Keeping the Moon (4 page)

"See?" Morgan said to her, squeezing her arm.
"That
wasn't so hard, now was it?"

"I'm going home," Isabel told her, her duty done. She was lighter on her feet now, practically bounding down the steps and across the yard to the little white house I'd seen earlier.

Morgan sighed. Close up she looked older and pointier: bony elbows, prominent collarbone, a nose that jutted out sharp and sudden.

"She's not so bad," she said to me, as if I'd said otherwise. "She can just be a real bitch sometimes. Mark says she's friendship impaired."

"Mark?" I said.

"My fiancé." She smiled and extended her right hand, that tiny diamond twinkling.

There was a sudden burst of music from the little house. Lights were coming on in the windows, and I caught a glimpse of Isabel passing by.

"Then why do you put up with her?" I asked.

She looked over at the house; the music was cheerful, bouncy and wild, and now Isabel was dancing, a beer in one hand. She shimmied past the windows, shaking her hair, hips swaying. Morgan smiled.

"Because, for the most part, she's all I've got," she said. And then she went down the steps, across the yard, and up the path to that little house. When she got to the doorstep she turned and waved.

40

"See you around," she said.

"Okay," I said.

I watched as she opened the door, the music spilling out; it was disco, some woman wailing. And as Morgan stepped in, Isabel whirled by, grinning, and grabbed her arm, pulling her into that warm light before the door swung shut behind them.

41

***

chapter three

The next morning, when I went in to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I noticed the index card over the sink.

RIGHT FAUCET DRIPS EASILY, it Said. TIGHTEN WITH WRENCH AFTER using. And then there was an arrow, pointing down to where a small wrench was tied with bright red yarn to one of the pipes.

This is crazy,
I thought.

But that wasn't all. In the shower, hot water is very hot! use with care was posted over the soap dish. And on the toilet: handle loose. don't yank. (As if I had some desire to do
that.)
The overhead fan was clearly broken, the tiles by the door were loose so I had to walk carefully. And I was informed, cryptically, that the light over medicine cabinet works, but only sometimes.

They were all over the house. I came across them like

42

dropped bread crumbs, leading me from one thing to another. Windows were painted shut, banisters loose, chairs had ONE LEG TOO SHORT. It was like a strange game, and it made me feel unsteady and weird, wishing that even one thing was new enough to work perfectly. I wondered how anyone could live like this, but it was obvious that Mira wasn't just anyone.

Before I got to Colby, all I knew was that she was two years older than my mother, unmarried, and had inherited all of my grandparents' money. I also knew that, like us, she was overweight. Mira had lived in Chicago during the first few years we'd crisscrossed the country in our Volaré, and the one thing I clearly remembered about visiting her were the doughnuts she'd made out of Pillsbury biscuit dough, fried and rolled in cinnamon and sugar. She always seemed to be cooking or eating.

When my mother got thin, it was like she'd found religion. She wanted to share it with everyone: me first, followed by the legions of women who flocked to her aerobics classes, and then the rest of the free world. She was like an evangelist of weight loss. But it was clear Mira hadn't converted: the closet in my room contained every bit of Kiki merchandise ever manufactured, all of it stacked and neat in its original packaging. (I'd added mine to the pile.) And that morning Mira made doughnuts. I sat and watched her eat five of them,
pop pop pop pop pop,
one right after another, licking her fingers and laughing that giggly laugh all the way.

Mira had been my grandparents' favorite: art school educated, full of promise, the good daughter. My mother, on the

43

other hand, with her wild clothes and lifestyle, had fallen entirely out of favor when she'd gotten pregnant at twenty, dropped out of college, and had me. We spent so much time moving around that her family hardly ever knew where we lived, much less who we were. Our few visits to Mira's had ended with big blowouts, usually sparked by some childhood memory she and my mother recalled differently. The last time I'd seen her was at my grandmother's funeral, in Cincinnati, when I was about ten. We'd stuck around just long enough to find out Mira was inheriting everything; not too long after, she'd moved to Colby.

