Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (8 page)

Katherine has promised to take her granddaughter Robin out for ice cream, and after she has showered and dressed, she drives across town to Tanner’s house, skirting the edge of Lake Sodowsky to avoid traffic. When she reaches Chestnut Street, the neighborhood children are playing a game of street hockey with a tennis ball. They part before her car in that resolute, mannish way of boys pretending to be athletes.

She coasts to a stop beside Tanner’s mailbox. His car is parked in his driveway, and his yard has been freshly mowed. Her feet kick up loose shocks of grass as she walks to the door.

She can hear voices coming from inside the house. “What did I tell you?” her son shouts. Ever since he was a boy he has suffered from fits of improbable anger—fits that would seize him for a few minutes and then just boil away—but this is the first time Katherine has heard him in such a temper in his own home. “Your grandmother will be here any minute. Put the damn puzzle up and get your shoes on!”

Robin says something that Katherine cannot quite make out. Her words are halting and breathy, like a breeze coming through the joints of a window.

“Don’t talk back to me!” Tanner shouts.

There is a sudden light pattering noise—puzzle pieces falling to the carpet, Katherine thinks—and then the slap of skin against skin. Robin starts to cry.

Katherine feels a rising heat in her chest and she raps on the door. “Just a minute!” calls Tanner.

When he appears in the doorway, he has composed himself. “Mom!” he says, registering excitement in his voice. “Come on in. Robin will be ready in just a minute.” He turns to his daughter, who is standing behind him and snuffling back tears. “Go get your shoes on, honey,” he says gently.

Robin rushes past, and Katherine sees a mottled red handprint on her bare leg. She steps inside, shuts the door, and looks her son in the eye.
“Tanner,”
she admonishes him.

“What?” he says.
“What
?
”

“She’s just a child.”

His face grows hard. “With all due respect, Mom,” he says, “you know nothing about it. It’s been fifteen years since you were a parent: your time has passed you by.”

Katherine doesn’t know what to say to this. “Your father and I never struck you, Tanner. Not once.”

“
You
never struck me,” Tanner says. “Dad did, sometimes, when I got out of line, and it did me a world of good.”

Katherine is taken aback. Her ex-husband, who now lives in Minneapolis with his second wife, has struck her son—this is a new fact. “I . . .” she says. “I didn’t know that.” She wonders if she should place a hand on his arm, but she can see him flinching away from her.

“You didn’t need to,” he says.

Robin runs up the hall from her bedroom, wearing clean white socks and sandals made of sparkly pink rubber. Though her cheeks are still wet, she is no longer crying. “I’m ready,” she says, and she takes Katherine’s hand.

Tanner escorts them onto the porch. “You two have a good time,” he says. Their conversation is at an end.

In the car, while Katherine shudders onto an access road over a set of rumble strips, Robin tells her that she would rather eat at her favorite restaurant, KidBurgers, than at the ice cream parlor. In her high, flat-toned singing voice, she delivers the first few lines of the KidBurgers jingle: KidBurgers /KidBurgers / The burger place for kids! /
A toy with every meal! / What a deal!

“Did your father come up with a name for his cereal?” Katherine asks.

“No,” says Robin. “He’s been walking around the house testing names for a week.”

At the restaurant, Robin orders a cheeseburger, fries, and a strawberry milkshake, Katherine a chicken sandwich and a diet cola. The boy behind the counter hands their food to them inside a checkered cardboard KidBurgers tray, along with a box of four wax crayons. Robin pours salt and pepper directly into her ketchup thimble, stirring them into the sauce with her fries, a habit she learned from her father, who learned it long ago from his own. “Do you want to hear what happened in school last week?” she says. “I won the Most Enthusiastic Student award.” She tells Katherine that she got to be the line leader when they went to the playground, and that she bounced on a trampoline in gymnastics after lunch one day, and that a boy named Jason lodged an apple seed in his ear on Friday and had to leave before TV time to go to the doctor. Katherine nods, only half listening, and takes a sip of her soda. The sun is shining onto their table through the window, and birds are flailing about in the sky.

