Promises to Keep

by Ann Tatlock

  “Yup,” Wally said. “Looks that way.” He accepted Grandpa’s and Marie’s coats and hung them up in the hall closet.

  “Have you put any thought into colleges, Wally?” Grandpa asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for? Now’s the time to be thinking about it. Education is the doorway to success, you know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We have a number of fine schools right here in Illinois, my own alma mater, the University of Illinois, among them.”

  Wally shrugged.

  “And listen, son” – Grandpa lowered his voice a notch – “if it’s the price of tuition you’re worried about, I’m prepared to help.”

  Marie looked stricken, as though she had just heard the clanging of a huge chunk of change falling out of their bank account. “And of course,” she added with a tremulous smile, “there are always scholarships.”

  “Well, yes,” Gramps said, rocking up on his toes, “but we may not have to resort to that kind of thing. There’s so much paperwork involved – ”

  “You’re just in time. Dinner’s ready,” Mom sang out, greeting Grandpa with a kiss on his cheek. She untied her apron and smoothed her skirt. “Everyone please be seated at the dining room table. Dad, we’ll talk about colleges later, all right? Tonight’s a night to celebrate.”

  It wasn’t much of a celebration, as celebrations go. Wally was pensive and sullen. Marie was her usual self, a perfectly coifed model of propriety and as cold as the winter night. Mom seemed quietly troubled herself, maybe because her firstborn had grown up, and though he seemed largely directionless, he would no doubt be leaving home soon. Tillie and Grandpa were oblivious as they rattled on about newspaper headlines: NASA’s Apollo 4 that had just been shot into orbit, the Soviet Union’s Vostok missile that Brezhnev was threatening to shoot in our direction, the coast-to-coast protests against the seemingly endless war in Vietnam.

  Only when they mentioned the war did Wally look up from his chili long enough to ask, “Do you think it’ll last awhile?”

  “What’s that, Wally?” Grandpa said.

  “The war. Do you think it’ll last awhile?”

  “It’s lasted far too long already,” Tillie interjected.

  “But,” Grandpa said, “it’s going to take some time before we can untangle ourselves from the mess we’ve made over there.”

  Wally looked from Grandpa to Tillie and back. “So, you mean the war’s not going to be over by the end of this year or anything, right?”

  Grandpa shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Nor by the end of next year, nor maybe the year after that, unless McNamara outright refuses Westmoreland’s repeated demands for more troops.”

  “Right, Archie,” Tillie said with a snort. “That’ll happen the day I start looking like Mae West in saloon-girl lingerie.”

  Wally must not have tried to picture Tillie as Mae West, because he gave a satisfied nod and went back to eating.

  Later, while Mom served up the cake and ice cream, we gave Wally his birthday gifts. From Grandpa and Marie, there was a fifty-dollar savings bond. From Mom, a couple of new shirts and a Swiss Army knife. Tillie gave him a leather wallet that, as she explained, she bought for Ross, “but he died before he could use it, so it’s still brand new.” I’d scraped together enough money from my small allowance to buy him a box of chocolates and a cheap cardboard bookmark for the book he was always reading, the one by Jack Kerouac. The design on the bookmark was simply the word PEACE in purple against a paisley pattern of orange and green. I signed Valerie’s name to my homemade card, since she was too young to buy Wally a gift herself.

  When he had opened all the presents, he thanked us, tucked the box of chocolates under his arm, asked Mom for the car keys, and left us to finish the cake and ice cream without him.

  I don’t know exactly what time it was, but it must have been after midnight when Wally slipped into my room and sat down on the edge of my bed.

  “Roz,” he said, shaking my shoulder, “wake up a minute.”

  Groggily I opened my eyes. “What is it, Wally?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to give you something.”

