Ladder of Years (25 page)

“The Hanffs!” Mr. Pomfret said. The Hanffs owned the furniture factory, as even Delia knew—the town’s one industry. “Well, of all the doggone folks to up and burglarize,” he said.

Delia went to the supply closet for more sugar, and when she came back Mr. Pomfret was still marveling at Juval’s choice of victims. “I mean, here you’ve got Reba Hanff, who disapproves of jewelry and doesn’t own a piece of silver,” he said, “gives every cent of their profits to some religious honcho in India … What did the boy hope to steal, for God’s sake?”

“And why, is what I’d like to know,” Mr. Wesley said. “That’s the part I can’t figure. Was he in need of money? For what? He doesn’t even drink, let alone take drugs. Doesn’t even have a girlfriend.”

“Not to mention the Hanffs own the only house alarm in all of Bay Borough,” Mr. Pomfret mused.

“And with such a hotshot career ahead!” Mr. Wesley said. “You can bet that’s all down the drain now. How come he went and ruined things, so close to time he was leaving?”

“Maybe
that’s
how come,” Delia spoke up, setting two mugs on a tray.

“Ma’am?”

“Maybe he ruined things so he wouldn’t have to leave after all.”

Mr. Wesley gaped at her.

Mr. Pomfret said, “You may go now, Miss Grinstead.”

“Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

“Shut the door behind you, please.”

She shut the door with such conspicuous care that every part of the latch declared itself.

In regard to the establishment of a designated fund
, she typed, and then Mr. Pomfret emerged from his office, stuffing his arms into his overcoat as he walked, forging a trail for Mr. Wesley. “Cancel my ten o’clock,” he told Delia.

“Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

He opened the outer door, ushered Mr. Wesley through it, and then closed it and came back to stand at Delia’s desk. “Miss Grinstead,” he said, “from now on, please do not volunteer comments during my consultations.”

She stared at him stubbornly, keeping her eyes wide and innocent.

“You’re paid for your secretarial skills, not for your opinions,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

He left.

She knew she had deserved that, but still she felt a flare of righteous anger once he was gone. She typed rapidly and badly, flinging the carriage so hard that the typewriter kept skidding across the desk. When she called to cancel the ten o’clock appointment, her voice shook. And when she left the office at lunchtime, she picked up a Bay Borough
Bugle
so she could look for another job.

Well, not that she would actually go through with it, of course. It was just that she needed to fantasize awhile.

The weather was raw and dismal, and she hadn’t brought any food with her, but she walked to the square even so because she couldn’t deal with the Cue Stick ’n’ Cola today. She found the park benches deserted. The statue looked huddled and dense, like a bird with all its feathers reared against the cold. She wrapped her coat around her and sat down on the very edge of one damp, chilly slat.

How satisfying it would be to announce her resignation! “I regret to inform you, Mr. Pompous …,” she would say. He would be helpless. He didn’t even know where she kept the carbon paper.

She opened the
Bugle
and searched for the classified section. As a rule she didn’t read the
Bugle
, which was little more than an advertising handout—several pages of half-price specials and extremely local news, stacked weekly in various storefronts. She flipped past a choral call for the Christmas Eve Sing on the square, a two-for-one day at the shoe store, and a progress report on the Mitten Drive. On the next-to-last page she discovered four Help Wanted ads: baby-sitter, baby-sitter, lathe operator, and “live-in woman.” This town must have unemployment problems.
After that came the For Sale ads. A person named Dwayne wished to sell two wedding rings, cheap. Her eyes slid back to
Live-in Woman.

Single father desires help w/ lively, bright, engaging, 12-yr-old son. Must be willing to wake boy in a.m., serve breakfast, see off to school, do light cleaning / errands / shopping, assist w/ homework, provide transportation to dentist / doctor / grandfather / playmates, attend athletic meets & cheer appropriate team, host groups of 11-13 yr olds, cook supper, show enthusiasm for TV sports programs / computer games / paperback war novels, be available nights for bad dreams / illness. Driver’s license a must. Non-smokers only. Room, board, generous salary. Weekends & most daytimes free except school holidays / sick days / snow days. Call Mr. Miller at Underwood High 8-5 Mon-Fri.

