Beyond Deserving (28 page)

He sets the bottle down on the table and stands up. “I need to get outside, it's too hot in here,” he says. He stands up too fast and he is dizzy.

Melroy sticks his legs out straighter and belches. “All a hot day's good for,” he says. He winces. Something hurts.

Bounder gets up suddenly and runs back and forth from one end of the trailer to the other. Then in a long leap, he lands in the chair where Gully has been sitting.

“He thinks you warmed it up for him,” Melroy says. “He thinks you're wonderful.” The dog tucks his paws and closes his eyes.

“You gotta watch it, Melroy,” Gully says weakly. He meant to tell Melroy about the fire and how it changed his life. “That stuff will kill you.”

Melroy snorts. “My beer? Not likely.”

Gully meant to tell him how bad it was before God intervened. He wants Melroy to go with him to a meeting one night. He thinks he might propose it as a kind of social event.

“Hell, Gully, I ain't a married man. My son don't have nothing to do with me. I don't drive when I drink. There's just me and my acre and my dogs and my recollections. Now, don't a man have a right to seek a little bliss? To have a little fun? Drinking is a pretty short route to a good time.”

“I never saw it that way. I always thought of it as getting away.”

“But now you're older, and the bogeyman's gone to bed.” Melroy stands up and winces apologetically. He hitches his pants and cranes his neck toward the back of the trailer. “Don't run off,” he says, and goes to the toilet.

Gully stares at the closed door for a minute, then shakes his head to clear his thoughts. He reaches down and scratches Bounder's backside. The dog wiggles and moans, his eyes still shut. Then, still for the moment, he looks at Gully raptly.

“I can be no man's salvation,” Gully says to the dog. “I can't teach a man tricks with a bean can.” And he heads home.

37

Gully goes to bed soon after supper, but he isn't sleepy, so he reads a few pages from a book Fish left at the place a few years back, Joshua Slocum's account of sailing alone, feisty old bugger. He knows this is Fish's fantasy, to lose himself somewhere on the ocean, and though Gully does not share it—he does not think he would like the openness, or the lack of steady balance—he would do anything to help his son sail away.

Geneva goes out to the RV with her sister, but Gully is still awake when she comes back in about nine. She takes a long time getting ready for bed. She fusses around in the kitchen, and then the bathroom. He hears her switching tv stations back and forth in her bedroom, and then turning on the radio. Down the length of the trailer, he thinks he hears her make a noise, a sigh, or cry of some kind, and it worries him. If she were ill, he wouldn't know until morning.

He goes to see. Her door is closed. He taps lightly and opens it. She is sitting on her bed with her keepsake box spilled out beside her on the covers. Little homemade Valentines with cut-out hearts and white doily trim; he remembers Evelyn making them; and other cards, store-bought, now faded and a little tattered, with shiny foil fronts, Be Mine, Love Me, I Do; and Christmas and birthday cards; he recognizes them, anyone would, but he didn't realize that was what she saved in her blackened metal box. Except for the ones their daughter made, they are all cards Geneva gave the children. He remembers sitting down to breakfast on Valentine's Day, a card at each child's plate. Evelyn would read hers and smile shyly, and say, “It's sweet, Mama,” but the boys would set the cards aside and eat cereal and toast without ever opening them. He has never wondered where the cards went when those breakfasts were over.

Geneva starts gathering up the cards, without haste, her long and slender, blotched hands moving with grace and a kind of sadness. He wants her to look at him, but he has no idea what he ought to say. It is pathetic to save mementoes you gave away that nobody took, or kept, or wanted, and he feels bad for her, and worse that he didn't know. Of course she could not have told him, she could not have shown him when she gathered up her silly verses and tucked them away for some undefinable reason; he would have mocked her, he realizes with a pang. There are probably some school photographs in the box, maybe a letter or two from Fish in the navy; those things you can understand keeping. If he asked her, would she show him what she had? Would she say, You never gave me a Valentine's card, your sons never did, no one ever said Be Mine?

He sits down on the bed, with the box and a few cards between them. Her mouth is tight; he thinks she will tell him he came in without her permission, that it is none of his business (he knows it isn't, and wishes he had not seen her like this), but she stops figeting and just sits, her hands on her lap over a faded red paper card.

