Dandelion Summer

by Lisa Wingate

  I put the food on the table, made toast and a glass of orange juice (just like the note said), and set a single place at the table. Then I went looking for J. Norman. He was upstairs in a room with the door shut. I knocked on it, and he hollered at me, “What do you want?”

  “Your food’s ready,” I told him.

  “I’m occupied.”

  “Well, it’s ready, and it’ll get cold.” What was I supposed to do now? Kick in the door, drag the man downstairs, and sit him in front of his plate? This job was such a stupid idea. Why was I even still here?

  “What’s in it?” Something in the room, a drawer shutting maybe, smacked like the crack of a gun going off, and I jerked back.

  “What’s in what?”

  “The food? What’s in the food?” His voice was closer to the door now. Just on the other side, but we were still yelling through the wood.

  “The stuff that was in the refrigerator.” Duh.

  “I don’t like those things.” A chair squealed. I guessed he was sitting down in it. Looked like J. Norman wasn’t coming to dinner.

  I gathered up my nice and tried one more time. While I was cooking, I’d started coming up with a use for the money for this job, and I was getting kind of attached to the idea. “I made it like your daughter said. Like Deborah said. In the note. I know how to cook.”

  “She doesn’t care what I like.”

  “Except I added a little ham.”

  “What for?”

  “To make it taste better. Like pasta carbonara.” I had pasta carbonara in a restaurant with Mrs. Lora once, and I liked it, so me and her found a recipe. Now I couldn’t help wondering if that was the Italian in me coming out.

  “Never heard of it.” The chair creaked and a drawer slid open. “I don’t like ham.”

  “Then why’s it in your refrigerator?” He didn’t have an answer for that, I guess. He snorted loud, and then the phone rang. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to answer it or not. I thought about the fact that it might be Deborah, and if nobody answered, she’d think something was wrong. Then she’d come over and find J. Norman upstairs and his dinner all cold on the table. I’d be out of this job in a hurry. Mama would go off on me like crazy.

  The phone on the hall table kept ringing and ringing. I could hear one in the office, too. Guess J. Norman wasn’t gonna answer no matter what. Maybe I needed to. Maybe I’d get in trouble if I did. Maybe I’d get in trouble if I didn’t.

  Finally, I grabbed the phone. It was Deborah, and she was mad. “He’s ignoring the phone, isn’t he?” she asked, and I heard a click like someone was picking up another receiver. Deborah heard the click, too. “Is that him? Did he just pick up? Dad, are you on here?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told her, and I wasn’t sure why I said it. The office door opened, and J. Norman poked his head around the corner, the phone cord wrapped across his chin and pulling his left ear down flat. The sunlight reflected off his glasses, so that I couldn’t see his eyes, but his mouth was hanging open a little.

  “Has he eaten?” Deborah wanted to know. “Did he give you any trouble about it, because I told him not to. . . .”

  “He’s eating right now.” Whether I was trying to save J. Norman’s rear or my own, I didn’t have a clue, but Deborah sounded like she could chew somebody up one side and down the other. “That’s why he didn’t pick up the phone.”

  J. Norman tilted his head back, squinted at me underneath the black plastic rims of his glasses. He frowned, like I had him all confused.

  “You want to talk to him?” I asked. “Because I can go in the kitchen and get him.”

  J. Norman put up a one-handed stop sign and shook his head. He made a sidestep toward the stairs, like he was afraid Deborah could see him right through the phone. The cord stretched tighter and his ear got flatter.

  “It’s just that he’s, like, in the middle of dinner.” I looked him in the eye. He stopped with his hand on the doorframe. “He likes it a lot, I think.”

  His eyes went wide.

  “He’s eating a ton,” I said.

  He cocked his head to one side and squinted at me again.

  Deborah let out a long, slow sigh, like the mad was flowing out of her. “No, don’t bother him. I’m glad to hear he’s eating a good meal, for once. I just wanted to check in.”

