by Pamela Morsi
“Do it later,” Peyton begged.
“I can’t do it later. I have to do it now,” Claire told them. “We have to take care of the minivan. If something happens to it, we won’t have any way to get you to swimming and piano and T-ball and Sunday school.”
The twins continued to whine.
“Ugh.” The sound Zaidi made was a blend of disgust and disbelief. “It’s not like we’re in love with this beat-up old minivan,” she said. “You should get Daddy to buy you something new.”
“We need a car like Dana’s,” Peyton said. “Have you seen the car that Dana has? It is so cool.”
“I know,” Presley agreed. “Dana has the best car in the world. Mom we should get a car like that.”
Peyton snorted derisively. “Mom can’t have that kind of car. It’s for cool people who are young and hip. Mom’s way too old and fat.”
“Hey!” Claire was stung by the words. “That’s a mean and hurtful thing to say to me.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Peyton dodged. “I just meant you’re like a mom and moms are not all hot and cool and stuff.”
“Hot or cool?” Presley corrected snidely. “You should make up your mind.”
Claire ignored that. “It doesn’t matter how you meant it,” she continued. “Hurtful things even spoken casually are still hurtful.”
The children were momentarily subdued.
“It’s not like you’re really that old, Mom,” Zaidi said, attempting to smooth the waters. “And you’re not fat, you just seem fat next to Dana.”
“Yeah,” Peyton agreed, warming up to the subject. “It’s like you’re just a little bit fat and Dana is like totally not fat.” That didn’t make Claire feel better, but she let it go. The truth was, these days she felt both old and fat. It was futile to argue that she wasn’t.
She pulled into Mister Auto and the kids all piled out of the car. She was told it would be at least forty-five minutes, but she wasn’t concerned. She knew that with her kids running wild in the waiting room, the mechanics would be encouraged to get her in and out in record time.
Zaidi sat down to read in a corner with very bad lighting. The twins quickly located the TV’s remote control and were flipping through channels looking for something they wouldn’t be allowed to watch at home.
Claire decided to try Jack again, though making a call was difficult. The TV was loud, but if she stepped outside, the noise level of the shop was even worse. She walked out of the room and across the parking lot where she could keep an eye on the kids through the glass and have a better chance at hearing what was being said. Even there she had to stick a finger in her other ear to drown out the traffic on the street. “Swim Infinity, this is Laura.”
The last time she’d called, they told her he was on his way back to the office. He had to be there by now.
“Hi, this is Claire Crabtree again. Is Jack in?”
“Uh, Mrs. Crabtree. He was here, but he went to lunch.”
“He went to lunch?” Claire was incredulous. She was barely able to hold back her anger. “Did you give him my message? Did you say it was a family emergency?”
“Well, I...I...” The receptionist sounded decidedly shaky. “Let me transfer you to Dana.”
“I don’t want to talk to Dana!”
Click. Click-click.
“This is Dana.”
Claire hesitated, drawing a deep calming breath.
“Hello? Who is this?” Dana was impatient.
“It’s Claire,” she answered evenly. “I need to talk to Jack.”
“He’s at lunch.”
“Yes, that’s what Laura told me. It’s a family emergency and for some reason the receptionist won’t put me through to his cell.”
“Is it about the kids?” Dana asked.
Claire was tempted to answer none of your business, but she managed to restrain herself. “No,” she said. “The children are fine. This is something else.”
Dana hesitated as if expecting Claire to elaborate. She wasn’t about to.
“Well, Jack has left strict orders not to be bothered if it’s not the kids or a client.”
“Just put me through to his cell phone. You won’t be blamed for the interruption.”
“I’m sorry, Claire, I just can’t do that,” Dana answered, her firm, unruffled tone was extremely patient, as if she were dealing with a willful child or a deranged person.
“Dana, am I going to have to come out there and sit in the lobby with my children?”
That shut the woman up. Claire could almost see her floundering on the other end of the line. Victory was almost within her grasp when she was suddenly distracted.
