Next to Love (36 page)

A little while later, he gets out of her bed and goes back to his. The next day, neither of them mentions the incident. But after that, every few months, he comes to her bed. She never stops him. She closes her eyes. Usually she thinks of Charlie. Occasionally she thinks of Mac.

EIGHTEEN

Millie

AUTUMN 1955

T
HE ODD PART OF IT, MILLIE WILL REALIZE WHEN SHE CALMS DOWN
, is that she is not surprised. She always knew she had it coming one way or another.

She has set the day aside to tackle the children’s closets. A cleaning woman comes in three times a week, but you cannot trust a cleaning woman to know what should be kept, what should be thrown out, and what should never have been there in the first place.

She starts in the girls’ room. Jack is more of a pack rat, but two of them mean twice the clutter. By eleven-thirty she has filled three large trash bags with outgrown clothes, forgotten toys, and junk they have carried home from birthday parties and family outings and school. She thinks back to her own childhood room. Strange how much less they had of everything before the war.

When she has finished arranging things—and God help her if she puts Betsy’s possessions on Susan’s side or vice versa—she takes the box of trash bags and makes her way to Jack’s room, though Al does not think she should be cleaning out his closet.

“He’s almost thirteen,” he said when she told him at breakfast that today was her closet day. “He’s old enough to clean out his own closet.”

“I don’t mind doing it.”

“I wasn’t worried about you. I was thinking of him. He deserves a little privacy.”

“I’m cleaning his closet, not bursting into the bathroom when he’s in the shower.” She stopped doing that a year ago, when he went berserk one night.

“What are you going to do if you find copies of
Playboy
or something like that?”

“I don’t know. What do you think I should do?”

“Stay out of his closet.”

If he has copies of
Playboy
, he has found a better hiding place for them. She finds nothing but old sneakers, forsaken balls, bats, and skates, and boxes of half-finished plane, tank, and ship models. The ones he completed are displayed around the room.

It takes a while for her to work her way to the box in the back, all the way on the side. Even before she pulls it out, she knows what it is. She has always known. When the teacher called home and asked for Mrs. Swallow, she knew. And when he got into fights, she knew. And when he came home asking if he was Jewish, she knew.

She drags the box out of the closet and opens the flaps. He is not usually neat—what boy is neat?—but the contents are in perfect order, the letters on one side, the pictures on the other, the sketches spread carefully beneath them.

She lifts out several photos and begins going through them. Pete in his new uniform, staring into the camera of a professional photographer; Pete in training camp; Pete in England. She knows them by heart. Yet the years have made them unfamiliar.

She reaches into the box again and takes out another handful. These are from before the war. In them, he plays ball, horses around with the guys, and graduates from high school. One of the photos stops her. Jack has put a picture of himself in with those of Pete, as if he is trying to go backward in time to find a way into Pete’s life. The tears blur her vision. She blinks to put the picture back in focus. It is not of Jack. It is of a young Pete, so young that he is closer in age to Jack than to the man he would have been now, than to her. He is wearing Jack’s wide-apart blue eyes and square face and unruly cowlick. She imagines Jack looking at it as if looking into a mirror.

She begins putting the photos back in the box, but another one catches her eye. In this one, Pete stands at the edge of the pond with a bunch of girls in bathing caps and boys in those old-fashioned swimming suits with knitted tops like pieces of chest armor. Grace is there, but not with Charlie. She can’t find Babe. She searches for herself. The picture must have been taken during one of the times Pete took up with another girl.

Suddenly her face jumps out at her. She did not recognize herself because the strap of the bathing cap pushes her cheeks up and out of shape. Only it is more than that. She did not recognize herself because she cannot remember being that girl. She cannot remember believing that despite her mother’s death, and her father’s, the world would still hand her happiness, as long as she had Pete.

The face in the photograph goes blurry through a new rush of tears. She is not crying for his death, though for a year after it she cried herself to sleep every night. After she married Al, she took her tears where he could not see them. He was always wondering why she spent so much time in the shower. But gradually she stopped crying in the shower, and over the sink, and when she went to check on Jack in the middle of the night. Gradually, she stopped grieving. The fact shames her, but she cannot help herself. She had a few months with Pete. She has been married to Al for almost ten years. For ten years they have eaten meals together, and gone to the movies together, and decided to buy this or not buy that together; they have made love, and had arguments, and raised children; she has seen his hair begin to recede, and he has pretended not to see her stretch marks. She cannot remember being married to Pete any more than she can remember being that girl who trusted the world to hand her happiness. She cannot imagine not being married to Al.

JACK SPOTS THE SMOKE
halfway down the block. As he gets closer, he sees the sooty plume rising from Uncle Claude’s yard. He looks up the driveway. Aunt Babe is standing over a garbage can. She is staring down into it, and the flames are licking up at her, and he knows, as he stands there, that this is not the way a normal person burns leaves or household trash or newspapers. He thinks of going to see if she’s okay. His mom is always saying Aunt Babe needs help. He stands waiting. If she looks up, he’ll go. She does not look up. He starts walking again.

His mother is in the kitchen with the electric mixer going. He hopes it’s brownies. He drops his books on the table as he goes past and crosses to where she’s standing at the counter. As she turns off the mixer, he starts to dip his finger in. She usually tells him to wash his hands first, but sometimes she doesn’t notice.

She doesn’t tell him to wash. She just pushes his hand away.

“I thought we agreed it’s wrong to take things that don’t belong to you,” she says without looking up from the mixing bowl.

He doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Brownies don’t belong to anyone. She makes them for him, his sisters, and his dad.

