In the Lifestyles section, there’s a recipe for a maraschino-cherry pie. I raise myself up out of the chair. The living room floor groans as I step onto it, and Frank looks down in surprise, as if it were a living thing, a person so quiet he hadn’t realized it was there. Daisy blinks and looks blearily up. With my thumbnail I pick the crust of sleep from the corner of her eye. She’s got the biggest, most sorrowful-looking tear ducts I’ve ever seen on a dog, and the haws raised up pink over her eyeballs make her look drunk. She sighs deeply, breathing out the heavy weight of the world, and settles back to sleep.
“Now, floorboards,” Frank says, “are the boards—”
I head to the kitchen, rummage through the cabinets, and open up a dusty can. The cherries and syrup inside are red as bright blood from a deer’s cut throat. I turn on the oven.
THIRTEEN
He’d got hired on at the mill at the best possible time, when the textile bubble was still big as it could be without popping, swollen with the entire country’s demand for every bolt of fabric it had been denied during the war. It was only a few years before there was too much production and too much competition, and the factory cut everybody’s wages, then fired a quarter of the workers; then, when things started to pick back up again due to renewed clamor for quality denim, instead of hiring anybody back, they implemented a little something they called the ‘stretch out,’ which required everyone who remained to increase his or her output by fifty percent. A woman who had tended fifty looms now paced behind seventy-five; Frank had to almost run from the loading dock to the dyeing racks to keep them full. Two men died of heatstroke that winter, there on the shop floor, and another about drowned when his sleeve got caught under the spool and pinned to the rack in his rush, dragged him across the floor and through the air and dropped him into the vat of indigo, shimmering and dark, so blue it was black.
It got so bad, some of the workers tried to organize themselves a union. Frank never had as much trouble keeping to himself than he did those months. Every day, somebody was tracking him down to talk while he smoked on the loading dock during their recently-reduced break, or bothering him in the bathroom while he tried to relieve himself, which he had trouble doing if there was another person anywhere nearby, much less leaning over the stall to talk about how his kids’ growth had been stunted because he didn’t make enough to feed them, or about how he didn’t want a bunch of race-traitor pinkos coming in to take his wages and send them home to Mother Russia. Regardless of who was talking to him, or what they said, he nodded, and tried to make his face look real sympathetic, but said as little as he possibly could and never agreed to come to a meeting, not to the union hall or the Chamber of Commerce.
Against all odds, and to the credit of how terrible conditions in the mill were, the union actually managed to win the election, by three votes: four-hundred seventy-five to four-hundred seventy-two. When they made the announcement, a brawl broke out on the shop floor. Frank voted against it. It was supposed to be a secret, but you had to put your name on the ballot, so the Labor Board could verify your eligibility as an employee in good standing. The last thing he wanted was his name associated with anything that might bring him under the slightest scrutiny or threaten the sanctity of the Southern woman, which was, apparently, very much at stake.
Not that any of it mattered in the end. The union and the mill management only made it through four days of negotiations before everything fell apart. The management filed a formal complaint questioning the union’s legitimacy for some obscure and arcane technical reason, and the union called for a strike. The strike lasted approximately forty-five minutes.
It was in the middle of all this that I got home one evening and found him hunched forward in his reading chair, a hideous high-backed thing he’d found on the side of the road one afternoon in the rich part of town, where he had no business driving anyway, upholstered in toile de Jouy, which he thought looked refined but whose pattern of pilgrims in buckle shoes fancy-stepping behind their hounds struck me as ghastly and deranged. Usually he took a shower and changed into short sleeves first thing after work, so the animals on his arm could stretch and breathe, but he was still in his uniform, the straps of his overalls shrugged from his shoulders, draped over the arms of his chair. He was shivering and staring into the empty fireplace, his hair and shoulders wet. I perched on the edge of my chair, across from his, and waited for him to look up.
His aunt Sally had been there when he came back from work that afternoon, wrapped in an oversized man’s peacoat and rocking in one of the chairs on the porch, despite the cold, the gray sky low and sagging with leaden snow. When he saw her, he imagined for the briefest of moments, before thought bridged sight to reason, that it was his mother there, or his mother’s ghost.
She was his favorite aunt, his mother’s youngest sister, the wild one her siblings shook their heads and clucked about. She was twenty years old and living with his parents when he was born—she’d got herself into some trouble with a married man and had to leave their home down east for a bit while everyone recovered from the scandal—and she carried him around on her hip so much those first few years, half the people in town thought he was her son. By the time he was old enough to really know her, she’d calmed down a bit and got married herself, settled into a lighter-hearted version of her sisters. She still came to stay with his family from time to time when he was a teenager, for a good while after his daddy died, and whenever she and her husband got into particularly bad fights. He liked to drink, and she liked to throw things, and every six months or so they’d have to spend a few weeks apart in order to decide that they couldn’t live without each other. He’d died, too, while Frank was overseas. Liver stopped working. The women in her family, Sally said, had a tragic attraction to men who weren’t long for the world.