“Mom!” Zaidi called from the doorway to the waiting room. “The twins are tearing up stuff.”
“Got to go,” Claire said to Dana and ended the call abruptly. She hurried across the parking lot and into the building to discover that Peyton and Presley had used the seat cushions from the cheap waiting room couches and chairs for a pillow fight. The ruckus had resulted in knocking a lamp off a table. Fortunately, the lamp was mostly metal and plastic. The lampshade however, would never be quite the same.
The twins were timed-out in opposite corners while Claire righted things as best she could and apologized to the waiting room’s other two occupants, an older balding man who was very nervous and skittish and a smiling guy who apparently didn’t speak English but understood kids.
They were out of there fifteen minutes later, which included a five-minute lecture on regularly checking the oil level because you are never supposed to actually run out.
Claire considered just driving to Swim Infinity as she had threatened. The image of being there in Dana’s face held a lot of allure for her. But she knew better than to try to play games with the woman. Dana was the kind of person who always won, no matter what. There were people like that in every city, in every culture. And there were people who wasted their whole lives butting up against them. Claire wasn’t going to do that. She had determined that her safest course of action was not to compete.
As she drove across town to the wealthy neighborhood of oversize homes near the Medical Center, she thought about Dana. She didn’t think about Jack. Thoughts of Jack haunted sleepless nights and her idle thoughts. Maybe if I had done this. Maybe if I had said that. The unending analysis, self-recrimination and second-guessing drove her crazy. She’d given up thinking about Jack. So, she thought about Dana.
Dana was a conniving, calculating bitch and a potential home wrecker. While Claire had been home virtuously breast-feeding twins and chasing a preschooler, Dana had managed to lure Jack, Claire’s Jack, into believing things, wanting things that he’d never been after before. Her husband had changed. Their marriage had changed. She wasn’t sure when it happened or why it happened. But she was sure it was Dana’s fault.
When she and Jack had run the business together, all he’d wanted was to design unique pools and support his family. Now he wanted money, he wanted status and he wanted social position.
Claire knew she was lucky that he still wanted to be married. And she was grateful that Jack was not the kind of guy who would have an affair. But their love had somehow worn out. And their relationship seemed as if it was headed nowhere.
How did that happen between two people who’d been so much in love?
She parked the minivan in the circular driveway in front of the lovely Shavano Creek home of Ernst and Antoinette Van Brugge, Claire’s in-laws. The kids were all racing to the door before she’d even made it out of the car. Toni greeted them as if the unexpected drop-in was the highlight of her day.
Four tables of gray-haired and heavily bejeweled bridge players occupying the living room belied that fact. The twins headed immediately for the elaborately decorated punch table.
“Don’t touch anything!” Claire warned them under her breath.
“Hello, hello.” Claire smiled and nodded toward all the ladies, sure she had cemented forever their opinion that To
ni’s son, Jack, could have done better.
“You can have two cookies each,” Toni told the children. “Eloise, will you set places for them at the table in the family room and get them some milk?”
The maid, uncharacteristically uniformed for the day, hustled them off in that direction, while Toni led Claire into the library nearby.
“What a surprise,” Toni told Claire. Although Claire was convinced her true sentiments were more along the lines of, What in the devil are you doing showing up here unannounced with three kids in tow?
“I’ve been trying to call all morning, but it went straight to the answering machine,” Claire explained.
“I had Eloise unplug it,” Toni said. “We were too busy to chat.”
“There’s been some kind of accident up in Oklahoma,” Claire continued. “Bernard called me. Old Mr. Crabtree is in the hospital in a coma or something. Jack is listed as the person to make medical decisions for him.”
“Oh, my goodness.” Toni’s face and demeanor changed immediately. “Poor old Bud,” she said. “I’ve worried about him since Geri died. I should have gone to her funeral. I’ve been beating myself up about it every day since.”
