Juliet in August

by Dianne Warren

  She begins with his sports jacket, which is hanging over the back of a chair in the kitchen. She finds a miniature appointment book—the old-fashioned kind; his phone was technology enough, he’d said. In another pocket, his keys. And a list—her own list—of items that he was to discuss with Joe. How could it be that just hours ago Norval was at the church talking about something as ordinary as paint? She hangs the jacket back on the chair.

  She moves from the kitchen to Norval’s den, where he has a desk, an armchair, and a set of bookshelves. The desk is so neat, you’d swear he hadn’t done any work at it in years, and perhaps he hadn’t. When Lila thinks about it, she has no idea what Norval did in here. He has a small TV on one of the bookshelves. Maybe he just came in here and watched the weather channel while Lila and Rachelle were watching reality shows in the living room. She scans the books on the shelves: several on history and geography, a couple of decades-old university commerce texts, the poetry and devotional books Norval used for his lay services, a set of reference books of famous quotations, and a National Geographic atlas that had been a Christmas present from her, at Norval’s request.

  She remembers that when they first got notice they were moving to Juliet, Norval had special-ordered a number of Prairie history books from a bookstore in the city because he wanted to understand the place they were moving to. She’d tried to read one of them herself and hadn’t gotten past the introduction. But Norval had devoured them all, read passages aloud to her that he found particularly interesting. He told her that apparently they were moving to a desert—a desert, Lila, and I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was a desert in Canada. Well, it wasn’t much of a desert, but the first year they’d lived here, Norval had taken her and baby Rachelle out into the dunes with a photographer for their yearly Christmas card picture. She’d objected, had wanted to use a studio photo, but Norval’s heart was set on the dunes picture so she relented. She wishes she had a copy of that photograph to look at right now, but she’s not sure one even exists anymore.

  She checks the desk drawers. Nothing. They’re empty except for a phone book, a pad of paper, and a handful of pens, some of them with the bank’s name printed in gold letters on the shaft. She holds the pad of paper up to the light to see if anything Norval had written had made an indentation on the page underneath, but the pad looks brand-new. The wastebasket contains just two spent scratch lotto tickets and a cellophane candy wrapper. The den is a perfect reflection of Norval, a perfect reflection of a man who kept everything to himself. She leaves the room, closing the door quietly as though she doesn’t want to disturb a man at work.

  Lila checks every surface in the house that might hold a last note from Norval—the dining room table, the telephone stand, the vanity counter in the bathroom—but she finds nothing. Norval’s bedside table holds only his cell phone, a newsmagazine, his reading glasses, and his clock radio. She gives up. On her way back downstairs, she opens Rachelle’s bedroom door and is shocked to see her there, sound asleep on top of the covers, still dressed.

  Now is the time. She must wake her and tell her. She says Rachelle’s name, but when she gets no response, she quietly closes the door. I’m a coward, she thinks. Without Norval, I’m not equipped for life.

  In the living room, she collapses into an armchair and looks once again at Norval’s shape in the Ultrasuede, and once again she cries, but this time not in anger. She sits with a Kleenex box on her lap and a wastebasket at her feet, dreading the conversation with her daughter, dreading all that she will have to do in the next few days, all the arrangements. Tomorrow, she thinks, she will become a widow in the eyes of the world.

  And there will be a funeral to plan instead of a wedding.

  Astrid’s Secret

  As Lee finally walks into his own yard, he studies the car parked by the house. He doesn’t recognize it. Cracker comes to greet him, his tail wagging, looking back toward the house as though he’s saying, Look, another stranger—the first one being the horse, all those hours ago. Now he doesn’t pay the horse any mind at all.

  “Who’s here, Cracker?” Lee says, reaching down to give the dog a pat.

  As they approach the house, he sees Mrs. Bulin from the post office sitting on the back step. He remembers her phone message, the one he’d ignored: Give me a call, Lee. There’s something I need to discuss with you. Mrs. Bulin stands and stretches, giving the impression that she’s been waiting awhile. She’s wearing purple knee-length shorts and her thin legs are blue-white, as though they haven’t seen a minute of sun all summer.

