They sipped their punch and watched Mister Guido hammer his way through Goodnight Irene. Dickie was standing by the piano with his arm slung over Nina’s shoulder. Lucinda stood next to them, swaying to the music, her eyes half-closed.
“They’re a complete family, aren’t they, Hadley?” Mama said. “A mother. A father. A houseful of cousins. That’s a good thing. A real gift.”
Hadley took her slender hand in his. “It’s what you always said was right.”
“That’s true. That’s what I said.”
He squeezed her fingers. “Our family ain’t been so bad either, has it?”
Mama’s reached into her carrying bag and pulled out her Bible. Pressed between the tissue-thin pages was a single four-leaf clover, the heart-shaped leaves brittle and clear with age. “Do you recognize it? You picked it from that clover patch many moons ago.”
Hadley didn’t dare touch the little thing, it was so frail after all these years. “I never knew you kept it.”
“Well I did,” Mama said. She closed the Bible and returned it to her bag. “I’m a lucky woman, Hadley. Having you was the best thing I ever done, and that’s the USDA Certified Truth.”
Hadley nodded. He thought about what it would be like to say Merry Christmas, Miss Nina every year and to hear her say Merry Christmas, Hadley and know that she didn’t really mean it. Then he thought about what it would be like to never see her again.
“I don’t think I can leave, Mama,” he said. He began reshaping the little broken bells one bell at a time.
It would hurt like nothing had ever hurt before if Nina really shut him out of her life as promised. His heart would surely begin to match his spleen, only it would feel so much worse, and having his spleen cut in half had hurt like a son of a gun. But if he never saw his daughter again, that would be unbearable. Hadley had learned that it was rare to get everything you wanted in the world. You couldn’t always control your circumstances, but you could make the best of them. “Everything I care about is here, Mama.”
“Oh honey,” Mama said. “I don’t want you to leave either, but are you sure staying is a good idea?” It hurt to see how she worried about him. He wished he could have given her an easier time. “What about Mr. Worther-Holmes?”
“I don’t want to leave you, Mama. It’s as simple as that. Anyway, Dickie might not know it, but he needs me. I don’t think he likes Lucinda any more than she likes him. Without me around, the place would go to rack and ruin.” He nodded at the blonde woman dancing by herself to Goodnight Irene. “Don’t want to leave her, neither.”
Mama glared at Lucinda. “After all she’s done to you?”
Lucinda pinched the hem of her dress and did a little twirl.
“I wish she could have loved me. It would have been so nice.”
“You got black skin, and she’s got white,” Mama said. “What would it have changed?”
“Everything,” Hadley said. Lucinda opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Every little thing.”
Meg
The world changed suddenly and unexpectedly for Meg Baldwin the day Old Hadley took sick, a trick of fate that snuck up like a bad germ, which is really what it was. For Meg, that was a memorable day.
From far away, a person might take Grandma’s gardener for a young kid, he was always so peppy. Up close he looked like any other old man, except he could bend and reach and lift like it was nothing. He fooled you like that. Meg realized there was something wrong when she drove up for one of her weekly visits and he looked like an old man from all the way up the street.
There were a sad few things to like about Meg’s grandmother, but she had to admit, the woman had always treated her help surprisingly decent, Old Hadley and Patti Carol, the housekeeper, being the extent of her help. It was that single idiosyncrasy that kept Meg coming back. That, and Pinochle.
“It won’t kill you to play cards with her for an hour or two,” Mom would always say whenever Meg felt like blowing off a visit. “Now that Father’s gone, we’re all she’s got.”
So even though spending time with Grandma was about as appealing as flossing (another habit Meg submitted to with teeth-gritting disdain), she went every Thursday after she got off at the bank. The habit was such that her car could not be made to drive anywhere on Thursday evening that did not involve Grandma.
