The Returning

by Ann Tatlock

  Andrea could well imagine the look of fear in the child’s eyes. Two weeks with her father home and Phoebe still regarded him as an intruder. She’d given him a Father’s Day card over the weekend only because Billy had insisted they make one together.

  Andrea listened hard but couldn’t quite hear Phoebe’s response to John’s question. She knew what it was, though, when she heard John say, “Well, it’s a little hard to play Chinese checkers by yourself, isn’t it?”

  The screen door opened, slammed shut.

  Andrea stepped to the window and looked out over the lake. She shouldn’t be so surprised. She had known all along that she might be disappointed, that John’s coming home might not be that second chance she wanted, that it might in fact spell only disaster.

  Things fall apart, she remembered, the centre cannot hold. The snatch of poetry bubbled up from somewhere, from long-ago school days. She didn’t know the name of the poem or who wrote it. She only knew the line, and that it was true.

  She saw bits and pieces of her life breaking off, floating away. . . .

  Rebekah, angry and alienated, and worse, flirting with alcohol just like her father. She might be lost completely, drifting off right under their noses if they weren’t careful to reel her in.

  Billy, her son, joy of her heart. He’d be eighteen on June thirtieth, less than two weeks away. Legally, he’d be an adult. And in spite of his disability, he was growing more and more independent. Andrea often wished she could have stopped time long ago, kept him a child, the vulnerable one who needed her.

  Phoebe, the baby. How quickly she was growing up! She’d be starting first grade in the fall. Then all of Andrea’s children would be in school. Some women looked forward to that. Not Andrea. She wanted to gather each of them to herself and keep them forever under her wing, where she could protect them. Which was, of course, the opposite of what a mother was meant to do.

  And then there was John. What a strange and tenuous relationship they had. Somewhere along the way they had stopped pretending to be lovers and had settled into this routine of tolerable coexistence. It was hardly the stuff of a woman’s dreams.

  She wondered what would become of her. Well, no, she didn’t have to wonder. She knew. Her children would grow up and move out—even Billy, who talked about having his own apartment someday. She would have to let them go. And then, she supposed, not even John would stay. Why should he? Unless something changed, it didn’t seem likely that he would stay even until then. The most probable scenario was that she would end up alone, with only occasional visits from children and grandchildren. And that was all.

  It didn’t seem near enough, couldn’t possibly be the sum of an entire lifetime, but no matter how she worked the equation, it all added up to the same impossibly small measure.

  “Dear God,” she whispered. Only after a moment did she realize the words were a prayer. What she had meant as a statement of disapproval, or at best a sigh of resignation, sounded for all the world like a plea. And she was surprised, because she was not one to pray, though she supposed there was a God out there somewhere.

  She turned back to John’s bed and stripped it of its rumpled sheets. Just as she reached for the clean linen, she heard Phoebe let off a wail on the porch. Andrea sighed, recognizing it as an angry cry. That child was always frustrated over something. The screen door banged again, and John’s voice floated up from the porch.

  “What’s the matter, Phoeb?”

  “My marble!”

  “What happened?”

  “Down there!”

  “You mean it rolled through the slats?”

  “Down that hole!”

  How many times had Andrea told Phoebe not to take her Chinese checkers out to the porch? “You’ll lose the marbles if you do,” she’d warned. The old floorboards had too many crevices that could swallow up a marble in seconds.

  Andrea left the bed and headed for the stairs, reaching the bottom just as John stepped back into the front room.

  “Hey, Andrea,” he said, “do we have a flashlight around here somewhere?”

  “In the kitchen. Why?”

  “Phoebe lost one of the marbles.”

  “Under the porch, right?” She was talking to his back. In a moment he returned with the flashlight. “You’re going to crawl under there and try to find it?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “You’ll never find it,” she said, but he was already moving down the porch steps. Andrea followed him outside, where she found Phoebe curled up in a wicker chair, crying. She started to say she had told Phoebe time and again not to take the Chinese checkers out to the porch, but the child’s mournful wails stopped her. Instead, she said, “Don’t worry, honey. Daddy’s going to look for your marble.”

  She watched as John moved around the porch, scouting out a break in the latticework. He was at the far end near the bay window when he cried out, “Aha! I think I can squeeze through here.”

  Phoebe lifted her head and looked expectantly at her mother. Andrea gazed at the child’s tearstained face and smiled reassuringly. They waited. Beneath their feet they heard a scraping, then a sputtering, like John was spitting out cobwebs. They saw a light flicker and flash between the floorboards. Then a bump.

  “Ow!”

  “You all right down there, John?” Andrea called.

  More sputtering. “I’m all right. Just a mild concussion is all.”

  “Maybe you should come out.”

  “I just want to look around a minute.”

  Andrea looked at Phoebe again. The child had stopped crying, and her eyes were wide.

  “What do you see down there, John?”

  “We’ve definitely had recent visitors. The neighbors’ cats, I think. And . . . ah, something dead.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s a mouse.”

  “All right, then. I won’t tell you.”

  Phoebe ventured a grin.

  “Hey, I think I found”—the child’s brows flew up—“my father’s old penknife. It’s—oh, never mind. It’s just a piece of metal off of something. I don’t know what.”

