“Will Mrs. Georges tell them why I didn’t come back to class?”
Beside him, Nona had been blowing her nose. She rested a frayed tissue in her lap, inside the curl of her hand. Harold drove with both hands, his fingers clenched so hard around the steering wheel that his hand looked like a skeleton. Which made Mitchell shiver.
“She’ll tell them,” Harold said. “That’s what teachers are supposed to do.”
“Are we going to get Dad?” Mitchell asked.
“Your dad’s busy. We’re taking you to our house.”
In spite of the horrible events, Mitchell felt a sharp thrill at this idea. His friends had told him about spending weekends with their grandparents and being encouraged to do all sorts of interesting things. Lydia bragged about how her grandma let her try every flavor of syrup at IHOP. Ryan Thompson drew jagged-teeth pictures of stalactites and stalagmites and told everyone in class that his grandfather had taken him to explore a cave. Kyle Grimes went with his grandparents on a houseboat at the Lake of the Ozarks.
Mitchell couldn’t remember ever being alone with Harold and Nona. He never got invited to visit them without his mother coming along too. Mitchell couldn’t quite decide whether it was because Nona felt uncertain and awkward around him or because his mother wanted to protect him from something he didn’t understand.
“You want me to make something to eat?” Harold asked when they got to the house. “How about popcorn?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Something to drink? We’ve got Pepsi.”
“I’m not supposed to have soda. It rots my teeth.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“But you’re the oldest grown-up I know. So if you said it was okay, it probably would be.”
They perched at the kitchen table and, with the stealth of criminals, popped open a couple of cans. Harold guzzled his down. Mitchell traced the condensation on the can with a finger, trying to be brave. “Mama knows how to swim, you know.”
“Does she? She’s a good swimmer?”
“She used to be a lifeguard one time. She wanted to take Kate to Aqua-Tots this year, only she didn’t have time so Mrs. Pavik had to do it.”
“Mitchell. I—” Harold stopped. Pain snagged in his throat. A grown man trying to comfort a child, at a loss for words.
“When can I talk to Dad?”
“Anytime you’d like. Do you want to call him and tell him we got you here safe?”
Mitchell nodded, his bottom lip starting to quaver.
“Come on. I’ll dial his number for you. I’ll bet he wants to talk to you too.” Harold hoisted himself from the chair and headed for the landline. He dialed Joe’s number and handed the receiver to Mitchell.
“Dad?” Mitchell heard three rings and then the click. “Dad?” But no one answered, only voice mail. I can’t come to the phone right now. If you’re trying to reach Harper’s Mazda Car-Care Clinic, please dial…
Mitchell wiped his runny nose with a shirtsleeve and waited for the beep. “I’m at Nona’s, and we got here fine. Will you call us, Dad? I want to talk to you.”
Harold produced a hankie from his pocket after he’d taken the phone from Mitchell. After that he invited Mitchell to come with him to the greenhouse. “You could dig around in the dirt out there. I have tomatoes that could sure use transplanting.”
Nona had told Mitchell plenty of times that she didn’t like him to get his hands dirty. So Mitchell shook his head even though Harold’s suggestion sounded like fun. Instead he went in search of his grandmother. He found her in her brocade chair, gripping a tissue in both fists directly below her chin. She’d worked the Kleenex with her thumbs until there wasn’t anything left of it, just a wad of shreds.
“Nona?”
It seemed a necessary thing: that a grandmother in a chair would reach toward a child who needed to be embraced. But Nona didn’t. She sat there, looking stricken, her limbs crimped tight against her, a cocooned butterfly unable to unfurl its wings. Mitchell’s throat tightened. He hated to admit it, but his grandmother frightened him.
“Do you like Mike and Ikes?” he asked timidly. He would try anything.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Those candies. They’re different colors and they’re shaped like pills and they get stuck in your teeth when you chew them.”
Her name had been Jane. His mother had once told him this. Mitchell thought about that sometimes, how your name could change when you got older and somebody gave you a nickname and it just stuck.
