The Trouble with Joe

by Emilie Richards

  Hoping she wasn’t blushing furiously, Lucy went in.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ADRIAN DID NOT GO to the café for dinner. He dined on a surprisingly good filet mignon and baked potato at the Steak House, where not a soul evinced any sign of knowing who he was. He had bought a newspaper earlier in the day and not had a chance to read beyond the front page headlines; now he read while he ate, discovering that the Mariners had lost to Texas, that the Seattle city council had another ludicrous idea for replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct, and that the ferry he had ridden over on had been dry-docked for repairs and replaced temporarily with a smaller one, meaning long lines at the terminals during school spring breaks.

  By the time he folded up the newspaper and paid, he couldn’t remember much of what he’d read. He hadn’t been concentrating. He’d been thinking about his afternoon and what the librarian, the hairdresser and the Safeway manager had told him about his mother.

  He wished Lucy had gone with him to the latter two meetings. Neither Cindy nor George had relaxed with him as readily as they would have if Lucy had been there. He’d always believed he was skilled with people, but this context was different. He was an outsider. They looked at him like everyone in this damn town did, certain his mother wouldn’t have been homeless if he’d done his duty as her son.

  He’d buried his guilt years ago, but now it was as if everyone in Middleton were scrabbling at the dirt with their bare hands, flinging it aside to bare the coffin enclosing all his suppressed emotions. They were doing it willfully, and, God help him, he was encouraging them.

  “Crap,” he muttered, then grimaced when the passing waitress turned, startled. “Sorry.”

  “We all have days like that,” she said with a comforting smile, and continued on with a tray laden with dirty dishes. The restaurant was emptying out. Apparently Middleton shut down early, even on Saturday nights.

  They all had days like this? He seriously doubted it.

  He went to the hospital, exchanging greetings with the same nurse that had been on last night, and went into his mother’s room, where nothing had changed.

  This was the first time, Adrian realized, that he’d walked in when Lucy wasn’t here, talking or reading to his mother. Tonight, the chair—her chair—was empty. The only sound was the soft beep beep of the monitors. He wished he’d brought something to read to the woman who lay in this bed. That was pure genius on Lucy’s part. It filled the silence without requiring any real effort. He had no idea what he would have read to her, though. He hadn’t brought anything from home but work. Nothing in the Times seemed suitable, and he’d left it behind anyway.

  He walked around the bed and sat in the chair. “Hi, Mom. It’s Adrian. I’m back.” Yeah, brilliant. “I had dinner at the Steak House. I’m told you ate there sometimes.” More charity, but he hadn’t asked for the manager to find out what about his mother had awakened the kind impulse. He felt battered enough by what the other people had told him.

  “I wonder why you picked Middleton. Did it remind you of Brookfield? It sounds like people here were pretty nice to you, so I can see why you stayed. I wish I’d known where you were, though. That you’d given me a chance.”

  To do what? he wondered. Commit her to a mental hospital? What would he have done with his mother if he’d come upon her down on First Avenue in Seattle ten years ago and recognized her in the dirty, hopeless street person looking up at him from a doorway?

  He had an uncomfortable feeling he would have been embarrassed. He’d have wanted to whisk her out of sight. Get her on meds and insist they be regularized until she was a normal, functioning human being.

  Except that she’d never been quite normal and he’d loved her anyway. Not for the first time Adrian tried to imagine how two people as disparate as his parents had ever imagined themselves in love. Perhaps the answer was that they’d been drawn to the qualities in each other that they themselves lacked. His father had seemed solid, the very embodiment of stability and sanity, while his mother...she had been whimsical, creative and mysterious. Maybe they’d each thought they could soak up some of the other’s best qualities. If so, they’d failed. It was as if the marriage had accentuated their differences; Adrian’s father had become increasingly stern, while his mother had drifted further from the here and now and from her husband.

  Adrian sat looking at her face, which seemed to have more color tonight. She could have simply been asleep. Her eyelids were traced with the pale blue lines of veins beneath the skin. As he stared, her lids quivered.

