Love Me Tender (8 page)

Chapter 14

I SHOT a look at Mel. How old did I have to get before she wouldn't keep sending me out of the room just as things got interesting? I took the dog, trying hard not to notice the softness of golden puppy fur. Or the puppy's wriggly warmth.

I would give Mel three minutes and not a second more.

The screen door slapped shut behind me. “Inside,” I said to Kerrie, who was on the back steps.

She was already getting up. “Can I hold her?”

“Not till you eat,” I said. “Those orders come from higher up.”

She let her fingers trail over the puppy as she passed me. We'd missed having a dog. I just didn't want this one. Not much, anyway. Even though it licked my hand.

It would grow to be more than twice Hound's size, was my guess.

I opened the boot box on the back porch and took out the one pair of rubber boots it contained. It was a long box, the puppy could run back and forth until it got tired enough to sleep.

It started to whine the minute I put it down. It tried to climb the sides, and when that didn't work, it sat back to study the situation.

I wondered if it was really the dog that bothered me so much. If I was honest with myself, I'd had a mood coming on right before Kerrie came into the kitchen with the news about the dog. I was tired, real tired, and still hungry.

I decided it didn't matter. Cleaning up after a puppy wasn't going to improve my mood one bit.

The puppy begged me for help.

I wanted to be able to drop a towel in there, something soft for it, but I had nothing to offer. The whine became a kind of yodel and I ducked back into the house, hoping the puppy would just quiet down.

Mel stood at the stove, where she was still frying bologna. Kerrie had been given my sandwich. It was pretty much a case of she and Aunt Clare had shown up in time to put their napkins in their laps. There was something of a family resemblance here.

Aunt Clare said, “We thought you'd end up some kind of gypsy"—at this Mel made a delicate snorting sound— “following his polished black hair and tight pants from one honky-tonk to another.”

“You'd have known better if you'd given him half a chance, Clare,” Mel said.

“I'm only saying that's how it
looked,
sugar. Plainly, that's not how it
is.”
Aunt Clare blew her nose and finished with a hopeful, “Is it?”

Mel laughed. “Tony is a wonderful husband, thank you. Not perfect, nobody's perfect, but I'm happy.”

“I'm the insurance policy,” I said. Mel ignored me, and I ignored the interested look on the grandmother's face as she came back with the bread and mayo, and sat down.

I lifted half my sandwich off the plate in front of Kerrie and took a bite. The grandmother took a bite of hers, shooting me a look that said there were
some
sensible people in the room. I liked being included in that look.

The puppy yelped with fresh determination. We silently agreed to ignore it. I took another bite of my half a sandwich.

Aunt Clare said, “When I think back, I remember being so full of promise.”

“Give me a for instance,” Mel said, sitting down with a plateful of fried bologna to be made into sandwiches. I got busy spreading mayo on bread.

“When I was in Brownies, I sold more Girl Scout cookies than any other Brownie in the entire state of Tennessee,” Aunt Clare was saying. “They gave me an award, do you remember?”

“Vaguely,” Mel said.

“I can show it to you,” she said almost eagerly.

“That's all right,” Mel said, waving away this offer.

Aunt Clare said, “It hangs next to my fireplace.”

“Then I doubt I'll miss it,” Mel said.

“I just stepped up to people's doors. People I'd never met before and might never meet again,” Aunt Clare said, with something like wonder. “And I'd offer them a wide grin and a sunny personality, and they would order just boxes and boxes of cookies.”

“Well, good for you,” Mel said irritably.

“The point is,” Aunt Clare said with exaggerated patience, “I used to be this little girl everybody loved. Something just shifted for me, the stars, or the plates of the earth, or some mysterious something. People don't just automatically like me anymore.”

Kerrie looked at me for a lead. I gave her back a tiny shrug.

“There are plenty of people who like you,” the grandmother said. “Not that you ought to be knocking on doors, of course, but you just need to be more outgoing.”

“I used to be,” Aunt Clare said. “I used to think I had reason to be confident, but things have changed since my husband left me. Even my most recent closest friend told me, when she first met me a question popped right into her head: Do I really like this woman?”

Mel laughed out loud.

“That was not meant to be funny, Melisande.”

“Maybe not, but it was. This new friend of yours, she likes you fine now, doesn't she?”

“It's only been three months.”

