Stony River (17 page)

LINDA AND ALLEN
would have been having lunch by the time Tereza woke up, lost and panicky. She groped for the knife until she remembered locking it in the briefcase with Miranda's money and necklace. So where was the briefcase and how had she ended up in a clammy room wearing only a bra and skivvies under a blanket that smelled like mothballs? She sat up so fast she got dizzy. Had to lie back down so she wouldn't puke. Her eyes took in the cheesy wood paneling and the Anheuser-Busch sign on the bar with relief: she was in Buddy's basement. She threw off the blanket, got down on all fours on the cold linoleum floor and felt under the sagging convertible couch. The briefcase was there where she'd put it. The pocketbook she'd slept with between her knees had crept its way to the bottom of the couch. The key was still in it. She opened the briefcase and counted the money. It was all there except for what she'd spent.

She let out a noisy breath and shook her head at how easily she'd let Buddy rescue her.

She'd planned to return his jacket and flashlight yesterday then head off on the train to New York. Try her luck at finding a decent
place to stay, maybe audition for a show. She started calling at nine, practicing in her head how she'd say, all cool as cream, “Hi, remember me?” when he got on the phone. Her calls rang on and on until the afternoon when a high-pitched, quivery female voice told her to call around nine-thirty that night after Buddy's shift at the A&P. By the time Tereza reached him, all she could manage was a whiny “I need you.” It shamed her to be such a chicken but she couldn't stand a second night in “Your Home Away from Home,” listening to banging doors and hollering voices, scared sleepless she'd be raped or murdered.

“I'll be there in two shakes, fair damsel,” he'd said, like some lame Prince Valiant.

“There” was the diner she'd hung out in all day, eating, using the john and the pay phone, leaving only to buy new duds, including dungarees she wore out of the store with the pink sweater she'd had on the night she met Buddy. She wanted to be sure he recognized her despite the purple shadows below her eyes and the greasy Brillo pad her hair had become under the wig. From the booth where she sat nursing a root beer, she watched him enter and cast about before spotting her. His shoulders seemed even wider than she remembered, his pants tighter. He slid in beside her, so close his thigh pressed against hers. She handed him the flashlight and his jacket.

“I thought about it holding you,” he said, his milky-smelling breath tickling her face. “Imagined it was me.”

He didn't seem to notice the briefcase she'd slipped into the shopping bag with her new clothes. And he said “Of course” when she asked him not to tell Richie he'd seen her. He took her to a tall, narrow, banana-colored house, let her in through the back porch and made up the convertible couch for her. The basement had a small bathroom, with toilet, sink and mildewy shower. She washed off two days of slime and came out in new undies thinking
he'd expect a thank-you hand job, at least. But he had one foot on the basement steps. “Thank you for letting me help you,” he said, like he was giving a speech. “You're very brave, but fragile, like an African violet.”

Tereza would've said something smartass but a zombie look she'd seen too often in Jimmy's eyes warned her off. “I'll put a note on my grandmother's door so she won't be surprised when she sees you,” Buddy said. He left her wondering what happened to the guy who'd imagined himself as his jacket around her.

Her watch showed nearly noon. She stepped into the dungarees she'd left on the bathroom floor and pulled a new sweater over her head—purple, Ma's favorite color. She climbed the basement steps and heard, “In here! In the kitchen.” Following the smell of coffee, she found a saggy-boobed old lady seated at a small wooden table. Her red-and-yellow-striped housecoat fought something awful with the bright pink hair swirling round her scalp like cotton candy. The woman peered up from her newspaper over wire-rimmed specs and smiled with her whole wrinkly face, as if Tereza's being there was the most normal thing in the world.

“Just reading the funnies,” she said. “Have a seat. Buddy's long gone to school. You staying awhile?”

Tereza pulled out a chair, turned it around and straddled it. “Nope. Heading to New York to become an actress.”

“That so? You got a stage name?”

Tereza didn't but one came to her right away. “Ladonna Lange.” Her own middle name and Ma's last before she married Jimmy.

The old lady took a swallow of coffee. “It suits you. My birth”— it sounded like
boith
—“certificate says Mina, but the day I came out, my three-year-old brother stuck his head in my cradle and said, ‘She's a dearie.' Nobody's called me nothing else ever since. You hungry?”

“Wouldn't mind a cup of joe.”

Dearie had a boss cackle. “Hear that, Alfie? Your words exactly.” She got up and shuffled over to a cupboard in fuzzy blue slippers. Thick orange hose stopped at her knees. “Cream and sugar?”

