Searching for Caleb (4 page)

   "Duncan has. He chose it," said Justine. "You haven't told us your name."

   "Why, I'm Red Emma Borden."

   "Do you work here all the time?"

   "Mornings I do."

   "Because I like to eat in diners. I expect we'll run into you often."

   "Maybe so," said Red Emma, breaking eggs onto the grill. "But if you come after noon it'll be my late husband's cousin, Black Emma Borden. They call her that because she's the one with black hair, only she's been dyeing it for years now." She poured coffee into thick white cups. "You say your husband chose the house?" she asked Justine.

   "He always does."

   Red Emma flung him a glance. A fine-looking, straw-colored man. His conscience did not appear to be bothering him. "Look, honey," she told Justine. She set the coffeepot down and leaned over the counter. "How come you would let your husband choose where you live? Does he understand kitchens? Does he check for closet space and woodwork that doesn't crumble to bits the first time you try to scrub it down?"

   Justine laughed. "I doubt it," she said.

   Red Emma had once sent her husband to a used car lot to buy a family automobile and he had come home with a little teeny red creature meant for racing, set low to the ground, slit eyes for windows. It ate up every cent they had saved. She had never forgiven him. So now she felt personally involved, and she glared at this Duncan. He sat there as calm as you please building a pyramid out of sugar cubes. The grandfather was reading someone's discarded newspaper, holding it three feet away from him as old people tend to do and scowling and working his mouth around.

   Only the daughter seemed to understand. A nice girl, so trim and quiet.

   She wore a coat that was shabby but good quality, and she kept her eyes fixed on a catsup bottle as if something had shamed her. She knew what Red Emma was getting at.

   "There's other places," Red Emma said. "The Butters are letting, oh, a big place go, over by the schoolhouse."

   "Now on the average," Duncan said, and Red Emma turned, thinking he was speaking to her, "on the average a single one of the blocks in Cheops's pyramid weighed two and a half tons." No, it was the grandfather he meant that for, but the grandfather only looked up, irritated, maybe not even hearing, and turned a page of his paper. Duncan spun toward Meg, on his left. "It is accepted that wheels as such were not used in the construction," he told her. "Nor any but the most primitive surveying tools, so far as we know. Nevertheless, the greatest error to be found is only a little over five degrees on the east wall, and the others are almost perfect. And have you thought about the angle of the slant?"

   Meg looked back at him, expressionless.

   "It's my belief they built it from the top down," he said. He laughed.

   Red Emma thought he must be crazy.

   She flipped the hotcakes, loaded Justine's plate, and set it in front of her. "The Butters' house is a two-story affair," she said. "They also have a sleeping porch."

   "Oh, I believe Mr. Parkinson's place is going to be just fine," said Justine. "Besides, it's near where Duncan's going to work. This way he can come home for lunch."

   "Now where's he going to work?" Red Emma asked.

   "At the Blue Bottle Antique Shop."

   Oh, Lord. She should have known. That gilt-lettered place, run by a fat man nobody knew. Who needed antiques in Caro Mill? Only tourists, passing through on their way to the Eastern Shore, and most of them were in too much of a hurry to stop. But Red Emma still clung to a shred of hope (she liked to see people manage, somehow) and she said, "Well now, I suppose he could improve on what that Mr.-I don't recall his name. I suppose if he knows about antiques, and so on-"

   "Oh, Duncan knows about everything," said Justine.

   It didn't sound good, not at all.

   "He hasn't worked with antiques before but he did build some furniture once, a few jobs back-"

   Yes.

   "The man who owns the Blue Bottle is Duncan's mother's sister's brother-in-law. He wants to ease off a little, get somebody else to manage the store for him now that he's getting older."

   "We've used up all my mother's blood relations," Duncan said cheerfully.

   He was correcting the pitch of one pyramid wall. The truth that was coming out did not appear to embarrass him. "The last job was with my uncle, he owns a health food store. But no one in the family has a fix-it shop, and fixing is what I really do. I can fix anything. Do you need some repair work here?"

   "No indeed," Red Emma told him firmly.

   And she turned back to Justine, ready to offer her sympathy, but Justine was munching potato chips with a merry look in her eye. Her hat was a little crooked. Could she possibly be a drinker? Red Emma sighed and went to clean the grill. "Of course," she said, "I don't mean to say anything against Ned Parkinson's house. Why, in lots of ways it's just fine. I'm sure you'll all be happy there."

   "I'm sure we will be," Justine said.

   "And certainly your husband can handle any plumbing and electrical problems that might arise," Red Emma said, wickedly sweet, because she did not for a moment think he could.

   But Duncan said, "Certainly," and started plunking his sugar cubes one by one back into the bowl.

