by Joanna Rose
He lowered his hand with the red feather.
“He waved people on, as if that was just what they needed to get on down the road, to get on with their lives.”
She was afraid to breathe.
“Crane is called Bird of Heaven.” He shrugged. “I was just too sad to write a poem.”
He turned around, and the men with their hard hats kind of shuffled some space clear for him to get at the table, and he set the red feather next to the wooden box.
Pattianne mopped her eyes with her sleeve. The woman next to her hiccupped. The hard hat on the podium started to slide again. People started to laugh. By the time the hard hat clattered to the floor, everyone was laughing, and the young guy picked it up, his shirttail coming untucked from his jeans, and then he and all the men looked at each other, and they all shouted out, “Ho!” and then they trooped back down the aisle. People clapped.
She was thinking that Michael should have come.
She was thinking what she could possibly say about the road worker.
She was glad Michael hadn’t come.
The woman next to her held out a tissue. She had a whole box of them in that purse, and not one of those small boxes, either. It was a regular-size box.
A girl with reddish, bushy hair got up from the front row. Her face was red and her eyes were a mess, but she stood at the podium and took in a breath that lifted her narrow shoulders, and you could tell from that breath that she was done with crying for now. What a simple thing to do, look out at all of them, like she was looking at every single person there.
“My dad would love this,” she said. “He always said the modern world amazed him, and he said part of that was how we’ve learned to celebrate. Like his last birthday. He wanted to take a road trip. He was always wanting to take a road trip, anywhere west.”
He’d wanted to travel the great highways. He had loved highways since he was a small boy, and when the interstate system was completed, he marked all the interstates in red on his map of the US, which had hung in their dining room.
He’d written President Eisenhower a congratulations note about the interstate system and had gotten a handwritten note in reply, thanking him for his love of the great American road. It hung in a frame next to the map that had hung in their dining room.
The map from the dining room stood on the easel next to the table now.
Mission said, “This is my mission.” A happy chuckle kind of rolled around the room, and when she smiled, tears overflowed from her eyes.
The old woman whispered, “I remember when she was Barbara. But she was always saying that. ‘This is my mission.’ And Bud started calling her Mission, and next thing we knew . . .”
“My mission,” Mission said, “is to help Daddy get to all the places he wanted to go. You are his friends and fellow travelers in this life. If you can keep traveling with him, if you can take him on one last journey, if you happen to be heading for the California Redwoods, or the Alamo, or the Grand Canyon or the Pacific Ocean.”
Shiny blue stars dotted the map. Those were the places he wanted to go, the places he hadn’t made it to, every star so sad Pattianne couldn’t count them. There were twelve blue vials. There were twelve blue glass balls.
Mission went to the picnic table and picked up one of the blue vials. “Please,” she said. Then she didn’t say anything else, and a huge sorrow filled the whole place. Maybe it had sneaked in when that chuckle rolled around the room, when no one was watching, when they were all just trying to breathe and make some sense of death and blue stars.
The mimes went up there. One mime up the left side of the room, one mime up the right side, the third mime straight up the center aisle. They stood there, not smiling, their faces hidden behind their faces, in that slightly malevolent way of mimes that makes you wait and wait and then start worrying about whether to laugh or flee.
Mission went back to her mother in the front row. The blue glass vials and the blue glass balls glittered on the table. An air vent rushed air into the room somewhere, and the stillness began to shimmer, and Pattianne began to panic, a flutter like a tickle at the bottom of her throat. She needed to touch the woman next to her, needed to remember something about the day outside, needed the mimes to speak.
One mime stepped sideways to the picnic table, and, one at a time, picked up all twelve blue glass balls, handing each one sideways to the next mime without looking, all three mimes staring straight out with their weird mime eyes, the second mime handing balls to the third mime.
And then the piper began.
“Moon River.”
The piper walked up the side aisle in his green-and-white-plaid kilt and his wheezing bagpipes. When she looked back at the mimes, they had begun to juggle the blue glass balls.
Nothing as sad as pipes.
Nothing as weird as mimes.
There was a gathering to follow at the St. Joe Elks Lodge next to the Piggly Wiggly store.
Pattianne just followed a lot of other cars out of the parking lot and turned west with them instead of east toward her house, west toward the Piggly Wiggly and the Christmas-tree lot and the St. Joe Elks Lodge. She couldn’t remember what day of the week it was. Debate practice, football practice, history club, Ecumenical Men’s Prayer Circle. She was locked out of her brain. There were no thoughts in there, or if there were, she wasn’t going to be allowed to know what they were. She was all in her body. Her heart ached, and her eyes let go thick wet tears. She wanted to love someone that much. She wished she had known his name. She wished she had a story about him. She wished Michael was with her, maybe driving her home and telling her he loved her, saying There is someone next to you who will make sure you have a fine and funny funeral.
