Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  Josie sat there, smiling sort of faint, like the statue of a saint, looking at sunshine and shadows moving over the grass.

  26.

  MONDAY MORNING, Dirk comes into the office. I says, “We’re through.” He gives me a sour look, as if to say it don’t break his heart. He shrugs, picks up his work orders, and takes his athletic rump out the door. The only thing bugging him is he wishes he’d have dumped me first.

  He revs the McIlveen’s plumbing van number three like a man that ain’t used to being the one dumped. Roars on out of there. I figure it’ll take him ten minutes to get over it.

  Tuesday, he give it one more try, just to see if he could get me going again and then be the one to dump. He’s standing there telling me in a low voice that I’m one hot lay and he misses my little wet hole.

  I push a work order across the desk to him. I says, “You know what, Dirk?” I says. “You better get on over to this address here. They got green water standing in the basement drain. That’s a wet hole.”

  Me and Dirk, we were on what Meredith calls a “professional basis” from there on. (Last I heard he was after both the girls at the dry cleaners.)

  So anyways, that Tuesday, I went to Group. Marg, Darlene, and Tammy was there.

  Marg’s still staying with Tammy, helping with the kids. Gives Marg something to do, eh. She’ll pack school lunches. Help them with their spelling. Pays for her own food and helps plan. “Okay, Tammy, how much have you got till your cheque comes? All right, so we’ve got to get four more family suppers and ten more school lunches out of forty-two bucks.”

  “And we don’t feed them crap neither, do we?” Tammy looks proud.

  Some health nurse give Tammy a piece of paper about how many fruits and how many grams of skim milk cheese and all that you’re supposed to eat. Tammy, she’s took it right to heart.

  “Green and orange is the best so you don’t get cancer,” Tammy tells me. Her and Marg look over all the sale vegetables careful to find ones that are still good.

  We’re in a huddle, with our heads all leaned in close, and I’m telling them what was the only wet hole Dirk got today, when Meredith walks in. We shut up, but we were still grinning. I saw one of them looks on Meredith there for a second. What’s the matter with her now? Mad she’s not in on the joke?

  Meredith smoothed out her raspberry-coloured skirt behind her before she sat on it. She pulled the two sides of her purple jacket, with a raspberry weave through it, together across her big front. I guess they must pay her pretty good for working on us.

  She tells Marg, Darlene, and Tammy that they’re “doing very well” in that kindergarten-teacher voice which grates on me so bad.

  Tammy, she never drew a breath the last eighteen years of her life without Asshole telling her to. She never had a bank account. Never paid a bill. Never went to a store by herself. Never cooked a meal somebody didn’t tell her to. She never answered a phone call. Asshole wouldn’t let her. Let him or the machine take the calls. She never even knew till last year that her own favourite colour was blue.

  I sit there, pissed off, listening to Meredith tell her “Very good, Tammy” in that voice. Tammy is doing great. Really. You got to say it in a straightforward voice: Tammy is doing excellent.

  And so is Marg. The kid with the hole in her heart, who couldn’t run and play like other kids. Stuck at home all the time with her frigging father who kicked her mother out and made Marg take her place in the bed. Beat her when she tried to run away to her mom.

  Only nice safe place, when Marg was a kid, was the hospital. Her heart would act up. She couldn’t get her breath. When she was turning blue, he’d finally take her in. The hospital was heaven full of healing angels in their white dresses, with a kind touch, calm voices, and a mask that let her breathe.

  Tammy and Marg are not kids that did a neat job colouring! These are full-grown people, wrestling, hand to hand, with what I call the rockslide and Sally calls the devil.

  My opinion is Meredith ought to see that and treat them respectful.

  When it come my turn, I said Dirk was done and Dave was coming to see me on the weekend.

  Meredith starts in about me taking some time out from men until at least next summer. “It would be healthier to take some time for yourself before you begin to date again, Rose.”

  “Date?” I says. “This is Dave.”

  Sally called on Thursday. “Dave’s all excited about going to see you,” she says. “He’s got a surprise for you.”

  I says, “Oh Sally.” I says, “I’m so scared.”

  “It’s going to be all right.”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “Wear your fuzzy sweater,” Sally says

  “You and your pink.”

  “It lights you up real nice.”

  “It ain’t going to be about my sweater.”

  “It’s going to be all right.” Sally said that again.

  “Do you think…” It was hard to get the words out. “Do you think I better tell him?”

  “About Jerk?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was some quiet while Sally done her thinking on that one. “I think so,” she says finally.

  “I can’t! I’m not going to.”

  “So what did you ask me for?”

  Marg called Friday morning while I was eating my toast. “I won’t keep you, Rose. Just called to wish yous luck for this weekend.”

  “Thanks, Marg.”

  “Mind you tell him everything, so you don’t have nothing dragging on your conscience after.”

  “Sally said the same.”

  “You going to?”

  “No! I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Well, best of luck, girl.” Then she adds on, “You should tell him.”

  On the way to work, waiting to cross a street, I shut my eyes.

  I says, “Oh, Josie, what do you see in them shadows on the grass? What’s coming next? What’s going to happen?”

