Sweet Everlasting (16 page)

“Yes,” she croaked, seizing on it. “Attention. People noticing me.”

It was his idea, but now he didn’t seem to like it. “No, that’s not it. I don’t believe you.”

“Yes. Pity—it’s close to love,” she said wildly.

“No. No, you’re lying.”

“It’s true, don’t you see? I was so lonesome.”

“Carrie, for God’s sake, tell me the truth. Is that all it was? Because you were lonely?”

She nodded.

“Talk to me!”

“Yes! And you were nice to me, so it worked. Please—couldn’t you forgive me?” She couldn’t look at him; she could scarcely speak past the misery in her throat. But through her tears she finally saw his face harden, go from disbelief to dislike, and she knew she’d convinced him.

He let go of her wrist, and this time he was the one who took a step back. He was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before, and the cold disapproval in his eyes made her feel naked and dirty. “Well.” There was a long, awful pause. “You’re right—it worked. If you’re telling me the truth, you must be pleased with yourself, Carrie, because you got what you wanted. I didn’t feel sorry for you before, but now I do.” He took something that hung on a strap from his shoulder and laid it on the ground at her feet.

“Wait!” she cried when he turned away.

“Well?”

“If you would—oh please, if you …” How to ask? She twisted her fingers until they hurt.

“What is it you want?” he snapped.

“Don’t tell anyone about me. I’m begging you.”

He didn’t answer; he just stared at her until it was hurtful to look at him any longer. She dropped her head and didn’t look up until she knew from the dreadful silence that he was gone.

“H
E’S NOT HERE.
C
AN’T
you read? Didn’t you see the sign downstairs?”

Yes, she’d seen it, a framed slate hanging on his office door: “Dr. Wilkes will return at__.” Nobody had filled in the blank. Carrie found her notebook and scribbled,
When will he be back?

Mrs. Quick squinted her eyes in that distrustful but fascinated way some people took with Carrie because she couldn’t talk. “Well, I’m sure I can’t say. He got called away on an emergency.” She pursed her lips, enjoying herself because she knew where Dr. Wilkes was and Carrie didn’t; but before long she couldn’t stand it, she had to gossip. “If you want to know, Emma Rindge’s boy come galloping up an hour ago, yelling about his poor mama’s appendicitis. “
Appendicitis,
” she scoffed. “Anybody knows Emma’s eight months gone if she’s a day, and nobody was there since old Rindge passed on except that Italian farmhand she hired to help out.
Farmhand.”

She put her hands on her hips when Carrie kept her face a blank and didn’t look interested. “What do you want with Dr. Wilkes anyway? Are you sick?”

Yes,
she thought,
I’m sick inside, my heart’s shriveled up to nothing.
She slipped the heavy leather case from her shoulder and handed it to the housekeeper.

“What’s this?”

She wrote in her notebook,
Please give it to him.

“What is it?”

After a long, motionless moment, while anger and grieving coiled inside her like garter snakes, she made herself write,
Binocyulers;
crossed it out, wrote,
Binoculers.
That wasn’t right either. She thrust the paper at Mrs. Quick, embarrassed and defiant.

“Well, I can see that. What’re you giving ’em to him for?”

Now, that was too much. Carrie made a sharp gesture with the flat of her palm and turned away, clattering down the wooden porch steps in her noisy shoes. Mrs. Quick hollered something after her, but she pretended not to hear. She wanted to stop and put the violets in her pocket on Shadow’s grave, but Mrs. Quick would be watching and Carrie didn’t feel like having anybody look at her right now. She went around the side of Dr. Wilkes’s office and hurried up the half block toward Broad Street.

Mondays were quiet in Wayne’s Crossing, which was why she always made it her shopping day. There weren’t as many people on the streets and in the stores to look at her and speculate on her. Feel sorry for her. She blew her nose, amazed that she could still have any tears left after two days of doing hardly anything else except shed them. She couldn’t help it, though; that Dr. Wilkes thought so badly of her that he believed she
wanted
people to feel sorry for her broke her heart whenever she thought of it. She’d lost her love, her dearest friend, and she couldn’t seem to do anything about it but weep. But she put her handkerchief back in her purse and squared her shoulders, because she wasn’t going to walk down Broad Street in the middle of the day with tears streaming down her face. People who already thought she was a little queer would decide she was completely crazy, and she didn’t need any more of the kind of attention she already attracted.

“Hey, Carrie.”

