Any Minute (13 page)

Try as she might, Sarah couldn’t erase her grandmother’s voice from her head. “Just imagine something this fine in the center of Buffalo Grove. People will come from all over just to attend church here. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” a little-girl Sarah had answered. Sarah remembered clenching a hand just as gnarled and timeworn as the tree trunks along the hill. “I do think.” And she remembered gazing into the eyes of the only woman who she ever felt really loved her, eyes that, in spite of age, had remained a clear, sharp blue. She remembered Annie’s face that heightened into pink whenever she was happy; Annie’s silver hair, so thin you could see the flush of her scalp beneath it, iridescent and finely spun on the top of her head into the shape of a Q-tip.

Sarah had never called her grandmother anything except Annie.

At first her mother had interfered, saying it wasn’t respectable for a two-year-old to call a grandma by her first name. Annie had tsk-tsked Jane’s objections almost before they’d started. “It’s the only thing she can say; she can’t even
say
‘grandmother’ yet. I’ll live by any name with which my granddaughter christens me. And if it happens to be my given name, well, then so much the better.”

Now, passing the church, Sarah remembered the smell of the wood-paneled rooms and the homemade play dough, the wax candles dripping on the altar, Annie’s lilac perfume. She remembered the cool shade splashing over her face when, later in the day, they sat with their cheeks together beneath one of the trees, Annie’s breath smelling faintly of root-beer mints, reading aloud the stories in the Sunday-school paper. Now, passing the church, Sarah missed her grandmother with an ache that resembled hunger.

She braked. “I can’t do it, Mitchell. I don’t want to go to Nona and Harold’s after all.”

“But Mom, we’re almost there.”

How quickly one little boy’s face could shift from joy to a troubled frown.

“I want to see them, Mama. I want to talk to Harold. I want to see if I can find apples in the tree.”

The car had drawn almost to a stop in the center of the street. She clenched her teeth and drew in air. She ran a hand through her hair, draped it behind her neck, and kneaded the tense muscles there. She didn’t want to see Mitchell disappointed, not again today. Not again. Not ever.

She went through the same emotional upheaval every time she came to the house. She dreaded it and yet she hoped that perhaps this would be the time her mother would be glad to see her. But the same disappointment met her every time she walked in the door, every time she saw Jane and saw how nothing had changed. She shouldn’t have done this; she felt too tired and weary to put herself through it again right now. But it was too late.

“You
never
want to come to Nona’s house anymore. Mom, please?”

Her shoulders rose and fell with her sigh.

“Please?”

“Okay. I promise,” she said, her voice resolute. “We won’t turn back now.”

She hadn’t even stopped at the curb before Mitchell unhitched his seat belt and flung open the door and galloped to the front porch. Sarah opened her window. Even this late she could smell the apples.

Most of the fruit was snagged from the limbs just as soon as it ripened. But a few pieces fell and fermented in the grass with a sticky sweet smell that attracted wasps and reminded old-timers of long-ago orchards. Annie had always told her the whole town smelled like McIntosh apples at harvest time.

Harold’s silhouette appeared against the light from the living room. “Harold!” Mitchell shouted, bouncing on his toes. “It’s us! We came to see you.”

“Woo ha-he-
goodness
,” the man’s voice bellowed. “We’ve got company, Jane. Who’s this in the dark jumping around like a chimpanzee? It’s Mitchell.” Sarah could see her stepfather surveying the yard, checking to see who else might be out there. “And I’ll bet Mitchell didn’t drive over here all by himself, did he?”

“Of course I didn’t drive,” Mitchell said as he pushed his way past Harold’s leg and went inside to find his grandma. “I’m only eight years old.”

“You’re eight? And nobody’s taught you how to drive yet? Well, if I had my keys and a phone book for you to sit on, I’d get on that job right now.”

“I don’t think so,” Sarah said, giving her stepfather a squeeze. “But when he gets to be fifteen, I might take you up on it.”

Harold hugged her back, and it felt so good that she wished he’d never let go.

She stepped back and searched his expression. “Are we bad, coming so late?”

“Of course you’re not. You know we’ll take you anytime we can get you.”

“I’m sorry for missing our coffee date, Harold. I wouldn’t have done that to you. I totally spaced it out.”

He gave a little humph, gripped her shoulders, and searched her expression. “Sarah? Are you okay?”

“Yes.” Then, “No.” Then, “Of course I am. Why would you ask? I’m fine.”

“I do need to talk to you.”

She raised her eyebrows in a question.

“Not now. It’ll have to be for another coffee date.”

Her teeth clenched in embarrassment. “Did you wait a long time?”

“Ate three whole pieces of pie.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Maybe next time you can punch it into your computer and have the thing give you an electric shock in the pants or something,” he suggested.

“Harold. I’m
so
sorry.”

I’ll get over it,
his brief smile said. He held open the screen to allow her entrance.

The minute she stepped into the house, she knew she shouldn’t have come. The wooden floors complained beneath each of her steps:
You don’t have any right to be here
. The old boiler rumbled to life, knocking and hissing like it disapproved of her presence.