“There’s lime and lemon and cherry and orange and strawberry. Do you know what your favorite color would be?” he asked. “I like green the best. But if you thought you’d like those best, I could save the green ones for you.”
She didn’t answer. She sat in the chair with her shoulders hunched forward to make herself smaller, as if she didn’t think it appropriate to take up so much room in her own chair.
“Or I could save another color for you if you’d like.”
When she pretended not to hear, pain squeezed his ribs. He inched closer, not knowing what else to do. He saw the picture frame of a young girl in her lap. “Who’s that, Nona?” Mitchell pressed closely against the chair. “Is that a picture of my mother?”
“Yes.” A whisper, faint as a breeze winnowing its way through the grass. “That’s her.”
Even though he wasn’t invited, Mitchell climbed into the chair with Nona, and for once she didn’t have the strength to push him away. “Can I see?”
Nona didn’t raise her head, but she handed the frame to him. Mitchell held it between two hands (his mom would be so proud of him because he hadn’t gotten his hands dirty today) and looked at the little girl’s face.
When he glanced up at Nona, she was staring at the girl’s face too. It surprised him that Nona didn’t look angry anymore; she just looked sad. Mitchell realized that Nona was feeling bad about his mom too. And even though she’d always acted bristly to him, even though he’d always been afraid of her, at that moment, Mitchell didn’t care. He laid his head against her bony shoulder.
The afghan in her lap folded to the floor unheeded, like ripples of cake batter, as he threaded his fingers into Nona’s hand.
Chapter Fourteen
It could be a fearful thing traveling with an angel, Sarah thought, even an angel whose forehead was covered by sparse hanks of hair (which occasionally lifted like a hinged lid on a teapot when he got caught by the Chicago breeze), who’d acquired his best pair of wingtip shoes from the clothing bin on LaSalle Street, whom God had relegated as the long-standing guardian of the Cubs.
They made an unlikely trio as they set off: Annie, the Christian grandma who had never stopped praying for the little granddaughter she’d adored. Wingtip, the angel who’d been inexplicably drawn to one small boy rooting for the Cubs in the bleacher section. And here she was too, given the gift of traveling with them, unable to turn back, not knowing what it meant to go forward. Not knowing why her heart felt so empty inside even when she’d had everything she ever thought she wanted.
It wasn’t like being lifted up and flying exactly. It was more like a hot-air balloon ride—at least that’s how Annie described it. A whoosh of warm air overhead (or maybe a whoosh of wings, she couldn’t be sure) while below them the bustling village of Buffalo Grove gently, silently, fell away. It was like watching Google Earth on the computer—the view widening as they rose, the rooftops growing smaller, the street layouts resembling the pattern on an Oriental rug, before Wingtip took their hands, waited for them to say they were ready and, together, they dipped toward the tilting world again.
It was night when they returned. Stars pinpricked a navy sky, so sharp they seemed like they were prickling Sarah’s skin. A gathering of teenagers caroused on a wooded rise overlooking town. Against the dark sky, tree limbs stood outstretched like a catcher’s glove, reaching to snag the ball of a moon.
Moonlight glanced off a row of car fenders. Somewhere d
own the line, a radio played. Johnny Rivers was singing “The Tracks of My Tears.”
Sarah gasped. “This is the night it happened, isn’t it?”
Why would anyone bring me here? Sarah rounded on them, her fists knotted at her sides. “I thought God wanted me to look at my life, not my mother’s!”
Wingtip asked pointedly, “Isn’t this the night your life began?”
Resentment burst forth in Sarah the way an ember bursts into flame. “This part certainly isn’t important.”
“Isn’t it?” Annie asked. “She let it affect her entire life, and you have been doing the same thing.”
“But it wasn’t my decision, and I don’t understand why I have had to pay for it. I didn’t have anything to do with it.” The bitterness shone in Sarah’s eyes.
