American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “Yes. My wife.” Lester glanced at the clock on the wall. “She’s supposed to be here in a little over an hour. I was going to walk around Town Lake first. It’s a nice day, and I was going to finish my workout by walking around the lake just as my friend Carl and I do. I mean Charlie. It’s what Charlie and I do every Saturday.”

  “Well, you can’t go and meet your wife wearing just that towel,” said Manuel, pointing. “Let me get the lost and found box and we’ll find some clothes for you to wear home.”

  There was nothing for Lester to do but nod in agreement. It was the best plan. It was the only plan. Audrey was shopping. Lester wouldn’t be able to reach her even if he’d wanted to. She would pull into the parking lot of Town Lake YMCA, not at all expecting that her husband would not have his clothes with him—that, until Manuel brought the lost and found box, all he would have would be a towel.

  A few minutes later Manuel returned with the box. Together, Manuel and Cleve and Lester went item by item through the contents of the box of forgotten or abandoned gym clothes.

  “This your size?” asked Manuel, holding up a sleeveless Nike workout shirt.

  “That shirt reeks, Manuel!” cried Cleve. “Let’s find one that won’t asphyxiate him!”

  Clothes—halfway clean clothes—were found which semi-fit. And shoes that didn’t fit at all, but were only needed to get Lester up to the parking lot to meet his wife’s car. Cleve plopped a baseball cap on Lester’s head to complete the mismatched ensemble before making his quick exit.

  “See you next Saturday, Lester!” he called. “Key lock: that’s the ticket. Hang the key dog-tag-style on a chain around your neck. That’s what I do. Can’t stand combination locks.”

  Manuel had to go too. He had work to do. Lester thanked him again.

  For the next fifty minutes, Lester Henderson sat on the wooden bench in front of his locker. He didn’t want to wait upstairs. He didn’t like what he was wearing. He looked silly. He had on oversized sweat pants that ballooned out like harem pants, a sweatshirt a couple of sizes too small, and mismatched sneakers. He took off the cap, and then, feeling warmly about Cleve’s friendly gesture, put it back on again.

  At twelve twenty-eight—nearly the time that Audrey was due to pick him up—Lester rose to climb the stairs to the main floor of the YMCA. He turned and started out of the locker room. He took three steps and stopped.

  36 right. 6 left. 10 right. It simply popped into his head. He smiled to himself. And then he laughed out loud.

  And then he went to unlock his locker. 36 right, 6 left, 10 right, and the lock released. Humming happily, jubilantly to himself, he took off the borrowed clothes and put on clothes of his own from inside the locker. He celebrated his reborn independence by slamming the locker door shut, the noisy clangor reverberating in his ears.

  Lester Henderson was spiking his football.

  “I’ve been parked out here for nearly ten minutes,” said Audrey from the driver’s side of the front seat as her husband slid in next to her. “I was starting to worry about you.”

  “Everything’s okay.”

  “Are you having a bad day?”

  Lester shook his head. “No, I’m having a good day.” He smiled. “A really good day. Let’s get a burger on the way home.”

  1987

  MOTHERLY IN GEORGIA

  The world is a mysterious and often confusing place. Especially for a three-year-old. Nona Connor understood this. She thought of herself as the mother hen and her thirteen little ones as her chicks. But Nona also knew that a three-year-old child should still be allowed some freedom to discover and explore. Every moment carries the possibility of being a learning moment. This was the balance that Nona had learned to strike after nearly thirty years of teaching preschool, or even more specifically, after nearly thirty years of teaching three-year-olds. Always three-year-olds. Less infantile than the two-year-olds (and, praise God, out of diapers!) but more pliable, more trusting than the four-year-olds, who could sometimes be wild and wicked little handfuls.

  Nona had her routine down, yet she varied it just enough each year so that she and her assistant, Miss Kalette, would never fall into a rut. There were books and magazines that she browsed for ideas. But a good many ideas came from Nona Connor’s own fertile imagination.

