by Lisa Samson
“First I got this strange postcard in the mail,” Mom says. “There was a picture on the front, one of those churches with the golden onion domes. The postmark was from Romania, and it said she was thinking of me and thinking about home. I didn’t recognize the handwriting at first and she didn’t sign the card, but I knew it had to be her. After all these years. So weird.”
“She’s here in the States?”
Mom nods. “She got back over the weekend. As soon as she got to your father’s house, she called the farm and left a message saying she wanted to see me.”
“Wow,” I say. “She’s at Daddy’s?”
“Yes, if you can believe that. Apparently they’ve kept in touch all these years. Just every so often, but still. That was news to me.”
“Where else is there to go, then, I guess.”
“I guess. It’s been so long. This will sound terrible, but I kind of thought of her as if she were dead.”
“It’s not like she kept in touch,” I say.
“Of course you were too young to understand what was happening at the time, but the whole thing was very traumatic. I mean, you don’t go overseas for the summer and then decide you’re never coming back. That’s crazy. She was only nineteen. Your grandfather was going to fly over there and get her, whether she wanted to come or not.”
This is more info than she’s ever given me. “Did he go?”
She shakes her head. “Your grandmother laid down the law, the way she does. As far as my mom was concerned, Aunt Bel was a saint. She could do no wrong. And having a missionary in the family? Over the moon. It was because Aunt Bel gave her so much trouble as a teenager. When she straightened herself out, when she became so devout, well, that was Mom reaping her reward. ‘Train up a child in the way she should go.’ ”
“Did they ever see her again?”
“No. And even so, Aunt Bel was golden in her eyes.” The bitterness in her tone comes as a surprise. Not that she feels it, but that she’s allowing herself to express it, and me to see it. “Anyway, I think it was me who finally convinced him not to go. Just wait, I said, and Bel would come home on her own.”
“You were right.”
She laughs. “I guess I misjudged how long it would take her. Do you remember much about her?” she asks as if she hopes the answer is no.
All I can do is shrug. My actual memories of my aunt Bel are all mixed up, just a fuzzy set of half-remembered sensations. She’d left for the field when I was four. I have some warm but vague recollections from family Christmas parties, Aunt Bel always my biggest fan, throwing me in the stroller to go hang out with friends. I seem to recall a tall, lissome girl sitting on the floor, holding me in her lap as I opened presents. No word she ever spoke to me is preserved in memory. Only a vague aftertaste of her presence, the sweetness diminishing each year, but never fully gone, remains.
“Here’s the thing,” Mom says. She’s done with her cake, but uses her fork to tap the empty plate. “I don’t think she’s here for a visit. She plans to stay for good. She doesn’t have a job, obviously, and I doubt she has much money, though she’s living on something. She’s going to need a place to stay. Walter doesn’t have the room.”
She shifts the crumbs on her plate here and there, long enough for me to see where this conversation is leading.
“What about your place?” I ask. “She’s your sister.”
She raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think she had living in a tent in mind when she got on the plane to come back, baby. But I figured you might want to put her up, since you and Finn have a lot in common with her, you know. Being religious, I mean.”
For Mom the word religious means signing on the dotted line of conformity that you will hereby cease and desist all autonomy and freedom. That all decisions have been taken out of your hands and into the grips of prideful old men with loads of money—if not their money, yours. Mom is very spiritual, as she’s quick to point out, but not at all religious.
I’m not sure how I feel anymore about all of that. Really. If Aunt Bel seems mysterious, Jesus is even more so. He seems so different from all the ways God has been presented, and while I’ve rejected the notion that he was hanging on the cross with just a few people in mind, I just can’t see him as anything else. I’ve never had one of those experiences where Jesus came into any kind of focus. So I just trust that he’s like Finn says, full of grace and truth, whatever that even means.
“And you have so much more room,” she adds. “At least I guess so.”
“Finn won’t go for it.”
“Baby, he’ll go for anything you want. That boy is putty in your hands. Compared to him, you’re a rocket scientist, and yet he’s smart enough to know that!” She seriously thinks she’s giving us both a compliment.
“Thanks a lot.”
“Besides, it’s your birthday. He can’t say no to you, today of all days.”
“Yay. Happy birthday to me. So this is my present? You’re dumping your sister on my doorstep?”
She slides the garbled paper ball across the table. “No, this is your present. Your Aunt Bel is just the icing on the cake.”
I walk home in a state of mild ambivalence, unwrapping my birthday present on the way. It wasn’t a crumpled ball at all, but a carefully folded sphere because, I’m assuming, Scotch tape would be an extra possession in my mother’s eyes. Inside the paper, in a tuft of white cotton, nests a vintage cocktail ring of my grandmother’s, a big blue sapphire circled with tiny diamonds.
I admit, I’m touched.
About a year before she died, my grandmother started giving away possessions almost willy-nilly. Walk in the door, you were sure to walk out with something, whether you were a relative, a friend, or the mailman.
Somehow Mom secured the prize: the ring I always tried on when Grandmom let me play in her jewelry box.
I slip the ring on my finger. It fits.
