The Bright Forever

by Lee Martin

  He brought himself back from his misery by concentrating on what was around him—the blue limestone pavers, Patsy’s roses, the new bicycle he had bought for Katie, anything to keep him anchored in the here and now—and when he returned he loved his family more fiercely, determined not to surrender to regret.

  It was Katie whom he cherished most of all—Katie, his darling girl. Soon Gilley would be making his own way through the world—already he had a head of his own. He didn’t want to sweat at the glassworks in the summers; he had no interest in that. Well, what could Junior do? He was disappointed. Sure. But boys were different than girls. A boy got his chest all puffed up, his head stuck on stubborn, and went off to prove he was his own man. But a girl? It was just like the old song said: her heart belonged to Daddy.

  Nights, that summer, he lay with Katie on a blanket in the backyard, and he named the constellations. He pointed to the sky, and she followed the handle of the Little Dipper to the brilliant star at its end—the North Star, he said, Polaris, the star of the northern hemisphere toward which the earth’s axis pointed. He told her how someone, no matter how lost, could always find his way by looking for that star. Then he moved on to Orion, the hunter, and named the stars that marked his shoulders and feet. Katie loved the chant of their names: Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Rigel, Saiph. He spoke them in a whisper as if they were too precious to say. In the silence that followed, she reached for his hand, and he let her take it. He closed his eyes and thought of that night all those years ago when he and Patsy had driven back from Indianapolis, and she had cried, and he had told her, “Don’t worry. We’re going home.” And now here they were: Junior and Patsy and Gilley and Katie. Life had gone on. It always did. That’s what you learned as you got older. Time. It kept moving. You couldn’t stop it. You couldn’t go back to the moments you wished you could change. They were gone. They left you in a snap. You knocked three times on a back-alley door. You put your hand on the small of a girl’s back, a girl you loved, and together, you stepped inside.

  What was that joke? A snail comes into a bar. The bartender takes one look at him and gives him a swift kick out the door. A year later, the snail comes back into the bar. “Okay, wise guy,” he says to the bartender. “What was that all about?”

  Katie rolled around on the floor in a fit of giggles the afternoon that her father told her that joke. It was the evening before the last day of school. Summer vacation—three glorious months—stretched out ahead of her. She was giddy with the thought of all those days. She and Rene Cherry would have tea parties in Rene’s playhouse; they’d invite their Barbie dolls. They’d make Ken and Barbie kiss and then giggle about it. Katie would do Barbie’s voice. “Oh, you smoothy,” she’d say, which is what her mother said sometimes when her father kissed her. And there would be sleep-outs in the pup tent in Katie’s backyard, and long afternoons on the front porch swing reading or playing another heartbreaking game of It’s Gotta Go. In a few weeks, the stores downtown would have their Moonlight Madness sales. They’d close off the streets around the square, and there’d be carnival rides and cotton candy and saltwater taffy and lemon shake-ups. This year there was supposed to be a live elephant. An elephant that you could ride. Holy moly. All of this and trips to Shakamak State Park to fish in the lake and the curlicue slide at the city park and whatever else she and Rene Cherry wanted to do. That was the joy of summer. It was yours. You owned it. If you wanted to laugh yourself silly over a corny snail joke, you could. If you wanted to roll around on the floor until your hair was a mess and you were dizzy, hey, who was there to stop you?

  Katie heard her mother’s high heels clacking on the hardwood floor. From where she was lying, she could see her mother’s feet, still in her dress-up shoes, the ones she had worn for an after-school meeting with Katie’s teacher. The shoes were black and shiny. They had pointed toes. One foot was tapping the floor.

  “Oh, Katie.” Her mother sighed. “Oh, dear.”

  A gust of wind caught the front door, and it slammed shut. The curtains at the windows, which had been merrily lifting with the wind, sagged and flattened against the screens. Katie remembered the time right before Christmas vacation when her mother told her that she had to go into the hospital to have her tonsils out. It could happen like that. You could think you were sailing along, and then something could throw everything, as her father said, “all jabberwockers.”

