Blessings

by Anna Quindlen

  Mrs. Blessing stood there until her legs threatened to give out. The hem of her nightgown dripped onto the floor. For just a moment she wondered whether she was having a particularly strange dream. Finally she found her way to the living room and sat down in a shabby chair by the window. She shone the flashlight on the old-fashioned striped material, and remembered that the chair had once been in her father’s study, to one side of the fireplace there. It seemed the only bit of sanity in the wild cacophonous night, and she clutched its arms. After a few minutes she went back to check, but the child was still there, sleeping peacefully while the alarm screamed on. She had read about the eye of a storm, about how it was the only still place in wild weather. This appeared to be it.

  If anyone had asked Skip where he’d least like to be on July fourth in a thunderstorm, the answer would have been easy: McGuire’s. But there he was, nursing a beer in a greasy mug, watching one of Ed’s younger brothers play a pinball machine with so much body English that it looked like he was going to slam Batman-a-rama through the back wall of the bar.

  “Yo, dude,” yelled the bartender over the noise of some country song, “ease up on the machine.”

  Skip looked at his watch. He figured he had roughly an hour before the baby would wake up. She’d seemed to settle in the last two days, eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping, with one pissed-off hour right around the end of the workday, as the sun was dropping down from the sky. He had to walk her then, back and forth, but when she finally dropped off there was a sweet quality of submission to her small body. She burped, spit up on his shirt, then went slack and silent. He realized that there was a point to that ungainly empty area between the human shoulder and chin: it was the perfect place to rest an infant.

  Nadine’s daughter had told Nadine, who had told him in her particular furious fashion, that some girl named Debbie had a letter for him from his father. That was the only thing that would bring him to McGuire’s now, although once he’d practically lived there. He looked around at the guys nursing their beers and playing pool and wondered for the first time in his life who the hell was taking care of their kids. Women, probably—wives or girlfriends or even their mothers, when the wives and the girlfriends went out or cut out. Skip figured he must be crazy, the only full-time single father in Mount Mason.

  He tapped his foot impatiently on the bar rail. He knew from living in their trailer those first few months after he got out of the county jail that Debbie cut hair during the day, and worked from ten to two at McGuire’s four nights a week. She might as well work there, Joe had said, since she’d be there anyway, and she could give him free beer. McGuire’s was what they all had instead of a social life, a tavern on the corner of Front and Route 211 that was long and narrow, with a pool table and a dartboard in the back room. Skip’s father and uncle used to drink there, and Joe’s father, and Ed’s, too. Chris had never had a father that anyone remembered, although Chris’s mother had been known to sit at the bar at McGuire’s until closing time. It set her apart when they were kids. Women went to McGuire’s when they were single, and then when they were married they went to baby showers or Tupperware parties or Weight Watchers or over to see their mother or their mother-in-law.

  McGuire’s was owned by a family named Jackson now, and they’d gone through a period, about ten years back, when they’d had somebody paint, in gold letters edged in black, “Bar and Restaurant” on the plate-glass window. And there were menus, and fancy coffees with booze in them, Irish and Neapolitan and whatever. It hadn’t been completely successful. Now occasionally someone would order a burger and fries, or those nachos that everyone had on the menu because you just popped them in the microwave. Most of the food consumed at McGuire’s consisted of the peanuts on the bar. Lots of the food consumed at McGuire’s got thrown up in the parking lot. Skip remembered the year after he graduated high school, when he was working the Burger King job, kneeling on the asphalt at least once a week, one time in snow so deep that he’d lost the feeling in his knees. If he ever went back to that life he thought he just might as well shoot himself and get it over with. He remembered some mornings, when he was living with his aunt and uncle, coming into the kitchen and seeing his uncle having a beer at eleven A.M. “Breakfast of champions,” his uncle had said, hoisting the can in the air.

  “You want another beer, Skipper?” the bartender said.

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m driving.”

  The bartender shrugged. “Been watching too many public-service announcements,” he said.

