Something Rising (Light and Swift) (20 page)

The plane tickets lying on the kitchen table were to New Orleans, one for Cassiopeia Claiborne and the other for Laura Dubuisson Claiborne, leaving April first. Four days away. They were intended as a surprise; Cassie and Belle were going to make
an early Easter basket for Laura, placing the tickets lightly in the crinkly plastic grass behind some Marshmallow Peeps. Cassie had reservations at the Maison Orleans, five days and four nights, and she'd even had matching T-shirts printed up with
WWJE
on the front, and on the back,
WHAT WOULD JESUS EAT?
Cassie laughed and shook her head, closed her aching eyes; it had been a surprise, all right. The six thousand dollars she had intended to spend on her mother in New Orleans had instead gone, all but a thousand of it, to Robbie Ballenger for Laura's funeral. He hadn't blinked when Cassie paid him in cash, although he must have been taken aback. Most people in the county didn't pay him at all.

Years ago when Poppy was still alive, Cassie had asked him where he'd hide a bit of cash, household expense money, she'd called it, and he said the last place he'd look if he was a burglar was in the kitty litter, so they'd devised a two-tiered scheme in the litter box, with the money sealed in freezer bags at the bottom, under a separate pan. Miss Mittens hadn't used a litter box in many years, preferring to employ the flower gardens Laura painstakingly planted. Cassie walked out in the mudroom and removed the bag, quickly counting the bills. This was the money Belle knew about and drew from to pay their bills and buy groceries. They were down to just over thirty-eight hundred, and there was no way to know what Laura's hospital bills would be. She'd been a patient for only three days, but Cassie had lost track of whether her mother had health insurance. There was another five thousand under the false bottom of a dresser drawer in Cassie's room, which she reserved for a stake, and another seven thousand wrapped with venison in the freezer. If Cassie went to New Orleans and didn't make it back, the money wasn't much for Belle to live on until she figured out something else. Her food
would have to be delivered, someone (undoubtedly Edwin) would have to carry her manuscripts to the post office and pick up her packages. She had a small income from editing, but the only thing that would save her without Cassie was if Belle could be legally declared unable to work and could begin receiving government benefits and Medicare, and who would verify what was wrong with her when Cassie couldn't get Belle to leave the house so someone could verify that she couldn't leave the house? Cassie would do anything, she had already done things she couldn't have predicted to save her family, but it seemed beyond her to do that one, to voluntarily cast herself into the jaws of bureaucracy. No one in the world wanted to save Belle, no one but Cassie, alone now in rural Indiana, and if she placed their lives in the hands of the government, they would be beaten as if with whips. Cassie had not ever, in her adult life, paid an income tax, and how to explain that one?

At three-forty Miss Mittens, whose radar was uncanny, began scratching at the back door. Cassie jumped, then realized she'd been dreaming. She opened the back door and scratched the old cat on top of her bony skull; Miss Mittens purred and wound between Cassie's legs as she opened a can of cat food and placed the whole thing on the floor, bypassing the food dish. She looked at the cat, at the floor, at the door, then propped the door open with a boot. As Cassie passed the kitchen table on her way to bed, she gathered up the letter, the journals, the plane tickets, leaving the constructed sentence as it was, so Belle would see it in the morning. She picked up a piece of yellow notebook paper Belle and Laura had been passing around for a few months, on which
they debated which historical suicide they'd undo if given the option. Their first choice had changed a number of times, from Sylvia Plath to Dorothy Parker to Cleopatra (back again to Plath), with notes about the song “Gloomy Sunday,” until Cassie had picked up the list and written
Elvis Presley
. Next to his name Laura had written,
Yes, that's perfect
. And Belle had engraved with her Eversharp,
He's not actually a suicide
. But later they'd discussed it and agreed: there are lots of ways to kill yourself; it just takes time.

She slept like a person falling down a hole, and woke at ten the next morning. Brutal, cherished Laura was not now and would never be again standing at the kitchen window waiting for her daughters to get up; no coffee made, no smoke hovering in the air like Saint Teresa. Cassie dressed quickly in a thermal shirt, a flannel shirt, jeans, and boots, then headed into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth and hair, surprised to find she still recognized herself.

