Follow Me (20 page)

Everyone disapproved of her in Helena. The other mourners wouldn’t speak to her after the funeral service. Mole’s friends,
the ones she’d seen playing that dangerous game at the mill, wouldn’t come near her. A few days later, when she went to purchase
shampoo at the five-and-dime, the clerk pretended that she couldn’t make change for a five-dollar bill, and she advised Sally
to buy her shampoo someplace else. When she accompanied Gladdy to the Barge one night, the bartender ignored her. Mrs. Mellow
met her at the door when Sally arrived for work. She told her that she wouldn’t be needing a typist for the foreseeable future
and handed her an envelope with a month’s pay. And Gladdy, who at first made an unconvincing show of trying to comfort Sally
“in her tearful sorrow,” as Gladdy put it, made it clearer than ever that she didn’t want her around. She kept saying that
she would be packing up and moving to Florida any day now and told Sally to start looking for other accommodations.

Sally had every intention of leaving Helena, though for a long while, she couldn’t bring herself to go. Helena had been Mole’s
home, and she preferred to stay as near to his memory as possible. But she knew she had to leave. She was just so afraid of
being alone, and even Gladdy Toffit, in all her drunken indifference, seemed better company than no one at all.

On a gray Saturday morning at the end of January, she woke up, dressed, boiled water to make herself a cup of Nescafé. After
she discovered that there was no milk in the refrigerator, she decided to walk the half mile to the market at the gas station.

When she returned, she found Gladdy’s door locked. She wondered if she’d locked the door behind her. She knocked loudly, first
on the door, then on Gladdy’s bedroom window, until she noticed that the car was gone from the driveway. She waited on the
porch for an hour or more and finally went to the Barge. The tavern was closed, but she met the bartender, who had come down
from his apartment on the second floor and was sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette. She asked him if he’d seen Gladdy,
and he said she’d moved to Florida.

“Where in Florida?”

“Florida is all I know,” he said, tossing away his cigarette. He might as well have told her that it was her turn to get out
of there.

Back at Gladdy’s house, Sally smashed a pane in the back vestibule door with a stick and was able to reach in and turn the
lock. Inside the house, she became aware of the heavy feeling of abandonment and an oppressive cold. She turned up the thermostat
but didn’t hear the surge of the furnace starting up, so she went to check it in the basement and discovered that it wasn’t
firing. She tried to light it manually but couldn’t get a flame going and gave up.

Instead of packing her few belongings and leaving on the next bus out of town, Sally moved her things into Gladdy’s bedroom
and made herself at home. With the furnace out of oil, the house grew brutally cold over the course of the day, but Sally
turned on the electric oven, opened the door to spread the heat, and wrapped herself in some extra clothes Gladdy had left
behind — a thick flannel robe, flannel pajamas, wool socks.

It was her right to stay there, she told herself. She couldn’t be expected to leave without having somewhere else to go. Besides,
Gladdy was lucky to have her remain, for without the extra warmth from the oven, the pipes would have frozen and cracked,
flooding the house. There would have been a terrible mess.

A brief, unseasonable thaw the following day made the house more tolerable. Sally put on an old denim dress she found in Gladdy’s
closet, something that probably had once belonged to the daughter, and she hauled in wood from a dingy woodpile behind the
garage. She kept the fire going all evening and then relit it the next morning, comforted by the crackling as much as by the
warmth. She cooked herself meals on the stovetop, and after the electricity was shut off she made sandwiches, ate vegetables
cold from their cans, and at night read by a lantern fueled with kerosene she bought at the store.

She lived like that, alone in Gladdy’s house, for far longer than she would have thought possible. She cried often, though
only when there was no one around to hear her. In town, she put on a show of calm. People started to treat her with casual
acceptance. Somehow weeks added up to months. By the spring she began showing up at the Barge regularly in the evenings, and
she took to drinking with a newfound thirst. The booze made her chatty, and the men gathered around her as they used to gather
around Gladdy, trading jokes and competing for her laughter. She would focus on one and then another, happy for the conversation,
and sometimes she’d spend part of the evening dancing. Closing her eyes as she swayed in their embraces, she’d imagine them
each as a different version of Mole — Freddy Mole and JJ Mole and Billy Mole.