  “Goddamnit!” yelled Ed’s little brother, banging his fist on the side of the pinball machine.

  He’d never had a letter from his father. Postcards, about twice a year, always with a picture of palm trees or a beach. When he’d been in the county jail his father had taken a detour, after picking up a load of machine parts in Connecticut, and come to see him unexpectedly. The two of them sat at a long table that was bolted to the floor, and his father bought him soda and a Ring Ding out of the vending machine. “The important thing is that you learn something from this,” his father kept saying, and Skip kept nodding, thinking, yeah, I’ve learned never to drive a getaway car. But he didn’t say anything. Actually, neither of them said much. His father said that Linda, who was the woman he was living with, was working as a hostess now, which was easier on her back and feet, and that the two of them had gotten a double-wide trailer that looked just like a house and came with the curtains already hung and the wallpaper already on the walls. Skip said that he was getting out in four and a half months. They hadn’t really had a lot to talk about.

  He wondered what was in the letter his father had sent him. He wondered if Debbie was always late to work, or just tonight, to torture him.

  He didn’t even hear Chris come up beside him until he felt the iron arm around his neck. Chris smelled of beer and pot smoke, and he had a bruise on his face that looked fresh. His freckled face had that puffy creased look that had come with sleeping in, drunk, when they were younger, but that just became the way you looked if you slept in, drunk, for enough years. He had a tattoo on his upper arm, the Tasmanian Devil. He’d gotten it one night at a place at the beach in Virginia when the four of them were all together, sleeping in one room at a Motel 6. Skip had gotten sunburned and he hurt all over, and when the tattoo artist had put the first needle in, to put a lightning bolt on the back of his hand, he’d seen black stars in his peripheral vision, and come to on a cot in the back with an egg coming up on the side of his head. “I’m not doing that, dude,” the tattoo guy said flatly. “I got a policy.”

  The Tasmanian Devil arched his round belly as Chris picked up his beer. “Where you been, Skippy?” he said. “How come I never see you anymore?”

  “You need me to drive you again?” Skip said.

  “Don’t be a wiseass, man. You know I never wanted to fuck you up.”

  Skip knew that in some twisted way that was true. He and Chris had been friends since first grade. He’d always stuck by Chris, even in fourth grade, when Chris got the ski jacket from Santa Claus, the really good one with the fleece lining, wore it to school, all proud, and then caught Robert Bentemenn, whose father was a lawyer and a magistrate and something-or-other with the chamber of commerce, staring at it.

  “That’s my old jacket that my mom gave away to the Salvation Army,” Robert’d said, and Chris was on him, bam bam bam. Half the class jumping on Chris’s back couldn’t stop his arm from going up and down, up and down. The jacket went into the Dumpster behind Newberry’s, once Chris found Bentemenn’s name written inside the pocket in indelible marker, and Chris had to go to counseling, and the counselor told his mom he had poor impulse control. Memorial Day weekend last year his impulse had been to hold up the Quik-Stop, and Skip had been stupid enough to be driving. Chris hadn’t really meant any harm, but that hadn’t made ten months running laundry through an industrial mangle any easier to take for Skip.

  “How’s life in the Magic Kingdom?” said Chris, and
Skip shrugged. “They need any part-time help out there, ‘cause I just got laid off from my sheetrocking job?”

  Skip shrugged again. It froze him, to think of Chris anywhere near Blessings, or the baby. He looked at his watch. Debbie was almost half an hour late. A girl named Mary Beth down the bar waved at him. “Hey, Skip,” she said. “What’s new with you?”

  “I need a job, and I need pussy,” Chris murmured in his ear.

  “Ah, man,” said Skip, putting down his beer on the bar with a thud. “Don’t talk like that. You’re too old for that kind of talk. That’s low. That’s just low, man.”

