The Beresfords (34 page)

No one met me at the gate. I stood for some minutes, searching every face, turning at every childish shriek. They might be late. They could not have forgotten—Aunt Terri called only the night before to make sure Mom got the flight details in the mail. When every one of my fellow passengers had headed off or been greeted by loved ones or hand-written signs, I heaved my backpack onto both shoulders and followed the signs to the baggage claim.

Fifteen minutes later, I stood at the Arrivals curb, sweating in the dry heat and flanked by my beautiful blue luggage. In my pocket I fingered the calling card Uncle Paul pressed in my hand at departure. After another twenty minutes ticked by, a shiny silver pick-up slid into the near lane, slowing to a creep as the driver inspected each lingering loner. He stopped in front of me and powered the window down, revealing a lean man about fifty, with weathered skin and a bushy, graying,
Magnum, P. I.
mustache. He was holding up a wallet-sized picture and squinting at me. “You did your hair different.”

“Bill?” I croaked. I could hardly call him Dad, and “Mr. Bill” might sound like I was making fun of him.

“In the flesh,” he answered. “Throw your stuff in the back and get in. Your mom couldn’t come because I had to leave her at the ER with Rob and
Jame
. More stitches. Those damned kids are gonna bleed us out of house and home.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but for Bill this was a long speech.

“Thank you for picking me up.”

“Uh-huh.” He dialed up the stereo volume. Some country song about “after all this time, you’re always on my mind.” Something was certainly on Bill’s because he didn’t talk any more the whole way home.

There was plenty to see on the drive up from the airport. I tried not to look at the Rockies from the highway, in case Bill thought I was staring at him, but even Kansas-ward there were fields and fields, blue sky, high clouds, the occasional town. And downtown Loveland itself looked a big Irvington District, with its old buildings and historic houses. I had brief notions of Bill pulling up in front of one of the Victorian homes, but he kept driving, and the little yellow house we finally came to had 1950s written all over it. Stuck to the mailbox were those adhesive letters you bought at the hardware store: D-A-W-E-S.

Two children were tearing around the patch of yellowed grass in front until they spotted the pick-up and came running over to gawk at me through the window. A chubby boy with a buzz-cut and fresh bandages on his forehead and a smaller, skinny girl with glasses and a patch over one eye. Both were white-blond as I used to be, their mouths hanging open, though I wasn’t sure if this was because they were panting or because they were regular mouth-breathers. A memory of Aunt Terri flashed in my head: “Shut your mouth, Frannie! Are you trying to catch flies? If you breathe that way, your jaw won’t develop right.” Her reprimand sent me terrified to a mirror, to see if I really was growing slack-jawed.

“Give
ʼ
er
some space,” bellowed Bill, slamming out of his side. “Let’s look at you, Rob.
God’lmighty
—if you make it to your sixth birthday it’ll be a miracle.”

“Seven stitches!” crowed Robbie with a squirm. Then his eye met mine and he fell back into open-mouthed contemplation.

“There you are, then.” The screen door banged open and my mother stood on the step. Heavier than I remembered and her hair faded and straggling, but she retained a hard attractiveness difficult to pinpoint. It might have been the way she moved, her hand fluttering to that hair and her chin rising as if to say,
You have seen me better and worse.
The sharp gaze that sent tremors through me as a child had faded as well; now her blue eyes were as mild as her sister Marie’s. A pang for my sweet aunt gripped me and I took a stumbling step toward my mother, uncertain if we would hug or shake hands. She took a step my way as well, but when I lifted my arms, she pushed past me to smack Jamie lightly on the bottom. “Take your fingers out of your mouth and say hello to your sister,
ninnypants
. It was a good day Robbie picked to rip his head open, Bill. The ER was empty. Only one other guy was there who fell off a ladder.”

“His bone was sticking out! We saw it!” Robbie and Jamie clamored, forgetting their awe of me.

“I love your little bag! Let me carry it, Daddy,” begged Jamie, wresting my smaller blue case from him and jouncing it up the walk.

“Me!” roared Robbie. He shoved her down—where she promptly began screaming—and hustled into the house with the contraband.