  I groaned, sat up, and turned on the light. Wherever Wally had been, he was fresh from the chilly outdoors. He hadn’t yet bothered to take off his jacket, and a layer of cold lingered about him like smoke. Along with the cold, he brought in an odor that was both nasty and familiar, and though I couldn’t quite place it at first, it turned my stomach and set me on edge. Then I remembered. He smelled like Daddy after one of his binges.

  “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you, Wally?” I said.

  “Yeah.” Wally nodded and gave a small laugh.

  “I think you’re drunk.”

  “I hope so. I was trying my best.”

  “What’d you go and do that for?”

  “It’s my birthday, my eighteenth birthday. What’d you expect?”

  “Does Mom know?”

  Wally put a finger to his lips, shook his head, hiccoughed. “Mom’s asleep.”

  “So was I before you woke me up.”

  “Ah Roz, don’t be mad. Like I said, I’ve got something for you.”

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  He unzipped his jacket and reached inside. “Here, kid,” he said. With that, he placed a familiar dime-store paperback in my hand, worn and dog-eared from so many readings.

  I stared at the book, trying to make sense of it all. “You’re giving me your copy of On the Road?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You want me to have your favorite book?”

  He started to nod; this time it took him a second to lift his chin off his chest. “That’s right.”

  “It’s got the bookmark in it that I just gave you for your birthday. Don’t you like the bookmark?”

  “Oh sure. I like it. Yeah, peace. It’s perfect. And the chocolates were great. We ate them all, the whole box.”

  “Who’s we, Wally? I bet you were with those Delaney twins, weren’t you?”

  “Them, and a bunch of my other friends. We were having a good time. Oh yeah.” He chuckled and his head started bobbing, as though he were listening to a tune I couldn’t hear.

  “Yeah, I bet.” I felt my jaw tighten. I looked again at the book in my hand. “You sure you want me to have this?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “But why are you giving it to me?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  I waited a moment. Then I shook my head and said, “Know what?”

  Wally looked about the room as though he were searching for the words. Finally he found them. He drew in a deep breath and let them out slowly. “On his eighteenth birthday, a man’s supposed to give his little sister his most prized possession.”

  My eyes narrowed. “He is? I never heard of that.”

  “Yeah. It’s true.” He laughed again. He sounded pleased with himself.

  “So you’re giving me your most prized possession?”

  In the dim light I saw Wally’s face become solemn. “Just take care of it for me, will you, Roz?”

  I was unnerved by the shift in his mood. He looked as though something terrible was about to happen, but I couldn’t imagine what. In my confusion I said simply, “Sure, Wally. I’ll take care of it for you.”

  “Promise?”

  I traced an X across my chest with one index finger. “Cross my heart, but why can’t you just take care of it yourself?”

  He put his finger to his lips again to shush me. “No questions, all right?”

  I narrowed my eyes and thought a moment. I didn’t like unanswered questions, but I finally relented. “All right,” I said.

  Wally smiled, nodded, and sighed in quick succession. “You know, Roz,” he said, “you’re really not such a bad kid.”

  “Well . . .” I felt myself frown. “Thanks, Wally.”

  He leaned toward me, and for one brief moment I was
in his arms.

  By the time I woke up the next morning, he was gone.

  chapter

  28

  Mom’s screams brought Tillie and me running. “Merciful heavens!” Tillie called out as she pounded down the stairs. “What’s the matter, Janis?”

  “It’s Wally,” Mom cried. “It’s Wally!”

  But she couldn’t get beyond those two words to tell us what was wrong with Wally. We found her in the kitchen, holding a piece of paper that had been ripped from a spiral notebook. With trembling fingers, she handed the paper to Tillie.

  Tillie read it and afterwards slapped it with both hands against the spot above her heart. “That young fool!” she cried. “I can’t believe he’d do this.”

  Bewildered and near tears, I looked from Mom to Tillie and back again. “What is it? Will somebody tell me what’s going on?”

  “Your brother has gone off to enlist in the army,” Tillie explained. “That fool! He’ll end up getting himself killed in Vietnam.”

