Small Blessings (23 page)

Come
on
!
Tom told himself sternly.
You organized anti-apartheid protests for several thousand students from five different colleges when you were only twenty years old. Surely you can organize your own life!

“I have something to do tomorrow morning, Henry, so Agnes will take care of you while I'm busy. But I'll be back by lunch, and we can read some more then if you like. And then I thought we might take in the college's first soccer game tomorrow afternoon at four thirty. Do you like soccer?”

Henry brightened. “I've seen soccer on TV. With my pawpaw.”

Tom was instantly alert. “Who's Pawpaw?”

“My grandpa. Down in Picayune.”

“Oh.” What, Tom wondered, was Henry doing here if there was a soccer-watching grandfather in the picture?

Henry's eyes had unexpectedly filled with tears.

“What is it? What's wrong?” Tom asked.

“My pawpaw's dead.” Henry spoke in a barely audible whisper. “And my mawmaw.”

Another peek at the chaos behind Henry's curtain. Tom was aghast. He reached for the nearest part of the boy, which was his shoulder, and held on. “I'm so sorry, Henry. So terribly sorry.”

Henry said nothing. His eyes were far away.

“You okay?” Tom asked.

The boy came back from wherever he was. “Do I really get to stay here?” he asked.

Damn the torpedoes!
“You do,” Tom said, knowing full well that Agnes would have his head for promising this child something he wasn't sure he could deliver.

Henry's eyes roamed his face again, looking, Tom supposed, for any hint of adult codswallop. Something he saw must have reassured him. “Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” Tom said firmly.

Henry seemed to be considering something. “Is it fun?” he asked.

Tom had completely forgotten what they'd been talking about before Henry's curtain had fluttered. “Is what fun?”

“A college soccer game?”

“Of course. I think it's great fun,” Tom said.

“Okay,” Henry said. “We can go.” He rolled over to face the wall, curling up around his pillow.

Tom reached down and smoothed the boy's fizzing hair off his forehead. “It's really nice to have you here, Henry,” he said, his voice catching.

Tom continued sitting right where he was for another hour, his hand resting just at the edge of the gaudy Harry Potter pastiche under which Henry slept. He thought briefly about the backpack full of money under his bed, but then quickly decided to think about something else.

 

chapter 13

Agnes Tattle got up very early Friday morning and went downstairs. She felt miraculously reborn, as though this really was—may God forgive her the use of a hackneyed expression—the first day of the rest of her life. This was not a completely new feeling. She'd experienced it six times before: the day after her marriage, the day after her husband's death, the day after Marjory was born, the day after she'd decided to go to law school, the day after the doctors had finally convinced her that Marjory's illness was hopeless, the day after she'd decided to give up her practice and move into this house. Each of these mornings she'd opened her eyes to find the demands of life had changed dramatically, and a reinvented Agnes was required to deal with them.

This reinvention, she was pretty certain, had been caused not so much by Marjory dying as by Henry coming to life. It had meant he was on the road to being all right, and if Henry could be all right, so could she.

The kitchen was the same as it had been yesterday, and yet everything in it seemed strange to her. This did not surprise Agnes in the least. During a reinvention, every object and aspect of life has to be reevaluated. She stood by the kitchen door, examining the tidy counters, the worn tracks on the linoleum, Tom's decrepit galoshes and Henry's Tonka truck. So here she was at seventy-two, floating in this familiar, unfamiliar space again. She would most likely come down to earth in a day or two, reformulated, reinvigorated, ready to go—after what, who knew? Who cared, when you got down to it? Right now, there was nothing to do but float like the
petit prince
on his ancient, threadbare carpet and experience the unbearable lightness of creative dislocation.

Henry was still asleep, as was Tom. This, as he had no classes, was a good thing for him and also for her, as she would have some time by herself. In her experience (seven reinventions
were
rather a lot), input during the process polluted it. The point was to discover things within yourself, not to respond to other people.

Agnes turned on the coffee and sat down at the table to wait for it to drip. She had brought her cigarettes with her, but she decided not to go outside and smoke. Instead she placed the pack of Camels on the table and inspected them. What nasty things they were, seen in the fresh light of a new life—little white paper tubes stuffed with shreds of a noxious plant, designed to be set on fire so you could draw poisonous smoke deep into your fragile lungs. She'd been puffing away on them—taking the last few years off—ever since that tenth-grade afternoon in the attic of Martha Arnold's house. If she was going to reinvent herself, perhaps she should become a nonsmoker again? It would certainly be much, much better for Henry.

