The Patron Saint of Liars (34 page)

"But I wasn't paying attention before." I looked at her. "Mom," I said.

She smiled a little. I never called her that. I never called her anything at all. "Go," she said, and got in the car.

I walked around and got in on the other side. Why hadn't I been paying attention all those years? I was always so happy to be a passenger, looking out the window, counting phone poles. I remember when my mother taught me to swim. She'd take me down to the Panther River and wade me out until the water was over my head, then she'd push me away from her again and again until I found a way to stay afloat. She was so serious about me doing it on my own that I really thought she'd let me drown trying. "Won't you at least back it out for me?"

"What are you going to do, call me for the rest of your life every time you need the car backed out?
R,
" she said, pointing to the letters above the wheel. "Reverse."

She told me how to start it up. How to give it a little gas and let the engine warm itself. She told me how to work the pedals and what all the letters stood for. She was animated as she talked to me over the sound of the car's low idle. "Check your mirrors every time," she said. I made a point to remember that, remember everything. I knew she wouldn't tell me twice.

I looked over my right shoulder the way she said and crept into the field as slow and straight as possible. My hands were sweating and I thought they would slip on the steering wheel.

I looked at the field for the first time as a driver and thought that this wouldn't be a bad place to start. The ground was pretty even and the grass was short. There was really nothing to hit, unless I went into the house or the garage.

"
D,
" my mother said. "Drive."

I shifted the car into drive and we started slowly to go forward. I kept it so slow that the sensation was more like rolling than driving, which was fine with me.

"Steer," my mother said, and tapped the wheel with her finger. "Get the feel of it."

As I turned the wheel the world turned with us, and we started to make our first big circle around the field. "Is this right?" I said. I hit the brakes for no good reason, and we both lurched forward in our seats. I thought I couldn't listen and steer at the same time.

"This is fine," she told me, and I started forward again. My mother was smiling. She rolled down her window and pushed her elbow out. "I should start driving more," she said. "I love this car." I looked over at her. "Eyes on the grass," she said, and pointed ahead. She didn't say anything about my speed, she just let me creep along. "I used to drive a lot," she said. "Just for fun. Not going anyplace."

"Did you ever take me?" I asked. I loved the idea. My mother driving, me as a baby in the seat beside her. The two of us going noplace together.

"No, no. This was a long time ago, before you were born."

"When you lived in California?"

She nodded, not seeming at all bothered by the mention of the past. I was in eighth grade before I ever knew my mother wasn't from Kentucky. I was writing a social studies paper on California, and my father told me to ask my mother about it because she was from there. "That's right," she said, tapping her fingers lightly on her door.

My mother moved away when I was ten years old. Or maybe we moved away. It didn't seem to be a decision as much as something that just happened. We all went to June's house together. I went to bed that first night with both of my parents across the hall and when I woke up it was just my father.

For a long time we all pretended that nothing had really happened. My mother was there in the kitchen of Saint Elizabeth's every morning, making our breakfast along with everyone else's. She'd throw out a couple of excuses to keep us at bay: she still had some packing she wanted to do; she was having trouble sleeping at the new house; she was planning on coming on Friday or Monday; next week. At first she was in the new house a lot. I'd find her there when I came home from school, cleaning out the oven or hanging some drapes she'd made. "I was working on these so late last night," she'd tell me. "I just fell asleep at the old house." Her sewing machine was at the old house. It made more sense to her to sleep with her sewing machine than with us.

But as time went by, it became clear she wasn't coming back. She didn't even bother giving us excuses anymore. A couple of times after she first left I spent the night with her, like she was a girlfriend or some distant relative I was going to visit. I'd put a change of clothes and a toothbrush in a plastic shopping bag and walk over to the house we used to live in. But it didn't work. My mother was just the way she'd always been, and I'd thought, for some crazy reason, that on those nights she would be different. I thought she'd ask me to sleep with her. She'd fix my hair. Instead she came home late, read her books, and planned her menus. She'd look up every now and then and say something like, "Which sounds better to you, carrots or wax beans?" As soon as I'd said carrots she was gone again.

