Miller's Valley (13 page)

I
was happy that only the valedictorian gave a speech at the high school graduation. My mother was annoyed, though. “Every other school, they both speak, number one, number two,” she said. “How will anyone know you were the salutatorian if you don't get to speak?”

“It's in the program,” I said. It also said I'd won the 1971 Chamber of Commerce Mathematics Prize. Richard got the science prize, although neither of us had placed out of our region with our projects. He'd been very disappointed, but I knew I wasn't going to win with “Andover, Pennsylvania, 1921–1930: A History of Water Management in a Drowned Town.”

“You pulled your punches, Miss Miller,” Mr. Bally had said after he'd polished off a western omelet at one of my tables the week after the regionals. “I thought you were going to be taking a good hard look at the water situation in Miller's Valley, not go over ancient history.”

“I did take a good hard look,” I said as I refilled his coffee cup. “I don't know that you would have liked much what I saw.” That was as close as I ever got to saying that I suspected what the government people had been up to. I stood at the table with the coffeepot in my hand and looked at him with my eyes narrowed.

“Aha,” he said. That was it.

“Oh, Mimi, you took me right back to when I was a girl!” Cissy had said, clapping her soft little hands.

“It turned out a little more like a history project than I expected,” Mrs. Farrell said. I could tell she was disappointed in me, and since she'd seen Steven pick me up a couple of times in his truck I was betting she thought he was the reason I hadn't done better. I couldn't really tell her what had happened. I wanted to say, Mrs. Farrell, if you did research and found out that someone you really loved was going to die, would you publish it or keep it to yourself? But I just came up with my own answer, and did what I did, and didn't do what I couldn't bring myself to do.

I got a check from the Chamber of Commerce for a hundred dollars for the math prize, and a check from the PTA for a hundred dollars for being salutatorian, and Mr. Venti surprised me by giving me a hundred dollars in new twenty-dollar bills in a card shaped like a mortarboard. With the money I'd saved from my job and a scholarship I'd gotten from the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters, I'd be able to make it through at least two years at the state university, and Mrs. Farrell said she was sure there was more scholarship money out there for a woman in math and science. I liked it, when she said that, like I was actually a woman, and in math and science.

My parents had a party in our yard, the tables set up between the back of our house and the front of Ruth's. If you talked to my mother she said that was the best place because there was plenty of room and some trees for shade. If you talked to my father he said it was the best place because then Ruth could sit in a chair by her window and hear most of what was going on. Steven insisted on walking with one arm around me, telling people to take a good look at the gold heart with the diamond at its center he'd given me as a gift. “It's a quarter carat,” he said over and over again. “When she graduates from college there'll be a bigger stone, and it won't be in a necklace.” He'd already bought one house and then resold it. He'd made almost two thousand dollars and said next time it would be more when he was finished with the two new places he was working on.

“Ed, I'd like to talk to you about an investment that I'm pretty sure will interest you,” he said to my brother, backing him up against the dessert table.

“Now, son, this is a social occasion,” my father said to him after a few minutes. Eddie took his business card out of his wallet and gave it to Steven. Steven did the same. “I'm going to make your brother rich,” he said.

He'd talked about calling his company Steamy or Misty, both names that combined his and mine, neither of which made any sense at all and sounded more like a dirty movie than a real estate business. “I guess I'm just a sentimental guy,” he said when I shot them down. Finally I'd come up with Home Sweet Home when I was having lunch with Aunt Ruth and staring at a fake sampler she had on her wall in the kitchen. Steven had gone right out and had cards printed up. He was still working construction, then knocking off to go over to work on the places he was fixing up. I helped him some, pulling up stained carpeting, chiseling Pepto pink tile off the bathroom wall. I'd panicked him a little bit in one of the houses when the toilet ran slow and I said the septic might be failing, but I had an old plumbing snake of my father's, and once I snaked it it was fine.

