Love Me Tender (6 page)

Chapter 10

I FOLLOWED Mel inside. The hallway had a faint smell. I thought of Miss Nelda, who was a little too enthusiastic about those plug-in air fresheners. But she always worried that her house would get what she called “that old-lady smell.” I wondered if this was it.

“To tell you the truth,” Mel said, “I was under the impression there was some kind of emergency.”

“Oh, well, the fire is out,” the grandmother said.

“What fire?” Mel asked. She went from Mel the Invader to Smokey the Bear in a heartbeat.

“The one in the warshing pantry,” the grandmother said.

“We're talking about a real fire?” Mel asked, her voice rising. “As in flames and smoke?”

“The very same.”

Smoke. That's what I smelled. I was really glad it wasn't the old-lady smell. They were more or less moving toward the kitchen, the grandmother shuffling along in big fluffy slippers, tissue paper afloat around her ears. I had time to look into doorways.

“When did this happen?” Mel asked.

“More'n a week now,” the grandmother said.

“Did you have smoke inhalation? Is that why you were in the hospital?”

“I didn't go to the hospital,” the grandmother said irritably.

The hospital idea had come to Mel while she was standing on the porch or maybe while she was driving through the night. She said, “Right, right. But you said there was a fire, Momma.”

“I just wanted to press the wrinkles out of a dress. I was in a hurry to go and I forgot to turn off the iron,” the grandmother said. “I wasn't even in the house when it started. I missed the whole thing.”

The place was bigger than I'd thought at first. Big central hallway. Two dark sitting rooms at the front, a dining room midway, and on the other side, what looked like the grandmother's bedroom. The lamp next to her bed gave me a good view of this room. A wall of bookshelves. Dark woods. Everything else faded and tired-looking, even the book covers.

“No one was hurt?” Mel was asking.

“My neighbor saw the smoke and ran over here to douse the fire. His eyebrows were singed right off. He looked a bit overbaked for a few days, and now he's peeling. But other than that, no.”

“Well, that's good,” Mel said. I knew she was wondering the same thing I was: What did her sister's message mean?

“If I'd had to count on the fire department, I'd probably be standing on
your
doorstep this morning.”

Mel looked stricken, and the grandmother laughed.

It
was
kind of funny.

The kitchen was just the kind Mel was always yearning for. Old-fashioned, mainly. There was a plain white gas stove. And a pretty, green woodburner held a collection of old bowls on the stovetop.

But even that stove wasn't enough to distract the eye from the window over the sink. It was brand-new, with the store label in one corner. The wall above and the cabinets around had a dark color over the paint job, like storm clouds.

“I thought you said the fire was in the laundry room,” Mel said.

“This is an old fire,” the grandmother said. “I left the little window fan running while I went to the store. I'd done that a hundred times, but this time it overheated, burst into flame, and ate the curtains.”

“It must have eaten the window too,” Mel said, in that tone she uses when she thinks she's about to catch me in a lie.

“That window always stuck going up and down,” the grandmother said. “I figured I'd just as soon start off with a new one that slides easy.”

“So you had two fires.”

“There's nothing to show for this one but scorch marks,” she said, as if this ought to close the subject.

Kerrie came into the room from the other side, and joined us as we sat down at the enamel-topped table in the middle of the kitchen. There was another table at the side, in a kind of breakfast nook that looked more appealing, but I gathered it hadn't yet been decided if we were going to stay. Summit meetings were likely held at this table.

“So how many fires have you had?” Mel said, sounding too casual, the way she does when the lie-catching voice isn't getting her anywhere.

“I'm not in the business, you know,” the grandmother said. “The arson business. Unless you count burning down the shed.”

“Let's count that,” Mel said, “if it burned down. It burned to the ground?”

“Accidents happen,” the grandmother said, her eyes narrowing.

“Yes, they do,” I said, hoping to avoid a fight.

Mel said, “How long ago was the window?”

“It's been a couple of months now.”

“And the iron was about two weeks ago?”

“Not quite.”

“One of those comes-in-threes things,” I said. “Like when you break a glass, it always happens again real soon,
and then again.”

