Home Another Way (22 page)
I drove all the way back to the cabin before remembering my laundry. But I wasn’t going back. For the next couple of days, I’d rinse out the underpants and bra I had on in the sink, and hang them to dry overnight. Like the pioneers, I thought. Self-sufficient. Resourceful.
Nope, I didn’t need anyone at all.
Maggie couldn’t get up.
She could still move her legs, though, and she kicked the door. It bounced off the wall, swinging into the room far enough that she could slide her toe beneath it and pull it toward her until it bumped her hip. She stretched her arm up to the doorknob, grabbing it and straining with motheaten muscles to pull herself to her feet. Her hand slipped off the metal and one of her fingernails bent backward. She cried out, squeezing the injured finger inside her fist until the initial sting subsided, then pulled off the broken nail and dropped it down the heating grate, half an arm’s length from where she sat, trapped, tailbone grinding into the hardwood floor.
Her spine had stiffened already, and she felt a cold numbness filling her legs. She considered rocking to one side, falling over onto the floor so she could roll onto her hands and knees, and stand from there. But she feared she’d still not be able to move, and then would be trapped, with her face against the hallway floor. At least now she could reach the phone; it was behind her on the nightstand. She flailed around above her head until she felt it and gave it a shove. It clattered to the floor, receiver off the hook, dial tone taunting her. She listened to it until it turned to the ear-splitting
whah-whah-whah,
then grabbed the cord and reeled it into her lap.
After one more unsuccessful attempt to stand, she dialed Jack.
“Hello,” he said. “Hello?”
Maggie scrunched her eyes closed.
“Anyone there?” Jack asked.
“Jack.”
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
“I just . . . I’m stuck.”
“I’m coming now.”
The pieces of Luke’s letters no longer lay scattered around her. She’d managed to collect them before stiffening—all except the one that she’d watched slip beneath the linen closet door across the hall—and tuck them in her pocket. She ran her fingers over the ragged edges as she prayed for her son to arrive quickly, and for her anger toward Sarah to leave her just as fast.
Jack barged into the house; she heard him push open the pocket doors and clomp into the kitchen without removing his wet boots. “Mom? Where are you?”
“My bedroom,” she called to him.
He found her and bent down to her. She clasped her arms around his neck, and her body unfolded as he lifted. She didn’t let go of him.
“My feet fell asleep,” she said. “I can’t stand on them.”
Jack swept his arm behind the back of her knees and carried her to the bed. “What ever possessed you to sit on the floor?”
“I was picking something up.”
“You see—this is why you can’t be alone. I’m staying here until Beth gets back.”
“And who invited you?”
“This isn’t a joke, Mother.”
“I’m not joking. I don’t need you here.”
“You don’t have a choice,” he snapped.
Maggie winced, both from her son’s tone and the pins and needles collecting in her feet. Not the tickling kind, but sharp, as if thousands of tiny electrodes stuck to her feet, shocking the blood back into them. She leaned forward to remove her Keds, but couldn’t reach past her knees. Jack saw this—had seen it many times before—and after he untied her tennis sneakers, he massaged her toes through her socks.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want some tea?”
She nodded. “And could you bring me the Scotch tape?”
While he was in the kitchen, Maggie folded the comforter over herself, and listened to her son clatter and bang through the drawers, the cupboards and pantry. Graceful, he was not.
Jack returned with the tea and some cookies, a magazine, a bag of pretzels, and the tape. “I thought you might be hungry. And I know how you like some salt after something sweet.”
“Thanks, hon. Just put everything on the nightstand.”
“Are you okay for me to leave? I’ll only be gone an hour or so.”
“I’m fine, really. I’ll probably have supper ready by the time you get here.”
“Don’t cook. I’ll bring in something from the diner for us.”
“Jack—”
“Indulge me. Just this once,” he said.
She nodded, and Jack kissed the top of her head before leaving.
Maggie emptied her pockets of the letter pieces, matching each half to its partner, then taping them together—first the sheets of paper within, then the envelopes. She read each one again.
