Julia stared at the bills. “I don’t want your money,” she finally said. But Carmen left it where it was.
All powers of reasoning seemed to have flown. Julia had taken in all the facts of the situation, yet no useful plan had emerged. A food chopper brain, that was what she had right now. It was a favorite self-deprecating joke of Flannery O’Connor’s—the kind of mind where everything went in but only minced pieces came out.
There were only a few options, none of them good. Julia obviously couldn’t leave the girl out here on the porch all day and into the night. But taking her inside was inviting trouble, all sorts of messy, complicated trouble that would go on and on. She couldn’t do that. But how could she send her away with nothing? Or send her away with something, for that matter? Now that she had sat out here and talked with her, it seemed that she had passed the point when that was possible.
All at once Pamela came to mind. What would her smart, sensible, go-getter of a sister do in her place? And right in the wake of that thought came a plan. Yes, maybe she could send the girl away after all. She could go inside right now and get together a travel bag for Carmen, and then send her off to Pamela in Twin Lakes, Virginia. After all, Pamela was Carmen’s aunt, too.
Julia felt the smallest stirring of hope. This might work. Twin Lakes didn’t have its own airport, but it did have a bus station, not far from Pamela’s house, in fact. And Pamela had a daughter not much older than Carmen, so surely she was better equipped than Julia to figure out what to do with her, would probably enjoy the challenge—another success to add to the long list of other things she had set right in the lives of her friends and family. As for Julia, she would gladly listen to Pamela boast for the rest of her days on earth about how she had fixed the problem of Carmen, if only she would.
She quickly reviewed the steps of the plan, revising as she went. She would go inside and call the bus station first, then collect some toiletries, then come back out and give Carmen a good excuse for why she couldn’t keep her here. Or maybe she should give her the excuse first, as soon as she thought of one, so that Carmen wouldn’t get her hopes up about staying here tonight. Then if there were hours to while away before the bus left, they could go shopping for a few more necessities—a new shirt maybe. She would wait until Carmen was actually on her way before calling Pamela to let her know where and what time to meet her.
Julia looked at her watch. It was just before eleven in the morning. If everything fell into place, Carmen could be on her way well before suppertime, perhaps even shortly after lunch.
Lunch. Julia suddenly wondered if Carmen had eaten anything since the Frosty. The girl was leaning forward now, staring at the floor, clutching the edge of the glider seat, as if it took effort to hold herself upright.
Something twisted inside Julia, like hunger, though she knew it wasn’t that. How many times, she wondered, had this child been at the mercy of others? How had she kept body and soul together? Where had she slept the night before, and the night before that? And though Julia didn’t want to know the answers to any of these questions, she couldn’t shake them from her mind.
A thought forced itself upon her, so powerful the words might have been spoken aloud: Jeremiah, what am I doing to you? The words from his memoir flashed into her mind: We had a child, a beautiful little girl. And Carmen’s words from minutes earlier: Daddy used to talk about you like you were some kind of . . . Julia couldn’t imagine what word went in the blank.
“What have you eaten today?” Julia asked her, and she knew the answer before it came.
“Nothing.”
Julia suppressed a sigh. “Well, let’s go get something. Give me a minute to put these things in the refrigerator.” This wasn’t a commitment, she reminded herself as she stepped inside. She wasn’t bringing the girl into her house. She was only going to take her somewhere and buy her some lunch. They could eat a quick bite, and then she could proceed with the plan to send her to Pamela.
But already, the plan felt shaky. The bus station here in Beckett had closed a few years ago, but she knew there had to be one over in Greenville. She would have to get directions, which was easy enough, but what if there wasn’t a bus headed to Virginia anytime today? Maybe she should check instead on airports in other towns close to Twin Lakes, Virginia.
But all at once, just as she opened the refrigerator door, she remembered something else, something that put an end to the plan, at least for now: Pamela wasn’t home. Her daughter-in-law’s baby had arrived two weeks early, and she had just left for Louisiana to help out. She wouldn’t be back for a week.
