Suncatchers (5 page)

Jewel stood up. “Mama, Perry might not want to talk about it. I heard that writers don't like to tell their stories till they're all finished. Here, somebody take this last piece of corn bread. I'm keeping some more warm in the oven.” Joe Leonard started to reach for it, then darted a look at Perry.

“No, you go ahead and take it,” Perry said. “I've still got some.” He watched as Jewel fit a quilted mitt on her hand and slid a muffin pan from the oven. Then she grabbed the top of a muffin and set it quickly on Perry's plate. He wondered how women could touch hot food without flinching. Dinah had been like that. She'd take baked potatoes right out of the oven with her bare hands.

“Joe Leonard's read one of your books, haven't you, Joe Leonard?” Jewel said.

The boy nodded and said, “Beth gave it to me.” He started to say something else but must have swallowed wrong, for he began coughing.

“Drink some tea! Drink some tea!” Eldeen said, and he did.

Finally the boy cleared his throat and said, “It was
Ice Planet Countdown
. It was a real good mystery.”

“Oh, a mystery!” cried Eldeen. “I just love a good mystery book. I've read every single one of Agatha Christie's. I think it's the most fun to try to figure out who's the guilty one before that man Hercule Whatever-his-funny-last-name-is or Miss Marple sets everybody down and explains it all. Sometimes I guess right, too! Have you ever read
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, Perry? You haven't? Well, I tell you,
that
one's a real stumper. I
never ever
would of guessed who it was, not even if I'd of read it a million times.”

But if you'd read it a million times, Perry wanted to point out, there wouldn't be any need to guess. He didn't say anything, though. He was just thankful that Eldeen had left the subject of his writing. He gave her his full attention as she explained the entire plot of the book.

“Mama, you're spoiling it for him if he ever wants to read it,” Jewel said at one point.

“No, it's fine,” Perry said. “Really, it's all very interesting.”

“You're welcome to have more,” Jewel said after Perry had emptied his plate and sat back. Joe Leonard had finally quit eating, having cleaned his plate to a slick shine, and was busy folding his napkin into different shapes, first a triangle and then a diamond. Now he was working on a hexagon.

“Oh, I can't,” Perry said. “I've had a lot more than I usually eat.”

“It was the funniest thing,” said Eldeen, “when Jewel was just a little girl and I married her daddy and fixed our first meal together as a family. I can still remember what we ate that night. It was pork chops that I fried way too long, and they ended up hard as Hiram's work boots. When I asked Jewel if she wanted another one, she looked up at me with them big blue eyes so solemn and said, ‘I've had a sufficiency, thank you, and any more would be a loathsome burden.' I like to died laughing. Hiram told me her first mama had taught her to say that. I've never forgot it. You can imagine
that
coming out of the mouth of a little six-year-old. She was the shyest little thing.”

Jewel smiled and shook her head. “Mama loves to tell that story.” She started picking up plates to carry to the sink. Joe Leonard took all the glasses over and then folded up the place mats and shook them out one at a time over the garbage can. Eldeen dipped her spoon into the applesauce bowl.

“I didn't use it before this,” she said to Perry. “I don't want you thinking we're not sanitary-minded around here.” She opened her mouth wide and turned the spoon upside down on her tongue. “Mmm, nobody's applesauce is as good as Jewel's.” Perry noticed a tiny crumb of corn bread clinging to the hair above her lip.

Eldeen got up slowly and took her spoon and the applesauce dish to the counter. Then she walked over to a small pantry, her rubber boots squeaking on the linoleum. Inside the pantry Perry saw rows of glass jars filled with what looked like more applesauce. From a top shelf Eldeen got down a box and brought it back to the table.

“Do you like Chinese checkers?” she asked. “We usually play it every night after supper.”

Jewel turned around from scraping off dishes and shot Perry an apologetic look. “Mama, Perry might rather just talk.” Joe Leonard was filling one side of the sink with soapy water but turned to watch Perry's response.

Perry shook his head. “No, no. This is fine. Chinese checkers is fine. Really.”

