Promises to Keep (14 page)
I shook my head while pretending to study the grammar book on the kitchen table in front of me.
“You just don’t look right.”
I didn’t feel right. Nearly a week had passed, and Daddy hadn’t picked up the note. He hadn’t left more candy in my desk either. There was no sign of him, and I was beginning to wonder whether Mara had been right. Maybe someone else had left the Sugar Daddies. But I didn’t want a secret admirer. I wanted Daddy.
Tillie paused in washing the dishes and looked at me over her shoulder. “Growing pains,” she said.
“I don’t know, Tillie,” Mom said. “Maybe Dr. Sawyer was right when he talked about getting her tonsils out.”
“But I don’t want to get my tonsils out, Mom!”
“You’ll feel better all the way around if you do.”
“But, Mom – ”
“I’m not saying you
will
have your tonsils out, just that it’s something to consider. I’ve only known you to mope around the house when you don’t feel good, and I’ve seen a lot of moping these past few days.”
“I’m fine, Mom. Really.”
“Growing pains,” Tillie said again. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Janis. If she says she’s fine, then I’m sure she’s fine.”
Mom gave me a long hard look before going back to drying the dishes. I turned my attention to the grammar book but couldn’t concentrate. We had come to Mills River to get away from Daddy, and I knew I shouldn’t want him to be there, but I couldn’t help it. My mind was soaring to all sorts of dream places where my family was together again – only in a good way this time. My head was filled with visions of a good father, one who never drank or got angry or hit Mom, one who was always kind and loving.
“Roz,” Mom said, “why don’t you finish up that homework and go on up to bed. You could probably use a good night’s sleep.”
I closed the book. “I can finish during homeroom tomorrow morning,” I said.
“Good idea. Go on and brush your teeth. I’ll be up to kiss you good-night in a minute.”
“All right. Good night, Tillie.”
“Good night, Roz. Sleep well.”
I gathered all my books and papers and laid them on the small table in the front hall, ready to go in the morning. At the top of the stairs I peeked into Wally’s room. He was at his desk by the window, drawing lines with a ruler on a sheet of graph paper. He sat with his back to me and couldn’t see me watching him from the doorway.
“Wally?”
Startled, he turned his head. “Yeah?”
“What are you doing?”
“My mechanical drawing assignment. Why?”
I shrugged. “Just wondering.”
He tapped the desk with the ruler a moment, then went back to work.
“Are you going to need that kind of thing where you’re going?” I asked.
He laughed lightly. “It might come in handy.” He drew a long line, the point of his pencil moving as slowly as a surgeon’s scalpel. When he finished, he turned back around. “You need something?”
“No.”
“You just feel like standing there staring at me?”
I pressed my lips together. He raised his brows. For a moment he looked like the Wally I used to know, when we were friends.
“Wally?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Can I stop you?”
He smiled. I felt encouraged to go on. “There must have been something good about Daddy, wasn’t there? I mean, I remember some good things . . .”
My words tapered off as the smile slid from his face. “Listen,” he said quietly, “the best thing you can do is forget about Alan. Forget he’s your father. Forget he ever existed.”
My throat was tight. I didn’t want to cry. “But, I mean, there was
something
good about him, wasn’t there?”
Wally sat without speaking for what seemed like a long time. Finally he said, “Tell you what, Roz, if I can think of anything good about Alan, I’ll let you know, all right? I promise. Now, I’ve got a lot of homework. You need to go away and let me finish.”
I nodded. “All right.” I took a step backward. “Good night, Wally. And thanks for thinking about it.”
But he had already turned back to his homework and didn’t respond.
Mom gave me permission to go to the public library with Mara after school on Friday. Though we’d lived in Mills River since the summer, I hadn’t yet been to the downtown library. Mara claimed she knew the place better than her own house; she had worked hard to memorize the exact location of all her favorite books, both fiction and nonfiction. When new books came into the library and old books were removed, shifting the shelf location of Mara’s favorites, it left her feeling out of sorts. “I can’t afford to buy all the books I want,” she told me, “but I pretend the library copies are mine and I’m just letting other people use them.”
