The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (31 page)

He went back to his laptop as soon as we finished eating and I continued combing through rhinestones and paste. I had a couple of interesting afternoon customers, and made a few good sales.

About three-thirty I found a brilliantly colored Morpho brooch. These pretty pieces from the 1920s used South American butterfly wings as part of the decoration, but they did not necessarily sell at high prices. But I felt the value of them could only go up. After admiring it thoroughly, I placed it in the padded case I’d marked as Not for Retail and returned to my labors.

It was after six when Scott came back to find me.

“How’s it going?”

“Found a few pieces with genuine gems,” I told him, indicating the little box I’d set aside.

“Valuable?”

“Moderately,” I told him. “And even a lot of the inexpensively produced items are unique enough to command some good prices.”

“I’m glad you’re going through those boxes,” he said. “I always knew it was a bad idea to have that much stuff just packed away.”

“You know, Scott, we might think about setting up a special jewelry section here in the store.”

“You think we could sell anything here?” he asked. “We haven’t had many people interested in it in the past.”

“Because the people who would buy this kind of thing
never made it to our door,” I said, “we probably need to heighten our profile.”

“You have an idea for doing that?”

“I’m thinking we could put some of the stock on consignment with jewelers around town,” I told him. “I could make sure Yesteryear Emporium was listed as the origin of the pieces. That would get our name in front of those people who might be our potential customers.”

When I glanced up at him, he was smiling at me.

“What?”

“Janey, you are undoubtedly the best thing that has happened to this store in a very long time.”

I laughed. “The feeling is mutual,” I told him.

He leaned against a support pillar, arms folded across his chest.

“You may be the best thing that has happened to me, as well,” he said.

That statement was considerably more serious.

“That feeling is also mutual.”

We just looked at each other. Our relationship was so new, we were both still too surprised by it to make the effort to link it to definition.

He stepped forward and bent down to touch my lips with his own.

“Thanks for being here, Janey Domschke,” he said.

“I can assure you,” I teased politely, “that it’s my pleasure.”

Scott tweaked my nose in retaliation.

“Have you got time to proofread my final version?” he asked.

“I will make time.”

He snapped his fingers. “Make time?” he said. “Didn’t we do that yesterday.”

I groaned with complaint. We made our way hand in hand to our little semiprivate hideaway behind the counter.

His finished letter was, in my humble and perhaps moderately biased opinion, a masterpiece.

I helped him find the appropriate Web sites on the Internet and showed him how to paste them into e-mail addresses.

“And in just a few keystrokes,” I said, doing a fair imitation of a newsreel narrator, “we send the words of Scott Robbins hurtling headlong into the digital universe of twenty-first-century technology.”

“It’s so easy,” he said. “I should have been doing this years ago.”

“You certainly should have,” I agreed. “But when the good comes, it’s never too late.”

“That’s a pretty quotable line you’ve got yourself,” he said.

“Yeah, but it’s not mine,” I admitted. “Better cc a copy of that to the White House. Wouldn’t want them to say they didn’t get a chance to look at it before it went to print.”

We closed the doors at 8:00 p.m. and went upstairs intending to make dinner. We made love instead and lay together afterward, so satisfied.

“I just can’t quite believe you’re here with me, Janey,” Scott whispered. “I want to say…to say something special, but it seems too early.”

“It is too early,” I agreed.

“But I feel it,” he told me. “I feel it intensely.”

It felt so wonderful being there in his arms. I wasn’t sure that I really deserved it.

“Scott, I’m not really the person you think I am,” I told him.

“What do you mean?”

“You think I’m a good person,” I said. “But I’m not. Before the accident, I didn’t even try to be.”

He opened his mouth, probably to contradict me, but I didn’t give him the chance.

“I wasn’t evil,” I assured him. “I did the right things. I went
to church, gave to charity, didn’t make judgments based on race, creed, color or national origin. But I never really gave a damn about other people or their problems.”

“You were busy,” he said. “You had your career and your family.”