Every Thursday, she picked up two Big Macs, a large fry, and a couple of small Cokes, the entire bag of which she and her grandmother would politely consume at the dining room table on a lace tablecloth, the French fries divided equally between two Nippon plates with blue butterflies hand-painted around the rim. Grandma ate Big Macs like they were filet mignon, actually cutting her hamburger into dainty little bites and spearing them with a silver fork. Sometimes she ate her Big Mac wearing a hat, if she happened to have a Library Committee meeting that day. Meg knew she only ever wore a hat in the house when she’d forgotten to take it off, yet she never reminded her grandmother that she was still wearing it. You had to save that for special occasions. Should their conversation become particularly annoying, Meg would pick a feather or a wooden cherry and fix her gaze on it until Grandma finally noticed and took the hat off in a huff. It was the only way to shame the woman. Once, Grandma had left her gloves on and not even noticed. That really threw her for a loop.
After this fancy meal, Old Hadley would come in from the yard and they’d have a game of cards. Sometimes Patti Carol played, too, but usually not. Patti Carol was such a poor sport at Pinochle, she made Grandma look like Little Mary Sunshine.
“What’s wrong with Old Hadley?” Meg asked on the day she saw him looking like an old man from all the way up the street.
“Wrong?” Grandma said. She sprang from her chair with uncommon sprite and flew to the dining room window to squint at him through the blinds. “Why, there’s not a thing wrong with that old fool. What makes you think there’s something wrong?”
“He was sitting on the steps when I got here. I’ve never seen him sit.”
“He’s just being lazy,” Grandma said.
“I’ve never seen him lazy,” Meg said. She buried her nose in the sweet pink flower he’d plucked off the princess tree. “He gave me this.”
“Why?” Grandma said. “Is it your birthday?”
“No.”
“Hmm,” Grandma said.
The funny thing about Old Hadley and birthdays was that he had been at every single one of Meg’s birthday parties for her entire life. Grandma was so formal, she drank pop from a champagne flute, but her gardener got a piece of cake every year on Meg’s birthday. And on Stephen and Henry’s birthdays, too. He was even there when they all got baptized. Grandma threw lavish birthday parties. She had that much going for her. It seemed ordinary to Meg that Old Hadley should attend them until the year she was allowed to invite Nancy Youngerman to her Sleeping Beauty birthday party, and Nancy wondered why the dark-skinned man in the gardening clothes was eating an Maleficent cupcake at the table with the white grownups.
“Who is that guy?” Nancy asked.
“Old Hadley,” Meg said.
“What’s an Old Hadley?” Nancy asked.
“He cuts the grass and plants the flowers,” Meg said, as though this made him good as an uncle.
When you went to Grandma’s house for a party, there was always Grandma, Grandpa, and Old Hadley, and after Grandpa had the heart attack—Grandma and Old Hadley. Patti Carol didn’t come to birthday parties unless they were during the week. Weekends were for Patti Carol’s own kids.
The week after he gave her the pink flower, Meg drove up the driveway and Old Hadley was nowhere to be seen.
“Shhh . . . ” Grandma said when Meg walked in the door. “Hadley’s feeling poorly.”
“Has he got that bad bronchitis Stephen is just getting over?” Meg asked.
Bronchitis was going around, and Old Hadley had long suffered from a poor immune system. It didn’t normally slow the man down.
This being the second Thursday of
the month, it was Library Committee day, but Grandma wasn’t wearing one of her Jacques Fath designer dresses, much less her fruit hat. Grandma never missed a committee meeting.
“The doctor came this morning, and he isn’t sure what it is. I’m supposed to take him for tests tomorrow.”
Meg held up the McDonalds bag. “Hungry?”
“Christ, Meg. How can you even think of eating at a time like this?” Grandma scolded.
That was the last day Meg brought Big Macs because, after that, Old Hadley was always worse. “Go and sit with him for awhile, will you, Meg?” Grandma said the fourth week he was in bed. Grandma never looked so tired.
It had been a month since the man was up and around, and Meg was worried what she would see when she went in his bedroom. Before he’d taken sick, she’d never even set foot inside his house. Now she spent every visit there.
