The following days are one gray haze, a long walk down an endless corridor of gray concrete. She must have met with Ralph Evans down at Evans Funeral Home, must have held up her end of some discussion about the casket, the service and obituary and burial, must have made all the necessary choices one is called upon to make, choices she and Ned—mainly Ned—had to make after Todd died, but she can’t remember a single thing about any of it. Like her mind shut down, a tape erased.
There is one thing: She recalls their return to the house after the service at the cemetery. Ethel was in the living room, one arm around her oldest boy, the other holding a glass of red wine, repeating to anyone who would listen, “He was a saint. My brother was a saint.” Meaning, all he endured. Meaning, putting up with Rose.
“No,” Rose said, shutting her sister-in-law up and shocking everyone in the room. “Ned wasn’t a saint.” An awkward silence fell. People avoided her eyes. They were probably thinking about where he’d been when he had the attack, even though Trudy insists he had been there only because he had given her a ride home.
Odd how she should remember that one thing: the shocked silence that greeted her proclamation that Ned wasn’t a saint. Well, he wasn’t. And it had nothing to do with him being at Trudy’s. The truth is that Ned was a good man—a kind man, kinder than she’d imagined as it turned out—but no saint. Why not remember him just as he was? Isn’t being as good as you were good enough? Why do people want to elevate him? Is this meant to be compensation, a payoff for having died?
She is determined not to become one of those women who speak of their dead husbands that way, turning them into perfection, recasting them into new and ideal images: Men who don’t snore or pass wind or speak a harsh word. Men you’d think were a cross between Gandhi and Jim Rockford, to hear their widows talk.
“Widow.” There’s a word she hates. “Widow. Wife.” The two words that start the same but are worlds apart. One belongs; she has a place. The other is alone.
She finds herself reading the sports pages, turning on ball games, listening to them, memorizing final scores, as if to report to Ned. It fools her mind, keeps her feeling tied to him. She still expects him to come in the back door. Nights are hard. She can’t face sleeping in their bed. Instead, she stretches out on the sofa and waits for morning.
If it weren’t for Opal, she wouldn’t eat.
The girl has taken over, managing everything, practically moving in. Who would have thought that Opal of all people would prove so competent? Who would have thought Rose could feel such gratitude? Honestly, she doesn’t think she would have made it through the past weeks otherwise. She has needed to submit, to be led. With all the troubles that child has on her plate—the custody battle and all—she’s just pushed it all aside. She refuses to be denied. Opal has a heart the size of three hundred Ethels.
From where she is sitting on the couch, Rose can see a paper with Opal’s handwriting sitting on the desk: a list of those who sent floral arrangements. When Rose feels up to it, Opal says they will write notes together. Or Opal will write, and Rose dictate, whatever Rose can manage.
“Who does she think she is?” Ethel sputtered one day, watching Opal answer the phone, make the coffee, put away the food an endless caravan of people insisted on bringing to the house. “She isn’t even family.”
“She’s just trying to help out,” Rose replied.
Ethel snorted. “I know the type. She wants something. You mark my words.”
She does want something, and Rose knows what it is. She wants to be needed, to know the healing balm of being needed, as Rose has known.
If there’s anyone who is looking for a piece of the action, it’s Ethel, who is already asking questions about what will become of the station. “It was our father’s, you know,” she has had the nerve to say. Rose has never forgiven her for taking Todd’s clothes for her sons. As far as Rose is concerned, Ethel can have anything she wants. There’s nothing here Rose cares about. Let her take the lot. All the things she thought she could never part with, things like the house, mean nothing. Why hadn’t she agreed to sell the house and move to Florida when Ned suggested it? Why couldn’t she have given in on that? It would have meant so much to him.
What was a house? A house can’t keep people alive. It can’t even keep them alive in your memory. People live in your heart. Too late, she has learned that. A good lesson wasted.
She thinks of all the things they have never done: trips never taken, words never spoken. Now Ned is gone. Life isn’t a thing, a—what’s the word?—a noun. It’s an act. A verb. It’s something you do. Or don’t.
