A Morning Like This

by Deborah Bedford

  “There’s a whole sack in the pantry.”

  Braden, Samantha, and a throng of other distantly related children strung along past them just then. David grabbed Samantha and Braden’s hands.

  “Come see this, you two. You aren’t going to believe what you’re about to observe.”

  “What?”

  They were out of the play and intrigued by their father’s plan faster than a mayfly gets gulped by a trout. The three of them tumbled out into the yard, both children with their chins lifted in adoration toward David. David’s limber length bent low so he could hear what they had to say, while Abby stood at the Uptergroves’ window, clutching a curtain, watching them go.

  Abby struggled with an unwanted pinch of melancholy. This was the first time, in all the years she could remember, that David hadn’t turned and said, “Abby, come on. Don’t you want to go with us, too?”

  Well, she would miss some things. But she would have her own special times with Braden. She would see to that.

  In the front yard, while revelers gathered, Floyd brought around his esteemed and prized toy. While the others watched, Floyd polished up the span of black PVC pipe on his arm. Abby watched him say something to the kids, who began pawing with both hands through the sack of potatoes with the zeal of treasure hunters, obviously searching for the perfect size.

  The satisfactory potato was inserted, the end of the pipe was unscrewed and, out of his tuxedo pocket, Floyd pulled a can of Final Net aerosol hairspray. He shot one squirt of the stuff into the PVC, rescrewed the end, and, ready to go, stood like Arnold Schwartzenegger in a movie, his legs straddled, his shoulders thrown back in his tuxedo, his eyes searching the rooftops for possible targets.

  He waited as long as anybody would let him. The children began to vault up and down beside his knees and David wasn’t much better. At last Floyd hitched up his pants legs and aimed the gun at an appropriate angle. He found the handle on the attached charcoal lighter and he pulled the trigger.

  With a rewarding pop, the potato launched. Up, up it sailed, high over the rooftops, high against the backdrop of the mountain, and higher still. If it hadn’t been a fat potato, they would have lost sight of it all together.

  Hard to tell the moment the potato began to come down. One moment they were watching it grow smaller, and the next it started getting big again. Down it came while the children clapped and cheered. Down, past the telephone poles, toward the rooftops. It came straight at them so they scattered and ran.

  The potato hit Viola’s bird feeder and pulverized it. Thistle and wood splinters flew like a small explosion. Chickadees and finches fluttered away in a state of shocked confusion.

  All that remained was the metal hook extending from the eaves and half of a shingle that had been its roof, still swaying from the force of the blow.

  The potato shattered on the ground.

  “Well,” Floyd said, sounding a little dejected. “I just built that birdhouse for Viola. I guess I can build her another one.”

  Outside the window, everyone jostled in line for a turn. David went next and shot a potato to the north over two condominium buildings. Braden went next. Then Samantha, very proud and careful, got to do the same.

  Inside the window, Abby clung to the curtain, peering into a life that had once been hers, halfway smiling. Because, no matter the reality between her and David, it seemed impossible not to smile at this.

  Viola and her walker, which had been twisted and tied with silver and gold streamers for this grand occasion, sauntered up behind Abby as if she could feel her being left out. “Come help me spread this new quilt on the bed,” she suggested. “The kids gave it to us for our sixtieth. Did you see what Floyd just did to my bird feeder?”

  “I did.”

  “He builds it, he breaks it, he builds it again. Sounds like a sign you’d see in a china shop.”

  Grateful, Abby followed her, flopped the quilt lengthwise upon the mattress, and admired its stitching and colors.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it? But a new quilt? After sixty years? What on earth am I going to do with the old one?”

  A daughter poked her head in the room as she passed in the hall. “Give it away, Mother. That thing is ratty and as old as the hills.”

  “But it was a wedding gift.”

  Abby smoothed out the new one while Viola watched. After a long moment, in spite of the walker, it seemed as if Viola couldn’t stand to keep her hands off the pattern. She touched with her fingertips the cool, plump edges of the fabric, the tiny perfect embossing of the thread. “You know,” she said in a girlish, confiding voice without ever looking up at Abby. “I have kissed another boy in my lifetime besides Floyd.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes.”

