“Nathan was going to the university?”
Gemma nodded without glancing over, her ears still crimson. She turned the knob and water began gushing over the clothes. Her palms rested on the side of the pulsating machine. “He wanted to be a teacher.”
Bea reached for a flowerpot and stared without seeing it. “A teacher.” She poured a fistful of potting soil into her palm and squeezed it, letting it siphon through her fingers, back to the pot.
She took one tiny sprig of sprouting rosewood and bud and thrust it upright into the prepared soil. With great care, she pressed the peat and dirt around it, careful to seat the rose deeply. She gave it a heavy watering and aligned it inside the box beside several others. Then she turned to Gemma. “I’m hardening these off for Nathan. Someone suggested they’d look real pretty, growing—” She hesitated. She couldn’t bring herself to say it yet. On his grave. Bea made a large sweeping gesture with her hand in the direction of the broad countryside out the window. “Out there.”
When Gemma didn’t chorus her approval, Bea touched her shoulder. But Gemma shook her head, never looking up. Inside the washing machine, iridescent bubbles set forth in swirls among the floating clothes. Gemma swabbed tears with the back of one hand and turned her face away. “I did something awful today.” The words burst forth from her like the sorrowful, weak chirp of a sparrow. “I’m so ashamed.”
“What is it?”
Gemma slammed the lid of the washer with a great clang and tried to back away. “No. Don’t.”
Bea wouldn’t let her. “Gemma, what happened?”
“A man in the restaurant today told me I was p-pretty,” she sobbed. “He wanted to know if I’d ever seen North Carolina.”
Bea’s palm still rested on the girl’s shoulder. The awkward moment came when she couldn’t decide whether to pull her hand away or draw Gemma close. She did neither. “You are pretty,” Bea said, at a loss.
“I don’t want anybody but Nathan to think I’m pretty. Not anybody but Nathan.”
“Gemma—”
“I d-didn’t know what to do.” Gemma’s words interspersed with deep, broken gasps of air. “He kept calling me h-honey.”
“Oh, Gemma.”
“And for a minute, w-when he asked, I wanted to go.”
“Oh, my.”
“I’m so ashamed.”
Comprehension burgeoned in Bea’s chest. A sudden, amazing awareness struck her, stole her breath away. I’m not the only one who’s hurting. I’m not the only one. Hard and cold and stunning, it slammed into her breast. I thought I was. I thought I was the only one who hurt this much.
“Gemma.” Her words came so soft that she doubted if the girl even heard her. “I’m sorry.”
Perhaps it happened because Gemma had been forced to be the strong one so long, never breaking down, standing staunch for her daughter. Perhaps it happened because Gemma had never given herself the chance to cling to someone and cry out like a child. Perhaps it happened only because Mrs. Bartling smelled like talcum powder and outdoor flowers and earth—a motherly smell. But Gemma turned to Bea at that moment, releasing her hold on the washer and the soap.
“They d-didn’t even tell us when he died,” she managed. It seemed to Bea that every protection this young woman had built around herself was crumbling. Her lips quavered as she spoke. “We’d moved twice since he changed his address on his driver’s license and they didn’t know.” Gemma pressed her hand tightly against her mouth, and then gasped the rest of the words against it. “I w-waited for him—”
“Oh, Gemma.”
Bea didn’t think twice. She gathered this young, broken woman fiercely against her, breastbone to breastbone, feeling the deep throbbing of each sob. “I’m so sorry. Oh, I’m so sorry. None of us knew. None of us knew, Gemma, or we would have called you.”
“I miss him so much.”
Bea clutched her with the desperation of a mourner. The girl’s hair was wet with tears as Bea stroked it. “There now. There there now.”
I’m not the only one who hurts. I never was.
Gemma sobbed for a long time, her body erupting in little chirrups of sound, her lungs filling and then shuddering to emptiness, her small, bony body wracked with regret. “Why didn’t he tell anybody why?” Hers were the cries of two hearts, two spirits, two lonely women—one young, one older—who had thought that loving would be easier, that the mistakes they’d made wouldn’t fall so hard.