  Was she trying to open her eyes? He tensed, watching, scarcely breathing for fear of missing some tiny movement. None came, and gradually he relaxed. He’d seen some reflex, no more. Or perhaps she was still capable of dreaming. If so, did her unconscious brain weave the voices she heard into those dreams?

  He cleared his throat. “Today I was remembering how you read to me every night. The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. I went to Greece a couple of years ago. Not to Crete, but to Athens and one of the other islands. Everything I saw was colored by those books. When you get better, maybe we could go together. I’d like to see Knossos.”

  He rambled some more, about other books they’d read, about the jokes she’d taken such childlike delight in and still did, according to Cindy. He’d gone through a phase of thinking knock-knock jokes were the funniest thing ever. His father had refused to participate in them. His mother’s face would invariably brighten and she’d say happily, “Who’s there?” She had made him feel incredibly witty.

  Adrian couldn’t remember the last time he’d told a joke. He laughed at the occasional off-color ones told in the locker room at his health club, but he hadn’t had a good belly laugh in...God. Years. Humor had never been uncomplicated for him again, after his mother went away.

  He kept wishing Lucy would walk in, while knowing she wouldn’t. She’d told him that Saturday night was her busiest of the week. The café closed at ten, but she was probably busy cleaning the kitchen and closing out the cash register until midnight or later. Visiting hours would be long over. He’d felt half-trapped by her presence before, both grateful and resentful that she insisted on being here.

  Now...damn it, he wanted to tell her what Cindy and George had said. He wanted her to talk about the perplexing woman who lay in the hospital bed and who, even in her mental illness, had been a chameleon, someone different to each person who knew her. He had a suspicion that if anyone had known her through and through, it was Lucy.

  “She made me laugh like no one else,” the middle-aged hairdresser with cheap-looking red curls had told him.

  “I know she took the food I put out back for her,” the balding grocer said, “but sometimes even when I saw her come down the alley I had trouble seeing her. You know? It was like she was a ghost. Not quite there. As though she wanted to be invisible.”

  Was it Lucy who’d said she was a chameleon? But why the protective coloration around the kind, portly grocer when she was so capable of letting loose peals of laughter around Cindy of the crimson curls? Was it because George was a man, and she was afraid of men?

  Adrian tried to remember how his mother had related to men back when he was a child, but in those memories it seemed he and Mom were always alone. She’d gone to some parent-teacher meetings, but his elementary school teachers had all been women. His parents hadn’t entertained, that he remembered. Even then he’d known Dad was ashamed of her. There had been...not fights. Just scenes, when his father, wearing a dark suit or even a tuxedo, had left the house in the evening and his mother had looked unbearably sad when the front door shut in her face.

  Had she actually been afraid of Dad? he wondered. He’d never seen his father raise his hand to her, but he’d been very good at freezing her with one look or a few scathing words. At best he wasn’t a warm man, and Adrian could recall no scrap of tenderness between them. T
hey’d had separate bedrooms, something he’d been too young then to think twice about. Likely, to Adrian’s father she’d been more like a flighty, untrustworthy child than a wife, and a child who would never grow up at that.

  “Were you frightened of him?” Adrian asked, his voice low in case someone walked into the room behind the concealing curtain. “Did you have any idea what he was thinking of doing to you? When I left that day, did you have any clue what was happening?”

  Thinking back, he knew she’d been odd that morning; even odder than usual. A dervish of activity, anxious he hadn’t forgotten anything, checking, rechecking, hovering with the quivering intensity of a hummingbird. And yet he’d seen the sheen of tears in her eyes, which had upset him and made him exclaim, “I shouldn’t go! Why do I have to go without you? I want you to come, Mom! Why can’t you?”

  She didn’t quite answer. His father, who had already loaded his stuff in the car, came back brimming with impatience and tore him away.

