“I don’t have anything to do at night,” he told me. “So if I’m not too tired I do this for an hour or two.”
I walked slowly through the rooms, looking at the work, wondering if I should have taken my boots off, if my hands were too dirty to touch anything, why he seemed to want so badly for me to see it, and why right then. It reminded me of the time he’d taken me to Boston, and I wondered if I’d done something wrong on that trip and that was why he’d never invited me anywhere again.
“No place else can be the same as this,” I said when we were standing in the kitchen after the downstairs tour and he was looking at me expectantly. “No perfect place could be better.”
Instead of seeming pleased at my comments, Sands appeared uncomfortable. He was fidgeting again, pouring himself a glass of water at the sink and pouring one for me, fiddling with his glasses, looping his eyes around in a way I recognized from other awkward moments. “You could live here if you wanted to,” he said at last, without quite looking at me. “Until the cathedral is done, I mean, at least. It would save a lot of travel.”
I pretended not to hear. I drank the glass of water down without moving it from my mouth. Sands waited, and when I didn’t answer, he started telling me about his plans for the upstairs, where there were two more bedrooms, a study, and another full bath. I could feel an echo of his nervousness in myself.
“There will be lots of space for guests,” he was telling me, still not making eye contact.
Instead of “guests” I thought he had wanted to say “children.”
“And there’s a whole big room up there—I’ll show you next time—that I’m going to turn into a study where I can work on my designs. There’ll be a big drafting table, and I’ll have a phone, and file cabinets, and a computer, so when I go into business once the cathedral is finished I’ll have a regular office. The cathedral is going to be a kind of advertisement. People will see what I can do. I’m going to put a skylight in there, too, upstairs I mean, and Italian tile in the bathroom. I’ve already picked it out. I’m going to hire somebody to take pictures and put together a portfolio.”
I held the glass for a few seconds then set it down on the counter. I glanced at the door behind me. Sands had stopped talking but he was taking small sips of water and looping his eyes around. He finally settled them on me. I was all dirty and sweaty from the work. There was sawdust in my hair.
“What about staying here instead of at your aunt’s?” he asked, as if he was forcing himself to say it and would never again find the courage if I didn’t answer this time.
I looked at him. In his square, rugged face, with the eyes peering out through the thick glasses, I believed I could see what the minister had done to him as a boy. I could see it as if it was painted there, just below the skin, a layer of old-man sadness underneath the boyish face. I thought this layer of pain might have grown smaller since I’d first met him, and I guessed that, maybe, if things went the right way for him, if he could have a little time every day to sit in his cathedral and talk to the God who loved you, if he could start calling Aunt Elaine by the name he should use with her, if the cathedral did, in fact, bring him regular work with his skilled hands, and if the people of the town got to know and appreciate him, then maybe the pain would almost disappear. It might even be possible, I thought, that when he woke up in the night it wouldn’t be the minister’s face he saw or the minister’s voice he heard.
Sands was looking at me across the kitchen.
I said what I didn’t mean to say, in a way I didn’t mean to say it, a young way, holding a young, not-so-smart Majie doll out in front of me as a kind of shield. “You want to be with me in a bed the way Cindy and Carl do.”
I watched something ripple across his face and couldn’t tell whether it was hurt feelings or surprise or another burst of anger.
“How old are you, Laney, really?”
“In April I’m being eighteen.”
He looked away and then back. I felt then that he had put up a shield of his own. I wanted to go back outside then and didn’t want to. I was thinking about how nice Sands’s face was, and how clean the bedrooms were, and how long the bus ride seemed some days, and about other things. And then about what people in the town would say if I moved in. I was thinking that probably never again in my life was I going to be asked something like this by a man as kind as this man.
“There are two bedrooms finished,” Sands went on. “There’s going to be four or five.”
I looked at him.
“It could be just for the company,” he said.
But I knew it wasn’t just for the company, and I didn’t want it to be, and I had to stop myself from reaching up and shaking the dust out of my hair and straightening it. I was thinking about what I had done with Aaron in his truck, and it is a measure of the person I was then that I was wondering whether or not I should tell Sands about it at that moment.
“I always rush things, I guess,” he said when he saw I wasn’t answering. “There’s something about my timing that is just off. I’ve never been good at these kinds of things.” He took a step toward the door and so I moved, also, too quickly, and we went outside and got into his truck. Before driving away, Sands looked through the windshield a last time at the roof rafters and crossbeams, the covered-over windows and sturdy walls. I looked, too, but the pleasure of it was shadowed, and I was working to understand what I could do to change that, to open up another part of myself to him. As he started up the truck and turned to back out of the lot, I said, “What would Aunt Elaine say about it?”
“About what?”
“For me to move here.”
“I’m twenty-four,” he said, turning the wheel and heading up toward the bridge and the interstate on-ramp.
