife: he had given his brother up.

“Danny, I don’t believe you.” She was of the opinion that love made exceptions to life’s most exacting rules. He looked haggard and old, and perhaps she alone was able to understand how much this breach had cost him. Thick as thieves, she used to think of them, thick as thieves, the flypaper family.

Cindy scanned the weathering town, its snowy hills gone ash-colored in the overcast afternoon. “Maybe it will end soon.” She imagined herself as a striker’s wife, collecting cans for the food bank.

“Is that your stepdaughter?” Danny asked.

Cindy nodded. Francine was waving mightily from the display window, where she was lining up the flower baskets, placing them into military rows. Her big sweatshirt read
SCABS OUT! UNION IN
!

“I’ve seen her down at the union hall,” Danny said.

“She’s been volunteering,” Cindy told him. Francine was tapping on the glass now, gesturing toward a display that Cindy would have to do over. After Cindy gave the thumbs-up, Francine climbed out of the window, lowering one lumbery leg at a time. Embarrassed, Cindy glanced away. “She was four when their mother left,” Cindy sighed. “She follows me like a dog.”

“Seems like a nice kid.”

“She is,” Cindy said. “Smart, too. Scary-smart. She’s designing my Web site.”

“You mean on the Internet?”

Cindy smiled wearily. “She’s planning to make me rich.”

He was looking at her as if to say,
You’re trusting a kid with your future?
Which was a good point, an excellent point, but she’d hitched her wagon to dimmer stars than this.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry about Tim.”

“Yeah,” he said. “He’s gone now, anyway. Off to parts unknown. I thought you’d want to know.” He bent to adjust something on the dog’s collar. It was a sweet dog, well-mannered. We should have had a dog, she thought.

“Anyway,” Danny said. “I’m glad you finally got the kids you wanted.”

“They’re not the kids I wanted,” Cindy said. In a rush of regret and nostalgia, she blundered toward her former husband
and his arms came around her. They stood that way for a very long moment, long enough so that she began to remember what it was like to be held by him before they’d been worn apart by their respective sorrows.

Francine was watching, of course, but Cindy didn’t mind. Her stepdaughter had been observing this town like a historian for months now, and she seemed to understand better than Cindy that all the rules of protocol had changed. Francine had once witnessed two women—one a striker, one a strikebreaker’s wife—leap out of their cars to slap each other’s face, then reported it to Cindy with the composure of a war correspondent.

Danny’s dog began to tug on its leash. Cindy blurted, “Remember that game?” and before she knew what she was doing she had confessed her three-year-old con. Danny chuckled a little, shaking his head. His old face flashed out from the blotched, grieving one, and she was glad she had told him just for that, for a two-second glimpse of her old life.

“Oh, God, Danny,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t.” Their breath mingled in tiny, cold clouds.

“Especially not your family, Danny. Really.” She stopped. “Listen, you don’t, you don’t happen to have a copy of the new MindMelt that I could borrow?”

He looked at her. “We don’t play anymore. Cindy, we don’t even talk.”

There had been a time when the Littles’ not talking would have been her dearest wish. But now she retreated into her shop, aware of Francine’s appraising eyes. Danny’s family, so fastened by blood and history, had been in love with themselves as a unit, a
secret club, a gravitational force. If a family like that could collapse at this late stage, then what hope was there for hers?

That night’s supper was a typical one in the Love household: Kenny gulping his food, holding his plate away from the table as if the lot of them had rabies; Bruce making painful small talk with Francine about her day at school; Cindy turning out radish curls that nobody noticed except Francine, who noticed everything.

“Wasn’t that your ex-husband today?” Kenny asked.

Bruce looked up. Then Francine.

“I was coming out of the VideoMart,” Kenny explained, the soul of innocence. “Looked like a deep conversation.”

“He’s having a bad time,” Cindy said evenly. She nibbled at a glazed carrot, having learned early on to give Kenny’s assaults more room than they required. “I’ve actually thought about sending him flowers, but I wouldn’t want him to take it the wrong way.”

“What other way is there to take it?” Bruce said.

Francine stopped chewing. “I can think of at least twelve.”

But Bruce was getting up, acting the wounded husband, an act that Cindy recognized as the righteous indignation of a sinner. She caught a glimpse of his face as he turned from the table, his eyes fixed in the middle distance, where the student he was screwing floated hotly, half in and half out of her paint-smattered shirt, her pinkish breasts turned up and asking.

Kenny pushed his plate back. “You’re a sculptor, Dad,” he said, switching to his true target, his voice well aimed and soft with condescension. “Cindy dumped the guy for you. What’s to worry?”

“You’ve got your facts out of order, Kenny,” Cindy said, mortified. Was this what everybody thought? Was this what Danny thought?

“Kenny always has his facts out of order,” Bruce said, turning around. “Which is just the damnedest thing for a kid who knows everything.”

Kenny scraped his chair back—a hard scrape that changed the tenor of the room. “Then let’s do it, Dad,” he said, staring his father down. “Let’s put the facts in order. What do you say, Dad? Want to put the facts in order?”

Cindy held her breath, sensing a plate-rattling showdown in the works, a bad one, a naming of names, a litany of things Kenny knew about his father that Cindy did not want Francine to hear. But Bruce apparently had other plans. Before Kenny could wind himself up another notch, Bruce had slammed out the door and his car was spitting up ice as he screeched into the street. Kenny slipped into his room, eerily wordless, leaving Francine and Cindy and a glory of leftovers.