Claire hadn’t gone to the funeral, either. Jack hadn’t even suggested it. “Somebody has to stay home with the kids,” he’d said. Claire had complied without argument. They never went up to Oklahoma. The old relatives had never even seen their children.
“So I suppose Jack is going up there,” her mother-in-law said to Claire.
“He doesn’t know yet.”
Toni’s brow furrowed unpleasantly.
“I can’t get through to him at work,” Claire said. “His cell phone goes through their receptionist and they just keep saying that he’ll return my call.”
Toni walked over to the desk nearby and picked up the phone. She punched in the numbers and only had to wait a moment.
“This is Antoinette Van Brugge, Jack’s mother,” she said with a voice as smooth as sugar and as tight as a garrote. “I need to speak with my son immediately.”
There was a half-minute of silence.
“Oh, Jack, I have some terrible news,” she said.
2
Bud
I was in the water. It was dark and gray and cold. I was exhausted. But I was alive and I had to stay awake. To sleep was to drown. I had to stay awake. I was so sleepy, but I had to stay awake. Maybe if I could open my eyes. But my eyes wouldn’t open. My arms wouldn’t move. I would surely drown. I would never make it home. I’d never be with Geri again.
Wait! I couldn’t be in the water. I had been with Geri. We’d had a life. I wasn’t in the water. I’d been rescued.
That thought calmed me. I realized that my heart was pounding in sheer terror. The same terror that I’d felt in the water. But I wasn’t in the water now. Where was I?
I did what I could to take stock of my surroundings. I couldn’t open my eyes. But I could smell. It was that antiseptic scent. Medicine and rubbing alcohol and plastic all mixed together in one memorable odor. Once you’d been in a hospital, you would recognize the smell anywhere. And there were the sounds, too. Incessant digital beeping and the unfamiliar huff that was somehow connected to my own breathing.
My eyes were closed.
What was I doing in a hospital? I couldn’t remember what had happened. I’d been at the cemetery. It was Geri’s birthday. And now I was here.
But I wasn’t alone. Someone was murmuring on the other side of the room. As they came closer I recognized Viv’s voice. My sister-in-law’s voice was similar to Geri’s, but it was higher and the sound carried across the room.
It was funny that I could recognize the sound, but had no sense of the words being said. It was all just noise, familiar noise, but unrecognizable.
Someone was standing closer to me now. Was it Viv? No, it was a stranger. Perhaps it was a doctor or a nurse. I couldn’t tell, but I knew it was a stranger. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did.
Sometimes you can know things and you don’t know how. It was that way the day I first met Geri. The day I came to her rescue.
The memory swelled up life-size in my mind. I gave myself up to it. The snap of cold air on an autumn morning. My scratchy wool scarf around my neck. The smooth feel of my overalls and the pinch of last year’s boots on my feet.
It was 1933. The scent of fall was on the breeze. There were clouds high in the sky, like angels I suppose, so quickly passing by above us with little time to concern themselves with our petty troubles. The leaves on the trees had colored up brightly. A welcome change from the frightening summer of heat and drought. It was reassuring that nature hadn’t turned against us completely.
I remember the year exactly, because it was one of those years that stood out in my life. Some years seemed the worst. And in others wonderful things happened. But there was always a little of both in every sliver of time and it’s only when you view a whole life that any of it ever makes sense.
But I didn’t know that in 1933. All I knew then was that my father had died in February. And after the funeral, my mother took to her bed. I don’t mean she was ill, at least not in any way that was obvious. She just couldn’t seem to stir herself to get up and live.
At first the pastor came repeatedly, along with two of the ladies from the church auxiliary. Several of her longtime friends, wives in the neighborhood, all pleaded with her to face her loss, to get up and get on with it.
She just couldn’t.
“If you won’t do it for yourself,” Old Mrs. McCrary told her, “then you must do it for Buddy. The boy needs you.”
I remember Mama turning to look at me, standing worried and anxious at her bedside. Her eyes were huge and ringed with dark circles of care. But she managed a small smile just for me.
