Ladder of Years (17 page)

Closing time was five-thirty, which meant that the librarian was busy with her last-minute shelving. Delia could place yesterday’s book on the counter without any chitchat; she could hunt down a book for today
unobserved, since at this hour all the tables were empty. But what to choose? She wished this place carried romances. Dickens or Dostoyevsky she would never finish in one evening (she had an arrangement with herself where she read a book an evening). George Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald …

She settled on
The Great Gatsby
, which she dimly remembered from sophomore English. She took it to the counter, and the librarian (a cocoa-colored woman in her fifties) stopped her shelving to come wait on her. “Oh,
Gatsby
!” she said. Delia merely said, “Mmhmm,” and handed over her card.

The card had her new address on it: 14 George Street. A dash in the space for her telephone number. She had never been unreachable by phone before.

Tucking the book in her handbag, she left the library and headed south. The Pinchpenny Thrift Shop had changed its window display, she noticed. Now a navy knit dress hung alongside a shell-pink tuxedo. Would it be tacky to buy her second dress from a thrift shop? In a town this size, no doubt everyone could name the previous owner.

But after all, what did she care? She made a mental note to come try on the dress tomorrow during lunch hour.

Taking a right onto George Street, she met up with the mother and toddler who fed the pigeons in the square. The mother smiled at her, and before Delia thought, she smiled back. Immediately afterward, though, she averted her eyes.

Next stop was Rick-Rack’s Café. She glanced over at the boardinghouse as she passed. No cars were parked in front, she was glad to see. With luck, Belle would be out all evening. She seemed to lead a very busy life.

Rick-Rack’s smelled of crab cakes, but whoever had ordered them had already eaten and gone. The little redheaded waitress was filling salt shakers. The cook was scraping down his griddle. “Well, hey!” he said, turning as Delia walked in.

“Hello,” she said, smiling. (She had nothing against simple courtesy, as long as it went no further.) She settled in her usual booth. By the time the waitress came over, she was already deep in her library book, and all she said was, “Milk and the chicken pot pie, please.” Then she went on reading.

Last night she’d had soup and whole-wheat toast; the night before that, tuna salad. Her plan was to alternate soup nights with protein nights.
Just inexpensive proteins, though. She couldn’t afford the crab cakes, at least not till she got her first salary check.

Paying for her new shoes on Tuesday, she had wished she could use the credit card she was carrying in her wallet. If only a credit-card trail were not so easily traced! And then a peculiar thought had struck her.
Most untraceable of all
, she had thought,
would be dying.

But of course she hadn’t meant that the way it sounded.

The print in her library book was so large, she worried she had chosen something that wouldn’t last the evening. She forced her eyes to travel more slowly, and when her meal arrived she stopped reading altogether. She kept the book open, though, next to her plate, in case somebody approached.

The waitress set out scalloped paper place mats for the supper crowd. The cook stirred something on the burner. Two creases traversed the base of his skull; his smooth black scalp seemed overlaid with a pattern of embroidery knots. He had made the pot pie from scratch, Delia suspected. The crust shattered beneath her fork. And the potatoes accompanying it seemed hand mashed, not all gluey and machine mashed.

She wondered whether her family had thought to thaw the casseroles she’d packed.

“If he do come,” the cook was telling the waitress, “you got to keep him occupied. Because
I
ain’t going to.”

“You have to be around some, though,” the waitress said.

“I ain’t saying I won’t be around. I say I won’t keep him occupied.”

The waitress looked toward Delia before Delia could look away. She had those bachelor’s-button eyes you often see in redheads, and a round-chinned, innocent face. “My dad is planning a visit,” she told Delia.

“Ah,” Delia said, reaching for her book.

“He wasn’t all that thrilled when me and Rick here got married.”

The waitress and the cook were married? Delia was afraid that if she started reading now, they would think she disapproved too; so she marked her place on the page with one finger and said, “I’m sure he’ll accept it eventually.”

“Oh, he’s accepted it, all right! Or says he has. But now whenever Rick sees him, he always gets to remembering how ugly Daddy acted at the start.”

