Promises to Keep (12 page)
I nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“So.” She took another long sip while she looked out over the street. “How come you moved here all the way from Minnesota?”
I rolled my eyes toward the sky as I thought about how to answer. I thought for so long my new friend grew impatient. “Never mind,” she said. “Forget I asked, if you don’t want to tell me.”
Drawing in a deep breath, I let it out quickly with the words, “Listen, Mara, I’ll tell you why, but you have to swear never to tell anyone else.”
Mara frowned, cocked her head at me. “All right. I swear.”
For a moment our gazes met. Something told me I could trust the person behind those big brown eyes. I shifted my focus to the street and said quietly, “My parents split up. My grandpa lives here, so he helped us move down. Mom wanted to get away from Daddy.”
Mara nodded as she went on sipping her drink. Finally she said, “What’s so bad about it that you have to keep it a secret? Lots of kids’ parents get divorced.”
I shrugged, made a small taut line of my mouth.
Mara said, “There’s more, isn’t there?”
I nodded.
“I bet your daddy was a drunk.”
Wide-eyed, I heard myself whisper, “How did you know?”
“Why else would a woman want to get away from a man?”
We didn’t say anything for a long while. I listened as Mara slurped up the last drops of her soda. Then she said, “Did he ever beat her?”
I froze, every muscle in my body stiff as ice. How to answer? How to tell someone I hardly knew that my daddy had hit my mother more times than I could remember? It was a part of him that I wanted to forget, a part of him that I wanted to seal up behind a brick wall, so it couldn’t escape and I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. I swallowed the truth and shook my head. “No,” I lied. “He never hit my mom.”
“You were lucky then,” she said. “Lots of men, once they get real drunk, they end up taking it out on their wife and kids.”
“Yeah, well, not my daddy. He was always pretty good to us. He’d do a lot of fun stuff with me – you know, take me places, buy me things, stuff like that.”
“Uh-huh.” She sounded like she didn’t quite believe me. “So your mama just got tired of the drinking.”
“Yeah.”
“He couldn’t quit?”
I had to think a minute. “I don’t think he ever tried.”
“Not even when your mama left him? Sometimes a man will straighten up once his woman works up the courage to leave.”
I shrugged. “If he’s trying to quit, I don’t know about it. We haven’t been gone all that long, but we don’t hear anything from Daddy.”
“He doesn’t have visiting rights?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then you’ll never see him again.”
I wanted to tell Mara that I thought I
had
seen him, that I’d spotted someone in Mills River who wore a fishing hat just like his and maybe it
was
him, though I couldn’t be sure. I said, “I don’t know. I suppose I’ll see him someday.”
“Yeah,” Mara said. “Maybe.”
“Well, you’re lucky. Your mom and dad are still together.”
Mara’s eyes grew small at that, and she lifted her hand to the locket that hung around her neck. She didn’t say anything.
“You got any brothers and sisters?” I asked.
“A whole slew of them,” Mara said. She fingered the locket for a moment before tucking it under her shirt. “They’re all a lot older than me. My mom and dad, they’re grandparents already. They were grandparents before I was born.”
I nodded. “I thought you might be a whoopsie.”
“A whoopsie?” she echoed. “What’s that?”
“That’s what Daddy called a kid whose parents weren’t trying to have any kids, but one came along anyway.”
“A whoopsie,” Mara said again, sounding out the word. “Yeah, your daddy’s right. That’s what I am.”
“But that’s nothing bad, you know.”
“It isn’t?”
“My mom says whoopsies must be destined for something special, because they come along even though nobody wants them. I mean, of course their parents want them after they’re born, but . . . you know what I mean.”
Mara nodded doubtfully. “I know I wasn’t supposed to be here, but I’m here anyway. I hope your mom’s right. I want to do something special.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I want to be a college professor for one thing, and on top of that I want to be a writer, a great writer,” she said. Her eyes took on a faraway look as she added quietly, “Like my daddy.”
“Like your daddy?” I asked.
She snapped back to the present and turned to me warily. “Promise you won’t – ”
“Roz!”
Mara and I turned as one in the direction of the voice. Tillie was lumbering down the sidewalk, pulling the empty wagon behind her.
