by Unknown
Then Keeley broke and bent over, huge sobs bursting out and making her whole body convulse.
Hannah jumped up and ran to her mother, wrapping her arms around her legs. “It’s okay, Mommy! I’ll be okay! You can go.” She twisted her neck to look up at her mother. “All my Aunties and my babysitters do is play with me when they watch me and…, and we watch TV, that’s all. And if I get hungry, there’s SpaghettiOs and bread and peanut butter and lots of stuff. I can do it. I can!” She wasn’t really sure about the SpaghettiOs – in fact she was sure she had already eaten them earlier that week as a snack – and the Barefooters and her babysitters did more to take care of Hannah than just play with her and watch TV, but she knew what her mother needed to hear.
Keeley stumbled away from her daughter’s embrace and over to the buffet, still crying. She picked up the bottle of Amaretto, twisted off the top, and took long swigs between long gasping sobs. Then she looked up at the starry sky and said, “Oh, Daddy. Why did you have to die? Why? You were a piss-poor father most of the time…but at least you helped us, paid for stuff. Why you? Why not her? What’re we going to do?” She moaned the last words.
Keeley sat down at the patio table, holding on to the bottle with both hands. Hannah went over and sat down on the ground next to her and put her head on her mother’s knee. “Mommy? I’ll be okay, I promise! Memember Pippi? I’ll be like Pippi,” Hannah said, referring to their latest bedtime story of Pippi Longstocking, one Hannah adored for its feisty independent main character.
Finally, after staring off into space for a while, her mother nodded slowly and looked down at Hannah. “Well, we’re putting you to bed right now. When you get up tomorrow, if I’m not home, have some cereal and watch TV, okay? Okay?”
They went inside and upstairs and Keeley tucked her daughter into bed, letting her sleep in her fairy dress from Aunt Amy, but making her take off her wings. “You’ll crush ‘em, sweetie,” she slurred.
Then her mother covered her with a light blanket, kissed her and left the room. A few minutes later their old Volkswagen Jetta clattered to life in the driveway, and her mother backed the car out and drove off, the chattering and grinding of the car ricocheting off the houses as it went down the street. The empty house the next morning was fine, because Hannah almost-knew that her mom would be back. She was a little afraid because Keeley had disappeared before and had also acted in ways from time to time that had scared Hannah, so there was that mom, the one she didn’t like to think about.
But Keeley wasn’t gone for one morning or even one day, she was gone for two. And Hannah knew where her mother had gone: to her grandparent’s house. Her mother said her grandfather had died. Hannah didn’t know what that meant, but she did know that when they went to Keeley’s parents’ house something usually went wrong, especially when her grandfather was away when they arrived. It was like Grandma hated Mommy. The hard way Grandma looked at her daughter, assuming she would look at her at all, was scary. Many times when they went to visit, Grandma shut the door in their face after seeing it was them. Grandma never touched, acknowledged, or even looked at Hannah, only glancing down at her and then looking away as fast as she could.
Grandpa was different. He was the reason they visited. Grandpa picked Hannah up and hugged her tight when he saw her, smelling of sharp whisky and lime-scented cologne, saying, “Who is this little girl? Who is this sweet girl? Is this my granddaughter? Is this my Hannah?”
After he put her back down, they’d get in his car and go to the High Ridge Country Club and have lunch or dinner, depending on the time of day, usually going to the bar there first. He was clearly well-known there, everyone waving and smiling and nodding. He’d lift Hannah up and put her on a stool at the bar and tell Frank the bartender his granddaughter wanted a “Shirley Temple straight up, heavy on the cherries”. Keeley and he would have drinks too, sitting on either side of Hannah and talking over her. After they went to the dining room and had their meal, he’d pull out his checkbook and say, “Okay, Keeley, how much do you need?” with his pen poised. Her mother would lower her head and say a number and he would scribble it out, signing his name with a flick of his wrist.