“I can’t stand to be around the man,” Rick said sadly.

“Daddy walks into a room and Rick is like,
whap!
and his mouth slams shut.”

“Then Teensy here feels the pressure and goes to talking a mile a minute, nothing but pure silliness.”

Delia knew what that was like. When her sister Linda was married to the Frenchman, whom their father had detested …

But she couldn’t tell them that. She was sitting in this booth alone, utterly alone, without the conversational padding of father, sisters, husband, children. She was a person without a past. She took a breath to speak and then had nothing to say. It was Teensy who finally broke the silence. “Well,” Teensy said, “at least we’ve got ourselves a few days to prepare for this.” And she went off to wait on a couple who had just entered.

When Delia walked out of the café, she felt she was surrounded by a lighter kind of air than usual—thinner, more transparent—and she crossed the street with a floating gait. Just inside Belle’s front door she found an array of letters scattered beneath the mail slot, but she didn’t pick them up, didn’t even check the names on the envelopes, because she knew for a fact that none of them was hers.

Upstairs, she went about her coming-home routine: putting away her things, showering, doing her laundry. Meanwhile she kept an ear out for Belle’s return, because she would have moved more quietly with someone else in the house. But she could tell she had the place to herself.

When every last task was completed, she climbed into bed with her library book. If there had been a chair she would have sat up to read, but this was her only choice. She wondered whether Mr. Lamb’s room was any better equipped. She supposed she could request a chair from Belle. That would mean a conversation, though, and Delia was avoiding conversation as much as possible. Heaven forbid they should get to be two cozy, chatty lady friends, exchanging news of their workdays every evening.

She propped her pillow against the metal rail at the head of the cot and leaned back. For this first little bit, the light from outdoors was enough to read by—a slant of warm gold that made her feel pleasantly lazy. She could hear a baby crying in the house across the street. A woman far away called, “Robbie! Kenny!” in that bell-like, two-note tune that mothers everywhere fetch their children home with. Delia read on, turning pages with a restful sound. She was interested in Gatsby’s story but not what you would call carried away. It would serve to pass the evening, was all.

The light grew dimmer, and she switched on the goosenecked lamp
that craned over her shoulder from the windowsill. Now the children across the street, released from the supper table, were playing something argumentative outdoors. Delia heard them for a while but gradually forgot to listen, and when she thought of them again she realized they must have gone in to bed. Night had fallen, and moths were thumping against the screen. Down in the street, a car door closed; heels clopped across the porch; Belle entered the house and went directly to the front room, where she started talking on the phone. “You know it’s got great resale value,” Delia heard, before forgetting to listen to that as well. Later she stopped reading for a moment and heard only silence, inside and out, except for the distant traffic on 380. It was cooler now, and she felt grateful for the lamp’s small circle of warmth.

She came to the end of her book, but she kept rereading the final sentence till her eyes blurred over with tears. Then she placed the book on the floor and reached up to switch the lamp off so she could sit weeping in the dark—the very last step in her daily routine.

She wept without a thought in her head, heaving silent sobs that racked her chest and contorted her mouth. Every few minutes she blew her nose on the strip of toilet paper she kept under her pillow. When she felt completely drained, she gave a deep, shuddering sigh and said aloud, “Ah, well.” Then she blew her nose one last time and lay down to sleep.

It amazed her that she always slept so soundly.

The toddler wanted the pigeons to eat from his fingers. He squatted in their midst, his bulky corduroy bottom just inches from the ground, and held a crouton toward them. But the pigeons strutted around him with shrewd, evasive glances, and when it dawned on him that they would never come closer he suddenly toppled backward, not giving the slightest warning, and pedaled the air in a fury. Delia smiled, but only behind the shield of her newspaper.

Today there was no further mention of her disappearance. She wondered if the authorities had forgotten her that quickly.

She folded the Metro section and laid it on the bench beside her. She reached for the cup of yogurt at her left and then noticed, out of the corner of her eye, the woman who stood watching her from several yards away.

Her heart gave a lurch. She said, “Eliza?”

Eliza moved forward abruptly, as if she had just this second determined something.

