Monday, Monday: A Novel (13 page)

He whispered, “If that’s what you want me to say…”

“It’s the truth,” she said.

He nodded, but only barely, and she couldn’t see his eyes. She felt the slight movement of his chin against the top of her head as he held her. “Okay,” he whispered softly. “It is the truth. So I’m going to say goodbye now. But I’m never going to stop loving you. I can say I’m not coming back, but I want you to understand that there won’t be a day when I don’t want to.” He kissed her hair and held her a moment longer; then she felt him pull away slowly. She held her breath as he went out the door and closed it behind him.

Then she went to her room and lay on the bed and wept, still clinging to the scrap of paper with Jack’s number, not because she was thinking about the baby, or even the future, but because it was the thing that Wyatt had left her with.

Finally she smoothed the wadded scrap, damp with her tears, out on the bed. The handwriting was Wyatt’s, as precise and meticulous as his paintings. For a long time, she looked at the number and thought about everything Wyatt had said.

She awoke sick to her stomach the next morning. Vomiting into the toilet, she had the terrible realization she no longer knew what was right for the baby. The question began to make her feel desperate during the day, and a frightened part of her started to wish that someone could take the decision out of her hands.

When evening came, she found her father standing in the middle of the backyard, looking idle and saddened in the lingering twilight. Her approach was so quiet it startled him. “Hey,” she whispered.

He turned to her, a swath of light from the window falling across his face. “Hi, sweetie.”

“Can I talk to you? I feel … confused. Yesterday I was sure about what I should do, but now I don’t know what’s right. Do you think I’m being selfish to keep the baby? If I stay here, and have the baby, and try to work … Mom won’t want me to be here. I know she won’t ask me to leave, but she’ll be humiliated and ashamed.”

He stared at a heat-stricken rose bush in the half darkness, and didn’t deny what Shelly had said about her mother. Finally he said, “Are Jack and his wife good people?”

“I don’t know them. I think so. Wyatt believes so.” She could hear the woman who lived next door feeding her dogs on the other side of the fence, pouring chow into their bowls, and she thought of the windy day at the farm when she and Wyatt had fed the dog, and collected the eggs, and made love. “Jack is almost like Wyatt’s brother,” she said. “The only time I’ve talked to him was in the hospital, and I’ve never met his wife. Her name’s Delia.”

“Your mother and I met her in the hospital.”

“I know.”

“She’s a nice young lady.”

“They’re Catholic, Dad. They would raise the baby as a Catholic.”

“I know plenty of good Catholics, honey.”

“So you think I should do it? That I should give the baby up?”

“Yes, honey. I do. I think it would be best for everyone. Including the baby.”

She looked at the rusty swing set she had played on as a child, and imagined her father hauling it off and bringing a new one, and imagined her mother out here with a little grandson or granddaughter she was embarrassed about having. She pictured herself in the back room of the feed store, surrounded by boxes and sacks of oats.

It didn’t seem like a happy life for a baby. It didn’t seem like a happy family.

What would she do with her life if she gave up the child? Finish her education? Join the Peace Corps?

At least with Jack and Delia, the baby would still have Wyatt around sometimes. It wouldn’t be fatherless—it would have two fathers, even if that was a secret. It wouldn’t be motherless either. And Delia had lots of brothers and sisters. The baby would have cousins.

She stared at the yard, the swing set. It seemed so pointless. She wished she were dead, and said aloud to her father, “I wish he had aimed better.”

“Shelly.”

“I do.” She looked him in the eye. “I don’t have the heart to call them, Dad. Would you do it for me? The number’s by my bed.”

“When do you want me to call them?”

“Now. Just go inside and do it. I’ll wait out here.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“I’ll never be sure about this.”

15

IN THOSE LONG MONTHS

Astronauts walked on the moon. Charles Manson and his cult followers murdered seven people. A music and art fair in Woodstock, New York, attracted hundreds of thousands. A hurricane battered Mississippi. And Shelly moved twenty miles down the road from Lockhart to San Marcos to be out of her hometown and away from her mother, who was incapable of responding to Shelly’s emotions in any way that was helpful. She moved into an apartment with a friend who was attending Southwest State, and got a job at the concession stand of the Holiday movie theater on the square. She didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant, and once a month she bought tampons and wrapped them up in toilet paper and threw them in the trash so her friend would see them and think she was having her monthly period. She wore a spandex girdle and tent dresses and had no one to confide in, no one to talk with about her broken heart. There was no one who knew her except Wyatt, and he was gone from her life.

