Authors: Lisa Wingate
Dandelion Summer (11 page)
I gave up the battle then, and we ate in relative peace. Deborah left quickly afterward, off to some project, I supposed. Over the weekend, she harassed me about the pacemaker issue, which put us at odds. In the end she was quite happy to increase the schedule of afternoon help, so that the two of us would not have to deal with each other as frequently.
On Monday, the housekeeper left a sandwich for me, and on Tuesday, the girl was to come. Deborah had dropped in at lunchtime to check on me and leave food for the girl to cook. Just as I was bidding Deborah good-bye and preparing to embark on my search of the upstairs closets, the tenant in our garage apartment stopped by to discuss repairing a water leak. The pitter-patter of company left me worn, and, after making some notations in my project log, I postponed my plans to dig around upstairs. I was catching a nap on the parlor settee when the girl banged on my door.
I let her in, and she bounced past me and dropped her backpack on the tile, then set some sort of folded display board beside it. More schoolwork, no doubt. Good, since it would keep her busy. “Hey, J. Norm,” she chirped, like a little bird fluttering through the entry. Somehow, she’d taken to shortening my name. She was an impudent little thing, because she knew she could be. She was aware of my secrets, after all. This overly familiar behavior was blackmail of a sort, but a small price to pay for having Deborah out of the way so that I could work unhindered at least four days per week. Making progress in the upstairs closets and the third-floor attic would require solid blocks of time. The attic, in particular, had always been a black hole, crowded with our castoffs as well as items that had belonged to my parents when they lived in the house. What I was seeking could be hidden in any of the boxes. Or in none.
“Norman,” I corrected. “
Mr. Alvord
, to someone as young as you.” We went through this process each time she came. It did not improve things, and I knew it would not. This was merely a dance we did upon meeting—a tango filled with anger and an occasional glimpse of mutual understanding. She’d be insufferable, now that she’d been asked to come four days each week. She would assume I was pleased with her job performance, or worse yet, that I found her presence tolerable in some way.
Mr. Alvord
, to someone as young as you.” We went through this process each time she came. It did not improve things, and I knew it would not. This was merely a dance we did upon meeting—a tango filled with anger and an occasional glimpse of mutual understanding. She’d be insufferable, now that she’d been asked to come four days each week. She would assume I was pleased with her job performance, or worse yet, that I found her presence tolerable in some way.
“Yeah, I know. So what’s on the menu tonight?” She asked this question each day upon arrival, as well.
“Deborah left an envelope.”
“How come I’m not surprised?” She shook her head. The envelopes filled with Deborah’s detailed instructions as to food and medications had become almost a private joke between the girl and myself. “She say whether you’re supposed to eat with a fork or a spoon today?”
I felt myself struggling to fight off a display of mirth. It was a good quip. “I think I’m allowed to have my choice tonight.”
“Woo-hoo. Is it your birthday?” She grinned impishly. The girl had a lovely smile, actually—beautiful, straight white teeth, and wide, full lips. It occurred to me that she didn’t smile very often. For someone so young, she seemed, in large part, bleak, tired, and resigned. A bit like myself. Such emotions were out of place in a fresh face like hers. I wondered at the cause of this, but considering that harpy of a mother of hers, the girl was doing quite well.
I wasn’t developing a fondness for her, of course, and I didn’t want her to think I was. “I have work to do,” I said, and started for the stairs.
“Go for it.” She directed herself toward the kitchen.
“You’ll answer the phone if Deborah calls,” I told her. There was a phone in my office, but it was an old hardwired model and had a little hum to it. I feared that if I were to answer, Deborah would discern the slight difference in the sound quality and know where I was. “And you’ll stay belowstairs and buzz me over the intercom if anyone pulls into the driveway.”
“Yup.” The girl headed off to the kitchen. I was pleased that she knew our arrangement was not to change just because she was working four days rather than two.
But as the week progressed, she grew slightly more familiar each day. It was troublesome. By Friday, she was kicking her shoes off in my entry hall. “Whoa, those were killing me,” she remarked of the sandals.
I frowned at them. “We do have a shoe closet.” I pointed toward the door next to her. “Conveniently within reach.”
Shrugging, she opened the door and kicked her shoes in, then slipped her backpack off her shoulder and pulled something from it. She held it up as if she felt I would have an interest. “Hey, J. Norm, look what I got today.” She lifted it near my face.