There was no one beside her. No one behind her.

No one.

She was wearing a dress—a tailored tan shirtwaist that dated from the time when they still had a Stewart’s department store. Eliza almost never wore dresses. This must be a special occasion, Delia thought, and then she thought,
Why, I am the occasion.
She rose, fumbling with her yogurt cup. “Hello, Eliza,” she said.

“Hello, Delia.”

They stood awkwardly facing each other, Eliza gripping a boxy leather purse in both hands, until Delia recollected the old man on the east bench. He appeared to be intent on his magazine, but that didn’t fool her in the least. “Would you like to take a walk?” she asked Eliza.

“We could,” Eliza said stiffly.

She was probably angry. Well, of course she was angry. Bundling her lunch things into the trash basket, Delia felt like a little girl hiding some mischief. She sensed she was blushing, too. Hateful thin-skinned complexion, always giving her away. She slung the strap of her handbag over her shoulder and set off across the square, with Eliza lagging a step behind as if to accentuate Delia’s willfulness, her lack of consideration. When they reached the street, Delia stopped and turned to face her. “I guess you think I shouldn’t have done this,” she said.

“I didn’t say that. I’m waiting to hear your reasons.”

Delia started walking again. If she had known Eliza would pop up this way, she would have invented some reasons ahead of time. It was ridiculous not to have any.

“Mr. Sudler thought you were a battered wife,” Eliza said.

“Who?”

“The roofer. Vernon Sudler.”

“Oh, Vernon,” Delia said. Yes, of course: he would have seen the newspaper.

They crossed the street and headed north. Delia had planned to visit the thrift shop, but now she didn’t know where she was going.

“He phoned us in Baltimore,” Eliza said. “He asked for—”

“Baltimore! What were you doing in Baltimore?”

“Why, we packed up and drove there after you left. Surely you didn’t think we’d stay at the beach.”

Actually, Delia
had
thought that. But she could see now it would
have looked strange: everybody slathering on the suntan lotion as usual, industriously blowing air into their rafts while the policemen gave their bloodhounds a sniff of Delia’s slippers.

“We thought at first you’d gone to Baltimore yourself,” Eliza was saying. “You can imagine the fuss with the floor refinishers when all of us walked in. And when we didn’t find you there … Well, thank goodness Mr. Sudler called. He called the house last night, inquiring how to get in touch with me personally, and as luck would have it I was the one who answered. So he said he could swear you hadn’t been kidnapped, but he hesitated to tell the police because he believed you’d had good cause to run away. He said you got out of his van at a church that counsels battered women.”

“I did?”

Delia stopped in front of the florist’s shop.

“You saw their signboard and asked him to let you out, he said.”

“Signboard?”

“And also there’d been some discussion, he said, something you two were discussing that made him wonder later if … But he wouldn’t tell me your whereabouts, in case your husband was dangerous. ‘Dangerous!’ I said. ‘Why, Sam Grinstead is the kindest man alive!’ I said. But Mr. Sudler was very fixed in his mind. He said, ‘I only called to tell you she’s all right, and I want to say too I didn’t know at the time that she was running away. She just begged me for a ride to this certain town,’ he said, ‘and claimed that she had family there, so I didn’t see the harm.’ Then he said not to tell Sam, but of course I did tell Sam; I could hardly keep it a secret. I told Sam I would come talk to you first and find out how things stood.”

She waited. She was going to make Delia ask. All right. “And what did Sam say back?” Delia asked.

“He said well
naturally
I should come. He agreed completely.”

“Oh.”

Another wait.

“And he quite understood that I couldn’t divulge which town it was till we’d talked.”

“I see,” Delia said.

Then she said, “But how did
you
know the town?”

“Why, because you told Mr. Sudler you had family there.”

“Family. Um …”

“Our mother’s family! In Bay Borough.”

“Mother’s family lives in Bay Borough?”

“Well, they used to. Maybe some still do, but nobody I would have heard of. You knew that. Bay Borough? Where Aunt Henny lived? And Great-Uncle Roscoe had his chicken farm just west of?”