Promises to Keep (11 page)
That night the doorbell rang promptly at six o’clock. Wally answered it. “Yeah?”
A well-dressed man stood on the porch, fedora in hand. He had a full-moon face, a sharply pointed nose and a swiftly receding chin. His dark hair, heavily greased, was parted on the side and combed flat against his head. Before he spoke, he pulled at the knot of his tie and thrust out his jaw. “I’m Tom Barrows,” he finally announced.
Wally waited for more but was met with silence. I left the kitchen, where I was setting the table, and moved quietly out to the hall to get a better look.
“What do you want?” Wally finally asked.
The man tugged at his tie again, and a nervous fear flashed behind the lenses of his glasses. “I believe Mrs. Anthony is expecting me.”
“She is?”
“Well, yes.”
“For what?”
The man frowned, then sniffed. “We’re having dinner and – ”
Before the stranger could finish, my brother turned and hollered up the stairs. “Mom!”
“Yes, Wally?”
“Are you expecting someone?”
“Yes. Is he here?”
Wally looked at Tom Barrows, then back up the stairs. “I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean, you’re not sure? Is someone at the door or not?”
“Um, yeah. Some guy’s here. Says he’s looking for you.”
“Well, invite him in, please, and tell him I’ll be down in a minute.”
Wally opened the door a little wider and waved toward the living room.
The man stepped inside, eyed me briefly, nodded at Wally. “Thank you,” he said. Crablike, he moved sideways into the living room, where he stopped just beyond the threshold. He seemed not to want to make himself at home.
Wally shut the door and crossed his arms. “You taking my mother out on a date or something?”
The fingers grew taut on the rim of the fedora. “We’re having dinner and going to a movie.”
“How do you know my mother?”
“I . . . well, I bought a hat from her.”
Wally actually snorted. “You bought a hat from her?”
“Um, yes, but not for me, of course. For my mother. For her birthday. She liked it very much.”
Mom came down the stairs then, wearing one of her nicer dresses and smelling of perfume. “Hello, Tom,” she said brightly.
“Hello, Janis,” he said with a nod and a small, relieved smile. “You look lovely.”
Wally took a step forward, as though to come between them. “Mom,” he said, “you didn’t ask me if you could go out tonight.”
Mom looked startled. Then she gave a small laugh. “I’m sorry, Wally, but I didn’t know I needed your permission.”
“Yeah, well, I – ”
“I’ll be home after the movie, around eleven, I suppose. You don’t need to wait up for me.” A sweep of her eyes brought me into the conversation. “Now, the two of you mind Tillie and help her out with Valerie, will you?”
She retrieved her fall jacket from the closet, kissed the top of my head, and exited the house with a man neither of us had ever seen before, not even at Tillie’s welcome home party.
Wally and I cornered Tillie in the kitchen. “Did you know Mom was going out tonight?” Wally demanded.
Tillie was kneading a batch of biscuit dough and didn’t let Wally’s question interrupt her work. “Of course. She put me in charge of you kids.”
“So why didn’t she tell
us
she was going out?”
“I don’t know, Wally.” Tillie kneaded and shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t want to have to fight with you about it.”
“I wouldn’t have fought with her about it. I would have just told her not to go.”
“And why not?”
“Because the last thing we need around here is another man.”
“Merciful heavens, Wally, she’s not marrying him. She’s just going to a movie with him.”
“Yeah, and one thing leads to another, and next thing you know . . .” Wally slapped his hands together loudly. What that meant, I didn’t know.
Tillie flattened the biscuit dough with her rolling pin. “Now, look, Wally. I know what you’re thinking and I know what you’re afraid of – ”
“I’m not afraid of anything – ”
“Not every man in the world is like your father.”
Wally clamped his jaw shut and looked at Tillie. “He’s not
my
father,” he said.
“Be that as it may,” Tillie countered, “your mother deserves some happiness. Wally, wait a minute. Where are you going?”
