Painted Dresses

by Patricia Hickman

  “It’s a classic. Can you say yet how you’re holding up?”

  “I can’t say for sure,” I said. My crying jag that afternoon left me feeling ashamed, as if I were responsible for Daddy’s death. I was ten again and responsible for my family’s pain.

  “You’re like your mother, not wanting a morsel of sympathy. I remember that about her too,” said Tim.

  I reached for the headache medication. The large bottle stayed in the middle of the kitchen table next to the hot pepper vinegar. I popped two capsules and swallowed coffee to wash them down. Tim and I split a wedge of cake. He stuffed several bites into his mouth, overfilling his mouth until his cheeks ballooned. He laughed. Crumbs blew out of his mouth.

  I got up, laughing, to find the dustpan.

  “I’ll get it later,” he told me. “Stop cleaning, will you?”

  “This house never smells clean. Maybe if I light a candle, it won’t smell like a pharmacy.” The hospice-care women had poured Daddy’s leftover medications down the disposal, but the medicine stink hung in the air. “Something about this old house, Mother used to say, was hard to keep up.”

  Without a bit of hesitation, Tim said, “I talked to Braden.”

  The news silenced me. I couldn’t breathe or cuss.

  “Just now.” He came up with a fast excuse. “I got depressed when we didn’t bag our deer. Braden was always good for a laugh, so I called him.” He touched the rim of my cup. “I hate it when you look at me like that.”

  My spoon clanked inside the half-empty cup. I pushed it away with both hands. “I should check the thermostat,” I said. Tim often lied to annoy me, or at least he did when we were kids. So when he confessed about calling Braden, I pretended not to care. “Aren’t you meeting Blaine and the guys at the Blue Water?” I asked. “They’ll be out of the movie soon.”

  “Stop changing the subject,” he said, put out with me. His knee hit the table leg, causing the hot pepper vinegar bottle to tremble.

  “Why did you call him, Tim?”

  “I was worried about you. You look awful.”

  “Did you say that to him?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “He told me what happened, but I didn’t ask.”

  “Shut up, Tim! He wouldn’t. He told me I couldn’t.”

  “You two are not over. I know Braden. He’s decent. Not like those other guys you dated.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That you’ve drifted as a couple.”

  “That’s what men say when they don’t know what to say,” I said, angry. Tears slipped down my face.

  “I can’t stand to see you like this,” he said. He touched the cast on my arm. “You always kept ahead of the others.” The dim naked bulb overhead turned the whites of his eyes yellow.

  I walked to the sink and leaned over the porcelain. The sleet had subsided. The wind whistled past the house. Through the window, nightfall seamed the sky and land together, thin and hard. The moon was covered entirely.

  “I’m an idiot,” said Tim. Both of us fell quiet, and then he said, “Meredith says I can’t stay out of other people’s business. She says it’s because I live in the South. Not that she hates the South. She likes it better than Pittsburgh.”

  The ibuprofen was like a pebble in my stomach. The polite thing to do would be to forgive him. But I stared into the space that swallowed Syler Acres. The dark could hide me entirely, and I’d be as happy as happy could be. “What else did Braden say?”

  “Was there something else he could say?”

  I stared at the empty cup.

  Tim muttered that he was filling my cup again. Then he got down on one knee and used a napkin and fork to clean up the cake crumbs.

  His breathing was audible as he walked on his knees to the open trash container. I sprinkled cleanser into the sink to whiten the scratched porcelain. I kept my back to Tim until he finally said, “When you were small, we’d stay over, Fanny and me.”

  I nodded.

  “Most nights I was the last to fall asleep. You girls had it so good. The three of you would curl up next to the gas stove in your folks’ living room here. I’d be jealous. All of you slept warm as kittens, all rolled up in your mother’s quilts.”

  I still owned one of those quilts. I allowed him one accepting look, liking him better telling a story.

  “I was the only boy. So I’d sleep sitting up in that plastic chair.”

