Shelter Me (21 page)

Aunt Jude seemed to know most of them, if not by name, by some detail they had shared with her about their lives. “Hello, Mary…Hi there, Antonio…Hi, would you like a little extra? I know you’ve got a healthy appetite…Now, Mr. Jones,” she addressed one elderly gentleman in a tattered Red Sox cap, “where is your friend, Mr. DiFilippo?”

“Ahh, he’s taking a nap. Little siesta. He’ll be ’round later.”

Janie smiled and scooped, garnering grins from some of the younger men. Others seemed strangely suspicious, and one even made quite a show of inspecting his casserole after she served him. Most, however, nodded and avoided eye contact, staring blankly into their paper plates.

“Just a half portion, please,” murmured Beryl, the walker. “I don’t metabolize cream-based cooking as I did in my younger days.” She moved quickly down the line to the salad and breathed a barely perceptible sigh of disappointment. A wide metal bowl of limp iceberg lettuce was speckled with shaved carrots and the occasional pale tomato wedge.

After the meal was served, Janie helped Aunt Jude and a handful of other volunteers ferry the serving trays back to the kitchen. The leftovers were shoveled into plastic containers while the volunteers stopped to serve themselves. Several took their plates out
to the large room to eat with the guests. Others, like Aunt Jude and Janie, had just a quick bite in the kitchen.

“Mmm,” said Aunt Jude. “I love your tuna casserole, Vonetta! Don’t you, Janie? Don’t you just love it?” Janie smiled and nodded toward Vonetta, wondering how quickly she could ditch the rest of the ample serving Aunt Jude had given her.

After they set the kitchen in order, Aunt Jude went back to the volunteer office and retrieved her laptop computer. “This is my favorite part,” she told Janie as they walked out into the dining room. Most of the tables still held the debris of the meal, but one table in the corner had been meticulously cleared and wiped. Two middle-aged men sat at the table waiting patiently for Jude.

“Well, I see my foreign correspondents have gathered faithfully!” Aunt Jude said to the men as she booted up the computer. “Any news, Malcolm?”

“She’s holding her own, God bless her,” said the man called Malcolm. His face was lined and pitted with blackheads. Janie thought he must be in his sixties, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Has hospice been called in?” Aunt Jude asked.

“Oh, I, uh…hospice? Can’t remember. Maybe they don’t have that out in Oregon.”

“Where’s the letter?”

Malcolm’s eyes dropped penitentially to his lap. “I had it,” he said. “But when I woke up it wasn’t there. Think it must have blown away.”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” said Aunt Jude, patting the arm of his stained shirt. “I lose things all the time. They’re right there, and then they aren’t. Have you met my niece? This is my Janie. This is Malcolm, and this is…oh, remind me one more time?” she pleaded with the other man.

His lips, held tightly closed over bucked teeth, parted to answer, “Jimmy. ’S alright. I only been here once before.”

“Jimmy, that’s right. Sorry. Well, now Malcolm, you just fire when ready. I’m all set to go.”

“Dear Mary Alice,” he began, and Aunt Jude’s fingers flew across the keyboard. He was writing to his sister, who was sick with cancer, and past the point of treatment. Malcolm was at least happy to hear that she could still drink her favorite A&W root beer, but wished he were there to make her one of his famous Ovaltine and graham cracker milk shakes, like he did when they were kids.

“That sounds delicious,” commented Aunt Jude.

“It’s god-awful,” chuckled Malcolm, “but she’ll get the joke.”

He went on to say that he hoped his nephew was taking good care of her, since Malcolm couldn’t be there in person, and it was lucky that good-for-nothing ex-husband of hers hit the road way back when he did, because he would have been useless. Worse than useless.

“Are you sure you want to say that?” said Aunt Jude. “It might be a little harsh for someone in Mary Alice’s condition.”

“Nah,” said Malcolm. “She’s a tough old chicken. ’Sides, no one knows better than her what a rotten bastard the guy was.” He gritted his teeth and shook his head. “No good rotten bastard.”

He finished his letter by telling Mary Alice that in his dreams he was holding her hand, just like he always used to, like when they’d hide in the basement closet on their mother’s “bad nights.” He was holding her hand and telling her that everything would be okay, and that soon they’d be away from there. But it looked to Malcolm like Mary Alice would be making her escape early, and it was hard for him to think of being left behind in a world without her.

