As Bright as Heaven(110)

“What were you doing in there?” he gasps, in between breaths. His voice sounds so ordinary. All these years I expected Gretchen’s father to have a thick German accent. But he sounds just like me, as American as I am. He has the same kind of fatherly look in his eye that Papa would have, but without the devastated hurt.

“I was singing,” I said, unable to think of a better answer.

“I know that, but why? Why in such a place?” He shakes his head, incredulous.

“I wanted to.”

Mr. Weiss leans against the bricks and takes in a deep breath. “You were nearly arrested tonight.”

“So were you.”

He turns his head to look at me. “I’m not a girl who should be home in her bed.” He sounds angry. Like he’s planning to tell Papa where I was, which means I may not be on my way to jail at this moment but I am going to get found out anyway.

“I know who you are.” I don’t mean for it to sound like a threat, like I plan to see if I can get him in trouble, too. But it sounds like that.

“I know who you are, too,” he says, but not in a mean way. In an irritated way. He pulls me away from the wall, and we start to walk south toward our part of downtown. “You’re the schoolgirl who is always looking in my front window and making my dog bark.”

“I don’t make him bark!” I snap back, but at the moment I say this, I realize he doesn’t seem to know I am the mortician’s daughter who lives down the street from him. I am just the girl who makes his dog bark. I may not be in danger of Papa finding out after all. I can’t think of anything worse than Papa having to bear another crushing blow. Not now. Not after losing Alex. I soften my tone. “I’m not trying to make your dog bark. I’m just saying hello.”

“Well, it makes him bark. Why must you say hello to him?”

“Because he was Gretchen’s dog.”

He stops and turns to look at me. In the cheery light of the moon, I can see his eyes have gone glassy. “You knew my Gretchen?”

“Gretchen was in my class at school. I used to watch her play with that dog. He was so cute and he loved her so much. I could tell by the way he’d jump and prance and play when she was with him.”

“Yes,” he says in a dreamlike voice. “He loved her.”

“And then after Gretchen died, I’d see you walking him and I wanted to run after you so that I could pet him and play with him, but I didn’t know if I should. Or if you would let me. So I never did. But I’d walk past your bakery all the time, and I’d see your dog in the window above and he’d see me. He’d bark and it was like we were saying hello to each other.”

“You’re one of Thomas Bright’s daughters,” he says slowly, as though all the details are becoming more clear to him.

I don’t say anything.

“You lost your mother to the flu.”

A hot lump immediately forms in my throat. “She caught it from me.”

He blinks. “What?”

“I gave it to her. I had the flu, too. I got better. She didn’t.”

“Who told you you gave it to her?”

“No one had to tell me. I had it and she took care of me and then she got it. From me.”

Gretchen’s father looks down at Sweet Polly Adler’s dress. At my disguise.

“You can’t be out like this in a place like that,” he says, nodding in the direction we came. “What you’re doing won’t bring your mother back. She wouldn’t want you to be doing it. And I’m sure your father doesn’t.”

We stand there looking at each other, both with our losses raw and new and out in the open like they just happened.

“What’s your name?” he says.

“Willa,” I whisper.

“I’ll walk you home now, Willa,” Mr. Weiss says. “And tomorrow, you come up to the bakery to meet Louisa, Gretchen’s mother. You can have some apple strudel and then you can take Fritz for a nice long walk and you can play with him as long as you want. You can come back to play with Fritz every day if you wish, and I won’t say anything to your father about where you were tonight if you promise you won’t ever go back to that place. Do we have a deal?”

It suddenly occurs to me there won’t be a Silver Swan after tonight. I won’t know what has become of Albert or Mr. Trout or Foster. Or Lila. A peculiar sadness envelops me. Everything I love always gets taken from me in one way or another. Even that little dog will someday be taken from me.

“Do we have a deal, Willa Bright?” Mr. Weiss asks.

I tell him yes.

It is easy to make promises in a world where nothing lasts.





CHAPTER 66



? December 1925 ?





Evelyn


Oddly enough it was when Maggie told me that she broke off her engagement to Palmer back in November that I first began to see the slender strands of the solution to my own predicament.

We were all of us—Papa, Maggie, Willa, and I—living in the same house but isolated and alone in our remote mental wastelands of sorrow. Our shared grief was that Alex had left us, but we were all suffering from private wounds we did not speak of to one another. We were getting a taste of what it would have been like if Mama had died and we hadn’t had Alex to soften the blow.