Staying Together (9 page)

Mr. Willet sat and stared. The more he stared at the T-shirt, the more he hated it. And, he realized, the less he felt like an old geezer. Maybe
that
was what was wrong with the T-shirt. If he wore it, then people would think he really was an old geezer, but eighty or not, hair or not, and home or not, he didn't feel like he was eighty. And he certainly didn't feel like an old geezer. He was just Bill Willet, who at birth had been given the slightly unfortunate name of William Willet. He could be Bill, who was three, or Bill, who was thirty, or Bill, who was leaning pretty hard on eighty-one.

On the other hand, he walked with a cane and needed a hearing aid in his left ear, neither of which helped much where the old geezer image was concerned.

Mr. Willet sighed. The day was absolutely gorgeous. It was the kind of spring weather that once would have beckoned him and his wife to the backyard of their Row House to work in the flower beds, but for some reason this memory didn't cheer him. He stood up and opened the door to his terrace. He sat on the squeaky wicker chair and breathed in the scent of lilacs. His neighbor in the apartment below had a patio with a garden that he worked in nearly year-round. Mr. Willet longed to have a garden of his own again. He longed to have a job. He longed to take Mary Lou's hand and walk the paths in front of Three Oaks with her. He longed to tell her he loved her and hear her say the words back to him.

“Pity party,” he said aloud, standing up. “That's what I'm having. A pity party.”

He strode back into his apartment, closing the sliding door behind him with just a bit too much force. Across the room, Sweetie jumped at the noise, leaped up from the Old Geezer T-shirt, where he had settled for a nap, and fled into the kitchen, tail fat.

“Sorry, Sweetie,” called Mr. Willet.

He sat in the armchair again. Well, this was some exciting morning he was having. Eat breakfast, sit in a chair, sit in another chair, sit in the first chair again. Maybe I'm an old geezer after all, he thought.

He continued to sit there until, for no reason he could figure out, the title of a children's book popped into his head:
Higglety Pigglety Pop!
Where had that come from?

After a while, Mr. Willet let out a long sigh. He could add that to his exciting list of things to do: eat breakfast, sit, sigh, sit again, sigh again.

“Enough is enough,” he said at last. “Sweetie, where are you? I'm sorry I scared you. I'm going out.” He found Sweetie crouching on the kitchen counter, returned him to the Old Geezer shirt, put on his jacket, and reached for his cane, which was leaning by the front door.

Mr. Willet stumped along the hallway. He realized he was walking in rhythm to the words
higglety pigglety pop
.

Higglety pigglety pop. Higglety pigglety pop
.

He reached the elevator and pressed the button. As he was riding to the ground floor, he suddenly remembered the rest of the title of the children's book:
Higglety Pigglety Pop! There Must Be More to Life
.

“I'll say,” he muttered. He checked his watch. It was only 9:40. The day stretched ahead of him. Mr. Willet suppressed a third sigh as he stepped off the elevator. He began the walk through the corridors of Three Oaks to Mary Lou's room.

“Morning, Bill!” called his friend Evie as Mr. Willet passed her in the hallway. “A fine day, isn't it?”

“Perfect weather. I'm going to take Mary Lou for a walk.”

“Good morning, Mr. Willet!” called Dee from the front desk.

“Good morning.” Mr. Willet gave her a wave.

He passed the coffee shop, the gift shop, the library, and the exercise center. Ordinarily, these familiar sights made him smile. Today he passed them stonily. He reached the keypad by the door to the wing where his wife now lived and punched in the code.

Before the door had even clicked shut behind him, he saw Mary Lou. And as he walked across the lounge, what he saw was a very young Mary Lou: Mary Lou, with smooth strong hands and an unlined face, studying a textbook, then looking up at Mr. Willet with clear eyes and smiling in pleasure at the sight of him.

But when he stood before her wheelchair, the hand that he reached for was creased, the bones of her fingers bulging painfully in impossible directions. And the eyes that she turned to him were blank, as if he were looking into the eyes of a doll.

“Good morning, honey,” he said. He realized that her hand was shaking.

“Is it … today … here?” she asked vaguely.

“Yes!” exclaimed Mr. Willet. “It's today, and it's ten minutes to ten in the morning. Would you like to take a walk?”

Mrs. Willet glanced down the hallway and lowered her voice to a whisper. “He doesn't know where he's going,” she said conspiratorially. (The hallway was empty.)

“He doesn't?” replied Mr. Willet.

“No.”

“Well, that's all right. Let's take a walk, shall we? It's a beautiful day.”

Mr. Willet didn't expect an answer. He turned to an attendant. “Mary Lou and I are going to take a walk outside,” he told him. “We'll have lunch in the coffee shop before I bring her back.”

“Enjoy the day” was the reply.

Mr. Willet draped a sweater around his wife's shoulders, and soon he was pushing her chair through the main entrance of Three Oaks and along a sidewalk.

“Look at the gardens,” he said. “Everything's blooming away. Narcissus, daffodils, bleeding hearts, grape hyacinths. Remember our gardens?” There was no answer from the wheelchair, so Mr. Willet continued. “Pretty soon the azaleas and the rhododendrons will be in bloom, too.”

The hands clasped in Mrs. Willet's lap bounced up and down, and her left foot began to wag back and forth. Mr. Willet paused by a wooden bench, set the brakes on the wheelchair, sat heavily on the bench, and gazed at the gardens.

Flora had mentioned the gardens to him the day before when she'd come to his apartment. “They look like English gardens,” she had said. “Or what I think English gardens look like. I've never actually seen one. Have you?”

