Monday, Monday: A Novel (33 page)

“We fell,” Madeline told him.

“It was my fault,” Nicholas said ruefully.

“It was Ranger’s fault,” Madeline said, watching the dog lap at the puddle of water.

Andy mopped while Madeline turned the portrait right side up and looked at it more closely. She noticed a scatter of cracks in the paint that had not been there before. The blouse her mother wore appeared in danger of chipping. Andy gave her some paper towels, and she carefully patted the paint while he and Nicholas loitered about on the stairs, watching her despondently.

“I wish you could go to Alpine with us,” Nicholas told his father sadly. “How come you’re not going?”

It crossed Madeline’s mind that Andy might actually tell him. “Your father needs to work,” she said.

The three of them went into the kitchen, where Nicholas stood at the counter, peering at Jerry in a glass. Andy searched the drawer for wire and picture hooks.

“I’m taking the painting to Alpine,” Madeline told him. “To get the frame fixed so the board won’t warp. There’s that frame shop next to Carlotta’s store.”

“If you take it, your mother will see it and she might be upset.”

“My mother was going to throw it away.”

“I can take it to a frame shop here,” he offered.

But she wouldn’t allow him to handle another piece of her life. She didn’t want him anywhere near the portrait.

Her momentum was starting to flag. She looked at her husband in front of the junk drawer, his hair uncombed and jutting out on one side of his head. He was better-looking than she was.

“Nicholas,” she said wearily. “Let’s get you packed.”

37

THE ROAD WEST

It was after noon by the time they finally left Austin under a merciless sun. Madeline squinted through her sunglasses. Nicholas stopped fretting over his sloshing tadpole, but became restless from sitting so long, and announced he felt sick to his stomach.

“We’ll stop for a Coke,” she told him. They stopped more than once. They parked at a roadside rest stop to settle his stomach.

Madeline was miserable, ruminating about Andy and the woman. Nearing the Highway 41 exit to Rocksprings, she felt the familiar panic, as if she might take the turn, and go to Devil’s Sinkhole, and despite herself see that terrible place again.

That night was still horribly with her—the blackness of a hole much deeper than God should have made it, the girl dangling from the rope, the boy with bleeding hands, screaming and waving his arms in the blazing headlights, and her father in a makeshift harness going down … and down.

Tears rolled out from under her sunglasses, and she shifted the rearview mirror so Nicholas wouldn’t notice. She wished she could somehow launch herself beyond that exit without having to look at it. But when she had reached it and sped past, she only felt worse, as if every important part of her life were slipping away—as if she couldn’t hold on to a single thing in the world. Her father was gone, and now she was leaving Andy. She wanted to get to her mother, suddenly afraid that her mother, too, would be lost to her.

Why, always, this sense of impending loss? She had felt it so far back she couldn’t remember when it began, and in her heart she sensed that it wasn’t because of losing her father, but somehow because of her mother. And yet it didn’t add up. Her mother had never left her. There had been the normal squabbles between a mother and daughter, and the burning, buried resentment Madeline felt for Carlotta, but her mother was devoted. There had never been a threat of losing her.

Whenever she glanced to the right she saw her mother’s likeness wedged in the passenger side of the front seat. The slant of the green eyes in the painting looked unnatural from this angle.

She decided that Andy was right: Her mother shouldn’t see the painting in this condition. She should stash it in the cabin at the Stones’ house and leave it there until she could take it to be fixed. She ought to have left it with Andy. How pathetic that she was dragging her blighted fairy godmother along in this flight from her husband.

She kept glancing at the face. The shy pinkish smile was pretty and the eyelashes were so distinctly painted they looked soft to the touch. The intricate smocking of the blue blouse had a sweet, sixties, peasant look, and the perfect shading of the skin, as smooth as a china teacup, was precisely like a youthful complexion. All of it together gave the painting a sensuality that Madeline found vaguely disturbing in a portrait of her mother—however young her mother had been at the time. She still longed for it to be a magical being with a benign and ethereal influence over her life, not a flesh and blood girl who years later would become her mother.

And in the rich brightness of the afternoon sun, she noticed something unusual. Where the light in the painting fell, with the ribbon, over her mother’s shoulders and rested in the folds of the blouse, the paint had been applied differently. It was flat in most places, but the hair and the blouse were painted more thickly, with obvious brushstrokes.

