Even Now (8 page)

“How I what?”

“Went,” I said softly, “left me.”

Daintry’s fingers tightened around the purse strap on her shoulder. I’d ruined something, immediately rued my frankness and
wanted the brief shared hilarity back, even if it had been at my expense. Like the double billing, it wouldn’t be the first
time. “I should have known then,” I said lightly, “that you’d go off and marry yourself a minister. You started hanging out
with religious types early.”

A horn honked from the parking lot, and Mark beckoned from the car window.

“What, no van?” Daintry said.

“No van,” I said evenly. “Let’s get together.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

I knew the refrain, a song from
The Parent Trap.
But there was nothing nostalgic, no elbow-poked reminder in the answer, and I strained to decipher the subtext.
Don’t, Daintry, don’t,
I wanted to say,
it’s me.

“Where were you during Sunday school?” Hal said at home as he stood at the kitchen counter, forking pickles from a jar.

I stared out the window over the sink, where a wooden bird feeder squirrels had gnawed nearly to splinters hung motionless
from a branch. “Talking to Daintry.”

“So you knew her growing up?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well?”

Well? “At their Sunday lunches, Dr. O’Connor would go around the table and make each child summarize a portion of the sermon.
His eyebrows grew in a straight line across his forehead.”

Hal’s own eyebrows, fair and chamois colored in the noon sun invading the window, lifted at my non sequitur. He clattered
the fork in the sink. “Small world.”

Yes. And here we were, reunited in another village so small that it barely graced a map. Yet Daintry was distant, different.
I wrenched free from a swamp of emotions too varied and complex for categorization— gladness, embarrassment, sentiment, anxiety.

“You two can pick up where you left off,” Hal added blithely, unaware that was precisely the problem. What hindered our new
relationship was the loose ends and rough edges of our old one.

From Hannah’s quote book:

. . . but she—after the nature of women and cats, which will not come when they are called and which come when they are not
called—

—
Carmen,
Merimee

I
breathed through my mouth to avoid the smell of canned ravioli rising from the lurid orange sauce bubbling and burping in
the saucepan. “Are you sure you want this stuff for lunch?”

“
Everyone
at AA brings ravioli in a thermos,” Ellen declared.

I’d hoped for another year or two of uncomplicated innocence for my daughter. “But do you
like
it?” I persisted, knowing even as I asked that I’d wanted to be like everyone else, too. Or at least like Daintry O’Connor.

An image of Daintry preparing for her own day rose before me. Across the village, dressing before a mirror, perhaps, as we
once stood before my full-length mirror. Daintry hadn’t had such a luxury, and she’d taught me to dance the dirty dog before
it: “Don’t buck your knees like you’re about to fall,” she’d said. “And point your thumbs.”

Now she would be buttoning her chic and understated outfit, pulling on stockings. Or
hose,
as Kathleen O’Connor called them, a term I’d never heard.

Hal straightened a batch of papers, stuffed them into his briefcase, and sighed.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Flunking someone already?”

“If only that were it. I’m meeting with a mad mommy today whose seventh-grader was issued a white card for leaning back in
his chair.”

Two white cards in one month resulted in suspension hall. “That seems a little extreme.”

“Not when falling backward might take a computer down with him. It would be funny if it weren’t so irritating.”

Ellen interrupted. “Don’t forget to get my stencils, Mom.”

“Since when am I ‘Mom’ and not ‘Mommy’?”

But in answer Ellen gave me only a secretive smile. Spooning the gummy pasta into a thermos, I remembered crouching beside
Mother in her garden and announcing that I was too old to call her “Mommy.” To shield myself from her stricken expression
I’d pressed my face into the soft ruffled whiteness of cottage pinks, drinking in their sweet scent.

I’d never succeeded in finding the identical pinks for my own garden, to duplicate that perfume. Pinks were “dianthus” now,
flash-and-show hybrid varieties: multipetaled, brightly colored, and odorless. As if in some horticultural conspiracy, the
spare simplicity of the old strains had been bred out.

Hal put his coffee mug on the counter. “What’s on your list today?” His A.M. query was regular as the sun.

“Just errands,” I said. “The usual.”