Something bad must have happened at Grandma and Grandpa’s. That must have been it. But what? And what was dying, exactly? Was it like the coyote in Road Runner? Was Grandpa all black and smoking, blown away by dynamite? Hannah waited and wandered the house, looking out the windows facing the driveway, waiting to see the Jetta pull in. And it kept not happening, making her cry with fear, a little hiccup-y sobbing that trembled in her throat.
But Mommy was home now. That was all that mattered.
Hannah stood in the cooling darkness looking over the scene of the party of two nights before. The ghost-town empty-echoing feeling that had plagued her yesterday was gone. Hannah closed her eyes and said softly, tears refilling her hot swollen eyes, “Thank you, God. Thank you for bringing my mommy home.” She put her palms together and looked up at the sky. There were no stars tonight.
She had to celebrate and show God her thanks, so He would really know.
Hannah ran over to the cluttered patio table where the magic-wands lay next to a pack of matches. Hannah pulled a wand out and lit it with a match. The lit wand scattered off sparks right away, suddenly a live thing in her hot and very sticky hand that still had jelly on it from the day before.
She ran in circles around the yard holding it, scattering sparks and thanking God as hard as she could, her heart feeling like, if it burst, it would shoot white burning stars into the night.
Chapter 1
Hannah sat at one of the tables in the back room of the restaurant doing her least favorite side job at Bella Via: prying the bases of melted candles out of the votives that sat on every table using a butter knife. She’d chop at the wax and try to wiggle the knife along the edge the way that Jennifer, her waitressing idol, had shown her, but she could never achieve that easy pop that she had seen Jennifer perform with the knife, the disk of wax coming out neatly in one piece.
As she worked, her mind returned again to the conversation she’d had with her landlord, Mr. Harris, that morning. She still couldn’t believe it. She felt as if she had been slapped, a hand flying at her face out of the blue.
He called her and that had been the first clue that something was up, as he usually walked across the lawn from the big house where he and Mrs. Harris lived, stopping by for a quick visit about some small favor they needed or to let her know about something that was going on at their house, a party or a group of workmen who would be on the property doing renovations. Often, it was to see what new improvement she had made on the old carriage house that she rented from them on their property in Greenwich, Connecticut.
“Hello, Hannah! How are you doing? Well?” Mr. Harris’s voice took a minute to recognize over the phone.
“Uh, oh! Great! Thanks! And you?”
“Fantastic! We’re very excited. Ginny is graduating from Colgate – a little behind schedule, but with honors. We’re very proud of her.”
Hannah had heard occasionally of their youngest daughter, Ginny, a child that had come late to the couple when they were well into their mid-forties. While their youngest was just finishing college, their two much older sons were married with school-age children and settled in Boston, Massachusetts and Boulder, Colorado respectively. She had often seen Ginny in passing when she was home for a visit, roaring by in her Jeep on the road near the house, straight brown hair flying. They had been formally introduced at the Harris’s Christmas open house this last December, Ginny smiling dutifully while Mrs. Harris rhapsodized about the improvements Hannah had made on the carriage house.
“That’s wonderful! Congratulations!” Hannah said into the phone while turning and walking to a window to look at her garden. Once a thicket of weeds and brambles, the area was now a carefully tended cottage garden filled with colorful flowers and enclosed by a new white-painted picket fence.
What favor would it be th
is time? Watch the house and feed their cat while they went away? Babysit for the grandchildren while the family was in town to celebrate Ginny’s graduation? Whatever it was, it would be worth it. The Harris’s charged her a very low rent in return for an on-site all-around helper who also happened to be willing to fix up their little outbuilding which had been literally disintegrating when Hannah moved in, the roof bowed, the walls falling in.
“Thank you! We’re going to have a big celebration, and of course, we’d love to have you join us. Nan was thinking of a big barbecue here at the house.”
“Sounds great! I’d love to come,” Hannah said, waiting.
Mr. Harris paused and said, “There’s something else I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. Do you have a minute?”
“Of course! What’s up?”
He cleared his throat and said, “Well, we were thinking. Now that you’re engaged, you’re probably planning on moving in with your fiancé, correct?”