Slowly Julia set the milk inside the refrigerator next to the orange juice, then used up more time by rearranging some things. No new plan came to mind, but maybe she would think of one while they ate. If she were a religious woman, now would be the time to pray to that end, but unlike Jeremiah, she had never returned to the faith of their mother. That kind of faith had never interested her in the least, tied up as it was with her mother’s abject servitude and her father’s bouts of rage.
She closed the refrigerator. She studied the three doorways out of the kitchen: one leading into the dining room; another into the living room; and the last one, through which she had just come. She heard the echo of her own words: When something big like this happens, you sometimes have to do things you don’t want to do. It’s the only decent thing to do. And something her mother used to say—You just have to keep going forward—though in her mother’s case going forward was never linked to real progress, only to yet another act of groveling at her husband’s feet.
In Julia’s case, for now, it meant walking to the door leading to the back porch, where Carmen waited.
• • •
THEY drove to Del’s Deli near campus. It wasn’t far from Ivy Dale Lane, and the service was fast. Although it was a popular hangout for students during the school year, Julia was counting on a slim crowd since it was summer and an hour before noon. She was relieved as they stepped inside to see that she was right. Only one other table was occupied at the present, by a middle-aged couple apparently waiting for their food.
After giving Carmen time to read the menu board, Julia ordered first, more than she usually ordered and more than she wanted, to encourage Carmen to eat heartily. If she had to feed the girl before she left, she meant to do it right.
She sent Carmen to get drinks and choose a table while she paid. Then there were napkins and straws to get. Through the mirror behind the condiment station, she saw Carmen looking at her, her face expressionless as her eyes studied her from head to toe.
She joined the girl at the table, wishing she hadn’t picked the one right beside the middle-aged couple. But on second thought, that might work to her advantage. With others so close, maybe Carmen wouldn’t talk. Maybe she would only want to eat, and that would be fine. Talking was dangerous. It could lead to knowing too much.
Carmen picked up a straw, jabbed it upright against the tabletop, and slid the paper off. She stuck the straw into her water and drank nearly half of it.
Julia felt a pang of shame for not having offered the girl a drink of water at home, or the use of the bathroom. “You could have something else besides water,” she said. “They have good sweet tea here.”
Carmen shook her head. “That’s okay. I like water.” She took another long drink.
“It wouldn’t be a bad drive at all from Greenville,” the woman at the next table said. She had the kind of voice that could be called sultry, and she talked rapidly, with crisp diction. Definitely not a native of the South.
“But it would get old,” the man said. “And if your first class started at nine, you’d get caught in all the morning traffic.”
The woman laughed. “Yes, all the morning traffic.”
“Hey, don’t make fun of our morning traffic,” the man said.
“Oh, I think your morning traffic is lovely,” the woman said. Just then a teenage boy in a red Del’s Deli T-shirt set a salad and sandwich on th
eir table.
Carmen was looking around at the walls, which were crowded with a miscellany of old advertisements for things like Brylcreem Hair Tonic and Barq’s Strawberry Soda as well as old road signs and several pieces of real art. Del, the owner of the shop, allowed local artists to display things they wanted to sell, usually leftovers from student art shows.
Several large paintings had dark Gothic themes. One of them depicted a phantomlike woman drifting through a dense forest with bats flying overhead. Another was a moonlit scene of an enormous purple spider in a black pool. It was easy to understand why no one had bought these pieces.
Carmen was staring at a painting of a castle silhouetted on a cliff. Without looking at Julia, she said, “You have a husband, don’t you?”
“I did, but he died,” Julia said.
Carmen looked at her, surprised. “He did? When?”
“Last August.”
“How?”
Julia laid her hand over her heart and patted it. “Heart attack. It was fast.”
“In his sleep?” Carmen asked.
“No,” Julia said. “In the front yard. He was planting flowers.” She looked away to indicate she didn’t want to talk further about it.
