Seasons of the Fool

by Lynne Cantwell

  Ms. Elsie propped her chin on her hand and studied her for a moment, an odd smile on her face. “Our little Julia, all grown up,” she said.

  Julia smiled at her around a mouthful of tuna, and swallowed. “So they tell me. Do you want a glass of water?” She rose to get one for herself.

  “No, thank you,” said Ms. Elsie. “So are you here just for the week, or…?”

  “Actually,” Julia said, “I’m moving here permanently.” She sat back down.

  “Oh? What about your husband?”

  “Lance and I have split up. I filed for divorce a couple of weeks ago.” She ducked her head for another bite of casserole.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” But Ms. Elsie didn’t sound very sorry. Julia was pretty sure neither she nor Ms. Thea had ever liked her husband. “We’re happy to have you as our neighbor, though. This house has been so sad and lonely since your grandmother died.”

  Julia smiled indulgently at the quaint turn of phrase. Ms. Elsie had always had an odd way about her, as if she believed even inanimate things were alive. “How have you been?”

  “Oh, we get by,” the older woman said. “I sold a couple of rugs at the art show in Washington Park this summer.”

  “That’s wonderful. Congratulations.”

  “And Thea’s going to become a master gardener. That’s where she is today – taking a class for her certification.”

  Julia snorted softly. “She could probably teach the class. I’ve never met anyone with a thumb greener than Ms. Thea’s.”

  Ms. Elsie smiled. “I’ll tell her you said that. Finished?” The older woman picked up the empty plates and moved toward the sink.

  “I can get that.”

  “Nonsense. You’ve been working awfully hard here. Put your feet up and relax for a minute.”

  Julia didn’t put her feet up, but she did lean back and allow Ms. Elsie to wash the plates and flatware. “I need to find the screens and put them up this afternoon. This place needs a good airing. And I don’t want to bleach the floor of the loft until I’ve got some decent ventilation in here.”

  “Bleach the floor?” Ms. Elsie turned toward her slightly.

  “Mice,” Julia said. “They pulled apart a corner of the futon mattress that was up there. They got into the linen drawer, too, and the towels in the bathroom. That’s why I’m using paper towels.”

  Ms. Elsie was shaking her head. “This is the time of year for them to come inside for the winter, too. You may want to get someone out here to set traps and show you how to plug all the holes they’re getting in through.”

  Julia sighed. “I’ll add it to the list.”

  Ms. Elsie gave her a sympathetic look. “It’s a lot to do, isn’t it? Tell you what. I’ll have Thea come over later. I think she may have some traps left over from last fall – the humane kind, not the kind that break the poor mousie’s neck. I’m sure she would set them up for you.”

  “That would be great,” Julia said. “Thank you.” She stood and stretched. “I guess I’d better get going on finding those screens. I suppose they’re in the shed.”

  “That’s where we keep ours. I’ll just finish cleaning up in here.”

  Julia smiled at her and pushed open the back door. As always, it stuck, and made a horrible grating sound as it opened. She grimaced at the noise. Then she traipsed through the carpet of leaves to the shed at the back of the lot.

  Some poking around yielded the screens, a brush for cleaning them off, a screwdriver for installing them, two rakes, and the pruning shears. She knew she couldn’t get to everything at once, but it was good to know she wouldn’t have to outfit the whole house from scratch. She spent a few minutes brushing the worst of the accumulated grime off of the screens outside. Then she carried them into the house, kicking through the leaves like a kid on the way.

  “Wow,” she said, pop-eyed, as she reentered the kitchen and pulled the protesting door shut behind her. The room absolutely sparkled, from the tops of the maple cabinets to the freshly-waxed linoleum floor. “You’ve been busy, Ms. Elsie. How did you do it all so fast? I could have sworn I wasn’t gone that long.”

  The tiny woman shrugged and sipped from a steaming mug. “I guess I just got going and didn’t know when to quit. Tea?”

