Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  Marg says, “You never seen a fat woman move so fast!”

  I guess she was up off that couch and hit the floor running. Tammy hadn’t bothered to put the chain on the door.

  Now, you’ve got to wonder why. But, see, this is the thing with people that are what Meredith calls “self-destructive,” like Tammy. You learn how to treat yourself from how your parents treat you when you’re young.

  Did yous know that? That’s a big thing I learned. Let me repeat that for yous. You learn how to treat yourself from how your parents treat you. So, you see, if your parents hadn’t no regard for your safety or your well-being, you won’t grow up to have no regard for your own safety or well-being. You might be apt to leave the safety chain undid, when anybody with a normal notion of self-care would fasten it.

  Anyhow, Tammy’s was not on.

  Marg, she felt bad that she never thought about it neither.

  Somebody’d got past the downstairs locks. And the door was just quietly jiggling in the frame.

  Marg says she did zero to sixty in one half-second, making for the chain.

  “Them two kids of Tammy’s have only been just starting to sleep good. Last thing they need is Asshole busting the door down in the middle of the night!”

  That’s Marg. Doing the fat lady world record half-second sprint, nightgown flapping. Nothing in her head but keeping them kids from any more bad dreams.

  I guess she rammed that chain home just before the lock give. Then she’s dialing the cops.

  They done all right, too. Got there right quick, blocked all the downstairs exits before they made a sound. Searched the building. Caught old Asshole in the janitor’s closet, down in the laundry room.

  Marg give a shudder. She says, “What is it with laundry rooms?”

  I’m thinking, and janitors’ closets.

  Marg had been getting so she could go down there and run a load sometimes, overcoming her old memories. Now she’s back washing her things upstairs in a bucket.

  Anyways, that looked good on Asshole. He got charged with illegal entry and some stuff to do with his restraining order.

  Marg says she never wanted to be a frigging security guard; she wanted to be a nurse.

  I says, “You’re doing the best out of all of us.”

  “Nah,” she says, “Sally is.”

  “Next to Sally.”

  “You were doing great too, Rose,” Marg tells me.

  “Well, I sure screwed that up.”

  “Dave might give you another chance.”

  “Why should he?”

  “He loves you.”

  I says, “Why should he?”

  Then Marg says, “There’s lots of good reasons anybody can love you, Rose. You’re a good person. You got a great drive in you, to work for a better life. But I don’t think it’s about the reasons, so much. People just feel love or they don’t. Dave, he happens to love you.”

  “Marg, I’m a piece of shit. I cheated on him.”

  “That type of thing always was your downfall,” she says, “just the same as double chocolate doughnuts with sprinkles always was mine. I went out and snuck two, day before yesterday. We’re going to both have to keep working on things.”

  I pour it all out to good old Marg. I tell her I was trying so hard and everything was really and truly deep down better, and me and Dave was closer than I ever thought could be. And he’s the sweetest man alive, and I miss him a hundred times a day. I can’t even look at his giraffe coat hook on the wall or his fish Jell-O mould in the drawer, or his roses wallpaper border in the bedroom that he put up because of Rose being my … I break down bawling. Kleenex is out, and alls I can see to grab for my running nose is one of the napkins that Sally give me.

  “Look,” Marg says, she says, “Dave knows that you got issues. You got to tell him your issues are to do with sex, Rose,” she says. “You been doing good for a year. You screwed up once. You’re real sorry. You’re going to try harder from now on.”

  I stood there, hunched over, wrecking the napkin with blowing my nose in it and bawled in Marg’s ear.

  “Oh Marg! It’s a lot frigging worse than sneaking doughnuts.”

  She says, “He loves you. You talk to him. Tell him you’re awful sorry.”

  “How could he ever forgive me?”

  “Well maybe he can and maybe he can’t. But, if you want my advice, I think you better tell him and see.”

  So then of course, Marg got on the phone to Sally. Told her me and Dave had had a fight.

