Small Blessings (33 page)

“Oh dear.”

Agnes looked at Tom over her glasses. “Shall I go on, or do you need a moment to wrap your mind around the way Serafine was now supporting her various habits?”

“It's … it's just hard to hear.”

Agnes had never been one to encourage sentiment. “And even harder to live,” she snapped.

“Sure. Of course. Go on.”

Agnes cleared her throat. “Anyway, this appears to have become Serafine's pattern after Henry's birth. She would get herself arrested, clean up, go home to her parents and her child, stay for a couple of months, go out, get herself arrested again. As her parents had stopped posting bail, her jail sentences ranged from five to ninety days. A couple of times she went from jail into treatment again, but there were no long residencies. Thirty days appears to have been her longest treatment sojourn. She was at home and clean when Katrina struck and the Drs. Despré were killed. But, as we know, not long after, she put Henry on the train for Charlottesville, and then she was dead. Henry evidently has quite a sizable fortune held in trust until his twenty-second birthday, and a whacking great allowance until then. Not to mention the five hundred grand currently under his bed.” Agnes took off her glasses. “That's it.”

“That's it? Doesn't it say how Henry ended up here?”

“Nope.”

“But surely there's something in all those papers that connects us to the Drs. Despré or to Serafine or to
someone
connected with Henry?”

“Nope.”

“Not one thing?”

“Nada. Zip.”

Once again, Tom found himself trying to grasp reality by its greased tail. “Okay. I'm stumped. What do we do now?”

Agnes was ready for this. “Well,” she said, “the good banker, Mr. Brownlow, must have been out of town, because it took him until yesterday to notice that Henry and his mother were not in residence at the Despré family home. But boy howdy, was he quick to call the police in after that. So what I'd suggest is that we phone the Mississippi state cops just as soon as we figure out what we want to say. And I suggest we figure that out right now.”

So here it was: the future. Those two roads in the yellow wood were diverging right here, right now! “Holy smoke,” Tom said.

“That's helpful.”

Tom laughed. “So what do you suggest?”

Agnes made her considering face, a kind of crooked moue, her many wrinkles pulled to one side. “You up for a question?”

“Sure. Fire away.”

“Is there any chance you want Henry to stay here permanently?”

Tom was stunned. Certainly he'd fantasized about this, but he'd never
thought
about it. At least not in any logical, orderly way that went forward through adolescent rebelliousness into paying college tuition. He was forty-four years old. Did he really want to plunge into full-time fatherhood?

Visions of future battles over loud music, curfews, and car keys danced in his head. Then abruptly they dissolved, vanquished by the reality that was Henry. This decision was not tied to some abstract child; it was tied to the very real child asleep upstairs. The question Agnes had asked him was not whether he wanted to father
someone
but whether he wanted to father Henry.

“I do,” he said.

Agnes was watching him. “You sound like you're marrying Henry.”

“I am.”

 

chapter 16

Ray's housewarming present, the old shoe box clock, banged away in the kitchen. Every day Rose told herself she would let it run down, and every day she wound it again. Time does pass; why should she avoid being reminded of that? The clock on her bedside table announced it was 6:22 in the morning.

Rose sat up in bed and looked around at the little, low-ceilinged room that had been her bedroom for the last few days. Its walls were bedecked, as all the walls of all her various bedrooms had been, with framed photographs. The morning sunlight moved across these captured moments of her life; pictures of people and places that had meant a lot at the time, but not so much they couldn't be left behind.

Fairly soon she'd be leaving here as well. All she had to do was wait a couple of months and this confused ruckus inside her head would simply become irrelevant. She didn't
have
to be involved with these people; involved, that is, in the sense of feeling that her life was intertwined with theirs.

Tick! Tick! Tick!
reminded Ray's clock. Time, if not flying, was at least marching briskly along.

Without really thinking about it, Rose picked up the phone and dialed her mother's number. Mavis answered on the second ring, wide awake, on top of things as always. “What are you doing awake at this hour on a Sunday morning?” she asked before Rose even said hello. Stu must have gotten them caller ID.

