Outrageously Alice (11 page)

“I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost my dad,” I said.

“You would
cope
, Alice, you would cope,” she said firmly. “Every single one of us has losses in this life, but I don’t think you’re in any danger of losing your dad anytime soon. Now. Do you want your chicken salad on lettuce or in a sandwich?”

We sat at her little breakfast table overlooking her backyard and the oak tree. I knew there was no way in the world I could ask the question I really wanted to know—whether she and Dad would marry—but I got as close to it as I could.

“I see you have Dad’s picture!” I said delightedly when I noticed his photo in the next room on her end table. It was a photo I hadn’t seen before, so she must have taken
it. He wore a soft sweater and was leaning against a tree, arms folded, feet crossed at the ankles. He was smiling. It was a wonderful smile.

“Yes. Isn’t that a good picture of Ben?” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the photo. “One of the best I have of him, I think.”

That meant she had even more!

She changed the subject then to school, and we talked about the eighth-grade dance next spring and how, before I knew it, I’d be in high school.

But will you be my mother?
I wanted to ask. It reminded me of a picture book somebody read to me when I was small about a baby bird that hatches while its mother’s away. It falls out of the nest and asks each animal it meets, “Are you my mother?”

“I love being here,” I said finally. Desperately. I wondered if I was carrying it too far.

Miss Summers looked at me quietly for a moment with her gentle blue eyes and then said, “And I love having you here, Alice. But if your dad is going to be discharged this afternoon, he’s going to want you there with him. What do you say we call the hospital and see what Dr. Beverly can tell us?”

I finished my sandwich while Miss Summers went in
the other room and dialed the hospital. Then I took my dishes to the sink to rinse them, and as I passed the refrigerator I saw a batch of photos stuck there with magnets, and one of them was of Mr. Sorringer, our vice principal, standing with his arm around Miss Summers on the deck of a sailboat.

I wanted to tear it off the refrigerator. He had a boat? He took her sailing? He put his arm around her and they went sailing off into the sunset?

But then I realized that Dad’s picture in the other room was in a far more prominent place and it was four times as big, so that had to count for something.

It was her bedroom that would tell the most, I figured. Whichever man’s picture was in her bedroom was the one she most wanted to see before she went to sleep at night, the man she most wanted to dream of. I couldn’t leave her house without peeking into her bedroom.

“Well, your dad’s ready to come home, Alice,” Miss Summers said, coming back into the kitchen. “I even talked with him. He says that from now on, Lester can clean the gutters.”

“Great!” I said. “Could I use your bathroom before we go?”

“Certainly,” she said, and I headed for her bedroom.
“There’s one right there in the hall, Alice,” she called.

I stood in the doorway of her bedroom, wanting terribly to go in, but she was watching. Reluctantly I turned and went to the bathroom in the hall. We left without my ever knowing whose photo she kept by her bed.

“WELL, I GUESS I PUT ON QUITE A CIRCUS,”
Dad said when we walked in the emergency room later. He was sitting by the door with an attendant.

“I was scared, Dad,” I told him. “Lester wasn’t home, and I didn’t know who else to call.”

“I hope you’re not apologizing for calling
me
!” Miss Summers said. She bent over and kissed Dad on the forehead. “How are you feeling, Ben?” One hand lightly massaged his arm.

“Giddy, but not quite so out of it as I was.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be sending you home if they didn’t think we could take good care of you.”

“Sylvia, I hate to be such a bother.”

She leaned closer as though they were having a private conversation, but I heard her say, “Now that’s a word that isn’t even in our vocabulary.”

“Our.” She said “our,” as though they had a secret language or something! I beamed.

The attendant insisted on helping Dad out to the car and strapping him in the front seat beside Miss Summers. I crawled in back, happy to see them sitting together.

As we drove home, Miss Summers said that she was going back to her house to make some soup after she let us off, and that if I would check on Dad while she was gone, she’d take over after dinner and stay until Lester got there.

Dad seemed normal enough as he went up the steps between us, and after we got him seated on the couch with the Sunday paper, Miss Summers went on home. Dad leaned back and closed his eyes, and I flew around straightening up the house so if Miss Summers decided to stay awhile, she wouldn’t think we lived like pigs. Every so often I’d go over to Dad, though, and pull open one of his eyelids with my thumb and finger to see if his pupils were dilated.

