Blessings (7 page)

“Whose daughter was that?” her mother had demanded, but her father had mouthed the words
bank president
and then it had been all right. But after that they had always had their own fireworks, and Lydia had done the same once the house was hers. One Fourth there had been thirty people staying at the house, sleeping on the patio divans, doubling up in the bedrooms, and they’d had starbursts and Roman candles at midnight, and then strawberry shortcake and champagne, sitting on quilts spread around the front lawn. She remembered that Jess had not liked the people who came from the city. She thought they drank too much, and one of the women, she thought it was Penny Lind, had tried to sit on Roger’s lap.

There was another boom, and then another, and a series of them, in waves, and she couldn’t parse out which were fireworks and which the storm building overhead. There was the silken sound of wind pushing the tree branches aside, and her room was lit silver with a strike of lightning nearby. The rain came with another gust of wind and a faint groaning sound from the old house, and the thunder again, sure of itself this time, filling the air. She
hoped the Fosters were checking to make sure the barn doors were closed. Then she remembered that the Fosters were gone. There had been Fosters in Mount Mason for years and years. There had been Blessings for Lydia’s lifetime, and soon there would be none.

“Don’t say anything to Mother and Father,” Sunny had said when he came up from the barn that first day he was supposed to be working, holding his right arm with his left one, a scratch across his cheek. She had been sitting on the grass by the frog pond, holding some new barn kittens in her lap, and in the slanting sun she could see the pale down on his face where his beard was coming in. He got through dinner, eating left-handed without anyone noticing, and somehow he made it through the night, although in the morning he looked as if he hadn’t slept at all. Lydia wondered how he’d gotten on his dungarees and the frayed white shirt from his old school uniform that he wore to work on the barn.

“Mr. Blessing, sir, this arm’s broken,” the foreman had said, jerking his head toward Sunny when her father had gone down to stand around and talk about the progress of his barn. Mr. Foster drove them to the little hospital in Mount Mason, and she held Sunny’s hand while the doctor set his arm. He’d cried out twice, turned white, then red, tiny beads of perspiration like pearls along his forehead. Then he’d fallen against her. “I need some salts in here,” the doctor had yelled to a nurse while Lydia held Sunny’s slack dead weight.

“That boy is a disappointment,” her father had said after they put him on the train to Newport to stay with Benny Carton. When he came home Sunny said he’d learned to sail with just one arm.

The rain was strong now, like the sound of gravel falling on the old slate roof. A gust blew a handful of drops through the screen and onto her pillow. Mrs. Blessing struggled slowly to her feet and brought down the sash. Her left arm was aching where she supposed she’d slept on it. She began to drift off again when a clap of thunder like an explosion settled over the house. They’d used dynamite to blow open the earth, to pour the cement foundation for
the barn. She remembered being deaf and dazzled afterward, as though all her senses had been rattled by the sound. The thunder was like that, and on its heels another jab of lightning, so bright this time that for a moment it outdid the outdoor lights. Then the light outside her window, and the ones by the front door and front walk, went out. She realized, looking from her pillow into a black night deep as a well, that the lights in the hallway and kitchen had gone out, too. She was irritated, and then, when she smelled burning, afraid.

The alarm for the house went off with a shrill scream, and she pressed her hands to her temples. When she could bear the sound no longer she stepped into her house slippers and felt her way down the stairs as though she were a blind woman, her white gown rippling like a sail in a high wind, driven by the gusts coming in through the bedroom windows, the hallway windows, and finally, when she had touched each step tentatively on the way down, the windows downstairs. The alarm would not turn off. Her foot slid on a patch of rainwater in the hallway and she started to fall, then caught the knob of a closet door. Feeling along the walls, she sank into the wing chair in the living room and lifted the phone. There was no sound. The burning smell was stronger.

“Damn,” she said aloud in the empty house, with no one to hear, with the ringing and the thunder and the percussion of the heavy rain drowning out the word.

From inside the closet she took out her raincoat and then tied a scarf around her hair. On the dining room table there was a bell that she used to call Nadine sometimes, and she took it to the back door and swung it frantically, the rain blowing into her face. The small silvery sound was nothing to the din. There were no lights on in the garage apartment, and no sign of life. In the kitchen drawer there was a large flashlight. She swung the beam around the room, then stamped one foot in rage and frustration. The sound of the alarm was intolerable, like having a tooth drilled.

