by K M Cholewa
Geneva thought they were wrong. She thought it was a skill some needed to have children in order to learn.
“Ready to get some work done?” she said, looking down at Rachael.
Rachael held a notebook. She looked up but didn’t answer. Still, Geneva knew that Rachael, even if she didn’t actually like Geneva, approved of her. She seemed to think they shared a secret, as though the two of them were allies, that they knew something about Tatum but were too polite to speak it.
Tatum stepped up onto the curb.
“Any word?” she said, referring to the board meeting being held as they spoke.
“None yet.”
Tatum nodded.
“Well, I’ll see everybody in about an hour.” Tatum touched Rachael’s shoulder before stepping back into the street. “Be productive,” she called over the roof of the car. Then she swung into the driver’s seat, hit the engine, and pulled away.
Geneva looked down at Rachael.
“Let’s get at it.”
Inside the coffee shop, it was soft light, warmth, and Saturday bustle. The music was reggae. No one could complain. Coats and mufflers and hats and gloves feathered booths like nests. Geneva beelined it for a newly opened booth, knowing it wouldn’t last.
The coffee shop, the Grounds, was an institution. It had endured for twenty-five years, surviving economic upswings, bear markets, hairstyles, cultural upheavals, smoking, and nonsmoking. Through it all, it remained itself. Summer upon summer, dirty feet padded over the wood plank floors. Winter upon winter, shivering regulars tromped in, geared up in their Nepalese, cold-weather wear. But the clientele was not a tidy row of paper dolls. Professionals and hippies. Retirees and teenagers. Fringes of different orbits warmed their hands against their mugs while the rich scent of a fresh grind rose toward the tin ceiling. Customers and employees alike argued politics, religion, and Belinda’s column — all subjects inappropriate at the dinner table.
Geneva and Rachael slid into the wooden booth, one on each side.
“What’s the homework assignment?” Geneva asked, pulling off her own coat.
“I have to write about what I might be when I grow up. Like what job.”
“What are you thinking of?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a photographer.”
“Not bad,” Geneva said. “I was interested in that for a while.”
A girl of maybe twenty appeared at their booth. Rachael, her coat still zipped to the neck, looked up at her.
“Hot chocolate?” Geneva said to Rachael.
Rachael nodded.
“Two hot chocolates.”
“Redemption Song” strummed through the old speakers propped up on the loft above the counter. Geneva watched the girl walk away, long underwear poking out from her long, hemp skirt, her bare feet stuffed into Birkenstocks. The service might be quick. It might be slow. You might have to remind the staff of your order. It didn’t matter. In fact, Geneva thought it was adaptive, kept the mainstream at bay and protected a critical ecosystem, one of the tide pools where life begins.
“Well,” Geneva said to Rachael, “I don’t like any of the letters I’ve gotten, so I need to write a column. I think I’m just going to go on a rant.”
“What’s a rant?” Rachael asked, seeming only half-interested.
“It’s a lecture to the world. A spirited one.”
The answer seemed to satisfy Rachael, or failed to interest her. She reached up and unzipped her coat.
“Maybe I’ll write about some other job,” she said.
“Well,” Geneva said, “there’s lots out there.”
Geneva knew she probably wouldn’t be a lot of help in this area. Though she’d had several jobs and fleeting careers, she was never truly bonded to the workforce. She was always competent at what she did, but her competence far outweighed her interest.
“Your Aunt Tatum used to be a technical writer. Paris is a cook.”
“What about Vincent?” Rachael asked.
Geneva raised her brows. She was aware of Rachael’s interest in Vincent. Tatum had told her that when she tried to engage Rachael in conversations about her dead mother or her father, Rachael was nonresponsive. But Vincent she was always eager to discuss. Where was Vincent now? Why, again, did he leave? What she seemed to be after, Tatum told Geneva, was the fatal flaw, the accident to avoid if you’re to keep those you love from blinking out of existence.
“Vincent’s job,” Geneva told Rachael, choosing words carefully, “is to help people who want to practice certain traditions and values.”
“That’s a job?”
