Blessings (13 page)

Maybe, he thought, in the truck on his way to the Mount
Mason Medical Center, that was why he wanted to keep Faith, and why he thought he should give her up, too. Her parents were going to make the difference between that sweater tied around her shoulders and some flimsy maternity T-shirt with an arrow pointing down at her belly at age sixteen. Maybe if he gave her to some nice cookies-and-milk woman and suit-and-tie man she’d wind up sleeping in a canopy bed in one of those mock Tudor houses that clean people with new money seemed to like so much.

Or maybe he could just make something of himself, and so make something of her. He wasn’t sure how to do that. “Not college material,” the counselor had said in high school, looking at his shop courses and his address. But Craig Foster had managed to edge into the middle of Mount Mason society with his auto body shop, managed to mingle at the Elks club with the plumbing contractors and the restaurant owners. Maybe Skip could do something like that, try working his way up in some business in which he could work with his hands. He’d become one of those people who could take his daughter on vacations, not to Europe the way the lawyers and doctors did, but at least to Florida somewhere. He could just imagine showing up at his father’s new place, in a polo shirt and pressed slacks, handing his old man a business card: “Cuddy Sheetrocking” or “Cuddy Painting Contractors.” He’d show off his little girl, talk about their new ranch house a couple of miles out of town: “Wall-to-wall carpeting all through the house, and a spa on the patio,” he’d say. He’d always had a little bit of contempt for those kinds of guys, all clean clothes and briefcases and high blood pressure, ruddy and smelling of lemon aftershave. But he’d join their ranks if it would buy a sleepover for Faith in one of their daughters’ pink gingham rooms.

At least she had a cradle now, a carved cherry cradle on shallow rockers that Mrs. Blessing had told him to come and take from a musty back bedroom in the big house. He had tickled himself with the thought of tying a string to his toe and looping its other end around the ornamental curves at the head of the little bed so that in the nighttime he could rock her without getting up. But
she was such a good baby now, so orderly and cooperative in her habits, that the idea was more of a cartoon construct than anything he needed to consider. He felt stupid sometimes, how he liked to watch her, how he still flinched when she popped herself in the nose with her spastic fist, how her face went real still and her mouth opened as she watched the sunlight shoot down onto the floor next to her blanket, how she would smile like a spasm and it would go straight to his heart. He’d watched some doctor on his little TV and seen him make babies, little babies, just as small as Faith was, imitate the things he did, and though they were stupid things Skip did them every day, pushing out his tongue slowly, watching her do the same, over and over. He figured when she was six months old he would start to read books to her, and when she started to stand he would get her shoes. Shoes were a problem, too, though, like sleeping positions; some books said that they provided support for the feet, others that they were unnecessary and maybe uncomfortable. He’d have to think about that one a little more.

When she went down at nine, woke at two, slept until seven, sucked down a bottle, and went down again for two hours more, he could convince himself that the future might be that regular. First grade, junior high, a life with a place for everything and everything in its place. When she stayed up half the night and threw up all down the back of his only remaining clean T-shirt, he didn’t know if he was going to make it, and he figured it must somehow be his fault. He’d always been a pretty tidy guy, for a guy, but the apartment had clothes and towels and cans and bottles all over the tables and counters, and just when he thought he was getting it cleaned up a diaper would explode out the sides and into the legs of one of those little suits with the snaps that he’d bought, and there’d be dirty sheets and shirts tied up in a case by the kitchen window to isolate the odor.

“Charles,” Mrs. Blessing had called one evening. “Where are you taking those things?”

“I’ve got to go to the Laundromat,” he said. “The monitor is on and she’s asleep.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Blessing said with a frown. “There’s a perfectly
good washing machine in the basement. Just use the basement door.”

He tried to look into Faith’s eyes at times when all the things she needed seemed too much for one man, to fasten on her face and not just the endless tasks she seemed to generate. “Teaching you to ride a two-wheeler is going to be so cool,” he said once. He thought about when he had learned. He had been nine years old and his friends found out he didn’t know how to ride a bike. Chris had taught him to ride. Chris had run beside him, his arms shaking with the weight of the bike and Skip on it. It hadn’t been easy to teach him, but Chris had kept at it all one weekend, and by Sunday afternoon he’d finally learned.

