Small Blessings (31 page)

“Yes, well. It's hard for us to help him with those troubles if we don't know what they are, right? And there is that money. We know
nothing
about that now because Retesia's out of the picture.”

Tom surprised her by nodding quickly and decisively. He really was, Agnes thought, coming along when it came to making decisions in all things except those that had to do with Rose Callahan. “You're absolutely right,” he said. “We'll sit him down tomorrow right after breakfast.”

*   *   *

Henry knew something was up as soon as Agnes whisked away his empty Cheerios bowl. Tom watched him get up, fetch his Tonka truck from over by the back door, and sit back down at the kitchen table. He clutched the truck fiercely and stared, wooden-faced, at nothing.

Agnes fussed pointlessly at the sink. Could the fearless bearder of soon-to-be-ex husbands possibly be
stalling
?

Eventually she came over and sat down.

The three of them were almost equidistant from one another around the table. Tom slid his chair closer to Henry, so as to be within easier reach.

“Henry.” Agnes spoke in the gentlest tone Tom had ever heard come out of her mouth. “Can you tell us where you come from?”

Henry's eyes were round as gumballs. “My pawpaw and mawmaw's house,” he said. And stopped. And looked off again at nothing.

Tom hung an arm across the boy's rigid shoulders.

“Okay,” Agnes said. “Where's that?”

Henry addressed the tabletop. “214 Grover Street, Picayune, Mississippi.” His small shoulders hunched even tighter.

“It's okay,” Tom said. “Just take your time.”

“They had a old house that was really big, and I could play in any room I wanted, even the study. And when they had to work, Laura Ann stayed with me. She was real nice. Sometimes my mama would visit when she had her act together.”

“Were Pawpaw and Mawmaw your grandparents, Henry?” Agnes asked. Tom noticed she'd caught Henry's use of the past tense in referring to them.

Henry's head sank lower. “Yes. They went to help in the hurricane.”

“Hurricane Katrina? The really bad one that just happened?”

“Yes.”

“How were your grandparents helping, Henry?” Agnes asked.

“They were doctors. They went down before the hurricane came, so they would be ready.”

Henry stopped. A tear splashed down on his Tonka truck. Tom smoothed the boy's hair and tried to hug him closer, but it is difficult to hug a statue.

“And?” Agnes prompted.

“They got drowned.”

Tom immediately looked at Agnes, who was looking at him. What a collision course with calamity this child's short life had been. “Oh, Henry,” he said, leaning down to nuzzle the child's ebullient hair. “I'm so, so sorry.”

“Me, too,” Agnes said. “They must have been very good people.”

Henry said nothing. Another tear hit the truck.

Still, it was important to press on. They had to know. “Then what happened to you?” Agnes asked.

Henry sighed deeply. “Then my mama came and stayed. This time she said she'd got her act together for good, and she brought some report that said that, too, but Mr. Brownlow looked worried and said he'd see.”

A new character in the Henry play. “Who's Mr. Brownlow?” Agnes asked.

“He's the man at the bank. He said he was legally in charge of me after Mawmaw and Pawpaw got killed as long as my mama was away. Laura Ann was staying with me, but then Mama came and Mr. Brownlow said, as she had the report, they had no choice but to give Mama my money and let me stay with her.”

“Your money?”

“Yes. The money in the backpack.”

“And do you know where that money came from?” Agnes asked.

Henry nodded but didn't say anything.

Tom held his breath.

“Where did it come from?” Agnes asked.

“From Mawmaw and Pawpaw. Mama didn't spend any of it. She said it was my emergency money. There's more when I get older.”

Tom exhaled. He and Agnes exchanged a look.

“What is your mama's name, Henry?” Agnes asked.

Henry's eyes flew upward to look at Agnes. “Serafine Despré. Don't you
know
her?” He suddenly looked quite desperate.

Agnes shook her head. “No, Henry, we don't. That is, I don't. Do you know her, Tom?”

Tom remembered Agnes's Googled hit on the junkie who'd hung herself in a parish jail. She'd been the only child of doctors, the article said. Bingo. Henry's mother. But why had she sent Henry to him? “No, I'm afraid I don't know her, Henry. But I'm sure if I had, I would have liked her very much.”

