The Fragrance of Geraniums (A Time of Grace Book 1) (7 page)

G
eoff gathered up
the last of his papers, neatened the pile by giving it a crisp knock on the
desk, and tucked it away into his satchel. The room was quiet now. He felt the
heavy silence gathering around him as he finished the final tasks of the school
day. He straightened the row of seven pencils on his desk, kept ready for
forgetful students. He cleaned the chalkboard thoroughly, wiping every
remaining tinge of white from the dust-smoked surface, breathing in that dry
scent familiar to every teacher. It steadied him now. Kept his mind on the
necessary, everyday things. The things that mattered. Not the things that didn’t.

Because they will
never be.
His faith collapsed as he thought of the words Emmeline had laid before him two
nights ago:
We will never have children of our own. Doctor Philips says that
I’m losing this baby as we speak.

The clock’s face
drew Geoff’s eyes, an executioner to an unwilling victim. Two-forty-nine. Emmeline
would expect him home any time. And he would leave the school soon. But first,
he must prepare himself, for he would not – he could not – enter their home
with this bitterness drawing new patterns across his face. He could not fail
her now; Geoff would get it together before his feet crossed the threshold.

Even if my own
heart breaks, Emmeline must never know it.
She must believe – he must
make
her believe – that it didn’t matter to him if she lost this baby. If she could
never carry a baby to full-term. That his only concern was for her health.

Geoff’s dazed
eyes found a piece of chalk that had rolled away beneath his desk. Another
excuse to delay just a moment longer. He knelt, welcoming the marble-cold feel
of the tile as evidence that the present was indeed real. Once Geoff knelt on
the floor, the piece of chalk no longer stood in his line of sight, but his
fingers found it readily enough with a little fumbling. They closed around it,
and he clambered to his feet again.

But he couldn’t
find the chalk box; the night janitor must have moved it.
The fool,
he
thought, enjoying the unusual stinging pleasure of directing his pain toward
another, more innocent man. With no chalk box to be found, Geoff stood
clutching that solitary piece in one hand, staring out at the empty desks.

In one more
minute, the detention bell rang. Breaking out of his trance, Geoff shook his
head and breathed deeply. Without hesitation, his fingers closed firmly around
the chalk-piece and bent. A snap sounded out, clear and loud. If anyone had
heard – but there was no one to hear in that empty schoolroom - the crack might
have reminded the hearer of a sparrow’s neck suddenly broken.

Why, God? Why
this?

G
race took off
her shoes and socks as soon as her feet found their way off the main road and
onto the tree-lined path leading to Papa’s land. The September day had warmed
considerably since that morning, and her toes felt hot and cramped.

Mama sat on the
back steps, her worn print skirt covering some of the places where the green
paint had chipped off the cement. Her auburn hair wisped around her face in
sweaty tendrils, and she’d rolled the long sleeves of her dress way up above
her elbows. A dead chicken drooped over her lap; Grace shuddered, glad Mama had
strangled it before she’d gotten home.

“Hi, Mama,” Grace
offered, gripping her stack of schoolbooks in one hand, her shoes and socks in
the other. Would Mama scold her fiercely for coming home late?

But Mama just nodded
and glanced up, taking in everything about Grace with one blink of her
emotionless eyes. Mama’s fingers, thick from half a lifetime of scrubbing
dishes and diapers, didn’t pause in their plucking. The white feathers floated
around Mama’s feet, shoved into an old pair of Ben’s shoes, sockless. “Careful
going into the house barefoot, Grace,” she said.

Grace raised her
eyebrows in surprise, pausing right beside Mama, feet in the piles of feathers.
“Why?” she asked, looking down at Mama’s bowed head.

“Broke something
earlier,” Mama replied matter-of-factly. “Cleaned it up as good as I could, but
there might still be some bits of glass lyin’ around. Evelyn got a piece in her
foot already.”

“What, a canning
jar broke?” Grace asked. Mama always put up lots of canned preserves and
pickles at the end of summer and beginning of fall. Sometimes the newly-washed
jars would slip to the floor, splintering into seemingly thousands of pieces.