Maybe she'd become a vegan, while she was at it.

Or maybe not.

What she had to remember was that all options, except those firmly denied to her because of age—inconsequential things such as becoming an Olympic diver or a concert pianist or a Mandarin Chinese scholar—were open. She didn't
have
to do anything. This would probably be her last reinvention. At seventy-two, it was reasonable to expect she'd have no more life-altering experiences except death—which didn't count as far as reinvention went. And for once, there would be no kowtowing to necessity or duty or love or any other such foolishness. She would live completely as herself—as Agnes Tattle, plain and simple, whoever she was, and whatever she wanted to do. There were Henry and Tom to think about, of course. But only if that was what she
wanted
to think about. After last night, it was pretty clear to her that both would do just fine without her. Or at least without her
hovering.

The Bunn spluttered and hissed. Agnes got up and poured herself a cup of coffee, automatically reaching for the mug that said “World's Greatest Mom!” This mug had stabbed her in the heart every morning for years. She hadn't been the World's Greatest Mom at all. She had been impatient, resentful, angry a lot of the time in her dealings with her daughter. But she had dutifully drunk her coffee out of that mug and smiled at Marjory and, at least three times a week, told her how much the mug meant to her. Now here she was, about to drink from it again on the first day of the last reinvention of her life.

Agnes poured her cup of coffee down the sink as though it had been contaminated. Then she stomped the trash-can lever to open the lid, dropped the “World's Greatest Mom” mug inside, took her foot off the lever, and watched it disappear with a bang. A familiar fierceness rose up inside her. She had a quick, bright vision of herself in boxing gloves, pounding something, before she moved briskly back to the counter and got down another mug, one that had no painful associations, white with the college logo. Agnes poured coffee into it and sat down automatically at the kitchen table with her back to the window. She stared at the wall opposite her, at its depressingly cheery yellow paint, at the perpetual calendar of saccharine kitten pictures that Marjory had thought so adorable. This was how she'd started her mornings for the last nine years, staring at those damn kittens and wanting to throw something at them while her poor, sick daughter sat beside her and talked about her magazines or a new hairdo or—haltingly, fearfully—about her latest imaginary catastrophe.

Agnes got up deliberately and moved to the chair facing the big window that looked out onto the neighbor's garden. The entire time she'd lived in this house, neither she, Tom, nor Marjory had ever sat there. In the self-sacrificial atmosphere of those long years, both she and Tom would have felt bad hogging the best seat, and contact with the outside had made Marjory nervous. Well, phooey on all that! This was the new seat of the new Agnes! Unless Tom or Henry wanted it, of course. Then, they would cut cards or draw straws, like the three
sane
people they were.

Time, glorious time, stretched before her like a lazy river …

The telephone rang, as insistent as a fussy infant.

Agnes got up and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” she said.

“Agnes Tattle, please.” There was a slight twang to the woman's
a
's.

“Speaking. Who's this, please?”

“Rose Callahan. I didn't wake you, did I?”

“Of course not. What can I do for you?”

Rose got to the point immediately. “You can eat lunch with me, that's what. I don't go into work until two. That gives me time to entertain, and as I didn't really get to talk with you the other times we've had together, I'd like a chance to talk with you today over a bowl of soup at my house.”

Agnes was so surprised she almost dropped the phone. She hadn't been out to lunch with another woman in years. “You're kidding,” she said, before she thought.

Rose laughed. “Why would I be kidding? I liked talking with you that Friday night out on your back steps, and I've already made the soup. Will you come?”

Agnes's recall of that Friday evening was fragmented, disjointed, scattered. She did remember going out to sit on the back steps in an effort to escape the stultifying atmosphere of the house, and finding Rose already there. She remembered Rose eating an extraordinary amount of mushy casserole while she had slugged back Scotch. Agnes didn't think she'd been drunk so much as uncharacteristically loose in the brain. She remembered feeling a lot better after their conversation, but what they'd talked about remained vague, submerged in the evening's river of banalities. But what the hell? Why not? “Sure,” Agnes said. “What time?”

“High noon. Do you know where I live?”

“Yes. Tom mentioned the other day you had moved into that funny little shack at the end of Farmhouse Lane. How is it?”

“I like it. But you can see for yourself at noon today. I'll see you then.”