“I know I haven’t seen you but once or three times in all these long years, but in my dreams I’m always holding your hand. And you’re holding mine. And that’s the way it’ll be until I come to join you in our new home above the stars. Love, your big brother, Malcolm.”

Aunt Jude finished typing and glanced over at Janie. A look passed between the two women that, Janie realized, had never
been transmitted before. It wasn’t about either of them or their struggles with each other. It wasn’t anger or disappointment or dismissal. It was a simple recognition of the real world in which they lived, both of them, together.

“Malcolm,” said Aunt Jude, turning her attention back to him. “This is just lovely. Mary Alice will be so happy to hear from you. When I’m done with everyone’s letters, I’ll just go in the office and print them all out at once, and then you can address it yourself.”

“Thanks,” said Malcolm. “I know her address by heart.”

“I’ve no doubt.”

“Uh, Jude? You got that nice paper you always bring? My sister said she never got letters on such nice paper before. Made me feel kinda…”

“Proud?” said Aunt Jude. “Yessir, I brought it. Matching envelopes, too. And stamps.”

“Thought of everything,” smiled Malcolm. “Like always.”

N
EXT IN LINE
, J
IMMY
wanted to write to the White House, indicating his advice on domestic matters as well as foreign policy. “I don’t know what we’re doing in the Middle East, Mr. President, sir, when it’s those crazy motherfuckers in North Korea we should be worried about.” It was Aunt Jude’s policy never to scribe curses, of which she had to remind Jimmy on several occasions.

“Oh yeah,” said Jimmy. “How ’bout ‘crazy motherfornicators’ instead?”

Several more guests stopped by at the table in the corner and dictated their letters. Aunt Jude said her fingers were getting tired (which Janie knew to be patently false, since Aunt Jude spent practically every free moment on the Internet) and asked Janie to take over. Janie was reminded of the first time Aunt Jude let her get behind the wheel of her car, back in high school. Janie had soon learned to tune out the constant barrage of driving tips
and notifications of any other car within a quarter mile. But for now, it was good to have Aunt Jude as her guide to the world of scribing letters for the hapless, the sad, the angry, and the mildly psychotic.

When everyone else had gone, Beryl was still lingering near the table.

“This is my niece, Jane LaMarche,” said Aunt Jude. “She’ll be doing the typing.”

Beryl studied Janie. “You have a tremendously auspicious name, Miss LaMarche.”

“Jane?” said Janie. It was about the most inauspicious name she’d ever heard in her life.

“No, LaMarche. It means ‘the walk’ in French. You must be a traveler like myself.”

Janie was unsure of how to respond, and Aunt Jude stepped in for the save. “That’s her married name, Beryl. The last name she was born with was Dwyer.”

“Oh!” Beryl’s eyebrows shot up. “Even more impressive. You
chose
to be a LaMarche.”

Janie offered to scribe a letter for Beryl, who politely declined. “I’m very old-fashioned,” explained Beryl. “A typed letter is so cold and impersonal. It can be sent to so many people at once! Only a handwritten letter can convey the sense that the writer is actually with you, saying the words to you alone. When you write a letter with your own hand, you give a tiny piece of yourself.”

“I see your point,” said Janie. “How about this? What if I make you some stationery? Then you could handwrite your letters on nice paper with your name printed on it.”

Beryl lightly touched her own cheek, then her hair. “I am overcome,” she murmured. “It is a most apropos solution to my conundrum. You are, indeed, a true LaMarche.”

Janie smiled. “How would you like your name printed?”

“Miss Beryl Ann Bishop.”

“And your address?” The words were out of Janie’s mouth too fast, and she nearly kicked herself for it. However eloquent her words, it was clear that Miss Beryl Ann Bishop was homeless.

Beryl pursed her lips in thought for a moment, “I think it best to say…En route, will advise.”

T
HEY WENT TO
M
ASS
at Immaculate Conception in Natick, a gothic-looking minor cathedral with a serious pigeon problem. So many nooks and crevices in which the nuisance birds could nest, and no way to stop them, short of casting wire mesh over the entire ornate building. An awning had been erected across the entrance to the church to shelter parishioners from pigeon-generated mishaps.

