One True Thing (29 page)

“My truck?” he said.

“I have to go back to Sammy’s and get my car. I’ll leave the truck there with the keys under the mat.” It never occurred to me to wonder how he would get there himself, and he didn’t fight with me about it. I rolled up the window and pulled out of the narrow opening in the trees that led away from the trailer. In the rearview mirror I could see him standing, hands in pockets, still dancing from one foot to the other.

In a place like Langhorne I would have known if he had told anyone about that night, but I never heard anything, not from Jeff, not from Mrs. Forburg or my lawyer, not secondhand through Mark or Jon or those faceless men who watched in silence as I staggered out of the bar. Chris Mortensen acted like a nice guy that night, and I suspect he probably was. Which made me something much worse than I’d even felt that day, driving his truck through the gathering morning between black rows of pines, leaving him to stare at the four walls of his bedroom.

L
et me be honest,” said Jules, who had left the magazine to be an articles editor at one of the fashion journals. “The utter degradation you’re describing so vividly is all in a night’s work for your average New York career woman.”

“I know,” I said. “It just feels different here.”

“Different how? Because everyone knows everyone else’s business? Because everyone is interested in yours?” Jules had quit in large part because James had demanded she write a first-person memoir of our friendship. She had called him a fucking slug and emptied her desk before Bill Tweedy had heard of the assignment and killed it. “You ARE a fucking slug,” someone told Jules he’d said to James, who replied that a real journalist—bad choice of words, but James had never understood the boss—used his life to enrich his work. “So does a black widow spider,” Bill had said.

“I feel like my mother’s watching me, judging me, like she sees everything I’m doing,” I said.

“Oh, honey,” said Jules, “I’ve always felt that way about my mother.”

“But now I feel like she has the right.”

“Oh, honey,” Jules said.

By the beginning of April the grand jury had heard a dozen witnesses. Jonathan had been in town Easter weekend for his appearance. When I told Jeff I had seen him in Sammy’s that night, he said that he imagined Jon wanted to talk to me.

“Did you throw a drink in his face?” he said.

“The thought never crossed my mind.”

“Before I die I’m going to break his nose,” Jeff said.

“You have my permission,” I said.

Jeff took me to the cemetery several weeks after Easter. He waited in the car while I wandered between the rows of stones like a tourist, reading all the familiar names, the names in the Langhorne phone book, on the high school class rosters, on the war memorial in the middle of the town square, on the brass plaques to one side of the doors of the lawyers’ offices and doctors’ suites, in the engagement and wedding announcements in the
Tribune
. James, Benson, Warren, even Best, Mr. Best’s mother, aged eighty-nine. They always said that he had been unusually devoted to her. Perhaps that was my bad luck. Or perhaps it was all the imagined slights over the years, the way I had always looked half amused at his wife’s dithering, the skating and swimming at the lake from which I had excluded his children, the puerile graduation speech criticizing the town fathers for their insularity. “Holden Caulfield couldn’t have said it better himself,” said my father, who was as contemptuous of Salinger as I’d been of the soft and pudgy Best children, improbably named Allegra and Herbert after some long-dead relatives,
KATHRYN
, said Mr. Best’s mother’s stone. Again my bad luck. Or perhaps he merely thought he was serving justice, or pouring the concrete footing of a midlife shift to politics. Perhaps there was nothing personal in it for him at all.

My mother’s stone was already in place, a small gray rectangle of granite.
KATHERINE B. GULDEN
, it said.
1945-1991.
I knelt and put my hands against it. I looked back and saw Jeff’s head
turned away, the sunlight making a bright stripe in his auburn hair. Faintly I could hear a guitar riff from the jeep’s tape player.

From the pocket of my jacket I took a trowel and began to dig two shallow troughs. The ground was cold and friable, with limp stringy remnants of yellow grass just below the surface. The deeper I dug the warmer it became, and I imagined that six feet under it was warm as toast. Warm as toast, I said, to soothe myself. Warm as toast. I looked at the stone and imagined the line beneath the dates:
HER LAST MEAL WAS RICE PUDDING
.

The stripe in Jeff’s hair was just the color of her own, a warm red-gold, as though the sun was always shining on it. The dirt beneath my nails was a shade darker than her eyes. The Wild Turkey had been just a little lighter.

