Labor Day (7 page)

I don’t think we’ll be needing these, Adele, he said, folding the scarves carefully and setting them on top of a stack of canned tuna. Like how the pope might handle some kind of special garment popes wear, when he puts them away.

I don’t plan on using these again, Frank said. But if the day ever comes when you have to say I tied you up, you’ll pass the lie detector.

I wanted to ask When was that day? Who would be giving her that test? Where would he be, when she took it? What would they ask me?

My mother nodded. Who taught you to make biscuits like this? she said.

My grandma, he said. After my parents died, she was the one that raised me.

There’d been a car wreck, he told us. It happened when he was seven. Late at night, driving back from a visit with the relatives in Pennsylvania, they hit a patch of ice. The Chevy slammed into a tree. His mother and his father in the front seat dead—though his mother had lived long enough that he could remember the sound of her, groaning, while the men worked to get her out, the body of his father, dead across the front seat of the car, his head in her lap. Frank, in the back—his only injury a broken wrist—had seen it all. There had been a baby sister too. In those
days, people just held their babies on their laps when they rode in cars. She was dead also.

We sat there for a minute, saying nothing. Maybe my mother was just reaching for her napkin, but her hand grazed Frank’s and lingered there a second.

These are the best biscuits I ever had, my mother told him. Maybe you’ll tell me the secret.

I’d probably tell you everything, Adele, he said. If I get to stick around long enough.

H
E ASKED IF
I
PLAYED BASEBALL
. What he asked, actually, was which position I favored. The idea of none, unfathomable.

I played one season of Little League but I was terrible, I said. I didn’t catch one ball the whole time I played left field. They were all glad when I quit.

I bet your problem was not having someone to coach you right, he said. Your mother looks to be a woman of many talents, but I’m guessing baseball may not be one of them.

My dad’s big on sports, I said. He plays on a softball team.

Precisely, Frank said. Softball. What do you expect?

His new wife’s kid is a pitcher, I told him. My dad works with him all the time. He used to take me out on the field with them to practice with a bucket of balls, but I was hopeless.

I think we should throw a ball around a little today, if you can fit that in your schedule, Henry, he said. You’ve got a glove?

Frank didn’t have one for himself, but that wasn’t a problem. He’d noticed there was an open area, out behind where our property ended, where a person could work on his fielding.

I thought you just had your appendix out, I said. I thought
you were holding us prisoners. What happens if one of us runs away when you aren’t looking?

Then you get your real punishment, Frank said. You have to go rejoin society.

What we did then: he scoped out our yard, to figure out where the chicken coop could go. Cold weather was coming, but with enough straw, chickens wintered over just fine. All they needed was a warm body to huddle up to in the night, same as the rest of us.

Frank checked out our woodpile, and when he heard the cord had just been delivered, he told my mother the guy who sold it had been shorting her.

I’d split this wood for you, but I might bust my stitches trying, he said. I bet it gets cozy here in wintertime, when the snow piles up, and you get a fire going in the woodstove.

He cleaned the filters on our furnace and changed the oil in the car. He replaced a fuse for the blinkers.

How long since the last time you rotated your tires, Adele? he asked.

She just looked at him.

While we’re at it, he said, I’m betting nobody ever showed you how to fix a flat, am I right about that, Henry? One thing I’ll tell you now, you don’t want to wait till it happens, to learn. Particularly not if you’ve got some young lady in the seat beside you that you’re wanting to impress. You’ll be driving before you know it. That, and other things.

He did laundry. He ironed. When he washed a floor, he also waxed it. He looked through our pantry, in search of something he could make us for lunch. Soup. He’d start out with Campbell’s but augment. Too bad we didn’t have a patch of fresh basil growing. Next year maybe. Meanwhile, there was always dried oregano.

Then he took me out in the yard, with the new baseball he’d picked up the day before over at Pricemart.

For starters, he said, I’m just going to take a look at how you place your fingers on the stitching.