The pastor was eighty-three, Aunt Jude informed Janie. Well past retirement age, but he didn’t want to leave, and the Archdiocese of Boston wouldn’t make him go because of the shortage of priests. His throat required clearing approximately every minute and a half, Janie calculated, and he did so with a grumbling
ehhhhhh, heh
sound that made it seem as if he were heckling himself.

There were no donuts after Mass. Everyone just went home.

In the car there was some discussion of going to Cormac’s Confectionary to rectify the lack of post-Eucharistic pastries, but Janie didn’t feel like ordering cupcakes from Barb and acting like everything was copacetic. She was able to convince Dylan that it would be more fun to make their own cookies and have beaters to lick.

“Could you please not wear the goggles?” she asked Dylan on the way home. “Just for this short little ride?” She hated that she was begging. He caught her gaze in the rearview mirror, then
hesitantly lowered the goggles so that they hung from his neck. He chewed on the end of the plastic head strap until they pulled into the driveway, when he tucked the goggles neatly behind his car seat.

It took Janie some minutes to find the cookbook with the recipe that Dylan had requested: Peanut Butter Blossoms. They were essentially peanut butter cookies with chocolate kisses perched in the middle. Janie didn’t have any chocolate kisses, however.

“No flowers,” said Dylan. “I guess that’s okay.”

Things picked up when the beaters started whirling the butter and brown sugar into a creamy sandstorm. Janie let Dylan hold the small hand mixer and he giggled as the vibrating appliance made his arms feel tickly. “Let Carly try!” he yelled over the sound of the mixer. So Janie held the little girl next to Dylan and all three sets of hands engulfed the whirring motor.

The addition of each ingredient required a taste, and Janie wondered if they’d have even half the batter left to bake. But Dylan was happy and engaged, two things she’d seen precious little of in the last week, so she allowed his fingers to slip into the bowl over and over again. As they dipped their forks in sugar and pressed them across the balls of dough on the cookie sheet, Dylan said, “Hey, I got an idea! Let’s bring some to Keane. He loves peanut butter, and he never had these before!”

“How’s it going with you two?” asked Janie. “I haven’t seen you sitting together for story time at camp.”

“Yeah, we weren’t friends this week.”

“No?”

“No.” Dylan pressed a cookie too hard and it splayed out over the edge of the baking sheet. “I felt bad to him.”

“What did you feel bad about?” Janie picked up the smashed batter and rolled it into a ball again.

“His mom scared you, and you yelled and he cried, and I was very not happy.”

Janie studied the wad of dough. “That happens sometimes. People don’t always get along.”

“So I guess we should just eat the cookies all ourselves.”

She sighed.
Pology Cookies,
she thought,
a first.
She remembered Malcolm and his Ovaltine-graham cracker shakes. “Well, let’s see if they’re home.”

T
HE LOOK OF ECSTATIC
surprise on Keane’s face when he saw Dylan made Janie wince. He leaped at Dylan who laughed and tried to hug Keane back until he remembered what he was there for. “Don’t crush the cookies!” he yelped. Janie rescued the plate from his outstretched hands before the two boys tumbled against the doorjamb and into the foyer of the house.

“Okay, boys,” Janie had to say several times while attempting to extricate them from the oversized basket of shoes they had fallen into. “Keane, where’s your mom?”

“Exercising! Downstairs! Did you bring those cookies for me? To eat?”

“Keane, go get your mom.”

“What flavor are they?”

“Keane, get your mom and then we can have some cookies.”

Keane bolted toward a doorway in the foyer. “DYLAN’S HERE! HE HAS COOKIES!”

Janie, Dylan, and Carly moved toward the doorway and peeked into the kitchen. It was larger than Janie’s living room and had a giant island in the middle. The satiny maple cabinets were perfectly complemented by the blond speckled marble of the countertops.

“How many people live here?” asked Dylan.

“I think just Keane and Heidi,” said Janie.

“Fancy.”

Heidi emerged from the basement in exercise shorts and a gray T-shirt that was splotched with dampness around her neck and
waist. Her pale hair was pulled back in a lopsided ponytail, tendrils of which were pasted to her pink, sweaty face. “Hi,” she said. It was half greeting, half question.

