French Braid(34)

He was. She could see that. He was going under. Oh, that helpless, sinking, beleaguered feeling, that weighted feeling of everything crowding in on you and strangling you and demanding from you, all at the same time!

She placed a hand on his arm, the sad puffy skin of his forearm. “It’s okay. I’ll take Desmond,” she told him. “Don’t you give him another thought. I’m glad to do it.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Then he turned to go. She wasn’t offended; she knew he had nothing left for the usual chitchat. She just dropped her hand from his arm, and he opened the door and walked out.



* * *



—

The following Saturday morning she walked over to the house to pick up the car, as she did every Saturday. She was the only woman she knew these days who had no car of her own, but she didn’t want the encumbrance, and anyhow, Robin would have found it extravagant. She went directly out back to the garage, and she fished her keys from her purse and got in and started the engine.

In her studio, she took Desmond’s travel case from the corner behind the door. Unaccustomed to cats though she was, she knew better than to let him spot it ahead of time. She set it on the kitchen counter and unlatched the lid before she went to scoop him up from the daybed. He struggled only briefly—surprised, it seemed, more than upset. She plopped him into the case and slammed the lid shut, lickety-split, and then she carried it outside and down the stairs. It was like carrying a bowling ball, the way the weight inside slid about and tilted and bucked, but she hung on. Meanwhile, Desmond was silent. She had expected him to meow. But it was an expressive silence, she felt, a sort of bristling of the airwaves. Not till she parked at the animal shelter and walked around to the passenger side to reach in for his case did he say anything, and then it was just a single, questioning “Mew?”

She shut the passenger door behind her and hurried toward the building with him.

When she got back to the studio, she gathered his supplies—his two bowls and his sacks of kitty litter and cat chow, his litter box and the slotted spatula next to it—and she carried them out to the garbage bin in the alley and dropped them in. Then she returned to the studio. The silence there was noticeable. She couldn’t figure out why, though. It wasn’t as if Desmond had been a noisy cat.

She ought to make her weekly grocery trip now so she could return the car to Robin, but first she thought she’d just sit awhile. She sat on the daybed with her hands folded; she didn’t even try to look busy. She didn’t even turn the radio on. She just sat listening to the silence.



* * *



—

Summer arrived, but David came home for only a few days, because he’d found a job with a theater group. Children swarmed the neighborhood, chanting and laughing and quarreling. The oak tree in the Motts’ backyard had filled out with so many leaves that any small birds on its branches chirped invisibly, but larger birds (hawks? some kind of falcons?) could often be seen circling high above it and then wheeling off again. For the first time Mercy wondered if certain birds were famous among other birds for their distinctive flying style—if they took pride in executing a particularly graceful arc or a breathtaking swoop as the others watched admiringly.

She would give her shoulders a shake, finally, and turn away from the window and go back to whatever painting she’d been working on. The carved pineapple on a newel post. The ball-fringe trim on a curtain. The doorstop shaped like a black iron dog with a tail like an upright feather.

Am I missing something? she thought every now and then. Am I overlooking something?

But she would dismiss the notion, and reach once more for a paintbrush no thicker than an eyelash.





4


Nobody in the Garrett family made much fuss over Easter. Oh, they did buy inexpensive prefilled baskets for their children if they happened to notice some in the supermarket, and they might drop in on a neighborhood egg hunt just to look sociable, but that was about the sum of it.

So when David phoned on an April afternoon in 1982 and proposed driving down that Sunday for Easter dinner, they were all taken aback. Lily was the one he spoke to. She was at work; she managed the store for her father now that young Pickford had become a survivalist and moved to the wilds of Montana. “Wellington’s Plumbing Supply,” she said, and David said, “Lily, is that you?”

“David?” she asked. “Is everything okay?” Because David was not a telephone person, to put it mildly.

“Yes, fine,” he said, “but I’ve had a hell of a time tracking anyone down. First I called Mom: no answer. And then Alice, but she didn’t answer, either.”

“Well, of course not. Alice is harder to find than any of us,” Lily told him.

She said this because it hurt her feelings, a little, that he’d tried Alice before he tried her. In fact, Alice was normally very easy to find. But “Carpool, moms’ group, PTA…” she said.

“So then I figured I’d try Dad,” David told her, hurting her feelings even further. “I’m glad I got you, at least.”

“Huh,” she said.

“I wanted to check about Easter.”

“Easter! What about it?”

“Well, I thought I might drive down for Easter dinner. Bring a friend.”