After I ate two doughnuts, I realized those forty-five-and-a-half pounds could creep back easily over a whole summer of what my mother termed "Stuffin' for Nothin'." I ran on the beach for an hour, Walkman on, music pounding in my ears.

When I got back I found Mira in her studio, a big messy room off the kitchen. She wore yellow overalls and her slippers, and her hair was piled up on top of her head, with about seven pens, capped and uncapped, sticking out in various places.

"Do you want to see my new death card?" she asked me cheerfully. "I've been working on it all week."

"Death card?"

"Well, technically it's called a condolence card," she said, shifting in her office chair, which was jacked up as high as it could go. "But it is what it is, you know?"

I took the two pieces of thick sketch paper she handed me. On the first was a pastel drawing of some flowers, over which was written:

44

I am so sorry...

And on the second, which was to be the inside of the card:

All losses are so hard to bear, but the loss of former love can be the hardest. Regardless of the reasons, there was love. And my heart and thoughts are with you at this difficult time.

"Too much?" she said as I looked down at the bottom of the page, where
Mira's Miracles
was written in small print, with tiny red hearts topping both
i'
s

"Urn, no," I said. "I just never saw a card that specific before."

"It's the new wave," she said simply, pulling a pen out of her hair. "Specialized condolence cards for new occasions. Dead ex-husbands, dead bosses, dead mailmen ..."

I looked at her.

"I'm serious!" she said, spinning around in her chair and reaching for a box behind her. "Here it is!" She produced a card and cleared her throat. "The outside says,
I considered him a friend
.... And when you open it up, it reads,
Sometimes a service can become more than just routine, when it is delivered with heart and humor and personal care. I considered him to be my friend and I will miss so much our daily contact."
She looked at me, grinning. "See what I mean?"

"You give that to your mailman?" I said.

"To your mailman's
widow,"
she corrected me, chucking the card back into the box. "I have them for everything, every profession. You have to. People's lives are very specialized now. Their cards need to be, too."

45

"I don't know if I'd buy a card for my mailman's widow."

"You might not," she said seriously. "But you are probably not a card person. Some people just
need
to give cards. And they're the ones that keep me in business."

I looked at the shelves against the back wall, all of them stacked with boxes and boxes of cards. "Did you do all of these?"

"Yep. I've done about two or three a week since art school." She gestured towards them. "I mean, I have cards here from ten, fifteen years back."

"Do you only do death cards?" I asked her.

"Well, I started out with the standard line," she said, straightening a can of pens on her desk. "Birthdays, valentines, et cetera. But then I hit big in the eighties with NonniCards."

"Wait," I said suddenly. "I know that name."

She smiled, reaching under her desk and coming up with another card. "Yep, she was the motherlode. Nonni made me my name in this business."

I immediately recognized the little girl in a sailor suit and her mother's high-heeled shoes. She'd been a greeting card star, the next big wave after Garfield the cat. I could remember begging my mother for a Nonni doll at a gas station once when I knew we couldn't afford it.

"Oh my God," I said, looking up at Mira. "I never knew she was yours."

"Yep," she said, smiling fondly at the card. "She had her run. Then, after all the hype, I was really in the mood to focus on something different. And condolences just interested me. They'd hardly been explored."

46

I was staring all the time at all those boxes, shelves upon shelves. A lifetime of death. "Do you ever run out of ideas?"

"Not really," she said, her slippered feet, blue and fuzzy, dangling above the floor. "You'd be
amazed
how many ways there are to say you're sorry in the world. I haven't even begun to discover them all."

"Still," I said. "That's a lot of dead mailmen."

She looked surprised, her eyes wide. Then she laughed, one single burst of "Ha!" A pen fell out of her hair, clattering to the floor. She ignored it. "I guess you're right," she said, looking up at the shelves again. "It sure is."

Cat Norman dragged himself up on the windowsill, settling his girth along its narrow width. Outside, Mira's collection of birdfeeders was swinging in the wind, several birds perched on each. Cat Norman lifted one paw and tapped the glass. Then he yawned and closed his eyes in the sun.

"So," Mira said to me. "It's your first day. You should go exploring, check out the town or something."

