Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  Dave’s dad, Al, come on the line. “How come you got cold feet all of a sudden?”

  I told him Meredith, our group leader, says I’m never going to be able to look after Jenny.

  He says, “Them people with the big education can be wrong, same as the next person. Look at that Frank fellow comes up here. He makes the big bucks. Must be smart some way, but for fixing ordinary everyday problems, I never seen a man stupider.”

  Jenny was staying over with me. I went and sat on the side of the bed and looked at her sleeping. Her soft little hand was curled. Fleck of yellow crayon under her thumbnail.

  I tucked the blanket up around her and got ready for bed. Cuddled in beside her.

  I used to argue with Sally about this mercy of God she talks about. My point was: why don’t He just fix the world up so’s we’re not all crouching down here, moaning for mercy? Wouldn’t that be more use than leaving us how we are and taking pity on us once in a while?

  But who knows? Maybe there is something you could call “new mercy” in the morning time because, when I woke up, things didn’t look so bad. I felt better.

  Moods, eh? It’s funny. Things can look dark as hell one day and a whole lot brighter the next. For no particular reason.

  I just laid there looking at the summer morning light on the wall, listening to Jenny. She was kneeling on the covers, happy, talking about our new home, where Dave was going to build her a playhouse with a portcullis.

  “A which?” I says.

  “Portcullis, Ann Toes, to keep out enemies and let in the breeze.”

  I knew we were going to go ahead after all.

  I give notice to my landlord, said goodbye to Bertie, downstairs, and to McIlveen’s. Me and Dave signed the purchase and sale agreement with old Elmer there.

  Marg and Tammy come over to help me pack. “Good job you’re not such a frigging pack rat as what Sally is,” Tammy says. “Remember when we moved her?”

  “Oh jeeze!” Marg laughed her shook-milk-jug laugh. “Poor Dave lugging all them gallons of pink paint!”

  Tammy’s laughing too. “Her and her lima beans! How many cases of them did we lug?”

  I says, “And about a thousand sprouts and seedlings in tin cans, and her fussing in case we might break one!”

  “Hey, did you hear, Rose?” Tammy says. “Sally’s let down because it turns out the only single hardware man, there, he don’t like women!”

  Marg says, “She’s been at the hardware more than church! Got Al’s drive shed crammed with new rakes and shovels, all for a gay guy!” Marg’s trying to wrap my dishes in newspaper, but she keeps having to rest them on her knee to laugh.

  I laughed at that about the hardware man too. But there was like this little edge of my mind that wondered. I was so used to Josie knowing pretty well everything. It was weird she was wrong about Sally and the hardware guy. Well I guessed she was allowed to be wrong once.

  We had a lot of fun that weekend. Marg stayed over with me. We kept one pot out of the packing to boil our tea water in, and we lived off a jumbo box of soda crackers and a jar of almond butter Tammy brought over. She said it had more something than peanut butter.

  Sunday morning, we’re eating almond cracker sandwiches for breakfast. I ask, “Darlene still in Cancun?”

  “Due back Wednesday,” Marg says.

  “And?”

  “Alls I know is she sent the dog a postcard,” Marg says, half choking herself chuckling through her cracker. “Said it was sunny and not to chew the orange flowered chair.”

  Tammy and the kids has been over there every day, looking after the dog. According to Tammy’s kids, the dog knows that Darlene’s not doing so good.

  “Idiot,” I says. “She must’ve spent her whole cheque on the plane ticket. What’s she think she’s going to live on for the rest of the month? She’ll have nothing to put in her new fridge.”

  “Good luck’s wasted on her,” Marg says.

  “Jesus,” I says, “I wished she’d level off. She’s either where she won’t put her nose out of her apartment or she’s flying to frigging Cancun!”

  “That’s Darlene. She’s down or she’s up.”

  “She’s better off down. So we can sit on her.” I says, “Anything could happen to her out there. She hasn’t got no judgement.”

