“I’m having only one, Mr. Thomas,” I said. “Got to get some housework done, and I’m not a big drinker. This will surely go to my head. My boyfriend hates coming into a mess,” I added, just to be clear.
“I knew a pretty girl like you had to have a beau,” he said.
Beau? I thought. Who uses that word today? I started to raise my glass to my lips.
“Oh,” he said. “Would you do me one more little favor first?”
“What’s that?”
“Would you be so kind as to put on the pearls I gave you? I would just like to see you wearing them once. It will sort of make this toast and celebration special for me.”
How lucky it was that I still had them, I thought. He’d be devastated.
“Put on pearls? With my nurse’s uniform?” I said, smiling.
“Sounds silly, but it’s not to me. I’ve envisioned you wearing them, but it’s not the same as actually seeing you wearing them.”
The instinctive surge of fear I had felt in the hallway when I first saw him standing at my door returned. He took a small digital camera out of his jacket pocket.
“I’ll make a couple of copies so you get one,” he said.
“Not for the Internet, I hope.”
“Oh, absolutely not. I won’t be sharing this with anyone, Nurse Dunning. I don’t understand how people share so much of their personal life anyway. If something is very special to you, it could mean nothing to others, and most often doesn’t. Please,” he said.
Get it on and over, I thought, and nodded.
“Okay, but I will be very upset if I see it anywhere.”
“No one else will appreciate the sight of those pearls on you. No worries.”
I nodded.
Who knew what he would say if he learned I was planning on donating the necklace to a charity? Maybe I should try to return it to him, telling him it made me feel too guilty to keep it. I put the glass of champagne down on the table and went into the bedroom. I realized that I hadn’t even taken off my jacket. I did that and opened the box containing the string of pearls. Feeling really very silly, I put them on, glanced at myself in the mirror, and then started out, thinking how angry Chandler would be about this. It was another secret I had to keep from him. Knowing how hurt he would be didn’t make me comfortable.
Douglas Thomas stood there with an exaggeratedly wide smile. He looked so pleased and happy that I felt guilty again even for simply thinking of denying him this moment or attempting to return his gift. He handed me my glass and then focused his camera.
“Just a little smile,” he said.
I did smile, but I didn’t think I looked that happy despite it. My eyes were surely giveaways. He snapped the picture, looked at it, and showed it to me. Oddly, I didn’t think it looked like me. Maybe it was the lighting. The weakened early-evening sun struggled to pass through my yet-to-be-washed windows.
“I bet this would make your fellow nurses and especially Belinda Spoon unhappy,” he said. It sounded more like the start of blackmail.
“It would.” There was no doubt what the expression on my face was saying.
“They’ll never see it,” he promised. He lifted his glass.
“I do hope not. As I said, it would make me very angry.”
“Promise, cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. He looked at his glass of champagne. He cleared his throat. “Too many people take things for granted,” he said, assuming a more formal posture as he prepared to deliver his toast. “They treat anyone in any health industry like their personal servants, like it’s all coming to them just because they’re citizens or something. ‘Thank you’ is an expression dying on the vine in our world today, but not for me.
“To a wonderful, caring, and dedicated young nurse, to whom I will be eternally grateful. My dearest and most cherished thank you,” he said, and tapped his glass against mine.
We drank.
He laughed. “Those pearls look like they were made for you,” he said. “I knew they’d be perfect.”
“Champagne and pearls. This is all way beyond what we’re supposed to receive for our work, Mr. Thomas.”
“It’s what’s deserved,” he insisted, and tapped my glass again.
Finish it and get it over with, I thought. I did.
“One more?”
“Oh, no, no,” I said.
“Do you mind if I have another?”
Before I could respond, he poured it.
“You should have a better apartment than this, not that it’s a slum or anything,” he said. He drank his champagne. “I’m sure it’s expensive rent, probably a bit more than a nurse can afford. Do you share the rent with your beau?”
“He has his own place for now,” I said sharply.
He ignored the tone in my voice. “You’re in a good neighborhood, and it’s a nice building. I don’t spend much time on this side of the city, but I’ve always admired it.”
His eyes seemed to get smaller and then larger to me.
“Nurses aren’t paid enough. That’s for sure. I know some janitors who make more than you do. The priorities in this country are completely confused. My mother was a schoolteacher, and she was paid pennies compared to much less important people. Don’t forget I’m an accountant, so I know about these things. What I see sickens me sometimes, but everyone else laughs and says, ‘It’s none of your business, Douglas. Worry about yourself.’ ”
He wagged his head and drank his champagne.
I had the strange feeling that he was swaying. After a moment, I realized it wasn’t him swaying. It was me. He continued to drink his champagne and smile. He was saying something about the pearls, but I couldn’t understand it. I thought he was mumbling.
What’s happening? I wondered. The spinning increased. My body suddenly felt very heavy. My legs were weakening, and my hands felt like they had turned to tissue paper.
I heard the glass shatter on the coffee table and realized it had slipped from my fingers. I was sinking toward the floor. It was as though it was swallowing me and I was on my way to disappearing. I uttered a small cry of despair.
