Rules of the Road

by Joan Bauer

  “Mrs. Gladstone, Alice, are you all right?”

  Mrs. Gladstone took a faltering step toward me. I reached my hand to help her.

  “What is it?”

  Her shoulders heaved in sadness. She sat down on the bed, overcome.

  She bent over.

  Alice cried harder.

  “Mrs. Gladstone . . .”

  “It’s Harry Bender,” she said finally, choking back tears. “He was in a car accident. Hit head-on by a drunk driver.” She shook her old head in disbelief. “My Lord, Jenna, he’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 22

  I sat at the Halverston Funeral Home with Mrs. Gladstone and Alice in “the viewing room.” That’s what the sniveling funeral director had called it and I instantly hated him for using that term. He should have said, “Here’s the place where everyone is paying their last respects to Harry Bender, the greatest shoe salesman in the world.” Calling a place like that the viewing room made it sound like we were going to see a movie instead of a person we loved cut down in his prime on a mission of mercy.

  I bent over, crying. The tears kept coming and the longer I cried, the longer I needed to keep at it.

  I couldn’t believe how much you can love a person you’ve only just met.

  I hadn’t looked long at the big wooden casket with the flag of Texas draped over it. Sad people were filing past. The men were holding their hats in their hands and the women were dabbing their eyes, but I mostly looked at the leather pumps and western boots slowly moving by. I knew if I looked at the casket with Harry dead and lifeless in it, I would have to leave and I really couldn’t handle any of this alone. I needed to stay in this room, surrounded by shoe people.

  Mrs. Bender looked like she was being held up by sticks. Her face was a mess. The front of her blue dress was wet from sobbing. A man who looked a little like Harry was helping her stand. Every once in a while, someone would just break down loudly and the weeping would fill the room, echoing the loss and sorrow of every person there.

  “Lord, have mercy,” a woman cried out, “struck down by the very people he was trying to save.” Her husband helped her outside.

  A man said to a woman that Harry was being buried in his Tony Lama boots that had the lone star of Texas handstitched on the sides, like a cowboy coming home to rest.

  Mrs. Gladstone sat stiff and small. Alice was all cried out. We sat there for I don’t know how long as Harry’s friends and family filed by and then another wave of weeping would wash over me as I remembered Harry and all the hope he brought into a room just by breathing.

  It was 10:27. I still hadn’t gone up to the casket. Mrs. Bender left with the man who looked like Harry. Only a few people were left in the room. The funeral director peeked in like he wanted to go home.

  “Go,” Mrs. Gladstone said to me. “Say good-bye to your friend.”

  I stood up, weak from the tears, walked slowly up the aisle to the dark wooden casket surrounded by flowering cactus trees, saw Harry’s head lying there, eyes closed, his cheeks sucked in and all made up, his brown hair too perfect, his mouth sealed shut, it seemed. He looked smaller without the Stetson.

  I looked away.

  Say good-bye to your friend.

  The tears came so hard and from such a deep, ancient place in me, I held onto the casket to steady myself. I was crying big for Harry, sure, but somehow I knew I was crying for all the places in life where dreams die and people get ripped from this earth. I was crying for unfairness and pain and loss and death that comes in so many forms. I was crying for my grandmother who had died to her old self and who would never know that part again, for my father who had lost himself to drinking. I was crying for people who had problems so big they couldn’t see them, for myself and Faith and how the father we both needed was so messed up, he could never be who we so hoped he would be. I was crying for my mother and the nightmare she had lived trying to hold things together. I was crying for all the times I felt guilty because my father couldn’t stop drinking, which I know wasn’t my fault, but the rawness of it, the feelings that I should have been able to help him, but couldn’t, burst from me with such stinging, ringing clearness.

  I looked down into Harry’s dead Texas face. I didn’t want to remember him this way. I wanted to remember him booming from the Bass display in the downtown Dallas Gladstone’s. I wanted to see him throw back his head and laugh that brave laugh that sends the darkness flying back where it belongs. That’s what you should have in the viewing room. A movie of the dead person’s life.

