Seventeen Against the Dealer (27 page)

Dicey took up the challenge.

*  *  *

The next morning Dicey went to work. She took her bike because Sammy, too, had work to get to and he needed the truck, but she didn't leave the house until they'd all had breakfast together, and she planned to be back by five. She rode the miles into town along the level road, pedaling hard, partly to use up some of her energy but partly also to keep herself warm. The air was clear but biting cold. Filmy clouds filtered the weak February sunshine.

Dicey worked the day away. With no hurry, no pressure to finish up fast, she didn't slow down. It felt slower, but it wasn't. Time went by at the same ticktocking pace, but Dicey's inner time was measuring itself out differently. She covered wood with paint, in long, slow strokes. The paint flowed from the brush onto the wood smoothly, silkily. She dipped and stroked, dipped
and stroked. Sometime in the middle of the day, she realized that it was good to paint, even these boats of Claude's; it was good to do a job right. She guessed, solitary and silent, that what she did when things went wrong was get to work. Since that was also what she did when things went right, she guessed that was just what she did.

Working, she knew what she was going to do. On Sunday night she wrote to Claude, telling him that she was giving up the shop, assuring him that the work she'd contracted to do for him would be finished by the end of the month, apologizing for such short notice. She didn't offer Claude any option to charge her March's rent. If she offered, he'd take it, and Dicey had better use for the money she'd earned. Things came up, like illness or tennis camp; she needed to save up her money against the things that might come up.

The dinghies she was storing she would move into the barn at home. The larch she'd try to sell—maybe put an ad in the paper. She had about enough money to pay for an ad. Until she sold it, she'd store that, too, in the barn.

Once she'd finished this job for Claude, she'd go looking for work for herself. She had a lot to learn. Maybe she'd just spend her whole life learning from the mistakes she'd keep on making. Maybe there wasn't anything you could do about that, except to make sure you learned.

By Tuesday evening she'd finished the last coat on the last of that batch of boats. She rode home feeling pretty good: That made twenty-four done, with only six to go. The only question was, should she do the final six in the same grouping of four, leaving just two at the end, or should she split them three and three, making two smaller jobs? She thought about that, pushing the pedals of the bike around and around, watching her own breath blow white out of her mouth. She could feel her pulse,
the steady beat of her blood. She felt, riding her bike along the quiet road between the hibernating fields, how her inner time fit into the flow of the day around her, outer time, how her lifetime fit into geologic time, how time washed all around her, as complex as a symphony, all the different instruments time played on, all fitting together. Harmony, that was the word.

As soon as she thought that, Dicey felt the differences of her knees jerking up to push down, her feet pushing back and forth on the pedals, her shoulders forcing her hands to force the handlebars steady . . . She felt out of sync.

She
was
out of sync. Probably everybody felt out of sync, if they started to think about it. That feeling might even be part of the harmony. Dicey rode along, pedaling, pedaled along, riding—and she discovered that she had decided not to sell the larch. Not even for money, not even for cash money being held out to her. Because she was going to build her boat, build it for herself. She turned into their rutted driveway, slowing down, gripping the handlebars firmly and rising off the seat to keep better balance as she bounced toward home. There was every likelihood that the boat she built would sink, or list uncontrollably, even if she got it far enough along to put it into the water.

Never selling a boat, that wouldn't be bad. But never building one, that would be the real failure.

“I got a seventy-one and a quarter,” Maybeth greeted her, turning around from the pot of soup she was stirring. “I'm making minestrone for supper.”

For a minute, Dicey didn't understand. Then, “You can pass history,” she said. “Because we can keep on studying, and it works. But where did the quarter point come from?”

“I didn't look, I just kept looking at the grade on the top of the paper,” Maybeth admitted. “I didn't know I could get seventy-one and a quarter percent of everything right.”

Dicey went into Gram's room, but Gram wasn't there. She went out to the living room and saw her grandmother enthroned on the sofa in front of the fire. Gram had a blanket spread over her and a book on her lap. Sammy sat at the desk behind her, doing some schoolwork. “You heard Maybeth's news,” Gram asked at the exact same time that Dicey asked, “Did you hear Maybeth's news?”