  This time it was math. She’d just barely squeaked by. “By the skin of your teeth,” her mother said. “The skin.” Katie rubbed her tongue over her teeth, which were hard and not like skin at all. “Miss Silver says you’re going to need help if you’re going to keep up next year.”

  Katie sat up. “Help?” she said.

  “That’s right,” said her mother. “A tutor. A summer tutor.”

  Katie fell back on the floor, her arms stretched out to her sides. “I’ll die,” she said. “A tutor? In summer? I’ll just die.”

  Patsy Mackey would think back to that moment often that summer, and in the years that would follow. She would remember how she and Junior, getting ready for bed that evening, agreed that Henry Dees was the one who could help them. Henry Dees, who lived in Gooseneck. A bit of an odd duck, that Henry Dees, but he got results. Patsy knew more than one mother who swore that her children would have never gotten through fractions, long division, or algebra without Mr. Dees.

  “I’ll go down to Gooseneck tomorrow morning,” Junior said. He sat on the edge of the bed, watching Patsy at her vanity table. She was braiding her hair, which she still wore long, and even though he had watched her do this every night for nearly twenty years, it still fascinated him. She put her hands behind her head as if she were fastening a necklace, and her fingers separated her hair into three sections and then began to weave those sections together. He loved to watch this graceful crisscross, Patsy’s fingers gathering and twining, because when he did, he felt that the world held still, that the storm he sometimes felt brewing inside him died down. The hatred he felt for himself over what he had done that night in Indianapolis went away. He could forgive himself, forgive his father. He could sit on that bed and watch Patsy braid her hair, and he could think that he was, all things considered, a lucky man. “I’ll talk to Henry Dees,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll get Katie back on track.”

  As they lay down in the dark and waited for sleep, Junior didn’t know that Patsy thought of the lost child, who would be a young man or woman now. She wondered what joys that child might have had, what miseries. Oh, that was all part of being alive, wasn’t it? The what-ifs? She remembered how scared she had been that night in Indianapolis. It was snowing, and she was wearing her new car coat, the camel’s hair her mother and father had given her for Christmas. She kept worrying that the snow would ruin the coat, and that was the part that made her feel silly now to recall it. How young she had been. What a fool. Worried about a coat on a night like that. Somewhere down the alley, a radio was playing. The song was Perry Como’s “When You Were Sweet Sixteen.” Sometimes, even now, a line or two of that song popped into her head, and she felt a tenderness for the girl she had been, the one who had believed Gil when he told her they had no choice. They couldn’t get married. Jeez, they were still in school. And how would he go to college with a wife and a baby to support?

  She had gone ahead and made a life with him. She had lived so long that sometimes the night in Indianapolis seemed as if it had happened to someone else, not her. Then there were moments like tonight when the two of them lying together in silence became too much for her, and she knew with a heartbreaking sureness that it had been no one’s fault but hers. She should have been stronger. She shouldn’t have gone along with Junior’s plan—his father’s plan. But—and this was the part that caught her breath, made her feel like she was suffocating—she had been afraid to have the baby. Secretly, she had been glad for someone to tell her what to do. She wanted to ask Gil on these nights, when she knew that they were both having trouble falling asleep, whether h
e ever thought of that night, whether he ever wished that they had turned around and come home and never knocked on that doctor’s door, but she knew she couldn’t ask him that, couldn’t whisper a word about that night, and this was the saddest part of all. They could never admit that they shared the same regret, the same heartache. They could only talk of the here and now: Gilley’s golf game, a new variety of tea rose, and now Katie’s problems with math, which they would have to solve. What was it their high school calculus teacher had told them, something from a famous mathematician, something about what to do when you couldn’t solve a problem? Oh, yes. If you can’t solve a problem, then there’s an easier problem you can’t solve. Find it.

  THE NEXT morning, the music was so loud at Mr. Dees’s house that Junior had to pound and pound on the door. The song playing was one he had heard Gilley play on his stereo—“Candy Man”—and for a moment he wondered whether he had made a mistake and gone to the wrong address.