“I’m sorry,” Carmen said. Silence followed, and she seemed to be done with the subject. Then she sighed and said, “I was planting flowers when Lulu came out and called me in to tell me Daddy was dead.”
Julia was instantly doubtful. “Planting flowers in October?” She didn’t know much about Wyoming, but October couldn’t be the right season for planting anything.
Something flared briefly in Carmen’s eyes as she recognized another challenge to her truthfulness, but she let it go and nodded slowly. “Daddy had helped me rig up this little portable greenhouse for a science project in school. I couldn’t really fit inside, but I could sort of crawl halfway in and do what I needed to, then close it back up tight. I had some beans growing in one big pot and some potatoes in another one, and I was planting some wildflowers when Lulu came out the back door and called me in. She was crying.”
These were exactly the kinds of details Julia didn’t want to hear, the whole reason she didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to imagine Carmen as a child, crawling around inside a makeshift greenhouse Jeremiah had built for her. She didn’t want to think about her planting things in October, hoping they would grow during the long winter. Or about her mother calling her to come in, for that only made Julia wonder what words Lulu had used and what it must have been like for a little girl to receive that kind of news about a father such as Jeremiah must have been.
• • •
I LIKE the looks of the campus,” the woman at the next table said. She was petite, with large, dark eyes and a short, ragged haircut of the sort that Julia had always wished she had the nerve to try. The woman’s face showed signs of wear, but there was a comfortable kind of beauty about it.
“It’s okay, I guess,” the man said. “It’s small.”
“Tobias said I could use all his notes,” she said.
The man laughed. “He was joking, right? As if you need somebody else’s notes to teach a course like that. Good grief, does he know you’ve written books? How many has he written?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not something you ask a person.”
“Well, it’s an insult. Like asking Babe Ruth to coach a Little League ball team. Or Einstein to teach junior high math. You could teach that course in your sleep.” He gave a scornful laugh. “So is Tobias the guy’s first name or last?”
“Does it matter?” the woman said. “Listen, I think this is one of those things that’s meant to be. The way I just happened to run into him that day and he just happened to mention they hadn’t found anybody to fill in for his class yet. And besides that, I need to be busy. I can’t just sit around. I want to do this, Ben.” She spoke the last words slowly, emphatically.
Besides Julia’s natural curiosity about other people’s conversations, this one was especially interesting, for it sounded as if the woman might be referring to Harry Tobias—the psychology professor at Millard-Temple who, along with Julia, had been granted a sabbatical for the coming year.
The man at the next table reached over and touched the tip of the woman’s nose with his finger. “Vibrant Vera. I value you too much to vex you. If you want to stay home, fine. If not, that’s fine, too.”
“Good, I’ll get the ball rolling,” the woman said.
Julia was always amused at the silly things grown people said. But the man’s last words weren’t silly at all: If you want to stay home, fine. If not, that’s fine, too. It was the kind of thing she could imagine Matthew having said, though never in a public place where someone might have overheard. Julia suddenly wished she could tell Vibrant Vera to appreciate this man.
The boy in the red T-shirt appeared again, holding two more plates. “I got a club sandwich with fries, and a soup and wrap combo,” he said. Carmen took the sandwich and set it down, then removed the long toothpick and examined each layer. Julia busied herself stirring her soup, testing it, sprinkling it with pepper. Then she took a bite of her wrap to encourage Carmen to do the same, but when she looked across the table, Carmen’s eyes were closed, her lips moving, her hands touching the sides of her plate as if to make sure it didn’t go anywhere.
Julia felt like groaning. Evidently her brother had not only returned to the faith of his mother but had also dragged his daughter along with him. Or maybe Carmen was only pretending to pray, making a show of piety in order to gain sympathy.
Her prayer, if that was what it was, was brief. She fell to eating in a way that made it obvious she was hungry.
There was more laughter at the next table. “Oh, sure,” the woman said. “I’ve never heard of that Tobias in my whole life. I think you just make half of this stuff up.”