  Gratefully, Julia sank back into her dinette chair. “Sure.”

  ~

  That evening, Julia sat in the living room with a damp-stained notepad and a pen, making a list of things that still needed to be done. The list ran to several pages, and still included some of the “first things” she had meant to get to that day.

  At least she could open all the windows now. Only one screen was so badly damaged that it would need to be replaced. Of course, it had occurred to her only after she had gone to the trouble of putting up the screens that in just a couple of weeks, she would need to swap them out for the storm windows again. Already, the evening air was chilly; she had first wrapped up in an afghan, and then admitted defeat ten minutes later and closed all the windows again. Still, she could open them tomorrow and attack the floor of the loft.

  And trim the vines on the trellis over the driveway, and rake the leaves, and find out when trash day was, and hire somebody to plane the top of the back door, and get a new futon mattress for the loft. And buy new towels. And set the mousetraps Ms. Thea had brought by that afternoon, and hire an exterminator. And set up her writing room in the smaller bedroom.

  That was, after all, why she was here.

  She got up, shoved her notepad and pen into the back pocket of her jeans, and went to the tiny room. Hardly bigger than her walk-in closet in Evanston, it was crammed with furniture: twin bed, nightstand, dresser with attached mirror, and desk. There was just barely room between the desk and the bed to pull out the chair. The closet had had its door removed – she had seen it, shrouded in cobwebs, in the shed – to accommodate the highboy dresser that matched the one with the mirror.

  This had been her father’s room when he was a boy, but all traces of him had been expunged long since. Now a faded quilt in a flowered fabric covered the bed, and the desk held a quartet of dead plants – the remnants of the planters sent by friends for her grandmother’s funeral.

  She fetched another trash bag from her dwindling supply and bagged up the plants, wondering why she and Jen hadn’t simply given them away. Too grief-stricken to think straight, she supposed.

  Then she pulled her laptop out of its bag and set it on the desk. The room would need a lot of work; eventually, she planned to get rid of the bed and dressers, install a reading chair, and hang a cork board next to the desk. But for now, she was content.

  “A pretty good first day,” she said aloud, and yawned. Then she checked the bedding for signs of mice, turned back the quilt, and tried to turn on the lamp on the nightstand.

  The bulb promptly blew.

  She shook her head and pulled out the pad. Light bulbs, she wrote on her store list, before collapsing onto the bed.

  ~

  She awoke with a caffeine-withdrawal headache and discovered there was no coffee to be had in the house. She settled for two cups of tea, but they only took the edge off. So she climbed into her car and headed out for breakfast.

  As she rounded the corner, she slowed, squinting through her pain at the ginger-haired man talking to a workman in his yard. She rolled down her window and called, “Hey, Dave!”

  The man’s face broke into a smile. “Julia! Is that you?” He approached her open car window, a mug of something in his hand.

  “Oh my God, is that coffee?” she asked.

  “You want some?” he asked. “Come on in.” He held the door open for her as she nearly fell out in her haste.

  “You are saving my life,” she chattered as he led the way into his kitchen. “I woke up with a killer headache and there’s no coffee at all in the house.”

  He grinned, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “You’d better take mine, then,” he said, handing his mug back to her. “I’ll get myself
another cup.”

  She took a long sip, eyes closed. She didn’t even care that it was black. “I could kiss you right now,” she said, unthinking, when she came up for air.

  For the briefest second, his eyes lit with anticipation. Then he threw up his hands to stave her off. “I’d better settle for a hug.”

  “Right, sorry,” she said with a contrite smile, and wrapped her arms around his waist for a moment. Then she stepped back. “Wait. What are you doing here? Don’t you have classes to teach? Young, impressionable minds to fill with historical factoids?”

  He chose to ignore her jibe. “The university has a long weekend for Founder’s Day,” he explained, settling into a dinette chair and motioning for her to do the same. “It seemed like the perfect time to get out of town and check on how those guys out there are doing.” He nodded toward the front of the house.