  “Mom, can’t you come to the airport?” Adrian had begged, but she had shaken her head frantically, tears sliding down her cheeks, as she stood on the front porch and watched his father drag him to the car and bundle him in.

  “For God’s sake!” his father snapped, backing out of the driveway as Adrian pressed his hands and face to the window and breathed in ragged gasps.

  He shuddered now at the memory and thought, You did know. Not everything, but something.

  Enough to fear she might never see him again.

  “Did he promise you’d get better and be able to come home if you went?” Adrian asked the silent, unresponsive woman in the bed. “Did he use me somehow?”

  Again her eyelids quivered. Was he upsetting her? He couldn’t imagine she understood anything he was saying. Perhaps his voice, rough with long-suppressed anger, alarmed her.

  He pushed back the chair and stood. “I’m sorry. I’m not very good company tonight, am I, Mom? I should have brought something to read. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go back to the library.” No, he realized, tomorrow was Sunday. He’d noticed it wasn’t open on Sundays. Probably nothing in town would be but the churches.

  “I’ll just, ah, let you sleep.” If that’s what she was doing. He hesitated, feeling awkward. He hadn’t touched her yet. He couldn’t imagine kissing her cheek. Adrian wasn’t much for touching, although he had liked the feel of Lucy’s back. For a ridiculous instant, he’d even imagined letting his hand slide lower.

  He said good-night and left, realizing he hadn’t seen Slater today. Had he been by? Did it matter? All they could do was wait, he’d said.

  Adrian wasn’t a patient man.

  * * *

  ADRIAN ALSO WASN’T a churchgoer. As he’d told Lucy, his mother had taken him to Sunday school and then services when he was really young. But either his father must have forbidden it at some point or his mother had become too uncomfortable around so many people, because they’d quit going by the time Adrian was seven years old or so.

  He had no trouble finding Lucy’s house, which appeared to date from the 1930s, as much of the town did. Wood-frame, modest porch, it lacked any distinguishing architectural features but had a plain, farmhouse-style charm. The lot was good-size, and most of the houses on the block were identical. Put up by the logging company that had probably once employed nearly every man in Middleton? All had large lawns that ran together with no fences in front. Hers boasted a big fruit tree in the front that was in bloom right now.

  After some hesitation that morning, Adrian had worn a suit, and was glad when Lucy came out the moment his car stopped at the curb. She wore a pretty, flowery dress and pearls in her earlobes, which he could see because she’d taken a wing of hair from each side of her face and clipped it in back. When she hopped in on the passenger side and smiled at him, his body tightened. She was pretty this morning, with high cheekbones and a pixie shape to her face, a wide mouth that smiled more naturally than it pursed when she was irritated, and creamy skin that had to feel like satin to the touch. Her neck was long and slender and pale in a world where most women tanned. Her breasts and belly would be just as pale, unbisected by the lines left by a bikini. And he knew already she had long, gorgeous legs; the filmy fabric of her dress had settled, baring the shape of her thighs and hips.

  They were on their way to church, and he was getting aroused by a woman wearing a dress conservative enough not to stand out in the 1950s. What was wrong with him?

  “Good morning,” she said. “Do you know how to find Saint Mary’s?”

  “Morning.” Adrian put the car into gear. “It would be hard to get lost in Middleton.”

  In the silence that followed, he realized how rude that had sounded. Then, worse yet, he thought, My mother was lost here.

  Her sunniness dimmed, Lucy said stiffly, “I didn’t know if you’d paid any attention to the churches.”

  “I drove around yesterday, after I talked to George McKenzie. I looked for it and the Lutheran Church. Someone mentioned that it runs the thrift store where she...shopped.” He couldn’t bring himself to say “accepted charity.”

  “She worked there, too. Did I tell you that?”

  Startled, he looked at her. “No. Worked?”

  “Sorting donations, hanging up the clothes, even putting things out for display. The thrift store is run entirely by volunteers. Your mother earned what she took.”

  He’d been that obvious?