Frank was slow to unbuckle his seatbelt, to pick his metal lunch pail up from the floorboard, trying to give his heart time to steady.
“There you are,” she said, when he finally got out of the car.
“Here I am,” he said.
She hurried down the steps to hug him before he was halfway to the porch. “It’s about time. I’ve been waiting out here in the cold for half an hour. Like a pauper. And that’s not counting the forty-five minutes I spent driving around in circles trying to find this godforsaken place. Hasn’t anyone out here ever heard of a street sign?” She held him at arm’s length, her hands clamped to his waist, to assure herself he hadn’t been starving.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m visiting my favorite nephew. I went up to see Bruce at school for the weekend and thought I’d drop by and see you on my way back.”
“How did you—” He was afraid to finish the question, for the risk of sounding suspicious.
“The post office,” she said. “I had to call them up—long-distance, might I add—and ask them where my own nephew lives. Since you always forget to respond to that particular part of my letters, somehow. It’s a real mystery. And then do you know what they told me? They told me they’d been instructed not to give out your address. ‘To anybody whatsoever.’ Special instructions, they said, as if the FBI were involved. As if I were nosing around for state secrets. I had to call them umpteen times, talk them up one side and down the other before I finally wore them down. A couple times I had to weep. It was a real debacle, the whole thing.”
He shook his head and laughed, despite himself. “You should have let me know you were coming.”
“I didn’t want to give you any warning.”
On the other side of the door, the dog whimpered at the sound of their voices. Her tail thumped the floor.
“Well?” Sally said. “I’m on the verge of losing my fingers to frostbite.” She held them up. Her hands were covered in big costume rings, one with a cut-glass amethyst that took up her entire knuckle, her fingertips red.
Inside, of course, there was a coat on the hook, too small to be
his, right beside the door. There were two towels on the rack in the bathroom, one still a little damp from the shower I’d taken that morning, two toothbrushes in a glass upon the sink, the bristles of one frayed from what Frank insisted was the entirely unnecessary force with which I brushed my teeth.
“The house is a mess,” he said.
“I’ve just come from a boy’s college dormitory. I’m sure your filth pales in comparison.” She waited for him to open the door. The dog’s nails clicked as she paced back and forth behind it. “Fine. You want to make an old lady sit out in the cold, I’ll sit out in the cold.” And she did, there on the porch step. She was, he told me, rather spry for her age. Frank lowered himself beside her.
“How’s Bruce?” he said, as lightly and casually as he could. “School treating him right?”
“He nearly failed his first semester. Went skiing instead of to class half the time. He wants to be an ‘oceanographer,’ whatever that is. As if we don’t already know where all the oceans are. It sounds like an excuse to spend all day at the beach to me. The one place he could think of that would be more conducive to frittering all his time away than a ski town.”
“And Alice?”
“Oh, she’s fine. A bit overwhelmed, I think. The new baby’s thirteen weeks now. A little girl. I’m just praying she doesn’t turn into the spoiled little tyrant her brother is.”
“He can’t be that bad.”
“You haven’t met him,” she said, laughing.
It wasn’t meant as a rebuke, but it stung him as though it were. He hadn’t met any of this next generation of cousins. The boy was nearly five now. Frank watched the afternoon dissolving into dusk, gray emerging from every little crack between the trees and grass and gravel. Any time now, my car might rattle up the driveway.
“You look more like your daddy every year,” she said. “When you were little, everyone said you took after your mother. Or me. But now it’s faded off of you somehow. And there he was, right underneath. The whole time.” She shook her head sadly.
He pulled his knees up, wrapped his arms around them.
“Frank,” she said. “What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. We hardly ever hear from you. Nobody’s seen you since your mama’s funeral. My children, I could understand if they decided never to speak to me again. But not you.”
“I write you,” Frank said.
“A couple sentences every few months. That tell me slightly more than nothing.”
“I’ve been busy. Whipping this place into livable shape was an endeavor unto itself.”
“And how long ago was that? Seven years now?”
“Work keeps me occupied,” he said.
“Did we do something? To drive you away? I know we should have stayed longer after your mama died, I shouldn’t have left you alone. It was just—”
“No. No, it’s nothing like that. You didn’t do anything.”
“Then what is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Honestly. Everything’s fine. Great.”
“Your mother would be worried sick if she knew you were out here all alone, in the middle of nowhere. You know that? And she’d be furious at me for letting it go on this long.”
“I like the quiet.”
“Quiet’s one thing. This is something else. You should come down, stay with us for a little bit. It’d do you good. Do us good, too.”
“That’s sweet of you,” he said.
“Tell me that after you’ve met the little tyrant.”
Frank picked at the step. It was old and warped, full of deep fissures that ran the length of the wood, so many of them it was unclear what substance, what force held the rest together.
