Miller's Valley (7 page)

T
om hadn't been overseas for long when an old friend of my father's named Pete Fenstermach showed up at our house in his truck. He'd pulled into the driveway with a sound from his tires that didn't look good for the visit, had gone around to the passenger side and pulled his seventeen-year-old daughter from the cab by her arm. It was January, but she wasn't wearing a coat, just a big old man's shirt and a pair of jeans underneath. She tried to pull away but her father was stronger than she was. I knew her to say hi to—she was a couple of years ahead of me at school, the kind of girl, pale and big-eyed and thin, who looked pretty sometimes and other times just looked plain. It took me a minute to remember that her name was Callie.

“Daddy,” I said.

Mr. Fenstermach and Callie came in through the back door, into the kitchen. My mother put her hands on her hips and looked the girl up and down as though she knew just what she was looking for, and then she sat down hard in one of our kitchen chairs. She put up her hand as Mr. Fenstermach, red in the face, started to open his mouth.

“Pete,” my mother said in a way that shut him right up, and then to Callie, “How far along are you?”

I remember I leaned so hard against the refrigerator that I could feel it humming through the backs of my legs.

“Go see your aunt,” my father said.

“No,” my mother and I said at the same time.

“Six months,” said Callie.

“You know who did this to her?” her father shouted.

“Don't be ridiculous,” my mother said. “You wouldn't be here if it was anybody but my Tom.”

My Tom. My mother never called me her Mimi, or called my brother her Eddie. It was always her Tom. I couldn't even argue with it. He was my Tom, too. Since he'd left, the house had seemed like a baby's rattle with all the jingly things inside gone.

“He's gotta marry her.”

“I hear what you're saying, but he's over in Asia someplace and we don't even know when he's coming back or whether the mail's getting through to him.”

“You get him back here,” yelled Mr. Fenstermach. “I'll go over there and drag him back here myself.”

Callie whispered something. “What's that?” my mother said.

“I'm not marrying anyone,” she said.

“You're not planning on giving this baby away to strangers, are you?” my mother said.

Callie shook her head. “I can handle it,” she said, and, quiet as it was, she said it in this kind of voice that made me believe her. The men argued some, but my mother kept quiet, and Callie wouldn't budge. And then it was all over, or just beginning.

I got the impression that my mother had known long before that afternoon. She was discreet, my mother. She had to be. You can't be a nurse in a small-town hospital, know who has a crooked spine and who has a killing cancer and whose hysterectomy is because she used a Lysol douche to try to keep from having an eighth child in ten years, and not be the kind of person who can keep a secret. My mother had two texts on the wall of her bedroom in gilded frames, the Lord's Prayer and the Florence Nightingale oath. “Hold in confidence,” it says about a nurse's obligation. It was never my mother who gave things away; it was the looks on other people's faces when they saw her.

I had a fifth-grade teacher who I could tell my mother didn't like, and who didn't like her, and it wasn't until the week my mother died, when I was telling her stories to take her mind off the pain in her gut, that she said to me, “That Mrs. Prentiss? She beat her boy. I was sure of it. She or her husband. But I couldn't prove a thing.” I don't think she would have told me even then if both Prentisses hadn't been dead, and their son living somewhere out west. I remembered the wary look Mrs. Prentiss had had those few times my mother had come to school.

Callie gave my mother a look that day, but it was more an exchange of understanding, and that's what they came to. Callie was going to need help, and my mother wanted a hand in the raising of her grandchild. I think my mother kind of admired Callie, admired her nerve, admired her determination to keep her kid at a time when a pregnant teenage girl either got married or gave her baby away. But it made her start watching me even more than she normally did. She needn't have worried. Every time I thought of what Tommy and Callie had done, it gave me a funny feeling, and not a good one. I liked kissing and even then some, although I'd done very little of it, mostly in the hallway at mixers with a boy from my homeroom named John Gellhorn, who said “wow” each time we came up for air. But what came after just seemed strange to me. And Callie and Tommy were such a mismatch, him all fireworks and her so not.

