Mrs. Saint and the Defectives: A Novel

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  “You do not like to be so involved with other people,” Frédéric said, and again, it was a simple statement, devoid of judgment.

  Markie didn’t feel the impulse to defend herself to him. She didn’t feel the urge to tell him she hadn’t always been like this. That she didn’t plan to stay like this, alone in her house, hiding from her neighbors, her colleagues, her parents, the rest of the world. Sometimes, even, from her son, and always, always from herself. That it was only something she needed now, until she could stand to look at herself again and could stand to have others look at her.

  Frédéric tilted his head to one side and regarded her kindly, then reached for her hand again and held it between his. “It is every bit okay,” he said.

  He continued to look directly into her eyes, and Markie was certain he was telegraphing to her only kindness, understanding. That he was absolutely not trying to convey the message that she was the one who was like Angeline, letting her own quirks get in the way of what was best for Jesse.

  He was Frédéric, after all, and he was not the type to send that message.

  But she heard it, loud and clear.

  “Patty,” Markie said, not taking her eyes away from Frédéric’s, “I have a proposition for you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  They were playing the Anything Game, and it was Lola’s turn.

  “The category is . . . ,” she said, thinking. She looked around the room, and her eyes settled on Angel, who was sleeping on the living room floor. “Animals. And the word starts with D.”

  Jesse looked at Markie and shook his head. “Dinosaur?” he asked.

  “Nope!” Lola said, trying not to make her delight too obvious. She took a bite of her sandwich to hide her smile.

  “Dingo?” Markie tried.

  Normally, an eight-year-old not living in Australia would probably have to ask what a dingo was. But they had been playing this game every night for the past three weeks, and Lola, after gazing around the room for ideas and landing on Angel, had used “category: animal, and letter: D” almost every one of those nights. There were surprisingly few animals that began with D, so they’d had occasion to discuss dingoes several times.

  Other turns of Lola’s included, after turning her head to look out the dining room window at the house on the other side of the fence, “Category: men. Letter: F.” Sometimes it was letter B. Or “Category: women. Letter, M-R-S-S.” Or “R.” Or “Category: boys. Letter, J.”

  Lola had shamed them into dinners at the table. At six on the first night she was there, she rose from the family room floor, where she and Jesse had been lying on their stomachs, her coloring and him flipping through a video-game magazine, and announced she was going to set the table.

  “For what?” Jesse asked. “And what table? Our homework’s all over the card table in here, and the dining room one is covered in my mom’s work.”

  “At Mrs. Saint’s, they eat dinner in the dining room,” Lola said.

  “Yeah, but where do you eat at your place?” Jesse said. “’Cause you never eat dinner at Mrs. Saint’s. You guys always leave before dinner.”

  “Carol and I eat on the couch, mostly. But we live in an apartment. This is a house.”

  “What does that . . . ?” Jesse started, but by then, Markie had risen from the family room couch, where she had been reading, and walked to the dining room to clear three spots at the table, so she didn’t hear the rest.

  “Okay, Lola,” Markie said, walking back to the family room. “The table’s ready for you to set. We only need plates tonight since we’re having pizza. Although, we do have . . .” She went to the kitchen, ripped three squares of paper towel from the roll beside the sink, and held them out. “There! Napkins. I think our place mats are in a box in the basement, so . . .” She shrugged, grabbed three plates out of the cupboard, and handed them to the girl.

  Lola stared at the plates and paper towels. “At Mrs. Saint’s, there’s always a knife, fork, and spoon for everyone.” Before Jesse could protest again, she told him, “I help Ronda set the table before I leave sometimes. You’ve even seen me do it.” To Markie, she said, “Also a second plate. For the salad.”

  “Ah,” Markie said, opening the fridge and peering in. “Sadly, I’m not sure we have anything that would pass for a salad at the moment.”

  She dragged out “at the moment” as though the issue was simply that Lola had asked on the wrong day. Jesse coughed from the family room, and although Markie couldn’t make it out, she was pretty sure it was one of those “cough—LIAR!—cough” coughs.