Fiancé. Would she ever get used to the idea? She glanced at the 2-carat emerald cut diamond on her left hand and then looked away. “Moving in? Ah, I wasn’t really thinking about it yet. You know, we haven’t even set a date, and-“
“Oh, but we thought most engaged couples lived together these days?”
Living with Daniel? In the city? And leaving her precious little house? She’d worked so hard on it…and, oh, it was weird to even think about not being alone, having to be with someone all the time. All that forced conversation and togetherness. God! “I’m probably going to stay here, for now anyway. Daniel and I haven’t even talked about where we’d live when we do get married. Who knows what we’re doing? Ha! Maybe we’ll live here!”
There was a pause, and then Mr. Harris said, “There, in that little place? The two of you?”
No, she couldn’t imagine that either. She didn’t want to think about it right now. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s too small. Well, we’ll figure it out when the time comes.”
Mr. Harris sighed. “That’s the thing. We…ah, Ginny was planning on coming back home, but we already made her bedroom into a guest room. She kept talking about living in the city when she graduated, so we were sure we lost her for good. Anyway, we were thinking…maybe the carriage house might be available, since you’re getting married and everything. It would be perfect for Ginny. Close enough so we can know she’s safe, far enough so she feels independent. You know how hard it is for parents to let go of their little girl.”
No, she didn’t. The door had practically slammed on her butt on the way out when she left home at eighteen. And her little house! The pile of rubble she’d turned into a home! Hours of work: replacing the peeling linoleum in the kitchen with tiles, sanding and painting the new walls, putting fresh shingles on the roof herself after the roofer had handled the structural work. She made nice with a general contractor in New Canaan who let her scavenge at his construction sites, and found many things including a beautiful mahogany front door was well as a pretty pale blue porcelain pedestal sink, all tossed aside at the multiple construction sites in the area where they were doing a tear-downs in order to build more McMansions.
What was the worst was that Mr. Harris knew exactly how much hard work and tender care she’d put into the house. Her life was that little house and her writing. How could he? But the carriage house was his, it was on his property, and it was his daughter, so what was Hannah supposed to say?
“I…I wish I knew what my plans were. Um, can I get back to you?” Hannah had said finally after she realized how long the silence had stretched out, and got off the phone as quickly as she could. Now, she wished she had been more firm. No! If it wasn’t for her, that house wouldn’t even be livable, just a pile of rotten wood. They wouldn’t even be considering letting their darling oh-so-perfect daughter live there! Hannah jabbed at the wax in the votive she was cleaning, her lips clenched in a tight line.
Her tips from the lunch shift had been awful. Between it being a slow lunch in late August when every self-respecting Greenwichite was in Nantucket or the Hamptons or abroad and the fact that the few tables she had gotten were tightwad types who gave exactly fifteen percent to the penny on a lunch bill that wasn’t much to start with as they had been drinking water and hadn’t ordered appetizers or dessert, she had made less than $15. To top off her bad day, she had an Advil-resistant headache that meant her period was coming and, even worse, her least-favorite manager, Josephine, was working.
Josephine hated Hannah on sight. In fact, if Hannah had walked into Bella Via two years before looking for waitressing work when Josephine was on duty, Hannah wouldn’t have gotten the job. Hannah didn’t understand why Josephine harbored such an instant and endless animosity toward her, but it was there.
Luckily, Hannah had walked in when the owner, Manuel, was there and he had the opposite reaction to her. He had the pure red hots for her, so instead she had been hired on the spot and had gotten almost all of the good high-paying dinner shifts – rarely working the poor-paying lunch shifts and managing to wiggle out of the slave-labor runner shifts by begging Manny to take them off of her schedule.
“Do you know how rare it is to have blue eyes and dark hair?” he had asked the first time he met her, his eyes sweeping over her again and again.
