Livvie's Song (11 page)

“You think our mom’s done crying?” Alex asked.

“I wouldn’t ask her, if I were you. You never can tell what might set off a woman’s faucet,” Will answered. He was hardly an expert on females, but it did seem that they had an inexhaustible supply of tears, and that the dam could break at any given moment, allowing them to spill forth.

“What faucet?” asked Nathan.

“Her tears, dummy,” said Alex.

“Your brother’s not dumb, just curious,” Will said, his eyes trained on the feminine creature just yards away now. “I’d play things cool, if I were you boys; act like nothing even happened. And, whatever you do, don’t remind her about Joe’s leaving.”

“Yeah, we don’t want t’ make her more sadder,” Nathan agreed.

“Watch this,” Alex said. “Hey, Mom!” He ran ahead of them toward the building. “Guess what we did?”

Livvie looked up and granted them a pleasant smile. It was the only genuine one he’d seen—pointed directly at him, anyway. Her dimples deepened, and, for the first time, he noticed her two top front teeth, one perfectly straight, the other turned in just so. Only one word came to mind when he laid eyes on her. Well, two, actually:
sweet
and
charming
.

In the restaurant kitchen, he began to fix them a light supper of roast beef sandwiches and leftover vegetable soup, even though Livvie had insisted at first that he need not go to any fuss. It was his day off, after all, she’d reminded him.

“Gotta eat, anyway,” he’d said. “I might as well make enough for everybody.”

Now, she said, “Well, at least tell me what I can do to help.”

“You can get the dishes and tableware ready, if you want.”

“Can I have a Coke?” Alex asked.

“Ooh, I want one, too!” Nathan shouted.

“Water will do just fine,” Livvie said. “The soda pop is reserved for customers.”

“But we
never
get t’ have it,” Alex whined. “Ain’t ever’thing in this place ours?”

Will kept his eyes down and sliced each sandwich in half, while Livvie set four plates in front of him and reached for the glasses. “No, everything is not ours. It…well, it mostly belongs to the bank.”

“But the bank don’t work here,” Alex argued.

Will fought to keep his mouth shut tight and his lips in a straight line.

“Oh, I guess you can have a small glass of cola, but just this once,” she said.

Both boys cheered, and the subject of the bank was quickly dropped.

When they were seated together at a rectangular table, Will noticed right away how they resembled a little family. He and Livvie sat side by side, their shoulders bumping from time to time, and her boys, seated across from them, devoured their suppers and talked nonstop about their lesson in stone-throwing. They included every detail—how Will had broken his own record by getting ten skips in one throw, and how neither of them had been able to get so much as one, but they weren’t discouraged, because Mr. Taylor had told them it took a lot of practice.

Livvie laughed at their enthusiasm and, every so often, reminded them not to talk with their mouths full. They’d swallow, take a swig of cola, and then continue, spouting about his harmonica and calling him the “best player in the world.”

“So, where did you learn to skip rocks and play the harmonica, Will Taylor?” Livvie asked. She turned to face him, and he noticed that her olive green shirtwaist made her luminous eyes look more green than blue.

“I grew up a mile or so from a little lake in upstate New York. A bunch of my boyhood chums and I used to walk down there, and we’d practice by the hour. ’Course, we fished, swam, hunted turtles, and looked for crayfish, too. You know, the usual kid stuff.” He snuck a grin at Nathan and Alex, then looked back at Livvie. “As far as the harmonica goes, well, my grandfather was a pretty musical guy. We used to sit out on the front stoop of his house, where he’d play while I listened and watched. Then, one day, he just handed it off to me and said, ‘Here, you try it.’ It just sort of started coming to me, real natural-like.” He instantly regretted having divulged so much with hardly a pause to catch his breath. He should have taken a second to think before letting it all roll off his tongue. The goal had been to remain an enigma, and yet, here he was, relating details from his childhood to a woman he barely knew, and to her boys, who kept their eyes fixed on him like he was some kind of hero.

“And your parents…were they musical, as well?” Livvie asked, oblivious to his sudden wariness.

He supposed it couldn’t hurt to answer a few more questions, as long as she didn’t dig too deep. “Not especially. My mother could at least hum a tune, but my pa…well, he was pretty much tone-deaf.”