That sounded like a plausible excuse, but I didn’t want to make excuses with Scott.

“Those things were always secondary with me,” I admitted. “My husband was a means to an end. My daughter was an obligation to my husband. All I wanted was to be wealthy and well-thought-of. Those were my two main pursuits, and beyond that, nothing else much mattered.”

“Maybe that’s the way you saw things,” Scott said. “But David was obviously quite satisfied with you as a wife, he stayed married to you for twenty years. And Brynn, for all her adolescent issues, sounds no worse off emotionally than many other young women of her age.”

“Those things worked out in spite of me,” I told him. “Not because of me. I could have done better. I should have done better.”

“We can all say that when we look back at the past, Janey,” he said. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. Besides, it sounds to me like Sunnyside syndrome.”

“Sunnyside syndrome?”

“That’s what I call it,” he said. “I don’t think it’s made the list of recognized psychological disorders, but it’s nonetheless pretty common.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Do you ever see anyone from our old neighborhood?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “I think you’re about the only person I’ve ever run into.”

“You should see some of them again. It would be an eye-opener for you,” he said.

“We were all scattered,” I pointed out. “Who knows where anybody is.”

“I sometimes see guys I knew,” he told me. “They come by here, remember the store and drop in. They all have the same problem that you have, that I have.”

“What is that?”

“We’re not sure where we come from,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Our roots are torn up, Janey,” he said. “Maybe the adage is true that you can never go home again, but what if your home ceases to exist? You try, we try, to fit in somewhere else, with people who have pasts and histories. We never quite manage it and that makes us try harder and harder.”

I frowned. I wasn’t sure if he was completely right, but what he said did ring true somehow.

“It makes sense that the struggle to fit in somewhere, to have a place that’s yours, could impact your real life and obscure the things that are really important to you,” he said.

“Lots of people live their whole lives continents away from where they grew up,” I pointed out.

“But those people know the places they lived are still there,” he said. “When we don’t have any tangible evidence of where we came from or who we were, our memory comes into question and we begin to think our view of it is unlikely.”

“Having no place to be from was perfect for me,” I insisted. “I’ve been able to live for years just pretending that whole part of my life just never existed.”

“But doing that leaves holes in you, Janey,” he said. “And those holes are like wounds that don’t heal.”

“That don’t ever heal?” I asked him.

“Maybe they can,” he said. “Maybe I can heal them. After all, I can verify that it was really you living in that little house on Coral Street with your mother.”

“Coral Street,” I said aloud. “You remember that? The whole street was just obliterated. I’d forgotten the name. I remembered the house, but I couldn’t remember the street—114 Coral Street.”

Hearing the address from my own lips sounded funny and I laughed.

Scott smiled with me.

“Not everyone from Sunnyside tried to fit into the country club like you,” he said. “But all of us have been trying to fit in somewhere.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” he said. “Maybe we should plan a reunion, have all the Sunnyside people come in, and do some kind of psychological survey on everybody.”

“Maybe we could get Dr. Reiser to do it. I think I probably still owe him an apology.”

“You certainly do,” he teased. Then more seriously, he said, “When you separate people from their past it’s going to have an impact.”

“So you would have written a letter to the editor about allowing that expressway to cut right through our lives?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know if I would have been against it,” he admitted. “The city had to grow and it had to connect the suburbs to the downtown to keep it from drying up completely. But I think we always have to anticipate the fact that there are always unexpected consequences in everything we do, no matter how valuable or compelling the reason for doing them.”

I thought about that for a long moment, then nodded.

“Like Chester in assisted living,” I said.

Scott just looked at me, so I explained.

“It was a necessity. He really couldn’t take care of himself. And selling his house and his things was probably reasonable. His nephew lives far away and there was no one to take care of everything, and no one anticipated him ever getting well or going home,” I said. “It was probably the right thing to do for him, but he’s getting sicker and sicker. And maybe that’s an unanticipated consequence of believing that the next big thing that he is going to do is die.”

