Painting Naked (Macmillan New Writing) (27 page)

Fergus hands me a glass of wine and tells me the old geezer in the corner is making eyes at me. I glance toward him. He raises his cane and grins, exposing oversized false teeth.

“You have an admirer,” Lizzie whispers.

“Christ, Lizzie. He looks about ninety two.”

“Perfect,” she says. “You’d be the younger woman for a change.”

September slides into October and suddenly it’s Columbus Day weekend and Alistair fills my life with dirty laundry and stories of his adventures among the fossilized rocks of North Dakota. After I show him Katie’s letters and tell him about Emma Katherine, Alistair gets choked up and hugs me till I can barely breathe.

“Mom, what can I do to help?”

He bristles with energy, a need to let off steam with hard labor, so I point him toward my clogged gutters, the peeling paint on my bedroom ceiling, and the tool shed’s broken window. He fixes them all while I bake cookies and apples pies for him to take back to college.

The parrots are busy, too, ferrying twigs to a large, untidy nest they’re building on top of a utility pole at the foot of Tom Grainger’s driveway. Like me, they’re getting ready for winter, except they don’t have to put up with a soul-destroying job that requires them to spend endless gray days in a cubicle half the size of my bathroom.

Renee Dodd, my supervisor, is ruthless. Behind her back, people call her Atilla the Hen. Last week, she fired a temp for surfing the Web. Another was shown the door because she used the company’s computer to update her resume. I could be next, so I watch my back when I call home during lunch to retrieve messages.

Today, I have two. The first reminds me that my phone bill is overdue; the second chills my blood.

“Nothing serious,” says the nurse at Anna’s school, when I return her call. “Just a tummy ache, but she’d be better off at home. We can’t reach her parents, and you’re next on the list.”

Obviously, Harriet didn’t take me off. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

Renee’s not in her office, so I scribble a message—
sick child, will make up time later
—and leave it taped to her computer.

Anna sits, hunched over, on a plastic chair in the nurse’s office. She looks at me with frightened brown eyes and tries to smile.

“Has she been throwing up?” I ask.

“Not so far.”

Her brow feels cool and damp beneath my fingers. No fever. “Did you try reaching her mother again?”

“Yes, but her cell phone doesn’t answer.”

“Then she’s probably in court.” I pause. “What about Bea French?”

“Her office said she’s at a conference in New Orleans.”

“The nanny?”

In a small voice, Anna says, “We don’t have one any more.”

The nurse hands me Anna’s knapsack bulging with books, papers, and spare clothes. I bundle Anna into her jacket and carry her out to my car.

“My belly button hurts,” she says, curling up.

That’s it. I’m not taking any chances. We’re going straight to the clinic. I tear out of the school’s parking lot, hit a speed bump, and my car bottoms out. Anna groans and clutches her stomach. Maybe I should go to the hospital instead. It’s a twenty-minute drive. The clinic’s less than a mile from here, but it’s just a clinic, and if this is serious, they’ll send her straight to the hospital.

I stomp on the gas and head for the highway.

Sands Point

October 2011

“You saved her life,” Harriet tells me later, much later, after we’ve paced the floor and drunk too many cups of bad coffee from the hospital’s vending machine. I tell her she’s exaggerating, but have to eat my words when the doctor informs us that Anna’s appendix was close to bursting and it’s a good thing I bypassed the clinic and brought her in right away.

“But she’ll be fine,” he says, smiling. “Kids her age are tough.”

Harriet sits by Anna’s bed trying not to look scared, Beatrice calls every half hour from New Orleans, asking if she ought to fly home, and I feel faint when I think what might’ve happened if I hadn’t phoned home for my messages. The only one not terribly fazed by all this is Anna, despite being hitched up to IVs and a tube that goes from her nose down to her stomach. “To prevent vomiting and gas,” the nurse says.

Anna begs for stories about Archibald and as I embellish my tale with details about the diva and the evil mayor, I catch Harriet’s eye, but there’s no need for words because her face says it all.

Forgive me?

