"Ladder of Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tyler Anne)

14

On a Friday morning at the tail end of February-a day so mild and sunny that she would have supposed spring was here, if she hadn’t known the tricky ways of winter-Delia walked to the Young Mister Shop to exchange some pajamas for Noah. (She had bought him a pair like an Orioles uniform, not realizing that for some strange reason, Noah preferred the Phillies.) And then, because it felt so pleasant to be out in nothing heavier than a sweater, she decided to walk to the library and visit with Mrs. Lincoln awhile. So she cut across the square and started up West Street. At the florist’s window she slowed to admire a pot of paper-whites, and at Mr. Pomfret’s window she slid her eyes sideways to check out his new secretary. Rumor had it he was limping along with a niece of his wife’s who couldn’t even type, let alone run a computer. But the way the light hit the glass, Delia would have had to step closer to see inside. All she could make out was her own silhouette and another just behind, both ivy-patterned from the sprawling new plant the niece must have set on the sill. Delia increased her speed and crossed George Street.

The window display in the Pinchpenny was little girls’ dresses this week; so now the two silhouettes were made up of rosebud prints and plaids. She noticed that the second silhouette was storky and gangling, mostly joints, like an adolescent boy. Like Carroll.

She turned, and there he was. He looked even more startled than she felt, if that was possible. His expression froze and he drew back sharply, hands thrust into his windbreaker pockets, elbows jutting.

She said, “Carroll?”

“What.”

“Oh, Carroll!” she cried, and the feeling that swept through her was so wrenching, like the grip of some deep, internal fist, that she understood for the first time how terribly much she had missed him. His face might have been her own face, not because it resembled hers (although it did), but because she had absorbed its every detail over the past fifteen years-the sprinkle of starry freckles across his delicate nose, the way the shadows beneath his eyes would darken at fraught moments. (Right now they were almost purple.) He raised his chin defiantly, and so at the very last second she merely reached out to lay a hand on his arm instead of kissing him. She said, “I’m so happy to see you! How’d you get here?”

“I had a ride.”

She had forgotten that his voice had changed. She had to adjust all over again. “And what are you doing on West Street?” she asked.

“I tried your boardinghouse first, but no one answered, and then I happened to see you crossing the square.”

He must not have told the family he was coming, therefore. (She had sent Eliza her new address weeks ago.) She said, “Is something wrong at home? Are you all right? It’s a school day!”

“Everything’s fine,” he said.

He was trying, unobtrusively, to step out from under her hand. He was darting embarrassed glances at passersby. Much as she hated to, she let go of him. She said, “Well, let’s… would you like some lunch?”

“Lunch? I just had breakfast.”

Yes, it was morning still, wasn’t it. She felt dizzy and disoriented, almost drunk. “A Coke or something, then,” she said.

“Okay.”

Turning him in the direction of Rick-Rack’s gave her an excuse to touch him again. She loved that hard tendon at the inside crook of his arm. Oh, she might have known it would be Carroll who finally came for her! (Her most attached child, when all was said and done-her most loving, her closest. Although she would probably have thought the same if it had been either of the other two.)

“There’s so much you have to bring me up-to-date on,” she told him. “How’s tenth grade?”

He shrugged.

“Has your father had any more chest pains?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Ramsay and Susie all right?”

“Sure.”

Then what is it? she wanted to ask, but she didn’t. Already she was falling back into the veiled, duplicitous manner required for teenage offspring. She led him west on George Street, very nearly holding her breath. “Is Ramsay still seeing that divorcée person? That Velma?” she said.

Another shrug. Obviously, he was.

“And how about Susie?”

“How about her.”

“Has she figured out yet what she’ll do after graduation?”

“Huh?” he said, looking toward a Bon Jovi poster in the record store.

He was as frustrating as ever, and he hadn’t lost that habit of ostentatiously holding back a yawn each time he spoke. She forced herself to be patient. She steered him past Shearson Liquors, past Brent Hardware, and through the door of Rick-Rack’s.

“Dee-babe!” Rick hailed her, lowering his copy of Sports Illustrated. She would have known from his greeting alone that his father-in-law was sitting at the counter. (Rick always put on a display for Mr. Bragg.) “Who’s that you got with you?” he asked.

“This is my son Carroll.” She told Carroll, “This is Rick Rackley.”

“Hey, your son!” Rick said. “How about that!”

Carroll looked dazed. Delia felt a prickle of annoyance. Couldn’t he at least act civil? “Let’s sit in a booth,” she said brusquely.

