The Silent Strength of Stones (21 page)

“I’m so pleased to meet you,” she said. Her voice hadn’t changed. Now that I was sensitized I realized it had an element of push in it—not a push for me to do something much, just a little push for me to believe her.

The questions rose up in me like bubbles in boiling water: Where have you been? Why did you leave? How could you do that? Don’t you even care about us? What did I ever do to make you leave me? What can I do to make you come back? Could I stand it if you did come back? Do you know how much you hurt us? They rose and faded, and I said, “Pleased to meet you.” My voice came out flat. I let go of her hand. “I better get the other chair from the store.”

Mom’s smile faded a little. She shook hands with Evan, murmuring something nice.

Pop gave me a stern look, letting me know I wasn’t behaving quite right. He said, “Susan, this is my dad, Leo Verrou.”

Would Granddad remember Mom? I had been about four when he first came to live with us. Nine years he’d spent in the same household with her, and sometimes I thought Granddad saw things none of the rest of us did. Then again, Pop had lived with Mom fourteen years, and he didn’t seem to sense anything.

While Mom was reaching for Granddad’s hand, I slipped through the hall to the store to grab the chair behind the sales counter. Evan followed me after excusing himself. “Look,” he whispered as we stood in neon-tinted darkness, “forget what I said before about not letting her know you recognize her. That’s none of my business. Let her know you know, if you want.”

“I don’t want to.” I closed my hands around the top of the chair and gripped hard.

He waited a moment. “I didn’t give you a chance td talk about this before. You just seemed so close to some edge. I hope it didn’t hurt you that I took that away from you for a while.”

“It’s all right,” I said, though I wasn’t sure. The afternoon had been full of enough chaos. If I had been thinking about Mom on top of all that ... well, maybe things would have happened differently. I would never know.

He murmured, “How come she left? What happened?”

“I don’t know. She never said.”

He roughed my hair. A moment ticked by in silence. “Maybe she’ll tell you now,” he whispered. “Maybe there was a really good reason.”

I shook my head. “She’s alive,” I said. “She could have said something.” Maybe she had said something, in all those letters; but that was too late. How could she leave me after making herself the only thing that mattered? She had stolen my very breath.

I didn’t want her to do it again.

The timer went off in the kitchen. I lifted the chair and took it down the hall to the kitchen table, then grabbed a fork and tested the pasta, which was ready. Got out the colander, drained the noodles in the sink. Put the salad and a bottle of dressing in the center of the table. Cut up the sausages and dropped them into the marinara. Glanced over my shoulder at my mother, who had taught me to cook, here in this kitchen. “I had to learn this out of books,” she had told me. “Except my roommate from before I married your father taught me a few things, but mostly how to make dishes that your father doesn’t like, like tofu and eggplant. It’s more fun if somebody teaches you.”

She had taught me while she was teaching herself, and it
was
more fun. Pop wasn’t so pleased when Mom started teaching me to cook, but he eventually relaxed about it. I had loved those hours after school with her.

After she left I had wondered if it had all been part of her plan: how to take care of Pop without having to be there. Soured me on remembering how much I had liked being in the kitchen with her, listening to the music she loved (mostly classical), reading around in cookbooks, mixing things up, kneading dough, cutting out cookies, experimenting sometimes if we had made a trip to the valley and found strange vegetables or spices or cuts of meat Pop didn’t carry in the store.

Mom was staring at me, her smile trembly. Evan had gotten out another place mat, napkin, and set of silver, and he edged one of the other mats aside to add it to the table.

“Anybody want anything to drink?” asked Pop.

“Soda,” said Granddad.

“Wine, Susan? Beer?”

“Fruit juice?” she said.

Pop opened the fridge and got out the orange juice, and another can of Coke for Granddad. I took plates and cups from the cupboard, filled a glass with water, and handed it to Evan. He swallowed the water and handed the cup back to me, so I filled it again. Pop took a cup from the collection on the counter and poured juice for Mom. I had a weird flashback of him doing that morning after morning while she cooked breakfast for him. She thanked him just the way she always had. How could he not know it was her?

