Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (8 page)

Finally, Charlie emerged from the house, and as Annette went off to look for Eliana once again, Charlie rearranged the suitcases in the trunk to his liking and started up the car.

They were all the way past Strong City when Annette remembered the book.

"Dad, stop. I've got to go back."

"Back? What for?"

"I forgot a book."

"What book?"

"It's a book the attorney lent me. I have to return it."

"Ethan Brown?"

"Yes."

"Forget it. He won't care."

"He will."

"I'll take it back to him."

"I don't know where I left it."

"We're already late. You're cutting it short."

"Just go back, please."

Charlie made a U-turn in a driveway and they drove back to the house.

Annette scoured the house for the book. She turned over pillows on the sofa, got down on her hands and knees to check under beds, looked on top of the refrigerator, pulled furniture out from the wall to check behind it, and as she rushed frantically about she began to grow alarmed.
This is absurd,
she thought.
Compulsive and absurd. You'll miss the flight.
She knew she should stop searching and get back on the road, but she didn't. She could send him a book of Yeats' poetry from Paris. A rare edition, perhaps. She could write him a profusely apologetic note. She could call him long distance and explain. But none of these alternatives, once contemplated, altered her momentum. The longer she searched, the more obsessive she became. She returned to the same places she had looked before; she dug through Charlie's piles of newspapers and magazines, which hadn't been touched for weeks; she looked in places where she knew the book would not be found.

Charlie honked his horn a few times, then he sent Eliana in to get her mother.

She found Annette sitting quietly in the sewing room.

"
Maman!
What are you doing?"

Annette looked up and at the sight of her daughter a great peace washed over her. She smiled.

"Go. Go play outside in the mud."

A smile crept over Eliana's face.

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes. Tomorrow we'll buy you some mud boots and jeans."

Annette heard her shouting the glorious news to Charlie before she sprang off toward the backyard. Then she heard the car door slam, the screen door slam and the slow purposeful steps as her father approached. She looked up at the old man in the doorway. He wore a peculiar expression of wariness mixed with hope; Annette had never seen him look quite like that.

"I'll change my ticket. We'll stay through the holidays."

"So you'll be here for Christmas."

"If that's okay with you."

Charlie looked at her and nodded. "You should stay until spring. You don't want to miss the spring. Prettiest time of the year."

"On one condition: you'll quit complaining about my cooking."

He gave her a rare smile. "I'll bring in your bags."

"I'll come help."

"No, that's okay. I'll do it."

Annette found Ethan Brown's book in her suitcase, where she had packed it by mistake.

Chapter 10

That afternoon Annette enrolled Eliana in school and the following morning she walked her daughter four short blocks to the two-story brown brick building where the child would attend class that winter.

In Paris Annette and Eliana's morning walk to school had always been one of their favorite moments of the day. The smell of freshly baked bread, the swishing sound of straw brooms on the wet pavement, the sight of venison and rabbit and quail hanging in the window of the butcher's at the end of the street as Christmas approached—all these things delighted their senses. Eliana never failed to notice the Hindu woman working in the kitchen next to the pizzeria, steam billowing out from the ground-level window onto the sidewalk, her dark arms moving ghostlike in the white vaporous clouds through which Eliana would sometimes catch a glimpse of her dark face and the vermillion tikka dotted on her forehead, just between her eyes. Eliana was a little afraid of the woman, who never looked up and never smiled, who seemed to live in a hot, slaving world where there was never any rest and never any joy. Farther down the street was the small pastry shop that made Annette's favorite prune turnovers. A bell on the door would tinkle as they entered, and from the back would emerge an immaculately dressed lady who'd greet them with a formal
"Bonjour, mesdames."
They rarely ran into other customers in the shop, nevertheless the refined, delicate pastries carefully arranged under glass were always gone by the end of the day. Appearance, or
présentation,
was a virtue in France. In the hierarchy of virtues it came much closer to God than hygiene. Eliana preferred a
pain au chocolat,
which they generally bought at the family-run bakery on the next block. There was always a line, morning and afternoon, and the mother and daughters flew from task to task with the precision and efficiency of a finely crafted engine, slicing baguettes, wrapping loaves, whipping together pastry boxes and securing them with bright ribbon in a flurry of skilled motion that seemed bred into their hands. The bakers, the fishmongers, the waiters were all proud professionals, and they looked upon their clients with an eye of equality if not condescension. The pride they took in the aesthetics of their work made buying a loaf of bread a pleasure, and Annette had grown accustomed to these things.

No such pleasure this morning, she thought sourly as she walked along the sidewalk with a tight grip on her daughter's gloved hand, all buttoned up and battened down against the raw wind. Annette noticed more than one car or truck pulling out of garages to drive a few short blocks to school, with sleepy children staring at her and Eliana through mud-splattered windows. She left her daughter in front of the school and watched as the little girl marched bravely down the walk to the entrance, wearing her new pink backpack, ponytail swinging gaily from side to side, betraying none of her nervousness.

Annette was waiting in the same place that afternoon when the dismissal bell rang. She spotted Eliana in the onslaught of children and waved. As the girl approached, Annette saw she was on the verge of tears.