Thank you, Universe, for looking out for me just this once.
It begins to rain.
2.
The Iron Maiden
Way back in the city’s past, maybe as far back as the days when Edgar Allan Poe roamed the cobbled streets, the Old Firehouse really was a firehouse, a modest fire station executed in utilitarian brick, though it looks ornate by modern standards. Over the years, the building has been gutted and repurposed a number of times, until it was finally left abandoned for a decade or so, tagged with spray paint, its windows busted out, rendering them sightless eye sockets looking out over Patterson Park and remembering the good old days.
Then Finn’s brother, Chris, stepped in. He bought the Old Firehouse and fixed it up the way he’d rehabbed a half dozen other properties, a minor player in the Patterson Park renaissance. Real estate is a Drexel thing—Finn’s brother and father are always buying and renovating and selling. Property is in their blood. We snagged some studio space in the Old Firehouse at a great price, on the condition that in return Finn wears the hat of property manager, seeing to the other tenants’ needs so his brother doesn’t have to. From home to work is just a ten-minute walk.
Honestly, it just couldn’t be better.
Three years ago I quit my job at a big Baltimore creative agency and married Finn, one of the freelancers I used to contract. Together, we started an agency of our own with a sideline in letterpress printing. The official name on the business cards is DREXEL PRESS AT THE OLD FIREHOUSE, but we just call it “work,” and the office we’ve dubbed the “studio.” While I design for clients and produce a line of cards and stationery for retail stores, Finn designs their websites and runs our print shop, devoting his spare time to renovation projects at home.
Was it the great Chinese philosopher Confucius who said, if you choose a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life?
He was so wrong.
Loving the job means you have to work. You never neglect what you love. Everyone who knows me thinks I’m living the dream. But they also say I work too much, so go figure. Like my mom,
I do what works best for me. And working hard works best.
How much time I’m going to have for mysterious Aunt Bel from Kazakhstan is already wearing on my mind. Will she need entertaining? A crying shoulder for the adjustments she’ll need to make?
Spare me, Lord. I’ll go to the dentist instead if you think that would be a fair trade.
The stable-sized doors in front of the Old Firehouse have been replaced with plate glass, flooding our studio with light. The front of the space is reserved for the printing presses—we have a Vandercook and two tabletop presses, a Pilot and a freshly restored Sigwalt—so people passing on the street can see us at work. Huey’s in action, pulling prints off the Vandercook and holding them up to the light. He sees me outside the glass and gives me a wink.
Can I just say here and now that I love Huey? I did from the moment he walked in two years ago and told us how badly we needed him at our studio.
I push through the front entrance and down the hallway to our door, which opens into the back of the studio, where the open-plan cubicles are separated from the presses by a long counter. My desk, along with Finn’s and a conference table for spreading out paper samples and meeting with clients, furnishes the stark white room, the walls displaying our best work.
“I thought you weren’t coming in today,” Diana, one part pin-up and two parts Rosie the Riveter and an extra 10 percent punk rock if her tattooed sleeves have any opinion on the matter, says from her swivel chair behind the counter. To one side of her large-screen Mac, she’s inspecting the colored edges of some duplexed business cards that have to be picked up later this afternoon.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”
“Happy Birthday. Do you feel old?”
“I do now. How do the cards look?”
“Perfect. I can’t believe how clean he gets the edges. Huey’s the man, even if he does say so himself. I’m about to box them up. Ooooh—I like your ring. Birthday present?”
She takes my hand, gripping the back of my hand with fingers tipped with nail polish so deeply red it borders on black, to examine the cocktail ring closer.
“Present from my mom,” I say. “Any sign of Finn?”
Diana shakes her head, but not too convincingly, because her bouffant hairdo barely moves. Whatever the surprise is, she must be in on it.
I help her box up the business cards, reminding her about confirming the booth at the upcoming show. As I suspected, Finn hasn’t forwarded the e-mail from the organizer, so I plop into his cubicle chair and do it myself. Then I walk up front to interrogate Huey, an angular black man in his late forties with a thing for wearing boiler suits with his name embroidered on the chest.
“I haven’t seen Finn,” I tell him. “I think you know what’s going on.”
“Not me, Boss. I keep myself to myself.”
“What do you think about the new poster?”
He pulls one of the prints off the drying rack, handing it over. “It’s not my thing, personally, but I think we’ll sell a bunch.”
“Wow.” The idea was Finn’s, but I ended up doing all the research and figuring out the design. It’s a chart depicting a grid of coffee cups in profile, with the correct proportions of coffee or espresso, milk, and foam for making twenty different drinks. The background is bright orange, the coffee inky brown, the milk tan and creamy, the foam white, the text red. Every color represents a separate pass, except for white, which is the Mohawk paper showing through. Framed, the poster will look striking above any coffee shop bar, or on the kitchen wall of a home espresso enthusiast. “You’re good, Huey. They look amazing. Has Finn seen them yet?”
“Not yet.”
“So he hasn’t been in this morning?”
“If he has, he snuck right by.”
I examine it some more, finding no imperfection to the naked eye. Huey’s that good.