“Genny,” he says in an old man's voice. He could curse, to hear it croak and quaver on him now.

She puts the last few cards in the box, fastens it, and sets it on the floor away from him. “I'm going to bed now,” she says.

He puts his hand lightly on her wrist, and when she doesn't pull away, he feels relieved, and braver. “I'm glad Ruby came.”

“She wants me to go with her.”

“To Spokane?”

“No. South, next winter.”

“Well.” He shouldn't be surprised, he thinks, but he is. He never thinks of one of them without the other anymore. He wouldn't go off without her, not now.

“It's been a long time since I've seen anything of the country.”

“I'd think it might be a disappointment,” he says. “The way things are built-up and paved-over.”

Now she frees her hand, and pats her hair, bouncing her fingers on its wiry fluff. “Still, a person ought to know what's going on past the edge of her yard.”

“Why, you ought to go.” He tries to sound hearty, but his voice betrays him, or perhaps it is only the hour, late for him. Slocum sailed, to leave a wife behind.

“I'll decide,” she says. She stands up suddenly and makes him feel foolish, perched on the edge of her bed like an old buzzard on a tree limb.

On his feet now, he takes a long leap of faith and says, “I wouldn't mind another fifty, Geneva, in the next life if not in this.” He means to comfort her, to give her what she wants.

She shakes her head. “Go on,” she says.

Now she'll tell what her sister says about me, he thinks.

“I set your coffee on the stove,” is what she says. She crawls into bed while he watches her. She wears an old soft pair of flannel pajamas. When it gets hot she changes to cotton “shorties,” she calls them. “All you have to do is turn it on and let it perk, if I sleep in.” She shuts her eyes.

He nods, and leaves her, feeling foolish and bewildered. He thinks of a time Geneva went out after supper, to go to a meeting. She was working on a raffle sale for the church. The girl was supposed to do the dishes, but she whined about it, and then when he yelled at her, she ran the water and began, leaning hard on one foot, her other hip higher, her posture slouched and slutty. Right away she broke a dish. And he hit her. He remembers watching her, disliking her; he remembers seeing the plate slide out of her hand and drop to the floor. He remembers his hand hard against her ear. At the time he forgot it, drinking.

When Geneva came home and Evelyn ran to her, wailing, and Geneva stood across the room from him, glaring, hating him, he had already forgotten. The girl was always unhappy, was always complaining, always trying to get out of things she was supposed to do, or into things she wasn't, and this was just another time, something between mother and daughter, that he did not need to understand. When he stumbled to bed that night, Geneva made a wall between them, out of rolled blankets and extra pillows, but he didn't care, he hardly noticed before he was asleep. Only, the wall was there a long time after, and when, weeks later, she made the bed in the old way, so that when you pulled the covers back there was the bare smooth expanse of sheet, and no reason he could see not to reach for her, or roll to her side in the night, he had forgotten that too. He had forgotten so much. There was only a blur between the time Evelyn broke the plate, and the day she lay in her coffin, looking pale and pure. He remembers Geneva whispering to him—there were people around, and when he looked at her, astonished, she had already turned away—“Now she can't do anything more that you don't like.” And after that things blurred again. There was the fire, and the hospital, moments when he knew it was his own voice he heard shrieking, and then this new, better life they have, the pieces put back together, except for the girl. And over everything, a haze of pain. It isn't that he ever wants to drink, and it isn't that he needs to forget, because he still cannot remember; it is that he knows Geneva remembers everything, and the wall is all around her, as though she is her own estate.

In the kitchen he goes to the stove and picks up the coffeepot, sets it back down, and commences to weep, as quietly as he is able.

38

Katie calls her mother. June answers the first ring. She sounds neither surprised nor pleased to hear Katie's voice. She sounds like a doctor's receptionist.

“Did I get you at a bad time?” Katie asks.

“I've got a pot of soup on the stove, and I'm sitting at the table reading. I've got a quarter hour till I go get Rhea at practice.”

“What's she practicing?”

“Gymnastics.”

