We groaned. Children on both sides of the street jumped, hands flying up to their scarred ears. The baby next to me started to cry.
“He got a deal,” I said by way of explanation to the miffed mother. “The horn needs some work.”
“Lookin’ good,” Matt yelled to Tank.
“Darn SHOOTIN’!” Tank yelled back. “God bless the USA, BABY!”
Amos waved from his perch in the driver’s seat. He wore several layers of tank tops, all in camo print and a size too snug. He yelled, “This big rig can plow ten acres in ten minutes! It is not to be fathomed!”
I gave him a thumbs-up when he cranked “We Are the Champions” on the radio.
Matt and I watched them lumber past, scaring another set of children a block southward.
“Someone should tell Ye Olde Amish to use less gel in his hair,” Matt said as we watched them recede. “It’s starting to look painful.”
I sat down on the curb again just as the middle-school scrapbooking club starting chucking Laffy Taffy from the back of a pickup. “It’s growing on me,” I said. “And it’s not as spiky as it looks.”
“What, you’ve touched it?” Matt caught a piece of strawberry taffy and started to unwrap it.
“I guess I have,” I said, tipping my chin to think. “I can’t place the exact moment, but I do know how it feels. Now, the DayGlo clothes and the tendency to practice club dancing in stores and restaurants—those things will need to stop. But change is slow, Matt.” I swept my arm toward the bleachers. “If there’s one thing this holiday teaches us, it’s to be patient when a revolution is at hand.”
Matt snorted, which I took as a prompt to continue speaking.
“For over two hundred years we’ve cultivated this dream called the United States of America, Matt DuPage, and still there are trials. Still there are burdens. Still there are struggles for freedom. And yet,” I paused, index finger pointing skyward, “yet there is always hope. Hope for a new tomorrow, hope for victory in the wars we wage, hope that things will change for the better.”
A silver-haired woman behind me poked me with the end of her umbrella. “Missy, if I have to hear one more word about hope, I’m going to be sick. I did not vote for Barack Obama, and you shouldn’t have either.” She sniffed and gave me another poke in the ribs.
I winced and turned back to Matt. “Did I ask for that?”
“Absolutely, you did,” he said and finished off my funnel cake and my smoothie without even asking.
Mrs. H. was in rare form, even for her.
“Perhaps I should submit my request in writing, like an insurance claim.” She beat the cushions on the living room couch until I thought they might start to bleed. “I could write, ‘Dear Sir,’ because I sure wouldn’t use his given name.”
I took a tiny scoop of pralines and cream out of my ice-cream dish, not wanting to hurry things along. “So,” I said slowly, “you wouldn’t write ‘Dear Arthur DuPage’?”
She stared at me, stony-eyed and peeved, as she had for most of my childhood. “No, I would not. There are some words better left unsaid.” She straightened her shoulders and looked off into the distance.
“Ah, self-righteousness. The linchpin of all dying relationships.”
“Self-righ—! Dying!” She was sputtering.
I licked a slurp of caramel off my spoon.
“You listen here.” Mrs. H. strode to my spot on the couch and pointed a Swiffer handle at my forehead. “If you knew what he did, you would not be calling me self-righteous. You’d be calling me”—she stopped and then the light bulb dawned—“a martyr! That’s what! And second, this relationship is not dying. It’s dead and gone and has been since 1969.”
“Ooh, Summer of Love.”
Mrs. H. looked at me with disdain. “Not all of us were hippies.”
I squinted my eyes and tried to reframe Mrs. H. with fringed boots and long dingy hair.
“That was a good decision,” I said. “So Arthur must have been a hippie. Is that why you’re mad? He wanted you to smoke pot, but you were a good girl who wouldn’t be caught dead with Mary and her Jane anywhere near your lips? You passed on grass? Said no to the giggle weed? No ganja, no griffa, no gunga? Wacky terbacky go home?”
I stopped, and she stared.
“Nellie Augusta Lourdes Monroe, you tell me the truth. Do you smoke marijuana?”