  Abby couldn’t keep the incredulity from her voice. “Only one?”

  “Only one.”

  Abby’s considered her hands where they lay on the hand-patched cotton. She stared hard at the new-moons of her own fingernails. Goodness, but Viola was sharing the secret of her soul!

  “He had the prettiest curls I’d ever seen whenever he took off that straw hat.” Viola looked past Abby’s left shoulder, as if she could see something far away. “Clifton Bates, that was his name. We’d been out for a drive and then he brought me home to the porch swing. Sitting right there, where I could see the top of my father’s bald head through the front bay window, Clifton says, ‘Miss Viola Lynn, do you mind if I give you a kiss?’ ”

  “Oh, my.” Abby leaned on her hands, surveying quilt stitches intently in an effort to hide her smile. “What did you do then?”

  “I said no. Any girl in her right mind, when asked for a kiss, should say no. Then I sat there looking at him thinking, Laws of mercy, Clifton, why do you have to be such a gentleman? Why don’t you just kiss me without asking and not put me in a spot like this?”

  “But, I thought you said—”

  “I did. But that’s it. Because there’s times that what you’re thinking you ought to do and what you want to do are two entirely different things.”

  “So?”

  “So I grabbed Clifton Bates by the hat brim and I kissed him.”

  Abby hollered right out loud, “Viola!” Even now, Viola blushed.

  They smoothed the quilt together a third and fourth time even though there wasn’t a wrinkle or lump to be had. Every few seconds or so, one cast an amused Victorian glance at the other, across the movement of their hands. Abby’s gentle laughter mounted from deep within her, a place both protected and vulnerable, that she didn’t know still lived.

  Viola laughed, too. She shoved the gilded walker away and watched it roll. She plopped into a threadbare wing chair and chortled like a meadowlark, kicking her swollen feet up onto the ottoman and leaning back hard like she was in a porch swing just this minute.

  “S-shame on you, Viola,” Abby said, giggling, her mirth bubbling from a free fountain. Nothing on earth could make it stop. “Talking about old boyfriends at your wedding party.”

  “Oh, pshaw!” Viola waved the whole thing away with her hand. “That’s one reason you do it, don’t you see? I think of all the things I might have had, and then I look at what I do have, and… and it’s okay. It’s very good.”

  Abby’s giggling toned down a notch. “You really think so, Viola? That it’s okay to measure what you do have with what you might have had?”

  “I think so.” Viola kicked her feet sideways off the ottoman and leaned forward. “When you look back, you count all the times you’ve broken faith with each other. And you count all the times of truth. Because, if you’re being really honest with each other, every marriage has plenty of both.”

  “Yes,” Abby said. “But some marriages are worse than others.”

  “During sixty years of marriage, Abby, do you want to know what was the hardest thing of all for me?”

  “What?” Abby asked, yearning for some answer, yearning for a way to survive these next days. “What was it?”

&n
bsp; Viola said, “Being kind to each other. That was sometimes the most difficult thing. Just being kind.”

  “Presents! Picture show!” a family chorus went up from the next room. “Grandma, can you get him in here for this? If you don’t, he’ll be out there with the potatoes all day.”

  Abby stood by the bed, her palm across three hand-sewn squares, looking like she’d been taunted—as if that hadn’t been much of an answer at all. Viola turned back to her. “Can I ask you a question, Abby?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a question about David.”

  Silence. Then finally, “I guess so.”

  “It’s this. How calm does water have to be before you walk on it?”

  “What? What does that have to do with David?”

  “If you walk on water during a storm or during calm, you’re still walking on water. Do you measure the journey by the wind and the waves around you? Or do you measure the journey by knowing you’re walking somewhere that’s impossible to walk in the first place?”

  The squares of the quilt, so many shapes and sizes and colors stitched together. Abby said, “But I thought I knew the man who would be reaching for me when I went under. Now I don’t know the man who’s holding out his hand.”