“Okay,” he said finally, “I can see I’m not going to get any nap today,” and he picked up the newspaper.

Elizabeth called.

“Alice, what happened? We saw you and Miss Summers helping your dad up the steps a while ago.”

I told her about Dad’s falling off the ladder, and how Miss Summers was coming back with our dinner. She obviously called Pamela, because that’s who phoned next. “Is Miss Summers going to stay all night?” she asked.

“Why would she stay all night?”

“He’s sick! They’re in love! She wants to be close to him! He needs her!” Pamela said. Dad falls off a ladder, and all Pamela can think about is sex.

The next time I checked Dad, he was sound asleep and snoring, the newspaper on the floor, so I decided to let him be. When he woke up about forty minutes later, he said he felt a hundred percent better.

“Good! Miss Summers is coming over after a while with our dinner.”

“Then I’m going to shower,” said Dad.

I went up and sat down outside the bathroom door to make sure he didn’t fall or anything, and a few minutes later I heard him singing in the shower. I wasn’t sure, but I think it was “Fascination.” I had to leave him once, though, when the phone rang. It was Janice Sherman wanting to tell Dad about a gorgeous piece of organ music
she’d heard in church that morning, and how we ought to buy it for the store. I could hear an orchestra playing in the background. I guess I always wondered how Janice Sherman spent her weekends. I imagined her sitting at a desk writing letters to her cousins and listening to Vivaldi. I don’t know Vivaldi from Verdi, but I know they’re the kinds of composers she’d listen to.

I told her about Dad’s falling off the ladder. “Oh, my goodness! How is he?”

“Well, we had him in the emergency room, but he’s better now,” I said. I was careful not to say who “we” were. Janice has been in love with my dad since he became manager at the Melody Inn.

“Poor Ben!” she said. “If there’s
any
thing I can do …”

“I’ll tell him,” I said.

The minute I hung up, Dr. Beverly called to ask how Dad was doing, and I said he was singing in the shower.

“That’s a good sign,” he told me.

It was after eight when Miss Summers came back. Dad had just finished watching
60 Minutes
, and Miss Summers walked in carrying a cardboard box with six plastic containers of her soup, two loaves of bread, some oranges, and a bouquet of mums from her garden.

“How’s the patient?” she asked me, taking her stuff to the kitchen. Then she saw Dad sitting at the table with a ginger ale. Even I could smell his aftershave. “Ben McKinley, what are you doing all shaved and dressed?” she asked.

“Waiting for a lovely nurse to bring my dinner,” he said.

It was good soup, with lots of onions in it, and the bread was thick and warm, with little pieces of herbs. I was chattering on about hospitals and how much I hate them when we heard Lester come in.

He hung up his jacket in the closet and sauntered on out to the kitchen, then came to a stop.

“Hello? Did I forget we were having company, Dad?” he asked.

“Hi, Lester,” said Miss Summers, smiling. “Of course you didn’t. It’s a surprise visit, that’s all.”

“This whole day has been a surprise,” said Dad, and he filled Lester in on what had happened.

“So I get here after all the heavy lifting, huh? Hey, Dad, next time you try this, at least wear Rollerblades so they can wheel you around,” Lester joked.

It was fun having Lester at the table. He made Miss Summers laugh, but he could also be serious. At one
point he and Dad and Miss Summers were all discussing Tolstoy’s novels, and I could tell by the way Dad sat back, listening to Lester argue his case, that he was enjoying the conversation.

See what an interesting family we could be?
I implored Miss Summers with my eyes, but she was already bringing out another surprise: homemade rice pudding with cinnamon on top. “Not exactly the most exciting dish in the world, but it goes down easily,” she told Dad.

The doorbell rang, and I went to answer. There stood Janice Sherman, holding a large aluminum pot with a cover on it. It must have still been hot because she was wearing oven mitts. Before I could say a single word, she walked right in.

