The Old House (3 page)

Max looked at her. “Hi,” he said. “We're not really cousins, of course.”

He would be rather nice-looking,
Buddy thought,
if he smiled instead of being so poker-faced.

He bent to pour milk into the bowl, then nudged the kitten toward it. The scruffy little gray-and-white creature drank greedily.

“Grandpa, did you wash your hands?” Cassie was asking now. “Do you want me to help you?”

Why would a grown man need help washing his hands? Cassie turned away and headed toward the bathroom off the back hallway, steering the old man ahead of her. Aunt Addie was busy slicing bread, and Max and Buddy were left standing there.

“I always wanted a kitten,” Buddy said.

“Somebody didn't want him. They dumped him off to shift for himself,” Max said. And then he shifted his attention from the kitten to her again. “I doubt if you're going to like it here very much. Everybody in this house is crazy.”

Buddy blinked. “I beg your pardon?” she said, startled.

“It's a very dysfunctional family,” he told her. “Unless you're a fruitcake, too, you probably won't fit in very well.”

If this was his idea of a welcome, Buddy didn't think she could expect much of Max.
She thought she had a general idea of what
dysfunctional
meant, but she missed having Bart there to explain so she'd know for sure. Her brother never made fun of her when she didn't understand something.

Buddy swallowed. “I don't expect to be here for long. Just until Bart finds Dad.” Her heart was beating very fast. If she'd hoped for a moment that the only other person her age in this household might be a friend, that hope was fading.

Max looked her full in the face then. “Your old man abandon you, did he?”

Indignation surged through her. “No! He left town with a friend for a new job, after he got laid off at the mill. When it closed, practically everybody in town was out of work. Most of the men had to go somewhere else to look for jobs.”

“That's what he told you, huh?” Clearly Max didn't believe her, and it stirred Buddy's anger.

“That's what he told us, because it was the truth. He'd never abandon us.”

“But he went away and didn't come back, huh?” Max's
mouth slid into a sneer. “My old man lies all the time, too.”

“Mine doesn't!” Buddy snapped. “He hasn't come back because something happened to him, so he couldn't! My brother Bart's gone to find out what it was!”

Max shrugged. “Good luck,” he said, but she could tell he didn't believe her, didn't mean it.

“Now, Grandpa,” Aunt Cassie was saying as they returned to the room, “you sit right down, and I'll dish up the soup. Beef and barley vegetable, it is. You like that, remember?”

Grandpa hesitated in the middle of the room. “Where do you want me to sit?”

“Right there on the end, same as always,” Cassie said, guiding him with a touch on his elbow. She picked up a bowl and a big ladle. “You can sit right there beside him, Buddy.”

Hesitantly, Buddy obeyed, wondering why Grandpa, who lived here, didn't know where to sit. And why he had to be reminded that he liked beef and barley vegetable soup. It didn't seem the sort of thing a person was likely to forget.

The others took their places around the big,
round table while Cassie placed steaming, wonderful-smelling soup in front of them. There were thick slices of bread, too, on a plate right in front of Grandpa.

Cassie sat down on the other side of Grandpa and buttered him a slice of bread, cutting it in half as she placed it on his plate. “Would you like to ask the blessing, Grandpa?” she asked.

Awkwardly, Buddy bowed her head with the others. They'd always said grace before meals when Mama was alive. Sometimes Dad remembered, sometimes not. They'd almost gotten out of the habit, though Buddy felt guilty enough so that she prayed silently.

“Thank you, Lord, for all your blessings, and for our food. And if Sister made pie for dessert, we thank you for that, too. Amen.”

Buddy started to smile at that last part, until she saw that no one else was smiling except Aunt Cassie.

“No pie today, Grandpa,” Cassie told him gently. “Oatmeal cookies.”

The old man reached up to a small device hanging on a cord around his neck and pressed it. A female voice said, “The time is 1:03 p.m.”

“Time to eat,”
Grandpa said, and picked up his spoon.

Everybody else dug in, too. The soup was marvelous, rich and thick and meaty. So was the homemade bread.

