Small Blessings (36 page)

Rose reached her hand up and touched his cheek. “You are a remarkable person, Tom Putnam.”

He liked that she'd said “person” instead of “man.” It meant she found him remarkable in ways that really
mattered.
“As are you,” he said.

They turned and walked on, in sync, not saying anything until they reached the turn onto Faculty Row. Tom felt all the underutilized parts of himself waking, stretching, springing into action.

Then, “I think we should go to bed,” Rose said quietly.

“What?”
Tom stopped dead, not quite able to look at her.

“I think we should go to bed,” she said again.

Tom took a deep breath. He had no idea whether
that
part of him was ready or even able to spring into action. “Rose,” he said, finally daring to look at her, “I haven't had sex with a woman in years.”

“So?” she said, looking up at him, her whole face twinkling.

*   *   *

The front doorbell rang while he and Rose were still in bed. Tom—awash in happiness and, yes, triumph—ignored it. Then he remembered it was Henry's first day at school, visions of the boy tumbling off the jungle gym elbowed their way into his head, and he jumped, naked, out of bed.

“I'll just see who that is. I won't be gone a moment.”

Rose's skirt poofed before him on the rug like a huge rusty red mushroom. “I think your trousers are in the doorway,” she said.

Tom turned to find her raised up on one elbow, smiling at him, her hair spilling across her shoulder in a rush of unmanageable curls. He stopped, mid-hurry, transfixed. “You are so beautiful.”

Rose blushed. “No, I'm not. That's just lust talking.”

“No, it's not. It's—”

The doorbell rang again. “You better go see who that is,” she said. “Better make sure Henry's all right.”

“Don't go anywhere.”

Rose smiled. “I won't.” She caught her breath. “Not for a couple of months, anyway,” she added in a voice just loud enough for him to hear.

*   *   *

Tom opened the front door to find a short, round man about Agnes's age, dressed in a suit and tie and holding a briefcase. “I'm Mason Brownlow,” he said, beaming a cautious smile up at Tom and sticking out a soft, pudgy hand, “from Picayune, Mississippi. May I come in?”

Tom's first move was to check his fly.

Mr. Brownlow noticed this. “Am I disturbing you?” he asked mildly, his hand still hanging in the air. “The state police said you'd invited me to visit anytime.”

“Of course!” Tom grabbed Mr. Brownlow's hand and shook it vigorously. “I'm sorry. I was just … just changing.”

“Ah, I understand.” Mr. Brownlow retrieved his hand. His eyes twinkled. “I am delighted just to lay eyes on you, you know. I always thought Tom Putnam didn't exist. That you were just a name Serafine made up to have something to write on Henry's birth certificate. And now, here you are in the flesh.”

“Yes!” Tom gave an awkward little flourish. “Here I am!”

Mr. Brownlow gestured vaguely behind him. “I could certainly come back later, if that would be more convenient. I wanted to have a little talk with you about Henry. As his grandparents' executor and friend, and, I hope, also a friend of Henry's and his late mother's, I felt I needed to come up here and see for myself how Henry's getting on.”

“Of course.” Tom's mind stampeded through his immediate options. Putting Mr. Brownlow off would only make him think he, Tom, had something to hide. Which he
had,
as Rose was upstairs, but surely that was not something Mr. Brownlow need find out.

“No, no.” Tom gestured for Mr. Brownlow to enter. “Come in. Come in. Henry's at school, I'm afraid. Today's his first day. And my mother-in-law, Agnes Tattle, who lives with us, has gone … gone shopping. But
I'm
delighted you're here. Delighted to meet you. Delighted you made the trip. And I'm sure Henry will be delighted to see you as well. And I know Agnes will be delighted to meet…”

Stop babbling!
a voice yelled inside his head.
Start over!

Tom took a deep breath. “Come in. I'm very glad to meet you.”