  She says, “That’s a long time to sit for an old girl like me. I was about to leave, but I could tell from the dog that it was you coming up the road. Did you get my message?”

  Lee decides ignorance is the way to plead. “Sorry,” he says, “I haven’t checked messages all day.” It’s not exactly a lie. He wonders what could be so important that it brought her out here. Surely not just an overdue bill for his mailbox. That would be beyond the call of postal duty, even for Mrs. Bulin.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she says. “In private, I mean. Not in the post office.”

  Lee is tired and sore, and he can’t think of anyone that he’d rather not talk to more than Mrs. Bulin right now. He’d like to put the horse in a pen, thank him for the day’s long ride with a cool bath and a good brush, then sit alone in one of Astrid’s webbed plastic lawn chairs and drink another beer or two—cold this time—and watch the sunset. He would like to be rude and send Mrs. Bulin packing, but he doesn’t because you have to be careful what you say to someone who daily sees and talks to the whole town. Anyway, Astrid didn’t approve of rudeness and sent no one packing without a good reason. He hears her voice: Use people well.

  “You’d better come in, then,” Lee says. “Just let me put this horse away. Wait in the house if you want. The door’s open.”

  “I might do,” Mrs. Bulin says. “That step was getting a little hard on the behind.”

  Not something he wants to think about, Mrs. Bulin’s behind, and neither does he want to think about her in his house, collecting information, sniffing for mold in the fridge, running her finger over surfaces to check for dust. He’ll have to hose the horse down later, he thinks, after Mrs. Bulin is gone, which won’t be long if he can help it. He leads the horse into the pen, and the horse pulls toward the water bucket. Lee removes the saddle and bridle and turns him loose. The horse takes a long drink and then goes looking for a good place to roll. He snorts and paws at the dust in a few different spots, then drops to the ground and stretches and rolls the full length of one side of his body, flips himself over and does the same on the other side. He stands and shakes, dirt now coated to his hide. Even his head is covered in black dirt. He looks like a chimney sweep, Lee thinks, tossing a substantial fork load of hay over the top rail. Then he takes the saddle and bridle and drops them just inside the barn door, saving the cleaning for later. The pad is wet with sweat, and he hangs it over a stall divider to dry.

  When Lee gets back to the house he finds Mrs. Bulin sitting on a kitchen chair. She’s staring at the stack of mail on the sideboard; mail, her stock-in-trade. She’s distracted, uncomfortable. She fidgets in her chair. She doesn’t look as though she’s been snooping around, which surprises Lee. He thought for sure he’d find her with her nose in a cupboard. He takes old George’s hat off and lays it on the counter.

  “I’ll make tea,” Lee says. “Unless you’d like something else.” Although he doesn’t have much else. He’s saving the beer in the fridge for himself.

  “Tea would be fine,” she says. “Lovely.”

  As Lee puts the kettle on, she says, “That’s quite a sunburn you’ve got. You should use sunscreen. Take Robert Redford. Too much sun. He used to be so good-looking.”

  Lee can feel the sunburn on his face and the back of his neck; he doesn’t need Mrs. Bulin to point it out. He gets a couple of c
lean mugs out of the cupboard and puts them on the table.

  “That cowboy movie,” Mrs. Bulin says. “I saw it at the drive-in, a long time ago. I guess he’s still handsome for his age, when you think about it.”

  Lee has no idea what movie she’s talking about. She looks down at her hands and grows silent—Mrs. Bulin, silent—and Lee wonders with a touch of alarm, What could it be, the reason she drove out here?

  Then she says, “It’s about Astrid.” She pauses, then says, “You know I see things, don’t you? At the post office.”

  Lee nods.

  “I see people every day. I see what comes in the mail. I get blamed for spreading rumors, Lee, but I can keep secrets. I’m actually very good at keeping secrets.” She stops.

  Lee doesn’t prompt. He’s standing by the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil.

  “This has been bothering me,” she says, and takes a deep breath. “I believe Astrid thought of me as a friend. We shared a secret, just the two of us, although we never spoke about it, not once.”

  And then Lee knows. He knows that whatever Mrs. Bulin has to say, it will be about his mother. Not Astrid, but his real mother. He places one hand on the porcelain stovetop, but it’s hot from the burner and so he removes it again. Sticks it casually in his back pocket.

