He left the room, and Melissa came in. “How do you feel?” she asked, taking Wanda’s hand.
“Fine. It was nothing.”
“Randy had to go back to the shop, so it’s just you and me. Ready to be lazy?”
Melissa waited on Wanda for the rest of the day, allowing her to rise only to go to the bathroom. It was fun, like a grade-school sick day, but without having to endure (or feign) illness. Wanda watched movies on the videocassette player with Simon, the L-tailed dog, wedged beside her. She didn’t have a VCR of her own, and still could hardly believe she could watch anything she wanted without having to wait for it to come on the Sunday Night Movie. When Randy came home, he teased Melissa, saying that she was subjecting Wanda to the “rest-cure” (whatever that was) and that she should allow her to take a twilight walk in the woods. To this, Melissa dryly responded: “It’s half-medical—she has a better chance of getting pregnant if she sits still—and half-superstition. Oh, and half just for the fun of it.”
“Yeah!” Wanda agreed.
“That’s three halves,” Randy said, winking at Wanda. There was a little bit of effort behind this joking; it was the tiniest bit forced. But Wanda knew they were trying to let her know that they really did forgive her, and like her, and trust her. She appreciated it.
Randy and Melissa went to get dinner on, leaving Wanda in complete comfort. She rested her hands on her belly, closed her eyes, and visualized those two cells uniting in her.
THAT NIGHT, ABBY told Liz over the phone, “I draw out my homework. I take longer than I need to because I’m afraid to run out.”
“Because then you’ll be bored?” Liz guessed.
“I’ll be bored, and I’ll be all theirs. No escape. They all tell me I work too hard.”
“Shit.”
“And when I think of the people, other than you, who I wish were here with me, I think of my mom—my old mom, before she got all churchy, back when she was mean and funny.”
“I liked her that way, too,” Liz said.
“Sure you did. Who wants a Mormon mom who hesitates to take pain pills because of the caffeine? She feels guilty about all her medications! And I can’t help but feel like, if she stayed the old mom, she wouldn’t be dying. But she became this way because she is dying. My thinking is all backward, but I can’t help it.”
As often happened on these phone calls when Abby inadvertently crossed a boundary, there was a rustling on the other end, Liz fiddling with the things around her bed—the tarot cards she had bought at a yard sale, perhaps, or the matryoshka dolls, egg women within egg women. It wasn’t selfishness, it was fear, so Abby didn’t mind.
“Anyway,” Abby said. “What’s new in Idaho?”
Liz gave a derisive snort of laughter. “Nothing, naturally. My secret admirer is back.”
“The one from months ago?”
“Yep.”
Abby’s grandfather called from downstairs.
“God,” Abby said, “they’re so helpless. I can’t have an hour to myself. What is it, Grandpa?”
“Could you come down? Yer ma’s askin’ for ya.”
“Coming! Well, I guess I have to go.”
“All right, Abby. Don’t let them get you down. Come home soon. I love you.”
This was something new: Liz ended every call since Abby had been coming down to Salt Lake by telling her that she loved her. It embarrassed Abby a little, even as it overwhelmed her with gratitude. “Love you, too. Talk tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
Abby ran down the narrow staircase.
“I gave her two doses of morphine,” said Grandpa Nelson, “one an hour ago and one just now, but she’s still in pain.”
Sandra sat in the easy chair. One arm supported her curled body against the armrest, the hand clutching her brow.
Abby knelt in front of her. “What hurts, Mom?”
It seemed to take a great effort to release her clamped lips. “My leg. All the way up.”
“Did I give you your afternoon codeine? Did I forget?” Abby leaped up and went to the bureau where she kept the box that divided her mother’s medication into doses by the hour. When she looked at today’s, Thursday’s, she saw both the ten a.m. and two p.m. codeine pills wobbling in their compartments like tiny yellow eggs. “Oh my God!” Abby cried. She picked one up and rushed to her mother. “I didn’t give you this morning’s either. You haven’t had any today. No wonder you’re in pain.”
Abby’s grandmother handed Sandra a glass of water and steadied it as Sandra swallowed the pill with a wince.