“I'm just up,” Rose said.

There was no beating around the bush with Mavis. “You didn't sleep well, did you? That's not like you, Rose. What's bothering you?”

Out it came. All of it. Tom, Henry, Agnes, Marjory's death, her job—everything that had happened over the course of the last two uncharacteristically tumultuous weeks. Rose had already told Mavis most of it in bits and pieces, but this morning she felt a great need to tell the whole story again to her mother. Or maybe she just felt a great need to tell herself, and telling Mavis was easier.

The Sage of San Marcos was silent when she finished. This, Rose knew, could mean only one thing. Her mother was thinking.

“I'm sorry you're quitting your job, child,” Mavis said at last. “You seemed to really like it there. That have anything to do with
why
you're quitting?”

“Of course not,” Rose said, a bit too quickly.

The sun shone now on a picture of a friend from Nashville. When Rose had left, he'd been in love with the husband of his wife's best friend, who, he'd thought, was also in love with him. Rose had felt so sorry for him—he'd allowed his life to become so higgledy-piggledy. But it had, she'd heard, all ended rather well. The two men were still together. The two wives had rolled with the punches and gone on. One was in medical school; the other had remarried and given birth to twins. “I'm sure I'll be fine,” she said into the phone. “I just thought you'd like to know what's happening down here.”

“I would like to know. I always like to know.”

Rose heard Mavis draw in a deep breath as though she were about to launch into something, but all that traveled south from Williamstown, Massachusetts, was more silence. Rose had an impulse to leap into it and tell Mavis truly
everything
—whatever everything was—but just as she opened her mouth to do that, the impulse died away. “So,” she said, “how's your stock portfolio these days?”

“My
what
?”

“I said, how are your investments doing?”

“Not well. And yours?”

Rose laughed. She had no investments. What little money she had was in a money market account drawing a whopping three-quarter percent.

There was another silence. Usually the two of them chattered away like squirrels.

“Rose,” Mavis said. “Why did you really call me?”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Why did you really call me?'”

“Just to chat?”

“Nonsense! It's still dark. I don't remember you ever calling me when it's still dark on a Sunday morning.”

“Oh.”

“So why did you call me?”

Despair rose up inside Rose like a sullen beast. If she couldn't talk to Mavis right now, she might never,
ever
be able to talk to anyone. And yet she had no idea what to say. Mavis's own voice rang in her head, a loud blast from the past.
Tell the truth, Rose.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Uh-huh.” There was a pause. “You really mean that, don't you, Rosie?”

Mavis only called her Rosie in her rare moments of deep maternal worry. “Yes, I think I do.”

“You're bothered about leaving that place, aren't you?”

“A little, I guess.”

Mavis laughed. “And probably more bothered by the fact that you're bothered, right? You've finally landed with people you can't take pictures of and then leave behind.”

“Yes!”
How had Mavis known this when she hadn't known it herself?

There was a long sigh. “Look, Rosie,” Mavis said. “People change. Or maybe I should say,
I
changed. In my thirties, I began to want different things than I did in my twenties, but it took me a while to realize it. I don't think I realized it fully until I met Stu.” Mavis paused. Was she, perhaps, remembering the moment she'd first laid eyes on her professor, the moment he'd put his hand on her arm, and she'd felt the rackety old world slow, then stop, then change forever … Rose could hear the smile in her mother's voice. “I can remember thinking,
Why am I, Mavis Callahan, attracted to this nice, smart, quiet, normal guy? I'm not usually attracted to nice, smart, quiet, normal guys. I'm usually attracted to interesting, difficult, creative, self-centered guys who make my life hell.
Sometimes they were smart, but not always. One or two were dumb as dull thumbtacks. You remember that guy in Ann Arbor? That artist who painted those big, ugly pictures and was always bad-mouthing people because no one bought them? Now, there was a dim bulb! It amazes me now to think I put up with him for five minutes. But I did. And had a pretty good time doing it—hanging out with weird people, smoking a little dope, drinking bad wine, talking irrelevant nonsense.” Mavis laughed. “You remember him, Rosie?”

