The Reading Lessons (40 page)

“Thadda boy!” Mr. Wiggins clapped him on the back. “It’s a real gem, I tell you. A real gem.”

“I know,” Hadley said.

Truth told, Hadley didn’t remember how he’d come to be standing on Dixon Street at six o’clock on a Saturday evening. He was at the hardware store, last he knew. The sun was still bright. He was looking at paintbrushes. Now the sun was setting.

Mr. Wiggins flipped a light switch, and Hadley came face to face with the milk-white glow of four freshly painted walls. The previous spring, a newspaperman had taken Hadley’s photograph next to the wisteria, and that’s what those glowing walls reminded him of, that same eyeball-searing flash. He blinked now like he’d blinked then. He probably looked as boozy-eyed as he did in that picture in the Beatties Bluff Dispatch. He turned in a circle, disoriented. Where were the birdcages and collectable spoons? Where were the magazines?
Everything was gone.

“The kitchen’s through here,” Mr. Wiggins said. “It comes with a brand new Electric Buffet stove.”

Hadley entered the kitchen as if entering a dream. Part of him could still see the mail and the feathers and the plates of chess pie. He could almost smell the pie. In reality, the table where Mr. Gibbs had once stuffed himself with peas was now gone. But for four thumbprint-size grooves in the linoleum, there wasn’t a single sign that Hadley had not dreamed up that table. The room smelled like paint instead of pie. 

“Where did she go?” he asked.

“I’m sorry? Where did who go?”

“The woman who lived in this house. Do you know where she went?”

Mr. Wiggins’ enormous shoulder pads went rigid under his big square suit. “Are you interested in buying this house, Mister, or are you just snooping?”

“Just snooping,” Hadley said. He headed for the sun porch. 

He remembered it red. He remembered it blue. He thought of all that hogwash he’d given Flora about a room having emotions. He braced himself for the emptiness of the place.

“I hope you haven’t been wasting my time,” Wiggins said, but Hadley barely heard him. 

Here it was, the place where he fell in love with her. Hadley pressed his hand against the wall and felt time fall away.

“Hmm. The painters must have missed this room,” the realtor remarked.

“No they didn’t,” Hadley said. “She left it blue.”

###

Words. There were times when Hadley wished he’d never learned to read them. They came in dirty novels, on violet paper, under blue paint. They left their mark on his skin. Saying goodbye to Wisteria Walk would mean saying goodbye to twenty years worth of words carved into the backs of china cabinets and the lips of windowsills. A tiny
nipple
had been carved into the window seat and there was a soup tureen in the kitchen with a
dong
hidden in its lid. Centuries from now, when they were all dead and buried, a man might bend over to tie his shoe one morning and see Hadley’s
yearning
still clinging to the baseboard. 

The fact that Nina was similarly stricken with an obsession for words, seemed like sure proof of his paternity. Her notebooks overflowed with
Words of the Week,
many of which she used against him. Recently, her notes had trickled to one or two every few days.
I don’t give a darn about college, if you must know. I am fleeing under DURESS and it’s all because of you . . . 
He fed Nina’s words to the stove because they were too dangerous and painful to save. If Hadley left Wisteria Walk, he’d be fleeing words as much as anything. They lifted him up, and they tore him down. He wondered where he’d be without them. 

A Going Away party had been planned for Nina, and the staff from both Wisteria Walk and Browning House had been invited to attend. At Nina’s request, it was a simple affair with cream cake and sparkle punch and white paper napkins, but Mister Rich and Mister Guido had put on suits, and the oldest boy was on punch-ladling duty, and the youngest agree to play the piano. Mama had been invited, too. She sat on a wooden folding chair and ate her cake with the rest of the female help, all of whom picked at their food and squeaked about in their seats, barely saying a word. It was upsetting to the staff to have their positions reversed, if only for an afternoon. Most of them were so worried that Mister Rich couldn’t properly handle that ladle, they couldn’t even enjoy the break. 

