The Bright Forever (8 page)

He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered in through the diamond of glass in the front door. What he saw amused him. Such a sight. Henry Dees with a spatula held like a microphone as he sang along. “Oh, the Candy Man can.” Who would have thought that he fancied himself a singer, that mornings he strutted around his kitchen, his head tossed back, his fingers snapping, his arm flung out, as if he were onstage at an Executive Inn dinner show, a spotlight following him as he reached toward the audience? “Yes, the Candy Man can.”

Junior couldn’t bring himself to knock again, to disturb Mr. Dees and let him know that he had found him out. But he couldn’t back away. Watching Mr. Dees, unguarded and exposed in this private moment, made him happy, glad to know that all manner of folks could manufacture joy—even a bachelor schoolteacher who, as far as Junior knew, had never even had a chance at love. He could sing into that spatula. He could turn up the volume and not care who heard. He could sing, sing, sing on this bright morning in June.

Then the music stopped, and Mr. Dees went to the stove and used his spatula to turn a pancake. Bacon was frying in a pan. He speared the slices with a fork and stacked them on a saucer. He was all business now. He was making time. He buttered toast, poured coffee, slid the pancake onto a plate, and spooned out batter for another. Soon there was a stack and syrup on the table, and he was ready to dig in. He paused and snapped his fingers twice. He tapped his foot. That song. That “Candy Man.” Junior knew it was still in his head, that little bit of dum-di-dum, and he was glad to know it, satisfied with the news that Henry Dees was a man who could make room for the cockle-fruity-do, a little bit of a silly song to give him a chuckle. It gave the earnest part of him, that by-the-numbers dignity, all the more weight.

Junior tapped on the glass and watched as Mr. Dees looked up from his breakfast. He squinted toward the door. He touched his napkin to his lips and then folded it into a neat rectangle before pushing his chair away from the table. It had been nearly twenty years since Junior had spoken to him. The last time—he could recall it clearly—had been in school, the night of graduation. In the hallway before the line for the processional formed, Junior bent to tie his shoelace and it snapped. Henry Dees had a spare one in his pocket, and he gave it to Junior. “Why do you have an extra one?” Junior asked him, and Henry told him he liked to think ahead. Who knew what might happen? He wanted to be ready. Junior had always remembered that, how Henry Dees had given him that shoelace, had been right there when he needed him.

Now he had come to ask for his help. “It’s my girl,” he said when Mr. Dees opened the door. “You remember me, Henry. I’m Junior Mackey. It’s my girl, Katie. She’s having trouble with her arithmetic.”

Mr. Dees asked him to come in. He poured him a cup of coffee, offered him pancakes and bacon. The house smelled of the coffee and food. A breeze lifted the curtain at the kitchen window. Outside, birds were singing. Those were his purple martins, Mr. Dees said. For a while, he and Junior sat at the table and said nothing. They sipped coffee, two men taking their time on a summer morning.

Then Mr. Dees said yes, of course he knew him. Gilbert Mackey. He’d married Patsy Molloy. They lived in the Heights. He’d had their son, Gilley, in his calculus class. A smart boy, a polite boy. Very nice. And he’d seen their daughter around town. A little brown-haired girl. What was her name? Katie? Yes, Katie. So it was Katie who had hit a snag with her math? Of course he could help her. He hadn’t found a child yet that he couldn’t teach.

He wasn’t boasting. Junior had no doubt of that. Mr. Dees was merely stating a fact in that quiet way he had, bowing his head as if it embarrassed him to have to say it. Such a claim was far from a boast. It was the simple truth stated with the same shy and quiet dignity Junior remembered from that night at graduation when Henry Dees loaned him that shoelace. Everything would be all right with Katie. He felt sure of that. Henry Dees was someone they could count on.

“Don’t worry about your Katie,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”

HE CAME
the first time on an afternoon when Katie and Rene Cherry were outside, sitting cross-legged on the grass. Mr. Dees wore a poplin suit—powder blue, the color of the sky in early June before the heat came and the clotted air. He paused on the sidewalk and listened to the girls. He memorized the lilt and chirp of their voices. As bright as pennies. They were talking about books they had read. The Henry Huggins books were
magnifique
, Rene Cherry said. She had copper-colored hair. Glorious hair that fell to her shoulders, that wreathed her narrow face. It was her mother’s hair. Margot Cherry, ne Legrand, who was Mr. Dees’s old classmate. Margot Legrand, who had spoken French and smoked cigarettes and tried once, unsuccessfully, to kill herself by slashing her wrists with her father’s razor. Even she had managed a family. A husband and this beautiful daughter sitting in the shade on this glorious summer day. “
Magnifique
,” Rene said again, and Mr. Dees grinned, convinced that she had heard her mother use that word and now was trying to make it her own.