The librarians all knew Mara by name, and when we arrived that Friday afternoon, the head librarian, a Mrs. Tisdale, presented Mara with two books that had the word
Withdrawn
stamped across the cover.
“I thought you might like these, Mara,” Mrs. Tisdale said. She smiled as she slid them across the counter.
Mara picked them up and squealed quietly, fully aware that we had entered a sanctuary of near silence. “Thank you, Mrs. Tisdale!” she said, hugging the books to her chest.
“The library recently purchased new copies, so I saved these for you.”
Both books were paperbacks, dog-eared from use. One was
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain
,
the other
Up From Slavery
by Booker T. Washington. The second book made me think about how, in some places not too long ago, Mara couldn’t have even come into the library through the front door. She would have had to use the colored entrance, and once inside, she would have had to sit in separate rooms from the whites. Thoughts like that always hit me with a jolt. When I looked at Mara, I didn’t see a Negro, I just saw Mara. Only at certain moments – like this one – did I remember that her skin was darker than mine.
“Are you here for anything in particular?” Mrs. Tisdale asked.
“We have to write a history paper on an invention. Any invention we want. I’m going to write about the printing press, and – oh yeah, this is my friend, Roz. She’s new in town.”
The pretty librarian looked at me, her polished lips turning up in a smile. “Well, nice to meet you. Welcome to Mills River.”
“Thank you,” I said shyly.
“Did Mara say your name is Ross?”
“No. It’s Roz. Short for Rosalind.”
“Oh yes, I see. Well, Roz, what invention are you going to write about?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“I’m going to show her where the nonfiction section is,” Mara explained, “and let her look around.”
Mrs. Tisdale nodded. “You may want to look for books on Thomas Edison. That’d be a place to start.”
“All right,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Come on, Roz. Thanks again for the books, Mrs. Tisdale.”
As I walked with Mara up the stairs to Young Adult Nonfiction, she whispered, “All the librarians know I’m going to be a great writer someday. I think they want to say they had a part in it, because they’re always giving me books and stuff. I’m really lucky that way.”
I nodded. She
was
lucky. I wished I had people giving me free stuff. And I wished I had a life goal. I wished I thought I was going to be great at
any
thing. But I didn’t seem to have any particular talent, not like Mara and her writing.
“Here we are,” she said as we came to a stop amid towering rows of books. “This is the right section, but let’s look at the card catalog to see what they’ve got on the printing press for me and Thomas Edison for you.”
An hour later she was seated at one of the tables, taking notes from several stacks of books that she’d piled around her. I was still wandering the aisles, trying in a slipshod fashion to decide what to write about. I figured everyone would pick an invention by Thomas Edison, and I wanted to do something different.
Absorbed in reading the spines of the books, I was only vaguely aware of the handful of people in the library. One teenaged girl strolled into Nonfiction, absently bumped into me, excused herself, moved on to another shelf. I scarcely glanced at her. Finally a book on Madame Curie caught my attention; I knew she had something to do with the invention of the X-ray machine. Rolling up on my toes, I had my fingers on the dust jacket when I was grabbed from behind. My mind needed a second to register that someone had me in his hold. In that second of dawning awareness my heart began to race, and I couldn’t breathe. The stranger’s hold was gentle, like a hug, with one hand around my waist and the other over my mouth. I instinctively tried to pull the hand away from my face so I could let go of the scream rising in my throat. But whoever held me was far stronger than I was. I sensed his face near mine. Wally? If this was a joke, it wasn’t funny. I squirmed, trying to free myself, but his grasp only tightened.
“Roz, stand still. Don’t scream. It’s me. It’s Daddy.”
His breath tickled my ear, and I froze. The sound of his voice brought on a whole new rush of fear, while his words slithered like a bad dream right into my brain. I’d wanted Daddy, wanted to see him, wanted him to come back to us, but now that he was here, I wasn’t so sure.
“Roz,” he said again. “I’m going to let you go. But I want you to promise you won’t scream. All right? Promise?”