She pulled into the gravel lot of the Elks Lodge, other cars doing the same, people getting out and slowly moving toward the stairs that went up to the small green door that was open. No mimes. No piper. There was Mission, helping her mother up the stairs. A big boy in a letterman’s jacket hauled the wheelchair up the stairs after them. The woman with the polka-dot bag. A road worker with a white shirt and a tie and jeans and no coat. Everybody who went in the green door seemed like someone she knew now. She sat in the O-Bug and watched and cried and wouldn’t let herself think of Mr. Bryn dying, ever.
Finally, she wiped her face with the big, soggy wad of tissue and got out. She thought maybe she could go in and say something nice to Mission, maybe tell her she was the one who gave him the book about Buddhism, say how she liked him, and then maybe just slip back out the door. The gravel parking lot was full of potholes, and the potholes were crusted around the edges with thin ice. She walked through a cloud of cigarette smoke. The road worker who talked about Bud and the cranes was standing, leaning on a shiny old blue pickup truck having a smoke.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“That was really nice, what you said,” and she heard her voice crack, felt her face go all screwed up trying to not let out any tears, watched the cigarette go up to his mouth. He blew a long stream of smoke up into the sky. The sky was turning a dark pewter color. She got her face back under control.
“Thanks,” he said. He shrugged. “How did you know Bud?”
That was how you do it at these things, you say how did you know the person, like at a wedding, are you a friend of the bride or the groom.
“I work at the bookstore.”
A red-and-white pack of Marlboros showed through the pocket of his white shirt.
“Lamplighter?” he said. “Or the Borders out at the mall?”
“Lamplighter.”
He nodded. “He liked that place.” His long black braid was pulled around front over his shoulder. He was maybe Native American or maybe Hispanic. He didn’t look Italian.
“So you worked on the highway crew with him?”
Nod. “I wish I could take him on one of his final journeys,” he said. “I’d like to take him to the silver tide.”
She wrapped her hands in A
unt Shirley’s scarf. “Yeah, he said something about that.” She was shivering cold deep, deep inside. “What’s a silver tide?”
He dropped his cigarette to the gravel and ground it out. Then he pulled out the pack. “One more before I go in,” he said, shaking one up out of the pack, and he held the pack out to her.
“Thanks.” The hand that reached out and took a cigarette wasn’t shaking. The cigarette slipped between her fingers like it had a mind of its own, like her fingers remembered just what to do. He lit his cigarette and held out the lighter. “Maybe I’ll save it for later,” she said, and he laughed a little.
“Funeral smoker,” he said.
“Funeral smoker?”
“You got your tavern smokers, your wedding smokers, all kinds of situational smokers.” He dragged and blew the smoke high. “I’m an off-work smoker, and a not-at-home-smoker.”
She was a haven’t-had-one-for-over-a-year-smoker.
“My girlfriend’s pregnant,” he said. “So I told her I wouldn’t ever smoke around her or the baby.”
Pattianne worked the pointy black toe of her shoe into a pothole, crunching the ice.
“I might call him Bud. She wants to name him after her dad, but I might just call him Bud. It’s going to be a boy. She’s due pretty soon, three weeks, and I guess that’s maybe anytime.” He waved at someone behind her, people going into the Elks Lodge.
She said, “There’s not a mime behind me, is there?”
“What?”
“Never mind. So what’s a silver tide?”
“Oh, mimes, no, I don’t know where those guys went. I don’t think they’re here. Those monks in the orange robes are here, though. I think they’re going to bless the ashes or something.”
A flock of crows went shrieking across the sky. They were black against a tinge of pink.
“And the silver tide?”
“Vancouver Island,” he said. “On the west coast of British Columbia. I went there once, and the tide turns silver, like light, and it’s like there’s writing everywhere you step, and in the water, where there are fish, they leave silver trails.”
His cigarette smoke drifted over, smelling nice.
“Tofino,” he said. A small, grateful laugh. “He wanted to go there.”
He dropped his half-smoked cigarette and ground it out.
“Wanted to see the Pacific. Said it touched ancient China and mystic Russia. He read that to me from a book he had.”
“He called it the great weather-maker,” Pattianne said.
He nodded. Then he picked up both of his butts and tossed them into the back of his truck. “Some people don’t think cigarette butts count as litter,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Pattianne.”
He held out his hand. “Ed.” His hand was warm and calloused. “Nice to talk to you. Coming in?”
“Maybe in a minute.”
The lights were on inside the Elks Lodge, tall windows lit up warm and yellow. She wanted to look up Vancouver Island. She wanted to smoke the Marlboro. She wanted to go home, wanted to be alone in her house on the edge of things.
She pulled everything out of the glove box, the Virgin too, looking for matches, and put it all back in. Then she searched through the bottom of her purse. Then she gave up and put the Marlboro in the inside breast pocket of her coat, careful, where it would probably break anyway, and that’s where the matches were. The first drag was awful. So was the second. She put the cigarette out and tossed it into the back of Ed’s truck. Her head was spinning from the crying, from the cold, from the cigarette. She had to drive away, just leave Bud there with all his friends.
The front bedroom window of Michael’s office was lit with the steely light of the television, and he was in there, moving back and forth by the window. She waited out in the darkening day, in the O-Bug, and the Virgin of the Dashboard waited too, retrieved from the glove box, restored to the dashboard. The circle where it sat wasn’t faded like the rest of the dashboard. She could replace it to its exact spot.