  “Oh, Tillie!” Mom’s eyes widened at the thought. Her tears spilled over and coursed down her pale cheeks.

  “I’m sorry, Janis. I didn’t mean that. He might not end up in ’Nam at all.”

  But it was too late. Mom sank to her knees, weeping as though Wally were already dead. Tillie bent over her and tried to console her while I ran upstairs to get Valerie, who had been awakened by Mom’s screams and was now screaming herself.

  By midmorning, our house resembled the scene of a wake. Grandpa came and called the police, and within minutes two cops arrived and read the note and listened to Mom’s story, spilled out between sobs. To everyone’s frustration, including the cops, they said they couldn’t do anything because Wally was an adult and he had left voluntarily, but they stayed anyway at Tillie’s invitation and drank cups of strong coffee and offered their speculations as to where Wally might be. Tom Barrows showed up and nervously paced the downstairs hall, looking as helpless and as useless as he was. Neighbors, alerted by the cop car in front of the house, came and went and came back again with casseroles and shoulder pats and well-intentioned words that did little to lessen Mom’s grief. In a matter of a couple of hours the house was crawling with people, Mom floating blindly in the midst of them as though they weren’t there at all.

  “It’s Frank all over again,” she kept saying as she walked aimlessly from room to room, ringing her hands. “It’s Frank all over again.”

  Once, when she and I came face-to-face in the living room, she looked at me with a haunted look and said, “Wally’s father went to war, and he never came back. Did you know that, Roz? He never came back.”

  “I know, Mom,” I said, giving in to the tears. “I’ve known that a long time now.”

  And on it went, Mom wandering and muttering, the cops drinking coffee, the neighbors mingling over food and murmuring among themselves – until Grandpa called a doctor who showed up with his black bag of tricks, including a sedative in a syringe. Mom protested only briefly, then complied, and after the shot was given Tillie walked Mom upstairs and put her to bed.

  Grandpa stayed for a time, but everyone else left, and soon the house was quiet.

  I snuggled next to Grandpa on the couch, and he put his arm around me and kissed my forehead. “What’s going to happen to Wally?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “But you can be sure he’s not the first young man who’s run off to war. They romanticize it, you see. They think it’ll make them heroes, but . . . well . . . once they get there, they begin to see what it’s all about.”

  He seemed to want to say more but didn’t go on. “Were you ever in a war, Gramps?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. I was in the Great War, over in Europe.”

  “And you came back, didn’t you.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes, I did. All in one piece.”

  “Then Wally will come back too.”

  Grandpa lifted his chin and offered me a tiny smile. “Of course he will. But in the meantime, he doesn’t know how he’s broken your mother’s heart. We must be extra good to her, you and I, to help her get through this. Do you think you can do that, Roz?”

  I nodded eagerly. I would be good to her, because I loved her and because I needed desperately to ease my guilt. I should have known Wally would leave; he had as good as told me more than once. If I had pieced together all the evidence – his favorite book, his talk of butchering the Vietcong, his talk of leaving, for crying out loud, that had seemed to me only so much foolish dreaming – but if I had pieced it all together I might have warned Mom, and she in turn might have somehow kept him from going.

  But I hadn’t spoken up, and now it was too late. Wally was gone, and we didn’t know where he was or when he’d be coming back. Or whether he’d be coming back at all.

  chapter

  29

  A light snow drifted down from a steel gray sky, slowly and wistfully, as though reluctant to fall from the clouds. I looked up as I walked and followed the journey of first one flake and then another, watched them travel as single airborne beauties, only to get lost amid the slush and dirty snow of the streets and sidewalks. I understood their unwillingness to drop to earth. Why would they want to leave the sky only to fall on the dismal streets of Mills River? I wasn’t all that keen on walking through these streets myself, except that I had somewhere important to go.

  Daddy had left me another note, asking me to meet him at Hot Diggity Dog. I hadn’t seen him in more than three weeks; since then I’d had my tonsils out and Wally had run away from home. I didn’t want to tell him about Wally, but I figured he should know.

