My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) (12 page)

For too long a moment, Mr. Cahill and I stared at each other. He reached down, his hand brushing mine, as he flipped several pages—sketches of clothes and designs—and finally stopped at a random sketch of a nude girl on a chaise longue, reaching for a bowl of persimmons. He did a double-take, and looked at me with unvarnished surprise. My face flamed.

Suddenly, the drill siren went off. We all knew what to do—duck and cover.

Mr. Cahill walked past scrambling kids, hands in his pockets, like he was ambling down the sidewalk on Main Street. I caught Jimmy’s confused, questioning gaze and Hank’s knowing smirk as they moved to get under their desks. I grabbed my sketchbook first, and then curled up under my desk.

I didn’t actually remember making that sketch.

In the event it survived an actual atomic attack and
revealed me for the scandalous girl that I was, I pulled the awful sketch from my notebook and wadded it into a tight little ball. As soon as this was over, I’d get rid of it.

After the siren stopped, we all got up from under our desks. Mr. Cahill had left the room. I didn’t see Jimmy or Hank, either. I put my books in my bag, clutched my wadded-up sketch, and headed out of the classroom. Out in the hallway, Jimmy came toward me, looking anxious. Hank stood near him, still studying me.

I smiled at Jimmy and veered suddenly into the girls’ bathroom. No one was there. I dropped the sketch into the special bin for menstrual pads. For a second, I stood in the bathroom, shaking.
Pull it together, Donna.

I went to the bathroom sink, and stared at myself in the mirror. I smoothed stray hairs back into my ponytail. The door swung open. Babs came in.

“Are you OK?” she said. “You were acting weird in art class. And you just ran away from Jimmy.”

I pretended to inspect a spot on my left eyebrow. “The siren went off. You know how that makes everyone jumpy. And I came in here because, you know, I needed to.”

Babs looked over my shoulder at me in the mirror. Our eyes met in the reflection. “Uh-huh. You’ve been jumpy all day,” she said. “I bought you a little time—told Hank and Jimmy you weren’t feeling well.” She grinned. “They took off like two terrified little boys. Said we should meet them at Cosmic Burger.”

Thank you, Babs.

“Of course, you probably want to study in the library after school again,” she said. She rolled her eyes. I was supposed to go by Mr. Cahill’s after school for another modeling session, but suddenly, I knew I couldn’t face him. Not after he’d seen that sketch.

I shrugged. “I think I’ll skip studying today.” A surge of disappointment shot through me.

“Good for you!” Babs sounded pleased. “You study harder than anyone. But I still want to know what’s wrong with you. You should be over the moon! Jimmy is the greatest thing that could happen to you. And you don’t have to work for that old shrew anymore.”

I laughed. Babs knew how I felt about Grandma.

And I knew she was right. I was now officially Jimmy’s girl, and I knew I
should
be over the moon. Spending time with Jimmy almost every night. Tending to Will and Daddy. Studying. Doing alterations for Miss Bettina. Posing for Mr. Cahill—and making sure not to get caught. Instead, I was exhausted. So exhausted I’d apparently sketched myself naked at Mr. Cahill’s while I was half-asleep.

Babs leaned toward me. “I think I know what’s wrong with you,” she whispered.

My eyes went to the trash bin. Even Babs—Babs, who loved her racy novels and who had gone all the way with Hank (it wasn’t nearly as thrilling as she’d hoped, she said)—would not think kindly of me if she saw that sketch.

“Come on, you can tell me,” she said.

“I’m just a little distracted thinking about pulling together Will’s birthday party,” I lied. “It’s this coming Saturday.” Will would spend the night at Tony’s on Friday, and
then they’d both return to our house for Will’s party the next day.

Babs rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. I don’t believe for a moment that you’re really tense about Will’s birthday party.” She waggled her eyebrows. “I know what’s really bothering you.”

I felt suddenly ill. Did she know I’d spent the past week modeling and cleaning after school for Mr. Cahill? “What’s that?”

She laughed. “Meeting Mr. and Mrs. Denton this Friday night, of course!”

I nodded, relieved to let Babs believe this. “I—I’ve been working on something to wear.” I’d spent most of the previous night in the basement remaking Mama’s yellow dress, tense that every creak in the house meant that Daddy was coming down and would find me.

Babs reached in her purse and pulled out a bottle. Her mom’s Dexamyl. My eyes widened. She pressed the bottle into my hand.