Sorrow was a huge round thing that took up all the air in the O-Bug. Her eyes ached with tears that slipped out, ached from holding on to the tears that didn’t slip out. How sad and glorious it all seemed, how undeniably glorious. She was afraid of the fact of the funeral. Death was close, and she couldn’t look, not even at some heaven or rebirth. The moon was rising, almost full, at the end of the road, misshapen and yellow, and she wondered where he was, the road worker, if he was actually anywhere.
A light went on in the house, the hall light, then the living room light, and Michael passed the big window. Then he came back to it and looked out. She waved her fingers at him from where they rested on the steering wheel. He walked away from the window.
Mr. Bryn was alive, breathing, sleeping and waking in his hospital bed, and death was close, right here, and of course Michael couldn’t go to the funeral, and she was sorry for being unthinking, for not paying attention.
If her father died, she would be afraid of the grief that would build silently, secretly, over years, until she suddenly became aware of it in a moment, and was knocked to the ground with the loss of what she’d never had. If her mother died, she would be sad for her, maybe, more than for herself. Then she heard herself saying if and not when, and she had to go in, quick, had to get to Michael. She could tell him she was sorry.
He stood at the door of his office, his arms crossed over his chest. He watched her hang up her coat, and then she stood there. He turned and looked in at the muted television. The light of it made his face an ash color, and she crossed the room to him. She would tell him not to worry. His father was doing well. Everything will be fine. The news played footage from the fire, and a picture of Emerson “Bud” Paul. The phone rang, and Michael answered it, looking at her, saying, “Yes, she’s home. No, I’ll call you,” and the silent news footage started over again with the fire. He hung up.
She put her hands on his shoulders and said, “I’m sorry.”
But the picture was a bright-haired woman in a blue hat being led to a police car in handcuffs. The woman was Angela Park.
She said, “What is going on?”
The silent screen said Arson Suspect.
His eyes never blinked. His face spoke, only his mouth moving.
The words were, “Did you smoke a cigarette?”
When he said it, she could smell the stink of cigarette.
“I was just at the funeral,” she said. “I thought about you.” And it seemed like she should take him in her arms.
Then she said, “Angela Park?”
“She turned herself in,” he said. “She said she set the fire.”
That was too weird. That had to be all wrong. She wouldn’t start a fire. It must be hard to start a fire that would burn down a whole building. She didn’t think Angela could even figure out how to do it.
Things happened really fast after that, and all Pattianne knew for sure was they just kept getting worse. The Christmas tree leaned outside next to the front steps and got iced over. She set the doohickeys for hanging lights on the counter and poked through the trash until she found the receipt so she could return them to Sears.
Michael decided they would drive back to New Jersey, stay for the whole Christmas break. That they needed to be home.
Elizabeth was in a dark mood. She’d ended up with Bullfrog because Frankie said he was moving to New York, and she was pissed and sad because she thought Joseph might move there with him. She said, “That dog drools, and he smells. And sleeps. That’s about it.” She said she was a cat person. She said, “Joseph can talk me into anything.”
Pattianne felt bad. It was her fault. She’d outed them, and she didn’t know if Elizabeth knew, if Joseph or Frankie knew. The store was busy. She found herself waiting for the road worker. She felt closer to him than when he’d actually been there, in the store, just because now she knew his name.
She didn’t smoke another cigarette.
Michael left the
house early and came home late, after dinnertime, three days in a row. When he was in the house, he looked stiff and too handsome and unreal. Being home alone was the only thing that felt right, and that didn’t feel good, it felt all broody and low. She would get there and turn on lights and turn up the heat. The first night she made chicken cacciatore. The next night she made shrimp stir-fry. The third night she opened a bottle of pinot noir and ate cold chicken cacciatore standing in front of the refrigerator. Halfway through the bottle of pinot noir, she started crying and just went to bed. Loving him felt like years ago.
In the morning she got up after he was gone, with a headache, a hangover, and puffy ugly eyes. She’d started her period. She ached. She had cramps. She changed the sheets and wandered around her house like it was bigger than it was. She never had cramps. The leftover shrimp smelled like a goldfish bowl Jen used to have on her dresser. Just a few tampons rattled in the box. They barely hid the packets of pills. She could run errands, buy a box of tampons, return the doohickeys to Sears. She got out the bag with the poinsettia on it and put them and the receipt in it, little boxes down there in the bottom of the big bag, and that made her cry too, the boxes looked sad and small down there. She hadn’t even turned her blue lights on again.
The sky was solid and low and gray, and comforting. She read part of an Elmore Leonard until she remembered the plot, and then she went back to bed. The bedroom was dark, and she turned on the small lamp on the table, its light small and warm and yellow and no good for reading. Life felt separate, like it was all happening somewhere else and she was supposed to know where.
She left for the bookstore. Just walking out of the house felt good, but as soon as she was down the block where she couldn’t look back and see it, she wanted to be back there.
