Kimberly Stuart

by Act Two: A Novel in Perfect Pitch

  I exhaled, relieved that I wasn’t going to have to defend my own career and pursuit of success to someone else’s abandoned child. “I’ll look forward to meeting her.”

  “Oh, you won’t be able to miss her,” Mallory said. She tipped her chin in thought. “Let’s see if I can give you a picture … If I am Ralph Lauren, spring collection, she is straight Versace, all Donatella with regrettably little Gianni.”

  “Mmmm,” I said, savoring the images. “Superbly expressed. And now I’ll really look forward to seeing you two in action.”

  She sighed on her way out. “Never a dull moment, that’s for sure.” Her ballet flats squeaked all the way down the hall.

  By mid-April, tepid days outnumbered frigid ones. In the morning, I would yank open my blinds in the attic and see the tree below my window arching carefully toward the sky, tiny dots of green peppering its branches. The rain that farmers were so jazzed about was great for soil and things, but not so good for my hair or heels. For the most part, I was able to keep to the sidewalks, both on the farm and in town. But sometimes the need to negotiate wet concrete, pig smells, and soft earth got to be a bit much, even for a pioneer like myself.

  One glorious part of spring’s arrival was the light that lingered later in the day. One Friday evening, I sat by the window, watching a particularly stunning sunset drape its watercolor over the fields. When the last bit of pale yellow had faded to indigo, I stood and lay the quilt that had covered my shoulders along the back of the chair. I walked to the bathroom to wash my face. I hadn’t performed deep exfoliation for several weeks, and my pores were suffering. No clean washcloths remained in the basket by the shower, so I headed downstairs. I found Jayne sitting head in hands at the kitchen table. She looked up and I could see she’d been crying.

  “Jayne, what is it?” I asked, sitting down beside her.

  “Oh,” she said, a new well of tears spilling over. “Just part of life.” She blew her nose loudly into a fresh Kleenex. From the looks of the litter on the table, she’d been through an entire box already. “My mom just called. A friend of mine from high school died in a car accident last night. Her name was Dana.” Her chin quivered with the sound of the woman’s name. “She has two little ones, one younger than Emmy. Cal’s still not back from Bakerstown and I just want to see him …” She trailed off and then set to another loud nose blowing event, an impressive racket coming from such petite facial structure. When she’d plowed through another three tissues, she shook her head. “It’s just so sad. So unbelievably sad. I’d like to help John and the kids, but they live three hours away.” She gestured to her open day planner that was buried in used tissues in front of her. “I can’t even find a babysitter so I can go to the funeral tomorrow.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, shaking my head even as the words escaped my lips. What did you just say? I asked myself. Please say you dreamed that part and just go back to lending a listening ear.

  Too late. Jayne turned to me, blue eyes wide and full of wonder. “Oh, Sadie, would you really? I can’t tell you how much it would mean to me.”

  I pulled my lips back into a smile and nodded.

  She threw her arms around me and crushed my trachea with her neck hug. “Thank you so much,” she croaked through fresh sobs. “I didn’t even think about asking you.”

  That’s because doing so would be along the same lines as asking the Pope to a Madonna concert at St. Peter’s Cathedral. Some worlds were never meant to meet.

  Jayne looked at me, worry etched on her brow. “Not that I have any misgivings. You’re so good with the children and they adore you.”

  That was a stretch but I was so shocked at this catastrophe of my own making that I had no words for dispute.

  “I’ll leave lots of instructions, if that will make you feel better.” She hopped up from her chair and retrieved a thick pad of Post-it Notes from a drawer by the fridge. “Plus, you won’t have to do it all by yourself. Mac can be here right after lunch, so you’ll only be alone with them from six-thirty to one.”

  I did the math in my head. “Six and half hours,” I said aloud.

  Jayne was already busy documenting a short history of childrearing on her Post-its. I pulled myself up from my chair and shuffled to the door.

  “Thank you, Sadie,” Jayne called after me. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  I took the stairs back up to the attic slowly, uninterested anymore in the stack of clean washcloths I’d originally sought. A lot of good they’d do me now, I thought. I didn’t need a clean and moisturized face. I needed Valium.

