Going to Bend (36 page)

“When’s the bus coming in? I’ll pick you up.”

“Oh, honey, that would be a relief. Just let me look for the ticket—you know, I lose everything now, even when it’s right under my nose. I don’t know why that is.”

Petie heard drawers sliding in and out, and at one point the receiver banged down on something hard and she heard Marge clucking to herself the way she did when she was exasperated. “My Lord,” she said
breathlessly when she finally picked up the phone again. “Have you ever known anyone so scatterbrained? You know, I think some of it might be the pills they have me taking. I carry a little card in my purse now, honey, with DeeDee and the kids’ address on it in case I forget. I probably ought to write my own name on it, too, I’m that bad. Looks like I’m getting in at two-thirty in the afternoon, day after tomorrow.”

“All right. Look for me there,” Petie said. “Don’t give it another thought.”

Marge sighed deeply on the other end of the line. “Thank you, honey, I feel easier already knowing you’ll be there. You and DeeDee, you’ve taken real good care of me. Don’t think I don’t know it.”

Now, outside the shabby Greyhound station in Sawyer, she held Petie in her embrace a minute longer than usual and then held her at arm’s length. “You look real good, honey.” She was dressed in her usual pastel stretchwear and a self collar sweatshirt that said, in sequined letters,
I’m Shelley’s Grandma
. “Isn’t it the cutest thing?” she puffed as Petie grabbed her suitcase. “She and DeeDee made it for me last Christmas, but it’s too warm to wear down in Tempe, so I’ve been saving it.”

Petie led her back to the car, trying not to give away just how bad Marge looked. Her face was thin and the skin seemed to have found new wrinkles and lost most of its color. Larry had always joked that there was just enough of Marge to get a good hold on, but Marge had anguished over those thirty pounds ever since Petie had known her. Now that they were gone she just looked old and baggy. She had used some kind of eye shadow, too, something Petie had never seen her wear before. DeeDee must be working on her. Petie helped her with her seat belt and pulled out onto the highway.

“Ever since Larry passed on,” Marge said, “DeeDee and the kids have been real good to me, but I swear to you, honey, I don’t know how I’ve done it.”

Then she sat up a little straighter and said brightly, “How are your boys? They’re just growing up so fast.” Marge had seen them just weeks
ago. DeeDee must have instructed her to be cheerful so she wouldn’t wear on people.

“Look,” Petie said. “You don’t have to pretend for me. You don’t have to act like you’re okay when you’re not. Okay?”

Marge dove into her bag for a Kleenex and nodded, overcome. She patted Petie’s hand hard and held her Kleenex to her mouth until she’d composed herself and drew a deep, quavery breath. “I’m just not myself right now. Lord, Larry would give me such a talking-to. I miss him, honey.” Tears ran down her face. Petie touched her cheek with the back of her hand and brought away a river.

“Don’t mind me. Seems like I’m always crying,” Marge said, waving her hand. “Sometimes I don’t even know it till I’ve got a lapful of tears. DeeDee and the kids, they’ve gotten used to me by now. Little Shelley, she just looks at me and says,
There goes Grandma again
, and runs to get me some tissues. I swear I don’t know what I’d do without that sweet angel.”

“Are we taking you to the Sea View?”

“Yes,” Marge said, and put both hands to her mouth. “Look, we’re home.” Petie drove by the Quik Stop, the Wayside, the Anchor. Marge turned her head away, looking out the window. Petie could feel her tremble.

“Did you remember your car keys?” Petie said. Marge had left her car in the Sea View parking lot when she took off for Tempe.

“I never even took them. They’re hanging in the office, right where they always are.”

“Okay. Look, I’ve got a couple of things I need to do, but I want you to come for dinner. Rose and Carissa will be there, too. Rose has been through some tough times lately. I thought we could cheer her up.”

“Has she?”

“Well, Jim left.”

“Oh, that’s too bad, honey. Why, I thought he’d marry that gal for sure, he looked at her like she’d hung the moon, her and that little daughter of hers.”

“I guess things didn’t work out, at least not for this year. We’re hoping he’ll come home after the season.” Petie pulled into the Sea View. She could feel Marge shiver.

“Look, do you want me to go in with you?”

Marge gave a thin, eerie wail. “Oh! Oh, honey, I keep expecting him to come out the door, you know how he knew the sound of every car. In all the years we lived here I never had to carry a single grocery bag in by myself, he was that thoughtful. And now he’s not here,” Marge cried. “He’s not here at all.”