“Sometimes I wonder why you're paying for college,” he said, lying beside me in a sleeping bag on the breezeway floor, both of us stripped to our underwear and smelling of sweat and spackle. “With two of us we could make twice as much money on this. We could clean up.”

I didn't say anything. My mother had ordered a sheet cake for my graduation party that said
GO GET 'EM MIMI!
which for my mother was pretty whimsical. I knew it didn't mean
GO GET THAT OLD TOILET OUT OF THE BATHROOM AND PUT IN A NEW ONE!

“That young man of yours is a keeper,” said Cissy Langer, fingering the heart around my neck and listening to Steven tell Mr. Langer about an apartment building that he was really itching to get his hands on if only he had the cash. She leaned in and whispered, “He is good-looking, too.” There was no question. The black curls, the dark eyes, the broad mouth. I still wasn't sure why he'd chosen me. That was another thing that made me hang on to him.

“Mary Margaret, bring me a piece of cake,” Ruth called. “A corner piece, with one of those big frosting flowers.”

“I'll take it to her,” my father said.

“You stay where you are, Bud. I asked your daughter and that's who I want.” Good thing my mother was across the grass talking to the Ventis, whose big party for LaRhonda at the steak house wasn't until Saturday night. “I'm closing the whole place for you kids,” Mr. Venti had said. “Do you know what kind of a loss I'm taking doing that?”

“Oh, Daddy, don't start,” LaRhonda had said. Her father talked all the time about how much college was going to cost him and how LaRhonda was just going to waste it by getting married anyhow. “Give the girl a ring and save me a whole lot of money,” he was always saying to Fred. LaRhonda kept saying she was mainly going to State to spite him, but she also kept talking about the sororities, spent most of my party sitting over in a lawn chair talking to Ed's wife, Debbie, who had been a Kappa, which was what LaRhonda wanted to be, too. Fred was next to her, empty beer cans lined up in a nice neat row at his feet. He'd given her a wallet for graduation. “I already have a wallet,” she'd said. “Not one I gave you,” he said. “Take a look inside.” There was a picture of Fred and LaRhonda in the photo compartment, and a hundred-dollar bill in the bills compartment.

“He's a decent guy, but he does not know the way to a woman's heart,” Steven said, running his hand up my arm and nodding at my neck, then putting one finger in the frosting on the piece of cake I was holding. “That's mine, young man,” Ruth called.

“Just testing it to make sure it's good enough for you, ma'am,” he called back as I went inside.

“I haven't decided yet if he's trustworthy,” Ruth said, taking the cake from me.

“When will you know?”

Her mouth was full; she looked like a squirrel storing nuts, like the sheet cake on the table wasn't big enough to feed half the county, and another sheet cake in Ruth's refrigerator because my mother had run out of room in hers, what with the Jell-O molds and the potato salad.

“Don't get smart with me,” she finally said, a blob of frosting on her upper lip. I reached over and took it off with my finger.

“What am I going to do without you around?” she said, and she started to cry, really cry, like she had finally said out loud something that had been eating at her for a long time.

“I'll only be two hours away,” I said. “I'll be home all the time.”

“It won't be the same,” she said, shoveling in some tearstained cake and licking the plastic fork.

From Ruth's window the party looked fuzzy, like maybe it was a mirage, but with plenty of balloons. I could see my mother talking to Mrs. Farrell. “You invited a teacher to a party?” LaRhonda had said when she saw her. My mother and Mrs. Farrell had become friendly, united in their determination that I better myself. My mother was holding the gifts that my father had given her, a sweatshirt and a hat from the university. The state university took itself so seriously that all its stuff had a big
S
on it for State, as though there weren't forty-nine others out there.

“Dad did the same thing when I graduated,” said Ed, who was standing by the cake when I went to get Ruth another piece. I think he was happy that I'd left him the only family valedictorian. “You're too young to remember.”

“I remember.”

“Mom invited Mrs. Farrell?” he said, squinting.

“Wasn't she your teacher?” I said.