Those nights I'd sleep in my old room but never sleep. I'd think about my dad, alone in our house. I'd feel his sadness coming across the field like a hand in the dark. I was angry with him back then, even more than at my mother. I thought he should have said something, to her or to me, somebody. He should have said to her straight out, Rose, have you left us? Are you never coming back? I want to know why. He should have told me she was gone for good and saved me all that wondering. But he did nothing. He just stepped back and let it happen. He let her go.

After a while I forgave him for it, though, even if I never said anything. I came to see that that was the way it was with my mother. There was no way to make her do anything. It would have been sadder to ask and watch her look up for a second and then away, or maybe to not even look up at all. It was better for us to hope for as long as we could. Those were good days, in a strange way, the days we thought she was always just around the corner, like prosperity or Christmas.

***

That night after dinner when we were home I asked my dad. "Have you ever driven the Dodge?"

"Sure," my father said. "A couple of times when the truck was in the shop, and when I had it painted. I drove it then."

"But did you ever drive with Mom?"

He thought about it for a minute. "Maybe. Not that I can remember offhand. Why do you ask?"

"She's teaching me to drive," I said, sitting down on the arm of the sofa. "I don't know why I'm asking."

"God, learning to drive." He shook his head. "I can't believe this."

I looked through our front window and couldn't see a light on across the field. She was probably still at Saint Elizabeth's. Sometimes, if Sister Evangeline wasn't feeling well, my mother would sleep on a cot in the little room next to hers in case she needed something in the night. "Did you know her dad was killed?"

"Your mother's?"

"In a car accident," I told him. I slid down off the arm to sit beside him on the sofa. I felt like I was gossiping, repeating something I'd overheard about the love life of a movie star. "She told me today when we were driving. He was killed when she was really small. She doesn't even remember him."

"No," my father said slowly, "she never told me that."

Then suddenly something occurred to me, how pretty my mother was, how young she seemed. There was my father, past sixty now. I always thought he was waiting for her to come back to him, but maybe it wasn't like that. Maybe he could never really believe she had been with him at all. Maybe he thought it was inevitable, her moving away, like their time together had been some kind of fluke and he was just happy for what he got. I thought I probably shouldn't have said anything about her father. Pointing out the things he didn't know would only make it worse. "It isn't a big deal," I said. "I just thought it was interesting."

"It's sad," my father said, and turned to look out the window like I had done only a minute before. He was wondering if she was all right.

I had been so excited about her telling me something, anything, that I had forgotten that part of it. It was sad.

That night I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about my mother's father. I tried to think of him as my grandfather, but that word seemed so impossible. He must have been a young man when he died. He must have barely been used to the idea of being a father. He was still getting up in the night to come and sit beside my mother and watch her sleep. At the most, he might have imagined her someday being old enough to go to school. He never would have thought then that she could grow up and have a daughter of her own. He couldn't have believed that his baby would have a baby old enough now to drive. I made his face like my mother's. He was handsome and tall with a straight nose and blue eyes. He sat on the edge of her little bed with his hand on her back so he could feel her breathe. He looked at the faces of the dolls lined up beside her and the striped yellow wallpaper he'd hung himself before she was born. He looked at his sleeping daughter and said her name. The part that I couldn't get over was the way he didn't know anything that was going to come. That she would grow up to be so beautiful. That she'd keep everything to herself, like the most basic facts of her life were all secrets. I wondered if maybe that was why it was all a secret, because she had been so disappointed by his not being here. I imagined that one night while he was sitting on the edge of her bed she woke up, just a little bit, and saw him there. She wasn't much more than a baby, maybe two or three at the most. She opened her eyes and saw her father watching over her and said nothing, just went back to sleep. It was that safe for her then. But later, maybe just a week later, she woke up and he was gone. Just like that, and night after night that followed he was gone. Days he was gone. He didn't know that was coming either. He had no idea that he would die in a car. I didn't know if it was his car, if he was alone, if it was his fault.