  He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered in through the diamond of glass in the front door. What he saw amused him. Such a sight. Henry Dees with a spatula held like a microphone as he sang along. “Oh, the Candy Man can.” Who would have thought that he fancied himself a singer, that mornings he strutted around his kitchen, his head tossed back, his fingers snapping, his arm flung out, as if he were onstage at an Executive Inn dinner show, a spotlight following him as he reached toward the audience? “Yes, the Candy Man can.”

  Junior couldn’t bring himself to knock again, to disturb Mr. Dees and let him know that he had found him out. But he couldn’t back away. Watching Mr. Dees, unguarded and exposed in this private moment, made him happy, glad to know that all manner of folks could manufacture joy—even a bachelor schoolteacher who, as far as Junior knew, had never even had a chance at love. He could sing into that spatula. He could turn up the volume and not care who heard. He could sing, sing, sing on this bright morning in June.

  Then the music stopped, and Mr. Dees went to the stove and used his spatula to turn a pancake. Bacon was frying in a pan. He speared the slices with a fork and stacked them on a saucer. He was all business now. He was making time. He buttered toast, poured coffee, slid the pancake onto a plate, and spooned out batter for another. Soon there was a stack and syrup on the table, and he was ready to dig in. He paused and snapped his fingers twice. He tapped his foot. That song. That “Candy Man.” Junior knew it was still in his head, that little bit of dum-di-dum, and he was glad to know it, satisfied with the news that Henry Dees was a man who could make room for the cockle-fruity-do, a little bit of a silly song to give him a chuckle. It gave the earnest part of him, that by-the-numbers dignity, all the more weight.

  Junior tapped on the glass and watched as Mr. Dees looked up from his breakfast. He squinted toward the door. He touched his napkin to his lips and then folded it into a neat rectangle before pushing his chair away from the table. It had been nearly twenty years since Junior had spoken to him. The last time—he could recall it clearly—had been in school, the night of graduation. In the hallway before the line for the processional formed, Junior bent to tie his shoelace and it snapped. Henry Dees had a spare one in his pocket, and he gave it to Junior. “Why do you have an extra one?” Junior asked him, and Henry told him he liked to think ahead. Who knew what might happen? He wanted to be ready. Junior had always remembered that, how Henry Dees had given him that shoelace, had been right there when he needed him.

  Now he had come to ask for his help. “It’s my girl,” he said when Mr. Dees opened the door. “You remember me, Henry. I’m Junior Mackey. It’s my girl, Katie. She’s having trouble with her arithmetic.”

  Mr. Dees asked him to come in. He poured him a cup of coffee, offered him pancakes and bacon. The house smelled of the coffee and food. A breeze lifted the curtain at the kitchen window. Outside, birds were singing. Those were his purple martins, Mr. Dees said. For a while, he and Junior sat at the table and said nothing. They sipped coffee, two men taking their time on a summer morning.

  Then Mr. Dees said yes, of course he knew him. Gilbert Mackey. He’d married Patsy Molloy. They lived in the Heights. He’d had their son, Gilley, in his calculus class. A smart boy, a polite boy. Very nice. And he’d seen their daughter around town. A little brown-haired girl. What was her name? Katie? Yes, Katie. So it was Katie who had hit a snag with her math? Of course he could help her. He hadn’t found a child yet that he couldn’t teach.

  He wasn’t boasting. Junior had no doubt of that. Mr. Dees was merely stating a fact in that quiet way he had, bowing his head as if it embarrassed him to have to say it. Such a claim was far from a boast. It was the simple truth stated with the same shy and quiet dignity Junior remembered from that night at graduation when Henry Dees loaned him that shoelace. Everything would be all right with Katie. He felt sure of that. Henry Dees was someone they could count on.