Henry glared down at his truck. “She really tried,” he said in a surprisingly fierce voice. “She just couldn't. And she knew Mr. Brownlow wouldn't let me stay in Pawpaw's house with Laura Ann, and Mama didn't want him to put me somewhere that wasn't nice, so she sent me here. She had to buy tickets because I'm so young. She got on the train with me to fool them, but then she got off again.”

“But, Henry, how did she
know
to send you here?” Agnes's voice was gentle as a falling snowflake.

Henry was not one to be sucked in by anyone's tone; he knew an alarming situation when he landed in one. He pulled away from under Tom's arm so as to be able to look up at him. “She said I
belonged
here, because your name is on that certificate. The one I showed you. Isn't that right?”

Tom was careful to look Henry straight in the eye and speak directly from his heart. “You do belong here, Henry. Agnes and I are very, very pleased that you are staying with us.”

Henry picked up immediately on Tom's careful choice of words. “Does that mean I have to go
live
somewhere else? That I don't get to live
here
?” His voice was shrill.

In all his helpless years with Marjory, Tom had never felt quite
this
helpless. He opened his mouth to say something both truthful and comforting, but there
was
no truth that was comforting. And he wouldn't lie. He wouldn't. Children knew when people lied; Tom was certain of that. Who knew how they knew, but they did.

Agnes cleared her throat. “Look, Henry. Here's the deal.”

Henry immediately sensed there would be no humbug coming at him from Agnes. “What?”

“Tom and I hope very much that you can stay with us, but we need to find out how you happened to get here. You've already said you know that Tom is not your real father—”

Tom could not stop himself from interrupting. “Not that that changes anything about our great joy that you're here,” he said, giving the boy's shoulder another squeeze.

Agnes plowed on. “So do you have any idea why Tom is listed as your father on your birth certificate?”

Henry shook his head. “I didn't see the certificate until my mama put it in my backpack. She told me to hang on to it even harder than I hang on to the money. She said the certificate was my real future.”

“What exactly did she say about the certificate when she gave it to you, Henry?” Agnes asked, as casually as though they were discussing a routine part of a routine day.

“She showed me the place where it said Tom Putnam was my father. She said he would meet my train when it was time to get off. And she said he was the nicest man in the world and would take good care of me. And then she started to cry and say ‘I'm sorry' a lot.”

Tom was thunderstruck. Who was this sad and mysterious Serafine Despré, and how had she come to think of him as her son's savior? And what was she sorry for?

Agnes once more rushed headlong where her son-in-law feared to tread. “Do you know what your mother was sorry about, Henry?”

Tom could
feel
sadness leaking out of the boy. “She said she knew she was ‘going out' again, and when she did, it wouldn't be safe for me to stay with her. I think she was sorry that she couldn't keep me safe.”

Tom heard Agnes catch her breath. This small being sent to them by a desperate junkie mother had somehow beamed himself into Agnes Tattle's crusty heart. “I'm so sorry, Henry. About your mother. I hope—” She stopped midsentence.

Henry was immediately transformed into a small human question mark. “Is what she did okay?” His concern, Tom realized, was for Agnes.

“It's great.” Agnes stood up abruptly and stalked over to the Kleenex box on the kitchen counter.

The Tonka truck tumbled to the floor as Henry scurried over to where Agnes stood with her back to the room, blowing her nose loudly into a tissue. He pulled at the hem of her ancient hoodie. “Agnes, please don't be sad. I don't want to make you sad, too.”

Agnes turned to the boy, squatted down, and scooped him into a fierce hug. When she spoke, it was over the top of Henry's head and to no one in particular. “I'm sad for your mother, Henry. I know what it's like to lose your child, and I'm sorry she had to lose you.”

Henry pulled back to study Agnes's face. Whatever he saw made him reach out and stroke her cheek. “Agnes,” he said, “you can say you're
borrowing
me, if that makes you not be sad. Okay?”