They went quiet. So I went quiet.

We all sat like we were there for a game but somebody forgot the cards. Neither Mel nor the grandmother would meet anyone's eyes. Kerrie and I waited to see if we were playing Hearts or War.

Mel said, “Could I make us some coffee, Momma?”

“Lands, yes,” the grandmother said, coming to life. “You children haven't eaten yet, have you?”

Kerrie and I shook our heads. We hadn't eaten.

“Start the coffee, Melisande,” she said, getting up. “Give me seven minutes to make myself look human and we'll make some breakfast.” She hurried out of the kitchen, pulling at the loops of paper and balling them up in her hands.

Seven minutes seemed an odd number. I looked at the clock, saying, “Can I do anything?”

“Sit still,” Mel said. She found coffee in one cabinet, mugs in another; both times exactly where she expected them to be. “And don't try to mediate.”

I said, “Mediate?”

“Be quiet. You don't have to help me deal with her.”

I watched the clock and sure enough, in seven minutes the grandmother was back, looking like a new woman. A new
old
woman, okay, but she looked pretty good, like she could be in a commercial for a breakfast cereal or something.

Mel and the grandmother moved around the kitchen like it was only yesterday they'd cooked breakfast together.

“I expected to find Clare here,” Mel said as the grand-mother passed her eggs and butter from the refrigerator.

“Your sister has her own home,” the grandmother said. I thought her tone suggested Aunt Clare ought to stay in it. Then again, the grandmother put that tone in most of what she said.

“Me too,” Mel said. “But I'm here.”

“Why?” The grandmother sounded like it was the last thing she'd ever expect, that Mel would be there.

Mel said, “I thought you needed me.”

“You had a clairvoyant experience?”

“You have not mellowed with age, Momma.”

The grandmother said cheerfully, “Now that's a pure fallacy, mellowing with age. People become more and more comfortable with who they are as they get older, not less and less. For some, that may appear to be a mellowing. In my case, it isn't.”

Mel sighed loudly.

It occurred to me that the grandmother wasn't un-friendly so much as it was that she enjoyed an air of debate to her conversation. Seen from the back, she was a dance of elbows to the beat of eggs cracked against an iron frying pan.

I glanced at Kerrie at the exact moment she looked in my direction. She raised her eyebrows, quirked her mouth down at one corner. I had never felt so close to her before.

Chapter 11

“SO YOU had this clairvoyant experience and you just upped and hauled your children over here, lickety-split.”

Mel dug into her pocket for the car keys and tossed them to me. “Pull it up closer to the house,” she said.

The grandmother arched an eyebrow. “She drives?”

“It's the driveway, Momma, not the interstate.” Kerrie took on an alert expression, hearing Mel come so close to telling her mother a lie. She didn't say a word.

“That car must take a lot of gas,” the grandmother said.

“We hardly ever use it,” Mel said. “It's more of an investment.”

“Risky,” the grandmother said. “Investing in a business you could lose over a fender bender.”

“You can replace a window, Momma, and I can replace a fender.” Mel looked at me. “Elvira, would you move that car?”

I hated to go, but I figured Kerrie wouldn't miss much and would be happy to tell me anything worth knowing. It wasn't only that I worried I'd miss something, I felt a little left out, the way the grandmother talked like I wasn't really there. She hardly looked at me.

I moved the car, even though there was this old fellow—Daddy says don't say “old man,” it sounds mean— standing across the street, watching me do it. He had a white paper sack in one hand, and when I got out of the car, he waved to me and started to come over.

Uh-oh, I thought, because he looked a little strange. At first I thought it was because he wore the standard golf pro outfit—yellow plaid pants, sparkling white shirt, sunburn. Then I saw the only really strange thing about him was his eyebrows; they were unusually sparse and crinkled, so his face looked strangely bare. But he had a friendly twinkle in his eyes, even if it was just a reflection from his shirt.

He said, “Are you offering a car-parking service in the neighborhood?”

“I'm visiting my grandmother,” I said.

