But, wait. Mama had pretty much said yes when Ben had asked her if Grace could join Mr. Kinner’s special choir. She’d never really denied Ben anything he’d wanted in earnest. Grace’s eyes lighted on the pencil near her schoolbooks. Not daring to let herself think, she flattened the slip of paper on the desk and picked up the pencil, sharpened just enough for the job. With a quick, flowing hand, Grace scratched out her mother’s signature. And – relief of reliefs – she felt a guilty courage course through her heart.
CHAPTER TEN
The soft knock came just after school the next day. Geoff didn’t turn from erasing the stray marks on the blackboard. “Come in,” he called, trying to keep up the effort he’d made all day: to give his voice its usual upbeat sound. “Be right with you,” he continued as he heard the classroom door open and click shut quietly. With a few brisk strokes, he finished up and turned, ready with a brave smile.
The Picoletti girl stood there, silent and grave as always. Her guarded eyes turned to the clock, then back to him. Geoff smiled again to put her at her ease. “Did you need something, Miss Picoletti?” he asked.
The student nodded. Wordlessly, she opened one of the textbooks she carried and drew out a sheet of paper. Geoff recognized it as the permission slip for the choir. “Wonderful!” he exclaimed with a cheerfulness he didn’t feel. “You’ve got it signed?”
The girl hesitated for a brief moment and then nodded. She held the paper out to him. He saw callouses marking the bird-like hand, signs of repetitive hard labor, and he looked into her face for just a moment. There, he found other marks of difficulty, yet of a different kind.
“Thank you, Miss Picoletti,” Geoff said, more gently, as he took the paper, running his eyes over the signature briefly. “We start practice this Friday after school. Attendance is mandatory at all rehearsals.” He waited for her agreement and received a short, unsmiling nod. “Alright, that’s it,” he finished, seeing that she seemed anxious to go.
The girl turned toward the door. Geoff looked after her for just a moment, wondering what her little story was – the literature teacher in him made him curious, he supposed. Then the clock above the door arrested his attention. Nearly three o’clock. Emmeline would be returning from her ladies’ Bible study, where he knew she would share her need – their need – for prayer. Geoff wanted to be home when she returned. To comfort her.
If she needed to be comforted. Last evening, her strength had amazed him. Here he had expected to find her curled up on their bed, weeping in the certainty that she would never hold their child in her arms.
But Emmeline had risen like a robin from its nest when Geoff entered the piano room. Yes, Emmeline had cried; that much evidenced itself on her weary pale face, her washed-out eyes, her hoarse voice. But a new intensity undergirded all of that, made the sorrow a set of notes rather than the entire opus. She’d lain her head gladly on Geoff’s chest, but he rather suspected she’d taken that action to console him.
Aunt Mary had never thought well of Papa, and when Grace walked into the kitchen after school, her mother’s sister sat there at the table, reminding Mama of just that. “I warned you, Sarah,” she jittered out in her high-heeled voice. Aunt Mary pursed her lips together into a tight sandwich around the teacup’s rim.
She paused mid-sip and lifted narrowed eyes to Mama. “This teacup’s chipped,” she proclaimed, as if everybody in the Picoletti household needed to know.
Mama’s weary face didn’t show its usual shame when Aunt Mary made that kind of announcement; she just stared down, blank as fresh notebook paper. Without turning, she asked, “Grace, get your aunt another cup of coffee, will you?”
Grace nodded, her chest caving at the sight of Mama leaning her chin on her plump hands, too tired to support her head without a prop. “Yes’m,” Grace answered quickly, dropping her stack of schoolbooks on the table and moving toward the cupboard.
“Leave it! Leave it,” Aunt Mary’s command interrupted her actions. Grace turned to look back at her and Mama, unsure.
“I do not want another cup of coffee, Sarah,” Aunt Mary explained to Mama. “I am just stating that this cup is chipped. It was part of our grandmother’s china set, you know, Grace.” Her blue eyes glared at Grace, as if she was to be blamed.
Grace nodded. In Aunt Mary’s economy, offspring were to blame for mostly everything that went wrong in life.
“Disgraceful. That’s what this household is, Sarah. Just a disgrace.” Aunt Mary paused and switched her weight from one crossed leg to the other. Grace noticed how perfectly straight her aunt’s stocking seams were.