  “Ronda will have extra!” Lola said, dropping the plates and paper towels on the counter. “She told me I could come over anytime we needed anything.”

  Markie considered it a personal victory that she managed to stop herself from shrieking, “No!” and clutching her throat. Before she could think of a less dramatic way of expressing her horror at the thought of Mrs. Saint’s house supplying the bungalow with food and, indeed, before she could even remind Lola to put shoes on, the girl was out the door and running across the patio.

  While she was gone, Jesse groaned about the impending salad. Markie didn’t like it any more than he did, but the little girl’s life had already been thrown out of whack enough. If eating the kind of dinner she expected, given that Markie and Jesse lived in a house and not an apartment, helped the child regain her bearings somehow, then Markie and her son would suck it up, be prepared to choke down a few greens, and figure out what else to serve that would merit a knife, fork, and spoon.

  Markie told Jesse all of this and added that, as he surely recalled, he was the reason Lola was there in the first place. It was parenting through guilt, and it had Lydia written all over it. Markie wasn’t proud of this. But the boy shut up and headed to the pantry.

  “Soup?” he suggested. “We could tick spoons off the list.”

  “Brilliant,” she said. “And the salad will take care of the forks.” She turned and reached for a loaf of bread, holding it up to show him. “I’ll put some slices on a plate, and we can set the butter dish on the table. Knives.”

  “Nice,” he said.

  By the time Lola was back with a container of salad and a jar of homemade dressing, they had the table almost ready. They also had their attitudes adjusted enough that when the three of them sat down at the dining room table, it seemed like it was no big deal at all, Markie and Jesse eating there. Like they had been doing it all along. And they had been ever since, because Markie was not about to shatter an eight-year-old’s illusions about what dinnertime in a house was like, and Jesse had been surprisingly pleased to go along with the act.

  Markie had been trying to keep food from the other side of the fence from making its way to her side, but it was a losing battle. To prevent Lola from running next door for leftover salad each night, Markie had been buying lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots, and she had picked up three kinds of dressing. But that only meant there was a different angle of attack for her neighbors. Cucumbers showed up one night, so Markie bought two the next day, and soon radishes—cut into flower shapes, no less—came over.

  She added some of those to her grocery list, and suddenly, shredded carrots, rather than the regular ones in Markie’s crisper, became a must-have. Markie’s canned soup dinners were one-upped by homemade broth and stew, and her grilled cheese was sent to the sidelines by Reubens, which Ronda delivered herself. And, of course, any dessert Markie bought—cookies, mini-muffins, ice cream—had a “made from scratch” version, transported over the fence in turns by Ronda, Mrs. Saint, or Bruce. Only Frédéric and Patty appeared to feel that whatever Markie came up with was adequate.

  As offended as Markie was, she also felt vindicated, because not one food item had arrived from next door that any of them was actually willing to eat. Lola claimed she liked Ronda’s salad dressing, but Jesse and Markie were sure that was only because Ronda’s was the only dressing the girl had ever tasted. Jesse talked her into trying one of the
ir store-bought kinds, and after that, although Lola obediently carried containers of dressing over anytime Ronda made some, Markie had seen her pouring it down the sink, then reaching into the fridge for a bottle from the store.

  The kids had taken to spending half an hour after dinner on “kitchen experiments,” which basically consisted of their trying to come up with ways to make Ronda’s offerings edible. Maple syrup and chocolate sauce had become anchor tenants on Markie’s grocery list; there was almost nothing that couldn’t be made tolerable by drowning it in some form of liquid sugar.

  Almost. One night, Markie heard Lola tell Jesse, “Maybe whipped cream would make the difference. Do you have any of that?”

  To which Jesse responded, “I think we need to just give up on this one.”