That was all he said, and I couldn’t be sure how he’d meant it. That he was too old to care what his real mother thought? That he was ashamed of being alone at that age? That he was regretting what he’d asked me and emphasizing the distance between us?
For the rest of the way to my aunt’s house we didn’t say anything more about it.
Twenty-seven
That night Aunt Elaine wasn’t working and for supper she made grilled salmon with mashed potatoes, broccoli, and corn bread. We set the small table on the front porch and she, Sands, and I ate outside in the summer air. There weren’t so many mosquitoes in Watsonboro, and very little traffic on the streets that bordered her small yard, and it seemed to me that we’d reached the point where the three of us were almost comfortable with who we were to each other, something partway between family and friends.
Aunt Elaine talked for a while about a sick boy she was helping in the hospital, a brave young child with a disease I’d never heard of. Sands talked for a while about the cathedral and said he’d had requests from some friends of his, who were Quakers, to rent it every week for what he called “meeting,” once the job was finished, and another request from someone to do stonework on their house when he had time. I ate my meal and listened to them, half my mind somewhere else. When we were finished I carried the dishes inside and scraped the leftovers into a plastic bin my aunt used to make compost for her garden. The corn bread made me think of my mother, and the smell of the fish cooking had made me think of my father and the walleye he’d sometimes bring home. Standing there in the kitchen, with the last of the day’s sunlight filtering through the curtains over the sink and the voices drifting in from the porch on the summer air, I imagined my parents having dinner at the old scratched-up table, the trees keeping out most of the daylight so the room was decorated around the edges with strange shadow shapes, and the mosquitoes buzzing at the broken screens and sneaking through. I told myself that now, if there was any talk there at all, it would center around the bitter taste of not having enough money, no meat, no way to fix the truck. I thought of what it would be like for a baby to come into that house, without me there to watch over it. When the child grew old enough they would douse her and hunger her. If Past
or Schect’s church remained closed, then probably my parents would find another one similar to it, or at least keep receiving True Home and Country with its recommendations for discipline and Ancient Way of the Lord penances. Probably they wouldn’t allow the boy or girl to go to school. Possibly, I thought, if things got bad enough, by accident or on purpose they would kill it.
My aunt had baked a chocolate cake with vanilla frosting, Sands’s favorite. When I finished clearing the plates she came into the kitchen and together we carried out the cake and cups for coffee (I had started to drink it then, one cup after supper; it never kept me awake) and cream and sugar, and Sands stood up and served us, his ponytail grown longer, his arms like tree trunks made of muscle, and his face, in the evening light, showing his mixed heritage and the little-boy happiness I liked underneath the shadow of a one-day beard.
We had started in on the cake when I said, “I want of visiting my mother and father soon, if we could.”
Aunt Elaine set down her cup and looked at me. Sands went on eating as if he hadn’t heard, but I was sure that he had.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Aunt Elaine said.
“It could be hard for them, not with money, with a baby coming on.”
“They’ll manage,” my aunt said.
“You don’t know it.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But I know they’re very upset that you left. I met your mother and father in town two weeks ago and tried to talk to them and it was as if I were the devil, literally. They’re furious with me, very upset with you. They’re bitter about the church closing, about everything.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to upset you.”
I swallowed a spurt of anger. “I want that we should do it,” I said. “I have a present I ordered for the baby. In town.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“We should have to think for that baby now, not for us. When a baby is being born, the grown-up people have to think for that and not themself.”
My aunt ran her eyes back and forth over my face, then looked down into her coffee cup as if something was hurting her inside. Sands had stopped eating; it seemed to me he wished he wasn’t there. Since I’d been staying at my aunt’s house, it was the first time I’d felt a strain among the three of us.
“Aunt Elaine,” I said, and the words felt strange on my lips. I was still unused to calling adults by their name. My aunt looked up at me. “I think now I’m old enough to saying what I want, and like that. I think now that I am. You couldn’t to stop thinking about”—I paused, glanced at Sands—“your son. I can’t stop to thinking about my brother or sister.”
“For what it’s worth,” Sands said, raising his eyes to his mother, pressing his mouth closed for a moment then going on, “I think Laney’s right.”
Aunt Elaine stood up abruptly and went into the house. I heard her in the kitchen, opening and closing a cabinet. I looked at Sands. “She’s on upset now.”
“She’ll come back in a minute,” he said, but we sat for several minutes in a silence that was broken only by the weak notes of some kind of party music from a house on the next block.
When Aunt Elaine rejoined us, I could see that she’d been crying. She couldn’t look at me. I surprised myself by reaching out and putting my hand on her forearm. She put her own hand over mine but still couldn’t look up.
Sands tried to shift position in his seat but his legs hit the table leg and jostled the liquid in the cups. Some of it spilled onto the table. “You know,” he said, and then he stopped. I wished he’d said, “You know, Mom,” but he wasn’t ready to do that. “You know,” he repeated, wiping up the spilled coffee with his napkin, “maybe from now on everything shouldn’t be guilt and sin and punishment for us.”
