Year After Henry (9 page)

“You want any dessert?” he asked. When she shook her head, he closed the drawer and pulled open the bottom one, which held a few utensils and paper plates. He took two plates, a plastic knife, and two plastic forks from the drawer and arranged them on the desktop. He went over to a shelf against the wall. Jeanie saw a tall stack of paper cups towering there in a corner. Larry pulled two cups off the stack and then knelt to lift a liter of Coke out of a blue plastic wastebasket that was filled with melting ice.

Within minutes they were having tuna sandwiches, pickles, and cups of cold Coke on the top of Larry's desk. Jeanie couldn't remember the last time she'd felt so
alive.
Maybe the thing that all adults
really
want is to go back to their youth and try again, to get inside those old bedrooms with posters on the walls of movie stars and athletes, school pennants and class pictures, a place where the future is still locked out, a place where dreams can be tacked up over the bed. A safe place.

“Now I understand the problem of the padlock,” Jeanie said. “Coke is good, but wine would be better.”

“Did Mom ask you to come?”

Jeanie took another bite of the tuna sandwich before she answered.

“Well, sort of,” she said. “She's worried about you.”

“You can't blame her,” Larry said. “I mean, imagine raising a son and watching him go off into the world, all shiny and new and full of potential. Then one day you open your door to find him back, hairy and potbellied and turning gray, all that potential leaked out of him like air from a balloon.”

“You're not potbellied,” Jeanie said.

“Of course, if it were Henry,” Larry added, “she'd be putting a private bath in this bedroom, buying new blankets and curtains.”

Jeanie said nothing. With her fork, she rolled a small pickle around her plate. She looked up at Larry.

“Did it take him dying for us to understand how much he shaped us?” she asked. “Did it take him disappearing, for Christ's sake, before we realized we were just satellites spinning around him?” Larry nodded. Henry was a tough act to follow. After all, where do planets go when there's no sun? He took the bottle of Coke and twisted off its cap. The carbonation inside let loose a loud
hiss
, as if reminding Larry once more of the school bus, those gushes of Jonathan's life that he was no longer privy to. He filled his paper cup and gestured to Jeanie, offering to pour her more, too. She shook her head.

“Hey, how about dinner Thursday night?” Larry asked. “The senior Munroes have a meeting with my fellow postal workers to put the finishing touches on Henry's memorial service. I cracked my door this morning and heard them talking about it.”

Jeanie thought about this.

“What's the dress code?” she asked.

“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” Larry said. “Take your pick.”

“You got a date,” Jeanie said. “Want me to bring the wine?”

...

At three o'clock Evie Cooper opened the door to her first client, Marilyn Foucher, who seemed almost frightened to step inside. This didn't surprise Evie. Often, it's the skeptics who are most scared, knowing that if they're proven wrong, they will have to rethink their lives.

“Don't worry,” said Evie, as she put a hand on Marilyn's shoulder. “It'll be okay. Come in and let's talk first, make sure this is what you want to do.”

Marilyn sat on the settee that Evie had pushed into the front room for her clients. She had redone the fabric on it herself, choosing a flowered pattern, light blues and lavenders, since color sets a tone, creates the atmosphere.

“This is a pretty room,” said Marilyn, looking at the crystals jangling from lamp shades, the framed prints of angels keeping watchful eyes on the earth, the hanging Boston ferns, the potted palms. A pretty room, and Evie had thought about its décor for many weeks before she had opened a can of paint or bought a curtain. She wanted it to be a place where the living could feel safe.

“Thank you,” Evie said. “I want you to feel comfortable here.” She sat in the chair positioned a few feet from Marilyn and let a few seconds pass before she began her talk. “Now, as you may already know from Charlotte Davis, I don't pretend to have any answers to any big questions about life and death. But I believe that when we die, we do not cease to exist. I believe we live again. As a matter of fact, I know it, for I have seen the faces of the dead since I've been a very little girl. The first face I ever saw belonged to my own sister, Rosemary Ann. For some reason, God—or whatever power may be—has seen fit to give me this talent. I wish I could share it with you for free, I really do. But if I can accept a reasonable fee for my services, then I can spend more time with folks like you, and in doing so, I hope I can bring you some measure of peace.”

Evie knew this warm-up speech by heart. In the earlier years, she had tried to make it original for each and every client, since she wanted them to know that she was truly sincere. But after a number of years, it became easier to remember the words and then deliver the speech to each new person as if it had just been written.

“I do not ask the dead questions for you,” Evie went on. “As a matter of fact, none of them speak to me, not since that day I saw my sister. Instead, I study their faces, their eyes, and in this way, they are able to tell me what is still in their hearts. If you have visitors today, and if I see them clearly enough to sketch them, you'll be able to see this for yourself.”