  “Fuck you, man. You’re pussy-whipped by that old woman. You never come to the bar, you’re never at Ed’s. You missed the demo derby. What the hell is it with that place? When I was a kid my aunt Patty used to pass around the food there at parties and she’d come home saying, ooh, the silverware, the flowers, the fucking lake. I bet you don’t fish in that lake, my man, because she’ll cut your heart out. Jimmy’s old man went out there once, and he pulled a twenty-two-inch brown trout out of that lake at six in the morning, and there she was, standing on the front porch. She wanted him to weigh that goddamned trout and she told him she wanted him to pay for it by the pound. By the fucking pound!”

  “What’d he do?” Skip said.

  “He paid her six bucks for the goddamned fish. Which reminds me, I’m going to come out there someday and fish in that pond. I hear there are still some big browns in there. And it’s not like she’ll ever notice. We’ll go fishing, and then you can either quit, or we’ll get you fired. You got to get out of there, man. You even smell like a girl. You smell like suntan lotion or something. What are you doing, basking on the diving board?”

  It was the baby wipes, and the baby powder. Skip was thinking about how to explain away the smell when Debbie blew through the swinging door from the back room, but not before Chris narrowed his eyes and looked at Skip like he was seeing him through smoke. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Debbie, knowing she was late, pulling the letter from the back pocket of her jeans.

  Two minutes and he was out in the parking lot, the rain so heavy that he couldn’t make out his truck right away. He turned on the interior light and ripped open the envelope like it mattered, like the old man really had something to say to him after all these years. He was amazed by the faint pulse of hope he felt in his own throat. On lined paper like the kind he used in school his father had written: “Son, We thought you would like to know that you have a baby brother. His name is Lance he eats good but doesn’t sleep all that much. Maybe you can come see him soon when he’s sleeping better. Take care of yourself and have a drink on me. Your father.”

  A ten-dollar bill fluttered from inside the letter to the floor of the truck. Skip leaned over and picked it up, then let it fall again. He started up the engine and peeled out from the parking lot onto the flooded road, his back end fishtailing. He wondered whether his father’s wife had the same baby books he had, and whether she’d found out yet that the newborn diapers were too small for most babies and cut into the soft skin of their upper thighs. He’d be goddamned if he’d tell her, or send a card. Lance Cuddy. What the hell kind of name was Lance? A soap opera name, was what.

  Lights came up on him suddenly out of the wall of water, a car heading his way, and both of them slowed down, afraid that the wind and the rain might just blow them headlong into each other. He was lucky with the lightning. It zigzagged toward the earth a minute later, when he was edging over the bridge over the big creek, and in the strange silver light he could see that someone had already blown out the guardrail on one side, so that there was a drop of ten feet or so to the creek bed. He went across at maybe five miles an hour, praying for his old bald tires not to slide on the bridge grid. He couldn’t afford to have an accident, not with the baby at home sleeping steadily toward her next bottle.

  There was a car up ahead on one side of the road, its front end an accordion pleated around the engine block, and he pulled up behind it, his brights on, and ran to the driver’s side to see if anyone was hurt. But the car was empty, empty with the emptiness of an abandoned house, and as he got back into the truck, soaked and shivering, he realized that he was at the Boatwright house, where cars were ranged around the drive and the lawn the way some people planted petunias. The Boatwright women all looked as though they’d been inflated with a bicycle pump and encased in stretch fabrics; the Boatwright men were short and wiry and always carried shotguns and cigarettes; Boatwright kids had gray skin and bad haircuts. In grade school there had been Boatwright twins in their class, girls with big round arms and raggedy bangs. For a nickel they’d show their privates behind the athletic-field bleachers.

  As he crawled through the valley, the water running across the road in rills of mud and gravel, Skip realized that it was less than a mile from the Boatwrights to Blessings. And for a moment he was afraid that his wet engine would stall and he would be caught in the Boatwright world forever, the way a lot of the guys he knew had been, since Boatwright girls would sleep with anyone, and sleeping with a Boatwright girl just about guaranteed a pregnancy. For one terrible moment he imagined that his baby was a Boatwright. But he knew it couldn’t be true. She was too plump, too pink, her nose and chin too distinct. Besides, there was no such thing as an unwanted child among the Boatwrights, just as there was no such thing as a wanted one. Babies just happened.

