Benediction (Plainsong #3)(14)

Who’s Alice?

The little girl next door with Berta May.

All right.

Her mother died of breast cancer.

I remember now, Dad said. I know.

Later, when the three of them were still talking, Dad said: You could come back and run the store. You’re already here. You wouldn’t even have to leave. You could stay here and run it.

I don’t know if I want to do that, Daddy.

It’s all in the will, he said. It goes to Mom and then to you after she’s gone. You could learn how. You’re quick and you know how to manage people. You manage people already.

Just four people in the office.

That’s enough. You wouldn’t have to take care of that many here. There’s Rudy and Bob and the bookkeeper. They’ve been with me so long they don’t need much managing.

They’re used to you, Lorraine said. They wouldn’t want somebody new coming in and telling them what to do.

They’d get used to it.

I doubt it.

They’d get used to it. Or else, you’d let them go. You can think about it. Will you do that?

I don’t know, Daddy. We’ll see. What do you think, Mom?

I think it’d be nice to have you here. You could live with me in the house.

We’d make each other unhappy. You know we would.

Well, I don’t either know that, Mary said. You wouldn’t make me unhappy. But you mean what I’d do to you.

I didn’t mean anything, Mom. I’ve just been away for so long.

They looked at Dad. He was staring out into the street past the trees and the fence. Does it hurt you, Daddy, for us to be talking about what will happen after you’re gone?

I don’t want to know all of that. What I want to know about is the store. I want that figured out.

But if I took over, what about Frank?

What do you mean? Frank won’t be coming back.

But what about him? How is he mentioned in the will?

He’s not mentioned.

Why isn’t he?

Because he left.

So did I.

But not like he did. We don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. We don’t know nothing about him no more. We haven’t had contact in years.

I used to hear from him, Lorraine said. He’d call me on the phone at work.

When was this?

When he was still in Denver. Then I didn’t hear from him anymore. I tried to find him but I couldn’t. We used to meet and go out to a bar and talk.

Honey, we know you did that, Mary said. We thought you were talking about something different.

He always wanted to meet at a particular bar downtown. He’d come in as he always did, like he was sick, or hungry. Maybe he was, both. He’d sit down and look around. I’m paying, I’d tell him. Then I’ll have something good, he’d say. We’d smoke and when the drinks came he’d take a long swallow and say, Goddamn. Here’s to happier days, and then he’d start talking.

About what? Dad said.

Oh anything. His work. His friends. What guy he was living with.

We don’t need to hear about that.

I know, Daddy. He was just so sad sometimes and so blue.

He was always sad, Mary said. As he grew older, I mean. Not when he was little.

He’d be drunk by the time we finished for the night. Sometimes he’d get funny too.

What do you mean?

Oh, he could be funny. He had style. He could be really witty. Did you know that?

We never heard much of that here, Dad said.

No. He wouldn’t here. But he could be very funny.

Like how? said Mary.

Oh, just clever. Not telling jokes, I don’t mean that. But talking in a funny entertaining way about different people. About his life. About his friends and the people he worked for.

I suppose he said something about us, Dad said.

He talked about you. About both of you.

What about us?

What his life was like here, Daddy. When he and I were growing up here in Holt.

It was all bad, I suppose.

Not all of it. He had some good things to say too.

Well, I don’t know.

I hope he did, Mary said. She got up and went into the house and brought back a blanket and spread it over Dad. He sat in the chair looking out at the street, the blanket drawn up to his chest.

The millers were swirling under the porch light and bumping it and dropping to the floorboards and fluttering upward again. Mary went back and switched off the light and returned and sat down. The millers still singed themselves against the hot bulb and fell or fluttered away. From beyond Berta May’s house the corner street lamp cast long shadows through the trees that moved a little in the night air.





10


YEARS AGO Alene walked along a wide Denver sidewalk with her arm in a man’s arm. That was in wintertime. A snowy evening. The snow was falling thickly and it was pleasant under the lights along the street, walking slowly past the city stores, looking in the windows, delaying going back to the hotel for the pleasure of being out in the cold air together. She was a young woman then, just thirty-three, nice-looking and slim and tall and brown haired and blue eyed. He was a little older, closer to forty, a tall man with the gray starting to show at the sides of his head. A principal in a school in the same district as the school she taught in. Which was how and why they met, at a district-wide school meeting. She had felt something at once. And then she had found a way of saying something to him. She couldn’t remember what it had been but it’d made him laugh and then they’d met again at another gathering and he had wanted to know if she would join him for dinner sometime in Denver. They both understood what he was saying. She said yes, she’d like that. And that was when it began.