  Marg heaved herself up off of the box there with a big sigh.She started working on my kitchen drawer, taking stuff out, piling it on the counter for me to go through. “What’ve we got here?” she says. She’s got my stack of stepping stones in her hand. So I explained and showed them. I set the stepping stones down, one at a time, across the floor. I hadn’t put them all out for a long time. Had quite a few new ones since the last time. They made a long path now, twisting around the boxes, all the way from hot red pain to pale blue patience. Then there was never giving up hope. Trusting my own judgement.

  “There should be one more,” I says. “It’s turquoise. Here.”

  “Healthy Coping.” Marg, she leaned on the stove to set the piece of paper down at the end of the trail.

  “This is telling me something,” she says, patting the stove.

  It was striking her the way Healthy Coping was right by the stove, since a lot of her problems have to do with food.

  That’s what that little omen meant to Marg. It hit me way different. The piece of paper just fit right in there perfect, next to the stove. My stepping stones reached right across the whole floor now, all the way from the door to the stove. I wondered if Dave would remember what we always said we’d do, once the stepping stones reached all the way across the room.

  When Dave come with his truck to help me move, there they were, the different coloured stepping stones, all the way. He took one look at that. “Huh!” he says.

  I wasn’t sure if he remembered. Seemed like maybe he did, the way he said “Huh.”

  He didn’t say nothing else, though. Just took my end table down to the truck.

  I stand there wondering. Does Dave remember? I bet he does. But maybe he don’t want to get married to me anymore. We’re going to live together and have our Jenny with us. So I guess it don’t matter.

  What’s a wedding anyways? I’m trying to say to myself. Just a big waste of money. We’re better to put it into fixing up that old place.

  That’s what I’m trying to think, but I can feel the tears wanting to come. Dave don’t want to bother with a wedding. He don’t know but what I’ll turn around and be unfaithful to him anyhow. He don’t think I’m worth going through a wedding for. And let’s face it, I’m not. What right have I got to dress up like a bride? As if I’m something special any man would want?

  That’s how fast I can fall down one of the big holes in my ego. By the time Dave come back up from the truck I was lower than a shoe.

  He had something in his hand. Said it was a surprise. He put it behind his back and made me guess which hand, teasing, smiling at me.

  I come sailing back up out of my low spot there, and I made a grab for his big left hand. I pried his fingers open. There was a little, blue jewellery store box, kind of beat-up looking, like it had been in the glove box of the truck a while.

  “How long you been carting this around?”

  “You said you wouldn’t marry me till your papers there got all the way across the room,” he says, “and then you quit making them for a long time. I thought maybe you didn’t want to.”

  He thought maybe I didn’t want to!

  “Anyways,” he says, when I let him come up for air, “took you so long I got her pretty near paid off. Ain’t you going to look? If you don’t care for this one, we can trade it for something else,” he says, watching me open it.

  Now, you wouldn’t think a guy like Dave would be so hot at picking out the right ring for a woman’s hand, would you, or guessing what type of things a particular woman might l
ike. Don’t seem like a talent he’d have, does it?

  But you just never know what talents a person has got.

  36.

  WELL, WE DONE HER ALL. We moved back north. I went to work for Dodd’s Plumbing and Heating in Strone. We got Josie moved into the rest home across the road. Dave’s police check come through, and we could go ahead and adopt Jenny.

  She finished her kindergarten year, said goodbye to her second foster home, there, that she never liked, and come with us, permanent, on July the nineteenth. We picked her up in the truck and put her between us.

  I’ll never forget that. Putting Jenny between the two of us and driving off. Anybody tried to hurt this girl again, it would be over our two dead bodies.

  The first summer up there we spent fumigating Elmer’s old place, fixing everything that had broke since the year it snowed so bad at Easter and Elmer had put his shoulder out. We found nice pine boards under the kitchen linoleum there and a child’s button shoe in the wall with an 1872 penny in the heel.

  Al said you’ll find them in a lot of old places. They used to put them in for luck when they’d build the walls. Luck for the children.

