Fixing Delilah (6 page)

I look at the card in the immediate future position: the Fool, a young boy playing the flute with his eyes closed, happily dancing toward the edge of a cliff.
Tra-la-la!

“No?” I ask.

“No. I want you to pay particular attention to this outcome card,” Rachel says, pointing to the page, “especially considering the Five of Cups in the crossing position. She’s the spilled-milk card, whereas the Page of Cups signifies a time of emotional rebirth. With the Five here speaking to a loss, maybe the ending of a relationship, the Page is saying that it’s okay to trust again. Don’t shut yourself off to new possibilities. But be mindful of the Fool, and don’t dive into anything with your eyes closed. Does any of this strike a chord?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, glancing over the spread. “Is it about… well… being back in Vermont? Family stuff?”

Mom leans in for a closer look, but Rachel shakes her head. “I don’t think so. Usually in a family spread for you, we’d see more of the mother cards, like queens or the Empress. This one’s probably about friendships. It could be about your friends at school, or new friends you might meet here in Red Falls. Could also be about your relationship with yourself. That’s for you to figure out.”

I look back over the cards again, accidentally thinking of Patrick. Is he the artistic dreamer? Is the Page of Cups heralding a passionate…
no
. Another non on the non-boyfriend list is the last thing I need. The only card that rings true here is the Fool, because that’s what I am for even
considering
this stuff right now, stuck out here in the middle of maple sugarville with all these secrets and a broken family that can scarcely go an hour without fighting.

Rachel puts the cards back together and shuffles the deck. “Now, let’s see what the universe is trying to tell your mom.”

Her first card is a woman, tied up, blindfolded, and surrounded by swords. “In your case,” Rachel says, “the Eight of Swords likely refers to the burdens of a successful career.”

“I don’t feel burdened,” Mom says, her fingers tracing the delicate gold links of her watchband. “I love my career. Things at DKI are great. I’ve worked for this kind of opportunity my whole life, and now I have it.”

“Like I told Delilah, everything is open to your interpretation. See—this next one looks scarier than it is.” The card depicts a woman being ferried across the water in a small wooden boat. Like the woman in Mom’s first card, she’s surrounded by a cage of swords. “They’re in rough water,” Rachel says, “but it smoothes out ahead. The swords don’t completely surround her, either. This could be about forgiveness, or facing and overcoming a difficult situation.”

“Interesting.” Mom picks up the card, looking at it with squinted eyes.

“Definitely something to think about while we’re here,” Rachel says. She describes a few more cards, mostly about career and hard work and material comforts, and turns over Mom’s final outcome.

“Ah,” she says, her fingers trailing over the image of two children standing on a path in the sunlight, sharing large cups of flowers. “I was wondering when this would turn up.”

“What is it?” Mom asks.

“Six of Cups. Funny that it appeared as your final outcome. The Six of Cups has to do with childhood memories,” Rachel says. “It’s the nostalgia card.”

Mom looks at her sister, then the cards, then at me. She runs her hand along my ponytail and stands, crossing out of the room and down the hall, her bedroom door clicking closed behind her. Rachel silently reassembles the deck of cards and slides them back into their velvet drawstring bag, folding the stars-and-moon cloth into a small, perfect triangle, leaving me alone with the Hellmann’s jar formerly known as Little Ollie.

Everything is open to your interpretation.

Chapter eight

After last night’s crystal-balling, the voices that float up the stairwell this morning seem exaggerated and unreal, my mind still stuck halfway in a nightmare in which a pack of mythical, two-dimensional characters imprisoned on laminated cards comes alive, rising up from the lake to warn me against impending doom.

But the voices remain sure and solid, growing louder as I open my eyes and stretch away the lingering sleep. Warm air blows in through the open window over the bed. My stomach grumbles.

Downstairs, Megan the Baker, along with an older woman and a girl about my age, are assembled around the table with Mom and Rachel, all of them picking from a plate of cut fruit and the pastries we got yesterday at Crasner’s.

“Delilah,” Rachel calls, waving me over. “Come meet the rest of Megan’s family. This is Luna, her mother. She owns the coffee shop we saw in town.”

“I remember when you were just a little thing,” Luna says, standing for a hug. “Hard to believe you’re the same age as my niece.”