In the kitchen Belle was sitting at the table, going over a manuscript. The sentence from the night before was nowhere to be seen. “You left the door open last night, and when I got up the house was about seven degrees. The furnace has been running for its life for the past three hours, I made coffee,” she said without looking up.

Cassie stopped halfway to the stove, having smelled coffee without fully realizing it. “Thanks.”

“Well, thank me after you've had a cup. I was winging it.”

The first two cups in the cabinet were Laura's, Fiestaware in pink and green, not the radioactive colors. Cassie moved them aside
and took out a battered piece of stoneware, dark brown with a lighter brown rim. They owned a whole set of these dishes, a wedding gift to Laura and Jimmy; they were ugly, and sacred as a relic.

Belle's face this morning was fine-lined, with a faint yellow tint; her eyes were puffy, and the skin around her nose was irritated. For years she had worn Laura's clothes, saying she had no interest in shopping or developing a personal style, but it was harrowing to see her in them now: Laura's green blouse and narrow black pants, her flat black shoes. Belle didn't say, and no one else said, that she didn't buy clothes because she never left the house, would never leave. She had retreated from the Wide World and come back to the kitchen table, and worked there every day, so what were clothes to her? “What's this?” Cassie asked, pointing to the manuscript Belle was correcting.

“It's a chapter of Peggy's dissertation on ancient Athenian festivals. This one concerns the Munichion, which was dedicated to Artemis.”

The coffee was too strong—it caused Cassie's tongue to curl—but she drank it anyway. “Good?”

“It depends on how you feel about the sacrifice of she-goats dressed up like young girls. I frankly think it's a good idea. And there were cakes covered with candles: imagine that. But the sentences are bland. I can't help but rewrite it as Roberto Calasso would have.” Belle ran her hands, shaking, through her brittle hair, going gray.

“You want something to eat?” Cassie asked.

“I ate already. Are you going to Bud's?”

“In a minute. What did you eat?”

“Toast.”

“I don't see a plate.”

Belle looked up, staring at Cassie for a moment with no expression. “I ate it over the sink.”

Cassie stared back, said nothing.

“Don't think for a moment that you're going to start telling me where and when to eat, I won't have it.”

The coffee seemed to be getting thicker as Cassie neared the bottom of the cup. She swirled the dregs around, trying to see the future, but she'd never understood the concept.

“Even Laura never hassled me about eating, I don't know where you get off.”

Cassie rinsed out the cup and placed it in the dishwasher, then started making a sandwich to take with her.

“Peggy misplaces modifiers right and left, and within a few months she'll be called
doctor
. Dr. Mosley. I can hardly stand it. And another thing is I could say plenty about how you live your life, but I keep my own counsel, so why don't you do the same.”

Cassie took a small carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator, stepped into the mudroom for her backpack and her coat.

“Are you driving into town?” Belle picked at the scabs on her forearm.

“I'll ride my bike.”

“Cass, it's cold outside. I nearly froze just picking up the paper this morning, and don't say it's because I've got no insulation, if I hear that one more time.”

Cassie pulled on her black wool cap and gloves, opened the closet where she kept her cue. The leather case fit against her back like a quiver of arrows. She searched in her pockets for her sunglasses, then wheeled her bike out of the corner and propped open the back door. Miss Mittens ran in, turned around, ran out again.

Belle walked out onto the porch. “Why don't you go ahead and take your truck?”

The back wheel of the bike bounced down the two cement steps. “Thanks for the coffee, Belle.” Cassie strapped her pack onto the back of the bike, pulled her right sock up over her pant leg, and climbed on. Belle sighed and closed the door as Cassie rode away; Miss Mittens clawed at the welcome mat. How were they to know how to live? Who would tell them?