Delia clucked. The nerve of the man! Some people wanted the moon. She rattled the paper impatiently and refolded it. You can’t expect a mere hireling to serve as a genuine mother, which was really what he was asking.

She rose and placed the
Bugle
in the trash basket. So much for that.

Crossing West Street, she glanced toward the shops—Debbi’s and the dime store and the florist. How about a job in sales? No, she was too quiet-natured. As for waitressing, she used to forget her own family’s dessert orders in the time it took to walk to the kitchen. And she knew from her talks with Mrs. Lincoln at the library that the town was having to struggle to support even one librarian.

Actually, she reflected, passing the sterile white blinds of the Fingernail Clinic, a hireling would in some ways be
better
than a mother—less emotionally ensnarled, less likely to cause damage. Certainly less likely to suffer damage herself. When the employer’s child was unhappy, it would never occur to the live-in woman to feel personally responsible.

She turned into Value Vision and took another
Bugle
from the stack just inside the door.

“I wouldn’t like for my son to think people are checking him over,” Mr. Miller said. “Filing through to see if he’s up to standard. That’s why I asked you to come while he was out. Then if you find you’re interested,
you could stay on and meet him. He’s eating supper at a friend’s, but he’ll be home in half an hour or so.”

He sat across from her in a chintz armchair that he seemed to dwarf, as he dwarfed the whole overstuffed, overdecorated living room of this little ranch house on the edge of town. To Delia’s surprise, he’d turned out to be someone she recognized. Joel Miller: he had consulted Mr. Pomfret several months ago on a visitation matter. She remembered admiring his undisguised baldness. Men who scorned the subterfuge of artfully draped strands of hair, she felt, conveyed an attractive air of masculine assurance; and Mr. Miller, with his large, regular features and his olive skin and loose gray suit, seemed positively serene. Underneath, though, she detected some tension. He had told her three times—contradicting the entire gist of his ad—that his son would be at school for the vast majority of every day, in essence
all
day, and that even when he was home he required not much more than a token adult in the wings. Delia had the feeling that no one else had applied for this position.

“He eats at friends’ houses often, in fact,” Mr. Miller was saying. “And in summer—I don’t think I mentioned this—he spends two weeks at sleep-away camp. Besides which there’s computer day camp, soccer clinic—”

“Summer!” Delia said. She rocked back in her chintz-padded rocking chair. Summer, with its soft, lazy afternoons, tinkling glasses of lemonade, children’s peach-colored bodies in swimsuits! “Oh, Mr. Miller,” she said. “The truth is, I seem to be in a changeable stage of life right now. I’m not sure I could get that … invested.”

“And in summer I’m around more myself,” Mr. Miller went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Not the whole day, exactly—a principal doesn’t have quite the same leeway his teachers do—but quite a lot.”

“I probably shouldn’t have come,” Delia said. “A child your son’s age needs continuity.”

Then why
did
you come?
he might reasonably have asked, but instead, poor man, he seized on her last sentence. “You sound experienced,” he said. “Do you have children of your own, Miss Grinstead? Oh.” The corners of his mouth jerked briefly downward. “I’m sorry. Of course not.”

“Yes, I do,” she told him.

“So it’s
Mrs.
Grinstead?”

“I prefer ‘Miss.’”

“I see.”

He thought this over.

“But, so, you
are
experienced,” he said finally. “That’s excellent! And do you come from this area?”

Evidently he didn’t keep up with Bay Borough gossip. “No, I don’t,” she told him.

“You don’t.”

She could see him reconsidering. Desperate he might be, but not foolhardy. He wouldn’t want to hire an ax murderer.

“I’m from Baltimore,” she volunteered at last. “I’m perfectly respectable, I promise, but I’ve put that part of my life behind me.”

“Ah.”

Oh, Lord, now he was envisioning some drama. He surveyed her with interest, his head slightly tilted.

“But!” she exclaimed. “As far as the job goes—”

“I know: you don’t waht it,” he said sadly.

“It’s nothing to do with the job itself. I’m sure your son is a very nice boy.”

“Oh, he’s more than nice,” Mr. Miller said. “He’s really, he’s such a good kid, Miss Grinstead. He’s wonderful! But I guess I overestimated how well we could do on our own. I thought as long as we knew how to work the washing machine … But things have gotten away from me.”