By the time she got to the stairs leading up to the garage apartment her slippers were soaked through. The rain was sluicing
down the drive in great sheets, and during one long lightning strike she could see the pond roiled by the wind and a big limb from the willow tree lying on the lawn. “Charles!” she cried up the narrow stairway. “Charles!” There was a faint echo. She was appalled by the notion of finding him sleeping. It was not that she felt she was intruding on his privacy, more that he was intruding on hers by forcing her to come up to his living quarters and ask for help when he should already be providing it as a matter of course. Even here the screeching of the alarm was loud.

She shone the flashlight around the apartment kitchen and frowned as she saw how untidy it was, with cans and saucepans ranged around the counter. She edged her way down the hall. “Charles?” she called again. The door to the biggest bedroom was closed, and she knocked, then knocked again. When she opened it she could see that the bed was made. There were two fans in the window, and both of them had blown water onto the wood floor before the power outage shut them down. Beneath one of the windows was a bureau drawer, and as she shone the flashlight into it she moved closer to peer inside. There was a baby sleeping on its side, a rolled towel behind its back to keep it propped in position. There was a faint luminescent freckling on one cheek, the mark of raindrops that had blown in but not waked it.

Mrs. Blessing stood there until her legs threatened to give out. The hem of her nightgown dripped onto the floor. For just a moment she wondered whether she was having a particularly strange dream. Finally she found her way to the living room and sat down in a shabby chair by the window. She shone the flashlight on the old-fashioned striped material, and remembered that the chair had once been in her father’s study, to one side of the fireplace there. It seemed the only bit of sanity in the wild cacophonous night, and she clutched its arms. After a few minutes she went back to check, but the child was still there, sleeping peacefully while the alarm screamed on. She had read about the eye of a storm, about how it was the only still place in wild weather. This appeared to be it.

I
f anyone had asked Skip where he’d least like to be on July fourth in a thunderstorm, the answer would have been easy: McGuire’s. But there he was, nursing a beer in a greasy mug, watching one of Ed’s younger brothers play a pinball machine with so much body English that it looked like he was going to slam Batman-a-rama through the back wall of the bar.

“Yo, dude,” yelled the bartender over the noise of some country song, “ease up on the machine.”

Skip looked at his watch. He figured he had roughly an hour before the baby would wake up. She’d seemed to settle in the last two days, eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping, with one pissed-off hour right around the end of the workday, as the sun was dropping down from the sky. He had to walk her then, back and forth, but when she finally dropped off there was a sweet quality of submission to her small body. She burped, spit up on his shirt, then went slack and silent. He realized that there was a point to that ungainly empty area between the human shoulder and chin: it was the perfect place to rest an infant.

Nadine’s daughter had told Nadine, who had told him in her particular furious fashion, that some girl named Debbie had a letter for him from his father. That was the only thing that would bring him to McGuire’s now, although once he’d practically lived there. He looked around at the guys nursing their beers and playing pool and wondered for the first time in his life who the hell was taking care of their kids. Women, probably—wives or girlfriends
or even their mothers, when the wives and the girlfriends went out or cut out. Skip figured he must be crazy, the only full-time single father in Mount Mason.

He tapped his foot impatiently on the bar rail. He knew from living in their trailer those first few months after he got out of the county jail that Debbie cut hair during the day, and worked from ten to two at McGuire’s four nights a week. She might as well work there, Joe had said, since she’d be there anyway, and she could give him free beer. McGuire’s was what they all had instead of a social life, a tavern on the corner of Front and Route 211 that was long and narrow, with a pool table and a dartboard in the back room. Skip’s father and uncle used to drink there, and Joe’s father, and Ed’s, too. Chris had never had a father that anyone remembered, although Chris’s mother had been known to sit at the bar at McGuire’s until closing time. It set her apart when they were kids. Women went to McGuire’s when they were single, and then when they were married they went to baby showers or Tupperware parties or Weight Watchers or over to see their mother or their mother-in-law.