“Out.” Wally flung open the kitchen door, slamming it shut behind him.
I looked at Tillie, who looked at me. She shrugged, picked up the cookie cutter, and cut circles in the dough. “He’s going to have to let your mother live her own life,” she said quietly.
“But, Tillie?”
“Yes, Roz?”
“Is he a nice man?”
“Mr. Barrows? I don’t know him all that well, but he has a good reputation around town. He’s county clerk, you know. Has been for years. Works over there in the courthouse in Wheaton.”
“Oh yeah? Well, he looks kind of . . . I don’t know. Boring, I guess.”
“Maybe boring is exactly what your mother needs, after the last man she had.”
She laughed lightly at that, but I didn’t think it was funny. The last man in Mom’s life was my father. Not Wally’s father but mine.
I narrowed my eyes and wrinkled my nose. “But he’s old and ugly, and anyway, isn’t he married by now?”
Tillie nodded. “He was once. Some years back.”
“So what happened?”
“The story I heard was that one of his deputies left a pile of divorce filings on his desk. Tom looked through them and found his own, and that was how his wife let him know she was leaving him.”
“She left him?”
“She did. Poor Tom didn’t contest the divorce. He signed the papers, and even before the ink was dry, his wife ran off to Montana with the deputy county clerk.”
“The one who left the papers on the desk?”
“One and the same.”
I went back to setting the table. I couldn’t help wondering whether Tom Barrows sat on his porch steps crying when his wife left him. It almost made me feel sorry for the guy, because I was sure he must be lonely, but I was just as sure I didn’t want my mother to be the answer to his loneliness. One glance at him told me he’d never make her happy.
Tillie laid the biscuits on a baking sheet and slid them into the oven.
“Tillie?”
“Uh-huh?”
“You think Mom will really get married again someday?”
Shutting the oven door, Tillie turned to me and said, “Don’t tell me you don’t want your mother’s happiness either. You’re not like Wally, I hope.”
“No, I . . .” I stopped, thought a moment, said quietly, “I
do
want Mom to be happy. That’s the thing.”
“Listen, Roz, a pretty young lady like your mother is going to get married again someday. I’d bet my bottom dollar on it. But like I said to Wally, going out on one date with Tom Barrows doesn’t mean your mom is going to marry the man. Maybe she just wanted to get out of the house. Or maybe it was a movie she really wanted to see but she didn’t want to spend the money on it herself. Who knows?” She smiled and shrugged. “There’s no use trying to cross any bridges before you reach them.”
I wasn’t trying to cross any bridges. I just didn’t want Mom walking down the aisle with Tom Barrows or any other man that wasn’t Daddy. I wanted nothing to get in the way of the dream that had lately been taking shape in my mind, that of Daddy drinking the magic potion and becoming the good Dr. Jekyll permanently so he could come home again. He would come home, and we would all be a family like we were before – the way we were on the good days, when he acted like he loved us and we were happy.
I didn’t realize until the night Tom Barrows showed up to run interference that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was Daddy.
On Saturday morning I awoke to the aroma of bacon frying on the stove. Throwing on my bathrobe, vaguely aware I wasn’t feeling well, I moved groggily downstairs to see whether Mom or Tillie was in the kitchen.
It was Mom, her apron tied around her waist over her long flannel nightgown. Valerie was in her high chair drinking orange juice. I stood in the hall for a moment studying Mom, looking for telltale signs of love and possible impending matrimony, but she looked the same as always – a little tired, pretty in spite of her rumpled hair, intent on the task at hand.
“Mom?”
Startled, she turned abruptly. “Oh, Roz! Good morning, honey. How’s my sweetheart?”
How was I? Taking stock, I realized I was gritting my teeth against a sore throat and trying not to swallow. I didn’t want to be sick. “I’m good,” I said. “How was your . . . um, how was the movie?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It was kind of ho-hum, really. Nothing you would have enjoyed.”
