Here Lies Linc

by Delia Ray

  “Oh, brother,” Lottie said in a tired voice. “The dogs. You haven’t been over to Mr. Krasny’s to walk Spunky yet, have you?”

  I shook my head with my face still buried in my hands. I needed to stay by the phone in case Delaney called.

  “I’ll go,” I heard Lottie say.

  I spread my fingers like fence pickets and peeked through.

  “You will?”

  “Yes.” She rocked up to her feet. “Come on, C.B.”

  After they were gone, I folded my arms into a bony pillow and laid my head down, right on top of all of Lottie’s papers and sticky notes and eraser dust. If I closed my eyes, just for a little while, maybe the phone would ring.

  WHEN DELANEY WASN’T AT SCHOOL the next day either, I decided my worst fears had come true. I couldn’t imagine how I would ever face her again. How could I have done it—talked her into sneaking out of her house in the middle of the night, even when I knew it was such a risky time for her mom? The afternoon dragged on, and I moved through the crowded hallways like a ghost, feeling haunted and invisible. I had to keep passing Delaney’s locker on my way to class, but I didn’t even bother glancing in that direction anymore. I kept my eyes on the clock at the end of the hall, watching the little hand slowly inch its way to the magic number three.

  At first I thought I was imagining things after seventh period, when I heard her call out my name. But nobody else said my name that way—Lanc instead of Linc—and when I whipped around, there she was, standing by her locker with a stack of books in her arms. I dodged around a huddle of kids and pushed my way toward her. “You’re here!” was the only thing I could manage to say. Then my heart dropped. She looked terrible. Her skin was as pale as chalk, except for the dark shadows under her eyes.

  “I came to get my homework,” Delaney said. “I called your house this morning and talked to your mother, but you’d already left for school.”

  I swallowed, trying to loosen the knot of worry in my throat. “Is … everything okay?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer.

  Delaney nudged the door of her locker open wider with her elbow and stepped out of the way so I could see her calendar hanging inside. It was flipped to November, and in the clean square of space under Saturday the second, Delaney had written in black pen:

  Eleanor Marie Baldwin

  Born 8:35 p.m., 5 lbs., 5 oz.

  “So the baby’s fine?” I blurted out. “It’s a girl?”

  Delaney nodded, and her tired face began to glow with a smile. “We’re going to call her Ellie. Isn’t that sweet? Even though she’s tiny, she’s awful strong.” Delaney took one more look at the second of November’s square before she pushed the locker shut.

  “Mama’s the one we’ve had to worry about,” she told me as we started down the hall. “I’ve never been so scared. She fainted in the kitchen on Saturday afternoon, and we had to call an ambulance. The doctors were real worried about her blood pressure, and they had her hooked up to all sorts of monitors and kept calling in different specialists. Then finally they decided to operate and deliver Ellie that night.”

  Delaney said her mother had started feeling better this afternoon, feisty enough to order her and her dad to go take showers at home and bring her back some chocolate pudding and gossip magazines.

  I walked Delaney out to the front entrance of Plainview. “My imagination sort of ran away with me when you didn’t call or show up at school,” I admitted as we pushed through the heavy front doors. I tried to laugh. “I kept thinking about that curse, and how if anything bad happened, it would be all my fault.”

  Delaney stopped underneath the flagpole. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes welling up with sympathy. “I should have called you sooner. I completely lost track of time.” Then she started to smile. “But see? I had a feeling about that statue the first minute I laid eyes on her. I thought … this is just a guardian angel in disguise. And now with Ellie, you’ve got living proof.”

  I nodded, even though I felt a twist of doubt deep in my chest. The Black Angel’s epitaph still bothered me, but there was no way I could share my worries about its frightening prophecy with Delaney anytime soon.

  “There’s Daddy,” Delaney said, waving at a man who sat in the blue Ford idling by the curb. “I would introduce you, but we better be getting back to the hospital.”

  There were at least five more things I wanted to say swirling around in my head—mainly how much I was hoping the new baby meant her parents wouldn’t want to move for a while. But I decided to keep it short. “I’m really happy for you,” I told her. Delaney looked like she wanted to hug me. But since her arms were full of books, she kissed me on the cheek instead, right there with her dad watching. I was so surprised, I didn’t even remember to say goodbye.

