Chapter 14 #2
“Have you missed your train?”
“Nah, I’ve still got time.” He looked over at his father, who was single-mindedly pursuing a stray bit of egg white with his fork. “How’re you feeling, Dad?” he asked.
“I’m okay.”
“Excited about your new place?”
“No.”
“There’s coffee,” Nora told Denny.
“That’s all right. I’ll get some at the station.” He waited a beat. “Should I call a cab?” he asked. “Or what?”
He was looking at Jeannie, but Nora was the one who answered. “I can take you,” she told him.
“Seems like you’ve got your hands full.”
He looked again at Jeannie. She flung back her ponytail with an angry snap and said, “Well, I can’t do it. My car’s packed to the gills.”
“It’s no trouble,” Nora said.
“Ready, Dad?” Jeannie asked.
Red set his fork down. He wiped his mouth with a paper towel. He said, “It seems wrong to just walk off and let other folks do the work.”
“But we’re going to work at the new place. You’re the only one who can tell me where you want your spatulas kept.”
“Oh, what do I care where my spatulas are kept?” Red asked too suddenly and too loudly.
But he heaved himself to his feet, and Nora stepped forward to press her cheek to his. “We’ll see you tomorrow evening,” she told him. “Don’t forget you promised to come to our house for supper.”
“I remember.”
He lifted his windbreaker from the back of his chair and started to put it on. Then he paused and looked at Denny. “Say,” he said. “That guy with the French horn, was that your doing?”
Denny said, “What?”
“Did you arrange it? I can just about picture it. Paying a guy good money, even, just so we’d all start missing you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Red gave a shake of his head and said, “Right.” He chuckled at himself. “That would be too crazy,” he said. He shrugged into his windbreaker and settled the collar. “Still, though,” he said. “How many guys in tank tops listen to classical music?”
Denny looked questioningly at Jeannie, but she was ignoring him. “Got everything, Dad?” she asked.
“Well, no,” he said. “But the others are going to bring it, I guess.” Then he walked over to Denny and set a palm on his back in a gesture that was halfway between a clap and a hug. “Have a good trip, son.”
“Thanks,” Denny said. “I hope the new apartment works out.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Red turned from Denny and left the dining room, with Jeannie and Nora trailing behind. Denny picked up the bag at his feet and followed.
“See you in a while,” Red told the two Hughs in the front hall. They were just coming in for another load, both of them slightly winded.
Jeannie’s Hugh asked Jeannie, “Are you leaving now? I think we can maybe fit one more box in.”
“Never mind that; just put it on the truck,” she said.
“I want to get going.” And she shouldered past him and hurried to catch up with Red, as if she feared he might try to escape.
They threaded between the tied-back swags of cheesecloth on the porch; Stem stood aside to let them pass.
“We should be over there in an hour or so,” he told Red. Red didn’t answer.
At the bottom of the steps, Red paused and looked back at the house. “It wasn’t a dream per se, as a matter of fact,” he told Jeannie.
“What’s that, Dad?”
“When I had that dream the house burned down, it wasn’t an actual dream dream.
It was more like one of those pictures you get in your head when you’re half asleep.
I was lying in bed and it came to me, kind of—the burnt-out bones of the house.
But then I thought, ‘No, no, no, put that out of your mind,’ I thought. ‘It will do okay without us.’ ”
“It will do just fine,” Jeannie said.
He turned and set off down the flagstone walk, then, but Jeannie waited for Denny and Nora, and when they had caught up she reached across Denny’s burden of bags to give him a hug. “Say goodbye to the house,” she told him.
“Bye, house,” he said.
“The last time I missed church, I was in the hospital having Petey,” Nora told Denny as she was driving.
“So, does this mean you’re going to hell?”
“No,” she said in all seriousness. “But it does feel odd.” She flicked on her turn signal. “Maybe I’ll try to make the evening prayer service, if we’re finished moving in by then.”
Denny was gazing out his side window, watching the houses slide past. His left hand, resting on his knee, kept tapping out some private rhythm.
“I guess you’ll be glad to get back to your teaching,” she said after a silence.
He said, “Hmm?” Then he said, “Sure.”
“Will you always just substitute, or do you want a permanent position someday?”
“Oh, for that I’d have to take more course work,” he said. He seemed to have his mind elsewhere.
“I can imagine you’d be really good with high-school kids.”