  “Go on,” he says.

  “Near the end, I visited Astrid in the hospital, and she kept talking about work she had to do. Baking. Ironing. Laundry piled on the clothes dryer. I kept saying to her, ‘It’s fine, Astrid, you don’t need to worry about that. It’s all taken care of.’” Mrs. Bulin looks at Lee. “Is it all right, me telling you this?”

  Lee nods. He doesn’t know if it’s all right or not. His mind is all over the place with questions about what Mrs. Bulin might know. Mrs. Bulin, of all people.

  “Even though Astrid was in a fog,” Mrs. Bulin continues, “she knew she wasn’t going home again, and so she asked me if I would come here, to the farm, and at first I thought she wanted me to come and do chores. By this time, with the drugs and such, I didn’t think it mattered who she was talking to . . . me, a nurse, a neighbor . . . but then I realized she wasn’t talking about chores, and she knew it was me by her bed. There was something she wanted done, and it had to be me.” She looks at Lee, who is now watching her carefully, waiting, his heart skipping beats, or maybe it only seems to be. “She asked me to come out here and find a box in her closet. An old candy box.”

  A candy box. Lee thinks about the closet, the one in Astrid’s bedroom, the same closet that holds the blue velvet watch box. He can see the candy box, knows exactly where it is.

  “I was supposed to find it and burn it,” Mrs. Bulin says, “and she was so insistent and upset that finally I told her I had already done as she asked. I said I’d found the box and burned it, and she relaxed then. Settled right down. Only I was lying, of course.”

  She looks at Lee. “So that’s it. And now it’s been bothering me, the same way it bothered her. That I didn’t do it when I said I did. I thought about coming out here when you weren’t home and finding it, but I couldn’t do that. So then I decided to just tell you. And when I got here tonight and you weren’t home, I thought again about what she’d asked me to do and how I could still make good on my promise, but that just didn’t seem right. I suppose I decided the candy box was something you should know about.”

  The kettle is boiling. Lee looks for the teapot, but it’s not on the counter where Astrid used to keep it. He doesn’t usually make a pot of tea for himself, just puts a tea bag in a mug. His eye lands once again on the silver tea service and he hears Astrid’s voice, For company, use the silver tea service, and so he does. He takes the pot out of the oak cabinet and rinses it out at the sink, and then drops a tea bag in. Even though the pot is tarnished. He carries it to the table and places it in the middle.

  “Do you have any idea what’s in this box?” Mrs. Bulin asks.

  “No,” Lee says. He imagines things: photographs, adoption papers, mailing addresses, and telephone numbers. “Do you?”

  “I believe I do,” she says. “But I’ll leave this with you now. I’ve done what I thought I should. I hope I did the right thing.” She stands up from her chair. “Thanks for the offer of tea, but I think you’ll need time to yourself.”

  Lee doesn’t know what to say. He feels neither gratitude nor animosity toward Mrs. Bulin, just that she has been a messenger, delivering an old package that he suspected was out there somewhere in the world but would never arrive in his hands.

  She stands but seems not quite ready to go. She says again, “It still bothers me that I told Astrid a lie, but I was trying to make things easy for her. ‘Don’t you fuss, Astrid,’ I said. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. I baked bread and I did the ironing. I cooked Lee a big pot of stew and I put that box you’re worried about in the burning barrel and lit a match to it. So everything’s been taken care of.’ That’s what I said to her.”

  She’s still looking at him, waiting. Lee thinks he’s no better at this than Lester was. Talking. Alleviating guilt, his own or anyone else’s. He says, “You can make me that stew anytime you want.”

  Mrs. Bulin says, “You don’t know what you’re asking. I can’t make a good stew for love nor money.” It’s left hanging, whether or not that part of the lie will be nullified.

  After Mrs. Bulin leaves, Lee pushes his chair from the table and climbs the stairs to Astrid and Lester’s bedroom. As he stands in front of the closet door, he thinks of the candy box as a gift that you get to open at a designated time. He doesn’t know if this is the time or not. He feels a strange sense of euphoria, like he did out in the sand, in the hot sun. Whatever is in the box, he decides, he has to know, and he opens the closet door.