  Each night, after the food experiments were over and the three of them had cleaned the kitchen, Jesse spread his homework out on a card table he had carried up from the basement and set up in the family room. For at least an hour, he worked on his homework while Lola, having finished her work sheets before dinner at Mrs. Saint’s, sat with him, crayons and coloring books spread before her. Markie had taken to settling nearby on the family-room couch with a book.

  Jesse had acted surprised to see his mother follow them into the family room on Lola’s first night. “I figured you’d want to hide from the noise,” he said, “in the living room or even way up in your room.”

  “I’m prepared to retreat if you two get carried away,” she told him. “But I think it’s better for Lola to have me nearby. In case she feels homesick and wants a mom figure around.”

  “You’re not exactly the mom figure she’s used to,” he said.

  “Still,” she said.

  Each time Lola finished coloring both sides of a page, she ripped it out of the book, carefully printed her name in the top right corner, and set it to the side. Most nights, she ended up with a considerable pile of finished pictures. When she was tired of coloring, she went through an elaborate process of examining the front and back sides of each finished page to decide which had turned out best. After that, she put herself through a seemingly heartrending task of deciding who would get each one.

  Frédéric received the most, and also her best ones; no stray crayon marks outside the lines, no people with green faces or purple arms. The rejects went to everyone else. Mrs. Saint had a number on her fridge, Lola told Markie the first night she presented one to her, and Bruce and Ronda had assured the child that their fridges were covered in her artwork as well. Markie got the hint and clipped the picture to the front of the fridge with a magnet.

  “And Frédéric takes all of his to the basement right away,” Lola said, beaming. “And he puts them on the walls.”

  Markie recalled Jesse saying Frédéric had a workshop in the basement and asked Lola if that’s where her pictures were hanging.

  “Some are,” the girl said. “And some are in his room.”

  “What do you mean, ‘his room’?” Jesse said.

  Lola’s brow furrowed as she regarded Jesse, the World’s Stupidest Boy. “His bedroom,” she said, leaving off “you idiot” but clearly thinking it.

  “Frédéric lives there?” Jesse and Markie said at the same time.

  “Mais oui,” Lola said. “Where else would he live?”

  Jesse lifted his hands in a “Where do I begin?” way.

  But he stopped himself before he blurted out his list of alternatives, and he angled his chin to one side, considering. Then he let his hands fall to his lap and bent back to his homework. Not, Markie assumed, because he had decided it wasn’t worth the effort to school an eight-year-old on the many living-arrangement options available to an adult man. But, because, after reflection, he had reached the same conclusion his mother had come to: Lola was right. Where else would Frédéric live if not at Mrs. Saint’s?

  “Don’t forget Monopoly tonight,” Lola said. “Since I got those two math pages done without, you know . . .”

  “Whining?” Jesse said, not looking up from his homework.

  Lola kicked him under the table. “Monopoly,” she said. “You promised.”

  If she did a good job with her homework after school and then colored quietly while he did his assignments, he let her choose a board game to play for fifteen minutes or so before her bath time. The two of them had traipsed down to the basement at first, choosing a game from one of the packing boxes, bringing it upstairs to play, and returning it to its box downstairs. Markie felt like she was reliving his childhood as they made their way from Sorry! and Connect Four to mancala and Apples to Apples and Clue Junior.

  They had moved on to Monopoly a few nights earlier, and Jesse had told Lola that if she could grasp that one, they would pull out Settlers of Cataan next. The prospect of being promoted to such a “big kid game” had thrilled Lola, and she had been attacking Monopoly with a quiet ferocity, determined to earn her prize. They had tired of fetching and replacing one game at a time from the basement, and after about a week, Jesse carried up all three of their boxes of games and puzzles, plonking them down in a corner of the family room. After that, they decided it was a pain to have to dig through the boxes, so they stacked them, open side out, against the wall, and then they restacked the games into neat piles inside for easier viewing and access. It was a far cry from the walnut built-ins in their old house.