Grandma’s house was an old house and everything in it was old-fashioned and smelled like yellowed books. The oldness of the place made Meg sneeze every time she walked through the front door. Old Hadley’s house was worse, a peculiar blend of bleach and stale air. There had been a cold snap recently so you couldn’t open a window. Thankfully, on this particular visit, it was a beautiful day, and the first thing Meg did was crank open the window above his bed. Old Hadley opened his eyes and took a great breath. “The lilacs are blooming.”
“Yes they are,” Meg said, even though the only thing she smelled was sickness and Borateem.
There was a chair pulled up to the bed with a blanket and pillow on it, and this surprised Meg. Grandma was the last person you wanted around when you were sick. She got put out if you asked for an aspirin. She was deathly afraid of “germies”.
“Your wisteria is looking a little wild these days,” Meg told Old Hadley. “When do you think you’ll get back to it?”
There was sunshine lighting up his face now, and Meg was amazed how much he’d shriveled. He’d always been a bony geezer, but his poor little head looked like a raisin on a toothpick now, and his thick dark hair was going gray.
“I wonder if you could water them until I’m back on my feet?” he said. “I’m worried about my wild flowers, too. Fairy spuds need lots of moisture.”
Worry about your own moisture! Meg thought. He was looking more dried up than the dried up fairy spuds she’d passed on her way in. “I’ll water everything before I go.”
He seemed to rest easier after that. “I’d ask Lucinda to do it, but she’s got her hands full with me.”
“What does the doctor say?” Meg asked. It surprised her to realize how much his diminished state upset her. She’d always liked Old Hadley, of course. She liked him more than Grandma, actually.
He waved a skeletal hand. “He charged me twenty-five dollars to tell me I’m old. I should rest, he said, as though that’ll make me young again.”
Meg laughed. Was Old Hadley ever young? This seemed doubtful. “Do you want anything? Are you thirsty? I could read you a book?”
Old Hadley’s room was full of books. That was practically all there was. He had a nice large walnut shelf for books, but the contents had long since spilled down into piles on the floor. The dresser and nightstand were stacked with books, too. One dresser drawer was half-open, and the red corner of a book poked out. He was like one of those crazy old lady’s with too many cat only his cats were all books.
She picked up the book next to his bed. “You’re quite a reader, aren’t you?”
“I reckon I am.”
Meg opened to the beginning of the book and started to read:
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish...
“What do you think you’re doing?” Grandma barked. She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, looking fit to be tied.
“I was just reading,” Meg said.
“Give me that,” Grandma said, and she snatched the book away. “Go home, Meg. I can take it from here.”
Meg shrugged and climbed to her feet. “I’ll run the hose before I go,” she told Old Hadley.
###
Outside, the pansies looked up at her with sad little purple faces. Meg couldn’t shake the feeling that the flowers missed Old Hadley as much as he missed them. She got a whiff of something tasty and sweet and knew it must be the moth orchids. Moth orchids smelled like vanilla ice cream. You could smell Lily of the Valley, too, because there were a lot of those around. They looked as lonely as the pansies.
Thanks to Old Hadley, Grandma’s wisteria was the envy of the county. It had been featured once in Southern Living magazine. Every year, during the first week of April, the Dispatch came out and took pictures of it. The front page would be spread corner to corner with pearly clusters of Grandma’s wisteria. SPRING IS HERE! If you ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut, you didn’t even have to give an address. You just had to say it was for the house with the wisteria. And when relatives visited Beattie’s Bluff, seeing the sites almost always included a ride out to the Beattie’s Bluff bluff, one complimentary game at Turner’s Mini Golf, and a long, slow coast past Wisteria Walk. It broke Meg’s heart to realize that Old Hadley was missing the blooming season this year. She thought of him tucked in that dark stuffy room.
“This will never do,” she told the orchids.
