The Cornerstone

by Anne C. Petty

  She watched the rain and waited for the tea kettle to whistle. The idea to bake some biscuits or cookies crossed her mind, but that would involve more work than she was willing to get sucked into. It would help heat the house, but she could just as easily turn up the thermostat. Either way would add to the utility bill. The kettle shrilled and she turned off the burner. Looking through the basket of tea bags on the counter, she pulled out raspberry and green with lemon. Then she went around the long granite counter, through the small dining area, and into the main room of the house.

  The living room was warm, and her mother dozed wrapped in a comforter on the loveseat in front of the small fireplace. The remodeling job done on the house over a decade ago had installed central heat and air (and the granite countertop), but they’d kept the working fireplace for its cozy factor. Below a narrow oak mantel, it had a wide squarish brick façade that made the entire room toasty when a fire was blazing in the grate. Her dad used to buy logs for it, but now Claire made rolled-up paper logs from a stack of newspapers and brown grocery bags that had been collecting for months on a spare dining room chair. Maybe they weren’t as aesthetically pleasing, but they got the job done. She’d planned to scour the tree-shaded back yard for fallen twigs and small branches to use as kindling, but that was out of the question today.

  She touched her mother’s shoulder. “Mom? You want some tea?”

  Her mother stirred and smiled. “That would be nice.”

  “What flavor?”

  “Raspberry.”

  “Coming up.”

  Claire padded in her stocking feet back to the kitchen. It was these small things that put them in synch and made Claire’s chest ache. She loved her mother so much at times like this, it was painful to think about how it was going to be when the respirator failed to be enough. When that inevitable death came, Claire would be alone. Completely. Well, there was an aunt across the country and a cousin whose name she didn’t remember, so technically that wasn’t true. And the neighborhood was full of families she’d grown up with, people who considered her as much one of their kids as their own. Jackie’s mom had always treated Claire as a second daughter, and she’d spent more nights than she could count at their house, curled next to her playmate in Jackie’s single bed. But that particular train of thought—death and the relentless passage of time—led down into the black hole of despair she fought to avoid by doing external things like joining a theater company and going to pubs with friends. The abyss retreated as she carried the mug of tea in one hand and a TV tray table in the other out to the living room.

  She set the table up in front of her mother, careful not to get the oxygen generator line tangled in its spindly legs.

  “Sugar, or maybe some honey?”

  Her mother shook her head and took a few sips from the cup. “This is fine.”

  Claire went back for her own cup and then curled up on her side of the couch, feet underneath her. They sat together without speaking, just listening to the rain and watching the fire burn down. Finally, Claire got up and pushed the coals around with a poker, bringing the flames back to life. She put on a few more paper logs, which caught and blazed up.

  “Your rehearsal got cancelled?”

  “Yeah, Addie said Bayard was sick or something. That’s pretty rare—the man’s never missed a single rehearsal in all the time I’ve been in the company.”

  “I wish I could see the show. It sounds exciting.” Her mother sighed and readjusted the comforter around her feet. They’d never carpeted over the original hardwood floors, which helped retain the value of the house but meant the floors were cool underfoot during the winter.

  “It’ll be videotaped. I’ll bring you a copy and we can watch it together.”

  Her mother smiled and nodded. Claire had gotten so used to these limited responses that it was easy to forget how voluble and talkative the mother of her childhood had been—a sociable woman so opinionated and eager to discuss or argue any point that got tossed into the conversation that she usually dominated the exchange.

  “Could you…” Claire waited while her mother gathered enough breath to say what she wanted. “…get my sweater?”

  Claire supposed that, no longer having the breath to adequately express what she thought, her mother’s mind must work overtime. In a way, emphysema seemed a karmic joke of some kind for a person who’d expended so much breath explaining what she thought, and what she thought others should think.

  She got up and went to her mother’s bedroom and retrieved a well-worn gray cardigan from the bed. Helping her mother sit up straighter, she slipped the old sweater in place, making sure it hadn’t bunched up in back where it would make an uncomfortable lump.

  “Better?”

  Her mother nodded. She looked small and folded in on herself, partially wrapped in the coverlet, with the sweater draped around her stooped shoulders. Hard to remember how she’d looked when Claire was in grade school. Gwen Porter had delivered her only child at the late age of forty-one, early middle-age by some standards, but Claire’s memory produced the image of a slender, elegant woman with dark bobbed hair and large luminous eyes.

  She settled back in her spot at the end of the couch, wondering if she really ought to turn up the thermostat. She felt guilty for keeping the house at bit cooler than she’d like, just to save a few pennies on the heating bill. Her mother looked cold. Not the level of comfort Claire knew her mother had grown up in. Gwen’s family had been wealthy, her father an investment banker, but he’d lost a bundle somehow; Claire wasn’t sure of the details. Gwen had gone to college and married late, far beneath her station to Jimmie Porter, a young insurance salesman. He was a friend of her brother and came around the Porter household a lot because, according to Gwen, they’d instantly hit it off. Once married, they’d struggled financially, trying to make it on their own. Gwen’s family helped them occasionally in the early days of the marriage, but as the family became increasingly impoverished themselves, those infusions of cash came less often and finally stopped. Claire had a picture in her mind of Gwen going from living a privileged childhood to a barely lower-middle class married life. Her mother’s brother, Jimmie’s pal, died in his fifties of lung cancer as had their father, a weakness of the lungs apparently running in that side of family. Claire assumed it had skipped her because she was tall and sturdy, with a strong constitution—her problems were mostly mental.