He waved a hand toward the room in general, which puzzled Delia, because it seemed painfully neat. Fat little cushions with buttons in their middles filled the skirted couch, each one propped at a careful angle. Glossy fashion magazines lapped at mathematical intervals across the coffee table. But Mr. Miller, following her glance, said, “Oh, the
surface
I can handle. I’ve posted a chart in the kitchen. Each day has its special job. This afternoon we vacuumed, yesterday we dusted. But it seems there are other issues. Last weekend, for example, he asked if we could have penny soup. ‘Penny soup!’ I said. Sounded kind of weird to me. He said his mother used to serve it for lunch when he was little. I asked him what was in it, and it turns out he meant plain old vegetable soup. I guess they call it penny soup because it’s cheap. So I said, ‘Well, I can make
that.’
I heat up a tin of Campbell’s, he takes one look, and what does he do? Starts crying. Twelve years old and he falls apart, kid who didn’t so much as whimper the time he broke his arm. I said, ‘Well, what? What did I do wrong?’ He said it had to be homemade. I said, ‘God Almighty, Noah.’ Still, I’m not stupid. I knew this soup had some meaning for him. So I haul out a cookbook and set to work making
homemade. But when he saw what I was doing, he told me to forget it. ‘Just forget the whole thing,’ he told me. ‘I’m not hungry anyhow.’ And off he went to his room, leaving me with a pile of diced carrots.”

“Sliced,” Delia told him.

He raised his straight black eyebrows.

“You should have
sliced
the carrots,” she told him, “and also zucchini, yellow squash, new potatoes—everything coin-shaped. That’s why they call it penny soup. It’s nothing to do with the cost. I doubt you’d find it in cookbooks, because it’s more a … mother’s recipe, you know?”

“Miss Grinstead,” Mr. Miller said, “let me show you where you’d stay if you took the job.”

“No, really, I—”

“Just to look at! It’s the guest room. Has its own private bath.”

She rose when he did, but only because she wanted to make her escape. What had she been thinking of, coming here? It seemed she could feel within the curl of her fingers the urge to slice those vegetables as they ought to be sliced, to set the soup in front of the boy and turn away briskly (twelve was too old to cuddle) and pretend she hadn’t noticed his tears. “I’m sure it’s a lovely room,” she said. “Somebody’s going to love it! Somebody young, maybe, who still has enough …”

She was trailing Mr. Miller down a short, carpeted hall lined with open doors. At the last door, Mr. Miller stood back to let her see in. It was the sort of room where people were expected to spend no more than a night or two. The high double bed allowed barely a yard of space on either side. The nightstand bore a thoughtful supply of guest-type reading (more magazines, two books that looked like anthologies). The framed sampler on the wall read
WELCOME
in six languages.

“Large walk-in closet,” Mr. Miller said. “Private bath, as I believe I’ve mentioned.”

In another part of the house, a door slammed and a child called, “Dad?”

“Ah,” Mr. Miller said. “Coming!” he called. “Now you get to meet Noah,” he told Delia.

She took a step backward.

“Just to say hello,” he assured her. “What harm could that do?”

She had no choice but to follow him down the hall again.

In the kitchen (cabinets the color of toffees, wallpaper printed with butter churns), a wiry little boy stood tugging off a red jacket. He had a tumble of rough brown hair and a thin, freckled face and his father’s
long dark eyes. As soon as they entered the room, he started talking. “Hey, Dad, guess what Jack’s mother gave us for dinner! This, like, cubes of meat that you dunk into this …” He registered Delia’s presence, flicked a look at her, and went on. “… dunk into this pot and then—”

“Noah, I’d like you to meet Miss Grinstead,” his father said. “Should we call you Delia?” he asked her. She nodded; it hardly mattered. “I’m Joel,” he said, “and this is Noah. My son.”

Noah said, “Oh. Hi.” He wore the guarded, deadpan expression that children assume for introductions. “So the pot is full of hot oil, I guess it is, and each of us got—”

“Fondue,” his father said. “You’re talking about fondue.”

“Right, and each of us got our own fork to cook our meat on, with different, like, animals on the handles so we could keep straight whose was whose. Like mine was a giraffe, and guess what Jack’s little sister’s was?”

“I can’t imagine,” his father said. “Son, Delia is here to—”

“A pig!” Noah squawked. “His little sister got the pig!”