All that night, Bea couldn’t sleep. She lay for hours in the darkness, determined not to pray, remembering the feel of another human being clinging to her, needing her, burrowing against her shoulder.
For the first time she allowed herself to feel anger at her son.
I know I was wrong, Nathan, but you were wrong, too!
How could you have let something you held against me bring so much pain to so many people?
A glimmer of light downstairs made Bea start. Someone had gotten out of bed downstairs. She rolled over and checked the digital clock on the nightstand beside her. Four in the morning.
Bea sat up and listened. Who could be up at this hour? She heard footsteps, feathery and cautious, in the hallway below. “Hello?” she called in a whisper.
Nobody answered.
Bea threw back the covers and drew her arms into the sleeves of her robe. She belted the heavy terrycloth as she began to tiptoe down the stairs, one at a time. She made it all the way down, from the top step to the bottom one, before the floor squeaked beneath her weight. She hesitated.
The light came from Nathan’s room.
Bea crept across the hardwood floor and peeked in.
There, with bare feet poking out from beneath the hem of a raggedy nylon pink gown fresh out of the laundry, with her hair in an untidy heap and her toenails still imbedded with yesterday’s dirt, stood Paisley.
The little girl stood with her nose propped against the lowest wooden shelf, clutching the varnished wood with her fingertips, pulling herself just high enough on her toes to see all of Nathan’s old toys aligned on the shelf.
Paisley lifted her fingers as if to touch one of the Tonka trucks. Then she stopped. She must have decided to abide by the rules because she didn’t touch. She pulled her hand back. She stared in awe, the same way she might have pressed her nose up against a glimmering toy store window.
Oh, Nathan.
When the question came, it came from someplace deep inside of Bea—the place that used to cry out for help without even thinking, without weighing the possibility of loss, without counting the cost of not being heard.
What would you have me to do with your family?
Bea waited an inordinately long time, afraid to even breathe for fear she’d frighten the little girl. But at last she exhaled gently and poked her head around the doorjamb.
“Paisley?” she asked in a soft, timid whisper.
“Yeah?”
“What are you doing up in the middle of the night?”
“I had a bad dream. I woke up.”
“Don’t you think you ought to get back in bed?”
“No.”
“You’ll be tired tomorrow, if you don’t.” Bea came around the doorjamb and stepped inside.
Paisley let go of the shelf with one hand and pointed toward the yellowed baseball in the round shiny case. “What’s this?”
“It’s a baseball.”
“I know that. But it’s got things written on it. I can’t read yet. But it says Nathan. See? N-A-T-H-A-N. He taught me how to spell it. How come it has Nathan’s name written on it with pen?”
I wanted them here so I could find out about Nathan. How could it be that I end up telling them things about him instead?
“He hit this ball in a game once. They gave it to him for a prize and he kept it a long time.”
“Will you read the other words to me? I want to know what they say.”
“Okay.” Bea lifted the special case from its place. And what happened next made her breath catch in her
lungs. Two little arms wrapped around her legs. Two little eyes closed as the child squeezed tight and laid her head against Bea’s waist.
Bea stared down at the top of Paisley’s head. Her chest tightened with expectancy and a strange joy. “You’re hugging me?”
Paisley nodded.
For a good minute, maybe two, Bea stood stock still with surprise, staring down, not knowing if she should move, her heart pounding. What did you do when somebody hugged you like this? How long did you wait before you stirred or pulled away? Bea decided not to move at all. She closed her own eyes and waited in wonder.
“I love you, Mrs. Bartling,” the child whispered steadily. She kept squeezing tight.
Merciful heavens, but that got Bea all choked up. It had been years since she’d experienced a child’s hug. Years since she’d remembered how a hug could make a person feel needed. Wanted. Cared for and loved. She struggled to speak for a moment, but couldn’t do it. She sat down hard on the side of the single bed, a lump in her throat the size of Scotts Bluff.
