Ladder of Years (46 page)

“Or today,” Delia reminded him. “I’ll probably catch a bus, oh, maybe this afternoon; I’ll know more as soon as—”

“Is that the
realtor?
” Susie called from upstairs.

Delia covered the mouthpiece of the receiver. “No, it’s not!” she called back. Then she told Noah, “You just stay on the couch. I’ll be home soon. Bye.”

When she hung up, she turned to find everyone watching her. “Well!” she said vivaciously. “So!”

From their expressions, you would have thought she’d been caught in some crime.

Then Sam walked in, wearing his white coat. He was taking his lunch break, and here they were, still at breakfast. In fact, Linda had his chair, which she made no move to give up. “If it isn’t the good doctor,” she said in an acid tone.

Delia said, “Sam, what would you—?” and then she stopped. It wasn’t
her place, really, to offer him lunch. But he didn’t seem to realize that, and he sat in Susie’s usual seat and said, “Anything would be fine. Soup.”

Soup must be what he lived on, because it was just about the only thing in the cupboard—his special salt-free, fat-free, taste-free brand, with a dancing heart on the label. She opened a tin of soya-milk mushroom and poured it into a saucepan.

Now he was asking Carroll why he wasn’t in school. He was going about it all wrong, taking a drilling-in approach that would only raise Carroll’s hackles, and Carroll was hunching belligerently over his cereal bowl. Both of them, Delia noticed—in fact, everyone in the room—had become less perceivable to her since yesterday. Already they had lost that slick exterior layer of the unaccustomed.

Sam said that the distant likelihood of a sibling’s wedding was not sufficient grounds for playing hooky. “What do
you
know about it?” Carroll asked him. “Some of the kids in my class take off for Orioles games, for Christ’s sake.”

“Watch your language, young man,” Sam said. Delia merely stirred the soup. She pictured Sam shifting in midair like some kind of kite or streamer, like a wind sock changing shape with changes in the wind. From one angle he was gentle and reserved and well-meaning; from another he was finicky and humorless. She remembered all at once that when she had gazed across her desk at him the morning they first met, there had been a split second when his fine-boned face had struck her as
too
fine, too priggish, and she had faltered. But then she had brushed that impression aside and forgotten it forever—or at least, until this moment.

“Please, Uncle Sam?” the twins were coaxing. Marie-Claire said, “Can’t he stay home just this once? For our sakes?”

The front doorbell rang before he could answer. Everybody looked at one another, and the cat made a dash for the basement. “I’m not here,” Carroll said with his mouth full. Finally Delia lowered the flame beneath the soup and went to see who it was.

In the sun-glazed windowpane at the center of the door, Driscoll Avery stood gazing off to one side and whistling. Whistling! Goodness. Delia opened the door and said, “Hello, Driscoll.”

“Hey there, Miz G.!” he said, stepping inside. “Super weather.”

It was, in fact. Autumn had moved in overnight, nippy and hard-edged, and Driscoll’s cheeks glowed pink. He wore fall clothes, weekend clothes even though this was a Tuesday. Delia shut the door against the
chill. “Come into the kitchen and have some breakfast,” she said. “Or lunch, or whatever you’re on.”

“No, thanks. I just need to talk to Susie a minute.”

“Well, I think she must be awake, but she hasn’t come downstairs yet,” Delia told him.

“Okay if I go up?”

“Oh, I don’t know if she—”

“Please, Miz Grinstead. I believe now I’ve got it! I know how to get her to marry me.”

Delia gave him a skeptical look, but he said, “All right?” and without waiting for her permission, he wheeled and bounded up the stairs.

It took real character not to listen for what happened next.

Back in the kitchen, everyone was waiting. “Well?” Linda demanded.

“That was Driscoll.”

“Driscoll!” both twins said.

“He’s gone up to speak with Susie.”

The twins scooted their chairs away from the table. Linda said, “Stay right where you are.”

“Can’t we just—?”

“They’ll never sort things out with you two making pests of yourselves.”

Delia returned to the stove. She stirred the soup until it started dimpling, and then she poured it into a bowl—a bleak gray liquid that reminded her of scrub water. “Taupe soup,” she said as she set the bowl before Sam. The phrase tickled her, and she gave a little snicker. Sam glanced at her sharply.