Then Sarah saw them. None of the other kids paid much mind to the couple necking beneath the tree. Intent on a kiss, the young woman braced her hand at the small of her back against the tree trunk, even while the young man angled her spine against the rough bark. They were only silhouettes, these two who had slunk beyond the far shadows so no one would see. His head lowered, her gaze lifted, and who knew if the whispers came from the rustling leaves or the promises he made as he told her he would always love her. Who knew?
A flash of white collar and the thin bow at her neck where she’d folded and refolded it to look perfect with his letter sweater. A glimmer of leather where her finger hooked his belt loop, something to hang on to.
The radio played in the distance. The song changed, and somebody whistled along to the words of Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” Sarah stood with her fists clenched, indignant, wondering what God intended to do, watching her mother let herself be coaxed out of sight over the ridge, Jane’s wrist clasped in his hand. She didn’t try to wrest it away, her black-and-white saddle shoes taking unsteady tiptoe steps in the grass.
Even in her anger, Sarah stumbled forward, trying to follow them. “Mama,” she shouted. “Don’t!” But Jane didn’t hear. Sarah gripped her grandmother’s arm. “Annie, you’ve got to make her stop it. We don’t have to let her do this.”
“Oh yes. We do. We do have to let her do this. She made the choice long ago.”
“Annie, please.” Because this cut through her bitterness, it was all she could figure out. “Don’t you think that’s why God sent us here? To change things for her?”
“God didn’t send you here to change things, child. He sent you here so you’d ask him to help change things that you can’t. The things that happened can’t be changed, but you can change, and so could Jane if she wanted to.”
Tears welled in Sarah’s eyes.
“One mistake does not have to rule a person’s entire life. Jane is stuck in a moment of time, and she has let it ruin her life, but you don’t have to make the same mistake.”
“Please.” She spun around, gripped the cuffs of Annie’s short sleeves. “Please.”
“Think about it.” Her grandmother brushed hair from her eyes, then gravely rubbed one of Sarah’s dark ringlets between her fingers, twisting it like an old telephone cord. “Child, God always works good things out of our mistakes if we let him. If your mother wouldn’t have gotten pregnant, then you wouldn’t be here.”
Sarah balled her hands into angry fists. “What difference would that make, Annie? Wouldn’t Mama have been better off? She hinted all the time at how different her life would have been if I’d never been born.”
And Annie said, “Your mother didn’t have to spend her life mad, but she chose to do it. She made a wrong choice in a moment of passion, and she spent her life blaming others for the results.”
Hearing it in her grandmother’s words, Sarah finally began to understand it wasn’t her fault.
“Even now she is still trying to get someone to pay her back for the bad things that happened in her life, but only God can do that.”
Jane Cattalo wasn’t the most popular girl in school or even much of a looker in her adolescent and teenage years. She was just a nondescript bobby-soxer who played the French horn in the high-school band, without a glittering personality, everyone agreed, and with a nose a little too wide for the rest of her face. “She might have been sort of cute,” one of the parents noted from the third row in the meeting hall that night, “if she ever stopped being so sour.”
Still, thanks to her persistence and being a senior, she was elected drum majorette that year. Everyone knew she’d been working on a miniskirt and matching hooded cape—a Butterick pattern, double-breasted with those big brass-plated buttons and yards of facing—for her 4-H clothing-construction project. This was the arena where she would earn her distinction; everybody knew it. The detailing on the cape alone would earn grand-prize rosettes at the fair.
Everyone knew Ronny Lee Perkins had given Jane his letter jacket for a while that summer. And after a couple of months, after football season had started, he’d taken it back, which surprised no one. First, everyone knew Ronny Lee had to go to college so he wouldn’t get drafted. Second, for a boy like Ronny Lee Perkins, something more interesting would always be coming along.
Jane’s Latin teacher, Mr. Gregg, was first to call everyone’s attention to the problem. During the “public discussion” portion of the School District 11 Board of Education meeting (so full that Sarah and Annie found it difficult to peer through the crowd when Wingtip led them in; even angels can end up in the rear when it’s standing room only), the teacher rose from his chair, walked toward the microphone when called upon, and asked, “Mr. Chairman. I wonder if we could discuss the situation I mentioned to Principal Steed in his office last week?”
