by Nicole Baart
“Stupid, stupid boy,” she hissed. For a moment I thought that was all she was going to say, but all at once something shifted in her expression and I saw that she had come to a conclusion. “I’m going to tell you something,” she began. “You’re probably going to hate me, but I think you need to hear it all the same.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just sit down and listen.” She spun around and grabbed the Queen Anne chair that she had brought me all those weeks ago and set it down in the center of the garage with a bang. “No interrupting.”
I sank to the ratty velvet with a feeling of foreboding, a sense that my world was about to shift on its axis yet again. “I don’t think I want to hear what you have to say,” I muttered, starting to rise the moment I felt the seat beneath me. “Please leave, Hazel.”
“No.” She put her hands on my shoulders and shoved me back against the chair. “I’m going to say what I came to say. And then, if you never want to see me again, I won’t blame you. I’ll leave you alone.”
“It might be too late.”
“It might,” she agreed. “But I’m going to have to take that chance.” Hazel turned her back to me and paced to the other side of the table, collecting her thoughts, marshaling her words before she dared to open her mouth. “Do you remember that day I saw you in the hardware store with that guy?”
That guy. Of course there was only one person she could possibly mean. It was so long ago, so innocent now that I knew what Etsell had been capable of, that I felt almost indignant. “Are you kidding me? You’re going to bring that up when you know what happened between Ell and Samantha?”
But Hazel ignored me. “I told him,” she said.
At first I didn’t know what she meant, but as realization dawned on me, I found I was too angry even to respond.
“I told Etsell about what I saw, and what I suspected. I know you probably think that I was trying to break the two of you up, but that’s not the case. It’s true, I’ve always thought you and Ell were a strange match—and I probably wouldn’t have picked you for him if I could have been the one to choose—but I didn’t want to ruin your marriage. I just wanted him to know.”
“Know what?” I spat out. I was clutching the arms of the seat, my fingers white-knuckled and my chest heaving. For a second I indulged an impossible fantasy—one where I flung myself up, slapped Hazel across her weathered cheek. “What did you want him to know? That he was ignoring me and that some stranger made me feel pretty?”
“Exactly.”
Anger whooshed out of me in a hot rush. “What?”
“I wanted him to know that he was screwing up his marriage. That relationships are a tenuous thing—fragile as crystal. He wasn’t being careful with you. He needed to know that.”
Astonishment made me unsteady, and I slouched into the chair, my spine curved dolefully against the stiff back. “He must have been so angry,” I breathed.
“He was,” Hazel said. “He was angry at himself.”
“But—”
“Oh, he was pretty pissed at you too. But mostly he blamed himself.”
We were silent for a few moments, surveying each other with what I first believed was mutual distrust. But we had come a long way since Ell’s disappearance, and there was something in Hazel’s face that I wasn’t prepared for. Affection? No, it was more than that. I understood with a quick and devastating conviction that her heart was breaking for me. And yet, that knowledge didn’t change the implications of what she had just said.
“What are you trying to say?” I asked, because the question needed to be voiced. “That it’s my fault Ell had an affair? That I should blame myself for what happened between him and Sam?”
Hazel slipped her sunglasses from where they were hooked on her belt loop. She put them on, her chin set in a straight, stoic line, then turned her mirrored eyes toward me. “I’m just telling you what happened. It’s up to you to draw conclusions.”
I felt rooted to the chair as I watched Hazel walk to her truck. It struck me for one of the very first times that she was old, that her spine was beginning to bend her head toward the earth. And she seemed just the tiniest bit unsteady on her feet; there was a quiver in her step. I thought about calling after her—I wasn’t even sure why—but before I could make my mouth form the words, the door of her truck slammed shut. The engine caught and the truck backed out of my driveway.
It wasn’t until after she was gone that I realized why she put on her sunglasses.
Hazel had started to cry.
I was sixteen years old when I first met Hazel.
