I spoon some potatoes on my plate and pass them on, watching Sarah shake her head when Joseph tries to put a drumstick on her plate. She laughs and pushes at the piece of chicken on the end of his fork like it’s a dog turd or something.
“Ewww,” Sarah squeals. “Stop, Uncle Joseph! Haven’t you seen Forks Over Knives?”
“What’s that?” he asks her, still trying to make her take the chicken.
“A documentary on Netflix.” Abby. “I don’t know that I agree that we should all become vegans, but it will make you think. You should watch it sometime.”
“There more butter, Birdie?” Little Joe asks without looking at me.
I push my chair back, and it scrapes the floor loudly. Duke yipes like I’ve taken off his leg instead of just bumping it. “Dogs shouldn’t be at the table,” I say to no one.
“Grandpop. Do you know where Mom Brodie’s marriage certificate is? Birdie says she doesn’t have a birth certificate.”
“House fire, when she was a little girl,” Little Joe responds. “But there’s a marriage certificate. Imagine it’s in my office somewhere.”
“Birdie thought it might be at the bank.”
“Nope, she brought all her stuff home to go through it. After they told her she had cancer.”
Sarah rests her chin on her fist, her elbow on the table. “I was wondering what year she and Great-Grandpop got married.”
I open the refrigerator and pull out a stick of butter. I unwrap it as I carry it to the table. It looks strange to see Mrs. Brodie’s chair empty, and it sets me off-kilter. She never misses supper. I put the stick on the butter dish in front of Little Joe and mumble something about checking on Mrs. Brodie. I love having everyone here, but it makes me anxious, too. All the laughing and talking between them, and I can’t think of a thing to say to anyone.
I go down the hall. In the sewing room, I turn on the bedside light. I notice a couple of red and white peppermints beside the teacup and the baby monitor and the pill bottles. Abby must have left them there. She and Mrs. Brodie were always eating them together.
“Just checking on you,” I say. I smooth the light blanket beneath her chin. I stand there for a minute looking down on her. She’s still breathing. “Made fried chicken and dumplings for supper. Added a little paprika to the flour for the chicken, like you showed me. Hope I didn’t put too much in.”
I look at her as if I think she’s going to say something back, but she doesn’t of course. It’s funny. There were times when I would have given anything to make her stop talking. Always criticizing me. Always telling me what I should say. What I should do. What I shouldn’t have said or done. Now . . . I just wish she’d say something. Anything. Even if it’s just to tell me the chicken’s got too much paprika.
“Sarah found my book,” I hear myself whisper. I have no idea why I’m telling her. “You know, my Arizona book. My own fault. I must have left it in the living room and then forgot about it in all the hubbub of your getting sick. It’s called the Grand Canyon State. Arizona. You probably know that. But did you know it’s also called the Apache State? Like the Indians. Native Americans,” I correct myself.
I stand there, quiet for a minute. I can hear everyone talking in the kitchen. Laughing. The sound didn’t change when I left the room. “I don’t think she looked at it, though,” I go on. “It was just lying there on the floor. I don’t think she noticed it. I’ll be more careful, now on.” I watch Mrs. Brodie’s chest rise and fall. I find myself trying to match my breath to hers, but it’s so slow, it makes me dizzy.
“Well . . .” I say finally. “Guess I’ll go have my supper. You need anything, you just holler.”
Later, I lie in bed in the dark, listening to Little Joe unbuckle his pants over on his side of the bed. He sleeps in his underdrawers. Always shuts the light off before he undresses.
“You check on Mama before you came up?” he asks me, throwing his pants over the chair. Then he adds his shirt, and I smell his state of undress. Not that he stinks. Little Joe has always been clean, not like some farmers who barely take a sponge bath on Sunday mornings. Joe showers regularly. Uses deodorant. But he has a man smell about him that I find strangely comforting. Especially since I don’t worry anymore about him pulling off his underdrawers. That ended after I had my hysterectomy ten years back. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t doing my wifely duty anymore. That I wasn’t doing it. I guess we just came to a silent agreement. Husbands and wives our age don’t do that anymore, anyway.
