"That sounds fine."
"You and Penny will dine with us in the evening. You'll help Alma cut her food and so forth."
Bobby smiled. "I do that for Pen anyway."
"Alma's entire left side is critically weakened as a result of the stroke," Eva continued, as if Bobby hadn't spoken. "That affects her balance and, of course, her ability to move around. Which is where you come in. She's fairly mobile in the wheelchair but otherwise requires assistance in getting from one place to another. We have a van that's equipped with a ramp, and I try to take her out at least once a week for some fresh air. The physical therapist comes on Thursdays, and she sees her doctor in Greenwich every other Monday. Saturday afternoons she spends an hour in the pool at the Y. It helps her keep her muscles toned to a degree. She looks forward to her swim. Until she had the stroke, my aunt was a very active woman. She played golf and tennis and traveled extensively. Anyway, I usually take her to the pool, but there may be an occasion when I'm not free. Then you'll have to go with her. Can you swim?"
"Yes."
"Good. You'll get into the swing of our routine fairly quickly. Now, if you haven't any questions, I'll take you and Penny over to the school."
"How's she gonna get there and back every day?"
"School bus," Eva said. "It'll pick her up and bring her back to the top of the driveway."
"Is she gonna need lunches?"
"You can either make it for her or buy lunch tickets for the school cafeteria. My daughter hated school food. Penny probably does too."
"She hates it all right. How old's your girl?" Bobby asked.
"Twenty."
"And she's away at school?"
"She's at college in New Hampshire."
"Oh! That's real nice."
"Really nice," Eva corrected automatically.
"Were you a teacher or something?" Bobby asked.
At this, Eva laughed. It changed her entirely. She was suddenly no longer austere and business-like, but friendly and very pretty. Bobby smiled in response.
"I'm a writer," Eva explained. "I'm forever correcting people. You'll get used to it."
"What d'you write?" Bobby asked with genuine interest.
"Novels," Eva answered flatly, setting aside her glasses and the folder, then glancing at her watch. "Why don't you get Penny while I put on my coat?"
*
It was all so easy Bobby could hardly believe it. Penny was whisked off to join the first grade class within fifteen minutes. The principal assured Bobby the driver on that route would be notified of the additional stop and Penny would be dropped at the top of the driveway by three-fifteen that afternoon.
Clutching her lunch tickets, Penny waved everyone good-bye and happily went skipping off with one of the secretaries to meet her new teacher and classmates.
A few forms were completed, and that was that. Bobby was back in the car with Eva, who took a somewhat circuitous route home in order to point out the nearest shopping center and supermarket, the post office, and the bank.
"You'll probably want to open an account," she told Bobby. "I'll be paying you by check."
"I guess so," Bobby agreed, wondering what to do about her mail. Not that she got much. Maybe she'd have the post office forward it to Aunt Helen, and Helen could send along anything important. She'd call her later and ask if that was okay. She glanced over at Eva, admiring her smartly-cut tweed coat. This woman and her aunt had money. A nice house, a special van, and this cushy car that was some kind of import. Joe would've known right off what kind of car it was. He'd always been crazy for cars. Thinking of him, she scanned the oncoming traffic, fully expecting to see the Firebird cruising the streets, looking for her.
Trying to push away her sudden fear, she turned her attention back to Eva. She had a pretty profile, with a rounded chin and kind of a pointy nose, big gray-green eyes, long dark hair tied at the back of her neck with a black bow. She wore a wedding band on her left hand and a big diamond ring on her right.
"You divorced?" Bobby asked, surprised by her own boldness.
"Widowed," Eva answered, looking over briefly.
"Oh, that's too bad."
"It's been a long time," Eva said with a slight shrug. "My husband went off on a business trip sixteen years ago and had a heart attack in his hotel room."
"He must've been real young."
"He was thirty."
"That's awful," Bobby said with immediate sympathy. "It must've come as a terrible shock to you."