“I’m thirsty,” Nicholas said from the backseat.

“We’ll be somewhere in ten minutes.”

In Sonora she stopped at a Chevron station and filled the car at the pump. Nicholas topped a Sprite with a squirt of Big Red at the soda bar. Heading back to the interstate, Madeline looked in the rearview mirror and saw him staring pensively out the window, his arm protectively looped around the tadpole habitat.

“What’s on your mind, pumpkin?” she asked him.

He shrugged, slurped from his straw, and stared out of the window, his cap low on his head and his cheeks flushed from the warmth of the low sun. Her heart sank at the thought that his happiness and security were in jeopardy because of what Andy had done.

Past Ozona, along the parched, monotonous miles, tall white wind turbines turned slowly in the cloudless sky. Madeline pulled to the shoulder so Nicholas could pee beside the road. When he was out of the car, she called her mother’s cell phone.

“Hey Mom. Are you in Alpine?”

“Hi sweetie. Yes, I’m here.”

“Well, this is going to surprise you, but I’m on my way too.”

“On your way …
here
?”

“Yes.”

“To Alpine?”

“Yes.”

There was a conspicuous hesitation.

“I’ll explain when I get there,” Madeline said.

“Honey, I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

“For me to be there? Why? Jack and Delia won’t mind.”

“They have another guest coming. And Carlotta’s moved back home. So…”

“There’s still enough bedrooms,” Madeline said.

“Yes. But … since they didn’t expect you—”

“Mom, they’re like family. It’s a standing invitation. They’ve always made that clear.”

“I know, honey, but—”

“Carlotta’s moved home?”

“She broke up with Martin.”

“You sound like you don’t want me there.”

“Of course I do. It’s … Is there a problem—a reason you wanted to come?”

Nicholas was getting back in the car, slamming the door.

“Yes, there is,” Madeline told her mother.

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“No.”

“You mean you can’t talk?”

“That’s right.”

“Because Andy and Nicholas are with you?”

“Just the latter.”

“Just Nicholas?”

“Yes.”

“And not Andy?”

“No.”

“So … is there a problem with Andy?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, my dear. Well … What … what can I do?”

“I’ll talk to you when I get there. If for some reason there’s a problem with my being there, I’ll leave.” She felt rebuffed and peeved. “Though I can’t imagine what that would be.” She signaled to pull back onto the road and turned to look at her son. “Are you buckled?” she asked him.

“Yep.”

“We’re almost to Fort Stockton,” she told her mother.

“That close?”

Madeline lowered her voice. “You sound like you don’t want me to be there. I don’t get this. This is weird. I have a big problem, and you sound like you don’t want me.” She pulled onto the road and accelerated.

“Of course I want you. Oh honey. Is it … the same problem with Andy?”

“Essentially the same. I’ll talk to you there.”

“Sweet lamb.”

From the backseat, Nicholas said, “Are you talking to Nana? Can I talk to her?” Madeline handed the phone over the seat. “I brought my tadpole,” Nicholas said excitedly, and then his tone dropped. “Ranger isn’t with us, though. Dad’s not coming either.”

On the last leg of the journey, the sun grew red and large and sat belligerently on the horizon for a long time before sinking onto the road before them and slipping out of sight. Madeline strained her eyes against it, shading them with her hand, and felt an escalating irritation toward the sun until it vanished much too quickly, drawing away its rosy glow and leaving her speeding along an empty road in a vast grayness and feeling a fretful urgency to be somewhere.

38

AN UNINVITED GUEST

When Madeline finally turned the car onto the dirt road that led to Jack and Delia’s house, the moon—a quarter full—was rising over Lizard Mountain. The house was silhouetted against the craggy shape in the falling darkness, a few of the windows lighted, and Madeline drove toward it before veering onto the narrower road that led to the cabin a hundred yards away. The road curved around three stunted, graceless willows, and the cabin appeared in a stand of junipers, glowing white in the headlights. Two wicker chairs with cushions faced each other on the porch, and the sight of them there, unoccupied, gave Madeline an empty feeling.

“Why are we at the cabin?” Nicholas asked from the backseat.