  And there it is, where he knew it would be, under a neat little pile of pillowcases, the special ones with the crocheted edges. The box is an ordinary old chocolate box, the kind Astrid used to save for storing odds and ends before she discovered snap-top plastic containers. It cries out with secrecy, the way it’s placed underneath the linens. Why had he not realized before? Lee’s heart begins to beat faster again as he lifts the pillowcases, sets them aside, and then reaches for the box.

  It contains a half dozen or so postcards wrapped in an elastic band. Lee removes the postcards and then sets the box back on the shelf. The ancient elastic band crumbles, and the cards, seven of them, fall open in his hands. He sees that they all have the same photo on the front—an old three-story building with some kind of ivy clinging to the red bricks, a sign over the doorway reading KELSEY HOTEL. When he examines the printed caption on the back, he learns that the hotel is in Winnipeg. The postmarks are over twenty years old, dating from the time of his childhood. Lee knows without reading a word that the messages, neatly written and never signed, are from his mother.

  He carries the cards to Astrid and Lester’s bed, his heart beating wildly now, and sits down and tries to read the messages even though his vision is blurred. He tries to stay cool. None of this really matters now, he tells himself; he’s simply curious. He can’t focus, but he keeps trying, and gradually he’s able to read and translate the writing into words. The first card contains eight lines of the children’s verse “Peas Porridge Hot,” which he knows by heart. He goes through the cards, and they each contain a verse. “Ladybird, Ladybird,” he knows that one, too. “The Lion and the Unicorn.” “Ride a Cock Horse.” “Old King Cole.” “The Owl and the Pussycat.” And, finally, “The North Wind Doth Blow.” Six or eight lines of verse, no signature. He recognizes them all, every verse, from Astrid’s bedtime recitations. He shuffles the cards and reads them again, savoring the familiar words.

  Lee looks at his hands and can’t believe how they’re shaking. He becomes conscious of his breathing, too conscious, and it seems that he’s getting it wrong as he tries to breathe properly, too shallow, too d
eep. How, he wonders, can you get breathing wrong, something that you’ve done without thinking all your life? He feels dizzy and lies back on the bed. The cards are on his chest, too heavy, much heavier than seven postcards should be, and he swipes them off, sends them flying to the floor. He tells himself to breathe, the same way he told Shiloh Dolson to breathe when he got bucked off the horse. He can hear his own voice, breathe, breathe, and he manages to get himself calmed down and the weight lifts off his chest and he’s able to sit up and think again. He pieces together the journey that took the postcards from his mother’s hand to Astrid’s closet, at the same time thinking, For a few minutes there I was almost dead. He wonders if that’s what Shiloh thought once he got his breath back.

  Lee picks up the cards, and this time he sorts them according to the dates on the postmarks and reads them carefully once more, in the order in which they arrived. It’s as though Astrid and his mother are in the room with him, Astrid’s voice, his mother’s hand. His mother had sent the cards hoping that Astrid would read them aloud and there would be some kind of connection among the three of them. And Astrid had complied. Although she hadn’t read the cards aloud or shown them to Lee, she’d recited the verses, all seven, over and over again at countless bedtimes, until Lee outgrew them and lost interest.

  No sooner has Lee pieced this together than the anger comes, unbelievable anger, at a woman who wanted to disappear but not completely, who would take the time to write a postcard but not to actually show up. Anger on Astrid’s behalf, because these cards arriving in the mail must have frightened her, tormented her with the possibility that Lee’s mother would show up and perhaps take Lee away. And then anger at Astrid for keeping the cards a secret, and anger at himself for being angry with a woman who had loved him like her own. Thoughts of the post office and Mrs. Bulin, the worry that she must have caused Astrid—who almost always got the mail, rarely Lester—because anyone will read the back of a postcard, and especially Mrs. Bulin, who took the term public mail literally. What looks had been exchanged between Astrid and Mrs. Bulin over the postcards, and had Mrs. Bulin really kept the secret the way she’d claimed? She’d lied to Astrid on her deathbed. How could she be trusted? Instantly, Lee is sure that everyone knew about the cards, everyone but him, and he tosses them to the floor again like a child having a tantrum.