Year After Henry

by Cathie Pelletier

  “I need to talk to you about the memorial service,” Frances said, once she had made coffee and poured them each a cup. She had grown too thin since Henry’s death, her face now gaunt beneath the short gray hair, her neat slacks and blouse looking as if they were thrown onto a rack rather than onto a body. Jeanie watched as Frances got two plates from the cupboard and cut two raisin squares from the pan. She didn’t mind. Let Frances wax the ceiling if she wanted to. Let her mop the front yard. Dust the roof. Who cared? This is what unexpected death can do to a person. It can surprise them into a long, dark corridor where they will gladly stay forever, unless forcibly pulled out.

  “Dad and I have been talking,” Frances was saying now. “The postal workers want to do a floral wreath, but they also think a plaque would be nice. You know, one that mentions Henry’s years of service. We can insert it in the ground at his grave, a bronze marker, like the kind you see for men who have served in the military.”

  “Do whatever you want,” said Jeanie. “It’s fine with me.” She picked up the fork Frances put in front of her and took a bite of the raisin square. Funny how everything tasted the same in the year since Henry had died. Golden raisins. Regular raisins. Apricots. Plums. It all went into her mouth and she swallowed it. Mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, scalloped potatoes, hash brown potatoes. Rice soup. Chicken soup. Onion soup. Unless she had reason to pay attention, as she did now, what with Frances hovering over her, all food was colorless and tasteless. It did what nature intended it to do: it sustained her body, provided fuel, got her through another day of hell.

  “Well?” asked Frances. She waited. Jeanie saw that her mother-in-law’s eyes were puffy. Sometimes, she even hated Henry for what he did to them all, for those plates of French fries loaded with cheese, those thick steaks, those cigarettes she knew he smoked down at the tavern even though he always swore he had kept his 1987 New Year’s promise never to smoke again, the year that Chad was born.

  “It’s delicious,” said Jeanie. “What a difference from regular raisins.” Frances smiled. It wasn’t the old smile Jeanie used to see on her mother-in-law’s face. It was the new smile, which is to say, it was the best smile Frances had left.

  “I thought you’d like it,” said Frances.

  “I’ll have to get the recipe,” Jeanie told her. How many times in twenty-three years had Jeanie pretended she wanted one of Frances Munroe’s recipes? Hundreds of times. And yet not one single recipe had exchanged hands. Now, she wished her mother-in-law could give her a recipe that would tell her how to mix the anger with the grief, how many teaspoons of bitterness with how many teaspoons of sorrow. That’s what Jeanie really needed, instructions on how to live again, to taste, smell, touch. Maybe even love.

  “Pastor Tyson will give the opening prayer and say a few words about Henry,” said Frances, now back to the memorial service. “A couple of his fellow postal workers will talk about him, little jokes from work, that sort of thing. And then, well, we’ll put flowers and the plaque on the resting site.”

  Jeanie could only nod. For a year now, Frances had been unable to refer to Henry’s grave as anything but a resting site, as if maybe her younger son were merely asleep, taking a power nap before walking in her front door again, a cold beer in one hand, a fishing pole in the other.

  “What about Larry?” Jeanie asked. She liked Larry. He had always made her laugh at family functions when the conversations grew stale. And Larry always treated her like she was an individual, and not just his brother’s wife. Frances frowned.

  “Larry can insert the plaque,” she said.

  “But he and Henry were so close,” said Jeanie. “Are you sure Larry doesn’t want to say a few words?”

  “Larry can’t even speak for himself these days,” Frances said. She pushed her plate away, the untouched raisin square still on it.

  “Whatever you think best,” said Jeanie. All she wanted was for that day of the memorial to be over. It wasn’t her idea anyway, but something brainstormed by the Bixley Post Office, with Henry’s own parents most likely at the vanguard. “Let them do whatever makes them feel good,” Jeanie had told Lisa on the phone, when word of a memorial service for Henry began to circulate among family and friends. “No, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she had told Chad when he’d staged a protest at the thought of sharing his sorrow with near strangers, and in public.

  “Are you sure Lisa can’t make it?” Frances asked now. She was pouring herself another cup of coffee and Jeanie had yet to take a sip from her own cup. Jeanie shook her head.