D
icey decided to split the last six boats four-two, getting the worst over first. She spent a day exchanging the finished rowboats for four unfinished ones and restocking her paint supply from Claude's storerooms. Then she spent a day sanding. Getting the work done. Sammy had agreed to help her get her own things out of the shop on Saturday—the three dinghies, the lumber, the tools. They would move them to the barn. She would be able to work in the barn. Everything was going to be taken care of. Once everything was taken care of, she'd build her boat.

She walked into the kitchen out of the lingering twilight of Friday evening, to the smell of spaghetti sauce and the sound of singing coming down the hall from the living room. Listening to Maybeth and Sammy sing, the same way that Gram—she knew—sat listening on the sofa, Dicey felt a sadness rising up in her. Their two voices carried the same melodic line, Sammy's rich, woody bass below Maybeth's golden soprano. It was about the loneliest song Dicey had ever heard. “Who will sing for me?”—the song kept asking that question, and never gave any answer.

She took a deep breath and hung up her jacket. The table was set, but there was a bowl of flowers in the middle of it. She recognized the bowl. It was a white china one Gram used for fancy dinners, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, for the days on which
first Dicey, then James and Maybeth turned sixteen, and the day Dicey turned twenty-one. She didn't recognize the flowers.

Yellow tulips with red streaks, tiny white irises, shining daffodils—the flowers looked like a handful of spring, set out in the middle of the table. Dicey went down to the living room.

They were just as she'd imagined, Maybeth and Sammy side by side on the piano bench facing Gram, who lay along the sofa. The fire burned warm. Dicey sat down on the sofa arm by Gram's feet, not wanting to interrupt. When they moved on to a new song she joined in. In this song, the rhythm was almost ragtime. “‘Oh, Lord, you know I have no friend like you.'” You could hear in the singing the way banjo and tambourine would sound, jollying the music along. “‘This world is not my home, I'm only passing through,'” Dicey sang, watching the miniature mountain range Gram's toes made under the plaid blanket twitch in time to the music. “‘I can't feel at home in this world anymore.'”

True enough, Dicey thought, hearing almost how the guitar would sound behind the music, sounding like a combination of banjo and tambourine. She didn't feel at home, even though this home of hers—people and place—felt entirely comfortable and good. She knew who was missing, and she couldn't do anything about it. “‘Oh, Lord, you know I have no friend like you,'” they sang, starting the song again because it sounded so good.

Grief, Dicey had learned, faded. There were things you couldn't do anything about, except outwait the worst of their grief. She looked around the room, wondering what was different—because something was different. Flowers, more flowers, that was what was different. A huge armload of flowers, the kind of armload a giant might gather, of puffy white flowers, were in the big red milk pitcher on the desk. Tall, proud, white roses, with leafy ferns, stood on the table by Gram's shoulder, in a gold-rimmed glass vase.

“What's with all these flowers?” Dicey demanded.

For a minute, nobody said anything. Then Sammy decided he could tell her. “It's Valentine's Day. From Jeff. He said mine were the closest he could get to tennis balls. They're pretty hairy for tennis balls.”

“Did you see the bouquet in the kitchen?” Maybeth asked.

“Yes, I did.” Dicey wondered if there was a fourth gift of flowers, somewhere.

“House looks like a funeral home,” Gram commented. “I know, I'm an ungrateful old bat.”

“You're not old,” Sammy told her.

Dicey understood, watching Gram and Maybeth and Sammy watch her, that there wasn't any fourth gift of flowers. Whatever they might think of it, it seemed to her that that was fair enough. It wasn't as if she'd sent anyone a card. She didn't think much of Valentine's Day and she'd always said so—Valentine's Day was just somebody's way of making money. “Why don't we ever grow flowers?” she asked, to change the subject and tell her family it didn't bother her.

“They aren't any too useful,” Gram pointed out.

“How much does that matter?” Dicey wondered. “How about daffodils? They're bulbs and all you have to do with them is plant them. That's right, isn't it? You don't have to take care of them. Couldn't we plant some daffodil bulbs around the yard?”