I wonder sometimes if he misses it, though. And if he tried with me, how I’d respond. I think maybe I’d let him, just because he likes it. And it’s really not that awful, and it’s over quick enough. A small price to pay when the man keeps a roof over my head.
I make a sound of affirmation. “And turned out her light. Just left the night-light burning. Plugged it in over by the door. And the baby monitor’s on.” I nod to the white receiver on my nightstand. Its little light glows green. I hesitate. “You tell her good night?” I ask him.
He sighs and sits down on the edge of the bed, and I feel the mattress shift. “It’s hard to see her like that, Birdie. She . . . she looks like she’s already gone.”
“But she’s not, Joe.” My words seem to hang in the darkness. I want to tell him that he ought to be sitting down there right now, holding her hand. Helping her pass. I want to tell him how lucky he is to have had his mother all these years. But I know he wouldn’t understand. I guess you have to be an orphan to appreciate a mother or a father.
He peels back the sheet and gets into bed beside me, and I feel him settle his head on his pillow. We both lie there, staring at the ceiling.
“Sarah gone to bed?” he asks.
“Light was still on, but the door was shut.”
“She sure has gotten pretty, hasn’t she?” I hear the smile in his voice. “Reminds me of Abby at that age.”
“Prettier than Abby was,” I say, and close my eyes.
We’re quiet again, and I feel the familiar heat of his body beside mine. He and I have been sleeping in this bed side by side almost five decades. I wonder what it would be like to not have him here. His father died of a heart attack around the age Little Joe is now. It could happen.
I wonder if I could sleep without him. The only time we haven’t slept together is when one of us was in the hospital, me for my hysterectomy, him when he got an infection in his arm from a cut from a piece of machinery. And after Joseph was born, when I told Little Joe if he crossed the threshold of our bedroom while I was in it, I’d shoot him with his own shotgun. Back then, he kept it loaded, propped in the corner of the room. People used to do that in those days, keep loaded guns ready for robbers. Now we have a gun safe in his office.
“Abby say how late they’ll be?” Joe asks me.
“Knowing Celeste, last call.” They’d gone to The Gull for a drink, our three children. It made me feel good to see the three of them together, laughing and arguing in the kitchen over whose car they were taking into town. But it made me a little sad, too. They asked their daddy if he wanted to go. He knew better than to say yes. He saw the way I looked at him when they asked. But they didn’t ask me. Not that I’d go. I’ve never set foot in there but once, and that was when the devil got into me and I went in and told Little Joe to get on home because all three of his kids were down with a stomach virus and I’d cleaned up enough vomit and diarrhea for one day.
“How did Celeste seem to you?” Joe shifts his weight in the bed and starts cracking his knuckles. He always cracks his knuckles the last thing before he goes to sleep. “She seemed good to me. She seem good to you?”
“She’s puttin’ on a good face,” I answer. “Don’t know how good she’s doing. She doesn’t look like she’s getting enough to eat. She’s nothing but bones.”
“She said something at dinner about an audition next week. Some TV show or something. Sounds like she’s getting a lot of auditions. She’s bound to get a part sooner or later.”
I don’t know what kind of lies Celeste’s been feeding him. I missed that bit of the conversation at dinner. But I don’t say anything. If Joe wants to go on thinking his daughter is some big, fancy actress, who am I to burst his bubble? Instead, I say, “I imagine she’s worried about money. Rent keeps going up. That health insurance she gets on the Internet, it keeps going up and up, too. I think the money will ease her mind. What Mrs. Brodie leaves her.”
He makes a grunting sound and rolls over, his back to me. I roll in the other direction and reach out to set the alarm to get up and check on Mrs. Brodie in two hours. The digits glow red. It’s nine thirty-two.
14
Sarah Agnes
“Do you love me?” I breathe.
“Of course I love you, ma belle,” Henri whispers in my ear. His breath is warm, and the sound of his voice makes me dizzy.
Ma belle. Belle means beautiful. I remember that from the French book hidden in my old box where I keep my clothes and stuff. Last night, after I got home from the carnival, from meeting Henri, I stayed up most of the night, reading and studying. There’s a good chance I’ll get slapped when Mrs. Hanfland realizes how much kerosene I used in the lamp, but I don’t even care. It will be worth the slap.