He bent over me, his long fingers over mine. This is your first problem, he said. Your grip.

We won’t actually throw today, he said, after he’d shown me the good way, his way. His scar was still a little tender for that, he said. But anyway, it was a good idea for me to just get used to this feeling first. Finger the ball. Toss it lightly in the air when I walked around.

Come nighttime, he said, I’d like you to put your glove under your pillow. Breathe in the smell of the leather. Keeps you in the zone.

We were back in the kitchen now. Like some kind of pioneer woman, or a wife from an old western movie, my mother was mending Frank’s pants where they’d ripped. She wanted to wash them too but then he’d have nothing to wear. He sat wrapped in a towel while she sewed, dabbing off the worst of the blood with a wet rag first.

You bite your lip when you sew, he said. Anyone ever tell you that?

Not that, or so much else he noticed about her that day. Her neck, the knuckles on her hands—no jewelry, he observed, which was a pity, she had such pretty hands. There was a scar on her knee that I’d never noticed.

How’d you get this, honey? he asked her, like it was no big deal calling her that, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

A “Stars and Stripes Forever” routine at my dancing school recital, she told him. I tapped myself right off the stage.

He kissed it.

S
OMETIME IN THE LATE AFTERNOON
, after his pants were mended, after the soup, and the card game, and the trick he taught me—making a toothpick come out your nose—there was a knock on the door. Frank had been around long enough now, almost a day, to know this was unusual. I saw the vein in his neck flicker. My mother’s eyes moved to the window: no sign of a car. Whoever it was came on foot.

You go, Henry, she said. Just let them know I’m occupied.

It was Mr. Jervis from down the street, with a bucket of late-season peaches. We’ve got so many of these, we don’t know what to do with them all, he said. I thought your mother might find a use for them.

I took the bucket. He remained on the stoop, as if there was more to say.

Big weekend coming, he said. They say it’ll get up to ninety-five by tomorrow.

Yup, I said. I saw that in the paper.

We’ve got the grandkids coming over Sunday. You’re welcome to come by, jump in the pool, if you’re around. Cool off.

They had an aboveground pool in their backyard, which sat empty most of the summer, except when the Jervises’ son’s family came to visit from Connecticut. A girl about my age who used an inhaler and liked to pretend she was an android, and a boy around three years old, who probably peed in the pool. I wasn’t tempted.

I told him thanks.

Your mother home? he asked. It was a needless question, not only because our car was out front. Everyone on our street had to know my mother hardly ever went anywhere.

She’s occupied.

You might want to let her know, in case she hasn’t heard. There’s some guy on the loose from Stinchfield, the state pen. They’re saying on the radio he was last spotted out at the shopping plaza, coming into town. No reports of any hitchhikers or stolen cars, which means he could still be in the area. Wife’s got her panties in a twist, convinced he’s headed straight for our house.

My mother’s sewing, I said.

I just thought I’d let your mother know. Her being on her own. You have any problems, give a jingle.

CHAPTER 7

A
FTER
M
R
. J
ERVIS LEFT
, I went back to the kitchen. I had only been gone from the room four minutes, maybe, but even though it was my house, where I’d lived four years almost, and we’d just met Frank yesterday, I had the feeling, coming back in the room, that I was breaking something up. Like a time I walked in my father’s bedroom over at our old house, and Marjorie was sitting on the bed with the baby, and her shirt was open and one of her breasts was showing, and another time when they let school out early because someone did an experiment wrong and the building filled up with sulfur smell, and there was a record playing so loud my mother didn’t hear the door open and slam behind me, and from the kitchen, where I came in, I could see her in the living room, dancing. Not a regular dance with steps, or the kind she was always trying to teach me. That day she was twirling around the room like she was one
of those dervishes I saw once on a National Geographic special. That’s how the two of them looked, when I came back in with the peaches. Like they were the only two people in the world.

They had more than they could use, I said. The Jervises.

The other part, what Mr. Jervis said about the prison escape, I didn’t mention.