The air smelled of the cedar shrubs and the attar of Patsy Mackey’s roses. Mr. Dees was content to linger and eavesdrop. He let himself imagine, just for a moment, that this was his home, these girls on the grass his daughters, and soon he would call to them and they would come running, each of them reaching for one of his hands.

Yes, said Katie. The Henry Huggins books were funny, but, really, wasn’t the Little House series so much better? Laura and her sisters, Mary and Baby Carrie, and Ma and Pa Ingalls. “
On the Banks of Plum Creek
,” Katie said, “when the grasshoppers eat the wheat crop, or
The Long Winter
when the snow’s so deep and the trains can’t get through with food or coal? Didn’t those books break your heart?” Mr. Dees could see that her cheeks were flushed and damp with tears.

“Oh, I know,” Rene said. “Absolutely heartbreaking.
Trs triste
.”

They went on debating the merits and disappointments of each book, but Mr. Dees wasn’t listening now. He was watching Katie. She was sobbing. Her shoulders shook. Her breath came in hiccups. Her hair fell over her face and she pushed it back with her hands. He wanted to run to her, gather her up in his arms, and tell her not to worry; nothing could be as bad as all that. He understood now that the girls were playing a game that required them to eliminate one of the books, pretend it never existed, and how could they make that choice when they loved each so dearly? A child’s game. That was all, and yet at the moment nothing could have seemed as dire to Rene and Katie, especially Katie, who blubbered and bawled and said, between her hiccups, “Laura .  .  .  and Mary .  .  .   and Baby Carrie .  .  .    and Laura’s friend Almanzo .  .  .  Oh, Rene.”

Mr. Dees felt an ache in his throat, and he wasn’t ashamed, not a whit, to know that his own tears were about to come. Katie’s anguish touched him. He removed the handkerchief, freshly ironed that morning, from his breast pocket and blotted his eyes. How could anyone behold the miseries of children and not take them in, not feel them as his own? He couldn’t bear to hear Katie cry. Not for another second could he stand it.

So he called out. “Hello, hello,” he said, waving his arm as he came up the driveway. “Which one of you girls is lucky?”

“Lucky?” said Katie.

“Why, sure,” he told her. “I thought you were the one.”

He began the first lesson by explaining how to divide a whole number into fractions. They sat on the patio at the table with the big green umbrella opened above it. From time to time, Mr. Dees caught a glimpse of Patsy Mackey at the kitchen window, pretending not to be watching. She had brought them a pitcher of lemonade. “Katie, this is Mister Dees,” she had said. “He’s a very nice man who’s going to help you with your arithmetic.”

He told Katie that any whole number could be divided, even one. It could be divided in half; it could be split into thirds, fourths, sixths, eighths, and on down the line. He showed her on his tablet how to write one-half by putting a one over a two: 1/2. The bottom number, the 2, was the denominator. It showed how many equal portions made up the whole number. The top number, the 1, was the numerator. It showed how many of the equal portions they were taking away.

“So if we have the fraction one-fourth,” he said, “it means we’ve split the whole number into four equal parts and we’re going to take one of those parts away. Do you understand?”

She had her arms crossed on the table, her chin on her hands. She nodded, and she looked so glum Mr. Dees almost called their lesson to an end. He imagined that she’d rather still be with Rene, that she’d rather be doing anything than learning about fractions.

But he had a job to do, so he went ahead and explained how to add 1/4 and 3/4 to return to the whole number, 1. “You add the numerators. One plus three. See?”

“I know how to add,” Katie said with a dramatic sigh.

“Of course you do,” he told her, determined to stay patient and cheery. “But I want to make sure that you really understand.”

“I said I did, didn’t I?”