  “What about the marble, John?”

  “Just a minute. I’m looking.”

  The light flickered and flashed some more. Phoebe got down on the porch floor and put her eye to the hole where the marble had disappeared.

  “I see you,” she said, almost playfully.

  “Oh, hey, Phoebe. That’s a good idea. That lets me know where—ouch!”

  “You okay, John?”

  “I think I just crawled over a nail. It’s—wait, let me see.” The light swung wildly, stopped.

  “You’re going to get tetanus down there if you don’t come out.”

  “Can’t get tetanus. I had my shots. Anyway, it’s not a nail. Just a sharp little stone that decided to dig its way into my kneecap.”

  “Well, if you’re going to be down there, you should be wearing pants instead of shorts.”

  “I’m sorry, Andrea, but I didn’t know I’d be crawling under the porch when I got dressed this morning.”

  Phoebe, her eye still to the hole, said, “Do you see the marble?”

  “Not yet, Phoeb. I’m still looking. Let me—aha!”

  “Did you find it?”

  “I’m coming out now.”

  “But did you find it?”

  John didn’t answer. He emerged, streaked with dirt, crisscrossed with cobwebs, looking triumphant. He climbed up to the porch and extended his hand to Phoebe. “Is this your marble?”

  Phoebe stood to see what was cradled in her father’s palm. She clapped her hands while jumping up and down on her toes. “You found it!”

  “Here you go, kiddo.”

  Phoebe took the marble and clutched it tightly, fist to chest. “Thank you, Daddy,” she breathed out happily.

  “You’re welcome, Phoeb.” John smiled and nodded. Then looking down at himself, he said, “Guess I’d better go clean up a bit.”

  After he stepped inside, Andr
ea said to Phoebe, “Why don’t you take the checkers inside now too, so it doesn’t happen again.”

  The child obeyed, and Andrea lingered on the porch a moment, marveling. She wondered whether John had noticed it too. This was the first time Phoebe had called her father Daddy.

  The lake seemed to wink at her, and in the distance a tangle of gulls took flight over the water.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  John put down the newspaper and glanced at his watch. His lunch break was over; he had to get back out on the floor. He carried his dirty dishes through the kitchen to the dishwashing area, scraped the remains of his sandwich into a garbage bin, and settled the plate and glass onto the stainless steel counter.

  “How’s it going, José?” he asked the young man at the sink.

  “Going good.” José nodded and tugged on the sprayer as he rinsed a rack full of dishes.

  “You wouldn’t want to switch places, would you? I’ll take over the dishwashing while you bus the tables?”

  The young man laughed. “No, no. The boss wouldn’t like. He hired me to wash the dishes, so I stay here, washing dishes.” He let go of the sprayer and pointed at the dishes in the sink.

  “You sure, José? You work out front, you can talk with all the pretty ladies that come in.”

  José laughed again while he waved both hands. “No, no. No pretty ladies. I can’t afford. I got to send money back home.”

  John nodded. “Well, okay. Just thought I’d ask.”

  “I’m here fair and square, you know,” José added. “No sneaking over the border. I work hard.”

  John smiled and gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “I know, José. You’re a good worker. Well, catch you later, huh?”

  He grabbed an empty tub and headed for the restaurant floor. Scanning the room to do a table check, he zeroed in on the tables in his section that needed cleaning. He made a beeline for the first one, keeping his head down and trying to avoid eye contact. He had two reasons for that: one, the remains of his weighty but battered pride, and two, the tug of his persistent weakness.

  As he went about the task of collecting dirty dishes, he wanted to remain as unobtrusive as possible. He didn’t like to be seen doing this kind of work. On break and at meal times he read the employment section of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, dreaming of the future. Eventually he’d move the family back up there and make a fresh start. A genuine fresh start. Not this halfway house of small-town probation with the added indignity of punching his brother-in-law’s time clock. But for now, he had two years of this ahead of him, till Rebekah and Billy graduated high school. Unless he could find other work here in Conesus, which wasn’t likely.

  Another reason he kept his head down was he didn’t want to see those same pretty ladies he’d used as bait for José. After five years in an arid place, temptation was suddenly blooming everywhere. He didn’t want to be distracted—not when he was trying to put his family back together.

  He smiled as he thought about Phoebe and the marble he’d rescued that morning. One huge step forward with the youngest daughter—she’d called him Daddy. Thank God for that.

  He barely had time to rejoice, though, when thoughts of Rebekah crowded in. He cringed at the memory of her passed out cold on the floor. He could only assume it was one more consequence of his own drunk driving. Rebekah might never have picked up a bottle if he’d been home to stop her. But he hadn’t been there, and she’d been without a father, and he knew only too well the pull of alcohol when a person feels in need of anything: a boost for the ego, an anesthetic for the mind, a salve for the heart. Or even just a lubricant for the jaw, so that social settings were something less than terrifying. He knew how easy it was to view alcohol as the consummate panacea for what ails you. As far as his older daughter went, he’d been losing ground for a long time.

