Chapter Three
They’d worried—privately, individually—that the grind of those early days of parenting might have wiped clean the dynamic they’d forged, but it hadn’t.
The only part they had a challenge resuming was their sex life.
They’d both assumed they would get back to it after the dust settled, but did the dust ever settle?
When they had sex now, it felt like a post-baby victory lap they lacked sufficient energy and enthusiasm for.
Neither of them could have said what the issue was, exactly.
Cal wondered if the fact that they couldn’t have another child was somehow getting in the way of Becky’s enjoying sex.
Becky wondered if Cal had gotten too used to the idea of her being “on hiatus” (as she’d called it) for such a long time.
They both wondered if the other felt less desire than before.
All of that was true, but only to an extent.
They still wanted each other, on occasion, but like groggy, thinned-out bears emerging from hibernation only long enough to put something in their bellies before going back to sleep.
Usually, when one of them wanted to, the other one didn’t, and the risk of that awkwardness took the fun out of the ask.
Weeks went in between. They didn’t talk about it.
Neither of them wanted the other to feel bad.
Neither of them wanted to be the one with a problem—if, indeed, there was a problem, which there might not be, because neither of them knew how this was supposed to go and who had time to stop and assess?
Problems, in this way, win out. Problems conquer the world.
—
Mrs. Dodson came over to check on Becky and Skip a couple of times a week.
She crossed Taft Street with sandwiches, plates of ginger snaps.
Becky was always glad to see her. Mrs. Dodson had had more than one child, it turned out; along with Henry, Jr., there’d been a daughter who’d died of enteritis before she’d reached the age of three.
Becky brought her hand to her mouth when Mrs. Dodson told her.
She couldn’t imagine getting through something like that as a parent and said as much, but Mrs. Dodson said time helped.
Time was like a rock bed with a lot of layers, she said, then took a moment to find the word she wanted: strata.
Even the most unbearable things became fossils, after a while.
They’d located Henry, Jr., back before Skip was born.
Or, Becky had located him while Mrs. Dodson sat quietly with her.
Henry, Jr., hadn’t taken any sort of shape and had sounded faint but peaceful.
Becky hadn’t been able to glean much from him beyond an absence of distress, which she reported to her neighbor.
“Well,” Mrs. Dodson said, “I should hope so. Is he warm enough?”
Midsummer, they were sitting across from each other in Becky’s living room, Mrs. Dodson holding Skip on her lap, when Becky said she was getting restless and wanted to do something again.
Skip was almost four months old. It didn’t seem unreasonable that she could resume putting in at least a couple days a week at the recycling center; the war was still pounding its drum, after all.
As Becky said this, she wondered if Mrs. Dodson would discourage her, maybe even tell her it was her duty to stay at home with Skip.
“I’ll babysit,” Mrs. Dodson said. Something in Becky’s face prompted her to add, “I’m not that old.” She’d been running her hands through Skip’s blond hair but slid them down over his ears now and whispered across the top of his head, “I’m sixty-two.”
“That’s very nice of you,” Becky said. “We’d pay you, of course.”
Mrs. Dodson said no, she didn’t want to be paid.
Not that one had anything to do with the other, but what she wanted was another session—to see if Becky might be able to reach her daughter.
“Just to see if she’s there. I don’t know why she would be, after all this time, but if she is, it would be nice to say hi.
I wanted to ask you weeks ago, but I was waiting for you to reemerge. ”
There were others waiting too, Mrs. Dodson said.
Just a few. A friend of hers who lived on the next block.
And someone from Camden who’d met Becky and Cal one evening when they were out walking.
Also, Mr. Timmons, who owned the ceramic store on Fourth Street, had expressed an interest; his son had been killed on Guadalcanal.
Mrs. Dodson got around more than Becky had imagined.
“Only if you’re interested, that is. If you’re not, I won’t breathe another word about it. ”
“What did you tell them I could do?”
“I didn’t tell them you could do anything. I told them what you did. And I didn’t fan it up, either. I said I walked out of that room feeling like I’d been breathing the same air as my son. Which is the truth,” Mrs. Dodson said, bouncing all fifteen pounds of Skip on the knee of her sundress.