“She trusts you enough to be honest with you, isn't that enough? Did she have to love you at first sight?”

“Since you put it that way...”

“You're too hard on people, Clare. But you're even harder on yourself.”

“That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Melisande,” Aunt Clare said in sincere tones.

We'd all been ignoring the puppy's whining, but it was getting to me. Now the creature burst into a frenzy of resentment, barking and crying and whining all being brought into play. This went on for about twenty seconds and then stopped abruptly.

Kerrie started out of her chair, but Mel pointed at her, very master of our ship, and Kerrie sat back down. Mel went to peek out the door. “It's fine,” she said, coming back to the table. “It's safe. If you let it see you and then go away again, it'll only feel worse. So eat, and then you can go out and pet it.”

“I really want this dog,” Kerrie said.

The puppy broke a single tortured bark that came in two voices, like something out of a scary movie. But it didn't sound scary, just miserable. And then nothing. We chewed with an air of waiting for the next round.

“That's how our other dog sounded when he didn't wake up one morning,” Kerrie said as she finished off the half sandwich. “Quiet.”

“Elvira, go take a walk,” Mel said. “Take Kerrie with you.”

“Are you going to decide about the puppy?” she asked, making the most of the babyish voice she'd adopted lately. “While we're out, I mean.”

“I'm not promising a thing, Kerrie,” Mel said, “except that if you throw yourself on the floor again, I am going to put you up for adoption.”

“I'll take her,” Aunt Clare said.

“You can't have her,” Mel said. “I'll only let mean people take her.”

Chapter 15

“LET'S PLAY that game again,” Kerrie said as we went down the front steps.

“What game is that?”

“Where you tell me the police want me for murder. That was fun.”

“That was no game,” I said. “I thought I scared you to death.”

She laughed. Not a ha-ha-on-you kind of laugh, but a thoroughly delighted laugh that meant big sisters were so silly or—well, I don't know what it meant, but it was not the reaction I was going for.

“Weren't you worried?”

“About what? The death sentence? I'm eight years old, for Pete's sake.”

“Go play by yourself. You're too old for me.”

“I'm going to be nicer to him than you are to me,” she said.

“Him who?”

“Our baby brother.”

“How do you know it's a brother?”

“It is. He is. I just know,” she said, going off by herself to I didn't know where. “You'll see,” she said over her shoulder. “I'm going to be so nice to him, he'll love me way better than he loves you.”

I didn't doubt this was true. I thought I wouldn't care. But I did.

I cared a lot.

I followed Kerrie for five minutes in one direction, then we turned around and went back. Aunt Clare had the sleeping puppy draped over her lap, but Kerrie pretended not to notice. I decided she was smarter than I thought.

“It wouldn't do to send you off to a motel,” the grandmother was saying.

“We don't mind motels, Momma,” Mel said. “I told you that already.”

“They never wash the bedspreads in them motels,” the grandmother said.

“I saw that program too,” Mel said. “I thought about buying these silk bed sacks that you slip between the sheets so you never really have to touch the pillows or any of the bedclothes.”

Aunt Clare butted in here to say, “I've seen those. They don't have a zipper up the side, that's the only trouble. You have to sort of slide down in, and I thought, what if there was a fire in the middle of the night?”

The grandmother's eyes flicked to the window and back, very quickly.

I said, “So it's settled? Do Kerrie and I sleep together, or do we each get our own room?”

The subject of fires was dropped. Also, we were staying.

We all trooped upstairs. The puppy rode in the crook of Aunt Clare's arm, like a football. A limp football. On the way up, the grandmother warned us that these rooms were bound to be needing some work.

Kerrie's room was pink. “This used to be my room,” Aunt Clare said. This I could believe. It had cheerleader and prom queen written all over it, in ruffles.

Aunt Clare began the tour with the words, “Do you know how to twirl a baton?” and Kerrie was hooked.

Mel looked into what I knew had to have been her old room just from the way she moved toward it, as if she were about to peer into a dollhouse.

But then she straightened; her whole posture told me the room had changed a lot. Mel's voice came high-pitched when she said, “Why, Momma, do you still sew?”

The grandmother hurried over to share the doorway. “It's a terrible trouble to keep setting up the machine and taking it away. And then I had it in the dining room, but it's just too dark in there to suit me.”

Standing right behind the grandmother, I saw a long worktable rested within a bed's imprints in the carpeting. A smaller table with a sewing machine took up the space in front of the side-by-side windows.