“Mama?”

“Good heavens, Sarah. Don’t you know better than to pop in to see people in the middle of the night like this?”

The ancient, upright piano huddled like a watchman in the corner. It was missing several select ivory keys the same way an ancient boxer missed teeth. Beyond the piano, the tiny woman must have leaped from her chair, distraught at first sight of her grandson. Her reading glasses rested upside down in a pool of ice cubes on the floor. With a stained tea towel, she flogged and thrashed at her bathrobe as if she were trying to punish the soda she’d spilled in her lap.

“Hello, Mama.”

“How could you have not made a phone call? For Pete’s sake, you’re one of those with the phone implanted surgically to your ear. Most of the time you’re so busy making calls that you don’t even talk to the people in the room.”

“Nice to see you, Mama—”

“Mitchell came romping in here, and I didn’t have a stitch of clothes on other than these bedclothes. And you know we watch the nine o’clock news. If you had called, we would have told you not to make us miss the news. Why didn’t we get a phone call?”

“You watch the nine o’clock news? I forgot about the nine o’clock news.”

“And did you forget my workday begins at Lathrop before seven o’clock in the morning?”

My
workday begins early as well,
Sarah wanted to say.

“There wasn’t time to call,” Sarah explained instead. “We were on the expressway. We were only five blocks away.”

“I thought you had better manners than to just show up without calling.”

Sarah heard Mitchell’s shouts from outside. Every so often, a flashlight beam would slash across the curtains. Mitchell and Harold must be rifling through leaves, searching for the remaining McIntosh apples. As she listened to her son’s happy chatter, Harold’s low-pitched, patient suggestions, it occurred to Sarah that, of all the things she’d tried, she’d finally found the one pursuit to win herself back into Mitchell’s good graces.

“Did you forget the importance of my job, Sarah? I don’t even have a high school diploma and look what I’ve done after forty-one years. No degree and I’m making more money than Harold.”

Sarah felt even more drained than when she first walked in.
I should have known better than this
, she thought.

Trying to remember something positive, she thought about how many times she had hugged Harold good night when she was little. How many times he had asked her to tell him about the things that made her afraid. Often when she’d been scared, he’d tucked her in with that flashlight. Oh, how she enjoyed seeing that flashlight of his!

“Would you just listen to those two out there?” Jane had given up on her sodden robe and was now using her hands to scoop ice from the carpet. Sarah bent to help. Each cube ringed the glass with a condemning
clink
. “Just look what you’re asking of Harold. He’s not even the child’s grandfather, and you’ve got him out there climbing trees.”

Sarah’s hand froze. Yes, she’d expected her mother’s bitterness. But she was surprised by its force. “What did you say?”

“In the middle of the night. Taking care of your child. Don’t you think that’s asking a great deal of him, Sarah?”

“I know, Mama.”
Oh, don’t say it. Don’t let her bait you into this.
But she couldn’t stop herself. “Wasn’t it asking Harold a whole lot to ask him to raise me too?”

Jane’s face shot up. The censuring twist of her mouth couldn’t have cut Sarah any deeper if it had been administered with a scalpel.
Clink
went the ice in the glass.
Clink. Clink.

In her mother’s embittered eyes, Sarah read the accusation again, the same resentful indictment that had been pouring into Sarah’s heart as long as she could remember.
Well, you’d sure better amount to something in your life because you certainly made a mess out of mine.

The door slammed open and the two boys, one big and one small, tottered inside with their arms laden with apples. “Well now.” Harold helped Mitchell balance his stash as they headed toward the kitchen. “I guess we found a few more out there.”

Sarah shot up off the floor. “I guess you did.” The items swam atop the piano as she tried to focus.

The FDR campaign button on its wire stand, passed down since 1944.

The glass jar that made Sarah cringe because Harold once used it to store her tonsils for the neighbors to see. Stored in alcohol, mind you! As if having her tonsils out had been the proudest thing she’d ever accomplished.

The three-generation portrait of the Cattalo women with its black-and-white likeness of Annie, Jane, and Sarah: grandmother, mother and child, the same as always, even then.

Annie smiling.

Sarah hiding behind her mother’s skirt.

Jane madder than a hornet at the world, not caring one whit if the cameraman knew.

Sarah went in search of the boys. “Mitchell. I’m sorry, honey. We have to go.”

“But we just got here.”

“I know. But it’s late.”

Harold took several apples and, with great care, placed them inside a bag so the skins wouldn’t bruise. “Get these wrapped up so you can take them to your dad. Show him how good you did.”

Above Mitchell’s head, Harold mouthed to Sarah,
Don’t get upset. You know how she is.

It about broke Sarah’s heart to see Mitchell start to lift his arms to his grandma, but then step back because he was afraid.

“Good night, Mother,” Sarah said carefully. “We’ll see you again.”

“Why don’t you call before you come next time? You shouldn’t visit anyone this late,” Jane said with the same enthusiasm as a porcelain bedpan.

Chapter Nine