 

chapter 15

Rose slept soundly and woke Saturday morning with the certain knowledge that her karma had long ago been writ. Like Popeye, she was what she was: She had always been, and would always be, a wanderer. Her heart could do whatever it wanted to make things more difficult and painful, but it was only a matter of time until she, Rose Callahan, was outta here.

The realization was almost a relief.

Almost.

“Oh, suck it up, Rosie,” she said aloud to the new day.

The Rolling Stones obligingly began shouting in her head about not always getting what you want but, provided you try, sometimes getting what you need. Mavis, as Rose remembered it, had worn out two separate recordings of
Let It Bleed
. Rose would come home from school to find her mother getting ready to go to work, moving free-form with the Stones.

Mavis had been fired just once, when Rose was about seven. She'd been working at a bar in Austin, Texas, and the two of them were living in a two-room apartment on the building's third floor. One night, Rose had been sitting at the bar coloring when a ruckus broke out. Mavis was refusing to tell a homeless man to move on so a couple of frat boys could have his table. When the owner intervened on behalf of the frat boys, Mavis called him an uncharitable pig in a very loud voice and was fired on the spot.

Upstairs in their apartment, Mavis had put on the Stones so she and Rose could dance and pack at the same time. The stereo system had been the last thing into the station wagon. They had left town that same night; moving on, Mavis had said, to their next adventure.

Her mother would have been, what, when she was seven? Twenty-six? Eleven years younger than she was now. Twenty-six years old with a seven-year-old kid and no savings to speak of. No wonder she'd danced, since cowering or wailing or worrying was not an acceptable option in the World According to Mavis.

Just like that, Rose's perspective on the past shifted slightly, uncovering a heretofore unimagined possibility. She'd always thought her mother danced to the Stones before work because she loved to dance. But might the real reason have been to fend off fear and worry? Might Mavis actually have had to
work
to be Mavis?

Could all her wandering have been less about freedom and more about necessity?

*   *   *

It was just ten o'clock as Rose reached for the knocker and pounded three times on the Putnams' front door. Henry and Professor Putnam opened it together, Henry resplendent in college gym shorts and T-shirt, Tom dressed as she was, in a pair of sagging gray sweats.

Astonishingly, Professor Putnam stepped forward and hugged her hard. It was not a romantic hug but a relief hug, one human claiming another human as his willing partner in circumstance. “Oh, Rose,” he said, stepping back and looking down at her with that
thing
in his eyes that reached straight into her heart and shook it. “We're both so glad you're here. It's been quite a morning.”

… his willing partner in circumstance …

“I made Agnes cry,” Henry announced.

“You did?”

“Yes. She didn't want me to know she was sad, but I saw.”

Professor Putnam ruffled the boy's hair. He didn't, Rose noticed, try to steer the conversation toward some safer haven. He just wanted Henry to remember he was there. “What was Agnes sad about, Henry?” she asked.

Henry's eyes drifted away toward the safety of some anonymous spot on the foyer wall. “She said she was sad because her daughter died and my mama lost me.” His eyes flew back to her; his chin jutted. For the first time ever, Henry looked mad. “Mama didn't
lose
me. She was ‘going out,' so she
sent
me here.”

“Going out?”

“It means she can't take care of me because something happens to her and she gets sick,” Henry said, obviously parroting words he didn't understand.

Oh,
that
kind of “going out.” The kind Mavis had witnessed—and enabled—from behind her many bars. “Did you think Agnes meant your mama couldn't find you? That she lost you as in mislaid you?” Rose asked.

“She
didn't
!” Henry actually stamped his foot. “She didn't lose me. She put me on a train and sent me here for Tom to take
care
of me.”

Professor Putnam put his hand on the boy's shoulder. “Why don't we all go sit down in the kitchen so you can tell Rose what you just told us?” he said gently. “I'm sure Rose would want to know.”

Would she, Rose wondered, ever plumb the depth of Tom Putnam's capacity for kindness and, yes, for love? Henry and he, it seemed, had no biological connection. Which meant that Tom had taken in the boy simply because the boy was there. And this morning he was struggling to convince Henry that, in their case, a biological connection was not necessary to make them father and son.