The hot chocolates arrived and were placed before them. They were beautiful, topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. The warmth from the mugs drew their hands. Geneva bought some time on the subject by fiddling with her drink. She spooned whipped cream into her mouth and mixed the rest down into the chocolate. Given the circumstances that had brought Rachael into her life, Geneva found it difficult to discern whether talk of funerals and death was a good or bad idea.
“Sometimes when people die,” Geneva said, “they want to have special kinds of funerals or ceremonies. Vincent tries to help them make it happen the way they want.”
It made him sound like a funeral director instead of an outlaw.
Rachael stuck her own spoon into the whipped cream. Geneva watched her for clues as to where she might want, or need, the conversation to go.
“I don’t think I’d do that as a job,” she said.
A neutral close to the subject, Geneva thought. Fine.
“Maybe you should do a brainstorm,” Geneva suggested. “Make a list of all the jobs you can think of and then decide the one you want to write about.”
“We’re supposed to write about the one we want to be when we grow up.”
“Just write about whatever one sounds interesting to you,” Geneva said. “Pretend it’s what you want to be. They’ll never know.”
Rachael twisted her mouth like Geneva didn’t understand the rules. She opened her notebook as though settling it that Geneva would be no help. Geneva followed suit, pulling her yellow legal pad in front of her. What shall Belinda say? But in searching her own mind, all she could find was dread about the board convening at Parkview Homes. The fear of arrest rippled through her, but then, she thought, if they were going to press legal charges, they would’ve done so already. Wouldn’t they? Parkview was a private institution, and it cost an arm and leg. Perhaps, they didn’t want the publicity.
Geneva briefly considered using her column as a forum on the whole affair. But she wasn’t certain that the world would be with her. Clearly, quite a few had already seen things quite differently than she did. Why take the shame public? Why take on a scarlet letter, a P emblazoned on her breast? P for Predator. Perpetrator. Perhaps, she could use her column to plea for a reduced charge, a scarlet H for Humper.
She mulled, pen poised. Rachael also sat with her pencil at the ready, but her eyes cruised the room.
“Ralph was a financial planner,” Geneva volunteered.
Rachael looked at her, and Geneva could see the words financial planner bounce right off her forehead. Such words did not belong in a third-grade world.
“Sorry,” Geneva said.
She let her own eyes drift over Rachael’s head and over the back of the booth. Unexpectedly, she caught the eye of a man at the counter who had clearly been observing her. Large and gray-haired, he nodded when her eyes landed on his. A jolt went through her, and she let the corners of her mouth lift in greeting.
She was not invisible. The boys in the storefront had been blind.
She looked back down to the blank page and her ringless left hand flat on the table. Her wedding band, it had never been a standard feature. It had come on and off throughout her marriage without a lot of fuss. Ralph never made an issue of it. Geneva had told him that the only way of it not being a big deal, whether or not it was on, was to never
get in the habit of always, or never, wearing it. Geneva was wary of investing inanimate objects with power — not because she thought the power was imagined, but because she knew it came to be real. She didn’t want to have to assess, every day, whether or not she had it in her to bear the symbol’s weight.
She flexed the back of her hand as though there were a ring to view. The skin was chapped, the days of smooth hands long behind her. In her right hand, she held her pen, cigarette-style, between her first and middle fingers. Unconsciously, she began to tap it, one end and then the other, on the table.
But thoughts of the wedding band were thoughts of Ralph, and thoughts of Ralph were thoughts of Parkview Home. She sighed and Rachael looked out from under her brow. Geneva smiled weakly, communicating, she hoped, nothing more than writer’s block. The board would scold her, she told herself, put her on probation, pacify the social worker, and get it swept neatly under a rug. Wouldn’t they? They would form a committee and create a policy. The Geneva Clause, or the G-clause, perhaps, for short.
It all seemed so unfair.
She looked at Rachael across the table. She imagined her saying, “You want to talk about unfair?” Nonetheless, the “No fairs” and “Why me’s?” had seized her. She recalled Paris once saying that it was pointless to look for cause and effect. Yet here she was. It was irresistible, the question, “Why?”
