Adelaide Piper (39 page)

“You're lucky, Ad. At least you aren't down here with it in your face all the time. You'll go from NBU to DC and never have to sleep a night in that sad old house again.”

Sad old house
. I had never known it to be a sad old house. Sure, it had been the place where I cultivated my desire to escape Williams-town, and it had also been the shelter where Dizzy hid her dark life beneath the black clothes until the DUI made her come clean. But that home had been a safe and nurturing womb for me, and it had cradled me from my childhood.

“It's for sale, you know.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. The Ice Lady figured they should split the profit to cover the legal fees. If it goes fast, you'll have to come down here sometime before you get married and get your stuff.”

Getting married. Though I had enjoyed looking at the china patterns and bridesmaid's gowns, I had pushed aside the actual thought of the sacred event that was going to take place in my hometown church between Tobias and me eight short months from now. My heart had been on my thesis ever since the proposal. I was working hard on my second draft in hopes that I could bring my GPA up a smidge so that I could walk down the graduation aisle with President Schaeffer remarking, “With honors,” after my name.

I had not let myself truly stop and think about the day after graduation and the new life that would begin for me in Washington.

“Fry one fish at a time,” Daddy used to say to me when I'd get overwhelmed with my schoolwork. Once I had two tests and a term paper due my junior year of high school, and he told me to give him my backpack and ask for only one textbook at a time before moving on to the next subject. And that is just what was happening. My focus was on graduation, and I would deal with the rest of my life the day after I donned my cap and gown.

And while Mae Mae and Juliabelle were planning the wedding, Tobias was planning our new life inside the beltline. He had recently let me know that Glenda was downsizing to a studio apartment in her same building, and so the new plan was that I would live with his parents in Vienna, Virginia, until the wedding. They had a finished room over their garage that would serve as a suitable place for me to live temporarily.

Starting our married life in his hip city apartment would have been great with me, but he wanted to move to Arlington once we tied the knot. To settle down just outside the city so that we could enjoy a quick commute and a safer place to lay our heads. He planned to research the market over the summer so that we could get just what we wanted before the big day.

“Are you okay?” Dizzy asked now after the long silence of my reeling thoughts on the other end of the line.

Outside, a security guard was testing the new night lighting system that Dr. Atwood and I had designed, and the bright fluorescent lights flashed on and off on the quad like a silent warning.

“Yeah,” I said, but I didn't know for sure.

Graduation was anticlimactic. It rained cats and dogs the day before, and instead of being held on the pristine quad, the ceremony took place in the gymnasium, where the muckety-muck keynote speaker's voice reverberated off the padded walls of the basketball court, and no one could understand a word of what he was saying.

A surge of terror rose up in my throat as I watched my parents sitting on opposite sides of the gymnasium and Tobias front and center, staring me down with his dogged adoration.

The night before graduation, my family had endured a painful dinner at Dr. Atwood's home on faculty row. The dean had offered to host us privately so that my folks could have a quiet setting in which to meet Tobias for the first time.

Daddy surprised everyone when he showed up with a black '64 convertible Mustang that he'd bought in Statesville on his way up the mountain.

Mama scoffed as he called us out the door to take a gander.

“Like he can afford
that
,” she murmured, accepting a full glass of Dean Atwood's chardonnay. Mama never took a drink, and the acidity in her voice made me wince. For the first time I could really remember, a fury rose in my throat toward my father. Why did he have to slip the whole rug out from under her?

Then Daddy turned his attention to my fiancé. He put the metal-pincher grip of his prosthetic on poor Tobias's hand when they were officially introduced in the dean's living room, and I guessed that Daddy was getting back at him for not having asked him for my hand as Southern tradition dictates.

“Sorry,” Daddy said as Tobias pulled his hand back and then down between his legs as he crouched over in pain. “I should have given you my good hand.”

Then Daddy looked me in the eyes as Tobias inspected his throbbing red palm.

Mama shooed Daddy out of the way as if he didn't amount to a hill of beans, and she gave Tobias a well-rehearsed hug as well as a little gift bag that contained a framed photo of me as a young girl.