“So, your grandfather who played the harmonica, he was your mother’s father, I presume?”

“Yes.”

She lifted her glass to her pretty mouth and took a few small sips. Will watched that hollow place at her throat go in and out with each swallow. Purely mesmerizing.

“Do you sing, too, Mr. Taylor?”

He met her gaze. “I can do a fair job.”

She set the glass back down and looked at her sons. “He’ll have to serenade us sometime, won’t he, boys?”

“What’s ‘serenade’?” Nathan asked.

“Sing and play, dodo bird,” Alex blurted out.

“Alex,” Livvie said, lowering her chin in a disapproving manner.

“Sorry,” the boy murmured, nudging his brother in the side. He picked up his sandwich and took another big bite.

Livvie picked up her own sandwich, turning it slightly in her hands. “Your family, do they all still live upstate?”

“No, they don’t.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“Had a sister. She died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did she pass recently?”

His heart caught as the memory took him back twenty-one years. “She drowned. I was thirteen at the time, and Joella was seven.” He cleared his throat. “I was supposed to be watching her.”

Livvie gasped and held her sandwich in midair. Even her boys ceased eating. They seemed to recognize the moment as brutally serious.

“Your parents must have been devastated. Did they ever recover?”

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “Whole thing was my fault. That’s when matters between my folks and me took a drastic turn. Looking back, I’m sure my pa’s anger influenced my mother’s, as I used to hear them talking in another room about how they never should have entrusted Joella to my care that day, how irresponsible it was of me to have taken her to the lake, and on and on. Don’t get me wrong; I know they loved me—no doubt there. They just failed to show it after that fateful day. It seemed like every time I walked into a room, about all I read in their eyes was shame and blame. And, of course, my mother never stopped crying.”

That was when he’d taken up with the wrong crowd—a bunch of fellows all seeking approval, acceptance, and a place to fit in. To manufacture their own fun, they’d started smoking, drinking, and committing petty crimes—vandalizing vacant buildings and such—which had soon escalated into more serious offenses. He often wondered what had happened to that gang of troublemakers, particularly the ones who’d joined him in the jewelry store theft. Had any of them reformed over the past decade?

“…shouldn’t have blamed you,” Livvie was saying. Her voice pulled him out of his reverie and back to the present. “You were only thirteen.” Good thing he’d had enough sense to clamp his mouth shut before divulging anything else. She’d fire him for sure if she learned about his stint in jail. “It must have been awful for you. Surely, you know that your parents probably blamed themselves and merely misdirected that blame because it made them feel less guilty.” She shook her head. “It’s all so sad. Where are they now? Do you ever see them?”

“They’re both gone. Passed on a few years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry—again. You’ve had a rough go of it, haven’t you.”

He shrugged. “No worse than anyone else. Look at you, young lady. Your life hasn’t exactly been a bowl of juicy red cherries. What we choose to do with our circumstances is what truly matters. I mean, yeah, for years afterward, the Lord’s grace and mercy seemed far off. I kept asking how a good and decent God could allow a young girl’s life to end so tragically, with me in the middle of it all. But then, there came a time when I had to lay it all down, just give it up, you know? That made all the difference for me.”

He had Harry to thank for getting him to that point, too, but he’d keep that matter to himself, lest she or one of the boys start asking about how he played into the scheme of things. Harry had also reassured Will that his folks had no business placing blame on him unless they pointed the finger back at themselves, as well. He’d been a mere lad, after all. Will recalled Pa’s stern instruction as he’d climbed to his perch on the buckboard, preparing to leave: “Take care of your sister while I run some errands in town. Your mother’s in bed with that bad case of influenza, so don’t go running off, you hear?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll watch over things,” he’d promised. But, of course, he hadn’t. No sooner had his father disappeared around the first bend in the dusty road than he’d dragged a balking Joella away from her dolls so that he could go fishing down at the lake. He’d never dreamed that she’d slip and fall from a steep cliff, hit her head on a rock on the way down, and tumble into the deep waters below. Even though he’d scampered down the hill to get to her, screaming at the top of his lungs for someone to help him, not a soul had heard his cries. By the time he’d found his sister and pulled her out, she’d already turned a strange, milky-white color.