Hannah had noticed since she’d hit puberty when her figure started filling out, that suddenly the pairing of her blue eyes and dark brown hair was something men commented on. It was a look that was subtle and seemed to appeal mostly to men with brown eyes. Sometimes she liked the attention, but other times men like Manny made her feel alarmed, protective of herself.
Hannah put down the knife and rubbed fingers that were aching from clutching the butter knife so hard and was jarred, once again, by her ring. Her beautiful engagement ring from Daniel. It was perfect. It was terrifying.
She had analyzed this mixed feeling of wonder and fear since she first felt it immediately after Daniel slipped the ring on her finger out on his sailboat one beautiful early summer evening in the beginning of June, the first truly warm day after a very cool and wet spring. They had moored in a little cove and were sipping champagne out of plastic wineglasses – that should have been a clue, the minute he produced that bottle out of the cooler her antennae had gone up – and then he had gotten this strange strained expression on his face right before he’d gotten down in front of her.
She examined the ring, its brilliant rainbows shooting into her eyes. This wonderful perfect man, this man she had trouble believing was her boyfriend, wanted to be her husband? And what was a husband supposed to be like? She had never witnessed husbandly love up close at home, only the celluloid version on TV and in movies. Her mother hadn’t married until three years ago at the age of 38, a year after Hannah had moved out.
All of the Barefooters, her mother’s closest friends who had functioned in Hannah’s life as both aunts and godmothers, had many bad experiences with men. Aunt Amy had a series of emotionally abusive boyfriends who had played endless games with her head before finally meeting Uncle Gus and finding real love. Aunt Pam had never married again after her first marriage at age twenty nine, which had only lasted two years and produced one child, Jacob, who was shuttled between the warring exes for his entire childhood. Whenever Hannah tried to find out what had gone wrong with the marriage, or why they still hated each other so vehemently, Auntie Pam said, shaking her head, “You don’t want to go there, honey.”
Even the slim, chic, and ridiculously wealthy Aunt Zo, Zooey Walker Delaney to outsiders, had been through two husbands and was on her third. The third marriage had failed to be the charmed one she’d hoped for and the lit-up way she used to talk about love had left her. The only time she glowed these days was when she returned filled with enthusiasm from her travels to yet another exotic place, when she was with the Barefooters at any of their innumerable parties, and when they all went back to Captain’s Island every August, kicked off their shoes and were the Barefoot Girls again.
Hanna
h stared at her ring and the scattering of reflected light it created on the tablecloth. Her life was scaring her. Her fiancé was too perfect for her. The novel she had labored over for a full year in what used to be the potting shed of the carriage house, freezing in the winter with a space heater burning her ankles and sweating in the summer with a fan whipping her hair into her eyes, had actually been sold to Knopf a year ago and had finally hit store bookshelves two weeks before. Her mother and all the Barefooters had gotten advance copies from Hannah, of course.
But she wouldn’t let herself think about the book at work as a rule, because all she wanted to do was write, not wait tables or scrape wax candle nubs out of votive holders. The clash of her dream and her daily reality became painful if she thought about it on the job. She picked up the butter knife and resumed scraping and chopping at the next votive holder.
At that moment, Josephine walked into the room. She stopped and made a loud tsking sound before walking over to where Hannah sat. “You shouldn’t be doing that on a tablecloth. You’ll ruin it.”
Hannah looked at the tablecloth with its wine stain and chocolate smears. “What do you mean? It’s dirty.”
“I mean that the wax could get into the fibers and you can’t get that out.”
Everyone that was stuck with this job did it at a table with a dirty tablecloth and Josephine never said a thing. Except when it was Hannah.
“Fine, I’ll roll it back.” Hannah moved the votives to a chair and stood up to roll back the linen tablecloth and expose the cheap wooden table underneath.
Josephine smiled her non-smile and reached into her shirt pocket, pulling out a piece of paper. “Hey, I heard about your book. Congrats. Thought you might find this interesting. It’s a review by your hometown newspaper. Fairfield, right? Seems they’re interested in anything if it’s about a hometown girl. Really fascinating review. I clipped it for you.” She put the newspaper clipping on the table.