  25.

  I GET UP SATURDAY MORNING and there’s feet in the downstairs hall. I look down and there’s the grey top of Dave’s dad steaming up the stairs. Blonde top of Sally marching right behind him. I shut the door quiet and quick. I know that the two of them’s here to set me straight. Just the way they clump up them stairs. They’ve been driving since dawn. They don’t want no bullshit. If you don’t think somebody can say all that by just the way they stomp up a set of stairs, you should’ve heard them two.

  I ran and hid in the bathroom. Combed my hair. Thought about what a low bag of scum I have been to this good man’s good son. Listened to them knocking.

  “Rose!” Sally shouts, like she’s my mother. “Open this door!”

  I dab cold water on my eyes. Then I crawl out and let them in.

  “Could yous use a coffee?”

  I thought everybody in Strone would know the whole thing by now, and what a whore I was. But it turned out Marg hadn’t said nothing about that part.

  Dave was back there staying with Jan and Tom, working in the construction, letting on nothing hadn’t happened. Dave’s dad and Sally didn’t know nothing about me being the town tramp. They didn’t even know me and Dave’d had a fight until Marg told them.

  “So now what’s all this about?” Dave’s dad, he goes right for the point.

  “I’m not fit,” I says, “for as fine a man as your son.”

  “Pretty hard on yourself, ain’t you?”

  Sally busts in with some of her church talk. “All we, like sheep, have gone astray,” she says.

  I’m getting out cookies. “What did yous want? I got windmill cookies a guy at work’s selling for the Dutch Reformed. Or could yous eat a meal?”

  They didn’t eat breakfast yet! The big sweet idiots drove all the way down here to me without even stopping for breakfast. So I fry eggs while I’m trying to give a rough idea of just how far astray this particular sheep has went.

  Dave’s dad wipes the toast crumbs off the corner of his mouth. He says, “I figure you and Dave’ll be all right.”

  “No!” I yell that at the two of them.

  “Faith, hope, and love remain,” Sally tells me, through her mouthful.

  I yell at her nothing at all remains. I’m a goddamn whore.

  Dave’s dad stands up. He ain’t used to people screaming that word over the eggs and coffee.

  But Sally, she’s one of us, of course, and she’s used to you-name-it. So she don’t even quit spreading her jam. She says, “You’re not a whore, Rose. You’re the survivor of childhood sex abuse, which can work out looking similar, but ain’t.”

  “Why not if it acts the same?”

  “Because,” Sally says, “it’s a thing that was done to you. Sit down, Al. It was done to you when you were a poor little girl like Tammy’s Meghan, there, and Jenny. You think it’s going to be their fault if they got some stuff to work through later on? Well, do you? It’s going to be all their own fault if they screw up sometimes, when they’re first trying to get their life straightened out? So, there you go.”

  “I can act any way I want and just blame it on somebody else a long time ago, is that it?”

  “Course not. You got to try your damnedest.”

  “I was trying!”

  “That’s alls you can do.�
��

  “I made all these stupid stepping stones.” I grabbed them out of the kitchen drawer and threw them all over the floor. I’m crying. I says, “What’s the use? I’m just that kind. I’m a slut, for which there’s no help.”

  Sally keeps trying to tell me what comfortable words St. Paul saith, that to all who are heartily sorry for their transgressions….

  I start yelling about Dirk the jerk, how I don’t know enough to keep off his back stairs because I crave the adrenaline rush and the secret sex.

  Dave’s dad, he’s like at a skeet shoot, with all this flying by and blowing up. His ears are hanging out like this is more about the seamy side than what he heard in his thirty winters at a lumber camp.

  Finally I says, “Look,” I says, “I gotta go get Jenny. We’ll take her to the park.”

  Sally drove me over in the T-Bird. Dave’s dad, he stayed at the apartment. Said he’d clean up. (Looking for a rest.)

  On the way to my place, Jenny says, “I want to phone Dave.”

