by Tricia Dower
“No, Grandma.” Ron has shown her a photo of a white clapboard house with a red door.
“You’ll do fine then.”
Things happen in a flurry after they cut the cake and she tosses the bouquet.
She and Ron return to the sanctuary and exit via the stone steps at the front so people can pelt them with rice. In his still-new-smelling Plymouth Fury, he chauffeurs her to her house where Mother presides over the Exchange of the Gown for a sapphire blue dress with matching coat and hat. Linda contended an expensive outfit to leave in was frivolous but Mother said, “No one will claim my daughter didn’t have a proper send-off.” Neighbors are the ones, presumably, who will judge Mother as they gather to wave goodbye on the cracked and buckled slate sidewalk where Linda once played hopscotch. She stands in her attic bedroom as Mother’s cool fingers undo the twenty-six cloth buttons down the back of the gown.
“Surprised you didn’t pack those pictures,” Mother says about the magazine clippings on the wall facing them. A castle on the Rhine. A teahouse in Japan. A rain forest in Bali. Machu Picchu high in Peruvian mountains.
“Little kid dreams,” Linda says. “You can toss them.” Not a single picture of Minnesota where she’ll be in less than a week, a place she never bothered to imagine herself before now. Ron has already taken the few belongings she cares about to the house with the red door. This room, once a refuge, doesn’t hold her anymore.
“I hope you know I’ve loved you the best I could,” Mother says, her voice thick and wobbly. “I never told you this but I didn’t want your father back after we separated.”
Linda stiffens. That awful morning eight years ago. Mother hurling angry words and a three-pronged fork to the floor where it stuck in the linoleum and quivered like an arrow, Daddy renting a room in a boarding house after that, Linda slipping from one world into another where Eldon Jukes lived.
“When that girl from Avenel turned up dead,” Mother says, “I agreed for your sake.”
Broken images explode softly in Linda’s head. “I wish you hadn’t if it wasn’t what you wanted.” She strokes her neck, imagining as she has countless times the give of the girl’s soft throat under Eldon Jukes’s knife, the cold smell of her death. Did his eyes meet hers when he cut her? Did he feel pity for her? The buttons are taking forever. She turns her head toward the window overlooking the street where Ron’s car, hers now too, waits below. The sun must be low in the sky already because the window’s in shadow. She has knelt by it more than once over the years, spying on neighbors, watching icicles form.
“I shouldn’t have brought up the murder. This should be a happy day.”
“And it is. I can’t thank you enough. Everything was perfect.”
Other mothers and daughters would hug right now.
“Last button. There you go.”
Linda steps out of the gown and attacks her itching arms. “I look like a leper.”
“Prickly heat,” Mother says. “Wait here.” With take-charge firmness, she crosses the short hall to her bedroom, returns with a small pink jar. “This should clear it up.”
A shimmer of hateful envy. “Something your witch doctor concocted?” Mother resorts to folklore remedies from a crackpot who has a connection to Linda’s Troubles.
“It’s from my Avon Lady. Care to try it or would you rather suffer?”
Linda dips a finger in the jar and dabs a bead on an eruption. Within seconds the burning quiets. She covers every angry spot.
Mother hands her a tissue. “It’s not Miranda’s fault that maniac got hold of her knife.”
“I apologize for calling her a witch doctor.”
A different mother might apologize for having anything to do with Miranda Haggerty and keeping the assault alive in her daughter’s memory. This one says, “Let’s chalk it up to the jitters, perfectly normal on your wedding day. Anything you want to ask me?” She lowers her voice. “About tonight.”
Her timing is too funny. Last month, Aunt Libby took Linda to lunch and expounded on douches, Vaseline and the like, confiding she uses a diaphragm, laughing at Linda’s shocked expression. Single doesn’t mean celibate, she said. She warned the Pill makes your body think it’s pregnant but the last thing Linda wants is a baby that will grow up to suffer or make others miserable and nothing else is as reliable. Ron says he can wait as long as it takes before she’s ready. She’s afraid to ask if he’s willing to wait forever.