Rosemary’s Baby
came to the theater, but Shelly wouldn’t watch it. Her own future was dark enough. She feared and dreaded the moment when she would have to surrender the baby. It felt like a death sentence. There would be nothing after that. She missed her mother and needed her but didn’t want to talk to her, because she felt her mother had shunned her. She felt exiled. Didn’t her mother understand how painful it would be to give the baby away?

Six months into the pregnancy her parents drove to San Marcos and loaded Shelly’s things into the station wagon and drove her to Beeville, a hundred miles south, where her mother’s aunt Aileen lived. Aileen’s husband was dead and her son Raymond was missing in Vietnam, and she had agreed that Shelly could stay with her until the baby was born.

Aileen was kind to Shelly, but depressed about her son, and prayed all the time, and cried a lot. She was extremely thin, with arms and legs as flat as a paper doll’s. She ate almost nothing but saltines with jelly, and drank Tabs all day.

On the first night Shelly was with her, they sat in Aileen’s kitchen with Red, Raymond’s shaggy old dog, in a heap at their feet, and made up a name for Shelly. “The neighbors are nosy,” Aileen told her. “I promised your mama I’d keep things private. What about Polly?”

“Polly’s okay.” She didn’t care what anyone called her.

“How about Polly Miller?” Aileen said.

That was all right with Shelly. It reminded her of Roger Miller, and she liked his lighthearted songs, if not “Little Green Apples,” which made her cry.

“We can tell them you’re from Ohio, and your husband died in a car crash,” Aileen said.

“That sounds good,” Shelly said. She had never been to Ohio, and doubted she’d ever go there. She doubted she’d go much of anywhere now. She might have been better off if she did live in Ohio and had a husband who died in a car crash. At least then she could grieve openly. And for someone other than Wyatt. And she could keep the baby.

“I’ll tell them you don’t want to talk about it. Not to ask you about it. And I’ll give you a ring to wear.”

“Thanks, but I have a ring.” Her mother had asked her to wear it whenever she left Aileen’s house.

“You can stay in Raymond’s room, or sleep with me.”

“I’ll do whichever is better for you.”

Aileen was such a sad woman that Shelly felt sorry for her. Her skinny hand cradled her weathered cheek and her eyes watered. “The last time you saw Raymond was at that family reunion in Belton,” she reminded Shelly. “What comes to your mind about him?”

She didn’t remember him well. That had been years ago when she was in intermediate school, and Raymond had seemed like a grown-up, though he was only about eighteen. “I remember that he was handsome,” she told Aileen, though he wasn’t really.

“When you were little, you came with your mama, and he threw the baseball for you. He always is good with the little ones. He’s generous—that’s what he is. By nature. That’s what got him in trouble.” She repeated what Shelly already knew—that Raymond had gone out into the dark to help a fellow soldier who was hurt and yelling for him. And nobody saw him after that. “They think the VC got him,” Aileen said. “He might have passed on to the Lord. But I have my valid doubts about it. I believe that he’s still with us.”

They talked a while about Raymond’s job at the Reynolds plant in Ingleside and about his girlfriend, who had given up on him when she learned he was missing. She had told Aileen on the phone that she knew he wasn’t coming home and that she wasn’t going to spend a bunch of years waiting.

“It’s a blessing he’s shed of that tripe,” Aileen told Shelly. “You can’t ask a girl to wait ten years, but how about ten minutes? It wasn’t like Raymond was out catting around. He was out killing the Communists.”

“Let’s look at the room,” Shelly told her.

“It won’t be clean,” Aileen said. “I haven’t been in since he went missing. I keep that door shut.”

“We don’t have to go in there,” Shelly told her.

“We’ll go in together,” Aileen said.

