Nice to Come Home To

by Rebecca Flowers

  Suddenly, Pru was overcome with a longing for her father. Leonard, sitting coolly at the kitchen table with his long legs crossed, his fingers steepled, while she and Patsy tore the house apart, looking for some lost piece of jewelry or library book. Steering the car with one knee in heavy summer beach traffic while doing a crossword puzzle that he’d rested on the wheel. Waving his metal detector along the sand, patiently digging until he came up with a quarter. None of this would be happening if Leonard were still here. The last, unshakable stake in the family tent, or so it seemed to Pru.

  “To Leonard,” Nadine said.

  They drank. Then John said, “Women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress.”

  Nadine brightened. “So, when she’s weary—”

  “Try another shabby dress,” finished Pru.

  They were smiling now. Except for Patsy, who muttered, “Idiots.”

  AFTER DINNER, PRU CLEARED THE TABLE AND WATCHED Patsy and Jimmy Roy out of the corner of her eye. The rest of the meal had passed in relative peace, with the two of them hardly speaking to each other and Nadine, John, and Pru assuming the conversational responsibilities.

  Now, as Pru watched, Jimmy Roy walked up to her sister, who was standing at the counter. He had his hands behind his back. Hearing him come up, she turned, irritated. It was clear that he was waiting for her to choose a hand. At first she didn’t want to, but finally she gave in and pointed to his right side. Pru could see that whatever he was holding behind his back had been in his left hand, but he passed it smoothly to the right, so that Patsy didn’t notice. He brought the hand forward and opened it, palm up. Pru could see that he held a peach. Patsy’s face softened, and she gave him a sort of begrudging half-smile.

  Peach, their nickname for Annali. When Patsy was in labor, she wasn’t supposed to eat anything, but Jimmy Roy snuck her a bite of peach, just after she’d gotten the epidural. Pru was collapsed in a chair at the time, exhausted from watching Patsy screaming for the drugs, which she’d refused earlier, and swearing to herself that if she ever had a baby, she’d begin asking for the drugs in about the eighth month. They finally administered the epidural, and as it kicked in, Patsy took the first bite of the peach that she wasn’t supposed to have but Jimmy Roy gave her anyway. Another huge contraction came crawling up on the monitor’s screen, but Patsy seemed unaware of it. She closed her eyes and grinned, fear and tension sliding from her face. Jimmy Roy kissed her forehead, already slick with sweat. As the needle on the monitor continued to chart another one of those killer contractions, Patsy sighed contentedly and said, around the fruit in her mouth, juice dripping down her chin, “Oh my God, that peach.”

  Pru brought a stack of dishes into the kitchen, where John was washing up. “Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” she said.

  “I’ve seen much worse,” he said. “You should see my sister Emily’s husband’s family. It’s like some kind of bad social experiment. Like they’ve been forced to live in one of those environmental bubbles together and can’t get out. Made me and Lila look pretty good, by comparison.”

  Pru smiled. “Were you very sad today?”

  “Well, I sure thought about how it was probably a good thing we never had kids. Me and Lila,” he added, hastily.

  “And Patsy thinks it’s a good thing they never got married,” Pru said. “But it hasn’t made this any easier, has it?”

  “I like your family,” he said. “They explain a lot about you.”

  “Like what about me?” she said, trying not to seem as eager as she felt to hear what exactly about her he’d noticed.

  He shrugged, scraping turkey bones into the trash. “I knew your sense of humor came from your dad. But now I see where your sweetness comes from—your mother. And you’re the one they count on to keep her head.” He slid a stack of dishes into the soapy water in the sink.

  “I’m not that sweet.”

  “Yes, you are. I bet you were the kind of kid who went around saving baby birds.”

  “Not sweet.” She tapped her head. “Stupid.”

  “That’s right. You’re a softie. I’ve got your number, Whistler. You rock.”

  He was so sincere that Pru was embarrassed.

  “I do,” she said. “I rock and roll.”

  ON NADINE AND JIMMY ROY’S LAST DAY IN D.C., PRU looked out the bay window to see Patsy, Annali, and Jimmy Roy walking together down Columbia Road.