   Red Emma wiped the grill with a sour dish rag. She felt tired and wished they would go. But then Justine said, "You want to hear something? This coming year will be the best our family's ever had. It's going to be exceptional."

   "Now, how do you know that?"

   "It's nineteen seventy-three, isn't it? And three is our number! Look: both Duncan and I were born in nineteen thirty-three. We were married in nineteen fifty-three and Meg was born on the third day of the third month in nineteen fifty-five. Isn't that something?"

   "Oh, Mama," Meg said, and ducked her head over her coffee.

   "Meg's afraid that people will think I'm eccentric," said Justine. "But after all, it's not as if I believed in numerology or anything. Just lucky numbers. What's your lucky number, Red Emma?"

   "Eight," said Red Emma.

   "Ah. See there? Eight is forceful and good at organizing. You would succeed at any business or career, just anything."

   "I would?"

   Red Emma looked down at her billowing white nylon front, the flowered handkerchief prinked to her bosom with a cameo brooch.

   "Now, Meg doesn't have a lucky number. I'm worried that nothing will ever happen to her."

   "Mama."

   "Meg was due to be born in May and I wondered how that could happen.

   Unless she arrived on the third, of course. But see? She was premature, she came in March after all."

   "I always ask for eight at the Basket of Cheer lottery," said Red Emma.

   "And I've won it twice, too. Forty dollars' worth of fine-quality liquor."

   "Of course. Now, who's the fortune teller in this town?"

   "Fortune teller?"

   The grandfather rattled and crackled his paper.

   "Don't tell me you don't have one," said Justine.

   "Not to my knowledge we don't."

   "Well, you know where I'll be living. Come when I'm settled and I'll tell your fortune free."

   "You tell fortunes."

   "I do church fairs, bazaars, club meetings, teas-anybody's, any time.

   People can knock on my door in the dead of night if they have some urgent problem and I will get up in my bathrobe to give them a reading. I don't mind at all. I like it, in fact. I have insomnia."

   "But-you mean you tell fortunes seriously?" Red Emma asked.

   "How else would I tell them?"

   Red Emma looked at Duncan. He looked back, unsmiling.

   "Well, if we could have the keys, then," said Justine.

   Red Emma fetched them, sleepwalking-two flat, tinny keys on a shower curtain ring. "I really do need to have my fortune told," she said. "I wouldn't want this spread around but I'm considering a change in employment."

   "Oh, I could help out with that."

   "Don't laugh, will you? I'd like to be a mailman. I even passed the tests. Could you really tell me whether that would be a lucky move or not?"

   "Of course," said Justine.

   Red Emma rang up their bill, which Duncan paid with a BankAmericard so worn it would not emboss properly. Then they filed out, and she stood by the door to watch them go. When Justine passed, Red Emma touched her shoulder. "I'm just so anxious, you see," she said. "I don't sleep good at all. My mind swings back and forth between decisions. Oh, I know it's nothing big. I mean, a mailman, what is that to the world?

   What's it going to matter a hundred years from now? I don't fool myself it's anything important. Only day after day in this place, the grease causing my hair to flop halfway through the morning and the men all making smart remarks and me just feeding them and feeding them . . . though the pay is good and I really don't know what Uncle Harry would say if I was to quit after all these years."

   "Change," said Justine.

   "Beg pardon?"

   "Change. I don't need cards for that. Take the change. Always change."

   "Well-is that my fortune?"

   "Yes, it is," said Justine. "Goodbye, Red Emma! See you soon!"

   And she was gone, leaving Red Emma to pleat her lower lip with her fingers and ponder beside the plate glass door.

   Justine drove the Ford down Main Street with the cat racing back and forth across the rear window ledge, yowling like an old, angry baby while people on the sidewalks stopped and stared. Meg sat with her hands folded; by now she was used to the racket. The grandfather simply shut his hearing aid off and gazed from his bubble of silence at the little wooden Woolworth's, the Texaco, the Amoco, the Arco, a moldering A&P, a neat brick post office with a flag in front. This time Duncan's truck was ahead, and Justine followed him in a right-hand turn down a side street lined with one-story buildings. They passed a drugstore and an electric shop, and then they came to a row of small houses. Duncan parked in front of the first one. Justine pulled in behind him. "Here we are!" she said.

   The house was white, worn down to gray. On the porch, square shingled columns rose waist-high and then stopped, giving the overhang a precarious, unreliable look. Although there was no second floor the dormer window of some attic or storage room bulged out of the roof like an eyelid. A snarl of wiry bushes guarded the crawlspace beneath the porch. "Oh, roses!" Justine cried. "Are those roses?" Her grandfather shifted in his seat.

