Windfalls

by Jean Hegland

  She looked up to see Sally studying them, the sponge poised in her hand. There was something clinical in her look, but something wistful, too, as though she were hearing a far-off music that triggered an even more distant memory. “I once got kicked out of the Chicago Art Institute for nursing Jess,” she said.

  “Really?” Anna asked. “I don’t remember that.”

  “It was the summer Mike was finishing his dissertation. Jesse and I used to spend every Tuesday at the Institute, because on Tuesdays it was free. It was air-conditioned, too.” She replenished the paint on her sponge and began to dapple a new patch of wall. “Anyway, I was sitting in front of one of Gauguin’s bare-breasted Madonnas, and suddenly a guard came up and told me I needed to go to the bathroom.”

  “Go to the bathroom?” Anna puzzled.

  “At first I didn’t get it, either. But when I finally realized what he meant, I asked so loud that everyone in the gallery could hear, ‘Do I look like I need to take a crap that bad?’”

  “You’re kidding.” Anna’s laughter made Lucy give a startled jump and pull away from her breast. For a moment she looked around perplexedly, and then, catching sight of her mother, her face bloomed in a milky smile.

  “I was pretty brash,” Sally said, pride and rue mingling in her voice. “Back then.”

  Anna smiled down at Lucy. “Not unlike Jesse …,” she suggested gently.

  “Unlike Jesse,” Sally answered with surprising fervor, “I never stole my parents’ car. I never drove without a license. That little bastard could have killed himself. He could have died. And his girlfriend, too. He could have killed that girl, and I would have been stuck trying to explain to her parents what my goddamn son had done.” Sally had stopped sponging. Her voice was high and loud, and her eyes glittered. A streak of mustard paint decorated her cheek like a fading bruise. “I just—” she began helplessly, and then she stopped and gathered herself. “It’s hard,” she muttered. Turning to Anna, she said, “I suppose I should have warned you.”

  “Warned me?” Anna asked perplexedly.

  “About having kids.”

  “Oh, no—” Anna began, clutching Lucy as though she might even now be taken back.

  Sally studied her sister dispassionately for a moment and then, with a bitterness that broke Anna’s heart, she added, “Maybe you can do better than me.”

  “But, Sally,” Anna began fervently. “It’s not too—”

  “Or maybe I should just shut up. I’m sorry,” Sally said. “I’m not being fair. You don’t need me to tell you all this right now. You need to just enjoy things while you can.”

  I’ll enjoy them forever, Anna answered inside her head. But looking at her sister standing in the warm autumn light, her handsome face stiff with anger and grief, she was suddenly gripped by a fear so fierce that for a moment she couldn’t remember how to breathe.

  * * *

  WHEN CERISE ENTERED THE WOODLAND MANOR DINING ROOM, THE morning sunlight was slanting through the tall east windows. Great rectangles of brightness lay on the linoleum, and the whole room seemed as peaceful as a chapel. The kitchen staff had already cleared the dishes, though the tables and chairs were littered with clots of oatmeal, shards of toast, soggy paper napkins. “We eat family style,” Cerise must have heard the director announce a thousand times as he paraded potential residents’ relatives through the dining room.

  She parked her cart inside the double doors and got to work, spraying cleaner in swift arches, wiping the tabletops and the seats of the chairs and then piling the chairs on the tables. Her sneakers squeaked on the linoleum. She paused to push a wisp of hair back from her face with her forearm. She planned to take her break as soon as she finished the dining room. If she hurried, she might have the staff room to herself, and she could call home and see if Melody had managed to get to school. When all the chairs were off the floor, she took the broom from the cart and began to sweep. As she bent to chase a pile of toast crumbs and egg scraps into her dustpan, she wondered how many times she had cleaned that floor since she’d started work at Woodland Manor.