Etsell and I had been dating for just a couple of months, but it was already serious. Or as serious as a relationship can be when you’re too young even to know what a relationship truly is. He picked me up one afternoon under the guise of taking me to a movie, but instead of driving toward Sioux Falls and the theaters, he took off in the opposite direction, toward the airport.
Hazel had been asking about me, he said. She wanted to meet the girl that had him tripping over his own two feet and showing up late for scheduled flight times—something he had never done before.
I won’t lie. I was downright terrified to meet Ell’s surrogate mom. She was notorious in Blackhawk, a stern-faced workhorse of a woman who farmed beside her husband and raised a pair of sons in relative anonymity until Mr. Jansen got sick and died a slow and agonizing death. His illness left its mark on her, too, and when she was finally able to lay him to rest, she spun her life around with the reckless abandon of someone who didn’t seem to care anymore. Of someone who had completely forgotten who she was and should be.
First, Hazel sold the farm. Then she started taking classes at the local tech school, introduction to mechanics, metal engineering, and even CAD. Soon she had enrolled in flight class, something she swore she had wanted to do ever since she was a little girl.
Hazel’s sons went out of state for college, and never came back. Rumor had it they resented her for taking the small fortune that Mr. Jansen had left to languish in the bank and investing it in the stock market. It didn’t help that their mother was a fifty-something college student, and more concerned with airplane mechanics than doing her boys’ laundry or fixing the sort of roast-and-mashed-potato meals that they had grown up enjoying on the farm. It was as if in the twilight of her life Hazel had decided that she was going to start from scratch. And everything conveniently fell away to accommodate her new dreams: her husband, the farm, her kids.
When eight-year-old Etsell started hanging around the airport, they were ripe for each other. He was longing for someone to fill the hole that Melanie left behind, and Hazel took him under her wing before she could stop to wonder what she was doing and why. Behind her back people said that it was a second chance at motherhood, an opportunity for her to make things right, but even then I knew that Hazel loved Etsell for who he was—not because of who she wished he would be.
My hands trembled as Ell walked me into the hangar that day. I laced my fingers through his to hide the evidence of my anxiety, and stuffed the other fist in the pocket of my coat. Hazel’s back was turned to us when we slipped through the side door, and her cheek was pressed against the side of a small plane, a rusty old thing that matched the color of her stained overalls almost perfectly. Though our footsteps echoed off the concrete floor and rang in the metal rafters of the cavernous building, she didn’t acknowledge our presence. My tension mounted.
She would hate me, I was sure of it. Surely she knew who my mother was. Everyone did. Surely I wouldn’t be good enough for Etsell, for the boy that she was pouring her heart and soul into, the young man she was resurrecting.
The child who, I understood in a rush, had saved her too.
I licked my lips, erasing the smear of my pink lipstick with my tongue, and wished that I had worn something less pretty. I felt out of place in the drafty hangar, and even more absurd in comparison to the harsh lines of her steel-toed work boots and wild mop of unkempt hair. My own re
d-blond tresses were elaborately braided, a twisted, intricate up-do that suddenly made me feel like something out of a storybook—a fair maiden, the sort of fainting girl who didn’t stand a chance against the evil stepmother.
Hazel ignored us up until the moment that Etsell reached out to her. He laid his hand against her shoulder, a touch so gentle that I wondered if she would even feel it. But she brushed a dusty rag against the side of the plane, smoothing it over the rivets, places where the rust had eaten away the paint, and then tucked the frayed piece of cloth in the front pocket of her coverall.
“Hey, sweetie,” she said, finally turning toward him. He was still holding my hand, but she didn’t acknowledge me. Instead, she grazed her lips against his forehead, eyes closed as if she was feeling for a temperature. They stayed that way for a long moment before she pulled away and sighed. I felt her eyes fall on me.
“So,” she murmured. “She’s the one.”