I nodded, my wide eyes rolling and shifting rapidly as I tried to make sense of what was happening.
“Good. Good,” he whispered. The pressure on my face was lifted. I realized I was holding my breath; my whole body trembled as I exhaled. Daddy’s hands turned me around slowly.
And then I was looking into his face. He was kneeling now, both hands on my shoulders, his eyes roaming my face like he was drinking me in. “Oh, Little Rose. Little Rose,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”
I didn’t know whether to run as fast as I could or throw my arms around him and hold on for dear life. I couldn’t pull my gaze from that oh-so-familiar but forbidden face. I knew every inch of it, the lines beside his mouth, the small scar that nicked his right brow, the narrow bridge of his nose, those piercing brown eyes, soft as a doe’s. They’d always perplexed me – those eyes – by speaking of tenderness. At that moment they were filled with tears.
“Daddy?” I lifted a hand to his cheek, as though I had to touch him to make sure he was real.
He smiled, nodded. “I’m here, Roz.”
His skin was rough and warm. My palm tingled from his days’ growth of whiskers even after I dropped my hand. “But how – ”
He laid a finger to my lips. “No questions. Not now. We have so little time, but I wanted to see you.”
I was still struggling to catch my breath. It was hard to speak. “You left the Sugar Daddies? In my desk?”
He nodded again.
Before either of us could say more, something caught my eye over his shoulder. At the far end of the aisle, the same teenaged girl who’d bumped into me earlier was pushing a cart of books and replacing them on the shelves. Daddy glanced over at her, then back at me.
“Roz, I’ve only got a minute, so I want you to listen carefully, all right?”
I met his eyes again. “All right.”
He squeezed my shoulders tightly. “I can’t live without you and your mom and Valerie. Ever since you went away, I’ve been dying inside, Roz. I want us to be together again, so . . .” He paused; he seemed to be looking for the right words. “I’m going to change, Roz. I’m going to make things right. But I need some time, so it’s not going to happen overnight. Do you understand?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I did understand.
“I’m working on making us a better life, and I want you to know that. But meanwhile, I don’t want you telling anyone you saw me. Don’t tell your mother, don’t tell Wally, don’t tell your friends. No one, you hear?”
I thought of Mara. “No one at all?”
“No one. Or it might ruin everything.”
“But, Daddy – ”
He looked back over his shoulder at the girl with the cart. “I’ve got to go now, Roz.”
“Will I . . . Will I see you again?”
“Of course. And you can know that I’m always close by.”
“But, Daddy – ”
He kissed my forehead and stood. “I love you, Little Rose.”
He looked at me a long while, waiting for me to respond. But I couldn’t say anything. In another moment he was gone.
I stumbled weakly down the aisle and fell into a chair at the table where Mara had built her fortress of books. She paused in her writing and frowned at me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.
I put my head down on the table and wept.
The next morning I woke up sick again. This time I was diagnosed with strep throat, and this time Dr. Sawyer scheduled me for surgery in three weeks. On Friday, October 27, a few days before Halloween, I would have my tonsils removed.
No one thought about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to go trick-or-treating. Not even me. All I could think about was Daddy, and when I would see him again, and whether or not he’d be able to put our Humpty-Dumpty family back together again.
In the first feverish forty-eight hours of my illness, my mind carried me back to the library and my few minutes there with Daddy. Over and over I felt his hands heavy on my shoulders, saw the look in his eyes, heard him say, “I love you, Little Rose.” And in my fog, I answered, “Daddy, Daddy,” until finally I awoke and saw my mother’s face above me, her eyes wide with distress. Those eyes told me something awful was happening.
“What’s the matter, Mom?” I asked fearfully, wondering whether I was sicker than she was letting on.
She tried to smile. “Nothing, sweetheart. Go back to sleep.”
When she left, Tillie’s face came into view. She too wore an odd expression. I swallowed hard in spite of the pain in my throat. “Tillie,” I asked, “am I dying?”
She frowned at me. “Of course not, child.”
“Then what’s the matter with Mom?”