  “Your sister said she stopped by on... Some day of the week. Tuesday,” he stated. “Because they were closed on Sunday and Monday.” What had Samantha said? That they let her take what she wanted? “I assumed...”

  “She helped in the day care at church, too. She didn’t usually attend services, although she liked being able to hear the hymns.”

  “She was crazy! People trusted her with their kids?”

  Her look made him feel as if he were a grease spot she’d just noticed on her dress.

  “The hat lady was gentle and sweet. She was wonderful with children, especially the little ones. They’d beam at her when they saw her. And no, she wasn’t alone with the children. Mothers take turns supervising the day care.”

  Adrian shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “What don’t you get? You’d better park,” she added. “This is as close as we’ll find.”

  They had to be four blocks from the redbrick church with the gilt Jesus nailed to the cross on the spire. He took her word for it, though, and pulled in to the first spot he saw that was big enough for his Mercedes. A family in front of them was getting out of their car, everyone scrubbed and in their Sunday best, the little boy’s hair slicked down, the girl’s in pigtails. Adrian remembered his mother ruthlessly taming his thick hair, using spit if they neared the church and his cowlick rebelled. He’d felt as uncomfortable in a suit as that poor kid did, holding his mother’s hand and dragging his feet.

  He and Lucy got out, too. Adrian locked the car with the remote before dropping it in his pocket and joining her on the sidewalk. A regular parade of townspeople was streaming toward the church, and even the teenagers dressed up, not a one sullen. Wasn’t there a sixteen-year-old in town who sported a nose ring?

  “What don’t you get?” Lucy repeated.

  He liked her height. She’d be perfect to dance with. A tall man, he’d never liked looking down at the top of a woman’s head. She had an easy, comfortable stride, too, when they fell into step together.

  “Why she was so easily accepted,” he said. “Get offended if you want, but the truth is, she was nuts. The homeless make people uneasy. Except, apparently, in Middleton.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Maybe,” she said at last, “that’s because she was our only homeless person. And also... Well, it’s not true that she was easily accepted, or even that everyone was nice to her. There are people who’d cross the
street so they didn’t have to get too close to her. She just...well, found refuges. Places she was accepted and even welcome.” Sadness infused Lucy’s voice. “She knew there were places she wasn’t.”

  A jolt of anger surprised him. “Like?”

  She shook her head, and he realized they’d reached the crowded front steps of the church.

  He let Lucy lead the way inside and choose a pew toward the back. A few curious glances turned toward them, but she only smiled and nodded at people she apparently knew.

  Father Joseph in robes and surplice proved to be elderly, his hair scant and white, his face so thin Adrian wondered if he were ill. But he had that air of certainty that clergy so often had, a kind of inner peace that comforted his flock. He spoke of forgiveness of sins small and large.

  Adrian suppressed a snort. Too much forgiveness would put his law firm out of business. Somehow, he didn’t think there was any danger of that happening.

  A choir of children in white robes sang, their voices astonishingly pure and high and beautiful. The entire congregation sat transfixed. Lucy’s face shone as she listened. Adrian could easily imagine his mother as captivated. He had trouble turning his gaze to the front. He would rather have watched Lucy.

  When parishioners stood to take communion, Lucy poked him with her elbow and they slipped out. Once they were in the lobby, she said, “I thought we could visit the day care until Father Joseph is free.”

  Sitting there watching a ritual being repeated a hundred times or more hadn’t held much appeal, but neither did checking out the toddlers. Adrian had no close friends with young children, and until these past couple of days had had only rare memories of being one himself. Still, he nodded and followed her down the steps into the basement.

  The room was bright, with white paint and high windows and cheerful pictures on the walls. Several cribs stood along one wall, while kids up to maybe four or five finger-painted at a long table in the middle. A baby slept in one crib, and another sat up and shook the bars of the crib, working from a grumble to a scream. There were only two adults in the room, one a teenager and the other likely a mother. She was changing a kid’s diaper at a table designed and stocked for the purpose, while the teenage girl supervised the painting.