  “Lance Cuddy,” he said to himself. “Lance goddamn Cuddy.”

  He almost missed the turnoff into the driveway, as many times as he’d taken it, would have missed it if the birch trees had not made a ghostly show just before the fence curved in. At first he thought it was because of the rain, which was impenetrable, nearly as deep as the night, dark gray on black. But as he came down the long drive and around the big circle, the back of the house on one side of him and the front of the garage on the other, no lights came on to illuminate the truck, and from inside the house he could hear a high thin screaming sound. He threw the truck into park and ran up the back steps to the big house, and then realized that what he was hearing was the sound of the alarm. He knocked and knocked at the back door, cursing Nadine, who had refused to give him the alarm code, or even show him how it worked. “You don’t need,” she’d said, looking at him as though he had one hand on the strap to her purse.

  Upstairs in the apartment over the garage the rain made a hard heavy noise on the roof. There were no lights there, either, not even the red glow of the clock on the stove in the kitchen. He felt his way to the drawer by the refrigerator and took out the flashlight. Outside the kitchen window, that looked back over the fields and then the long tangle of forest, he could see nothing but the rain. His work boots sounded of wet as he squeaked down the worn wooden hallway floor.

  Like the birches that had been beacons on the road, there were two small columns of white in the living room, two candles burning on the old steamer trunk. Slowly he swung the the flashlight up, and saw Mrs. Blessing sitting on the sagging chair, holding a light-colored raincoat to her throat, two feet of wet white cotton hanging from beneath its folds. A scarf with some pattern of flowers was tied over her hair.

  “Jesus Christ,” Skip breathed. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  “Don’t speak to me about being frightened,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I’ve been here all alone, no electricity, no power, no light, for who knows how long. And that hideous alarm sound.”

  “Did you call the alarm people?”

  “The phone’s gone, too, everything’s down, and then there’s a terrible smell of burning and I don’t know where it’s coming from. And I had no idea where you had gone.”

  “How did you get in?” Skip said.

  “I have a key, of course. What sort of a question is that?”

  He was catching his breath now, his heart trying to slow down from the drive, the bridge, the alarm, and above all from the sight of Mrs. Blessing in the small room. He felt funny, shining the flashlight right at her
like that, illuminating all the lines in her face and the fear in the set of her mouth and the wild glare in her light eyes.

  “You have to do something,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “Right this minute. The entire house could be burned to the ground while you fiddle about.”

  “Not in this rain it won’t.”

  There was no smell of fire in the apartment, only the smell of rain and mothballs, maybe from Mrs. Blessing’s raincoat, and the smell of powder and the sweet smell of baby wipes, that Chris had scented with his nose for secrets and weakness. Skip shone the flashlight onto the face of his watch. It was twenty minutes until twelve.

  “You needn’t worry,” Mrs. Blessing said sharply. “I’ll stay here with the child while you see about the alarm and the fire.”

  “What?” Skip said.

  “You can imagine my surprise,” she said, her mouth pursed, “to come in here looking for help and discover that, behind my back, without permission, you had your child living here.”

  Of course. She’d come over and made a circuit of the place. She owned it, after all, and she owned him, too, in her way. Skip felt his shoulders slump, as though his body knew the sad pathetic ending to this latest brief episode in his life before his mind did. It was like when the sheriff’s car had been waiting behind his truck at McGuire’s the night after the Quik-Stop robbery; his whole body had gone slack, his eyes sad, in the moment before he had known to say to himself, well, that’s it, then. Chris’d be pleased, he thought, when he heard Skip got fired from Blessings. “Welcome back,” he’d say, standing at the bar at McGuire’s. Lose the job, lose the baby. He guessed he’d wind up leaving her in the hallway at the courthouse for the social workers after all. His stomach turned, the beer gone sour.