“Uh-uh. Who's Alfie?” A radiator beside the table hissed out warmth and, off the kitchen, a glassed-in porch trapped sun. Ma would've been fanning herself like crazy.

“My husband. Dead five years now. A Fuller Brush Man all his working life and proud of it. I was seventeen, him thirty-two, the Saturday he knocked on our door with a free pastry brush. I told him I liked what he was selling. He didn't have a chance.” She poured coffee from a percolator on the stove and set a cup and saucer in front of Tereza. “Buddy left me a note. Said you need looking after. Why's that?”

Tereza shrugged. “I don't, really.”

“Your ma okay with you going to New York?”

“She don't know.”

“How long you been gone?”

“Couple days.”

“I wouldn't want the cops coming 'round looking for you.”

“They won't. Only you and Buddy know I'm here. Ma would get in trouble with Jimmy if she called the cops and he sure as hell won't.”

“Who's Jimmy?”

“Wish I didn't know.” Tereza went on to say more than she probably should have about her stepfather and the shit he'd done but the coffee was going down warm and Dearie's eyes, not at all sleepy like Buddy's, seemed to yank the words right out of her.

Dearie ran her fingers softly over the lump on Tereza's jaw. Her eyes got damp behind her specs. “Nobody should have to live where it ain't safe. Where's your real dad?”

Tereza shrugged again. “I don't even know his name. Ma's folks sent her away to have me. When she got back they made up a story for
neighbors about how she married a G.I. who got shipped overseas; later they said he got snuffed in the war.”

Dearie squeezed her hand. “Girlies used to get sent to unwed moms' homes all the time. It says a bunch about her that she didn't give you away.” Dearie took her specs off and wiped them on her housecoat. “You old enough to quit school?”

“Don't matter if I ain't. I'm never going back.” For some reason Allen tumbled into Tereza's head. She could see the twerp lining up for school on the playground that last day, as though time had stopped and she could step right back into the scene.

“I always wanted my high-school diploma,” Dearie said. “Had to leave after eighth grade to help support the family. I worked as a seamstress until I married Alfie. Buddy's almost finished eleventh. I'm darn proud of him.”

“I don't need a diploma to be an actress.”

“How you gonna pay for a room and eats in New York?”

“I got money. Been saving for years.”

Dearie raised her eyebrows at that. “I grew up across the river in Jersey City. New York's big and expensive. It can swallow a piggy bank fast. You ain't old enough to get an honest job. You should call your ma. I'd turn into one big puddle if I lost Buddy.”

“She don't have a phone.”

Dearie got up and poured more coffee. “Tell you what. Take the train into the city and look around as many days as you need. Come back here to sleep every night till you find something. The deal's off, though, if the cops start snooping.”

A chance to see Buddy more. “Why you being so nice to me?”

“Why wouldn't I be? You can stay as long as there's no hankypanky. That's my rule.”

“Does Buddy bring girls home a lot?”

Dearie cackled again. “You're the first”—it sounded like
foist
— “but I just think it's a good rule. If you stay, I could use some help
with the lace coitans. It takes two people and Buddy's been too busy. They're filthy from the winders being open all summer.”

Tereza didn't know what coitans were, but she said “I don't mind.” Copping a safe place to sleep until she landed an acting job didn't make her lazy or chicken.

Dearie gave Tereza what she called the fifty-cent tour of the main floor: parlor, dining room, bathroom and her bedroom. Pipsqueak glass frogs sat on shelves, tables and windowsills everywhere. They were holding footballs and baseball bats; fishing, dancing, smoking cigars; squatting on lily pads and tree logs; playing drums, banjos, guitars. Dearie said that Alfie had given her the entire collection. “All it took was me saying he was my frog prince.”

That afternoon, between school and work, Buddy hauled down wooden frames from the attic room opposite his bedroom and set them on chairs on the back porch. They looked like torture racks with hundreds of little spikes all around. Tereza stood on a stepladder and removed the lace curtains from the parlor windows. She washed and rinsed them in the pink bathtub while Dearie sat on the toilet lid telling her how. Together they stretched the wet curtains so they could dry on the frames, Tereza pulling the bottoms, Dearie the tops, until each outside loop of the lace fit over a spike. You would've thought the World Series was at stake the way Dearie kept at Tereza to do it right, not miss a loop. Tereza felt an unfamiliar flush of pride when Dearie said she couldn't have done it without her.

That night, when Dearie and Buddy were both at work, Tereza palmed one of the frogs and stuffed it in a box in the basement, under a pile of Fuller Brush receipts. She wondered how many she could pinch before Dearie hated her too and kicked her out.