Scott nodded. “But it doesn’t have to be that way,” he said.

“No, of course it doesn’t,” I agreed. “Think of Miss Heloise, she certainly doesn’t feel that way.”

“Maybe that’s because she believes the house she lived in goes on,” he said. “It’s a kind of immortality that makes living more full of promise.”

“I think you’re right,” I told him. “I think that really might be it.”

“Why don’t you try introducing Chester to Miss Heloise,” he said. “Those two might really enjoy each other’s company.”

I propped myself up on my elbow and nodded down to him. “You know, I thought of that months ago,” I told him. “But I just let it go. It seemed kind of silly to set up a blind date with two nursing-home residents.”

“I guess it wouldn’t be typical,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be good.”

“Maybe we could do another picnic,” I said. “And we’d take both of them.”

“That’s going to be one crowded Volkswagen,” he said.

“We’ll look like clowns getting out of a car at the circus.”

“It could be good for Chester to meet somebody,” Scott agreed. “And it might be fun for Miss Heloise, too.”

“You sound like you are about ready to play matchmaker yourself,” I said.

Scott laughed. “That’s what happens when you fall in love, you get so schmaltzy you want to fix everybody up.”

I let the “in love” comment go without reaction.

“Have you got anything to eat in this place?” I asked.

Scott cooked up some spicy okra in tomato sauce that he poured over instant couscous. It wasn’t Le Parapluie, but it wasn’t bad for a quick dinner for two people who seemed to be spending a lot of time working up an appetite.

After dinner we snuggled together on his living-room couch and watched Jay Leno, laughing even when the jokes weren’t all that funny.

“Can you believe that we’ve been together for thirty-six hours,” I said.

Scott looked at his watch. “Actually thirty-seven hours eleven minutes and twenty-four seconds, but who’s counting? Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight.”

I playfully elbowed him.

“It’s just amazing to me that I’m still here,” I admitted. “That I haven’t felt strange and put-upon and pressured like it’s all too much. I feel comfortable here. I feel comfortable with you.”

“You don’t crowd my space either, Janey,” he said. “Being with you is…well, it’s like being alone, only better.”

We kissed and giggled like kids, and kissed some more.

At the commercial break, the hospital walkathon was highlighted. A popular local deejay was doing the voice-over about how the money raised would be used for a Special Therapies wing of the new cancer center. There were shots of smiling children who were obviously sick, a young woman wearing a turban, posing for the camera with her happy family all around her, a woman with a weathered old face, lined with experience.

“Your help brings hope,” was the oft-repeated phrase.

The next shot was completely different, obviously an add-on to the previously produced message. It was set outside on a sunny parking lot. The long-haired, tattooed deejay looked very pleased with himself as he sat in a blue Z3 convertible.

“Look at me, dude,” the deejay said. “I’m helping in the fight against these deadly diseases and have a chance to win this way-phat ride. You can, too. Participate in the We-Can-Do-It Walkathon and buy a chance to win this nearly new and very hottie, hot, hot BMW. I want it, I want it.”

“God, Janey,” Scott said. “That looks just like your car.”

I hesitated just a second too long before I responded.

“Ah, yeah, it does, doesn’t it.”

Scott leaned forward and looked me straight in the eye.

“You gave them your car?” he asked, incredulous.

“Hey, you gave away a genuine Stickley,” I pointed out. “And now I have a car I like just as well.”

“And I got a couch I…well, I’ve got another couch anyway,” he said.

I
T WAS
W
EDNESDAY
before I finally left Scott’s place to go home. If I’d had any clean clothes there, I might have stayed even longer. I walked through my house with no sense of being home. The place was roomy, beautifully decorated and expensive. Not any more welcoming than a movie or a TV version of what an upper-class American life might look like. Ours had always been more soap opera than sitcom. I didn’t miss it. And my house was no longer where I really wanted to be.