  She knew she could figure it out—five days a week times fifty weeks a year times nine years, minus the days Melody had been too sick to stay at home alone, and the few days Cerise had had to take off for herself, to see a doctor at the health clinic that time when her back was so bad, to go to the dental school when her molar got abscessed. She could figure it out, she thought, as she tipped the gatherings from her dustpan into the trash bag on her cart, but it would only make her tired.

  The door from the kitchen swung open. An aide came out to get the coffee urn, and a thick steam of meat and starch and bleach wafted toward Cerise, triggering the queasiness it seemed these days she always carried with her, as if her worry about Melody were another pregnancy pushing its constant nausea against the back of her throat. Her stomach lurched as though she might be sick when she thought of Melody as she had been that morning, sprawled across the sofa in a stupor so deep that none of Cerise’s questions or pleas or warnings could cause her to do more than flop a limp arm and mutter, “Go away.”

  When the dining room was mopped, she pushed her cart down the hall to the staff room and peeked inside. It was empty, and she entered with a sigh. Usually she was able to resist the invitation of the soft-drink vending machine that purred next to the time clock by reminding herself of the generic diet sodas she kept in her refrigerator at home and rationed out to herself—a can a day—after work. But today, after only a moment’s struggle, she dug through her pockets, found three quarters, and fed them to the machine. She made her selection, and a can of Diet Coke thunked down onto the shelf.

  Standing in front of the grubby microwave, she pried the pull tab open, took the first sip, felt the icy carbonation bite her mouth, let its sweetness widen like a little gift inside her. She sat beneath the wall phone on one of the vinyl-covered chairs that edged the room, and when her can was half-finished, she lifted the receiver and called home. The phone rang, steady and lonely as the beating of a heart, until Cerise hung up.

  Two dozen limp magazines—mostly parenting and fashion, a few on news or travel—were strewn across the coffee table in the center of the room. Gazing from their covers were an assortment of women as lush as tree-ripened peaches. These days Melody scoffed at her mother’s dream of modeling. “Get real,” she’d said last week when Cerise had suggested they enter her picture in a contest for modeling classes she’d seen advertised at the Rite Save pharmacy. “Do you remotely think I’d have a chance? Besides, it sucks, all that crap.”

  Melody claimed that modeling was bullshit. She said what she really wanted to do was be an artist, but Cerise could see no future in that, even if she believed that what Melody did could be considered art. Melody seemed to have inherited Cerise’s old knack for drawing. In the past few years she’d discovered she could copy pictures and even sketch the things she saw so that they looked as real as the originals. But instead of using her talent to draw pretty things—things that might soothe people or cheer them up—Melody made drawings of lizard skulls and road-killed rabbits, sketches of used lipstick tubes and crushed soda cans.

  Last fall for the school art show she’d collected a bag of trash from the side of the freeway, spray-painted it gold, piled it on a pedestal, and called it Harvest. When Cerise protested that it was just a heap of junk, Melody had rolled her eyes and tossed her hair and groaned as though it was hopeless to even try to get Cerise to understand.

  Melody fixed her own hair now, or rather didn’t fix it, but instead found a new way to wreck it every week. The day after Cerise mentioned the modeling contest, Melody came home with her beautiful hair dyed midnight black, and since then she’d braided feathers and beads into a few random strands and let the rest hang like a dead mane down her back. When Cerise protested that she thought Melody had looked prettier before, Melody said that pretty sucked, that her new friends thought she looked way bad. Melody was proud of how much older than she her ne
w friends were—girls of seventeen or eighteen, their faces smooth and hard as ceramic masks, and slouching boys already out of high school.

  Melody had gone out with those friends last night. When Cerise observed it was a school night, Melody said they were only going to the library, to study for a quiz. “I thought you wanted me to get good grades,” she’d snapped. But the library closed at nine o’clock, and Cerise had stayed up until two waiting for Melody to come home. For the last hour she sat with her hand on the receiver of the phone, both willing and dreading its ring. She had considered calling someone herself—the police maybe, or another parent—but she was scared of what might happen if she got Melody involved with the law, and she cringed at the thought of waking a stranger to admit that her daughter had not yet come home. Finally, because she had to be at work at six, she went to bed, and though she had not intended to, she slept so heavily she did not hear when Melody came in.