She patted the blue coverlet beside her to mark the spot. “Come sit up here. Come hop on the bed.”
Paisley released her hold and climbed up. But she didn’t stop there. She clambered into Bea’s lap, the crown of her little head leaning against Bea’s cheek.
Bea clasped her tightly, willing her old bones to support them both, willing the unwanted tremble in her hands to go away. How long had it been? How long had it been since she’d held a child this way?
For a moment, she allowed her nose to fall forward against Paisley’s little face, drinking in the sweet, sweaty pungence of little girl, rocking as if they were in a chair, taking strength from the small and perfect body drooping against her arms.
She turned the ball sideways and held the words under the spill of the lamplight, reading them carefully, one by one, even though she could recite them by heart.
“Nathan ‘The Grape’ Bartling. #14.” As Bea read the ball, Paisley craned her chin so she could see. “First All-Star Home Run 6-28-91 -vs- Bucktail.”
“He hit a home run?”
Bea nodded, her cheek against Paisley’s cheek. “That was the first of many.”
“Where does it say ‘The Grape?’”
Bea pointed. “Right here.”
“Why does it say that?”
“Because,” Bea said, “for awhile that was Nathan’s nickname.”
“How come?”
“You really want to hear this story?” It seemed that everywhere they went together, every question asked, everything they began together, evoked yet another memory of Nathan. Bea traced the outline of the frayed red ball stitching with one finger.
“Yeah. I do.”
Bea rumpled the soft curls on Paisley’s head. “They were headed to a baseball game over in Oshkosh and the school bus passed through road construction. Someone threw a grape out of the bus window. It thumped one of the construction workers in the head.”
“Did it hurt him?”
“Well, it was just a grape, pretty harmless, but I guess the road workers decided they had to be tough. They couldn’t have motorists or school kids or baseball teams throwing things out of windows at members of the Dembergh Construction Crew. So they radioed to the other end of the roadwork, had a flagman stop the bus and climb on board.”
“He got on the school bus?”
“Yes.” Bea made her voice sound like a gruff man. ” ‘Somebody tell me who threw that grape,’ this fellow yelled at the whole team. Nobody said a word. Nobody told. Not until Nathan stood up and said, ‘I did it. I threw the grape.’”
“Did they arrest him?”
“No. Because he confessed they let the bus go through and the team made it in time to warm up for the game. Everybody called him Grape all summer long after that. Every time he’d come up to hit, they’d holler, ‘Just a little poke, Grape!’ ‘Blast it out of the park, Grape!’‘Belt it, Grape!’”
“If I would have known that, I would have called him Grape all the time, too.” Paisley raised her gaze to grin at Bea. “Read me a story, Grape. Please push me on the swing, Grape.”
Bea couldn’t resist a smile. From somewhere deep in-side herself, she felt something uncommon. Something like magic. Something she was almost afraid to acknowledge. A hint of happiness. “He would have laughed. He would have thought it was the funniest thing, you calling him that.”
For the first time, Bea looked down and noticed Paisley’s hands. They lay in the little girl’s lap, palms upturned and open, fingers curled as if the child expected something. Her tired, tiny body swayed against Bea’s like prairie grass in slight breeze.
“You want to hold this ball?”
Bea couldn’t keep her eyes from Paisley’s tiny bent fingers, barely opening, barely closing, as if she could already feel Nathan’s baseball sitting there. Paisley didn’t answer aloud. She just bit her bottom lip and nodded.
“Here. Don’t miss this.” Their heads bent together again and Bea rolled the ball over to the other side. “See this green scrape. You can feel it. That’s where Nathan hit it with the bat. Smacked it right out of the park.”
And with that, Bea placed Nathan’s baseball inside the chalice of the little girl’s hands.
Chapter Sixteen
Alva T.?” Gemma asked the next afternoon while she polished the silver lids of two-dozen saltshakers. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
Alva punched a button on the cash register and the cash drawer came sliding out. It bopped her in the mid-section before she could catch it with her hands. “What?”