I gaze into Henri’s eyes. He thinks I’m beautiful with my ugly red hair and uglier freckles that are spread across my nose and cheeks like some kind of disease. That’s what Mrs. Hanfland says. I look diseased. Afflicted.
Henri and I are lying in the grass on an old horse blanket just beyond the bright lights of the carnival. In the distance, I hear the calliope music and men laughing, but it seems as if they’re very far away. I can faintly smell popcorn and candied apples, and the smell of horse is strong on the blanket, but mostly I just smell Henri. He smells like tobacco and men’s cologne and . . . a chance to be happy.
He leans over me and brushes his lips against mine, and I touch his chin with my fingertips the way he showed me. The way he likes me to do.
Henri asked one of his friends, Bilis, if he would run the Ferris wheel for a little while so he and I could go for a walk. Henri has a lot of friends here; everyone likes him. Bilis is the shortest man I’ve ever seen; he doesn’t come nearly to my shoulders. He’s got a regular-sized body, but short legs and short arms. I knew it was rude, but I couldn’t stop staring at him when he came over to talk to Henri. He was wearing wool tweed pants and a matching jacket, even though it’s getting warm for wool. And his hat matched, too. He was the nicest dressed man I think ever came to Bakersville. And when he spoke he had an accent, but not French like Henri’s. It was something else. I asked Henri where Bilis was from, and he said England. Bilis has a British accent, which is divine. Of course not as divine as Henri’s. Nothing is any more beautiful than a Frenchman speaking French.
Henri told me that Bilis is a dwarf. Henri said Bilis was born that way, short like that. I’ve never seen a dwarf before, and the whole thing about God’s making us in his own image occurs to me. I wonder . . . what if God is a dwarf?
But the Bible doesn’t say anything about that, so I realize that’s probably silly.
Bilis told Henri he’d run the Ferris wheel for a few minutes, but he’d better make it snappy. He said something about Jacko, but I didn’t catch it because I was too busy staring at him, at his little feet and little hands. The funny thing is, he isn’t bad looking, though he does have an enormous nose.
On the midway, after we left Bilis to take tickets at the Ferris wheel, Henri bought me cotton candy and we walked, holding hands, to get the blanket out of the back of a big truck. Henri said he wanted to lie out and look at the stars, but I think mostly we came for kissing. I like kissing Henri. I like how it makes me feel. I like the sounds Henri makes when I kiss him.
Henri didn’t just have kissing on his mind, though. He unbuttoned the front of my dress. (I wore my second best so I could wear something different on our second date.) He wanted to touch my bosom, inside my brassiere. I knew I shouldn’t let him, but he was nice and so sweet and . . . I liked it. So I let him. But I know better than to let him touch me under my skirt. I set him straight on that.
So now we’re just lying here under the stars, and Henri is holding me tight, moving his hands lightly over me. It’s warm out tonight, but him touching me makes me shiver.
“How much do you love me?” I ask him.
“To the stars and back!” He gestures to the sky. Then he sits up and reaches for his cigarettes. I watch him in the darkness. He strikes a match, and I smell the sulfur, then the pungent smell of burning tobacco. He breathes it in and offers me the cigarette. The fag. That’s what he calls it. A fag.
I shake my head. “Oh, no, my father would—” I feel my cheeks go warm as I catch myself. What kind of woman will Henri think I am if I’m talking about my papa? What he will and won’t let me do. Henri won’t think I’m a woman at all. He’ll think I’m a little girl, and that won’t work, not for my plan. “I don’t smoke,” I say quickly.
I sit up beside him. “When do you think you’ll go? Tomorrow? The next day?” I ask anxiously.
“I told you; I don’t know, chéri. When Jacko says we pull up stakes, we pull up the tent stakes,” Henri says lazily. Then he looks at me. “Why? You want me gone?” He smiles his handsome smile, and I know he’s teasing me.
I laugh and boldly put my hand on his chest and kiss him. “No. In fact . . .” I hear my voice tremble, but only just a little. “I think you should take me with you.”