  “I don’t know the number, honey.”

  Al was washing dishes with his back to the door when we come in.

  I’m just starting to tell Jenny, “There’s a man here who is…”

  But she caught sight of the plaid shirt, drowned me out with a shout, made a running leap for Dave’s dad.

  Then she jumps back and stares at him.

  Al says, “Hi there. Did you think I was Dave?” He says, “I’m not him but I know him real good. He’s been telling me all about you.”

  Dave’s dad was a hit at the park. He knew how to teach somebody to skip a stone (which ain’t the same thing as just knowing how to do it yourself). Me and Sally sat on a bench and looked at the wrist-flicking lessons there, while she tried to tell me that the Lord forgave me. My throat was burning to cry.

  Then Sally went and played with Jenny. Dave’s dad took a turn at me. “Back in my day,” he says, “if a woman done like what you done, that’d be the end of her, far as any man was concerned.”

  I hung my head. I wasn’t going to be able to hold back from bawling much longer.

  “But,” Al says, “times are changing.”

  Head still low, I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.

  “Times are opened up nowadays. People talk about things they never used to. That’s all to the good,” he says, “because life ain’t clear cut. A person can get all turned around and do a fool thing. A wrong thing. But that don’t mean there’s no good in that person or no chance of them getting themself straightened out. Used to be, women who strayed was automatically wrote right off. Not so much now.”

  I don’t know if yous have been up real early, when it’s still dark? Did yous notice, long time before the sun really rises, it already ain’t so dark? That’s about where I was. Sort of a lighter grey starting to dawn on me there, with Al hinting I might not have to be automatically wrote right off of Dave’s good books.

  Soon as we get back to my place, the phone rings. It’s a nurse at the home. “I have somebody here who would like to talk to you.”

  “Josie? Are you phoning me, Josie? Hey! Wow! That’s great that you can phone now! How are you? Sorry I haven’t gotten in to see you lately. I been kind of busy. Some stuff going on here. Listen, guess who’s here today? Sally come to visit! She’ll say ‘Hi’ to you.”

  Josie cuts through this crap, and she says, “Man at the door with a lucky ticket.” That’s all I can get out of her.

  Sally talks to her for a while. Tells her all about how things are going back north. Tells her the Good Luck Restaurant’s brightened up since they’re using her tablecloths. Bought a bunch of them off her.

  All them tablecloths Sally made on faith, a year ago last winter, is coming into use, apparently. Not at a hotel of our own. But still, they ain’t sitting in a bag under Sally’s bed neither. And Sally, she’s not laying in bed.

  “She’s got my barn half full of yard sale beds,” Dave’s dad, in the background, tells me.

  Oh boy. Sally with an empty barn to fill! There’s a thought.

  I say, “Put a stop to her, Al. I’m not kidding you. She’ll fill available space like a gas vapour.”

  Josie wants me again. Sally hands me the phone.

  I hear Josie’s little voice. “A man at the door. With a lucky ticket.”

  I says, “You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  She didn’t say nothing. Sat there waiting.

  I says, “Okay, Josie.” I says, “I hear you.”

  Still waiting.

  Finally, I says, “What do you want me to say? I’ll try. Okay? I’ll try again!”

  That was alls she wanted, I guess, because she just gently hung up.

  Dave’s dad “just happened to have,” in his shirt pocket, Jan and Tom’s number, where I could call Dave.

  Jenny was colouring with Sally, kneeling up to the coffee table in the front room. I didn’t think she heard. But Jenny don’t miss much. She knows we got the number now to call Dave. And I’m not going to hear the last of it until I call him.

  I start for the kitchen. Sal gets up and follows me. Wants to know how everybody’s doing. I told her about what happened at Tammy’s place.

  I say, “Can you believe that Tammy was all set to go right back to the way things was before? Just because of her tax form!” I says. “She didn’t know how to fill it in, so she was right ready to waltz back to Asshole.”