  They looked like members of the same combat unit, with the matching flyer caps Nadine had knitted for them over the weekend, chin straps flapping on either side. Annali swung between her parents, who at least seemed to be carrying on some kind of conversation.

  “I can’t tell if it’s good or bad,” Pru said, when her mother came to the window to look, too.

  “It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re talking,” her mother said. “I have hopes for them,” she added. “Jimmy Roy has changed. He’s grown. He was determined to come here, even if it was to find her with someone else. I told him, point blank, ‘There’s someone new, Jimmy Roy. And he’s really got her. You don’t have much of a chance.’ But he came anyway.”

  “Well, for Annali.”

  Her mother shook her head. “Not just for Annali. Jimmy Roy has qualities, indeed he does. I think Patsy’s sold him a little short.”

  “What happened between them, anyway? After Annali was born? The next thing I knew, we couldn’t even mention his name around her.”

  “I’m not sure. I think Jimmy Roy disappointed her by going along with everything she wanted. He didn’t fight hard enough for her. She’s like me in that way. Unless you make a big show of it, she doesn’t believe it. That’s why she got lured in by that Jacob. All flash, that one.”

  Nadine had been apprised of the Jacob situation just that morning, by Patsy. Pru remembered how it wasn’t so long ago that her mother, too, had been taken by “that” Jacob, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Call it what you will,” Nadine said, turning from the window. “It was no accident that Jimmy Roy showed up right when he did.” She sighed and sat down with her knitting. “Your father would have liked that. Oh, it’s so sad he never got to know Annali. He would have been so smitten with her.” She shook her head, sadly.

  “I miss Daddy,” Pru said.

  “Of course you do,” she returned. “He was your father.”

  Fifteen

  Nadine cried at airports. Usually she began on the ride over. It was wordless crying, almost soundless, something that happened incidentally, like breathing. Pru would look over and there would be two rivulets working down each side of her nose.

  Nadine held Annali and talked to her quietly. “You’ll see Grandma soon,” she said, holding Annali’s face in her soft hands. Pru saw how tall and erect her mother still stood, her broad face split by a smile, as she turned to wave from beyond the security gate. But when Pru glanced again, Nadine was bent low over her suitcase, with a hand to her chest, as if she couldn’t catch her breath. It scared Pru, and she almost reached for Patsy’s hand; but then Jimmy Roy lifted the heavy bag from Nadine’s shoulder and transferred it to his own. Nadine straightened up then, wiped her face, and they moved on, down the concourse.

  DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT STILL HOUSED TWO WOMEN, a child, and two animals, the apartment seemed quiet and empty without Nadine and Jimmy Roy. Pru realized that it was the absence of her mother’s sounds, with which she was intimately familiar. She knew the exact rhythm of her mother’s footsteps, how her heels brushed the floor slightly as she walked. She knew the intonation and duration of her inhale, that very slight whistle as breath moved through her nose and past her vocal chords. If she couldn’t see Nadine, she could always find her just by listening for her to clear her throat. She wondered if she would ever be on such familiar terms with any human again.

  Patsy went back to her moping, but it didn’t seem to display the same vigor she brought to it before. For one thing, Pru made a new rule forbidding the TV to be turned on while she was trying to work, and
Patsy got bored pretty quickly without it. For another, Annali had started preschool.

  One of Nadine’s big accomplishments of the week had been to get Annali enrolled in a school up the street, where Fiona sent her little boy, Sean. It meant that, at least twice a day, Patsy had to leave the apartment to escort her daughter to school.

  This foray into the preschool world brought with it new demands of play dates and school-related activities. Fiona and Sean welcomed Patsy and Annali into their circle of mom-preschooler couples. It also seemed to cement Patsy and Annali’s stay in the neighborhood. Pru wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but she didn’t say anything. Patsy never spoke of returning to Rehoboth, and the truth was, Pru liked having them around, even though, more and more often, Pru found herself alone in the apartment.

  One day in early December, it began snowing. Pru looked up from her computer to see white flakes swirling against a gray sky. It took her a minute to figure out what they were. When Patsy and Annali came home that afternoon, they reported that the schools were closing early.