“It’s the Dexamyl my mom takes.” She rolled her eyes. “She has plenty of bottles—she’ll never miss this one. Or the one I took for myself.” She giggled. “Anyway, they’ll help you be more confident, more awake.”

At that moment, Lisa Kablinski came out of the stall at the far end of the bathroom. I wondered how much she’d overheard. Everything, from the look on her face.

But Babs gave her a hard, daring look and said, “You didn’t hear anything, right?”

“R-right,” Lisa said.

“Don’t be silly, Babs,” I said, “regular aspirin will take
care of my cramps.” I breezed toward the door, held my hand over the waste bin as if I was throwing away the pills.

But I hung on to them.

I made it through a very busy week without taking the pills, although I thought of them often, tucked at the bottom of my intimates drawer by the Blue Waltz Sachet and my stash of money.

I missed seeing Mr. Cahill, hated myself for that, hated the hurt, questioning look in his eyes, hated myself for looking away. And always, the image of the Dexamyl bottle floated across my mind’s eye accompanied by the thought that taking the pills would make things so much better.

I resisted. Instead, I worked on the yellow dress, planned Will’s party, and tried to escape into the comfort of being Jimmy’s girl, preening just a bit too much around other girls, clinging a little too tightly to Jimmy’s arm.

On Wednesday night that week, Grandma came to our house, three days before Will’s party. Daddy was out at a midweek AA meeting; Will was upstairs in his room. I was sitting on the couch in the living room, carefully reading, for the third time, the Chocolate Cake II recipe in the one cookbook in our house, the
Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
. The book had been inscribed to Mama—“with many happy wishes on your wedding day”—from Mrs. Mary Lou Johnston, the wife of the then-president of Groverton Pulp & Paper. The book’s brown cover and eight-hundred-plus pages looked as new and untouched as they would have when Mama opened the gift.

Hearing a knock, I put the cookbook down on the side
table and went to the front door. Grandma stood there, overdressed in a black wool coat and matching hat. Other than at church, where we exchanged only public pleasantries, I hadn’t seen her since the night Jimmy had come to Dot’s Corner Café and swept me into his life. She looked too small, smaller than I remembered her seeming at her café, at least.

“I heard you’re having a party for Will’s birthday on Saturday,” Grandma said. There was a little tremble in her voice. I couldn’t help but smile. “I thought you could use some help. I could make the cake—”

“Oh, thank you, but I have that under control,” I said. Her thin eyebrows went up. I’d been studying the Chocolate Cake II recipe more painstakingly than I studied for a chemistry or algebra test. I’d made the cake at least twenty times in my mind, and each time, it had come out perfectly. I pulled myself up a little taller and stared down at Grandma. “I’m baking a scratch cake. I have a recipe from Mama’s cookbook.”

Grandma’s eyebrows heightened almost to the gray fringe over her forehead and I could just feel her thinking,
Your mama never cooked a decent meal in her life…
but in the next second, her face fell. She was disappointed that I was denying her the chance to do the one thing she did really well—baking—for Will’s birthday.

“Very well,” she said. Her voice carried no taunting, only sadness. “I came by with something else,” she added. I kept my arm up, barring her from entering our home.
Leave us be,
I thought.
Just leave us be.

Her hands shook as she unclasped her purse and pulled out an envelope. She held it out to me. “Go ahead, take it. Look inside.”

I took the envelope but said, “Will can open this Saturday, with his other gifts.”

Grandma shook her head, her too-big hat wobbling on her head. “It’s for you. Open it.” Some of the spitfire was back in her voice, and I hesitated, but then I unsealed the envelope.

I gasped. Inside was a twenty-dollar bill. A fortune.

I looked back up at Grandma, confused. Her smile was tight with grim pleasure that she’d made me lose my composure. “I also heard,” she said, “that you’re going to the homecoming dance with Jimmy Denton. I thought you could use some help for a dress and shoes and such. A
real
dress.” Her gaze took in the remade outfit I wore that evening—a teal-and-pink-checked skirt and a white blouse to which I’d added matching trim around the collar and cuffs—and suddenly I felt as exposed as if I were wearing nothing.

She knew.
She’d probably known all along that I’d been remaking Mama’s clothes. Grandma never missed or forgot a detail. Especially not where her hatred of my mama was concerned.