Though she liked each of them because, in different ways, they helped distract her, she never brought a man home, not for
a long while. Not until she met the fellow in the plaid suit who introduced himself to her at the Barge, with a clink of his
glass, as Bennett, but who turned out to be Benny Patterson, the famous cream-cheese prince. He was the only one she invited
back to Gladdy’s.

He’d breezed into town on a Saturday night looking for fun and had decided, after meeting Sally, to stick around for a while.
He was wide in girth and voice, the boom of his greeting filling the room, his belly filling his shirt and stretching apart
the cloth between the lower buttons. Pools of liquid gray filled the slits of his grinning eyes, and his blond curls made
a floppy halo. He was big and loud and impossible to ignore. And he used his merry mood as a charm, winning Sally over with
his teasing ways, convincing her to trust him enough to buy her a drink and then to buy her another.

“Angel!” he bellowed in echo after she’d told him her name. And while she watched him over the lip of her glass, he called
into the crowd at the Barge, “You boys, you have an angel in your midst! A real live angel! How come this ain’t national news?”
And then he said in a quieter, silkier voice, “Miss Sally Angel. Why, you’re something else.”

She was something else. Did she believe it? Not quite. But she had the sense, mistakenly or not, she couldn’t tell at first,
that there was a worshipful quality to his affection, and in this single way he seemed more like Mole than anyone else she’d
met in Helena.

But the real lure of him for Sally was in the gamble. Though he didn’t reveal much information about himself, he had an insistent
manner and implied that she had to make her choice about him quickly. He wasn’t a man who would let himself be strung along.
It was now or never. Either she followed through or she gave up the possibility of ever getting to know him any better. Without
putting any of this explicitly, he offered her an ultimatum, making the opportunity seem tantalizing and the timing urgent.

In the six months since Mole’s death, Sally had come to think of loneliness as an aspect of herself, inescapable and defining;
she really wasn’t so different from a woman who’d been widowed after fifty years of marriage. Having lost the boy she loved,
she expected to be mourning him for the rest of her life.

But here was Benny Patterson to prove that she didn’t have to stay lonely forever. Sally could almost persuade herself that
he’d been sent by Mole to deliver her from her loneliness, or at least she could hope that Mole wouldn’t mind if she tried
out an alternative ending to the story that had begun for her in Helena.

Back at Gladdy’s, in Gladdy’s own bed, Benny Patterson covered Sally so completely that she couldn’t see past him and couldn’t
raise her head to see their reflection in the mirror above the bureau. The weight of his body was in itself a comfort, and
the fragrance of his skin — cigarettes and sweat and a faint scent of glycerin combined — made him seem worldly and important.
He moved decisively, obviously confident in his knowledge of physical pleasure.

They slept through the next morning until noon. Like Sally, Benny Patterson had no place he had to be, no responsibilities
or schedules to follow; if he was telling the truth, there were foremen to oversee the workers on his family’s farm, and he
didn’t even have to show up for meals.

Sally wasn’t convinced that he was telling the truth. In fact, as she observed him over the next few days, she perceived something
furtive in his sweetness. And then over breakfast their fourth morning together, after she’d poured his coffee and spilled
some drops on his lap, he thrashed his arm in sudden rage, smacking the back of his hand hard against her chin. He was immediately
full of remorse. He was sorry, so sorry, he hadn’t meant to hit her. Would she ever forgive him? Sure, she said. How could
she blame him for something he hadn’t meant to do?

She watched him more carefully after that and noticed that he had a habit of suddenly shaking his head, as though trying to
empty it of an unwanted thought. Or maybe he was just prone to sudden bouts of irritableness, without motive or depth. She
wasn’t really sure what to think about him. But she didn’t need to trust him. In fact, she preferred not to trust him and
to enjoy his bulky body without worrying about his intentions. Just by filling so much space, he distracted her from her grief.