Henri doesn’t do what I expect him to do. He doesn’t pull me into his arms and cover my face with kisses and say he was going to ask me to come with him. To marry him and travel all over the country with him, seeing the sights.
My chest gets to feeling tight when he doesn’t answer right away. “You love me, right? You want me to go with you, don’t you?”
He still doesn’t answer right away, then he asks, “You don’t think your parents would miss you?” He blows smoke.
I shake my head. “They don’t care about me. They don’t love me. But you love me, Henri, right?”
“Of course, mon chéri.” He kisses me, first gently, then harder, and he pushes me onto the blanket, and for a minute I can’t resist. He stretches out over me on the blanket, and I feel his body against me, hard where I’m soft.
He kisses me until I can’t breathe, and I feel like the sky overhead and my life are spinning faster and faster. When I feel his hand on my bare thigh, I put both hands on his chest. “Henri,” I pant. “Do you want me to come with you or not?”
He rolls onto his side and takes another puff of his cigarette. “You’re eighteen, right?”
“Almost,” I say. It’s the baldest-faced lie I think I’ve ever told, but I’m getting better at it. “I . . . I can work if I come with you. In the carnival, right? Take tickets or sell candy apples or . . . whatever Jacko needs. And . . . and I can live with you.” It occurs to me that I don’t know where he sleeps when he travels. “Do you stay in hotels?” I ask.
He laughs. “Back of that tent truck. It’s cozy, though. Got a mattress and all.”
I sit up again. The stars are bright tonight, and the sky seems so big. And suddenly my tiny world seems big. And full of wonder and possibilities. “So I can come with you?” I playfully take his beret and pull it onto my head, wishing I had a mirror right now.
He seems to think about it for a minute, maybe because marriage is a big commitment. But when you love someone, you love them, right? You can’t live without them.
“Sure, doll, you wanna come along?” He shrugs. “Free country.”
“Hank!” a voice in the dark calls. “Hank! You out here?”
Henri grinds his butt out on the bottom of his shoe and tosses it into the grass. “Yoo!” he hollers, raising his hand.
I hear someone in the grass and see a small figure approaching in the dark. I stiffen and start buttoning my dress, my face hot with embarrassment.
Bilis stops a few feet from th
e blanket, but I know he can see me buttoning my dress. I can feel his eyes on me.
“Jacko says to get your bloody arse back to your post.” The little man tips his hat to me. I don’t think I like the word dwarf. It makes me think of Snow White, and in books her dwarves are like gnomes or something.
“Pardon my French, Miss,” Bilis says.
I think that’s such a strange phrase, pardon my French, especially since Henri is French.
“Come on, chap. Business is spanking,” Bilis says in his British accent. “I gotta run my ballyhoo for the coochies.”
Henri takes his beret off my head and puts it back on. “Who’s runnin’ my joint?” He stands and puts out his hand to me. I take his hand and come to my feet, still fussing with my dress.
“Jacko,” Bilis answers.
Henri swears under his breath. I don’t even know the word, but I can tell by the way he says it that it’s a swear. He grabs the horse blanket off the ground. “You should go,” he tells me, not really looking at me.
“Okay.” I lift up on my toes and kiss his cheek. “I’ll be back tomorrow night with my things. You won’t leave before tomorrow night, will you? You won’t go without me?” I grab his shirt. “Don’t leave without me, Henri!”
He runs his hands over my buttocks and heads for the bright lights, walking right past his friend.
Bilis just stands there looking at me. Long enough to make me uncomfortable. “How old are you?” he asks me.
“Eighteen.” It comes out smooth.
He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell when he speaks again that he doesn’t believe me. “Hank’s right. You should go home, girly. To your parents. A place like this, carnies like us, they’re not for the likes of a good girl like you. Pretty girl.”
I don’t say anything because I don’t know what to say. So I just walk off, but as I cut across the field, heading home in the dark, it occurs to me that Bilis is the second man who’s told me I am pretty today. Which makes me think maybe I wasn’t meant to move to Chicago and marry a rich man. Maybe God means me to be a carny.
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