She missed Luke more than she missed her husband. Perhaps she should have been ashamed of that, but she wasn’t. She’d had twenty-two years with John, and all those treasured moments before they were married—from the day he shoved her in the mud puddle when she was seven, to the time in sixth grade when he helped her find all her scattered jacks after some bully kicked them across the playground, to their first kiss at the senior dance. She’d known him all her life.
With Luke, there just weren’t enough times like that. Nearly seven years he lived in Jonah, and it had taken almost as long for Maggie to halfway understand him. And, almost as long for her to ask about his wife. She’d spent weeks mustering the courage, preparing for some violent, Poe-like tale of dismemberment or revenge.
Instead, Luke spoke plainly. “I was young and stupid, and sinful,” he said. “I’m still sinful, but I’m not young anymore, and not nearly as stupid. I hope, anyway. And I’m forgiven. That, I know.”
“I’m not saying you’re not,” she’d said.
“And I’m not saying you’re saying I’m not. I’m reminding myself,” he said with a short laugh. “If you want the gory details, I’ll tell you.”
She didn’t. She’d fallen in love with him by then.
After that, Luke would talk about Helena often. Little things, recollections mostly, about how she always sneezed when first stepping outside on bright sunny days, or how she could flip pancakes to the ceiling, catching them perfectly in the skillet. Maggie fought stabs of jealousy, and then she’d do something special for Luke—cook his favorite meal, or go to the cabin and scrub his shower—to prove she was as worthy of his love as Helena.
But he’d rarely mentioned Sarah. He’d bring her up in prayer meetings occasionally, with vague references to her struggles. Or, he’d begin sentences with, “When Sarah was—” and stop, shaking his head with a quiet, “Never mind.” Maggie had seen that, for all his brave talk of forgiveness, Luke carried his sins against his daughter with him always, a millstone dangling around his neck, and scourged himself for his inability to change the past.
Maggie stretched, stood. She retrieved the last piece of letter from the closet, taped it, and returned all the envelopes to her hope chest. Had some Sarah-like stranger happened upon the inn, all sandpaper and swearwords and defensiveness, Maggie would have handed her a bill the following morning and not thought of her again, except perhaps to laugh with some of the ladies about the obnoxious city girl who’d spent the night. She wouldn’t have offered her a bag of breakfast to take with her, nor taken five minutes to wonder where the girl was headed. And she certainly wouldn’t have spent the last three months praying for her every night. Earnestly praying. Not merely dropping her name into a list of toothaches, sore bunions, and noisy furnaces needing to get through one more winter.
She cared for Sarah, yes—but only because of Luke.
If anything, Maggie should have been ashamed of that.
My hair looked like pumpkin-colored straw.
I’d run out of conditioner in the week before Beth’s wedding, and given all the commotion, only remembered I had none after I was in the shower, soaked and groping for the bottle while rinsing the last suds of shampoo from my eyes. Today, my to-do list consisted of two things: buying skates and conditioner. I’d visited all Doc’s patients earlier in the week.
The variety store sold two brands of conditioner, both costing less than two dollars. I dropped the more expensive bottle into my shopping basket. I’d tried the seventy-nine-cent bargain stuff first because it was unscented, but it made me look as if I wore a wig of dank, orange seaweed. With the dollar ninety-nine bottle, at least, my hair wasn’t greasy, even though I smelled like my eighty-seven-year-old great-aunt Penelope’s sock drawer sachets—rose and clove and artificial orange.
A jar of dry shampoo hunched between the conditioner and hair spray. The label read
No water necessary.
Thinking of Rabbit and her ponytails, I picked it up, along with a soft-bristled brush. Then I searched the back wall for ice skates. Only two pairs remained—both men’s, and neither of them my size. On the way to the counter, I snagged a jumbo bag of potato chips, a box of Devil Dogs, and a half-dozen packages of chicken-flavored ramen noodles.
“Are you getting any more skates in?” I asked Nancy Brooks as she rang up my purchase.
She shook her head.
“Is there any other place around here I can get them?”
“Bethel Baptist Church has a thrift store. Sometimes they have skates.”