“I learned to ride a bike,” he said that night to his father, who was watching football on TV.

“That’s good.” It didn’t seem to occur to his dad that he was about four years late on the learning. But the next weekend his father brought home a pretty nice secondhand bike he’d gotten from a guy who sold things out of his garage. “You know, I never did learn to ride one of these things myself,” his father said, watching Skip make jerky circles in the driveway.

“I’ll teach you to swim in the pond,” Skip said to Faith. “And to fish.” She hooted in reply, arched her back, shuddered, then hooted again.

“Talk to your baby whenever the spirit moves you!” the book said. “He understands more than you can imagine.”

“Faith,” he said each night when he put her to bed, “you’re safe.” Sometimes he really believed this was true. He did a lot of the outside jobs at Blessings in the evenings now, after Nadine was gone, and he could take the baby with him while he vacuumed the pool, filled the bird feeders, cleaned the boathouse. She would lie on a blanket twisting her head from side to side, watching the play of light on the surface of a window, the pond, the slowly darkening edge of the western sky. Sometimes Mrs. Blessing would sit in one of the white wooden rockers on the front porch and he would leave Faith on a blanket on the lawn just past the walk, lying among the small umbrellas of pachysandra. “This child is going
to roll over sooner than you think,” Mrs. Blessing said once, and “Those nails are badly in need of a cutting,” and “She has especially long fingers.” But mostly she rocked and watched and looked sideways over the pond while he worked.

He looked at the old woman and the big house and the spreading pachysandra and the roses growing along the terrace and he thought that maybe it would all work out, that the little girl could grow up here. When the breeze was soft and the fish flipped in the air over the pond and dove back down into the green water again and Mrs. Blessing’s tight disapproving mouth relaxed into something like a smile, he could convince himself that somehow no one would notice that, instead of a mother and a father and a birth certificate, this particular child had this young guy and this old woman and a cardboard box and a barrette that had once clamped her cord. As Mrs. Blessing said, who cared about one baby?

“Faith, you have a good deal,” he’d whispered on one of those nights.

But that night when he heard Joe outside his window, calling, “Yo, dude—dude!” he knew that any little girl of his in this town would have a hard road to hoe, even if he found a way to explain her to people.

“Yo,” Joe yelled, “yo,” and Skip went downstairs because he couldn’t let Joe come up with Faith slumped in the baby swing, listening to its tinny workings picking out the
Sesame Street
theme song while she tried to get her thumb into her mouth. Joe smelled like turpentine and tobacco.

“You painting again?” Skip said.

“Yo, man, you need a phone for emergencies.”

“What’s the emergency?”

A light went on in the back of the big house in what Skip thought was Mrs. Blessing’s bathroom. She’d managed to come around about the baby, but he didn’t think Joe was the sort she’d want visiting the place. For that matter, Skip didn’t want him there either. “Come in the garage,” he whispered. “What’s up?”

“You got a beer upstairs?”

“You drove all the way out here to get a beer?”

“What kind of way is that to talk, man? You think I’m a moron, I’d drive all the way over here for a beer?”

Skip sighed. Talking to Joe was like driving a tractor through mud. He remembered when he was living in the trailer, how Joe had a big sign on one side of the steps that said
BE WARE OF DOG.
He remembered pointing at it, saying, “You want someone to be ware? What’s that, ware?” He’d laughed. “It’s not two words, man,” he’d said, but Joe’s eyes had stayed blank, not getting the joke. “I don’t get you,” Joe had said.

“Joe, just tell me what’s up,” Skip said softly in the big bay of the garage, his words echoing faintly. “What’s going on? You need help with something?”

“No, man, it’s Chris, all right? Chris busted up his motorcycle bad. I tried to call you this morning but I forgot your old number didn’t work anymore and I woke up your aunt. She was pissed, man. She said to tell you to get your stuff out of her garage. She’s still really mean, you know? Like she hasn’t mellowed at all.”

Skip grabbed Joe’s arm to get him back on track. “Is Chris okay?”

