Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  PART

  TWO

  12

  IN THE Lowe’s parking lot, Susan sat behind the wheel of Lois’s VW, the driver’s door wide open, her notepad resting against the steering wheel. They’d already picked out their new air conditioner, which Susan had offered to pay for, but Lois had waved her hand in the air and told her to bring the car around. Susan wrote: Noni’s smell. She always forgot it, but how could she? It was that obscene combination of baby powder and cigarette smoke Lois had had ever since Susan was a little girl, her grandmother’s Carlton between her lips as she patted the powder under and between her breasts. Up north Lois only did this in the summer, but once they moved down here it became her morning ritual. Maybe Susan could begin with that. She could start with a description of Noni’s large breasts, how, as a girl, they were pendulous and lovely to her. There was also the sticky sweetness of Noni’s hair spray, her strong floral perfume, the rose tang of lipstick. Even at her fattest Lois had always been a pretty woman, but now that she was in her eighties she’d begun to let herself go. Her hair was thinning and she didn’t bother coloring it anymore, and if she put on any makeup at all, Susan didn’t see it. Today she wore dark sunglasses that covered most of her face, some kind of boxy cotton sundress covering the rest of her except for her arms. She was raising one of them now and calling Susan over, the underside of her arm jiggling as she stood there in the shaded doorway of the Lowe’s store. A young employee stood beside her with the cart that held the air conditioner for Susan’s old room, and she pushed her notebook onto the backseat, started the VW, and drove up to the entryway and climbed out to help.

  Inland here, the air was too hot and thick to breathe. The asphalt felt soft under her sandals.

  “Pop the trunk, Suzie.” Nobody but Noni called her that. Hearing it now was as comforting as it was belittling. She’d have to write that down later, too: Suzie. That could even be her title. No, it sounded too much like a Barbie doll or a porn star, something both saccharine and tawdry about it, which was probably why she never liked it in the first place. She opened the trunk. It was stuffed with toy and furniture catalogues.

  “Just toss those in the back.”

  Susan was wearing denim shorts and a fitted T-shirt, and as she leaned into Lois’s car she could feel the invading eyes of the young man at his cart. He was twenty or twenty-one and held the fixed stare of so many of her students, his lips parted as if life were one long movie unfolding inside his head just for him. She turned to him and said, “There’s enough room now. Thank you.”

  The young man lifted the air conditioner into the trunk. He pulled the lid down and turned to leave, but Lois surprised him with a two-dollar tip, and he thanked her and glanced down at Susan’s flat belly and bare thighs before pushing his cart back through the opening glass doors of the store.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, let’s get out of this heat.”

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It was how people talked up north. Susan would write that down, too.

  Back behind the wheel, Lois pulled out of the Lowe’s lot onto DeSoto. She turned the air up to max, but its cold wind blew directly against Susan’s chest and she pointed the air vent up and away.

  “Any idea how we’re going to carry that damn thing up the stairs, Suzie, never mind install it?”

  “I think I can do it.”

  “No, you can’t. You did enough yesterday. I’ll call Marianne. Those Mexicans keep their place up all year long.” Lois glanced at her and accelerated.

  It was the word Mexican: Gustavo all these years later.

  “It can’t be that heavy, Lois.”

  “Well, you’re on your own, then. I can’t do much anymore, you should know that. I’m not gonna live forever, you know.”

  It was her tone from the old days when her words were sharp and hurled through the air and could break skin if you weren’t careful. If you weren’t fast enough.

  That was a word Noni used to use a lot—fast. “You’re going to be one of those fast girls, aren’t you?”

  MotherGrandmother, she was both in one, and Susan did not really want to stay with her now. Things were already coming back to her that she’d long ago dug a hole for and buried. Like Lois’s magisterial wave of the hand, that scrutinizing overhead light in the kitchen, how in the mornings, like today, she and Lois made two different kinds of coffee and were overly polite to one another when both would rather not have to talk so early at all.

  Lois turned onto Pinellas for the historic district. She was humming a song from the fifties, something she did to make the air softer after she’d hardened it up.

  Noni’s smell and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and how she never ever said she was sorry about anything.

  “I need to swing by the store a sec. You can finally meet Marianne.”

  They were passing the one-story homes of citrus workers and ranch hands. Susan had driven by these yesterday, but now that she wasn’t driving she could look closer, and she did. Some were run-down, with dog shit and faded plastic kids’ toys spread around their front stoops, an upside-down motorcycle in one driveway, a torn couch in another. But others were well kept, their stucco sides hosed down, their cracked concrete driveways spotted with oil but swept clean. Beneath corrugated fiberglass carports, trash cans stood side by side, and it made Susan think of her husband’s kitchen knives, how Bobby kept them ordered by size in their butcher block holders, from the short paring knives to the long carvers and bread knives. Susan thought of last Christmas and how good he’d been to Lois, how he took her food-shopping with him and, when they got home, how he made her a Cuba libre with dark rum while Lois chopped celery and onions, and he peeled potatoes, Coleman’s chaos turned off for once, Ella Fitzgerald singing, Baby, it’s cold outside. Susan could see them from Bobby’s office and living room where she draped strings of dried cranberries over the potted palm they’d used for their Christmas tree. She’d also wrapped tiny blue and white lights around its trunk and the bases of its thicker branches, and as she watched Noni working in their small red kitchen, sometimes smiling or laughing, her double chin jiggling merrily, Susan thought Noni’s skin looked bad, not enough color in her face, and she felt a stab of love for her so deep she nearly had to sit down.

