French Braid(55)

He knew he was going into way too much detail. He hated when other people did that; he hated when they discussed their dreams at all, in fact. But it seemed important, for some reason, that Mercy should envision this scene as concretely as he had himself. “The whole motion of it came back to me,” he said. “Do you remember that motion?” and she nodded and said, “I remember,” and drew a blouse from the basket.

“And then Alice was there. Alice about three years old or so. She had that square kind of Dutch-boy haircut she used to wear back then, and she said, ‘Guess what, Daddy, we’re having busketty tonight.’?”

Mercy looked up from her folding. “Oh,” she said softly. “Busketty.”

“You remember?”

“Busketty and meatballs,” she said.

“It wasn’t so much a dream as a kind of time trip,” Robin said. “It felt a whole lot realer than a dream.”

“She was a cutie, wasn’t she?” Mercy said. “Weren’t they all? Oh, that was so long ago!”

“We’re getting old, Mercy,” he said.

“It’s true. We are.”

She was taking another blouse from the basket, but she folded it in slow motion. And she gave it a sort of caress before she laid it on top of the other clothes.

“So,” he said, “do you think you might want to move back to the house now?”

“Oh,” she said.

“Nothing would change! You could still paint your pictures! You just wouldn’t paint in your studio. Or maybe you could retire! I’m retired! You and me: we could loaf around together, take it easy, spend more time with the grandchildren or even travel a little, if that’s the kind of thing you…”

Once again, he was talking too much. And too fast. He was watching her take the very last item from the basket—a pillowcase—and shake it out and then carefully slide the stack of folded laundry inside it. She gave the pillowcase a gentle shake to settle the contents, and then she lifted it with both hands and turned to smile at him. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You hate to travel!”

He could have argued. He could have said that maybe he would learn to like it, or—more to the point—that travel was only the tiniest part of what he had just proposed. But he didn’t. All he said was, “Do you want Greta’s plant?”

“No, thank you,” she said.

“I could carry it for you.”

“It would be too much to take care of,” she said.

“Okay.”

He followed her to the foyer, but since he was still in his bathrobe he didn’t come out on the porch with her; just accepted her kiss on his cheek and then held the screen door open for her to pass through.

After that he went upstairs and got dressed, because there was nothing more pathetic than an old guy wearing a bathrobe in broad daylight. Then he went to the kitchen to rustle up some supper. Not that he was the least bit hungry after that big lunch, but it was past five o’clock by now and another pathetic thing was when old people started skipping meals and grazing on junk food and developing what Dr. Fish used to call tea-and-toast syndrome. No, indeedy: here was this nice potato salad the women had packed into Tupperware. He took it out of the fridge and set it on the kitchen table, along with a half-cup or so of cucumber slices grown only slightly translucent in their dressing. And a third of a salmon loaf, just about, still in its baking tin. He took that out too and carried it over to the silverware drawer so he could get himself a fork. Still standing at the drawer, he stuck the fork into the edge of the loaf and took a sample mouthful. Delicious. And then another. And then he sank onto a kitchen chair with the loaf pan cradled in his left arm and forked up mouthful after mouthful, each bigger and more hastily shoveled in than the one before, and all the while he was thinking, Why not? And, Who’s going to stop me? And, I have a right to this, goddammit!

In the end he finished it, every last crumb, and scraped the last crusty bits from the rim. Then he placed the empty pan on the table and laid the fork down beside it and sat staring straight ahead of him, while outside the screen door the birds were still singing and the sun was still brightly shining.





6


On Candle Lainey’s twelfth birthday—January 8th, 1997—she announced that she was instituting some changes in her life. Those were her exact words. “I am instituting some changes in my life,” she told her mother when she walked into the kitchen that morning.

“Oh?” Alice said, and then she planted a kiss on Candle’s forehead and asked what she would like for her birthday breakfast. So, basically implying that whatever those changes might be, they wouldn’t much matter.

“First,” Candle said, “I’m getting my hair cut. Ponytails are for kids. I’m thinking a kind of feathered look, a kind of winged look at the sides.”

“Isn’t that a little passé now?” Alice asked.

“Second, I’m getting my ears pierced. You said I could; you’ve been saying for years that I could do it when I turned twelve.”

“I said maybe when you turned twelve.”

“And third, I want to be called by my actual name from now on. Kendall.”

“That’s fine with me,” Alice said. “You were the one who started pronouncing it ‘Candle.’?”