Mama sat there, slumped silently over her full cup of cooling coffee, waiting for her childless sister’s next pronouncement of doom. Grace stood motionless, listening.
“And now this: Your husband has a woman. Living in the cottage. Behind your house.” She punctuated the phrases precisely, like the priest did during Confession when he especially wanted someone to feel sorry for their sins.
She talks like Mama and us kids should be the ones repenting. Aunt Mary raised her thinly-penciled eyebrows. Grace thought they could compete with the arches in their church for height. She bit her tongue to keep from saying anything. After all, Aunt Mary was Mama’s sister and Evelyn’s godmother.
“Mary…” Mama murmured, her gaze darting toward Grace, who had stayed right near the cupboard, ears fully open, mouth shut.
Aunt Mary gave a mirthless smirk. “Oh, really, Sarah, you think the girl doesn’t know what her daddy’s doing out late at night? She knows what’s what, don’t you, Grace?” Aunt Mary directed the last part to her.
Grace pressed her lips together and said nothing.
“I thought so. Well,” continued Aunt Mary Evelyn brusquely and, Grace thought, mercilessly, “it is true, isn’t it, Sarah?”
Mama nodded and looked down into the dark liquid of her cup. “Where did you hear it?” she asked, softly.
Aunt Mary Evelyn snorted. “Where did I hear it?” she asked in mock wonder. “My Johnny’s second cousin heard it at the club last night. He told Johnny on the telephone this morning, so I rushed on over here. Your husband evidently has no problem tossing the news around. It’s only in this house – and maybe the church, I suppose - that he keeps it hush-hush. As if a wife didn’t suspect something when her husband keeps a mistress. Behind her house, to boot! Who does he think he is, the king of Greece?”
Grace looked over at Mama, but Mama didn’t say anything. She just kept her eyes lowered, looking into her coffee as if it would give her some answers that might halt her sister’s tirade.
“Well,” Aunt Mary continued, “there’s nothing to be done for it. Of course, you can’t leave him, what with six children. Going on seven. And the Church would never approve. So that’s out of the question. Though I have no idea why you thought that so many children were necessary with that bum of a husband of yours.”
“Charlie’s a hard worker,” Mama inserted in that tone of hers that disallowed argument. At last, having found the right words, she picked up her cup and took a deliberate sip, her pale lips clinging to the china edge.
“Yes, in more ways than one,” Aunt Mary retorted, setting her teacup down with such a force that Grace feared it might break altogether.
Rebuked, Mama sat silent.
“I’ll come for her on Friday, then,” Aunt Mary said, rising to her feet. She layered her words with an official air. “I’ve been telling you I’d take her for years. I’m glad to see that you’ve come to your senses.”
Grace glanced at Mama. What did Aunt Mary intend? For whom would she come? And why?
But Mama didn’t say anything to enlighten Grace. “Yes,” Mama said in the same voice with which she would give an order at the grocer’s. “Come for her on Friday.” When Grace looked into Mama’s eyes, they seemed like holes in the night sky, places where the stars had died.
Without a good-bye to Grace, Aunt Mary swept out of the kitchen, her shiny black heels tattooing her pat
h with efficiency. Grace heard the door of Aunt Mary’s car slam shut, the engine start, and the wheels grind their way out of the drive. In the ensuing quiet, Grace listened as the grandfather clock ticked the seconds of their lives away.
“Mama,” she asked finally, “what did Aunt Mary mean?”
Mama turned toward her, eyes floundering, unfocused. “What? What?” The words tumbled out, unsure if they could find their footing. “What do you want, Grace?”
“Nothing, Mama. Just,” Grace began tentatively, “Aunt Mary said she would be back on Saturday to pick up someone. What did she mean?”
“She’s going to take Evelyn, Grace.” Mama’s voice remained vacant. To Grace, the sentence made no sense.
“What do you mean, Mama? ‘She’s going to take Evelyn?’ What do you mean? Take her where?” Grace dared to place a trembling hand on her mother’s shoulder, rounded under her faded print dress.
“Home.” With the suddenness of a Rhode Island thunderstorm, Mama’s face crumpled. Grace watched in dismay as the sobs gained control over her mother’s petite frame. “To live… with her and Uncle J-Johnny.”