He put his glass down and then stepped toward me just as everything went dark.
Scarletta
“YOU KNOW WHAT we’re going to do tonight?” Daddy said at our first breakfast without my mother. He paused with that Fourth of July excitement in his face that usually exploded with a sudden idea.
His behavior surprised me. I was preparing myself for the saddest and most depressing start of any day, but he was beaming. At the moment, I couldn’t imagine being excited about anything. Smiles and laughter were like distant stars, light-years away. My mother was gone, maybe forever, as he had insisted. Didn’t Daddy have as big a hole in his heart? Couldn’t anyone see that his and my smiles would be masks and not real? I didn’t want us to be constantly unhappy, but I looked at my mother’s empty chair and wondered how we would not be.
However, I had something weighing on my heart that was an even bigger dread. My real fear this morning was that the second my classmates looked at me, they’d know something terrible had happened at our house. My face was usually an easily read road map to my emotions. For me, it would be a day of avoiding people, keeping my eyes down, and then, when I had to, dressing my face in what my mother called “plastic joy.” How could I not be depressed all day? I couldn’t imagine doing well at track practice and thought that by then, I might claim sickness and take the early school bus home.
On the other hand, Daddy looked like he would have no trouble conducting his work just as he had always done. When I thought about it, I realized he was really good at hiding his innermost feelings, especially with my mother. Any other man would probably have growled back at her more, but he was able to laugh or smile at almost anything and therefore diminish the flames that threatened to burn down our family.
But perhaps this time, they had come from another direction, one totally unexpected. Sly fires burn faster. The flames emerge in an instan
t around you. There is much less of a chance to snuff them out. Yet looking at him, how impeccably he was dressed, how hungry he obviously was, and now how excited, it was easy to see that he was contending well, perhaps too well. Maybe he believed he had to be this way. He was fulfilling his role as my father above his role as a husband, an abused and distraught husband. It was all for me.
This morning, he had made me what was my mother’s and my favorite breakfast dish, Swedish pancakes with blueberries. I realized that he must have gotten up earlier and mixed the batter, because all he did was get the skillet hot and open the refrigerator to take out what he had already prepared in the bowl. He had even set our breakfast-nook table. He would do all this normally on weekends. He was determined to show me that nothing had changed. Sometimes on Sunday mornings, he would bring Mommy her breakfast, and he and I would eat here without her, which was what we were going to do now. Could I close my eyes and imagine she was up in their room sipping her coffee in bed? Could I convince myself it was just that?
“We’re going out to your favorite restaurant for dinner tonight,” he said. “Dante’s.”
“We are?”
“Yes, okay?”
“Okay.”
I didn’t know what else to say. That wasn’t my favorite restaurant. It was my mother’s. I just pretended to love it as much, but to me it was stuffy, and there wasn’t all that much I liked on the menu. If we were going to a restaurant so that we didn’t dwell on being unhappy about my mother leaving us, why go to one of her favorite places? The maître d’ might ask about her, or there might be people eating there who knew us and would wonder why she wasn’t with us. Wouldn’t that be more painful for him and for me?
“You look very nice this morning,” he said. He smiled, looking out the window. “You remember how your mother would never come down to breakfast without first putting herself together, as she used to say?”
He leaned forward to whisper.
“I don’t mind confessing to taking a little more time with my own appearance because of her. She was a very big influence on us both. We have to admit that, Scarletta.”
He returned to the pancakes, sighed, and poured himself more coffee.
I remained quite puzzled not only by what he was saying this morning but also by how he was saying it. He sounded like she had already been away for years. He turned back to me. His eyes did not look anywhere nearly as sad as they had yesterday and even earlier this morning when I had gone to his bedroom.
Suddenly, he stood straighter and looked like Mommy did when she made one of her important announcements or decisions. His lips were tightly pressed together, his shoulders were back, and he looked past me as if there were other people in the room, an entire audience of listeners, just the way my mother often did.
“Breakfast, lunch, and especially dinner should never be treated with too much informality. It is at meals when we most secure our family relationships,” he declared with an attempt to mimic Mommy’s voice. It was Mommy’s statement, word for word. Anyone else might think he was making fun of her, but I couldn’t imagine him doing that.
He relaxed and looked at me for some sort of compliment, I guess. When I said nothing, he nodded.
“Your mother is gone, Scarletta, but it doesn’t mean we won’t remember the good things she taught us. She did teach us good things, right? Sometimes we resisted a little, but in the end, we realized she was looking out for us. We’re not going to forget those things just because she isn’t here anymore. Are we?”
It was as if my tongue wouldn’t obey the command sent down from my brain. I stared at him.
“Right?”
“Right,” I said. It was hard to say it, because it meant I agreed she was gone for good.
“Good.” He served the pancakes and sat. “Anything special going on today?” he asked.
It was late April. He knew that I had track practice after school and took the late bus home.
“No tests, but I have track practice.”