"Precious! What's wrong?" asked Annette as she crouched low and looked into her face.

Eliana shook her head and whispered,"Pas maintenant."

Annette took the child's hand and they walked stoically through the crowd of children streaming toward the waiting cars and trucks in the street. Annette squeezed the little hand, and Eliana responded with a squeeze of her own, that simple way they had of communicating, in silence, in secret, their understanding of each other.

"How about some ice cream on this smoldering hot day?" asked Annette. "I've been dying to try out that ice cream parlor. Or we can go home and have hot chocolate."

Eliana looked up at her mother, a smile eclipsing the gloom in her eyes. "Can I have a chocolate milk shake?"

"So you like the idea of the ice cream parlor?"

"Yeah."

"Good, because I've been dying to have a chocolate milk shake too."

"Thanks,
Maman,
" Eliana said, and she pressed her mother's gloved hand to her own tearstained cheek.

They found the ice cream parlor closed, with a sign on the door saying, "Gone to Lunch: Back at 1:00," but since it was already three o'clock, they decided to walk up the street to Hannah's Cafe.

They opened the door to a noisy, smoke-filled diner that smelled of old cooking oil and fried onions. As they stepped inside, the noise momentarily subsided and heads turned toward them. The customers were all men, many of them regulars who gathered this time of day to play cards and talk, and their stony stares made Annette feel like an unwelcome intruder. But there was nowhere else in town to go, and the café was warm, so she firmly gripped Eliana by the hand, marched her past the men and settled them into an empty booth at the back of the café.

A waitress with arms that sagged like taffy barreled out of the service door, loaded with orders, and as she passed their table she paused, thrust her right hip at them where a menu projected from her pocket and said with a wink and a nod, "Take a menu, girls. Be with you in a sec."

"Now," said Annette to her daughter as she laid the menu aside. "What happened?" She reached across the table and stroked her daughter's cheek. The little girl's eyes were still red from crying.

At that moment a second waitress with long bleached hair burst into the room tying an apron around the waist of her snug, short uniform.

"Sorry I'm late, Bea."

"Yeah, sure," answered the taffy-armed waitress. "Get those ladies in the corner, will ya? I'm swamped."

"Go on," Annette said in French. "Tell me what happened."

"They called me a frog."

"They what?"

"They said it was because we ate frogs' legs. And at recess all the girls started hopping around to make fun of me. No one was nice to me. One girl came up to me at first, but then the others made fun of her too and called her a frog lover, so she wouldn't play with me, either."

Annette's eyes clouded, and she reached for Eliana's hand across the table. "They're ignorant, sweetheart. They know nothing about the world beyond these hills." Annette tried to explain how ignorance bred suspicion, and suspicion bred fear and hate. They spoke softly, but it was clear that the customers had gone quiet and were straining to overhear. The two men in the booth opposite stared at them with the unguarded curiosity of spectators watching animals in the zoo.

The blond waitress had stopped to chat with some young men at the counter.

"Patti," Bea scolded as she charged across the café carrying stacks of dirty dishes. "The ladies. Get those ladies!" She shook her head as she disappeared behind the swinging doors.

Patti shuffled to their table, counting on her fingers. "Six months. Six months 'til my birthday." She seemed to be talking to her order book as she pulled it out of her apron pocket. "I was supposed to get married on June first. But that's off."

Bea reappeared and Patti turned, calling across the floor to her. "I don't know what to do with the band. I've already paid for them. I guess I could have a party. My mother's birthday is May thirty-first."

Bea walked up to her and whispered emphatically in her ear, "Patti, take the goddamn order."

"What can I get for you?" asked Patti finally.

"Two chocolate milk shakes, please," said Annette.

"Sorry, don't make 'em."

Annette thought for a moment, then opened the menu and ran her finger down the deserts. "You have ice cream."

"Vanilla, chocolate and strawberry."

"Do you have chocolate syrup?"

"Nope."

"But you have milk."

"Yeah."

"Then do you think you could put some milk and chocolate ice cream in a glass and mix it up? Would that be too much trouble?"

"We don't have a mixer."

Annette gave her a tight thin smile. A smile that she would have liked to wrap around the woman's neck.
Don't be like your father, now. You're acting exactly like him.

Eliana, keen to her mother's sensibilities, was watching with pleading eyes. "It's okay,
Maman.
I'll just have a Coke."

The waitress heaved an impatient sigh. "You want more time to make up your mind?"

"No," said Annette, closing the menu and handing it back to her. "No, I don't want more time. I want a chocolate milk shake for my daughter."

"Well, lady, I can't make it for you."

Annette glared at the waitress, this Patti with the black roots, the fake nails, the safety pin that fastened her dress where the second button should have been. Patti from the same hostile world as the cold-staring old geezers and the children making fun of her child. She stood, grabbed Eliana's hand and spat contemptuously,
"Vous êtes tous des pauvres cons!"

Eliana gasped.

Annette tossed her black sable-collared coat over her arm and stormed out with her child in tow.