I had gone to a farmers’ market to buy seeds and cold frames for Mrs. Forburg’s house, to plant her a perennial border and a vegetable garden. Moving toward the big stall where an Amish woman with silver-blond hair and almost colorless blue eyes had always sold bulbs, I saw a woman with red-gold hair wearing a navy peacoat. Her back was turned to me; she was picking over bulbs, leaning forward to look at the small photographs of flowers that were spiked above each bin, leaning in to ask the woman, in her white bonnet with a virginal frill framing her long oval face, some question about a small knotty tuber on the palm of her outstretched hand.

So foolish, I thought to myself as I edged around people carrying hanging plants and flats of flowers, brushing by women with big pots of garish red tulips like rapacious mouths swaying on their pale green stalks. So stupid, as she moved away from the bulb stall, still with her back to me, and on to a circular wire display of Burpee’s seeds, looking at the Big Boys and Better Girls. She went over to a corner of the big warehouse building where peat and fertilizer were stacked in fifty-pound sacks, and out a side door into a blue car with some unreadable college sticker on the back windshield. I think she flashed a glance at me in her rearview
mirror, and then she was gone, her hair still curving just above the navy collar of her coat.

Years after, I remember, I read a monograph on grieving that studied bereaved children and found that many thought their mothers had moved away, gone to a new house, a new life, new children. “We are all children,” I said aloud as I read it, feeling foolish, foolish and correct, too.

The troughs were finished and I took from my pocket the assortment of bulbs I had gone back and bought after the car had driven away, twenty-four in all: a dozen tiny grape hyacinths and a dozen dwarf tulips, small sturdy things less than a foot tall that would have ruffly pale-pink petals like improbable little birds. I dropped them randomly into the holes and patted them softly into place, planting them out of season.

“You’re not allowed to do that,” said a man walking by in gray work clothes and a checked wool jacket stiff with dirt.

“So arrest me,” I said, picking the soil up in small handfuls and letting it drop onto the bulbs until they finally disappeared. When the holes were filled, I put some mats of dead grass on top to keep the bulbs warm until the earth thawed, and wiped my hands on my pants.

Jeff took me out to a diner on the highway afterward. We ate burgers with cooked onions and greasy fries and chocolate shakes and he talked about the handball game he had once a week with Mr. Duane and how difficult it was to tread the fine line between giving the older man a good game and not going all out and trouncing him. “Plus,” Jeff said, his mouth full, “aside from the question of leaving him with a shred of dignity, there’s the very real possibility that if I run him around enough he will keel over with a coronary. Pop’s in much better condition than Mr. Duane and he starts to get windy on me pretty early on when we play tennis these days.”

“How is he?” I asked.

“Ah, you know Dean Duane. One story about the glory days of the bull market after another. When giants walked the hallways of
Dean Witter Reynolds and the corporate raiders were in the full flower of their manhood.”

“I meant Papa,” I said.

“He’s the same,” Jeff said. “Maybe a little better. I think he really misses the both of you. It’s like he had these two great things going and now they’re both gone. He’s stopped asking me to talk you into seeing him.”

“Do you guys talk about me?”

“Never,” said Jeff.

“Mama?”

“Nope. Nor will he discuss Edith Wharton or Jane Austen with me, or the shortcomings of the modern English major. It doesn’t leave us with a whole lot to talk about over our TV dinners.”

“Not really TV dinners?” I said.

“Nah, I just wanted to make your skin crawl. Actually, it’s a lot of pizza and takeout. Have you ever had the Chinese food from the place in the mini-mall just past the Safeway?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Unfuckingbelievable, El. It is the worst stuff you’ve ever tasted in your life, but if you pick it up late all the guys who work there are sitting around eating bowls of what looks and smells like Chinatown food, great fish and vegetables and sauce. So one night I point to this guy’s bowl and I say, ‘Gimme that’ and they all start talking to one another in Cantonese dialect or something, and when I get the stuff home, it’s moo-shu pork and fried rice. It’s Caucasian discrimination, like they think real Chinese food is too rich for our blood.”

“Did Papa get a laugh out of that?”