Balancing newspapers in one hand, I struggled to open the heavy steel door of the recycle bin with the other. Twice it slammed
shut, practically taking off my fingers.

“Here, let me help.”

An arm grazed the back of my head, and I ducked beneath it. He’d surprised me. The lot of the community recycling center had
been empty when I parked. As he lifted the lid and dumped in my load, I stepped aside and watched Peter Whicker. He was a
physical opposite of Hal, with the kind of sturdy, wholly male physique that intimidated me in college. Peter was dark where
my husband was fair. Stocky and broad where Hal was lean and rangy.

“That it?” He’d caught me staring. My head reached Hal’s chin, Peter’s shoulder.

I nodded. “My good citizen deed for the day.”

“What’s next on your list?”

I started at the question, an echo of Hal’s. “Why?”

“Forgive my nosiness. I was driving by and saw you. Thought I’d catch you in Sunday school yesterday, but you obviously didn’t
attend my Inquirer’s class. I got tangled up with Frances Mason instead. She had the bound-tos to harass me with unanswerable
questions.”

“’The bound-tos’ must be related to ’the re-andres.‘”

“Which are. . . ?”

“If my father said too much or drank too much or did anything too much, the next day he suffered from the re-and-res: regrets
and remorses.”

“So what class did you attend?” He laughed. “How’s that for on the spot?”

I hesitated, but Peter’s frankness was contagious. “The abstainer’s class. If you’ll
teach
me something, I’ll come. But classes where you break into small groups and
discuss. . . ”

Peter folded his bare arms across the charcoal expanse of his buttonless shirtfront. “Then I don’t suppose you’re waiting
for me to make a call on you.” At my alarmed expression he added, “Don’t worry. I’m not the pastoral-care type. I’m the rabble-rousing
type.”

There was that unexpected irreverence again. “What were you trying to ‘catch’ me for?”

“Your horticultural reputation precedes you. I was hoping you’d come look at the columbarium. Or the weed pit that passes
for it.”

“Me? Now?”

“Just a look. Please?”

I debated, stalled. “Hal did ask me to pick up a lectionary study guide at the church.”

“Put them in the narthex myself,” Peter said. “Let’s go.”

He was reaching for the car door before I’d turned off the engine. “I can’t remember the last time someone held a door open
for me.”

“Mean mother,” he said. “Meaner nuns. My good Catholic upbringing.”

“Catholic? But—”

“I don’t
look
Catholic, do I?” he said, deadpan. I laughed, and he shrugged. “Jumped the fence.”

“What happened?”

“What makes you think something happened?”

The answer was abrupt, and I regretted the question. “I’m sorry. Forgive my nosiness.”

Recognizing his own earlier apology, he shook his head. “No, I’m sorry for snapping. Too many rules. I was just a classic
bad boy.”

I could see it in him still. In his bearing, loose limbed with pent energy. In the quick eyes and stubborn sideways flop of
hair. An appealing shagginess. “The choir-boy with the whoopee cushion?”

“No, acolyte.” He grinned, restored.

On either side of the church’s arched stone entrance, sugar maples were crimson tipped with fall’s first touch. The sky was
pure blue, the hue of spring forget-menots. I appreciated the pretty solitude of the scene, the weekday vacancy. “When I was
a child my mother claimed that every Episcopal church was left unlocked so anyone anytime anywhere could go inside,” I said.
“It’s a Wednesday. Is St. Martin’s unlocked?”

“Care to test it?”

“If it’s not true, I don’t want to know anymore. It was the
idea
that I loved.”

The parish house door opened and a frizzy-headed older woman walked briskly toward us. “The messages are piling up, Mr. Whicker.”

“’Peter,’ Maude. I keep telling you, call me Peter.”

“Yes, well, you need to get to them.” She peered at me suspiciously.

“Soon, soon. Hannah, this is Maude Burleigh, the church secretary and my jailor. Hannah’s going to overhaul the columbarium
garden.” I opened my mouth to protest.

The woman frowned. “I’d talk to the vestry before proceeding with that idea.”

Peter ignored her. “Have the new visitor cards come back from the printer yet? And the sexton needs to install hooks for them
on the pew backs.”

