Suncatchers (17 page)

Back at the check-out line, she let two women get in line ahead of them since both of them were buying only one or two items, and when they finally made it to the cashier, Eldeen asked for somebody to please check the shelf price on the jars of Hi-C that she thought were only $1.49 but that the scanner had priced at $1.79. Outside, she pointed to the cart return after they had unloaded their bags into the Toyota and said to Perry, “Way over yonder's where you take the buggies so's they can use them for the next round of folks.” It seemed to Perry that everything Eldeen did turned out to be complicated.

Jewel opened the kitchen door now and stepped outside, looking curiously toward Perry's car. “Oh, lands, what am I going to tell her?” Eldeen said. “I know for sure and certain she's going to ask where we been.”

Perry rolled down his window and called, “I took Eldeen with me to Wal-Mart. I had some things to pick up. She'll be right in.” Jewel nodded and went back inside.

Eldeen turned to him with a spectacular grimace. “You sweet boy, you,” she said. She reached inside her purse, and Perry heard the crisp crackle of the candy bag she had taken from the Wal-Mart sack. “It's sure a good thing I talked you into getting you some of that Windex and them lightbulbs that was all on sale,” Eldeen said, “or you'd of been telling a story just then.” She held out a handful of pastel candy hearts, then laughed happily as she poured them into Perry's hand. “Here's you some treats. I get such a kick out of what's on them. Here's one that says ‘Dig you.'” She shot him another grin, then opened her door and slowly swung her feet out onto the driveway. “You go on and take all the bags to your house if you don't mind,” she said. “I'll get them tomorrow after Jewel's left for school—oh, except give me my thread and the spatula, will you?”

Perry turned to the backseat and rummaged through the bags while Eldeen made her way to his side of the car.

“I sure appreciate your neighborliness in taking me on my errands,” she said, smiling broadly. She looked over toward Perry's house, her smile fading, then back at Perry. “I hope you don't mind if I pray for you,” she said. “I just have a feeling, a real strong feeling right here,” and she laid the spatula over her heart.

“Well . . . thank you,” Perry said. He looked down into his palm at the little mound of candies. He took a white one that read “U R #1” and put it into his mouth. He dropped the others inside his coat pocket. Then he sat for a moment watching Eldeen mount the steps, her cape whipping about and lifting with the brisk wind as she struggled to keep it down. Perry thought suddenly of the famous picture of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt flying up all around her, and he tried to imagine what a conversation between Eldeen and Marilyn Monroe would have been like. Eldeen would no doubt have asked the sex goddess point-blank if she was born again. And what would Marilyn Monroe have said to that? he wondered. How old would Marilyn be anyway if she were still living? Probably in her sixties at least, maybe older. Reaching the top step, Eldeen turned before she went inside and waved the spatula like a small flag.

After carrying in the bags and setting them on the kitchen table, Perry glanced at the digital clock in the living room. It was almost four-thirty. He lay down on the sofa in the living room and closed his eyes. He didn't even take his coat off. Maybe he could sleep through these next couple of hours—the worst time of the day for him since he had come to Derby. He wished earnestly for a time-release drug he could take to knock him out for exactly four hours without any harmful effects. He would take it around three o'clock every afternoon and wake up at seven.

Troy would be home from school now. They were an hour earlier in Rockford. Dinah would be home, too—or at least that had been the plan. Perry wondered if she ever stayed late at work these days, if Troy ever had to come home to an empty house. It would be the kind of thing Dinah would have no qualms about. “He knows where the key is hidden,” she would say, “and he knows exactly what he's supposed to do after school. Mother can even run over to make sure he keeps on schedule.”

Starting about two-thirty, Perry had always begun watching the clock back home in Rockford. Troy's arrival from school was his favorite part of the day. For a whole hour the boy was his, not shared with Dinah or other children. They had a routine, beginning with Oreos and chocolate milk and ending with what they called “art from scratch,” when Troy would scribble on a piece of paper and Perry would form a picture of something—a ship or a mythical animal or a clown's face—out of the random lines. In between was the odious task of homework, usually only a couple of papers Troy hadn't completed at school. Perry was often appalled at the boring nature of these papers. Hadn't teachers learned anything new since his own days in elementary school? Didn't any of them have any imagination?

