Families torn asunder.
Here, in her own judicious handwriting, Bea had declared with guileless joy the bright beginnings of her life with Ray—the date of her wedding, the date of her son’s arrival. Here she’d filled in Nathan’s birthday, never guessing the time would come when she’d be expected to fill in the date of Nathan’s death as well.
How complicated Bea’s own entries in the Bible had become. How did one document a divorce within these solemn pages? How did one record the loss of a child? How did one record the day-to-day decisions that made up a life, a history? The trivial details that made life both grand and heartbreaking? The only spaces provided here were meant for names, places, dates, mar riages, deaths. But so much else happened in between.
Bea closed the Bible with a resounding thwack and set it on the table. She propped her forehead on her fingertips.
Nothing good ever came out of that Bible for me. A lot of warm feelings and hope, maybe, but when it mattered most, none of those parables or messages or love poems ever applied to my life.
Outside she could hear children shrieking and talking. She gave one resigned sigh, stood again, and sauntered down the hallway to find clothes. She opened the closet door and stared indifferently at the row of skirts and trousers, caring little what she chose to wear.
The ranks of garments disappeared as she stared at them and for one haunting moment she saw instead the yearning, uplifted faces of one small girl and one young woman halting in her dark hallway, eyes riveted to a kindergarten picture hanging on the wall.
How old was he in this?
Is that Nathan, Mama? When he was a little boy?
Heaviness engulfed Bea, a darkness of mourning that settled over her shoulders like a weighty cloak. She felt unable to lift or move or breathe.
If Nathan had married that girl, then that girl had something of Nathan’s that Bea would never have.
His last five years.
Nathan would have carried things too heavy for Gemma and reached things that were too high. Gemma would have listened to his goofy, off-pitch songs while he showered and watched him make sideways faces against his jaw while he shaved and chastised him for gulping milk out of the carton while his Adam’s apple bobbed criminally up and down. Gemma’s toothbrush would have stood handle to handle with Nathan’s toothbrush. If he’d ever been angry or happy or concerned about something, Gemma would have known.
At that moment the telephone rang from the night-stand across the room. The shrill bell made Bea’s heart stop. Ever since she’d been startled out of sleep with the dire news of Nathan’s death, any ringing of the telephone and any knocking on the door had the power to terrify her. When it rang now, Bea gave herself a list of careful instructions. Cross the room. Carry the phone back to the closet. Draw a deep breath, and answer. She leaned hard against the closet wall. “Hello?”
“Hello, Bea? This is Geneva. What are you doing?”
There. See. No reason to panic. Only Geneva. She tucked the receiver inside the crook of her shoulder and willed her pounding pulse to slow down. Meticulously, she began to slide hangers along the rod. “I’m trying to pick out something to wear.”
“How are you?”
“Okay. I mean, better. I suppose.”
“Glad to hear it. Bea, I’m really glad.” A pause, now that quick pleasantries were taken care of. Geneva’s phone calls always began this way. “You up for the latest news? You aren’t going to believe what I just heard.”
“Well, I—”
As Geneva was wont to do, she didn’t give Bea much of an opportunity to respond. Instead, she plunged right in, eager to expound before anyone else got the chance to scoop her.
“A group of hoodlums broke in over at the pioneer museum.”
“No. Oh, goodness, Geneva.” What dainty morsels rumors were. “Those things never happen here.” Bea knew everybody in town, including Geneva, expected her to be engrossed in daily Ash Hollow happenings. She should try to sound interested.
But, today, trying took too much effort.
Bea sorted through the hangers once more. Two-thirds of the outfits here, just as in every other closet in Garden County, had come from the factory outlet store in Oshkosh, the home of Cabela’s catalog returns. Bea settled on a pair of navy knit pants from Cabela’s, so worn that they would have been better off going into the ragbag. She pulled them off the hanger and said nothing.