My hand fell from the doorpost, and I hugged my arms around me, suddenly shivering on the warm, humid evening. But Grandma didn’t take the opportunity to rush past me inside to see Will, or even wait to see if I’d thank her. She just turned on her heel and walked down the porch steps with that slightly-to-the-left hitch in her gait.

I shut the door and ran upstairs to my room. I pulled Grandma’s twenty from the envelope and stashed it in my own envelope, with all the money I’d already set aside for the following summer, when I’d go to New York and
somehow become a costume stitcher, by the Dexamyl tablets from Babs (that I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw away) and the Blue Waltz Sachet from Jimmy. Of late, my only income had been a few alterations for Miss Bettina’s customers. I hadn’t been working for Mr. Cahill or getting tips at Dot’s Corner Café, but the twenty dollars more than made up for even weeks of lost work.

I made up my mind right then, as I wadded up Grandma’s envelope and threw it in the wastebasket, that I would go through with my plan. Well, not a plan, really; until that moment it had been a vague, uneasy idea that I tried to push away. But Grandma’s comment, her “gift” to me, made that idea come to life with startling, sudden clarity and determination: I would remake the last big dress left in Mama’s old suitcases for my homecoming dress.

Mama’s wedding dress.

“O
h, for pity’s sake, Jimmy, is something wrong with your girlfriend?” Mrs. Denton asked.

“No, no, she’s fine,” Jimmy said. “Right, Donna?”

I looked over at Jimmy…all the Jimmys…desperately staring across the table at me, nervously tugging his tie, wanting me to behave properly. So I shook my head to clear it, but that only made me dizzier. That…and the Dexamyl. I’d finally given in to the temptation of the pills that night, hoping they’d make me as alert and confident as Babs had promised.

Instead, on top of my dizziness, everything around me seemed distant and odd.

“Then why is she giggling and staring at me and not eating and—”

“Julia!” Mr. Denton’s voice was sharp, reprimanding.

I startled out of my giggles and dropped my fork, which made a ting as it hit my plate.
Julia
…the name of Mr. Cahill’s mystery woman, the woman I imagined as his long-lost love and the subject of his mysterious project, the woman I assumed I was a stand-in for, as I posed in tiring, awkward positions on the chaise longue…or
used
to.

I gave my head another little shake, picked up my fork, poked at my food. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that that painting behind you…it—it’s very…” I stopped, not sure how to describe the dark blue swirls on black.

“Oh, that. A college friend of mine did that.” She spoke dismissively, as if she’d hung the painting up to cover a hole in the wall, but I heard emotion in her voice. A bit of sadness. Even wistfulness.

I looked up and our gazes locked. “Mr. Cahill?” I said, without thinking. Mrs. Denton stiffened, her fork frozen just above her plate, on its way to her lips. The bite of cordon bleu dropped off.

A memory tumbled forth, my subconscious trying to rescue me. “Mrs. Leis is a regular at my grandma’s diner, Dot’s Corner Café, and she asked me if I was in the new art class, and I said yes, and she said you’d met at the Groverton Women’s Club this summer, when you first came here, and that she’d said she thought there should be an art class, and you said you knew a college friend who would be perfect for the job….”

Finally—thankfully—my words trailed to a stop.

Mrs. Denton shuddered, like she was shaking herself back to life, and put her fork down on her plate with a purposeful tap. “Well, aren’t you just at the center of this cozy little town’s grapevine,” she said.

Mr. Denton coughed, warningly. Mrs. Denton ignored him and went on. “You are right, dear. The painting is by my”—she paused and gave Mr. Denton a sidelong glance—“by
our
old college friend, Nate Cahill. Well, he started out as my friend.” She paused. “I was an art major.”

My face involuntarily twitched with surprise. Mrs.
Denton smiled ruefully while she peered at me. “That’s right. Art. Not teaching or nursing.” Her gaze shifted from me to Jimmy and then to her husband. “Not that I’ve done anything with it. Nate, of course, has exhibited in art shows and galleries in San Francisco, Chicago—”

“Now, Julia, I think you are being too modest. You’ve helped Nate make connections many times,” Mr. Denton said, bragging about his wife, proud of her, completely unaware of the revolted look she was giving him. He looked at me and smiled. “Mrs. Denton still dabbles in art. She’s even won a few club contests over the years.” He sliced off a bite of cordon bleu, held it on his fork in midair. “I’m guessing the women’s club here has a contest or show, and if not, of course Mrs. Denton could organize one.” He popped the bite into his mouth.