“Mom, I’m so sorry.” Abby buried her face in her mother’s lap.
“Hush, Abby. It’s all right. I’m fine.”
“It’s so much, for a girl,” Grandma Nelson said, laying her hand on Abby’s shoulder.
“. . . and all that homework,” Grandpa Nelson added.
Abby stayed there for a while, letting her grandparents believe she was crying. In her mother’s lap, Abby smelled baby powder, the smell of her old mother, her hard-jawed, bloodshot mother who was so stingy with hugs but whom Abby loved. When Abby sat up, her grandparents were gone.
“See?” Sandra said with a wan smile. “It’s already kicking in. I feel better.”
“Do you?” Abby reached up and gently hooked the hose, which had come loose, back over her mother’s ear.
Sandra nodded slowly. “Don’t be hard on yourself, Abby. You’ll need . . . yourself—”
Abby smiled teasingly, and her mother responded with a faint roll of her eyes. Despite the circumstances, it was funny to see her mother, who all her life had been so precise with words, muddled by painkillers.
“Who’s sleeping in the living room tonight?” Sandra asked.
“It’s Grandma’s turn.”
“Oh.” Her mother asked this question every evening and was disappointed if it was anyone but Abby. “Have you done your homework?”
“Yes.”
“Would you read to me?”
“Sure.” Abby went through the pile beside the chair and held up the copy of Vogue she had brought from home. Sandra had always kept up her subscription to the magazine, whisking it from the mail pile up to her bedroom, where she could read it in private. She had done her mission in New York City and, Abby suspected, Vogue was her way of keeping an eye on that frivolous, far-off, beautiful world. Abby offered it now half in jest, half hoping her mother would break down and let her read some bit of fluff that didn’t have to do with the Fruits of the Spirit or the Word of Wisdom.
But Sandra shook her head and said, “The Bible, please.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Connie went to her parents’ house a few miles out of town to clean. She did this every spring. She used a stiff dead sunflower to clear the spiderwebs from the porch and the arbor and the garden shed. She didn’t want to kill the spiders or muss the dust broom. She threw the old flower, now bound and cocoonish, over the fence into the field that had once been theirs. The breeze carried away some strands, up to the white sky, where they disappeared. About half the sky was covered in clouds, or not clouds, really, but a shroud that reduced the sun to a glow. Mid-sky, this cover was rent, leaving some fibrous trails, then the sky was blue to the horizon, and populated by bright, bulbous clouds, the kind Gene called “cauliflower clouds”—or had until the day when Connie pointed and said, “Look, Genie, a cauliflower cloud,” and he had answered, flatly: “Cumulus.”
She mended a broken plank in the fence with some wire and swept the walkways. All these chores she did mechanically, just as she had mechanically gone to work and made dinner in the past months. Her spine was stiff and resolute, the contents of her chest scooped up and underpinned with her shoulder blades. She hadn’t taken a deep breath since Bill’s departure.
She went inside for lunch. Connie’s father was nearly deaf and answered any attempt at conversation with an annoyed “Whuh?” as he raised his arm to a right angle and twisted the dial of his hearing aid with his blunt fingertip—a gesture parado
xically close to that of plugging his ear. This better be worth it, his sneer seemed to say. Rather than sit at the table, where her father examined the spread-out newspaper with a magnifying glass, Connie stood at the sink, where her mother was polishing silver and talking about something from the news, and ate some chicken salad straight from the Tupperware container.
“I think that Jessica Hahn is a demon sent from the Devil to destroy a wonderful ministry.”
“Who?” Connie asked.
“Jessica Hahn, that woman that’s saying all those awful lies about Jim Bakker. I don’t know if someone’s paying her to do it, or if it’s just out of pure evil. I’m just praying she’ll take it all back and they’ll put Jim back on the air.”
“Oh, Mother, I wish you wouldn’t watch all that.”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s Christian programming.”
“You don’t send them money, do you?”
“I tell her not to,” grumbled Connie’s father.
Connie’s mother said nothing, but fiercely polished a spoon.