I squinted at the box. Unsalted butter, by the look of it. A full pound. Unopened. My mouth watered. I couldn’t recall my last taste of real butter—sometime before Annalee put me on a low-fat and low-cholesterol diet two years ago, following my close call with a heart attack and subsequent surgery.
“Butter?” I surmised.
The girl’s face lifted into a grin. “Yeah, I jacked it from the consumer science room at school. Mrs. Lora always said nothin’ cooked without real cow butter tastes right, and Mrs. Lora could cook.”
“
Stolen
butter,” I corrected.
Stolen
butter,” I corrected.
She snorted and rolled her eyes, I suppose to indicate that I was ruining her surprise.
“Yum,” I said blandly, and she smirked at me, then started for the kitchen.
“Don’t fall down the dumb stairs and get me in trouble.”
“I will endeavor not to.”
She stopped then, and flashed a glance over her shoulder, her lips pursed. “What’re you doin’ up there, anyhow?” Her gaze drifted toward the stairs, curiosity brewing in her odd gray-green eyes. This was the first time she’d shown an interest in my comings and goings, other than to warn me not to cause her to be fired, because she had a use for the money.
“Work,” I answered, and I noted that she had on even more makeup than usual. “So much makeup is unbecoming on a young lady. My wife never allowed Deborah to wear more than a bit of lipstick when she was in school.”
Momentarily, I thought I’d succeeded in offending the girl, or perhaps in making a point, but she only bobbed her head side to side with a slight shrug of her shoulders. “Well, you ain’t my mama, and besides, you ain’t so shiny, neither.”
“
Aren’t
. . .
either
,” I corrected, and she gave a slow, deliberate blink.
Aren’t
. . .
either
,” I corrected, and she gave a slow, deliberate blink.
“If the fashion police come by here, they’re gonna haul you off first.” She motioned to my attire, and I was reminded that I still had on this morning’s pajama pants and slippers. Halfway through dressing, I’d had a thought about the young woman who had lived above the garage and served as a mother’s helper in the house when I was quite young. She was a cousin of some sort, as I recalled. She had an older sister who had lived with us briefly, too. I’d adored Frances, and now I remembered that she’d left my mother’s employ abruptly. I couldn’t recall why. Frances . . . Frances . . . something. It occurred to me that if I could unearth my mother’s photo albums, Frances’s full name might be written there. No telling whether she would still be alive today—Frances must have been eight or ten years older than myself. I’d had no luck finding Mother’s photo albums in the closets. I had finally concluded that they must have been packed and moved to the attic when my mother passed. The albums would not be easy to find. There was no rhyme or reason to the tangle of items stored in the attic—ours, my parents’, perhaps even things that had been in the house when my parents had purchased it.
Deborah had come and gone this noon and not even noticed my combination of a worsted button-down shirt and blue pajama bottoms. Perhaps she thought I’d done it to goad her, and so she’d ignored it intentionally.
“I fear they’ll arrest both of us. The fashion police,” I remarked, and started up the stairs. I had the urge to turn and look at the girl again. When I did, she was shaking her head and smiling. It seemed a long time since I’d made someone smile.
“Mind the fort,” I told her. “Keep the front door locked and chained. If Deborah drops by, delay removing the chain until I can make it down the stairs.”
The girl’s gaze met mine again, and she winked. “I got your back, J. Norm.”
I did not correct her, as she seemed determined to persist in the ridiculous nickname. I supposed I was becoming accustomed to it.
After the long climb up the stairs, then through the door at the end of the second-story hall and up the attic stairs, I proceeded with my search for Mother’s photo albums. There was an old steamer trunk in which she kept family mementos when I was a child. With any luck, I could spot it among the offal of stored items. The idea that I could perhaps find information about Frances, and that she might still be alive, had fired my imagination. A direct link to the past could answer so many questions. Frances was present in my most remote memories, the ones close to the time of the seven chairs, perhaps slightly after.
The upper deck was unusually warm when I reached it, April sunlight flooding through dormer windows high in the eaves, illuminating stacks of boxes, crates, a rocking horse, a dress dummy, a wooden room divider purchased in Saudi, a clay water pot from Kathmandu, a drugstore Santa Claus that Annalee had dragged home after the season, half price. He stood in the corner now, his red paint gone from the white plastic, giving him the look of a snowman about to be whisked into oblivion by a ray of sunshine.
