by Ann McMan
No matter how many times they each tried, gently, to explain to him that a different outcome was likelier, Henry clung to his idealized view that everyone would continue to live together in the big white house.
Maddie and Syd struggled with what to say, and how much to tell him. He needed to know the truth, and he needed, as much as he was able, to prepare for his impending separation from them, and from everything that defined his sense of the familiar.
In the end, they decided that less was more, and it was better to stick to simple, unvarnished facts—avoiding a lot of overlay that might confuse or scare him. He was already dealing with the loss of David, Michael, and Astrid—who had moved back to the inn the night before the party. They didn’t want to overload him with more than he could be expected to handle.
They finished dinner and walked with him to the pond so he could feed the catfish. Henry stood with his red coffee can near the edge, and Pete sat at his heels, hoping for any dropped morsels. Henry tossed small handfuls of feed onto the surface of the water, and so many fat fish competed to retrieve it that the pond soon resembled a pot of boiling water.
“I talked to your daddy today, sport,” Maddie began.
Henry looked at her with an excited expression.
“He had some really good news. He’s getting out of the hospital in just a few days.”
“He is?” Henry’s eyes were like saucers. “Are we going to go and get him?”
Maddie shook her head. “We don’t have to. He’s going to come here on his own—right after he goes to Kannapolis to see your gramma and pick up his car.”
Henry had a big smile on his face. “Daddy has a fast car, and it’s red like the Camaro.” He looked at Syd. “You’ll like it, and so will Uncle David. I only rode in it once, but I had to sit on the back seat.” He looked up at Maddie. “But I bet I’m tall enough now to ride in the front—aren’t I, Maddie?”
“I don’t know, sport. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Is Daddy going to stay here with us?” Henry asked.
Syd took a deep breath, but didn’t speak.
“Not at first, Henry.” Maddie knelt down beside him. “Your daddy got a job fixing cars at Mr. Junior’s garage, in Troutdale, and he’s going to live there.”
“He is?” Henry looked bewildered. “Why can’t he live here with us?”
“Because Mr. Junior is letting him use use the apartment over the Esso station, so he can be closer to his job.”
“But we have room for him here . . . especially since Uncle David and Uncle Michael went back to their house.”
“I know, sport, but this is what your daddy wants to do, and it’s important for us all to help him out as much as we can.”
“Will he come and see me?” He sounded confused.
Maddie ran a hand through his hair. “Of course he will. And Henry? Once he gets all set up in his new apartment, he wants you to come and live with him.”
Henry looked excited, then he looked at Syd, and his face fell. “But then I won’t be here with you.”
Maddie shook her head.
“Who will feed Before and my fish?” he asked.
Maddie squeezed his small shoulder. “You will, sport. Every time you come to visit us.”
“But I don’t want to go away. I want to stay here with you.”
Maddie had no idea how she was managing to hold it together. “We want that, too, Henry. More than anything. But you love your daddy, and your daddy loves you. He fought very hard to come back to you from the war, and we’re all just so happy and grateful that he found a place for both of you to live that’s so close to us.” She smiled at him. “We’ll still be together a lot, and you’ll always have your room here—just like it is now.”
He looked down at the ground, where Pete was sniffing around, looking for stray pellets of fish food.
“Can Pete come with me?”
Maddie opened her mouth, but couldn’t come up with any words to say. How could she tell him that the apartment was right on a country road, and there’d be no place safe for Pete to roam—much less for Henry to play?
“Honey.” Syd knelt next to Henry and Maddie. Her eyes were puffy. “Pete needs to stay here so he can do his job, watching over the farm.” She wiped some dirt off the corner of Henry’s forehead with her thumb. “You know how hard he works, and how much we all depend on him to take care of us.”
Henry nodded. Maddie thought he looked . . . resigned. Just like he did nearly two years ago when she first met him flying solo on a cross-country flight to live with a grandmother he’d only met once before. How was it possible for so much pragmatism to reside in such a small package? She had only an inkling of what that had to suggest about Henry’s understanding of how life worked, and she didn’t like it one bit. It made her think too much of her own childhood, and her angry tantrums in protest of her mother’s taking her to live three thousand miles away from everything she loved. Away from the same place Henry would now be leaving in just a few day’s time.
“Okay.” Henry set his coffee can down on the ground and looked at Syd with his big blue eyes. “Can Daddy and I still come for taco night?”
Syd gave Henry a watery smile and pulled him into her arms.
“Of course you can,” she said into his hair.