He raked a hand through his hair to keep from shuddering at the memory. He supposed none of it mattered now; it hadn’t, ever since his mother had died of pneumonia and his pa had overdosed on liquor and aspirin while he’d sat in prison. In the end, a broken heart was probably what had really killed them. After all, they’d lost their only daughter in a senseless accident, their only son to a life of crime.

“I could use a glass of water,” Will said when he realized how desperately he wanted to change the subject. “Any of you need anything?”

“We’re fine, and you don’t need to wait on us,” Livvie said.

He wanted to ask her when the last time was that she’d been waited on; when she’d last let someone else shoulder a burden of hers. Instead, he glanced over her head at the clock on the wall. “Man, where’d the time go?” He pushed back his chair, making the legs scrape loudly against the wood floor. “I’m going to start cleaning up the kitchen, if you don’t mind, and then I need to run upstairs and change my clothes for church.”

“Church? For the second time today?” She gaped at him as if he’d suddenly grown a third eye. “Isn’t once a Sunday enough?”

Her remark made him toss his head back and laugh. “It’s not a chore to me, Livvie. Fact is, I enjoy it. I’ve been attending that Wesleyan Methodist church at the corner of Market and Thorne. It’s a bit on the strict side, I suppose, but they’re a loving, generous bunch, far as I can tell. This morning, they took up a collection for a missionary couple serving in Siam. Let me just say that when the offering plate passed by me, it sure did look full to brimming. The reverend’s sermon did a number on my conscience, too—always a sign of good preaching, if you ask me.”

“Ha! Then I best not go there,” she said, pushing a few strands of golden hair out of her face. Her comment was worded like a jest, but her tone was dead serious.

“Mom don’t ever take us to church anymore,” Alex said glumly. “We used to go, but that was before our daddy—”

“Alex, hush,” Livvie said. She stood up hurriedly, making quite a racket with her chair.

“No, please—sit. You aren’t even done yet,” Will said, nodding at her half-eaten plate of food.

“I should help.”

He smiled beneath his forest of whiskers. “Relax, would you? I’ll take care of things.”

She gave a hesitant nod and lowered herself slowly into her chair.

As he washed dishes and tidied up the kitchen, Will tried to think of the best way to go about offering to take Alex and Nathan with him to church sometime.

“But thou, O Lord, art a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth.”—Psalm 86:15

Will didn’t know if Monday mornings were always this busy, or if more folks than usual had come out just because they’d heard about Joe Stewart’s replacement and wanted to see how he measured up. He’d been flipping pancakes and French toast, browning bacon and sausage, and frying up one egg after another for the past hour with nary a break—and loving every minute of it. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t had so much fun since…well, he couldn’t recall.

Coot Hermanson sat on a stool at the bar and kept Will informed of everyone’s comings and goings, making introductions whenever someone joined him at the counter, and waving folks over when they rose from their seats to leave. He probably should have saved his breath, though, because Will forgot everyone’s name immediately after being introduced.

Livvie and Cora Mae had been moving nonstop, too, picking up breakfast platters at the counter and dropping off new order slips faster than a blink. Somehow, though, Will managed to remain calm and cool.

No more than a couple of sentences had passed between Livvie and him, for all of her running back and forth, but he did catch several glimpses of her mopping her shiny brow with her apron, promising Coot she’d be right back with the coffeepot, and bending to coo at a newborn baby in his mother’s arms. Despite her busyness, she still took the time to acknowledge folks. And Will admired her for that.

Around eleven o’clock, when the breakfast crowd had dwindled to a few retired oldsters, Will started cleaning up the kitchen and thinking about the lunch menu. There would be the usual Monday soup options—chicken noodle and tomato—and the sandwich choices, which Cora Mae had scribbled on the blackboard: ham, roast beef, or chicken. Below these, she had listed their pie offerings at five cents a slice: apple, cherry, peach, and strawberry. They had enough pies to tide them over for the next day or so, but soon, perhaps as early as tonight, Will would have to bake a new supply. He looked forward to it, especially since he’d received a stack of recipe cards from Harry in the mail on Friday.