“Is there any jam?” Grandpa asked.

There was a small jar beside his plate. Buddy looked from Grandpa to Aunt Cassie, who met her gaze sadly as she pushed the jar closer to the old man's hand. “Right here, Grandpa.” Then, to Buddy, she added, “He has macular degeneration. He can't see things that are directly in front of him.”

Buddy must have looked bewildered. Across the table from her, Max saw that she was confused, and made his own explanation. “That means that he has peripheral vision—you know, around the edges, he can see light and color—but in the middle of his sight, where your face would be if he could see it, it's just a black spot. He's been legally blind for the past two years.”

Blind? Now she understood why Cassie had guided him to the bathroom and his chair, why he needed help washing up, and why he wore
a speaking timepiece around his neck. Grandpa Harry's eyes looked perfectly normal, she thought, but they could no longer see the way they used to.

Buddy dug into the lunch, hungry in spite of what she'd eaten on the bus. The soup and fresh bread were delicious, and she said so. Cassie smiled her appreciation of the compliment. “You want to get the cookies, dear? They're on a plate right over there.”

Buddy wondered what Bart was eating, or if he was eating at all. He did have money, but not very much, and he needed to pay for gas. All he'd known was the name of the town where Dad and Rich Painter had gone for the promised jobs. Dad had told them the name of the trucking company that had agreed to hire them, but neither of them had remembered what it was.

Whenever she thought of it, which was practically all the time, Buddy prayed that her brother would be able to find Dad, and that he was all right.

They were finishing the cookies—Buddy ate three, the same as Grandpa—when the
doorbell rang in the front of the house. Max, stuffing his fourth cookie into his mouth, pushed back his chair. “I'll get it,” he said. “It's probably Hank. He said he'd come over and we'd go ride bikes for a while.”

They heard boys' voices, and then Max came back with a handful of envelopes, putting them down beside Addie's plate. “Mail's here. There's a manuscript returned for you, Addie”—he plunked down a large manila envelope—“and a letter from Gordon. Plus the electric bill.”

Gordon, Buddy knew, was the only boy in the family, between Addie and Cassie in age, all of them older than her mother had been. He was the only one besides her mother who had moved away from Haysville; he had left before Buddy was even born. He lived in Los Angeles, where he was a successful attorney.

Addie picked up the envelope, held it to the light, tore it open, then made a small grunting sound of annoyance. “I don't have my glasses. I left them on my dresser. Fetch them for me, Max.”

“Don't have time, the guys are waiting,” Max
said, and fled after grabbing another handful of cookies.

Addie looked after him in exasperation. “His legs are younger than mine. Why can't he do me a favor?” she asked of no one in particular.

“My legs are young, too,” Buddy said impulsively. “Could I get your glasses?”

“Yes, please. Top of the stairs, the first room on the right. They're on the dresser. You might as well take this up, too, and leave it.” She handed Buddy the big, thick manila envelope without opening it.

The spectacles were right where Addie had said they were. Buddy picked them up before she noticed the dark red leather-covered photograph album on the nightstand a few feet away.

It looked just like the one Mama had left. Buddy couldn't have said why she paused to open it, except that perhaps she hoped there would be pictures of her mother there.

There were a number of them, some that Buddy had never seen before. The ones in the front of the book were old, when the sisters were little girls, and then there were snapshots taken as they grew into their teens.

Buddy stopped flipping the pages, realizing that she was intruding on Addie's private things. The pages flopped back into place, but not before a loose, enlarged snapshot fell out onto the old-fashioned floral rug.

Automatically, Buddy stooped to pick it up and then stopped.

The picture had been taken in front of this very house, many years ago. She recognized Addie, looking young and happy, but that wasn't the surprising part. She was standing with her arm around a young man who was also laughing, and he had his arm around her, too.

The man was Buddy's father.

She stared, stupified.

Dad and Aunt Addie? Hugging each other?

She brought the picture closer to her eyes to examine it more carefully.