“Hey,” the girl says. “I’m Emily.”
Patrick’s Emily.
She smiles at me from behind a curtain of shoulder-length brown hair, big blue eyes warm and genuine. “I’m working at the café all summer. You should check it out—way better than all the corporate stuff at the other end of town.”

“Definitely.” I sit next to her and grab a maple walnut muffin from the plate. She smiles again and I let my shoulders relax, just a little. Maybe the summer won’t be so horrible after all.

After Emily tells me more about the coffee shop and her time so far in Red Falls, Luna and Megan catch us up on eight years of missed news. No one seems to hold a grudge or question Mom and Rachel about why we left, though the conversation is dotted with the awkward pauses of those who aren’t quite sure. Those who want to ask but can’t find the words. Those who know part of the story but need the rest of the pieces to put it all together.

“We’re glad you’re here again,” Luna says to Mom as Rachel puts on another pot of coffee. “I’m just sorry it’s not under happier circumstances.”

Mom covers Luna’s hand with her own and thanks them for coming, but I can see behind her smile that she’s anxious to start work on the house. To map out plans for the rest of the summer—plans that probably don’t include entertaining guests from our past. But with no sign of moving toward the door, Luna accepts another cup of coffee and Megan refills the pastry plate from the bakery box on the counter, everyone jumping back into the conversation as if we have only today to make up for all the missing years.

We’re halfway through the second pot of coffee when the first car rolls into the driveway, followed by another, then another. Emily and I step outside to see who’s here, and from a row of boat-size Buicks, a parade of white-haired women bearing foil-covered trays marches in a crooked line to the porch, introducing themselves as friends of Elizabeth’s.

“We are so sorry for your loss, sweat pea,” they say, lowering their eyes and moving toward the screen door as if called to the house by the spirits within, ghosts old and new branding us a family in mourning.

One in need of many pounds of coffee cake.

Elizabeth Hannaford knew a lot of people. And those people sure love coffee cake. And they sure love talking. Rachel keeps their coffee and tea cups full as they share stories about my grandmother’s famous potato salad and her volunteer work at the hospital and, oh my, look how big Delilah is, and it’s wonderful to see you all again after so many years, but we sure are sorry it’s for Elizabeth’s funeral. They ask about plans for the service and if there’s anything we need, and all of the outside parts of my mother seem to be smiling, seem to lean forward in her chair and welcome their kindness. But beneath it all, Claire Hannaford Speaking struggles to climb out and get to work. When she ducks into the living room and pulls the tin of pills from her purse, I offer to tell everyone that she has a headache so she can retreat to her room.

“Thanks, Del. Unfortunately, there’s no time to lie down on the job today. The neighbors are coming later to discuss plans for the remodel. Rachel’s cooking and I need to get some supplies ready before they get here. You remember Jack and Little Ricky, right?”

The side door on the porch opens and closes a thousand times today, groups of visitors rotating in and out from morning until late in the afternoon, clearing out only as the dinner hour approaches. Finally, I see the shapes of Patrick and his father walking toward the house from the sidewalk, and when I hear their footsteps on the creaky porch step, I rush to meet them. Patrick leans in for a hug through the open doorway, and in his arms I’m reminded of the
other
dream I had last night, which… oh… which I immediately stamp out of my mind, hoping that no one else noticed the temperature in the room shoot up about five hundred degrees. Could my subconscious
be
any more inappropriate?

“We ran into each other at the lake yesterday,” Patrick says, answering the question on Mom’s face. “We’re old friends again. All caught up. How’s your head?” he asks me.

My hand rubs the spot where I whacked it under the bleachers yesterday. “No bump. Guess I’ll live.”

Rachel smirks at me over her mug, but I ignore her, shaking off the lingering smoke of my dream. I know what she’s thinking about—that “passionate dreamer” stuff is all over her face. Yes, there goes my favorite aunt, destiny-mongering around New England with her merry band of tarot characters.

Jack, Patrick’s father, stands in the doorway with open arms. “Delilah! My God, you’re beautiful. All grown-up.”

