B000FCJYE6 EBOK (15 page)

Then Oma was prying my fingers off a spoon. I was sitting on the front porch. The sweet potatoes were mostly gone. I felt as if I’d swallowed something warm and huge, like a child. I was starving and freezing. My teeth were chattering, and I had a hard time getting the words out.

I looked up into her face, partly hidden in shadow. “I’m hungry,” I said.

“I know. Give me the dish.”

I let it go.

“Come inside.”

I followed her in and sat at the table. She stood before me, a curious look on her face. “What are you hungry for? Salty? Sweet?”

I stared at her. “I don’t know. Food.”

She shook her head. “Answer my question. Salty or sweet?”

“Salty, I suppose.”

“One or the other. Yes or no. Salty? Yes? Now, do you want smooth like silk or do you want to break a glass?”

I thought about it, my head pounding with sugar and lack of sleep. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, putting my head in my hands.

“Answer me!” She clapped her hands twice.

“A glass.”

“What? Which is it?”

My head snapped up. “A glass!” I yelled. “A fucking glass! I want to break a glass!”

I clapped my hand over my mouth, unable to believe what I’d just said.

We stared at each other in the dark.

“Very good.”

She turned her back to me. I sat slumped in my chair, looking confusedly at the wall. I wanted to break a glass with my
teeth.

I listened to her washing something at the sink.

“There,” she said, setting an overflowing bowl of radishes and a salt shaker in front of me. “Eat!”

I picked up a radish and was about to bite into it.

“Salt,” she commanded.

I salted and ate it.

I don’t know when she went to bed. I sat crunching in the dark, licking the salt off my fingers, eating the radishes, chewing with my molars, staring down into the bowl to see where the next one would come from, until suddenly I was full, and I got up and fell asleep on the guest-room floor next to Kate, who had fallen off the bed.

“I want to go home.”

Kate was bouncing up and down in her red boots, looking out the back door at the lake. She’d spoken casually, as if it mattered very little to her when, specifically, we went home, as long as we did.

“You will,” Oma assured her, not looking up from her letter desk.

“Quick as you please,” Opa seconded idly from behind the paper.

“Now,” Kate said, still bouncing on her toes.

Oma raised her head slightly. “Not good enough for you here, ah? You’re tired of me and Opa?”

“Opa and I,” Opa said.

“No, Mr. Schiller, it is ‘me and Opa,’ thank you and good night.” She licked her pen and wrote.

Kate turned to me. “Can we go?”

I opened my mouth as if I expected words to form themselves. “Okay,” I said.

She and I looked at each other.

“I can go get my stuff?” she asked.

I nodded, stunned.

She left the room. Oma and Opa stared at me. I avoided their eyes.

“We have to leave sometime,” I said, sounding like a sullen teenager. “Don’t we?”

“Claire, now. Stop and think this through.” Opa leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

“There’s nothing to think through,” I said. Kate walked back into the room, staggering under a pile of clothes.

“What should I do with them?”

“Leave them,” Oma snapped. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Yes we are. Mom said.” She shifted her arms, and a tiny sock fell on the floor. She looked at it, trying to decide whether she should attempt its retrieval.

“Katerina, your mother is tired and she needs to stay here and rest.” “No she doesn’t. No you don’t, Mom.” She looked at me, pleading. “You can rest at home. Right?”

I nodded.

“I’ll take care of you,” she said firmly, and bent down to get the sock, and dropped the entire pile of clothes. Scowling, she set about picking them all back up.

“No!” Oma nearly shouted. “You are not to go home and that is all.”

“Now, Oma,” Opa said, soothing.

“No, no, no.” She shook her head. “I won’t have it. First one thing, and then another thing.” She slammed her pen down on the desk. “Up last night dying of starvation, she is. Crazy she is with lonely. No sleeping for days. Sitting there with the radishes.”

She took her reading glasses off and put her hands to her eyes. Kate sank down slowly, a head above a pile of clothes.

Opa said, “Now, Oma. It isn’t so bad. We’ll see them in a few days.”

“Oh, that is it? No, that is
not
it! Not us,
them
! How are they going to
do
with it? I think they will starve to death!”