  I stand there on the curb like a blind person, eh, with my eyes shut, hearing the cars roar by, straining to see like Josie sees, beyond eyesight, into tonight and tomorrow.

  What come to mind real strong was the colour yellow. To me it meant the yellow stepping stone. No secrets. Tell Dave.

  “Josie, tell me the future! Are we going to be able to patch it up?” I opened my eyes.

  Across the road, where the sun was shooting through the clouds, there was like a hundred welding torches roaring up out of the ground, blazing yellow. Yellow tulips.

  I had to go and look in them, see their purple centres, with thin stripes of red, and their sex parts. Wish ours was beautiful and sweet smelling like that. I remembered Dave telling me that he liked a woman’s smell.

  I was all the way to work before it hit me to wonder if Josie had anything to do with me seeing them yellow flowers in that blast of yellow light, just when I’d been thinking that yellow meant: no secrets from Dave.

  I sat down at my desk and opened up the appointments book. Get a grip, Rose, before you go as nuts as what Josie is herself! How would she have anything to do with where the town council horticulture committee seen fit to put in a flowerbed or where the sun seen fit to shine?

  Dirk, he was the first man come into the office that morning. Picked up his day sheet fairly civil and went on out.

  Once the adrenaline’s gone, you can see straight, eh. I look at the back of him leaving and I think, all this trouble over what? That ass?

  27.

  I WENT TO SEE JENNY Friday night after work. Took her a chocolate egg. Didn’t have the heart to tell her Dave was due in an hour. Me and him had to talk. I told her he’d be here in the morning and we’d come see her.

  “Right after this sleep?”

  “Yes, sweetheart.”

  “As soon as I wake up?”

&
nbsp; “Don’t wake yourself up extra early. We can’t come get you until nine o’clock.”

  Nine is the rule at the foster home. She’ll sit and wait, watch the big hand crawling all the way around its circle. We were five minutes late once, and Jenny was in a cold sweat. Pure white. Terrified. Jumped for me like a drowning person. Clung on all day. Cried like a baby if I left the room.

  Meredith says that would be from fear of abandonment. I think it’s like if yous stepped into your kitchen one day and the floor give way. Landed yous right in the basement. After that yous wouldn’t step so confident.

  Something like that happened to Jenny. The floor of her little world had gave way, and here she was dropped in this strange home. Me and Dave being there when we say we will, that’s alls she’s got to stand on.

  Her mom’s wedding was five weeks from that Saturday. The social workers warned my sister, Sandra. They said that’s it. If she marries this Ian treasure, she’s giving up Jenny for good.

  Sandra still says she’s marrying him.

  Me and her had a big fight on the phone a month or so ago, when Dave was still here.

  “Bastards!” she says. “Taking my own kid away from me! They think their shit don’t stink. It’s your fault, Rose! For getting those dickheads into it. You couldn’t let me handle it.”

  I says, “You weren’t going to handle it!”

  She says, “You seen me slap her for it.”

  “How is slapping her going to stop him?”

  “She leads him on.”

  “She’s a little child.”

  “She’s a little flirt.”

  “She’s a kid that wants a hug. She don’t have a dad. She wants to be loved. She don’t know about being a flirt or nothing like that.”

  “She’ll spread her legs for him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Ian told me.”

  “You want to marry a guy that teaches your baby daughter to do that and then turns around and blames it on her?”

  We wind up screaming at each other, but it don’t do no good. The next week she’s on the phone again, expecting me to show up at the wedding. She wants me for a bridesmaid, if you can believe it. She just don’t get it that no amount of wedding is going to change what this Ian is.

  I ain’t going.

  I says, “You think I’m going to throw confetti on yous? I’ll tell you what I’d like to throw on him,” I says. “I don’t know why they even let him out of jail.”

  “All right, Rose,” she says. “You don’t have to get rude.”

  “Rude?” I says. “What do you think? Child abuse is polite? You go and marry the fucking creep who—”

  She hung up on me.

  Good riddance.

  I told Dave when I got off the phone that time, I says, “I can’t see where her and me can have much to say to each other after this. She’s my own sister,” I says, “my only near relation outside of Jenny.”

  Dave he said, “Yeah, but…”

  I put my face against Dave. And he said to me, he said, “You’re going to have other relatives soon.”

  He was talking about me marrying him and belonging to all those folks of his. All them decent people who would hurl at the thoughts of a stunt like what Ian there gets up to. They’d be warning him off their land with twenty-twos. Not frigging baking him a wedding cake.

  So now Dave was coming back to me in one hour, for to give me a second chance, please God, to belong with him and his decent people.

  Walking home, I tried to think. I could start in with, “It really wasn’t nothing about your socks.”

  The question is—I think to myself as I’m going around the break in the sidewalk to my place—the question is: should I tell Dave about Dirk?

  When I got in, I threw my jacket and purse on the chair and phoned Marg.

  I says to her, I says, “I’m just as bad as what Tammy’s Asshole is. I’m all right for a while and then all of a sudden I act like a maniac. That running after Dirk was like what a maniac would go and do. Maybe Asshole looks at young Matthew bleeding out of the side of his head and can’t believe he done that, neither, after. Maybe he goes through a time where he thinks he could never do that again. And then he turns around and does it again!”