  “No one made you sleep in Mother’s chair, Tim.” It was actually her mother’s chair passed on, called Naugahyde, but I didn’t correct him.

  “Then right about the time I’d be nodding off, you’d have a bad dream.”

  “Is there anything about me you don’t remember?” I stared at my feet. Sleet had dissolved on my suede boots. I slid out of them.

  “I was scared when you had those bad dreams. Delia and Fanny, they’d sleep right through it. The two of them could sleep through heavy artillery fire.”

  I slipped back into the chair. The hot coffee tasted strong.

  “You still have those bad dreams?” he asked.

  I stayed too long out on the porch that morning, and my throat was raw. The coffee warmed my throat.

  Tim’s voice was soothing. I closed my eyes. He said, “When you met Braden, I knew he’d take good care of you, that I’d not have to worry about you anymore.”

  “I’m not nine anymore, Tim.” He had Meredith to play Mother Hen to now. That ought to have satisfied him, but he kept prying. The headache spiked through my skull. I remembered something I’d overheard in the kitchen at noon. “I heard you enlisted in the National Guard. Is that right?”

  “It was awhile back, even before the war. I’ve still not gotten called up. Maybe because I’m a park ranger. Could be I’m on some list. We needed the extra money. I want Meredith to have her house.”

  Headlights moved across the window glass above the sink. Two car doors opened and slammed closed. Fanny’s laugh spilled out across the drive. Delia was yelling, “Who’s the ice queen? Me, me!” A bit of moon showed through the clouds like a mustard streak on a child’s face.

  “What is it you want?” Tim asked. He leaned toward me. Our privacy was drawing to a close, so it was his last chance to pry me open. “I’d buy it for you if I could.”

  “What are you going to do? Knock over a gas station?”

  “I’ll have to think about it. Don’t know if I’d go to jail for you.”

  “Best you don’t. You’d be the worst candidate for jail. You were never good at being the girl, and you’d definitely be the girl in jail.” Since he wouldn’t laugh for me, I said, “I want to finish school, I guess. I’ve made a lousy pilot.” I didn’t know if that was the answer he wanted.

  “What’s to finish?” He acted impressed with me. Considering his soft spot for Delia, I measured the validity of it. “I think you and Braden really want to make a go of it. But you made his life yours. Meredith says that if you really love each other, you can have a life of your own and a life you share.”

  Tim’s mosquito-persistent probing was softening my resolve not to spill my guts to a man who still had my ex on speed dial. “I feel as if I’ve had a fill-in-the-blank question hovering perpetually over my life.”

  “Say that to Braden.”

  “You saying that if I make my life my own, Braden will return to me?

  Tim never knew it all. But what he said brought comfort. He called it his conduit from heaven. He blinked, which was what his father had taught him to do when at the dead end of manly advice.

  The girls made it to the back door, stomping their feet on the back porch rug, laughing raucously.

  “We’re being invaded. I have to go to the airport tomorrow. You want to give me a lift?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Sure.”

 
Fanny burst through the door. Delia followed close behind, yelling the punch line to a dirty joke. She was snorting. Her arms high in the air, my sister brandished a couple of wine-cooler six-packs and said hoarsely, “Drinks for the house.”

  Too many women underfoot sent Tim off for the Blue Water Café.

  Fanny got the idea to dress for bed before coming back to my father’s house. They drove home like that, Fanny wearing a T-shirt and blue lounge pants under her coat. I put on Felix the Cat pajamas. Braden had not liked them, so the store folds were still new.

  “It’s high time for a pajama party,” said Fanny. “We changed at Delia’s and drove over here like nincompoops. Delia kept lookout for Deputy Bob.”

  “I’ll show him the bird, is what!” said Delia. “How I’d love to moon that man after all the grief he give me.”

  “I was literally hooting,” said Fanny.

  “You was farting,” said Delia. She turned off the back porch light.

  “No lie!” said Fanny. Her expression was one of mock shame.

