The Penny (16 page)

“He’s going on to school.” I turned to Darnell. “Aren’t you?”

Aurelia’s cousin arched his neck and rolled his eyes skyward, pushing against the wheel as if he wanted to push away Mr. Lancaster’s words; he glowered at the dashboard like the car itself had become his enemy.

I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying,
“There’s all sorts of things that aren’t appropriate, Mr. Lancaster, and I can tell you exactly what they are.”

Darnell threw the Ford into gear and it sounded like it might detonate as he laid his foot on the accelerator. All that week you could tell Darnell had peeled out of there. His tires left black rubber scars beside the curb in the street, scars just as dark as the scars on my heart.

Chapter Eighteen

T
hat afternoon after school, even though I’d been scheduled to go to work for Miss Shaw, I went to the Fox Theater by myself and saw
The Country Girl
instead. It was the first time I’d ever gone to a picture show without my sister. I huddled alone, the itchy seat giving me fits, the popcorn tasting like greasy pulp, the guilt over not showing up for work eating a painful hole in my stomach.

“How could you be so angry at someone you didn’t even know?” Grace asked William Holden as I nestled deeper into my seat, my hand curled inside the popcorn bucket. Leave it to Grace Kelly to voice the precise thought that had been running through my head all day.

William told Grace, “Maybe I really wasn’t. Maybe I screamed at you to keep myself at an angry distance.” And I thought,
Me, too.

I walked out of the darkness into the late-afternoon light and realized I’d been so focused on watching Grace Kelly that I
felt
like Grace. If I had caught a glimpse of myself in a reflection as I passed a window, I would have been astonished not to see the polished woman who spoke with trained, rounded vowels, and touched the stray wisp of hair at her neck whenever she considered a thought, and clasped her hands over the hollow at her throat when she had something consequential to say.

I remembered making fun of my sister as she peered at me through tortoiseshell sunglasses, imagining herself as Grace. And here I was, imagining the same.
You’re not her. You’ll never be her.

Well, now I understood Jean exactly. Thinking about all things Grace Kelly made it a lot easier not to think about Aurelia or Miss Shaw or Daddy or anything else going on.

“You have the strength to trust,”
Miss Shaw had told me once.
“You hold on to that because it’s being given to you.”

Yes,
I could have answered her then if I had known.
I want to trust
you.

Mr. Witt tipped his hat at me as I stepped outside the Fox Theater box office. “Glad you’ve been making good use of those free tickets, Jenny,” he said.

“I’ve been making good use of them, all right,” I answered. “Can’t use them up nearly so fast now that Jean isn’t here.”

The green, silver-lettered awning that shaded the door to Shaw Jewelers lifted and fell in the evening breeze. From where I stood, I could see the
CLOSED
sign Miss Shaw must have flipped inside the door when she’d finally given up on me. Every evening when Miss Shaw departed, she adjusted the chain so the sign would hang at its usual perfect angle. Now it hung sideways, as if she had slapped the card over in frustration and left in haste. When I cupped my hands around my face and peered inside the darkened shop window, I could see a folded rag and a pile of price tags and an assortment of office files she had readied for my attention. I stood on the outside looking in, my insides consumed with a gnawing sense of regret.

I knew where I had to go. I began to run.

I ran because I wanted to get away from myself, because I wanted to get away from my whole life. I ran because I wanted to escape the fear that all the pennies I’d found on the pavement were meaningless, that they didn’t carry a message from someone who cared about me the way Miss Shaw said they did.

I looked up every so often, searching people’s faces to find the one person I needed most. But Miss Shaw wouldn’t be walking along the sidewalk anyway. If she wanted to find me, she would tie on a scarf and don tortoiseshell sunglasses and drive through the streets in her baby-blue convertible. Nobody ever saw her driving without her scarf, knotted beneath her chin.

When I heard a car approaching from behind, I slowed down, thinking for one insane moment that it might be Miss Shaw searching for me. But when it turned out to be a police cruiser instead, I hurried away from the curb and stood against the wall of Baker’s Alterations and Dry Cleaning, staring at the electrical lines overhead, gasping for breath.

The sound of my sandals slapping the pavement seemed to come from far away. I swung aboard the first streetcar that intersected my path. Every seat was taken, even now that dusk had settled in. I held onto the brass rail overhead as hot air chased my hair across my eyes in tatters.

