Winterbound (20 page)

Caroline edged off before firing her parting shot.

“Well, anyway I just came round by the kitchen an' the potatoes have started to burn, so I guess …”

Garry sat back violently on her heels.

“Oh, Lord! Where's Kay?”

“I saw her going up the road a while back. I did pull the saucepan off, Garry, but I guess you better look at them.”

“I guess I had!”

Garry fled to the kitchen, where an only too-familiar smell of burned saucepan greeted her nose; the kitchen clock marked twelve-thirty. Creamed sauce still to make for the mince, and the salad not even prepared.

“You think anyone wouldn't walk off up the road without a word and leave potatoes to look after themselves all morning! What on earth's got into Kay anyway, these days?” she muttered as she clattered round. “I'll attend to all this. You go wash your hands, Caroline, and get the table set,
quick
. And then go up the hill and tell Kay dinner's ready.”

Everything was done, the cream sauce made, the rescued potatoes keeping hot in the oven, before Caroline returned, alone and important.

“Where's Kay? Did you find her?”

“She said to go ahead and start. She an' Charles …”

“Mr. Bassett,” Garry corrected.

“Well, you all call him Charles!”

“What grown-up people do doesn't include little girls. I suppose they were busy measuring or something.”

“They weren't busy either,” Caroline burst out. “If you want to know, they were just sittin' out on a rock back of the house, going chu-chu-chu about nothing at all with their heads together, and when I told Kay dinner was ready all she said was to run along and not come bothering.”

Garry drew a long breath, staring at the minced ham.

“Heavens!” she thought to herself. “I wish Penny would hurry up and come back!”

Kay's Day

AS a matter of fact there had been something rather odd about Penny's letters lately. Usually she wrote long and gossipy accounts of everything, the people she met, all the little things that she and Peggy had been doing. But her last few letters had seemed unaccountably flat; tame notes referring to this and that but giving no particular news, except that everything was all right and she hoped to be home before long. If not exactly constrained they were so unlike her natural self that Kay grew quite concerned.

“Isn't she funny? She doesn't mention a single thing that was in our last letters, and she must have had them by now. I just don't make it out. She might tell us a little more.”

“Maybe she's just fed up with the place and can't think of anything new to write about,” Garry suggested.

Kay frowned. “The whole thing is so sort of detached and funny, but the writing looks all right. She couldn't
be having a nervous breakdown or something, and Peggy not wanting to tell us?”

“Not Penny. I tell you, Kay, she's been writing long letters all winter and now she's suddenly got bored with it. That's what it reads like to me. It's the sort of stuff you write when you have to fill a page in and don't know what to say. I've done it myself.”

But that explanation didn't satisfy Kay, haunted by visions of a changed and preoccupied Penny, too busy with her own thoughts and affairs to be interested in other people's. Nothing about their own eagerness to have her home again, but just pleasant little references to the weather and sitting in the sun. If that was what a winter in New Mexico did to one . . .

Meantime she stitched away at the curtains she was making for Penny's room, pale green glazed chintz with a piping of dull rose to go with the new wall paper. Martin had given up the best part of one precious holiday to scraping and waxing the old painted bureau that had always looked so shabby, while Caroline hung about disconsolately until Garry had a bright idea.

“I tell you what. You make her a dish garden. You can use that flat blue bowl on the top pantry shelf. Fix it with moss and Quaker ladies and it'll look lovely on her window ledge.”

“But they'll die before Penny gets here,” objected
Caroline, who had been counting the days off one by one on the grocery calendar in the kitchen, seeing in her mind's eye the long space yet to cover before the little black crosses reached to the end of the month.

“If they do you can always get fresh ones. Don't be such a misery, but go and start it right now. Take a basket and you can have my trowel to dig them up with; it's out there by the cold-frame.”

The arranging and rearranging of that dish garden took most of Caroline's attention for days to come. She planted it over at least a dozen times, and whenever she was needed to set the table or dry the silver it always happened that she was busy “fixing Penny's garden,” but at least it gave her something to think about during the days of waiting. For there was still no news of the exact date of Penny's arrival, and still those brief pleasant letters arrived at intervals of a few days each, regular as clockwork.

“Suppose she never did come home,” said Garry one morning. “Suppose we just keep getting these queer letters day by day, and nothing else ever happens. Suppose . . .”

But at this gruesome suggestion Caroline began to snivel, and Kay said sharply: “Don't tease the child like that! You're getting her all worked up.”

“I was only fooling. Don't be silly, Caroline.”

“Well, when you're fooling you sound like you weren't fooling, and I don't like it!”

“Ambrose Bierce just disappeared and nobody ever found him,” said Martin, who kept curious and unexpected bits of information stored in his mind, to produce usually at inopportune moments. “And Neal said there was a man once lived over on Seven Hill and one day he just walked out of his front door and nobody ever saw him again.”

“Which is exactly,” said Garry, “what I would like to do myself, one of these days.”

She wandered out into the spring sunshine where Emily was playing ball with Arabella. Hands clasped round her knees, she sat watching the tiny racing figure, so like a skein of orange wool blown to and fro by the wind, until Emily said abruptly: “That'll do,” put the ball in her pocket and turned, while Arabella dropped panting on the grass.

“What's the trouble?”

“Spring,” said Garry, digging her fingers viciously into the soft earth beside her. “Doesn't it ever get you that way? I'm cross and disagreeable and restless. I want to do something and I don't know what I want to do. I'd like to walk out on everything and go some place where I'd never been before—and
stay
there!”