  “Not bad, right?” Jesse had said one night as he and Markie regarded the makeshift shelving unit after Lola went to bed. “I thought it was going to really suck, but it doesn’t. I mean, it’s not perfect, but it’s, like, good enough.” At first she thought he was only remarking on the practicality of what he had done with the games. But he put an arm around her, pulled her close, and tipped his head sideways until it rested on hers, and suddenly she had the feeling he wasn’t commenting on the way he had arranged the games.

  He was telling her he didn’t need walnut built-ins. Or cathedral ceilings. Or his private school. He was telling her he didn’t blame her anymore.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Patty had been getting to the bungalow later and later: one, one thirty, two, two thirty. She was apologetic each time, but Markie had been waving her off, partly because at that hour she was too tired to engage in discussion, and partly because it wasn’t like having the entire household woken at two a.m. was appreciably different from having it happen at one thirty. She had yet to figure out how to get Lola downstairs from the guest room and out the door without Angel rousing, barking, and waking Jesse.

  “I’m really sorry,” Patty said as Markie opened the door at three fifteen one night. Taking a whimpering Lola in her arms, she said, “I really wanted to turn down the . . . overtime. But I can’t afford it. Carol’s back to her old tricks again.”

  “Oh, right,” Markie said, as though she had any idea what Patty meant or the energy to be curious about it.

  She intended to wave good night and shut the door, as she always did, but Patty didn’t move from the doorway, and Markie saw Patty’s lips part as though she had more to say. Markie was too tired to hear more, but she didn’t let on. The woman in her doorway was the sole reason she was still pulling off her work-from-home position. Patty had been taking Angel for such long walks every morning that the dog snored in her crate for the rest of the day while Markie tore through file after file. Her last file-swap session downtown had gone as well as she could have hoped; instead of accosting her in the hallway and insisting they “interface,” Gregory had merely waved from someone’s cube and called out, “Nice to see you back on track!”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Markie asked. “About your mom, I mean?”

  She leaned on the open door and tried to keep her eyes open. It wasn’t exactly active listening, but it was the best she could do.

  “Nothing much to discuss,” Patty said. “She’s an addict.”

  Her directness woke Markie on the spot. “She spends her Social Security check before she even collects it,” Patty said. “And th
en she takes out loans from the wrong kinds of people and gives my name when they try to collect. Carol’s sometimes got herself under control, but she goes through these rough patches now and then, and she’s in one now.”

  Markie tried to think of how to respond. How did Carol sleep at night, she wondered, knowing her daughter was working extra shifts to cover her debts?

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. And I will never complain about Lydia again.

  “Anyway,” Patty said, “I just wanted you to know I’m not showing up late because I’m inconsiderate. If you want to stop our . . . deal because of this, I’ll understand. I feel terrible, getting you all up so late.”

  “It’s fine,” Markie said.

  A few nights later, Patty arrived close to four a.m. Lola held her arms out, ready for her mother to lift her, but Patty didn’t pick her up, and instead, she asked Markie if Lola could stay in the house while Patty slept in her car in the driveway.

  “What?” Markie asked. “Why? Are you . . . is there some reason you can’t drive?”

  “I can drive fine. I just can’t get into my apartment. Carol and I got into it about something before I left tonight, and she took my keys and locked me out.”

  “How did you start the car?”

  “Oh, I keep spares hidden. This is one of Carol’s favorite tricks. But I forgot to put the extra apartment key back last time I needed to use it.”

  “Just come in,” Markie said. “You can sleep with Lola or on the couch. You’re not sleeping in your car.”

  “I’ve done it a million times. Lola, too.”

  “Not on my watch,” Markie said, motioning her in. “Couch or Lola’s room? Guest room, I mean.”

  “I’ll sleep with her,” Patty said. “So if she wakes up and freaks out, I’ll be there.”

  Far from being upset about waking in the bungalow, Lola skipped into the kitchen in the morning as though she had been starting every day there for years. She said good morning to Markie, who was at the counter with a cup of coffee, and trotted to the card table in the family room to sort through her stack of coloring pages. She held one out to Markie and clutched the others in her fist as she made her way to the door.