  I was still thinking about that kiss when I walked to the bus stop a few minutes later. I didn’t even notice Lottie’s car until she had rattled up next to me and honked the horn. It took her a few extra seconds to crank the stubborn window down. “Hi there,” she said brightly.

  I squinted at her in confusion. “What are you doing here? You never pick me up at school.”

  “Get in,” she said. “There’s somebody we’ve got to go see.”

  “Who?” I asked warily.

  Lottie paused and drew in a shaky breath.

  “Listen, Lottie,” I said. “I already told you I can handle Kilgore on my own.”

  “Not Kilgore, Linc. We’re going to see your grandmother.”

  I ONLY HAD TO PUSH the buzzer once this time before Adeline Raintree opened her tall front door. I blinked in surprise. She was wearing a dress today—belted around her thin middle and printed with old-fashioned sprigs of flowers—and she had tucked her limp hair behind her ears with bobby pins. It was as if she had been waiting there, just inside the shadowy entrance hall, ever since I had hurried off nearly a week ago, promising to return soon. Her face lit up when she saw me, making me realize this was the first time I had seen her smile. It was a little kid’s smile, nothing but happy and innocent. Then it faded as she glanced uncertainly at Lottie and peered past our shoulders, searching the long walkway for Dad.

  Lottie reached out to shake her hand. “I’m Linc’s mother, Charlotte Landers.”

  Miss Raintree’s fingers were trembling as she slowly lifted her hand to grasp Lottie’s. “You’re my son’s wife?” she asked.

  Lottie faltered. “Yes, I am.… I mean, I was, but—”

  Miss Raintree didn’t let her finish. “Lincoln, why don’t you take your mother around back to the garden?” she said in a rush. “I wanted to serve tea there. This might be our last fine day before the cold sets in.”

  I hesitated. She wanted to serve us tea? Right now? But Lottie was quick to fill up the silence. “That sounds lovely,” she said. “May I help you?”

  “Oh, no,” Miss Raintree told her. “Everything’s ready. I only have to put the kettle on. I’ll meet you in the garden in a few minutes.”

  As she disappeared inside, Lottie and I made our way to the so-called garden and found seats at an old wrought-iron table next to the dried-out sunflower patch. The sun was shining, but a cold breeze rattled through the stalks, and we perched on our rusted chairs hunching our shoulders against the chill. I followed Lottie’s gaze around the remnants of the flower beds. An old rose arbor nearby leaned sideways under a brown tangle of vines. You could tell the yard must have been pretty once, before the years of neglect had taken hold.

  “Doesn’t this seem like kind of a weird time to have a tea party?” I half whispered. “I mean, she can see Dad’s not coming. And it’s freezing out here.”

  “She must have been planning this reunion for years,” Lottie said sadly. Her gaze drifted up to the top stories of the house and down again. “She probably imagined herself sitting out here with her son, sorting out the past over cups of tea.”

  I squirmed on the edge of my chair. “We’ve got to tell her right away.”

  Lottie nodded. �
�I’ll do it,” she said firmly. “As soon as she comes out.” We both stared across the overgrown lawn toward the back stoop, nervously waiting. When a few minutes more had passed and Miss Raintree still didn’t appear, Lottie pushed herself to her feet. “I’m getting worried,” she said. “We’d better go see if everything’s all right.”

  We could hear the shrill whistle of a teakettle even before we stepped through the back door. It was boiling away on a huge iron stove in the dingy kitchen, steam hissing and screaming from its spout, and there was a tall silver teapot waiting on a polished tray next to the stove. But Miss Raintree was nowhere in sight.

  Lottie shot me a frightened look. “Hello?” she called out. “Miss Raintree?” Lottie found a frayed dishcloth amid the clutter. She pulled the noisy kettle from the burner and turned off the flame. Then we stood like statues for a few seconds, listening for clues in the sudden flood of silence.

  “We should go look for her,” Lottie whispered. I nodded and led the way through the narrow pantry that connected the kitchen to the rest of the house. We didn’t have to search very far. We found Miss Raintree sitting at the head of the long dining room table, bent over her wooden box full of letters. She barely looked up when we entered the room.

