Still Life with Plums (20 page)

“You’re beautiful, too,” I say.

“He always liked brunettes,” your wife says. A pained laugh before her mouth flattens into a line. “We were divorced, you know.”

“I didn’t know.” That’s a lie.

“Four years now.”

Maureen waves her hand to encompass every potent thing in this room, including you. “It’s a relief in a way. For the kids, especially. Every
late night phone call was a scare. And now it’s happened. It’s over.”

I know what she is saying, exactly, though I wonder why she is making this confession to a complete stranger. And then I know, because she delivers one more astonishing fact: “All the time we were married I felt like I was living in your shadow.”

It’s difficult to breathe and I feel myself tipping backward just a hair, teetering on heels. I have to put one hand out for balance, the other over my mouth to keep from screaming.

“He went to see you, you know.”

“What?” I say, conjuring an image of you scrabbling out of O’Hare airport toward the taxi queue, no luggage because there was no time for packing, my address on a scrap of paper clutched in your palm.

“When you came back here to give that speech.”

“Oh.” I rewind ten years, twelve, and remember that talk at the university which was open to the public. The auditorium crammed with journalism classes forced into attendance, my former professors, old neighbors, my mother, of course. I try to recall faces, look for you standing by the back door, your usual strategy. Did I look right at you and not know it? No. I would have known.

“Did you ever get married?” she asks, eyes boring into mine as if the answer is somehow vital.

“Yes,” I say, omitting the fact that this is my fourth go-round, with three exes in three different states.

She lets out a disappointed sigh and peels off the next logical question. “How long?”

My impulse is to give her the combined total, nine years, but I don’t. “Richard and I have been together four years.” A record for me and he’s a perfectly lovely man. Perfectly fine. Who owns a reasonable car and drives at a reasonable speed. But the recently tabulated truth is that we’ve occupied the same bed for less than 1000 nights. Apparently I am not Scheherazade enough to keep him home. His job requires a
certain amount of traveling, wining and dining. A lifestyle I imbibed in and acquiesced to at first because of my own all-consuming career, a vocation I walked away from with one impulsive phone call.

“Any children?”

“Yes. I have a three-year-old daughter.”

“Three! You started late.”

“I guess I did.”

“Well, you had your career already and I’m just starting mine,” your wife says. “Once the kids were mostly grown I went to nursing school. Just finished last May.”

“Congratulations.”

“Sometimes I wish I’d waited to have kids, like you.”

I look into her eyes that are spooling backward into the life she shared with you, years filled with diapers and teething, school plays and driving lessons, images that make my stomach clench.

Her eyes pull back into focus, the present, and she says: “What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Helena.”

“I bet she’s gorgeous.”

I want so much to pull out her photo and show your wife just how beautiful Helena is, a practice I shuddered at as a childless woman. I want her to see my daughter’s doleful eyes. It’s as if she’s trying to steal people’s souls when she looks at them, and the first moment I looked at her, I let her steal mine, which is the exact moment I knew I couldn’t leave her in the hands of the impeccably referenced nanny Richard and I so painstakingly researched and retained.

“There are advantages to waiting,” your wife says. “No money worries, I’m sure. Your husband can probably spend more time at home.”

I have to swallow the bubble of laughter caught in my throat, if that’s what it is. Helena’s soul-stealing magic has not entranced Richard any better than my 1001 tales.

“I bet you have a nice house. Better than the one Tommy and I started out in, I’m sure.”

“I do. I mean, I guess I do.” A quick vision of the newly developed, upscale, planned community miles from the city. Our custom-built home with the undulating landscaping that secludes us from our neighbors. No chain link, no squat kitchen, but sometimes it presses in just the same. A closeness that occasionally sends my mind reeling backward, too, not all the way to West Virginia, but to the two-bedroom condo I still own in Lincoln Park, with a galley kitchen and a cedar-fenced patch of grass, to the tenant whose lease renews every March, less than six months from now—162 days.

Your wife looks at her shoes, searching for a tactful exit.

“I really need to be going,” my gift to her.

“It was good to finally meet you,” she says. “It’s strange, but it means a lot to me that you came, to know that he still means something to you. That all his pining wasn’t for nothing.” This extraordinarily generous woman looks over at you, all alone now.

She begins to walk away, but I put my hand on her arm because there is still one thing I need to know. “Was he a good father?”