“Ardis Jacobs told me about it. She was there going through the exhibits. Nobody knows if they stole anything yet. You know what it’s like in that place. All those square feet and they’re still looking for space to display Francis Clupney’s Korean War memorabilia and Jason Stone’s guitar collection. It could take years to figure out if anything’s missing.”
“Geneva, I’m sorry. I’m just not up to gossip right now. There’s too much else going on in my head.”
Humph, she could almost hear Geneva say. This wouldn’t sit too well with her friend. And she was right. Geneva waited several long moments before replying. “I know it’s got to be difficult. But you can’t close out the world, Bea.”
“I know I can’t.”
“But you are.”
Bea decided on a plaid shirt from Cabela’s, the cotton rubbed as thin as gauze at the elbows. She took it off the hanger and sat down hard on the dirty clothes hamper between a pile of folded blankets and her jumble of rubber-soled walking shoes. “I’m trying not to.”
Silence again from Geneva on the other end of the phone—the potent, blame-filled sort that, in its wordlessness, says “Oh no, you aren’t!” Bea sighed, determined to ask some sort of question just to prove Geneva wrong. “What happened to those people? Did they get arrested?”
Geneva forged ahead then, sounding thrilled to be back on track. “You won’t believe this when I tell you. Jay Triplett wrote up a formal complaint because Mabel Perkins insisted on protecting county property. But, in the middle of all that, he made Mabel Perkins feed them her famous sticky buns. Ardis said they ate like animals, growling and shoving food into their mouths like they hadn’t seen any for weeks.”
“My heavens. Those things never happen here.”
“Ardis thought they ought to all be toted down to the county jail, but Jay called George Sissel instead. Pastor came right over, met them, and invited them to move in for a few days.”
“To the church?”
“No! To his house.”
“Oh, goodness.” In spite of herself, Bea decided this was turning into an interesting story. First the museum and now Pastor George. If George was involved, perhaps she ought to step outside of herself and find a way to help. “How many are staying over at Sissel’s? I’ve got casseroles in the deep freeze and I’ll never eat them all. I could certainly donate a few to the cause.”
At that question Geneva paused. “You know, I’m not sure how many.”
“You do, too, Geneva. I can tell by your voice. Six? Ten? What?”
While she waited for Geneva’s answer, Bea balanced the receiver beneath one ear and began to tug the pants on, working first on one leg and then the other. She lifted her rear end off the laundry hamper and maneuvered them all the way on. She could tell by the waist band of the pants that she’d lost pounds. All those casseroles to eat, and she still couldn’t force herself to choke down much of a meal.
The hollow within her wasn’t something that could be filled with food.
“How many?” Bea asked again.
Geneva’s voice sounded rather cagey when she spoke up this time. “Actually, I may have exaggerated. A little.”
“Geneva. Tell me.”
“Well, actually . . . I only know of two.”
“Two?”
“And one is a small girl. A very small girl.”
Bea’s heart gamboled forward double time. Apprehension sluiced through her. It couldn’t be. No.
“Two.” Bea began to fasten the mother-of-pearl buttons on her shirt. Her hands shook violently and she couldn’t work t
he buttons through the buttonholes. She asked the question carefully, making it sound like an afterthought. “What does she look like?”
“Who?”
“The very small girl.”
Nathan would have lugged in bags of groceries for Gemma whenever she went to the store. Gemma would have smoothed out the pillow every morning that bore the indentation of Nathan’s head. Gemma would have held his athletic socks up, heel to heel, to make certain they matched before she bundled them both together. Gemma would have brought him an aspirin and a Pepsi in bed whenever he got the flu.
“How should I know what she looks like? I haven’t seen her. I’ve only heard about her. That’s the way gossip is.”
For some vague reason Bea felt protective. “Maybe you ought to learn from that, Geneva. Maybe you ought not to talk about folks until you’ve seen them with your own eyes.” She shoved her foot into a shoe and wiggled it sideways until her heel went in, her heart wavering dangerously between anger and mistrust. Where before she had struggled to sound interested, she now fought for nonchalance. She asked Geneva with forced looseness, “Who are those two? Where have they come from? Do you know?”