“Oh,” Katie says. She should have remembered. “Ursula said you called. I've got my own phone now.” She gives her number to her mother, blushing deeply, whether ashamed, or frustrated to do so at all, she isn't sure.

“I've wondered how you're faring.”

“I work, I eat, I sleep.”

“You wrote that you were seeing a lawyer.”

“Oh that.”

“Katie, really. ‘That'?”

It must please her mother, Katie thinks. She feels a wave of defensiveness for beleaguered Fish. “It's all in motion, Mother. The end of Katie and Fish.” She is repeating herself, she realizes, or was it Jeff who said that?

“Is there a chance you'd want to come down here, dear? Rhea asks about you.”

“I'm working. I can't get away right now.” When her mother calls her “dear,” it affects her exactly as does the scrape of nails on a chalkboard.

“Then I don't suppose I can do anything.”

“Do anything?”

“To help.”

Katie feels her throat tightening. “You already do a lot, don't you? Like take care of my daughter?” June does not throw that up to Katie; it is Katie who keeps it in the air between them.

“She's a sunny little girl, Katie. I don't know where she gets her disposition. She puts us in a good humor most of the time.”

“I'm glad.”

“She's been asking about you lately. And her father.”

“What do you tell her?”

“I try to answer questions in a straightforward way. I say, your father is a carpenter, he lives in Oregon, where there are lots of trees. Your mother works for a theatre. I tell her it's an office, is that right, Katie? Selling tickets?”

“You don't tell her that I worked as a waitress for twenty years? Or that her father was in prison?”

There is a long silence. June says, “It's not a rare thing anymore, for a child not to live with her parents, especially not with both of them.”

“Lucky for all of us, to be in style.”

“Nobody's being criticized, Katie.”

“I hope not. Since it's my call.”

“I'll write. That won't cost you anything.”

“Sorry Mother. Sorry, sorry.”

“I think she wants more of you, that's all. She's not unhappy, Katie, but she's growing, and she has questions.”

“Maybe it was a mistake for me to come and go, to see her at all.” There always is a bad moment, every visit, but not with the child.

“It's too late to think that. And it's not like you were dead. I didn't want to trade you for her, you know. I didn't see it as an exchange.”

Katie thinks, but that's exactly what you wanted, Mother. You got Rhea, Fish got me, I got off the hook. “I don't know when I can come again. I just don't know.” She wonders which step would have to do with her mother. She wouldn't know how to make amends. She didn't make her life by herself; her mother has always had the upper hand.

39

Katie went to Texas at Christmas.

Her trips to Texas are nothing like going home. Though it is the same house, it looks different, it feels different. Of course it holds a different family, only June being constant, and, all these years later, she seems in many ways younger and happier, a relaxed mother to Rhea.

There is the real difference: the attitude of house and family toward child, the place of the child. Sunny Rhea.

The house has been improved by paint and wallpaper, tasteful furniture, a new large sun porch in recent years. There is an easy feel to the rooms, a brightness. June cleared away old pictures and left the walls bare. She replaced the heavy furniture of the fifties with spare chairs with slung seats, a chintz-covered couch with fat pillows, an old chaise lounge upholstered in polished cotton.

Rhea has a bedroom with twin beds. Christine has the third bedroom, so Katie shares Rhea's when she visits. It was once her room, and for a couple of years, Uncle Dayton's.

She lay on the bed in the middle of the night and tried to recall the room as it had been in her childhood. There were twin beds then, too, a blond wood set. (Rhea's are white iron, with firm mattresses and feather-stuffed pillows.) There was a dark dresser with drawers on two sides and a large oval mirror in the middle. Katie can remember sitting on the cushioned stool in front of that mirror, an adolescent anguished at the sight of her own image. Rhea has a long sleek wall of laminated cabinets, and a little desk built in at the window. Above the cabinets are wide open shelves, filled with the paraphernalia of a contemporary girlhood: a boxed set of
Little House on the Prairie;
a dozen paperbacks all called
Babysitter's Club;
some old volumes of Katie's, with fairy tales and Bible stories, myths and legends, a book of narrative poems; modeling clay, and small fanciful animals made from it; drawings; airplane models; a working paper clock; origami birds; a dangling God's eye.