“Right, right, track. Your mother wasn’t crazy about your being on the track team, but she wasn’t much of a sports fan. Working with a personal trainer was as far as she would go when it came to exercise. She wouldn’t even take up tennis when we first got married and I was playing regularly. Did you know that? She could be very, very stubborn when she made up her mind about something.”
He leaned forward to whisper again. Why all this whispering?
“I’d think ‘worse than a mule,’ but I’d never dare say it. I bet you thought of her like that, too.”
I shook my head. Call my mother a mule? Never, ever, never.
He looked thoughtful. “You know what?” he said, leaning back and speaking louder now, loud enough for her to hear if she were still in the house, even upstairs. “Your mother took her best things; however, she left a great deal behind. Actually, she had far too much to take on a quick exit like that. I haven’t touched a thing she left in that closet, but you’re close to her size in almost everything now, aren’t you?”
“Not everything, no.”
“But you can wear some of her nice things. For dinner tonight, why don’t you put on that blue dress I bought her last year? That was one of the dresses she left, maybe because I bought it as a surprise and she didn’t want to explain that to her new lover.”
New lover, I thought. The words seemed so out of place. I never even heard her give another man a big enough compliment to make my father jealous. At times, I thought she hated men. She had so many warnings about them for me. It was a wonder I wasn’t afraid of just talking to boys. “Men are hunters; men set traps; deceit, lies, and false faces are part of their DNA.”
“You can wear the shoes that match,” Daddy continued. “She told me you were the same shoe size.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I meant I didn’t know whether I would like to do what he suggested, but I was afraid to be too contrary. I didn’t want to add an iota of sadness to what he was already suffering. Maybe he could pretend he wasn’t with strangers but not with me. No matter how he sounded, he was like a match that even rubbed gently would burst into a flame of rage.
When it came to clothes, the truth was that my mother never let me wear any of her things. She had told me that since we weren’t exactly the same everywhere, my hips were a little wider, and I didn’t have as big a bosom, I might stretch something or in some way cause it to lose its shape.
“You have your own clothes,” she said when I had expressed a little more admiration for one of her blouse-and-skirt outfits than I usually did. “A mother should be a mother, not a sister,” she added. “Those women who deliberately buy and wear the same outfits that their daughters wear are simply trying to look younger. They look ridiculous and pathetic most of the time, especially when they reach my age.”
I knew she was referring especially to Janice Lyn’s mother, who had come to parents’ night at the school wearing the same dress Janice wore. Other mothers thought it was cute, but my mother ranted about it, calling it one of the most embarrassing things she had to witness a supposedly grown-up woman do.
“Some example she’s setting for her daughter,” she said. “Acting like a big fool. And the rest of us have to act like it doesn’t matter.”
All of that came rolling back at me. She’d hate for me to wear her clothes and therefore make them look like a younger person’s fashion.
“I have that new lace chiffon Mommy bought me right after Christmas, remember? I wore it to a school dance in February and once when we went to that steak house you guys liked. That should be all right, Daddy.”
He nodded, but he looked very disappointed. “Whatever,” he said. “I’ll make a reservation when I get to the office.” He finished his coffee and rose.
Dare I ask? I wondered, but I really needed guidance.
“What are you going to tell people about Mommy, Daddy?”
He looked at me as if the whole situation had just occurred to him.
“I
’m not sure.” He thought a moment and widened his eyes. “No. I am sure. I’m going to tell people the truth, Scarletta. Your mother has run off with someone. She had a secret affair, apparently, and she’s gone. I’ll tell them about the note she left and that she took most of her things, too, which will convince them. I’m certainly not going to chase after her. A man has to hold on to his pride. Sometime in the future, she might contact us or me for money. You can bet your ass on that, but until then, I doubt we’ll hear a peep from her.”
“What would you do if you heard from her?”
“If she called and asked for money?”
I nodded.
“Get a lawyer. That’s what I’d say. I have a prenuptial, you know. Thanks to my mother. I didn’t want to do it, but she was relentless about it, and your mother didn’t care, because she claimed she would never divorce me. She was more in love with me then, I guess, if she ever really was.”
He was quiet, and then, like someone waking from a daydream, he said, “Whatever. Got to get organized and going. Big day at the factory today. Ironically, I have a lot to celebrate tonight. We have the biggest order since our family began the business.” He smiled.
No matter how well his business was doing, I still couldn’t understand how Daddy could be happy about anything. I remained so shocked and numb that I really didn’t want to go to school. I didn’t know how to tell him. It would spoil his efforts to be happy.
“Maybe I should stay home today. I wouldn’t know what to tell my friends at school, Daddy.”
“Friends? Er . . . don’t tell them anything yet, Scarletta. If someone asks something about your mother, just say you don’t know. You don’t really, and if you do what I do, you’re bound to be pursued with annoying questions. I’d rather you not repeat anything I say just yet. Of course, you should go to school. There would be more chatter about us if you didn’t.”
“But don’t you care where she went? Who she went with? I know you’re angry about it, but—”
The Silhouette Girl Page 8