“Thank you, Delia,” he said in his deliberate way.

The twins were badgering Linda about their bridesmaid dresses. Could they put them on right now? Could Linda iron their sashes where they’d wrinkled from before? Delia placed a spoon beside Sam’s bowl, and he thanked her all over again and picked it up. “You go get your books together,” he told Carroll. “A half day of school is better than none.”

“I’m just waiting to hear what Driscoll says,” Carroll told him.

“Driscoll has nothing to do with this.”

“He does if the wedding is on again. And anyhow, I don’t
have
my books. They’re at Velma’s place. So there.”

Sam started spooning soup, ostentatiously composed.

“I’ve been in charge of getting my own self to school all fall,” Carroll
told him. “How come the minute I’m under your roof I’m treated like a two-year-old?”

“Because you’re behaving like a two-year-old,” Sam said.

Carroll pushed back from the table. His chair scraped across the floor, and he very nearly slammed into Driscoll, who arrived at that moment in the dining-room doorway. “Hi, all,” Driscoll said.

“Driscoll!” the twins screeched. “What’d she say?” “Did she say yes?”

They should have known she hadn’t. Driscoll had come back down far too soon, and if that were not enough, they could have read the bad news in his face, which was somber and no longer pink-cheeked, somehow thicker through the jaw. He gave a deep sigh and then turned and—it seemed for an instant—took his leave; but no, he was fetching a chair from the dining room. He dragged it back to the kitchen and placed it next to Carroll and sat down heavily. “She says I’ve got to do it myself,” he said.

“Do what?”

“See, all night long I thought and thought,” he said. He seemed to be addressing Delia, who had reclaimed her own seat at the end of the table. “I thought,
What is it Susie wants?
And it came to me: I had to set things straight with that kid who called on the phone. But the only person who might know his name was the girl he was trying to reach—Courtney. So this morning I started dialing every possible variation on you-alls number, looking for Courtney.”

“Lord have mercy,” Linda said.

“Well, it’s simpler than it sounds. Turns out I had to transpose two digits, that was all. About my tenth or so try, I get Courtney’s mom, I guess it was, and she tells me Courtney’s at school.”

“Ah,” the twins said together.

“So I say, ’Well, I was supposed to drop off her history notes, so what I’ll do, if you don’t mind, I’ll bring them by her house after school, is that okay? And could I please have that street address again?’”

“Cool,” Carroll said.

Even Sam looked mildly interested. He had stopped eating his soup and was watching Driscoll, with his eyebrows raised.

“Lucky for me, the mom fell for it,” Driscoll said. “Gave me their address straight off–place right here in the neighborhood.” He paused, struck by a thought. “Carroll,” he said,
“you don’t know any
Courtneys, do you?”

“I know six or seven Courtneys,” Carroll said.

“Any on Deepdene Road?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Well, anyhow,” Driscoll said, “all I have to do now is ask her who her caller was.”

“But what if she has no idea who he was?” Delia said.

“She might have
some
idea. If he’s been hanging around her a lot, giving her, like, signals or something.”

Sam was spooning up soup again, shaking his head.

“So next I go talk to Susie. Ask her to come with me to Courtney’s after school. You know I can’t do it alone! Strange guy showing up full of questions … Except Susie says no.”

“No?” Linda echoed.

“No. Sends me straight downstairs again. Says I’ll have to manage without her. Bring her the boy in person, was how she put it, if I want her to forgive me.”

If you want to win the princess’s hand
, Delia thought to herself, because the errand did have a certain fairy-tale ring to it. She began to feel slightly sorry for Driscoll, although he himself seemed to be recovering his good spirits. “So now it’s up to you, Miz G.,” he said almost jauntily.

“Me!”

“Could you come with me to Courtney’s after school?”

“Why, Driscoll, I—”

“I’ll go!” Thérèse said.

“Me and Thérèse’ll go!” Marie-Claire said.