And here’s Mother waiting for an answer, her expression a mix of hope and trepidation.
“What do you think I should know?”
Mother’s voice breaks. “So much.” Her shoulders shake. Her face hides in her hands.
“Hey, Mom?” She takes this infuriating, suddenly fragile, woman into her arms.
Mother pulls her hands from her face and leans into the embrace, mumbles into Linda’s neck, “Golly, what came over me?”
She can’t take on Mother’s regrets right now, doesn’t want to hear how Daddy has let her down. “The jitters, I guess.” She gently untangles herself, makes a show of looking at her arms. “The rash is gone,” she says with a forced lilt. “Betty Wise saves the day.”
She slips the going-away dress over her corset. Lets Mother zip her up.
Downstairs, Ron brushes her cheek with the back of his hand so tenderly her throat knots up. He looks sharp in a maroon jacket, gray trousers, white shirt and skinny navy tie. “That is one handsome guy,” Angela whispered at the reception. Linda heard it as Angela’s blessing.
4
The Tree House complex feels less charming than before, the grassy bits dying of thirst. Roughed-up phony cedar shakes lend the six buildings a rustic aura if you can ignore the frenzied roads around them. She parks in a visitor’s spot at the management office. Tavis hops out and scampers about like a puppy let off the leash. No scowly owl here, just a southbound swarm of grackles darkening a piece of sky, their long tails and the echo of their chidip, chidip trailing behind them. “Tavis’s new house is gigantic,” he says, legs apart, hands in his pants pockets, a mini-Ron gaping at a four-storey building. A grown-up Tavis steals into her mind and takes a fist to her heart.
“It’s not all for us. Our place is in another building and just the right size.”
The management office smells of burnt coffee from an urn on a plastic table. Tavis heads for a scale model of the apartment complex and stands like a wide-eyed titan over it. Pipsqueak wooden people stroll paths beside balconied buildings, the scattered trees, benches and lampposts more seductive in miniature.
The manager’s door is open. He’s staring at a small black and white TV, ghostly light from it playing on his face. She knocks on the doorframe. “Lenny?”
He turns toward her, grins and stands. “Hey, you made it. Aces.” He slurs his words as though he can’t bother making them clearer, is in his mid-thirties, not bad looking except for rubbery lips and the beginning of a paunch under a frayed white golf shirt. “Terrible, that,” he says, waggling his head at a chopper blowing up on TV in Germany. “Screws up the Olympics.”
“Not to mention the people who died,” she says.
“That, too. People over there are nuts.”
People everywhere.
He deposits the key in her hand, holds it there with his fingers a little too long. He’s forgotten to scrub the grime from under his bitten-off nails or maybe he thinks it’s macho. “I’ll be up later for the move-in inspection,” he says with a wink.
She wonders how big a slime ball he is, hates that he has a master key.
She lugs the groceries and Tavis totes a case of Matchbox cars Ron collected from age fourteen and bequeathed to him this morning. He holds the case by the handle like a little lawyer, says, “E is for elevator” in his sweet, smart voice when the door closes. She says, “Bingo! Give that boy a rubber kazoo.” She lives for his giggle. The narrow, poky elevator
stinks of cigarettes. Taped above a full ashtray is a No Smoking sign. The elevator growls before it shudders to a stop. From now on they’ll use the stairs when they don’t have groceries.
Ammonia and lemon hit her nose as they enter apartment 205. A good sign. They slip off their shoes. The nubby, gold carpet is damp, as though shampooed this morning. Tavis screeches when he sees himself in the mirrored closet doors, says “Hulloo” and laughs when his voice echoes in layers. She drops the Red Owl bags on the floor and joins in. They go room to room, bantering with the echo, she crying out, “Scooby Doo, where are you?” he cracking himself up with “smelly-belly.” She experiences a strange lightness as though she could flutter kick herself up to the ceiling. This is the first place truly hers, such possibility in its emptiness, its white walls like hopeful blank canvases.