Mr. Brownlow stepped inside and shut the front door firmly behind him. He stood there beaming, both hands clasping the handle of his briefcase, calmly inspecting Tom and what he could see of Tom's house. Tom turned around and inspected it with him, taking in the piles of junk mail, Henry's Tonka dump truck, the coat tree holding Agnes's thirty-year-old Harris tweed, the dust balls in the corners—their housekeeping efforts never quite made it this far. Yet when he turned back to Mr. Brownlow expecting the worst, the little banker gave a decisive nod. “Let me assure you, Mr. Putnam,” he said, in the same cheerful, hopeful tone, “that I am not here hoping to make trouble for you. I'm here only to make sure Henry's all right. He's such a dear boy and there's all this money involved and his grandparents were my dear friends and—” At this point, Mr. Brownlow abruptly broke off to gape at something behind and above Tom's head.

Tom turned around to see Rose, wearing a bedsheet like a ball gown, standing at the top of the stairs.

“Hello,” Mr. Brownlow said, not unkindly. “I see I
am
interrupting something.”

“I'm—I'm so sorry,” Rose said, speaking in a rush. “I heard the door close. I'm Rose Callahan. I—I do community-building work for the college bookstore and run the coffee bar.”

Tom whirled back to Mr. Brownlow and was shocked to see he was still smiling. His good manners evidently ran deep. “I'm Mason Brownlow from Picayune, Mississippi. You said you do community building for the college bookstore?”

Tom turned back to Rose. It was worse than watching a tennis match. “At least for now,” she said. “The Book Store serves everyone around here.”

“Interesting,” Mr. Brownlow said. “A good bookstore is so vital to a community's life of the mind, don't you think, Mr. Putnam?”

“I do,” Tom said. With conviction.

Mr. Brownlow went back to Rose. “And are you a friend of Henry's as well as Mr. Putnam's?”

“Oh yes!” Rose almost let her ball gown slip in her enthusiasm. “Henry's great. We play soccer together.”

“Indeed,” said Mr. Brownlow. “Well then, perhaps you'd like to join us. I've come to check up on things here for my own satisfaction. But let me assure you right from the start that any real friend of Henry's is a friend of mine.”

“Oh, lovely,” Rose said. “I feel exactly the same way.”

*   *   *

“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” Tom asked. “I'm afraid we're not very neat.”

“Neither am I,” said Mr. Brownlow. “At least not since my wife died ten years ago. My housekeeper says the hardest part of her job is picking up after me.”

“Oh,” Tom said. The two of them still stood in the foyer. Rose had disappeared from view, presumably to put on something other than her bedsheet.

There was a slight pause. “Might I trouble you for a glass of water?” Mr. Brownlow asked.

“Of course,” Tom said. “Where would you like to sit?”

Mr. Brownlow thought about this. “Do you have a kitchen table?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, let's sit there. The kitchen is the heart of a house, don't you agree?”

Tom flashed back to his parents' kitchen table thirty years ago, to Eddie and Louise and their friends plotting the liberalization of all New England over the remains of supper. “I do!” he said, relaxing slightly, relieved that Mr. Brownlow was not a parlor kind of guy. He was also relieved he'd thought to clear the cereal bowls away this morning and put them in the dishwasher. “This way,” he said, leading Mr. Brownlow down the hall toward the back of the house.

The pudgy little banker trotted behind him, his leather-soled shoes tap-tapping along the hardwood floor.
This whole place needs painting,
Tom thought, looking around him. At least there were no dust balls lurking in the corners once they left the foyer. He had vacuumed just yesterday, and Agnes had trailed behind him with a dust mop.

“What a nice kitchen,” Mr. Brownlow said as they entered the sunny room. He made a beeline for the refrigerator and peered at a drawing Henry had done showing himself, Rose, Agnes, and Tom dancing around a giant soccer ball. “Did Henry do this?”

“Yes,” Tom said. “He really likes to draw.”

“And has fallen in love with soccer, I see.” Mr. Brownlow turned and smiled at Tom.

“Yes,” Tom said. “He insisted on taking his soccer ball to school with him this morning.”

“And where is he in school?”

“We've just enrolled him in second grade in the campus school, which has an excellent reputation.”

“I see.” Mr. Brownlow blinked his bright little eyes. “And who's we?”

Tom stared. Who
was
we? “Why, myself and Agnes—my late wife's mother—and, and Rose,” he added, just as she entered the room reclad in her red skirt, T-shirt, and cowboy boots.

“Rose what?” she asked.

Mr. Brownlow spoke up. “Tom was just telling me that you were part of the team that enrolled Henry in school this morning.”

