Chapter Nine
The war still raged in the Pacific, Truman reminded everyone, and added that there was a tremendous amount of work to be done to defeat Japan. But for the first time in a long while, the citizens of Bonhomie had something to celebrate and seized the opportunity.
There was an impromptu parade down Main Street that afternoon to honor all of the Bonhomienians who’d fought in Europe and made it home alive (fifty-eight so far).
Food Town handed out red-white-and-blue snow cones, and Paulson’s, not to be outdone, pulled up alongside the Union Soldiers Memorial Fountain with a truckload of free watermelons that had come all the way from Florida.
When they opened the back of the truck, several watermelons rolled out and smashed onto the street.
Grateful just to be feeling happy, people cheered.
The Kill Shot offered free beer while it lasted.
Roman bought sidecars for whomever was there, raised toasts, spun war yarns, and was tight by midafternoon.
He shuffled home saluting neighbors on their porches and replaying in his head the story he’d told about having a live Stielhandgranate land beside him in a trench and tossing it back at the Germans, kaboom.
He almost believed it himself. While he slept upstairs, Ida planned a celebratory cookout and raided his deep freeze in the basement for steaks.
Cal closed the store early that day and drove out to his father’s place to bring him groceries and see if he’d heard about the surrender in Europe.
Everett had heard and was toasting the news into oblivion in a ratty wicker fan chair on his back porch.
He was telling the dog about the end of the First World War.
“…It was a fellow came through the woods,” he said, pointing to the woods behind the house, “and someone’s puffing away and he whispers, ‘Put out that goddamn cigarette!’ Because you never know but we might be surrounded, see, but a minute later, someone else comes along and says the war’s over.
Over? Well, we didn’t know what the hell was going on, or who won.
For all we knew, we were going to have to start learning German.
But ten minutes later, the Germans were out there hugging us, and we were hugging them back, and who won didn’t matter as much as it was over. That’s what mattered, it was over.”
It was more than Everett had ever said to Cal about the war he’d fought in.
Cal tried, unsuccessfully, not to startle his father when he stepped out onto the porch.
He told him Happy V-E Day and thought to bend down to hug him but ended up shaking his hand instead.
Everett kept his grip on his bottle of Old Crow lest Cal try to take it from him, and when Cal asked him to go on with what he’d been saying (to the dog), Everett looked confused, and shrugged, as if he hadn’t been speaking.
The mood on Taft Street—where Cal headed next—was more sober.
The living arrangement that had started off feeling punitive now felt like a standoff.
Unless it had become a stalemate. Cal had his own bathroom, anyway.
He could get up in the middle of the night without worrying about waking Becky.
Snore without having her nudge him to turn onto his side.
They still interacted almost constantly—they had to; they had a toddler.
They still ate dinner together, did the dishes, listened to the radio, and enjoyed their son—but if it didn’t involve Skip, they kept their interaction to a minimum.
Fine with me, Cal thought many times a day, even though it wasn’t.
Nor was it fine for Becky. She found it hard to look at Cal and not see him acting like a buffoon all over again.
Disappointment in one of her two favorite people in the world was a heavy thing to lug around, and she had enough on her hands.
She already had two people scheduled per day, three days a week, and, while she wasn’t clairvoyant, her gut told her the German surrender was going to bring out even more worry in people with loved ones in the Pacific.
Across town, Ruth piled her two boys, her cousin, her cousin’s two girls, Agnes, and Margaret into her station wagon and drove them all out to Lake Meyer for a picnic.
Ruth yelled at the children for jousting with oars on the swim raft.
When they ignored her, she said to the rest of them, “You know what? I don’t care. I’m in too good a mood.”
Agnes’s mood was elevated too, but her feet were pushed down into the sandy dirt just behind the hem of the blanket she’d brought to sit on. She reminded them all—again—that the war wasn’t over.
“We know,” Ruth said. “But would it kill you and Miss Sunbeam over there to accentuate the positive for five minutes?”