“He rides in a Rolls-Royce, you know,” Connie said. “It’s vanity.”
“He speaks the word of God,” her mother said with finality.
Connie was quiet for a while, raking gently through the salad, looking for pieces of white meat. Then she said, “I was wondering, Mom . . . I might need to go away. Could you maybe take Gene for a few days?” She said this as if it were something reasonable to ask, as if her mother took care of Gene all the time. Connie had been planning it all morning.
“Oh,” her mother said, and waited, it seemed, for Connie to qualify the request or take it back. After a few seconds she said, “No, sweetheart, I don’t think we could.”
“Why?” Connie asked.
“We’re too old. It would drive your father crazy to have a little one running around.”
“Gene’s not little anymore, Mom. He doesn’t run around, he keeps to himself. He’s very little trouble.”
Her mother sighed. “I’m sure you could get someone at the church to help you.”
In the silence that followed, Connie wondered if all children taught their parents how to treat them, as Gene had her. If so, then Connie had taught this woman to act always in her own best interest, as if there were no other option. She had allowed her mother to drop neat little gates between them, plotting out her own comfortable space, never considering how it might confine Connie and make her less free.
“Wind’s picked up,” her mother said.
“Yes,” Connie said, looking up from the salad. “Good thing I did all the outside chores this morning.”
“My eyesight is so bad, sometimes I think I see men in those trees.”
Connie looked where her mother was looking and saw that the trees around the ditch were thick, their trunks barely visible in the darkened gaps in the canopy. The wind caused man-sized shadows to shift and sway. “We should get your eyes looked at,” Connie said. This response seemed inadequate next to the frightening idea of backyard phantoms.
Her mother took off her glasses and gave them an exasperated look, as if they should just clean up their act and work right.
Connie went upstairs and dusted the high shelves her mother could no longer reach, cleaned under the sink in the bathroom, and hung a couple of plaques her mother had bought at a craft fair.
Where was Eugene? Where had her husband gone? She had asked herself that again and again in the time after Bill left, until the question became a mental tic. Where was he? She’d never be free unless she knew. The fact that she had started her search, she had gone to the library and looked up all those Kansas City Andersons because she had imagined she could marry Bill and work with him in Africa . . . this fact was something she chose to forget. Now the simple question was, where had her husband gone?
This naturally led to imagined scenarios of finding him. She would find his brother in Fresno, who would lead her to the sunny hillside cemetery where he was buried. Or she would find Gene himself confined in the psychiatric ward of a Kansas City hospital, rocking in a chair and muttering. Eugene? He would regard her with fearful, unrecognizing eyes, and she would lift him, as she did her charges at the nursing home, and take him out for a walk around the grounds. Or she would find him, overweight and alone in the bleak glow of a television, smelling of whiskey and neglected laundry.
Or she would find him in a blue suit, a little wider at the middle and grayer at the crown, selling insurance from an office in a tall building. She would ride up in an elevator. He would be speechless.
Goodness, Connie, I— I don’t know what to say. Well, let me start with this: I’m awfully sorry. How is little Gene? Connie, would you consider coming over for dinner tonight? I mean, only if you’re comfortable. I’d like you to meet my children. My other children.
And though this scenario caused a pang or two—how could he be kind and respectable and still the same man who had abandoned her?—it had an advantage over the other scenarios. After dinner, when the children had been sent off to do their homework, Connie would linger at the table with Eugene and his wife, a solemn woman who might have a lame arm or one leg shorter than the other, and Eugene would say, Connie, I wonder if . . . No, it’s crazy. You’d never . . .
I’d never what, Eugene?
I wonder if you might let Gene come down here, for a visit, or perhaps an extended period, the summer maybe, so we could get acquainted. I know I’m probably overstepping a boundary, but if there was any way that I could prove myself a father, and make up for all those years . . .
Connie would refuse, of course. Eugene, you can’t just pick up with a boy after . . . You’re a stranger to him . . . What makes you think . . .
But then it would happen. A summer.