I lifted a hand, none too eagerly. “Hi, Tillie.”
“Who’s that?” Mara asked.
“Tillie. She lives with us and helps my mom with the housework and stuff.”
“Like she’s your maid or something?”
“Kind of. But don’t tell her that. She thinks she owns our house.”
“What?”
Tillie drew up alongside the bench and stopped. “Your mom said you were here getting ice cream. I’m on my way to Jewel to pick up some groceries. Do you want to come along?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
She looked at Mara and back at me. Smiling, she asked, “Who’s your friend?”
“Mara Nightingale,” I said. “I know her from school.”
“Nightingale,” Tillie repeated. “Why, I know your folks. Willie and Hester, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Mara nodded.
“Oh yes. Fine people, those two. We were on Mayor Hamilton’s race relations committee some years back. We managed to get the roads paved for the Negro folks over in Crestmont. Got streetlights put in too. Folks in Mills River, well . . . I like to think we’re ahead of our time.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Another nod.
“Though I predict the day’s going to come when we won’t see segregated neighborhoods the way we do now. Someday, whites and blacks will be neighbors, living side by side. Won’t that be something?”
“Yes, ma’am. That’ll be something.”
“Is your mother still doing alterations down at Goodwin’s?”
“Yes, ma’am. She’s still there.”
Tillie gave a satisfied nod. “She’s one of the best seamstresses around. She did both my daughters-in-law’s wedding gowns, you know.”
“No, ma’am, I didn’t know.”
“You take after her? You like to sew?”
“No, ma’am. I’m no good with a needle.”
“She’s going to be a writer,” I broke in. “She writes poetry and stuff. And, Mara, you don’t have to say
ma’am
to Tillie. She’s just Tillie.”
Tillie didn’t hear what I said to Mara because she was leaning over me, studying my face as though it were something indecipherable. “Merciful heavens, Roz!” she cried at last. “Your cheeks are all flushed. You not feeling well?”
By now I felt too lousy to try to hide it. I shook my head at Tillie and shrugged.
She laid a hand on my forehead. “You’re burning with fever, child. I’ve got to get you home and into bed. Come on.” She waved toward the wagon. “Hop in and I’ll pull you.”
“That’s all right, Tillie,” I said. “I can walk.”
“Over my dead body. No child of mine is going to walk six blocks with a fever.”
“But, Tillie – ”
“In, young lady!”
I looked at Mara and made a face of feigned disgust. Secretly, I was glad to have Tillie pull me home.
“Soon as we get home, I’m calling Dr. Sawyer,” Tillie said as I picked myself up off the bench. “He took care of all my boys. I know I’m perfectly capable of nursing you back to health on my own, but let’s call the doctor this time around, just to be on the safe side.”
I settled in the wagon and, drawing my knees up to one cheekbone, made a pillow of my kneecaps.
“Hope I see you in school on Monday, Roz.”
I lifted a hand toward Mara. I felt myself sinking fast.
“You give my regards to your folks, all right, Mara?” Tillie said amiably.
“Yes, ma’am, I will.”
“Say, is your father still at Tinkerman’s Garage?”
Mara didn’t respond for a moment. Her eyes darted from me to Tillie and back again. Finally, very quietly, she said, “Yes, ma’am, he is.”
“That’s good to know. Mrs. Anthony’s car could use some work and I need a good mechanic. I’ll call Tinkerman’s on Monday, see if Mr. Tinkerman can get Willie to look under the hood.”
Mara lifted her chin in a small nod even as her eyes rolled toward me. Something unspoken passed between us, something sad and hurtful. When the wagon started up with a jerk, she looked away.
Our first real conversation as friends, and already she had lied to me about her daddy.
Dr. Sawyer gave me a shot of penicillin and ordered three days of bed rest. Tillie played nursemaid, making chicken soup, bringing me aspirin, tracking my temperature. I read and worked on schoolwork and slept.
