What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (25 page)

They sent me back to class, and I’ve been thinking about this ever since. It’s not fun to think someone might have done something like that for you. If that’s love, it’s a very scary kind. Not the kind I ever want.

I thought I might have nightmares about it. But I didn’t dream at all, which scared me even worse, because where has Felix gone? I’d be happy now if he showed up in a dream, even.

And I never thought I would say this, but I want my mother.

23

He’s at Wuffie’s house. I got Ben to drop me off on the way to his Saturday tennis game, and Felix was sitting on the floor clipping Cookie’s toenails.

“Where have you
been
?”

Cookie gave me a popeyed look and started drooling. I lowered my voice. “I was worried about you.”

“As you can see, I’m all here.”

I thought,
I wouldn’t bet on that
, but I didn’t say it. I told him I found the statue, and he gave me this look and said, “Well, I guess I can’t go back in there.”

“No, it’s pretty much of a mess,” I said sarcastically. Now that I wasn’t panicking, I was mad at him for scaring me. “You might want to inhabit St. Thomas instead.”

“Oh, I don’t think
he
would let me in.” Felix snipped off the last toenail and Cookie sat up. He fed her a biscuit.

“I do not believe in any of this,” I said, despite the fact that I
had
half believed it when I couldn’t find him.

“I used to think God might take me back,” Felix said. “But it doesn’t look like he’s going to. I’ll have to figure out something else. Maybe it’s time I gave up the sainthood thing. Settled down.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Sensible thing to do.”

He scratched Cookie’s ears. “The Virgin says I should hit the road, see what I find.”

All of a sudden I didn’t care what he was. I just didn’t want him to leave. “That’s not settling down! Why?”

“Check out who else I am,” he said. “Since I seem to be stuck here.”

“How am I going to get along without you? Who am I going to talk to?”

“I think you can probably talk to yourself now,” he said.

I think maybe I probably can. But it feels like having somebody else die.

Felix looked like he knew that. “You still having my dreams?”

“Not since the fire,” I told him. “And that one was even freakier than the others. You were in it too, and you talked to me.”

He nodded like he remembered. “I don’t think you’ll have them anymore.”

“How do you know?”

“I told ’em to stick with me.”

“You
want
them?”

“I don’t mind them. They’re kind of like friends now.”

“How can you make dreams listen to you?” This conversation was getting as weird as talking to Felix always did, like he was getting some kind of transmission from a mother ship nobody else can tune in to.

“I had to tell them it was okay, let them come home.”

That halfway made sense.

He reached into a pocket of his shirt and pulled out something wrapped up in a scrap of cloth. “I made you something. Since I ruined your statue.”

He put it in my hand and I unwound it. It was a little
santo
, carved out of wood. It might have been the Virgin with a crown of roses on her head. Or it could have been a man with a robe and tonsure. It was hard to tell.

“So you’ll have somebody to talk to,” he said. “From your lips to their ears.”

“‘Their ears?”

“There are lots of people listening to you, you just don’t see them all.”

Saints from the eighth dimension, maybe. I remembered what Helen said about the pattern of the universe. I think that looking at it from where we are, we might as well all be dyslexic. There are probably a lot of things we just don’t see, or see backwards. Cupcake came and put her head in Felix’s lap beside Cookie’s. I watched him snuggling the spaniels and thought about him cleaning out the church anyway while all those old ladies were saying he’d started the fire.

“Grandpa Joe told me about something when I was little,” I told him. “It’s called
tikkun olam
. That’s Hebrew for mending the world. I think that’s what you do.”

He ducked his head. “Not me.”

“Not the big things,” I said. “Not global warming or AIDS or things like that. What one person can do. Mending the things you can mend. Taking care of Cookie. Planting lavender. Being kind to people.”

“Little stuff?” he said.

“Little stuff. Just whatever we can do. If you do that, you mend those boys you couldn’t save, too, I think.” I was starting to sound like Felix, but I really did think so. I still do. I’m not sure he can mend himself, but he mends other people.

He didn’t say anything. His head was still bent over and now I saw tears on his face. I leaned down and kissed his bald spot. Or his tonsure. “Is Mom around?”

“She’s out back.”

I went through the kitchen and out the back door to the vegetable garden, where Mom was watering the romaine. We haven’t had any rain yet. It’s really wonderful when it rains. The hills turn green overnight and then they’re covered with yellow mustard flowers and orange poppies, like somebody poured paint out of a bucket. Right now everything is still brown.

Mom was setting a sprinkler on the lettuce. She turned the faucet on and it jetted around and shot me in the face. I backed out of range while the sprinkler whirred its way across the garden.

“Sorry about that!” Mom called.

“Can I talk to you?” I dodged the sprinkler and sat down on the rock wall.

Mom sat down next to me. “What is it?”

“Felix is leaving.” I kicked the wall.

“I know, honey. Wuffie asked him to stay here and do the stuff that Grandpa Joe is getting too old to do, but he won’t. I think he wants to see if he can make it on his own.”

“I can’t stand it.”

She put her arm around me. “You can stand what you have to stand.”

“Are you coming back home?”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“I’m glad about that.”

“I want you to be very clear that I’m glad you’re glad, but also that I’m not doing it for you. No one should make or leave a marriage for anyone else’s sake.”

“Got that,” I said.

“Well, remember it,” Mom said. She squeezed my shoulders.

“Mom, why did you marry my dad?”

She got real quiet then. She didn’t take her arm away but she sat absolutely still for three minutes, which is a long time. I timed it, counting hippopotamuses the way you do to scald a tomato. I could have scalded a whole bushel.