“This is absolutely scalding, Alice, but I thought the best thing I could do for Ben would be to make him a pot of my potato-leek soup. I’m famous for it, you know,” she said as she headed down the hall toward the kitchen. “I hope I’m not too late for …”

She never finished her sentence. I saw her pause in the doorway, and heard the clunk as she set the pot on our stove.

“We love potato soup!” I croaked, following her in.

“Janice, this is … I mean was … my English teacher,
Sylvia Summers. Miss Summers, this is Janice Sherman, Dad’s assistant at the Melody Inn.”

Miss Summers had popped a bite of bread in her mouth and swallowed hastily. “I’m so glad to know you,” she said.

“I didn’t realize you were already eating or I could have brought it later,” Janice said stiffly.

“Janice, you didn’t need to go to all this work, but it was very thoughtful of you,” Dad told her. “Won’t you sit down and have some supper with us?”

Was Dad crazy? I wondered, but I guess he knew she’d refuse.

“Oh, no. Actually, I’m rushing home to watch
Masterpiece Theatre
,” Janice said, taking off the oven mitts and thrusting one in each pocket of her coat, where they stuck out like ears.

“Are you a fan of that program too?” asked Miss Summers. “You could eat some soup and watch it here.”

That
did
bother me. If a woman was in love with a man, why would she want another woman staying for dinner? To test the competition?

But Janice wasn’t about to take the consolation prize.

“Actually, I’ve got my own dinner in the oven,” she said, which I’ll bet was a lie, because I know if Dad were alone and had asked her to stay, she would have let her
food burn in order to keep him company. “But thanks, anyway. And Ben”—she put one hand on his shoulder as though he belonged to her—“take care of yourself.”

“I will, Janice. With all you nurses around, I can’t do anything but get better.”

“Do you really think she has dinner in the oven?” I whispered to Lester after Janice left, and Dad and Miss Summers were putting food away.

“As likely as an ingrown toenail on the end of her nose,” he said, and we laughed.

We told Dad and Miss Summers to go relax in the living room while we cleaned up.

“Thanks, Les, I hoped you’d say that,” Dad told him.

“I’ve got to be going soon,” said Miss Summers. “I still have papers to grade before tomorrow.”

“You can at least stay long enough to enjoy the fire I built the other night, then forgot to light,” Lester said. “Marilyn called, and I just never got around to it.” He took some matches off the shelf and went into the living room. I heard him rolling up newspaper as Dad and Miss Summers followed him in.

When Lester came back to the kitchen, he said to me, “Well, I’ve done my part. The rest is up to Cupid.”

“Do you think she loves him, Les?”

“He loves her, that’s obvious.”

“But …?”

“If she doesn’t, she’s certainly put a lot of time into looking after someone she doesn’t care about.”

“She cares, but does she
love
him?”

Lester sighed. “Define love,” he said cynically, and then, “I get any mail today?”

“Today’s Sunday.”

“Oh. Right.” We rinsed the dishes off and set them in the dishwasher, and then he said, “Dad told me he got an invitation to Crystal’s wedding. I just wondered if she mailed one to me and it got lost or something.”

“I didn’t see any.”

“Then I suppose not.” He put detergent in the dishwasher and closed the door. “I guess I thought we could at least be friends.”

“Wouldn’t it be a little embarrassing to have you there, Lester? Maybe it would bring back memories she’d rather not have on her wedding day.”

I was putting the best spin on it I could, and Lester perked up. “That’s probably it. Yeah, I suppose that’s it. What’s Dad giving her, do you know?”

“A gift certificate for the Melody Inn. Help them start a really nice CD collection.”

“Yeah, she’d like that,” said Lester.

We stayed in the kitchen as long as we could, not wanting to bother Dad and Miss Summers. I wanted her to realize how easily she could have lost him, if not to illness, then to Janice Sherman. I wanted her to know how lonely she’d be if she had, and how she belonged here, on our sofa in front of the fireplace. The fact was, of course, that Dad
hadn’t
been about to die, she
hadn’t
almost lost him to Janice Sherman, but didn’t she have any imagination?

Later, when I passed the doorway to put Janice’s pot in the refrigerator, I saw Dad and Miss Summers by the front door. She had her coat on and they were standing about three inches apart. He had his hands on her waist, and she had hers folded behind his neck. They were smiling at each other.