The Probable Future

by Alice Hoffman

  There was a faint buzzing sound inside Jenny’s head. That was the way it had all begun on the morning of her birthday. Once upon a time she had been absolutely sure of whom she was meant to love. She had seen what she wanted to see, not what was before her. She hadn’t stopped to turn around twice. Patience, that was the illegible ingredient in nine-frogs stew, that was what Jenny had missed entirely.

  “Someone stole it?” Matt said to his brother. He had just realized the impact of this theft.

  Will knew what his brother thought of him. It had been clear since that horrible New Year’s party, when he’d been too drunk to think straight and had gotten involved with one of his students. Well, Matt had every right to his disdain, but it was Jenny whose disappointment Will dreaded. Oh, they were over, he knew that, but she was due some consideration after all the years she’d put in. He fully expected her to be furious. She had every right to be. He had allowed a stranger into their house, he had put his needs first, selling his daughter’s safety for five hundred dollars that he had only possessed for an instant. The payoff had evaporated in his greedy hands, like smoke, leaving nothing but ashes.

  Will looked at Jenny and for the first time he hid nothing from her. They’d been together so long, he owed her this at least: a single moment of honesty.

  “Baby,” he said, the enormity of his failures crashing down on him as he stood beneath the laurel in his wet socks. He could see his reflection in the glass panels on the side of the door to Cake House: he appeared to be underwater, a drowning man with nothing to hold on to but a single shred of truth. “I made a mistake.”

  “I understand completely,” Jenny told him. “So did I.”

  THE CURE

  I.

  HAVING LIVED IN ONE PLACE FOR THIRTEEN years, Stella was now forced to move yet again. They had all agreed this was the best course of action; with the model house stolen and fears raised, it was decided that Stella must leave Cake House. But where would she go? An Avery cousin in New York was an option, or boarding school in Rhode Island or Connecticut. But Stella refused to leave Massachusetts. She was not about to enroll in a third school in a single year. No matter the circumstances, she planned to finish ninth grade at Unity High School. Let there be flood or famine, parental anxiety or real danger, she was staying put. For the first time in her life she was earning all A’s; she enjoyed going to the clinic and the rest home with Dr. Stewart. And there was her personal life to think of. What would Hap do without her? Who would Jimmy Elliot follow around if Stella left town, whose window would he throw pebbles at late in the evening, when darkness was falling and the warblers began to sing the last of their songs?

  “I’ll be no trouble to anyone,” Stella said. “I’ll be a mouse,” she vowed.

  There were few people in town the Sparrows could turn to; those who believe the best neighbors are those who don’t speak to each other have few allies to call upon in times of trouble. But Liza Hull was known for her big heart. When Jenny phoned to ask if Stella could move in with her, Liza didn’t hesitate. In a matter of hours, Stella was ensconced in the guest room above the tea house. Oh, scent of vanilla, of soapsuds, of Assam tea. Oh, room with privacy, with a lock on the door, with a view of the plane trees. If this was charity, it was fine with Stella.

  Liza hadn’t even asked any questions, she’d simply made up the bed with clean sheets, then showed Stella how to regulate the water in the tub, which had a tendency to be too hot or too cold. Stella was down to a few treasured possessions—just enough to fill her backpack and a shopping bag—still, she was given an old oak dresser to use, one that had belonged to Liza’s grandmother, the one who as a girl had written down Elisabeth Sparrow’s best recipes.

  “I’m going to love having you as a guest,” Liza announced after Stella was all moved in. She hugged the girl, and although Stella wasn’t much for such shows of affection, it was hard to dislike anything about Liza. As for the tea house, it was a fine place to live, except in the mornings, when a steady stream of customers began to arrive at 7:00 A.M., so that Stella could not sleep, even with the quilt over her head. There was no way to avoid the sound of dishes rattling or water running through the pipes every time the dishwasher was turned on. Perhaps it would have been impossible to sleep late anyway, all those pain-in-the-neck warblers chattering in the lilacs outside her window, the bravest coming to perch on the window ledges, tapping their beaks against the glass, drawn to the tea house in the hopes of crusts and crumbs.