“It looked really bad, man. He almost coded on the table.” Joe watched a lot of hospital emergency room shows. He’d wanted to be an EMT but he’d had a felony conviction for a B and E when he was eighteen, and that took care of running the cherry lights on an ambulance. Another reason why Skip hadn’t given him up on the Quik-Stop deal.

“But he’s gonna make it?”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe permanent damage in one leg, man. He broke a lot of shit. A lot of shit. But the thing is, he really wants to see you. I think he saw the white light last night.” Joe watched a lot of shows about miracles and mysteries, too. He was always peering at people in the mall to see if they looked like anyone on
America’s Most Wanted.
“He really needs to make things right with you.”

“Things are right with me,” Skip said. Things are right with me, he thought. I never see Chris anymore. That’s exactly right.

“Dude.” Joe gripped his arm. “Go see him. Go tomorrow.”

He went. He put the baby to bed early, at eight, which gave him an hour to drive over before visiting hours ended at nine. Mrs. Blessing turned on the baby monitor and placed it by the chair in the library, and Skip left a bottle in the kitchen refrigerator just in case. He’d wound the mobile before he came downstairs, but the tune was starting to slow already. “She won’t wake up,” he said as Mrs. Blessing cocked her head. “I’ll be back soon.” Not much time to visit, which was fine with him. There was a picture of Mrs. Blessing’s father in the lobby of the hospital. He looked like an actor in a period film, a high stiff collar, a mustache, and a level look from beneath a thatch of thick light hair. He was holding a shovel the way a man does who has never used one. “Time flies,” Mrs. Blessing had said he’d had carved on those benches out by the apple trees. When he’d given them ten thousand dollars in 1925, the Mount Mason infirmary had been in an old colonial house. Then it had become the Mount Mason Hospital in a collection of sullen brick buildings with too-small windows, and now it was the Mount Mason Medical Center, and looked like an airport for a smallish town. The lobby was called the Blessing Lobby in the hope that a testamentary bequest would follow the compliment. Skip would bet money against that one.

You just couldn’t get away no matter how hard you tried, he thought when he walked into Chris’s room. There was Ed, and Ed’s little brother Sam, and Joe, and Debbie wearing her waitress uniform, going right from the hospital to McGuire’s. Actually they were probably all going straight from the hospital to McGuire’s. There was Shelly, at least twenty pounds heavier, in stretch exercise shorts and a big T-shirt that wasn’t improving things one bit, holding a bald baby dressed in a diaper and a shirt that said “Little Dear” with a picture of a fawn on it. And there was Chris’s mom in a slippery white polyester tunic, smelling of bleach and beer, sobbing into the shoulder of his shirt as she hurled herself at his chest: “…  could have been killed … stand to lose him … happy you’re here … my baby … my baby.” Skip patted her lightly on the back, the way he burped Faith.

“What’s up?” Chris whispered, squinting at him through blackened eyes.

Skip was shamed by his first thought: that if Chris had taken it a step further and bought the farm, Spencer’s Funeral Home would have had a tough time making him look presentable for his mother. He had two cuts on his face closed with stitches, long train tracks along his forehead and one cheek. Both eyes had gone black and he had big fish lips. His leg was in a cast. Skip felt weary, looking at him.

“This is why they passed helmet laws, man,” he said.

Chris nodded and looked at him. “Everybody wait in the hall,” he said. “I got business with Skipper.”

“I have to leave soon, honey,” Chris’s mom said. “I got late shift at the nursing home.”

“Go to work, Ma. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bring me some glazed doughnuts, okay, and some decent coffee from that place on Main Street. The rest of you I’ll see tomorrow, whatever. Sit down, Skip. Man, I haven’t seen you in a couple weeks. Ed says you hired his old man to put a roof on the old lady’s barn.”

Skip could hear everybody talking out in the hall. Chris’s mom was sobbing, saying something about glazed doughnuts.

Skip nodded. “It’s a strange roof, kind of like an upside-down boat or something. He said you can’t work it with a scaffold, only ladders.”

“I’ve seen it,” Chris said. “I had to deliver chicken wire up there one day, before I got fired at the hardware store. That’s some sweet piece of land.”

“So,” Skip said.

“So,” Chris said, his fingers drumming on the top sheet. “I got such a jones for a cigarette I’m going mental.”

“Don’t look at me.”