  Her mother coughed slightly, then started to choke. Claire was on her feet in an instant. Her trained hands went to work, massaging the middle of her mother’s back between the shoulder blades.

  “Just lean forward.” One hand on the shoulder, the other on the back, as much for comfort as for therapy. Gradually her mother relaxed and the coughing spasm passed.

  Claire remembered being told that her mother had started smoking at a very early age, which, her doctors informed everyone, was the reason she’d developed emphysema. The wasting disease in Gwen’s lungs had really taken hold when Claire started middle school, and by the time she entered high school her mother had become an invalid. Now, at age 66, Gwen had marginal lung function left, requiring her to stay tethered to the portable oxygen generator that hissed softly to itself, artificially sustaining its patient in the land of the living. These days she spent most of her time reading and dozing, dependent on the gray box the size of a small ice chest. There would come a time, though, when the collapse of lung tissue and inability to expel oxygen would take its toll and the patient would suffocate, or end up with a breathing tube down her throat. Dread settled around Claire’s shoulders—not a way anyone would choose to make their exit. There were times when her black mood was on her that she wished she could help nature along. Then she’d feel guilty for having even entertained such a thought.

  “Whatever happened…to the one who got hurt?”

  It took Claire a second or two to figure out what she was talking about. “You mean Danny?”

  Her mother nodded. “Sounded like you should hav
e treated him.”

  “Yeah, I know. But Bayard wouldn’t let me. He didn’t seem to think it was that bad. Then the next day he told everybody that Danny had decided to quit the play and the company.”

  “And his replacement is better?” Gwen sipped the last of her tea.

  “Yeah, by light years. I wouldn’t have thought changing one character would make such a difference, but in this case it really has.” Claire thought about it. The play had momentum, excitement because of Tom’s presence onstage. He’d managed to push Morris to a higher level as well, and the two of them sparred as Faustus and Mephistopheles in a way that made the play come alive. She’d never seen the play as anything other than running lines and marking stage positions while Danny had been Faustus. But now it had become a real story, the tragic plight of the worldly scholar risking his immortal soul for fame and fortune—a story of greed and regret as gripping as any soap opera. And in that moment, she decided to give Danny a call.

  Claire got up. “Mom, I need to go call about the rehearsal schedule. I’ll use the phone in Daddy’s office so it won’t bother you. Want me to heat your tea while I’m up?”

  Gwen shook her head. “Go talk. I’m fine.” She bunched the sweater up under her neck and closed her eyes.

  “I’ll leave the door open…call me if you need anything.”

  Claire headed down the hallway toward the tiny back bedroom that had served as her father’s home office. Its single window looked out over the fenced-in back yard. A large business style desk took up most of the floor space, with a couple of gray metal filing cabinets pushed into corners.

  Jimmie Porter had a real office downtown in the suite maintained by the insurance firm that employed him, but a lot of the time he’d worked from home to be near his ailing wife. Claire was touched when she thought about it. Hard as their lives may have been, Gwen and Jimmie Porter never ceased to care for each other, at least as far as Claire could tell. Their cozy little bungalow on the narrow residential street in their southside neighborhood of old friends encompassed a world they’d built for themselves that had little to do with the brief socialite life her mother had led in college. When they’d gone looking for a house, for Jimmie it had been love at first sight over the small Craftsman with its arched doorways, neat brick fireplace, and pecan floors. Claire remembered going with her parents to see the house when it was on the market and walking though the unfurnished rooms, hanging onto her father’s hand. She’d been four, or maybe five…preschool, anyway. What she’d liked most was the fenced back yard with its big trees, one of which had a tire swing.

  Whatever Gwen may have thought of it, given the house she’d grown up in, she’d never challenged Jimmie on his decision to buy the bungalow, at least within Claire’s hearing. Her mother had plenty of opinions about how to furnish the house and insisted on putting a small birdbath fountain in the front yard “to dress it up,” but once they’d moved out of the tiny upstairs apartment of which Claire had only shadowy memories, the family settled in with no complaints. Claire had her own bedroom, so what wasn’t to love? Their first year in, Jimmie added a two-person wooden swing under the arched supports of the open front porch. Claire well remembered him varnishing the pale wood with its cutout heart design across the back. These days the swing was terminally weathered with too many slats missing. It should probably be replaced, but since Claire had no plans to swing in it any time soon, that particular task sat near the bottom of her priority list.

