“Oh yes.” Lisette’s voice was primed for sarcasm. “Beef stew. Quite the culinary accomplishment.”
“That’s enough with you.” Molly gestured with the knife, a small chunk of potato clinging to its tip. “I’ll have you know I had something a wee bit grander planned before those ones come trampin’ in with Sleepin’ Beauty upstairs.”
“Speaking of which,” Vada said, grateful for the change in subject, “do we have any idea what his name is? Did he have any sort of identification?”
“Sure’n I’d be the last to know if he did,” Molly huffed.
“Perhaps we’ll have to go through his pockets later, when we,” Vada shot another cautionary glance toward her youngest sister and mouthed, undress him.
“I’m not an idiot.” Lisette had resumed reading her page. “And there’s no need to worry—I can’t imagine anything more disgusting than looking at that man naked. So you both feel free to keep the bathing party all to yourselves.”
Molly and Vada laughed as the last of the potatoes were peeled and the skins scooped into a bowl to be taken out later to compost the garden. Molly then set aside the paring knife in favor of her large butcher knife and began turning each potato into bite-sized chunks with just one or two decisive blows.
Lisette, not taking her eyes off her book, held out an open hand, and Vada knew exactly what to do. She snatched a potato from Molly’s un-chopped pile and cut it in half, lengthwise, then trimmed the rounded side off, leaving her a full-length flat slice.
She took the saltshaker from the middle of the table and shook a generous amount onto the glistening white potato slice and wordlessly dropped it into Lissy’s outstretched hand. Soon the only sounds in the kitchen were those of Molly’s knife, Lisette’s crunch, and Vada’s fingers drumming on the heavy wooden table. Soon added to that were Hazel’s footsteps.
“Doc says it’s fine.” She reached over Molly’s shoulder, grabbed a chunk of potato, and salted it for herself. “And he wrote up a list of things we’ll need to get for…him.”
“Let me see.” Vada took the scrap of paper from Hazel’s hand and squinted, trying to better focus on her father’s scrawl. “Two yards thick cotton batting and three waxed sheets? Why three?”
“If it turns out he lasts more’n a day, don’t want him soakin’ up the mattress.”
“Oh, my.” Vada shook her head, trying to dispel the image. She refrained from asking the purpose of a sea sponge and cornstarch. “Hazel, why don’t you and Lissy go right now and get these things so you can be back by the time Molly and I have him ready.” She reached for Hazel’s hand and ignored Molly’s scowl when Hazel flinched at her touch.
“Why do I have to go?” Lisette licked the salt from her fingers. “I’ll never get my homework done.”
“Not at the rate you’re going. You’ve been on the same page for thirty minutes.”
“Come on, Lissy.” The tender tone in Hazel’s voice clutched at Vada’s own heart. “We can get an egg cream at the drugstore.”
“Don’t you be spoilin’ your dinner, now.” Molly got up from the table and dropped the sliced potatoes into the pot of simmering water, heedless of the splashes that sizzled on the stove. “Though you might stop by Moravek’s and get a cream cake for dessert. It’s a hard day we’ve had, and I think we’re due a little sweetnin’.”
“I’ll go get my hat.”
Vada watched Hazel walk out of the kitchen, noticing she’d changed back into her own wide, sensible shoes. Vada wanted to take time to warn her not to say anything to Lisette or Althea or anybody about their lunch with Alex Triplehorn, but the sadness that emanated even from her slumped shoulders told a story that Hazel had chosen to keep buried deep inside. At least for now. And if nothing else, the young man upstairs was proving to be a welcome distraction.
“And you, littlest miss,” Molly said, busily crumbling herbs into her stew, “take them peelin’s out to the compost heap.”
“Can’t Vada do it?”
“Vada’s got her own unpleasant chore waitin’. Now go ’fore your sister gets back downstairs.”
Lisette sighed and pushed herself away from the table. She somehow managed to hold the bowl of peelings with just two fingers, the others distended in a dainty display of distaste. Holding the bowl as far away from her as possible, she opened the door leading out to the backyard.