Feeling a little dizzy, I dished up some spaghetti and sauce for Granddad and set it on the table in front of him. “Serve yourselves,” I said, “please.”

“Ladies first,” Pop said.

Mom helped herself and I stood and watched, with Evan beside me, his hands in his pockets, his whole self somehow dimmed. I had an intense feeling of longing: Mom belonged here. Things were finally set right.

Be realistic. She’ll leave after supper. The ripples of this will fade. Things will go back to non-Mom normal.

I couldn’t let them go back to Mom-normal. I couldn’t take the chance that something would hurt me that much again.

“Evan?” I said when Mom had filled her plate.

He hesitated. Then he served himself. “Salt,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” said Pop, fetching the salt and pepper shakers from the stove and putting them in the middle of the table.

“Salt,” I said. “Thanks, Pop.” Evan had never eaten anything with me before. I hadn’t even thought about it. How could salt between us be any more intense than breath between us? I got the Kraft Parmesan from the fridge and put it on the table.

“Enough salt for everybody,” Evan said, watching Pop as he dished up spaghetti and sauce for himself, then glancing at Mom. Evan licked his upper lip. He made a pass above the food that reminded me of the way he had signed above the
skilliau
rock that afternoon and murmured a few words.

Oh. Salt between Evan and me, salt between Evan and my parents. What had Lauren said about that? You couldn’t hurt people you had shared salt with, couldn’t be enemies with them. And it extended to their whole families.

I wasn’t sure how Evan defined family. Didn’t salt between Lauren and me mean Evan had to respect my family already? Apparently not, or he wouldn’t be worried about it. Maybe he no longer thought of Lauren as family.

Probably just as well if Evan and my family had salt between us. Only I wondered what this would mean if it came down to a tug-of-war between Pop and Evan as to who really owned me. Technically, taking me away from Pop might hurt him.

My stomach growled. I got supper and sat next to Evan at one side of the table, across from Pop, with Granddad on my right, Mom on Evan’s other side. Realized I had forgotten to get something to drink, and fetched myself a Coke.

“So, Evan, how’d you and Nick meet?” Pop asked after a period of forks and knives scraping plates and people chewing and swallowing, and Mom’s murmured, “Delicious, Nick,” another throwback to old times that made me wonder how long Pop could continue to ignore the fact that Mom was Mom.

“Evan is Willow’s brother,” I said.

“Willow’s the little gal you took to the dance last night? And never really introduced me to?”

“Oh. Sorry. Yes.”

Mom smiled, almost sparkled. The tightness in my chest moved up into my throat. She was wonderful when she sparkled. She could convince you that whatever you were doing was the most exciting thing you had ever done, even if it was just a walk in the woods. She could make you believe that your picture or your rock or the song you sang was the best one in the world. She could give you a glow that would carry you through a cold night.

“Your folks staying at Lacey’s?” Pop asked Evan.

Evan nodded.

“Different from the usual Lacey’s folks,” Pop said, looking at Evan’s overalls, then squinting his eyes and looking closer. “I could swear.

“I got them in the attic,” I said, before he could swear anything. “Evan forgot his suitcase.”

Pop’s eyebrows rose. I could see him thinking about making an issue out of it, but then he glanced at Mom.

She was also studying the overalls. She wore a faint smile.

I wanted to ask her what she was remembering. She probably knew Pop when he was still wearing things like overalls. The questions were percolating through me again till I couldn’t even taste what I was eating.

Mom looked up at Pop with such a smile, her eyes tender. It was as if she were saying right out loud how she remembered him, and how she remembered loving him.

Pop’s eyes widened. He cleared his throat. “We should talk about this later,” Pop said to me.

“One man’s trash, another man’s treasure,” said Granddad.

I chugged some Coke, said, “You were saving them. Pop, but for what? Were you ever going to use them again? Why not let somebody who really needs them use them?”

“Later, Nick,” Pop said, going a little red. He slid a glance toward Mom.

Later, when there were fewer strangers and/or relatives around. Then he could yell. Maybe he was like Old Faithful, had to let off steam regularly. I put down my fork and studied him, wondering why I’d never had a thought like that before. Until this moment I had kept hoping that if I just did everything right, he wouldn’t yell at me again. But it occurred to me that he always did yell, eventually.