  “Lisa’s having irregular bleeding as it is,” she said. “She’s afraid such a long trip and such an emotional day might be too much. And then Patrick is working around the clock just to pay the bills. Lisa has to think of the baby first. After all, Henry is…”

  Jeanie stopped. A patch of silence fell between them. How could it be so difficult, this many days and weeks and months later, to even say that word? Frances poured some milk into her coffee and stirred it.

  “Lisa has to think of the baby now,” said Jeanie. From somewhere down the street, the music of the ice-cream truck rang out. It had always reminded Jeanie of church bells over the years of hearing it, years when Lisa and Chad would grab her purse and pester her to Hurry, Mom, it’s coming up the street, it’s at the Petersons’ already, gimme some money, Mom, please!

  “I had some problems when Larry was born,” Frances said then. “Some irregular bleeding, as you call it. But Henry, when he came along, it was an easy birth. I almost didn’t know I was pregnant until Lawrence drove me to the hospital.” She smiled, a smile that belonged to another time and place. Would they ever be happy again? That’s all that Jeanie wanted to know.

  “How is Larry?” she asked, wondering if it would be wise. She knew immediately by her mother-in-law’s face that it wasn’t a good question.

  “He’s acting the fool, is what he’s doing,” said Frances. “I told him right at the start not to marry that vain girl. But Larry never listened to a word of advice from me. Now, if he doesn’t snap out of it, he’ll be fired from the post office. Lawrence says there are only so many strings a human being can pull. If only Larry had been just a bit more like Henry. Henry was as dependable as they come.”

  Jeanie watched as Frances reached for the plate with her raisin square and pulled it back in front of her on the table, the yellow raisins spilling away from the crust in a tiny avalanche of filling.

  “Frances, there’s something I think you should know,” said Jeanie. Frances took a bite of the raisin square as she looked at Jeanie’s face.

  “Oh, this is good,” Frances said. Then she quickly put her fork down on the table and hid her face in her hands. The sobs seemed longer and more uncontrollable than they did on her last visit. Within seconds, the wave of grief had passed and Frances picked up her napkin, wiped her eyes quickly. “It comes out of nowhere,” she said, and Jeanie nodded, recognizing a truth in that statement. “I’ll be fine one minute, talking about rosebushes with Ellen Barnes, and the next I’m crying like a baby.”

  Jeanie went around the table to her mother-in-law’s chair. She put her arms around the older woman’s thin shoulders and the two rocked back and forth, their pain flowing like a hot liquid from one body to the other. Were women meant to do this? Was this in their genes? If they couldn’t sit side by side on bar stools at Murphy’s Tavern, saying nothing the entire time, did they rock instead, remembering the babies they had held and nursed and soothed in those same arms?

  “I’m sorry,” said Frances finally. “I’m fine now, Jeanie. Really I am. What was it you wanted to tell me?”

  Jeanie kept the older woman in her arms, not ready to let go. The warm current flowing into her from another body felt good, like a stream of sunlight. With Henry not there anymore to give her a hug now and then, with Chad vanishing into his own cloud of sorrow, what Jeanie noticed most was no
t being touched.

  “It was nothing,” Jeanie said. “Don’t forget to bring me that recipe.”

  ...

  It was just coming twilight when Jeanie pulled her car up to the curb across from Evie Cooper’s house and turned off the engine. She sat staring at the sign in the front yard, Evie Cooper, Spiritual Portraitist, and at the candlelight that flickered from behind the white lace curtains. This was the time of day Evie did her sessions. Jeanie knew this from the ad she had seen in the Bixley Courier. It was one of the cheaper ads, sure to be missed except by the most desperate and sincere scholars of the unknown. Spiritual Portraitist, it said, and below the words was the silhouette drawing of a woman standing beneath a huge star, like the one that had guided the three wise men to baby Jesus. Let me break down the veil that separates you from your departed loved ones. Twenty years of experience. Fifty dollars per session. Call now for appointment. It wasn’t as if Jeanie believed that the dead could be dialed up, paged, summoned forth for a chat. She didn’t believe it. But at the same time, she did believe in God and an afterlife. What if there was a way to poke a hole in that so-called veil? All she knew for certain was that something like a morbid curiosity had finally drawn her to Evie Cooper’s street, some kind of indefinable link. She was more curious about the mistress now, a year after Henry died, than in those months when he was actually having the affair.