  Soon, there was the weekend to look forward to. Stella and Juliet Aronson had made plans, none of which Stella had mentioned to her mother, who had never approved of Juliet. True, Juliet was always surprising; she wasn’t like other people and she had no desire to be one of the crowd. The last time they’d spoken, for instance, Stella had confided she was confused about which boy in town was her heart’s desire. Did she follow her brain, her heart, her overheated pulse rate?

  “Stick a pin in a candle and light it,” Juliet had advised. “When the flame burns down to the pin, your true love will walk through the door.”

  Stella had laughed. “Very scientific.” Preposterous, of course. Still, it might be worth a try. Perhaps just once. “What sort of candle?”

  “A plain old candle and a plain old pin. It works every time.”

  Stella had found a candle and an old brass holder in the kitchen; these she kept in the tea house dining room, ready to light should there come a time when she wanted to try Juliet’s silly game. But what if Jimmy Elliot was the one who walked through the door, would it mean she was bound to him? And if it was Hap, would she be disappointed?

  At last it was Friday, the day Juliet was set to arrive. Juliet would be cutting classes at the Rabbit School and arriving on the three o’clock train. Thankfully, Jenny would not be working on the weekend; she had the time off, but still would be busy, for there was plenty to do at Cake House now that Elinor was failing. Who would have ever imagined it would be just the two of them in the house by the lake? That there’d be so many errands to run? Food shopping at the market in Hamilton, laundry to do in that horrid old washing machine in the scullery, chicken and rice to cook for Argus, whose stomach was more and more sensitive.

  By Friday, Jenny was simply wiped out. Her feet hurt from standing most of the day, her hands burned from the soapy dishwater, and she found herself shivering when the wind blew through the open window beside the cash register. It was a dark, rainy morning, which usually meant a brisk business at the tea house. People wanting to put off going to work, lingering over another cup of coffee or tea, something to warm them against a day of wind and chill, puddles and hard work. Stone rain, Elinor called it, the sort of cloudburst that didn’t care about the state of humanity, with sheets that poured down so hard it hurt, enough precipitation to flood side roads and gutters and lakes. The rain had kept Jenny up half the night, hitting against the old slate roof. She kept thinking of Matt Avery, even when she didn’t want to. She was sleepless over him, bound up with some sort of dumb yearning she couldn’t seem to put a stop to. Even when the sun rose, there’d been little difference in the slate-gray sky. The one bright spot of the morning was that Stella had stopped at the counter for a quick breakfast before rushing off to school.

  “This brioche is great,” Stella said as she happily munched and poured herself a cup of tea.

  Drinking tea was something new. Favoring brioche over cinnamon rolls was, too. Jenny had the sense that with each move away from her, her daughter grew happier. Stella glowed in the dark dining room, brighter even than the candles Jenny had lit on the sideboard.

  “Liza! Your brioche is the best thing in the world,” Stella called when Liza came into the dining room with two blackberry pies for the display case. Before going back to the kitchen, Liza came to give Stella a dish of butter and some of her homemade apple cider jam.

  “Did you tell your mother about your weekend plans?” she asked.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Stella assured Liza,
fingers crossed behind her back.

  “Talk to me about what?”

  Jenny had returned from taking a breakfast order from that ill-humored Eli Hathaway. “Don’t give me any health food,” Eli had demanded. The old taxi driver looked about a hundred years old in the murky dove-colored light. “Strong coffee and two jelly doughnuts. That’s what I want,” Eli had said. “Don’t try to talk me out of it.”

  There were no jelly doughnuts, and Jenny sincerely hoped the raspberry strudel would suffice. Eli’s vision was failing and he probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.

  “Talk to you about my helping out here on weekends,” Stella said.