“For God’s sake, cut it out,” bawled Bill, stepping over Jamie and rolling my bigger suitcase over her pigtail. Jamie screamed harder, and Mom leaned over to yank her back to her feet, giving me a shove toward the door in the meantime.

For all that the Dawes’ house was only a third the size of the Beresfords’—if that—it was stuffed with twice as many things. Piles of newspapers, magazines, plastic toys, decrepit furniture, jackets, baseball caps, dirty dishes, electronic equipment and cassette tapes, mail, shoes, lamps and cords and plugs, abandoned fish tanks, wilted plants, and—the jewel in the crown—a terrarium in the corner filled with scalped
Barbies
and unraveling stuffed animals.

“You’ll be with Jamie,” said Mom.

“Ha ha! I get my own room!” jeered Robbie.

“You’ll get the tool shed out back if you don’t quit all that hollering,” hollered his father. The noise level, which had been attention-getting outside, was positively ear-splitting when contained by walls. Jamie seemed unable to shut her mouth. She either shouted at her brother or wailed when he retaliated. The two of them took possession of my luggage, wheeling it top-speed up and down the hall and bumping it around corners. Mom hammered tabletops and walls to try to hush them, but eventually she sank beside Bill on the flowered sofa and took a sip from his Coke. The television was on, tuned to a talk show I could only hear intermittently but which I recognized as one Aunt Marie sometimes watched.

I felt a pressure building behind my eyes. If I were home, I would have sat in the shade outside and Paola would have pressed ice water and aspirin on me.
If I were
home.
This is home now, Frannie, I chided myself. For who knows how long. Pushing aside a pile of papers and junk mail, I made space for myself in an armchair and waited to be spoken to.

“I guess it’s a little louder here than at your uncle’s,” said Mom.

I had to hunch forward to hear her, and the displaced pile slide downhill toward my lap. “A little. My cousins are all grown up and gone. It was just me and the grown-ups left.”

“In that giant house! How many bedrooms does Marie have?”

“Oh…five, I guess.” I decided not to count the playroom or garage bedroom.

“And a pool, wasn’t there.”

“Yes.”

She sniffed. “Well, there’s no pool here, unless you want to count the city one by Osborn Park.”

“I don’t mind. I hardly used it.”

“And there’s no entertainment. Bill’s working and there’s the kids. You’ll have to find some friends your own age.”

I shifted off of the spring jabbing my backside. Some of the papers cascaded to the floor and I hastened to pick them up.  “I can help you with Robbie and Jamie and maybe get a job. I worked at a savings and loan in California.”

“Take care of us, take care of us!” sang Jamie, prancing over. “Read me a book!” She thrust a dove-gray leather-bound volume at me that I recognized as my Bible, pilfered from my backpack.

“We don’t need anyone taking care of us,” her brother objected. He had found my banana clip and was holding it to his face like a mouth of sharp teeth.

“Stay out of her stuff,” groused my mother. Jamie seized my Bible and the two kids took off down the hall, Robbie roaring through the banana-clip teeth and making Jamie shriek. Mom patted her hair and addressed me again. “You can babysit, but I can’t pay you. I guess your uncle says you’re supposed to be working on some school project. Something to do with biology and you can’t graduate without it.”

“Yes, that too.” I gulped. Apparently Uncle Paul neglected to tell my mother what the project was about. I didn’t blame him. I was loath to bring it up myself. “It’s—it’s about the brain. Is there a library nearby?”

“Not too far. Maybe a mile. We don’t have a car for you, so you’ll have to walk or take the bus.”

“Okay.”

“Can you cook, is what I wanna know,” spoke up Bill, tearing his eyes from the screen, where one of the talk-show guests, a teenage girl, was weeping nearly as hard as I wanted to.

I thought of all the delicious meals Paola spoiled us with. She let me help sometimes, but I had no idea how to work the magic on my own. “Uh—a little. I can write Paola for her recipes. They’re the best.” Only, now that I thought about it, Paola didn’t use any recipes.

“Who’s Paola?” said Bill.