  Jeanie reached into the paper sack on the seat beside her and found the pack of cigarettes she’d bought at the 7-Eleven. Henry never knew that she had taken up smoking, that same day she found the receipt to room 9 at the Days Inn. Jeanie had lit that first cigarette out of spite, no doubt about it, coughing the harsh smoke back up from her lungs and wondering how on earth any sane person could do that every day without quitting forever. But now, all these months later, she liked the taste of tobacco and the calmness that smoking a cigarette brought with it. Maybe she was even addicted to nicotine. It didn’t really matter why she smoked. She just did.

  Jeanie reached into the same sack and pulled out a margarita wine cooler from the four-pack carrying case. The bottle had perspired in the heat and now the paper sack from the 7-Eleven was damp with humidity. She spun the silver cap around until it broke from the aluminum binding and came free in her hand. She tossed the cap onto the floor on the passenger side, then put her window down a bit to let the smoke leak out. She took a sip of the cold wine cooler and lit her first cigarette of the evening. Birds sang out from the bushes along the street and the muted sounds of traffic floated down from the four-way stop at Foster and Elm. Two women were out power walking, their white fists punching the air in unison as they strode past Jeanie’s car. They hadn’t noticed her there behind the wheel. Maybe she, too, was disappearing and just didn’t know it yet. She exhaled slowly and watched as the smoke left her lips and spiraled up toward the window crack, set free on the night air.

  What bothered Jeanie most, what still hurt, what stopped her from finding what the talk shows call closure, is that she wasn’t sure but what Henry Munroe was still visiting Evie Cooper, in those dark hours of the night when things go bump. Jeanie Munroe wasn’t sure but what her dead husband, so attached to the mistress he had unexpectedly left behind, had broken down that veil Evie’s newspaper ad talked about. Maybe he had forced his way back to the world of the living just so he could touch the life in her again. One thing was certain. Henry’s spirit sure wasn’t hanging out at Jeanie’s house. Not unless you count the leftover smell of Old Spice in an orange hunting bonnet. Jeanie was tempted to walk up to Evie’s door and knock on it bam! bam! bam! When Evie answered, she would say to her, I’m getting the number 9. Does that mean anything to you? Yes, he’s showing me a nine and a receipt for the Days Inn. What do you think that means?

  By the time Evie Cooper’s first client of the evening arrived, Jeanie had already finished off the first wine cooler and opened another.

  3

  When Larry heard the kitchen door open and close downstairs, he waited another minute until he was certain his mother would be in the garden. Then he unlocked his door and stepped out into the narrow hallway. Sunshine flooded the house, turning it the color of ripe wheat. Motes of dust spiraled up from the rug on the stairs, a universe disturbed, and he wondered if his mother had just crept up to his door again, to listen. The soles of his bare feet slapped on the wooden floorboards as he made his way to the bathroom. With a great sigh of relief, he emptied a bladder that had been pestering him since he woke to the sound of his father’s Toyota truck backing out of the drive and whining off up the street. Then he washed his face and brushed his teeth, keeping tabs through the window on his mother in the garden below, her gray hair floating over the cucumber beds like a soft cloud.

  In the kitchen, Larry opened the refrigerator door and found a half gallon of milk. He poured a tall glass and drank it as he stood there. He had even dreamed of milk during the night, so thirsty had he been. He dreamed of walking down the aisles of the local IGA, asking clerk after clerk, “Where do you keep the milk?” That’s when the IGA had turned into a huge field of talking cows. “Here’s where we keep the milk, asshole,” one of them said. Larry had knelt by this talking cow and reached for the teats, hoping to milk her and quench his thirst. Only it wasn’t leathery teats hanging from the cow’s udder. What he held in his hands, and was still holding when he woke seconds later, was the leather mail pouch. Thinking of this now, in the bright sun of day, Larry smiled as he finished the milk. He rinsed his glass and left it in the sink, not caring that his mother would find it and know he’d been there. An empty plastic sack lay on the table, the kind that came full of groceries from the IGA. Larry opened it and stood before his mother’s slide-out pantry. A jar of crunchy peanut butter was the first item into the bag, along with a box of saltine crackers, a jar of pickles, and two cans of tuna fish. He glanced out the kitchen window and saw his mother just leaving the cucumber beds and heading for the sweet peas.