Mr. Willet had smiled. “Yes. Mary Lou and I took several trips to England. One of them was a tour through the Cotswolds in spring. We saw beautiful gardens.”

“Lucky,” said Flora, who had stopped just short of embarrassingly saying, “Lucky duck.” Then she had turned to Mr. Pennington and added, “Have you seen a real English garden?”

“I have.”

“I wish I could get out and see the world,” Flora had replied. And then she had done something unexpected. She had turned back to Mr. Willet and said, “I think
you
need to get out and see the world again.” Moments later, she had gathered up her things and left with Mr. Pennington.

Now, why had Flora said that? wondered Mr. Willet. She hadn't told Mr. Pennington that
he
needed to see the world. And Mr. Willet hadn't mentioned anything about feeling restless or like a useless old geezer. But as he sat by the gardens and recalled his conversation with Flora, who was an unusual girl, and as the phrase “there must be more to life” ran around and around in his head, an idea came to him.

As soon as he had finished lunch with Mary Lou and walked her back to her room, he settled himself in the Three Oaks library and began to look up information on trips for seniors. He found walking tours (those must be for people who were a little less senior than he was) and cruises (he had never been a big fan of boats) and trips to places that seemed a bit too exotic. And then he found a description of a bus tour through the Cotswolds.

“A bus tour,” he murmured. “I could manage that.”

He copied down some information, a phone number, and a web address. He wasn't sure how he would feel about traveling without Mary Lou but —
higglety pigglety pop
— he was going to see the Cotswolds again. Surely he would meet some other nice seniors on the trip. Maybe he would even invite Mr. Pennington to go along. He would bring his camera with him. And he would take a photo of an English garden for Flora.

Hilary Nelson walked slowly down the stairs from her apartment to the door that opened onto Main Street. Spencer ran noisily ahead of her and jumped down the last three steps, landing with a thud. He flung the door open and announced, “It's summer!”

It was April 30
^th
, and not particularly warm, but Spencer had convinced his parents that he could wear shorts that day.

“Come
on
, Hilary!” he called, holding the door open for her with his foot.

“I'm coming.” Hilary felt grouchy but tried not to show it, since it wasn't Spencer's fault. She increased her speed by an infinitesimal amount, edged through the door, and stood outside the window of the diner.

Hilary and Ruby had worked hard during the past few weeks to help improve things at the Marquis. It had been Hilary's idea to hold a poster contest for the kids in their class and to display the posters in the window of the Marquis.

“Get it?” she had told Ruby. “People will come by to look at their kids' posters and then they'll stay for dinner or ice cream or something.”

Ruby's idea had been that the person who won the poster contest would have a sandwich named after him — or her. Sadly, she had lost the contest to Robert Swenson, who was new in class.

“What kind of a boring sandwich will The Robert be?” Ruby had grumbled to Hilary the morning after the judging of the contest. And would she
never
see The Ruby up there on the sandwich board?

“Mom and Dad will think of something interesting,” Hilary had replied confidently.

Hilary and Ruby had also made paper flowers for the vases on the tables in the diner and spent Hilary's money (Ruby seemed to be short on cash) on boxes of crayons so that kids who came to the Marquis could color on the paper place mats.

“It's like we have little elves,” commented Hilary's mother the morning after the crayons appeared.

Ruby and Hilary had been working very hard indeed — and Hilary was somewhat poorer than she had been at the beginning of the month — but it was worth everything if they could save the diner.

“I can't even think about moving back to Boston,” Hilary had said several times to Ruby during April.

And now it was the last day of the Nelsons' experimental month. That evening her parents would decide whether to stay in Camden Falls, at least for a while longer, or join the ranks of the families who had had to move on for one reason or another.

Hilary had woken up with butterflies in her stomach. They had stayed with her during breakfast and they were with her now as she stood before the window. She simply could not bear to leave her new home. It would be one thing if her family could pack up and go back to their old house in Boston. But that wasn't possible. And anyway, it wasn't the point. The point was that Hilary had fallen in love with Camden Falls. She loved Main Street, even if it was on the shabby side. She loved her teeny room in the apartment over the diner. She loved Camden Falls Elementary, and her teacher, and walking to school with Ruby and the kids from the Row Houses, and going to concerts at the community center, and the fact that she lived across the street from the library. She truly did not know what she would do if her parents decided the diner was a failure. She hoped that at the very least they would let her and Spencer finish out the school year before they moved (again).

Hilary cupped her hands around her face and peered through a gap between two posters in the window. She could see her father moving around in the Marquis. Her mother, she knew, would be downstairs in just a few minutes, and soon the diner would open for breakfast.

“Come
on
!” called Spencer again.

Hilary followed her brother to the corner, turned onto Dodds Lane, and looked ahead to Aiken Avenue. Ruby, the Morris kids, Olivia's brothers, and Cole Hamilton were waiting in a noisy group.

“There they are!” called Jack Walter, pointing at Hilary and Spencer.

“Hurry up!” added Mathias Morris.

“What are they in such a rush for?” Hilary asked her brother.

“We want to play softball before the first bell,” Spencer called over his shoulder, and he and all the kids except Ruby took off down the street.

Hilary approached Ruby slowly.

“So today's the day,” said Ruby when Hilary finally caught up with her.

“Yup.”

“Do you have
any
idea what's going to happen?”

“Nope.”

“Your parents haven't given you a single clue?”

“Nope.”

“But you'll know tonight?”

“Yup.” Hilary expelled a sigh. Then she added, “You didn't tell anyone, did you?”

“No!” Ruby was in enough trouble as it was, and she knew better than to leak Hilary's secret and become known as a blabbermouth in addition to everything else.

When they reached school, Ruby said, “Want to play softball?”