The power of her misery was almost unbearable. The only thing Petie could think to do was to hold Marge’s arm firmly in her hand, as though in her grief Marge might fly away instead of sitting arrested and bereft in the passenger seat, her legs out the open door. Marge finally took some deep, shuddering breaths and quieted down. She patted Petie’s hand blindly. “I’m okay, honey.”

“Bullshit,” Petie said. “You aren’t okay, you shouldn’t be okay, no one
expects
you to be okay, so stop trying to spare me. Just stop.”

Marge nodded blindly, mopping at her eyes and nose. “All right, honey.”

Petie brought Marge’s suitcase up to the apartment she and Larry had built above the office. Marge seemed to have forgotten Petie was there, so she let herself out, saying, “Come over whenever you’re ready. Or call me, if you want me to come get you.”

The woman looked about as fit to drive as a blind man.

R
OSE
C
AME
first, with soup—potato leek, one of her best, in Petie’s opinion. Eddie had taken off with Loose to go look at a wrecked dirt bike they were thinking of fixing up, so it was just Ryan and Carissa and the women. Marge would be there any time.

Rose set her pot on the stove and said, “You know, if I’d known it was just going to be us, I’d have invited Nadine, too. They’re leaving the day after tomorrow, I can hardly believe it.”

“Why don’t you call her? Maybe Gordon can close up.”

“You know, I think I will—it would be a nice way to say thank you for everything she’s done for us, don’t you think?” Rose turned on a low heat under the soup pot and smoothed her skirt, a pretty one she’d bought with some of her book-advance money.

Petie handed her the wall phone. “Do you know her number?”

“By heart.”

Petie watched Rose cradle the phone between her chin and shoulder. Her hair had silver threads already—her mother had been snow white by thirty-five—and her profile had softened and filled out lately. Petie thought Eve must have looked just like Rose, walking through her garden in Eden humming quietly to herself and snipping a blossom here and there, tidying up a little, doing light housework for the Lord. But Rose would never have fallen for the snake. Rose had a sort of built-in goodness meter that would have picked out the serpent’s insincerity in under a minute flat.

“You know how to get here, don’t you?” Rose was saying. “Yes, take that last right. We’ll wait dinner for you. No, it’s not a big deal. Okay? Okay.” She hung up the phone. “She’ll be here in half an hour,” she told Petie. “She was so pleased to be asked. We really could have been nicer to her.”

“We were nice to her,” Petie protested. “You’re always nice to her, and sometimes I was, too.”

“We were okay,” Rose countered. “Okay is not the same as nice. Anyway Gordon said he’d finish up and close early. They’ve only had a few customers, anyway.”

“Good,” Petie said, and turned to Carissa, who was sitting at the table making a friendship bracelet out of embroidery thread. “Would you call upstairs and ask Ryan to come down? I want to talk to you both for a minute before Marge gets here.”

When they were all together in the kitchen, Petie said, “You guys know that Marge’s husband Larry died a few weeks ago, right?”

Ryan nodded solemnly.

“Well, Marge is real sad right now, she has a big bruise around her heart, and—”

“Did you see it?” Ryan said.

Petie frowned. “Did I see what?”

“The bruise.”

Rose smiled. “No, sweetie, it’s too deep to see. That’s why your mom’s talking to you about it.”

“Oh,” Ryan subsided, clearly disappointed.

Petie started again. “When people miss someone as much as Marge misses Larry, they forget how to be happy for a while, and sometimes it makes them cry even when they’re right in the middle of talking to you.”

“I like Marge,” Ryan said.

“So do I,” Petie said. “That’s why I want her to come over for supper. It will help. If you have to be as sad as Marge is, it’s easier to get through it when you’re with people who love you.”

“She’s probably still going through the five stages of grief,” Carissa said.

Petie looked at Rose.

“Anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance,” Carissa explained. “Somebody named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross figured that out.”

“The child cannot possibly be from my loins,” Rose said to Petie.

“We learned about it in Family Sciences.”

“What the hell is Family Sciences?” Petie said.

“You learn about how people relate to each other at different stages of life,” Carissa said, unruffled by the looks she was getting from Petie and Rose.

“Huh,” said Petie. “So anyway, if Marge cries when she’s here, I don’t want you to worry.”