“Tell me,” she asks. “How often does your dad get mad at you?”

“Not very. He yells sometimes. Mom says it’s his
job
that does the yelling, not him.”

There are times, Katherine thinks, when her granddaughter seems to have the grace and poise and self-possession of a full-grown woman, like a coin sent whirling for a moment on its edge. “Did he get mad at you before I came over today?”

Robin signals with her finger to wait a second, sucking a globule of shake through her straw. She swallows, takes another sip, and swallows again. “No,” she finally says.

When they have finished their lunch, Katherine drives Robin to the grocery store. “I’ll buy you a coloring book to go with your crayons,” she says, and Robin begins to shift about excitedly, zipping her thumbnail back and forth over her seat belt.

Katherine has always found grocery stores strangely reassuring. Shopping carts with rattling silver baskets. Automatic doors with pressure-sensitive exit pads. Weighing scales and cheese displays and mounds of shining fruit. The people in grocery stores know what they’re there for, lists of things to purchase gripped in their hands. They wheel from aisle to aisle, gradually filling their baskets, passing each other like ducks on a pond and converging finally at the cash registers. Also, there is the basic grocery store floor plan, a single, universal design that she has found to be the standard—vegetables at one end and dairy products at the other, meats along the back wall and frozen foods down the center aisle. She takes comfort in this lack of surprise.

After they have parked, Robin leads Katherine straight to the breakfast foods section, stopping at a rack of cheap toys and magazines and sifting through the coloring books. “I think I want this one,” Robin says, examining her options. She holds up a coloring book with the title
Ponies and Princesses
on the cover, her hand obscuring a picture of a unicorn.

Katherine hears a voice behind her say, “Hello.”

When she turns to look, it is the man from the library. “Where did you come from?” she asks. This is the first time she has seen him outside the library, and she wonders if perhaps he has been following her.

“Just purchasing a few necessities,” he says. He grins as he talks, his head bobbing idly on his neck. “Loaf of bread”—he displays in his left hand a loaf of bread—“and carton of eggs”—he jiggles a carton of eggs in his other.

Robin is watching him with undisguised curiosity, clearly not at all wary. She is enjoying this strange glimpse into her grandmother’s life. “Hi,” she tells the man. “I’m Robin.”

“Robin,” he answers, “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. My name is Woodrow.” He stoops to his knees and meets her face to face. “And I think your mom is the
best
mom in the
whole
world.”

“Grandmom, actually,” says Katherine—though why she feels the need to clarify this, she doesn’t know.

“We had cheeseburgers for lunch,” says Robin.

“
Cheese
burgers!” exclaims Woodrow. His eyes bug out and he laughs as if she has just told a tremendous joke. “You don’t make
burgers
out of
cheese
!”

Robin giggles. “Yes, you do!” she says. “And then we came here for a coloring book, because I got crayons with my cheeseburger. See, I’ll show you.” She shakes the crayons from her crayon box onto her palm. “Blue, yellow, orange, and green.”

“Mm-hm,” Woodrow says. “Four crayons. So where did you leave your mommy, Robin? I hope you didn’t lose her.”

“She stayed home with Daddy.”

“This little piggie went to market,” he says, tapping her on the nose, “and that little piggie stayed home.”

Robin smiles. “Which little piggie are you?”

Woodrow gives a theatrical scratch to his chin, thinks for a moment, and then appears to experience a great revelation. He stands and his knees crack. “Whee, whee, whee!” he cries. He trots to the end of the aisle, disappearing around the bend. His voice stops abruptly—for a moment it seems that he has simply dissolved away— but then his head appears from around the corner and he waves good-bye.

When it becomes clear that he is not going to return, Katherine takes her granddaughter by the shoulder and asks her if she is ready to go. Robin is clutching her coloring book in a rolled-up tube, staring up the aisle as if a train has just departed there.

“Where did he go?” she says.