  21

  The Trenches

  As was my habit as least once a week, I performed Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia for a packed house at the Met clad only in my bra and rainbow-striped cotton leggings. To make things even worse, the leggings had stirrups. The audience, understandably, had a difficult time focusing, not only because of back fat and puckering in the wrong places, but also because some annoying woman kept coming over the loudspeaker intoning, “Sadie. Sadie.” I twirled a few times, in beat with the music of course, trying to locate the source of my summons.

  “Sadie,” she said again, nervousness dripping from her voice. “I’m sorry.”

  I had some ideas of how the woman could rectify the situation, one obvious measure being to retrieve my elusive costume and get me out of those tights. But each time I tried to speak, my voice became lost in thick sludge.

  With dogged determination, I finally uttered a single phrase, one that has spurred many a woman on to greatness and avoidance of the embarrassment I was currently encountering: “Control top.”

  The sound of my voice acted as a pulley to lift my heavy eyelids and rejoin the world of wakefulness. I pushed aside my night mask. Jayne sat on her haunches, her perky freckled nose inches from mine. The room had the feel of three in the morning, deeply dark, no light escaping from the shaded windows, no sound of a house awake, only the intermittent purr of the heater kicking in.

  “I’m sorry it’s so early. The kids were in our bedroom by five o’clock. They’re too excited about you babysitting.” She smiled sheepishly and I remembered with full force my folly of the previous day.

  “What time is it?” I asked, unmoving from my sprawled position on the bed. I lay on my stomach and could feel the deep wrinkles made by my pillow on a creased face.

  “Nearly six,” Jayne said, clearly unaccustomed to telling lies. “Um, about five-thirty-five.”

  I moaned.

  Jayne winced. “I know, it’s horrible. But,” she said, her voice rising in pitch and volume, “the kids are downstairs eating their breakfast and waiting for you.”

  And this was the good news.

  I rolled onto my side and pushed myself up with both hands. “I’ll be down in a minute,” I said, massaging a kink out of my neck with sleep-numbed fingers.

  Jayne crept to the stairs as if I were still sleeping. In her hands dangled two of the most sensible black shoes ever to grace the planet. I let myself fall back onto my pillow. As if the ungodly hour weren’t enough, I thought. My wake-up call also had to involve the sting of poor fashion decisions.

  One hour after Jayne and Cal left the house, I still sat at the kitchen table with all three kids. That everyone was sitting at the same time represented a miracle on par with Lazarus’s sudden and odorous exit from the tomb.

  “Miss Sadie, did you know that there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet?” Drew’s question had to navigate through a greasy bite of bacon to be heard.

  “I did know that,” I said. Joel bounced up and down in his chair as I poured more orange juice into his plastic cup, one he’d immediately commandeered upon ordering his beverage of choice. With the help of some valuable interpreting by his older brother, Joel had made it clear, eventually, that he preferred the Buzz Lightyear cup. As that word combination was nothing but melodic gibberish to moi, I had been completely lost until Drew expounded on the man on the cup, all his friends, a detailed account of th
e film in which they were featured, and copious amounts of editorializing on which character could “kick behind” with the greatest efficacy.

  “Twenty-six letters,” Drew repeated, nodding to himself. “And I know every one of them. Wanna hear?”

  While Drew recited all twenty-six, forwards and then backwards, I passed out another round of Oreos. Of course I knew this was wayward breakfast protocol, but when two of the three children had cried with their mother’s disappearance, I’d opened all the cupboards in a frenzy, trying to locate some coffee for my own morning needs. In the process, Joel spotted the blue package on a top shelf and when I brandished the cookies to their big mournful eyes, it was as if the sun had begun to shine right into their little hearts. Everyone became so suddenly and convincingly pleasant that I couldn’t help but indulge them with the source of their joy. Five cookies each later, Emmy’s eyes had begun to bulge, so I resolved to cut them off. I decided to leave the breakfast dishes, bread, cereal, and so forth on the kitchen table as the kids would likely be back for a real breakfast within a couple of hours.

  “… B and A!” Drew finished triumphantly. He threw both fists in the air to exult in his brilliance but clocked Joel on the head in the process.