“I didn’t tell him. He doesn’t really resonate to that kind of thing, if you get my drift.”

“You just don’t try with him,” I said.

“And the feeling is mutual, dear, unless you’ve forgotten.”

“You could have felt the same way about me.”

“I did. But there’s more to you than meets the eye. Besides, you know many attractive women who can be introduced to me.
Speaking of which, I saw Teresa the other day on Maple Lane. She was visiting Bobby Jackson’s dad, who has lung cancer.”

“Wow,” I said. “For us, Mama was her only case. But for her, it’s one of so many.”

“Yeah, but she has a special spot in her heart for you still, I think. She told me to tell you that she’s not seeing the guy anymore, and to ask you why the gorilla crossed the road.”

“Because he thought he was a chicken.”

“Whooa,”
Jeff said, “you are good. Very good.”

“That means the lady with the kids and the breast cancer has breast cancer again.” I shook my head. “It never ends.”

“She said just the opposite. She said to tell you she thinks of you often and it will all be over soon.”

“I know. She called me that night after she saw you. She sounds good, although she says she has two patients now who are fading fast.”

“Are you going to go see her?”

“Maybe,” I said. What I didn’t say was that when I had asked Teresa whether I might take her to dinner to thank her for everything she’d done, she replied quietly, “The hospital has asked me not to see you until after all this is settled.”

“Et tu
, Teresa,” I said.

“That is not fair, Ellen,” she said evenly. “I want very much to see and talk with you and I am very concerned about you. But it is important to other people that, for now, I keep this job.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“We will talk after,” she said. “For a long time.”

I made no social feints, no more trips to Sammy’s. I knew why Jeff chose a restaurant fifteen miles from home and then chose a booth with no other diners seated around it. My voice had automatically taken on a quieter timbre, the better to avoid being overheard. There were fewer messages on the machine, but the assisted suicide and euthanasia zealots still pursued me, and a psychic from Missouri called twice to say that she had talked to my mother, who was very happy and forgave me.

The huge bruise shaped like an open mouth on my left breast had turned from blue-purple to yellow-green, then disappeared, but I had never been able to reconstruct precisely how it had come to be there. Sometimes I would be reading or watching television,
How Green Was My Valley
one night,
I’ll Cry Tomorrow
the next, and a momentary tableau would be there before me, a tangle of limbs, frantic movements, loud cries, and I would put my head in my hands.

“Do you remember a Chris Mortensen?” I asked Mrs. Forburg one night when she was correcting essays on
Pride and Prejudice
.

She nodded. “Nice boy,” she said. “His father used to bounce him and his mother around a good bit and his mother was an alcoholic, and not a recovering one either, but somehow he turned out very sweet, the kind of boy who’d help you get your car out if it got stuck in the snow in the parking lot. I’m surprised you know him.”

“I met him in passing one night.”

“He comes to Al-Anon sometimes. I think he goes to meetings himself, too, although I can’t say for sure.”

“AA, you mean?”

She nodded again. “Whether he inherited it from Mom or started in because of Dad, I’m pretty sure he had a problem. Although maybe he’s working on it now.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said.

“Things are tough all over,” she said. She passed me a sheet of looseleaf with a single sentence on it. “The girl named Elizabeth in the story is a snotty bitch!” it said. “What should I reply?” she asked with a small smile. “It’s true,” I said. “But reductive,” she said. “Write that,” I said, “‘true, but reductive.’ That’ll knock him for a loop.”

“Why do you assume it’s a boy?”

“The bitch part. I don’t know. The snotty stuff. It sounds like the cute girl with the locker next to his is ignoring him so he projected onto Jane Austen. Write: Please see me after class and we
can compare and contrast the courting rituals of nineteenth-century England with your difficulty getting dates.”

“True but reductive,” Mrs. Forburg said.

“Are you going to lose your job because people think you’re harboring a lesbian murderer for carnal purposes?”

Mrs. Forburg started to laugh. She was wearing a bright red sweater, and her face above it, red-cheeked and shiny, made her look when she laughed like the bride of Santa Claus. She even shook when she laughed, like a bowl full of jelly, although I would never tell her so because she was more sensitive than she pretended about her weight.