  He was in the same booth as before, his mustache neatly trimmed but his hair a little longer. He smiled at me as I slid onto the bench across from him. Without a hello or any other greeting, he jumped right back into the conversation we’d been having weeks ago. “There, now see? I told you you’d be all right, didn’t I?”

  I nodded, trying to return his smile.

  “So how are you feeling? Can you eat?”

  “Yeah, I’m better now. My throat stopped hurting a long time ago.”

  I was hoping he’d hear my unspoken question of, Where’ve you been, Daddy? What were you doing while I was recuperating from getting my tonsils out?

  He laced and unlaced his fingers on the tabletop. A half-empty coffee cup sat nearby. “Can I get you something to eat then? A hot dog or something?”

  I thought a moment. “No, thanks. I don’t think I need anything.”

  “Aw, come on. How about a shake? A chocolate shake would taste good, wouldn’t it?”

  I lifted my shoulders. “I guess so.”

  He waved a hand and called out my order to the waitress behind the counter. There were a couple of other people in one of the booths, but they were halfway through their hamburgers and deep in conversation. With nothing else to do, the waitress moved to make my shake right away.

  I looked back at Daddy. “Thanks for the Halloween candy,” I said.

  “So you got it okay?”

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  “I know how you favor those Sugar Daddies, so I wanted to get you a bunch of those.”

  I nodded again. The waitress brought my milk shake, plucked a straw out of her apron, and set them both on the table in front of me.

  “Thanks, Darlene,” Daddy said.

  “Sure thing, Nelson,” she responded with a nod. “Can I warm up your coffee?”

  Daddy stared at the cup by his right hand, as though wondering where it came from and how it got there. Then he said, “Sure, why not?”

  “And listen, you must be hungry. How about something to eat? I could holler to Joe to rustle up a couple of cows and make ’em cry.”

  Daddy looked at me. “You want a hamburger?” he asked.

  I shook my head slowly.

  “We’ll pass on that, Darlene. Just the coffee.”

  “All right, Nels, honey. Be right bac
k.”

  When she walked away, I leaned over the table toward Daddy. “Why’d she call you Nelson?”

  “She thinks that’s my name.”

  “Don’t you want to tell her what your real name is?”

  “Naw.” He waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, what does it mean to rustle up a couple of cows and make them cry?”

  “It means to serve up a couple of hamburgers with onions.”

  “Oh.” I leaned back against the padded bench and looked hard at Daddy. He was gazing intently after Darlene, watching as she moved behind the counter, where she pulled the coffee carafe from the burner. She was young and pretty, with wide blue eyes and heavily sprayed blond hair that turned up into a perfect flip at the ends. She moved with an ease and a confidence that told me she’d been doing her job for a long time, though she couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. Probably not even that old.

  She carried the coffee back to our table and filled Daddy’s cup almost to the brim. As she poured, she indicated my presence with a quick roll of her eyes in my direction. “Your niece is real cute, Nelson. How old did you say she is?”

  Daddy rubbed his cheek thoughtfully. “She’s eleven,” he said at length. “She’ll be twelve in May” – he looked at me – “right, honey?”

  I nodded. At least there was one accurate statement floating around the table.

  “Well now, she’s going to be a real heartbreaker one day. You’d best keep your eye on that one once the boys start coming around.” Darlene’s full red lips turned up in a smile, and she actually winked one blue eye at Daddy.

  “That’s what I aim to do, if I have any say in the matter,” Daddy said.

  “Sure I can’t get you some cream for that coffee?”

  “No thanks, Darlene.”

  “All right. You just holler if you need anything.”

  The front door opened and a trio of teenagers came in; Darlene turned her attention to them.

  I looked at Daddy questioningly. “She thinks I’m your niece?”

  He shrugged, took a sip of the hot coffee. “People get confused. It’s hard to remember one customer from another.”