McGuire’s was owned by a family named Jackson now, and they’d gone through a period, about ten years back, when they’d had somebody paint, in gold letters edged in black, “Bar and Restaurant” on the plate-glass window. And there were menus, and fancy coffees with booze in them, Irish and Neapolitan and whatever. It hadn’t been completely successful. Now occasionally someone would order a burger and fries, or those nachos that everyone had on the menu because you just popped them in the microwave. Most of the food consumed at McGuire’s consisted of the peanuts on the bar. Lots of the food consumed at McGuire’s got thrown up in the parking lot. Skip remembered the year after he graduated high school, when he was working the Burger King job, kneeling on the asphalt at least once a week, one time in snow so deep that he’d lost the feeling in his knees. If he ever went back to that life he thought he just might as well shoot himself and get it over with. He remembered some mornings, when he was living
with his aunt and uncle, coming into the kitchen and seeing his uncle having a beer at eleven
A.M.
“Breakfast of champions,” his uncle had said, hoisting the can in the air.

“You want another beer, Skipper?” the bartender said.

“Nah,” he said. “I’m driving.”

The bartender shrugged. “Been watching too many public-service announcements,” he said.

“Goddamnit!” yelled Ed’s little brother, banging his fist on the side of the pinball machine.

He’d never had a letter from his father. Postcards, about twice a year, always with a picture of palm trees or a beach. When he’d been in the county jail his father had taken a detour, after picking up a load of machine parts in Connecticut, and come to see him unexpectedly. The two of them sat at a long table that was bolted to the floor, and his father bought him soda and a Ring Ding out of the vending machine. “The important thing is that you learn something from this,” his father kept saying, and Skip kept nodding, thinking, yeah, I’ve learned never to drive a getaway car. But he didn’t say anything. Actually, neither of them said much. His father said that Linda, who was the woman he was living with, was working as a hostess now, which was easier on her back and feet, and that the two of them had gotten a double-wide trailer that looked just like a house and came with the curtains already hung and the wallpaper already on the walls. Skip said that he was getting out in four and a half months. They hadn’t really had a lot to talk about.

He wondered what was in the letter his father had sent him. He wondered if Debbie was always late to work, or just tonight, to torture him.

He didn’t even hear Chris come up beside him until he felt the iron arm around his neck. Chris smelled of beer and pot smoke, and he had a bruise on his face that looked fresh. His freckled face had that puffy creased look that had come with sleeping in, drunk, when they were younger, but that just became the way you looked if you slept in, drunk, for enough years. He had a tattoo on his upper arm, the Tasmanian Devil. He’d gotten it one night at a
place at the beach in Virginia when the four of them were all together, sleeping in one room at a Motel 6. Skip had gotten sunburned and he hurt all over, and when the tattoo artist had put the first needle in, to put a lightning bolt on the back of his hand, he’d seen black stars in his peripheral vision, and come to on a cot in the back with an egg coming up on the side of his head. “I’m not doing that, dude,” the tattoo guy said flatly. “I got a policy.”

The Tasmanian Devil arched his round belly as Chris picked up his beer. “Where you been, Skippy?” he said. “How come I never see you anymore?”

“You need me to drive you again?” Skip said.

“Don’t be a wiseass, man. You know I never wanted to fuck you up.”

Skip knew that in some twisted way that was true. He and Chris had been friends since first grade. He’d always stuck by Chris, even in fourth grade, when Chris got the ski jacket from Santa Claus, the really good one with the fleece lining, wore it to school, all proud, and then caught Robert Bentemenn, whose father was a lawyer and a magistrate and something-or-other with the chamber of commerce, staring at it.

“That’s my old jacket that my mom gave away to the Salvation Army,” Robert’d said, and Chris was on him,
bam bam bam.
Half the class jumping on Chris’s back couldn’t stop his arm from going up and down, up and down. The jacket went into the Dumpster behind Newberry’s, once Chris found Bentemenn’s name written inside the pocket in indelible marker, and Chris had to go to counseling, and the counselor told his mom he had poor impulse control. Memorial Day weekend last year his impulse had been to hold up the Quik-Stop, and Skip had been stupid enough to be driving. Chris hadn’t really meant any harm, but that hadn’t made ten months running laundry through an industrial mangle any easier to take for Skip.