“She was just starting out,” Ed said. “Maybe she's a better teacher now.” I laughed, just a little. “What?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Where's our brother?”

I shrugged. Steven was talking to Mrs. Farrell's husband, who worked at a bank. I could see his face freezing while Steven talked. My mother put the State hat on Clifton, who started to strut a little bit, that way little kids do when they think they're really something. I looked around and it was like I was seeing everything frozen into a still photograph, like I was seeing my whole life but in one of those shots you look at later and think, Yeah, that's what it was like, once upon a time. Once upon a long time ago.

Time passed, and I had a chicken leg and some of my mother's quick pickles, which were really just cucumber salad. I didn't really care for bakery cake, but I had one of the homemade cookies Cissy brought with her, chocolate chunk and coconut. There were all those conversations you have at a party like that, about when I had to leave for school and what I thought the chances were for the football team, which any idiot knew you were supposed to say were good. Every once in a while one of the adults would stuff a bill in the patch pocket of my dress. My white patent heels got dusty, and finally I put them on the back steps and walked around barefoot, hoping my mother wouldn't notice.

Some people started to leave, LaRhonda's parents, Donald's grandfather. He'd brought me a package from Donald. “He was trying his darndest to come, Mimi, but it's real expensive, flying from out there, and it's too far to drive,” he said. Inside the package was a lacquered jewelry box. When you opened it the blue fairy from
Pinocchio
popped up and “When You Wish Upon a Star” played, tinkly little notes you could barely hear over the sound of people talking in the yard. I knew that Donald had sent it because his grandmother had taken us to see
Pinocchio
when I was ten and Donald was eleven. LaRhonda hadn't come with us that day, and afterward she made her mother take her, and spent two weeks saying it was the stupidest movie she'd ever seen. But Donald and I loved it. We both started to cry a little bit when Pinocchio died, and Donald's grandmother had put her arm around me.

“What's he think, you're twelve?” said Steven, poking the blue fairy with his finger. I knew what he meant, but he was wrong. It was the perfect gift, and just the kind of thing the Donald I'd once known would think of, not something that would impress other people but something that would send a message just to me, that he hadn't forgotten.

“It's great,” I said to Donald's grandfather. “I'll write and tell him so. Now I have a place to keep my necklace.”

“Hey, hey,” Steven said. “Don't take that necklace off.”

“That's some gift,” Donald's grandfather said, about the necklace, not the music box.

I think a fair amount of time passed between that moment and when the state police pulled up. But when I thought about it that night, after I went out and had a couple of rum and Cokes with Steven and found myself staring at the cracked ceiling of a stuffy room in somebody's apartment, feeling like I was going to throw up the quick pickles and the cookie, it all ran together. My shoes, the cake, the bills in my pocket, the blue fairy, the glass bowls with the last spoonfuls of potato salad, the chicken bones that had fallen underneath one of the tables, the pink paper tablecloths flapping a little, and then police car cherry lights. No sirens. Thank God no sirens. My mother's face got white enough when she turned and saw the car.

“You stay right where you are and take care of the guests,” my father said in his low voice, and he and Mr. Langer walked over to the troopers together. We didn't have local cops out where we lived. The Miller's Valley police only took calls in town proper. Otherwise it was the staties, who came from miles away, so that everybody who lived in the valley said that before you called the police about someone breaking into your house you'd best call your closest neighbor with a gun. My father had taken more than a few of those calls over the years, although usually the burglar turned out to be a bear trying to turn over a trash can.

The men standing by the police car were talking low, but everyone else had stopped talking, so we could catch a word here or there. Clifton ran to my father, and my mother tried to catch him as he went by. But he got past her and threw his arms around my father's leg, and my father absently picked him up, although he was getting so big that his legs dangled halfway down the length of my father's body.

“Dear God, no,” said my aunt behind me, but I knew she couldn't hear a thing and was just offering up some general bad-news prayer. Then there was some shaking of hands and nodding of heads, and the two state police guys got back in their car and drove down the road.