—
Walking was still okay, but standing for any length of time became uncomfortable for Cal, even with a corrective shoe.
Barefoot, he was more unstable than ever—and uncomfortable even when he stood still.
He picked through the wood scraps in Everett’s yard and cut and glued pieces together to make two-inch blocks a little longer and wider than his foot.
He kept one of these blocks in the bathroom to stand on while he shaved and brushed his teeth, one at the foot of the bed to stand on while he dressed, and one in the kitchen, in case he was barefoot or in socks when he helped Becky clean up after dinner.
He brought a stool to work and kept it behind the counter to sit on during the slow times.
Roman was leaving him alone at work now.
Roman had the lamp store in Fostoria and the luncheonette in Tiffin to keep an eye on, and there were whole days when he didn’t step foot in Hanover Hardware.
Cal was fine with that. He enjoyed the job even more without his father-in-law hovering over him, felt more at ease with the people who came in.
Without trying to—without even meaning to—he sold a toaster oven to someone looking for a pack of Phillips-head screws.
It was the last toaster oven the store would see until after the war.
—
Mrs. Dodson’s friend—the one who lived on the next block—was curious about a long-dead cousin.
The person from Camden wanted a few words with the mother she’d buried last fall.
And Mr. Timmons from the ceramic shop was so bereft over his son that it was hard for him to articulate, at first. Three strangers Becky invited into her home, on three separate occasions, to sit with her in the little room upstairs.
They each had questions, and she had to wonder if they were frustrated by the time they left, because the answers she was able to provide were often spotty.
Still, each of those people wanted to come back again, and did.
And each of them knew someone else who might be interested in sitting with her.
“Just ask them to call first,” Becky said.
“I’m in the phone book.” But some people were too timid to call—like Mr. Timmons, who preferred to linger on the sidewalk and look up at the house until Becky went out to see what he wanted.
One evening, Cal went out to greet a pair of middle-aged women—sisters, it turned out—who were hovering around the mailbox.
When he asked if he could help them, one of them asked if Mrs. Jenkins was at home and the other one said they were hoping she could locate their grandfather.
Cal felt the skin go taut across his forehead.
He asked them to wait on the porch and went to find Becky, who was toweling Skip off after a bath.
Cal told her who was outside, and what they wanted.
Becky groaned. “I wish they would call first.”
“Why would they call? They don’t know us.”
She handed Skip to him and went down. A few minutes later, all three of them came up the stairs.
“So,” Cal said after the sisters were gone, “they just happened to know you did that?”
“They’re friends of friends of Mrs. Dodson’s,” Becky said.
A week later, when he was home from work and pulling into the driveway, Cal saw a woman who wasn’t one of the sisters coming out of the house. Her eyes looked swollen, and she brought a tissue to her nose as she walked past the Nash without seeming to notice him.
“That was Miss Valenz. We met her one night,” Becky said. “She has that little Scottie dog—remember? Her fiancé died on Attu.”
Cal remembered her and said he was sorry to hear about her fiancé. Was Miss Valenz another friend of Mrs. Dodson’s?
Becky shrugged. “I think Miss Valenz just talks to people in the neighborhood.”
How many people?
He was at the store one day when Becky, heading out for a walk with Skip, discovered a pale young woman standing on the front porch, gripping her purse strap.
Mrs. Wooters from over in Camden had sent her, the young woman said.
She wanted to know if Becky could locate her brother, whom she’d lost on account of the war. Becky invited her up.
At times, the spirit world was as quiet as a monastery.
Other times, it could be like an overcrowded party line full of distant chatter, moans and laughter and weeping.
No matter what, Becky could always detect a thrum—what she’d concluded was the collective sound of kinetic thought vibrating throughout the preternatural ether.
She was getting better at this. But she couldn’t find the young woman’s brother.
“Then he’s alive?” the young woman asked.
“I’m sorry—I thought you said he died in the war.”
“I said I lost him on account of the war. Hey, are you like a priest? Are you not allowed to tell anyone what goes on in here?”
“I’m allowed, I guess. There aren’t any rules. But I wouldn’t.”