  Thankfully, Liza had gone back to the kitchen and Stella did not have to actually admit to Juliet’s impending visit. But lies weren’t so easy to tell for a novice, and Stella began to cough as the words stuck in her throat. Jenny patted her daughter’s back and poured her a glass of water.

  “Not necessary,” Jenny said. “School’s more important.”

  “But Cynthia works here.”

  Stella and Jenny exchanged a look.

  “Let me guess.” Stella’s expression had soured so that she looked a bit green around the edges. “Working here is good enough for Cynthia, but it’s not good enough for me. You never like my friends, do you?” Stella grabbed her backpack and headed for the door.

  “I do like Cynthia. I just think she’s troubled, that’s all.”

  “Everybody’s troubled,” Stella informed her mother. “Including you.”

  Here was the argument, about to fall harder than the stone rain outside, about to hurt just as much, maybe more, causing wounds that might or might not be permanent. But just as their argument was about to become a full-fledged fight, the strangest thing happened, and as it did, their disagreement fell away as though it were a shadow. For there on the highboy, beside the sugar bowls, one of the lit candles flickered high into the dark air. There seemed to be a bit of silver, a radiant light. Outside, the stone rain fell harder, but here there was a brilliant spark. The pin Stella had stuck in the wax.

  “Where’d you get the candles?” Stella had a panicky feeling, as though she worked a charm all wrong.

  “In a drawer behind the napkins. It was so dark when I first got in. There’ll be a dozen turtles in the driveway today when I get home.”

  Jenny had stopped wiping down the counter. She had noticed the spark as well. The rain fell like a river of rocks, a thousand hard drops that were as clear as the first ice that covered Hourglass Lake in winter. Stella was holding on to her backpack and her umbrella and a yellow rain slicker Liza had lent her. The rain hit against the screen door and splashed drops at her, cool and sweet and unforgiving.

  When the light touches the pin, your beloved will walk in. Close the door, you need not see more.

  “That’s how you’ll know it’s true love,” Juliet Aronson had told her. “You’ll know for sure.”

  The fire had reached the pin, but nothing had happened. So far no one had appeared, and maybe that was just as well. Stella couldn’t control who would walk through the door any more than she could choose whom she would fall in love with. At least she could now tell Juliet she had tried the silly game.

  “I’d better go,” Stella said.

  “I could drive you.” Jenny wrote out Eli Hathaway’s bill. She’d been right; he hadn’t complained about the strudel.

  “No. You’re working. Don’t worry. I can take care of myself. I won’t drown.”

  Still, it was dark as night, the parking lot illuminated only by the headlights on a truck pulling in. Matt Avery ran through the rain, in his old duck-weather jacket and his leaky work boots. That oak had another reprieve, it seemed. This was no day to cut down a tree. Matt let the door slam behind him, and he stood in the threshold, wiping the rain from his face.

  “Hey, there,” he said when he almost bumped into his niece. She was standing right there, mouth open like a fish’s. The flame was burning the pin and she saw the way Matt turned to look at her mother.

  “See you.” Stella was actually embarrassed; she could use a dose of the cold, windy weather. She opened the screen and let the rain splatter into the tea room.

  “Do you need a ride to school?” Matt said.

  “You’ve got more important things to do,” Stella told her uncle.

  He laughed. “Such as?”

  “Whatever. But good luck. You’ll need it.”

  “Teenagers,” Matt said when he took a seat at the counter.

  “They’re crazy,” Jenny agreed. She poured Matt a cup of coffee, but she didn’t meet his eyes. She felt quite crazy herself, in the dim tea room light with Matt staring at her and Eli Hathaway clinking his spoon against his water glass as a way of calling for another slice of raspberry strudel.

  “Come on, girl,” Eli called. “I’m starving to death. I’ll have another jelly doughnut.”

  Girl, Jenny thought. She laughed at the notion. “I thought you had diabetes,” she called back to Eli. Eventually, she’d have to look at Matt, so she did so now. Outside, a chorus of frogs called from the puddle beside the steps. The only other sound was of the rain falling, the sort of rain that occurs in dreams, endless, invisible, the pulse of the universe.