“I have this package for her, if you wouldn't mind delivering it.” He offered me the paper sack.

I took it.

We told each other thank you a little awkwardly, and I went back inside.

I didn't knock. Going down the hall as quietly as possible, I heard the grandmother say, “He's still in that landscaping business?”

“He's doing very well, and you'd know it, Momma, if you bothered to read my letters.”

I didn't know Mel wrote to her mother.

It got me thinking. If Daddy offered to drive Mel to see her mother now and again, he thought it was important. If Mel wrote letters, she must've hoped the grandmother would write back.

“He ought to have come with you,” the grandmother was saying. “It's a hard trip for a woman in your condition to make.”

The grandmother had put Mel on the spot, but Kerrie said, “We stopped at a motel with a pool.”

“Oh, you don't let them get into a heated pool?” the grandmother said, letting the subject of what Daddy ought to do slide. “Those are just swarming with bacteria. They could pick up I don't know what!”

Mel smiled as I slid onto the chair. “Beats me, Momma, if you didn't sound like an old grandmomma right then.”

The grandmother ignored her. “You girls want your scrambled eggs on the toast or next to it?”

“Next to it, please,” Kerrie said. She had pulled the coloring books out and spread her markers in front of her.

“This paper sack, and whatever's in it, is for you,” I said. The grandmother looked over her shoulder, a tad flustered for a moment, but then said, “Sesame-seed bagels. We can eat them instead of toast, if you like them.”

“Bagels, Momma? After all those years of insisting we eat whole wheat bread?”

“It's good for you,” the grandmother said. “That doesn't mean I can't eat anything else.”

“True,” Mel said. “Where do you get these?”

“A neighbor has them mailed in from New York,” the grandmother said. “He has relatives up there.”

Mel glanced at me. “Is he cute?”

The grandmother looked around, so I shrugged. But when she turned back, I nodded. Cute. Mel grinned.

Mel's momma didn't sit. She kept a plate on the counter and took bites from her toasted bagel as she went about the kitchen, watering her single houseplant and setting out food for a cat I hadn't yet seen.

At the same time, she covered the usual territory—what grades were we in now and did we play any musical instruments, like that. I reported I played the guitar. Kerrie said she took ballet and then took a bite of her scrambled eggs. She started coloring as she chewed.

She didn't say she'd taken ballet happily for one week. Or that for ten months and three weeks since, it had taken bullying and bribery to get her to the two classes a week Mel was paying for. Kerrie liked tutus and tiaras. The hard work of ballet class didn't appeal to her in the least.

“Ballet is important for girls,” the grandmother said. “It makes them graceful, but it also makes them strong.”

Kerrie didn't mention she was looking forward to month twelve, when the contract Mel signed would expire. That we were all looking forward to that. Without even looking at each other, neither Mel nor I blew Kerrie's cover story.

As we ate our breakfast, the sounds in the room were the clink of our forks on the plates, the squeaky progress of Kerrie's markers, and the grandmother doing a little kitchen cleanup.

The grandmother finally sat down, asking, “This one that's coming, do you know whether it's a boy or a girl?”

“No, I didn't want the doctor to tell me.”

“So you weren't trying for a boy?”

“If you must know, Momma, we weren't trying.” Mel pushed her chair back from the table so she could stretch her legs.

From outside, a voice very like Mel's, should she have been imitating an ambulance siren, called, “Yoooo-hoo, Momma.” We had no more than put down our forks when a woman came in through the back door.

The grandmother's voice was quick and sharp. “What on earth is the matter with you, Clare, squealing at me like that? The neighbors will think the house is afire again.”

“Why, Momma, there's a strange car in the driveway—” Aunt Clare stopped, open-mouthed, and put her hand to her chest.

“It's an investment,” the grandmother said, and she was too quick for me, I couldn't tell whether it was sarcasm. Besides, Aunt Clare was something of a distraction. Her voice on the machine was so like my mother's that I'd expected some version of Mel. Tall and flat-chested mostly, nothing showy about her.