  From beyond the staff room door Cerise heard the sound of voices. She looked up from the sprawl of magazines and blinked to regain her focus.

  “Exterior only,” a male voice said. “Obviously that’s all that matters to the Man with the Money, what it looks like from the street.”

  The two men who pushed their way into the room were wearing work boots and canvas coveralls streaked like clown suits with a dozen different colors of paint. They brought with them a breeze of turpentine and sunshine.

  “Oops,” said the taller one when he saw Cerise.

  “What?” she asked, jumping up as though she’d been caught at something.

  He grinned at her confusion and asked, “Are you his daughter?” His brown hair was stiff with a dusting of white paint that made him look prematurely aged, although for a moment Cerise saw the boy he must have been, quick and brash in torn jeans, his hair cowlicked into confusion, his smile melting stones.

  “What?” she said again, standing awkwardly in front of him, hating how she could never find the right words in time. But the man laughed as though she’d said something clever. “That’s right—not who, but what. The Man with the Money. Herr Doctor Director. Mr. Harding—that’s what.”

  “He’s my boss.”

  “I knew you were too pretty to be his daughter,” he answered, while the other guy dug into his pocket for soda change.

  He studied her for another moment, then said, “Hey—he’s my boss, too.” He turned to his buddy. “Doesn’t that mean she and me’re related?”

  Spreading his arms wide as though he were going to fling them around her, he said, “Sweetheart, remember me? Your favorite long-lost uncle Jake! Come here and give Uncle Jakie a great big hug.”

  But Cerise ducked his embrace. Tossing her empty can into the box by the machine, she said, “I got to get to work,” and left, letting the staff room door swing shut on the sound of the men’s laughter.

  The apartment was empty when Cerise got home from work, although Melody’s presence blared in the mess she’d left behind—clothing draped over the sofa, dishes strewn across the floor, schoolbooks stacked unopened on the coffee table. A note on top of the books said she was at the library, studying. It was signed, “Love Melody,” like a command.

  Cerise kicked her shoes off beside the door and crossed the room to turn on the TV. An image bloomed obediently on the screen, a pulsing montage of soft drinks and gaping mouths. She stood watching it, dazed by its flood of pep and urgency, until finally her own thirst drove her to the kitchen.

  When she opened the refrigerator and saw that her six-pack of diet colas was gone, her immediate thought was to go buy more. But then she remembered she’d given the last of the grocery money to Melody so she could buy the leather boots she’d put on layaway last October.

  “What were you thinking?” Cerise had asked when Melody told her she would lose the deposit if she didn’t pay the balance that week, “to put something that expensive on layaway?”

  “I had to,” Melody said, her voice heavy with contrived patience, as though she were explaining something to a stupid child. “I didn’t have the money at the time.”

  “You don’t have the money now, either.”

  “It’s only twenty more,” Melody pleaded. “Otherwise I’ll lose the eighty-five I’ve already paid.”

  “Eighty-five,” Cerise echoed, thinking of rent, of the electric bill, of all she still owed the dental school. But when she gave Melody the money, Melody had flung her arms around her, hugging her so warmly and treating her with such friendliness for the rest of the evening that it was almost like old times once again.

  Cerise ran a glass of tap water and fixed a bologna sandwich for herself. She carried her meal out to the coffee table, sat down on the sofa, and rummaged beneath the blankets for the remote. These days, with the TV as her sole companion at meals, it sometimes crossed her mind to get out the crayons and color while she ate. But when she imagined Melody’s contempt if she were to come home and find her mother coloring, she always chose the television instead.

  She took a bite of sandwich and began to surf, pausing to watch a news segment about a missing teenager. The newscasters said the girl had last been seen the evening before, climbing onto a motorcycle with a man she’d met at the party she’d snuck out after her curfew to attend. The newscasters’ smooth faces held practiced little furrows of concern as they said the police were asking the public to help in their widening search.