“Well, dammit, Mother, I guess they’ll muddle through.” Opa was irritated now. “They’ll just do what they do and none of our business, is it?”

“Yeah,” said Kate sullenly.

“Katerina, you mind,” Opa snapped.

Kate put her face in the clothes and started to bawl. Oma sniffled, furious. Opa gave me a look, stood up, and said grimly, “Well, get your things.”

I felt like I was falling backward. Opa went out to start the car.

Opa and I stared over the dash at the black ribbon of road that spooled toward us from the south. Kate sat by herself in the backseat, bouncing from one side of the car to the other, quietly singing, “Home again, home again, higglety pig.”

She burst in the door and ran through the house, calling gleefully, “We’re home! We’re home!”

I stood in the hall, watching her, listening to the hysteria rise in her voice. Opa carried our things inside. He came back to where I was, frozen, put his arm around me, and squeezed. He led me into the living room, past the closed bedroom door. I could have sworn I smelled bleach.

Together we watched Kate run, her voice strangled and hoarse.

Eventually she stopped yelling. A claustrophobic quiet settled in. Dust motes floated down the sunbeams. The stale air bore the scent of us, the unmistakable smell of our bodies and meals.

My face was suddenly clammy. It felt like there were hands around my throat.

Kate was standing in the middle of the room, still wearing her coat. She looked very small. She glanced up at me with no sign of life in her face. Then she crossed over to his chair, curled her entire body into its wide seat, and fell instantly asleep. Opa hugged me and left.

I sat down on the couch and looked out the window at the split tree. Have to get that sucker removed, I heard a voice say.

You son of a bitch, I replied. Don’t talk to me.

Kate’s coat rose and fell. Blessedly, the sun began to set. I looked up at the clock and watched the hand tick toward five.

“You hungry?”

I screamed, dropped my glass on the floor, and stood paralyzed among the shards.

“For
Chris
sakes,” I said. “You scared the bejeezus out of me.”

“Sorry,” Donna said from behind me. “Stay still.”

“I’ll do that, thanks.”

I was standing in the living room in my stocking feet, staring down the tunnel of the hallway at the closed bedroom door. I swept the glass out of my way with my toe and went over to the table.

“Thought I told you to stay still,” Donna said, emerging with a broom and a towel. The sight of her comforted me. She wore a plaid flannel shirt, purple and red. I wanted to sit on her lap. I was drunk.

“I’m drunk,” I said.

“You don’t say.” She crouched and cleaned up the mess.

“Is it late?”

“Round ten.” She stood up, pulled out a chair at the table. “Siddown.”

I did, and she went into the kitchen. “You want a beer?” she called.

“No. I want the drink you made me drop.”

“Suit yourself. I’m having one.”

“All right.”

She came in with a beer and sat down.

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“What?”

“You could have brought one for me.”

“You said you didn’t want one!”

“But then I said I did.”

“Oh, for—” She heaved herself up, disappeared, reappeared, and set a beer down in front of me. “May I get herself anything else?”

“No thanks.”

“You sure?”

I laughed and waved my hand. “New house? New life?”

She sat down. “No can do. I was thinking more along the lines of a sandwich.”

“Ugh.”

“You got enough food in that fridge, you could feed the whole town for a week.”

“Why then, let’s call ’em up, honey!” I said grandly. “Invite ’em all over! I got nothing better to do, now do I? We can have a little church-basement social.”

“Your accent always get this thick when you’re drunk?” she said, smiling.

“Why, it sure
does,
” I drawled, and glared at her, and took a swallow of beer.

“Yep. Claire, how long you been drinking?”

I waved away the thought. “Not long. A couple of hours?”

She nodded and sipped her beer. “Well, no point getting you sober now.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I agreed.

“Kate asleep?”

“The minute we walked in the door.” I nodded over at the chair. “Sat her little self down and fell asleep right there.”

We stared at the chair for a while.

“What the hell you doing home this soon, anyhow?” Donna asked.

“Well,” I said, plunking my empty bottle down on the table and picking at the Grain Belt label. “I’ll tell you, honey. I don’t have the faintest
fucking
idea, pardon me.” I giggled, shocked at my own audacity.
“What
I’m doing home.”