  “If her old man back at the motel, trying to bed down all those kids, could have seen her out tomcatting down Cornell Street in her pink nightie, well, it would have been all she wrote.” Delia dropped an empty wine-cooler bottle into the waste can.

  “But Delia, she wouldn’t do it,” said Fanny.

  “My clothes are my pajamas.” Delia excused herself to go out for a smoke. “Tim forgot the drink we brung him. I’ll finish it.” She screwed off the lid and pressed the bottle to her lips. Tiny dog hairs pirouetted through the air behind her. She forgot her coat. The second I hesitated to remind her, Delia stepped out into the cold. A cloud of smoke blew past the door glass.

  “Delia does have live chickens in her kitchen,” said Fanny. “Here’s how it goes. She has this birdcage, right. So she takes wire cutters, and she cuts the front out of the birdcage, lays it open, makes this, I don’t know what you call it, a drop bin for the chickens.”

  “Drop bin?” I said.

  “So the chicken, Least One, right, will lay an egg for her breakfast. The egg, she says, rolls down the ramp—that’s what you call it, an egg ramp! So when she gets up to make her breakfast, she says, the egg is waiting for her.”

  “Sounds made up,” I said.

  It was not the first time Delia had thought up an elaborate scheme to shortcut household duties. Once she cut the tops out of popcorn tins, left them all over her house. She did it to cut down on the time it took to empty the seven glass ashtrays her boyfriend brought home one night from a shooting gallery.

  “You really think she’s got that chicken trained to do all that?” asked Fanny. Then she fell facedown on the kitchen table. She laughed, slapping the tabletop.

  I leaned forward, whispering as if my mother were still alive and sleeping down the hall. “If she cut open the birdcage, won’t the chicken get out?”

  “This chicken sits there on this little pile of hay like it don’t know it can run away,” said Fanny.

  “Then there’s got to be a big mess.”

  “She changes out the newspaper underneath, like it’s a freaking parakeet,” said Fanny.

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  Fanny held up two fingers and crossed her heart.

  By midnight, Fanny chucked six-pack carton number one under the table. She pulled carton two out of the refrigerator. “I’m good,” I said. Delia went out for her last smoke.

  “Hurry and close the door!” Fanny said. “I can’t believe how fast the temperature has dropped.” I loaned her a bathrobe to warm up. She still wore her red rain boots and wool socks. After Fanny gulped down half her wine cooler, she got up from her chair and fetched an entire Bundt cake. I told her not to cut me a slice, so she cut one for Delia and one for herself. Fanny had seldom eaten anything sweet throughout her teen years. She was bulimic in high school, so I often found her up in my bathroom giving up what she had just ingested. After discovering she was pregnant with her first child, though, she followed in her health-conscious husbands footsteps. Dill was a vegetarian. She said she would never date a construction guy. But the promise to herself was dropped when she saw him for the first time. He was fit and muscular, utterly sinewy and brown from his job as a roofer. I could not imagine Fanny throwing up vegetables. She glowed like a girl on a ski slope, her skin the color of pink carnations.

  “I’m sorry I talked about Delia awhile ago,” said Fanny. “If I were to go out the door, I’d hate to think you’d talk about me. If I was an idiot, forgive me.”

  “My headaches finally subsiding,” I said. I put on another pot of coffee. I didn’t know how to answer Fanny. Most people who talked about Delia seldom apologized.

  “No one thinks you’re an idiot, Fanny,” I said.

  She arranged bottle caps in the plate border around her cake. “I do.” She laughed quietly.

  Delia coughed outside from her perch on the second step. She blew out a stream of smoke. The wind blew the haze back into her face. She closed her eyes and took another drag. Her hair had grown down her back. The dark strands lifted and spun in the wind. It was magical the way the moon and the wind changed her looks.

  “Gaylen, my mother says you’re going to stay at Aunt Amity’s,” said Fanny. “Is it snowing up there yet?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “The pines look pretty in the snow.”