“Can I get you anything?” Opal stands at the door. She looks tired. The boy is hanging on her legs. Ever since he returned from North Carolina, they haven’t left each other’s side.
“No, thanks,” Rose says. “You don’t have to stay here, you know.”
“I know.” She comes in, the boy with her. “I just thought I’d stick around for the afternoon. Keep you company. I brought over some work.”
Rose is used to spending time alone in the house, whole days when Ned was at the garage, but with him gone—truly gone—the emptiness extends and echoes. Sometime soon, she will have to get used to this, to being alone. But not yet.
She watches as Opal threads a needle. Zack has brought in a coloring book and crayons. He stretches out on the floor and starts coloring.
“Shall I put the TV on?”
“If you want.”
Rose clicks the remote until she finds a show that she thinks will be all right for Zack.
Opal lifts a doll from the protective tissue.
“What’s this one?” Rose asks.
“A pioneer. A pioneer woman.”
Opal’s dolls are amazing. Such attention to detail. The girl has explained how she makes them. Simplicity is the secret, she’s told Rose, showing her how she uses a thin, wooden dowel in the neck to keep the head from tipping, how she paints the faces with a finepointed sable brush. And all the sewing—painstaking stitches she has to do by hand. Right then Rose gets the idea. She will give Opal her Singer. She should have given it to her months ago.
Pleased, she lets her head fall back on the sofa cushion and closes her eyes. She lets the sound of the television wash over her, hears the boy humming lightly, hears Opal shush him. It’s okay, she thinks, let him sing, it doesn’t bother me, but she is too tired to manage the effort of speech. At last, sleep overtakes her.
When she wakes, it is nearly dark. She must have slept for hours. For an instant—one heart-swelling instant—she thinks Ned is there. But it’s Zack. The boy is nestled next to her on the couch, his warm body curved to fit hers.
“You had a nap,” he says.
“I did,” she says. “I had a lovely nap.”
He pats her cheek with a damp hand. “That’s good.”
She hugs him to her.
She has to hug someone, has to touch someone. She has to, or her heart will dry up and blow away.
CHAPTER 41
OPAL
OPAL UNCOILS THE HOSE AND SNAKES IT TO THE GARDEN. She adjusts the spigot so water will trickle into the soil beneath the tomatoes. A slow, steady stream is best according to Rose, who has also shown her how to spread powdered lime around the base of each plant, how to stake them in cages so the fruit—tomatoes are a fruit, Rose has also instructed her, so why is tomato juice the base of vegetable soup?—will not fall. Now the plants reach her shoulders. As she moves among them, leaves brush her skin, releasing their pungent scent. The tomatoes are beginning to edge from green to red. Keep them watered, Rose tells her, and they’ll thrive. Tomatoes don’t need a lot of fussing, and they give back so much.
It hasn’t rained in weeks, not even a quick thunderstorm to relieve the suffocating heat. Everyone is complaining, but it doesn’t bother Opal in the least. No different than any summer back in New Zion. She welcomes the heat. Heat slows things down. She likes that. It slows her down, too.
“It
doesn’t wear you down?” Rose asked the other day. They were sitting out under the maple tree, sipping iced tea from condensation-slippery glasses. Rose was stirring the air with a folded newspaper. “It does me. Saps the life out of me.”
“What I mind is the cold. I about froze this winter. I like the heat. It’s one of the things I miss about home.”
“What else do you miss?”
“About New Zion? Let’s see.” She took a minute to consider. “Porches,” she finally said.
“Porches?” Rose looked at her as if she’d turned loony. “We have porches up here.”
“These aren’t porches.” Opal gestured around to take in the street’s prim stoops. “At home we have real proper porches.” She tried to explain about Southern porches: wide, with pillars and grooved wooden ceilings and plenty of room for a table and a rocking chair or three for sitting after dinner. A porch with space to string a hammock for kids to fight over. Where adults could laze. Where grandmas could sew and doze. A place you could sleep on hot nights. Where lovers could neck. “Northern people don’t use their porches, don’t live on them.”