I set the fruit on the table. Frank was down on his knees on the kitchen floor, fixing a pipe under the sink. My mother sat next to him, holding a wrench. They were looking at each other.

I picked a peach out of the bucket and washed it. My mother didn’t believe in germs but I did. Germs are something they made up to distract people from what they should really be worried about, she said. Germs are natural. It’s the things people do you have to worry about.

Good peach, I said.

Frank and my mother were still sitting there, holding the tools, not moving. Too bad they’re all so ripe, she said. We’ll never get through them all.

Here’s what’s going to happen, said Frank. His voice, which was always low and deep, suddenly seemed to drop another half octave now, so it was like Johnny Cash was in our kitchen.

We have a serious issue on our hands, he said.

I was still thinking about what Mr. Jervis said. People out looking for the escaped prisoner. From the newspaper, I knew they’d got roadblocks on the highway. Helicopters over by the dam, where someone thought they spotted a man matching the description, only now they were saying he had a scar over one eye and possibly a tattoo on his neck of a knife or a Harley, something along those lines. Now was the moment Frank was going to take out a gun, or a knife maybe, and wrap his lean, muscled arm around my mother’s neck, that he’d just finished admiring, and press the knife against her skin, and guide us out to the car.

We were his ticket across state lines. That was the story. I’d watched enough episodes of
Magnum, P.I.
to get it. Only then Frank turned around to face us, and he was holding a knife.

These peaches, he said, looking even more serious than before. If we don’t put them to use soon, they’re goners.

What did you have in mind? my mother said. There was a sound to her voice I could not remember ever hearing. She was laughing, not the way a person does if you tell them a joke, but more how it is when they’re just in a good mood and feeling happy.

I’m going to make us a peach pie, like my grandmother did it, he said.

First thing, he needed a couple of bowls. One to make the crust. One for the filling.

Frank peeled the peaches. I cut them up.

Filling is easy, Frank said. What I want to talk about is crust.

You could tell, the way he reached for his bowl, that this man had made more than a few pies in his life.

First off, you need to keep your ingredients as cool as possible, he said. Hot day like this, we have a challenge on our hands. We need to move fast, before the heat gets to them. If the phone rings when you’re making crust, you don’t pick it up. (Not that this was likely to be a problem at our house, where days went by sometimes that nobody called, unless it was my father, confirming plans for our weekly dinner.)

As he set out the ingredients around our work area, Frank talked about his life on the farm with his grandparents. His grandmother mostly, after his grandpa’s tractor accident. She was the one who raised him from age ten on up. A tough woman, but fair. You didn’t do your chores, you knew the consequences, no discussion. Clean the barn all weekend. Simple as that.

She had read out loud to him at night.
Swiss Family Robinson. Robinson Crusoe. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Count of Monte Cristo
. We didn’t have television in those days, he said, but there was no need, the way she could read out loud. She could have been on the radio.

She had told him not to go to Vietnam. Ahead of her time, that woman understood no one was going to win that war. He thought he was going to outsmart them all. Stay in the reserves, get his G.I. bill college education. Next thing he knew he was eighteen years old, on a plane to Saigon. Got there two weeks before the start of the Tet Offensive. Of the twelve men in his platoon, seven went home in a box.

I wanted to know if he still had his dog tags. Or souvenirs. An enemy weapon, something like that.

I don’t need one thing to remind me of those days, he said.

Frank had made enough pies in his life—none lately, but this was like riding a bicycle—that he didn’t need to measure the flour, though just for my information he said he favored starting out with three cups of flour. That way you’d have extra crust, to make a turnover, or if there was some young whippersnapper around, you could give him the dough to cut out shapes with a cookie cutter.

He also didn’t measure the salt he put in, but he figured it to be three-quarters of a teaspoon. Piecrust is a forgiving thing, Henry, he told me. You can make all kinds of mistakes, and still come out OK, but one thing a person can never do is forget the salt. It’s like life: sometimes the littlest thing turns out to be the most important.