The Truth About Forever(81)

As we came around the corner of the porch, Lucy, who was toddling along ahead of us, immediately ran down the stairs and toward a large piece that was made up of hubcaps attached to a twisted center pipe. "Push! Push!" she demanded, slapping at one of the lower parts with her hand.

"Say please," Wes told her. When she did, he gave one of the top hubcaps a big push, and the entire piece began spinning, some of the circles rising up, while others moved down, all of it circular, catching the light again and again. Lucy stepped back, watching entranced and silent until it slowed a couple of minutes later, then creaked to a stop.

"More!" she said. She was so excited she was hopping up and down. "Wes, more!"

Wes looked at me. "This," he said dryly, "can go on for hours." But he pushed it again anyway.

"Wes?" Delia's voice carried over the trees. "Can you come over here? I need something heavy lifted."

"I said I can do it," I heard Bert protest. "I'm stronger than I look!"

"Wes?" Delia called again. Poor Bert, I thought.

"Coming," Wes replied. To me he said, "You okay with her for a minute?" When I nodded, he headed around the side of the house. Lucy watched him go, and I wondered if she was going to start screaming. But instead she began walking across the yard with what for a two-year-old seemed like a strong sense of purpose.

When I finally caught up with her, she was at the back fence. Looking over her shoulder, I saw a row of three small heart-in-hand sculptures, miniatures of the one by the side of the road. Each one was slightly different: in the first, the heart had a zigzag across it, like it was broken. In another, the edges of the heart were jagged, pointy, and sharp looking. My favorite was the one on the very end, where the heart in the center of the palm had another, smaller, hand cut into its center, reminding me of the little nesting dolls I'd had as a kid. All the sculptures were especially rusted and dirty: clearly they'd been there for awhile before Lucy pushed aside the grass covering them.

Now, she turned her head and looked at me. "Hands," she said.

"Hands," I repeated. I watched as she took her small hand and pressed it to the hand in the first sculpture, her fingers overlapping the rusted ones, the pale, smoothness of her skin contrasting with the dark, ragged metal. Then she glanced back at me and I did the same, pressing my hand to the one beside it.

I felt a shadow fall over us and looked up to see Wes coming back across the yard, with Delia beside him. Lucy turned her head and, seeing her mother, scrambled to her feet and darted across the grass, hurling herself at Delia's knees. Delia looked down at her, shaking her head, and pulled her fingers through Lucy's dark curls.

"What are you guys doing?" Wes asked me.

"She was showing me these," I told him, nodding toward the sculptures. "I never knew you made small ones."

"Just for a little while," he said, dismissively. "They never really caught on."

"So," I said, standing up, "is it time for potato duty?"

"Nope," Wes told me. "False alarm."

"Really?"

Delia pressed Lucy against her legs. "It's the strangest thing," she said, shaking her head. "Right as we're about to start boiling all those potatoes, I get this phone call from the client. Turns out that they don't want potato salad after all, that they'd rather do coleslaw and macaroni and cheese, which we have plenty of, instead."

"I tried to tell her," Wes said, "that this is a good thing."

"Of course it is," I told her. "Why wouldn't it be?"

She smoothed her hand over Lucy's head. "It's just… weird. I don't know. It makes me suspicious."

Wes just looked at her. "You know, sometimes things do go the way they're supposed to. It's not unheard of."

"It is for us," Delia said with a sigh. "Anyway, now we at least we have plenty of time to get ready. Which I guess, you know, is good." She still didn't sound convinced.

"Don't worry," Wes said, as we started back toward her house. "I'm sure disaster will strike any minute now."

Delia reached down, taking Lucy's hand. "Yeah," she said, seeming encouraged. "You're probably right."

As we packed for the job, though, things kept happening. Or, more accurately, not happening. Whereas we usually had to cram all the carts in and hope they'd fit, for some reason this time Delia had managed to organize the items in the coolers so economically that we were able to take one less, so everything went in easily, with even (gasp!) room left over. The best round serving platter, which had been missing for weeks, suddenly turned up in the garage, behind one of the freezers. And, most amazing of all, instead of racing down Sweetbud Road already late, we finished with time to spare and actually found ourselves having to kill time instead of scramble for it. It was a little weird, I had to admit.

Delia and I ended up on the front steps fanning ourselves, while Bert and Wes milled around the garage, packing the last few things. "So," she said, leaning back on her hands in an effort to get comfortable. "I heard you quit your job."

I glanced at Wes, who was passing by with a box of napkins. "Couldn't help it," he said. "It's just too good not to tell."