Something surged through me, an emotion that I couldn’t identify at the time and was scared to examine later. I should have been deferential, shy, but instead of cowering beneath her scrutiny, I threw back my shoulders. Looked her full in the face.
“Yes. I’m the one.”
16
Because Everything Has
There was a warm streak the second week of October, a brief Indian summer that descended on Blackhawk like a sudden blessing. Though Dani opened all her windows and resurrected a few forgotten T-shirts that she had stored on an unused shelf in her closet, she rolled her eyes when Kat spread a beach towel on the front lawn and arranged herself on top of it in nothing but a string bikini. All the same, Dani couldn’t help but turn her face toward the sunshine, closing her eyes and arching toward the light like a cat about to stretch and purr.
On Sunday the warm front hit its zenith, and favored the autumn afternoon with a fresh and whisper-still eighty degrees.
“Let’s go to the lake,” Kat suggested. “Or maybe for a hike. We have to do something.”
“I thought maybe you’d lay out in front of the house again,” Dani said, only half teasing. “A living lawn ornament. Apparently you’re decorative.”
“Not enough people come by this corner.” Kat smirked. “That’s why I want to go somewhere else.”
“Take off,” Dani said, convinced that her sister was sticking around only to make sure that she didn’t mope the day away. “I want to get some things done around here.”
“Such as?”
“The table should have one more light sanding.”
“Are you ever going to be done with that table?”
“Almost.” Dani smiled almost shyly. “I’m almost done.”
Kat threw up her hands. “Fine. I’m going to call some friends and head to the lake. Join us later?”
“Maybe.”
But Dani had no intention of going to the lake. She planned on sanding the table, just like she said. And winterizing a few of the plants. Maybe, just maybe, she’d take a walk to the river.
Dani threw open all the garage doors while she worked, and reveled in the crisp harvest scent of the unseasonably warm air. It seemed laced with apples and earth, just a hint of smoke, as if someone had decided it was the perfect day for a bonfire. And it was. A perfect day for evening bonfires and reading a book in the shade and inhaling every moment of the last reprieve before the weather did a one-eighty and draped Iowa in a shimmering gown of snow and ice.
As she moved around the table, Dani tried to make her mind blank, to exist in the fragile heart of the day as carefully as the last few leaves clung to brittle stems. She was succeeding, until she caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye and came to peer through the window overlooking her backyard.
Benjamin was standing at the very edge of her lawn, one hand on a railroad tie that stood beside him like a staff. His dark head was bent and he seemed to be considering the ground before him. He scuffed it with the toe of his tennis shoe, then dropped his shoulders and looked up at the sky, considering the sun, the way that it would slant.
As Dani watched him from the frame of her garage window, she couldn’t help but think about what Kat had said. The truth was, she was too numb to feel much of anything, to allow herself even to dwell on the implications of her neighbor’s goodwill and all the ways he had reached out to her since Etsell’s disappearance. But he had been there. That should count for something. And though Dani contemplated leaving him there, pretending that she had never seen him at all, there was something about the serious way he worried his bottom lip that made an unexpected smile tug at the corner of her mouth. At the very least she could offer him a little direction.
Abandoning her sandpaper, Dani stepped out of the garage and into the full splendor of the sun. She shaded her eyes with her hand and made her way to Benjamin, waving her fingers a little when he looked up and saw her coming.
“Are you allowed to work on Sunday?” she asked, indicating the wooden beam with a tilt of her chin.
“Are you kidding?” Benjamin gave her a droll grin. “I work every Sunday. Twice. This is for fun.”
“Studying my brown grass is fun? I thought you’d have had enough of it after all the mowing you did this summer.”
“Oh, I’m done with your grass,” Benjamin said. “I’ve decided that today would be a good day to start on that strawberry patch you wanted. I’m not much of a gardener, but I do know that we’d be well served to get a couple loads of manure worked into the soil before the first frost.”
“I had kind of forgotten about it,” Dani admitted. She regretted it immediately, hoped she hadn’t hurt his feelings.