  “Look the same to you?”

  “Yeah, it does.” Susan answered before she’d even taken in what she was seeing. They were in the historic district now, and except for the late-model cars parked up against the curbs, Oak Street still looked to be from a century earlier. Scrolled columns still held up the long porticoes shading the sidewalks in front of the shops, and between their glass display windows were heavy cypress doors that opened to stairwells to upper floors where Susan had never been, though when she was sixteen she and Gustavo had climbed the iron stairs behind Noni’s store to the flat roof.

  Gustavo. Maybe she should start with him.

  Lois pulled her VW into the lot behind the shop and parked in front of a cluster of hickory trees. The exterior stairs were rusted now, yellow paint flaking off the rails. In their stippled shade sat an empty lawn chair, cigarette ash on one of its arms.

  “Six a day, Noni?”

  “That’s what I said, didn’t I?”

  Susan followed Lois for the rear door of the shop. She was thirsty and a little hungry, and as she glanced at those iron stairs above the door of her grandmother’s business, squinting her eyes in the sun, she felt like the dried-up ghost of the girl she’d been.

  The inside of the store was too warm and smelled like mahogany, cast iron, and dust. It was such a familiar smell that it put her instantly back behind the register working through her stack of paperbacks, sipping warm Cokes and bouncing one leg on the ball of her foot. There was the hum of the dehumidifiers, the store still too dark and filled with dressers and chairs and bed frames, shelves of old toys that when Susan was a teenager made her sad to look at because she’d done the math and the kids who’d once played with those toys were very old or dead. Why in the world would
anyone want what these long-gone little kids had left behind?

  “Here she is, Marianne. Here’s my Suzie.”

  “Oh, my, you’re even prettier in person.” Marianne walked around from behind the register, smiling and extending her hand. Her graying hair was newly styled, and she wore light pearls and a lime-colored blouse and matching skirt, her eyes genuinely warm. Susan liked her right away. She took her hand and squeezed.

  “And a professor, too, no less. My goodness.”

  “Well, sort of—”

  “Any action, Marianne?”

  “Adjunct.”

  “Part-time?”

  “Yes, it gives me more time for my own work.”

  “Marianne, anything?”

  Marianne glanced over at Lois. “No, honey, just a browser or two. Nobody serious. And what is your work, Susan? My God, you could’ve been a movie star. Just look at her, Lois.”

  “She looks better with long hair. I don’t know why she cut it.”

  Susan could feel those heavy scissors back in her hands, could see her small face in the mirror as she held strands of her hair and cut. “I’m a writer.” She felt like a liar saying it.

  “A writer, Lois. You never told me that.”

  Lois shrugged. “She’s never shown me anything.” Her tone was indifferent with just a touch of hurt, and she was walking down the narrow aisle between furniture of all kinds to the front of the shop and the two large windows facing the shade of the portico and the bright sun on Oak Street. “We need to display all our mirrors in these windows, Marianne. It was an accident that that bitch from Ohio found the Biedermeier.”

  Marianne smiled and winked at Susan. “We did that last fall, but sure, we can do it again.”

  “We did?”

  “Yes, you remember.”

  Lois stared at them both. With the light of the street behind her, she was just a shadow and looked smaller than she was. “Did we sell any?”

  “Now I don’t remember.” Marianne laughed and touched Susan’s arm. Susan smiled at her. She and Noni seemed to have the easy rapport of old friends, and she was surprised at this.

  “We need one of your Mexicans to help us with a new air conditioner, Marianne. Can you have Walter send one over? I’ll pay cash.”

  “I really think I can do it myself, Noni.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Marianne reached into her purse on the desk and pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll call my husband. God, he’s going to love you. Are you staying long?”

  Susan’s face flushed warm. She turned to a shelf and ran her fingers along the top of a cast-iron statuette of a cowboy on one knee playing a guitar. “Not too long, no.”

  “Well, we’d love to have you both over to dinner at least once before you go.”

  “Hey, she might be here awhile, who knows?” Lois walked behind the register. It was the same one Susan had sat in front of so long ago, brass with ivory buttons for the numbers, and Lois popped it open and pulled out a twenty. “Mark this as petty cash, Marianne.”

  “What time should I have Walter send someone over?” Marianne held her phone to her chest. She had her eyes on Susan. They were attentive and motherly, and this made Susan want to stay and it made her want to leave.