Into my inner eye came a vision of Pastor Schect with the children lined up in front of him. I squeezed my aunt’s arm and let go.
“Maybe,” Sands said, not looking at either of us, “we should go visit Laney’s mother and father and let them see we’re making something new, the three of us, over what was wrecked and ruined in the past. Maybe the baby that’s coming is a chance for them to start something new, also.”
I was glad to see my aunt’s face change and lighten at those words. Though it made no sense, really, though I knew better, I let a little candle of hope go on inside me, one little impossible light. I think that’s what happens in families like the family I grew up in: You keep telling yourself it will be different. Year after year, time after time, you keep telling yourself things might change. It’s what makes people go back to people they shouldn’t ever go back to.
Twenty-eight
By the end of the workday on Saturday, Sands and I had almost finished attaching the oak boards to the lower half of one side of the main roof. At four o’clock, an hour before we usually would have put the tools away, Aunt Elaine drove up and parked at the curb. I remember that she was wearing new jeans and a copper-colored short-sleeved shirt with a collar. As we drilled and screwed into place the last of the long boards for that day, she walked around the cathedral the way she’d done on her previous visit, running her hands over the stones, stepping beneath the arch where the front door would be, calling compliments up to us. When we finished our work and climbed down, she helped us loop the orange extension cords and carry them into the cellar, and then, while I put away the rest of the tools, Sands gave her a tour of the rectory’s first floor. I could hear more compliments through the screen and then the quieter notes of a conversation that wasn’t meant for my ears.
But when my aunt appeared again, there was no sign that we wouldn’t go, no late change of plans. I sat in the backseat of her car, behind Sands, and we set off through the town and east on the two-lane highway. We passed Weedon’s Bar—I looked for my father’s truck in the lot there and didn’t see it. Then Warner and Sons Gravel and Stone, then the 112 Store, then C&P Welding and the bus shelter at the corner. And then, on Waldrup Road, the skin of my arms and neck felt the way my legs felt just after I shaved them. I was caught, for just a minute, by a wave of nausea. We rolled and bounced slowly down the dirt road and turned into the driveway. I saw my mother’s face in the kitchen window, and then my father, off at the far end of the yard, sitting on a boulder fishing the stream for six-inch trout for supper. He turned his face to us, but I could see nothing there. I made myself get out. Sands and Aunt Elaine got out. For a moment I imagined my mother closing the lock on the door and my father continuing to fish or walking off into the forest. But Aunt Elaine opened the trunk, and I lifted out the present. I had wrapped it in pretty paper of my own choosing, neither blue nor pink because I didn’t know if the child in my mother’s body was a boy or a girl. I lifted it out and held it in front of me against my chest. Aunt Elaine had a present, too, but hadn’t wrapped it.
My mother opened the door, reluctantly it seemed. She had a belly. In the corner of my eye I saw my father set down his fishing pole. “Ma,” I said, standing at the bottom of the steps with Aunt Elaine and Sands close behind me and my mother close in front, “we broughten some things for of the baby when it’s come.”
My mother stared, a wisp of cigarette smoke circling up beside her face. I thought we wouldn’t be admitted to the house then, and I was about to say we’d brought some money, too. But at that moment my aunt said, “Emmy, aren’t you going to let us in?”
My mother pushed open the door. “Good to see ya,” she said with the hoarse-voiced sarcasm I instantly remembered. I could hear my father’s footsteps on the dirt near the shed, and with those two familiar sounds I had a moment of thinking I’d made a terrible mistake. I had forgotten what it was really like to live here.
Inside the house, with all of us crowded near the front door, Aunt Elaine turned to my mother and said, “This is Sands,” and then, a little quickly, as if forcing the words out, “my son.”
When my mother understood what she meant, she let out a laugh.
She seemed happy to have the news, but it was what I thought of as a wrong happiness, the kind that grew in the dirt of someone else’s trouble. The laugh twisted my mother’s mouth up high at the corners. Her eyes moved from Sands’s face to Aunt Elaine’s, back and forth twice, and then to the face of her husband, who had taken one step in over the threshold and was standing there with his fingers drumming on the cloth of his overalls. After a moment, she put her hands on her belly, the cigarette smoke now twirling up in front of her, and she said, “This here’s my son. Hah.”
I couldn’t look at my father. I said, “Ma, this here is a present to him. A little cradle so because he won’t have to—” I stopped short there. I’d been about to say, “so he won’t have to sleep in a cardboard box”—which is where I had slept as an infant, a box with a blanket on a table in my parents’ room. They’d told me that themselves, proudly. “It’s soon, but we had a want to give it now.”
“She wanted to,” Aunt Elaine said. “She bought it with the money she’s made. This”—she held up the unwrapped box that had baby bottles and some formula in it—“is from me. I didn’t think you would want to breast-feed.”
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