“I thought since you’ve been running the restaurant for awhile, you might have heard people talking about something.”
“Talking about what?”
“About—” Gemma stopped. She had been about to say “About why Nathan left home.” She struggled to make the question sound a little less personal. “About Nathan Bartling. About why he left home.”
Alva pulled a pile of bills out of the drawer and began to count. “Now, why would you be interested in a thing like that?”
“I . . .” Gemma didn’t know what she should say. If Mrs. Bartling hadn’t acknowledged her to anyone as being Nathan’s wife, it seemed wrong for Gemma to announce it to Alva now. “I just wondered, I guess.”
“Does Bea Bartling talk to you much about her family?”
Gemma shrugged, being deliberately vague. “Some.”
“Humph.” Alva set the cash tray down on the counter with a clatter. “You think it’s your business, digging for gossip about somebody who took you in when you needed a place to stay?”
“I’m not digging for gossip, Alva T.”
“Oh, really. That’s sure what it seems like to me.” Alva unlocked a plastic moneybag with a tiny key and made ready to fill it. “Never could figure why they tell you to lock these bags,” she said. “Never could understand why the bank goes through all the trouble of locking a bag that somebody could pick up and run with.”
“I wasn’t digging for gossip,” Gemma insisted again. “I was thinking if I knew something about it, I could help.” This was a close to the truth as she could come. If she discovered the answer, maybe she could say something that would help Mrs. Bartling heal. It seemed like a last gift, a last token of devotion she could offer Nathan.
Alva pitched the moneybag into the back room. “If Bea Bartling is talking to you about anything at all, she’s telling you more than she’s told anybody else in town. Nobody understands what happened with Nathan. He was three weeks away from graduating. Then one day he was gone. Bea has never talked about it.”
“Never?”
“No. But we’ve all heard rumors.”
“Rumors of what?”
“There’s folks that tell all sorts of stories. That he struck out for what she did the only way he knew how.”
“Fow what she did? What? What did she do?”
“Get back to work, Gemma. If I started telling you stories, I’d be no b
etter off than the rest of them.”
Resigned, Gemma turned back to her task and began aligning the shakers along a brown, plastic tray, defeat pounding hard against her ribs.
Maybe I have no right. But, if I did, there might be something I could say to her, something I could say about Nathan that would make things better. For Nathan’s sake.
The telephone rang. Charlene’s voice called from the kitchen, “Gemma! Phone’s for you!”
When she went to answer it, she could hear the loud whirr of an air-powered impact wrench in the background. “Gemma Franklin?” a man’s voice bellowed over the racket.
“Yes?” she hollered back.
“This is Bill at Sandhill Texaco. Wanted to let you know we found a rebuilt engine for your Toyota this morning.”
“You did?”
“We’re trucking it in from Sumner. Found an old one sitting on a shelf at Butch’s Repair over there. Can you imagine that?”
“You did?”
“Of course, I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to get the thing in. We haven’t gotten the old one out yet, and some of those bolts couldn’t be tighter if they’d been welded on.”
“What do you think?” Gemma talked loud so he could hear her over the noise. “Do you have an estimate? Any idea how long it will take?”
“That engine weighs over five hundred pounds. We’ll have to wench it up with something and drop it down in. I’d say it’s going to be a good three weeks at best,” he told her. “I’d say that’s a pretty good guess.”
Three weeks.
“Thank you,” she told him.
“I can’t believe we found that engine,” Bill told her. “All that, and it wasn’t even very far away.”
Three weeks seemed like no time at all.
Three weeks seemed like an eternity.
“Alva?” Gemma asked on her way out. “If you’ve got extra work to do around this place and Charlene doesn’t mind, I could sure use the hours. I’m going to need to pay off my car pretty soon.”
“I don’t mind, honey,” Charlene called out. “I don’t need extra hours these days. You got emergencies. I’m just sailing along.”
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