Driscoll didn’t seem to hear them. He said, “Miz Grinstead, you can’t imagine what I feel like. I feel like I’ve got this … cloud in my chest! You think at first it’s some snit she’s having, some temporary snit, and you’re mad as hell and you figure if you ignore it … but then it starts to get to you. You start to feel really, I guess you’d say, sad, but still mad besides and also eventually just, almost,
bored
, I mean so sick of it all, so sick of going over it and over it, sick of your own self, even; and you say to yourself, ’Well, look at it this way: you ought to be glad you’re free of her. She always did act kind of irritating,’ you say./But then you say, ’If she’d give me one more chance, though! I mean, how did things get so out of hand here? When did they start to go wrong that I didn’t even notice?’”

Sam set down his spoon. Linda gave a sudden sigh. Delia said, “Well,
I … well, why
don’t
I come with you? I doubt I’d be much help, but certainly I could try.”

“Oh, God, thank you, Miz G.,” Driscoll said.

“I don’t know if this will work, though,” Delia told him.

“It’ll work,” he said, standing up. “If school lets out, say, two forty-five, three o’clock, and I come pick you up by …”

That wasn’t what Delia had meant. She’d meant that in her opinion, Susie might reasonably refuse to marry him even after he apologized. But she changed her mind about saying so. She didn’t even say goodbye to him, because just as he was leaving, the telephone rang.

This time it was Joel. He said, “Delia?”

“Yes,” she said evenly. She glanced toward her family. They were all watching her—everyone but Sam, who seemed to be studying the table.

“Where
are
you?” he asked.

This was such an illogical question that she couldn’t think how to answer it. She said, “Um …”

Where are you?
Sam had asked in another phone call, months ago, and she wondered now if he had meant the question in the same way Joel did.

Then Joel, as if recollecting himself, said, “I came home to have lunch with Noah and he told me you haven’t left Baltimore yet. I just thought I should find out if everything’s all right.”

“Oh, yes. Fine,” she said.

She wished the others would resume talking, but they didn’t

“But you do plan to be back, don’t you?” Joel asked. “I mean, eventually? Because I see from your closet … I wasn’t trying to pry but I did just, so to speak, glance in your closet, and I noticed all your clothes are gone.”

“They are?” she said.

“I thought you might have left for good.”

“Oh, no, it’s just … things are taking longer to finish than I expected,” she told him.

Sam rose and walked out of the room.

From upstairs, Susie called, “Mom? Mom?”

“It’s not the realtor
!” Delia called back.

Joel said, “Pardon?”

“Sorry, Joel, I’d better go,” she said. “See you in a while.”

She hung up.

“Well, aren’t
you
the popular one,” Linda said.

Delia gave what she hoped was an offhand laugh and started clearing the table.

It was true, she saw when she went upstairs, that she had brought all her clothes. Well, not really all. Joel would have found enough in her bureau to reassure him, if he’d looked. But what with one thing and another—the iffy season, the dither over a wedding outfit—she had packed as if she’d be gone for days. She pictured Joel standing in front of her closet, his broad forehead creased in perplexity as he surveyed the empty hangers. Abruptly, she closed her suitcase and snapped the latches shut.

Then she crossed the hall to Sam’s room. Here she had left plenty behind. How odd that when she was debating what to wear for the ceremony, she hadn’t considered her old wardrobe! Or maybe not so odd—all that froufrou and those nursery pastels. She turned away. She went to her bureau and found, in the top drawer, a draggled blue hair bow, safety pins, ticket stubs, everything hazed with talcum powder. A pair of sunglasses missing one lens. A fifty-five-cent hand-lotion coupon. A torn-out photo of a fashion model in a stark, bare sliver of black. She couldn’t imagine ever wearing such a style, and she studied the photo for some time before recalling that it was the model who’d caught her eye, not the dress. The sickle-shaped model with the same snooty haircut as Rosemary Bly-Brice.

Footsteps climbed the stairs, and she closed the drawer as stealthily as a thief. She turned and found Sam halting in the doorway. “Oh!” she said, and he said, “I was just—”

They both broke off.

“I thought you were seeing patients,” she said.

“No, I’m through for the day.”

He put his hands in his trouser pockets. Should she leave? But he was filling the doorway; it would have been awkward.

“Mostly now I keep just morning hours,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of patients anymore. Seems half of them have died of old age. Mrs. Harper, Mrs. Allingham …”

“Mrs. Allingham died?”

“Stroke.”

“Oh, dear, I’m going to miss her,” Delia said.

Sam very kindly did not point out that she’d lost all touch with Mrs. Allingham sixteen months ago.