Maude Burleigh dramatically shifted her belt upward on her thick torso. “I’m not at all sure our parishioners will approve
of the yellow ribbons that you want pinned to the visitor cards. Much less their dangling from the pew backs when they’re
trying to kneel.”

“But Maude, our parishioners are already members now, aren’t they?” Peter said, undeterred. “They don’t need to like the ribbons.
They just need to be welcoming. You know my job description. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Unconvinced, Maude frowned again and crossed her arms over her wide bosom.

“And what about that new font for the newsletter and bulletin?” Peter continued. “Something clean and contemporary instead
of that English Gothic.” He stepped on my toe. “Mrs. Marsh here told me it looks just like the title for that
Dark Shadows
soap opera. Did you ever watch
Dark Shadows,
Maude?” I looked at my foot to keep from laughing.

The woman only pulled at the collar of her dress and turned to go. “It’s going to be expensive to change. Don’t forget about
the messages,” she added over her shoulder.

“No, ma’am,” Peter called uselessly as the parish house door slammed. “I’m following instructions. Daintry thinks my first
job in a new parish is to charm the underpants off the OG.”

“’OG’?”

“Old Guard. Humor the natives.”

Suddenly I knew Daintry had devised the cheat sheet Peter had referred to at Ceel’s party. I wondered what two-word description
she’d used for me. Best friend? Old friend? “Daintry always was. . . instructional.”

“Do it this way, Hannah. You turn a cartwheel like this. You’re not doing it right.”

“Of course it hurts. It always hurts to change the part in your hair.”

“You should eat more Jell-O. It makes your fingernails stronger.”

“Maude doesn’t seem like much of an ally. Can’t a new rector hire whoever he wants?”

“
Interim
rector, and I
am
hiring who I want—you.” Beyond the crumbling blacktop of the rear parking lot, the grounds sloped steeply downhill to a primitive
split-rail fence separating church property from the Rural Ridge Cemetery. As if protective and proprietary, a thick hardwood
forest spangled red and gold surrounded the graveyard. Gentle inclines and barely leveled terraces of the dilapidated graveyard
proper fell away to a valley boundaried only by the notched and curving shoulders of the Blue Ridge. Square specks of barns
and houses pegged corners of pastures and Christmas tree farms. An isolated pocket even for Rural Ridge, the cemetery had
an ancient air, still and undisturbed. I leaned my elbows on the fence. “I had no idea this was back here. So peaceful.”

A dry gust ripped leaves from the trees, and acorns rained down, rattling with percussive snaps on railings and headstones.
The graveyard’s maintenance was minimal, only enough to check wilderness from reclaiming it. Leggy shrubs crowned hummocks
and plumed jutting boulders; thick tufts of scraggly weeds and grasses overran burial plots, if they could even be termed
such. For there seemed no formal delineation of plots, no planned design. An obelisk kept counterpointed company with a humble
rounded headstone; listing, lichened monuments shouldered glossy modern markers. Rock outcroppings formed natural stopping
places together with rough levels carved in earlier decades on the steep hillside to accommodate visitors. Above and beyond,
the distant mountains floated powdery blue, merging with the sky.

“I love cemeteries,” I said. “So tranquil and contented.”

“Came here myself last week to write my sermon. What did you think of it?”

“I. . . ”

“Caught you again,” he said, and cleared his throat loudly. I remembered that from Ceel’s party, a throaty cough that said
I know what you’re thinking
and
I’m right, admit it
and
We agree
all at once. “Even without my X-ray glasses. Half the men are thinking about their golf game, afraid I’ll go over the eleven-minute
limit.”

The sleek tabby that had followed us arched sinuously against my bare leg, and I stepped away. “She came with the rectory,”
Peter said. “A church cat instead of church mice.”

“Where’s the rectory?”

“Just a good pitch from the church.” He pointed up the hill to a white clapboard barely visible behind full-grown magnolias.
I wondered if either of the two windows I glimpsed were Daintry’s. Daintry and Peter’s. I straightened, as though my father’s
knuckles had prodded me in the spine. “Hold your shoulders up,” he’d say.

Peter nudged the animal with his toe. “Scat, Cheshire. Can’t you tell when someone doesn’t like you?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Bird lover?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of the cardinals in my Durham smilax, the disintegrating feeder outside our kitchen window now. “But.
. . ”