She repositioned the pen properly in her hand.
Two kinds of people believe everything happens for a reason, she wrote. One kind believes that the reasons reveal themselves in the future. The other kind believes that the reasons lie in the past.
16
Tatum stood in the camera section of Osco Drugs. The film display took up an entire wall with nearly identical packages. She withdrew from her coat pocket the slip of paper on which Geneva had written down the kind of film she was to buy. Tatum knew nothing of photography, cameras, and their accouterments. Her only camera had been a pocket Instamatic, circa seventh grade. The logistics of accumulating snapshots, for her, was simply too overwhelming, too complicated. Better to live the undocumented life.
Not so for Rachael. Before dropping her off at the coffee shop, she and Tatum had taken a walk around Spring Meadow Lake. The lake was, in fact, an old gravel pit filled with groundwater that seeped up from the beds of sand and rubble below. But nature had adopted it as one of her own. In the spring, frogs and ducks took up residency. Cottonwoods crowded the shore and willows wept in the surrounding fields of timothy, wheatgrass, and mountain brome. But it was winter, and all the busyness slept.
Still, the lake hosted couples on quiet winter strolls and ice fishermen dropping their lines for bass and trout. The pictures Rachael took there were not of the naked trees or the distant slouching mountains. They were of reeds, stripped of color, standing broken in the frozen shallows. In the back of the park on the wood plank bridge, she had looked down through the railing at a big-mouthed bass slipping by in the water beneath the ice. She aimed her camera and snapped.
“What do you think that fish is thinking?” Tatum had asked her.
“He’s not thinking anything.”
“Not enough brains?”
“No,” Rachael said. “He’s dreaming.”
Wishful thinking, Tatum had thought, that it was all a dream and that with the thaw, one would wake to the world, intact and unharmed. She stood beside Rachael, watching the fish disappear beneath the bridge. “I’ll never leave you” — that’s what Tatum wanted to say to her. But she didn’t. She wanted Rachael to feel safe, but more, she wanted Rachael to trust her. Pianos do fall from the sky. Tatum would hate for one to make her out to be a liar.
Tatum found the package with the words that matched the ones on her slip of paper. She chose wrapping paper from a different aisle and then paid at the counter. The camera had been Rachael’s Christmas present. It had been Geneva’s idea. Back in December, Tatum had told her that Rachael had asked for copies of all the photographs in the family albums she had stolen for her. Geneva suggested that getting Rachael a camera might give her a “medium” for figuring out that time hadn’t stopped, that memories were still accumulating. The idea proved to be inspired. Rachael carried the camera everywhere. She always wanted doubles of her prints. Tatum understood why she’d want backups of things that could be forever lost.
Next stop, the bakery.
Tatum pointed the car toward the historical district at the base of the north slope where downtown ended and the foothills began their ascent. The bakery was tucked in a small strip of brick buildings that originally served as hostelry for prospectors. Above the shops, small subdivisions slithered up the mountain’s face, each resenting the next as one climbed higher than the one before, bulldozing their hearts’ desire in the effort to inhabit it more fully. Tatum parked the car in front of Sweetie Pies and Cakes. New, white flakes fell on the old stacked snow clinging to the shade and northern walls. It was February, short and sweet. Winter, and no one expected it to be anything else.
A bell rang above the door as she entered. Bonnie Raitt sang on the radio. The shifted lintel above the archway that led back to the ovens revealed the valley’s history of tremors, subtle and not so subtle alike. The display case, on the other hand, was thoroughly modern, featuring confections, bundt cakes, and truffles made fresh that morning. In the corner of the bottom shelf was a small cluster of Valentine’s Day items on sale half-price. The stale sentiment made them look older than they were. Unappetizing, they conjured images of lonely people eating heart-shaped discount cookies in the eerie glow of late-night TV.
A woman emerged from the back room. Her face was young, but her hair was gray, long, thick, and pulled back in a ponytail. She took Tatum’s name and disappeared again. Tatum’s gaze drifted back to the discounted treats. She fought the urge to rescue them. She forced herself to look away.
