The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  She is walking toward him, her hands cupping her swollen belly.

  Ellie.

  Ellie smiles and holds out her hand. Brick, look what you’ve done.

  His head hits the pavement.

  “Ma,” he whispers, his eyes wide.

  Ellie sat in her underwear on the closed toilet seat and stared at the boxes of soap lining the edge of the bathtub. An apology, Brick-style. She stood up and walked to their bedroom closet, and pulled out the one black suit she owned. She brushed the dust off the shoulders. “Hand me the lint brush,” she said, reaching toward the bedside table. She sat down on the bed and started to cry.

  She stood up again when she heard Sam’s car door close in the driveway. She looked at her watch. A half hour before they had to leave for the funeral home. Reilly and Lisa would meet them there.

  Ellie ran her fingers along the chenille bedspread and thought about her children’s reaction to Brick’s death. With her permission, Carson had called Sam from the ER. When she arrived, Ellie could tell she’d been crying, but Sam was who she’d always been, making it clear that she was there to help Ellie. “What do you need?” she kept asking, until Ellie finally asked Carson to take her home.

  Reilly was so calm on the phone. “I’m on my way, Mom,” he said, and hung up. One look at him an hour later at the hospital, and Ellie finally fell apart. Reilly held her until she was cried out, and then drove her home. She couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were red, but dry. “Let’s talk later,” he said when he hugged her goodbye. Such an odd thing to say. Of course they would talk.

  She walked over to Brick’s chest of drawers. Everything was just as he had left it, including his wedding ring, which he never wore when he was working in the yard. She picked it up and slid it onto her thumb, but it was too loose. His leather wallet sat on top of the folded list of job duties she had left on his dashboard. So, he saw it, but did he read it? Maybe that explained the soap, and the thawing steaks on the counter.

  The wallet had been a birthday gift from the kids more than twenty years ago. Brick had refused to part with it no matter how tattered it became. Last Christmas, Sam—and Reilly in absentia—gave him a new one. Brick held it in his hand for a moment, then set it back in the box. “I appreciate this,” he said, folding the tissue over it and replacing the cover. “But I don’t need it.”

  “Dad, it’s still from us.”

  “But not from my children,” he said, handing it to Sam. “Every time I open my wallet, I see your excited little faces on the day you gave it to me.”

  Ellie knew what he was thinking. Sam was eleven when they gave him the wallet. The year before everything changed.

  Ellie opened the wallet and looked at the pictures. The first sleeve dated back to their wedding day: On one side, a black-and-white photo of them clowning around in a drugstore photo booth; the other side a picture of Ellie standing by Brick’s truck outside their hotel. The rest of the sleeves held pictures of the kids at various ages. She pulled them out, one at a time, reading Brick’s handwritten note on the back of each one.

  Reilly, age 6. Lost a tooth two days before.

  Sam, age 10. Hit her first home run in the backyard.

  The sleeve holding the kids’ high school senior portraits was chunkier. She tugged to slide them out, and the folded square of newspaper fell to the floor.

  She could tell it was a team photo from softball days. “Brick,” she said, smiling as she picked it up. “After all these years.” She unfolded the paper and dropped the wallet.

  She sat down on Brick’s side of the bed and stared at the headline.

  PAULL RUSSO’S HITTING SLUMP GONE FOR GOOD

  She looked at the date. July 20, 1989.

  She spotted him immediately. He was the young man in the back, tall and lean. Ellie ran her finger across the photo of his freckled face, her breathing shallow as she studied the curve of his father’s chin, his narrow nose, his smile that curled a little higher on the left.

  Her eyes scrolled down to the paragraph circled in pencil.

  When asked about his new strategy at the plate, Russo wasn’t giving up any secrets. “Let’s just say I got some really good advice,” he said. “From a real pro. I hope he sees this, so he knows I listened. I wish I could thank him in person.”

  Ellie folded the news clipping into the tiny square and wedged it back into the sleeve, between the kids’ portraits. She set the wallet on the dresser.