Marilyn began to cry. Evie wished she had some kind of assistant for times like this. As much as she cared about the pain and sorrow that life delivered to her clients, it was getting harder and harder for her to be the sounding board for it. And then, these people were mostly strangers to her. She wanted to say to each of them,
Listen, I know you're hurting, I'm hurting, the whole world is hurting. I know life sucks, but it's still the only game in town. So live with your chin back. And hey, believe it or not, the hardest part for me is to channel them. But you don't know that, do you? You think the spirits come to me as easy as turning on your TV set. Well, they don't. They make me pay for every smile, every nod, every wink. Thank the gods for cannabis, and if you really want to do something to help me channel your loved ones, then cast your vote to make the stuff legal.

“Sit back now and relax,” is what Evie said to Marilyn Foucher. She reached for her sketchbook and placed it on her lap, flat across her legs the way she liked it. She selected one of the lead drawing pencils she had sharpened that morning and left in a vase by her chair. Slowly, delicately, she began to make light circles at the top right corner of the page, her pencil going around and around as if it were thinking for itself. All this time, Evie kept her eyes to the right of Marilyn's shoulder, although sometimes spirits also came in at the left. Other times, they were on both sides, if the sitter's energy were so strong that it pulled many of them at once. And then she saw it forming, the face of an older woman she guessed to be seventy years old, maybe older. The contours of the face came first, shaping themselves as if it were a paint-by-numbers picture, the features appearing, the texture of hair and then the hairdo itself, the ball on the end of the nose, the thick eyebrows, the thin lips, the brown mole above the left eye, the dark eyes that seemed so kind. And then, as always, something to nail it, something to say,
Yes, this is who I think it is!
as if all those other things weren't enough. When Evie's pencil finally stopped, a dark-colored cat was cradled in the woman's arms. This was the part of the drawing that Evie referred to as the
coup
de
grâce
. What was it her mother had said, that day in the green Kaiser when Rosemary Ann had first appeared? She had stared down at the crude drawing and whispered, “I'd forgotten about Rosemary Ann's necklace.” The
coup
de
grâce,
that's what it was. Evie had seen it work time and again over the years. She could thank the dead for this visual help. It was that one
something
that took away the last shred of doubt for the sitter. Today it was the cat. She gave the finished drawing to Marilyn Foucher, who stared at it for a time before she spoke.

“Mama never did go anywhere without that goddamn cat,” Marilyn said.

When Jeanie got back from Fillmore's Drugstore it was almost noon and Chad was still in bed. She could knock on his door, the way she often did before Henry died, and say, “Chad, honey, you're missing a beautiful day out there.” But this was back when nothing was really wrong. This was in that other life when Chad might oversleep a half hour if he'd been up late the night before, watching some rental movie with a friend. But these days he was sleeping in later and later, rising sometimes as Jeanie was having her lunch, that dazed look on his face that seemed to ask if he'd missed something important.

Jeanie put her keys down in the glass bowl that she kept on the hall table. The house was deathly still, and that was the adjective she had come to prefer when she walked in and stood in the hallway, stunned by the silence that settled around her. What she wished now, knowing that she couldn't undo the dead, was that Lisa were back home again, still growing up, still dating different boys until she found the right one, still talking about the children she might have one day. Jeanie wished this as much for Chad as she did for herself. Lisa had been seven years older than her brother and it seemed as if he was too busy riding his bike, fishing, playing softball with the guys, to fully appreciate his sister's presence in the house, to understand that one day it would be gone. But how does a kid know that? That's what Jeanie often woke to ask herself, those nights when she heard Chad tiptoeing up to his room, thinking she wouldn't hear him and ask again why he was out so late. He had that big, wide upstairs to himself, and had for some time before Henry died. How could she, as his mother, have helped prepare Chad any better than she did? What mistakes did she make that other mothers might have seen coming? Did they possess some rare wisdom that had been denied her? Did they tuck their children in at night, kiss them, and whisper into their ears,
I
know
you're just a kid, but be careful. Be oh so very careful. Touch each day as if it's made of glass.

In the kitchen, Jeanie could smell the leftover aromas of her own breakfast that morning, the cup of coffee, the waffle she had taken a single bite from before tossing it out for the birds. The bowl of cereal she had left for Chad was still waiting on the table, covered in clear wrap, next to a glass of orange juice, also covered. She wondered if Chad knew how hard she worked to make it appear that life was going on as usual, that this was just another day, another bowl of cornflakes. She went past the table to the fridge and opened the door. She bent and pulled out one of the plastic bins at the bottom, the one on the right, the one designated to hold Chad's favorite drinks. Two cans of Pepsi were neatly arranged at the top of the bin, along with a package of cheddar cheese and some candy bars. Jeanie shuffled the Pepsi and cheese and candy aside and counted the cans of beer that lay hidden beneath.
One, two, three, four
. Chad used to share that refrigerator bin with Lisa, years before Jeanie ever imagined he would one day hide beer in there. Instead, it had been his Cherry and Vanilla Cokes that had vied with Lisa's Snapples for space. Now, well, the whole bin was his.