I let my head fall back on the couch cushions and sighed. When, oh, when would these people take me and my job as an investigator of crime seriously? If I didn’t hone up on drug slang around here, who would?
“No,” I said slowly. “I believe we were talking about you, Mrs. H. Listen.” I put my bowl on the coffee table but returned it to my lap when I saw her glare. “After all these years, don’t you think you’d feel better just telling someone what happened between you and He Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken? Think of how much better you’d feel to let this secret out in the open.”
To my surprise, she didn’t leave the room. Instead she fiddled with the end of the Swiffer, seeming to consider my offer.
After a minute, I tried once more. “Forty years is a long time, Mrs. H.”
She sat down carefully beside me. I scooted over to give her ample room, but she remained perched on the edge.
Clearing her throat she began. “I’ll tell you. But.” And she leaned over to grab my earlobe between two fingers. She pinched, and I whined. “You keep this to yourself, or I’ll find ways to make you wish you had.”
“Sheesh!” I rubbed my ear. “I’m twenty years old, Mrs. H. Do you think you could do away with the pinching?”
“We’ll see,” she said and leaned back slightly. “It’s actually a short story. When I was in high school, Ar—he and I were friends. Good friends, really. We both played in the marching band, he on trumpet, I on clarinet.”
“Cute.”
“Not really. Arthur—I mean—” She shot me a look. “I’ll use his name but only for the purposes of storytelling. After this, we go back to avoidance, got it?”
I nodded. “It’s like when Prince didn’t want a name but a symbol. Too cumbersome.”
Confusion lighted on her face but was quickly dismissed. “So we played in band together, studied together, even went to a few dances together when we couldn’t get other dates. The problem came during our junior year, the semester before I started going steady with Mr. H., God rest his soul.”
I realize to the outside observer that referring to one’s husband with a “mister” in front might seem a bit formal. But remember that this woman didn’t use any names at all for people she didn’t like. “Mister” was a term of endearment.
She smoothed her starched skirt. “That spring, Arthur started acting very strange. He wrote my phone number on the boys’ restroom wall, and I got crank calls for a full month before the janitor repainted. He was dating a snotty girl at the time, Francine Waterson, who was beautiful and mean, a vicious combination in high school. She made me her pet project of irritation.” She sat up primly and smoothed her skirt. “Francine was rather developed, whereas I was a late bloomer, so she used that difference between us as a point of ridicule.” She looked over her spectacles at me, eyebrows raised.
I stared.
“What?” she said. “Didn’t think I was in tune to those kinds of things just because I don’t care to see you prancing about without a shred of modesty? Pshaw.” She sniffed. “I tried talking with Arthur but he’d just laugh it off, tell me I was too sensitive. All this, though, all this I could have forgiven if he had stopped there. But he did not.” Her eyes were large and sad, and all of the sudden I got a bit nervous. I knew it was my job to squeeze the truth from people, but maybe I should have left Mrs. H. alone. What if she were a part of a crime ring? What if she were running from the FBI, and we’d been harboring a fugitive for year
s without knowing it? What if she were actually a man?
“All this I could have forgiven.” She took a deep breath. “But then Arthur asked me to go to our junior prom. I was surprised, seeing how he’d been practically humiliating himself to impress Francine. They’d broken up, was all he said. But I’d missed him. So I took him for his word and went to buy a dress.” She held her hands together, grip firm, in her lap. “I’ll never forget the way I felt in that dress. Empire waist with a satin sash, sky blue to match my eyes. There was a lace overlay on the bodice and it fell, all swishy, to the floor.” She swallowed hard and then looked at me, almost as if she needed me to help her finish.
“What happened?” I asked softly.
She looked past me as she answered. “He never came.”
I waited while the arrogant chirp of a blue jay pushed through the front porch glass.