She nodded. “Right. Well, how’d you
get
home?”

“Elton drove us. Kate said she wanted to come home, so we came home.”

“What’s she want to come home for? I never seen a child so spoiled.”

“Oh, tell me. Don’t I know. And now she’s stuck with me.” I laughed. “Poor thing.”

“Well, you’re stuck with her too.”

“True enough.” I shredded the label, feeling guilty. “She’s no trouble.”

“Hell, you say. She’s a child. Course she’s trouble. Even
Davey’s
trouble.”

“No.”

“Yes he is. If I wanted to sit around, get a proper drunk on, feel sorry for myself, sure.”

I considered that. “All right.”

“You want another beer?”

I nodded.

We clicked the necks of the bottles and drank. “To Arnold,” I said. “May we drink all his beer.”

“This his beer?”

“Not anymore, it isn’t. He’s dead, ain’t you heard?”

“Oughtta get your own beer.”

“I’ll do that.”

She stood up, untucked her shirttails, and unbuttoned her shirt, revealing the men’s white undershirt she wore beneath. She fanned herself with the side of the shirt.

“Claire, honey,” she said, sounding apologetic, “it’s a goddamned oven in here.”

I was surprised. “I’m cold.”

“Well, hon, you’re only wearing your slip.”

I looked down. My arms were goose pimpled and purple, and my nipples stood out through the nylon. I laughed.

“Well, what do you know,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “You want a robe?”

I stopped laughing. “No,” I said flatly. I took a drink of beer and ran my thumbnail over the textured surface of the table. She was looking at me.

“You been in there yet?”

“No.”

We sat in silence.

“I could go in for you. Get you a robe.”

I shook my head. “S’all right.”

She took her shirt off and passed it across to me, wadded up. I put it on the table and lay my face on it. It smelled good. Wood smoke, cologne, and beer. It smelled like her hair too, which smelled somehow smooth. Like water, or the earthy, clean smell of mud.

I wrapped my arms around it and heaved a sigh.

“You see that?” I gestured toward the hall. “Down there? The door?” I was facing the window, actually, but I would have sworn I could
feel
the door, and behind it a hole, a darkness pulling at the top of my head. “That’s it,” I said. “That’s where he shot himself.”

She said nothing. That was fine. I lifted my head to drink, as clumsy as a patient in a hospital bed, almost missing my mouth. I wiped my lips with the back of my hand.

“He shot himself,” I said again, to hear myself say it. It sounded like someone else talking. I liked the sound of the word
shot.

“That’s enough,” she said, and I felt her hand on my arm, briefly, as if she were pressing a stop button.

“Smells like bleach in here, doesn’t it?” I said idly.

“Not really.”

I put my chin on the pillow of her shirt. “Yes it does. Don’t bullshit me.”

“All right, it does. As you’re going past it, it does.”

“Thank you.” I laid my head back down. It was a perfectly clear night, and the heavy midwinter moon hung high in the wide window-pane, almost full. “Smelled like gunpowder when he did it,” I said, suddenly remembering. “Is that possible?”

“I suppose so.”

I flared my nostrils, remembering the sulfur burn.

“When I was growing up, we kept a box by the door,” I said. I lifted my head finally and sat up, pulling the flannel over my shoulders. “My mother kept a box there, of all her treasures, she said. Heirloom jewelry, pictures, things like that. I think she had a baby shoe of mine.”

Donna sat splayed in her chair, her clear skin covered with a sheen of sweat. Tiny hairs at her temples curled. She took a swallow and nodded for me to go on.

“I never knew what it was for. I’d wait until she was out and go dig through it. Try on all the jewelry, look at the pictures to see if I looked like anybody. I didn’t look much like her, God knows.” I laughed.

“What’d she look like?”

“She was gorgeous. Oh, she was just beautiful. One of those women you hate, you can’t help it. Little tiny thing. Little southern belle, round in all the right places.”

Donna laughed. “Woulda killed her.”

“You would too. She was terrible. But Lord, was she pretty. Scarlett O’Hara pretty, with the black Irish hair.”