"It was awful," Eva confirmed. "Melissa was four at the time. She kept asking for him for months. Eventually, she seemed to forget. But when she turned twelve, she asked to have a photograph of him. She's kept it with her ever since."
"It must've been hard on her, a little girl with no daddy." "What about you?" Eva asked. "How has it been for Penny with a father who likes to use his fists?"
"Joe's never cared much about Pen," Bobby said quietly. "See, he never wanted her in the first place. It's 'cause he started hitting her too that we ran away. Long as she stayed out of his way, it was okay. But lately, the past few months, if he started in on me and she came in, he'd slap her around. I couldn't let him do that."
"No," Eva said soberly, "you couldn't. Does he have any idea where you've gone?" With alarm, Bobby said quickly, "No! I don't ever want to see him again." "Really?" Eva's eyebrows lifted as if she didn't believe what Bobby was telling her. "I don't," Bobby enunciated carefully, "ever want to see him again."
"I'll make the lunch today," Eva said, "then I'll come up with you to get Aunt Alma, show you how the chair lift works."
It was Bobby's job to shift Alma from the wheelchair to the lift. It was-n't difficult. The woman was tall and big-boned but not especially heavy. Since the lift was on the right-hand side of the stairs, it was simply a matter of Bobby's positioning herself on Alma's weakened left side, draping the woman's lifeless arm across her shoulders and, with an arm around her waist, directing Alma sideways and down into the chair lift. She could feel Alma helping, could smell the woman's perfume, and at the moment Alma was safely deposited into the conveyance, Bobby felt a wrenching pang of sympathy for her. It had to be terrible to lose control of yourself that way, to go from being someone strong and in charge to someone needing help with almost everything.
Eva showed her how to collapse the wheelchair, then carried it down the stairs and reopened it at the bottom. When the slow-moving lift arrived, the procedure was repeated again in reverse. From that point, Alma insisted on driving herself along the hallway to the kitchen, where the table was set for lunch.
It was a simple meal of soup and sandwiches, but Bobby was embarrassed to eat in front of these women. She was convinced they'd find fault with her table manners just as they found fault with the way she talked. She took tiny bites of the baked ham and Swiss cheese sandwich, finding it hard to swallow. Her mouth was still very sore and this, combined with her uneasiness, made her even more self-conscious. Neither of the women appeared to take any notice of her. Alma started in asking Eva about some guy named Charlie, and Eva said they'd be going out Saturday night. Charlie had tickets for a play at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven.
Bobby pretended to be busy with her food, not wanting to appear as if she were listening. But she couldn't help hearing, and wondered if Charlie was Eva's boyfriend. The possibility that Eva had a boyfriend lent the woman a new dimension, and Bobby again covertly studied her, as she had earlier in the car. Men would probably find her attractive, Bobby thought, even if she did like to correct everybody's grammar. She was slim but had a good shape, with a nice small waist and quite a big bust.
Every few minutes Bobby looked over at the back door, imagining Joe charging through it with a shotgun under one arm, a handgun in the other, a grin on his face. It kept her stomach in knots. It didn't matter that there was no way he could know where she was, she couldn't stop expecting him to come crashing in.
Eva had the impression that Bobby was trying to hide behind the
frizzy curtain of her hair. She watched her take tiny bites of her food, saw the way her eyes kept going to the door, and knew she was afraid. Deborah had been angry and defiant, her dark brown eyes wide with challenge, her spine straight as a rule. She'd never cringed or cowered. Yet she'd appeared to tolerate the beatings. Now, as then, Eva couldn't help wondering if there were some cultural aspect to Deborah's behavior that she'd failed to perceive or comprehend. After all, despite her British public school education, Deborah and her mother had been West Indians, and Eva knew all too little about social customs in the islands. During her stay on Montaverde, it had seemed to her to be a male-dominated society. It had been another era as well, a time when wife-beating wasn't something discussed on talk shows and on the front cover of Newsweek.