On Monday afternoon I awoke from a nap to find Tillie propped up on pillows on the other bed in my room, another pillow beneath the heels of her stocking feet, the newspaper spread open across her lap. But she wasn’t reading. She was staring off into space with that glazed-over look in her eyes that I’d seen before. She could sit motionless like that for long stretches of time, gazing out the window or down at the floor, her eyes dull and more or less sightless, as though someone had pulled down the shades. Mom decided when Tillie got like that, she was napping with her eyes open. Wally complained that she’d gone catatonic on us. Once he said it loud enough for her to hear, and she snapped out of it long enough to say, “Keep it up and I’ll show you catatonic, young man.”
I pushed myself up on one elbow and asked quietly, “Tillie?”
No answer.
A little louder this time. “Tillie?”
She turned to me then, and it was almost as though I could see her coming back from far away. Once she was there, she said, “Yes, Roz?”
“What are you doing?”
“Oh.” She smiled a small wistful smile. “Just remembering.”
“Remembering what?”
Instead of answering my question, she said, “Do you realize how much of our lives we forget?”
She waited for an answer, but I didn’t have one. I simply frowned and shook my head.
“Just think of it,” she went on. “Every day has one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“That’s a whole boatload of minutes.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“So if you multiply that by the number of days in a year, you get more than half a million. Every year you live more than half a million minutes, unless it’s a leap year, and then you live one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes more. Like next year. Next year is a leap year, you know.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know that.”
“Now, when you’ve lived for seventy years like I have, do you know how many minutes that is?”
She didn’t go on. I fidgeted on the bed. “You don’t want me to figure that out, do you, because I’m not that good at multiplying.”
She smiled, shook her head. “No, you don’t have to figure it out. Because by the end of the day – well, just by the end of the hour – it’ll be a different number anyway. They’re always going by, on and on and on, never stopping. So by the time you’re my age, it’s not just one boat you’re talking about but a whole fleet. A whole fleet of minutes have sailed on by. And where do you suppose they all sail off to, Roz?”
By now my face was scrunched up into a tight ball of puzzlement. “I don’t know, Tillie,” I said.
“Well, I’ll tell you, then.”
“Okay.”
“They sail right on over the horizon, and you never see them again, and most of them, you forget they ever were at all. Off they go, and” – she waved a hand – “they’re as good as lost. You might as well never have lived them.
Unless
,” she said, looking intently at me now, “unless you make the effort to remember. If you go after them, you’ll find some of them. A few, not many. But some.”
“So is that what you do?”
Tillie nodded. “Oh yes. I ask God to help me remember the forgotten moments, and he always brings something good to mind.”
“Like what?” I pushed my pillows up against the headboard and leaned back to listen.
“Well, like the time I was pinning up the laundry on the clothesline out back, and the neighbor next door – not Esther Kinshaw but a woman named Doris Haversham who used to live in the house on the other side – well, she had all her windows wide open, and she was playing a piece by Chopin on the piano. It was the most glorious thing. It was almost like being at Carnegie Hall, only better, because the open sky was my auditorium and I was the only one in the audience.
“And then there was the time – it was a winter night, and I was so cold but so exhausted from the babies I couldn’t wake myself up enough to grab an extra blanket. But when Ross came to bed, he put a blanket over me, tucking it up under my chin. And then I was warm in body and soul both, because someone was taking care of me.
“And I remember the summer day when Johnny was little and he picked a fistful of dandelions for me from out in the yard. He was so proud when he gave them to me, I just had to put them in a vase and put them at the center of the dining room table. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away until they’d wilted beyond all recognition.”
She was smiling as she spoke, and when she finished she went on smiling. I continued to be puzzled. “That’s what you find when you go to this place of lost time?” I asked.
“Yes, lots of moments like those.”
“What’s so great about that stuff ?”
“Oh, my dear!” Tillie said, her blue eyes wide. “Everything! That’s the point. People look for greatness only in the extraordinary and completely overlook the wonder of the ordinary. That’s why those moments are all forgotten, counted as nothing. It’s a terrible loss.”
She gathered up the pages of the newspaper and folded them. Then she sighed. “I don’t expect you to understand, Roz. You’re too young. You haven’t lost enough time yet to care.”
I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, “Maybe I understand a little, Tillie. It’s like when you said I should remember the good things about Daddy and put all those memories in a safe place so I wouldn’t forget them.”