Grandma all but slammed into Meg as she rushed past with the first armful. “What on earth are you doing?” Grandma asked.
Meg took the tin pitcher off the windowsill. “I’m going to need as many of these as you can find, Grandma.”
Grandma watched her fill the pitcher and dump the orchids in. “Smells like ice cream,” Grandma said. She went over to her own kitchen after that and returned with a silver platter loaded with hoity toity vases. The hoity toity vases were used up before they made it through the orchids.
The crystal supply having been exhausted, Grandma started pouring pickles down the drain. “Get the ketchup, Meg.”
Bottles and jars were working out nicely for the flowers until the sink backed up. They switched to drinking glasses then. Wisteria tumbled across the kitchen table like lavender caterpillars. Poppy petals trailed the floor. Meg carried in magnolias, pink bush honeysuckle, and orhids. Grandma seemed especially partial to the orchids. She even rattled off a peculiar little poem about them: “A rose will prick my finger, and a bluebell makes me blue, but the soft mouth of an orchid makes me dream of kissing you.”
Meg stared at her grandmother.
“Hand me a juice cup,” Grandma said.
It took them nearly half an hour to carry all the flowers into Old Hadley’s room and find a place to put them. Stacks of books became pedestals, and lamps were unplugged and cleared out of the way. Old Hadley watched blue stars and bead lilies cross the room and never said a word. By the time they were done, the outside gardens were choppy and bald, and Old Hadley’s room was a messy explosion of purples, oranges, and reds. Even Meg could smell the lilacs now.
“But your Garden Girls are coming tomorrow,” he finally said.
Grandma had been named Queen of the Roses more years than not and never tired of reminding you that she was royalty. “Don’t worry about that. It’s still prettier out there than Mercy Levine’s pathetic little excuse for a flower bed.” Grandma sniffed. Mercy Levine was usually crowned Queen of the Roses during the not years.
In truth, the garden was all stems now, yet Grandma was actually humming as she rearranged a bucket full of snowball lobelias.
“Stephen and Henry are going to stop by tomorrow,” Meg told Old Hadley. He was happy about the flowers and even happier to hear about the boys coming for a visit, but she could read the unspoken question in his eyes. “Mom still has a cold and says she better stay away.”
Mom and Grandma didn’t get along. They probably hadn’t spoken two words to each other in all Meg’s years. Mom felt responsible for the old woman, certainly, but that didn’t mean they were friendly. At family gatherings, they ignored on
e another with the exception of what Meg and her brothers called The Nod. “Mother,” Mom would say, and then she would do this quick stiff nod. “Nina,” Grandma would say, and she’d give a quick stiff nod, too. Then they’d be so busy taking lids off Jell-O molds or setting the table that they couldn’t be bothered to look at each other again. It was creepy.
One of the things they disagreed about the most was Old Hadley. Mom had a housekeeper, too, and she gave Tilda an extra twenty-five dollars at Christmas, and that was that. Tilda did not come to birthday parties and baby christenings. Mom said it would have been stupid to even ask her.
“Do you want to spend five minutes more at the bank than you absolutely have to?” she asked Meg.
Mom wasn’t as snooty as Grandma when it came to most stuff, but she did not like to see Old Hadley eating birthday cake next to her at the dining room table. “Father should never have let that get started,” she complained.
When Meg suggested that her mother ought to go visit Old Hadley, Mom had asked, “Why would I visit the gardener?”
Mom visited orphans and brought tater tot casseroles to shut-ins, but she would not visit Old Hadley. Dad had dropped by with the boys twice, and Mom had ridiculed him for it.
“Mother has always given that man too much attention and now you’re doing it, too. What next? Shall we offer him a kidney?”
“That’s pretty heartless, Nina,” Dad said, so Mom threw a piece of buttered toast at him, and he had to go change his pants before work.
Mom acted furious whenever the subject of Old Hadley came up, yet she asked after him one day completely out of the blue. “Any improvement?” she asked.
The Reading Lessons Page 31