“I remember
you
.” I smile up at him, standing on tiptoes to reach him, the reunion of his arms like a warm blanket. Jack wants to know all about the last eight years, asking me about Key and school and future plans, but Mom clears her throat like she’s got a bit of food stuck, standing behind me with an armload of notebooks, pencils, and sticky notes. We have never in my life run out of office supplies. If our house got blown down by a freak storm, I’m confident we could build a fortress out of mail sorters and thumbtacks with hanging folders for shingles and survive just fine, and here she is again, ready to avert another potential disaster with the click of her Bic.

“Thanks for coming,” Mom says, all of us now at attention around the table as Rachel dishes out her baked squash casserole and spinach salad. “Just so we all know what we’re dealing with, the plan is for Patrick and Jack to help us prep the house for a listing. Since they’ve worked here before, they know the major obstacles and how each of us can best help.”

Jack gives us an update on the work-in-progress in the sunroom. “I think we already have the materials, so that shouldn’t be an issue. That’s the only room that needed a major overhaul,” he says. “We’ll have to see what the exterior looks like. Might need to get some painters out here.”

Mom makes a few notes as the rest of us eat, mumbling to herself about materials and painting estimates as her food goes cold. “Rachel and I will tackle the internal property and decide what to trash, donate, or tag for the estate sale,” she says. “And Delilah will help wherever we need her. I’m hoping to have it on the market no later than early August so we can feel out the interest level before we leave. We may sell it furnished, but we’ll probably need at least three estate sales to clear out the rest of the junk.”

I think of all the stuff upstairs and wonder where it will end up—the fabric and thread and patterns, and from the closet, the coats and shoes Nana walked around in for all the winters of her life. Images of Mom’s bedroom back in Key flit in front of me like gnats. I swat and blink them away.

“I’m going to do as much as I can,” Mom tells Jack, “but as my sister and Delilah know, I’m somewhat chained to my desk. For major decisions or issues, check with me or Rachel. Otherwise, I trust your judgment. You’ve been doing this a lot longer than we have.”

Jack nods.

“No problem, Miss H,” Patrick says.

“Are we all on the same page, Delilah?”

The same page?
I don’t think we’re even in the same
library
, but no need to bring that up. I nod.

“Great,” she says. “Starting tomorrow, I think it would be helpful for you to follow Patrick around with a notebook to assess the exterior. Whatever he tells you to write, you write. I need you to stay close to the house—got it?”

“Sure, Mom.” There are worse punishments than tailing Patrick all summer. Don’t contractors usually work without shirts?

“Okay, then.” Mom claps her hands together once—her version of
Go, team!
“Any questions?” Apparently, her annual bonus depends on our ability to complete this mission on time and under budget.

“No,” Jack says. “But Claire—and Rachel and Delilah, too—I just want to say again how sorry I am about Liz.” He pushes a casserole mushroom around his plate. “She was—”

“Thanks, Jack. We appreciate all you’ve done for her.” Mom’s gentle nod sugarcoats her interruption, but she’s got the face. The
You’re Skating on Thin Ice, Delilah
face. Only this time, it’s meant for someone dead.

Jack nods and pops the mushroom into his mouth, eyes fixed on the now-empty plate before him as if he can’t remember how it got that way.

“All right,” Rachel says, clearing the dishes. “Who’s ready for some coffee cake?”

Chapter nine

“We’ll start here and work our way around,” Patrick says, propping a ladder against the back of the house. “The gutters are probably the worst of it—they look pretty nasty.”

I stand near the ladder as he climbs, pencil poised to catch his running commentary. It’s manual labor, but I’m glad to be out in the sun, away from the kitchen and day two of the seemingly endless paying of condolences by the coffee-cake bakers of Red Falls.

“Sorry about last night,” I say, squinting into the sun to see him. “I mean, my mother. She gets a little demanding sometimes. Well,
most
times.”

Patrick pokes around the gutters, dropping a pile of leaves behind him. “No biggie. My dad has his moments, too. Write this down—back gutters stable. Need cleaning.”

I scribble down what he says. “Parents, right?”

“Tell me about it. So what would you be doing all summer if you didn’t have the honor of inspecting gutters with me?”

“Oh, you know. Typical summer stuff,” I say, avoiding all the taboo topics: Finn. Cell phone pictures. Seven Mile Creek. Google-stalking my father. I kick at the dirt with my flip-flop but don’t get much traction and stub my toe on a rock instead.