  John set the tub down on the table and briefly studied the remains of the meal. Two salad plates and a couple of iced teas, heavy lipstick on the rim of the drinking glasses. No doubt a couple of dissatisfied ladies meeting for lunch, chatting up their marriage woes, dreaming of escape from husband and kids. And I said to Roger, I said, Listen, either you bring home more money or I’m outta here. And Roger said—

  It was a game John played to pass the time, to divert his mind from the task at hand. In John’s imagination, no one in Conesus had a happy marriage. He wasn’t sure it was possible. Though God knew, he wanted it to be.

  After piling the dishes into the tub, he lifted the bottle of bleach solution from where it hung on his apron strings and sprayed the table.

  “Hey there, Dad.”

  John looked over his shoulder and saw Billy passing by. “Hey, son. How’s it going?” he called after him.

  “Great, Dad.”

  “That’s good.” John rubbed circles on the tabletop with a dishrag.

  “Oh, you were too quick. I—”

  Aware that he was being spoken to again, and that this time the speaker was a woman, John straightened up, then stiffened.

  “I had to get change to leave a tip,” the woman finished.

  John’s mind tossed about, trying to come up with a story, some reason for his being here bussing this table. But nothing he might say could make any difference, and he knew it. He held out a hand, tentatively. “I’ll see that your waitress gets it.”

  She laid the three dollar bills across his palm. The corners of her mouth turned up. She had already applied a new layer of lipstick. “You’re . . . John. Right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I’m Pamela.”

  He dropped his eyes while tucking the bills in the pocket of his apron. “I remember.”

  “You work here?”

  “Just temporarily.” He glanced up, then down again. He was acutely aware of the color of her lips and the scent of her perfume. “The owner’s my brother-in-law. I’m helping him out for a while, as a favor.”

  “I see.”

  Undoubtedly she did. Part of the picture anyway. A boozer and a loser, resorting to bussing tables.

  But, then again, she must have a story too.

  “You going tonight?” she asked.

  “To the meeting?”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah, I’ll be there.” He wasn’t about to mention that he had to be there as part of his probation.

  “Listen, John, do me a favor, will you?”

  He cleared his throat. All the thoughts he had more or less successfully stifled since the previous Wednesday rose to the surface again. “Sure.”

  “Tell Larry I can’t be there tonight, all right? I’ve got to run out of town for a day or two with my sister.”

  “Sure,” he said again. “I’ll tell him.”

  “Thanks.”

  He thought they were finished and that she would leave now, but she didn’t. An awkward silence settled between them. He didn’t like the way it needled him, making him feel nervous and inadequate.

  He lifted the tub full of dishes and backed up from the table. “Well, see you around, then,” he said.

  She looked as though she wanted to say something. He didn’t wait to find out what it was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Billy, in the passenger seat of his mother’s Volvo, tapped his fingers on his knees excitedly as the car headed down Lake Road toward Conesus Lake Amusement Park.

  “Why are you so nervous, Billy?” Mom asked.

  “I’m not nervous. I’m happy.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve almost got enough tickets to buy that prize I wanted.”

  From the backseat, Phoebe explained, “He wants to buy a nightlight. It has a picture of a little lamb on it.”

  Billy’s drumming picked up speed. “Yeah,” he agreed.

  “You don’t need a nightlight, Billy,” his mother said. “Is it for Phoebe?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “It’s for me.”

  “Well, okay. If it’s something you want.”

 
“I might get enough tickets to get it today. If someone hasn’t already got it.”

  “Don’t worry, Billy,” Phoebe assured him, “Beka won’t let anyone take it.”

  “What’s today, Mom?”

  “Thursday. Why?”

  “I want to get the nightlight before my birthday party on Saturday.”

  “Then you have today and tomorrow to get enough tickets. Speaking of your birthday,” Mom said, “what kind of cake do you want?”

  Billy laughed loudly. “You know what I want, Mom!”

  His mother smiled. “Vanilla, right?”

  More laughter. “No, Mom!”

  “Spice cake?”

  “No!”

  “Liverwurst?”

  “Mom!”

  Shrieks of laughter from both the front and back seats.

  “Oh, I think I remember.”

  “What?”

  “Chocolate cake with chocolate icing.”

  “That’s it!”

  “But that’s what you have every year. Don’t you want something special this year?”

  “But chocolate cake is special.”

  “All right, then. It’ll be chocolate.”

  As they neared the entrance to the amusement park, Billy heard his mother sigh heavily.

  “What’s the matter, Mom?” he asked. “You don’t want chocolate?”

  She laughed quietly. “Yes, I want chocolate. But I just can’t believe my baby will be eighteen years old. All grown up.”

  “Aw, Mom, I haven’t been a baby in a long time.”

  “I know, son. But still . . .”

  She smiled at him, but it didn’t look like a happy smile to Billy.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” he said. “I’ll always be around to take care of you.”

  His mother reached over and squeezed his hand. Billy squeezed back. He liked this feeling of being a man and taking care of people.

  The car rolled to a stop, and his mother shifted into park. “Okay, you two,” she said, “I’ll pick you up right here at the entrance at eight o’clock. Billy, you’ve got the watch. You keep track of the time, all right?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “I don’t want to have to come in there looking for you after dark.”