  “Miss Raintree?” Lottie said softly. “Adeline? Are you all right?”

  She slowly raised her head. A dusty shaft of sun from the far window lit up the sorrow in her face. “He’s not coming, is he?” she said. “My son.”

  “No, he’s not,” Lottie told her.

  I wanted to move, to help somehow. But all I could do was watch, rooted like a stump, as my mother went over to sit at the table. I saw the sad lines in Miss Raintree’s face deepen as Lottie carefully explained what had happened five years ago.

  “Just like Papa,” Miss Raintree whispered. Her eyes shimmered, and as the tears began to spill down her cheeks, I was wishing for an excuse to turn away. Maybe I could go get her that cup of tea from the kitchen … or a box of Kleenex … anything.

  But there was something that held me there, something haunting and familiar about the way she bowed her head. Then all at once I remembered where I had seen that exact same expression before—frozen in bronze on the Black Angel. And I thought of Delaney hoisting herself up to kiss the Angel’s broken hand with hardly a second of doubt. She—and her mother too—had decided to take a chance and stare sadness straight in the eye. And now they had a new member of their family to show for it.

  I found myself walking toward the table. As I slid into the chair across from Lottie, Miss Raintree looked up at me in a fog. “I’m sorry,” I began. “I’m sorry I ran off the other day without telling you what happened to Dad.”

  I could see her face starting to crumple again. “I guess I got overwhelmed,” I tried to explain. “It was so hard to believe—that you might be my real grandmother, and all this time you’ve been living just a few miles away.” I stole a look at Lottie. She gave me a tiny nod, urging me on.

  “But now that I’ve had time to think,” I said, leaning across the table, “I was wondering … I mean … do you think we could start where we left off? With the letters? I’ve always wanted to know what Dad was like when he was my age.”

  As Miss Raintree carefully reached for the box, like she must have done a hundred times over the last forty-five years, I thought I saw the haze begin to clear from her eyes. We spent the rest of the afternoon poring over Ellen Crenshaw’s letters and snapshots, passing them around our small triangle. Every so often I would read an interesting line or two out loud. “Lincoln came down with a terrible case of chicken pox this week, and today he insisted that we count them,” I read, making a face. “Now he’s feeling quite proud of himself. Fifty-seven spots in all.”

  Lottie nodded knowingly. “That must have been when he got that little scar on his forehead.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Miss Raintree listening, hoarding each new detail we mentioned like gold.

  She even noticed a smile flit across my face when I read a letter about company coming to the Crenshaws’ for Sunday dinner and Dad getting into trouble for hiding food in his napkin. “What is it?” she asked eagerly. “What’s funny?”

  “Dad hated broccoli just as much as I do,” I told her, feeling strangely satisfied.

  A dozen letters later Lottie was exclaiming, “What? Lincoln was voted prom king? He never told me that!”

  “Yes,” Miss Raintree confirmed with a proud lift of her chin. “Prom King of Verona High School, 1982.”

  Lottie and I couldn’t help snickering a little. But the next time I looked over, my mother had started to cry. “What’s wrong?” I whispered. She didn’t answer. I glanced at the neat cursive script on the piece of stationery in her hand. Then I understood. She was reading the letter I had just finished—one Ellen Crenshaw had sent right after Dad left for college. It described how much she missed him, how any minute she expected to hear him come clomping up the front porch stairs.

  “Shall we put the letters away for now?” Miss Raintree suggested in a small voice.

  “Oh, no,” Lottie said through her tears. “Not yet.” She blinked at the two of us in astonishment. “I almost forgot what a relief it is to cry.”

  LOTTIE INSISTED ON COMING WITH ME after school the next day to face Kilgore. She stood silently near the doorway with her arms crossed while I babbled out an apology and offered to serve my time working on the cemetery grounds.

  Kilgore never smirked or interrupted once as he sat behind his desk hearing me out. He waited for me to finish, his pointer fingers propped like a church steeple under his sharp chin. Obviously my mother’s presence had startled him into acting professional for a change. He must have known I had told her about the canteen in the vault. His gaze kept darting in her direction as he decided how to respond to my proposal.