“Can I tell you something?” he says. “This whole infographic kick, it leaves me cold. I understand the theory—people like this stuff, and it helps get our name out there—but to me, it’s like opening up the USA Today. It’s just not beautiful.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“It’s not you that’s the problem, Boss. It’s the idea. ‘Everything we do here has to be in good taste.’ You made the rule, not me.”
“Infographics are hot on the Internet. If you create a good one, it can go viral and that brings a lot of traffic to the site. People buy the prints, and we get to pay the bills. I can’t help it if you don’t like coffee.”
“The caffeine makes me jittery,” he says. “And what you’re describing is being a trend-hound, not having good taste.”
“And if you ask me, this is beautiful, whether you see it or not.”
“I’m looking right at it, and I don’t know.”
Channeling Mom, I say: “You’ve got to look with your eyes open, my friend.”
He shakes his head. “Thank you. I’ll give that a try.”
“One thing I’d love to see, though, is a deeper impression. You’re keeping it light again, Huey. I want the plates to bite into the paper.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, waving me off. “You’re listening too much to those hipster types. Now back in the day—”
“So what are your plans for the day off?” Diana interrupts just in time to abate the upcoming lecture. “You did the big birthday dinner last night, didn’t you? Anything special coming up?”
“The point of a day off is that you don’t have to plan. But I would like to know where Finn disappeared to.”
“Have you tried calling him?”
“I’m trying not to.”
As I’m standing across the counter from her, Diana sneaks a look at her phone, which I pretend not to notice.
“I guess I’ll take off,” I say.
“You should stick around for a few minutes.”
“How many minutes?”
She checks her phone again. “Maybe ten?”
“Is a camera part of the surprise here, because if it isn’t …”
“Stick around anyway.”
“Drat.”
The big red pickup rolls to a stop right in front of our window. I can’t tell one truck from another, but I recognize this one. It belongs to Finn’s older brother, Chris, who slides down from the driver’s seat, taps the glass, and waves. Finn exits from the passenger side and circles behind the pickup, examining the rain-slick plastic tarp that covers and conceals their cargo. The shape underneath is suggestive, tall and square like an old arcade game, and it’s so heavy that the truck’s rear wheels are half hidden.
“Look at that!” Diana coos in mock surprise.
Now Finn is tapping on the glass, beckoning Huey to come out. Huey strips off his latex gloves—he’s been cleaning the Vandercook—and rests his hands on his cocked hips, watching the men outside with no indication that he’s about to join them in the rain.
I push through the door and into the corridor, leaning outside for a better look.
“What have you got there?” I ask.
My husband comes around to the front of the truck, smiling broadly, his copper-brown curls dripping wet. He rubs his gloved, greasy hands together in anticipation.
“Hey, hon, look what’s out here. You want to come and see?”
“I’ll get all wet.”
“It’ll be worth it,” he says. “Come have a look.”
It’s not that camera. For sure.
As I venture into the rain, Chris, same hair as Finn, but with a shorter and stockier build, lowers the tailgate and growls out a greeting: “How’s it hanging, birthday girl?”
“All right, I guess.”
“The suspense is killing her,” he says, laughing.
Finn leaps into the bed of the truck and starts working on the guide ropes and bungee cords that crisscross around their cargo. The truck groans under the weight.
“What’s under there?”
“Can’t you guess?” Finn says.
T
he problem is, I can guess. I just don’t want it to be true.
He loosens the ropes and starts working the back of the tarp up, revealing in stages what I’ve already guessed. “A Chandler & Price!”
Full-size.
“Look, hon,” he says, pointing at the wavy spokes on the flywheel indicating an Old Style press, from back in the 1800s. “Once this is restored to working order, this beautiful old machine will be virtually indestructible.”
Right now, however, its surfaces are pitted with rust, the moving parts seized up.
“Wow,” I say. “Look at that. What barn did you find that thing in?”
The light of happiness glows in his greenish eyes. Oh, Finn.
“It’s just what you wanted, right? A full-size press?”
The legs are bolted down on a wooden pallet, which is good, but the foot treadle is still in place, meaning the press was never fitted with a motor back in the day. Which is bad. Very bad.
He lays a hand on the rusted iron. “No, I know, I know, it’s a little rough, but give me and Huey a couple of days, and we’ll have it running like new. Imagine this thing front and center in the window. It’ll be amazing. I was thinking we should paint it fire-engine red—or maybe British racing green, I can’t decide. It’ll be your choice, whatever you like. Happy birthday, hon!”
He hops down and puts his arms around me, leaning into a kiss. I kiss him back because it’s the thought that counts, and we love each other, and even when he screws up and bites off more than he can ever chew, Finn can’t help being cute about it, and charming. It always comes from a good place inside him.
“Are we bringing it inside?” Chris asks.
Finn releases me. “We need Huey. Go tell him to get his butt out here, baby.”
Diana raises her eyebrows as I pass.
“It’ll look nice once it’s all fixed up,” she says.
When I sidle up alongside Huey, who is still contemplating us through the window, he cuts me a sideways look.
“You asked for one of those?” he mutters. “It looks like jungle rot to me.”