“I stood in my bedroom, waiting for the doorbell so I could walk down the stairs in all my glory. Then I waited in the living room, watching out the front window. Then I waited on the front porch. I remember how my hair felt sticky with hair spray in the humidity and how my shoes started to ache, but I just stood until my daddy came out to tell me he’d be happy to escort me to the dance if I’d like.”
I felt like a deflated balloon. All those years of wondering, and now I wished I couldn’t see poor Mrs. H. in her 1969 prom dress, stood up and wilting.
“I found out that Monday at school that Francine had called at the last minute, and he’d taken her instead.”
“Ouch,” I said. Bookkeeper gone bad, I thought. Still, was it wrong that I’d hoped for something a bit more salacious? I mean, I had looked through microfiche in search of the answer to this mystery. I deserved the latitude to hope for something gritty, right? Maybe not the Witness Protection Program, but money laundering? White-collar crime? At the very least, an illegitimate child?
“It was very hurtful,” she said, spine curved. “He’d been my friend for years, and all of the sudden, my feelings were less important than making a vapid girl laugh.”
“What did you do?”
“I ignored him for the rest of high school. He called, he stopped by, particularly when Francine Waterson dumped him for Alan Nussbaum that summer. But I had none of it.” She tilted her chin. “I was not a woman who forgave and forgot.”
Atta girl, I thought. Better to burn with resentment for the rest of your life.
“And now,” she said, pulling a stack of folded papers from the pocket of her skirt, “he won’t leave me alone. Every morning, I find one of these dropped through my mail slot.” She shoved them to me.
I opened the one on top. “Dear sweet, stubborn Lavinia,” it read, “will we die with you mad at me? Love, Arthur.” The second: “Lavinia, I still know you after all these years. And I’m still very, very sorry. Forgive me? I’m starting to grow long eyebrows, which means I’m on the down slope. Love, Arthur.” The third: “Lavinia, remember when we skinny dipped in Crawford’s pond?”
I looked up.
“I know,” she said. She shook her head in dismay. “He’s relentless.”
“You skinny dipped with a boy in high school?” Unprofessional, I know, but it was a captivating image I was having a hard time shaking.
She pursed her lips and snatched back the stack of papers. “Well, I think that concludes our Dr. Phil moment of the decade. Don’t tell anyone or else.” She sounded much less menacing than at the start of our conversation.
My eyes followed her as she made her way to the dining room, dust rag at the ready yards before the archway.
“Thanks for spilling it,” I called after her.
She raised her rag in salute without turning around.
I stood, and a splotch of white on the hardwood caught my eye. I opened it.
“Lavinia Loo,” it read, “I won’t give up, so you might as well. Yours, Arthur.”
15
Field Work
“You’re late.”
Granny Mary stood behind the screen door to the kitchen and scowled.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The leopard-print stockings stretched taut against my legs. I’d pulled them on in a hurry and could feel a twist of fabric that was acting as a tourniquet on my left leg. “I worked this morning and—”
Mary held up her hand. “It does not matter why, only that it is true. This is a good thing to remember in most situations.” She waved me aside so she could open the door. “We garden today. The others are already there.”
I fell into step beside her. “Gardening? As in outside?” My question came out like a lament. At twelve-thirty on a July afternoon, I’d already dreaded a kitchen cooled only by the stares of my instructor. A garden visit seemed better timed for, say, harvest. Pumpkins, I thought. Let’s wait for the pumpkins.
“Church meeting was at our house Sunday. Sixty people came and ate. We need to catch up on weeding, and you will help. Even English people who don’t know anything can weed the plants. Maybe you do not eat plants, but you can weed them.” At this, she dissolved into laughter. She slipped into Pennsylvania Dutch, sprinkling her laughter with phrases that were, apparently, much funnier than I could appreciate.
“Yeah, yeah, dumb English,” I muttered. She was too busy with self-congratulation to hear me. We passed a barn with wide plank siding. A group of junior-high-aged boys stood in the mammoth doorframe. The black brims of their hats swiveled toward us. One of them smiled, but the rest just stared with mouths open.