  We put that in Jenny’s room on a special shelf.

  This is still Elmer’s place, to people up here. “I hear yous are living up at Elmer’s, eh?” That’s what everybody said when they come in to pay their bill at the plumbing place I was working at now.

  Sally, she got a boyfriend that summer. The brother of Jinping and Hong, there at the Chinese restaurant. He only come up to her shoulder. Sure seemed like the guy for Sally, though. Always thinking about the condition of his spirit and the balance of his character. He helped at the restaurant some. But he was also opening up a kind of a factory outlet wholesaling work clothes that his relatives back in China were turning out. But he still made time, somehow, to stand on the bridge with Sally and fish and smile and argue about what unseen forces are behind the universe.

  Me and Sally kept on trying to talk Marg and Tammy into moving up closer to the rest of us. We could see they were starting to lean towards it.

  They didn’t know what would become of Darlene. She was back hiding in the house again now, wouldn’t even walk the dog, wouldn’t tell them nothing about Cancun. Wouldn’t talk about moving. Wouldn’t go to Group.

  Marg, she said her and Tammy didn’t know what to do about the dog. They can’t have it at their buildings. Tammy’s kids are attached to it. Darlene’s quit looking after it.

  “But she loves that dog!”

  “Not no more. She’s on some pill now where she don’t feel nothing. Not one emotion at all.”

  I said to Marg on the phone, I said, “Well then, she’s got what she always wanted. Come up here and bring the dog with yous.”

  Marg, she was wavering. “But…” she says.

  I said, “Darlene is never going to change because Darlene won’t try! She won’t even take step one and face her pain. There is nothing yous can do about a person if they will not face their pain.”

  Marg, she sighed. “She was doing pretty good after she took in that dog of Josie’s. If she had of just held steady there, not re-traumatized herself…”

  Re-traumatized is right. That’s what she must have went and did. “It helps to have a few words for the stupid things we do, don’t it!” I says.

  “Thanks to Meredith,” Marg says.

  I don’t know what to say. It’s true. If it wasn’t for Meredith, I wouldn’t have what I have today. I’d be sitting back in the Women’s Shelter, black and blue from jerk number a hundred and sixty, looking at the stepping stone poster on the wall. Then again, it was Meredith tried to take it all away from me again at the last minute. Sally calls her a “mixed blessing.”

  “That psychiatry woman” is what Al calls her. “That psychiatry woman can’t be no good because yous are all still crazy,” he says. Thinks he’s funny. He’s had no use for Meredith since she told me I wasn’t fit to adopt Jenny.

  The social worker looking after the adoption, she put us in touch with the counsellor up here for Jenny. Marion, the art therapist. We walk into her office. Jenny’s got a tight hold on my hand. I look at this woman, and I do a thing I’m learning. I pay attention to see if I’m getting any hunches.

  Her shoulders looked easy and loose. Hands quiet. Feet comfortable and still. She looked at us pleasant and normal. Like Frances. My hunch was she was okay.

  I told Josie about it, sitting on the porch at our place, looking over the lake. “I think this shrink they got for Jenny is all right.”

  Josie, she nodded.

  To the south of us, about a half mile along the shore, there’s a point sticks out into the lake. That’s this Macaulay’s Point they talk about. Old guy lived out there in a falling-down house (worse than ours, even). That shack was sitting on the prettiest lot on earth. Lost Gold Lake sparkling on all sides.

  “That’s the place Al and Sally always talk about putting the hotel, eh Josie?” I says.

  “Near the caves,” she says.

  Which I didn’t know what she was talking about, except that she always used to say our hotel was going to be by some caves.

  Sally and her boyfriend come around the point in Al’s duck boat. “There’s one you got wrong, Jos.”

  Josie, she didn’t say nothing, just kept on smiling, watching them drift and cast their lines, out in the sparkling water.