Dutifully I sorted through the mail. It was mostly bills, but I did find a postcard from Brynn. It showed a lovely Tuscan landscape. I flipped it over and found she’d attempted to counteract the sweetness of the photograph with a happy face and a flippant message.

“Having a wonderful time,” it read. “Good thing you’re not here.”

I burst out laughing.

The doorbell rang. I was still smiling when I answered it.

“Shanekwa,” I said, delighted to see her. “Good morning. And, Jarone, how are you, sir?”

The little guy grinned at me.

“Juss fine,” he said in his lispy singsong voice.

“Come in,” I told his mother. “I don’t know if I’ve got coffee. But if I do, it’ll just take a second to brew some up.”

“Thanks,” she said, “but I can’t stay. I promised to get into work early today and I still have to get him to the day-care center. I just wanted to drop this off.”

She handed me a check. I looked at it. I looked at her.

“What’s this?”

“I know we didn’t talk about me paying rent,” she said. “But I’m on my feet now. I
can
pay it. You don’t know how good it feels to be able to say that. I’m looking for a place and this is what I’ll have to pay for anything around here. I thought I’d start paying it to you, that way I’ll be in the habit by the time I find a place of my own.”

I hardly knew how to respond. My first thought was that I shouldn’t take it. If Shanekwa wanted to move into a real apartment there would be two months’ rent and deposits to pay. She was going to need this money. Then as I looked into her young, determined face, I smiled.

“Thank you,” I told her. “If I can do anything to help, let me know.”

“I will,” she assured me.

We shared a hug, and Jarone let me kiss him on the forehead. I watched them walking all the way down the block.

Maybe they wouldn’t have to move away, I thought. Maybe they could rent my house. I glanced down at the check and shook my head. Shanekwa would never be able to afford to rent a five-bedroom Italianate in Davenport Heights. Nobody would. I was back to that.

Undoubtedly, I should sell the house. It was a drain on my income and I didn’t even really like the place anymore. I would
prefer to keep it if it could make me an income, but I couldn’t figure how I would manage that. What kind of business venture could effectively utilize a huge, completely furnished house? The kind of people who could afford to rent it wouldn’t want to rent. What I needed was a group of people who didn’t have high incomes and were willing to live together. I couldn’t imagine where I might find folks like that.

I took a long soak in the tub and thought about Scott. There was a phone right next to the tub and I was sorely tempted just to call and hear the sound of his voice. Out of sheer strength of will, I managed to resist. I needed to prove that I still had a life separate from his. That I wasn’t so infatuated with the man that I couldn’t enjoy a morning alone.

The truth was, I already missed him.

I got out of the tub, got dressed and groomed and began packing. I’d filled two suitcases, a huge portmanteau and a rolling carry-on before it occurred to me that arriving at his doorstep, or mezzanine in this case, with a month’s worth of clothes might be a bit threatening. Scott had at no time ever asked me to move in with him. He did say he loved having me there. And he’d told me that he was happier with me than he could ever remember being in his whole life. But that was far from saying, “Let’s live happily ever after.” And I wasn’t even sure if that was what I wanted either. I wanted to be with him. But did I want to be married? What if I reverted to being the old Jane Lofton? Would Scott end up being David?

Thinking about it made me crazy. I threw one suitcase and the carry-on into my trunk and drove out to Bluebonnet Manor Assisted Living. Chester might not know what I should do, but he’d let me talk it out—we’d brainstorm and I’d have a far better idea of where I stood.

I was so lucky to have that man.

When that thought hit me, I found it humorous enough to laugh out loud. Without Chester I would have died in the auto crash. But his value to me as a savior was now outweighed by being my confidant, counselor and friend.

The air was very humid and the sky was gray, but I opened the sunroof nonetheless. I just enjoyed driving like that.

I ruminated on my relationship with Scott, wondered about Brynn and reminded myself about things I wanted to do at the store. I was feeling a bit less anxious as I pulled into the nursing-home parking lot. Rain was still threatening, but it held off.

I made my way through the glassed-in entry and the wide, nicely furnished foyer. The desk in the reception area was deserted as usual.