Mary barked something fierce at them, and they went scurrying into the barn.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“The manure pile needs attention from boys who stare at women.” She puffed up a bit, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her they were probably more interested in me. For one thing, I was the only one in racy stockings, constrictive though they may have been. Also, my hair was pretty awesome that day, enough to dispel even the subtlest suggestion of Fraggle Rock. The key was copious amounts of product, more than I really want to describe here. Just know it was worth it.
We walked along a fence and got a healthy whiff of pig.
“Look, there are the new piggies.” Granny Mary pointed. Strange, hearing a diminutive term from her. I decided to go with it.
“Oh, they’re so cute,” I said. “Look at their little snouts.” In a pack, they came snorting and waddling over to us.
“Nette schweine,” Granny murmured. She petted one of them through the slats of the fence. “My belly already rumbles to think of eating you, skin first.”
“Mmm,” I said through a frozen smile at little Wilbur. Granny rose from her haunches and kept walking. I mouthed “Sorry” as we left. I was no PETA member, but did she have to describe his death to him?
“Hello,” she called as we rounded the corner behind a shed. Sarah, Katie, and Elizabeth straightened from their weeding stances and waved. It took a moment to make eye contact with all three of them because this garden was not the quaint patch Nona had tended for a few years when I was a kid. There, we could have reached out and touched each other at any distance within the plot. This monster, however, had the square footage of a Super Walmart. Sarah was knee-deep in sweet corn, planted all along the back border. Katie smiled at me from a good two hundred yards away, carrying a basket of green things amid other green things. I was too far away to make out what. And Elizabeth was closest to us, on her knees picking at the miscreants growing around a petunia border.
“Good grief,” I said. “How many people does this feed?”
“Nine family members and a winter of company.” Granny Mary’s voice lilted with pride. “We grow raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. Lettuce, spinach, and kohlrabi just for fun.”
We walked toward Katie, who had kneeled carefully between two rows of peas.
“Green be
ans, lima beans,” Mary continued, “carrots, potatoes, sweet corn, watermelon, muskmelon, onion, peppers, yellow squash, zucchini, tomatoes, rhubarb, and peanuts. Those are for fun purposes as well.”
Crazy Amish. Always throwing kohlrabi and peanut frat parties. Fun!
“Katie,” Granny said, “you will show Nellie Monroe how to weed around raspberries while you pick.” She raised her eyebrows. “Keep your eyes watching her.”
“Yes, Grandmother Mary,” Katie said. She deposited her full basket at Mary’s feet and picked up two empty galvanized buckets. She looped her arm through mine. “To the raspberries.”
I smiled but stopped short when the granny cleared her throat.
“Thank you,” I said quietly and tried looking depressed as Katie and I walked off together. When I thought we were out of earshot, I said, “I love raspberries.”
“Shh,” Katie said. She turned her head slightly and paused. “She listens and watches still. Wait to speak until I say.”
We walked through rows of beans, their skinny Wicked Witch fingers poking our calves as we passed. Through a spot of lacy carrot tops and a jungle of rhubarb, we reached the easternmost border of the garden. Beyond us lay neat rows of soybeans, their leafy umbrellas nodding like debutantes in the warm breeze.
Katie turned, facing the way we’d come and what we could still see of Granny. I followed suit, squinting through the bushes. Granny Mary sat on a chair under an oak tree. She pointed at Elizabeth and issued an order in percussive Pennsylvania Dutch.
Katie giggled. “I am so happy she sent me with you. Poor Elizabeth. She will have two times the instruction. Here.” She pointed to the plants, peppered with ripe fruit. “Pick the ones you would want to eat.” She popped two in her mouth and grinned. “And eat as many as you like.”
I pulled one off the vine. The berry was warm on my tongue, collapsing in a puddle of juice as soon as I bit. “Mmm,” I said, shaking my head. “Awesome.”
“Awesome?” Katie pulled off a handful and let them drop carefully into her bucket. “This means it is really great?”
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