Dinah used to scold Perry frequently for what she called his “pampering” of Troy. “Let him learn some independence!” she'd chide. “Maybe he could get used to the idea that life isn't all fun and games if you'd quit mother-henning him to death!” She had come in on them a few times when Perry had been trying to add some sparkle to the homework procedure by timing with a stopwatch each arithmetic problem Troy did or doling out pretzels for each correct answer.

Perry sat up suddenly. So many things could happen to a kid by himself in a big house. What if some pervert had been stalking their neighborhood, watching for a child who was home alone? What if Troy slipped on the kitchen floor while carrying his chocolate milk to the table and cut his head on a shard of glass? What if he tried to light a match for some reason and caught the whole house on fire? What if a friend came over with his father's gun and tried to show Troy how to load it? Perry felt his heart racing. What was I thinking, he asked himself, when I drove away and left my only son behind?

He reached for the telephone and began dialing, wishing desperately that Beth had a Touch-Tone phone instead of one of these old stupid slow rotary ones. But at least his fingers were finding the right holes—not like the dreams he often had where he was in extreme danger and kept misdialing in his panicky attempts to call the police. There, the phone was ringing now. On the sixth ring it suddenly stopped. There was a bump and a scraping sound, as if the receiver had been dropped. Then Dinah's voice: “Hello?” She was irritated about something. Funny how he could tell that from only one word spoken eight hundred miles away. She was definitely irritated. “Hello?” She spoke again, louder this time, more impatient.

Perry's fingers tightened around the receiver. He ought to hang up now that he knew Troy wasn't home by himself, but he couldn't. He heard Dinah sigh. “Who is this? What do you want?” she asked. In the background he could hear a rhythmic pounding. Was that Troy? What was he doing? He wasn't supposed to bounce balls inside the house. Was he trying to hammer something? Maybe it was the washing machine out of balance. It was bad to do that.

“Hello?” she repeated, then paused. Then “Oh, for . . .” and she hung up. Perry sat still, clutching the receiver. It felt warm. But he knew that was only because he had been breathing into it. He realized suddenly that he was hot. He started to take his coat off, then stopped when he thought about the effort it would take. “Who is this? What do you want?” she had asked. Simple questions that he supposed deserved answers. What should he have said? “This is your ex-husband, Perry Raymond Warren, and I want things to be like they used to be when we were first married.” He couldn't begin to imagine how Dinah would have responded to such a statement.

Slowly he hung up the phone. It was only four-forty, and still there stretched before him the long hours when he should be hearing the sounds of supper in the kitchen, then voices around the table and the clink of ice in glasses and silverware against plates, then the dishes being stacked and rinsed and set inside the dishwasher. There was another answer for Dinah's question. “This is Perry, and I want to hear the kitchen sounds again.”

His eye caught the television on the coffee table. He had brought along the old one from home—the small set he had kept in a corner of his study, usually stacked with old magazines and mail left unattended. He realized now that he hadn't turned it on once since he had moved in. Where had the past week and a half gone? A couple of errands with Eldeen, he thought, and a few pages of notes about the Church of the Open Door—those were the grand sum of his accomplishments.

He stood to take off his coat, feeling the slight bulge of the candy hearts in the pocket. He fished them out and set them in a little pile on the coffee table, then ate one that said “Hot Mama” on it. He turned on the television and lay back down on the sofa.

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
was on. Mister Rogers had on an apron. He was stirring a bowl of batter as he smiled into the camera. “And I call these cookies Super Special Cookies because I make each one special—just like each one of you boys and girls. But before I show you what I mean, I have some other nice things to share with all my special friends out there.” He walked over to a refrigerator and set the bowl inside. Then he took off his apron and put his blue zippered sweater back on, all the while smiling into the camera and singing a song that started off with “No one else is just like you, and no one's just like me, But though we're all so different, we're as happy as can be.”

Troy had watched Mister Rogers several times when he was four or five, Perry recalled. Then one day he had looked at Perry and said, “Mister Rogers acts dumb,” and he had refused to watch him again. Perry had taken it as a sign of superior intelligence then, but thinking back over it now, he wondered if it didn't have more to do with the precocious cynicism of kids today than with intellect. And, too, he and Dinah sometimes passed each other looks when Mister Rogers said something particularly saccharine. Troy could easily have picked up on those.