When I disembarked and neared the house, my feet slowed. My sandals seemed to weigh more with each step I took as the tar sucked at my soles. I wanted to tell Miss Shaw the truth about my life so bad that I felt like I was going to burst open, but I just couldn’t trust her, or anybody else for that matter.

Miss Shaw’s house, across from Lafayette Park, was encircled by a high brick wall and latched behind a formidable double iron gate. The courtyard, which once must have been laden with flowers, was now overrun with brambles and weeds. It astonished me that Miss Shaw would run a jewelry shop where everything glittered with light, yet she would live in a house like this one. Any house where Miss Shaw lived ought to be dazzling with gleaming windows—shutters thrown open, flowers overflowing their pots along the windowsills. I’d noticed Miss Shaw’s cheerful blue convertible parked out in front. But the façade of this brownstone looked like a closed, empty face.

As I raised my hand to the brass knocker on the towering mahogany door, I was terrified that I shouldn’t have come.

When I lifted the knocker and let it drop, its heavy echo lingered for a lengthy moment. My ears buzzed; maybe I shouldn’t have come. But if I was known for anything, it was for being stubborn. I remained rooted to the spot. After an excruciatingly long time, heavy footsteps approached the door. I had no idea what to expect as the door swung open.

The woman wore the crisp uniform of a professional housekeeper, spotlessly black with a ruffled white apron, and a cap pinned over her hair. She opened the door only a crack and looked as if she wanted to keep me out.

“Yes?”

“I—I’m here to see Miss Shaw.”

“I don’t know—”

“Miss
Opal
Shaw,” I persisted, fully expecting her to say that I had the wrong home entirely.

But hearing the name a second time seemed to clarify it to her some way. She gave a nod that told me she understood, but that it was still entirely her own prerogative whether or not she allowed me to enter.

“Is she here?”

“Miss Shaw?”

“Yes.”

“And who might you be?”

I told her my name, and it surprised me to no end when she seemed to recognize it. She stepped backward and gave me entrance immediately.

“Of course, Jenny. If you’ll wait here in the sitting room, I’ll let her know you’re here.”

I sat perfectly still on the silk couch, allowing neither my feet to jostle nor my hands to fidget. Beyond my left elbow sat a crystal canister filled with butterscotch drops, but I didn’t dare help myself to one. She’d put me in a small sitting area at the front of the house, where every stick of furniture faced the white marble fireplace with its ornate andirons and the adjoining bay window swathed by yards of lace.

Until this moment, I hadn’t known a house existed like this anywhere in St. Louis. This was a progressive city, with its jazz music, and its blaring televisions that had recently amazed viewers with the first coast-to-coast broadcast, and its Sportsman’s Park baseball team that had been sold to Anheuser-Busch. But this house, with its musty smell and its broad open archways and its mahogany newel posts, its velvet-seated chairs and its fringed rug that felt as spongy as moss when I’d set my foot upon it, seemed like it dated back to the days of Tom Sawyer. Everything inside this place seemed bound to the past.

The house, which had seemed silent at first, now whispered with sound. A floorboard complained overhead. From somewhere in the distance, I heard what sounded like a kettle clattering to the floor. I stared at an oil painting of the Soulard Historic District, bouncing the toe of my left sandal on the floor.

When Miss Shaw finally entered, she looked just as beautiful and timeless and poised as always, wearing her blue jacket buttoned at her waist and a pearl brooch upon her collar. “Oh,
Jenny.
”

The white linen of her gloves felt smooth and cool against my skin when she took my face in her hands.

“Are you okay? I tried to call to find out why you didn’t come to work this afternoon. Do you know how impossible it is to get through on your family’s party line?”

The worst thing you can do is go into a day being afraid,
I remembered she’d once told me. I stepped away from her hands, not wanting her to touch me. “I’m not coming back to the shop. I don’t need your job anymore,” I lied.

“Jenny, please don’t—”

“Besides, if I
were
to have a job, I’d want to work for someone who everybody
likes
. Nobody likes to be with you because they’re all afraid of you. Nobody knows a
thing
about you.”

I heard the wind rustle the leaves outside.

“That’s why I came here. I wanted to say that.”

The distant barking of dogs made town seem far away. The giant house stood dignified and serene around us, waiting, as if it, too, wanted to keep Miss Shaw’s secrets concealed.

“And I wanted to find out why you didn’t tell me about the grave you go to. I wanted to find out why you didn’t tell me the rumor was true.”

Miss Shaw lowered herself to the couch.

“I
gave
you the chance to tell me. When we were riding in your car that day. But you didn’t.”