“Such as?” Patrick asks, still poking around the muck of the gutter.

“Movies. Hanging out. Reading. Whatever. Not much going on in Pennsylvania.”

“Yes, but in Pennsylvania, you’ve got a friend.”

“Huh?”

“The slogan—you know?” Patrick puts his hand on his heart and sings, straight out of the old tourism commercials. “You’ve got a friend, in Penn-syl-van-ia!”

“What about Vermont?”

“It’s ‘Vermont, naturally.’ No song, though.”

“Naturally.” I laugh.

“Hey, I didn’t say it was good,
friend
. Look out,” he says, dropping his shirt from high up on the ladder. “It’s hot as hell up here.”

He moves down a rung to check the second-floor windows, the muscles in his tanned shoulders and arms tightening as he grabs the sides of the ladder. I watch the way his bare back twists as his hands move along the wood frames searching for flaws and fractures. I’m just spotting him, of course, in case he slips. I need to assess his approximate weight so I can best position myself to catch him if he falls, so he’ll land on top of me and…

I force my eyes back to the notebook. “Find anything?” I ask, head down.

“Windows in good shape. Glass solid. Looks fairly new. Write that down.”

“Good. Solid. New. Got it. What about you? What do you do when you’re not fixing stuff or breaking hearts onstage?”

“Write this,” he says. “Exterior and shutters need work. Get estimates for paint or siding.”

“Got it. So?”

“Breaking hearts? Not exactly. I do what everyone around here does,” he says, climbing down to grab his Nalgene bottle. “Swim. Hike. Water stuff. Kayaking on the lake is fun—I’ll take you sometime.”

I close my notebook, my eyes involuntarily tracking the tiny rivulet of water trailing down his chin… his neck… his collarbone…

He steps closer and offers me the water bottle. “You’d like it, I think.”

“Water?”

“Kayaking.” He’s right near me now, officially past my “just friends” space, smiling with his amber-honey eyes and those dimples, and I’m so hot standing out here on the hot grass in the hot sun next to the hot house…

“Patrick?”
Jack.
Patrick takes a step back, still smiling as I grab the water bottle from his outstretched hand.

“Man, it’s funny to see you two like this,” Jack says, a grin plastered all the way across his broad, tanned face. “You were inseparable as kids. Even after all day playing, you wouldn’t leave each other’s houses. Half the time we’d let you sleep over just to avoid the fight.”

“Um, Dad?” Patrick shades his eyes from the sun and looks at his father. “Did you need something?”

“I gotta make another hardware store run. Those nails I got aren’t the right size—wood’s thicker’n I thought.”

Patrick hands over the keys from his pocket and smirks. “You know it wouldn’t kill you to walk, right, old man?”

“Maybe not. Wouldn’t kill you to keep your clothes on, either.” Jack’s still laughing as he heads next door toward the green-and-white Reese & Son Contracting truck.

I look to Patrick’s reddened face. “It’s nice to know my mother doesn’t have a monopoly on embarrassing her offspring.”

“Oh, you think that’s funny?” Patrick sticks his arms through the holes in his shirt and grins at me, a little bit of devil in his otherwise perfect smile. I drop my notebook and run, Patrick close behind, both of us laughing like the kids we used to be, laughing harder than I’ve laughed in months. I’m squealing and sprinting and dodging Patrick all around the house, nothing but happy and sun and warm all over me, and I feel a release, a free fall of carefree summer days with no end in sight. But on our second trip around, when we near the back corner of the house, I look up and notice them—the curved panes of the bay windows reflecting the lake, the windows Little Ricky and I used to curl up against to read when the rain kept us inside. Like a new movie starting in my head, I see a red cardinal and I stop, remembering the bird trapped in the enclosed sunroom, confused by all the windows. Papa was in his wheelchair and couldn’t do much to chase it out, so he called Jack. Ricky and I stayed close behind Mom, watching from the height of her elbows. When Jack finally coaxed the bird to the open door, it shot out and sped away toward the lake, sailing over the trees beyond. All of us cheered and clapped and retold the story a hundred million times, so happy were we that the bird could reunite with his family.

Except for Nana.