In the photo, I was four years old and sitting on the pine straw in the front yard, smiling up at the camera with my big, brown eyes. I was wearing an old-fashioned smocked dress, and my dirty bare feet were peeking out from beneath the hemline.

“Thank you,” Tobias said as he rubbed his sore hand and smiled sincerely at Mama. “I will treasure this.”

Then he looked to Daddy and back to Mama and said, “I love your daughter, and I always will.”

“Dinner is served!” Dr. Atwood interrupted with a blackened spatula in her hand. She wasn't much of a cook, so we suffered through her tough pork tenderloin and crunchy risotto. My heart felt as heavy as the sheets of steel loaded onto the containers in the Williamstown port that night as I listened to the strange blend of voices that made up the different pieces of my life. Mama was talking up Dizzy's culinary prowess and Lou's rising grades at Trident Academy, while Daddy showed the Bizway plan to Tobias by drawing strange little ovals down the side of a paper towel and assuring his future son-in-law that the business was approved by the Federal Trade Commission.

Dr. Atwood talked over everyone about what I had meant to NBU and what we had accomplished together, but I was tired of thinking about campus policy and refused to contribute to the conversation.

Then Daddy and Mama got into it as we choked down the charred crème brûlée. Mama had mentioned something about Papa Great's role in keeping the unions out of the textile mills, and Daddy said that he was as happy as a clam to be the heck out of that doomed industry.

“So happy you were willing to dishonor your parents and give up your family?” Mama murmured, staring him in the eye as he attempted to get his prosthetic around Dr. Atwood's china cup for a sip of decaf coffee.

He spewed coffee across the table at her and said, “You wouldn't care a lick about what I wanted as long as it fit your perfect little picture of how life should be.”

Then he looked over to Tobias, wiping coffee out of his eye with the corner of Dr. Atwood's navy linen napkin, and said, “She'd have me chained to some wall in a dungeon as long as she was happy!”

“Hush, Daddy!” I yelped midway between the sitting and standing position. I had jumped up so quickly that the table was rocking slightly, and Tobias thrust his hand forward to catch Dizzy's coffee cup before it overturned.

Dr. Atwood cleared her throat and looked conspicuously at her wristwatch, and Daddy looked me grievously in the eye as though the last member of his reconnaissance team had betrayed him. Had pushed him out of the foxhole, leaving his hide exposed.

He threw down his napkin on his dessert plate. “Thank you for the hospitality, Miss Atwood. Please excuse me.”

Then he stormed out the door before anyone could call him back and sped down the hill, his Mustang sputtering over the speed bumps that led to the campus gates.

Now I felt completely alone in the gymnasium on my graduation day as I stared out at the faces that lined each row of bleachers. When they called my name up to receive my diploma, I was reminded of the .08 decimal point I lacked, and so instead of having “with honors” attached to my name, I walked up and across the stage as simply “Miss Adelaide Piper.”

After the ceremony, I said my good-byes to Jif, Ruthie, Frankie, and my professors.

“Remember your poetry,” Professor Dirkas told me as I hugged him good-bye. His recent chapbook about a couple adopting a baby from Guatemala had just been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and I was thrilled for him.

“Dirkas is right,” Dr. Shaw said as he and his toothless seven-year-old, Molly, ran over to tell me good-bye. “We expect to see
your
name in a publication soon.”

“Can you write that on my next round of MFA applications?” I joked, and we all chuckled, knowing how disappointed I was that I had not been accepted.

“Hey, it took me three years to get into a program,” Dirkas added. “The key to being a successful poet is acquiring thick skin.”

“Thank you,” I said to both of them, “for all you've done.”

They both nodded, their humble way of saying, “You're welcome.”

Molly broke the silence with, “Can I wear your dress, Dad?” in reference to Dr. Shaw's cap and gown.

What a beacon of decency those two professors had been to me when I was in my
Lord of the Flies
valley. They would never know how much their goodness had meant.

I went back to my dorm room to meet my parents, who had to arrange separate times ten minutes apart to come by to bid me farewell.