Rose did. He'd drawn her pictures of dogs and cats on bar napkins. She'd tolerated him because she'd known he wouldn't be around long. She and Mavis were the team. The others in their lives who came and went were just groupies. “Sure, I remember him,” she said.

Mavis sighed. “You know, Rosie, I don't think it was until Stu asked me to marry him, and I immediately said yes, that I realized how much I'd changed. And that what I wanted now was some kind of permanent home and a permanent partner who made life easier instead of more difficult. Oh, eventually I would have found some nice place and settled down even without Stu showing up and giving me a shake by proposing, but I must say, I find my permanent home is much nicer with him in it, even though he can annoy the dickens out of me. As long as I had you, Rosie, I guess I didn't need anyone else permanently. But when you struck out on your own wandering ways, what I really missed, I think, was shared history. You know the way we'd always laugh and talk and remember things? Well, without you, it was as though I had no history.”

My photographs,
Rose thought, staring at herself surrounded by her high school basketball teammates.
My photographs are my shared history.
“Were you ever lonely, Mama?”

“You mean without you? God, yes. I missed you terribly.”

Rose smiled. “We were quite the team, weren't we?”

“That we were, child. That we were. Good for many a mile and many a laugh.”

“I loved my childhood, you know?” Rose said impulsively. Surely Mavis knew that, but it felt important to say it anyway.

“I do know. But you're not a child anymore, Rosie, my dear. And you're also almost not young anymore.”

“I know. I suppose I should dread turning forty in a couple of years, but I just don't somehow.”

Another laugh. “Speaking for myself, I found not being young anymore a great relief. It allowed me to get rid of a lot of ridiculous expectations I'd set for myself. I was always pushing myself to
do
something—what exactly that something was, I had no idea. I found I was a lot more comfortable once I got rid of all that ridiculous excess baggage.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Rose felt calm again, all the way through. It was the way she was used to feeling. But she felt quite different in other ways. How, she wasn't sure yet, but that didn't worry her. Pippi Longstocking piped up,
Don't you worry about me. I'll always come out on top!
“Thanks,” she said.

“For what?”

“For talking.”

“You're welcome. Do you feel any better?”

“Yes. I think I do.”

“Good. Well, I gotta go. I just heard Stu stirring around. We're on a tight schedule today. Gotta go pick apples with friends.”

My goodness, her mother and her professor knew how to enjoy themselves. “Okay. Give him my best,” Rose said. Someday she might even say “love.” “May I ask you one more thing before you hang up?”

“Shoot.”

“Why haven't we talked like this before?”

Would Mavis, Rose wondered, tell Stu about this conversation in great detail? Probably. And it came to Rose with a sense of wonder that she wouldn't mind in the least.

She heard Mavis chuckle. “We have, Rosie. I haven't said anything today to you that I haven't said before. I've always pretty much told you everything I felt.”

“You're kidding.”

“Nope.”

Rose had absolutely no memory of her mother ever talking to her about being lonely, or describing her old boyfriends as dull thumbtacks. “But why don't I remember it?”

She could picture Mavis standing in her own bright kitchen, shaking her head, smiling. “Because, as I just said, people change, Rosie. Maybe it just wasn't anything that interested you until today.”

*   *   *

Sunday morning at breakfast, Tom and Agnes had another talk with Henry. Agnes took the lead, explaining that Mr. Brownlow at the bank had learned he was missing and, out of concern that he was all right, had alerted the Mississippi State Police. In order to keep things as simple as possible, Agnes said, she was going to call the police in Mississippi as soon as they'd finished their pancakes, just to let them know that Henry was here with his legal father, that his mother had sent him, and that he wanted to stay put. “We don't expect any real trouble from anyone about your living with us,” she added. “Although it may be a bit confusing to Mr. Brownlow and the police at first, and could take some time to sort it out.”