Teensy was nowhere in sight, so Delia took it upon herself to grab two menus from the pile on a stool. As soon as they were seated, she passed one to Carroll. “I know it’s early,” she said, “but you might want to try the pork barbecue sandwich. It’s the North Carolina kind, not a bit sweet or-”

“Mom,” Carroll whispered.

“What.”

“Mom. Is that Rick-Rack?”

“What?”

“Rick Rackley, the football player?”

“Well, yes, I think so.”

Carroll gaped at Rick, who was topping off his father-in-law’s mug of coffee. He turned back to Delia and whispered, “You know Rick-Rack in person? Rick-Rack knows you?”

This was working out better than she could have hoped. She said, “Yes, certainly,” in an airy tone, and then, showing off, she called, “Where’s Teensy got to, Rick?”

“She’s over at House of Hair,” he said, setting the coffeepot back on the burner. “You-all going to have to shout your order direct to me.”

“Well, is it too early to ask for pork barbecue?”

“Naw, we can do that,” Rick said.

Carroll said, “I just had breakfast, Mom. I told you.”

“Yes, but this is something you wouldn’t want to miss,” she said. “Not a drop of tomato sauce! And it comes with really good french fries and homemade coleslaw!”

She didn’t know why she was making such a fuss about it. Carroll was clearly not hungry; he was still staring at Rick. But she called, “Two platters, please, Rick, and two large Cokes.”

“You got it.”

Mr. Bragg spun his stool around so he could study them. His thin white crew cut stood erect, giving him the look of someone flabbergasted. “Why!” he cried. “What’s happened with this boy?”

Delia glanced toward Carroll in alarm.

“How’d he shoot up so fast?” Mr. Bragg asked. “How’d he get so big all at once?”

She wondered if the old man had somehow read her mind, but then he said, “Last Christmas he was only yea tall,” and he set a palm down around the level of his shins.

“Oh,” Delia said. “No, that’s Noah you’re thinking of.”

It was common knowledge by now that Mr. Bragg was failing, which was why poor Rick and Teensy couldn’t send him back wherever he came from.

“Who’s Noah?” was his next question.

“Who’s Noah?” Carroll echoed.

“Just the boy who…” She felt rattled, as if she had been caught in some disloyalty. “Just the son of my employer,” she said. “So! Carroll. Tell me all that’s been going on at home. Has the Casserole Harem descended? Lots of apple pies streaming in?”

“You haven’t asked about Aunt Liza,” Carroll told her.

“Eliza? Is she all right?”

“Well. All right, I guess,” he said.

“What is that supposed to mean? Is she sick?”

“No, she’s not sick.”

“Last Christmas you were just a shrimp,” Mr. Bragg called. “You and her were drinking coffee together, tee-heeing over the presents you’d bought.”

“Eliza is still taking care of the house, isn’t she?” Delia persevered.

But Carroll seemed distracted by Mr. Bragg. He said, “Who’s he talking about?”

“I told you: my employer’s son.”

“Is that why you’ve got that bag with you? Tasteful Clothing for the Discerning Young Man’? You buy this kid clothes? You tee-hee together? And what’s that you’re wearing, for God’s sake?”

Delia looked down. She wasn’t wearing anything odd-just her Miss Grinstead cardigan and the navy print housedress. “Wearing?” she said.

“You’re so, like, ensconced.”

Two plates appeared before them, clattering against the Formica. “Ketchup, anyone?” Rick asked.

“No, thanks.” She told Carroll, “Honey, I-”

“I would like ketchup,” Carroll announced belligerently.

“Oh. Sorry. Yes, please, Rick.”

Carroll said, “Have you forgotten you have a son who puts ketchup on his french fries?”

“Honey, believe me,” she said, “I would never forget. Well, maybe about the ketchup, but never about-”

A plastic squirt bottle arrived, along with their Cokes in tall paper cups. “Thank you, Rick,” she said.

She waited till he had left again, and then she reached across the table and touched Carroll’s hand. His knuckles were grained like leather. His lips were chapped. There was something too concrete about him; she was accustomed to the misty, soft-edged Carroll of her daydreams.

“I would never forget I have children,” she told him.

“Right. That’s why you sashayed off down the beach and didn’t once look back at them.”

Someone said, “Delia?”

She started. Two teenage girls stood over their table-Kim Brewster and Marietta something. Schwartz? Schmidt? (She brought Joel homemade fudge so sweet it zinged through your temples.) “Well! Hello there!” Delia said.

“You won’t tell Mr. Miller you saw us here, will you?” Kim asked. Kim was one of Delia’s remedial pupils; lately, Delia had been volunteering as a math tutor over at the school. “He would kill us if he found out!”

“We’re cutting class,” Marietta put in. “We saw you in here and we figured we’d ask: you know how Mr. Miller’s birthday is coming up.”