Mama gasped for breath, choking and weeping, but Grace couldn’t comfort her. She’d heard the words that her mother had spoken, but they seemed to have no meaning. “Why?” she finally managed, feeling nothing. “Why?”
Mama didn’t respond, but as soon as Grace had asked, she’d known the answer, spoken or not. Evelyn is Mama’s favorite, outside Ben. Mama wants Evelyn at least to have a chance. A chance to live without the stain of… this. Grace swallowed hard, desperate to accept the truth of the kind of life her papa was creating for them. She sat there as Mama wept, shoulders shaking hard, nose running. She waited until Mama had no more tears to cry, and then she asked, “Does Evelyn know yet?”
Mama shook her head. Wiping her eyes and nose on her dirty apron, she muttered, “No, not yet.” She hiccupped from the sobbing. “But she’ll be glad. Your aunt and uncle have the money to give your sister the right kind of life. The kind of life she deserves.”
With one harsh motion, Mama stood and pushed her chair into place at the table. Her small, quick feet brought her over to the cupboards and countertop, where she began to prepare supper for the family.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Emmeline woke with a jolt. Dread rose in her chest, numbing her, as she realized what had broken her sleep: Her legs felt sticky and moist. Her abdomen panged with cramping.
Geoff slept solidly beside her, his breathing calm and deep, such a contrast to the ragged gasps making their way up her throat. Resolvedly, Emmeline pushed back her side of the bedcoverings and forced herself to look at the sheets, illuminated by the moonlight.
Blood soaked the linens where she’d lain. The life is in the blood…
The loss had begun in earnest, then. Doctor Philips was right. I will never carry a baby to full-term.
Emmeline’s nails dug into her palms as she struggled to contain her sobs. When she realized she couldn’t, she dropped to the floor beside the bed, pulling her pillow with her. Face buried to muffle the weeping, she spent a long, dark night.
The smoke coming from behind the barn alerted Grace. Papa’s burning. In the quiet after-supper darkness of her bedroom, she leaned against the windowsill, arms crossed, breathing in the earthy scent of orange flames consuming orange leaves. She hadn’t seen Gertrude since yesterday when Papa’d brought the woman home. Sometimes, Grace tried to push the whole idea of it out of her head, tried to conceal it as a corpse in the clods of her heart. But, like a vampire not buried at a crossroads, the knowledge that this really was happening continued to resurrect in her mind and heart.
Maybe if I talked to Papa… True, Evelyn always held first-place in Papa’s heart, just as she did in Mama’s. But occasionally, Grace had seemed to see a regard for herself in Papa’s eyes. Perhaps if she talked to him, let him explain, she could understand… Maybe he could show her that the situation really wasn’t as bad as it seemed, that he wasn’t the gross monster whom Ben had understood him to be.
I’ll talk to him, Grace decided and rose from her kneeling position.
Charlie threw another chunk of yard debris and garbage into the barrel. The container’s sides rose up four feet, rusted tangerine from years of use. His father – an Italian straight from the Old Country – had always burned his garbage along with leaves and wood waste, and Charlie Picoletti saw no reason why he, his father’s son and proud of it, should do differently, town garbage ordinance in place or not.
His eyes fell on the large brick homestead towering over the nearer barn. His father had built that too, and now Charlie’s own family dwelt there, made safe and secure by the sweat of his brow and the work of his large, rough hands. This Depression had turned out to be a tough time for the state – no, for the country - and Charlie had done a little of everything to get by: junk-collecting, other folks’ butchering, gambling, and, yes, even politics. He was a smart man, Charlie was, and he knew it. He would get by in life. He always did.
Now if only stupid Sarah could get it through her thick skull: that this thing with Gertrude had nothing to do with her. Charlie shook his head. Sarah’d moaned and whined a bit in the past when he’d had flings – truth was, he’d rarely not had a girlfriend in the years since they’d been married; he was, after all, a very attractive and fascinating man – but his wife’d never carried on like this – as if it was the end of the world!
“You brought that woman into my own house!” Sarah had screamed at him, tears running down her cheeks like a lovesick teenager. ‘Cept she weren’t a teenager no more, with rosy cheeks and honeyed glances that could melt his heart.
