Still Life with Plums (21 page)

Sarah needn’t have worried. By the second night Jack was back in his bed. With his arms buckled around her, Sarah fell asleep facing west knowing she and Chloe were safe, at least for the time being.

While Jack worked in town, Sarah rummaged through every cabinet, every cupboard, cataloguing treasure for later. Chloe watched TV and listened for the man—Jack—so she could stay out of his way.

“Don’t get too close to these guys,” her mother always warned. “You never know what they’re thinking.”

Sarah left Chloe alone so she could find handy pawn shops and bars. She wore pink eye shadow and lipstick for anemic effect, baggy pants that rode her hip bones to accentuate her frailty. She knew the kind of vulnerability that made a man want to protect a woman.
This is for Chloe
, she chanted to herself. But once she had a palm full of dollars, she grew anxious to edge into the thin darkness of bars, the close dampness that assuaged an inner tug she refused to name. After years of running and wheedling, Sarah craved that fuzzy edge of sober. She felt an ironic sense of stability with those barstool silhouettes she would only know for an hour, a day, a week—long enough to make connections, but not long enough for the kudzu to entangle her feet.

At the house, Chloe rested her arms and head on the front windowsill wondering when her mother would return. Jack’s narrow road was vaulted with trees, leaves red-yellow-orange-green. Occasionally a car drove by, or a neighbor slapped out a screen door to get mail. Suddenly the sound of laughter and feet smacking concrete spilled onto the street. Chloe pressed her ear to the glass as it grew louder and louder. A herd of school children galloped around the corner chasing, tugging, swinging lunch boxes and book bags. Chloe forgot her mother’s standing order to never go outside alone and ran out as they passed. They pulled her along like a parade, but quickly turned the corner, leaving only the echo of footsteps.

From behind her Jack said, “Chloe?”

She twisted around, surprised to see him home this early. “Did you see that?”

“The kids?”

She nodded.

“Power’s out in over half the city. We all got to go home. Looks like they hate school as much as I did.”

It didn’t look like they hated school to Chloe.

“How come you’re not in school?”

Chloe shrugged.

Jack’s mouth scrunched up on one side. “We still got electric?”

Chloe nodded.

“Where’s your mom?”

Chloe looked at her feet. “Gone.”

He paused. “I’ll be out back,” he said, then he jammed his hands in his pockets and left.

Chloe watched clock hands spin round and round. She couldn’t read numbers, but the sun was gone, and her mother wasn’t back. She smeared peanut butter and jelly on white bread, mashed the pieces together, and was headed to the TV when a curious humming drew her out back. She tracked the noise to the garage, to Jack, covered in wood shavings and dust, sitting in front of a monstrous machine. When he looked up at Chloe the noise stopped.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He pointed to the lathe. “See this?”

She nodded.

“Never touch. It’ll bite your hand clean off.” The noise started so abruptly Chloe dropped her sandwich in the dirt, ran back to the house and into her mother, just returning. Sarah handed Chloe a baggie filled with gumballs before wobbling to the garage.

Chloe carried her prize to the good spot she’d found for watching TV.

During
Cop Stories
Jack and Sarah clomped into the kitchen. Fresh coffee smells perked through the house.

“Where I go is my business,” Sarah said.

“I didn’t say where. I said who.”

“Nobody you have to worry about.”

“Do I look worried? I’m just asking. Besides, Chloe was alone here, and anyway how come she’s not in school?”

“Chloe’s been tested gifted,” Sarah said without pause. “She’s on a waiting list for a special school.”

Jack started to speak when the phone rang.

Sarah leaned against the wall and crossed her arms.

Jack said, “Hello?” He listened for a moment then stretched the phone cord out to the back stoop. Sarah strained to hear, always afraid it might be her ex no matter how many states or rivers separated them, but all she heard was low laughter and Jack’s last line, “Sorry. It’s just not a good time.”

Sarah cracked her knuckles. “Who was that?”

“I guess if you can have secrets, so can I.” Jack walked past her into the living room where Chloe stared at the TV. “You sure watch a lot of this stuff.”

Chloe furrowed her eyebrows. “Yeah?”