  Take, for example, the pointer Nona used each morning to lead her little ones through the big felted sentence strips she had mounted upon her classroom wall—sentences that changed each day. Together she would point, and Susie and Christopher and Jason and K’lynn and Sharry and Amber and Jessica and Jamaal and the others would recite aloud with her: “Today is [Tuesday]. Today’s helper is [Megan]. This week’s color is [green].”

  It was the pointer that was special, that was uniquely Nona’s. It had a tiny glove on one end of it filled with batting, and Nona had pulled the thumb and fingers together—all of them but the index finger, so that the finger did the work, and the finger even had a little personality going for it.

  There was never a dull moment in Nona Connor’s classroom of easily distracted three-year-olds. Moving them all about the room from activity center to activity center became a game in itself, each of the areas of her preschool classroom—its dull green cinderblock walls hidden behind colorful pictures and displays, easels and cubbies—catching the eye with chromatic splash and warmth and humor. There was a song Nona and Miss Kalette sang that took the children into Circle Time: “Let us take our little mats and sit upon the floor. Today I am a mighty lion. Tell me how I roar. And what, little creatures, be you today? One – two – three – who wants to play?”

  For nearly thirty years, Nona Connor had shown up for work at a little past eight in the morning, greeting the equally early-risen director of the Buford Baptist Church Preschool, which was only two miles from Nona’s house in the city of Marietta north of Atlanta. For nearly thirty years, Nona had prepared her classroom for the day. She’d changed the sentence strips on the wall, set out the puzzles upon the puzzle table, arranged the peg boards and sewing cards and interlocking wooden blocks that tiny hands would soon plug and thread and put together and pull apart with serious purpose. Hands that would someday work factory machinery, take blood pressures, draft contracts and steer heavy highway rigs. Nona was old enough now to be teaching some of the children of her first three-year-olds.

  And for nearly thirty years, Nona Connor had led her class in the “good morning song”: “Let’s clap hello for Joshua. Clap hello. Let’s wave hello to Heather and Billy and Annaree. Let’s smile hello to Erica and Brock…” And when it came time to lead the children single-file out to the playground, there was even a song that Nona sang which accomplished the task of well-behaved transport with perfect efficiency: “One, two, three. All eyes on me. Four, five, six. Fingers on our lips. Seven, eight, nine. Walking quietly in line. What a funny song we love to sing! Today’s little helper, take your swing!”

  There were routines and there was a schedule, and though some flexibility was always allowed—a trip to the filmstrip room on some days, for example, in the place of Quiet Book time, or a visit to the gym on days when there was inclement weather—Nona Connor liked the routine just as much as the children did. It gave her a feeling of security, just as it gave her little three-year-olds a structure and familiarity with the day that kept them feeling safe in an adult-run world of mystery and confusion.

  Long after they had left at noon, Nona Connor thought about her children and how to fix what little problems might crop up—the child who spent too long on the potty and held up the class, the boy who wouldn’t let go of his favorite truck, the little girl who always wanted to hold on to Nona’s leg. Nona even dreamed about her children, for these were the only children that Nona would ever have.

  Except for Cory. Nona Connor had Cory in her life for three years.

  In late July, Nona got a call from Deloria Wasson, the school’s director. Nona was out and the call went to her machine. Nona found it odd that Deloria shoul
d be calling, because the first teachers’ planning meeting for the fall wasn’t scheduled for another couple of weeks. It was also odd that Deloria didn’t give her reason for calling. Nona called her friend, Rosanna Walker, who was in charge of the school’s day nursery—“Mother’s Morning Out,” it was called.

  Rosanna didn’t have it in her to teach. But she liked taking care of little babies. This job was perfect for Rosanna—so perfect that she had been doing it for the last ten years. During this time, she and Nona had grown quite close.

  “So what is it? Do you know?” Nona could hear the sound of Rosanna’s television in the background. “Are you watching something? Do you want me to call back?”

  “I’m fine. I’m waiting for Genie Francis. She’s moved over to Days of Our Lives from General Hospital.”