He just needs a little touch-up
, Annalee said cheerfully in my mind. She never tossed out anything. To her, the items here were precious receptacles in which the days of our lives remained stored, frozen in time. It was because of Annalee that the boxes from my parents hadn’t been sent to the trash during our many years here.
Someday you’ll want these things, Norman
, she’d said.
, Annalee said cheerfully in my mind. She never tossed out anything. To her, the items here were precious receptacles in which the days of our lives remained stored, frozen in time. It was because of Annalee that the boxes from my parents hadn’t been sent to the trash during our many years here.
Someday you’ll want these things, Norman
, she’d said.
I’d insisted that I wasn’t a sentimental person.
As it turned out, both of us were correct.
It seemed strange that, if my mother’s photo albums were here, Annalee had never rescued them from the attic. In later years, she’d developed an interest in genealogy and scrapbooking. She’d spent many an hour poring through old files and photos. My mother was also a preservationist, given to keeping scrapbooks, never one to leave family heirlooms and photos without a notation on the back. Yet I’d never seen Annalee with any of my mother’s private things. That seemed odd, now that I considered it.
A sweat broke over me as I worked, and the air in the attic turned stifling. I relocated closer to the stairway, sifting through things piled atop what remained of an old bedroom suite with trundle beds. I remembered moving them up the attic stairs. Roy and I had done it together. At seventeen, he was six-foot-three, having inherited the tall, slim stature of Annalee’s father. He’d outgrown the boyish furniture and the child-size bed. Annalee’s parents were moving into a nursing home, and she wanted to redo Roy’s room with their furniture. The room was never finished. Roy never slept in it. Everything that belonged to him lay carefully boxed, where it had been since the spring of his senior year. Rather than a high school graduation party that April, we arranged a funeral.
I stood in the corner for a moment, looked at the bed, and thought of Roy. There was a stack of boxes under the eaves—model rockets and cars. Annalee had placed them beneath the Christmas tree year after year. She’d thought that Roy and I would build them together, but the models remained in their containers by mutual agreement. Roy wasn’t one to stay in the house and I wasn’t one to be home. Occasionally, when I was around, I found Deborah working with the models. She was more inclined toward quiet, solitary pastimes. She had a scientific mind, even when she was young.
It occurred to me now to wonder whether my mother’s trunk could be in this part of the attic, behind Roy’s furniture. That would explain Annalee’s never having encountered it while doing her family research in later years. I sidled along the edge of the stairway opening and began laboriously moving bed railings, a headboard, a footboard. The blue paint was faded and crackled now. It seemed foolish that we’d saved the furniture. I suppose Annalee had been thinking that the little trundle suite might one day be a perfect heirloom, that Roy might pass it along to a son, or paint it pink for a daughter.
Those ideas were too difficult to consider, even now. Too painful. The heart is never prepared for a child who remains frozen in time, for hopes unrealized.
I caught a glimpse of tarnished brass behind the three-drawer chest that held Roy’s little-boy clothes. We’d rescued that dresser from a trash heap when we were living on Switch Grass Island. Annalee had painted it to use in our bedroom at the time. I was a young man, working for Hughes Aircraft at Cape Canaveral, in the race of a lifetime. A race beyond all that was known, to the surface of the moon. The hours were long, but the work was important, competing with the Russians an imperative. Annalee was busy with the house and with Deborah. My work was stimulating and challenging. We made the most of my rare days off by enjoying time on the lake in our little boat. Life, it had seemed, couldn’t be any more golden.
I stretched across Roy’s dresser now, and there was the black steamer trunk, the one my mother kept in her sewing room with a lace quilt draped over it. I was more likely to find something of value in there than in all the boxes I’d sorted through to date.
I went to work moving the rest of the furniture, stopping on occasion to mop my forehead and catch my breath. Good fortune that I hadn’t started this project in the summer, or the attic heat would have been unbearable. All the same, I took heart in my ability to clear the furniture out of the way. Only a couple weeks ago, such work would have been beyond my capacity, but all this climbing up and down the stairs and moving the boxes had increased my stamina.
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