But I got to admire her, too. She'd had to leave school before Clifton was born, and when he was three months old she'd gotten the job at the diner. My aunt Ruth said the baby was named after some movie actor I'd never heard of, but Callie said she'd just seen the name in a book and liked it. Her grandmother took care of him sometimes, and so did her mother. Her father told my father that he was washing his hands of the whole business, and it seemed like he was standing by that. “I've lost respect for Pete,” my father said, and that made me proud, that my father felt that way.

I asked Ruth if she'd help with Clifton, but she looked shaky and said, “Oh, good gracious, Mimi, I'm not up to all that.” So I worked eight to four at the diner that summer, and then Callie came in and handed Clifton over to me before she started her shift. She always insisted she pay me a dollar an hour. At first I said I wouldn't take it, but my mother said, “People need their pride,” so I caved. LaRhonda said that was cheaper than the going rate, but I don't know how LaRhonda would have had any idea what the going rate was. She never did any babysitting. All the other girls said it was because she didn't need the money, but I'm not sure anyone would have asked her. She didn't seem like the kind of person who liked kids much, and she seemed like exactly the kind of person who would go through your underwear drawer and jewelry box and eat all your ice cream while you were out.

“Me! Me!” Clifton always said when Callie handed him over, reaching out his arms and putting them around my neck. “You be good,” Callie said as she tied on her apron. “I'll pick you up in the morning.” I fed Clifton at our house, gave him a bath, and put him to bed in a secondhand playpen in Tommy's old room. “Da,” he said, pointing at a picture of Tom in his dress uniform on one corner of the bureau, but only because I'd told him that.

The diner was a couple of miles outside of town. Mr. Venti said that that was where the future was, that downtown was dying. He said that at a Chamber of Commerce lunch and some of the business owners wanted to throw him out but he owned too many businesses for them to do that. Besides, I thought maybe he had a point. My parents talked all the time about how they used to go shopping on Main Street, for my mother's wedding suit, for my father's tools. Now there was nothing but a Christian Science reading room with books open in the window and no one inside, an insurance office with travel posters and a sign that said
PLAY IT SAFE WITH MUTUAL OF OMAHA
, and the sporting goods store that stayed in business because of the high school teams and the Little League and because it sold guns. There was one place that opened as one thing or another, a used book store, a bakery, a gift shop, and then closed so quickly that sometimes it seemed like you'd imagined it.

There was nothing close to the diner except for a big parking lot where I waited with Clifton on my hip for my father to pick me up after work, a big sweaty spot on one side of my uniform where the baby sat. He was starting to walk now and didn't like being held, but if I put a couple of barrettes in my hair they could keep him quiet, playing with them, trying to yank them out, at least until my father pulled in. My mother usually had Clifton's dinner waiting. Callie didn't let him get away with much, so for a baby he was pretty well behaved. We sent Tommy pictures. He was in Vietnam, a place I'd had to find on a map, fighting the Communists. I asked Callie if she wanted to send him a letter, but she didn't.

“It wasn't any big thing,” she'd said to me once, but at least she'd let us share the baby.

I sent Donald a picture of Clifton, too, although LaRhonda had said it was a well-known fact that boys didn't care about babies. “Only how you make them,” she'd said, like she knew. But I was pretty sure Donald was going to like Clifton when he met him. He'd finally sent a real letter, although it was typed, as though it was more business than personal. “I am coming to visit for a week on August 2,” it said. “My grandfather is picking me up at the airport. Maybe you could come with him so he could stay outside with the car and you could come in and find me.” He did make it sound a little bit like business, but I was still happy. “Your Friend,” he signed that one.

“I sure will be glad to see that young man,” his grandfather said when I saw him at the diner. “I can't call him a boy anymore. He's a young man now.”

“I hope he still has that nice way about him,” Ruth had said when I told her.