  “Why does Deloria want to talk to me?”

  “I’ll tell you, but please don’t tell Deloria I told you. I promised her I wouldn’t.”

  “Just tell me, Rosanna.”

  “Holly’s not coming back next month. I know she waited until, like, the last minute to tell Deloria, but when has Holly ever done anything the right way? Deloria knows a woman who’d be perfect for the three-year-olds but she doesn’t have any experience with four-year-olds. She’s going to ask if you’ll teach the four-year-old class.”

  “I don’t have any experience teaching four-year-olds either, Rosanna.”

  “You can do anything. You know you can.”

  “I want my three-year-olds. I’m going to have Skyler’s little brother Jared this year. And Bethany Towler’s little sister Brianne. I’ve really been looking forward to it.”

  “Deloria needs you.”

  “Deloria will have to find somebody else. Seniority has to count for something. Even in a church preschool.”

  “She isn’t going to like it.”

  “She’ll just have to deal with it.”

  Rosanna took the remaining two minutes of the phone call to talk about the weekend jaunt to Stone Mountain she had made with her geologist husband, Chase, who said that the two should visit the big carved rock more often and stop taking it for “granite.” Rosanna added that her husband should be on Johnny Carson, he was so funny.

  Nona had never married. She had a little boy. She didn’t have him have him. She kept him. She started the paperwork to adopt him. He belonged to Nona’s younger sister Eve. Eve lived in New York City. She was an artist…and a drug addict. Nona took Cory down to Marietta with her to keep him out of the foster care system. And because he was her nephew. And because she loved him and he deserved to have the mother that Eve could never be.

  Until, that is, Eve cleaned herself up. And then took him back. Cory was three. A day didn’t go by after that in which Nona didn’t think about Cory. He’d be well into his thirties now. Nona had stopped speaking to her sister after Eve reclaimed her son. It was the most painful thing that Nona ever had to do—giving up that little boy.

  He was three.

  Rosanna didn’t know all there was to the story of Cory—the fact that Nona had grown to love him as her own. And Deloria didn’t know the story at all. At least not until Rosanna told her.

  “We need you to teach the four-year-olds, Nona,” said Deloria the next morning in her office. “Maureen can’t do it. Maureen’s a good assistant, but I’m not at all comfortable giving her full responsibility for that class. This is about that little boy, isn’t it? Your sister’s son.”

  “How do you know about Cory?” Nona had tried to stay seated in Deloria’s office, but she was too agitated, too fidgety, and was now standing at the window.

  “Rosanna told me. I have to be honest, Nona. You’re a very good teacher and I see how much you love the children. But it isn’t just three-year-olds who need you, and it doesn’t make sense that you only want to teach three-year-olds unless you’ve got some wild idea in the back of your head that someday another little Cory is going to come walking into your room, and, honey, that just makes you sound a little screwy.”

  Nona didn’t take offense. “They’re all little Corys in a way, Deloria. I can’t explain it. I just have an affinity for children that age.”

  Deloria stuck a pencil in her electric pencil sharpener. She had been sharpening pencils when Nona walked in and now seemed to need something to do with her hands. The pause in the conversation gave Deloria a chance to choose just the right words for what she wanted to say next. She pulled the freshly sharpened pencil from the hole and the sharpener got quiet again.

  “Have you seen Cory—I mean, since your sister was granted custody of him again?”

  Nona shook her head.

  “But why? After all these years, don’t you ever wonder about him?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Do you wonder sometimes if he ever thinks about you?”

  “How much do you remember from the age of three, Deloria?”

  “Not that much, I suppose. You don’t want to know what happened to him?”

  “If I wanted to know what happened to him, I’d call Eve. But it’s a call I’m not comfortable making. We haven’t spoken for years.”

  Deloria sat down in a chair near where Nona was standing. Deloria motioned for Nona to take the chair next to her. “Honey, you can’t hate your sister for getting better and taking her child back.”