  Sally, she’s standing there leaning her back against the broom closet, just looking at me. I remember I’ve did worse than Tammy. She was just thinking of going right back into her old mess. I’ve went and really did it.

  I let out a big sigh.

  “It’s like we’re on a rope,” I says to Sally, “and it’s tied to a centre post of misery so alls we can do is go in circles. The more we try to break free, the more we go in misery circles.”

  Sally hangs her head and shakes it. “I know,” she says. “Sometimes I still give up and sleep all day. Still!”

  Dave’s dad had came in, in time to hear the part about going in circles. He says, “You know, there’s been times in my life I thought I was going in circles. But when you come to look back on it, you see it wasn’t circles you was going in. It’s more like a set of spiral stairs.”

  He goes and borrows Jenny’s blue crayon, and he draws us a picture on the bottom of my shopping list. I can see his big old hand yet, that worked in lumber all them years—rough, arthritis knuckles—holding that little crayon and drawing us a picture of the set of spiral stairs that everybody’s on.

  “See, we start here.” He moves his finger, tracing up the spiral he’d drew. “Now see here where it loops back around. Looked at one way, you’d say we was right back where we started, eh. We’re back here on this here side of the circle. But are we in the same place?”

  On a spiral, of course, going around didn’t bring you to the same spot you started from.

  Sally says, “Higher up.”

  “That’s right,” he says. “And look here, if you keep going”—he showed us with his finger following the blue line—“you’re going to feel like you’re looping right back around again here. And here again. But the fact is you’re not, eh. You’re never going to be in the same place twice. It can feel like it. But you never are. You’re higher up every time because you’ve learned things. Long as you’re learning,” he says, “you’re going up.”

  When I’m kissing Jenny goodbye at the foster home, she makes me promise to call Dave. “Before sleep.”

  “Okay, honey.”

  “And make him come back.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Make him.”

  “I’ll try my very best. But I don’t know if he will.”

  God, between her and all the rest of them—!

  So I go home and there’s Sally and Dave
’s dad still parked in my front room, looking at me.

  “I’ll call,” I says.

  They sit there waiting.

  “Not while the two of yous are gawping.”

  So they finally leave.

  I dial the number and croak out to Jan that it’s me and I want to talk to Dave if he’s not busy.

  Dave comes on. Of course, with all of them after me, I haven’t had no time to think of what I’m going to say to him. “Oh Dave,” was as smart as I come out with.

  We fixed it up that he was coming to see me next weekend.

  Afterwards I called Marg all excited and brung her up to date and cried. She said she was real glad.

  Marg’s for being optimistic. She says look at how good things are going. She says, “The bad guys is pretty near all cleaned off the streets.”

  Marg’s dad, Josie’s Brent, and now Tammy’s Asshole was all in jail.

  “We’re in a different place to where we were this time last year!” she says. I hear the words echo.

  Learning, eh. Learning’s like that. You hear a new thing once and you’re going to hear it again soon. Have yous noticed that?

  I finally got myself over to see Josie. Sunday afternoon. She’s sitting in the sunroom. It’s one of them pretty, green days in April with sun and clouds. Josie’s looking at a green patch of the lawn there, lit up with sunshine. There’s red and pink tulips out in bloom.

  “You always say there’s hope for the world. Looks it today.”

  Josie turns her head. She’s something now! When she looks at you? The eyes on her! Big and strange in her little white face. You feel like you should bless yourself or take your hat off.

  Her thin little see-through fingers was resting on the dark green arm of the wheelchair there. I took and lifted her hand. It was cool and dry like a small, smooth stone.

  I said, “Thank you, Josie! Thanks for calling me!”

  “You climbed the stairs.”

  I said, “No, I took the eleva—oh.” Them stairs. “Yeah.”

  I sat and told her how I treated Dave and that he was coming in five days to see me anyways. How Jenny loves him and I hoped to God there was some way to patch it up, for her sake as much as my own.