“Well, listen to you asking questions now, Bea. I didn’t think you cared about any of this.”
“Did you hear a name? Any name?”
She heard Geneva rummaging around in her own cabinets, running water, finishing her own chores. “Not sure. Gemma. Gemma somebody. That’s all I remember of a name.”
“Gemma?”
“Yes, I think that’s it.”
“Did you happen to hear? Are they from Omaha?”
“I didn’t hear where they come from.”
Their coats would have hung side by side, Gemma’s and Nathan’s, on two hooks beside the door. The magazines Nathan best liked to read when he got stuck for a while in the bathroom—Reader’s Digest and Sports Illustrated—would have driven Gemma crazy, splayed out in a jumble on the bathroom floor. The top drawer in his dresser would have been an untidy muddle of treasures he’d found—a pinecone, a cord switch, a pack of gum.
Too much had come upon Bea too quickly. Her emotions turned off. She did not feel, anymore than someone feels after receiving a grave cut. She felt tired and battered, as if someone had kicked her. Tired and battered and numb.
“Bea, don’t you need to go lay down or something? You’re sounding strange over the phone.”
“I’m fine, Geneva.” Bea struggled to bring the careful steadiness back into her voice. “I’m sitting right here on my laundry hamper putting on my shoes.”
“Well, at least you’re wearing shoes. That’s a start. You’re getting better by my book.”
“I’ve worn shoes every day since Nathan died, Geneva. That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I need to let you go, Bea. But I almost forgot to tell you the rest. Alva Torrington hired her on. Gave her a job so she can survive.”
“Who? Who did Alva hire on?”
“That girl you ask so much about.”
“Oh.”
“She’s waitressing over at The Cramalot Inn. She told Alva and Pastor George both that she’d only be around long enough to earn money to fix her car.”
“They won’t be here long, then.”
“No. They won’t. You know, you could call George Sissel and see if they need casseroles. That sounds like a nice thing to do.”
“Talk to you later, Geneva.”
“Bea. Good-bye.”
For a long time after Bea hung up the phone, she sat staring into the deep annals of her closet. She could just make out her own reflection, distorted by the convex of the metal shoehorn hanging beside her—huge nose and lips, tiny forehead, pinpoint eyes.
She bent over and tied one shoestring into a perfect bow.
She tied the second shoestring the exact same way.
Chapter Nine
Sunday morning services at Antelope Valley Christian Fellowship in Oshkosh began promptly at 10:10 A.M.
Look it up in the Garden County Yellow Pages and the service officially began on the hour, at ten. Look it up in the Religion Section of The Garden County News and the listing there read exactly the same thing. But local folks all understood, no matter what any printed schedule told them, that Ash Hollow ran on High Prairie grassland time, and that meant things didn’t get going good until fifteen minutes after everybody showed up.
If Bea attended church today for any reason at all, she attended out of pride.
It wouldn’t do for her regular seat—fifth pew back, three spaces in—to remain conspicuously empty. It wouldn’t do for the upstanding Christian folks in this town to notice she was absent. So she attended this morning’s Sunday service with her chin up, her hat tilted at a spry angle, wearing her cheeriest summer dress and her bravest smile. She sat thumbing through the church bulletin, her eyes veering neither to the right nor to the left, while the sanctuary filled with noise around her and Jo Nell’s heavy-handed organ music wafted to the rafters.
It was George Sissel himself who stopped beside her, laid a reassuring arm across her shoulders.
“Bea. Hello.”
She stole a glance up at him, valiant smile pasted on, traitor tears glimmering. “Good morning, Pastor George.”
“I’m glad you came today,” he said, his gentle eyes peering deep into her soul. His entire demeanor seemed to say, “I know how hard it must be to sit here, to wear a hat with a flower, a lacy dress, a smile.”
“I couldn’t not be here today, Pastor George. Folks wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t come.”
“Oh, Bea. We would have understood if you weren’t. You becareful with yourself. You let yourself heal.”