He swung his eyes toward her. “No,” he said, “the whole thing got me down, it turns out. It was kind of depressing. Everything you’re supposed to teach them, you know it’s only a drop in the bucket—and not all that useful for real life anyhow, most of the time.
I’m thinking I might try something else now. ”
“Like what?”
“Well, I was thinking of making furniture.”
“Furniture,” she said, as if testing the word.
“I mean, work that would give me something … visible, right? To show at the end of the day. And why fight it: I come from people who build things.”
Nora nodded, just to herself, and Denny returned to looking out his side window. “That thing about the French horn,” he said to a passing bus. “What was that, do you know?”
Nora said, “I have no idea.”
“I hope he’s not losing it.”
“He’ll be all right,” Nora said. “We’ll make sure to keep an eye on him.”
They had reached the top of St. Paul Street now.
It would be a straight shot south to Penn Station.
Nora sat back in her seat, her fingers loose on the bottom of the wheel.
Even driving, she gave the impression of floating.
She said, “I would just like to say, Denny—Douglas and I would both like to say—that we appreciate your coming to help out. It meant a lot to your mom and dad. I hope you know that.”
He looked her way again. “Thanks,” he said. “I mean, you’re welcome. Well, thank you both, too.”
“And it was nice of you not to tell about his mother.”
“Oh, well, it’s nobody’s business, really.”
“Not to tell Douglas, I mean. When he was younger.”
“Oh.”
There was another silence.
“You know what happened?” he asked suddenly. There was something startled in his tone, as if he hadn’t intended to speak until that instant. “You know when I was mending Dad’s shirt?”
“Yes.”
“His dashiki kind of thing?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I was thinking I would never find the right shade of blue, because it was such a bright blue. But I went to the linen closet where Mom always kept her sewing box, and I opened the door, and before I could even reach for the box this spool of bright-blue thread rolled out from the rear of the shelf. I just cupped my hand beneath the shelf and this spool of thread dropped into it.”
They were stopped for a red light now. Nora sent him a thoughtful, remote look.
“Well, of course that can be explained,” he said.
“First of all, Mom would have that shade, because she was the one who had made the dashiki in the first place, and you don’t toss a spool of thread just because it’s old.
As for why it was out of the box like that …
well, I did spill a bunch of stuff out earlier when I was sewing on a button.
And I guess the rolling had to do with how I opened the closet door.
I set up a whoosh of air or something; I don’t know. ”
The light turned green, and Nora resumed driving.
“But in the split second before I realized that,” he said, “I almost imagined that she was handing it to me. Like some kind of, like, secret sign. Stupid, right?”
Nora said, “No.”
“I thought, ‘It’s like she’s telling me she forgives me,’ ” Denny said.
“And then I took the dashiki to my room and I sat down on my bed to mend it, and out of nowhere this other thought came. I thought, ‘Or she’s telling me she knows that I forgive her.’ And all at once I got this huge, like, feeling of relief. ”
Nora nodded and signaled for a turn.
“Oh, well, who can figure these things?” Denny asked the row houses slipping past.
“I think you’ve figured it just right,” Nora told him.
She turned into Penn Station.
In the passenger drop-off lane, she shifted into park and popped her trunk. “Don’t forget to keep in touch,” she told him.
“Oh, sure. I’d never just disappear; they need me around for the drama.”
She smiled; her two dimples deepened. “They probably do,” she said. “I really think they do.” And she accepted his peck on her cheek and then gave him a languid wave as he stepped out of the car.
The clouds overhead were a deep gray now, churning like muddy waters stirred up from the bottom of a lake, and inside the station, the skylight—ordinarily a kaleidoscope of pale, translucent aquas—had an opaque look.
Denny bypassed the ticket machines, which had lines that wound back through the lobby, and went to stand in the line for the agents.
Even there some ten or twelve people were waiting ahead of him, so he set down his bags and shoved them along with his foot as the line progressed.
He could sense the anxiety of the crowd.
A middle-aged couple standing behind him had apparently not thought to reserve, and the wife kept saying, “Oh, God, oh, God, they’re not going to have any seats left, are they? ”
“Sure they are,” her husband told her. “Quit your fussing.”
“I knew we should have called ahead. Everybody’s trying to beat the hurricane.”
“Hurkeen,” she pronounced it. She had a wiry, elastic Baltimore accent and a smoker’s rusty voice.
“If there’s not any seats for this one we’ll catch the next one,” her husband told her.
“Next one! Watch there not be a next one. They’ll stop running them after this one.”