Eva had gone to the island knowing very little about Deborah's relationship with Ian. She'd met the man only twice before, once soon after his and Deborah's hasty marriage when Melissa was a newborn, and again just before she and Ken left England when Mellie was six months old. Both times Eva had felt uncomfortable, in part because Ian seemed so unlikely a partner for Deborah. For one thing, he was almost fifteen years older than she and appeared deeply set in his ways, while Deborah had always been spontaneous, a free spirit. The fact that he was white didn't faze Eva in the least. Deborah had dated any number of white men, and Eva didn't believe in any form of racial discrimination. No, what bothered her about him were his protracted silences when he contributed almost nothing to the conversation, and his penetrating, somehow judgmental sidelong stares. His elongated features seemed to have been shaped into a perpetual sneer.
At the time, she had told herself she was being hypocritical, but she couldn't help feeling there was something about Ian that smacked of contrivance. For Deborah's sake, she'd wanted to like Ian. But his three-piece suits, his club tie, his sports car, his mannerisms, and his constantly referring to himself as "one," all struck her as pretentious. One said, one did, one thought, one would rather. It irritated Eva, and after that second meeting with Deborah and Ian at their new house in Newington Green, when she and Ken were back in their denuded flat, the baby sleeping in her carry-cot while they packed the last of the boxes, she'd had to ask Ken what he'd thought.
"He's a pompous jerk," Ken had said. "I can't figure out what the hell Deb's doing with him."
"Neither can I," Eva admitted. "There's more to it than her being pregnant. But what?"
"Don't know. Maybe it's money," he offered. "Maybe it's security."
"From what I can gather, they bought the house with her savings."
"Well," Ken had said with a grin, "maybe it's love. You never can tell what attracts two people."
Just like Ken, she thought then and now. He'd been living proof of her secret conviction that men were far more romantic than women. And all at once, added to the discomfort of remembering Deborah was the pain of missing Ken. No longer acute, but pain nonetheless at recalling his sweetness and humor. It was a reawakening of the same sorrow that had prompted her finally, more than six months after the fact, to write to Deborah on the island, telling her about Ken's death.
Deborah had written back at once, sympathetically suggesting that a change of scene might do her good. Why not bring Melissa and spend a month on the island? Melissa would have Deborah's little boy, Derek, to play with, and Eva could help with the children while Deborah and Ian oversaw the construction of their new house. "Ian's as keen as I am to have you come," Deborah had written, "and the island's beautiful. I'd forgotten just how beautiful. As I told you ages ago, I was only eight when Mum took me to England, so I scarcely remembered it after so many years. When my uncle Alfred died and I inherited the land last year, Ian felt it was the perfect time to return. He was fed up with practicing law and wanted to make a new start. So here we are, and I'm longing to see you. I haven't seen Melissa since she was a baby, and you've never seen Derek. It's been too long. Getting on for five years. Please say you'll come, darling. I miss you."
The invitation had seemed providential. Eva had been emotionally paralyzed by Ken's death. She needed a break. An island in the Caribbean sounded idyllic. Mellie would have a playmate and open spaces to run around in, and Eva would finally see Deborah again. Without stopping to think about it, she wrote back saying she'd love to come in eight weeks' time, when Melissa's play school group closed down for the summer.
There followed an exchange of letters while they worked out the details, and Eva actually became excited about something for the first time since Ken's death. It wasn't until the plane had landed and she saw Ian standing at Deborah's side, watching her and Mellie cross the tarmac, that she remembered her dislike of the man. And by then it was too late.
"So, tell me," Alma was asking Bobby when Eva turned back to the conversation. "What does this husband of yours do?"
"You mean Joe?" Bobby asked stupidly.
"If that's his name."
"He's a welder. He's got a job in a machine shop, earns good money." Why did she make it sound as if she was proud of him? she wondered. It was what she'd always done, not wanting people to know she was unhappy.
