The Reading Lessons (39 page)

“No idea what that has to do with the price of tea in China, but I did fire her. Did you ever notice that her right eye is bigger than her left? Of course you did. I saw you gazing into that wonky old thing just the other day.”

“She got Dreft in it when she was washing your slips. I was helping her get it out.”

“Yeah, well I never did like the looks of that big ugly eye. I couldn’t eat my breakfast with that big ugly eye always looking at me.”

Hadley nodded. “I’m gonna get a new job, Lucinda. It’s time. I need to leave before anyone else gets hurt.”

“Then you best read with me while you can.”

But Hadley didn’t. Hadley couldn’t.

###

The next day, he went over to talk to Mr. Shel Boyd of Sunset Lane about a driving job. Mr. Boyd was a wary looking fellow. He stepped out the front door with his hands clutched behind his back and a frown that made his whole face squash up like a sock doll that’d been stitched together too tight. “The job would be a step down for you, son,” he said when Hadley told him that he was interested in the driving position. “I can’t think why you’d want to take care of automobiles when you’ve got such a grand reputation for gardening. Unless you’re in some sort of trouble over there at the Worther-Holmes place?”

Hadley didn’t want to mention his halved spleen. “I just like automobiles, Mr. Boyd. Honest. I always have.”

Mr. Boyd shot a look at his upstairs window where a woman stood in the curtain crack, looking down at them. “My wife’s twelve years younger than me, Mr. Crump, but perhaps you already know that? My ears work just fine though, if you catch my meaning? I believe I’ll say good day to you now.”

Hadley did not catch Mr. Boyd’s meaning. “What about Mr. Farley or Mr. Stumps? I heard they might be hiring.”

He turned his squashed face up to that curtain crack again. “They got wives, too, don’t they?” 

Hadley was thunderstruck. He’d thought Nina was making up about the rumors just to bother him, but was it true? Was there really talk going around town about him and Lucinda? 

Mama confirmed his suspicions later when he told her about Mr. Boyd. “Oh honey,” she said, giving his arm a little pity-pat. “People like to talk, you know that. Mrs. Worther-Holmes fires more maids than anyone in town. Of course nobody knows a thing. They just gossip like they do.”

They were eating lunch at the
Sunny Side Café
, the
Dinner Bell
no longer being an option. “I don’t get it, Mama. I mind my own business. I do a good job. Why should anyone care about that sort of stuff?” But even as he said the words, Hadley knew how naive they sounded. It was a known fact that people liked nothing so much as sex. They even sold soap with it. Hadley knew because he’d been building radios for years, and he was fond of listening to them. “Oh hell. I wonder what Dickie is waiting for?”

“You could try Forest Green,” Mama suggested. “That’s fifty miles from here.”

Hadley reached across the table and took her hand. “Are you ashamed of me, Mama?”

Mama squeezed his finger. “Got no right to feel ashamed. I only wish you were a happier man for it all.”

Mama hadn’t brought up Lucinda Worther-Holmes since Hadley was a kid. After Flora, she seemed to give up. He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand, surprised to note how thin it was. “I’ll leave the state if I have to.” 

“Maybe that’s for the best.” 

A man had to be crazy to give up a good job these days. People weren’t hiring domestic help like they used to. A lot of folks didn’t have much money anymore. “Times are awfully tough,” he said. “And I got me this bum spleen now.”

“There’s plenty of work you could do. You know how to do so many things.”

“I reckon that’s true.”

“Sure it is. Maybe you could get assembly work?
Armstrong Tire and Rubber
just opened up over in Natchez, I heard. Or you could try the Magnolia Mill. You just need a fresh start, that’s all.”

“A fresh start. I like the sound of that.” 

Hadley knew he was fortunate. He could paint and plant and hammer things together and anyway, he wasn’t a kid anymore. He had a whole big box of things to show for himself now. Thanks to Phoetus Day, he owned one Tiffany shoehorn, a Huddie Ledbetter record, a special deck of forty-eight playing cards for pinochle, a tortoise shell traveler’s comb, a Borsalino fedora, and a good pocket watch that had never even been wound. He could pawn his box and live off it for a year, if he had to. By the time they left the café, he’d decided to use his box to fund a fresh start. 

###

“You’d leave me, Hadley Crump? After all we’ve been through together?” 