Lisa.
While Jeanie had watched from behind a kitchen curtain, watched as Chad horsed around with the neighborhood guys, still only twelve years old, Lisa had been with her girlfriends, up in her lavender bedroom, where they were all growing up too quickly. Boys were so different from girls. Boys seemed to hang on to childhood much longer. Once girls started their periods, once their breasts began to grow into soft mounds beneath their sweaters, it was as if they heard a silent language whispered to them by the wind. They put dolls that were still like new up onto shelves where they were to be looked at and admired, but no longer played with. They packed away the Judy Blume books, knowing one day their daughters might read them. They looked with pride upon the snowy white pads or those thin boxes of slim Tampax that were designed for tiny bodies. They felt suddenly
older,
not knowing the rivers of blood that lay ahead with the years, not even caring about cramps, or back pain, or the whole inconvenience of what a boy would surely consider an alien act upon a human body. Girls got down to the business of growing up. And they did it so much faster than boys. At least, that's what had happened to Jeanie and her friends, and it's what she had seen happen in her own home, to her own daughter. And then Lisa had moved to Portland to take a job at a small advertising firm, and that's where she met Patrick Bailey. The wedding had come and gone so fast, as if the day were made of nothing more than lace and satin. All Jeanie could remember of it was how beautiful Lisa looked as she walked down the aisle on Henry's arm. And then, with Henry gone less than four months, Lisa announced that she was pregnant. “I know it's bad timing, Mom,” Lisa's girlish voice had told her, the night she called with the news. “But it was an accident.” Hearing this, Jeanie had to smile. Lisa had been an accident too, many long years before, a wonderful accident. Now she would have her own family to watch grow up, to fuss over, to guide wisely. That's when Jeanie knew it was time to turn her only daughter's bedroom into something more useful than storage space for abandoned dolls and Judy Blume books with worn covers. Had Chad come to realize that there were only empty spaces in the house where his sister had been? That her departure was like a little death, too? Now and then, a reminder of Lisa Munroe still turned up when Jeanie least expected it. An old hairbrush. A lost earring that Jeanie found while vacuuming. A blue cotton hair band. It was amazing to her how quickly she had begun referring to Lisa's old bedroom as
the
guest
room
, all those teenaged leftovers gone into boxes in the attic, as if childhood and adolescence were things that could be boxed up and put away. It had happened so fast that Jeanie didn't know how any human being could ever prepare for it. If a
mother
wasn't ready for it herself, how could she warn her
son
? Besides, Jeanie had come to see lives like one of those Hollywood action movies Chad was forever renting. Sometimes, lives play out while you're in the kitchen getting a snack.

After making sure the beers were still covered, Jeanie pushed the bin back in and closed the fridge door. What had she been telling herself for weeks now, once she was finally able to come out of her own stupor enough to pay more attention to Chad?
Every
teenage
boy
is
going
to
drink
a
beer
once
in
a
while. That's how he impresses the girls, not to mention how he handles peer pressure.
At least, that's how Henry had seen it. So, when Jeanie occasionally smelled alcohol on Chad's breath as he hurriedly kissed her cheek and then went past her, up the stairs and into his room, the closing of his door like the period to a sentence of words he could never speak to her, she had remembered what Henry told her.
He's a boy, he's growing up, he'll be okay, he's our kid, we raised him right.
She had been a fool even before Henry died, and now she was a bigger fool. Now, she had seen with her own eyes as Chad waited outside the 7-Eleven until an older boy could deliver him some beer, in the middle of the day. And so Jeanie had driven home and gone on a search, what the cops call a raid. Where else to keep beer but in the fridge? Had she become so ineffective as a parent that her teenaged son didn't have to go any farther than her own kitchen in order to hide booze from her? What would Henry do? Would he slap Chad on the back and say, “That's my boy, that's my man”? Or would he be furious, red-faced, so angry that his son would know immediately the best thing to do was to give up, give in, as Chad had always done in times of trouble? Those two Ds on his report card. The time he was caught smoking at Sunday school and still only twelve. The time he put the roadkill—apparently a squirrel, since it still had a bushy tail attached to the flattened body—into his science teacher's mailbox. The science teacher happened to also be the football coach. That one had hit Henry too close to home for comfort. “I'm a gee-dee mailman!” he'd screamed at his son until the boy had gone so pale that Jeanie stepped in. “He'll go apologize first thing in the morning,” she'd said, calming Henry and reassuring Chad at the same time. She had learned well how to do that, how to wield the double-edged sword in her life that was forever falling between her husband and her son. This was how she discovered that while boys aren't always as anxious to grow up as girls, they use that extra time to demand more of each other. Lisa was Daddy's frilly little girl. Chad was Daddy's chance at finally becoming a professional athlete. Sometimes, or so Jeanie had come to realize, the big themes in life are so small and simple, they're almost laughable.