Eldeen brushed her hand across the plastic tablecloth. “Joe Leonard, bring the rag over here and wipe up this sticky place. I hate a gummy tablecloth.”

Perry helped her set up the game board and fit all the pieces in the holes. He tried to remember how many years it had been since he had played Chinese checkers. It must have been at least twenty-five. He and Beth had played it a lot during summer vacations at their aunt and uncle's cabin in Wisconsin when they were kids, but Beth usually won, since working out a tidy, systematic plan and fitting things into place suited her temperament perfectly. Perry had always grown restless after a game or two and started experimenting with creative, roundabout jumping patterns or had played defensively by trying to figure out and block Beth's next move, which always rankled her.

Eldeen must have asked him something because he looked up to find her staring at him.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “My mind wanders a lot. Did you say something?”

“No,” she said. “I was just noticing your mouth. It reminds me a lot of Beth's, the way your lips are kind of thin. And your eyes, too,” she went on. “They're exactly like hers, dark and set in deep. Why, you two could be twins! I never thought of that—
are
you?”

“Oh no,” Perry said. “Not at all.”

She laughed and reached over to pat his hand. “Well, your hands sure aren't like hers. Not one bit. I like a man's hands that are big and sinewy like yours,” she continued. “So many men you see have these little pale, milky-white hands without any hair on them at all. You half expect to see their nails painted pink. I don't like to see a man with fingernails. You've got you a pair of real man's hands. Hiram had hands like that. Big and rough. And Bailey did, too.”

Dinah used to say the same things about his hands, only not in so complimentary a tone. She had fumed over his nail-biting and complained when he stroked her knee, saying he'd ruin her stockings with his rough skin. So he had started picking at his nails instead of biting them, peeling off the thinnest little strips and dropping them onto the carpet when she wasn't looking. And he had begun keeping his hands off her knees.

“I bet you got thick dark hair all over your arms, too,” Eldeen continued. He must have looked surprised because she patted his hand again. “Oh, don't worry. I'm probably old enough to be your grandmother, so I can say things like that. How old are you?”

“Thirty-eight,” he answered.

“Let's see, I was seventy-nine my last birthday, so when you were born, I was . . . yes, that would of worked. I
could
be your grandmother!”

Perry couldn't help wondering how different his life would have been had this woman actually been his grandmother.

“I like a man with dark hair,” Eldeen went on. “‘Course the hair doesn't make the man, not by any stretch. My first husband was nearly bald by the time we married—his daddy lost his hair real early, too, so it had to of run in the family, although I read one time in Joe Leonard's science book that it's really the mama and not the daddy who's to blame for the boys in the family going bald. My second husband sure wasn't bald, though. Hiram had hisself a head
full
of dark wavy hair just as dark and thick as yours, though of course like I said,
his
was wavy. He was tall like you, too, but a little more plumped out. I think Joe Leonard's going to be a string bean just like you. I bet neither one of you's ever going to have to worry a minute about getting fat.” She drew a long straight line in the air with her index finger. “Like a rail—both of you!” She laughed and repeated the process, this time using both index fingers. “Just like a pair of rails!”

“We're going to miss Beth,” Jewel said from the sink.

Perry was grateful for the change of subject. He felt as if he had undergone a physical exam.

“I hope she's going to enjoy her time up in Washington, D.C.”

Joe Leonard was washing the dishes and Jewel was drying. Perry hadn't seen anybody wash dishes the old way in almost as many years as the last time he had played Chinese checkers.

“You couldn't pay me to go live in Washington, D.C.,” Eldeen said. “I never could figure out why Beth would leave here for a whole year and go off to someplace like that where all them corrupt politicians live and they have blizzards and protest marches on a regular basis. A lot of nasty things go on up there. That's where that man killed all them teenage girls last year and chopped 'em into little pieces and threw 'em into the Potomac River in plastic bags. Them big Hefty CinchSak bags I read in the paper. Fourteen or fifteen girls in all. What a horrible way to meet your death. I'm still wondering what got into her. Beth, I mean. Looks like she could of found a place to do her studying closer to home.”