  Nona sat. She didn’t reply for a moment. And then, in a very quiet voice, she said, “I don’t hate Eve. I admire her for turning her life around. But Cory wasn’t hers anymore. I was with him for three years. I did telephone sales from my house so I could be with him, so I wouldn’t have to put him in a nursery. So that people could see that even as a single woman I was fully capable of raising a child, of loving a child. So that there should be no doubt that I was the right person for Cory.”

  “I’d be curious, if I were you. After all these years, I’d be curious to see him now. To ask him if he has any memories of the woman who was there for him in the beginning.”

  “I let that go a long time ago.” Nona bowed her head almost as in prayer. A moment later she raised up and met Deloria’s eyes. “If there’s no way around it, I’ll teach the four-year-olds. But I want my three-year-olds next year. Is that a deal?”

  “It’s a deal, honey.”

  Rosanna found him. It wasn’t her place to do it. But Rosanna loved a good story—especially one that had the potential for a happy ending, just like Luke raping Laura on General Hospital and then Laura falling in love with her redeemed attacker. Rosanna crossed her fingers. This one just had to have a happily-ever-after. Nona deserved it. She’d given nearly thirty years of her life to teaching her little ones to say their numbers, to put on their tiny coats one sleeve at a time, to wipe their paintbrushes on the side of the jar before attacking the manila paper on their art easels, to put away their toys prior to Story Time, to make funny heads out of Play Dough with just the right number of orifices, to pledge allegiance to the flag, to wipe their little bottoms like big boys and girls, to think of things that rhyme with “shoe,” to make presents for Mommy and Daddy.

  He lived in Tallahassee, Florida, and worked in the athletic department of the university there. He didn’t even seem surprised by the call. “I know I have an aunt,” he told Rosanna. “I know that she and my mother have never gotten along. I thought someday I’d look her up. I know she never married, so I’ve got no cousins.”

  “I’m sure she’d like to hear from you,” said Rosanna. Then Rosanna took a breath and said, “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  “That she took care of you the first three years of your life.”

  Cory shook his head. “Mom said I was put in foster care.”

  “You have no memories of that time?”

  “Vague ones. Some nice lady who wore pearls.”

  “She still wears pearls.”

  Cory didn’t call. After getting the full, true story from his mother, who now ran a gallery in Soho, he drove up to Marietta. A
nd when he turned up on his Aunt Nona’s doorstep that Saturday, he had someone he’d brought along with him (with his wife’s somewhat hesitant consent).

  A little boy. Three and a half years old. He looked just like his father at that age: round face, plump cheeks, long black lashes over bright, brown, wondering eyes.

  His name was Brandon.

  And he liked trucks.

  1988

  STOUTHEARTED IN FLORIDA

  It was an elaborate scheme—and to think that it was engineered by a girl of thirteen. Lindsey took a risk and no matter how you feel about what she did, you have to admire the courage it took to pull it off.

  Lindsey is my niece. She is my mother Hallie’s granddaughter. I don’t want to confuse you with too many names and relationships here, but if you’ll bear with me, I’ll make it short and sweet. Mom had two kids: me and my sister, Sybil. Sybil married Gary. I never married. I’m what they call a lifelong bachelor. I seldom clean my apartment. Don’t come over.

  Anyway, I call Gary “Doc” to get under his skin. He dropped out of UF’s med school, and now he does probably just as well selling medical appliances, but he hates me reminding him that he couldn’t cut the mustard as a doctor. He, in turn, calls me the family bum, and I suppose that makes us even.

  Sybil and Gary have three kids—Donald, Glen, and then the “Afterthought,” Lindsey. I would never call her that to her face, and would ask that you don’t either, or I will come and do serious harm to you.

  So that’s the cast of characters with regard to my lovely extended family. But there are a couple of other vital players in this family drama: Winnie—now that’s my mom’s late-life lesbian lover—and Nurse Gibson. I have no idea what Nurse Gibson’s first name is, but she’s important to the story because she’s the night nurse supervisor on the Intensive Care floor at the hospital, where my mother is a critical care patient, and in this capacity she wields quite a bit of authority.