When the phone rang, it frightened Jeanie at first. Ever since that morning when she had to call the ambulance, she dreaded holding a telephone to her ear.
Symbolic
is what the psychologist called it. Jeanie didn't need to pay her money every hour to learn this. She already knew it. But it was more than the memory of those minutes she lay in bed next to Henry, his body cold, his heart finished, that caused her to panic when a phone rang at her house. The funny thing was, for a year now, she was afraid that when she answered it, she'd hear Henry on the other end of the line. This is how the years can train you, like a dog that jumps to a bell. Every day Henry had phoned her from work.
How's it going, baby? You okay? Listen, what about pork chops for supper? I'm starving.
Later, as the years unwound themselves, his message had begun to change.
Don't worry about supper, honey, I'm stopping for a beer with a couple of the guys. No need to cook. You take the evening off, okay?
At the end, his calls were kind but brief. Sometimes, they were just messages on the answering machine that Jeanie played to an empty house.
Jeanie, it's me. I'll be home about ten. Click.

It was Fillmore's Drugstore calling. They had received the application she left there earlier, asking for her old job back. It was Mrs. Leona Fillmore herself.

“Jeanie, if we get an opening, you're the first one I'll be phoning,” she promised. It was after Jeanie thanked her and agreed that
Yes, the memorial service for Henry will be very nice
and hung up the phone nice and neat, that she broke down and wept.

...

Evie made her way down the bar, picking up empty bottles and dumping the butts from ashtrays, then wiping them clean. Billy Randall was just finishing his Jack and Coke, with his usual beer chaser. Evie didn't ask if he wanted a refill. She knew Billy's habits by now. A Vietnam vet who kept to himself, Billy always left before the bar grew packed and noisy. He nodded good-bye to Evie and slipped out the front door.

At Andy Southby's favorite stool, the one in front of the small poker machine that sat atop the bar, Evie wiped faster, making large round circles, as if the bigger the swipe, the bigger the rush. Pretending to be in a hurry was one way to avoid Andy, but it was early evening and the bar was still too empty to use customers as an excuse. She could always do a quick mop job on the floor behind the bar. Gail had spilled some Pepsi there the day before and the soles of Evie's tennis shoes were still sticking to the tiles every time she walked over the spot. Maybe by the time she was done mopping, Andy would have already lost his usual three dollars into the poker machine and the door would be swinging shut behind him. Before Evie could turn away and head for the mop stick out back, she heard a loud
pop!
She stopped, a small rush of anger coming up from inside, coming quickly, the way anger does when it wants you to say something fast, something you might be sorry for.

“Damn it, Andy,” she said to the young man who was perched with his face just inches from the five poker cards. “How many times have I told you not to crack your knuckles in here?” Andy hunched his shoulders, his eyes still on the brightly lit cards.

“It's just acoustics,” he said. He punched a couple buttons on the poker machine.

“It's obnoxious, is what it is,” said Evie. He shrugged again, another habit of his that was annoying to bar regulars. Evie wished Andy Southby would find another establishment to make his own personal hangout, maybe one filled with people who actually liked him.

“I can't help it,” said Andy. This was followed by another loud
pop!
“I heard a doctor talking about it on the radio once. When you pop your knuckles, the change in pressure releases nitrogen into the spaces around the joint, and
that
causes a small release of endorphin. I been doing it for years and now I'm addicted.”

“Well, from now on endorphin is illegal in this bar,” said Evie. “Unless you want to get busted, stop it.”

Evie went for the mop. If only some college would take Andy Southby. There had even been a suggestion one night by another of the regulars that they take up a collection by putting a big glass bottle on the bar. Every time Andy popped his knuckles, or said something obnoxious, or hunched his peaked shoulders, which was often, another dollar or two could go into the Send Andy Southby to College Fund. But there had to be a college that would take him first.

Evie was mopping the last of the sticky Pepsi spots when she saw Chad step into the bar, the orange bonnet pushed back on his sweaty forehead. Again, it caught her unawares. Chad had that easy stride that Henry used to have, as if his legs were thinking for themselves. Evie watched as he walked up to the bar and pulled out a dollar bill.

“One Megabucks ticket,” he said. “But not a machine pick. I wanna pick my own.” Evie leaned the mop against the bar, wiped her hands, and went to the ticket machine. She waited for Chad to give her the numbers. He did so slowly, as if wanting to be sure there were no mistakes. But after hearing the first two, Evie could have punched them in all on her own.
Nine. Eight. One. Twenty-seven. Four. Forty-two
. Henry's lucky numbers. When the machine spit out the ticket, Evie handed it to the boy.