  “Nina and the kids didn’t come?” She took another long sip of coffee.

  “The kids have school,” he said, as if that explained everything. But it seemed to her as if his shoulders sagged a notch.

  “Hmm. Trouble in paradise?”

  He recollected himself. “Nah. Not really. What about you? Where’s the dashing Lance?”

  It was her turn to slump. She set the mug on the table in front of her. “We’re getting a divorce.”

  “Ah. Sorry to hear that.”

  She waved away his sympathy. “It’s an adult rite of passage by now, isn’t it? Get your degree, get a job, get married, get divorced.”

  “Get married again,” he said, nodding.

  “Oh, no. Not me. I’m done with men.” She got up to refill her mug, flashing him a smile over one shoulder. “Unless they come bearing coffee.”

  “Noted,” he said, settling back in his chair. “Hey, remember the time we decided to go camping on top of Suicide Hill? And Tim brought that thermos full of coffee?”

  Julia was already chuckling. “And a pack of cigarettes. We all got sick as a dog, and the cops chased us home.”

  Dave shook his head. “He was always a boatload of trouble. How’s he doing?”

  “Fine. Still in Hawaii.”

  He nodded. “We got a Christmas card from him. Seems to like it there.”

  “What’s not to like?” she asked, raising her hands. “It’s Hawaii. He says the North Shore reminds him of the lake, except the waves are bigger.”

  “Yeah, right. Why doesn’t he come home, then?”

  “Feel free to ask him.” She sat back down.

  A moment of quiet ensued, during which she studied him. She had known Dave nearly all of her life; if they had grown up in the same town, instead of only being neighbors in the summertime, they would have been in the same class at school. He looked almost the same to her as he had then – or rather, she could see in him the boy he had been. His hair was the same reddish-blond, although more of his forehead was visible now, and his eyes were still the same: pale blue and kind. He had never had the sort of build that made girls go crazy; he was only of average height and was too bookish to care about building up his physique.

  But that had never mattered to her. They had a shared history and shared interests; they loved the same books, believed in the same things. Thought the same things were important. Looking back on it, she realized they had loved each other for years before their teenaged hormones had caught up. The physical attraction had come almost as a bonus.

  And yet, circumstances had compelled them both to move on.

  “So,” he said, shooting her a significant look.

  She sighed, debating how much detail to give him. He deserved some sort of explanation. But between her lawyer and her therapist, she was sick of talking about it all. In the end, she opted for the shorthand version. “We both found someone else. His worked out. Mine didn’t.” She raised the mug to her lips, watching him watch her. As she set her mug down again, she said, “So I’m moving out here permanently. I’m finally going to try to make a living as a writer.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “It’s about time, Julia. You’ve been talking about it since we were ten. And you’re good.”

  “Thanks,” she said lightly.

  “I mean it,” he went on. “When you’re ready, let me know. I’ll ask around the English department, get you some names of agents.”

  “Thanks,” she said again, “but agents are passé. All the smart writers are going indie now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No, really.” She sat forward. “I’ve been taking workshops at StoryStudio. Everybody’s buzzing about it. Publishing’s going through the same thing the music industry went through a few years back. It’s a brave, new world out there for authors.”

  He was smiling at her. “Your spirit’s back.”

  She grinned and dropped her head. “Sorry. I get carried away. Lance hates it when I do that.”

  “Another good reason to dump him,” he said, putting his mug in the sink. He paused. “You did dump him, didn’t you?”

  She felt her face grow warm. “Damn it. How did you figure that out?”

  “I know you,” was all he said. After another moment, he asked, “How’s your head? Better?”

  “Much better, thank you.” She rose and handed him her mug. “You really did save my life this morning. And as much as I would like to stay here all day and drink up all your coffee, I have a ton of stuff I need to do. I’d better get going.”