Without even meaning to, really, Connie had set a plan in motion. She responded to the Christmas card sent by Tess of Kansas City, a member of the prayer-chain letter, “I’ve been thinking of coming through Kansas City in the spring. I’d love to meet you face-to-face after all these years.” It was only an offhanded remark, a friendly gesture really. But then Tess’s response had been immediate: she would be delighted to meet Connie; in fact, Connie mustn’t think of staying anywhere but with Tess, who had a little apartment above the garage, where Connie could stay as short or long as she wished, and Kansas City was beautiful in the spring, and Connie should just let Tess know when she was on her way.
After such a deluge of benevolence, Connie would feel bad not going.
Connie went to her old bedroom and sat on her bed. A child’s bed, it was low to the ground and as comfortable to sit on as a couch. After Connie married and moved out, her mother had made this her sewing room, and then, with the first touches of Parkinson’s years later, her hands had become too shaky to sew. So, now this room was a little graveyard of her parents’ hobbies—the sewing machine, the lathe, the loom; all under dust cloths. The house responded to a wind gust with a few creaks and taps. When Connie was about eight, there had been a windstorm so strong that she had hidden under the covers waiting for the house to be picked up and spun around like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz. The house hadn’t been picked up, but it had shifted, and across the room a gap had opened up between the ceiling and the wall, and some black dirt had rained down on Connie’s desk and bureau. Close examination the morning after showed the dirt to be made mostly of the broken bodies of dead bugs. The thought still gave her the shivers.
Connie glanced at the Jesus portrait, whose eyes she had been avoiding, and felt that spark of emotion that she sometimes allowed herself, a split-second flash of something huge, like a glint of sun through the trees. The bond she had felt with Bill was more than she felt with Gene or with Christ. It was the strongest thing she had ever felt, and it wasn’t real. He was a false prophet. She only allowed herself a peek through squinted eyes, and even that was dangerous.
Driving home that evening, she wished she could have an appointment with Reverend McNally and discuss some theological point
with him, just to ground herself—to reason something out with him to prove that she was still reasonable. But she couldn’t, not after what had happened last winter. She felt a deep cringe in the center of her belly, she was so ashamed of what had happened on the Deals’ lawn the night of the progressive dinner. Ed had wanted to tell her that Bill was getting married, and Connie, vain and stupid as she was, had thought Ed was jealous. A married man, a minister, jealous. Thank God Connie had had no confidante. As it was, she could still look everyone in the eye as if the whole thing had never happened.
WHEN COOP PICKED Wanda up at the Greyhound station that evening, Wanda said, “I’m starved. Do you want to drop by Denny’s on the way home? My treat.”
Coop turned slowly to her with a brow full of wrinkles. The usual stretch of his smile slackened into something more natural: surprise. He inhaled to say something—something teasing, Wanda could tell by the twinkle in his eye—then stopped himself. “Sure,” he said simply.
A hot blast greeted them when they hauled open the heavy glass-paned door of the restaurant. The hostess, a hefty woman whom Coop knew well, seemed to get the idea that this was a special night. She deposited Coop and Wanda in a booth and left them alone. Gina, too busy to flirt, marked them as special customers only by dropping her voice an octave when taking their order, from the syrupy soprano she used with other tables to her regular smoker’s rasp. Maybe she would tease Coop tomorrow about being taken out by his little sister, but Wanda didn’t mind. Time spent with Randy and Melissa made Wanda realize that Coop was the one person in her life worth loving. When Melissa had said, on that beautiful evening on the mountainside, “It’s forever,” she had made Wanda yearn to say that about someone, even if it was her brother, or a friend, or them, the Weston-Sloanes.
“Order surf and turf if you want,” Wanda told Coop. “I want to thank you for helping me out.”
The line of Coop’s smile lengthened with sincere emotion, his lips disappearing into his mouth.
SUNDAY NIGHT, SANDRA was so racked by waves of pain that she was up twice, vomiting, and in the morning her breath was so shallow that Abby called to push up the appointment to have her lungs tapped. Every Tuesday for months now they had inserted a needle through Sandra’s back and drained a week’s worth of fluid. To ask for a Monday appointment seemed to Abby a failing, not on the part of her mother but herself.
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