The last time he had yelled at me—last night, before Willow and I went out—I had defied him, and both of us had survived.

“Susan, what brings you to these parts?” Pop asked, smiling at Mom. I studied that too. He really looked charming. How could Pop look charming?

Mom stared down at her half-empty plate. “I ... uh ... I was up here one summer a long time ago, and I wanted to see if it was still the same.” She looked up, uncertain, maybe a little scared.

She was scared of him. I didn’t remember that. I thought back. I could remember Mom and me doing things, but Pop wasn’t in the picture very much. He was there at meals. He said silky loving things to her and touched her often. She smiled and pressed against him. She made little gestures in the air all the time. I had thought of it as dancing. It seemed like she waved us closer to each other, an air nudge here, an air stroke there, a soft humming you had to lean closer to hear, until Pop and I were part of her dance, moving in and out between Mom’s movements, all of us harmonized. Scared had never entered the picture.

“What do you think?” Pop asked. “Are things still the same?”

“Oh, no,” she said, with a sideways glance at me. “Everything has grown so.”

Pop glanced out the window toward the night. “It’s beautiful here,” he said. His voice had a tiny wobble in it.

That surprised me again. I’d never seen Pop cast any but darkling looks toward the forest and the lake. He never swam. He never hiked. His idea of a good time was satellite TV, and driving down to the valley to shop for bargains. He was glad other people had outdoors interests, since it kept the store alive, but he never ... that wasn’t quite true. He did fish, and he shot, mostly at targets. I had always had the impression that nature spooked him, though. Which was another reason why I liked running around in the woods.

“It is,” Mom said cautiously.

Pop took a deep breath and roused himself. “Evan, what are you doing in these parts?” He said it friendly, as though he had forgotten that Evan was sitting there in Pop’s own pilfered overalls.

“Looking for rocks and some other local things,” Evan said. “There’s a lot of power in this landscape.”

“Interesting,” said Pop. “Nick used to collect rocks. He kept getting ugly ones that all looked like each other, though. Not like a regular collection, one each of really pretty things. He picked up a lot of brown and gray ones.”

“Maybe they were valuable in another way besides just looking nice,” Evan said.

“What other way is there? You think they might have been ore samples? S’pose there’s uranium up here?” He sounded curious rather than confrontational. “Nick, what were you doing with all those ugly rocks?”

“I don’t know, Pop. I just like picking things up.”

Mom was watching me, her eyes wide.

“And saving them,” Pop murmured, “just like your old man.” He glanced at Evan’s overalls and then at me. He smiled. “I’m sorry I threw them out.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t know what to do with them, anyway.” If I had stroked them and murmured to them and gestured at them the way Willow and Evan had with the afternoon’s rock, I wondered what things I would have wakened in them. I could have used comfort. But I hadn’t known to think at the rocks.

“I was afraid you’d throw ’em at cars or something,” Pop said.

“Why?” I was almost startled into a laugh. “Did I ever?”

“It just ... looked like you were stockpiling ’em upstairs. That was the only reason I could think of for doing it.”

I shook my head. “There was no planning involved.”

“Huh,” said Pop. He looked up, realized everyone was listening, smiled. “Well, I’m sure there are more interesting things to talk about than a kid’s rock collection,” he said.

“Dessert,” said Granddad. He had cleaned his plate long before.

I laughed and got out the Tin Lizzy Special ice cream.

* * *

“Can Evan spend the night?” I asked Pop as I cleared the table. Granddad had turned on the TV in the living room half of the kitchen and retreated to his wicker rocking chair, and Evan and Mom were sitting on the sofa, watching a rerun of “Roseanne” with him. Mom had slipped into her old place near the lamp, where she used to do cross-stitch while she watched. Evan sat where I usually sat. He was staring so hard I wondered if he had ever seen a TV before. After all, he came from a home with no telephones and not much mail.

Pop was still sitting at the table, nearer to me than the others. He sipped from his coffee mug. “Where would he sleep? The motel’s full.”

“He can sleep on the floor in my room. He’s used to roughing it.” I loaded dishes into the dishwasher.