“No, it’s true,” the man said. “Well, maybe not true, but it’s a real story. With a happy ending, too.”
It suddenly occurred to Julia that although they both wore wedding bands, this couple couldn’t be married to each other and still interact this way at their age. Or maybe they were newly married. The whole thing was more than a little weird—that she would be sitting right next to someone in Del’s Deli who might cover Harry Tobias’s classes while he took his sabbatical concurrent with her own.
Carmen was still concentrating on her food. And here was another defiance of probability, Julia thought—that her brother’s daughter, virtually a stranger, would somehow in her long miles of wayfaring from Wyoming end up on Julia’s back porch in Beckett, South Carolina, one Saturday morning in June. And without a stitch of extra clothing, not even a bar of soap or a comb.
She looked away, her eyes landing on an old road sign on the wall: Danger Ahead—Bridge Out. Too bad there hadn’t been a sign on Ivy Dale this morning when she had come home with her groceries: Danger Ahead—Girl on Back Porch.
• chapter 7 •
THE DEEPEST PART OF NIGHT
Carmen had already eaten almost half of her sandwich, but she paused now and set it down on her plate as if suddenly aware that she was violating the rules of etiquette by eating so fast. She wiped her mouth carefully and took another drink of water, then picked up a few French fries. “Do you have any children?” she asked Julia. “Daddy didn’t think you did.” She bit the tip off a French fry and chewed it, then ate the rest of it quickly in small bites, her eyes fixed on Julia the whole time.
“He was right,” Julia said, and before Carmen could respond, she asked, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
Carmen bit into another French fry. “Not any that really count. Lulu was married before she knew Daddy, so she already had two kids, but they lived in Casper with their grandmother, so I didn’t know them. Their daddy was mean to Lulu. To everybody, really. He was Effie’s stepbrother.”
She picked up her sandwich again. “So I was the only one at home. With Daddy and Lulu, I mean. Until Daddy died, and t
hen relatives I’d never heard of started showing up, most of them from Arkansas. That’s where Lulu was from.” She took a bite of her sandwich and chewed it slowly. “Some of them overstayed their welcome. It was pretty . . . horrendous at times.” She took another swig of water. “Lulu was older than Daddy. I guess you already knew that.”
More information Julia didn’t want, but that was what came of asking questions. The facts were hard to sort out. Effie was Lulu’s half sister. And Lulu had once been married to her half sister’s stepbrother? So where did Ida fit in? She wondered how much older Lulu was than Jeremiah, but she wasn’t going to ask any more questions. She would just be quiet and try to think of the next thing to do.
“Does Aunt Pamela have curly hair, or is it straight like yours?” Carmen asked.
“Straight, like our mother’s. Jeremiah was the only one who got the curls.” She wished the girl would quit talking and just eat.
“What was she like—your mother?”
This was not a subject Julia wanted to talk about in Del’s Deli or anywhere else. “Your daddy must have told you about her,” she said.
Carmen nodded. She set her sandwich down again and took a crunchy bite of her pickle spear. “But not much. He cried one time when he talked about her. I remember that. Said he couldn’t forgive himself for abandoning her. That was the word he used—abandon. I’d never heard the word before, but it was so lonely-sounding I never forgot it.” She finished the rest of her water. “I never knew either one of my grandmothers. Lulu’s real mother died a long time ago. She was . . .” She broke off suddenly and leaned closer. “How did Lulu die? Did they tell you?”
“I didn’t get all the details,” Julia said. “It happened suddenly, Ida said.” And then, in case the girl had forgotten, “Effie may have died by now, too.”
Carmen went back to her sandwich. Presently she continued. “Lulu was always making excuses for her. Poor Effie—nothing but hard knocks all her life. She was sick as a kid, she had a lisp, she was picked on in school, men treated her dirty, on and on. It was always something. Effie couldn’t be held responsible for anything she did.”
To See the Moon Again Page 8