There was no question that the young man was Dan Adams. He was almost a dead ringer for Bart, taken when he was maybe only a few years older than Bart was now.

The voice from below drifted up the stairway. “Can't you find them, Buddy? On the dresser, just inside the door.”

Buddy jerked, jabbed the picture into the photo album, and spun toward the doorway. “I found them,” she called, and started downstairs. She had no idea why her father had been hugging Aunt Addie. It made her most uncomfortable as she descended to the ground floor and handed over Addie's glasses. Somehow she felt it was important, though she didn't know why.

At home Buddy had often helped her father with the cooking, and she was expected to clear the table and help with the dishes. Uncertain if she should offer or simply start picking up the bowls, she hesitated as Addie settled her glasses on her nose and began to read.

Cassie waited, too. “Did he send a check?”

“Umm. Yes, right here.” Addie paused in her reading long enough to fish the check out of the envelope. “He's not coming home for Grandpa's birthday party, though. He's too busy.”

Cassie's face fell. “It's not every day a person gets to be ninety-two. I thought it would be nice if Gordon came home for the party.”

“What party?” Grandpa Harry asked.

“Your birthday party, honey,” Cassie said,
leaning toward him and raising her voice slightly. “On the seventeenth.”

“I'm having a party? How old am I?”

“Ninety-two,” Cassie repeated.

“According to the Bible, a person's years are three score and ten. Isn't that seventy years?”

“Yes, but some live longer, and some live less. Grandma lived to be eighty, remember?”

And Mama had died at thirty-eight,
Buddy thought. It was hard to figure out why some died so young, and others lived to be so old.

Cassie stood up and reached for the nearest bowls, and Buddy moved to help her.

“Oh, thank you, dear. Just rinse them in the sink, there, and put them in the dishwasher. This way.”

“We never had a dishwasher,” Buddy said, obeying orders. “I usually wash the dishes.”

“I do most of the cooking, so Addie used to do most of the dishwashing, until she bullied Gordon into buying us a dishwasher,” Cassie stated.

Addie was distracted from her letter. “Well, he never does anything else for this family, does he? Grandpa's
his
relative as well as ours. There's
no reason he shouldn't pitch in and do his share, even if it's only with money for things we can use.”

Grandpa pushed the button on the talking watch, which squawked a response. “The time is 1:47 p.m.” He stood up, unhooked his cane from the back of his chair, and headed toward the bedroom that opened off the kitchen. “It's time for my nap,” he said to nobody in particular.

It hadn't taken long to load the dishwasher, and Cassie smiled at Buddy. “I guess we'd better get you settled, hadn't we? If you were going to stay for a while, we'd clear out that back bedroom upstairs. But it's got an awful lot of junk in it, and we figured since you'll probably be back with the rest of your family within a few days, maybe you wouldn't mind sleeping in the little sewing room. It has stuff stored in it, too, but it's not like upstairs.”

Again Addie put down her letter to comment. “What makes you think she's only going to be here for a few days? They don't know where Dan is, do they? Or if he's even coming back?”

“Of course he'
s coming back,” Buddy said quickly, shocked.

“He never was very responsible,” Addie asserted, to Buddy's further indignation. “Always doing things on the spur of the moment, without thinking of the consequences.”

Buddy bit her lower lip. That wasn't the way she thought of her father at all, but in Addie's house it probably wasn't polite to say so.

“That was a long time ago,” Cassie said soothingly. “I'm sure he's changed since then. Come along, Buddy, and we'll get you fixed up.”

“It's Friday. School's still open. Somebody should take her over and sign her up,” Addie said.

“School?” Buddy couldn't keep still for that. “Aunt Cassie's right. I'll probably only be here a few days. There's no need to go to school for that little time.”

“Nobody knows for sure, do they?” Addie asked. “The law says kids have to go to school, and there's no reason to get behind.”

“All right, just in case Dan and Bart don't show up by the first of the week, you can take her over and talk to Herbert,” Cassie said. “After
we get her squared away in the sewing room. Max could do it, but those seventh graders are off for a couple of days, I guess, so you'll have to do it.”