He plopped beside her and watched two men in leather punching, stabbing, kicking a man in a suit. They crammed him into a car trunk, slammed the lid down, and shot round after round through the metal and into the man inside, all the while laughing like lunatics. Chloe’s round eyes readily took in the violence. Jack grabbed the remote and flipped channels, stopping at a jackrabbit darting oblivious through the desert until a hawk swooped down, nabbed it by the scruff, and carried it up into blue sky.

“Might as well learn something useful,” Jack said, but Chloe’s round eyes looked the same as when the two leather men shot up the third in the trunk.

Afterwards, whenever Jack found Chloe at the TV, he’d switch stations looking for animals. If there weren’t any, he’d shut the thing off and hand her a stack of
National Geographic
. “Look at these,” he’d say. “Or go do something. Play.” Now Chloe hunted nature shows all by herself, and started her own eye-level gallery of animal pictures down the hall. She clipped photos of snakes wedged under rocks that could easily tip. Birds nested on precarious cliffs, or high up in trees that the wind might blow down.

Three weeks into their stay, Sarah pulled a tattered tablecloth from the back of the china cabinet and draped it over a chair back. “Look at this, Chloe,” she said, eyes roving over the ancient piece of handiwork. “Beautiful,” Sarah whispered, running her fingertips lightly over the embroidery and openwork stitch. “Moths got to it in a few places,” she said, sliding her hand underneath to expose the open wounds.

“Bet you could fix it,” Chloe said.

“You think?”

Chloe nodded and soon Sarah was sitting on the couch with the tablecloth fanned out before her like a wedding dress. Chloe sat beside her mother holding the thread and scissors, begging to sew just one stitch. “Okay,” Sarah said. “But let me show you how first.” Chloe watched her mother’s thin fingers, how she deftly wove the needle between the fragile fabric. “Aunt Nellie taught me how to sew.”

Chloe scrunched up her face. “I don’t remember her.”

“Sure you do. Don’t you remember the time—” Sarah stopped sewing and looked at her daughter. “I guess you don’t,” Sarah said.
“And it’s a shame. She’s about the only thing I really miss from back home.” Sarah’s gaze drifted over into a corner and stayed there for so long that Chloe looked over expecting to find a mouse or a cricket.

“Mama?” she said, to break the spell.

Sarah shook off whatever memory captivated her. “Now you try,” Sarah said, standing to drape the cloth over Chloe’s knees. Chloe bit her lip in concentration as she worked the needle this way and that. “That’s good!” Sarah said. Chloe looked up, smiling, and over her mother’s shoulder saw Jack looking on in silence. He held a finger to his lips for secrecy. “You’re doing fine,” Sarah continued. “You know you’re brilliant, don’t you,” she said. “Course you get that from me.” Chloe giggled, peering at Jack, who quietly watched the mother-daughter tableau, his head tilted to the side, eyes droopy and warm. It was a look Chloe had never seen on a man’s face.

That night, while Sarah and Jack laughed in their room, Chloe snuck out to the garage. She hadn’t forgotten the forbidden machine. She tiptoed around it, mesmerized by moonlit edges and angles. Curious about this hand-eating contraption, she eased a pointed finger down to tease when the overhead lights flipped on. Jerking her hand straight up in the air, she would have run except Jack leaned in the doorway with a hand on his hip and an amused smile slicing through his beard. Chloe backed against his tool chest, fully prepared for a slap or punch. Jack seemed to be deciding something, and finally said, “Hard to resist, isn’t it. Come on, I’ll show you how she goes.”

And he did. More than nature shows, it became her favorite pastime as Chloe watched the miracle of turning two-by-twos into chair arms and legs, or spindles for rockers or banisters. Half-finished projects crowded the garage walls and hung from the ceiling. Jack sat with his head cocked to the side. He’d position a length of chalked cherry or mahogany between the two clamps. Round and round it
spun with a hum while Jack shaped and sanded. Leaning his tools into its surface, he could change the machine’s whine while molding splintery, hard-edged wood into something so smooth Chloe often sat for hours turning it over and over in her soft palms. They rarely spoke while at the lathe, but both tried to match the lathe’s song: Jack’s hum low and steady, Chloe’s high with interrupted breaths.

One Sunday evening Sarah peeked in the garage just as Chloe scooted her stool closer to Jack’s. It was a closeness that made Sarah uneasy, made her legs feel itchy, as if something was trying to crawl up and grab hold. When she went back into the house the phone screamed and she barked into it: “Hello!”

“Is Jack there?” It was a woman.