Your wife looks at me, the tears welling as she weighs everything, and there is a lot to weigh. Finally she tells me what I already suspected. “Yes. He was a wonderful dad.”

I nod and watch her walk toward you, maybe to tell you this herself.

I head into the foyer, pass cypress trees and consoling streams, though I don’t really see them because of my own blurring tears. I’m not crying for you, Tommy, though I’m sure I will in the months, the years to come. I push out into bright sunlight and start running, of course, the thing that I do. I hop into my SUV, crank the engine and peel out of the parking lot, tires squealing, gravel spraying. I can’t buzz down the windows fast enough, all four of them,
and when I veer onto the main road I mash my foot against the gas, urging this behemoth to go fast, faster, and though it’s no GTO, the speedometer needle shudders as it passes 50-55-60. It’s still not fast enough but the wind feels so good, my hair lashing my face, stinging my eyes. I don’t care. But I’m not running away, Tommy. I’m running toward something. The same elusive thing that’s tumbled me from Dallas to Denver, Seattle to Chicago. The belief that if I just run fast enough I can reach 90 mph and lift off as I crest over hills. Because even after all this time, especially now with you beside me, shit-eating grin slicing your face, wild golden hair whipping, I am still desperate, utterly frantic, to fly.

Chloe and her mother huddled inside Foodland’s bus shelter fending off pelting autumn rain. Wet grocery bags smelled like worms, so Chloe burrowed her nose into her mother’s side. Sarah’s foot tapped fiercely as she willed the bus to arrive: “Come on, come on, come
on.”
She balanced a wilting sack against her angular hip until the bottom split and out spilled cans of Spam and tamales, grape soda and 3/$1.00 pork ’n beans. Eggs broke, the jelly jar cracked, and Sarah yowled: “Shit!”

Scrambling to collect the rolling goods, Chloe reached over the curb for the soggy lettuce when a Dodge Ram drove by splashing her with a muddy wave.

Sarah glowered at the truck. “Asshole!” she yelled, pulling Chloe up by the elbow to swipe off loose grass and dead leaves. “Son of a bitch ought to look where he’s driving.”

They heard heavy footsteps and turned to see a bearded man tromping toward them. Behind him the offending truck sat cockeyed in the parking lot. “I’m sorry!” he said, brows furrowed, eyes taking in the mess that he made. “I didn’t see her.” He immediately bent to scoop up groceries, tucking cans inside his pockets and zipped jacket.
“Can I give you a ride home?”

Chloe’s and her mother’s eyes met.

“Please. Your girl’s soaking.”

Sarah appraised the man’s face, his intentions.

“All right,” she said. They followed him to the truck where he opened the passenger door. Sarah slid in first, pulling Chloe up beside her.

The man got in and started the truck. “I really am sorry.”

Chloe rested her cheek against the foggy window while Sarah shifted toward the driver, her foot madly twitching. At a red light, she looked at him full-faced, tucking a blade of sopping hair behind her ear to expose the swollen cheek. “My name’s Sarah.”

“Jack,” he said, looking over.

Chloe and Sarah were both surprised when he cupped Sarah’s face in his hand to inspect the green bruise. “What happened here?”

Sarah pulled away. “Nothing. It’s just… nothing.”

“What. Somebody hit you?”

She crossed her legs. “It’s just that he gets so angry sometimes.”

Chloe recognized the tone of her mother’s lies. The bruise was from a drunken stumble.

“Your husband?”

“No. A friend. We’re staying with him until we get back on our feet.” She pressed her face into Chloe’s kinky red hair.

“He do this a lot? This—friend?”

“Only lately,” she said. “He’s not used to a child in the house.”

Chloe started to protest, but Sarah squeezed her daughter’s knee.

Jack gritted his teeth as Sarah gave him directions.

The truck squeaked to a stop and Chloe popped open the door to jump down. Jack pulled food from his pockets to pile in Sarah’s cradled arms. “Look,” he said, “if things get bad here you give me a call.” He pulled a pencil from the dash board and scratched his
number on a bean can. “I could put you up for a night or two.”

“You better check with your woman before you make offers like that.”

“I don’t, uh, have—”

“We’ll be fine,” she said, edging down the seat. “Thanks anyway.”

Inside the apartment, Sarah parted the curtains and watched Jack’s taillights recede. “Alleluia,” she sang. “God
does
provide.”

“Are we leaving now?” Chloe asked.