“Stay in the car,” she told him. “I’m just taking the painting in.” She turned the motor off but left the headlights on, their piercing gleam shining back at her from the windowpanes. The sharp smell of the junipers greeted her when she opened the car door. A breeze lifted her spirits slightly. Knowing the cabin was usually left unlocked, she carried the painting to the porch and flipped the lights on as she entered.

The interior was a single room with a closet and a small bathroom, a bed with a quilt, an armchair with flowered upholstery. A coffeepot sat on a table near the bathroom door. Madeline took the painting to the closet and propped it upright under a trio of coat hangers.

“Can I drive?” Nicholas asked when she returned to the car. “Jack let me do it before. And he let me drive the golf cart.”

She remembered how her father used to let her drive on these roads when she was Nicholas’s age. A heartsick longing overwhelmed her. “Not in the dark,” she told Nicholas. “You can unbuckle the seat belt and put your head out the window.”

The brushy limbs of junipers scratched noisily over the hood as she put the car in reverse. “Sweetie, don’t mention that we stopped at the cabin; I don’t want Nana to know the painting got wet. I don’t want her to worry about it. We’ll take it into town tomorrow to get the frame fixed.”

“What did you say?” Nicholas shouted against the rush of air in his face as she drove toward the house.

She repeated herself more loudly.

“What?”

“Get your head back in,” she told him, and when he was looking at her through the sheen of the rearview mirror, she said, “Pretend we didn’t stop at the cabin.” He had taken his cap off, and his windblown hair stood straight up. “Don’t say anything about the painting. It isn’t a lie.”

“Got it,” he answered, shoving his head out the window again.

She parked the Suburban next to her mother’s car in the gravel driveway. Nicholas shouted out of the window as his grandmother and Jack came out of the house to greet them. “Hi Jack! Hi Nana! I brought Jerry!”

Madeline knew how bad she must look as she got out of the car. Her hair was oily and pulled back in a clip, strands of it hanging in her face. Her mother hugged her tightly, but seemed somehow nervous.

Nicholas scrambled into his grandmother’s arms. He dragged the flimsy tadpole container out of the backseat, setting it on the ground in the glow of the buzzing pole light and squatting beside it while Jack peered in and admired Jerry.

“Sorry to show up unexpected,” Madeline said. “I hope it’s not a problem.”

“It’s never a problem to have you here,” Jack told her. “Delia just put clean sheets on the bed; your room’s all ready.” He pulled her bags from the back. “Well, Nick, my boy. Shall we take your tadpole in?”

Madeline lingered with her mother. “I don’t want to go into it now, but basically Andy’s done it again.” She shrugged her purse strap over her shoulder. “He felt sorry for some woman who had broken up with her boyfriend. I don’t know how far it went.”

Shelly put her arm around her, but Madeline said, “Don’t do that—don’t act like anything’s wrong. I don’t want Nicholas to know.”

They went inside to the kitchen, where Delia offered Madeline a glass of wine and asked about the drive. She mentioned how dry everything was—how long since it had rained. “Carlotta’s doing some things at the shop, but she’ll be home shortly. I think your mother told you she’s moved home.”

“Yes, and Mom said you have a guest coming?”

Delia started unloading the dishwasher. “Jack’s cousin, Wyatt.”

“Wyatt Calvert?” Madeline looked at her mother. “You didn’t tell me it was Wyatt Calvert.”

“I only found out he was coming after I got here. I’m sorry, I should have mentioned it right off.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t.” She stared at her mother, amazed. “When I called from the road, you just said someone was coming and didn’t tell me who it was.”

“I was going to tell you when you got here.”

“But until I called, you didn’t know I was coming. And you know I’ve always wanted to meet him.”

“It was a surprise to everyone that Wyatt was coming,” Delia said. “And we love having you here, Madeline, and you’re absolutely right that you should meet Wyatt—I imagine he wants to meet you, too. And he’s going to stay out in the cabin, so there’s no problem with rooms. He often stays there. If you want to get settled, Jack’s upstairs with Nicholas.”

Madeline and Shelly went upstairs and found Nicholas with Jack in the sitting room. They had opened the sofa bed and cleared a space on the bookshelf for the tadpole, and Jack was helping Nicholas set up his video games.