“Hey, Ryan, why don’t we make a picture for her?” Carissa said. “It might cheer her up.”

The two of them went upstairs to the boys’ room. Petie could hear them banging around in the closet. She gave Rose a quick summary of the afternoon, and Rose shook her head. “I feel so badly for her,” she said. “You’re a brave woman, meeting her at the Greyhound station and having her over.”

Petie shrugged. “There haven’t been that many people who’ve loved me, and most of them are dead.”

Outside, a car door shut and a minute later Marge puffed in, shaking rain off a plastic rain bonnet. “My Lord,” she said. “I was getting used to it being dry in Tempe.” She carefully folded her rain bonnet and set it on top of her purse.

“Hi, Marge,” Rose said, and approached for a hug.

“Hello, honey,” Marge said. “Why, don’t you look pretty? Petie said you’d been going through some times lately, but you’d never know it to look at you, hon.”

“It’s all makeup and bad lighting, but thank you anyway,” Rose said. “Can I get you anything? Petie, what do you have?”

“Beer, juice, water. Pepsi, of course.”

“I’ll just have a glass of water, hon,” Marge said.

“Nadine’s coming over in another few minutes,” Petie told her, “to have dinner with us, too. Girls’ night.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice of you. I always felt sorry for her, to tell you the truth,” Marge said, accepting a glass of tap water from Rose. “She seemed like one of those people who has their nose pressed to the glass, watching other people having a nice time, but like it was never going to happen for her. And her brother, what was his name?”

“Gordon,” Rose said.

“Yes, Gordon,” Marge said. “I never really saw the point to him. He didn’t ever seem to do anything.”

Rose looked at Petie. “You should tell her,” Petie said.

“Tell what?” Marge said.

“Gordon has AIDS,” Rose said. “He helps when he can, but he doesn’t always feel well enough.”

“Why, I had no idea. Is he a fairy?” Marge said.

“Well,” Rose said, “he’s a homosexual.”

Marge nodded thoughtfully. “I can’t pretend I understand how people get that way, but Larry and me, we always tried to keep an open mind. There was the nicest boy over in the Valley who cut my hair for years and
years, just the sweetest thing. He’d tell me about his boyfriends sometimes. Will he die?”

“Will who die?” Rose said.

“Gordon. You said he has AIDS. Does that mean he’ll die?”

“Yes.”

Marge nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes, I thought so. Maybe that’s why Nadine’s always looked so sad. I didn’t know that, honey. I’m glad you told me.”

A
S SOON
as Nadine arrived, Rose served them all from the big soup pot. Ryan brought his picture down for Marge, presenting it with great solemnity. He had drawn a rainbow over the ocean, with a boat sailing underneath it. Marge was elaborate in her praise. “You’re such a good artist, honey. Look how good you did your colors. Whose boat is it?”

Ryan tucked his chin gravely. “Larry’s.”

“Oh, is it? But we didn’t have a boat, honey. Larry used to talk about it, but we just never seemed to get around to doing anything about it.”

“It’s the boat that’s taking him to heaven,” Ryan said.

“Oh! Why, that’s a beautiful thought, honey.” Marge’s eyes glistened. “Is the rainbow heaven?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan said thoughtfully. “But I think it might be. Are there colors in heaven?”

“I’m sure of it,” Marge said. “Do you know, I think God must love colors, to have made such beautiful rainbows and flowers.”

“Yes,” Ryan agreed.

“Can I take this picture home?” Marge asked.

Ryan nodded.

“I know just where I’m going to put it,” Marge said. “I’m going to put it smack in the middle of my refrigerator door, where I can see it all day long.” She gave the boy a hug. “You’ve made an old lady real happy, hon,” she said.

“Mom told us you might cry.”

“Ryan,” Petie warned.

“It’s okay, honey,” Marge said to Petie. To Ryan she said, “I might. I get real sad sometimes. But being here with you I don’t feel one bit sad, and that’s the truth. Thank you for that, honey.”

Carissa and Ryan took their dinner to the living room and turned on the TV. The four women settled around the kitchen table like old campaigners during a lull in the fighting. They ate Rose’s good soup and talked quietly about things that didn’t matter: the price of early strawberries, the cost of gasoline in Tempe, the five-year prison sentence Billy Wall had been given that morning for abusing those Hubbard boys; Nadine’s job at the rare books store in Los Angeles, where she would return to work two weeks from next Tuesday.