“Do you think—” She bit her bottom lip. She’d been about to say, “Do you think I will ever heal, George?” Only she couldn’t.
He sat down beside her for a moment while the organ music crescendoed, Jo Nell’s obvious signal that she thought the pastor ought to be out of the congregation, behind the altar, preparing to conduct the service. “You know how God does things sometimes. When you give him free rein to be in charge, sometimes things get messy.”
“Well, things sure are messy right now.”
Once George had spoken with her, others began to speak to her, too. They came around the pew and hugged her, patted her shoulders or kissed her on the cheek—onslaughts of empathy shared without words.
Everyone around her greeted her or waved or smiled her way.
“It was such a nice funeral for Nathan. I hadn’t gotten a chance to tell you yet.”
“How are you faring? Better after this time?”
“Have you eaten Jan Blackwell’s crumb cake she brought over? She’s decided to enter it in the Garden County Fair.”
At Bea’s recommendation, Holechek Funeral Home had donated several dozen potted plants from Nathan’s memorial service to the Garden County Senior Center. The ones that the senior center hadn’t found room for had made their way to the church altar committee instead.
“Altar plants in memory of Nathan Roger Bartling,” the bulletin read.
Bea stared at her son’s name in print, at the words written there, hating them for what they said. She glanced up when the call to worship began and her breath caught. Across the aisle, she saw someone else staring at the bulletin, too.
Someone else who could be staring at Nathan’s printed name.
Someone else with a red nose and a clenched jaw, battling tears.
George Sissel motioned with his arms. “Please stand for Hymn 307.” Jo Nell pounded out the beginning strains of “Standing On The Promises.”
There could be no mistaking that girl, even with her unruly hair tamed just a bit, even with her hands folded in her lap and her face washed, wearing a print dress that Bea recognized as borrowed from Loren Sissel. Even with her little girl burrowed up like a frightened puppy at her side. Bea peered out at both of them, her chest constricting, from beneath the safe haven of her hat brim.
Around her they sang, “Staaanding, staaanding, standing on the promises of God my Savior.”
A strangling sense of subjugation rose like bile in her throat. Familiar. Helpless. How easy it would be for some young woman to take advantage of a lonely old woman—to have read a random obituary in a paper and decided to redesign her life to fit.
Friends had delivered at least a dozen copies of Nathan’s obituary in The Garden County News to the house, the page either folded or snipped out or circled to mark the spot. She’d read the article over and over again, perusing the words from beginning to end before she tucked the story away in her old maple magazine rack, wanting to know if anything printed there would be enough to have given Nathan’s intimate past away.
BARTLING—Nathan Roger . . . Born to Ray and Beatrice Bartling . . . fond of the Masonic Lodge pancake breakfasts on July Fourth . . . worked two summers at Garden County Country Club, another summer making milkshakes at Campbell Drug . . . a respected boy in his school, considerate, smart enough not to have to study to make Bs and so he made Bs. . . taken into custody once for shooting off firecrackers underneath a trashcan behind the church. . . won the carp-fishing contest at Otter Creek Marina when he was ten . . . known around town for his authentic goose call . . . a tragic loss to the community even though he hadn’t finished Lewellen Rural High School and had left town five years before.
Although some of these stories came close, nothing published here explained someone recognizing Nathan’s kindergarten picture. Nothing explained someone knowing about Nathan getting his backside walloped for squeezing rose petals.
Small details to hinge a lifetime of hopes on.
Small details to risk trust on, when you’d spent the past twenty years trusting folks and fate and Jesus, all three of which had let you down.
The song in the little sanctuary rose to the roof beams. “Staaanding, staaanding, standing on the promises of God.”
Nancy Law nudged Bea with an elbow. “Who is that girl down there? You ever seen her before?”
Bea swallowed. Hard. She stood in the middle of a church with her hymnal propped open in her palms, as good a reason as any she could think of to avoid telling a falsehood.
A Rose by the Door Page 8
