Dicey's Song (24 page)

The woman said they cost fourteen dollars. Dicey had eighteen dollars of her own money, back in the motel room. She wanted those gloves, and they were practical too. She wanted them for Gram's hands when her fingers turned white with cold. She wanted to give something to Gram, not at Christmas but right away.

Somehow, carrying the bag holding the box with Gram's gloves, Dicey felt a little better. She began to think about the little kids and what they might like getting. When she saw a secondhand bookstore, she went in. James always liked books. If she could find something old and thick. Old books didn't cost as much as new books.

The air in the store was dusty and warm. A young man sat by a cash register at the front, his feet looped into the bars of a tall stool. He was wearing scuffed boots, and seeing them reminded Dicey of her own cold feet. She stamped on the floor and peered into the room. Rows and rows of bookcases made alleyways down the long room. The young man was reading. Dicey started down one row.

Paperbacks, regular hardbound books, fancy leather ones, one after the other, like stalks of corn in a field: how was she supposed to know what James would like? She had never heard of any of these stories, or any of these writers. She bet even James hadn't.

Dicey reached up and pulled down one book. She chose it because it was bound in red leather. When she looked inside, it was in a language she'd never seen before. Not English. She put it quickly back and moved on.

She would go up and down every row, she decided, and maybe something would catch her eye and if it did maybe she would buy it. But she wanted to be sure it was something James would like. It was warm and quiet in the store; nobody paid any attention to her. It was like Momma's hospital in a way, with the books lined up like patients. You didn't know what was inside them.

Dicey wondered if James knew how very many books there were in the world. She guessed maybe he did. Every now and then she pulled one down to just look at it. The only book that she could recognize as interesting was a big book of songs, with piano music. She studied that for a long time, turning the pages and looking at the pictures. She had heard of about half the songs. Some of the others had words she liked. But James wouldn't want a song book. She slipped it back into place, sighed, and went on down another aisle.

She was partway down the last aisle when she had a sudden idea. In the toy store, there were planes you shot from catapults with elastics. The planes had broad white wings and shiny red fuselages. She could see Sammy playing with one of those, out front by the paper mulberry, making the plane soar and swoop. She grabbed the bag that held Gram's gloves and hurried outside again. She hurried so fast she almost stepped into a puddle of ice-frosted water at the curb.

In the toy store, children and their mothers were crowding around the shelves. It was a tiny store, bright with the colors of the paints and bright with the music of Christmas carols. Most of the people in it were young. They talked and quarreled, they laughed when they found something they liked. Some of the women had long lists they would take out and study.

Dicey went back to where she had seen the planes on display. They were plastic, but not the same kind of light plastic as the chess game. If there was such a thing as fancy plastic, that was what these planes were. She picked one up and felt its balance in her hand. It had long tapering wings; probably so that it could sail out farther. She looked at the way the catapult worked, and that, too, seemed strong. Then she looked at the prices.

The littlest plane cost five dollars, the middle size cost ten, the large one cost fifteen. Fifteen dollars for a toy — you'd have to be pretty rich to be able to spend that much money on a toy. But in comparison, the littlest plane looked too small, meager. Dicey took the middle size.

The girl behind the counter gave her only one, harried, glance before she filled out the receipt and put the plane and catapult into a box. She put in a big elastic too, and took Dicey's money.

“What if the elastic breaks?” Dicey asked.

“It won't.”

“How do you know?” Dicey asked.

Instead of getting angry, the girl smiled. She took the top off the box and put in two more elastics. She put the top back on and answered, “Because I have one myself, at home.”

“Oh,” Dicey said. “Thank you,” she said.

“It'll last,” the girl assured her.

Dicey nodded. After the warmth in there, maybe because they sold toys, the street seemed even dingier and colder. Dicey went down past the wood store again, and then back to the bookstore. There she bought the big songbook for Maybeth. She knew what James would say, that Maybeth couldn't read it. “So what?” Dicey answered inside her head. “She can read the music, and besides, I thought you said her reading was improving, and I bet she can, anyway.” The book cost nine dollars, and Dicey was surely surprised by that, because, after all, it was old. But it was what she wanted to give Maybeth. It was what she was sure Maybeth would like.

Dicey felt as if she was a million miles away from the hospital. And that felt better.

The next store she went into was the wood store again. A man with a beard was reading a magazine behind a glass-topped counter. Dicey went right up and asked him, “Do you have chess games made out of wood?”

She was finished with her question before he had finished lifting his face to look at her. He pushed his glasses up on top of his head. All he did was nod, yes.

Dicey was about to ask him how much they cost when he stood up straight and moved slowly to the opposite side of the store. He took down a box and opened it.

The top of the box slid back, in grooves. The box was roughly made. It hadn't been sanded smooth, or waxed. The chess pieces lay jumbled together inside. Dicey picked a couple out and looked at them. They weren't fancy, but they felt warm in her hand. Some were stained black, some were left a plain, pale white. A lot of them were little round-topped figures, just the right size to hold between your fingers. Some had been carved into rough statuettes. Dicey thought she recognized a tower for a castle and two tall figures, one a man, one a woman. He named them the king and queen; he named knights and bishops, pawns, rooks. The details weren't carefully cut, but you couldn't confuse the pieces. “I get these from Mexico,” he explained.

“Are there any made here?” Dicey asked.

He tapped his finger on the top of the counter, pointing her attention below. There, a set of wooden chess pieces was arranged for play on a wooden board. These pieces had been carved, but not stained. One of the woods was a rich brown color, like tea. The other was a pale, shining gold. Dicey could see the points on the queen's crown and the flowered embroidery along the foot of her robe. The knights rode rearing horses, and on their shields Dicey could see dragons with long twisting tails.