  So like Brick, to think he was the only one with a secret.

  She’d never told a soul about that day. Over the years she had tamped it down until the memory surfaced only as an occasional flutter, a gnat quickly batted away.

  A full year before Rosemary Russo showed up at their door, she had made sure Ellie knew about Paull-two-els.

  Another hot August day, but in ’68. Ellie had just pulled into the parking lot of Hills department store and was stepping out of the car when she saw him: a cherub of a baby with red hair blazing in the final glow of the setting sun. Just like my Reilly’s, she remembered thinking as he and his mother approached. She was tall with long bleached hair, carrying him on her hip. When the woman’s eyes met Ellie’s, she paused for a moment, it seemed. Ellie smiled and kept walking.

  A few minutes later, Ellie was riffling through the bin of discounted bras when the same woman stopped on the other side of the bin. This time she returned Ellie’s smile. “I forgot about these being on sale,” the woman said. Her face was flushed.

  Ellie pointed to her baby. “His hair is red just like my son’s. Like my husband’s, too. You don’t see that bright shade very often.”

  The woman nodded and kissed her son’s forehead. “That’s right, Paullie.”

  The skin on Ellie’s arms began to tingle. Her body had been one step ahead of her, she thought later, warning her that something was wrong. She studied the boy’s face and tilted her head. “Paulie? Is that a nickname for Paul?”

  The woman nodded, and when she ran one of her hands through her son’s hair, Ellie noticed that it was trembling. “Spelled differently, though,” Rosemary said, locking her fingers together across her son’s bottom. “He’s Paull-two-els.”

  Ellie looked down at the lacy bra in her hand and felt suddenly exposed, as if she were revealing something intimate about herself. “I’ve only known one person who spells Paull that way,” she said, dropping the bra.

  The woman nodded again. “Me, too.”

  How long did they stand there looking at each other? Ellie could never recall. For the longest time, it seemed, her feet couldn’t move. She just stared at that little boy until she couldn’t take it anymore.

  She looked at Rosemary. “You can’t have him.”

  Rosemary smiled, and Ellie knew she had lost. Rosemary lifted her son to press his cheek against hers. “And you, Mrs. McGinty, couldn’t have him.”

  Ellie walked away from the bin and straight to her car. On the drive home she vowed never to tell a soul that she knew. Not Brick, not Mardee, not Reverend Lubinger. If she didn’t acknowledge that baby’s existence, if she and Brick never talked about him, then he wasn’t real.

  A year later Rosemary showed up banging on their front door, and one look at Brick’s face filled in the rest of the story. “Bic,” the little boy called him, just as he had at Brick’s game, when she had still pretended not to know.

  That night, after Rosemary left and Brick left, too, she lay on top of the bedspread and never slept. By the next evening she stood at the stove heating leftovers, so exhausted that her fingers were having trouble clasping the handle of the wooden spoon, when Brick walked through the door with the newspaper rolled up in his hand.

  They looked at that photo of Rosemary’s mangled car, and on the spot Ellie had a plan. It was as simple and awful as that. She didn’t have to tell Brick that she already k
new about Rosemary, about the baby. Rosemary had written a new ending when she drove off the Clayton County Bridge.

  Ellie stood up and avoided her reflection in the dresser mirror as she got dressed. She picked up the bottle of White Shoulders to spritz her wrists, and thought of the day she and Brick had buried his mother. Ellie had been so pregnant at the time, full of worries about her stricken husband and their emergency marriage. On the drive home from the cemetery, Brick had said something she had clung to over the years. “I still don’t know if I believe in God,” he told her, “but if I do, Pint, it’s because of you.”

  She unclasped her gold cross necklace and walked over to Brick’s bureau. She slid his ring onto the chain and refastened it, and tucked it inside her blouse. She picked up the hand mirror on her dresser and thought about how Grandma Ada had amended the mirror’s message for her pregnant granddaughter. “It doesn’t matter, Ellie, who we see in the mirror. What matters is who God sees.”