“I only wanted a lick.”

She puts the spoon down and steps back so she is facing him with a few feet of kitchen between them. “I’m not talking about brownie dough.”

“I didn’t swipe anything.” He thinks of the Snickers bar, but how could she know about that? He didn’t get caught at the store.

“I cleaned out your closet today.” She stops, as if she is waiting for him to say something.

He looks down at his feet. She did not even notice the mud on his sneakers. The realization scares him.

“I found a box there that doesn’t belong to you.”

He drags his eyes up from the floor. “I just wanted to look at the stuff.”

“You should have asked me.”

Sure, a voice in his head shouts, and you would have said no. But he knows better than to talk back to her now.

“Those were my letters and my pictures,” she goes on, and he does not recognize the voice. It is hard as steel, with none of the lilt she uses to charm the birds out of the trees. “My letters and my pictures, and you stole them.” It is the voice of a drill sergeant in the movies or a coach at school telling you he is not going to take any more guff. “You stole them and you hid them from me.”

They go on standing that way, as she stares at him with hard, unforgiving eyes he has never seen, and he wonders what to do. Suddenly he knows. He feels his own fury rising until his chest heaves with it. He wants to hit her. He wants to start swinging at her the way he did at Billy Craig the time they had the big fight. He is tall enough to. He could really hurt her if he wanted. His hands have balled into fists. He hides them behind him, but he cannot hold back the rage.

“You stole them from me,” he yells. “He’s my father, and you stole him from me and hid him. You took away my father.”

His hands are still balled behind him. His fists tremble with the urge to pummel her. He feels himself taking a step forward. He sees his knuckle connect with her nose. The blood spurts out and runs down her face. She staggers from the force of his hand.

He closes his eyes, then opens them. She is still standing there. He takes several steps back, bumps into one of the kitchen chairs, and sits down hard. His breath is coming in shallow gasps. His fists hang at his sides. He forces them open, but he cannot look up at her. He is terrified at how close he came to hitting her.

MARCH 1956

Millie is surprised when Jack says he wants to go to King Gooding’s funeral.

“For Amy,” he explains.

It is not a lie. He is going partly for Amy, but he is also going for himself. His dad doesn’t—didn’t—like King Gooding, and a lot of people were afraid of him, but he always felt as if he and King Gooding were almost friends. King gave him that dollar, and asked if he was young Pete Swallow, and when he said he wasn’t sure, called him on it, so that he had to stand up and say, yes, I’m Pete Swallow. He owes King Gooding more than a dollar.

He was too little to go to the cemetery that day, so they left him in the car, but he remembers getting up on his knees in the backseat to watch what was going on. He saw the big wooden box, just like the one the men are lowering into the ground now, but then there was a flag on the box, because King Gooding’s son died in the war, just like Jack’s father, Pete Swallow. The hero.

He looks from the hole in the ground to the stone next to it.

CHARLES HENRY GOODING, JR
.
1918
–
1944

What he can’t figure out is why Charles Henry Gooding, Jr., is buried here, and his father, Peter John Swallow—Peter John Swallow, Sr., if you count him—is buried in France. He knows not to ask his mother, but he cannot stop thinking about it. If his father were buried here, he could visit him. He could ride his bike out after school, sit on the grass, and shoot the breeze with his real dad.

MILLIE STANDS STARING
across the open grave at Grace, Amy, and Dorothy. Amy looks up, sees she is being watched, and drops her reddened eyes again, but not before Millie catches the wild, trapped look in them. It makes her, perversely, even lovelier. She is still in high school, and talking about college, but Millie cannot help thinking the sooner Grace marries her off to some nice boy, the better off she’ll be. Otherwise, she has a feeling Amy is in for a hard time. So is Grace.

She looks from Amy to her grandmother. Dorothy’s eyes are red too. Millie does not know why she is surprised. She thought of King as an old man. Old men are supposed to die, though during the war the arithmetic was reversed. But King was not an old man to his wife. And now he is gone, and she is alone. She pictures Dorothy rattling around that big beautiful house on her own, no husband, no son, nothing but silence as loud as a shriek. The prospect is terrifying. It makes her hang on to Al’s arm as they make their way down the path and out of the cemetery. Not until she is in the car does the thought come to her. She wonders if Dorothy is going to sell the house.

NOVEMBER 1957

Millie drives by the house daily, sometimes more than once a day. She does not bother Dorothy, merely cruises by slowly, admiring the half-timbered façade with the brick chimney, the mullioned windows, the shrubs that encircle the house like a demure skirt. A large wound in the trunk of one of the two tall oaks on either side of the path has been painted black, and Al thinks they may have to have it cut down. She is hoping they can save it. She likes the symmetry.

She is itching to get inside the house and start measuring, though Al does not want her to until they have closed on it, and she does not want to appear to be rushing Dorothy. It’s bad enough the poor woman lost her husband. Now she’s giving up her house. Before the war, she probably would have held on to the place, but times are changing. Widows and retirees are selling their big, expensive-to-heat, hard-to-keep-up houses and moving to Florida or Arizona, where they live on scratchy long-distance telephone calls and vanishing memories.

One day as Millie drives by, she sees Dorothy standing on the lawn, talking to a man in overalls and a heavy work jacket with
KYLE’S TREE CARE AND SURGERY
written across the back. Millie is embarrassed to be caught casing the joint, as Al calls her drives by, but Dorothy waves, and Millie stops to say hello. Dorothy asks if she’d like to come inside and have another look around the house. Millie says she would like to very much.