  “How’s your brother?” Jenny said as she cut a last piece of strudel for Eli and handed Matt a menu.

  “Ah, Will.” Matt added cream to his coffee. “Always Will. We can never seem to get away from him, can we?”

  They both thought this over as Jenny delivered Eli Hathaway’s order. Will, it turned out, had moved in with his brother. He and Henry Elliot had gone to the judge and explained the theft of the little house. Will had cooperated, of course, and had described the individual who had claimed to be a reporter and might easily be a murderer, so that an artist could draw a likeness. Now, Matt informed Jenny that the judge had decided to allow Will to live in Unity while the case was pending, in his brother’s custody.

  “So you are your brother’s keeper?”

  “There’s no place else for him to live.”

  That rain could make you dizzy, it really could. Matt recalled that in Anton Hathaway’s diary, sent to his mother after the boy fell in battle, Anton had noted that the thing the men in his troop dreaded most was rain. That’s when they were most homesick; there were those who had bravely faced down blood and bullets who would call out their mothers’ names when the thunder began and torrents of rain began to fall.

  “I paid the rent.” Jenny was livid. She sent Matt’s order for rye toast and eggs, over easy, to the kitchen with the new fellow Liza had hired to wash dishes and take out the trash. “I don’t understand. I sent a check long before the first of the month.”

  “You sent it, but Will cashed it. Apparently, the model house isn’t the only thing he’s managed to lose. The rent money’s what he’s been living on. I went over there to collect some belongings. Mrs. Ehrland said to say hello.”

  “Oh, great. Lovely.”

  Jenny poured herself a cup of coffee. The Harmon brothers, Joe and Dennis, came in, waving, stomping the mud off their boots. Jenny had been in class with Joe Harmon all through elementary school. She could not believe that she had been at the tea house long enough to know both men’s breakfast orders by heart: one bagel, one rye toast, two cheese omelets, cooked through.

  “Did Stella seem a little odd to you today?” Jenny asked as she put in the Harmons’ order.

  “Maybe she has a test. High school’s got its pressures.”

  Every time Matt was in Jenny’s presence he had the feeling that he was dreaming, still asleep in his bed, far from the customary emptiness of his waking life. Jenny, on the other hand, so accustomed to dreaming other people’s dreams, had begun to have her own dreams as well. Just last night there was a maze of green hedges that went on endlessly, so that she’d had to run, breathless, ready to fall.

  Matt had begun to talk about his day—he had to drive into Boston to collect Will’s belongings
, now stored in Mrs. Ehrland’s cellar. Hopefully, he would get back to work on the old tree by the end of the week. If it wasn’t rain that had slowed him down, it was errands, other jobs, and then, of course, there was a hive of bees inside the trunk, honeybees drunk on the pollen of spring from the field of red clover behind Lockhart Avenue. By then Jenny was staring at Matt. In last night’s dream there had been bees in the hedges, on every single leaf.

  “Are you okay?” Matt said when he saw her expression.

  “Oh, yeah.” Jenny got his breakfast and watched him eat. The food disappeared. He was almost through and she was still curious about something.

  “The other evening when Will came back, you were standing on the porch. A bee settled on you, but you waved it away. You weren’t the least bit worried.”

  “Bees don’t usually sting you if you’re polite to them. On the other hand, if you curse at them, they’ll come after you. I’ve seen it happen.”

  Jenny laughed. “I cursed them once. To keep them out of my mother’s garden. It worked till she got wise to what I’d done. She concocted some brandy cake and they all came flying back. Double what I’d sent away.”

  Matt loved the sound of her laughter; it reminded him of that day on the lawn, when everything was green and he fell in love with her. He wanted to give her something, but the only thing he had was his knowledge of the town. He turned to local history, searching for a tidbit Jenny might appreciate. “If you have a wedding, you’re supposed to offer the bees some cake as well, for luck. Elisabeth Sparrow did it on her wedding day, and she stayed married for sixty years.”