  I wish I could tell yous all to live by water. At least go stare at water if you get the chance. I don’t know why it’s such a comfort to me. Meredith told me once that it has to do with the watery sounds in the womb before we’re born. I don’t know. But I’m telling you, sitting on that new porch of ours, looking at the water, listening to them sounds of comfort, that was a good part of how I got where I am today.

  I looked at that water with the pink mist lifting off it in the morning. I looked at it silver and black in the moonlight. I watched the thunderstorms roll over it and the rain pour into it, grey and wild. I heard it lap and ripple. I heard it roar and crash. It sparkled, shone, glowed, and sang, different every hour of the day. Always good. I felt like it was washing and washing my wounds. The notion I got was it was making new patterns of wavy light, right in my brain, in place of the old, dark patterns.

  Marg and Tammy, they made the move! Found theirself two apartments in an old clapboard house in town, right on the main street. Moved up to Strone.

  Josie’s dog, he come to live at our place. Jenny was happy about that. Josie too. Her and that dog. I swear they can talk to each other. You should’ve saw them the day they got back together, after so long!

  Tammy’s daughter Meghan, Jenny thinks she’s the cat’s pyjamas. She is a real nice girl, too. She’ll let Jenny tag after her. They walk the dog together.

  Young Matthew there, Tammy’s lad, him and Josie took a shine to each other. He started going over to see her. Took her outside her building in the wheelchair. She’d sit in a back corner of the parking lot and watch him do his skateboard tricks by the hour. Clap for him when he done good.

  Al, he always has a lot of time for Josie. He’s got the idea that crossword puzzles are good for your brain, eh. So he’ll sit with Josie. Try to get her to think of a seven-letter word for “salubrious” or whatever he’s got to fill in. Once in a while, she’ll just come right out with an answer. Might be the only thing she says all day. Anyhow, she likes the company and so does he.

  I was walking along the main street in town, one day about that time, heading for the post office. Tammy’s up on a stepladder inside the front window of her new place there. Her blue drapes that Sally made for the other place are up. Seem to fit good.

  I stop.

  Take a wild guess what Tammy’s got dripping from her fingers? She’s lifting them out of a pail of wash water. Stars! She’s hanging up a sun-catcher decoration. Little crystal stars, dangling o
n pieces of fishing line. She’s drying them in a cloth, then lifting them up, glittering. I stand there looking at the clear plastic suction thing. Tammy’s pink fingers pressing it to the window glass.

  I went to the door. Told her these stars had been in the picture of the town that Josie had, way back at the start!

  Tammy said she found them in the back of a cupboard, all covered in dust.

  “They cleaned up nice, eh?” she says, looking at them sparkling there in the window, new-washed, throwing rainbows across the room.

  Dave, when I run home to tell him, he didn’t see nothing particular in it. Just said, “People before must’ve had them hanging there when the picture was took.”

  “But the curtains too!” I says.

  “There’s more than one set of blue drapes on earth, Rosie.”

  “But I seen them in the sky, too!”

  Dave’s getting a kick out of me, here. I’m so excited over Tammy’s front window. He thinks I’m cracked.

  I told him where to go, and I went galloping to Josie. She didn’t say nothing. But she sure smiled.

  Well, Marg and Tammy, they started in, trying to raise money for the hotel. Tom, he still hadn’t made his mind up. Wouldn’t say nothing about it yet. But that never slowed down Tammy and Marg.

  Marg had her first bake sale. Sweated in the kitchen for a month, loading Jan’s freezer. And then she brought all the baking out and loaded a table, the day of the fishing derby. Marg bakes beautiful. Sold out. Put the money in the hotel account. Come to more than I would’ve thought, too.

  “My days of undercharging are through,” Marg says, putting her chin up. “This is high-quality baking. Nobody blinked an eyelash at my prices, neither.”

  Tammy, she went to work cleaning houses. She was going to charge way too low but Marg helped her find out the going rate. Couldn’t talk her into charging that much. But she come up closer to it. Still had her disability to live on. So she put the cleaning money in for the hotel.