"Maybe I will," I said, just as the front door slammed.

"It's me," someone called out.

"Norman Norman," Mira called back. "We're in here."

Norman poked his head in, looked around, and stepped inside. He was barefoot, in jeans and a green T-shirt with a pair of red, square-framed sunglasses hooked over the collar. His hair, just to his shoulders, wasn't long enough to be truly hippie-annoying, but it was close.

"So, Norman," Mira said, uncapping another pen and outlining a tree on a new piece of paper, "any decent finds this morning?"

47

He grinned. "Oh, man. It was
a good
day. I got four more ashtrays for that sculpture--one's a souvenir from Niagara Falls-- and an old blender, plus a whole boxful of bicycle gears."

I
knew
it, I thought. Art freak.

"Wow," Mira said, pulling a pen out of her hair. "No sunglasses?"

"Three pairs," Norman said. "One with purple lenses."

"It
was
a good day," she said. To me she added, "Norman and I are
into
yard sales. I've furnished practically this whole house with secondhand stuff."

"Really," I said, eyeing the cracked fishtank.

"Oh, sure," she said, not noticing. "You'd be amazed at what some people will throw away! Now, if I just had time to fix everything, I'd be all set."

Norman picked up a sketch, glanced at it, then put it back down on the table. "I saw Bea Williamson this morning," he said in a low voice. "Lurking about looking for cut glass."

"Oh, of course," Mira said with a sigh. "Did she have it with her?"

Norman nodded solemnly. "Yep. I swear, I think it's almost gotten ... bigger."

Mira shook her head. "Not possible."

"I'm serious," Norman said. "It's
way
big."

I kept waiting for someone to expand on this, but since neither of them seemed about to, I asked, "What are you talking about?"

They looked at each other. Then, Mira took a breath. "Bea Williamson's baby," she said quietly, as if someone could hear us, "has the biggest head you have ever seen."

48

Norman nodded, seconding this.

"A baby?" I said.

"A big-headed baby," Mira corrected me. "You should see the cranium on this kid. It's mind-boggling."

"She's going to be
very
bright," Norman said.

"Well, she
is
a Williamson." Mira sighed, as if that explained everything. Then, to me, she added, "They're very important in Colby, the Williamsons."

"Mean," Norman explained.

Mira shook her head, waving him off with one hand. "Now, now," she said. "So, Norman. I was just telling Colie she should go exploring today. You know, she met Isabel and Morgan last night."

"Yeah," Norman said, smiling at me in a way that made me look over at the birdfeeders, quick. "I heard."

"Very nice girls," Mira pronounced. "Although Isabel, like Bea Williamson, can be somewhat of a pill. But she's good at heart."

"Yeah." Norman scuffed his bare foot against the floor. "She's got nothing on Bea Williamson."

"Everyone
is good at heart," Mira said simply, fixing me with a look that made me feel strange. "It's true," she added, as if she thought I wouldn't quite believe her, and I looked into her bright eyes and wondered what she meant.

"I'm going to the library," Norman said. "You got anything that needs to be returned?"

"Oh, Norman, you are my saint," Mira said cheerfully, swiveling to point to a stack of books by the far window. To me she added, "Without him I would flail about, lost and bewildered."

"That's not true," Norman said.

49

"Oh, Norman," Mira said with a sigh. "I don't know what I'll do when you leave me." Then she added, "It's a long bike ride to the library.
Lots
of potholes."

"It's no problem," Norman said. "So, Colie. You want to come?"

Mira was already back at work, humming softly under her breath. Under the drafting table she had one leg crossed over the other, one blue slipper bouncing up and down, up and down.

"I guess," I said. "I mean, I need to change."

"Take your time," he told me, picking up the books and starting that slow amble toward the door. "I'll be outside."

I went upstairs and washed my face, then pulled my hair back in a ponytail and put on a different shirt. From my window I could see Norman; he was wearing the red sunglasses and stretched out across the hood of the car, his feet hanging off the edge. He was kind of cute, if you liked that Deadhead type. Which I didn't.