  Ellie stared at her reflection in the mirror. “We should have raised that boy,” she said. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please forgive Brick, and me.”

  She heard a tap at the door. “Mom?”

  “I’ll be right there, Sam,” she said, setting down the mirror. She’d have to tell Sam about Carson, how wonderful he’d been with her that day. How he’d been in the ER when they brought Brick in, and raced to the patient rec room. “Ellie,” he’d said, pressing his hand against her back, “come with me, please.”

  He was such a handsome man, so quick to smile, but in that moment he looked ancient as he stood with her in the hallway and said, “Ellie, I am so sorry to tell you this.”

  He walked with her to the emergency room, and led her to the corner stall. “I will wait right here for you,” he said.

  Ellie had slowly pulled back the curtain and closed it behind her. It was Carson, she learned later, who had broken protocol and tucked a sheet around Brick, instead of draping it over his body and face. Brick was wearing only one shoe. He would have hated that. She pulled off the shoe and wrapped the bottom of the sheet around Brick’s feet before looking at his face. His eyes were wide open, as if he’d been surprised.

  She pushed his hair off his forehead and kissed his cheek. “Sam and Reilly are on their way,” she told him. A small lie. She would call them soon, but they could not see him like this. As she had done countless times before for other people’s husbands, she dabbed her finger in the pot of Vaseline and sealed his eyelids shut.

  Ellie stood at the dresser and patted the ring under her blouse. “Who was waiting for you, Brick?” she said. “Who did you see?”

  Sam flicked on the turn signal to turn left on Maple. “No,” Ellie said. “Let’s drive by the old house. It’s the most direct route to Penney’s.”

  “Mom, I can turn here and it won’t add more than thirty seconds to the drive.”

  “I want to see the old house,” Ellie said. “I haven’t seen it since we moved.”

  Sam started to say something, and stopped. Her father had been gone for almost four months now. This was the first time Ellie had wanted to go anywhere but work or church. “I want new sheets,” she’d told Sam earlier in the week. “And I want to buy some pretty towels. With flowers on them.”

  Sam was relieved to see her mother showing signs of life. Her father’s death had left Sam feeling hollowed out and adrift for weeks, but Carson had slowly reeled her back in.

  She had resisted at first; not from grief, but from fear. “It has occurred to me,” she finally explained to him, “that if I love you too much, I will never recover from losing you.”

  “Then why love anyone?” Carson said. “Why love your parents? Why love a dog or a cat, for that matter? Your heart is too big for anything less, Sam, and you don’t do anything halfway.”

  “But look at Mom.”

  “You mother won’t always be this sad.”

  “She will always miss him,” Sam said. “And so will I.”

  “What a lucky man,” Carson said, “to be loved that much.”

  Sam had repeated that to herself so many times since Carson said it. What a lucky man. Not once had she ever heard her father describe himself that way, and her mother had deserved to hear it.

  She pulled to a stop at the intersection, as Ellie had instructed. “I’ve avoided that house for so many years,” she said. Ellie pointed at the light. “It’s green.”

  Sam turned left and slowed down as they approached the four-story apartment building. A smattering of old people sat out on the stacked concrete porches, bundled against the cold and watching traffic. When Sam was a child, she used to love waving to the old people, making them smile. Now, they reminded her of the little figures in her childhood dollhouse, anonymous in the world.

  Sam pulled to a stop in front of their old house, and they gasped in unison. A bulldozer was parked where the front porch used to be. A lighted sign on wheels blocked the driveway:

  COMING SOON!

  MORE PARKING FOR LOUIE’S STEAKHOUSE!

  Sam glanced at the new restaurant across the street. “Wow. I knew Cecil’s gas station was gone.” She looked again at the house. “But I didn’t know about this.”

  Ellie rolled down the window and faced the house. There was a gaping hole where the door used to be, offering a clear view of the fake-brick linoleum floor. “Such a long time ago,” Ellie said. “I wonder if Dad knew about this.”