"And how did you come to be married to this welder?" Alma asked, taking a spoonful of the cream of mushroom soup.
"I met him when I was in high school," Bobby said quietly. "Me and my girlfriend Lor used to hang out at the pizza parlor. Joe came in one night with his friends and asked me out. We started going together. After my grandpa died, we got married."
"And was he abusive from the beginning?" Alma asked, slowly turning to look directly, piercingly into Bobby's eyes.
"You mean did he start hitting me right away? No." Bobby thought for a moment, the last bite of her sandwich sticking in her throat. "That didn't start till after Pen was born."
"Why did you stay?" Alma asked. "I've never understood that about women like you."
Women like me? Bobby bridled at that. What did these two know about women like her? "Everybody's different," she said softly. "Even women who get beat up're different from each other." Her eyes filled and she sat in silence, vowing she'd die before she shed a tear in front of these women.
"Don't take offense," Alma said in a softer tone. "I'm simply trying to understand."
Bobby looked over. It was hard to read the woman's expression, what with the way her face sagged on the left side. "This one time," Bobby said slowly, feeling her way, "I tried complaining to Joe's mom, thinking maybe she could talk sense to him, get him to stop. She made out it was only what I deserved, that men had a right to go hitting their wives. That's the way marriage worked. She didn't see nothing … "
"Anything," said Eva.
"She didn't see anything wrong with it." Bobby lowered her eyes, feeling like a freak. These two probably thought she was trash. Maybe she was. How could she explain Joe to them when she couldn't understand him herself?
"Woman was a fool," Alma growled, glaring down at her plate.
"Did you love him?" Eva asked surprisingly.
Taken off guard, Bobby looked across at her. "I don't know," she said thickly. "I thought I did. He was real good-looking, and I was only eighteen when we met. I guess I was stupid." If they were going to question her this way all the time, she didn't know how she'd last more than two weeks. She felt naked and ugly.
"Eighteen is very young," Eva said, and gave her quite a gentle smile. "No one would blame you."
"What about your mother?" Alma asked. "Where was she?"
"I never knew my mother," Bobby said almost in a whisper. "She ran off when I was a baby. She was seventeen and not married. Nobody ever saw her again. She left me with my grandpa and Aunt Helen, and she never came back. See, my grandma died a long time before, so it was only Grandpa and Aunt Helen, and they didn't really want the responsibility of a baby. They talked some about sending me away for adoption, my aunt told me. But they didn't. They kept me." Bobby's voice faded out and she sat gazing at her plate, hoping they wouldn't ask her any more questions. She didn't like the w
ay her story sounded.
"Let's give Bobby a break," Eva said to her aunt. "We're embarrassing her." To Bobby she said, "You'll have to forgive us. We're in the habit of dissecting everything, analyzing endlessly."
"I don't understand that," Bobby admitted.
"You'll get used to it," Eva said with confidence. "It isn't personal."
How, Bobby wondered, could it not be personal when it was her they were talking about? This must be the way educated rich people conversed.
It sure was a far cry from going over the K-Mart flyers with Lor, or visiting Aunt Helen with the TV going the whole time. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and waited for the meal to end.
* At ten past three Bobby was waiting at the top of the driveway. And when Pen came off the yellow school bus, Bobby threw open her arms, relieved to see her. With Penny, she knew who she was.
"My teacher's name is Mrs. Corey and I like her a whole whole lot," Penny said as they walked up the driveway. "We did printing and we had a story. It's a good school. C'n I go up'n see Granny?"
"Hold on a minute," Bobby said, stopping her outside the front door. "Alma's not really your granny, you know, Pen."
"She c'n be my granny if I want her to."
"She might not like you calling her that. You call her Aunt Alma, and don't go making a pest of yourself. Old people like to stay quiet."
"She told me I could read to her this afternoon. She said I could."
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