Delia hadn’t known, but she nodded. Anything to get rid of them.

“So a bunch of us are chipping in on a present, and we thought you might could tell us what to buy him.”

“Oh! Well…”

“I mean, you know him better than anyone. He doesn’t smoke, does he? Seems like a lot of gifts for guys are smokers’ stuff.”

“He doesn’t smoke, no,” Delia said.

“Not even a pipe?”

“Not even a pipe.”

“He’s always so, you know, distinguished and all, we think he’d look great with a pipe. Maybe we should just get him one anyways.”

“No, I really think he would hate that,” Delia said firmly. “Well! It was good seeing you girls.”

But Kim was studying Carroll now from beneath her long silky lashes. “You don’t go to Old Underwear,” she informed him.

Carroll flushed and said, “Underwear?”

“Our high school: Dorothy Underwood,” she said, snapping her gum. “You must be from out of town.”

“Yeah.”

“I knew we hadn’t seen you around.”

Delia started eating her coleslaw; she felt it would be a kindness not to look at Carroll’s face. But Carroll just picked up the ketchup and squirted it thoroughly and methodically over every single one of his french fries. “Well…,” Kim said at last, and the two of them moved on toward an empty booth, trailing crumbs of remarks behind them. “Thanks anyhow, Dee…,” they said, and, “If you think of something…”

Delia took a sip of Coke.

“So who’s the guy?” Carroll asked, setting down the ketchup with a thump.

Confused, she glanced around the café.

“The guy with the pipe, Mom. The oh-so-distinguished guy that you know so extremely-emely well.”

“Oh,” she said. She laughed, not quite naturally. “It’s nothing like that! He’s my boss.”

“Right.”

He pushed his plate away. “It all fits together now,” he said. “No wonder you weren’t home for Labor Day.”

“Labor Day?”

“Dad said you’d be back by then, but I guess it’s pretty clear now why you weren’t.”

She stared at him. “Dad said I’d be back by Labor Day?”

“He said you just needed some time to yourself and you’d come home at the end of the summer. We were counting on it. He promised. Susie thought we should go get you, but he said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘leave her be. I guarantee she’ll be here for our Labor Day picnic,’ he said. And look what happened: you went back on your word.”

“My word!” Delia cried. “That was his word! I didn’t have a thing to do with it! And what right was it of his, I’d like to know? Who is he to guarantee when I’ll be home?”

“Now, Mom,” Carroll said in an undertone. He glanced furtively toward Rick. “Let’s not make a big thing of this, okay? Try and calm down.”

“Don’t you tell me to calm down!” she cried, and at the same time she caught herself wondering exactly how often she had uttered that sentence before. Don’t you tell me to calm down! And, I am completely cool and collected. But to Sam; not to Carroll. Oh, it all came back to her now: that sense of being the wrong one, the flighty, unstable, excitable one. (And the more she protested, of course, the more excitable she appeared.) She gripped the edge of the table with both hands and said, “I am completely cool and collected.”

“Well, fine,” Carroll told her. “I’m glad to hear it.” And he picked up a red-soaked french fry and threaded it into his mouth with elaborate indifference.

I’m glad to hear it was one of Sam’s favorite responses. Along with If you say so, Dee, and Have it your way. After which he might serenely turn a page, or he would start talking with the boys about some unrelated subject. Always so sure he was right; and the fact was, he was right, generally. When he criticized people she liked, she would suddenly notice their faults; and when he criticized Delia, she saw herself all at once as the foolish little whiffet he believed her to be. Like now, for instance: he had promised she would slink home by summer’s end, and the picture of that humbled return was so convincing that she almost felt it had happened. She couldn’t even desert properly! Had only been off in a pout, anyhow. Just needed to get it out of her system.

Although, in fact, she had not slunk home. Not by summer’s end and not afterward. Not to this day. She had actually made a life for herself in a town Sam had nothing to do with.

So when Belle sailed in, calling, “Hey, Dee, I thought that was you I saw,” Delia made a point of rising to give her a flamboyant hug.

“Belle!” she cried, and Belle (her purple-clad figure a luxurious, pillowy armful) had the grace to hug her back.

“Who’s your new fella?” she asked.

“This is my son Carroll. This is Belle Flint,” she told Carroll. She kept an arm around Belle’s waist. “How’re you doing, Belle?”

“Well, you’re never going to guess what, not in a million years.”

“What?” Delia asked, a little too enthusiastically.

“Swear you won’t tell Vanessa, now. This is just between the two of us.”

But the whole demonstration went for nothing, because just then Carroll stood up and pushed his way out of the booth. “So long,” he mumbled, head down.