Cassie passed the fencerow on her right, where sometimes a hawk circled, and the pond surrounded by cattails a little farther up. It was too cold to ride the four miles into downtown Roseville. On either side of the road, mobile homes and double-wides sat tucked away in the tree stands farmers left when the land was originally cleared; at night the trailers twinkled like narrow gift boxes, and there were more every year. Large tracts of land went up for sale in five-acre increments, and within a year ten to fifteen mobile homes and their inevitable accessories—plastic flowers and wooden cutouts of overweight women bent over weeding, garden gnomes and small plaster donkeys—dotted what had been a soybean field.

Cassie turned right on 300 West and sped up. The road had been repaved only last summer, so the Indiana winters had not yet destroyed it. She lowered her head and leaned into the miserable air, her legs beginning to come to life after the many motionless days. It was flatly too cold to be riding into town. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a handkerchief; her nose was running, her eyes were streaming tears behind her sunglasses, but the feeling she'd had earlier of her knees being made of old cork
was fading. She breathed deeply, rode, thought of herself in motion, as she had when she was a child. Then there had been no limit to how far she could ride, not because she was stronger but because she thought differently. The trees and fields began to give way to businesses dotting the edge of the Price Dairy Road, a used-car dealership, a lawn-mower repair shop. The Granger School was in ruins. The gas station was still there; the florist's shop now held a custom framer. April and May's was still standing, although the sisters themselves were dead. Cassie remembered one of them sitting on the front porch of the house where they had been born and always lived, it might have been April or it might have been May, the way she sat on the front porch wearing a dress and red lipstick. The candy shop was now owned by two gay men who did well there. They had taken the pathos right out of the candy business, as Laura had said. Cassie passed Holzinger's and approached the center of town. The mechanics and body shops that had dotted Railroad Street when she was a girl were gone; even a car wash had been abandoned, its fiberglass walls gradually buckling as volunteer trees grew up too close. It sat in a green pile, covered with last autumn's leaves and young shoots of ivy. Only Uncle Bud's remained on Main Street, with Howdy's hanging on behind it. Cassie unlocked the steel back door, then rolled her bike up the steps. She pulled the string and turned on the light in the storage room, a corner of which was kept clear for her bike. She stowed her jacket and pack, carried her lunch and her cue up front.

Cassie had owned the cue fourteen years and handled it so gently that only the tip had been changed. Uncle Bud had given her the best advice, which was to treat it as if it were an original; no harm done if she was wrong. She screwed the parts together,
felt again the brilliance of the balance. Jimmy loved things more because they bore a certain signature or earned him greater respect. If someone had told him that this very cue had been made by someone in Hopwood County in a garage in his spare time, Jimmy would have given it away without a second look. But what her father would have done with the cue, and who he would have lost it to had he not lost it to Cassie, no longer mattered. Because he'd lost it. She racked the balls and practiced for the next three hours.

Uncle Bud opened a Diet 7UP. He had recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure and high sugar, so he'd given up alcohol, caffeine, and regular soda. His life was miserable.

“Didn't see Jimmy at your mom's funeral,” he said, pushing an open bag of pretzels toward Cassie.

“Ha.”

“Anybody let him know she died?”

“Why would we?” Cassie took a drink of orange juice.

“Well, they were married. They had kids together.”

Cassie said nothing, unwrapped her sandwich.

“Just seems like maybe a person would want to know if his ex-wife died.”

“Are you
trying
to piss me off?”

“All I'm saying—”

“Seriously, are you trying to piss me off?”

“Cassie, knock it off. Sit back down and eat your sandwich.”

She sat down on the bar stool, heart pounding. Bud took a drink. Cassie took a drink.

“What about New Orleans?” he asked.

“What about it?”

“You going?”

“I'm thinking about it.”

“What's to think about?” Bud's dark blue T-shirt was stretched taut over his broad shoulders and heavy stomach, and proclaimed, in white letters,
FAIR WARNING
.

“A lot of things.”

“Like? start your next sentence with Like.”

“Like are you
trying
to piss me off?”

Bud opened a second bag of pretzels. “Like maybe you don't want to go without your mom, like maybe it would be too painful, maybe you'd feel a little like you were betraying her.”