  Joel wailed, “No hit!” His cries were as loud as an ambulance siren lodged just inside one’s eardrum, only more piercing.

  “Mamamamama,” Emmy started in. Positive peer pressure in action.

  Drew put both hands over his ears and started singing/yelling, “Crybabies, crybabies, Joel and Emmy are crybabies.”

  I glanced at the microwave clock. Seven-fifteen. Pale gray light made its way tentatively into the room through the window above the sink. I looked back at the trifecta of screamers.

  “All right,” I said in what I hoped was an authoritative voice. “No more crying.”

  They ignored me. In fact, Emmy upped the volume.

  “Listen up!” I shouted. All three stopped kvetching long enough to look at me. Joel looked frightened, and I found it didn’t bother me one bit.

  “Now, you’ve had your Oreos and some orange juice.”

  “And a piece of gum,” Drew chimed. He chomped to demonstrate.

  “Yes. And a piece of gum for Drew.”

  “Gum, tooooo,” Joel whined, his eyes filling with a fresh round of tears.

  “Fine, fine,” I said, hurrying to unwrap another piece from the pack I’d retrieved from Jayne’s stash.

  Drew’s eyes widened to sand-dollar size. “Joel can’t have gum. Mommy never lets Joel have gum.”

  My hand froze in midair on its way to deliver the contraband item. Joel’s lip quivered. “Well,” I said, “the rules are just a bit different today.” Joel took the gum from me and giggled. “Miss Sadie isn’t Mommy, she’s Miss Sadie,” I said, uttering a prayer of earnest thanksgiving under my breath. “But we’re all done with the first round of breakfast, so how about you boys go play with your toys while Emmy stays here with me?”

  “What are you going to do?” Drew asked. A wild spray of light brown hair crowned his impressive nest of bed-head.

  “Clean up,” I said briskly. And then I’m going to curl up in the oven for the next six hours while we wait for Mac to rescue us, I thought, already calculating how many Oreos I should ration per hour to survive until then.

  “Okay.” Drew and Joel padded out of the kitchen in their flannel pajamas. My jaw ached watching them try to subdue the chunks of bubble gum knocking around in their little mouths.

  Emmy watched me, understandably wary about her current situation.

  “You’re no dummy,” I said as I poured myself a third cup of coffee. “You know Miss Sadie is an unfit mother.”

  We watched each other in silence for a full ten seconds before we heard a scream.

  Joel stood in the middle of the family room, forlorn and weeping. Drew sat on the floor, racing one of their toy trucks up an arm of the couch.

  “What happened?” I asked. I sat down on the carpet next to Joel. He backed up and plopped himself down on my lap. I tried to ignore the weighty feel of his urine-soaked diaper and hugged him from behind. “Drew?” I asked again.

  “Accident,” he said, interrupting his truck noises long enough to utter that one word.

  “I’ll bet,” I said under my breath. Emmy began to yelp from the kitchen, where I’d left her fixed to the gooey straps of her high chair. “Drew, even if it was an accident that you used your toy as a weapon, and I must say I doubt your truthfulness here, you still should say you’re sorry to your brother.”

  “Sorry,” Drew said. He was perched along the back of the couch like a cat. “Sorry, sorry, so sorry, banana fanna fo forry,” he sang, lessening, somehow, the potency of his apology.

  Joel inhaled shakily around the thumb he sucked.

  “Good enough,” I said. With the grace of a camel rising to its knobby legs, I rose from the floor with Joel in tow and walked toward the kitchen to retrieve Emmy. I forced myself not to look at the grandfather clock as I shuffled by. Salt in the surrogate parent’s wound.

  Mac let out a low whistle. “How’s everybody doing?” he asked, scanning our faces.

  “What do you think, kids? Scale of one to ten.” I gave Mac a goofy, caffeine-intoxicated grin. “It’s unanimous! We’re a perfect ten!” My eyes blinked at a pace unnatural to nonreptiles.

  “I see,” Mac said slowly. “Looks like you’ve had lunch.”