Perry ate several more candy hearts. One said “Be Mine,” another said “No Way,” and another said “Melt My Heart.” What a coincidence. That last one was the same phrase Eldeen had used in her prayer in the bank parking lot. Something like “And dear Lord in heaven, melt my heart and make me soft to the needs that Perry has so that maybe, just maybe, I can help show him the way to the cross of Jesus.”

Maybe that was how Eldeen and Brother Hawthorne and the others composed their prayers—out of the messages on conversation hearts. He ate two others—one said “One and Only” and the other “Stay True.” That was it. They strung these little clichés together, and presto—they had a prayer. “Teach us, Lord, how to serve you as our One and Only God. Show me that your promises can all Be Mine. We know there is No Way to heaven but through salvation and help us to Stay True to the Bible.” They might have to skip a few, like “Hot Mama” and “Cute Dish.”

Perry closed his eyes again and listened to Mister Rogers talking with a woman named Miss Gardenkeeper, who was explaining about different seeds as she dug little holes in the soil. Of course, Mister Rogers took everything she said and forced his theme upon it. “These little seeds are all special and different, aren't they, Miss Gardenkeeper? And each one will grow into a beautiful plant with blooms of different colors.” What must it be like to live with a man like that? Perry wondered. Did his wife ever tell him to shut up? Did he have children of his own? Grandchildren? Did Mister Rogers always speak so gently to the neighbor children who ran across his flower beds?

Of course, he knew enough about men to know that all of them—including the soft-spoken Mister Rogers—were capable of living private lives that were totally unlike their public ones. Fundamentalists should have learned this lesson by now, too. All these TV evangelists who spoke so self-righteously to their adoring audiences and then proceeded to take the money mailed in by widows and spend it on swimming pools for their dogs and sleazy videotaping sessions with prostitutes. He'd read all about them. It was one of Cal's greatest sources of delight. He knew Cal would love nothing better than for Perry's book to expose some kind of scandal at the Church of the Open Door.

Frankly, though, Perry didn't think Theodore Hawthorne was the type to be embroiled in a scandal. Of course, he didn't know the man—didn't
really
know him. He tried now to visualize Brother Hawthorne in a compromising situation, but the only woman whose image he could conjure up in the same picture was soft, round, red-haired Edna. He wondered what they were doing right now. It was getting on toward suppertime. Was Brother Hawthorne in the kitchen now helping Edna? Did he put on an apron like Mister Rogers? He wondered if the Hawthorne children watched Mister Rogers on television.

Mister Rogers was back in the kitchen now, rolling out dough on a floured cutting board. An assistant, dressed in a dog costume, was helping him cut out shapes—stars, bears, hearts, etc. Another helper, this one a cat, was helping to sprinkle each cookie with sparkles and tiny colored beads. It all went so smoothly that Perry wondered if they had practiced all of this beforehand with a different batch of cookies.

Perry sat up suddenly as the door buzzer sounded, followed by several loud knocks. A pizza delivery car idled in the driveway, and a teenager wearing a Pop's Pizza Palace cap stood at the door holding two large cardboard boxes. Perry pushed open the screen door, frowning slightly.

“It comes to fifteen twenty-five, sir,” the boy said cheerfully.

“Uh—I didn't order anything,” Perry said. The boy's smile vanished.

“Not again,” he groaned. “This is the third time in an hour.” He stood there staring helplessly at the boxes he was holding. “I can't believe this is happening,” he said.

Teenagers as a rule usually annoyed Perry, but for some reason he liked this one. The boy had on a well-worn gold and black letter jacket with a big
D
on one side and a huge hornet on the other—probably an athlete of some kind at Derby High School. Too little for football, though, and basketball, too, most likely, unless he was incredibly quick and wily. Track was a possibility. He could be a sprinter, maybe the anchor on a relay team. He had an angular jaw and deep-set brown eyes—a youthful Clint Eastwood kind of look about him. But for all his good looks, he had a vulnerable, almost childish expression in his dejection. As the boy started back down the steps, Perry saw the name “Darrell” emblazoned across the back of his jacket. He wondered if Darrell knew Joe Leonard at school.