Sarah rubbed her arms to scale off the perpetual chill that encased her. “No, baby. Just a couple more days, though, so get ready.”

Get ready
meant start looking for treasure so when Sarah said, “Go!” Chloe could scavenge through whatever man’s apartment, pocketing silver lighters and pens, gold rings and tie clips, anything shiny she could palm and tuck. At the new place, when they were alone, she’d lift her arms while Sarah dug into pockets and hoods, under shirts and in cuffs, pulling out surprises like Christmas. She’d hug her daughter tight and say, “Good girl, Chloe. That’s my good-good girl. Best thing I ever did in my life was have you.”

And she meant it so much that the first years of Chloe’s life Sarah planted herself in front of her husband’s open palm when he went after the baby for crying. When the open palm clenched to a fist, Sarah scooped up the baby and bolted out of the steep mountain hollow that had trapped her in cold shadows her whole life. But he always found them. Court orders couldn’t stop him from stalking and threatening. “I don’t listen to no piece a paper,” he said. “You’re still my wife, and that’s my kid. However long it takes, Sarah, I’ll get her back.”

That was enough to scare Sarah from one town to the next, to family, at first, then any marginal friend. After they were used up, she started scrounging up men. Always moving a little farther west, a little closer to sea level to escape the Appalachians, the forest of trees
that made her feel as tangled in milkweed and kudzu as they were. If she could just get to flat land where the horizon was a straight line that stretched for miles and miles and miles maybe she would feel safe. Maybe the blazing sun would dry up the chronic dampness in her bones. But even when she crossed the Ohio River and made it to Cincinnati, then beyond it to Indianapolis, she still looked over her shoulder. “However long it takes,” scraped through her mind.

By now Sarah was used to trading herself for shelter. Her body became a cash crop—her only commodity. It was a business with only a pretense of emotions involved. And as for Chloe, the men pretended to care about her as long as Sarah pretended to care about them. A few months were about as long as the pretense would hold, but before she left one man, she had to line up another. Which had been particularly difficult this time—until Jack. Three days after the grocery store, Sarah’s voice crackled into his phone, “He kicked us out.” Jack picked them up on a corner six blocks away, their suitcase and clothes bulging and clanking with hidden spoils he did not hear over his continued rail against any man who would strike a woman.

Twenty minutes later they parked in front of Jack’s frame house. Sarah pressed Chloe’s hand as they stepped onto his porch. Inside, Sarah nodded toward the silver spoon collection on one living room wall, a framed twenty-dollar bill on another. Chloe gawked at an albino deer head mounted over the couch. Its pink eyes scared her and she wanted to run. She swiveled to look at the other walls covered with stuffed fish and birds, thumbtacked pictures of gorillas, hyenas, zebras.

Chloe gaped at animal pictures lining the hall as Jack led them to a door in the middle. “Here you go,” he said, pushing it open, flipping on the light.

Ballerina posters crowded lemon walls. Lace curtains draped the
windows. Canopy bed pushed to one side. Chloe backed into her mother’s legs.

“What a sweet room,” Sarah said, nudging Chloe inside.

Chloe resisted, saying in a wobbly voice, “Whose room is this?”

“My daughter’s.”

“Your daughter’s?” Sarah said, pulling Chloe back against her.

Chloe pressed a plump cheek into her mother’s side. “Won’t she get mad if I sleep in here?”

Jack leaned in to scan the room. “Camille’s away at college. Besides, she hasn’t lived here for a long, long time.”

Sarah winked, so Chloe went into this other girl’s room while Jack led Sarah farther down the hall.

Sarah was surprised by Jack’s room. Needlepoint. Dried flowers. Chenille bedspread.

Jack read her expression. “My ex-wife did the decorating. I’ve just never gotten around to changing it.”

Sarah said, “Oh.” What startled her even more was when Jack said, “I’ll take the couch,” and pulled the door closed behind him. Usually the men started in right away, but Sarah was grateful for a night alone, a chance to rifle through Jack’s dresser, to heft the mason jar full of half dollars and state quarters to her chest and judge the weight. She grabbed a fistful and slipped them in her pocket before sliding the jar back. A silver picture frame rested on the nightstand. Inside the frame, a much younger Jack sat on porch steps hugging a young girl tightly between his knees, his chin on her head. They both grinned at the camera. The photographer’s shadow climbed up the steps beside them.