On Shifting Sand

by Allison Pittman

  “What—?” I clap my hand over my mouth. What are you thinking?

  Ariel pulls a loaf out of the bread box. I follow behind, bumping her gently aside with my hip as I take a knife from the drawer and instruct her to get the cheese out of the icebox. I hold the loaf steady against the countertop, but the hand with the knife shakes so, I hardly trust myself to slice it. The serrated blade grates against the crust, sending flakes and crumbs to the countertop. There was a time I’d take a damp cloth to wipe them up before even getting the sandwiches on the plate, but this afternoon I leave them, along with tiny remnants of cheese. I set the butter knife right in the midst before pouring a small glass of cold milk for Ariel and taking it to where she waits patiently at the table.

  “Aren’t you gonna eat, Mama?”

  I’ve left the second sandwich on the counter.

  “No, baby.” I tell her I’m not hungry, which is easier than trying to explain the odd fullness in my stomach.

  “Is it for Papa? Is he home?”

  “No.” I answer her second question.

  “Is that for Mr. Jim, then?”

  “I suppose it could be. Now, no more talking ’til you’ve finished your lunch.”

  In general, I tend to encourage conversation at mealtimes, trying to school our children in its art should they ever have the opportunity to dine in a fine establishment. Once, when Ronnie was three years old, Russ and I went on a weekend away to a prayer gathering in Tulsa. We stayed in a fine hotel and had occasion to share the dinner table with other ministers and their wives, and I was appalled at some of the attendees’ inability to carry on an entertaining dialogue. Nothing beyond parables and the country’s moral decline.

  Now, though, I need quiet, as my mind races with the ravings of a banshee. There is something new, yet familiar, about this tightening clot within me. Something equally detested and welcome, and I can only think of Lucifer in his finery, jeweled and beautiful and deadly.

  Ariel hums as she eats, clearly in defiance of my instruction to be silent, because it isn’t a tune, but unvoiced talk, with all the inflection and rhythm of banter. She pauses as if listening to a reply, raises her eyebrows in reaction, and nods, shoving another bite of sandwich into her mouth.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  She puts a finger to her lips and hums what I’m sure are the words It’s a secret.

  “You shouldn’t keep secrets, girlie. It’s impolite.”

  But I hardly get the words out, because I feel secrets sprinkling my thoughts, grabbing hold of my lips and tugging them into a half smile as I remember the evening spent around this very table, and how very schooled he was in the art of conversation. At ease with Ronnie, amiable with Russ, attentive to Ariel, and to me.

  I remember every word of it. Everything he said, everything I said, though for myself I reshape my words, making them wittier. I knew the answer to the riddle before he even spoke it. The two of us shared a secret before we even met.

  “The beginning of eternity, the end of time and space. The beginning of every end, and the end of every place.”

  I adopt Ariel’s performance and hum the cadence of the phrases as I take her empty plate, give the crumbs a halfhearted swipe with the bottom of my apron, and put the dish back in the cupboard. She drinks the rest of her milk and runs her arm across her lips, a habit I allow of late since we so rarely have clean, dry napkins lying about. Besides, straight from the table, she’ll go to the bathroom to tinkle and wash her face and hands before meeting me in her bedroom to read three selections from her Children’s Book of Virtue and Verse.

  “I don’t wanna take a nap.” She is pouting, as she does every afternoon.

  I point to the big hand on the small, round clock by her bed. “Watch it fall, slowly, slowly. Until it’s all tired out. When it touches this six on the bottom, come find me.” It is our normal routine, just to see if she needs to sleep. Some days she might come running with her clock, thirty minutes to the dot after I’ve left her side. Other days, more often than not, I check in to find her lost to sleep. The only constant is the fact that she must not leave her room. Nor her bed, since the day I checked in to find her playing with her paper dolls and took them away for two whole days.