  She eased down into the well-worn leather chair behind her father’s desk. It had been all she could do to go through the drawers and piles of papers right after his death. Reading his correspondence and pulling everything out for inspection felt embarrassing, invasive…as if she were plundering through someone’s private life without their knowledge (which, of course, she was). But the deed had to be done because there were things like unpaid bills, letters from clients, insurance contracts waiting to be executed, and so much business trivia to sort through that it made her head ache. She’d sucked it up, though, because there was no one else to do it. At least the one thing she’d especially been dreading—unearthing a stash of porn mags or something worse, like love letters from someone who wasn’t her mother—hadn’t materialized. She thought perhaps there might be a God.

  Now, the surface of the desk was mostly clear and she’d started using it herself. She found Addie’s number among the entries she’d added to the rolodex and then hesitated, her hand on the receiver. She could imagine Addie’s reaction to the call. Holy crap, Claire, give it a rest! What is it with you and this obsession over Danny? She grimaced and dialed the number.

  Addie answered on the sixth ring, slightly out of breath, just as Claire was about to hang up.

  “…‘ello?”

  “Hey, it’s me. Claire. Sorry, did I catch you at a bad time?”

  “No, no. I was in the laundry room downstairs. Had to run to catch the phone. What’s up? I hope that rat Bayard doesn’t want us to come in after all.”

  Claire laughed. “Not a chance. The reason I called, I just wondered…since you have the cast phone list…if you could give me Danny’s number.”

  There was a beat, then two. “Um, okay. Give me a minute.” Claire heard the receiver clunk down on a hard surface as Addie went to retrieve the list. She returned shortly and read out the number. Claire jotted it down and wondered what the bloody hell she was doing. This was none of her business, but like an itch she couldn’t quite reach, she couldn’t let it alone.

  “Mind if I ask why you wanna call him?”

  “I just wanted to ask him if he got his wrist properly treated. I don’t know if he lives alone or what...” Lame. Completely lame. Addie must be rolling her eyes. Claire sighed and leaned back in her father’s chair, quietly despising herself.

  “Well, I can tell you that he lives in an apartment near Inman Park. Don’t know if there’s a roommate.”

  “Ah. Well, thanks for the info.”

  “So, why do you really need to call him?” Addie had switched to her legal assistant’s voice, which told Claire she wasn’t buying any part of the checking-up-on-a-patient excuse.

  What to say? “I just have this gut-level feeling that something’s not right.”

  Instead of laughing, Addie said, “I could do a card reading on him. Hang on, I’ll go get them.” The phone clunked down again. Claire ground her teeth. She didn’t want a bloody card reading predicting falling towers and whatnot. She just wanted to hear the guy’s voice and satisfy the rat-gnawing worry she couldn’t shake off.

  But Addie was back—Claire heard the cards shuffle.

  “Okay. Claire, just picture Danny in your mind, if you would, please?” Her voice went up, like a question. Claire sighed. She’d gone this far, might as well play along.

  “Are you visualizing, Claire?”

  “Yes. Go ahead.”

  “So…here we go. I’ll pull three cards. Show us the energy surrounding Danny. Is he safe?” There was silence, then, “Hm. All three cards are reversed.”

  “How bad is that?” Claire felt a tension headache starting at the base of her skull.

  “Depends. Reversals can mean barriers or blockages, or it might just show delay in the resolution of something. Doesn’t necessarily mean bad luck…usually the interpretation is more complex. Anyway, first card is The Seeker, reversed. My guess would be it means a delay in learning or understanding, or there is a barrier preventing enlightenment.”

  Claire made quick notes. “Could it refer to something secret, or maybe something that’s preventing us from finding out what we want to know about Danny?”

  “It might.”

  Claire added that to her notes. “What’s the next card?”

  “Six of Swords, reversed. Hm, not so good.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, swords generally have to do with actions or physical events, and the number six has to do with the self. So I’d interpret the card to mean selfishness or a failure to do w
hat’s right, a misguided sacrifice maybe.”

  Claire’s scalp prickled. “A what?”

  Addie’s voice was thoughtful. “The sacrifice of another, for one’s own selfish interests. Not literally a sacrifice, you understand…probably like undermining someone’s well-being to further your own ends…or something like that.”

  Claire realized she was holding her breath again, a nervous habit when things she didn’t want to hear came out anyway.

  “Claire? You there?”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking. Keep going.”

  “Last card. Eight of Wands, reversed. Dishonesty, falsehood, communication failure.”

  Claire put her pen down. “We’re being lied to. I knew that story about Danny quitting the company was bullshit.”

  “Huh? But, he did quit. I think.” Addie seemed genuinely confused.

  “We only have Bayard’s word for it.” Claire was annoyed—the truth seemed blatantly obvious. He knew what really happened to Danny, but he wasn’t sharing.

  “Well, yeah, but why would he lie? I mean, what’s his motivation?”

  Claire bit her lip. “Who knows? I’m just suspicious by nature. Do your cards ever give you wrong information?”

  “Not wrong information, per se. Sometimes I might misinterpret what they show me, especially if it’s a complicated reading. But looking at this spread, it’s actually pretty straightforward. Three reversals, all having to do with blocked communication and lack of information. It does sound like something being kept secret, doesn’t it?” Claire thought she might have heard a whiff of fear in Addie’s voice. Maybe she remembered that other reading she’d given in the pub.