  She closed her eyes against the crisp winter breeze and the house came alive. She could see Reilly and Sam laughing as Sam pinned down his shoulders in the grass. A young beehived Ellie stood in her scuffed slippers on the porch, cupping her mouth with her hands to call the kids to dinner. Time for my Dean Martin medley, Brick said, patting the spot next to him on the swing. Just for you.

  “Mom?”

  Ellie opened her eyes and the porch was gone. “It wasn’t all bad,” she said, staring at the house. “This was our first home together. We made good memories here, too.”

  “Lots of them,” Sam said.

  “He did love me,” Ellie said. “I believe that.”

  Sam pressed her hand on her mother’s back. “Of course he did, Mom.”

  Sam looked down at Ellie’s open purse. “What’s this?” she said, pulling out the brochure.

  Ellie turned and snatched it from her hand. “Since when do you rummage through my purse without permission?”

  “Mom, it was sitting right there. I was just wondering what it was.”

  Ellie eased back in her seat. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be short.”

  “But you’ve always been four feet eleven.”

  Ellie looked at her daughter and almost smiled. “Well, I see your father’s jokes have certainly survived.” She handed Sam the brochure. “It’s for Reynolds Way, that new housing development.”

  “Lenny’s project,” Sam said, spreading it open. “Whoa, a trifold. Look at you, Lenny Kleshinski.” She studied it for a moment and tilted her head at Ellie. “Are you thinking of moving already? Experts say wait six months for big decisions.”

  “Experts aren’t living in that empty house with me,” Ellie said, grabbing the brochure and folding it. “A waitress gave this to me a couple of months ago. You know how it is. You get to talking and people just tell you things. She lives there.”

  “When were you at a restaurant?”

  “Perkins. A while ago, as I just said.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Sam, honestly. I have done things without your father, you know.”

  Sam pointed to the brochure. “What did Dad think about this?”

  “Dad didn’t know.” He died the next day, she didn’t say. “I’ll toss it out when we get to Penney’s. Then you and the experts can feel better. Let’s go.”

  Sam eased back into traffic. “Don’t throw it out, Mom. Hold o
n to it for a while.”

  Ellie flipped down the visor to check her lipstick in the mirror. “It wouldn’t bother you if I moved?”

  “We just saw the only house that mattered to me,” Sam said, gesturing over her shoulder. “Or, what’s left of it, anyway. Besides, it’s your life. You have a lot of years ahead of you. Who knows where you’ll end up?”

  Ellie looked at her. “Nobody has said that to me since I was seventeen years old.”

  “Said what?”

  “That it’s my life. The last time I heard that was when I was having lunch with Aunt Nessa at the Silver Grille in Higbee’s, in downtown Cleveland. She had just handed me the application for nursing school. ‘Don’t be late for your own life,’ she told me.”

  “The same thing you said to me when you and Dad dropped me off at Kent State.”

  “Yes, well,” Ellie said, clasping her hands on her lap. “I’m not that teenager anymore. I’m going to be sixty before you know it. And a grandmother. Imagine that. I wish Dad had lived long enough to hear Reilly’s news.”

  “So does Reilly,” Sam said. “I’ve lost count of how many times he’s said he wished he’d called Dad right after he told me.”

  “He wanted to tell him in person,” Ellie said. “I like imagining that, Reilly and Dad standing together, talking about your father’s first grandchild.”

  Sam pulled to a stop at the red light and looked at her mother. “Mom, you’re going to be sixty anyway, so why not be the sixty-year-old woman you want to be? Who knows what’s coming next? Let’s go look at Reynolds Way.”

  Ellie studied her daughter’s face for a moment. “I feel like we’re talking about more than my new house,” she said.

  “Maybe,” Sam said. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Sure you do,” Ellie said. She pointed up at the light. “It’s green.”

  For Clayton, Leo, Jackie, Carolyn, Milo, Ela, and Russell, always