“And that is?”
“In Bethel.”
“I figured that one out,” I said. “Where’s that?”
“It’s t-two towns over. East. No, west. No, wait. Now I’m not sure,” she said, absentmindedly plucking the lint balls from the cuff of her sweater. “I’m sorry. I’m no g-good with directions. I can get Carl—”
“I’ll find it.”
She nodded and folded the top of my bag, stuck the brown paper in the stapler and pressed. Nothing happened. She tried again. “I think I’m out of staples.”
“It’s fine.” I snatched the bag and looked at her, gummy and shrunken-headed under her prodigious hair. Normally, I enjoyed how she slunk away from me, eyeballs jittering back and forth, waiting for me to pounce. But today there was no pleasure in it. “Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you. Really.”
Nancy pulled her thin, brown lips into a smile of sorts, and said, “Oh, that’s okay. We all have our bad days now and again, don’t we?”
Some of us more than others.
“Isn’t that the truth?”
“Here, why don’t you go ahead and take this map with you,” she said. “And just you keep it now. It fits nice in your glove box. I got one in my own. Not that I’m so good at reading it.”
“Thanks.”
“And maybe you can make your way over to the house for supper some night soon. Carl and me, we hardly had any time to get to know you, and Luke, he—” She stopped, shoulders all twitchy again, remembering, no doubt, our first encounter.
“He helped you when your husband was sick,” I finished for her.
She smiled wider now, dentures straight and brown from too much coffee. “That he did. Well, then, you just come on over any time. There’s always enough for one more.”
I nodded.
In the truck, I unfolded the map and found Bethel. It was west, and I needed to drive by the Jonah Inn to get there.
I hadn’t spoken with Maggie since the blowup, four days earlier. I was still angry with her, but I didn’t want to be. What did loved people—those who’d never had a moment in their lives when someone, somewhere, didn’t love them—know about going without? They couldn’t fathom that there were others like me in the world, the hapless forsaken who didn’t share in their blissful ignorance. Others like me who understood too well that love didn’t come to all.
It came to my father, though. More than once. More than it should have, after all he’d done.
Truth and I, we weren’t well acquainted. But it had been creeping up on me, like a shiny, black cockroach—one that scurried under the basement door when the lights came on, disappearing too quickly for me to smash under my heel, and lurked, waiting to feast on the unswept crumbs as soon as the dark came again.
I knew lies. I spoke them, loved them. They kept me out of trouble, and got me into it. They comforted me and hid me, and felt more real than any truth I’d known. I lied now out of habit, even when a simple, honest answer would cause fewer headaches and far less complications.
But each day it became more difficult to deceive myself—too much time spent alone, stagnant, without the distraction of my usual mind-numbing activities. And the truth was, I wished I’d known my father.
Oh, I hated him. I did. I had to. But the pigtailed little girl in me wanted to reach my hands to the ceiling and have him grab me under the arms and toss me into the air so, for a second, I could fly. Or have him dance with me, my white stocking feet standing on his shoes.
He’d called me only once. I know Aunt Ruth told him I didn’t want to see him, but if he had loved me, as Maggie insisted he did, why hadn’t he tried again? Why hadn’t he called every day, or inundated me with letters, or come pounding on the door of my shoddy 176th Street apartment at midnight until I let him in so the neighbor wouldn’t call the police because of the noise?
Because he didn’t need his inconvenient daughter to remind him of the past while embarking on his new beginning with the happy Watson clan. I couldn’t compete with Reverend Jack and Saint Beth, and Maggie’s deep-dish cherry pie.
I approached the inn, slowing, then speeding up, then slowing again, and when I saw Beth’s car wasn’t in the driveway, I drove past. I would have had an excuse to stop if she were home. Yesterday, she’d returned my laundry, all folded and ironed, and lavender-scented. I’d been out visiting Doc’s patients, so she left the piles on the porch in thick, green plastic bags, a handmade card taped to the top so I’d find it. The note thanked me for the money and all I did for the wedding. She wrote she’d stop by soon, making no mention of my argument with her mother.