Cindy remained where she was, Francine silent across from her, until the sound of Bruce’s car faded far around the corner. She waited for the air to settle, for the kitchen clock to take over the management of time. Then she took up her fork, and Francine did likewise. They finished eating.

“I like what you put on the carrots,” Francine said.

Cindy thanked her. Then: “I didn’t leave one man for another, Francine. I would never do that.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” Francine said solemnly. “Kenny’s a jerk.” She took up some plates and put them in the sink. “You want to see what I’m working on?”

Cindy followed Francine to her room. This is what her evenings came to. She sat patiently, the way she had so many times since she had become Francine’s default mother. Bruce’s first wife had moved to London and showed no signs of ever coming back. The photograph on Francine’s desk hadn’t been updated in years, so it was impossible to know what she looked like now, but Cindy felt a profound, unwanted kinship with this woman who knew what it was like to be Mrs. Bruce Love: that peculiar loneliness, the kind that intensified the nearer he got.

“Watch this,” Francine said, presenting a scanned image of Cindy on the computer screen. The image startled her. She looked like a movie star holding flowers so vivid you wanted to eat them. A little flutter happened inside her, a feeling like, God help her, a bud opening. She thought, I’d buy flowers from her. I’d buy anything from her.

“How’d you do that?” Cindy asked.

Francine grinned. “Magic.”

From downstairs came the sound of Kenny slamming out of the house, then the more distant
rrr-rrr-rrr
of Cindy’s car struggling to start in the cold.

“He didn’t even ask you,” Francine said. “I don’t like him anymore.” Finally the engine turned over, and Cindy relaxed.

“When I was little he used to ride me around on his handlebars,” Francine said. “I was his favorite little kid of all time.”

Cindy did not know how to answer this.

Francine shook her head—gravely, as if presiding over a death. Cindy thought something might be wrong with the computer, until Francine blurted, “He’s leaving. I know it.”

Cindy touched Francine’s hair, which was coarse and old-feeling. “Well, he’ll graduate soon,” she said.

“No,” Francine muttered. “That’s not what I meant. He’s already gone, really.” She hunched over the keyboard, blinking hard, clicking here and there. “A lady came into the shop today while you were out,” she said. “She wanted two dozen roses with the buds cut off. Just the sticks, that’s all. She wanted to send her brother a big bunch of thorny dead sticks.” She stared at the screen. “They’re on opposite sides.”

“What did you say to her?” Cindy asked.

Francine looked up; Cindy received her face in all its homely beauty. “I told her we were in the joy business.”

She clicked the keyboard again and another image showed up: an order form accompanied by a different photograph, a long shot that Cindy couldn’t place. She’d been caught outside the shop in summer, her back to the camera, hanging a basket of fuchsia, midday sunshine showering over her glinting hair. The real surprise was the town, which looked green and prosperous: window boxes brimming, doors flung wide,
OPEN
flags rippling. You could tell everyone was working.

“Where’d you get this?” Cindy asked, squinting at the screen.

“I took it.”

“When?”

Francine hesitated. “Last summer, I think. It was last summer.”

“That’s not last summer, honey,” Cindy said slowly. “That’s, what, four years ago, at least.”

Francine shook her head.

Now Cindy got serious. “I replaced that plant hanger a long time ago, Francine. When did you take this?”

Francine sat back, her skin blotching. “Before Dad knew you,” she admitted.

Cindy regarded Francine, accosted by a deep unease. “Why would you have taken my picture before Dad knew me?”

Francine cast her eyes down, the pale lashes fluttering behind her thick glasses. “I don’t know. I picked you out. I told him and told him. Once I came in the shop just to look at you close.” She was crying a little, and Cindy hardly knew what to do. She was too shocked to be angry; she couldn’t imagine Francine, who would have been nine years old back then, roaming the streets of Abbott Falls looking for a mother.

“Kenny’s leaving,” Francine was saying, not looking at anything but the image on the screen. “Don’t you leave us, too.” She passed a pudgy palm across her handiwork, which now looked desperate with effort. “You can’t leave. I’m going to make you rich.”

“You don’t have to make me rich, Francine,” Cindy whispered. “I’m not going anywhere.” You can say
that
again, said a voice in the back of her head. Then she stroked the scratchy hair of this child who loved flowers.

“Did that woman say something to you today, Francine?” Cindy asked. “The dead-sticks lady?”

“No,” Francine said. “It’s not that.” She sighed like an old woman. “She just went away. I tried to explain, but she wasn’t listening. Nobody in this town is listening.”

After Francine went to bed, Cindy sat up in the dark living room. Bruce, as usual, wasn’t home. Something at the college, an awards dinner or seminar or colloquium. Or.

She heard her car pull up around midnight—that telltale whir—and Kenny sauntered in. Most boys his age would be red-faced and reeking, but Kenny seemed composed, as if he’d spent the evening discussing math theorems or sitting alone in a diner.

“Where’s your husband?” he asked. In his voice she detected a note of resignation that moved her unaccountably. She wondered if what she had taken for scorn all these years had been something else altogether: pity, perhaps. He looked older to her, at this hour, in this room, in this quiet.