“It's beautiful,” she said, crouching down to see closer.

“Thank you,” he answered, and she knew he had made it himself.

“How much is it?” she asked.

“Six hundred.”

Dicey looked up, then asked how much the Mexican set was. “Fifteen,” he told her.

She told him she'd take one, and said she wished she could buy the beautiful set.

“I'm not sure I want to sell it,” he told her.

“You could make another,” Dicey told him. “Couldn't you?” she asked.

“Of course, but each time — the wood is different. Look,” he said. He pulled over a rack on which hung a dozen bracelets, each made out of a circle of wood. The man was right, each bracelet was entirely different, even though they were all exactly the same. On some of them the grain of the wood made designs that looked almost like carvings. Some of the woods were light and shone as if from inside; some glowed golden, as if late afternoon sunlight was shining on them; and some were dark and had a gleam like a field freshly turned over for planting. She reached out to touch them.

There was one she especially liked, a ring of golden wood with a dark grain. “Oak,” he told her, before she asked. He took it off the rack and handed it to her.

Dicey held it in her fingers, feeling how smooth it was and studying the deep glow in the wood. She wondered if anyone ever made boats out of such wood as this.

“It's four dollars,” he said. “Try it on.”

“Oh, it's not for me,” Dicey told him. She was thinking of Maybeth, and she didn't know why because she had already bought a present for Maybeth. But the wood seemed so beautiful to her that she knew Maybeth would like it. Then she recognized the similarity: the wood had the colors of Momma's hair. And if she was going to spend fifteen dollars on James, she should spend that much on Maybeth too, because that was fair. And she could feel how Maybeth would like the bracelet and would always keep it. She decided to buy it.

While he added up her bill, Dicey looked around the shop. He made boxes in all sizes, the way he made bracelets. They were simple boxes with lids that fit down over the tops. But all of them had been constructed out of a variety of woods, and the woods seemed to fit together as the pieces of a patchwork quilt do. The different woods talked together, Dicey thought, looking at them; only it was more like singing in harmony than conversation. The man also made little figures of raccoons and birds, rabbits and — something that had to be a chicken pecking at the ground for food.

“Wait,” Dicey said, crouching down again. He came slowly back towards her. “Is that a chicken?”

He looked where she was looking. He took a maddeningly long time doing anything, answering any questions, Dicey thought. “Do you want to hold it?” Dicey nodded.

Dicey held the little carving in her hand. It made her smile, the busyness of that chicken, determined to eat and eat and do nothing else. The chicken looked cross, its feathers ruffled and fluffed out. It wouldn't be easy to live with that chicken.

He watched her studying it. “I meant to carve a jay,” he said slowly, “but that piece of wood just wanted to be a chicken.”

“I think,” Dicey said, “that's the way with chickens.”

“It's four dollars too,” he said. “Do you want it?”

“Yes,” Dicey said quickly, thinking of Sammy and how he would laugh. The man turned the carving over and pulled off a price tag. Dicey thought the price tag said something with two numbers, and she looked at his face. He was rolling the tiny square of paper in his hand. He knew she'd seen.

“You liked it, you saw right away what it is,” he told her.

“My little brother keeps pestering us to get him some chickens,” Dicey explained.

“Ah, then you don't live around here. In the city.”

“No, in Maryland.”

“Maryland? What are you doing up here?”

Dicey stared at him. “My momma's in the hospital,” she said shortly.

“And you're doing some Christmas shopping while your father visits her.”

“It's my grandmother,” Dicey told him. She didn't have to tell him anything, and she didn't really want to. But it was so hard to say — she was talking about as slowly as he did. If it was so hard to say she thought she ought to say it. Because not saying it wasn't going to change anything.

“Everything going to be all right?” he inquired. He didn't ask to be nosy, but to tell her he sympathized with her. Dicey heard that in his voice.

“No,” she answered, her throat tight and the pieces of her heart squeezing again.

He put down his sales pad and lay his pencil beside it. He folded his fingers together, and Dicey could see how they were covered with cuts. Old cuts and new ones. “I'm sorry to hear that,” he said slowly. Dicey nodded and blinked her eyelids, fast. “I'm sorry the world is the way it is and always has been. It's not easy, is it?”

“How could it be?” Dicey snapped.

“I can imagine how it could. Can't you?” he asked her seriously.

And Dicey could, but it wasn't true, so that didn't make any difference.

“I tell myself,” he said, “that it's like the wood. Sometimes, things just have to happen, it just has to be the way it turns out. Are you old enough to have something you tell yourself?”

That surprised Dicey. She swallowed, remembered, and nodded her head. “I saw a tombstone, once. It had — Home is the hunter, home from the hill, and the sailor home from the sea.”

He studied her face for a long time, and then didn't say any more, as if she had answered his question and he didn't have anything else to ask. Dicey didn't wonder about this, as she paid her bill and took the bag into her hand. She had just made up her mind about something.

Momma was going to come home with them. No matter what, she wouldn't leave Momma up here.

Dicey dropped the packages off at the motel and ate a quick supper in the coffee shop. Then she went back to the hospital. She didn't ask anybody permission, she just got right on the elevator and rode up to the fourth floor. She went right through the big doors and down the aisle to where Momma lay.

Gram sat in the same chair, holding onto the same hand. She was talking softly, but she stopped when Dicey stood at the foot of the bed.