“So you didn’t have a good time?” I asked hopefully.
“Oh no. I didn’t say that. It was all very nice, really.”
That being the case, I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to know anything about this Tom Barrows fellow. Maybe if we didn’t say his name, he’d go away.
“Are you working today?”
“Not today. It’s my Saturday off.”
“Where’s Tillie?”
“She was in the shower when I came down. Listen, honey, while I’m making the scrambled eggs, would you mind pouring Valerie a bowl of Cheerios?”
I pulled Valerie’s plastic bowl from the cupboard, poured cereal and milk into it, then set it on the tray in front of her. I picked up her little spoon from the tray and put it in her pudgy fist. “There you go, scooter pie,” I said.
Mom stopped beating the eggs and looked at me over her shoulder.
I bit my lower lip sheepishly. “Sorry, Mom,” I said. “It just came out.” Scooter pie was what Daddy had always called Valerie. Now that nickname brought Daddy into the house in a rush of bad memories.
Mom sighed heavily and shut her eyes a moment, as though waiting for the images to pass. When she drew in her next breath, she opened her eyes and tried to smile at me. Then she went back to beating the eggs – this time with a little more force, so that some of the goop splashed over the sides of the bowl and made yellow puddles on the counter.
I turned to Valerie and made a funny face. “Rozzy funny,” she said with a laugh. I kissed her forehead and poured myself a cup of milk to drink. The cold felt good against my throat.
“Mom, can I go down to the drugstore today to get an ice cream cone?” I asked. “I’ll use my own allowance money.”
“I suppose that’ll be all right. But I’d like to see you get some of your homework done first.”
The morning dragged by as I worked and reworked long division problems. At my desk in my room, I could hear Mom and Wally downstairs arguing about Mom’s date the night before.
“I’m just saying you could have asked me first,” Wally said.
“What did you expect me to do, Wally? Tell him I have to ask my
son’s
permission to have dinner with him?”
“When we left Minnesota, you said it was just going to be the four of us from now on – ”
“Well, I didn’t mean I’d never – ”
“And now, to start off, we’ve got some crazy old lady living with us – ”
Tillie called from somewhere else in the house, “That’s a fine way to talk about the person who’s opened her home to you, young man.”
“
We
own the house, Tillie, not you – ”
“That’s paperwork, Wally. All paperwork.”
“Yeah, and money. Plenty of that.”
“What’s money compared to – ”
“Yeah, I know, I know. Sweat equity. Stuff it, Tillie, I’m tired of hearing – ”
Mom interrupted. “Wally, I won’t have you talking to Tillie like that. You know we’d be in deep trouble without her.”
“Well, if she came here to die, why doesn’t she just go ahead and do it. What’s she waiting for?”
“Wally!”
Tillie again. “I can’t go until the Lord calls my name, and so far I don’t hear Him calling.”
“Wally, you apologize to Tillie this minute,” Mom said.
“Nothing doing. I’m going to work. I’m already late.”
The front door slammed. The house was quiet. I lifted my head and looked out the window, watching Wally pound down the sidewalk toward town.
“I’m sorry, Tillie,” Mom said. “Honestly, sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to do with that boy.”
“Not to worry, Janis. If he thinks life will be better when I’m gone, he’s just whistling Dixie. Just wait till it really happens. We’ll see who’s sorry then.”
Mara was on the bench sipping a fountain drink by the time I got there. She squinted up at me against the sun. “I thought maybe you weren’t coming,” she said.
“My mom made me eat some lunch before I came.”
“You want some ice cream?”
I shook my head, sat down on the bench. “Naw. I don’t think so.”
“You sick or something?”
“I don’t know. I don’t feel so good.”
“What’s the matter?”
I shrugged. “Just a sore throat.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”
“I wanted to.”
She looked at me a moment, put her lips to the straw. Her cheeks caved in as she sipped. “Well, I’m glad you came. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“Well, I don’t know. Anything. That’s what friends do, right?”