“I thought you’d have one or two of them yourself by now,” Sally said. “Why haven’t you ever—?” She nodded to the empty spot on his ring finger.
Our standard answer to this question, which complete strangers inexplicably often felt empowered to ask, was that we were widowed. Saying you’d never married, at thirty-seven, raised all kinds of suspicions, meant there was something deep-down, dangerously wrong in you, festered and spoiled or else withered and desiccated, but saying you were a widower never failed to keep a person from prying further, afraid they’d hit some weak spot and have to endure the resulting effusion.
“I just ain’t found the right one,” he said.
Sally groaned. “Oh, Frank. There is no right one. Especially not at your age. You waited too long, the right ones all got snatched up fifteen years ago. Just pick one that’s decent enough and hold on. That’s all anyone does, really. Some people just make a better show of it than others.” She crossed her arms and shivered theatrically. Frank shrugged out of his coat, draped it over her shoulders. “Your mama and daddy weren’t perfect, either. They used to fight like the dickens. Your mother could cuss like you wouldn’t believe.”
“She used to wash my mouth out with soap,” Frank said, in mock indignation, “if I said darn too emphatically for her liking.”
“That’s because she didn’t want you ending up like her. Parents never do.” She put her hand on his, the metal bands of her rings cold against his skin. “I miss them too, you know. Both of them. And I know losing them when you’re young is hard. But you don’t have to give up on the whole world.”
“I haven’t—that ain’t it.”
“Then what is it? A person doesn’t cut off all ties with his family and move into a shack in the woods for no reason.”
“It ain’t a shack. It’s a nice place. I’ve worked hard on it.”
“How would I know?” she said. “This place, this job—” She licked her thumb and brushed a blue smudge from his cheek. “Do you know how many of the people in that mill would have killed for the chances you got? To go to college? You could be anything, do anything you want. This life you’re living, it isn’t yours.”
“It is,” he said.
“You’re still young enough. It’s not too late.”
“I’m happy.”
“I’ve known you since you were a little boy,” she said. “I’ve known you since before you can remember. You think I don’t know what your face looks like when you’re happy?”
He searched the trees for the flash of my headlights.
“What is it?” she said. “What are you trying to keep so secret?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m not a fool, Frank. You couldn’t act more suspicious if you tried. You won’t even let me in your own house, for heaven’s sake. And it’s freezing out and getting dark. Are you in some sort of trouble?”
He shook his head.
“You’re not mixed up with those communists trying to take over the mill, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then what? What is it?” He was quiet. After a minute, she sighed. “I had lots of time before you got here to prowl around, you know. Peer through your curtains. It certainly doesn’t look like you’re all alone in there. Unless the two chairs by the fireplace are both for you. Unless you’ve taken up baking in your spare time.”
The thickening dark, mercifully, made it hard to see the look on her face, which meant it must be hard to see the look on his.
“It’s getting late,” Frank said. “You ought to be going. Before you catch cold.”
“Is she married? Divorced? What’s so bad that you can’t—”
“You should go. And you shouldn’t come back.”
“You don’t mean that.”
He tried to make his voice cold and hard. “If I ever wanted to see you,” he said, “don’t you think I would have made it a little easier to find me?”
She waited a moment, watching him. Then she grabbed the banister and hauled herself up. Frank stared at his lap.
“Don’t tell anyone where I am,” he said. “Don’t even tell them you saw me.”
“Frank—”
“Please. Can you do that for me?”
She set his jack
et over his shoulders, kissed him on the cheek. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just—I was nearby, and I knew my sister would want me to. She always worried about you. Said you took the world too hard. I never believed her.”
He didn’t watch her go. The gravel crunched under her shoes. The car door groaned as it opened.
“You were always my favorite, you know,” she said. “When my children were growing up, I used to wish and wish they would be more like you.”
He covered his face with his hands. She closed the door softly and drove away. Frank sat on the step long after the jacket had slipped from his shoulders. The snow began to fall, in fat, wet flakes that sank quick and heavy from the clouds. They melted as soon as they touched the ground.
“I guess I’d better close up that PO box,” he said.
I got up from my chair and balanced on the arm of his. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I do. It’s safer this way.”
“Not really. She already knows where we are.”
How nice it must have been, I thought, for someone to track you down. How much they must love you.
“Do you think she’ll tell anyone?” I said. I leaned against his shoulder, ran my fingers through his damp hair.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then you shouldn’t close it. There’s no reason to. She cares about you. And it’s good to have some link to the outside world. You shouldn’t cut that off.”
“I’m not sure you’re the one who should be lecturing me on the importance of family.”
“Fine.” I stood. “Do whatever you want.”
“I’m sorry.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me back to him. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight with you. Seeing her, talking to her, it’s just—it’s too hard.” He had to whisper to keep his voice from breaking. “It’s too hard.”
He looked up at me, his eyes wide and gutted.
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