In the living room the usual wheelchairs were parked in front of the blaring television set. And the occupants didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the screaming accusations thrown among the guests of a tabloid talk show.

On the surrounding couches people who were by now familiar to me sat quietly, some watched TV and some ignored it. The woman I referred to as Big-Haired Blanche was talking nonstop to nobody in particular. As usual her clothes were fashionable and expensive, her hair and makeup the envy of evangelists’ wives everywhere.

“Good morning,” I called out as I walked by.

“Good morning,” a number of people responded.

I’d grown accustomed to this place, these people. It was a part of my life, and I decided that despite the strange smells and somewhat dreary atmosphere, I had come to relish my visits here.

I was halfway down the hall when Anje stepped out of Chester’s room. I was already smiling at her when she looked up. As soon as she saw me, her expression changed.

“Jane!” She said my name as if my presence startled her.

She hurried to my side and took my hands in her own.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I tried to call you,” she told me. “For some reason your name and number weren’t listed in his records. I even asked his nephew in California, but he didn’t know it. He wasn’t familiar with your side of the family at all.”

“You called Chester’s nephew?” I was horrified. This immediate reaction was based on the fear that I would be found out. That I would get into some kind of trouble for pretending to be one of Chester’s relatives. Self-preservation quickly subsided as niggling fear overrode it. “You called Chester’s nephew,” I repeated. This time it was a statement.

“We had to call somebody,” Anje said.

The question why suddenly loomed large before me. I didn’t get a chance to voice it.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

I pushed past her into his room.

“He’s not there,” she called after me.

It was true. The room was exactly as it always was, his books and papers stacked in familiar chaos. Too much furniture crowded into far too little space. The accumulation of almost eight decades boiled down to a space eight feet by ten.

The bed was empty. Its brown plastic mattress bare, the sheets and blankets gone.

I turned to Anje standing in the doorway.

“Where have you taken him?”

“Serenity Mission,” she answered.

The name was unfamiliar to me. “Is that a hospital?”

Her brow furrowed. “It’s a funeral home,” Anje said. “Chester passed away last night. I am so very sorry.”

Her announcement startled me completely.

“No, no. That can’t be true,” I told her. “It’s impossible.”

Anje was shaking her head.

“It’s always hard to accept,” she said.

“He was fine on Sunday,” I insisted.

“Well, he wasn’t
fine
,” she corrected me. “But he was doing pretty well. I’m so glad you took him for that outing. He was so pleased and he had so much fun.”

“Was it the picnic? Did he catch cold or get too much sun?”

“No, of course not,” Anje assured me. “Don’t even start that, Jane. Of course, it wasn’t your fault. You know how sick he was.”

I hadn’t. I was sure that I hadn’t.

“He was getting better,” I argued. “He was feeling stronger.”

Anje shook her head. She obviously didn’t agree.

“He’d been going downhill for a long time and you knew it,” she insisted.

On some level I had known. She was right about that. I knew he was old. I knew he was sick. I knew that he would die. But I hadn’t expected it to be soon. I hadn’t expected it to be now.

“It’s so sudden,” I said. “It’s not supposed to be like this. Sunday he’s fine and Wednesday he’s dead.”

“Sometimes that’s exactly the way,” she said. “We’re honestly not sure what happened. He’d been under really good control for months. And then last night, unexpectedly, we lost him.”

“Was it the breathing problems?” I asked her.

Anje looked surprised. “What breathing problems?”

I didn’t bother to answer. “Then what was it? Heart attack?”

“No, of course not,” she said, and then quickly backtracked. “Or maybe it was, ultimately. Renal failure, cerebral edema, respiratory distress, the whole body malfunctions in ketoacidosis and hyperglycemic shock.”

My hands were trembling. I clasped them together to make them stop.

“Just tell me what happened,” I insisted.