  “Look at the ten commandments in the Bible, Abby. Look at every one of them that starts with ‘don’t’ or ‘stop.’ All those rules, and God was telling people that they ought to stop walking away from love.”

  Abby said, “Maybe I don’t even know what love is anymore.”

  “Mother!” a good number of people bellowed at them from the other room.

  “I wanted to be achingly in love with my husband,” Abby said. “I didn’t want to be afraid.”

  “Oh, honest to John.” Viola fumbled up onto her walker and pulled it into her grasp. “Someone else is going to have to get Grandpa. I can’t move that fast. Besides, he’ll never give up the potato gun for me.”

  She turned back to Abby one last time.

  “When he comes in, just look at how handsome Floyd Uptergrove is in that tuxedo. And wearing that flower to please his children. Sometimes I wonder what Clifton Bates looks like right about now. I’ll bet Clifton Bates is…Clifton Bates is… well, I’ll bet Clifton Bates is dead.”

  David and Abby Treasure, who had once been so anxious to leave this party the moment they arrived, had gotten crowded in with the other party guests to watch the opening of the gifts.

  David and Abby Treasure, whose differences seemed irreconcilable and whose future together would be bleak, sat hipbone to hipbone on the cold stone hearth. He sat with his elbows propped on his knees and his hands dangling between them in a knot. She sat with her fingers aligned perfectly, pointing downward, pushed hard between clamped thighs as if she was hiding a prayer.

  Abby’s son curled like a kitten on the rug beside their feet.

  David’s daughter sat as close as she could without bumping into his arm.

  Abby could feel the warmth of David’s leg through the linen of her skirt. She scooted a half-inch to the right so their thighs wouldn’t touch anymore.

  The tilt of David’s spine was severe, lunging forward, as if he had to force himself to be still beside his wife. Once, when his eyes met Abby’s, they moved indifferently away. How unimportant gifts seemed to David and Abby Treasure right then. After all these years of housekeeping, Floyd and Viola didn’t need a thing. But Viola sat with her hand proudly on Floyd’s shoulder while he said, “You grandchildren, slow down. You’re opening too fast. Can’t we wait?”

  “Here. Hand me that card, Floyd. I want to read the letter.”

  One by one, Floyd and Viola exclaimed, thanked, hugged, and passed the loot around. More things to fill up the already overburdened storage spaces, David thought. A golden bell with their name and wedding date inscribed. A set of coasters with hummingbirds. A glass hummingbird to hang in the kitchen window. Matching polo shirts that read “Sixty Years Together” and a plaque that said “Each New Day Is A Gift From God.”

  After the gifts had been unwrapped, someone extinguished the lights, someone drew the curtains, and a proud son showed huge black-and-white pictures on a screen.

  All the talk of years-gone-by could not suffice for the sepia-tinted photographs that confirmed it. There were pictures of the wedding gifts, not so different from the ones their grandchildren had opened moments ago. There was an assortment of houses and cars and communities and friends. There were baby pictures and Christmases and Easters where the children sat with curved bonnet brims holding baskets aloft with eggs the color of a sunrise.

  There was Viola stretched out full tilt on the hood of the old bullet Chevrolet, a sight that made several men in the crowd wolf-whistle.

  There was Floyd dressed to the nines in his new white Navy uniform, which made one of the women say, “So that’s what you fell for!”

  “You gonna be one of those tugboat boys like your great-grandpa?” An uncle touseled the hair of a little boy as they all stared up at the Navy cross on Floyd’s proud, young chest, his impressive chiseled face overshadowed by the regalia.

  Faster and faster the images came, as everyone in the room forgot themselves and began shouting out comments.

  “What were they doing, Viola? Saving material for the war effort?”

  “Oh, those bobby socks and those shoes. Weren’t they something?”

  “Which one is the Welsh Corgi who rode in the baby carriage, Floyd? Was that Paddlefoot?”

  “Have you seen Mom’s pictures when she was a blonde?” More wolf-whistles. And someone’s laughter. “Hey, she was blonde for a long time! And red-headed, too.”

  On and on they went, through the growing children and the flashier cars. “Look at those two! Out for a date in the fifties.”