“We brought you some cookies,” said Janie matter-of-factly.

“Thanks.” Heidi reached for a paper towel and dabbed at her face and neck. “How are you?”

“Good,” said Janie. “Better.”

Janie hadn’t realized that Heidi was holding her breath until she exhaled. They set up the boys with cookies and milk and let them eat way too many as they chatted carefully about which camp counselors the boys liked best and whether those swimming lessons were just glorified splash time. Carly cruised around the kitchen holding onto cabinet knobs, until she suddenly turned and walked across the ceramic tiled floor to Janie, supplying the mothers with more safe subject matter. Eventually Carly got fussy, and milk got spilled, and Janie was ready to go.

“I’m really sorry about Dairy Queen,” ventured Heidi, as the boys ran outside.

“Sorry I flipped out. It was a really bad week, and I’m just…you know…extra…I just need to know where he is.” Janie took a deep breath, surreptitiously pinched the back of her hand and said, “I hope you’ll have him over again.”

“Yes! Great! Any time.” Heidi looked so enthusiastic that Janie almost laughed out loud. With her hair a mess and no makeup on, Heidi was the grown-up-girl version of her son.

J
ANIE PULLED INTO THE
driveway after dropping Dylan off at camp Monday morning, and strange men were hanging around her yard. Maybe not quite hanging around, but not working terribly hard, either. One, his long, thin arms covered with rust-colored freckles, was cutting a piece of wooden molding with a handsaw. The other, dark and shorter than the molding cutter, was snapping the measuring tape in and out of its casing and smoking a cigarette.

“Oh, hi,” he said, flicking the cigarette butt under the nearest rhododendron. “Mrs….” He looked to the other guy for help, but only got a shrug. “…Laverne?”

“LaMarche,” said Janie. “Who are you?”

“Uh, well, Tug sent us over to finish up here. Won’t take long. Day, maybe two. Being as there’s two of us.” A sly grin came over his face and he looked at the other guy. “And we got no reason to, you know, extend things.” A harsh little snort of laughter erupted from his friend. Janie noticed a green tattoo on his freckled forearm that read “Greg the Grate.”

“Terrific,” said Janie, and went into the house. Tug was showing her up. Clearly. He wasn’t going to just take her money and leave her alone. He’d sent over his most annoying workers to make sure the job was finished—his way. She thought of phoning him and telling him to call off his minions, but Carly needed a diaper change and the breakfast dishes were putrefying in the sink, and somehow the phone was never quite handy when she thought of it.

The reassuring sounds of hammering and small motors whirring were coming from her porch again, and Janie felt her shoulders slide lower into their sockets. It was disturbing how comforting it was. Damn him. She put Carly down for her midmorning nap and went to empty the dishwasher. The power tools had stopped and by the sound of the hammering overhead, she knew the men were on ladders working on the porch ceiling.

“Jesus, would you look at this?” she heard one of them say. She guessed it was the short dark-skinned one. “Two-by-eights instead of two-by-fours. Thing’s built like a brick shit house.”

“Fuckin’ gold-plated,” grunted the other one, Greg-the-self-proclaimed-Grate.

“Took his time, too. He’s been here all summer. Coulda thrown it up in about four, five weeks. Less if he’d brought in the crew.” A few more slams of the hammer. “You know why, though. You get it, right? He likes the LO-CA-TION. He likes the VIEW.”

“What view? Fuckin’ street, is all.”

“It’s those eyes, man, I’m telling you,” he crooned. “They’re like ice. They’re so cold their HOT!”

“What, the lady? She’s freaky, Ignacio. She practically backhanded you before she went in.”

“That’s the best kind!” This was followed by some hoots and some
heh-heh-heh
s and a Jesus! when one of them must have lost his footing for a moment. Finally they started hammering again.

Needing a little space from the two stooges, Janie took a cup of coffee out to the picnic table in the backyard. She brought some children’s clothing catalogues with her, knowing that in a month or so the weather would turn cooler, and Dylan had not one pair of pants that fit him anymore. But she flipped through the catalogues without paying much attention.