  “Everything’s great. He can’t get enough of that pasta. He even said he liked it.” I stared J. Norman dead in the face, and his mouth dropped open again.

  “He did?” Deborah was in full-on shock.

  “Yes, ma’am. He even told me ‘thank you.’ ”

  J. Norman coughed like he had a bone in his throat, and he shook a fist in the air.

  His daughter said good-bye; then I pushed the button to hang up the phone, pointing the antenna at him. “You owe me big-time now.”

  I had a feeling I wasn’t gonna have near as much trouble with Mr. J. Norman anymore, and I was right. By the time I left for the day, we were getting along, if that’s what you call it when two people act like they don’t notice each other, but they don’t argue, either. I cleaned up the rest of the kitchen and left him at the table, eating pasta carbonara. I couldn’t tell if he liked it or not, but I didn’t really care, so everything was fine.

  Russ was gone when I got home, and Mama was already down at the university, trying to get those classrooms shiny clean so she could get promoted from being on a temporary status to full-time with benefits. That meant I was free to finally get in Mama’s closet again and pull out the secret boxes.

  I opened the big box first this time. It was full of old clothes that smelled kind of musty, but they weren’t the kind of clothes Mama would wear anymore. They were nice dresses, like she might’ve put on for a dance or a party at someplace fancy, but all of them would be too small for her now. Smashed on one side against the cardboard were some things that must’ve been hers when she was a kid—a china doll in a pretty dress but with her hair moth-eaten; a lacy white little girl’s dress, like a wedding dress, only smaller; a pink ballet costume and a pair of crushed ballet shoes. I never even knew my mama was a dancer.

  I laid everything back in the box and put it in the closet, feeling like I was digging around in her life. None of it had anything to do with me.

  I opened the shoe box next, set aside all the stuff I’d already looked at, and got out the baby book and the pictures in a Wal-Mart envelope. The baby book was mostly blank inside, the notes about first teeth and first steps stopping after I was about a year old. On the page that said, First Birthday, there was nothing but an imprint of the Wal-Mart envelope. I guessed Mama had planned to paste the pictures on there, but never got around to it.

  I set down the book and picked up the envelope of photos, flipped it open. There wasn’t much inside. I counted seven pictures as I spread them out on the carpet. Seven little bits of my life I never knew existed. Three pictures were taken outside some church, and four looked like they were from a picnic in the park. In the church pictures, my mama was standing with five other women—my daddy’s family, I guessed. I stared into the faces of those black women—tall, dignified, decked out for church in wide-brimmed hats and matching dresses and heels. They looked like something out of a magazine, like they were about to walk the runway at a fashion show. My mama was dressed like them, but her smile was careful, pasted on, like she felt kind of silly being there. She was so young when that picture was taken. Just eighteen, I guessed, because I was a year old. The birthday girl. The big dress-up celebration in the park was for my birthday. I could tell it was the same day, because none of the dresses changed.

  I couldn’t remember ever having a birthday party in my life. Some years Mama rushed around at the last minute and brought home a cake. Some years she forgot. Some years a birthday present came along a week or two later, when she ran across something at the grocery store or the dollar store.

  I studied my mother’s face in the pictures—no hard lines, no cold look in her eye, no d
ried-up cigarette skin. I could see myself in her—same wide hazel eyes, except hers were darker than mine, same chin, same nose. But those black women were in me, too. Their high cheeks, their long, narrow fingers, and their tall, thin bodies were like mine. Now I knew where the flat chest and the stick legs came from, too. I didn’t get my mama’s; that was for sure. My mama was short and curvy, even back then.

  I sat for a long time looking from one picture to the next, trying to hear the sounds that would go with it, trying to pull the voices from my mind. In one of the pictures, I was sitting on the lap of a woman who looked a hundred years old. I stared into her eyes and tried to decide, Do I remember her?