He’d stared at her. Was she serious? “Into your house?” He’d stated the question. “Into my house, you mean. I’ll bring whoever I want into my home. You got that?”
And he’d not even kept Gertrude in the house! He’d gone to all the expense and trouble of fixing up that old ramshackle cottage for her, when they all could’ve saved a good deal of money by her staying in the guest bedroom. And yet he’d done all this to please Sarah; she was so finicky!
Charlie gave a kick to the barrel. Women. You couldn’t live with them… and he, for one, certainly couldn’t live without them.
Speaking of women – well, girls, at any rate – his middle daughter had come out of the house just now. Grace paused on the back stoop, hesitating like she was waiting for something, someone, or maybe she was just catching her breath. Grace was turning out to be pretty good-looking, if Charlie did say so himself. Small of stature like all the Picolettis, her thin frame caused her to take on the appearance of a tiny bird, golden-feathered, soft-featured, except for her slightly-bigger-than-average nose. That nose comes from her mother’s side.
Grace’s face stayed turned away from him, looking toward the sky, and Charlie stood studying her, wondering if she was waiting for a boyfriend to swing by, or whatnot. She was fourteen; she must have one, he figured. Not that it mattered to him at all. Grace would talk to her mama, or to Lou and Nancy about all of that. Let the women handle themselves.
Back when he and Ben had been on speaking terms – before his son had bashed in his tooth for no good reason – Ben had said something about Grace having a nice voice, too. It was why his eldest son called her, “canary-bird” or some such silliness. Charlie sniffed in the smoky air, appreciating the melded scents of burning rubber and wood. Now, if you wanted hear a good voice, all you had to do was listen to Grace’s mama, Charlie’s Sarah. He smiled in the gray light cast by the fiery barrel. There was a time, past now – long past – when he and Sarah’d sit at that old piano for hours, singing one popular tune after another. Charlie remembered that season in their life together the way a little boy remembers his birthday cake from the year before: sweet and rich, and he didn’t care if it didn’t have no nourishment. He liked the taste of it; that was for sure.
He poked at the flames rising up over the side of the rusted barrel, eyes smarting
from the smoke. That time’s past, Charlie, he reminded himself, even as the picture of Sarah, bright-eyed and lighthearted, pushed itself into his mind. Her fingers had flown over the ivory keys like a swallow catching bugs at the dusky lake nearby. Her voice had combined with his, challenging Charlie with the ease with which Sarah switched keys and changed harmonies. Sometimes, she overreached herself, he thought with a brisk poke at the pile of smoldering debris. As if she wanted to outdo me.
And such could not be borne. It wasn’t a woman’s place to tell the man what to do or how to live. Which was why Charlie had every right to bring Gertrude into his home. What did it matter to Sarah, as long as she and the kids ate good? Why did she care whose bed he slept in on the nights he wasn’t in hers?
Sometimes a man just got sick and tired of coming home to the same barefoot porridge of a woman. Couldn’t Sarah understand that? When Charlie walked in the door, night after night, he saw Sarah standing there at the stove, making his dinner with her once-smooth hands roughed up by housework. The sight certainly didn’t lift the cares of the world from Charlie’s shoulders. And she’d invariably have one kid or another bothering her about something – school, chores, whatever.
And then there were the potatoes. How many potatoes could a man eat, no matter how your woman tried disguising them, mashing them, buttering them, boiling them? Of course, she blamed him for that, too – said there weren’t no money for anything else.
And her hair… Charlie could remember when Sarah’s hair ran lush and heavy down her back, a burnished, enticing path. She’d not cut it when all the running-around women had bobbed theirs. But she had sacrificed it on the altar of motherhood, snipping it right around her shoulders. Charlie spit in disgust at the memory of Sarah sitting in the rocking chair, the first day she’d had her hair cut. She’d not even asked him, as if his permission wouldn’t have mattered. That’d been right around the time Sarah’d disappointed him in another way too; she’d lost three babies, one right after another. And when he’d done all in his power to make sure she’d get pregnant each time, knowing she’d felt bad about it all! Women! You just couldn’t please them.
The Fragrance of Geraniums (A Time of Grace Book 1) Page 7