  I touched the lapel on his dark blue jacket.

  I couldn’t say anything, so I didn’t even try. But if I could have, I would have said, “I wish I had known you all my life, Harry Bender . . .but I know this . . .I’ll never forget you.”

  I was in the Cadillac with Mrs. Gladstone and Alice, following the funeral procession past the winding gravel road to the back of the Last Roundup Cemetery and Crematorium. Harry Bender’s grave was by a little hill overlooking a field of sagebrush. Last night Mrs. Bender said the field was going to get turned into a duck pond by next spring, but I think Harry would have preferred sagebrush to duck poop any day. I think he should have been buried somewhere in the mall near the store he loved, but a grave by the ATM machine outside Gladstone’s might have killed the festive buying mood and Harry would have hated that.

  I’d told myself I wasn’t going to cry and I didn’t until Mrs. Gladstone, Alice, and I walked to the freshly dug grave where all the people were gathered. That’s when I saw the headstone.

  HERE LIES HARRY BENDER—HE GAVE IT HIS BEST SHOD.

  It was the ultimate farewell to a true shoe person.

  I crossed my arms tight like that would hold me together somehow, and lost it, crying deep and full like I’d lost my dearest friend. I cried for a long time and decided for once in my life not to keep the sadness manageable. It wasn’t manageable. It was awful.

  The Texas heat was a killer and my tears were mixed with sweat. My face and hands felt sticky. People were crowding in around me. Mrs. Gladstone grabbed my hand. Alice bent her head low.

  There were only some parts of the funeral I could focus on.

  Mrs. Bender asked everyone to wear bright colors to celebrate Harry’s life. I wore my bright yellow jacket.

  Murray Castlebaum had flown in from Chicago and gave a speech about “the great Mahatma” and all the shoe people put their hands together and bowed down.

  A minister said that we don’t understand God’s ways and that Harry lost his life to the very forces he was fighting against.

  A nun said Harry had personally saved hundreds of people from alcoholism and he wasn’t going to heaven alone.

  Then people were coming up to the grave from the left and right to say something about Harry Bender.

  A woman from Shreveport said that if people were just wearing sandals in heaven, Harry would get them all in leather walkers before they knew what hit them.

  A man named Peds Jawarski said he’d personally witnessed Harry’s greatest moment in the shoe business, when he’d waited on Imelda Marcos (the wife of the fallen president of the Philippines and a famous shoe lover) who bought thirty-three pairs of shoes from him in two hours. It took two servants to get the boxes in her stretch limo that was parked outside.

  A man named Monk Fischer said Harry was such a great salesman, nothing could stop a sale. “It was the height of flu season,” Monk said, sniffling. “Harry’d just written up a six-shoe order, but he was looking pretty green around the gills. The woman signed the Visa slip, walked out the store, the last customer of the night, and it wasn’t until then that the great man vomited. All over the register, too, but he held that sales slip over his head. Harry would never have puked in the middle of a transaction.”

  Mrs. Gladstone said there was never a better man, never a more magnanimous employee, and she would be forever grateful to God for calling Harry Bender to sell shoes.

  I didn’t say anything because I was crying t
oo hard. Murray was sitting next to me on the folding chairs that had been set up.

  “You’ve got something to say, kid, you should say it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can.”

  Murray gave my elbow a tug and scrunched over so I could get by.

  “I don’t know these people,” I said to him.

  “So?”

  I looked around. Elden was sitting behind me, staring at me hard. He was the only one who didn’t look sad.

  That got me up.

  I walked to the front.

  Stood by the podium, my legs shaking, the tears coming.

  A man was saying how Harry had lent him money when he was down and out. He stepped back from the podium. I walked forward, clutching my Kleenex.