  Chapter 5

  J. Norman Alvord

  The girl and I have reached an understanding, of sorts. She stays on the main floor and I stay abovestairs, where I can continue to devote myself to my current project. She does not bother me, and I do not bother her. We do not speak, unless she tells me to eat, or asks where something is located. I have instructed her in the use of the intercom, so that she can warn me if Deborah should make a surprise appearance. When the girl is here, I can search the boxes from my father’s estate and lay out my work in my office without fear of being disturbed or discovered. The going is slow, as the collection of items packed by my mother upon my father’s death has been haphazardly stored in the crawl space behind my office closet for years. I unearthed some family items, but nothing pertaining to the house with the grand stairway and the seven chairs. I continue on my mission, but to date have learned more from dreams than from research. I have decided that I must widen my search to the remainder of the upstairs closets, and eventually the third-floor attic. Today I will embark upon a plan to make that more feasible. I remain hopeful and committed to the mission.

  —JNA

  Project Log, April 4

  I closed my logbook to the sound of Deborah talking on her cell phone as she crossed the porch. The book was a relic I’d discovered while searching the office closet—a leather-bound project notebook with a fading Hughes Aircraft insignia on the front. No doubt I’d saved it at some point, after a project was complete, a mission accomplished or perhaps aborted after an information leak let valuable secrets go to the Russians, rendering the project no longer viable. There were a few of those. There was a time when our notes were kept closely guarded.

  I tucked the book beneath the sofa cushions, then sat drumming my fingers impatiently, wondering how long Deborah would stay before she was satisfied that I wouldn’t have the gall to die before morning. A plastic bag crinkled as she came in. She’d brought me something from a restaurant.

  That would be as good an excuse as any to execute the next phase of my plan.

  I waited until she’d passed by the doorway to the front parlor before I spoke. When I did, she started and nearly dropped the food.

  “Oh, I didn’t see you there,” she gasped, slapping her car keys against her chest and spinning around in the entry. Sliding her purse off her shoulder, she entered the parlor and sat on the other end of Annalee’s flowered settee. Deborah looked somewhat more relaxed today, the lines having softened around her eyes, and the prominent vein in her left temple having retreated into the skin. The evenings of not needing to worry about me were doing her some good. The girl had come four times now to cook for me. Two weeks, Tuesday and Thursday. Now it was Friday again. The disagreeable, sour-faced housekeeper would be here on Monday. She was a horrible woman. No spunk. No determination. The stale smell of cigarettes and occasionally alcohol. She maintained a blank, disinterested stare and had a habit of lurking around the house as if she were looking for something—perhaps trying to catch me doing something forbidden, so that she could report it to my daughter. Deborah would pay her extra for the information, no doubt. I knew they talked occasionally at the university, when the woman picked up her checks. No telling what sort of information they exchanged.

  Deborah delivered a perplexed look my way. “What are you doing here in Mom’s parlor?” Throughout our years in this house, Annalee had kept the front room strictly for formal occasions. The furniture was stiff and unpleasant, straight backed, velvet, hot and uncomfortable. But I was close to Annalee here, with her collections of birds and teacups.

  “I’ve just been sunning.” I felt the weight of the project log tucked beneath the center cushion, mere inches from Deborah’s hand. “You look well today,” I offered.

  She cocked her head to one side, mistrusting the pleasantry. “I feel well, I guess. Everything okay here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Fine.” And I reminded myself not to look toward the stairs. I’d left a box tucked under the desk in the office, which was a risk, but if I didn’t tire too quickly this evening, I wanted to look through it. I was like Hogan entertaining Colonel Klink while not having quite covered the secret hatch. The box was heavy, and moving it back to the crawl space would be difficult. Old age was filled with such frustrating limitations—often the penance for the folly of youth. I wished I could go back and tell the young men who kept ashtrays at their desks and filled the blockhouses and control rooms with a haze of smoke that they’d one day pay the piper. You do not fully appreciate oxygen until you haven’t enough.

  I hoped Deborah wouldn’t notice that I was still flushed. I’d stayed upstairs too long before finally checking the time and realizing that she could be coming any minute, as it was Friday, and there was no housekeeper and no girl today. Fortunately, Deborah was a bit later than usual, and I’d had time to catch my breath while making notations in my project log.