Then came the commotion—Lisette’s high-pitched scream, the clattering of the bowl, the scattering of the peelings, and the boy in the Spider uniform falling into the kitchen.
Vada jumped up from her seat and was standing by her sister’s side before the bowl came to a spinning stop on the floor.
The poor Spider, looking equally confused and embarrassed, immediately began to scoop up the peelings to put them back in the bowl.
“I’m dreadful sorry, Miss Allenhouse.” He acknowledged Vada, then Lisette. “Miss Allenhouse.” He looked over his shoulder and up at the looming Molly Keegan and began scraping up the peels a little faster.
When the last one had been dug up from between the floor boards, he brought himself unsteadily to his feet and raked the dark curly hair away from his face, leaving behind a tiny bit of peel in the process.
To Vada’s horror, Lisette reached out and plucked the peel straight from the boy’s hair and shook her hand, sending it fluttering back into the bowl. “Just what were you doing out there?”
“I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t go not knowing if he… How is he?”
“He hasn’t woken yet,” Vada said gently. Something about the boy touched her; everything about him seemed hungry. “Perhaps you’d like to stay for supper, Mr.…”
“Cupid.” He extended a hand, looked at it, wiped it on his pants, then extended it again.
Lisette snickered. “Cupid? Honestly. Of all the—”
He stumbled over his words to answer. “No, honestly. I mean, yes, that’s my honest name. Kenny Cupid. Sometimes they just call me Kid, ’cause I’m so young. Well, not that young. Almost twenty. But I’m not one of these guys that gets the slick nicknames. Which is a good thing, I guess, since cupid rhymes with—”
“Stupid?”
“Lisette Allenhouse! How could you be so rude?” Vada turned to Kenny. “I do apologize for my younger sister. Sometimes she is just terrible.”
“Like she’s taken over by the devil himself.” Molly spoke over her shoulder, having turned back to her stew.
“Ah yes.” The way Kenny looked at Lisette was nothing short of longing. “But wasn’t Lucifer the fairest of the angels?”
Lisette rolled her eyes. “I don’t have to stand here and take this, you know.” She pointed through the open door out into the yard. “And you can take that right out to the compost pile. It’s a big heap of stinky, festering trash. So you should have no trouble finding it.” She spun on her heel and flounced out of the kitchen.
His eyes never left her, even staying transfixed on the swinging door she left behind. “She’s the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”
“Don’t be fooled by that pretty face,” Vada warned. “This isn’t even her worst behavior.”
He dropped his gaze to stare longingly into the potato peelings. “I guess it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to come to supper after all, then.”
Molly slammed the lid on the pot. “I’ll be decidin’ who stays to dinner and who doesn’t. Now,” she approached, wiping her hands on her apron, “you take those out to the yard, then pick up this bucket an’ the kettle an’ meet me upstairs to help wash up the man. You’ll be sparin’ Miss Vada here the chore no young woman should see.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“An’ do ya have a decent shirt to put on?”
“Not with me, ma’am. But this one’s clean.”
“Then it’ll have to do.” Molly stepped into the mud room briefly to retrieve a large washtub, then made her way to the back steps.
“Don’t be afraid of Molly,” Vada said.
He looked up
, and for the first time, she saw a certain light in his eyes.
“Don’t worry about me, Miss Allenhouse. I haven’t met a fear I couldn’t conquer yet.”
Relieved to be free of the responsibility of bathing the patient, Vada met up with her sisters at the front door with a hastily scribbled note. “While you’re out, will you stop by the theater and give this to Herr Johann? I want him to know that I won’t be coming in this afternoon or this evening for rehearsal.”
Hazel put the final pin in her hat and took the note. “We’ll be back in an hour.”
Vada stood in the empty entryway, unsure exactly what to do, when Molly clumped her way through saying, “An’ look at the mess they’ve made down here. I feel I’ve lived three lives this very day.” She held a length of clumsily folded waterproof tarp under one arm and still carried the empty washtub. The young Kenny Cupid followed close behind, carrying the steaming kettle.