He stayed with Sally at Gladdy’s house for five nights altogether. The lack of electricity in the house amused him. Everything
amused him. Sally didn’t lie to herself about the potential of this romance: whatever they had going on between them didn’t
add up to much. It would be a brief chapter in both their lives. And yet it was this, the very brevity of the affair, that
made her desire something permanent to take away with her and gave an intensity to her recklessness. She’d already lost so
much in her life. But she wasn’t yet twenty-two. She felt her youthfulness more strongly than ever when she lay with Benny
Patterson. And because she was still young, she deserved a second chance.

On the sixth afternoon Benny offered to take her driving in his green Cadillac wherever she wanted to go. She carried the
purse containing all of Mason Jackson’s money, along with the few dollars she had left of the pay from Mrs. Mellow. She asked
Benny to drive to the town of Fenton, which had its own department store. It made him proud to dole out money for a beautiful
girl, and he didn’t hold back. He bought her a bottle of French perfume and a necklace of freshwater pearls, and as he was
paying the clerk he winked at Sally, communicating to her his anticipation at the thanks he expected when they returned to
Gladdy’s.

They headed over to the Woolworth’s next and ordered milk shakes at the coffee counter. While they were waiting to be served,
Sally excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. She lingered at the back of the store, watching Benny as he took out his
fancy gold-plated lighter to light his cigarette. The flame failed to rise, and he jammed his thumb on the lever repeatedly,
his upper lip curling in a sneer, his teeth gritting, his whole face bunching and turning a hot, furious red.

Sally would never know that it was Benny Patterson in his Cadillac who had forced Mole off the road. She didn’t need to know.
The image of the cream-cheese prince sitting there trying to force the flame from his lighter was enough for her to admit
to herself the truth she’d been avoiding: it was plain that he hadn’t smacked her by accident, and he would do it again. She’d
be better off without him. And even if he didn’t feel the same about her, he would feel it sooner or later. They’d be miserable
if they stayed together. And so it was a welcome coincidence when, in the ladies’ room, she looked out the window and spotted
a Northway bus drawing up to the stop beyond the store’s awning.

She made it outside just as the driver was closing the doors. She ran along the sidewalk, calling for him to wait. He opened
the doors for her, and she fumbled in her purse for money to buy a ticket to, to, to… She couldn’t think straight and couldn’t
come up with the name of any place she wanted to go. The best she could do, finally, was to spit out “Rondo,” the name of
a place that didn’t exist.

“What’s that?” the driver asked. “Rondo,” she repeated stupidly, desperate to escape before Benny Patterson realized that
she wasn’t coming back.

“Rondo it is,” said the driver, to her amazement — or that’s what she thought she heard him say. “Three dollars seventy-five
cents, please and thank you,” he added. Sally counted the money into the box. When the driver pulled the lever to shut the
doors, she felt weak enough to faint right there in the aisle, but somehow she managed to make her way to a seat.

She gazed out the window at a lanky young man pedaling on a bike, racing the bus. She wondered where the bus was taking her,
where Rondo was — the real Rondo and not the place she’d made up. She thought about Gladdy Toffit’s cold, dreary, abandoned
house in Helena. She thought about Benny Patterson waiting for her at the coffee counter. She was relieved that she’d never
see him again.

The bus went straight through the town’s last intersection while the man on the bicycle made a wide, arcing turn to the right.
Sally stared as he lifted his feet from the pedals and glided down the street, enjoying, she assumed, a sensation that was
close to flying.

As the bus picked up speed, she decided that after all she’d been through, she deserved a new name. She settled on a name
that she believed would last for the rest of her life. She kept repeating it to herself so she’d get it straight the first
time she had to say it aloud:
Sally Mole, Sally Mole, Sally Mole
.