And I’m okay with this because while Harriet’s a verbal wizard in the court room, she’s hopelessly inept at coping with simple apologies. I see her struggling, trying to find the right words, and I wait because maybe she has a need to say them.

She does.

“I hate that it took all this,” Harriet says, waving her arm at Anna’s hospital bed, “to get us back together again.”

“Me too.”

“Jill, I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Did Colin leave because of—?”

“He left for a lot of reasons.”

If only I could figure out what they are.

We spend the night in Anna’s room, and I doze, fitfully, in an armchair while Harriet alternates between the cot they set up and lying beside her daughter, the two cuddled up like a pair of spoons. In the morning, Anna’s in better shape than we are. I offer to stay because I know Harriet has another grueling day in court with needy clients and a demanding judge. She doesn’t want to leave, but I shove her out the door, remind her the courthouse is less than five minutes from the hospital.

At nine, I call my office and leave a message for Renee that I won’t be back till tomorrow, but when I show up for work the next day, I discover I no longer have a job, because, as my supervisor informs me, she takes a dim view of employees who go traipsing off to cope with somebody else’s child.

“You can’t fire me for this.”

Renee looks at me. “I just did. Now please get your things and leave. Right now.”

Driving home, I wonder how the hell I’m supposed to find another job with a black mark like this on my résumé. Should I even admit to having had this job? It was only temporary; on the other hand, it’s the only current reference I have, and I’m so busy worrying about my lack of options, that I’m halfway down Bay Street before I notice the festival decorations.

Oh, my God, the colors.

Red and turquoise bunting droops between the lamp posts; matching posters leer from shop windows. A banner the color of cat vomit hangs from a telephone pole, and I’m wondering who’s responsible for such appalling taste when a gunshot glues my hands to the steering wheel.

What the hell was that?

I glance back. Clouds of exhaust hang over the trunk of my car. Dammit, my wretched muffler has let loose.

The driver behind me honks his horn. I press, tentatively, on the gas. Another explosion rents the air, followed by a throaty roar that propels me down the street and into Dave Norton’s garage.

“Are you practicing for the Indy Five-Hundred?” he asks.

I have to yell. “No. I need a muffler.”

“So does your car.” Dave grins, wipes his hands on a cloth, and bends down to investigate. “That muffler’s got a hole the size of a baseball and the pipes are rusted out.”

“Can you fix it while I wait?’

“Yes,” Dave says. “But it’ll mean a whole new exhaust system.”

Shit. This won’t be cheap. “Go ahead.”

Dave does the job in less than two hours. “Your brakes need relining,” he says, writing up my bill. “And you’re due for another timing belt. Do you want to make an appointment?”

“Not yet.” I open my checkbook and glance at the register, but there’s not nearly enough to cover this little repair. “Dave, can I come back and pay you later?”

“No problem,” he says.

Colin’s bracelet fetches three hundred dollars at the pawn shop behind Wal-Mart. I’m sure it’s worth more, but it’s enough to cover Dave’s bill and that’s all I care about right now.

Feeling a bit shattered and in need of a hug, I drive out to see Lizzie. After telling me she’d like to nail my ex-boss to the wall, she asks about Anna and I tell her she’s doing just fine. “She’ll be home in time for Halloween.”

“Which reminds me,” Lizzie says, “Fergus and I are going to the dance Friday night. Come with us.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Rubbish,” Lizzie says. “It’ll do you good to get out. I’m going as a pumpkin.”

“That’s original. What about Fergus?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“The Energizer Bunny. He’s got a drum.” Lizzie grins.

So do I.

“It’s good to see you smiling again,” she says. “And I won’t take no for an answer. You’re coming with us, and if you’re worrying about Elaine, you can stop right now. I doubt she’ll dare show her face.”

“Don’t be daft. The whole bloody festival committee will be there.”

“But not Elaine Burke.”

“Why?”

“Because she screwed up,” Lizzie says, grinning hugely. “The festival hasn’t exactly been a whopping success. The money they were supposed to raise for the new library hasn’t materialized, and now”—her grin widens—“some of the village elders are pissed at her.”

“I had no idea.”

“That’s because you haven’t been paying attention.”