“That’s what you miss?” Rose said. “The weather and porches?”
“And Aunt May. I miss my Aunt May. You’d like my aunt.” This is true. As different as May and Rose are, they would get along. She hadn’t thought about it until then, but the two women have a lot in common. For starters they are both as different from her mama as stars from fake jewels.
“And that’s all?” Rose said.
“That’s the lot.” Warmth, porches, and Aunt May. Mostly Aunt May. What she definitely doesn’t miss is being under her mama’s thumb. During the time she’s been in Normal, Opal has changed. It’s nothing you’d notice looking in a mirror, but something has altered, inside. If she had to choose words, she’d say she has grown up. She has begun to feel like a real mother, not just someone playing house with a doll that breathes. So much has happened in these months. The job at the toy shop, the success of her dolls, Ty—something in her belly still stirs at the thought of him—Ned’s death, the way Rose has given her the respect of depending on her. All these things have changed her.
If she went back to New Zion, her mama would take right over, turn her into a child again. Watch her every move. Boss her around. Criticize her. Complain about her attitude.
That’s always been the problem as far as Melva is concerned: Opal’s bad attitude. But what her mama calls defiance, she sees as determination. It is the right kind of will, not like Billy’s; it’s the sort of determination that leads to independence, the kind that is fed by the possibility of dreams. Why can’t her mama see that? Why ask why? Melva is Melva, like chicken is Sunday dinner.
She adjusts the hose. Her feet sink in the wet earth, and the water cools her down. Through a haze of wavy heat, she looks across the lawn to where Rose sits with Zack. Rose is wearing the green macaroni necklace Zack made in nursery school. She hasn’t taken it off since he gave it to her. She acts as if it’s made of jade.
Zack has proclaimed that Rose is his new best friend. First thing every morning he asks, “Can I go over to RoseNelson’s?” He always says it that way—her whole name, RoseNelson—like it is one word.
Although Opal worries that Zack may tire Rose—from the moment he wakes, he’s a steady stream of questions—she also thinks her son is good company. Since Ned’s death, her neighbor has spent most days sitting out under the maple staring into space, shaking awake only when Opal or Zack is with her.
“You send him home if he’s a bother,” Opal tells Rose every day.
“He’s no bother,” Rose always replies. “And he’s more fun than a soap opera.”
The other day, Opal overheard a snatch of conversation between Rose and Zack. “You’re a smart boy,” Rose said. “I get smarter every day,” Zack replied. “That’s what my mama says.” And then hadn’t Rose leaned over and pressed her cheek to the top of his head.
Rose, too, has changed. When they first moved in, she mostly ignored them, acting like they carried some disease, like she could barely tolerate the sight of them, but now, she is . . . Well, kind is the word that comes to mind. Tender. Like when she gave her the sewing machine, right out of the blue.
“Poor Rose,” that horrid Ethel gushed after the funeral. “I worry so about her. First Todd and now Ned. Her heart must be broken in half.”
That woman is dumb as a sack full of hair.
Shit. Rose’s heart is hurting, no question there. But it’s like all the pain has broken her heart not in half, but wide open .
She repositions the hose and looks up just as Rose and Zack, hand in hand, head toward Rose’s house. Lemonade time. Rose walks with a measured pace, steps not just matched to Zack’s small stride, but slowed by heat and grief.
Opal is on slo-mo herself these days. She inches toward the custody hearing, fluctuating between dread of it and eagerness to have it settled. To have Billy out of her hair.
To date, there have been two sessions with a mediator. The meetings were Sarah Rogers’ idea, proposed by the guardian in hopes of avoiding a hearing altogether. Although it nearly killed her, Opal had caved in on almost every point the mediator raised. Compromise makes you look good, Vivian had said.