  Some talk about the stock market came on next, but Cerise was too overcome to bother to change the channel. It made her panicky to think what Melody might be doing at that very minute, where she might be instead of at the library. There were hundreds of ways that Melody could be killed, thousands of ways for her life to be ruined, and what scared Cerise most was that Melody didn’t seem to care. These days it seemed that Melody’s life meant more to Cerise than it did to Melody herself.

  She should quit work, Cerise thought as she stared at the TV screen where a woman and a man ran toward each other across a flower-spangled meadow. Melody needed someone to keep an eye on her. She needed someone to insist she did her homework, to see she got to school every day, got home on time at night. She needed someone to be there for her, to listen like the articles and news shows said parents were supposed to listen to their teens. Things hadn’t been easy for Melody, Cerise knew that—growing up with no money and no father, in a crummy apartment with a mother who was always working extra hours, who was always tired.

  She felt a stab of remorse, remembering the times Melody had been sick and had to stay home by herself because if Cerise missed another day at work, she wouldn’t be able to pay the rent. Occasionally there had been a friend to check in on her, or, before Rita and Fred moved to Florida, Rita would sometimes stop by on her lunch hour to see that Melody was okay. But mostly Melody had had to endure her fevers, colds, and flus alone, watching daytime TV and eating her solitary lunches from cracker boxes and soup cans.

  She should quit her job, Cerise thought as the couple on the TV screen met in the middle of the meadow. Now, before it was too late, she should devote everything to Melody. They could make popcorn together, could watch the late-night shows. Cerise would try to help Melody with her homework. She would get to know Melody’s new friends. They could eat their meals together again, family style.

  But then her thoughts began a circle as familiar and as endless as the paths she mopped through Woodland Manor’s halls—for hadn’t she already devoted everything to Melody? Hadn’t she lived these last fourteen years for Melody alone? Hadn’t every hour of overtime been for Melody—to feed her, to pay for shelter, to buy her clothes? Hadn’t she already done everything she could for Melody?

  Besides, quitting work meant going back on welfare. Cerise watched as a squad of cartoon roaches fled from a giant can of bug spray. She felt the slump of defeat the thought of the welfare office always caused in her, its grubby rooms crowded with strangers as intent on their own needs as people in the betting hall at a racetrack. She remembered the rules, the sta
cks of forms, remembered the stream of weary caseworkers who all ignored the fact that her meager list of monthly expenses always came to more than her benefits ever did. Some of them were kind and some were mean, but all of them made sure to warn her that if she failed to report any extra income she could be sent to jail, and not one of them ever asked how she was able to cover the difference. She remembered how necessary it had been to accept Rita’s grudging help, and thought how unlikely it would be to get more help from Rita now.

  And what would it teach Melody anyway, Cerise asked herself as the roaches writhed and died, if she were to go back on welfare? Especially now, when every argument about Melody’s blighted future swung back to Cerise’s failed past, quitting her job and going back on welfare—even for Melody’s sake—would only prove Melody’s point.

  It was the gunning of an untuned car that tore her from her sleep. Her half-eaten sandwich had fallen to the floor, and the apartment was dark, lit only by the TV and the streetlight outside the window. Her body ached from sleeping on the sofa and her brain felt glued shut, but she rose and moved unerringly across the room. She opened the door to find Melody standing in front of her, her head lolling to one side so that her black hair hung over her shoulder like a ragged shawl.

  “You okay?” Cerise croaked through her sleep-drenched throat. Something about Melody looked so wrong that for a moment Cerise reinhabited the night Melody’s fever had risen to 105 and she had woken to find the body of her toddler daughter jerking on the sweaty sheets, her eyes rolled up into her skull as though she were looking inside her own brain.

  “’m fine,” Melody slurred, swaying vaguely in some private breeze.

  “What’s happened?” Cerise asked, the sound of the fear in her own voice pricking her into a painful wakefulness.