  “Well, I sure appreciate you and your mother coming by to set things straight,” he said, his voice as slick as oil. Lottie didn’t make a sound behind me. “How many hours are you offering to work?”

  I clenched my arms tight to my sides. I had known this was coming. “That’s up to you, I guess,” I said guardedly. “Whatever you think is fair.”

  He tapped his fingertips together. “Let’s see,” he considered, plainly beginning to enjoy himself. “I’d say eighty hours would about do it.”

  Eighty? I almost choked. It would take weeks to work off all that time. As if he could read my mind, Kilgore added, “If the snow starts falling early like last year, there might not be as much work for you to do around here. But that’s okay.” He allowed himself a hard little smile. “Whatever time you don’t finish this fall, you can make up in the spring.”

  Already I felt weary at the thought of spending all those hours under Kilgore’s thumb—whole seasons of following his orders, waiting for him to snap like a rubber band pulled too tight.

  “When do you want to start?” Kilgore asked.

  I let out a deep sigh. “Tomorrow?”

  “Fine.” Kilgore scrubbed his hand across his mouth as if he were trying to wipe off another smile.

  Then I heard the swish of Lottie’s long patchwork skirt, and suddenly she was there beside me. “I’ll make sure that Linc keeps a time sheet of his hours,” she said. “And since we live right next to the graveyard and I work from home quite a bit”—she seemed to be lingering over each syllable, carefully enunciating, until somehow her words of reassurance shifted into a warning—“it will be very easy for me to keep a close watch on exactly what he’s up to over here.”

  A long second passed. I could almost hear what Kilgore was thinking as he sat there measuring up my tiny mom with her mop of streaky hair and secondhand-shop clothes. What a kook. But something in the way Lottie raised one eyebrow and fixed Kilgore in her steely stare must have made him decide to watch his step.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he finally said.

  That’s what got me through those cold November afternoons working in the cemetery. Whenever my hands turne
d numb on the rake and Kilgore zoomed up in his golf cart to point out another tiny pile of oak leaves I had missed in the fading light, I would smile to myself, remembering how scared he had sounded as my mother stared him down. “Yes, ma’am,” he had practically mumbled, like a kid in the principal’s office.

  Meanwhile, our Adopt-a-Grave Projects were due in the middle of November. I took two days off Kilgore duty so I could rush to the historical society after school and search for more clues about the Black Angel. It was always dark by the time I finally got around to taking the dogs for a quick run. But Mr. Krasny seemed to understand. One night he even invited me to stay for dinner. He made us something called lívance—Czech pancakes—and after dinner I showed him what I had found on my latest trip to the society. We didn’t even realize another hour had passed until Lottie came to rap on Mr. Krasny’s front door and order me home to bed.

  I was so tired those afternoons working in the cemetery. Some days I did my own version of Civil War reenacting, pretending I was a downtrodden soldier in the winter campaign of 1863 as I swept out the toolshed or pushed wheelbarrows full of mulch. When Kilgore showed up to fire out more orders, I pretended he was an evil army captain all the troops hated, and I made up mean nicknames for him under my breath. Killer Kilgore. Hatchet Face. Old Smokey. Captain Killjoy.

  But the main thing that kept me content as I whittled away at my eighty hours was the thought that from now on I could wander into the cemetery and visit Dad’s grave whenever I felt like it, without worrying about Kilgore or anything else keeping me out. I had earned the right.

  ON A BRIGHT SATURDAY, just before our Adopt-a-Grave Projects were due, I organized my very own field trip to Oakland so Delaney and I could practice our reports in front of a handpicked audience. Kilgore happened to be standing outside the workshop when we drove into the parking lot. He watched our weird little flock with narrowed eyes—me, Lottie, Delaney, Mr. Krasny, and Adeline Raintree, bundled in coats and hats, gloves and boots and galoshes, pouring out of my mother’s old car. I was wearing my brand-new running shoes. I was only supposed to use them for training, but I hadn’t been able to resist putting them on that morning. They were bright red and white—Plainview’s colors—and they made me feel like I had springs in my feet.