  Viola’s gentle, reminiscent voice. “Remember? We didn’t even have heat in that car.”

  Something entirely different, almost lecherous, in Floyd’s voice. They all saw him poke Viola in the ribs with his elbow. “We didn’t need heat back then, did we?”

  “Daddy!” someone hollered, sounding scandalized.

  Everyone burst into laughter. Everyone, that is, except for Abby Treasure, who stared at the ceiling and worked her throat against the ache. Everyone, that is, except for David Treasure, who scrubbed the back of his neck with his hand and looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here.

  Chapter Twenty

  Abby watched her husband fall in love with his daughter from a remote distance, from a far-flung space that left her separate. She watched David moving with purpose on an outlying horizon, and she felt totally, completely alone.

  They had only hours before Susan arrived. David made the best of them. Like a Santa Claus, he showered Samantha and Braden with fun. As the mid-summer day progressed, Abby watched as the three of them played, running in and out of the house to change or to get something.

  First, he had taken Sam for a ride on the candy-apple stagecoach through the square, where people perched on the top or hung out of windows and doors like hedgehog spines and waved at friends and family, and at people they didn’t know.

  Next, they took a jaunt to see Menor’s Ferry, where wagons had crossed the Snake River before there was any bridge. They followed the trails, dust adhering to their tennis shoes, through the once-bustling town of Moose, Wyoming, viewing the carriage house and the log Episcopalian chapel, where David took turns holding them both high so they could yank the chain and ring the chapel bell. Once David decided that the bell had been clanged enough to give everyone within a ten-mile radius a headache, he took them to the Moose General Store and bought them spearmint candies from a jar.

  Abby heard the details while she spread mayonnaise onto their sandwiches for lunch. She held a piece of Country Farm loaf flat in her palm, wiping it first with one side of the blade and then with the other. She kept spreading long after the thick, creamy dressing had soaked into the bread.

  “I know what we’ll do,” David said arou
nd the edges of his sandwich. “How about a float down Flat Creek this afternoon?”

  “On inner tubes?” Braden was already standing, fists lifted in victory in the air. “Sam, you’ll love this. It’s the best thing you’ll ever do!”

  “It’s your favorite thing, huh?” Samantha’s fingers were working, happily braiding the fringe of Abby’s placemat.

  “Yeah. It is.”

  As much as she begrudged it, Abby had to give David credit. Whenever he talked for long minutes with Braden, he would turn and give Samantha a wink. Whenever he went rapt with awareness of Samantha, he would clap his hand heavily on Braden’s right shoulder, squeezing hard on his son’s bones.

  David moved, in Samantha’s presence, like a man entranced. His eyes followed her with delight and reverence when she bounded across the room. Whenever Samantha came near him, the whole stature of David’s body went gentle. He became a knight ready to do battle for her. With every movement, every glance and smile, he paid homage to this new daughter. He was so proud of her, his movements were excruciating. And Abby felt like she was a foreigner to them, living on the opposite side of some impenetrable boundary, looking inside a store window when she didn’t dare to walk into the shop.

  After lunch, David, Braden, and Samantha loaded the Suburban, tossing towels and mud shoes and dry T-shirts into a pile on the backseat. Inner tubes, inflated as large as they could inflate, lay perfectly aligned in the cargo hold like donuts in a box. The engine was already running when David turned to Abby as if he’d forgotten something.

  Well, this would be a surprise. Maybe he was going to ask her to join them on the creek. She loved floating Flat Creek. There was one spot she especially liked, where the banks twisted back on themselves, where forget-me-nots and wild violets grew in miniature nosegays, hidden on the banks beneath the fierce protection of the willows. Hikers who explored the riverbank would never see them. But from the low water, moving at the level of the current, tiny blue-purple flowers peeked out everywhere.

  In another spot, downstream, the creek slowed, to where it moved just faster than a mirror. Abby had learned that, if you held your limbs motionless and let yourself bob along with the stream in that place, fingerling trout would rise beside the inner tubes to snap at mayflies.