“Miss Sunbeam” was Margaret—sharing Agnes’s blanket, half-reclined, her gaze fixed on the opposite shore as if waiting for someone to appear then.
What she was actually doing was trying to find things to think about that weren’t the man she’d kissed in the hardware store.
For example, there was the marble flagging she wanted for the walk that connected the porch to the driveway.
She’d found it in the Sears catalogue, but it was too expensive, so it went on her “for later” list. Same went for the pastel-colored mix-and-match countertops and sink basins in the Montgomery Ward catalogue.
What were those pastel-colored candies that were round and flat, like little flagging stones?
She’d gotten them for Felix’s last care package but had changed her mind at the last minute and kept them for herself.
Necco Wafers. He—the man she’d kissed in the hardware store, the one she was trying not to think about—had tasted like a Necco Wafer.
The house, though. Didn’t it deserve nice canvas awnings, once cloth stopped being rationed?
It did, and he’d tasted like a Necco Wafer dipped in coffee.
And he had very soft lips. There was something about him that reminded her of Bernard, in fact, but that hadn’t been why she’d kissed him.
She’d kissed him because she saw in his eyes that he wanted her to kiss him.
She saw in his eyes something she’d never seen in Felix’s.
Desire.
—
She moved art around. That was a way of tending to the house that didn’t cost anything, since she already owned all the paintings.
Some of them she didn’t like anymore. They looked drab, or like valley scenes you’d find in a travel ad.
But she was still fond—fondest—of her Leon Dolice.
“Ash Can School,” the gallery owner had told her.
“The filthy grit of everyday American life. New York, most likely.” But the buildings weren’t particularly gritty, or distinct, just wide, some of them, and tall, others, and to her it resembled Broad Street in Columbus, with the American Insurance Union tower in the background.
She’d never settled on a wall to hang the Dolice.
She’d leaned it up in various spots around the living room, had it on the mantel for a while, and had finally leaned it against a wall in the bedroom, to be dealt with later—and there it still was.
She carried it downstairs to the bay window in the living room and admired it all over again.
She walked around with it—eighteen by twenty-four, it needed space to breathe—and finally decided the living room wasn’t right for it at all; the dining room was.
Over the sideboard, between the sconces. Perfect.
Only then did she discover the painting had never been wired for hanging.
—
“We certainly do sell picture wire. Hooks, too—all sizes. You came to the right place.”
He, who was not the person she’d kissed a week ago, was an intense little man with recessed eyes and dandruff.
Around sixty, she guessed. Checkered trousers hiked all the way up and his business, as Lydia would have called it, shoved over to one side and on display.
He was flirting with her, she thought. There was too much eye contact in his sales pitch, too much finger-wagging.
“I’ll bet you thought you were going to have to run all over town looking for what you need,” he said. “Am I right?”
“I hadn’t really—”
“Not that I want to put our competition down, but they don’t have half the selection we do. We’ve got everything you need, right here at Hanover’s.”
Where was Cal? This man tried to sell her a hammer. He tried to sell her a level and a tape measure. When she told him she already had those things, he asked her how she’d celebrated V-E Day. Before she could answer, he said, “You enjoyed yourself, right?”
“I went to the lake with some friends.”
“That’s swell. You and the Mister?”
The Mister, she said coolly, was on a ship in the Pacific. She paid for the wire and eyehooks, and left.
—
The next day, she returned to Sutton Street and peered through the window.
Cal was leaning over the counter, filling out an order form, and when he saw her he pinched the pen right out of his hand and sent it skittering across the wood.
She had on a green cardigan and navy skirt and didn’t look nearly as dressed up this time, more like a fancy person having a regular day.
He said hello and asked what he could do for her.
She retrieved the handkerchief from her purse and handed it to him; it was washed, ironed, and folded.
She’d decided to say nothing about the kiss just in case he regretted it, or felt like apologizing for it or, worst of all, wanted to do it again, because wouldn’t that be the last thing she needed?
She told him she was hanging a painting.
Something she’d purchased in Columbus—by a painter from the Ashcan School, maybe he’d heard of it?