“Heavens!” said Emily, looking at her with interest.

“I mean it.”

“I'm sure you do. Everyone gets like that once in a while. Usually it's the result of too much family. I know all the symptoms. It gets you all of a sudden, like measles.” She spoke jokingly but her sharp eyes lingered on Garry's face, for she had been well aware of those symptoms for some time. It had been a long winter, and most of its responsibilities had fallen on Garry's shoulders, sturdy, but not sturdy enough to go on forever without rebellion. “Did you ever sit down and think,” she went on cheerfully, “just what you would do if you suddenly came into a fortune? Not a big fortune, but a nice comfortable-sized one, that you could do what you liked with.”

“I know exactly what I'd do,” said Garry, falling promptly into the game. “I'd send Kay to Europe for two years, first of all. I'd have Martin prepared for college. Then I'd see that Penny and Caroline were settled somewhere comfortably—or they could go on a trip if they wanted to.”

“In fact, everyone nicely placed.” Emily nodded, thoroughly enjoying this little insight. “You make me think of a hen with a bunch of chickens. And then what?”

Garry grinned suddenly.

“Then I'd take what money I might need for emergencies myself, and put it in a bank some place. And I'd
start out and work my way all around the country, taking different jobs just as they happened and trying any darn thing I fancied that would support me for as long as I was interested in it. It may sound crazy,” she went on, ruffling Arabella's orange mane as she spoke, “but I've often wondered whether a person couldn't do that if they really set their mind to it, and I'd like to try it out. Maybe I'd get clear across the continent and maybe I wouldn't get any further than the next township, but I'd have a swell time trying.”

“What kind of jobs?”

“Anything. I don't mean swanky jobs. Any old thing that would pay my way as I went along. There's nearly always something that somebody wants done, if you look around you.”

“True,” said Emily.

“I'd like to know what it feels like to wait on table or work in a store or pick fruit, or . . . oh, just the sort of things anyone could do.”

“You might advertise,” said Emily meanly.

“If I did,” Garry retorted, “I bet I'd write an ad that would get me the kind I want, anyway. Hello, there's the mailman.”

She jumped up and strolled down to the gateway where the dusty creaking car had just come to a pause on its way downhill. A queer sort of castle in the air, Emily
Humbold thought, watching the straight swing of her shoulders, but there was one thing about Garry; she never wove schemes about things that she couldn't do.

“All for you, as usual. There's a card about some auction; we'll keep that for Penny. Oh, and a letter for Kay.”

Kay was indoors, turning the last hem on Penny's curtains. She looked at the envelope heading.

“Another refusal. Well, they've taken a little longer about it, this time.”

“Open it and see. Heavens, Kay, don't be such a poke! What did I tell you?”

For Kay's face had changed as she read the closely typewritten page.

“They like it. It's some woman writing and she wants me to come there and talk it over with her. She doesn't say for certain, but it sounds as if they were interested.” The color had rushed into Kay's cheeks. “Look, Garry, do you suppose that really does mean anything?”

“Of course it does. Do you imagine she'd drag you all the way up to town to talk it over if it didn't.”

“She only says ‘if I'm likely to be in town any time soon.'”

“You're likely to be in town tomorrow morning. You'll make that eight-o'clock train if I have to push you on it.” Garry had taken prompt command of the
situation. “You'll have time to see these people and settle everything, and get the afternoon train back again. Edna will take you down.”

There was no need for Edna or the train journey either, for as soon as Charles heard the news he offered to drive Kay into the city and back. He had business in town himself that could just as well be done tomorrow as any other day. It was to be an early start, with breakfast along the road, and as Kay swallowed a hasty cup of coffee next morning she gave a last anxious look at the plain tailored suit, carefully pressed the night before from its winter creases, the town shoes that Garry had finally located after long search in one of the attic trunks, and Cousin Carrie's Christmas silk stockings, useful now for the first time.

“Do I look all right?”

“Fine. Stop at the first decent store you come to and buy gloves, and you can leave that old pair in the car. And remember—act big and don't let them talk you down. And don't you sign any contract till Emily has looked it over for you. Good-bye and good luck!” Garry waved vigorously as the roadster sped down the hill, feeling that she had done her best, anyway, towards launching Kay on the high road to success.

With the children off to school ten minutes earlier than usual there was a long and tranquil day ahead.
Garry basked in the feeling of freedom and leisure that comes over any member of a family, no matter how united, when all the other members are comfortably off and out of the way. She tidied the house, baked a chocolate cake for supper, feeling unusually energetic, and set it to cool while she wandered over to the Rowes', to find Mary busy over her washtub in the kitchen while Tommy amused himself with a saucepan, a strainer, and a pail of soapsuds, making soup with the gravel outside the back door. It was long since she had had a good gossip with Mary, and the time flew until Neal's overalled figure, suddenly blocking the doorway, reminded her of lunch and a hungry Emily waiting across the road.

“Half the day gone,” Garry thought guiltily. “And I was going to get Penny's curtains up and the rest of the garden dug.”

“I expect I'll have to be packing my things before so very long,” Emily remarked casually as they sat over their coffee in the living room.

“You?” Garry stared at her in sudden dismay. “Indeed you won't. Why, you're one of the family. Penny would be furious if you were gone before she got here, after all we've written about you. We want you to stay all summer. Unless you don't like it any more,” she added. “Maybe you've got something else to do.”