She looked beyond the cross street to see Eugene Starkey coming out of the drugstore with Teenie Yingling. Eugene grinned, showing the toothpick he had clamped between his big teeth, and waved to her. She waved back. He stood still, as if he was waiting for her to catch up, and she quickened her step. Teenie gave his hand a yank and said something in his ear. Just then the ice wagon turned off Broad onto Truitt, cutting off Carrie’s view. When it passed, Eugene and Teenie had turned their backs on her and were walking away fast.

She was used to being snubbed, especially by girls, but that didn’t make it sting less when it happened. She didn’t want to talk to Eugene anyway, but it annoyed her that he liked to flaunt Teenie or some other girl in front of her every chance he could, trying to make her jealous. She
wasn’t
jealous, but sometimes he could make her feel sadder and lonelier by showing off how much fun he was having with one of his girlfriends. She thought of the night he’d kissed her and told her she was pretty. He’d been drinking, of course, but that didn’t explain everything. It was hard to say whether Eugene liked her or hated her, and sometimes Carrie didn’t think he knew which it was himself.

She’d left Petey and the wagon in front of Eppy’s house while she did her errands. As she turned the corner onto the Odells’ quiet street, a familiar bobbing figure caught her eye. Going closer, she recognized Broom, bent double over an enormous trash can beside the curb. She knew what he was doing as soon as she saw the pile of tin cans on the ground at his feet.

She had to touch his raggedy sleeve to get his attention. When he straightened up, he smacked his head on top of the can. “Ow! Hi!” That fast, his pained expression turned into a wide, gap-toothed grin. “Hi, Carrie! I’m working! See? I’m hard at work.”

She nodded, showing how impressed she was. Mr. Needy, who owned the metal salvage yard, was paying Broom a nickel for every hundred tin cans he collected. Carrie didn’t think it sounded like a very good deal, but Broom was so pleased because he had a “job,” she didn’t have the heart to tell him.

“Guess what happened! I thought Mrs. Hawbaker’s gate was scrap and I tried to take it, I
did
take it, and she found out and come after me! Mr. Needy was gonna pay a dollar, Carrie, a
dollar
for the whole thing, but in she comes runnin’, carrying on, yellin’ about her gate, her gate!”

Carrie made an amazed face.

“I thought it was
junk.
You seen that gate, Carrie? All bent and rusty and spokes gone and dirty and all?” She nodded, although she couldn’t really picture Mrs. Hawbaker’s gate. “So they made me take it back and put it where it was, and I could hardly make it stand up. And then Mr. Needy said I wasn’t to look for nothing but cans from now on. Say, you got any cans today, Carrie?”

She shook her head; she was saving some for him, but she hadn’t thought to bring them down today.

“That’s okay, I got plenty anyway. Listen, write down how many this is, okay?” She raised her brows, asking why. “Because, just because.” He shuffled his feet and stuck his finger in his ear. “Sometimes I might get mixed up. Sometimes I might think I got more than he pays me for. That’s what he says.”

Carrie frowned, wondering if Mr. Needy was counting wrong on purpose. She counted the cans on the ground, and then the ones in the burlap sack Broom had already collected. She wrote
64
on a page of her notebook and handed it to him. She wished she could caution him about her suspicions, but she didn’t know how—Broom couldn’t read. But he would surely show his boss the paper and tell him all about how she’d counted the cans for him, and maybe that would make Mr. Needy think twice the next time about shorting him—if he was even doing that. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Broom was the one who was counting wrong.

He started telling her about all the places where he’d found cans today and yesterday, and all the places he had in mind to try tomorrow. She listened as long as she could, but finally she had to go. She put her hand oh his skinny arm. He shut right up and grabbed her into one of his fierce, jerky hugs. She hugged him back, feeling how pitifully thin he was. There was hardly enough meat on his bones these days to keep him standing up straight. She worried about him often, but she could never think of what to do to help him.

“Bye, Carrie! I’ll see you!”

She waved until he was out of sight, and then she went through the high privet hedges and up the Odells’ walk to the front door. It was open, as usual, and through it she could hear the sounds of chaos that were a standard, everyday thing in the Odell household. From the sweet cinnamon smells, she guessed Eppy was in the kitchen, making something with apples. Through the parlor door she caught sight of Charlotte, the oldest child, trying to play one-a-cat with a pillow instead of a puck. Upstairs, Emily and Jane were having a shouting match, and from somewhere in the back of the house Fanny, the baby, was squalling. All the Odell children had literary names, and Frank Odell said if the next one was another girl he was going to call her George. That had mystified Carrie until Eppy explained that George Eliot, who was a famous writer, was really a woman. For the child’s sake, Carrie hoped Mr. Odell was joking.