  “Don’t worry about your Katie,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”

  HE CAME the first time on an afternoon when Katie and Rene Cherry were outside, sitting cross-legged on the grass. Mr. Dees wore a poplin suit—powder blue, the color of the sky in early June before the heat came and the clotted air. He paused on the sidewalk and listened to the girls. He memorized the lilt and chirp of their voices. As bright as pennies. They were talking about books they had read. The Henry Huggins books were magnifique, Rene Cherry said. She had copper-colored hair. Glorious hair that fell to her shoulders, that wreathed her narrow face. It was her mother’s hair. Margot Cherry, ne Legrand, who was Mr. Dees’s old classmate. Margot Legrand, who had spoken French and smoked cigarettes and tried once, unsuccessfully, to kill herself by slashing her wrists with her father’s razor. Even she had managed a family. A husband and this beautiful daughter sitting in the shade on this glorious summer day. “Magnifique,” Rene said again, and Mr. Dees grinned, convinced that she had heard her mother use that word and now was trying to make it her own.

  The air smelled of the cedar shrubs and the attar of Patsy Mackey’s roses. Mr. Dees was content to linger and eavesdrop. He let himself imagine, just for a moment, that this was his home, these girls on the grass his daughters, and soon he would call to them and they would come running, each of them reaching for one of his hands.

  Yes, said Katie. The Henry Huggins books were funny, but, really, wasn’t the Little House series so much better? Laura and her sisters, Mary and Baby Carrie, and Ma and Pa Ingalls. “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” Katie said, “when the grasshoppers eat the wheat crop, or The Long Winter when the snow’s so deep and the trains can’t get through with food or coal? Didn’t those books break your heart?” Mr. Dees could see that her cheeks were flushed and damp with tears.

  “Oh, I know,” Rene said. “Absolutely heartbreaking. Trs triste.”

  They went on debating the merits and disappointments of each book, but Mr. Dees wasn’t listening now. He was watching Katie. She was sobbing. Her shoulders shook. Her breath came in hiccups. Her hair fell over her face and she pushed it back with her hands. He wanted to run to her, gather her up in his arms, and tell her not to worry; nothing could be as bad as all that. He understood now that the girls were playing a game that required them to eliminate one of the books, pretend it never existed, and how could they make that choice when they loved each so dearly? A child’s game. That was all, and yet at the moment nothing could have seemed as dire to Rene and Katie, especially Katie, who blubbered and bawled and said, between her hiccups, “Laura . . . and Mary . . . and Baby Carrie . . . and Laura’s friend Almanzo . . . Oh, Rene.”

  Mr. Dees felt an ache in his throat, and he wasn’t ashamed, not a whit, to know that his own tears were about to come. Katie’s anguish touched him. He removed the handkerchief, freshly ironed that morning, from his breast pocket and blotted his eyes. How could anyone behold the miseries of children and not take them in, not feel them as his own? He couldn’t bear to hear Katie cry. Not for another second could he stand it.

  So he called out. “Hello, he
llo,” he said, waving his arm as he came up the driveway. “Which one of you girls is lucky?”

  “Lucky?” said Katie.

  “Why, sure,” he told her. “I thought you were the one.”

  He began the first lesson by explaining how to divide a whole number into fractions. They sat on the patio at the table with the big green umbrella opened above it. From time to time, Mr. Dees caught a glimpse of Patsy Mackey at the kitchen window, pretending not to be watching. She had brought them a pitcher of lemonade. “Katie, this is Mister Dees,” she had said. “He’s a very nice man who’s going to help you with your arithmetic.”

  He told Katie that any whole number could be divided, even one. It could be divided in half; it could be split into thirds, fourths, sixths, eighths, and on down the line. He showed her on his tablet how to write one-half by putting a one over a two: 1/2. The bottom number, the 2, was the denominator. It showed how many equal portions made up the whole number. The top number, the 1, was the numerator. It showed how many of the equal portions they were taking away.

  “So if we have the fraction one-fourth,” he said, “it means we’ve split the whole number into four equal parts and we’re going to take one of those parts away. Do you understand?”