  I shut her door—not all the way—behind me and set my mind for thirty minutes. I’ve always been selfish with this time, using it to sip a glass of lemonade and read a book, or listen to a radio program, or lie down on my own bed to see if I need to sleep myself. I might even indulge in some household chore more readily accomplished without Ariel’s childlike “help,” like running our finer glassware through a vinegar rinse, or dusting the tops of the picture frames. But there is little use in such frivolous pursuits these days, and I am still standing in the hallway smoothing my hair when I realize more than three minutes are gone.

  My mind awash with the rules of hospitality, I go back into the kitchen to find the cheese sandwich right where I left it, though I can’t imagine what other fate it could possibly have suffered. I take the knife and cut it into halves, and halves again, thinking that to do so will make the eating of it less ungainly. I spoon a few slices of pickled beets into a small dish, wondering if he likes them, irrationally hoping that he likes them, as I put them up myself, and fill a glass with the remainder of the milk in the icebox. All of this I assemble on a tray with a clean blue napkin resting underneath a fork, and make a halting journey to the shop downstairs.

  “Lunch?” I say upon arrival. There is no one else in the store, and he stands behind the counter leaning over a battered, well-read book.

  “You didn’t have to do that.” He doesn’t call me ma’am. In fact, nothing about him matches his demeanor of an hour ago.

  “It’s just a cheese sandwich and some pickles.” The milk sloshes in the glass, making me grateful there hadn’t been enough to fill it to the top. “I still owe you a good, hot meal.”

  “I look forward to that.”

  He stands straight and closes the book, showing it to be a Rand McNally road atlas of the Western Plains. I tighten my grip on the tray handles and take a few steps closer, thankful to set it down at last.

  “Are you planning a trip?”

  He looks at me quizzically, then acknowledges the book and grins.

  “Nothin’ else much to read in here.”

  I try to ignore the relief I feel at his response and offer to find him something more suitable. “If you like cowboy stories and the like, Ronnie has quite a collection.”

  “What about Russ?” he says before taking the first bite of his sandwich.

  “Oh, he has several books too. Not so much fiction, but several religious texts and philosophy.”

  “From college?”

  “Some.” The mention of the word makes us both uncomfortable, yet somehow allied, our resentment creating a common enemy—one I feel compelled to defend. “And since, too. From all of his years preaching here.”

  “I don’t know that I’d be interested.” He stabs a pickled beet, puts it in his mouth, and chews thoughtfully. “It’s good. You put them up yourself?”

  I nod, pleased. “Maybe you could get a library card? If you’re going to stay here awhile, that is. And you could read whatever you want.”

  “This town has a library?” He sounds teasing.

  “A small one, yes. So, if you’re staying . . .”

  He pushes the atlas away and takes another bite of sandwich.

  “I could take you if you want. Or Ronnie—or Russ, if—” I am flustered, desperate to fill our silent, dusty shop with noise. He just eats, his jaw working slowly, as if he is terribly entertained at my discomfort. I blather on a bit more about our town’s sparse book collection, mostly agricultural tomes and the complete collection of Mark Twain, until I run out of things to say. My final words dissolve into something akin to a giggle, and I twist my apron, wishing it had the ability to make me disappear.

  “Well now, Mrs. Merrill, as attractive as all of that sounds, I don’
t know that I’m the type of fellow to have a library card.”

  His inflection leaves me no choice but to suggest an alternative—some other condition to make him stay in town, stay here, at least long enough for him to read a book. Or two. None of mine, of course. The thought of taking a book from the battered, three-tiered shelf next to my bed and handing it to him seems a gesture far too intimate to be appropriate. Our eyes scanning the same words. Licking his thumb to turn the page the same way I do, especially these days, when my skin refuses to be anything but dry.

  I want him to stay and I want him to read. I want us to have a reason for interacting—a shared reaction, perhaps, to a common story. Better yet, for him to read something I haven’t, so he can introduce me to something new. Nothing in Featherling is ever new. Not the people, not the thoughts, not even the books in our pittance of a library. They’re all donated, culled from estate sales, or rescued and catalogued from abandoned attics.

  Which makes me think.