I got out of bed and went to the window. My mother's house was still dark, but I didn't know if that meant she'd gone to bed or never come home at all. I thought that if something had happened to her I wouldn't know about it until morning.

I missed my mother's father. Is that even possible? Maybe I had fallen asleep for a while. Maybe I was like her, just waking up and looking for him to be there. I wondered how it would have changed things for all of us if he had stayed home the day he was supposed to die in his car. How his decision to go out for something small, something like coffee or orange juice which everyone could have done without, had changed things for all of us.

I went down the hall, into my father's bedroom. He slept with his door open. He was always afraid that something was going to happen to me in the night. That I'd be sick and call for him and he wouldn't wake up. I stood by his bed and looked at his shoes underneath the straight-backed chair, his overalls folded over the chair, his shirt hanging over the back. There was a picture of my mother holding me as a baby framed on the night table. She was trying hard to smile, but you could see in her eyes how much she hated having her picture taken. There was a paperback mystery novel, a box of blue Kleenex, reading glasses. I can't tell you the comfort I took in these things. They were always there, just exactly like that. He was facing away from me. The covers were pulled up to his neck even though the night wasn't cold. I watched his breath go in and out, as regular as a clock, until I felt better. And I did feel better, because he was something I understood. He was something that didn't change.

I was just through the hedge and heading up the path to Saint Elizabeth's the next morning when I saw Lorraine sitting on the front porch, waving at me like a mad woman. "Hey there," she called.

"Hey," I said.

"I've been looking for you all over the place. You're never around." She looked so much happier than she had on that first day. I had forgotten about her, really, how upset I'd been by the whole thing. I sat down next to her on the steps.

"I'm around all the time," I said. "I just usually come and go out the back. I don't actually live here."

"I know," she said. "That nice nun, Sister Bernadette, told me. Your parents work here."

"That's about the size of it."

"I thought when I met you in the lobby that day you were..." She opened her hands over her lap and laughed. I just couldn't see being sixteen, pregnant, and so damn cheerful about things.

"Nope," I said.

"Well, I wanted to thank you, for being so nice and all. That was a bad day, you know. My sister said she'd drive me up here but I took the bus like a dummy. Sometimes I get it in my head that I have to do everything by myself. I didn't tell Mother Corinne that Homer was dead. I wanted to thank you for that, too."

"Sure," I said. Homer?

Lorraine looked out over the lawn. "It's so pretty here. I wonder if the babies ever stay in town. I mean, I wonder if the local people adopt them or if they're shipped off to places like New York."

"I don't know," I said. I'd never thought about where the babies went, or where the girls went. I used to, when I was little, but then I stopped. I imagined if all the babies to come out of Saint Elizabeth's stayed in Habit the town would be pretty well flooded by now.

"If they don't tell me where my baby's going, I may just take a mind to keep it. You can keep your baby here. There're places in Texas where I hear they make you give the baby up, even if you change your mind halfway through. I wouldn't go there. I wouldn't go someplace that said I couldn't change my mind."

I was feeling a little uncomfortable about this whole thing. I didn't like talking about what happened to the babies, it just made me sad.

"Where're you from?" I asked Lorraine, not because I was so interested but because I wanted to change the topic of conversation.

"Alabama," she said. "Birmingham. It seems pretty far away now, I'll tell you."

"Why didn't you go someplace in Alabama?"

Lorraine looked at me like I was crazy. "There aren't any homes in Alabama. This is the last one in the South. These places started closing down years ago, that's what social services told me. There's not such a call for them anymore. It's not a big deal to have a kid on your own these days. Everybody wants to have a baby now, you know?"