But Aunt Clare was so blond, so rounded where Mel had never been, so... glittery, with earrings and beads on her shirt. Her shorts were styled to look like a little skirt. It was barely eight o'clock in the morning and already she was dressed like Memphis Barbie.

“Well, if it isn't Melisande,” she said. “Isn't this a bolt from the blue.”

“Is it?” Mel asked in a cool voice.

“You haven't changed one bit,” Aunt Clare said. “Or is that one of those joke pillows you've stuffed up under there?”

My breath caught.

Mel said, “No joke.” Which is not to say that Mel took this crack about the Belly all that well. I saw that she wanted to look like a woman who had never heard of raging hormones. She might even want to trade places with a woman who wore beads before the first soap opera of the day came on the TV.

Mainly, I saw how Aunt Clare wanted to hurt Mel and she had; Mel looked like she could be poured under a door. I hated Mel's little sister at that moment.

“Melisande always had the awfullest sense of humor,” Aunt Clare said, looking at me. “You must be Elvira.”

“Want to try these false eyelashes?” I reached for Kerrie's sack. “They've only been used once, and they're just the thing for that touch of glamour.”

Aunt Clare gave me a suspicious look. “I don't believe I'd be interested.”

“Too bad,” I said, and began to spread jelly on my last bit of toast.

“Pretty girls,” Aunt Clare said, eyeing Kerrie, who did not look flattered. Kerrie had picked up on the general air of a fight might break out. But a little color came back to Mel's face.

“Is there any coffee left?” Aunt Clare asked after a long, awkward moment during which only the scraping of my knife could be heard. “Aren't you going to offer me some, Momma? Ask me to sit down?”

“Pour yourself some coffee and sit,” the grandmother said.

Aunt Clare used exaggeratedly polite tones to say, “Why don't you roll out the red carpet, Momma?”

The grandmother was not embarrassed. “Don't wait for engraved invitations, the mailman's bag is already heavy enough.”

“If you aren't just the limit,” Aunt Clare said, doing exactly as she was told, pulling an extra chair from beside the refrigerator. “Just because I'm family is no reason to let your manners slack off.”

“Then I guess I ought to tell you that's my chair I stood on to wash some of the soot off the cabinets. Put a dish towel over it if you don't want to dusty your shorts.”

“You shouldn't be standing on chairs at your age, Momma,” Aunt Clare said.

“I don't have a right way to get up there,” the grand-mother said. I could see the grandmother had tried. There were rounded shapes at the bottom of the stains to show where she had wiped them away until she couldn't reach anymore. She added, “I need a step stool.”

“I took the step stool, Momma, so you
wouldn't
get up there. The last thing I need is for you to fall off of it.”

“Step stools are for stepping on,” Kerrie said. “I learned that in Health and Safety.”

“Been here long?” Aunt Clare asked Mel, like she was the other person waiting at a bus stop. “Tony with you?”

“He had to be away for a few days,” Mel said. This was her chance to tell them more, but she didn't, pretty much leaving the impression his trip was business as usual.

“Mel came to see how I was doing,” the grandmother said. “She seemed to think I might be in the hospital. What do you make of that?”

Mel said, “I don't know where I got that idea.”

Kerrie looked up from her coloring book, saying, “On the way here—”

“We passed a big hospital,” Mel said.

“But we didn't stop by,” I added, and Kerrie remembered to take another bite of her egg. She went back to coloring.

“You said you thought I was in the hospital,” the grand-mother said, showing some nettle.

I said, “She asked about the hospital after you told her you'd had a fire.”

“I remember,” the grandmother said. “I remember things fine.”

“Fine,” Aunt Clare said, like a weak echo.

The grandmother fixed Mel in her sights. “I have this idea Clare called you and told you to come on out here.”

“I felt like you ought to get to know my girls, Momma,” Mel said, her eyes shining into the grand-mother's. I didn't think she ought to lie for her sister. I didn't think Aunt Clare deserved it.

“Isn't this a wish come true, Momma?” Aunt Clare asked, concentrating on adding some more sugar to her coffee. Rule number one for telling a lie: She should meet the grandmother's eyes, the way Mel did.