  “I need to get on those guys out there anyway.” He slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Good to see you. Don’t be a stranger.”

  “As if,” she said, hugging him back. “When are you going back to Chicago?”

  “Not ‘til tomorrow night.”

  “Good. Come over for supper tonight. I’ll burn a couple of steaks.” She grinned up at him. “It’ll be just like old times.”

  “Now that’s an offer I can’t refuse,” he said.

  ~

  Elsie stood to one side of the living room window, peeking out at the street through the space where the curtain met the window frame.

  Thea, wearing a high-necked flannel nightgown, strode into the kitchen and flipped on the overhead light. “Turn it off!” Elsie scolded her.

  Thea rolled her eyes. But she pulled the cord on the light over the sink, and flipped off the overhead light as the neon bulb flickered to life. “Come to bed, Else,” she said.

  “In a minute,” said Elsie. She, too, was dressed in a flannel nightgown. “I just want to see.” Although, she reflected, there wasn’t much she could see; not all of the trees had shed their leaves yet, so her view of the front door of the Morton place was obscured.

  Thea clucked her tongue, but fondly. She fetched herself a glass of water and took it with her toward the bedroom. “Let me know,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “And don’t stay up all night.” Thea delivered this line with a knowing smile.

  Elsie gave her a saucy look. “I won’t. If he hasn’t left by one, I’ll consider the evening a total success.” She looked out the window again. “Oh, drat.”

  “Already?” Thea rushed to the other side of the window. Sure enough, there was David Turner, hands in his pockets, walking along the shoulder toward his place at the end of the block.

  The women sighed in unison.

  “I was so sure,” Thea said. “What with the dragonflies.”

  “Oh, Thea,” said Elsie. “You know it’s an imperfect science.” She glanced toward the window and sighed again. “We’ll just have to try again, that’s all.”

  ~

  Dave found himself whistling as he made his way up the block in the dark. Then he remembered it was late, and switched to a subvocal hum.

  He had had a terrific evening. Julia remembered more about their exploits than he did, and she had such a gift for storytelling. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed so hard.

  She was still so beautiful. She had always moved with unstudied grace, and that had not change
d. Her hair was dark; her eyes, a brown so deep that a man could fall into them forever.

  She had strong-armed all of his attempts to get her to open up about what was going on in her marriage. He’d seen the news; he knew that asshole husband of hers was in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he wondered whether her arrival in Michiana had anything to do with that. But she wasn’t dishing.

  Of course, I wasn’t exactly candid with her, either. He hunched his shoulders against the chilly evening and kicked at a stone that was barely visible in the gloom. The village streets had no sidewalks and almost no street lights, the better to preserve the rustic ambiance – and yet he was unafraid. It was as if the whole area were charmed somehow. And he had walked this block so many times over so many years that he felt he knew even the potholes by heart. Were he at home in Chicago, he’d be carrying a flashlight, and maybe even a crowbar, even though his own neighborhood was perfectly safe.

  Perfectly safe on the outside, at least.

  He had no desire to go home.

  He shook his head. Focus on the kids. They don’t deserve the drama. They deserve to have a normal childhood. A normal life.

  A normal mother, a demon on his shoulder murmured in his ear, but he refused to agree. Nina was doing her best. She saw her therapist and took her medication, and if she needed to be more consistent about both, well, who among us was perfect?

  In sickness and in health. Isn’t that what he’d promised her?

  Fiercely, he kicked another stone, and heard it crack against a tree trunk like a shot.

  ~

  Julia only half-heard the stone’s report. Her attention was all on the chicagotribune.com story on the laptop screen before her.

  She had known about the story before Dave brought it up; her lawyer had called her while she was making dinner. “It’s bad,” Elaine had said.

  She’d been right. Julia had known something was coming, of course; the SEC had been investigating Lance for the past year. She had been interviewed twice. But she never expected the agency would file a thirty-count indictment against her husband in federal court.