“All right. Show me.” He wanted to win her over. He wanted to convince her that learning mathematics could be fun. “Let’s say you have four of something, four .  .  .  oh, I don’t know .  .  .  four children. Let’s say their names are Laura and Mary and Carrie and Almanzo.”

She raised her head. “From the Little House books?”

“That’s right. And let’s say one of them wanders away from the others, gets lost in the woods perhaps.”

“Lost?” Her eyes opened wide. She was interested now. Mr. Dees congratulated himself on having the good sense to turn the math problem into a story. Katie, he could tell, was a girl who understood narrative, mystery. A girl with curiosity. Someone who wanted to know what happened next. “Which one?” she asked. “Which one of them got lost?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Dees said. “It could be any one of them, any one at all. You just have to pick one.”

Right away, he recalled the game Katie and Rene had been playing and the anguish it had caused them. He knew he had made a mistake. Katie’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Pick one?” she said. Her chin started to quiver. “I have to pick one?”

Mr. Dees tried to erase his error. “Tell you what. I’ll pick one.”

But that only made matters worse. “Who?” Katie was even more worried now. “Who has to be the one who gets lost?”

Mr. Dees could see that any answer he gave would be the wrong one because Katie couldn’t bear to think of any of the four children lost in the woods. “Maybe we should forget the children,” he said. “We could do the problem with something else. Dogs or cats or zebras.”

Katie’s voice shook. “A dog? Lost? Like Lassie? Lost?”

Then the tears were coming, and she jumped up from her chair and ran into the house, leaving Mr. Dees alone, cursing himself for how foolish he had been. He hadn’t meant to hurt her at all, but that’s what he had done. He had convinced himself that he knew what it was like to want the best for someone like Katie, but now he had done this stupid thing, and it made him realize how clumsy he was when it came to dealing with people.

He didn’t know what to do, whether to wait on the patio, or knock on the door so he could apologize, or just slink away, a lost dog starved and alone. He put the cap on his fountain pen and clipped it to his shirt pocket. He closed his writing tablet.

The door behind him opened, and he heard Junior Mackey say his name. “Henry,” he said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What did you say to my girl?”

“Didn’t she tell you?”

“Christ, she could barely talk. Henry, she came running in bawling her head off.”

Mr. Dees was angry, disgusted with himself for bringing up the Little House children. How had he even managed to recall their names? Why hadn’t he seen that the very mention of them would upset Katie? He was also irritated with her for being so sensitive. But wasn’t that what he loved most about her? The stories of those children had broken her heart, she had told Rene, and he had ached for a child like Katie who could take in the miseries of people, could feel them as if they were her own.

“We were doing our work,” he said, and then, though he was furious, he told Junior Mackey in a calm voice what he had said to Katie and why it had disturbed her so. “I was wrong,” he said. “I miscalculated.”

“Good God,” said Junior Mackey. “Don’t you know a thing about kids?”

Mr. Dees was standing up now. He buttoned his coat, smoothed his tie, tugged at his shirt cuffs. He stepped toward Junior Mackey, his gaze level. He took off his glasses, folded the temples, and slipped them into his breast pocket. Later, he would think how silly that was; it was what he had seen high school boys do before a fistfight. Did he really think that he and Junior Mackey would come to blows?

“I was wrong,” he said. “Sometimes people make mistakes. If you’d rather I didn’t teach your daughter, then say so, and I’ll go home and not come back. Otherwise, you’ll have to trust me.”

He never raised his voice. He never stomped a foot or shook a fist. He didn’t have to. He narrowed his eyes and said what was on his mind, and because no one, particularly Junior Mackey, was accustomed to hearing him talk with such force, his words, quiet as they were, had weight.

Gilley stepped out onto the patio, golf club in hand. He saw his father and Mr. Dees, and something about the way they were standing told him he should turn around and go back into the house. He saw his father take a step back from Mr. Dees. He rubbed a hand over his head.

“A misunderstanding,” he said. “That’s all. Come back tomorrow and we’ll give this another try.”

Gilley stood there and watched Mr. Dees walk across the yard to the street. His back was straight, his shoulders squared, and he wasn’t in a hurry. He took his time, and Junior stood there, watching him go.

“Something wrong?” Gilley said.

Junior brushed past him on his way into the house. “You don’t know anything,” he said. “That man’s got backbone. You’re a kid.”