“I’m not sure we know,” Anje said. “In the evening his levels were well within acceptable range, everything seemed normal. But when the nurse came in for his 2:00 a.m. needle he’d gone into crisis. His glucose was through the roof. I don’t remember the number, I’ll check the chart, but it was over three thousand.”

She said the number as if it had tremendous importance. I had no idea.

“The poor old guy,” Anje continued. “He just wasn’t strong enough to hang in there until we could get him hydrated and stabilized. His blood must have been as thick as syrup in his veins.”

As I listened to her, my brain didn’t seem to be functioning correctly. It was like some fouled-up computer system. I kept feeding in the correct data but it was giving me nothing but error messages.

“He had diabetes.” I stated the obvious.

She nodded. “We know it’ll get you eventually,” she said. “Chester lived a lot longer than most.”

Had he? He was only seventy-eight.

“I honestly think he’d lost heart,” Anje said. “Don’t you?”

I nodded vaguely. “Yes,” I said. “He seemed depressed since he lost his leg.”

“They were going to start dialysis this week,” she said.

“Dialysis?”

“He didn’t tell you?” Anje tutted and shook her head. “I’m not surprised,” she admitted. “He didn’t seem too upset about the prospect of another amputation, but he really didn’t like the idea of being hooked up to that machine twice a week. He’d held the doctor off for months.”

“They were going to take off his other leg?”

“Probably,” she said. “I suppose they were hoping to get him stronger before doing surgery.”

“I just can’t believe it,” I said. “I didn’t realize he was in such trouble.”

Anje shrugged. “His diabetes was so brittle,” she said. “Blindness, kidney failure, circulation problems, wounds that don’t heal. It’s all textbook. He knew what he was facing from the time he was in his twenties.”

I just stared at her. I had no idea what to say.

Anje picked up a book on his table, looked at the title and set it down again.

“His nephew said they wouldn’t be able to come out here for the funeral,” she told me. “He had me call Molly…Molly somebody, she’s a niece, I guess. She can’t come either, but she’s making the arrangements for the service and burial. I told her I was sure you’d be by. She said if you wanted his personal things, that would be fine.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

We both just stood there. Uncomfortable.

“I really am very sorry,” Anje repeated.

“Thanks,” I said. “Could I have a moment alone?”

“Sure,” she said, very willing, even anxious, to leave me with my grief. “Take your time.”

I gave her a brave little smile that was totally forced.

She shut the door behind her. Tears clogged my throat. My knees were shaky. I sank into Chester’s recliner and the silence of his room. The scent of him still clung to the furniture. I ran my hand along the arm of the chair where I’d seen his own fingers so often lay idle.

Chester was dead. I had no trouble accepting that. I had loved him and now he was gone. The pain and emptiness in my heart couldn’t be caused by anything less. But what was impossible for me to grasp at that moment was the truth, staring at me so starkly. I had not known Chester at all.

I began to dissect the past in a new light. Stories and events in retrospect took on meaning that would have been so obvious to me if I’d been searching for clues. I remembered once more the strength of his grip as he’d pulled me out of my car. I had allowed that image of my rescuer to blind me to everything I had heard and seen thereafter. It was as if I had defined Chester by my own need for him and never allowed myself to see him as he really was.

I stifled a moan and bit back tears.

I had been in this very place once before. Not this room, not this time, but this very place in the depth of the soul. This regretful, sorrowful abyss of unwanted solitude.

Vividly I was reminded of the last time I’d faced the death of someone I’d loved. I hadn’t known Mama, either. I hadn’t known she was sick. I hadn’t known what she’d gone through. There was nothing about her needs or desires or fears that I was privy to. All I knew of her was her life as my mother. I had been a very greedy, selfish, uninterested young woman. The price I’d paid for that was never knowing my mother at all.

But my relationship with Chester was different. We had things in common. We’d understood each other. He knew I was trying to be a better person. He tried to help me. Why would he have kept the truth from me? Not because I wouldn’t have listened or wouldn’t have cared. He knew that I would. Why had he been unwilling to share what was happening in his life?