Sarah paused. “Hold on,” she said, and stomped back outside, tamping down the earth so that nothing could push through and reach out.

Sarah and Chloe followed Jack to the kitchen where he picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

He listened. “Can it wait? I’m in the middle of something.” A pause. “All right. I’ll be over in a minute.” He scratched his ear and looked at Chloe. “Sorry kid, gotta go.” He looked at Sarah. “My ex-wife’s got a busted faucet. I’ll be back in an hour or so, okay?”

Sarah leaned against the kitchen wall. “Sure.”

Jack tugged on his coat and hefted a toolbox from the closet. He kissed Sarah’s forehead before leaving. From the window, she watched him climb into the truck. Tilting the rear view mirror, he raked fingers through his hair and beard. By the time he backed out of the driveway, Sarah had slid on pink eye shadow, lipstick, and her oversized coat.

Jack did return in an hour. Sarah did not.

Harsh voices filled Chloe’s dreams before yanking her fully awake.
Sarah and Jack argued outside her door.

“She was here all alone, for God’s sake. Anything could have happened.”

Sarah strained most of the slur from her voice. “Nothing
did
happen.” A hint of guilt edged the words. “And it’s
still
none of your damn business where I go.”

“Did I ask? All I said was I don’t like Chloe left alone in my house.”

Sarah spouted the line that usually bought more time. “You want us to leave? Fine. We’ll be out tomorrow if that’s really what you want.”

“That’s
not
what I want, Sarah. But if you can’t stay and look after your child, maybe you
should
go.”

“Fine. We’ll leave in the morning.” Her footsteps padded down the hall.

Jack kicked the floor board beside Chloe’s door. “Shit,” he said, and walked the other way.

Sarah hugged her knees tight in Jack’s bed. She’d been kicked out before, but never for this. Never for leaving Chloe by herself. It was a puzzle she couldn’t quite solve, so her mind turned to her immediate problem: she had no real money and no place yet to go.

In the morning Chloe found Jack asleep on the couch. She leaned close to his face, crinkled from sleep and from time. The thick hand on his chest was road-mapped with veins, but she knew the palm would be shiny smooth with calluses from molding all that wood. She looked at her rubbery pink palms wondering when her own calluses would form.

Chloe slipped back into her room and scanned the bright walls, Camille’s walls,
her
canopy bed,
her
desk,
her
ballerina posters. She imagined Jack tucking his daughter in night after night after night. Laughing and whispering until she fell asleep. In the morning when
Camille awoke it would all still be hers.

Chloe crept into Jack’s room and dug under the covers beside her mother.

Sarah rolled toward her. “Morning, baby,” she said. “Sleep well?”

“Yep.”

“Least somebody did.”

Sarah pulled herself up against the headboard. “Where’s Jack?”

“On the couch.”

“Well Chloe,” she said, sliding fingers through her hair, “we’ve been here awhile already, so I guess it’s time to—”

“Mama, I got something to show you.” She dangled a baggie filled with wadded bills and loose change. “It was in the middle of the sidewalk, so I just ran out and took it. Finders keepers, right? Nobody saw me, so finders keepers, right?”

Sarah snatched the baggie. “Absolutely.”

Chloe hadn’t found the cash. It was an accumulation of birthday and Christmas money from various men. A quarter or fifty cents pressed into her palm to get her out of the house for half an hour alone with her mother. Chloe instinctively hoarded the handouts, couch nickels, sidewalk pennies, for some future purpose which had never become clear—until now.

Sarah dumped the money between them and counted crinkled fives and ones. “Wonder how much there is.”

Giddy, Chloe blurted, “Can we stay?”

Sarah stopped counting.

“I mean, just a little while longer?”

Sarah took a deep breath. “Look, Chloe, what do I keep telling you about getting too close to these guys.”

“I know,” Chloe mumbled.

Sarah scooped the money back in the bag and sat perfectly still. “Brrrr!” she finally said, sliding out of bed to squint out the window.
“Looks like winter’s coming early.”

Chloe followed and looked outside at the frosty glaze coating the grass and tulip poplar out back. Steam rising from the garage roof.

Sarah smoothed her daughter’s sleep-tangled hair. “I wouldn’t mind staying put until spring.”

Chloe looked up at her mother. “You mean it?”

“It’s not up to me, you know. There’s Jack.”