  Still, I undoubtedly didn’t look good.

  Eyeing me with suspicion, Deborah slipped her fingers through the handles of the restaurant sack. “I brought a roasted chicken dinner for you.”

  “I’m tired of restaurant food,” I replied, and she rolled her head as if she were trying to work out a cramp. This was all part of my plan. I’d thought it out ahead.

  “Well, Dad, I could buy something and cook, but you’re not happy with anything I make.” If she’d seemed disappointed at that juncture, I might have felt an inconvenient temptation to offer reassurance, but she merely appeared irritated, which was much easier to combat. It fit nicely, as a matter of fact.

  “I like the way the girl cooks. You can arrange for her to come four days a week in the afternoons, rather than two, and on Mondays her mother will leave a sandwich. That way, you can spend your weekday evenings at home with Lloyd, rather than dropping by here to look after me. I can get by at lunch on my own, as well. I shouldn’t be pulling you away from your work or your husband. The girl can make a little extra for leftovers, and I’ll have it the next day. I do know how to operate the microwave.”

  Deborah was speechless. Perhaps my sudden reversal was a bit too abrupt to play believably. I’d been complaining about both the girl and the housekeeper for two full weeks, but now it had come to me that I was better off having someone here who didn’t poke into my business. The only hurdle was convincing Deborah.

  “I’m not leaving you alone all day, every day.” If only Deborah were more like her mother and less like me. Annalee was never a suspicious type.

  “I’ve been behaving myself. It’s been two weeks, and I haven’t so much as skipped a pill,” I pointed out blandly, trying to affect the sound of an old man resigned to his fate. “You can call from your office to check on me—speak with the jailer, even.”

  Deborah smacked her lips irritably. “You’re not bullying Epiphany, are you? She’s only a teenager.”

  “I’ve been a model citizen.” I waved a hand toward the door, as if the girl would be coming in any moment. In reality, this being an off night, Deborah would linger around my house for hours, punching away on her laptop and her cell phone, keeping me from my work. When the girl was here, I had no such problem. She saw to the cooking, or watched TV, or occupied herself with school projects. Her only annoying habit was turning on rock-and-roll music on the old stereo sound system I’d built from surplus
Hughes parts in 1965. Occasionally, when I passed by the kitchen and saw her at the breakfast table, tapping to the beat and working her way through algebra problems with impressive speed, my mind went back in time, and I thought it was Deborah there doing her homework, her spindly legs folded into the chair in impossibly uncomfortable positions. Where’s Roy this evening? The question would cross my mind, and then I’d find myself hearing the answers from days gone by, like an echo clinging in the house. Must be off down the street with his skateboard or a football, starting up a game. His homework isn’t done. Roy was so much like his mother. Joy was a chosen pursuit in their lives, toil an afterthought. Deborah, on the other hand, would slave away, chained to the kitchen table until her work was finished. By then, the neighborhood mothers would have called the children in for supper, and the time for play would be over. Her social skills suffered for it, but her grades were top-notch.

  My mind always came back to the present if the girl looked up at me. There was a spark in her eyes that Deborah had never possessed, and, of course, she was mixed-race of some sort—black and Spanish or Italian, my guess. She looked much like the Creoles I knew while designing levee pump systems in Louisiana. There was a time when people frowned on mixing the races, but it was a different world now. My mother, who was British by descent, abhorred prejudice of all kinds. She was wont to remind me that in her home country, a gingerhead like me would have been teased—the red hair being considered a sign of Irish bloodline. But you’re not Irish, are you? You’re my sweet little Normie boy, she’d say, and ruffle my hair. So, you see, Norman, it’s best not to judge a book by its cover.

  It occurred to me now, as I was talking to Deborah and thinking about the girl, that I couldn’t recall ever having met anyone in my family who had red hair.

  There must have been someone. . . .

  “Dad, are you listening to me?” Deborah demanded, and I realized I wasn’t.