“Buddy’s nearly a man already,” she said. “He can take care of himself.”
I was ten.
In the end, though, she was right. My childhood dropped away from me right there, and I became her caretaker and her sole support.
That’s what I was doing that autumn day, making a living for us. Our Guernsey cow, Becca, didn’t know that there was a depression. Every morning and evening she gave me two buckets of milk, just as she had when times were good and my father was alive. I strained it into the milk can, put the can in my red wagon, a Christmas gift from better days, and delivered it to my customers all over Catawah.
Finished and on my way home, I had just passed the Pentecostal church when I noticed a crowd of boys standing around the piss pit just dug for the church’s outhouse. They were all guys I knew, Piggy Masterson, Orb O’Neil, Stub Williams, the McKiever brothers, Hackshaw Hurst. They were laughing and having a good time. I figured that something had fallen down in the pit and couldn’t get out. The churchmen hadn’t gotten around to moving the outhouse over. That’s what you did back then when your pit began to fill up, you dug a new one and slid the outhouse over the top of it. Then you’d lime the old pit and use the dirt dug from the new pit to fill in what was left.
But during this process there was always a time when the new pit was just a big open hole in the ground and a squirrel or a possum might fall inside. Unable to get out, the creature would scramble frantically, which was always entertaining for boys to watch.
Although I knew Mama was home and there was plenty there that needed to be done, my curiosity got the best of me. I left my empty milk can in my little wagon at the side of the road and went to see for myself.
I heard her before I saw her, but the sight itself was something I’d never forget. She was a wild-haired little ragamuffin with a dirty face and threadbare overalls.
“You don’t scare me, Piggy Masterson,” she declared adamantly from the bottom of the pit. “I’ll whup your sissy lily liver and all your friends, too.”
The boys found that uproarious. She was younger than us by a year or two and small even for that age. Piggy, the biggest kid in school, was twice her height and outweighed her by a
hundred pounds.
“I’m not scared of any of you!”
There was truth in her words. She stood fists clenched, eyes narrow, defiant. I admit to being totally fascinated by her. She was like some strange creature I’d never seen before. Her hair, instead of being neatly bound in pigtails, was sticking out in every direction. Her stance downright pugilistic. She couldn’t really be a girl, I thought. Girls would cower and cry and be helpless until someone came to their rescue. This girl was talking mean as a hornet and didn’t even seem to realize that she needed help. She was a crazy girl, pure and simple. I think I must have been drawn to her that very minute.
“What’s going on here?” I asked Stub. The nine-year-old had lost his right arm to a threshing machine. He was now Piggy’s chief sidekick and spokesman.
“We’re just trying to get rid of some junk,” he said. “We figure Dirty Shirts’s daughter probably is garbage and she’ll feel right at home in a pit.”
That’s where I’d seen her before. Her, or one of her sisters, they all looked pretty much the same, riding on the junkman’s garbage cart. In those days, picking up trash was a trade, just like carpentry or tailoring. Our junkman was named Darby Shertz. Kids, with our affinity for nicknames, called him Dirty Shirts, because that’s pretty much what he wore.
Dirty Shirts rolled his pushcart up and down the streets of Catawah every day, picking up cast-off items, broken crockery, bent metal, rags. The citizens paid him a pittance to haul off the things they couldn’t use. He made a living from repairing and reselling these items. In the best of times it was a poorly paid and unpleasant job. During the Depression, when basically every human in town was living hand to mouth, it was hardly a living at all.
Dirty Shirts and his wife, a thin, exhausted-looking woman rarely seen in town, lived in a tin-roofed, tar-paper shack at the dump. They combed through the scraps of other people’s rubbish as a way of life.
They had a whole slew of daughters. One was in my class at school. She was routinely made the butt of jokes. I remembered one day in class when all the girls who sat in desks behind her put clothespins on their noses. The suggestion that she smelled bad was a great joke. I’d chuckled along with everyone else. But this girl, a bantam hen ready for battle, was somehow no laughing matter.