“You have to do that in the fall,” Maybeth said. “It's too late now.”

Dicey guessed the message from Jeff was pretty clear.

“But we could next fall,” Maybeth said. “I'd like to. Could we, Gram?”

“I don't see why not,” Gram said.

Sammy got up from the piano and took one of the flowers out of the pitcher. He tossed it up from his left hand and swung at it
with the palm of his right hand. The flower shot across the room like a comet, dribbling skinny white petals. “It makes a rotten tennis ball,” he said. “If Maybeth gets to have flowers, I should be able to have chickens. Can I have chickens, Gram?”

Gram didn't even turn her head. She just ignored Sammy.

“You're ignoring me,” he pointed out, picking up the disintegrating flower and batting it over the back of the sofa to land in front of the fire.

“That's right,” Gram agreed.

After they'd had supper and cleaned the kitchen, after Gram and Sammy had settled down to a checkers tournament while Maybeth played the piano behind them, Dicey went into the dining room and took out the sheets of paper and the pile of books. If she was going to build a boat without really knowing what she was doing, she'd better know as much as she could. She'd gotten out of the habit of concentration, she discovered that. Even though there were no flowers in this room, she couldn't seem to sit easy with the idea of them.

She tried to get herself angry, because if you thought about it, it wasn't an awfully nice thing to do. He didn't have to send flowers at all. If he was going to send flowers, but not to her, he should know how she'd feel. Or at least he'd know how her family would feel about how she'd feel.

Dicey tried, but she couldn't get angry, because she didn't figure she'd been any too nice to Jeff. She tried, but she couldn't concentrate on the lines before her—not the lines she'd drawn on paper, nor the lines of words in the book. She felt uncomfortable, uneasy with herself. It wasn't like her to feel that way about herself.

Yeah, and it wasn't like Jeff to be unkind. So people didn't always act like themselves.

Dicey gave up trying to work and looked at the flat black windows instead.

People did act like themselves, that was what felt wrong.

Dicey got up. She went to the living room door. She told her grandmother that she was going to take the truck for a while, if that was all right. That was all right. Dicey had decided: She could gamble on what she knew was true of Jeff, what she had learned he was like, or she could gamble on what she was afraid of.

Driving along the dark road, Dicey realized that she might have things all wrong, but she thought there was a good chance that Jeff was home this weekend. He wouldn't call or write to let her know; that wasn't his way. But he would figure out a way of letting her know, if she wanted to figure it out, that he was home. From his point of view, it would all depend on whether she wanted to figure it out.

The long driveway up to Jeff's house ran beside the creek, along a low bluff. The oyster shells that covered the driveway glowed a dim white. Dicey drove slowly, partly for the well-being of the truck, partly because she wanted so much to be right that she put off arriving, in case she might find out she was wrong.

The little house was dark. It sat in its own shadow. On the other side of the low, slanted roof a full moon rode up into the sky. Jeff's station wagon was parked by the door.

Dicey knocked, and opened the door before he could answer. She really only wanted to apologize to him—in general—and let him know how things had been going, and find out how things were going with him. As she drove over, she had been thinking that maybe you had to work as hard at people as at anything else, and she owed Jeff an apology.

He sat at the table, looking out the window to where the moonlight fell over the barren landscape, dreaming so deep about something that he hadn't even heard her come in. When he heard her, he turned his head, his face like a mask in the shadows. He waited for her to say something.

Dicey didn't have anything to say. She had thought she did, but she didn't. She didn't know this face, and maybe she didn't even know Jeff. Jeff's eyes were gray, sometimes cloudy gray and sometimes clear, but never these dark, shadowed, unreadable places. She didn't know what she could say to him.

“Dicey?” he asked.

She heard it in his voice—and she already knew it, anyway. It wasn't that Jeff no longer loved her—but she was such a chicken, she hadn't even dared to know that. Maybe it was hearing it, knowing it. Or maybe it was the moon, hanging sad-faced up there in the dark sky. “I'll give it up,” she heard herself say. “I promise, I will. I don't have to be a boatbuilder.”