 Hadley looked around the Fireside Room and thought about how the place had looked when it was brand new. He’d been afraid of the house back then, with its complicated conveniences and its wisteria-less lawn. Now the yard flowered from stem to stern, and the icebox was out of date. The pristine walls had been scuffed by children. Empty bottles of
Berry’s Best
sat atop the dusty radios in the Radio Room. Hadley had cleaned and hammered and fetched wayward rodents from every secret cranny. He knew which floorboards objected the loudest when you stepped on them and which ones could be counted on to keep silent. The place was as familiar to him as his own skin.

Nina had called him aside before the party to give him one final chance. “Just say the word, and I’ll stay. We both know you’re going to miss our anomalous love with every beat of your heart.”

Anomalous? “The place won’t be the same without you, Miss Nina, but we’re all very excited for you.”

She pounded her fist on a newly painted apple-green wall. “If you let me walk out of here tomorrow, I will walk out of your life forever. Do you understand?”

It was all he could do to hold himself together. Everyone was sad that Nina was going, but Hadley had not been able to eat. He hadn’t had more than five hours of sleep in five days. He’d read
Uncle Wiggly’s Automobile
two dozen times since Lucinda had given it to him. “What about Christmas?”

Her voice was low and trembling as she leaned close to his face. “I may be here for Christmas and a Sunday dinner or two. I might even say hello when I see you, but you will be dead to me in my heart. Are you prepared to live with that?”

Hadley couldn’t answer because Hadley couldn’t speak.

She handed him a lily of the valley. “Goodbye, Hadley.”

When he joined Mama in the circle of folding chairs, he still had the flower in his sweaty hand. “It must be hard to see her go,” Mama said.

He crushed the flower by mistake, and when he opened his fingers, the bells were limp and flat in the cradle of his palm. In eighteen years, Mama had never said one word about Nina. Some Sundays she would send Hadley home with
Silhouette Pudding
because
Silhouette Pudding
was Nina’s favorite dessert. But other Sundays it would be bourbon balls instead because Mister Rich could wolf down a whole plate of anything that was chocolate in two minutes flat, especially if it had bourbon in it. Other weeks, it would be Mister Guidio’s treat of choice,
Mystery Cake
with
Philly-Vanilly
– frosting—the the mystery ingredient (unbeknownst to Guido) being tomato soup. Mama never played favorites. She never asked if Nina could be her granddaughter.

They sipped their punch and watched Mister Guido hammer his way through
Goodnight Irene
. Dickie was standing by the piano with his arm slung over Nina’s shoulder. Lucinda stood next to them, swaying to the music, her eyes half-closed.

“They’re a complete family, aren’t they, Hadley?” Mama said. “A mother. A father. A houseful of cousins. That’s a good thing. A real gift.”

Hadley took her slender hand in his. “It’s what you always said was right.”

“That’s true. That’s what I said.”

He squeezed her fingers. “Our family ain’t been so bad either, has it?”

Mama’s reached into her carrying bag and pulled out her Bible. Pressed between the tissue-thin pages was a single four-leaf clover, the heart-shaped leaves brittle and clear with age. “Do you recognize it? You picked it from that clover patch many moons ago.”

Hadley didn’t dare touch the little thing, it was so frail after all these years. “I never knew you kept it.”

“Well I did,” Mama said. She closed the Bible and returned it to her bag. “I’m a lucky woman, Hadley. Having you was the best thing I ever done, and that’s the USDA Certified Truth.”

Hadley nodded. He thought about what it would be like to say
Merry Christmas, Miss Nina
every year and to hear her say
Merry Christmas, Hadley
and know that she didn’t really mean it. Then he thought about what it would be like to never see her again. 

“I don’t think I can leave, Mama,” he said. He began reshaping the little broken bells one bell at a time. 