Daddy.
If it weren't for him, I never would have made it to NBU. Heck, I'd still be sporting my floaties for all I knew and staring at a storybook, wondering why the letters didn't make the right words.

When our eyes met in the dorm hall amid the pop of champagne corks and the squeal of packing tape being rolled across cardboard boxes, there was a double kind of shame between us. We both knew we had let each other down. Still, I hoped he would embrace me. Rub his good thumb across my jewel with pride.

“Good luck, sister,” he said, getting only close enough to pat my shoulder.

He shook Tobias's hand with his flesh this time and turned toward the hall, looking back and forth in confusion before finding the back door that led to the parking lot.

Tobias loaded up a U-haul with my stuff before we took one last look at the quadrangle and the colonnade. Though he was sensitive, my fiancé was still the possessor of a Y chromosome, and he rushed me into the car before I was ready.

“This is it, NBU,” I mouthed out the window as two unhurried graduates threw a Frisbee back and forth on the hill, their black gowns split down the center to reveal their fraternity T-shirts, cut-off shorts and Tevas.

I rolled down the window to take one last breath of the pastoral scene. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the tombstones at the top of the cemetery hill, the dogwood blooms falling around them in a flutter of white. Then the grand Kappa Nu house with its Corinthian columns and rocking chairs, and I remembered racing there that spring night a year ago after Peño's distressing call and even farther back to when Peter Carpenter spun me around on the lawn my first night, freshman year.

And as we made the final curve before the exit gates, the image of Ruthie's elm tree appeared in the large side mirror on my door, its lush leaves swaying in the late-spring light. Just yesterday I had walked by it and seen the winged fruit forming beneath the blooms.

In a few weeks the fruit would be carried off by the wind, and if one landed just so in a patch of fertile ground, the early shoots of another elm would appear, reaching up from the black mountain dirt.

When we turned onto the highway and away from the surrounding mountains that Daddy had named the “wise sages calling me to learn,” a scream formed in my gut. I swallowed it, though, stuffed it down so as not to startle Tobias, and instead watched trancelike as the Blue Ridge gave way to the flat asphalt roads while we traveled the two hundred miles north to the Moore family F.R.O.G. (Furnished Room Over Garage) apartment at the end of a Vienna, Virginia, cul-de-sac.

“I'll see you at the office tomorrow,” Tobias said to me after he settled me into my room above his parents' garage and prepared to head back to his apartment in the city. His blue eyes smiled straight through me, clueless to the terror written on my face. “It will be so amazing to work together, and I've already got you slated for a meeting with me on Capitol Hill with a senator who is fighting for us. I couldn't be happier, Adelaide.”

I nodded quietly as a dark coolness filled my chest like the inside of a vault. Then I watched out the window as his sedan pulled out of the driveway. When he turned onto the main road, I looked up and out at all the cookie-cutter houses that lined the street. The walls in the F.R.O.G. were thin, and Mr. Moore was already snoring above the sound of
Headline News.

The room was sparsely decorated with plastic furniture and a small bowl of potpourri that hadn't been refreshed in a year. I went over and took one whiff of it and smelled nothing. Then I wrote:

Hurricane David

lifted Papa's

johnboat

up and off

the slip.

It surely

floated

out of the river

and into

the Atlantic.

We never

saw it

again.

Dare I say it, but I missed Williamstown. Missed Mae Mae and Papa Great's gracious home with the blooming magnolias adorning their garden, and the smell of pluff mud at low tide. If I closed my eyes, I could envision Mama's carefully tended hydrangeas and the yellow jasmine along the fence and the bees that buzzed around the summer flowers, gathering nectar. I missed Dale and Darla and Charlie Farley and the converted barbecue-joint church where I first learned about the plan of salvation. Heck, I even missed the stench of pulp and soot catching in my throat. It was terrible, but at least it was real.

Snap out of it,
I said to myself, unpacking my cosmetic bag and lining the bottles of soap and hair products on the shelf over the bathroom sink.
Transition is always weird, but it'll get better.