   "This house is even worse than the last," said Meg.

   "Never mind, here you'll have a room of your own. You won't have to sleep in the living room. Isn't that going to be nice?"

   "Yes, Mama," Meg said.

   Duncan was already pacing the yard when the others reached him. "I'm going to put a row or two of corn here," he told them. "Out back is too shady but see how much sun we get in front? I'm going to plow up the grass and plant corn and cucumbers. I have this plan for fertilizer, I'm going to buy a blender and grind up all our garbage with a little water. Pay attention, Justine. I want you to save everything, eggshells and orange peels and even bones. The bones we'll pressure-cook first. Have we got a pressure-cooker? We'll make a sort of jelly and spread that around here too."

   Meanwhile the cat had streaked under the crawlspace, where she would stay till the moving was over, and the grandfather was climbing the front steps all hunkered and disapproving, muttering to himself, making an inventory of every splinter and knothole and paint blister, every nail worked loose, windowscreen split, floorboard warped. Meg sat down on the very top step. "I'm cold," she said.

   Justine said, "Your father's going to take up farming. Maybe we'll have tomatoes."

   "Will we be here to harvest them?" Meg asked nobody.

   Justine found the keys in one of her pockets and opened the door. They stepped into a hall smelling of mildew, littered with newspapers and broken cardboard boxes. The kitchen leading off it contained a refrigerator with a motor on top, a dirty gas stove, and a sink on stilts. There was a living room with a boarded-up fireplace. In the back were the bathroom and three bedrooms, all tiny and dark, but Justine swept through flinging up windowshades and stirring the thick, musty air.

   "Look! Someone left a pair of pliers," she said. "And here's a chair we can use for the porch." She was a pack rat; all of them were. It was a family trait. You could tell that in a flash when they started carrying things in from the truck-the bales of ancient, curly-edged magazines, zipper bags bursting with unfashionable clothes, cardboard boxes marked Clippings, Used Wrapping Paper, Photos, Empty Bottles. Duncan and Justine staggered into the grandfather's room carrying a steel filing cabinet from his old office, stuffed with carbon copies of all his personal correspondence for the twenty-three years since his retirement. In one corner of their own room Duncan stacked crates of machine parts and nameless metal objects picked up on walks, which he might someday want to use for some invention. He had cartons of books, most of them second-hand, dealing with things like the development of the quantum theory and the philosophy of Lao-tzu and the tribal life of Ila-speaking Northern Rhodesians. But when all of this clutter had been brought in (and it took the four of them two hours) there was next to nothing left in the truck.

   Their furniture was barely enough to make the house seem inhabited: three rust-stained mattresses, four kitchen chairs from Goodwill, Great-Grandma's hand-carved rosewood dining table, a sagging sofa and easy chair donated by a neighbor two moves back, and three bureaus of Justine's mother's, their ornate feet and bow fronts self-conscious next to the bedsteads Duncan had constructed out of raw pine boards that gave off a yellow smell. For dishes they had a collection of dimestore plates, some light green, some flowered, some dark brown with white glaze dripped around the edges, and thermal mugs given away free when Esso changed to Exxon. The cutlery with its yellow plastic handles had been salvaged from Aunt Sarah's English picnic basket. There were two saucepans and a skillet. (Justine did not like cooking.) They owned a broom and a sponge mop, but no dustpan, no vacuum cleaner, no squeegee, scrub bucket, or chamois cloth. (Justine did not like cleaning either.) No washing machine or dryer. When all the clothes in the house were dirty the family would lug them to the laundromat. Of course that was not much fun-the four of them struggling with their bulging pillow slips, the grandfather's head ducked way, way low in case of passers-by, all of them a little bedraggled in their very last clean clothes unearthed from the bottom of the drawer or the back of the closet-but wasn't it better than moving those shiny, heavy appliances from place to place? Why, by late afternoon they were completely settled in. There was nothing more to do. It was true that most of the boxes remained to be opened but that was nothing, some were still packed from the last move. There was no hurry. Justine was free to stretch out on her mattress, which had the piney-wood smell of home, and work her feet from her shoes and smile at the ceiling while the cat lay on her stomach like a twenty-pound, purring hot water bottle. Duncan could sit on the edge of the bed fooling with a stroboscope he had forgotten he owned. Meg could shut her door and unwrap, from its own special box, from seven layers of tissue paper, her framed photograph of a young man in a clerical robe at least a size too large, which she rewrapped almost immediately and slid to the back of her closet shelf. And in his room across the hall the grandfather could take a photo of his own from his pocket: Caleb Peck in tones of brown, framed in gold, wearing a hat and tie, his face stark and dignified, playing a violoncello while seated in an open stable door twenty feet off the ground.