It would hurt like nothing had ever hurt before if Nina really shut him out of her life as promised. His heart would surely begin to match his spleen, only it would feel so much worse, and having his spleen cut in half had hurt like a son of a gun. But if he never saw his daughter again, that would be unbearable. Hadley had learned that it was rare to get everything you wanted in the world. You couldn’t always control your circumstances, but you could make the best of them. “Everything I care about is here, Mama.”

“Oh honey,” Mama said. “I don’t want you to leave either, but are you sure staying is a good idea?” It hurt to see how she worried about him. He wished he could have given her an easier time. “What about Mr. Worther-Holmes?”

“I don’t want to leave you, Mama. It’s as simple as that. Anyway, Dickie might not know it, but he needs me. I don’t think he likes Lucinda any more than she likes him. Without me around, the place would go to rack and ruin.” He nodded at the blonde woman dancing by herself to
Goodnight Irene
. “Don’t want to leave her, neither.”

Mama glared at Lucinda. “After all she’s done to you?”

Lucinda pinched the hem of her dress and did a little twirl.

“I wish she could have loved me. It would have been so nice.”

“You got black skin, and she’s got white,” Mama said. “What would it have changed?” 

“Everything,” Hadley said. Lucinda opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Every little thing.”

Meg

The world changed suddenly and unexpectedly for Meg Baldwin the day Old Hadley took sick, a trick of fate that snuck up like a bad germ, which is really what it was. For Meg, that was a memorable day.

From far away, a person might take Grandma’s gardener for a young kid, he was always so peppy. Up close he looked like any other old man, except he could bend and reach and lift like it was nothing. He fooled you like that. Meg realized there was something wrong when she drove up for one of her weekly visits and he looked like an old man from all the way up the street.

There were a sad few things to like about Meg’s grandmother, but she had to admit, the woman had always treated her help surprisingly decent, Old Hadley and Patti Carol, the housekeeper, being the extent of her help. It was that single idiosyncrasy that kept Meg coming back. That, and Pinochle. 

“It won’t kill you to play cards with her for an hour or two,” Mom would always say whenever Meg felt like blowing off a visit. “Now that Father’s gone, we’re all she’s got.” 

So even though spending time with Grandma was about as appealing as flossing (another habit Meg submitted to with teeth-gritting disdain), she went every Thursday after she got off at the bank. The habit was such that her car could not be made to drive anywhere on Thursday evening that did not involve Grandma. 

Every Thursday, she picked up two Big Macs, a large fry, and a couple of small Cokes, the entire bag of which she and her grandmother would politely consume at the dining room table on a lace tablecloth, the French fries divided equally between two Nippon plates with blue butterflies hand-painted around the rim. Grandma ate Big Macs like they were filet mignon, actually cutting her hamburger into dainty little bites and spearing them with a silver fork. Sometimes she ate her Big Mac wearing a hat, if she happened to have a Library Committee meeting that day. Meg knew she only ever wore a hat in the house when she’d forgotten to take it off, yet she never reminded her grandmother that she was still wearing it. You had to save that for special occasions. Should their conversation become particularly annoying, Meg would pick a feather or a wooden cherry and fix her gaze on it until Grandma finally noticed and took the hat off in a huff. It was the only way to shame the woman. Once, Grandma had left her gloves on and not even noticed. That really threw her for a loop.

After this fancy meal, Old Hadley would come in from the yard and they’d have a game of cards. Sometimes Patti Carol played, too, but usually not. Patti Carol was such a poor sport at Pinochle, she made Grandma look like Little Mary Sunshine.

“What’s wrong with Old Hadley?” Meg asked on the day she saw him looking like an old man from all the way up the street. 

“Wrong?” Grandma said. She sprang from her chair with uncommon sprite and flew to the dining room window to squint at him through the blinds. “Why, there’s not a thing wrong with that old fool. What makes you think there’s something wrong?”

“He was sitting on the steps when I got here. I’ve never seen him sit.”