“Are you sure you don’t need my help?” Vada called up after them.
“’Tis not a fit job for a lady.” Molly’s words were no fainter at the top of the stairs than they’d been at the bottom.
Vada escaped to the parlor and slumped into the nearest chair. In truth, nothing she’d done today was fit for a lady. Sneaking off to lunch with a stranger, confronting her mother’s sordid past, kissing Garrison on the corner in the middle of the day. Touching Louis LaFortune.
She sank further into the chair and clutched her own arms at the thought of it. Noticing how thin they were brought forth the memory of the thick strength of the Bridegroom’s biceps. The sound of his lilting, playful accent kept time with the ticking of the mantel clock, and soon her feet were tapping and she was humming the little tune he’d whispered in the ear of the wounded man before they left the room.
Who knew a man could have such a big heart and such broad shoulders? Why, he’d nearly been in tears at the bedside. She’d never seen Garrison—
Garrison.
She jumped up and looked around, as if anybody walking into the room might have been privy to the ideas swimming around in her head. Gracious, she didn’t even want to acknowledge them. What kind of a woman would entertain such thoughts when she had the affections of a warm, generous man such as Garrison? Why, they had an understanding. Practically engaged. They’d declared their love for each other, and sometimes—quite often, actually—Garrison’s kiss was almost as thrilling as what she imagined a kiss from Louis LaFortune would be.
Stop it!
She paced around the room. Compared to most parlors she’d seen, the décor was downright sparse. There were no corner whatnot shelves packed with figurines. Rather, there was a simple, worn sofa and two upholstered wing-back chairs. In the corner by the window, a small round table hosted a chessboard, the players abandoned in the last battle between Hazel and her father.
One tall bookcase was stuffed with various tomes. All of the intricate medical books had been moved down to Doc’s office, lest any of the girls run across an inappropriate anatomical illustration, but a few scientific volumes remained. Althea, once fascinated with insects, had spent hour after silent hour watching them through a magnifying glass, and the Entomological Classification text was just as lovingly tattered as father’s prized copy of David Copperfield.
Visitors often commented that the room lacked “a woman’s touch,” and then seemed embarrassed, given that four women lived in the home. Vada looked at those women now, their photographs lining the mantelshelf above the fireplace. Two on each side of the simple ticking clock. The three older girls had sat for a photo at the time of their graduation. In hers, Vada smiled the sweet, closed smile that brought out the dimple just below her lip. The color of her eyes was lost to the photograph, but she knew its lavender hue was identically reproduced in Hazel, who looked out at her from the next frame. Taken just a year later, this could have been a picture of Vada herself, given Hazel’s slender figure at the time.
Althea remained the tiny wisp of a thing she was in her photograph, where she wore an intricate black dress with tiers and tiers of ruffles. Her hair was parted down the center and rolled on each side with a flower pinned above her left ear. More than anyone, Althea appeared the same in the picture as she did in life. Maybe because so much of her time was spent in silent stillness.
Next to the photograph of Althea was an ornate silver frame with a green velvet mat behind the glass. The mat revealed two oval-shaped cutouts, and within one of those ovals was a photograph of Doc. Taken nearly thirty years ago, he was a young man, hair slicked down and whiskers neatly trimmed. He wore a white carnation in the lapel of his jacket, as the picture was taken on his wedding day.
The image in profile, Vada remembered as a little girl loving the way her father seemed to be looking with such longing at the woman who, in her own profile, looked back at him. Her childish imagination thought of the thin strip of green velvet mat as some sort of mythical valley the two lovers must cross in order to find each other in the terrestrial world.
But the photograph of her mother had long been removed. In fact, it lay tucked away inside the top drawer of Vada’s bureau, where it had been since the night she snuck down into the parlor to remove it from its frame. She used to look at it every night, turning her face to the side, trying to look into the woman’s eyes and beg her to come home.
Soon enough, that image of her mother gave way to the profile Vada could never forget—that of her mother in the lamplight, rocking in the chair, humming her final lullaby. That was an image that could never be framed.