Red got to his feet with effort—he was a massive old dog—and followed them down the hall. “Since Raymond was ten years old that dog’s been sleeping with him. If I didn’t keep him shut out of that room he’d lie on that bed all day waiting for Raymond to come home. That’s not a good life for a dog.” His shaggy hair littered the floorboards. “Come on,” Aileen urged him. “You’ve been begging for months to get in there, and now you’re draggin’ your bones.”

The room was dark and dusty. Cold dampness had taken up residence. There was a bed and a chair and a dresser. Shelly set her bag on the floor and watched the dog sniff around on the rug.

“Raymond’s things are still in the closet,” Aileen told her. “But you can put your things in there too. You remember exactly what Raymond looked like?”

“Not exactly. Just handsome.”

“I got pictures we’ll look at later.”

“I remember he had big feet.”

“Sure enough he did. His shoes are there in the closet.”

Aileen left, telling Red to come with her, and Shelly sat in the chair for a minute and rested her hands on her stomach to wait for the baby to kick. “It’s sad here,” she said to the baby. “Aileen misses her son.”

She got up and looked in the closet. A coat and a few shirts and two pairs of slacks dangled from hangers, and belts hung from a nail. Three pairs of shoes were neatly lined up. A box contained a baseball mitt and a trophy of some sort.

When Aileen had gone to bed, Shelly lay in Raymond’s bed and felt so gloomy she couldn’t move. Her heart was a lump in her chest. The only thing that felt alive inside her was the baby. It kicked every now and then. It got the hiccups. Shelly lay with her hands on her belly and imagined that she was dead and the baby had gone on living. She thought about killing herself after the baby was born: shooting herself with her father’s pistol, or jumping from the tower onto the plaza, where Wyatt Calvert and Jack Stone wouldn’t rescue her this time.

After a while Red began to sniff at the door, and she let him in. She helped him into the bed, hoisting him from behind, and slept with her arms around him. He smelled bad, but she didn’t care.

In the weeks that followed, she hoped for a letter from Wyatt, even though she didn’t expect one and knew that none would come. Every day, she looked in the mailbox, but the only letters that came were from her mother.

Stone-faced, she sat with Aileen through episodes of
Gomer Pyle
, and
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
, and
The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.
When she heard songs on the radio about rain, by the Cascades or Dee Clark or the Serendipity Singers, she remembered the rainy day she had sat in the station wagon with Wyatt and told him she was pregnant. When the Temptations sang about how they had “sunshine on a cloudy day,” she thought of the cloudy day at the beach with Wyatt, how he had bundled her in his arms as they sat against the dunes watching the whitecaps roll in.

Before bed every night, she and Aileen held hands at the kitchen table and prayed for Raymond. “Let him walk through that door,” Aileen said. “Let the phone ring and somebody tell me they’ve found him.” Later she said, “We can pray for the baby’s daddy, too.”

It was months since Shelly had spoken his name aloud. “Maybe just once,” she told Aileen. “His name’s Wyatt.” It sounded unfamiliar even to her.

“Would it help you to talk about him?”

So they did. Shelly told Aileen everything from beginning to end. She told her what Wyatt looked like, and how kind he was, and how she admired and loved him. How he had come out to help her on the plaza, just like Raymond had gone out to help someone. She talked about the portrait and said she wondered what would become of it. “I wish you could see his paintings. I wish you could meet him. You could look in his eyes and know what a good person he is.”

“Keep your hand on the shoulder of that young man,” Aileen prayed.

Shelly tried not to think about Wyatt too much, and imagined putting all her memories of him into a room and leaving them there. She told herself not to look into the room; she knew everything that was in there. Now and then she imagined herself going inside. She would look over the memories. Stand in the middle of her ruined life.

Her mother called her sometimes and talked about local things going on in Lockhart. Sometimes she told Shelly that people had asked about her.

“Do you think they know?” Shelly asked her.

“They wonder. I’m doing my best to stop the rumors.”

Shelly’s father was running for reelection as sheriff, and on the day of the election, Shelly called home to find out if he had won. Her mother was tearful on the phone, her father not yet home.

“Did he win?”

“Oh honey, he lost.”

“But … how? Everyone was for him. Everybody loves him. Why would he lose? Mom? Was it … because of the rumors?”