  In the silverware drawer, Larry found a can opener, a fork, a spoon, and a knife. They clinked against the cans in the bottom of the sack. From a plate on the counter, he grabbed a chocolate doughnut and bit into it, leaving it in his mouth while he opened the cupboard door where the gallons of water were stored. He pulled one out. On the way back through the kitchen, he grabbed two apples out of the fruit bowl. He had never been a Boy Scout, had never possessed the kind of “group mentality” he felt it took to join such an organization. Henry was more the Boy Scout type and had excelled, his earned merit badges often discussed at the dinner table while Larry scooted a few peas around with his fork, waiting for praise of Henry to subside. It had never really bothered him that Henry seemed cut from a better cloth than he was. He loved his younger brother too much, and love can cushion anything, even jealousy.

  Back in his room, Larry made himself a breakfast of peanut butter and crackers and ate it while sitting on his bed, his back propped against the wall. He would save the tuna fish and pickles for lunch. He drank water from the throat of the plastic jug and then selected the larger of the two apples. It oozed a sweet juice the moment his teeth broke through the red skin. He finished the apple in a few quick bites and then reached into the leather mail pouch to select another letter, this one personal. The envelope was yellow and smelled of lilacs. Why did some people odorize and perfume their mail? There were days when Larry’s pouch smelled like the perfume counter at Fillmore’s Drugstore. He gave a cursory glance at the return address in the upper left corner: Sheila Dewberry, 1013 Cedar Grove Court, Sioux City, Iowa. It had been sent to a Miss Stella Peabody, the town librarian whose beige nut of a house sat catty-corner on Thorncliffe Street, next to the future site of Bixley’s second McDonald’s.

  Larry took the knife he’d found in his mother’s silverware drawer and inserted it beneath the sealed flap of the envelope. He cut his way slowly and neatly along the glued line until the letter was opened. He took it out of its envelope and lay back on the be
d, head on his pillow and sheet pulled up to his waist. His own father never opened an envelope without his silver-plated letter opener, a knifelike apparatus that was inscribed with the initials LSM, Lawrence Simon Munroe, which had been given to the first Lawrence Munroe ever to be entrusted with the government’s mail, upon the event of his retirement in 1928. “This will be yours one day, Larry,” his father liked to remind him as he held the silver-plated letter opener up to catch the light. This had been going on from the time Larry was five years old, ever since he could first remember being able to grasp the concept of letter. Just as some boys watched their own fathers cut into the silver bellies of freshly caught trout, Larry had watched his father make incisions in the bellies of envelopes, slicing them open with a quick movement of the wrist. He was twelve years old when he knew for certain that he did not want the damn letter-opening thing. And he was eighteen when he told his father outright that he didn’t want to be a goddamned postman. He was ready for college, and older, horny women, and Playboys all over the coffee table any time of the night or day without fear of retribution. “Maybe another time, another place,” he had gone on apologetically, trying to ignore the fact that his father’s face was growing like a long, tanned squash, a sad vegetable elongating, searching out a place for the sadness to take root. Maybe in the old days of postal service Larry would’ve taken up the call. Those were the days of Pony Express riders, when that dangerous route from St. Joseph to Sacramento was waiting to be ridden, to be broken in. Larry had read about it in history class. Maybe then, if he’d had a fast horse, a little excitement, maybe then he would have saddled up, grabbed the mailbag, and turned his collar up against those outlaws and bandits and dangerous holes in the black road ahead. In those days, mailmen were heroes. Those Pony Express riders must have gotten all the best, loose women, like modern rock stars and athletes. Trembling virgins probably waited on the edges of towns to lift their dresses at the first sound of hoofbeats. And while it would make sense that a good-looking, modern-day mailman would have all the lonely, bored housewives to himself, what small-town, teenaged boy would want to bed down the mothers of his best friends? “I’m sorry, Dad, but the answer is no,” Larry had said. A month later, he was enrolled at the University of Maine.