Now, instead, the image of her father looked at one of a little Lisette in a photograph taken when she was just twelve years old. Even the dullness of the picture couldn’t hide the coppery shine of the curls pinned to the side of her head with large white bows.
Where Althea, Hazel, and Vada all faced the camera with winsome, thin-lipped smiles, Lisette showed no such restraint. Her eyes were wide, her bow-shaped lips parted, her hand the tiniest blur in her lap.
Molly Keegan always said that the three eldest Allenhouse girls could be a set of those Russian nesting dolls—so alike they were in feature and so graduated in size. But Lisette never fit into that image. She was at once as tall as Vada, as buxom as Hazel, and as thin waisted as Althea.
Vada took a deep breath and stared once again at the head of the mantel, craning close, looking into one face, then the next, then the next—the horrific words of Alex Triplehorn echoing in her mind.
“Oh, Mother,” she whispered to Doc’s boyish profile. “Certainly you couldn’t.”
But then she thought about herself this day. Comfortably kissing one man and thrilling at the touch of another within the hour. “Or maybe you could.”
The light touch on her shoulder startled her, and she spun around, stifling a cry as she saw it was only Althea, a bewildered expression on her face.
“You’ve got to learn to take heavier steps.”
In response, Althea ripped a slip of paper off the little notebook she wore suspended from a ribbon around her neck.
Are you aware that Molly
and a man named Cupid
are giving a sponge bath
to a naked man in your bed?
The tears that Vada had been so close to just a moment before disappeared, set free with the release of laughter. “Oh, my goodness,” she said once she caught her breath. “Nothing you read in the telegraph office could even come close to the excitement we’ve had here today.”
Vada put her arm around her younger sister’s slim shoulders and led her to the sofa where they both collapsed, legs tucked up underneath them, and began to tell her the story, beginning her narrative on what she imagined happened the moment Lucky Lou LaFortune’s bat hit the ball.
By the time Hazel and Lisette came home from their errands, Althea was smiling broadly at the image of Kenny Cupid meekly following Molly up the stairs.
But Alex Triplehorn and their fateful lunchtime conversation appeared nowhere in the tale. After
all, he’d been kept a secret for the past seventeen years. No need to add him to the mix today.
TUESDAY
AMEN TO YOU TOO
8
Most of the room was still hidden in predawn shadows when Vada opened her eyes. The first thought to register was surprise that she’d slept at all, given how uncomfortably crowded sharing a bed with Hazel had been. At some time during the night, she’d rolled off the bed and onto the floor, taking her pillow and the blanket with her.
Groaning, Vada eased up onto one elbow until she was eye level with the mattress. There Hazel lay curled up within the flannel gown that was the only covering she had against the cold. Her face was smashed against the pillow, and as Vada’s vision adjusted to the darkness, she realized one violet eye was open and staring straight at her.
“I tell you one thing,” Hazel said, her voice thick with sleep, “that boy’d better wake up or die today, ’cause you’re not sleeping in here again.”
It was a wicked thing to say, let alone laugh at, but Vada couldn’t help herself, feeling such relief at seeing the spark of her sister return. It had been a long time since laughter was the first utterance of the day. In the last breath of it she asked, “Is it time to get up yet?”
“Nope. The clock downstairs chimed five just a few minutes ago.”
“How long have you been awake?”
“Awhile.” Hazel scooted to the far side of the mattress and patted the newly vacated space.
Vada climbed up, ignoring the protest of her aching back, and settled gratefully into its softness. She brought up the blanket to cover them both, and they snuggled together. Vada tried not to squeal when Hazel lodged two icy feet against the backs of her legs. “Your feet are like icicles.”
“You always were a cover hog, but I’ve never known you to actually take the blankets away.”
They twisted and turned, seeking each other as much as warmth and comfort, and when they finally settled in together, their breathing became deep and even. Perfectly synchronized when the parlor clock sounded quarter past the hour.
The Bridegrooms: A Novel Page 8