Claudia calls to tell me she’s in touch with the toy company representatives in London and that finally things are looking up for the squirrels. I swallow my own disappointment over not having heard anything positive about Archibald and tell Claudia I’m thrilled for her.

She wants to share it with me. “Fifty-fifty.”

“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”

“Then I’ll give you sixty percent, and—”

“Claudia, the squirrels are yours. I only gave things a bit of a leg-up, that’s all.”

“Nonsense,” Claudia says. “Without you, nothing would have—”

“Please, don’t argue. I told Sophie six months ago I did this for you. To thank you for being the mother I never—”

“I insist you get something.”

“What I really want from you,” I say, suddenly overwhelmed with thoughts about mothers, “is Edith’s address.”

“You’re going to write to her?”

“Yes.”

Claudia sighs. “I’m glad,” she says. “For your sake.”

After I jot down Edith’s address—a nursing home in Sussex—I pull out my photograph album and turn to the second page. I remove a small photo. Edith’s strong features—high cheekbones, prominent chin, and deep-set dark eyes—still have the power to control. I swallow hard and prop my aunt’s picture on the shelf next to one of Jordan and Alistair fishing for crabs by the jetty. I’ll find a suitable frame for it later. In the meantime, I have a letter to write.

The words come slowly. My fingers freeze on the keyboard more than once. Then I change my mind. I’ll write this by hand, so I rummage in the cupboard and pull out a plain white card, folded, with a raised scroll across the bottom. Matching envelope. Edith will appreciate this. So I pen my words of reconciliation in a careful script and hope her eyes aren’t too old to see them. I’m sure someone, a nurse or a volunteer, will read this to her.

Before I can change my mind, I seal the envelope, slap on a stamp, and drive it to the post office where I stand, hesitantly, in front of its sturdy blue mailbox. Opening the flap, I sigh deeply and let go of another piece of my past.

Disguised as a cat—black sweater and tights, velvet ears, and bristly whiskers borrowed from a broom—I join Lizzie and Fergus at the village’s annual Halloween dance. There’s no sign of Elaine so I relax and enjoy myself by pretending to be someone else for an hour or two. I hadn’t planned on staying longer than that, but when some guy dressed as a monk in long, black robes and a mask shows up and nobody knows who he is, I’m intrigued enough to stick around.

Using sign language, he asks me to dance.

I shoot a nervous glance at Lizzie. She grins and tells me to get on with it, so I follow him to the middle of the room and we jerk about in the awkward way middle-aged people do when they dance to young people’s music. God only knows how old this guy is. I can’t see his face. It’s covered by a cowl and a hideous mask—blank eye sockets, dripping fangs, the works. He doesn’t talk, just shrugs and points, and when the music speeds up, he gets tangled in his cloak and trips over his feet. One of his sandals is missing a buckle.

At midnight, he wanders off toward the bar and disappears.

“Maybe he turned into a frog,” Fergus says.

Lizzie grins. “Or a prince.”

Much to my disgust, the fun I had at the party is obliterated by problems with the plumbing. I crawl out of bed the next morning, bleary-eyed and a little hungover, to find the kitchen sink is stopped up and the downstairs toilet is leaking.

Nothing I do solves either problem. The door bell rings and I answer it, clutching a pipe wrench and still in my bathrobe.

My next-door neighbor smiles at me. “Need any help?”

“No.” I try to close the door, but his foot’s in the way.

He points at my wrench. “I’m a fabulous plumber.”

I’m tempted, oh so tempted, to smack him, but I hear the sound of running water and race for the bathroom. He follows and takes the wrench from my hands and in less than ten minutes he fixes both toilet and sink, and I wish, nastily, that he’d had at least half the trouble I had. It must be some sort of strange male mystique in which pipes and plumbing refuse to cooperate with any female over the age of fifty.

“Have I earned a cup of coffee?” Tom places my wrench on the kitchen table and sits down, and I glare at him while Zachary hops into his lap and starts to purr. Traitorous beast.

“I’d rather you went back to your wife and daughter.”

“But I’m not—” He stares at me. “My daughter?”

“That little girl with brown hair and dimples.”