The Sweetness of Salt(57)

“So law’s your thing, then?”

“Yeah.” And then, “I mean no. No. It’s not.”

Aiden looked over at me.

“No.” My voice was firmer. “No. It’s definitely not.”

“So you’re doing it because…” Aiden gestured with his hand, indicating that I should go on.

I looked over Aiden’s head at the trees, raised like a green arch behind him. A large shadow on the right obscured most of the leaves, but on the left, where the sun was bright, I could see them perfectly. Some hung limp and flat; others were curled over slightly, just at the tips, like shy little girls.

“Julia?” Aiden’s voice was soft.

“I don’t know.” I lowered my eyes so I was looking at Aiden again. “I honestly don’t know anymore.”





chapter


42


It rained the next two days—a steady, heavy rain that turned most of Main Street into one giant puddle, and saturated the rest of the ground into a muddy, squishy layer. With her repeated trips to the Rutland bank—which took a good amount of time—along with her trip to get roofing tile, and now the rain forcing us to work inside, Sophie was hell-bent on picking up the lag.

We concentrated on the front room, which was by far the most time-consuming. Most mornings were spent on our hands and knees, sanding ourselves into oblivion. In the afternoons, we spread drop cloths over the floor and got to work painting. Sophie had chosen a pomegranate red for the walls, with cream trim around the edges. The color looked putrid in the can, but as we began to spread swaths of it over the walls, I stood back, surprised. It was gorgeous.

I was about two-thirds of the way done with my wall when Sophie leaned over and turned down the radio. She had splotches of red paint on her nose and a hole in the knee of her overalls. “I just thought of something,” she said.

“What?”

“About Maggie. Well, about Dad, really. Back in Milford. Before you came along.”

I could feel my shoulders tense slightly as I dipped my brush back into the vat of paint. “Okay.”

Sophie coated the wall in front of her for a few seconds and then reloaded the roller, working the excess off along the ridges of the paint tray.

“His practice was struggling,” she said. “And I guess to cope with that, he started drinking. A lot. Beer mostly. He might’ve drunk other stuff, but I don’t know. And it wasn’t a regular thing. The refrigerator might just be a refrigerator for weeks at a time, which meant that things were okay. And then other days when I’d open it, looking for a piece of string cheese or an orange, I’d see the stacks of blue and white cans lined up on the left side, neat as could be. It was always a Friday night when the cans appeared, and they were always, always gone by Monday morning.” She wrinkled her forehead, remembering. “One time, I counted the whole mess of ’em. There were thirty-six.” She shook her head, as if the number still amazed her. “He would drink thirty-six cans in a single weekend. That’s a case and a half of beer.”

The only cans I had ever seen in the refrigerator growing up were Diet Coke and the occasional Slim-Fast, when Mom was trying to lose a few pounds. There were never any surprises when I opened the refrigerator; the shelves were always filled with hamburger and green grapes, bottled water, eggs, salad greens, and orange juice. Sometimes, if Mom had cooked the night before, there would be leftovers, carefully wrapped in foil, stacked like little pyramids on one side. No blue and white cans. Ever.

“What was he like when he drank?” I asked.

“What was he like?” Sophie repeated my question carefully, as if she had to reach back and retrieve the memory from an old, dusty place without disturbing anything else around it. “Drunk, obviously. But not always the same kind of drunk. Sometimes he’d just sleep. Other times he’d sit on the sofa for the whole weekend, without moving, and just stare at the television. He wouldn’t even get dressed. He was there physically, but the rest of him was gone. Completely gone.”

I’d never once seen Dad inactive. If he wasn’t at work, he was out in the yard or hammering something in the upstairs bathroom or installing a new light fixture above the kitchen sink. He’d built the deck that led out into our backyard one summer, and he had transformed the basement into a finished room, complete with carpeting, new wallpaper, and furniture. At night, if he felt restless, he took a walk. And not just around the block. Sometimes he would be gone for hours, walking for miles, returning only when the sky had darkened and the moon had settled itself in for the night.

“Mom made herself scarce whenever he got like that,” Sophie continued, “and she’d take Maggie and me with her. We’d go to the mall or the movies, eat lunch at some dumpy restaurant, and then go shopping some more. We’d sometimes be gone the whole day. At night, we’d tiptoe back inside the house as quietly as we could. Mom always slept with me on those nights. Always. I figured things out eventually, but before I did, whenever I’d ask her what was wrong with Dad, she’d just say something like ‘He’s not feeling well. We just need to leave him alone right now.’”

Sophie turned around again and began to drag the paintbrush over the wall.

“Sometimes, though, we didn’t leave. Sometimes we stayed home, and the two of them would argue. It’s funny. I never heard or saw them argue about anything else, ever. It was only when the blue cans came into the house.” She paused, leaning back to examine her work. “You know, he hurt her once. During one of those arguments.”