  Marg said, “I’ll tell you the difference between you and Tammy’s Asshole. You’re working on your problem, and you’re making headway. Asshole ain’t. He’s just going around in circles, the way we all used to.”

  “What makes you think I’m making headway?”

  “What you got with Dave is a million times better than what you ever had with any man before. True or false?”

  “True till I screwed it up.”

  “And your job is way better. Plus, you know a lot more. And you got a bunch of true friends who know your whole story. You can figure things out better. If that ain’t all progress—” She pauses. “Look, you slipped this once. But you’re going to handle yourself better from now on. You’re bound and bent. You got the tools. You’re going to do better. You’re not screwing up no more. That’s what you got to tell Dave. Level with him. Tell him what you’re up against. Swear to God you can do better. You can!”

  Sally calls again to say God bless us.

  Tammy calls. Says I’m not like Peter the least bit.

  I’m so wound up by this point, I can’t think who the hell Peter is.

  Marg’s in the background calling, “Tell her you mean Asshole. She won’t know who the hell Peter is.”

  By the time I was finally done on the phone, I didn’t have time to eat or nothing. I just ran and took a bath, shaved my legs, done what I could with my hair. Jenny says my hair is “independent” (The words she comes out with!). Did put on my pink sweater.

  I was sitting on the edge of the bed pulling my second sock on when I heard him on the stairs. I sit there, froze, eh? Sock hanging off of my toes. Trying to hear what kind of a way he’s walking up them stairs.

  He ain’t in a hurry.

  He taps on the door, quiet. Figures he has to knock, now, on our own door!

  I hopped out there, whipped that door open, and grabbed him in my arms like the end of the world. I told him everything before I even fixed my sock. Door standing open. Chilly spring evening air from the stairwell on my half-bare foot. Me talking into the front of Dave’s jacket, telling stuff I would have never thought I could tell a man.

  Just right out with it. No lead-up, nothing. How would you anyways? How would you lead up to telling your boyfriend that your one little fault happens to be you’re awful apt to sleep around?

  Dave, he just stands there in the mud room.

  I’m talking to his third jacket-dome, telling it I’m so frigging sorry and I’m going to work sixteen times as hard and do what the shrinks say and whatever it takes to be a decent woman for his and Jenny’s sake and my own sake too and I can, I can, I know I can, if he can only forgive me, which why would he?

  After that, I didn’t have the nerve to raise my eyes up and look him in the face.

  He just stands there, eh. I don’t know what he’s thinking. I’m too scared to look up. His arms are limp, hanging down at his sides. Them arms were always so quick to hug me, before.

  My foot’s cold. There’s a robin singing.

  He’ll turn around now without a word and go. Or maybe he’ll say some word first, that’ll burn. I’ve done it now. I’ve threw away my lucky ticket.

  Finally Dave says, “So it wasn’t my fault?”

  His fault?

  I said, “You in the public works department?”

  When I hear a snort of a laugh, I glance up at his face. Dave’s nice eyes. Full of pain. That I’ve caused him.

  He says, “Are we going to spend the weekend in this mud room?”

  So I thought to let him in. We sat down at the kit
chen table.

  I could never part with this table afterwards. I’m sitting at it now. Got my computer on it. It’s an ugly old table. Legs made out of chrome. Top’s a pale turquoise plastic with a design of like black doodle marks. But there’s so much has went on at this table! Gingerbread princesses with silver buttons. Jell-O fish. All them Monday nights trying to fill in my homework sheets (What am I guilty of? What am I responsible for?). The morning after Josie got hurt, Marg sitting here with a notepad, making like a shopping list of what we had to do (Get boxes. Take shovels. Dig out plants. Hide plants. Call cops.). Dave’s dad and Sally eating their eggs at this table while I whipped my stepping stones at the four walls, screaming.

  Me and Dave sat. He says, “So you been fooling around on me?”

  I look down.

  “And you’re telling me it’s part of your trouble, that you’re working on?”

  I give a couple of little wee nods. I’m studying the table leg, where there’s two metal parts that join to the rim of the tabletop.

  I tell him in a low voice, “It’s like I fell off the wagon.”

  “And your group there is supposed to help with this?”

  “Well, this and all kinds of troubles. They’re coping mechanisms. Whether you drink, or sleep all day, do drugs, hide in the house, or like what I done. It’s from before.”

  “Before what?”

  So that’s when I finally tell Dave I was a childhood sex abuse survivor.

  Dave’s a long time taking it in. Asks questions and then just sits there, tracing around the doodle pattern in the table with his big finger.

  He can’t believe it. Albert, my father, that he had a beer with on Christmas! Seemed like a regular old man!

  “It’s dirt common, Dave. There’s millions of them abusers walking around looking regular.”

  He didn’t say nothing more for a long time.

  I’m with this red-hot anxiety feeling in my chest. What does he think of me now? Can he ever feel the same? It never even entered my head to hope that he could understand about the buzz. Me backsliding into being addicted to the adrenaline rush buzz. If he could ever understand that, he’d see that it hadn’t been nothing personal against him.