But Benjamin seemed undeterred. “It takes a few years for a strawberry patch to really produce,” he said. “If you’d like fruit before you’re too old to enjoy it, I’d better get started.”
Dani struggled for a second, wondering if she should excuse herself and let him work in peace. But whether it was the sunshine or the fact that Benjamin had done so much for her, she couldn’t bring herself to disappear back into the garage and leave him to labor alone. “I’ll help you,” she said.
He looked at her quickly. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
Benjamin shrugged good-naturedly. “I won’t talk you out of it. Maybe we can get it done before I have to shower up for the evening service.”
They measured out a large bed, Benjamin walking off the dimensions and marking the spot with landscaping ties that he set up at the perimeter. Then it was a matter of pulling up the sod, a task that was made all the more difficult by the fact that the ground was dry and hard, and that Dani was woefully inept at using the spade as a blade to hew hunks of grass from the dusty soil.
“If I’d have known I’d get sweaty,” Dani said, passing her wrist over her forehead, “I wouldn’t have offered to help.”
“It’s not too late to back out,” Benjamin joked. But they both knew that Dani wasn’t going anywhere.
It wasn’t until Benjamin was drilling holes for the stakes that Dani worked up the courage to ask him the question that had been plaguing her since she first caught sight of him from the garage window. “I know we don’t—I don’t—go to your church, but I was wondering if . . . I was hoping that maybe you’d be willing to do a memorial for Etsell.”
The drill went silent, but Benjamin’s head stayed bowed over the splintered wood. For a second, Dani wondered if he had heard her at all, or if her request had fallen on deaf ears. She swallowed hard.
But then Benjamin looked up, and his eyes were so soft and earnest, it made her breath catch. “I’d be honored,” he said. “Truly, I would. Etsell was an amazing man.”
“He was,” she echoed, surprised to find that it was suddenly hard to speak. “We . . .” her voice broke.
“I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you,” Benjamin said.
Dani wanted to make light of it, to break the spell of her need and his compassion, but it was too late to dissemble, to go back
to the work before them as if nothing had ever happened. She had just admitted that Etsell was gone. That she was ready to let go.
Benjamin must have seen the anguish in her face. “You’re very brave,” he told her.
“No, I’m not.”
“Of course you are.”
She shook her head quickly, denying it. “I don’t really know how to do this. What a service would look like.”
“I’ll help you figure it out.”
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“I think it’s important that we remember Etsell,” Benjamin said. “But it’s also important that we acknowledge what you’ve lost. Honor your relationship.”
Dani looked at the ground because she didn’t want to look at Benjamin. “I used to think we were holy,” she said. “I mean, I thought our marriage was holy. You know, holy matrimony and all that. That must sound so silly to you.”
“Marriage is holy.” Benjamin used one hand to push himself up. He stood before Danica with the drill dangling from one hand and a faint smile on his lips.
“I don’t really even know what that means.”
“It means set apart. Purposeful.” He lifted one shoulder as if in apology. “I actually think most relationships are worth much more than we give them credit for. They mean something—God wants to use them for something. But we fall short. We mess it up.”
Dani bit her lip. Wondered if Benjamin suspected more than he let on. And wondered why he wasn’t going on—why he wasn’t evangelizing, asking her to repent, or at the very least encouraging her to join him at the evening church service.
“You let me know when you’re ready,” Benjamin said, and for just a moment he laid his hand over hers where it rested on the handle of the spade. Then he glanced at the quickly setting sun, his watch. “I’d better get going or I’ll be late. I’ll wrap this up tomorrow, okay? Get a few loads of manure, finish staking the borders . . . I promise I’ll have it ready for spring before the first snow flies.”
Dani nodded. She just stood there as he kicked the last railroad tie into place and left the stakes in a neat pile in the dirt. Then he gave her a close-lipped smile and tipped an imaginary hat.