Hadley and Lucinda were alone in the Reading Room, but he went into the hall to make sure no one was listening to them. He was not there to read. “People speculate about us, Lucinda. Did you know that?”

“So what? People speculate about Babe and her gardener, too.” 

Hadley gave her a pointed look. 

“But Forest Green is so far away. What about our daughter? Don’t you care about her any more?”

“So now she’s
ours,
is she? Well, let’s go break the good news, shall we?”

“What is this? Just because you aren’t getting a little something on the side, you don’t care about her anymore?”

Lucinda’s words hurt worse than a slap. Hadley closed his eyes and took a deep breath and thought about the life he might have had with Flora. He did that sometimes. He pictured their kids and their house. He even gave them a dog sometimes because dogs were a sign of stability and roots. 

“Wake up, you fool,” Lucinda snapped. “Don’t you care about us?”

“You’ll never know how much,” he whispered. The children and the dog dissolved from his brain. 

“Then don’t go to Forest Green.”

“You don’t know what’s it’s like with Nina. It’s killing me, Lucinda.”

Lucinda brightened suddenly. “But she’s leaving for Sophie Newcomb in August, Hadley. Didn’t you hear the news?”

“Who is Sophie Newcomb?”

“It’s a women’s college in Tulane.”

Hadley sat on the window seat. “Louisiana?”

“It’ll be good for her. It’ll be good for us all.”

“What about Dickie?”

“Dickie is a mess right now,” she said, and she actually looked sorry for her husband. “He doesn’t want Nina living two hundred miles away. It’s tearing him up.”

“Well, I can understand that, Lucinda.”

“If you left us, Hadley, we’d have to hire three people to do all the things you do around here. Maybe four. It would cause Dickie more chest pain right now if you go than if you stay.”

“I’ll think about it,” Hadley said.

His baby was going to college. In Tulane!

###

A couple of days later, Lucinda called him upstairs. “I need your help packing these things,” she said. She was sitting on the floor in Nina’s old nursery, folding up a pink blanket.

“No,” he mouthed when he saw the blanket with its embroidered sweet peas and white eyelet trim. 

“Remember this?” she said, as if he might actually have forgotten. Mama had made the sweet pea quilt as a christening present for Nina. “It was always one of my favorites,” Lucinda said.

“You packed that away a long time ago, Lucinda.”

“Nina gave me a list of items that she wants to bring with her.”

“Why does she want a baby blanket?”

“Girls like to have their favorite things around them when they leave home, dear. I would have thought you’d know that by now.” She patted the floor beside her. “I can’t do this on my own.”

“This might surprise you, Lucinda, but I’ve got real work to do today.”

“This is real work. Now get in here.” 

There was a big cardboard box marked with Nina’s name, and Hadley sat down by it. 

“Hand me something else,” she said.

“She’ll be needing this at college, I suppose?” Hadley grumbled. He handed her an Uncle Wiggly rattle from a mountainous pile of old stuff. It was cruel, really. Every bootie, diaper pin, and tangled bow stirred a different memory. He picked up a well-played-with doll by the foot, dangling it like a dead mouse. He and Lucinda had had one of their biggest arguments over this faded, little rag-baby. 

Hadley had tried to buy it for Nina the day he went with Lucinda and the kids to the
Hoxie Bros. Gigantic 3 Ring Circus
. Because something came up at the last minute, Dickie had asked Hadley to walk around with his family in his place, and it turned out to be Hadley’s all time favorite day ever. Nina was seven at the time, and she had these brown eyes that no human heart could possibly say no to. Even Lucinda’s heart was vulnerable. When Nina said she wanted the doll, Lucinda insisted on buying it herself. Hadley had already bought the boys popguns, but for some reason, Lucinda wouldn’t let him get the doll. 

“What would Dickie think if he heard you bought the kids toys?” she’d asked.

“He’ll think I like the kids, which I do.”

“No. I won’t have it. Either I’m paying for the doll or we’re putting it back.”

“Don’t put it back, Mother,” Nina mewled.

Hadley was angry as hell, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. “Besides,” Lucinda said. “You can’t afford a rag-baby.”

Regardless of the incident with the doll, Hadley loved spending the day with them. For a few hours, it felt like he had a family of his own. 

“Mimi,” Hadley whispered. This was what Nina had named the doll.