  I joined him in a survey of our surroundings. Dirty dishes from both breakfast phases, an excess of empty wrappers from something called “fruit snacks,” and roughly thirty used glasses littered the area in and around the sink. At present, we sat at the table, surrounded by partially eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, an empty bag of potato chips, neglected slices of apples and carrots, and the ever-present bag of Oreos. Emmy’s cheeks now contained the final cookie in the package.

  “Mac-Mac,” Joel sang. He bounced wildly in his chair, fueled by hours’ worth of synthetic sugars understood only by nuclear physicists. I, for one, would be adding DingDongs to my diet from that day forward. So many years I’d wasted.

  “Sadie?”

  I came out of my partially hydrogenated fog. Mac was looking at me intently.

  “Mac Hartley.” I stared at him. “You’re a nice looking man,” I said, beaming a full smile. “Would you like some Goldfish?” I offered him the package I’d been hoarding on my lap.

  “Good gravy,” he muttered. He ran a hand across his face and massaged a thick patch of short whiskers. “All right. Listen up, kiddos.” He walked to Emmy’s chair and in one motion, pulled out the tray, unbuckled the baby, and lifted her to his arms. He turned to me and the boys. “Shoes and coats. We’re going to Uncle Mac’s place.”

  “Woo-hoooo!” The boys engaged in running circles through the kitchen, through the dining room, into the family room, and back to the kitchen. Emmy clapped her sticky hands and blew spit bubbles in Mac’s arms. I watched them all from my cozy perch in the exhaustion cloud I’d rigged up for myself. Kids, I thought. What a fascinating midget species.

  Mac started the gear roundup. I’d watched Jayne on many occasions as she performed this impressive ritual. In a large bag by the door, Mac placed a pile of well-loved and germ-caked blankets, an armful of stuffed animals, and a stack of story books. Five minutes in, he must have assumed I could still be trusted to sit motionless with a child and he put Emmy gingerly on my lap. He placed a small pair of purple shoes and a jacket with a daisy print on the table before us.

  “Can you put these on?” he said, each word crisp and distinct as if I’d recently suffered debilitating injuries.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, trying really hard to be huffy but still so subdued by the morning’s utter chaos that it came out sounding more like Minnie Mouse.

  By the time I had both shoes on Emmy, the boys and Mac had tromped out the door to his truck. I lifted Emmy and followed, grabbing a dish towel for odor prevention on the way out. While Mac strug
gled to fit three of the Hartleys’ SUV-style car seats in the back seat of the cab, we stood like the Clampetts waiting for Pa to tie the mattress on. I giggled into my towel, a lovely terrycloth with a rooster printed on it. The kids looked up at me curiously.

  “What’s so funny, Miss Sadie?” Drew asked. He appeared to be chewing on a piece of candy only slightly smaller than the size of his head. I wondered where he’d gotten it.

  “Everything,” I said with a shrug. “Drew, these days, everything is funny.”

  He went back to chomping on his cud until Mac signaled for our exodus.

  22

  What’s In a Name

  At Mac’s house an hour later, Joel and Emmy were napping and Drew was coloring quietly on the floor of the living room. Mac nodded toward the front door and I went obediently, clutching my hot cup of mint tea in both hands.

  “We’ll be on the porch, buddy,” Mac told Drew. He bent down and kissed his hair. “You’re a good artist.”

  Drew started to smile but had to resume his tongue-out-of-mouth position to continue his work.

  I pushed open the squeaky porch door and inhaled sharply. I’d been so busy with the noisy disembarkation of the children, I hadn’t really noticed Mac’s house. To be frank, I couldn’t believe a heterosexual man had such an eye for color. The porch wrapped around his house, a two-story number painted a slate blue-gray with bright white trim. Polished copper and ceramic pots dotted the porch and front steps. Even without flowers, the pots added pretty color in all shades of patina, blue, turquoise and orange, set against a neatly painted porch floor.

  I turned to my host. “You did this.” I stated it as a fact.

  “You’d better hope so or I’ve been hiding a wife in my basement.” He sat down on a wide swing hanging to the far right of the front door. He leaned back and draped his arm along the top of the swing. “Come sit.”

  I did. We rocked in silence for awhile. I could easily imagine the porch as a welcome oasis in the middle of an Iowa summer, which, I’d been told, could put hair on the most dainty of chests.