Perry couldn't understand it either. Although his mother had branded him as inquisitive when he was barely old enough to hold a spoon, his inquiring mind evidently hadn't extended to geography, for all his life he had hated leaving home. It was odd, really, considering the inadequacies of his home. A normal person would have longed to escape. Beth certainly had. She had shaken the dust of Rockford off her feet the day after high school graduation. She left the Midwest to attend college in Virginia, moved to Colorado for a master's degree, then went to South Carolina for a teaching job in a junior college, though why she'd chosen one of the poorest-paying states in the nation Perry had never figured out. She didn't want to live in a city the size of Spartanburg, where she taught, so she had scouted out the surrounding area for a fifty-mile radius and had moved to Derby. Beth had always been like that, studying everything out and going where the so-called best opportunities opened up, although her definition of opportunities often stymied Perry. Now it was a doctoral degree she had set her mind to. And she'd get it, too, he knew, probably finishing with the highest math scores in the history of the university. “I can't live my whole life knowing my big brother's got more education than me,” she had told Perry when she decided to go to Washington. He had almost corrected her grammar—“than
I
, Beth,” he had wanted to say but had let it go.

“Well, Mama, bad things happen everywhere,” Jewel said. “And anyway, Beth sure is plucky to be going after a doctor's degree.” She looked back at Perry. “She sure was glad it worked out for her to start on it in January instead of having to wait till fall.”

“Yes, sir, she was one happy gal when she found out there was that opening back before Christmas,” Eldeen added. “And it just all fell together like a puzzle! That man who used to have her teaching job over in Spartanburg wrote the college a day or two later and asked if they could hire him back again 'cause his other job wasn't working out so good. Then she came over another day a few weeks later and told us
you
might be moving down here to look after things at her house while she was away. My, my. It sure did happen fast.”

Jewel nodded. “I told her she'd be so smart when she was done that she wouldn't be able to carry on a regular conversation with normal folks like us.” Jewel stopped suddenly as she was reaching to set a plate in the cupboard. “Oh, I'm sorry, Perry. I didn't mean anything by that. I just now remembered Beth said you had a doctor's degree, too.”

“Don't worry about it,” Perry said, shaking his head. “Those degrees are . . . well, they don't mean a whole lot really.”

When Jewel and Joe Leonard finished the dishes, they both sat back down at the table, and they started the game, which turned out to be highly competitive. With four players, the middle of the board was a thick jumble of different colors for a good while. No one spoke much as they played, and Perry was surprised at how serious they all seemed to be about it. Even Eldeen kept quiet most of the time, her thick eyebrows drawn down like an awning.

When Joe Leonard won, Jewel had the courtesy to suggest stopping the game there. It was obvious that Perry would come in last. Joe Leonard returned the game pieces to the box and then marked a tally beside his name on a sheet of notebook paper taped to the inside of the pantry door.

“We can have our dessert now,” Jewel said.

Perry wondered what it would be. Maybe pecan pie or chocolate cake. It would have to be brown to match the rest of the meal.

It was brownies with chocolate ice cream.

“Would you like to come to church with us tomorrow morning?” Jewel asked when he walked into the living room to leave several minutes later.

“Joe Leonard's playing a solo on his tuba,” Eldeen said, and Joe Leonard frowned down at his black canvas hightops.

“Thank you. I'd like to go very much. I . . . yes, I would,” Perry said. This would work out fine. After all, the church was probably going to be the focus of his attention for a good while—if it met the requirements, that is. He might as well check it out right away.

Jewel was just opening the front door for him when Eldeen clapped her hands. “Wait, hold on a minute, I want to show Perry what we got,” she said. She walked to the large front window, grabbed the drapery cord, and gave a sharp tug. The draperies, made of a cheap, nubby mustard-colored fabric, parted violently. “Looka there at our suncatchers,” Eldeen said, pointing proudly to the window.