  Storms always took D.C. by surprise. Back in Ohio, the traffic kept moving in the worst snow. But here in the mid-Atlantic states, at the first sign of snowfall people pulled their cars off to the sides of roads and left them there. By nightfall, Columbia Road was filled up and down on either side with abandoned cars, even in the no-parking zones.

  Patsy turned on the local news channel and they watched the storm come in on the radar. There were warnings not to leave the house unless it was absolutely necessary. News footage showed people buying out all the available milk and batteries from a grocery store, where the shelves were already almost bare. Pru went out to scrounge what food was left at the Safeway, where she waited in the checkout line for forty-five minutes. She stopped at the video store on the way home, and Phan helped her choose what seemed like enough movies to entertain Annali for weeks. As the snow swirled around outside, they baked cookies and watched TV. Annali sat in the bay window, watching the snow as if it were the first time she’d ever seen it.

  It snowed while they slept, and all the next day. They stayed indoors and kept watching the snow from the bay window. By the following morning, the snowfall had finally wound down to a gentle flurry. They were dying to get out, so they bundled up and trudged outside. Where two days ago there were dirty streets, now white, brilliant snow sparkled. There were huge drifts and giant hills where the snow had buried the abandoned cars. Columbia Road looked like a long white cake edged with gloppy white marshmallows.

  Regular life was suspended. There was a festive, magical air. Nothing moved. All the shops and restaurants were closed. There were no buses rattling by, no airplanes overhead. The massive, noise-absorbing snowbanks had turned the city into a giant sound studio. Pru had never heard it so quiet. They could hear people talking a block away. Were it not for the presence of Patsy, frowning at everything from behind her huge black sunglasses, a glamorous wreck, they could be in a Hans Christian Andersen tale, Pru thought.

  John was out in front of the Korner, shoveling a path in the sidewalk. He looked up and smiled and her heart lurched. They talked about the snow, and he told Annali about his new hot-chocolate machine. Then Pru, Annali, and Patsy moved on and he returned to his shoveling, apparently determined the neighborhood should have one place that was open, despite the conditions.

  They hunkered down to wait for the city’s snowplows to make it to Adams-Morgan. Everyone said that it would take days for the city to dig itself out. The District’s few plows were old and known to break down frequently. Capitol Hill and the financial district would be first, of course, before the residential neighborhoods, which would be plowed in order of income. Adams-Morgan would be farther down on the list, well after Chevy Chase, Cleveland Park, and Dupont Circle. Pru was glad for the food she’d purchased at the beginning of the storm. If she hadn’t stocked up on bananas, oatmeal, and pickles, Annali never would have survived.

  Pru was figuring out, little by little, how to handle her. She was getting better at anticipating where Annali was headed. On one occasion, when she saw that the child was on the verge of throwing a huge tantrum, Pru suddenly fell to the floor. She rolled around on the floor, gagging. Finally, with a final shudder, she groaned and lay still, dead. Annali stopped the tantrum and cracked up. “Aunt Pruuuu!” she cried, jumping on top of her. Pru felt quite proud of herself. It seemed like an enormous victory—she had figured out something essential about living with a child. For some reason, she thought of Dr. Bond, the vet. She felt he might approve of how she was doing, these days.

  Three times each day, Pru made everyone get dressed and go outside with the puppy. She felt like the commander of the Intrepid, making the troops play football while waiting for the great ice to melt. Every day they saw John, working to keep the diner open. His staff and suppliers couldn’t get through, but he did his best, and some of the customers even pitched in and helped. It was always packed. People read books and drank coffee, and played Parcheesi and Chinese checkers. No one seemed to be in any rush to go back to work. John walked around beaming, thrilled at the café’s being, for a change, full up almost every minute of the day.

  “This is just what I’d envisioned,” he told Pru, happily, as he swept by with a tray loaded with cups. “Like the old corner store, or something.”

  “He’s just the kind of guy you’d fall for,” Patsy said one day. They had just left the diner and were walking home. “So utterly decent, so regular. So boring.” There was a note of such bitter contempt in her voice that Pru stopped in her tracks, stung.