  “Dill and I stayed at Amity’s one summer when she was off visiting her sister. We started a family after that and haven’t been back,” said Fanny. “I guess they might have sold the place after she died. But none of the family could agree on a price.”

  “Did you know her well?” I asked.

  “Not really,” said Fanny. She poked my cast.

  I flicked her cheek. We started gouging each other, laughing, until Fanny came up out of her chair as if she were coming after me.

  Delia threw open the door. “Tell me what’s going on!” she yelled. She made a run for our small mob.

  “I’m beating up your sister,” said Fanny.

  “Hit her hard!” screamed Delia.

  Fanny and I just stared.

  “There’s someone else not here besides Braden,” said Fanny.

  “A whole bunch of Sylers are missing,” I said. It was the only job I gave to Delia, calling family members to invite them to Daddy’s funeral. She did not call a soul on the list Renni gave to me.

  “I’m talking about your brother,” said Fanny. “His name was Truman, wasn’t it?”

  “He wasn’t Daddy’s son, so he wouldn’t be here,” I said and then remembered, “Delia, you called Truman when Mother died. Did he say anything?”

  She sat tinkling a long strand of necklace, one I had not noticed her wearing until now. It made a soft swishing noise, like the sleet outside. She flipped it behind her, causing the single silver charm to fall down her back. “I didn’t want him showing up at my mother’s funeral wearing handcuffs and under prison escort,” said Delia. It was strange to see her suddenly so full of herself.

  “That’s not what you told me, Delia,” I said. I had asked her to call Angola Prison, my mother’s last known address for him. When Mother passed away, Delia’s job was to call the prison and see if they would send him by escort to the funeral. Maybe it was my nosy curiosity, but I wanted to meet a half brother I scarcely remembered.

  “It’s like everyone forgets your mother had a son,” said Fanny.

  “Truman had a different daddy than us,” said Delia.

  I had not thought of Truman, not during Daddy’s illness nor even throughout the funeral preparations. He was my mother’s boy, the boy never mentioned, not even at Christmas.

  “Delia, you told me that Truman wasn’t allowed to come to Mother’s funeral, that he was in a maximum security prison.” Now that I thought about it, it did seem odd that Truman would be locked up in a max-security p
rison for stealing cars.

  “Medium security, I said,” said Delia. I couldn’t tell if she was lying or if my memory was lagging.

  “You kept Truman from coming to Mother’s funeral?” I asked. I didn’t know if that was why I was mad or if it was because she had made a decision without asking me.

  Delia kept fiddling with the wine cooler caps.

  “Don’t prisons allow their inmates to attend a parent’s funeral?” I asked.

  “Of course. They make arrangements,” said Fanny.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “My father’s cousin’s son,” said Fanny. “He had a friend who was in prison for tax evasion. He got to go to his mother’s funeral.”

  The wine cooler and the painkiller were going to my head.

  “Like, how would they do that?” I asked. “Escort him in with a prison guard? Wouldn’t that be odd?”

  “That’s why I told him no,” said Delia.

  After all this time, she was finally telling me. It was a rare power play for Delia.

  Fanny chucked a third empty into the waste can and then examined the wedge of Bundt cake in front of her. “How did I get cake?”

  I had never stopped to count the years. Truman was fifteen, or so they said, when he took off. I might have been four years of age. “Has it been twenty-five years?”

  Delia said, “Somebody peench me.”

  I could never tell when she was trying to be funny.

  “I got rigermordus standin’ too long out in the cold,” she said.

  Fanny laughed.

  “Delia, you said that when they told Truman his mother had passed, guards had to restrain him,” I said. “But that wasn’t the reason, was it? It was because you denied his leave, wasn’t it?” I could feel my ire rising. I hated it when she lied to me.

  Delia didn’t answer.

  “Gaylen, has it been that long?” asked Fanny. “I mean since you saw your brother?”

  The clock over the sink hit twelve thirty.

  “Half brother,” I corrected her. “I never knew him, Fanny.”