“Yes.” Rose walked over to Tom and took his hand. “I was.”

“You two, I take it, are a couple?” Mr. Brownlow inquired affably.

“Yes,” said Tom firmly.

Rose said nothing.

“And how long has your wife been dead, Mr. Putnam? If I may ask?”

Tom felt the walls closing in on him. “She was killed in a car wreck three days before Henry got here.”

Mr. Brownlow considered this information, his face unreadable. “I see. Interesting. Perhaps I might trouble you for that glass of water now.”

Just at that moment the back door banged open and Agnes backed into the kitchen carrying several recyclable bags of groceries. “Yoo-hoo! I brought smoked turkey for lunch. Is it all clear in here?”

“No,” Tom said. “It's not, actually.”

Agnes spun around to find Tom, Rose, and Mr. Brownlow all staring at her. “Ooops,” she said, grinning puckishly. “What have I walked in on
this
time?”

For some reason Mr. Brownlow appeared charmed by this. He put down his briefcase and bustled forward. “Let me help you with those, please.” He reached for Agnes's bags.

Agnes backed away from him. “Who are you?”

The little banker beamed. “Mason Brownlow, from Picayune, Mississippi. Come to check up on Henry.”

Agnes dropped her groceries. “Holy Mother of God,” she said, staring at the little man. “Why the hell am I trying to quit smoking?”

*   *   *

Russell found Luellen Mars, chair of the Biology Department, in her basement lab, busily directing a half-dozen students in the pursuit of some truth that could be demonstrated in a petri dish.
I should have been a lab technician,
Russell thought, as he stood in the doorway and watched the students reconstructing an experiment that was guaranteed to turn out the same way every time.
Or perhaps a line worker, putting the same part in the same place of the same thing, all day every day
.
Anything with a predictable outcome.

Russell had been arguing with himself about the merits of knowing
un
predictable outcomes ever since he'd pulled the hair out of Henry's head that morning. A line from an old hippie-dippie Youngbloods song kept running through his head, something about holding the key to love and fear in your trembling hand.

He'd always hated that song for its sappy, one-size-fits-all inclusivity, its call to “try to love one another right now.”

Today, however, that business about holding the key to love and fear in your trembling hand could not have been more appropriate, for in his own trembling hand were two envelopes containing Henry's hair and some of his own. This was it. He had to decide right now: Did he or did he not want to know whether he was Henry's biological father?

As long as the question had remained a hypothetical one, Russell had pretty much been all for knowing. Paternity had seemed somehow a picture-perfect completion of all that he'd wanted himself to be. It would be so … so
Jeffersonian
to have fathered a beautiful little person of color with blue eyes. But then this morning, with one impulsive yank, he'd replaced a theoretical argument with a concrete one. Russell, along with the rest of the world, watched
CSI
and so knew that hair follicles contain DNA and DNA proves paternity. Ambivalence had immediately gripped him like a pair of giant pliers. He'd stood looking down at Henry—at that beautiful little boy, properly outraged at having his hair pulled out by the roots—and felt for the first time in living memory that someone else's well-being might be more important than his own.

It had been an awkward—no, an
awful
—moment; Russell hadn't had the slightest idea what to do next. He'd scraped for acceptance, indeed for love, for so many decades, that this onslaught of selflessness incapacitated him. His first impulse had been to go back inside the Dean Dome, find those bottles of Wild Turkey, and down half of one in a single mindless gulp. The only thing that had stopped him was the thought that Henry deserved better of him, whether or not he was his father. Henry deserved better of everyone.

“Russell? May I help you?”

Luellen Mars had spotted him and begun walking toward him. This was it: Did he or did he not want to know?

Time slowed. Russell watched Luellen swim toward him leisurely and thought—God help him—of his own nonentity of a father. Oh, how much he'd wanted
not
to be that man, patiently dealing with his alcoholic wife, doing what he could to make life easier for his loser of a child, cheerfully going every day to his dead-end job. “Son,” his father had said to him over and over and
over,
“you've got to do the best you can with the hand you're dealt.” Standing there in the doorway of the biology lab, Russell saw in a flash that his whole adult life had been one massive effort to disprove that statement; he had spent the last fifty years refusing to play the hand he'd been dealt and, instead, pretending he'd been dealt a different one.