She clutched her throat with her glove, the way I’d seen Grace Kelly do in the movies about a hundred times.

“I said, ‘They say they’ve seen you in a cemetery sitting on the ground beside a grave without any stone. It’s crazy, isn’t it, all the things people say about you?’ ”

As she began to tighten her earbob, I could see her hands shaking. “Everybody has stories they’d rather keep to themselves. Are you going to make up your own mind about me, or just go by what other people think? Haven’t you figured out we met each other for a special reason?”

“We met each other because of the penny. But I don’t care about the penny anymore.”

“It’s more than just a penny. It’s a message. Can’t you see that?”

I wanted to clap my hands over my ears. “Don’t talk to me about the penny anymore,” I insisted. “I’m sick of hearing about the stupid penny.”

She gave up on her earbob and let it fall into her lap.

“I’m not letting go of you,” she said. “Because I know I’m not supposed to.”

“You sit at a grave with no marker.” Childishly, I wasn’t going to let her divert me from my anger, my distrust. “And no one who talks about you has any idea who’s in it.”

“You know the other thing everyone whispers about?” Miss Shaw asked, her eyes boring intensely into mine. “Everyone wants to know why I don’t take off my gloves. They haven’t asked, but they’ve thought about it. Haven’t you heard them gossiping about that, too?”

Dumbly, I nodded.

She fumbled with the miniature buttons at her wrists. Once those had been freed, she tugged first the end of one finger then another. She loosed her right hand and then her left. Fear shot through me. “I’ll have to show you,” she said.

For all the stock I placed in people’s hands, I never could have guessed what Miss Shaw’s hands looked like. When she slipped the gloves off and laid her fingers before me, the hands Miss Shaw revealed spoke a terrible story.

“What happened?” I barely dared to ask.

For so long, I’d wanted to see her hands. Wanted to find out who she
was
.

Miss Shaw’s hands were the most damaged hands I’d ever seen, yet they were also the most gentle. Where the underside of Miss Shaw’s thumb met her palm, the skin was drawn so tight that it appeared translucent. Each knuckle was webbed with angry white slashes. Thick ropes of red ran the length of several of her fingers. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. I wanted to take her hands into my own and weep over them.

I remembered the first time I’d seen my hands and Miss Shaw’s side-by-side in the jewelry case. Hers had appeared so refined and beautiful; mine had been so small and grimy by comparison. Now it seemed the opposite. My hand appeared stronger, more capable, than her scarred one somehow.

“My mother had a mental illness, an explosive temper. She punished me by locking me in a dark closet for things I didn’t do. This happened to my hands on jelly-canning day. I broke one of her plates while I was washing dishes.”

I reached to take her hand and she flinched. When Miss Shaw held her hand level so I could grasp it, I could see it was a struggle for her to let me do it.

“That’s my mother in the grave, Jenny. That’s how she repaid me for breaking her best china plate. She grappled me by the arms and made me plunge my hands in the boiling water.”

For all these long years, I had managed to build walls around the hurt in my own life. Nothing could have prepared me for the surge of distress that hit as I realized this mysterious friend—whose kind interest in me had worn down my guard—had endured a wound so demeaning and awful herself.

“Mother boiled my hands with the canning jars. She held them down so long, I wanted to die. Not just because of how the water cooked my skin on the outside, but because of how it killed me on the inside.” Miss Shaw said, “Not many people know how it feels to be so hurt on the inside that you’d rather die than live with it.”

But I do. Oh, I do.
I couldn’t hear past the roaring in my ears. I physically ached for her, in a way I never could have grieved for myself. And yet, I
did
mourn for myself. Touching Miss Shaw’s wounded hands brought me up against every crippling wound that lay inside me.

Her bare fingers lay slender and scarred and cool in my palm. I couldn’t take my eyes from them, I suddenly loved them so. “Your hands are beautiful.”

“Are they?”

I raised them to my face and touched their coolness to the side of my cheek. “Yes.” I lifted my eyes to hers.

I began to sob uncontrollably, and Miss Shaw gathered me into her arms and held me in such a way that I felt secure for the first time I could ever remember. She let me cry for a long time until she finally asked me if I wanted to talk about anything. I opened my mouth intending to say no, but the truth started pouring from my lips and did not stop until I had shared everything with Miss Shaw about what Daddy did to Jean and me and how Mama did nothing to help us. I told her how afraid I felt every minute of my life. Miss Shaw cried with me and assured me that she understood and would help me in any way that she could.