“The housekeeper,” Mom answered. She said it again, more loudly, when Robbie and Jamie drowned her out. “Marie has help. That girl never lifted a finger in her life.” Her tone held
more amusement than resentment, but the resentment was there. “We should’ve told Paul to send us Frannie
and
the housekeeper.”

Bill chuckled. “Doubt he would have spared
her
.”

I did too. Paola was essential to the smooth operation of the Beresford household. Unlike me.

A silence fell, if you didn’t count the constant din of Robbie and Jamie playing and fighting. They were in a back bedroom now and somewhat muted. Probably trying on my clothes or trying to set the house on fire with my curling iron.

Bill hammered the remote control to dial up the volume.

The teenage guest had regained a measure of control by this point, although her face was red and her eyes swollen. “There, there,” the talk-show host said. He shook his head slowly in exaggerated sympathy as the girl blew her nose. “Hang in there. You’ve been through a lot, but look how far you’ve come. It’s hard to do, isn’t it?

“It’s hard to grow up.”

Three weeks passed before I received any word from home.

When a letter finally came, to be rescued from the spill of bills and catalogues and advertisements heaped on the kitchen counter, I spotted Caroline’s handwriting and was amazed by the swell of joy and longing it provoked.

“
Frannie’s
got a letter!” crowed Robbie, leaping up and down to snatch at it.

I held it high above his head. “Which means I’m the one who gets to read it. But look what I found the other day when Mom and I were cleaning out the desk. This has your name all over it.”

“Co-o-o-o-o-
ol
!” my brother cried when I presented him with the Banana Republic catalogue, on which I had carefully Liquid-Papered my mom’s name and written over it,
Mr. Robert S. Dawes
. It dated from 1987 but I knew Robbie wouldn’t care. He would be swept up in the safari illustrations and made-up travelogues.

“After you’ve looked at it, take a pen and circle one of every letter of the alphabet. Twenty-six letters. I’ll give you bonus points if you find more than one X or Z.”

“No fair!” protested little Jamie. “Where’s my mail?”

“Right here.” For her I had put aside a Spiegel catalogue. “Pick out your favorite models, and we can cut them out and make paper dolls later, okay?”

With my siblings occupied, I turned my back on them and slid my finger under the envelope flap.

Dear Frannie:

Groveling apologies for not writing earlier. I have no excuse except that I’ve been crazy busy. You wouldn’t believe how law students love to party—and I haven’t even officially begun! But the get-togethers and orientations continue. I suppose during the school year everyone has his nose to the grindstone, so when the opportunity for socializing presents itself—! Besides not having a second to myself, Eric isn’t here to nag me. He’s been traveling and so not home to sigh over his absent love (not that there wasn’t plenty of that the first couple weeks you were gone!). I never thought I would be sick of my brother, but it’s too much to ask of any girl, that she be forced to hear another’s praises sung day after day, especially when those praises were enumerated (world without end) just the day before and the day before that. Fear not, dear Frannie—my brother’s vanquished heart is still yours to torment! But Eric is (alas) gone, and you will have to satisfy yourself with memories of him, in the absence of new material.

I do have some exciting news for you, though. The Mets were in town to play the Giants, which meant—yes—the Perkins’ graced us with their presence. Even Julie deigned to visit, timing her stay to coincide with Rachel’s, I think so that neither one has to make conversation alone with her beloved father. Not that anyone cares the least bit about your cousins anymore. It’s all the baby the baby the baby now. You’d think Rachel gave birth to the Christ Child, for all the fuss about Jimmy! Everyone longs to hold his little red-faced, puffy, squalling self—the very image of
Greg
when Eric
pantsed
him in the pool long ago!—and Jimmy’s every movement and sound are marveled over as miracles from the hand of a loving God. Even Tom is under the baby’s spell, and I see
Marcy plotting an “accidental” pregnancy so she can nail him down at last. Your aunt Terri bustles around taking over, as always. She thinks because she spent that time in New York with Rachel when Jimmy was born that she knows him better than everyone else, and she has lots to say about “Jimmy prefers
this
” and “Jimmy always likes it when you
that
.” Deliver me.