Around the table, the board members frowned. They didn’t know the situation to which he referred. The chairman of the board asked, “You spoke with Dr. Steed about a matter? Can you tell us what this is?”
When Mr. Gregg announced the young lady’s name, it rang out like it had been broadcast over a bullhorn. “Jane Cattalo, sir.”
At the mention of Jane’s name, a woman in the fourth row sat a little straighter. Sarah felt Annie tense up next to her.
“Is that you?” Sarah asked. “Were you present at this meeting?”
“Yes,” her grandmother answered. “I’m sorry to say I was. That’s me sitting right there.”
They were still talking in the boardroom. The chairman asked, “And you’ve already spoken to Dr. Steed about it?”, bringing them back to the matter at hand.
“Graham Steed seems to want to ignore the situation.”
“I do not!” The high-school principal leaped from his seat as if a lightning bolt had struck him. “It is a sensitive issue, Gregg, and you know it. We should have discussed this privately, but now you have trounced on my authority by introducing it in front of the entire town.”
The board chairman jutted a chin toward the Latin teacher. “And how do you know that much about Miss Cattalo?”
“She’s in my fourth-period class, sir.”
Jane Cattalo was one of those stay-at-home girls who you didn’t think about much. She’d gotten brave enough to try out for the senior play, South Pacific, and although she wasn’t the type to play Nellie, her reasonable singing voice had gotten her a part in the chorus. She certainly wouldn’t be one to sample illicit drugs or to be drawn in by The Beatles or to say something objectionable about the boys in Vietnam. Which is why you could have heard a gnat come in for a landing right before the teacher remarked, “She has flaunted it in front of us, sir, and until now, we haven’t noticed.”
“Excuse me, but where is this girl? What is she flaunting?”
At the back of the room, Annie touched her granddaughter’s arm.
“It’s me, isn’t it?” Sarah whispered. “She’s trying to hide that I’m on the way.”
Annie hugged Sarah. “I’m afraid so.”
The horrible man hemmed and hawed, apparently trying to figure out how to state such delicate facts in mixed company. “Jane Cattalo’s barely seve
nteen years of age and…”
A few people just stared at him.
“She’s, well you know, she’s… I don’t know how to say it in front of the women, sir.”
But the women were starting to get the idea. The room erupted in gasps of disbelief and indignant humphs and murmured conversations.
“Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have brought it up at all.”
The woman in the fourth row, Annie when she was the mother of a high-school-aged daughter, rose from her chair. “Whatever you have to say about my daughter, you had better stop hinting at rumors and innuendos. If you have something to say, come right out and say it!”
“All right, I will. Are you her mother? You ought to take blame for this too.” At last the man found the words he’d been searching for. “How could you even show your face in town with a daughter who’s in the family way?”
A great deal of time passed before the hoopla died down and either the school-board chairman or the superintendent of schools could get a word in edgewise. Everyone in the hall seemed to have an opinion needing to be expressed. Finally, when he could be heard, the superintendent tried to take charge of his own meeting.
Mr. Graham Steed, who had not even discussed this subject with his wife, who had not even decided how he would present the idea in front of a small group of male colleagues, let alone a roomful of people, felt the tips of his ears go pink as a turnip.
What regrettable luck that any of them should find themselves in this position, having to report this delicate matter.
But no reliable public educator could let a girl in Jane’s condition go unnoticed. How might something like this affect the well-being of other young ladies in the classroom? After all, a thing like this was almost unheard of and quite shocking.
And the entire time Mr. Gregg was talking about the young woman and the situation at hand, Sarah Harper, formerly Sarah Cattalo, stood with her fingers resting lightly on the stackable chair in front of her, her stomach twisting in anguish, all the resentment she felt toward Jane coupling with the helpless realization that she hadn’t been the only person censuring her mother. Sarah felt sympathy for her mother for the first time as she realized how embarrassing this must have been for her.
Any Minute: A Novel Page 14