It had been a while since she’d been assessed for her sex appeal. Or maybe not so long, but being married, with a ring on her finger and a live husband, the attention of other men had always seemed like just so much verbal dust, flying around but having no actual meaning. She still had the ring, but it didn’t seem to hold its former powers of filtration. Men ogling women, making assumptions about attractions that had no basis in reality…
Standard stuff,
she told herself.

And a gold-plated brick shit house? What was that about?

D
YLAN NEGOTIATED AN AFTER-DINNER
trip to Dairy Queen in return for putting his own clothes in his own dresser drawers. He was able to accomplish this task with almost no whining and very few stops to play with his toys or lie on his floor with Nubby the Bald Bunny and stare at the ceiling. As Janie had required virtually nothing in the way of helping out from Dylan over the past seven months, she considered it a step in the right direction for both of them.

A disagreement ensued over whether they would do the drive-through or park and wait in line with the hordes of other ice-
cream-needy patrons, then dally over their dripping cones at one of the sticky picnic tables nearby. In the interest of a reasonable bedtime, Janie put her foot down, promising to go home the long way as a concession.

The long way took them by Pelham Ball Field where the Men’s Over-40 League had pitted the Pelham Stealing Geezers against the Natick Trophy Husbands. Janie’s car seemed to slow of its own accord.

And there he was, in a stop-sign-red shirt and gray baseball knickers, hands hanging on the fence near the Geezers’ bench, shoulder to shoulder with one of his teammates. The two men conferred momentarily and then burst into laughter. Janie pulled over.

“Why are you stopping? What’s this game?” asked Dylan.

“It’s softball. Take off your goggles.”

By the time she had ushered them out of the car, wiped their sticky hands, and disposed of the cone wrappers, the Stealing Geezers had taken the field. Carrying Carly and holding Dylan’s hand, she climbed the stands to an empty spot on the end of the third row. Dylan wanted to sit on the very end of the bench, but since there was no railing, Janie insisted she take the end.

“But it’s not high!” whined Dylan. “If I fall off I’ll only get a bump or something!”

“Hey, look over there,” said Janie to distract him. Dylan followed her finger out to third base. “Who’s that guy?”

“It’s Tug. That’s Tug! He’s got a red shirt, like the other guys! HEY TUG!”

He was only about fifty feet away, so his head turned at the sound of his name, soon focusing on the small boy waving and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Tug gave a thumbs-up to Dylan, who threw his two little thumbs into the air in return. Tug’s gaze turned to Janie—hard to be sure at that distance, but she knew, all the same—and she gave a little wave. She didn’t plan it. It just happened.

Tug smiled back, narrowly missing a pop fly that was generously covered by the left fielder, who’d had to run his hardest toward the infield to make the catch. He gave Tug a friendly whack in the back of the head with his mitt and trotted back out to left field.

The Trophy Husbands were not to be trifled with, and gave the Geezers a solid workout. Toward the end of the inning, Tug lunged to field a speeding grounder and fired it to first base before tumbling sideways into the grass. It was a courageous play and fans in both sets of bleachers jumped to their feet in appreciation. Janie noticed that he waited for the attention to wane before he allowed himself to give his shoulder a rub. He glanced up to see if she was watching, and a barely perceptible grin graced his face before it was replaced with the standard issue glare toward home plate.

At the third out, the Geezers jogged toward their bench. Tug walked past the bench to the stands and greeted Dylan with a high five. Then he took off his mitt and let Dylan try it on. “Hi,” he said to Janie. “Passing by?”

“On our way home from Dairy Queen. Thought I’d take the opportunity to talk to you about the crew you sent over.”

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? They seem like clowns, but they do good work. You’ll see.”

“Okay, Shakespearean references aside, you didn’t have to send them.”

“I know. But I have your money and I want the job finished properly. That’s only right.”

“Malinowski!” called a member of the team. “You’re on deck!”

“We’re not finished,” she warned him.

“Hold onto that glove,” he told Dylan, who cradled it tightly to his narrow chest.

Tug approached home plate swinging the bat every other step. The catcher said something to him and he grinned, but
then turned his attention to the pitcher. His body was facing Janie across the plate, which seemed strange until she realized he was batting lefty.
He’s left-handed
, she thought, and stored the information as if she might have some occasion to retrieve it. She frowned at herself.