The room around Agnes abruptly seemed cavernous and empty, everything in it unfamiliar and uncomforting. “I look forward—” Agnes began hurriedly, hoping to prolong the conversation for a minute while she got her bearings again, but there was a sharp click, and Rose Callahan had hung up.

“No,” Agnes said. “Don't go yet.” But it was too late, the connection was cut. And just like that, the conversation she'd had with Rose Callahan on the night Marjory had died came back to her. Agnes was stunned. Had she really talked with Rose Callahan about her
husband
?

The morning her flyboy had left her for good, they'd had that stupid spat. She'd given him only a grudging kiss and a lukewarm hug, and then he'd been gone forever. She never thought about that morning.
Never.
She'd loved him, he'd loved her, he'd been killed, she'd lived on. What was there to think about? But now—on this morning of the first day of the last new rest of her life—Agnes felt her heart sliding backward until suddenly she missed him as keenly as though he'd died only last week in the same crash that had killed his daughter.

Agnes stood frozen, as stuck as though turned to stone, staring at a yellow wall and clutching a dead phone. She'd lived with her flyboy for three years, four months, and twenty-seven days. He'd been gone almost half a century, and yet—right now—he seemed more real than any of the subsequent shadows that had wandered through her life claiming to be people. She unstuck herself enough to reach her hand out. Wasn't he right there with her now, only just unreachable from this box of space and time that passed for life?

Images flickered across from her on the yellow wall, just to one side of the smirking kittens. Agnes blinked and rubbed her eyes, looked again at that wall. Across it, as clear as a home movie, marched images of herself and her flyboy, astonishingly young again, walking hand in hand at the beach, in the mountains, out in the back pasture of his family's farm. When these faded, they were replaced by bright images of Marjory as a towheaded toddler lurching across green grass toward Agnes's outstretched arms. Marjory, her chubby pink arms and legs churning and flailing, laughing and babbling, toddling toward her mother from out of the golden time when untreatable illness was only a queer, flashing foreboding that came upon Agnes at odd times. It had been decades since she'd gone this far back in her own heart. My God, she had loved that child, that small, human connection with her vanished flyboy who somehow didn't seem so vanished right now, that tiny being who had been their daughter, had dispensed hugs and kisses with abandon, and whose first spoken word had been “A'nes.”

“Reinvention, shmee-invention,” Agnes said aloud. She hung up the phone, walked to the trash can, stomped on the lever, and retrieved the “World's Greatest Mom” mug. When she turned around, it was to find Tom standing in the doorway watching her. He irritated Agnes by smiling at her and not saying a word.

*   *   *

Iris Benson had to force herself to walk to the Book Store before going to her office and holing up for the day. Iris's office functioned as her womb. It was full of safe aggravations and familiar battles, and she liked to start the workday there, drinking coffee and firing off a volley of e-mails. Over the last week, though, she'd become fixated on the idea that she should apologize to Rose Callahan for shouting at her at the Putnams'. Iris's chief maxim had long been “Never apologize, never explain,” but this stupid, aberrant apology idea had been pecking at her ever since she'd woken up Saturday morning in the Putnams' dreadful guest room, remembering nothing about the night before except that she had lambasted Rose—who was probably the one person on campus except Tom with whom she had never had an argument. And then at that damn AA meeting, she'd found herself staring at some ridiculous set of instructions tacked to the wall that said something about making amends, and it had been as though those words had writ themselves in fire across her brain. She'd hardly slept at all last night, despite two Valiums and two or three—she couldn't remember the exact number, it could have been more—tiny,
tiny
shots of bourbon. This morning she must have still been quite groggy from the Valium because, purely out of habit, she'd filled her antique silver pocket flask and tucked it into her purse. This had emptied the bottle of bourbon, meaning she had to have
spilled
quite a bit last night since the bottle had been full when she'd had her first drink, but this filling of the flask had turned out to be fortuitous, because she'd only gotten as far as the college's main entrance before she'd been forced to turn around and head back to McDonald's for another coffee and another shot just to have the courage to drive onto campus. If it weren't for that stupid apology, she wouldn't have even
thought
of drinking in the morning, Iris told herself as she sat in the parking lot of McDonald's
(McDonald's!)
gulping coffee and bourbon, but you had to do what you had to do to get on with things in this life. When the coffee was gone, Iris had badly wanted another slug from the flask, but she'd disciplined herself and refrained. She would certainly tell
that
to her psychiatrist! Imagine, the pompous jerk having the nerve to tell her she had no control over her drinking! What a crock!