“Nope.”

Grace hesitated,
but Mama didn’t offer any further explanation, so she headed on inside the
house, careful where she put her feet. The screen door screeched shut behind Grace,
but otherwise, the house echoed with silence. She wondered where Evelyn had got
to, and Cliff, too. Lou and Nancy were no puzzle; they worked ‘til nearly six
o’clock most weekday nights, Lou at a drugstore and Nancy at a fancy department
store down-city.

I wish Ben had
stayed.
The thought crept from Grace’s heart into her mind, but she pushed it away as
she tucked her hair behind her ears. She wouldn’t – she couldn’t think about
Ben.
He’s gone now, so forget about him, Grace.
She saw the broom leaning
lazily in the corner and decided to sweep the kitchen thoroughly so it would be
ready for bare feet again. Grace took the broom with both her small, strong
hands and began sweeping, scraping the corners and edges of the room to be sure
to get all the glass. When she’d finished, she scooped the little debris pile
into the dustpan and threw the contents into the barrel Papa had placed outside
the back door.

“You want
potatoes peeled for supper, Mama?” Grace offered, pausing before going back
inside the kitchen. “Or you want ‘em baked?”

Mama just
shrugged. Grace bit her lip. If Mama was in a bad mood, she might refuse when Grace
asked her to sign that permission slip. “You want me to open up a jar of beets,
too, Mama?” she ventured.

Mama gave a
huff. “Grace! You ask so many questions. Whatever you want, girl. It don’t
matter. Beets’ll do. Just open the jar.”

“Okay, Mama.”
Grace went back inside, peeled the potatoes, and opened the can of beets, red
and reeking of vinegar.

When she’d
finished, she went back to the screen door. Mama sat there, the chicken now plucked
lying across her lap, blood staining Mama’s apron. “Mama,” Grace said hesitantly,
“I’m going upstairs to do my homework now. The potatoes are boiling on the
stove.”

Mama didn’t
reply, so Grace turned after a moment and retrieved her books from the kitchen
table. She pocketed a few soda crackers to stave off hunger pangs before
trotting up the staircase. Not bothering to knock, Grace pushed open the door
of the bedroom she shared with her three sisters.

Evelyn lay stretched
out on the pale pink coverlet, washed by the sunlight weakly filtering in the
windows. She seemed asleep, but when Grace closed the door with a click, Evelyn’s
eyes sprang open, bluebells in the tan field of her face. Wordlessly, the
younger girl propped herself up on her elbows, staring at Grace, who sat down
on the edge of the bed.

Grace touched a
hand to Evelyn’s face, which showed the path tears had taken earlier that
afternoon. “Mama said you stepped on some glass,” she said, wrinkling her nose
in sympathy.

Evelyn nodded,
tears rising in her eyes again. She sniffled and pointed a skinny little finger
toward her feet. One foot still wore its white sock, cuffed over, but the other
olive-toned foot lay bare except for a bandage.

Grace bent to
look more closely at it. She could see a reddish spot oozing through the gauze,
despite its double-thickness. “Mama got all the glass out?” she questioned,
surprised that their mother had allowed Evelyn to hobble up to her bedroom with
a still-bleeding foot. That wasn’t Mama’s usual way, to deal haphazardly with
things. Especially when it came to her darling youngest.

Evelyn shrugged,
her slight shoulders rising and falling in her floral print dress. “I think
so,” she mumbled, her glance turning toward the window, avoiding Grace’s eyes.

For a long quiet
moment, Grace looked down, studying her fingernails.
Oh, God, why can’t our
family be like everybody else’s?
She wondered this but knew instinctively
that the Almighty’s ears were shut to her, a poor wretched sinner.

“What happened?
Mama dropped a jar or something?” she asked at last.

Evelyn looked
away. “No.” She picked at her fingernails, just like Grace had been doing a few
moments ago.

“What happened,
then? You dropped something?” probed Grace, fresh fear entering her heart as Evelyn
avoided answering her simple question. Mama had evaded answering, too.

“Mama threw a can
at Papa,” Evelyn blurted out, like she’d swallowed something terrible and
couldn’t keep it down.

