French Braid(22)

Morris. Mercy filed the name in her memory. So many unexpected people seemed to edge into a person’s life, once that person had children.

“I was thinking last night that I might ask if I could camp out in your studio awhile,” Lily said. “Sleep on the couch, heat a can of soup on the hot plate…”

Mercy stirred uneasily. “Oh, well,” she said. “Actually, your and Alice’s old room would make more sense. Since it has real beds and all.”

“My room! Do you know how defeated I’d feel, moving back into my childhood bedroom?”

“Well, no need to make any rash decisions,” Mercy told her. “But, listen! Maybe you should see a doctor, find out if you’re really pregnant. It could be that you’re just late.”

“Three months late?”

“Oh.”

Recent sightings of Lily raced through Mercy’s mind—Lily stopping by the house to borrow the blender, Lily at David’s goodbye supper. Had she been wearing extra-loose clothing? But she’d always been the sloppy type. “Well,” Mercy said, “you should see a doctor anyhow. How do you feel, by the way?”

“I feel fine,” Lily said. “What do you hear from David?”

Mercy dragged her mind back to the reason she’d called. “Not a word,” she said. “I was thinking we might get a letter today, but the mailman’s already been and he didn’t bring a thing.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Lily told her.

“No, well…”

“Now, promise not to tell Dad about you-know-what, okay? Wait till I decide what I’m doing.”

“All right, honey,” Mercy said. “I know you’ll figure this out.”

And they said their goodbyes and hung up.

It was a lot to take in, Mercy reflected—not just Lily’s pregnancy, but the disastrous state of her marriage and the unexpected appearance of what’s-his-name.

Morris, that was it.

She was ashamed to admit that her main concern was how to dissuade Lily from moving into the studio.



* * *



—

When they didn’t hear from David on Thursday, Mercy sent him a postcard from her stash of museum cards—a Seurat. “We miss you!” she said. “We need to hear you’re okay! Please write.” She didn’t give him any news from home, because she wanted him to wonder. Besides, at the moment she didn’t have any news that she could share. Lily’s condition was still a secret, and her own move to her studio should first be announced to his father.

She sort of dreaded that.

She dropped the postcard into the corner mailbox on her way to the studio. Today she was bringing footwear. She had exchanged her Sunkist carton for a canvas tote by now, and she filled it with a pair of dress shoes, a pair of sandals, and her slippers. What she hadn’t planned ahead, though, was where to stow them once she’d arrived. She cast her eyes around the room, which still had a satisfyingly stripped-down look. It was crucial not to add any extras. Eventually, she stashed everything in the deepest of the drawers beneath the kitchen counter. It wasn’t as if she meant to do any serious cooking here, after all. She could afford to give up one drawer.

Today, for the first time all week, she walked over to the table and studied the single painting that stood propped against a jarful of brushes. This wasn’t a work in progress. It was completely finished. The subject was her own house—the dining room, specifically. A vague gleam of dining-room table and a blur of rug and a forest of sticklike chair legs, except one chair was the high chair that her children had once used, and those legs were microscopically detailed, every knob and indentation, as was the stuffed rabbit in overalls, little Robby’s rabbit, lying facedown across one rung where Robby had thrown it.

Next to this painting was a stack of postcards featuring the same painting in miniature. The white edging at the bottom bore her name and her studio phone number, followed by “Let a Professional Artist Paint Your House’s Portrait.”

She was sort of a professional. Wasn’t she? Or should she have said a “trained” artist? She had deliberated some time over that, and still she wasn’t sure that she had made the right choice.

She’d been trained at the LaSalle School, down on 26th Street. She’d spent a year and a half there, and she had dreamed of studying in Paris someday. Now she couldn’t imagine how that would have come about. Her father was not a rich man by any standard. Had she thought she would get a grant of some kind? Or apprentice herself to some famous French painter? All she could recall now was a mental image of the attic room she had fancied she would live in—the steeply slanted ceiling and the narrow window with its view of Parisian rooftops.

Still, the LaSalle School was a very respected institution.

She was planning to display these postcards in neighborhood grocery stores and on laundromat bulletin boards and next to the register at Wellington’s Plumbing Supply. But not till she had told Robin.



* * *



—

On Friday they heard from David. Finally! He wrote on ruled notebook paper and he sent it in one of the envelopes Mercy had stamped and addressed for him and tucked in his suitcase pocket. “Dear Mom and Dad,” he wrote. “I like it here a lot but I have to take remedial math which I am not happy about. Love, David.”