  “The faster, the better, honey.” Lois was already stepping through the back door. Marianne punched a button on her cell phone and pressed it to her ear and smiled brightly at Susan, waving at her as Susan left Lois’s old store full of old things feeling that old shyness that so often came up when she was around any woman who could have been her mother.

  13

  IT’S MIDMORNING, the sun on him, and Daniel wants to get this job done. In front of him is the last of the dealer’s eight chairs and even here outside it still gives off the smell of the walnut stain he’d used on it last week. Daniel squeezes a few drops of glycerin into a bucket of warm water then stirs it with a short length of pine. He takes up three coils of cane, clamps them with clothespins, and pushes them down into the bucket where he’ll let them soak for ten minutes. When he first started caning, he would weave the strands too tightly from chair rail to rail and when the cane dried and tightened it would fray. But no more. He takes pride in weaving his cane just right so that when it dries it’s firm and level front to back with just the right amount of give in it. He keeps thinking of his letter to his daughter still sitting on the kitchen table where he last left it. I’d like to see you before I go.

  A crow caws from the torch pines behind him. Last night he dreamed he’d slept nude beside a woman who was nude too. He had the body of a small boy, and he lay on his side with one leg over the woman’s bare belly, his cheek against her breast. There was the feeling she belonged to him and always had, that part of him had come from her and that he would never fully be himself without her. He was aware of his penis touching the skin of her hip, and there was his full bladder too, and the sound that came from the woman’s lips was like an old song she was singing to him, rain falling on his tin roof, then he was awake and alone on his mattress and he rose to piss for the fourth time.

  How long had he stood there in his trailer’s bathroom? How long had he waited for the two or three drops that burned as they released themselves? This was a worsening symptom, Daniel knew.

  The crow caws then flaps its wings a dozen feet over Daniel’s head. He counts the cane holes in the back rail of the chair. He finds the one in the center, then pushes a golf tee into it to mark it and does the same with the front rail. He reaches into the bucket for a coil of cane and pulls it dripping to him and releases the clothespin and runs his fingers a foot and a half down the length. That printout of Susan’s face tacked onto the wall, she’s a beauty like her mother, and he can only wonder if that has brought her trouble. He pulls the golf tee from the center hole in the front rail and weaves the cane through it and now, as if from a wind tunnel deep in the ground, comes Linda’s voice and she’s screaming at him, “You don’t own me! I don’t fucking belong to you!”

  There was the way her long brown hair fell in front of her face, how small and dark her eyes got, her teeth flashing while flecks of spit flew from her mouth. Danny and Linda had been together for five and a half years, and since that hot afternoon making love standing up under the Himalaya, all that loud happy noise rumbling inches above their heads, they had never spent one day or night apart. Daniel had to have hundreds of moving pictures of her in his head, yet the same dozen or so keep circling, and this is one of them, though it has not come to him in many years.

  He pulls the golf tee from the center hole of the back rail, but he can feel his letter to his daughter behind him like a cooling spirit only he can warm back to life and he better get to it while what’s in his head is still there. He leaves the cane hanging where it is and soon he is sitting at his kitchen table in the heat of his trailer, a pen in his hand as he reads where he last left off.

  His name was Chucky Finn and he was from Charlestown. I had my tray of baloney and mashed potatoes made from water and powder from a box and

  Why the hell is he writing her this? The crazy that matters is the crazy before going down, not after. Daniel draws a large X over his handwritten words and writes:

  I see you’re a professor and I’m very proud of you for that. I used to love comic books but I wasn’t a reader till I found books on tape.

  Daniel’s mouth is dry. His eyes burn. He pulls off his work glasses and wipes away the sweat with the back of his arm. He fits his glasses back on. Who the hell is he to tell her so casually about himself?

  He crosses out what he’s just written.

  That worm I talked to you about? Well it became a black snake and it filled Danny’s veins so he was scared all the time. But what could he do with this? He was The Reactor. When Danny got a bad feeling he shot it out of himself like a bullet from a gun. But now he was like one of the heroes in his comic books when two super powers come together in one man. Like flying and being invisible too. But this second power for Danny was n
o power at all. The worm had crawled into The Reactor and become the snake and the snake was Captain Suspicion and he never slept and he never got tired and he never believed a word anyone ever said especially your mother Linda.

  Danny started coming home in the middle of the day. He wasn’t working with Liam anymore so he could do it. Danny would just wrap his wet paint brush or roller in cellophane and climb down his ladder and start up his Datsun and drive too fast over the river and east to the strip. The whole way he wasn’t seeing the road. Only Linda doing it with someone else and the thing is he was almost disappointed when he never caught her doing anything but working the arcade or taking care of you.

  Daniel stops. He reads over the last few lines. He gets up and fills a glass with tap water and drinks it. Outside his casement window the dealer’s chair sits directly under the midday sun, the cane he’d left there drying out. That isn’t good, but what lies on his table pulls him more and he rests his glass in the sink and sits back down.