Katherine makes a wide, stumped gesture with her arms. “I have no idea,” she says.

Robin thinks for a moment. A pale fluorescent light flickers overhead, and a shopping cart with an unpinned wheel jerks past. “I
like
him,” she finally says.

On Sunday Katherine visits her mother at the Briarwood Nursing Facility, a converted hotel in the center of the downtown business district. She is lying in her bedroom, her head propped crookedly on a pillow, and a flower pot is tucked beneath her arm. Katherine can see that this is one of her bad days. She seats herself on the edge of the bed and leans over, placing a kiss on her mother’s forehead. There is a fog of misunderstanding in her eyes.

“Mom,” Katherine says, smoothing the skin of her hand. “Mom, do you recognize me?”

“Hello, dear,” her mother says. Then adds, after a moment, “Katherine.”

“How have you been?” Katherine asks. “Have you been sleeping well?”

“Look at that giant woman,” her mother says. She gestures weakly toward the window, which presents to her room a view of a billboard. Giant woman? The model in the advertisement holds a long brown cigarette in the crook of her fingers. The left half of her body has come unglued, stripped from the billboard like bark from a birch tree. It hangs past the walkway and twists loosely in the high breeze, and in the opening it leaves Katherine can see the face and arm of another woman, larger than the first, fingering the stem of a cocktail glass.

“She’s splitting in two,” says her mother, “but she’s still laughing. Why do you think she’s still laughing? Do you suppose it tickles to have her in there?”

Katherine guesses that the “her” her mother is referring to is the second woman, the one inside the other.

“I wish you had a better view, Mom. Have you asked the nurses about being moved to the other side of the building?”

Her mother does not answer.

“I can talk to someone for you if you’d like.”

She closes her eyes, her plum-colored eyelids shivering once or twice behind thick spectacles.

Katherine has just begun to think that she has fallen asleep— lately her mother seems to drop away instantaneously—when suddenly she breaks the silence. “Tell that boy to visit,” she says. Her eyes are still shut. “Tanner. That son of yours. I’d like to see my great grand-”—her voice fades away for a moment and she opens her eyes—“daughter.”

“I’ll do that.”

A man with an aluminum walker scuffs by in the hallway, and a car horn sounds on the street. There is an air of stillness and exhaustion in the building, a forgetfulness in the faces of the nurses and residents. It is as if the days and months and even the seasons here are without aim or effect or intelligibility.

“Let me tell you about my week,” says Katherine. “I took Robin to lunch yesterday. We ate at KidBurgers. Did you know that she dips her french fries just like Tanner does?
He
learned it from
his
dad, and
she
learned it from him. It made me think of all the things I’ve learned from you, all the little habits and mannerisms. I still carry extra buttons in my wallet, did you know that? Just like you always did. I still eat my meals one ingredient at a time and I still wait for the third ring before I answer the phone. That’s what makes us family, I think—little things like that . . . What else happened this week? I met a man at work—”

“He always leaves that there,” her mother says, grimacing.

“Pardon?”

Her mother looks toward the doorway, and Katherine turns to see a metal carriage there, weighted down with blankets. “Would you be a dear and move that for me?” her mother asks.

“Of course,” says Katherine. “On my way out.”

“Good,” her mother says, and yawns. “I had a dream about your father last night. I wanted to tell you that. We were living in our first house, the house we bought when he got his promotion. The one with the deck in the back and the pine trees in the yard. You were just a baby. Do you remember that? It was summer and—oh—something happened. It was a lovely dream. We were very, very happy.” She sighs. “Why doesn’t your father ever come to see me? Have you asked him why he never comes to see me?”

Katherine feels a prickle of fear—almost panic—washing through her. She can feel it in her hands and in her shoulders. Her father is seven years dead now, resting beneath a tablet in the Edge-wood Memorial Cemetery, and this is the first time her mother has forgotten his loss, the first time she has restored him to life in her mind. Carefully, Katherine says, “Mom, Dad passed on. Don’t you remember? He had a heart attack and died in the hospital.”