  “There’s a family,” I say, even as the idea is forming. “The Campbells that just left. Packed up and gone. They’re from Chicago—well, she was. Their house is empty, and I know she was a reader, so they might have left—”

  “What are you suggestin’, Mrs. Merrill?”

  I blush, because there is more to that question than I care to admit to myself. “It’s an understanding we have here. What’s left behind is—”

  “Fair game?”

  Now he is outright flirting, and I flush clear down my neck. I can only plow through my thoughts, speaking too fast and too loud for him to wedge himself between my words.

  “I thought you might go out to their place. We could take you—Russ could take you, if he wanted, or I’d write you the directions, though it might be better if you went with someone from town, in case anybody asked questions. Mrs. Brown, even, might escort you. She usually heads up these things. . . .” My mind wanders briefly to the image of the minuscule Merrilou Brown and Jim, picking their way through abandoned Campbell finery, and I immediately change tack. “The point is, you can go and look and see what they have before Mrs. Berry, our librarian, takes them all. Or before the bank comes for the auction. I myself might be heading out there to take a peek. For the kitchen . . .”

  I haven’t run out of things to say, but his growing amusement at my speech stifles me.

  “So, you’re sayin’ I’ve stumbled into a town of sanctioned squatters and thieves?”

  I don’t laugh, really, not wanting to indulge his judgment. “Is that what it sounds like?”

  “No,” he says, his voice gentle now, and low. “Sounds like you’re just people, hit hard and hurtin’, like everybody is. Takin’ care of each other best you can. Times like these, seems best to throw right and wrong out the window. This whole part of the country’s livin’ in a cloud.”

  “It seems that way.” Which makes me wonder why he would choose to show up in a place where the rest of us longed for escape? So I ask him, but before he can answer, the bell above the shop door rings, and Russ walks in. In that moment I have my answer. Jim Brace has blown in to test me, and my feet are too shaky to stand.

  CHAPTER 6

  WE SPEND NEARLY EVERY AFTERNOON of the next nine days together. I’ve managed to pilfer a copy of Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned from Mrs. Campbell’s nightstand, along with a lovely cut-glass candy dish, should we ever again feel safe to have a dish of candy exposed to the open air. Every day, when Russ leaves to tend to his pastoral visits and Ariel waits for the minute hand to fall to the six (sometimes taking longer than thirty minutes, due to my surreptitious setting of the clock), I venture down to the shop with a tray of lunch for Jim, stationed behind the counter should a customer wander in. Few ever do, and those in need of a saw blade or a bag of nails find me busy feigning inventory while Jim, engaging in enough charming banter to encourage a return visit, completes the transaction with a notation in our book of pending payment. Then, alone again, the novel emerges, and we read.

  I take my turn first, reading while he eats, a tacit acknowledgment of how difficult it might be to accomplish both tasks at once. Then, when he finishes, he asks politely if I’d like to take a break.

  That first day, I am thankful for the refuge of text—something to keep me in his company while excusing me from small talk. By the second day it is an accepted habit, as he tells me he doesn’t read a single word in the time between. I am soon invested in the story of Anthony Patch and the glamorous life I am supposed to condemn. I read, he eats; he reads, I listen. On the third day I bring myself a glass of water to ease the dryness of my mouth, and on the fourth I bring four fresh-baked cookies—two for him, two for me.

  Every day, before Ariel comes downstairs, before Russ can interrupt our story with the ringing of the shop bell, Jim slips in the scrap of cardboard to mark our place and I slip the book deep in the back of one of the drawers where we keep the files of customer accounts. With times so hard, Russ has all but given up on expecting payment from anybody, so I know he’ll not likely find it there.

  And that, of course, means he doesn’t know. About the meal, yes. It is Jim’s payment for watching the store in the afternoons. But not about the book, and not about my presence.

  Perhaps there’d be no harm had I said, on any given day, when he asked what I did with myself all afternoon, “Oh, nothing much. Your friend who’s been watching the store? That Jim? He and I have developed a little lunch routine of reading an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel together.” There are times when such a confession burns at the base of my throat, especially when Russ’s voice tugs at the edge of my thoughts, asking me where I’ve gone away to, and I have to come up with an answer that has nothing to do with beautiful, damned people.