  Patsy kept walking, then stopped. She circled back to where Pru stood. “I’m such a bitch,” she said. Pru could see, under the sunglasses, that she’d started crying. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” Her voice was high, and tight in her chest.

  “It’s okay,” Pru said.

  “He’s a nice guy, Pru. I just said it because I wanted to hurt somebody. That’s all.” She swallowed. She still looked as small as a bird, to Pru, in her mottled fake-fur jacket, her nesty hair. Her nose was red and running. “I really like John,” she said. “I want things to work out for you, I really do.”

  Pru nodded. “Okay.”

  “You do like him, though, don’t you?”

  “Let’s not talk about it now.”

  Patsy nodded. “Okay,” she said, and they moved on.

  BY THE NEXT MORNING, FIVE DAYS AFTER THE STORM had hit, Annali’s patience was wearing thin. She missed her school, her routine, her new friends. She’d watched enough Disney princess videos “to choke a horse,” as Patsy put it. Pru still hadn’t shook off the bad mood that had settled on her since Patsy’s crack about John. Patsy was making an effort to be happier, but she was working with limited resources. By dinnertime, Pru had lifted the ban on eating in front of the TV, and they were dining on canned soup and watching Mulan—the least sexist or saccharine entry in what Pru referred to as the Disney Princess oeuvre.

  In this oeuvre, all the princesses have fabulous hair and little animal friends to help them. They sing and dance and are brave and kind. They teach others how to care. They are rewarded for their suffering with men—brave, kind, stand-up guys, all of them. Captain John Smith stares at Pocahontas as she appears before him, like a big-eyed doe, through the mist. Her face is caressed by the velvet curtains of her hair. All the princesses have a sort of pouty collagen-lipped look, and heinous personalities. Snow White is stupid and so sweet you want to strangle her. Pocahontas has a great body, and she is silent and mysterious, the perfect woman. Ariel is supposed to be sixteen but she has huge breasts, and Belle is supposed to be a more acceptable heroine to modern moms because she reads books, though in the end she watches the action as helplessly as that twit White. Only Mulan knows how to fight, and her boyfriend is the hottest, in Pru’s opinion. He goes shirtless through most of the film. He’s brave and daring, and his body looks to be carved of stone.

  An hour into the movie, Pru couldn
’t take it anymore. She put on her long, warm camel-hair coat and went out into the night.

  The streets were busy. No doubt she wasn’t the only one bored and restless and entirely sick of the other co-captives at home. Columbia Road still hadn’t been plowed. There were even people out cross-country skiing. She walked along quickly in the cold air. She couldn’t believe it, but Mulan’s boyfriend had done something to her. She was—could it be true?—actually aroused. She hadn’t felt this way in a long, long time. She began walking faster.

  She passed under the Cluck-U Chicken sign, dark for the time being, its arrogant fowl hidden under snow. Without the lurid glare of its neon lights, the street looked serene, classic, even charming. Although it was late in the evening, she could see light coming from the Korner’s big plate-glass window. She peeked inside. She meant to take only a quick look and continue walking by, but she saw that John was there, looking right out the window at her. He had closed up for the night, and sat alone, with his feet up on a chair. She was about to pull back from the window, when something—perhaps her sudden, furtive movements—drew his attention. He smiled at her and jumped out of his chair. When he opened the door for her, the most beautiful music poured out into the cold night air. Pru recognized it as a Duke Ellington suite—languid, lush, sensual. The music and the way he pulled her indoors and wrapped his arms around her left her discombobulated.

  “I was looking for you,” he said into her hair. “And look, here you are.”

  “Oh?” she said. She still hadn’t recovered.

  She closed her eyes. She felt the knot of worry that had been lodged at the base of her neck loosening. She felt their legs pressing together, his hands slipping inside her coat, the camel-hair with the robin’s-egg-blue silk lining. Ellington swirled around them, making her knees buckle. She felt as though she’d just walked in the door to a Moroccan brothel.

  “You smell clean and neat,” John said, brushing his nose against her temple.