The yellow paint was cheerful. The wooden dresser looked nice with the afternoon sunlight hitting it. In the middle of the room, I turned in a circle, looking around.

“I had your bed moved across the hall from my sister's room only a few weeks ago,” the grandmother said in an apologetic tone. “I didn't know you'd be coming home, or I would have waited.”

“Don't worry about it, Momma.” Mel sounded impatient. She probably felt too flattened to lift her mood just enough to satisfy the grandmother that she wasn't heartbroken.

I personally thought Mel's heart had broken just a little.

Maybe the grandmother thought so too, because she said, “I thought I'd make myself some kitchen curtains.”

“That's a fine idea.” Still flattened.

“I need sunlight to thread a needle these days,” the grandmother said. “And there's a good view of my neighbor's flower garden.”

“Don't apologize, Momma. I'm just tired to death,” Mel said.

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure,” Mel said.

“You can sleep in your own bed, anyway,” the grandmother said, leading us on to that room. Here, Mel made more of an effort. She sat down hard and fell back on the bed like this was it for her, don't bother her till morning.

My room was the best. The grandmother was right, this side of the house lacked for sun. But there was a tree right outside the windows, and because they were open by about three inches at the bottom, bird chatter filled the room.

The rest of the view was of a garage off to one side of the backyard, and behind it there seemed to be a garden. The garage sat where the greenhouse could be found in our yard, and Mel's veggie garden back of it. It was not home, but had the pattern of home and felt right to me.

“This was my sister's bedroom,” the grandmother said. “When she passed, it lay empty until I got married. Then we started calling it the guest room.”

It was green, mostly. A faded green rug and an upholstered chair, walls gone creamy with age. The bed was covered with a quilt. In the books I read, the best grandmothers always had quilts.

“We'll find the curtains for this room,” the grandmother said. “I hardly ever come upstairs anymore, and it's going to pot.”

“It's nice without,” I said, going to the bookcase. There were old books here; I'd seen these titles at flea markets.
The Bobbsey Twins. Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.
“I like this room the way it is.”

“Fold up this quilt, will you?” she went on, still not looking at me. “We'll find you fresh linens.”

“I get to use the quilt, though, don't I? After we change the sheets?”

“Only if we wash it. I can't have your mother wishing she'd bought those silk bed sacks after all.”

We legged all the bed linens down to the “warshing pantry.” Even Kerrie, who had more sheet trailing behind her than she had in her arms. We left Aunt Clare with Mel to sort out the suitcase she shared with Kerrie.

The grandmother began once more to tell us her story about the iron as we approached the pantry, how she set up the ironing board too near the window. “It was the curtains again. Curtains are a terrible hazard.”

I thought she sounded a little nervous. When she opened the door, I was looking right at what I suspected was the trunk of the tree that reached my bedroom window. Behind it, I could see the back doors of two houses at the other side of the block.

“Big hole,” I said. It was a shock, but mainly I was impressed. “It must've been some fire.”

“Not really,” she said. “The firemen knocked the wall out. Just took their axes to it, can you imagine?”

I didn't have to imagine it. The broken edges were right before me.

“The repairs ought to have been done this week,” the grandmother said, flapping a hand at the hole, now covered in clear plastic. “Nobody finishes a job on time these days.”

“It'll be good as new,” I said, but I couldn't sound convinced. In the kitchen, it looked like they'd popped a new window into a window-shaped hole and that was that. This wasn't a window-shaped hole.

I could see the outside wall, the charred edges of cotton-candy insulation, and the plastered-over slats that made up the inside wall. I had no idea how somebody fixed such a mess.

The grandmother didn't look at the wall at all. “Let's drop all this laundry right here. Kerrie, have you ever helped with the wash before?”

It was a mistake to notice the hole at all, I could see that now. I was sorry about it. I wanted to say something else, turn the subject in some way so that she would forgive me, or at least forget about it. But everything I thought of didn't sound right.

“Now let's sort out the whites, Kerrie,” the grandmother said.

Pretty much ignoring me.

“If Daddy was here,” I said, “he'd know what needs to be done. No big deal, really.”

“Elvira, would you give the rooms upstairs a good vacuuming and do a little dusting? Open the windows,” the grandmother said. “The vacuum is in the hall closet.”