During the second meeting she had agreed to a proposal allowing Billy visitation rights for every school vacation, as well as for six weeks in the summer and alternating holidays. Billy didn’t give an inch. What more does he want? she had asked Vivian. As it turns out, he wants a lot more. He wants everything. He wants full custody of Zack. Well, now she knows plain. Billy’s out for blood. His blood. Hasn’t that been what he’s called Zack?
How could she have forgotten his junkyard-dog determination, all those mornings he talked the janitor into letting him in before school so he could practice free throws and layups. No sitting during games for Billy Steele. Billy Steele got what he wanted no matter what it took to get it. When he had turned that determination to winning her, she had made the giant miscalculation of mistaking it for love.
So far, in spite of her vigilant eye, in spite of keeping alert to the possibility, she has received no sign, nothing to relieve her fears, nothing to show her the way. All she has to count on is Vivian’s advice.
Their last meeting didn’t go well.
“Just tell me there’s no way I’ll lose Zack,” she demanded.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Fuck. There are women in jail who have custody of their children. In jail. What makes me such a bad risk?” What she wanted here was a guarantee. She didn’t get it.
We can’t be complacent, Vivian said. The political climate has changed, she said, ranting on about the Green case, that mother who killed her two kids and how the sacredness of motherhood took a body blow with that one, then going on about the growing backlash fueled by the fathers’ rights groups. Blah. Blah. Blah.
Vivian was still pissed.
She had confronted Opal as soon as she walked in the office. “No lies,” she’d said. “That was my ground rule from the beginning.”
“What are you talking about?” Opal’d hedged. “I didn’t.”
“Can it.” Vivian had picked up a pile of documents. “Sarah Rogers’ report. It’s all here. Everything.”
“What does it say?”
“It says you’re in deep shit.” She’d waited for Opal to say something, then prompted, “Zack’s broken arm?”
“I told you about that.” She hadn’t been able to meet Vivian’s gaze.
“What you told me was that you had a witness to the accident. You didn’t tell me the witness was lying.”
“I was afraid of what it would look like. You know, ’cause I left Zack alone.” How had the guardian found out? Rose, Opal’d guessed. Rose must have changed her story and told Sarah Rogers the truth.
“You think a lie looks better? Trust me, it doesn’t. It makes you look guilty.”
“One lie? You think I’ll lose Zack because of one lit
tle lie?”
“It’s no one thing. It’s a pile of a lot of things. They could add up to trouble. We don’t know how Judge Bowles will rule. I want you to know the truth of what we’re facing.”
Opal had felt the blood drain from her face. “You think Billy could win?”
Vivian had relented then. “I’ll tell you what.” She stubbed out her cigarette, crushing it so hard the filter split. “You’ve made mistakes, but Billy Steele will get full custody of your son over my bloody body.”
Over my bloody body. Opal clings to the words. They are the closest thing to a guarantee she is going to get. In the absence of a true sign, they will have to do.
CHAPTER 42
OPAL
OPAL CAN’T SIT STILL. IF SHE BITES ANY MORE OF HER nails, she’ll be chewing flesh. What she needs here is a sign. It’s raining for the first time in weeks. But if that’s a sign, how should she interpret it? Are the drops tears? Meaning what? Sorrow? Loss? Or does it mean a cleansing? Washing Billy out of her life. Or does it simply mean a change in the weather pattern? Her head aches from thinking about it. She needs something big, something she can’t misread or fail to understand. Something huge, like skywriting. She’s keeping her eyes open.
She’s waiting for Vivian. Her mama and daddy, Billy, and their lawyers have already gone into the courtroom, Billy striding by her like she wasn’t even sitting there, like she was a person he’d never seen, like he’d never chased her, held her, begged her to open her legs for him, given her a child. Before he went in, her daddy stopped to hug her and tell her he loved her, nearly breaking her heart. And her mama? Well, Melva looked straight at her with that look that said, I’m done cleaning up your messes, girl, then walked through the double doors to the courtroom where the future will be decided. It’s hard to remember all the things Aunt May told her about her mama’s past. As far as her mama is concerned, it’s hard for Opal to hold the least little bit of softness in her heart.
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