French Braid(33)

Spring came early that year, at the very beginning of March. Lavender crocuses started speckling the lawn, in among the grass blades where they weren’t supposed to be growing. One morning the Motts’ huge oak filled up with tiny birds, so many of them that all at once the bare tree seemed abundantly leafed, and they made a busy chittering sound like hundreds of scissors snipping. Desmond stared round-eyed from the windowsill with his chin quivering.

Lily’s baby arrived, a boy, and she and Morris moved into their new house. They were planning to have a quiet wedding as soon as their divorces came through. Alice’s Robby began talking, and once she started she wouldn’t stop; Alice kept a notebook of all her funny sayings. David wrote to say that a skit of his would be staged in the college auditorium.

In April Mercy invited her three closest friends to the studio for tea: Darlene from high school and Carolyn and Bridey, whose children had grown up with her children. None of them knew she didn’t live at the house anymore. The few times they’d gotten together lately it was only for a movie or for lunch at a local café; no need for her to explain where she was coming from or going back to.

Her excuse for having them come to the studio was that she wanted to show them her portraits, but she served real tea from a teapot and cookies she’d bought at the Giant just the same as if she were entertaining at home. The three of them perched in a row on the daybed and sipped from cups that she had carried over in her tote. They all said they liked the portraits very much. Well, what else could they say, of course, but Bridey did ask, “So if you came over to paint my house, what part of it would you focus on?”

“I wouldn’t know what part, at the outset,” Mercy said. “I would just make some quick overall sketches and then come back here to figure that out.”

“Why is that? Why wouldn’t you need to paint the detailed part while you were there at the house?”

“Because the whole reason I’m painting the detailed part is, that is what’s ended up being the only thing I remember,” Mercy said patiently. “It’s the one part I really saw, it turns out. So I know it must be what’s important.”

“I see,” Bridey said, but she didn’t sound very sure.

When the women left, Desmond slipped out of the bathroom, where he’d been hiding, and stalked all around the room’s perimeter, reclaiming it as his own.



* * *



—

On a balmy evening in early May, Mercy heard someone climbing her stairs. She figured it had to be Robin; the girls would be fixing supper at this hour. She stood up hastily from the daybed and turned the radio off. (The idea was that she was staying here nights to work, not to sit idle.) But when she went to open the door she found Mr. Mott outside, Mr. Mott puffing and sweating in a short-sleeved seersucker shirt that made his arms look embarrassingly naked. “Why, Mr. Mott!” she said. “You’re back!”

“Not back back,” he said. “Just here to pick up a few things from the house.”

“How’s your daughter?”

“Not so good,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“She’s having to have these treatments, series of treatments,” he said. “Seems like things have spread everywhere.”

“Oh, no.”

“Right,” he said. Then he looked past her and said, “There you are!”—talking to Desmond, who was gazing at him blankly from his spot on the daybed. “How you doing, fella?”

“Oh, Desmond’s fine. We’re getting along just fine,” Mercy said. “Won’t you come in and—”

“So we’re going to have to move down there,” Mr. Mott said. “Move to my daughter’s place in Richmond. Got to help out with our grandson. Well, Elise can’t tend him. Right now she can’t even have him to visit her in the hospital, because the slightest little germ could be the end of her. And Dickie is not but eight, you know. So me and Mrs. Mott are going to have to move there.”

“But…maybe once everything is back to normal…” Mercy said.

He just looked at her.

“My nephew will be staying in our place,” he said finally. “He’s going through a divorce. So you can put the rent through our mail slot same as always and he will pass it on to us.”

“Certainly,” Mercy said.

“And would you might want to keep Desmond?”

“Keep him? You mean forever?”

“Right.”

“Oh! No, I’m sorry, I could never do that.”

“We can’t take him to Richmond because Dickie is allergic. And my nephew despises cats; I already asked him.”

“See, I really don’t lead the kind of life to own a cat,” Mercy said.

“But you’ve managed up till now, haven’t you? He hasn’t been any trouble, has he?”

“No, none at all. Still, I just don’t want a cat,” Mercy told him.

“But what am I going to do, then? How am I going to deal with this? I just have too much on me! Everything’s crashing in on me and I don’t know where to turn, and now I find out the water heater has been leaking all over our basement for I-don’t-know-how-long when my nephew swore in God’s name that he would keep an eye on things for us. I’m just…surrounded!”