Finally she said, “For all the reasons I just told you why you
shouldn’t
make a marriage. Because he wanted me to. Because I was afraid no one else would want me again. Because I wanted children. Because I wanted a second chance at getting love right.”

“With a South American gangster you met in a bar? Honestly, Mom.”

“That’s Wuffie’s version. He wasn’t South American, and I met him in a library. Wuffie didn’t like him, but I was old enough to do what I wanted, so they gave me a big wedding and prayed.”

“Were you pregnant?”

“No, but I wanted to be.”

“Why did you leave him?”

“I didn’t. He left me.”

Oh. That might explain a lot.

“I was pregnant then,” Mom went on, “and I was way too demanding. He had business to take care of, and I thought I could get him to change. Instead, one day he was just gone. He left me you, though.” Another long pause. “Do you want to look for him?”

I knew she was hoping I didn’t, but she’d let me if I wanted to. I’ve thought about it before, but by now I’m pretty sure Ben’s the only father I really want. “Sometime, maybe. When I’m eighteen.” When nobody can get any insane custody ideas. I don’t think I would trust Gil Arnaz. “For, like, his medical history,” I said. “Not now. It’s just that I don’t understand guys and I thought maybe there was some secret password, you know, handed down from mother to daughter with the tampons talk, that you’d forgotten to tell me.”

Mom kind of snorted. “Boy, are you talking to the wrong person.”

I sighed. “Okay, how about your first husband? The one who gave you the rabbit?”

Mom looked wistful at that. “Brian Reilly.” She shook her head. “He was seventeen and I was sixteen and we swore eternal love at a football game. His family was going to move to Ohio as soon as school let out, so after the game we took his dad’s car to Las Vegas and got married.”

“Were you drunk?” I asked. Maybe that wasn’t tactful, but I want to know what makes people do things.

“Only on the romance of it all. Then we woke up in a motel room that had bedbugs because that was all we could afford, and I knew we’d been stupid. I wouldn’t admit that to Wuffie, but I knew. I was tragic about it, but I let her get the marriage annulled.”

That struck me as so sad. “Do you still think about him?”

“No, sweetie, not really. I feel bad because maybe I messed up his life—when you’re seventeen you’ve got a grown-up body and a baby brain, and it’s so hard. I worry about what an awful example I’ve set for you.”

“I have no plans to elope,” I assured her. “I’d really like to make the first marriage work out.”

“Like I said, you aren’t talking to the right person. Ask Wuffie. She’s been married to Grandpa for forty-seven years.”

“No way.” I am so not going to ask my grandmother about sex. And I suspect Mom really knows more than Wuffie. Mom probably knows what I need to know. “But, Mom—”

“Yeah?”

I bit my lip. “Well, Jesse was at the fire? And he tried to put it out?”

“Angela, please don’t speak to me in questions.”

“Sorry.” I made myself quit that. But it’s so easy to do when you’re feeling unsure of yourself, like it kind of protects you from what you’re actually saying. “Well, Jesse was there right away and now the fire department thinks it wasn’t the fuses after all. They think he set the fire, to impress me by putting it out.”

Mom let out a long sigh.

“You think so too?” I demanded.

“Helen Reinder said it wouldn’t surprise her,” Mom said. “I’m pretty sure you were more serious with Jesse than you’ve told me.”

“Mom, how can someone do something totally horrible because he loves you?”

“I never did figure that out,” Mom said. “But I did figure out that people don’t do things like that from real love. Out of obsessive love maybe. Or they’re using you as an excuse. But not real love. That’s not the way real love behaves.”

“Real love takes a plot point out of a script even when he still thinks you’re wrong?”

“Yeah.” Mom smiled. “For the record, I’m not wrong.”

“You’re not ever going to tell me what it was, are you?”

Mom took a deep breath. “You know, I think I will.”

“You’re kidding.”

But she wasn’t. She told me.

She kept her arm around me while she talked. “Have you ever had anything happen to you that was just so humiliating and awful that you cringed every time you thought about it, even a long time afterward?”

Okay, I can relate to that. “Yeah,” I said.

“Well, this was one of those. It’s been thirty years, and it still made my stomach knot up. But it’s odd, now—after Darren and Jesse dying, it suddenly seems so far away, it’s just not worth hiding anymore.”

“Is this about First Husband?” I still wondered if she’d been pining for him all this time.

“Yeah. I told you, I realized the next morning that we’d been stupid. There we were, in this awful motel room with bedbugs and a stopped-up toilet, and I just knew that our whole life was going to be like that because there was no way we were old enough to be grownups. I called Wuffie while he was in the bathroom, and it made him so angry. He said I didn’t love him and we started to argue, and then it got into a shouting match and he called me a whore and drove off and left me there.”

“Oh my God.”

“He was hurt. I’d made him feel like a fool. I can see that now. But the motel owner heard him and thought I really was a prostitute, and he threw me out. I had to sit on the sidewalk in my best dress, that I’d gotten married in, all stained and torn where I’d caught my heel in it, and wait for Wuffie and Grandpa Joe to come and get me. It took hours, and every so often the motel owner would stick his head out the door and yell at me and threaten to call the police, but I didn’t have any money or any way to call my parents again and I’d told them where I’d be and I was afraid to leave for fear they wouldn’t find me. I’ve never been so terrified.”

“But they came and got you?”

“Oh yes. I knew they’d gotten in the car the minute they hung up the telephone. But it’s a day’s drive. It was night by the time they got there. Wuffie wanted to know why I was sitting on the sidewalk, but I was too humiliated to tell her.”