Cupcakes are not tragic. Her impulse to rescue them was just the sort of thing that had driven Vincent away. “Don’t do what sad people do and you won’t be sad,” he used to say. At first, she had admired his stance. She had tried to adopt it, but it wasn’t a philosophy she could maintain. Besides, she wanted to speak her melancholy. It was a place she knew, part of her, and she wanted to share it with him, like one’s hometown.
“Why do you do this to yourself?” he would say. “It’s frightening.”
“Frightening? Why?”
“It’s not prudent to care about someone more than they care about themselves,” he said. “Never do it.”
Tatum had tried to ring the South Dakota listing for Vincent when she and Rachael had arrived back in Montana, but the voice that answered said no one was there by that name. Maybe it had been an old listing. Maybe Vincent had lent his name to a friend with an unpaid bill so he could get reconnected. Vincent would do that. Tatum had asked the man if he knew anyone by Vincent’s name, but he hung up.
Sometimes Tatum wondered if Vincent knew she was out there, hunting him down. Did he find himself looking over his shoulder, feeling her rifling through phone books and interrogating phone operators? Perhaps he told people, “If a woman calls here looking for me. . .”
The woman with the gray ponytail returned with a white square box. She opened it for Tatum’s inspection. The frosting was yellow, pink, and lime green. The cake said, “Happy Birthday” in cursive writing beside a number nine made of roses.
Tatum paid in cash. She placed the cake carefully on the back seat of the car and headed back toward the coffee shop. She hesitated at the intersection. The coffee shop was a right turn, but Tatum turned left, heading back to the duplex, deciding to take the opportunity to call Lee and remind him his daughter’s birthday was tomorrow. Lee was not completely neglectful. He did call, just not often enough. He didn’t realize, Tatum thought, that a desired thing too long denied can become the enemy.
Tatum parked at the curb and carried the cake inside. She left it on the kitchen table while m
aking space in the refrigerator. She shuffled juice boxes, milk, and hot dogs. When she turned to get the cake, she found herself staring into the living room. Two pairs of Rachael’s shoes were kicked off by the door. Paris’s wool hat sat beside two of Rachael’s barrettes on the trunk Tatum used as a coffee table. The items made her smile and look forward to tomorrow’s party.
Paris. Due to logistics alone, she had seen less of him lately, and the time they had together often included Rachael. Tatum had never experienced missing him before. She had anticipated but never longed. No need to want what is there. She smiled quizzically at the new sense of urgency in her when they were together, a wish to rush, to hurry and close some gap, to do with touch in an hour what it took days and weeks to say. The urgency unnerved her, and she found herself overcompensating. Backing off. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable.
She wedged the cake into the refrigerator then walked to the coffee table. She picked up Paris’s hat, brought it to her face, and brushed the coarse wool gently against her lips. Then she put down the hat, trading it for a barrette, which she opened and closed. She picked up the other one and wondered what would have happened had she killed herself in that garage or hotel room. What would’ve become of Rachael? Or would that one change have shifted reality significantly enough that Margaret would have never died?
Tatum took the barrettes and carried them down the hall to Rachael’s bedroom, the room that used to be her office. Now, she did have pink in her home. The bedspread. The curtains. Rachael had grown in the short time she had been there, and there were clothes to buy as well. Tatum knew it was time to consider getting back into the workforce, though she had been surprised when Lee sent her two thousand dollars. She had to force herself to see it as good and not as hush money or a bribe.
Her eyes drifted through Rachael’s room, taking note of the two stacks of photo albums under the dresser. One stack consisted of the ones Tatum had stolen for her. The other stack was the new albums for Rachael’s new pictures. Rachael filled these new ones quietly, secretly, politely declining invitations to share the contents. Tatum placed the barrettes on the dresser and sat down on the floor with her back against the bed, facing the underneath of the dresser. She knew which pile was which, which were Rachael’s secret ones and which were the stolen ones. She considered peeking at the secret ones but instead pulled one of the stolen ones randomly from the pile and opened it.