Lucinda took it from him like it was a real baby. “That was a fun day, wasn’t it?”

Even though Mimi played perfectly into her plans, Hadley didn’t feel like Lucinda was trying to be mean anymore. She was remembering that day, too. “Do you recall how much that doll cost?”

“One dollar and ten cents,” he said.

Lucinda patted its yarn curls. “I should have let you buy it for her.”

“Yeah. That would have been nice.”

“How much you got on you now?” 

Hadley checked his pockets. “One dollar and ten cents.”

Lucinda held out her hand, and Hadley gave her a dollar and two nickels. She added Mimi to the new box. “I’ll send it with her,” she said.

The next day, Lucinda asked him to paint the foyer, and when he went to put on his paint clothes, he found a package on his bed.

It was wrapped in cream-colored paper and tied with a pale blue bow. Hadley didn’t trust it. When he finally got up the nerve to rip off the paper, it was just a book.
Anna Karenina
. It looked as deceptively boring as it had all those years ago. 

He started to put it on the nightstand when he noticed another package. He opened this one with a bit more gusto.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
. It was musty and decrepit and warped with age, but when Hadley opened the cover, Tom and Huck were waiting inside, young and devious as ever.

Dracula
was in the bathroom. It still had an old price tag taped to the cover that read
Pringles Second Hands
. It was the same book Spitbone had bought for him twenty years before. A blank piece of violet paper served as a bookmark. It marked the page where Jonathon is seduced by the brides. 

When Hadley looked up from the brides, Lucinda was standing in the doorway. She handed him one final package. 

Inside was Nina’s first book.
Uncle Wiggly’s Automobile
. 

“Don’t leave us,” she said.

He stacked the chapters of his life in the cardboard suitcase he’d picked up at
Wendell’s Pawn
when he sold his Phoetus Day gifts. Mister Wendell had given him one hundred and twenty dollars for his box of gifts and thrown the suitcase in for free. There was only one Phoetus Day gift that Hadley had elected to keep, and that was a Dictionary filled with dried flowers. Lucinda had pressed a marigold in the “M”s and a violet in the “V”s and a buttercup in the “D”s, because she thought it was a dandelion. 

“I’ll miss you if you leave, Hadley,” Lucinda said. “I already miss you madly and badly.”

Hadley dug his fingernails into the lid of the suitcase and tried to think of all the things he wasn’t going to miss. Like watching Dickie kiss Lucinda. 

Lucinda sighed a shaky sigh. “Sometimes I wish we were still ten years old so we could do it all over again. Do you ever wish that?”

“Never.”

Lucinda looked surprised and hurt. “You don’t?”

“I’d never wish for that, Lucinda. Not unless it could be different.”

She squatted down by the suitcase. “Different how?”

“You know how.”

Lucinda fingered her hair. “Tell me anyway.”

Hadley didn’t tell her about the parallel life he wished for with Flora. He took his wishing further back than that. “I’d change it at the attic part. I’d change it one of two ways.”

“In what way?”

“You’d still come to the attic only instead of biting me, you’d give me a different birthday present. You’d say, “To hell with everything. I want to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you.’”

“I hope your other wish is more realistic.”

“It is. You’d never show up. You’d leave me waiting around like a fool, and I’d be sad and disappointed, but you’d never come to the attic. You’d let me go on and live my life because deep down, you’d love me enough to know that I’d be better off without you.”

“You’d really wish it all away?”

“Yes.” He looked at the books that filled an otherwise empty suitcase. Would he really wish his whole life away? “Maybe.” He touched the corner of Uncle Wiggly. “I don’t know, Lucinda. I really don’t know.”

###

The sign in the Gibb’s front yard read:
P & W Reality Company ~ A better home for a better tomorrow.
The house had a clean coat of yellow paint and an abandoned look about it. Hadley stumbled up the front walk and peered through the kitchen window. The room was empty.

“Would you like to see it?” a voice asked from somewhere behind him.

Hadley jumped. He hadn’t heard the black Cadillac pull up to the curb. 

A young man wearing a three-piece suit and a felt fedora thrust his hand out to Hadley. “Delbert Wiggins, P & W Realty. What do you say, old man? Shall we have a look inside?”

“Yes,” Hadley said. “I do believe I’d like to have a look inside.”