She stows the groceries in the galley kitchen off the short hallway. It has fewer cupboards than the parsonage and they’re pressed wood with a phony oak finish but they’ll do. She runs her fingers over the green speckled Formica counters. Tavis starts racing an MG and a Jaguar on the white vinyl floor. He has shucked his clothes already, is used to galloping through the parsonage in his underwear, awkward when certain church folk appear at the door.
The kitchen opens to an L-shaped dining/living room. At the far end, mustard-colored drapes frame a sliding glass door that rumbles in the groove as she opens it. She steps onto a balcony big enough for two lawn chairs and a barbecue, none of which she has. The balcony overlooks the daycare’s playground with its eponymous tree house: a climbing gym built into a whimsical three-dimensional wooden tree with a painted brown trunk, green leaves the wind can’t seize and apples so red she can taste them. She’d like to climb it and pull the ladder up behind her. To the right is a drained, sad-looking pool. When she and Ron visited, it sparkled blue as a glass eye, was full of little people splashing and shrieking like seagulls, bigger people on jazzy chairs.
A sound like a wounded goose makes Tavis yelp: the intercom beside the door. She hurries in to answer it. The guys from Penny-Wise Movers have arrived.
“Put your clothes back on, honeybunch. We’re moving in for real.”
The movers she’s dubbed Bert and Ernie have hoisted the hide-a-bed on their shoulders by the time she and Tavis admit them through the lobby entrance on the first floor. It pops open in the elevator and spills across the threshold. Impatient to close, the elevator’s jaw starts chomping the newness out of her only decent furniture. Tavis holds his head in his hands like an old man and wails, “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” Bert and Ernie stare as if the hide-a-bed might draw up its knees on its own should they wish hard enough. The door to apartment 103, opposite the elevator, opens to a tiny, barefoot woman in a peacock-green smock and black leggings, heels together, toes out like the base of a coat rack. Her wild nest of hair is the Burnt Orange of one of Tavis’s crayons.
“Holy Toledo,” she says.
Two pint-sized hands clutch her slender thigh. A boy peers around it, his face as freckled as the woman’s, his eyes frank with curiosity. A gray Minnesota Twins baseball jersey engulfs him to the knees. Ron would smile at that. Red socks hang loose around the boy’s ankles.
“Sorry we disturbed you,” Lin says, wishing the woman had minded her own business.
“Got any rope?” Bert asks Lin.
She doesn’t.
“I do,” the woman says. She unhooks the child from her thigh, scoops him up and disappears inside. An older boy with darker coloring and a better-fitting Twins jersey comes to the door. He stares at Tavis and Lin with heavy-lidded eyes. The woman returns, hands two jump ropes to Bert. He and Ernie wedge themselves in the elevator and start wrestling the hide-a-bed’s metal springs. The younger boy scurries back into sight and hugs the older boy, who gives him a half-hearted shove. The woman holds out a hand and announces “Angel Alfredsson” the way she might proclaim good news. She has bird-boned wrists, a short, sharp nose and a crooked smile as though you could take whatever she says another way.
Lin won’t be rude with Tavis watching. She accepts Angel’s hand, introduces herself.
Angel says, “Where you moving from?”
“Prairie Fire.”
“Hey, I’m from Northfield. Graduated in nursing from St. Olaf.”
Lin’s not up for any um yah yah, I’m an Ole too bonhomie. “I know Northfield well.”
“Hubs moving in, too?”
“No. Just Tavis and me.” She wraps an arm around him and draws him to her.
“You’ll fit in with the rest of us here, then, acting out our single mommy scripts. Hey, Tavis. Meet Anthony and Matty. Say hi, boys.”
Matty obliges. Anthony mumbles something. Tavis gives a timid little wave. Lin’s tempted to ask what Angel meant by scripts and risk deeper involvement but Angel moves on to an exchange of children’s ages: Anthony, six, Matty, three and a half, Tavis, four since July.
“An unusual name,” Angel says about Tavis.
“I suppose.” Gaelic for son of David. Ron chose it, as though Tavis, like a messiah, sprang from the house of David. “Is your name short for Angela?”
