Passing through Perfect (Wyattsville #3)(79)
On the second day they had a little more than a hundred miles to travel. It would be a short day. They’d arrive well before dinnertime, and Benjamin would have time to unload the truck and get settled in. Monday he would start work.
A million thoughts rolled through Benjamin’s head. He tried to picture the house, Marty’s face, the kind of work he’d be doing, but right now everything was a foggy shade of gray, too far ahead to see clearly and without a past to look back on.
He eased back on the gas pedal and slowed the truck. There was no need to rush. For too many years he’d rushed from one job to the next, never taking time to enjoy the moment. Never taking enough time to enjoy Delia and Isaac. This time it would be different. This time he would be both daddy and mama to Isaac. He’d make time to listen when the boy had a story to tell. He’d get to know Isaac as Delia had known him.
Now crawling along at thirty miles an hour, he turned to Isaac and asked, “How you feel about moving to Pittsburgh?”
Isaac smacked the baseball from his right hand into the catcher’s mitt and back again.
“I guess it’s okay,” he said. “I like having new clothes ’n stuff, but I miss playing with Jubilee ’n having Miz Carmella teach me lessons.”
“I miss them too,” Benjamin replied sadly. “They surely are good people.”
“I miss that nice playroom what had toys ’n games,” Isaac added. “When Miz Carmella finished lessons, she give me cookies.”
“Now I got a good-paying job, maybe we can see to some after-school cookies.”
Isaac looked across and rolled his eyes, “They ain’t gonna be good as Miz Carmella’s.”
Benjamin laughed. “Probably not.”
Isaac said nothing more; he just sat and stared out the window. They passed by a few billboards saying it was only fifty and then forty miles to Pittsburgh; the images were of brick buildings and steam belching steel mills. Isaac looked at them with childlike disappointment. After a long while he asked, “You think there’s kids what’s gonna play with me in Pittsburgh?”
“Pittsburgh’s a city, just like Bakerstown was a city,” Benjamin replied. “We ain’t gonna live in Pittsburgh. We’re gonna live a ways out in the country, where there’s plenty a’ things for a boy to do.” He gave Isaac a grin and added, “It’s a place where you can see real airplanes coming and going.”
Isaac turned with an expression that seemed to question whether such a thing could be true. “Even if I sees airplanes, it ain’t gonna be good as playing with Jubilee and living in that nice playroom.”
He gave a low mournful sigh, one that made him sound decades older than his years. “I wish we could a’ stayed there,” he said. “That place was perfect.”
Benjamin was relieved that neither Isaac nor Jubilee had heard the ruckus on Wednesday evening. When Paul started up the stairs, he’d turned up the volume on the television and both kids sat there mesmerized by Wagon Train.
Stretching his arm across the seat, Benjamin pulled Isaac a bit closer. “Perfect ain’t a place,” he said. “It’s a time when everything’s good and we’re happy. Folks don’t live in perfect, they just get to pass through every so often.”
“You ever passed through perfect ’fore, Daddy?”
Benjamin nodded. “I sure have,” he said and began telling of the night he first met Delia.
“Your mama was the prettiest lady I’d ever laid eyes on…”
As Time Passed
Back on Bloom Street it took many months for the wounds to heal. During the next few weeks several of the neighbors stopped by to apologize. Barbara Paley brought Carmella a potted plant. Prudence trotted over with two dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies.
“Being a widow makes me overly frightened of strangers,” she said.
It wasn’t much of an apology, but Carmella could see little value in carrying a grudge so she brewed a pot of tea and invited Prudence to sit.
Not all of those involved came to apologize. Some neighbors held on to the belief that they’d been right. They scurried in and out of their houses without ever glancing to the right or left.
But in time such anger wearies a person. It weighs on them like a heavy coat, worn threadbare and without warmth. After a while the wearing of it becomes a burden, so it gets pushed to the back of the closet and forgotten. That’s pretty much what happened with the last few holdouts on Bloom Street.
When winter turned to spring, crocuses broke through the earth and people started once again setting out pots of daffodils and spring lilies. By then the memories of that night had faded to nothingness. Although no one spoke of it and few cared to remember, the truth was that the residents of Bloom Street were never quite the same.
In the wake of such bitterness a new understanding was born. A greater tolerance, you might say. On Saturday afternoons when Sid returned from the store, he’d often find his lawn mowed. When Paul returned to college, Bab Paley’s son volunteered to work in the grocery store after school. And that first Christmas a basket chock full of homemade cookies, cakes, and candies was left on the Klaussners’ front porch. No name; just a card saying, “Merry Christmas from your friends.”