I don’t remember thinking my grandmother was miserable or bitter when I used to visit her, but those words, cruel and sad, come to me now as I remember the red cardinal. She was so flustered by it, so unimpressed that Jack set it free, so tired of hearing the story and how it made us all smile.

Papa always laughed. He taught Ricky and me how to play checkers and backgammon, told us adventure stories about his travels through Asia during the Vietnam War, and read the comics with me every Sunday over breakfast. I remember feeling
cared for
by Nana—she cooked for us, gave me a bedroom with toys and a lace canopy princess bed, sent Christmas presents, drank tea late at night with Mom and Rachel—but now that I think about it, she didn’t
smile.
Her laugh? If she had one, I don’t recall the music of it. And some days she’d go to her room after breakfast and stay there for two or three days, coming out only for the bathroom and to get the food Papa left on a tray outside the door.

Did I know she was hurting, even if I couldn’t name it? Did I feel it, like when you can tell it’s going to rain because the leaves get all shaky and silvery and your bones creak and you just
know
it’s coming? Patrick said that Nana died of a heart attack, but I wonder how much of her life she could have saved—how much of our family history could’ve been rerouted—if only she’d been happy. If only she could’ve laughed the way Papa did when I told him my made-up stories, even after the death of their youngest daughter.

And just like my recollection in the bedroom yesterday, I realize now that the shock of losing Stephanie must have done that to her. It took away her laugh. Her joy. Her ability to know happiness.

“You okay?” Patrick stops the chase, his hand on my shoulder as he catches his breath.

“I don’t know why she didn’t try to get in touch with me. I hadn’t really thought of it that way until just this second. If your only grandchild is taken away from you because of some family fight, wouldn’t you at least try to call her? Or send birthday cards or letters or something?”

“I wish I knew, Del. I have no idea.”

As my aunt sorts through her mother’s food and my mother buzzes around her desk inside, I remember the sad things about my grandmother and sit down in the grass to catch my breath with a boy with whom I’ve only just reunited. He was once my very best summer friend, and in the space between our lives, he’s grown and changed as I have—separate, away, strangers who are still connected by some weird cosmic rubber band, stretched apart for nearly a decade only to be snapped back together in this moment on Red Falls Lake.

“Hey, baby. Don’t be sad.” Patrick puts his arm around me and pulls me close to him, my mouth near the skin of his neck. I feel like I should resist, but he’s so warm and solid and real, like a memory that hasn’t yet faded—one that I visit over and over when I’m scared or alone. It’s the first time since Finn that I’ve been this close to a guy. It’s funny to smell someone different. Different soap, different shampoo, different skin. His hand brushes my ear as he moves to squeeze my shoulder, and a shiver rattles its way on through. “She’s still here with you, Delilah.”

“Do you know what happened that day?” I ask him. “I mean, after Papa’s funeral? Did your parents ever say anything about the fight after we left?”

Patrick shakes his head. “No one talked about it in front of me. I asked them when you were coming back. They said they didn’t know. My mom tried to call your mom and Rachel, but they wouldn’t tell anyone what happened, and of course your grandmother wasn’t talking about it. Eventually, my mom stopped calling. I asked about you every summer for years after. They kept telling me it was a family situation. That it wasn’t our business.”

“But your dad’s been here the whole time. He worked for her. She must have said
something
about it.”

“Nope. And when she died and I knew you’d be coming back, I asked him again. He told me that Liz never talked about it. Maybe the whole thing was all her fault. Who knows?”

I look out over Red Falls Lake below. From here, it’s just a giant blue hole, still and peaceful and immune to the constant flux of sailboats and people and babies below.

“I was thinking about the time the bird got trapped in there.” I nod toward the windows of the sunroom. “Remember?”

“Yeah. My dad built that tunnel out of sheets to get him out—I totally remember! It was a cardinal, right? I haven’t seen one in forever. Sometimes I see blue jays, but never cardinals.”

“Same.” I stand to brush the grass from my shorts.

Patrick turns his backside to me. “Get mine, too, all right?”

“That costs extra.”

“How much?” he asks.

“I’ll have to get back to you on that. My rates went up since eight years ago.”

Patrick shakes his head, looking at me in his just-a-second-too-long way. “I think you’re okay now, Hannaford,” he says. “My work here is done.”