“Nah, my parents were nuts about Christmas, that’s all. They’re on the astral plane now. They disengaged together, let’s see, it’ll be three years ago this New Year’s Eve.”
Anthony, bless him, saves Lin from inquiring further when he snorts at the elevator scene. Angel says, “Unless you have a brilliant idea that will help, mister, I’d advise you not to sneer.” As if on cue, the elevator door snaps shut. A light indicates its ascent.
“I’d better get up there,” Lin says.
“Why don’t I keep Tavis while you move in?”
“Gee, that’s swell of you, but I want him to help.”
The most harmless-looking people can steal your child.
“Well, come for supper, then. Nothing fancy. It’s one-thirty now. Let’s say six.”
Refusing would have been awkward.
5
Ron ditches the Just Married sign some joker taped to the trunk. They ride back to the church, leave the car keys with his mother, who’s staying at the parsonage, and stroll to the train station, arm-in-arm like movie stars. On the platform, he pulls a corsage of milky gardenias from a bag and pins it to her coat, his eyes all sappy. Might as well have hung the Just Married sign around her neck. She imagines the other passengers sniggering, a litany of ribald jokes in their heads.
The brown vinyl seats slip and sway with the train’s motion. She gawks through the grimy window at houses and cars below the elevated tracks. The people in them don’t know how her life has changed, wouldn’t care if they did. He drapes his arm across her shoulders, enveloping her in a smell that makes her hungry for pumpkin pie. Old Spice? A wife should know things like that.
He leans in closer and whispers, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men. Preserve me from violent men who plan evil things in their heart.” His warm breath in her ear fills her with the sickening realization she barely knows him. He was in Minnesota settling into his new church for five of the seven weeks they were engaged. She has spent no more than a month of days with him if you total the hours they talked and talked, hungry to connect, but what did she learn about him other than he darns his own socks, would rather watch or play baseball than eat or sleep and thinks Peter Sellers’ acting in Dr. Strangelove was inspired?
Maybe Daddy was right.
Each station stop jars her spine until the train gives a final shrug at New York City’s Penn Station. They emerge from the murky underground to air choking with buildings, strident neon lights, traffic moving in fitful lurches and blaring horns as threatening as a raised fist. Ron hails a cab as if he’s a pro at it. She wonders if he’s deflowered anyone—a word that brings to mind deadheading a rose. Don’t make too much of your first time, Aunt Libby told her. It’s only
one of thousands to come. Linda can’t imagine a man entering the narrow slit between her legs even once. Aunt Libby asked, “Do you love him, precious?” Linda wanted to ask if it was reason enough to love a man because he listens to you so completely you feel worthier than you know yourself to be but she said only, “Oh yes,” and Aunt Libby said, “Then don’t let what happened that awful summer stop you from enjoying it. Most men aren’t like that creep.”
Grace is picking up the tab for two days at a hotel shaped like a castle. A doorman extends a white-gloved hand as Linda and Ron exit the taxi onto a carpet the deep red of raw liver. They cruise through a revolving door to marble, mirrors, chandeliers, creamy colors, ornate ceilings and flowers smelling like expensive perfume. Honest-to-gosh palm trees form a canopied path to the elevator. The thick-skinned mahogany door to their third-floor room is the color of dark plums. It would make a fine coffin lid. While he tips the porter, she heads for the window. Heavy silk drapes, the lush green of tropical ferns, swish as she shoves them aside to take in what she can of Central Park in blue twilight. The sidewalks spill over with life. Lanterns illuminate the horse-drawn carriages lined up in front of the hotel. Holmes and Watson could climb out of one and she wouldn’t be surprised.
“This must be costing your mother a bomb,” she says when he joins her at the window.
“She hung on to some of Dad’s insurance money, wanted to do this for us.” He opens the window and a cool breath from the city’s loud mouth rushes in. “Hear the horses?”
She pokes her head out, pinches her nose. “Yeah. I smell them, too.”
He laughs. “How about a ride? I’m told it’s romantic.”
Her gaze locks on a white horse hitched to a black carriage gussied up with red carnations. “What are those doohickeys on their heads?”