  “I only knew Harry Bender for a week,” I said. “But I loved him like he was my father.” I was crying pretty bad now, but I looked straight at Elden for the next part. “He knew about selling shoes and what makes business special and how to treat people. He wasn’t afraid of saying the truth, wasn’t afraid of telling people about the things he’d learned, about the things that almost ruined him. Those were the things that probably became his greatest strength. By talking about them and turning from them, he taught me to not be afraid of the darkness.” I stared at Elden who was staring at me. Everybody from Gladstone’s was staring at Elden now.

  I used my height. “So I’m not going to be.”

  Elden looked away.

  Murray Castlebaum said, “Amen.”

  I squared my shoulders and sat back down. Everyone around me smiled. Mrs. Gladstone patted my hand. Alice whispered, “I never had kids, but I would have wanted a daughter like you, Jenna. No changes.” I held her hand.

  A priest who was Harry’s friend got up and walked slowly to the casket. He made the sign of the cross, pain and sadness carved across his face, took off the small silver cross he wore around his neck, kissed it, and placed it on the casket.

  “Rest well, Harry Bender,” he said softly. “We’ve all been made finer for having known you.”

  CHAPTER 23

  It was five days after Harry Bender’s funeral. The stockholders meeting was tomorrow at three o’clock and there was no way Mrs. Gladstone was going to win. It was hard to care about that anymore.

  No one knew who Harry had been going to talk to the night he died.

  No one knew the plan he was cooking up to get more votes at the meeting.

  All his power died with him, it seemed.

  Death is a strange thing. Some people die flat out in the midst of something important like Harry, others, like my dad and grandmother, seem to follow a slow path toward it from such different places, taking another step toward dying each day.

  I’d been checking the stock market listings every day in the paper because it helped me think about something else. Mrs. Gladstone was right—the price of my shares had been climbing, except for Monday, when the market dipped and Gladstone’s stock went down a dollar twenty-five per share, which meant I’d lost sixty-two dollars and fifty cents in one day without even getting out of bed. It gained a full two dollars the next day, but I wasn’t sure if I had the raw courage it took to be a stockholder.

  Mrs. Gladstone was angry at Harry’s death. She said there was enough unfairness in the world without losing Harry Bender in the prime of his life.

  “What did his dying serve?” she shouted.

  Alice shook her head and walked off.

  I said, “I don’t know, Mrs. Gladstone. I just know bad things happen more than I’d like because the world has got more than its share of problems.”

  “Well, it’s not right!”

  “I know it’s not, m’am, I—”

  She rammed her cane on the floor. “I don’t need platitudes!”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “What?”

  “This is a hard time for everyone, Mrs. Gladstone, and—”

  “Enough!” She stormed from the living room, but it felt like she was still standing there. Anger hangs in places sometimes long after the person is gone. I stomped my foot hard because I had to do something. I hate it when people stop a conversation and I have more to say.

  My grandma used to say that some things in life don’t have an explanation. What kept her going was believing there was more good in the world than there was bad.

  “Sometimes you have to look real hard for it,” she said. “But I swear to you, Jenna, it’s there.”

  I promised her I’d look.

  And I’ve been looking ever since.

  When my grandmother had to be put in Shady Oaks, she got Gladys as her roommate.

  When Mom started the nightshift, she got time and a half pay.

  When Dad came back to town, I was pushed out the door to Texas and got to know Mrs. Gladstone and met Harry Bender and Alice.

  You never know where the road’s going to take you. I think sometimes it’s less important that you get to your destination than the sidetrips you take along the way.

  I walked down the hall to Mrs. Gladstone’s room and knocked on the door.

  “What?” she shouted.

  “I’m going to make a grilled cheese sandwich, Mrs. Gladstone, and wondered if you wanted one.”

  Silence.

  “I make the best grilled cheese sandwich in the world,” I added humbly.

  The door opened. She was standing there in camel slacks and a cream-colored shirt. “I haven’t had a grilled cheese in years.”

  “This is your lucky day,” I said and headed toward the kitchen.