There wasn’t any point in knocking, nobody would hear, so she walked right in and started down the hall toward the kitchen. Charlotte saw her from the parlor. “Carrie!” she yelled, dropping the stick she’d been beating the pillow with and dashing out the door. Her sturdy, seven-year-old body almost knocked Carrie over. “I was hoping you’d come soon, I haven’t seen you in
ages.
Do you like my dress? Mama made it so I could wear it to Gramma Odell’s birthday party, but now I can wear it anytime I want. The party was lots of fun, we got to stay overnight, and Jane threw up in the bed. The next day Gram made fried pears for breakfast, and Jane threw up again, right at the table. Come on, Mama’s making apple butter, and it’s almost time for the tasting!”

Carrie let herself be pulled into the kitchen, where Eppy was standing in front of the stove, trying to stir the big iron kettle with one hand and hold Fanny with the other. As soon as Carrie took her, the baby stopped screaming.

“Praise God,” laughed Eppy, pushing damp hair back from her forehead. “I’ll never question the power of prayer again, Lord, and that’s a promise. Carrie, you are a sight for sore eyes. That child’s not wet, is she? She couldn’t be, I just changed her ten minutes ago. Is this butter dark enough, do you think? It’s been six hours. Charlotte, get
down,
I told you, before you pull that kettle over and scald yourself to death.”

The baby wasn’t wet, just cross, and Carrie had already coaxed a smile out of her by tickling her belly button. Wonderful smells came from the oven, where fresh biscuits were baking; soon it would be “tasting time”—an excuse to spread hot apple butter on warm bread and pretend to consider whether the apples were a rich enough brown or the cinnamon was overpowering the sugar.

Eppy gave the pot a final stir, then dropped into a chair at the big kitchen table, wiping her face with a towel. “I swear, this is the last time I put up apple butter in the middle of summer. What possessed me? Charlotte, move that chair over so I can put my feet up. Sit down, Carrie, I haven’t seen you in weeks. What’ve you been doing?”

She tried to shrug, but it was hard with Charlotte standing behind her, hugging her around the neck. Eppy, who loved to talk, didn’t wait for Carrie to fish out her notebook; she launched right into a recitation of all the Odell family doings in the last two weeks, including the trip to Chambersburg for old Mrs. Odell’s birthday, progress on the renovation of the pantry downstairs into a tiny bedroom for Charlotte and Emily after the new baby came, the female typesetter Frank had hired last week at the
Clarion,
the string bean blight, Emily’s new tooth, Jane’s sleepwalking, and how hard the baby had kicked last night. “I swear, I thought I was going to fall out of bed. Frank woke straight up and said, ‘What the devil was
that
?’ ”

“Gram says it’s a boy this time,” Charlotte told Carrie. “Oh, I hope, hope, hope so! I’m so tired of girls, I really, really hope it’s a boy.”

“We’ll love it whatever it is,” Eppy said automatically, as if it was something she’d said many times before.

Carrie looked down at the apple-cheeked child in her arms, thinking she could have a
hundred
girls and never get tired of them, or boys either. Would there ever come a day when she was so old, she wouldn’t care that she had no children? She hoped so. But she couldn’t really imagine it.

“And now Frank’s talking about turning that old two-horse stable in the backyard into a study for himself. Can you beat that? He goes to his nice, quiet office every day of the week while I’m home with four and a half children, and
he
needs a study.”

Carrie shook her head in sympathy.

“You’ll stay to supper,” Eppy announced, getting up to stir the apple butter again. “Frank’s coming home early, he
says,
so we can probably eat early. You can’t? Why not?” She leaned over to peer at the word
Artemis
Carrie scribbled in her notebook. She scowled. “How is he?” Carrie lifted her shoulders and made a noncommittal face. Eppy said, “Hmpf,” but nothing else. She never had a good word to say about Carrie’s stepfather, but when her children were around she tried to keep her opinion to herself. Carrie wondered what she would say if she told Eppy that last night Artemis had gotten drunk on the front porch with one of his shiftless friends from the sawmill. She’d overheard them plotting mean things to do later to Willis Haight—burn his outhouse, trample his garden, kill his chickens—but they’d both passed out cold before the moon rose.