MADDIE UNDERSTOOD THAT Henry was already more focused on being reunited with his daddy than he was on any of the more disturbing details related to the impending changes in his everyday life. He loved her, and he loved Syd—but he was still a child. And for him, life was made up of a loosely connected sequence of moments—not events. And those moments came and went with a relatively finite set of emotions. Sometimes anger. Sometimes excitement. Sometimes anticipation. But never angst—and rarely, if ever, fear.
He was a loving and sweet—splendidly normal—kid. A kid, who in this mixed-up mash of the best and most unfortunate circumstances, just happened not to be theirs.
After their conversation, Syd cried for a solid two hours.
Maddie just tried to keep herself busy.
That’s what she was doing today.
For too long, she’d neglected the blenders, toaster ovens, and vacuum cleaners that sat collecting dust in the barn. It was like the Island of Misfit Toys out there, and Syd kept complaining that trying to park her car was like navigating a motorcycle obstacle course.
It had been a long day.
Celine left early that morning. Michael came by to collect her shortly before dawn so they could make the two-hour drive to the Charlotte airport in time for her eight o’clock flight back to L.A. Maddie and Syd remained behind because graduation services were taking place at the local high school just a few hours later.
Maddie teased her mother for leaving at such an ungodly hour, alleging it was nothing more than a flimsy attempt to avoid the paparazzi, who were certain to be dogging her in the aftermath of her arrest for assault. Celine replied that she was just jealous. But when they hugged goodbye, Celine held her more tightly than usual and whispered that it was okay for her to let down her guard and feel all the things she was fighting to hold back.
Celine said her private goodbye to Henry the night before, and promised to be back for another long visit during his summer vacation. They even talked about the possibility of having Henry visit her in California—if his father agreed to the idea.
Henry, of course, was one hundred percent confident that he would.
The house seemed so empty at breakfast that morning—like an inn during the off-season. No guests. No chatter. No complaints about the organic cereal. No Astrid competing with Pete for the inevitable scraps of—something—that Henry would “accidentally” drop. And the kitchen table seemed cavernous with just the three of them. The empty chairs mocked Maddie. She was halfway tempted to move them someplace out of view—in the same way she wanted to move her own cascading emotions to a more benign location.
Fortunately, they’d had graduation services to attend that morning, so
they didn’t have the luxury to over-analyze the dramatic changes to their home environment.
The weather was good enough that the high school could hold its commencement ceremony outside on the football field. It was a poignant experience for parents and family members to sit on folding chairs set up just several-hundred yards away from the spot where the school gymnasium had collapsed during the tornado. That site had been mostly cleared, and construction on a new facility was slated to begin in another week.
Graduation was an especially significant experience for Syd and Roma Jean—who each had managed to escape serious injury after being trapped for several hours beneath the building’s rubble. There were several commemorative speeches that made mention of the storm. And there was a special musical tribute, courtesy of the Oak Hill Academy Pep Band—on loan while Syd’s marching band continued with fundraising efforts to replace storm-damaged instruments.
There were one-hundred-and-sixty-four students in the Class of 2012. This year’s Valedictorian honors went to Jessie Rayburn, and Nicorette Jackson was named class Salutatorian.
There was one other special honor announced that day. An anonymous donor established a one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollar endowment for the Jericho Public Library and instituted a merit scholarship program that would pay full, in-state college tuition and expenses for one enterprising student, renewable for four years. The inaugural recipient of the Gladys Pitzer Community Spirit Scholarship was Roma Jean Freemantle.
When the announcement was made, the audience sat in stunned silence before exploding into ear-splitting applause. Nobody seemed more surprised than Roma Jean, who somehow managed to endure the barrage of public scrutiny without falling off the stage or knocking over the sound system.
It was a day for the record books in more ways than one.
Maddie smiled when she thought about how happy Roma Jean looked. The whole world was opening up for her in ways the teenager would never have been able to imagine. The irony of it all was hard to miss. Roma Jean’s world was expanding by leaps and bounds, but Maddie’s world was contracting and growing smaller.
Just like an aging heart muscle.
She shook her head and tried for the umpteenth time to concentrate on Edna’s blender. The damn setscrews that anchored the heat shield to the motor housing were rusted into place and wouldn’t budge—no matter what she tried. She was about ready to go at the thing with a ball pein hammer.
She stood back and remembered how her father always told her to use all of her senses when she confronted a problem. “Sometimes,” he’d say, “you can get further with a good dose of common sense than you can with conventional wisdom. The right tool for a job might not be a tool at all.”
Okay. So tools aren’t working, here. What are my alternatives?
She looked around her workbench. Phillips screwdriver? Nope. Socket wrench? Nope. Vise grip pliers? Nope. Pry bar? Tempting—but, no. Hydrogen Peroxide? She stared at the brown bottle with a faded label. Why in the hell is that out here?