Grace’s spine
straightened, and her breath became shallow before she could even process the
thought. It was unthinkable. Often, Papa had given one of the children the back
of his hand for disobeying him, or he’d even occasionally hit Mama when she
gave him lip. Nothing bad. But
Mama
, throwing a can at Papa?

“It was a can of
green beans,” Evelyn said, as though that detail was important. She traced the
spot of crimson in the center of her bandage.

“Did it hit
him?” Grace heard herself ask as she stared unblinking at Evelyn, as if the
action of throwing the can didn’t matter, as if it only mattered if Mama’s aim
had been true or not.

Evelyn shook her
head fiercely. “No, it didn’t hit him. But she meant to.” Evelyn’s eyes met Grace’s
and the favoritism that had gone on perpetually didn’t seem to matter. What
mattered was, they were sisters. Sisters caught on the Picoletti train, a
vehicle seemingly meant for destruction. “She hit the blue lamp,” Evelyn
explained. “It was right next to Papa’s head, see.”

“Oh.” That fragile
blue oil lamp was Mama’s favorite, handed down from her grandmother, who came
from the Old Country. The lamp had survived the sea voyage sixty years ago and
two households since, but the Picoletti family had killed it. “What happened, Evelyn?”
whispered Grace.

Tears brimmed
again in Evelyn’s eyes. “I don’t know why Mama did it,” she mumbled. “I came
home from school, and I could hear Mama screaming from the street. I was so
embarrassed in front of Natalie Quivers that I just ran to the back door. When
I came in, Mama had the can in her hands. Papa stood all quiet near the
telephone. Mama pitched it at him. That’s… That’s when the lamp broke,” Evelyn
finished. “I stepped on the glass coming in the door.”

Hearing the
story, Grace’s chest hurt. Thinking of Mama in that way, screaming at Papa like
a wild animal… What could have possessed her to do it? And throwing the can at
him? Grace closed her eyes. That was even worse. “And what’d Papa do?” she
breathed.

Evelyn wiped her
nose on the back of her hand and pushed her tousled stray hair out of her eyes.
“He just stood there for a second. Then he walked out the back door past me,
got in the car, and drove off. I don’t know where he went.” She shrugged and
flopped back down on the bed, eyes on the ceiling. “That was, I don’t know,
maybe an hour ago.”

Grace opened her
mouth, unsure of what to say next, but before she could speak, she heard a car grinding
its way into the hard-packed dirt-and-pebble driveway out front. She listened
as the car moved around the house – to park, she guessed. Evelyn’s eyes met
hers. Grace rose from the bed, quick as a cat, and walked to the bedroom window
overlooking the backyard and barn area. Ever so gently, she lifted the curtain
to the side, veiling herself in the shadow and dingy lace. If whoever was below
looked up, he would not catch sight of her.

Grace’s peering
eyes found Papa just stepping out of the car, his short stature masked by the
vertical distance between them. He wore his good hat, a clean-looking shirt,
and dress pants. All this, Grace took in at a glance. When Papa closed the car
door with a bang, her focus switched to the person in the car’s passenger seat.
Grace couldn’t make out the face from her position above them, but she could
see tightly-permed blond hair under a smart little hat that seemed to match the
woman’s brown tweed suit. Papa strode to the woman’s side of the car and opened
her door. He gave her one of his heavy tanned hands, and she stepped out, one
hand clasping a small carpetbag. Another bang closed her door, and Papa went
around to the trunk. The woman waited for him, hands smoothing her skirt, head
turning to look this way and that. Another moment, and Papa pulled out two
large suitcases, their obvious heft having no effect on him as he toted one in
each hand.

“Who is it?” Evelyn’s
question broke into Grace’s inspection of the scene below their bedroom.

Briefly, Grace
turned her head to answer her younger sister. “Papa’s back.” Something stopped
her from telling Evelyn about the woman he’d brought with him, something
gnawing that made her hands shake a little as she turned back to the window.
She gripped the ledge this time for strength before allowing her eyes to fall
on the scene below.