“Carroll?”

She dropped her arm from Belle’s waist.

“Tomorrow night,” Belle was saying, “I’ve asked Horace Lamb to the movies.”

Horace Lamb? Delia felt an inner hitch of surprise even as she went hurrying after Carroll. He lunged out the café door. “Carroll, honey!” she called.

On the sidewalk, Teensy was mincing toward them beneath a gigantic new busby of exploding red ringlets. Carroll almost ran her down. Teensy said, “Oh!” and took a step back, reaching up to feel for her hairdo as if she feared it might have toppled off. “Delia, tell me the truth,” she said. “Do you honestly think I look silly?”

“Not a bit,” Delia told her. “Carroll, wait!”

Carroll wheeled, his eyebrows beetling. “Never mind me, just tend to your pals!” he said. “Orphan Annie here and Mr. Distinguished and little Tee-hee Boy and Veranda or whoever…”

Vanessa, Delia almost corrected him, while behind her, Teensy asked, “Delia? Is everything all right?” and Belle, in the doorway, said, “Kids. But that’s just how they are, I guess.”

“I was going to do you a favor,” Carroll said.

“What, honey?”

“I was going to tip you off to what’s going on at home, but never mind. Just never mind now,” he said.

Still, he didn’t turn and leave. He seemed to be suspended, teetering on the squeaky rubber soles of his gym shoes. Cannily, Delia came no closer. She stayed six or eight feet away from him, her face a mask of smoothness. “What’s going on at home?” she asked him.

“Oh, nothing. Not a thing! Except that your own blood sister is making a play for your husband,” he said.

“Eliza?”

“And Dad’s so out of it, he just laughs it off when we tell him. But we’ve all noticed, me and Susie and Ramsay notice plain as day, and we can guess how it’s going to end up, we bet, too.”

“Eliza would never do that,” Delia said, but she was trying out the notion even as she spoke. She cast her mind back to the living-room couch, the row of marriageable maidens. Whenever I hear the word “summer” I smell this sort of melting smell. And now it seemed that Sam sent Eliza a quick, alert, appreciative glance, as he had not done in real life. It wasn’t impossible, Delia saw.

But she told Carroll, “You must be imagining things.”

“Oh, what do you care?” Carroll burst out, and he spun around again and started running toward West Street.

“Carroll, don’t go!”

She followed at a fast walk. (How far could he get, after all?) He crossed George Street, halting briefly for a mail truck, and disappeared around the corner. Delia picked up her pace. On West Street she saw him loping south, passing Mr. Pomfret, who stood in front of his office speaking with a UPS man. She raced by Mr. Pomfret herself, with her face averted; the last thing she needed just now was another acquaintance calling out her name. She lost sight of Carroll for an instant and then spotted him near the florist’s. He was jogging up and down on the curb as he waited for a break in the traffic. Evidently he was headed for the square. Good: they could sit on a bench together. Catch their breath. Talk this over.

But once he’d crossed the street, he stopped at one of the cars parked along the perimeter. A gray car, a Plymouth. Her Plymouth. With Ramsay at the wheel. She recognized his dear, blocky profile. Carroll opened the passenger door and got in. The engine ground to life, and the car swung out into traffic.

Even then she might have run after them. They were forced to drive very slowly at first. But she stayed where she was, brought up short on the sidewalk with one hand pressed to her throat.

Ramsay had been right here in town. He had driven all these miles and then not bothered to visit her. Susie too, perhaps, although Delia had glimpsed only two heads in the Plymouth.

She deserved this, of course. There was no denying that.

She turned and retraced her steps to Rick-Rack’s, all but feeling her way.

An enormous amount had happened to her, but when she reached the café Belle and Teensy were still talking out front, Kim and Marietta were blowing sultry ribbons of cigarette smoke inside, and Rick was tucking her lunch bill under the ketchup container. She counted out her money in slow motion and paid, not forgetting to leave a tip on the table. She gathered her purse and her Young Mister bag and walked out the door, through the scorched, chemical smell of Teensy’s hairdo, through the clack and tumble of Belle’s chatter. “Have you ever noticed,” Belle was saying, “that Horace Lamb looks the eentsiest little bit like Abraham Lincoln?”

At the corner, Delia turned south. The clock in the optician’s window read eleven-fifteen-nowhere near time for lunch, and yet she regretted leaving that barbecue sandwich. And the coleslaw had been superb. It was the creamy kind, with lots of celery seeds. A seed or two still lodged in her mouth, woodsy and fragrant when she bit down. She savored the taste on her tongue. She felt the most amazing hunger, all at once. She felt absolutely hollow. You would think she hadn’t eaten in months.