Then she remembered. Her father once used it to loosen the rusted head of a lawnmower screw when he ran out of Liquid Wrench—and it worked like a charm.
Why not give it a try?
She walked to her toolbox to get a bulb syringe, but the damn drawer wouldn’t budge. Something inside the drawer was stuck and kept catching inside the opening. The more she pulled, the harder it stuck.
Use all your senses, Maddie.
Fuck that. She pulled harder. The bright red cabinet shook and rattled, but the drawer didn’t give an inch.
She’d had it. There was no way this thing was going to best her.
She braced her foot against the base of the tool chest and yanked as hard as she could on the drawer pulls. They snapped off like dry twigs and sent her sprawling backward into a low storage bin. It toppled over, and half a dozen bags of birdseed spilled out across the barn floor. She ended up flat on her back in a sea of cracked corn, sunflower seeds, and thistle—still holding the drawer pulls in both hands.
She sat up and waited for her breathing to return to normal. Then she saw them. Little red-and-white striped candies wrapped in cellophane. They were everyplace. The breath mints Henry fed to that damn, rogue heifer, B4.
It was too much. It was all too much. Too much loss. Too much change. Too many people who came and went before she was ready to lose them.
Her emotions boiled over and pulled her temper right along in their wake.
She hurled the drawer pulls across the barn. They hit an old kerosene lantern hanging from a support post and shattered its globe. Her rage gained momentum, and she threw anything she could get her hands on: bins, buckets, garden trowels—even a small weed whacker. It didn’t matter. Anything within reach was fair game.
Then she started to cry. Gut-wrenching sobs shook her frame and rose up into her throat like hot bile. She hugged her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth on her bed of birdseed and peppermints, wrapped up in a cloak of torment like a modernized version of Job—the beleaguered ancient Hebrew who mourned his losses by scratching at his boils in a pit of ashes.
“Dr. Stevenson?”
Maddie froze when she heard the voice. She hadn’t heard anyone drive up, but that wasn’t surprising, given the volatility of her tantrum.
She hastily rubbed a hand beneath her nose and tried to wipe the tears from her face.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I heard the noise in here from up on the porch, and it worried me.”
It was Roma Jean. Maddie turned toward her, but made no effort to get up. She could tell by the look on Roma Jean’s face that she must’ve scared the shit out of her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was husky.
Roma Jean stood rooted to her spot in the center of the doorway. A beam of sunlight was hitting the top of her head, and it radiated off her hair like fire. She was still wearing her dress clothes from the morning graduation ceremony.
“I came out here to see Miss Murphy,” she said. “I knocked on the door, but nobody answered.”
“No.” Maddie cleared her throat. “She’s not at home. She took Henry into town to run some errands.”
“You’ve got birdseed in your hair,” Roma Jean said. “I’m really sorry for bothering you. I’ll come back later.”
“No. It’s okay, Roma Jean. You don’t have to go. I was just . . .” Maddie struggled with how to explain her meltdown.
Roma Jean was looking at her intently. “You don’t have to say anything, Dr. Stevenson. It’s really okay.”
“Is it?”
Roma Jean nodded.
“Henry is leaving us on Wednesday.” Maddie made an oblique gesture toward the mess on the barn floor. “I guess I just hit critical mass with everything. I mean . . . it’s not like I didn’t always know it would happen—of course I did.” She didn’t know where on earth the words were coming from, but once they started, she didn’t try to stop them. “Somehow, when James gave us an actual date, I just fell apart—on the inside. I couldn’t even tell Syd . . . I didn’t want her to see how weak I was . . . how weak I am. How much I’m hurting.” She wiped at her nose again. “I didn’t want to make this harder for her.”
Roma Jean knelt down to clear off a spot in the carpet of birdseed. Maddie started to protest, but Roma Jean just ignored her and continued—as if sitting down on a dirty barn floor in her best outfit was the most natural thing in the world for her to be doing.
“You’ll ruin your clothes,” Maddie said.
Roma Jean shrugged. “I never really liked this dress all that much. Mama made me buy it because I had shoes it would match.”
“That’s very sensible.”
“It would be if I liked the shoes.”
Maddie had to smile at that.
“I know it was you and Miss Murphy,” Roma Jean said, quietly. “It had to be you.”
Maddie looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“My scholarship.”
“Oh.�
�� Maddie looked out across the barn. The mess she made would take the rest of the afternoon to set to rights. She didn’t want to slip up now and create an even bigger one for Syd to have to deal with. “I promise you, Roma Jean, as happy as I am for you, I had nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing?”
Maddie shook her head.
Roma Jean sighed. “Okay, then. I’ll just wait to thank Miss Murphy.”