  I stood at the long tiled kitchen counter, brushing olive oil on thick oatmeal bread; I spread the other side with honey mustard, layered on cheddar cheese, tomato slices, and sautéed Canadian bacon, placed a slice of oatmeal bread on top, put the two sandwiches in a cast-iron skillet sizzling with butter. Mrs. Gladstone leaned against the opposite wall, watching me. Never miss a good opportunity to shut up, Harry Bender had said. I kept quiet, flipped the sandwiches when they got perfectly browned on one side as Mrs. Gladstone cleared her old voice. We were standing there, as different as two human beings on this earth could be, and yet we were connected.

  I put the sandwiches on two plates, cut them at an angle to show off, put them on the round glass kitchen table by the window that overlooked the rock garden. Our kitchen table at home overlooked the fire escape.

  Mrs. Gladstone came to the table slowly. She’d been moving slower since Harry Bender died. We all had. Grieving sucks energy from a person’s core. She took a bite of the sandwich; her face lit up.

  “Superb.”

  I tried mine. It was, too.

  She said, “If Harry were alive, Jenna, what do you think he’d be doing right now?”

  I checked my watch. Four-thirteen. Wednesday. “He’d be selling shoes, Mrs. Gladstone, doing his level best to make you rich right up until the store closed.”

  She laughed.

  “And he wouldn’t be giving up. He’d be talking to people, thinking about what he was going to say at the stockholders meeting. I think being in AA for as long as he was, he got used to seeing all kinds of problems turn around and that gave him courage.”

  Mrs. Gladstone ate the last bite of her sandwich. “I’m about to lose my company, but I certainly am well fed.”

  I put my sandwich down. “Mrs. Gladstone, I don’t think you realize how strong you are.”

  She looked at me irritated, but I couldn’t stop.

  “I know your hip hurts and you’ve got that operation coming up—I mean your strength as a person. I know what it’s like to be tossed aside by an important person, Mrs. Gladstone. It makes you think you’re not worth fighting for, that people can do whatever they like and you don’t fight back or tell them how you’re feeling. You just keep being a good sport, hoping the person will change, while people walk all over you. I let my dad do that. I just took it like I was powerless, like I didn’t have a right to be angry and say no.”

 
; “And do you really think telling him would have changed anything, Jenna?”

  “Probably not. I don’t know. But I think speaking the truth would have changed me.” I was standing now, waving my napkin. “Because I’m angry, Mrs. Gladstone! I’ve been afraid of it for so long. Afraid that if I let him know how I felt, he’d hate me, like I was supposed to be perfect and make up for the fact that he had all these problems!”

  Mrs. Gladstone was studying her plate like the answer was in the blue and white flowered pattern. “I’m angry, too,” she said quietly.

  “Then go to that meeting tomorrow and kick some butt, ma’am. That’s what we’re in Texas for, isn’t it?”

  She stared at the plate. “I don’t know anymore . . .”

  “And wave the cane around, Mrs. Gladstone. That cane’s a real killer.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Whack.

  The killer cane came down on the banister.

  Mrs. Gladstone announced, “I’d rather eat live snakes than go to this meeting!”

  It was three-thirty—Thursday. The stockholders meeting started in one and a half hours. I was standing in Mrs. Gladstone’s kitchen, wearing my green shirt, khaki skirt, and 11⁄2-inch-heeled pumps. Mrs. Gladstone stuck a bony thumb toward the door, which meant we were leaving now or else.

  We walked out the door. Alice was waiting for us on the porch. The heat was mean and heavy. I’d washed the Cadillac myself early this morning, but nobody noticed. Mrs. Gladstone said, “Let’s get this over with.”

  Alice put her hand around Mrs. Gladstone’s shoulder, but Mrs. Gladstone shook it off. I helped her in the backseat. She was wearing a red two-piece suit with a striped blouse, and sat there trying to be tough, writing notes in her blue leather folder with angry movements.

  Alice said, “Madeline, honey . . .” and got glared at.

  I started up the Cadillac. “You sure look ready for anything, Mrs. Gladstone,” I said and headed down the driveway as she grunted. It wasn’t until I took a quick peek at her in the rearview mirror that I saw her smile.