I shifted Clifton from one hip to another. My work uniform usually smelled like hamburgers and donuts, and I think Clifton liked the smell, because sometimes he'd put his nose to my chest and inhale loudly. I always had to check afterward to make sure he hadn't left a snail trail of snot behind.

“You're good with that child,” my aunt Ruth said. After dinner but before he was due to be put down for the night I usually walked him up to her little house and let him toddle around a bit. My aunt Ruth had a lot of dolls on shelves in the dining room, and Clifton always pointed up at them like he wanted to look at them. She had a doll dressed like a nun, which was the only way I knew what a nun looked like because there weren't any in Miller's Valley, and a doll that was supposed to be a figure skater named Sonja Henie that had belonged to her mother. She had one dressed like Scarlett O'Hara and one dressed like Florence Nightingale, and she had some Cissy dolls, too. Clifton seemed to point at those the most, but Ruth just ignored him. She ignored him when he put his arms in the air to be picked up, too. One day he even took her hand and tried to get her to walk him outside, but that led nowhere.

Ruth's well was acting up that summer, and my father spent a fair amount of time behind her place, tinkering. He'd put in a new sump pump, too, because the last time there'd been a heavy rain, water had wound up really flooding the basement of her house for the first time.

“Your father can fix anything,” Ruth said. “Gaga,” Clifton shouted, his hands on the sill, his face to the screen so that there was a grimy grid pattern on his nose after. That's what he called my father, Gaga. “Right out here, little man,” my father shouted back.

“I don't care so much for children when they're small,” Ruth said.

“What about me?”

“That was different,” she said, finishing up the crust of a tuna sandwich. It had been maybe a year since my mother had stopped sending meals up to Ruth's house. “She can look after herself,” my mother said flatly, and a couple of nights later when she caught me with a ham steak and some macaroni and cheese on a plate she took it wordlessly out of my hands and dumped it in the trash.

“That's a waste of good food,” my father had said.

“I made it, I paid for it, I can do what I want with it,” my mother said. I thought I saw my father wince.

The two of them were at war because the older Clifton got, the more my mother wanted to move him and Callie into the little house where Ruth lived. I didn't even have to eavesdrop on the heating vent to know about her plans, or my father's upset with them. They'd fight about it right there in the living room.

“Callie's doing fine living over there with her mother,” my father would mutter.

“She and the baby are in one room,” my mother countered. “What's she going to do when he's out of the crib?”

“We can't turn Ruth out onto the street.”

“No one is talking about turning anyone out onto the street. There's always vacancies at those garden apartments down by the hospital. One of the girls in the ER lives there, and her place has a nice big living room, and a little balcony. Not that Ruth would need a balcony. God forbid she should go out on the balcony, the world would end.”

“This is her home.”

“This is our grandson.”

“Ruth's not a town girl.”

“She's not a girl, she's a grown woman and it doesn't matter where she lives as long as it has walls. It's not like she's going to miss the scenery.”

Then my father would play his trump card: “How the heck would we get her out of there?”

And my mother would fold: “I don't give a rip.” Or a hoot. Or, if her feet really hurt and Callie's mother had been bragging at the beauty parlor about how much time she spent with the baby, a damn. Even she couldn't find an answer to the idea of Ruth screaming her lungs out, holding on to the doorjamb as someone tried to drag her into the open.

“I'm her only flesh and blood she's got in the world and your mother treats me like a boarder,” Ruth said to me, tears running down her cheeks onto her floral blouse.

“I'm pretty sure I'm her flesh and blood, too,” I said.

“You know what I mean. I don't know why you all make such a fuss about that child.”

“He's flesh and blood, too.”

“Oh my God, Mary Margaret, you are the most literal girl I've ever met. You're worse than my sister. You think it's right for her to talk about throwing me out?”

“What if Clifton and Callie moved in here with you? You've got two bedrooms you're not even using. It would be company for you.”

“I like my privacy,” Ruth snapped. “Besides, your father won't let her do anything. It's his place. She forgets all about that. Your father's the boss, pure and simple.”