  It is dangerous enough how often he invades my thoughts, how I find myself structuring my day in terms of before and after lunch. My salvation has been knowing that when Russ comes home, Jim goes away. Out there, somewhere in the dusty streets of our little town. I have no idea where he comes from in the midmorning, or where he goes at night—an ignorance that keeps my feet on solid ground when thoughts of him threaten to uproot me.

  “No,” I tell Russ. It is late at night—dark, at least, and we are sharing a last piece of pie, which itself is the last of the meal we shared with Jim that evening. It has taken nearly two weeks for me to fulfill my promise. Finally, though, I found time to spend an afternoon at Rosalie’s getting my hair freshly set and spent half our weekly grocery budget on a beef roast and enough potatoes that none of us would have to share. I used the money from my kitchen purse to pay the grocer, leaving Jim’s half dollar hidden at the bottom of my talcum powder, for reasons I cannot even explain to myself.

  Ronnie sits at the table with us, fretting over a math problem. Ariel busies herself on the sofa in the front room, cutting out newspaper furniture for her paper dolls.

  “He doesn’t have anyplace else to go. There’s no choice.”

  The subject of our disagreement is Jim Brace, who at that moment sits downstairs, having been sent there with his battered duffel bag slung across his back.

  “Where has he been staying until now?”

  “He’s been renting a room at Bernice’s,” Russ says, an odd impatience to his reply.

  “So why can’t he stay there?”

  Russ looks at me, his brows knit together. “I told you last Sunday that Bernice was leaving town. Going to live with her sister in Oklahoma City.”

  “Sorry.” I pick up our plate and rinse it in the sink. “So many of our people are leaving, it’s hard to keep track. My mind clouds up with everybody’s stories. It’s a shame she can’t let him stay there, look after the place until . . .”

  “Until when? He decides to move on?”

  “Well, how long are we going to keep him here?” I keep my back to Russ and train my words to hide my thoughts. “Do you think it’s a good idea to keep a drifter under our roof? Aren’t you worried about the children?”

  �
��He ain’t a drifter, Ma,” Ronnie says.

  “I don’t know what else you’d call him.” I scrub the plate harder. “Man who can carry his life around in a duffel bag. Blowing into town like the wind, stirring everything up.”

  Russ asks, “What has he stirred up?” and I turn the tap on stronger to rinse the dish.

  “We’re stretched thin enough already. I suppose taking him in will mean breakfast and supper. Inviting him upstairs to listen to the radio of an evening.”

  “Gee, you sound like Paw-Paw,” Ronnie says, and the very tone of his voice makes me too ashamed to face him. “It’s a matter of hospitality.”

  “We have enough,” Russ says, now behind me, reaching around to take the too-clean dish from my hand and set it on a towel to dry. “We’ll always have enough, and since when are we unable to share our blessings with those in need?”

  I will myself to relax in his embrace and lean my head back against his chest. “You’re right, of course.”

  “That’s my girl,” Russ says with a kiss against my temple. “So if you can round up some sheets and blankets, I’ll get him settled in the storeroom. He’ll need help setting up that cot.”

  Ronnie closes his math book and his pencil rolls across the tabletop. “I’ll help too. If that’s okay.”

  Russ and I both turn to look at him, surprised at his willingness to do anything unprompted.

  “He’s interesting. He’s the only person I know who isn’t from here.”

  “Don’t ask him about the war,” I say, wanting to protect them both. “He might not feel comfortable telling those stories, and I don’t know that I want you to hear them.”

  Russ skirts my instruction. “Just tell him we’re on our way down.”

  And with a scrape of a chair Ronnie’s gone.

  I glance back at Ariel, ensuring that she is still engaged in her play, then lead Russ back into our bedroom, where a tall armoire holds our extra linens.

  “Why is it so important to you to help this man?”