The House on Persimmon Road (7 page)

At first she had prayed hard and steadily to the Heavenly Supreme Being to guide friend or foe to her remains. But as she got used to her condition, and the idea of returning took hold, she said her prayers in whispers so as not to draw attention to herself. At war’s end, she’d thought it a shame that no one had come to collect her bones. Now, she knew it was just as well. She would most certainly need them again. The idea of returning to normal only to discover herself with less backbone than a limp newt didn’t sit well with her at all.

Eventually she had tired of having to traipse around bones every time she’d gone downstairs and had propped them up in her solid oak rocking chair. She had spent years sitting in the chair with them—in hopes of a miracle, she supposed. So far, just sitting on them like a broody hen hadn’t done any good.

Suddenly Lottie cocked her head and listened. The folks below were stirring. Best she got down there to keep an eye on things. She took one last drag off the cigarette and carefully stubbed it out in Elmer’s spittoon.

—  •  —

Cheerful noises beckoned Justine from sleep like slow enticing music. The sounds came through the window into the room. Birds trilled and chirped, chickens clucked, wind soughed in the trees. A woodpecker’s tat-tat-tat seemed to set the cadence, underlining nature’s cacophony.

Pajama-clad and barefoot, she padded over to the French doors which were a feature of every outside room in the old house. She tugged them open and stepped onto the side porch. The foundation plantings on the east side of the house were of azalea. A pair of butterflies flitted among the leaves, searching for late-blooming buds.

Her world was condensed into this place. It wasn’t bad. The sky was blue, sun trickled through moss-draped limbs, and in the distance she could hear the sound of a tractor motor, a farmer in his fields.

The wind carried with it the pungent summer odor of foliage, earth, and moldering leaves. A hint of smoke mingled with the old mustiness of the house.

Smoke?
She sniffed. Not wood smoke, Not leaves burning; it was cigarette smoke. Yet, she was the only one of her household who succumbed to that dreadful habit. She walked the length of the porch to the front of the house and spied Pip crouched among a tangle of bushes. She leaned over and parted them.

“Good morning.”

Startled, he shot out of the greenery.

“Mom! You scared me.”

“What’re you doing hiding down there?”

“Grandma Gates sent me to find some flowers for the table.”

“So?”

“It’s a sissy thing to do, Mom.”

“That’s debatable, horticulture is big business. What else were you doing down there?”

“Nothin’!”

“Nothing? As in smoking one of my cigarettes?”

“No! Why’re you accusing me? I’m not messin’ up my lungs.”

“Come up on the porch and let me smell your breath.”

He began backing away. “No.”

She pinned him with her eyes. “You were smoking, weren’t you?”

“I wasn’t! Why don’t you believe me?”

“Because I smelled the smoke and you’re here.”

“Well, it wasn’t me!” he yelled, voice cracking and sounding betrayed. “You blame me for everything!” Without a backward glance he dashed out of the azalea and took off around the corner of the porch.

Justine watched him go. He looked all arms and legs and feet. Damn it! She had handled him all wrong. He was growing up. That meant confusion, rebellion, and experimenting. It meant sorting the mixed messages received from adults, an idealized image of perfection, exploring the senses, especially taste and touch. Smoking, drinking, drugs,
sex!
Oh, dear God! How did a mother get a child from age ten to twenty and end up with a healthy happy human being?

Growing up was the second hardest task in the world!

The first hardest, she decided, was being a parent. Which reminded her there were two others of her kind in the house, both of whom she’d have to speak to concerning Pip. She could see that a wealth of patience and understanding were going to be demanded of all of them.

Though she had told Pip and Judy Ann that it had not been their or her fault that Philip had left them, buried deep in her psyche was the notion that she had been at fault. She
had
failed in her marriage,
had
failed as a woman.

She was not going to fail as a mother.

With a sense of urgency that she had not hitherto experienced as a parent, Justine gathered up her clothes, scrounged a towel from her partially unpacked suitcase on the floor, and hurried off to the ancient bathroom to bathe and dress.

Fifteen minutes later she was searching for Pauline and Agnes. “Where is everybody?” she called.

“Out here,” came her mother’s voice. Pauline stepped through the double doors into the dining room-cum-office. “We’re just having our coffee, dear. Come join us.”

Pauline’s tone was so sugary, it was instantly suspect.

Justine looked askance at her mother. “We? Who’s we?”

“Agnes and myself. Who did you think? Isn’t this lovely?”

Justine took in the card table draped with a wrinkled pink cloth. On it sat her mother’s silver coffee service, cups and saucers; the crystal bud vase nearby stood empty. Used dishes and cutlery had been stacked to one side.

“One of you cooked breakfast?” she said wonderingly.

Pauline smiled. “Agnes and I did it together.”

“Once we’d figured out the stove,” Agnes said. Her pasted-on smile made her thin lips appear even thinner.

Justine sat down and looked from her mother to her mother-in-law. Pauline, as usual, was elegantly clad in a simply designed shift that belied its cost. She was fully made up, not a gray hair out of place. Not for the first time Justine noted that her mother had the carriage and suppleness of a much younger woman.

Agnes, on the other hand, was at the opposite end of the spectrum. She looked as if she had not only built the cross she had to bear, but had carried it around the block a few times. She was wearing her favorite purple blouse that clashed with a skirt of a different shade. The soft breeze left Pauline’s carefully coifed hair alone, but it was taking Agnes’s livid locks apart in frazzles.

“Medaglia d’oro,” Pauline said as she poured Justine’s coffee. “I had a tin in one of my suitcases.”

“It’s wonderfully tasty,” said Agnes.

Wonderfully tasty?
Justine’s cat sense told her something was afoot. “All right. Out with it. What’ve you two done?”

Agnes went on the defensive. “Nothing.”

“Well, that’s not true, Agnes, dear. We had ourselves a chat.”

“That’s not what Justine means.”

“Agnes,” Pauline managed through clenched teeth. “We agreed—”

“Yes, tell me. What did you two agree on? Did the earth shake? Did one of you get smote by lightning?”

“My dear daughter, you’re such a cynic. Agnes and I have agreed to get on with each other.”

Justine had the cup almost to her mouth. She lowered it. “How did this come about?”

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” said Agnes. “I had the feeling that someone was in my room. I kept getting up to look.”

Pauline patted Agnes on the hand. “That’s neither here nor there, old dear. What we’re trying to say is that both of us felt a trifle out of sorts last evening. We neither of us could sleep, new surroundings and all that.”

“Mother, you sound awfully like defense counsel preparing an alibi for—”

“I told you she wouldn’t believe us,” said Agnes.

Pauline went on as if neither of them had spoken. “So we sat out on the front porch in the moonlight and talked out our differences. Not all of them mind you, but enough. And since we have, we thought you might like to go into town and buy groceries today.”

“I must be dense, but I don’t get the connection between the two of you sitting down to a peace conference and my going shopping.”

“Well, you’ve never left us alone together before for fear of…well, whatever. Now you can. We’ll hold down the fort. All we could find to cook Pip and Judy for breakfast was instant oatmeal and dry toast.”

“Mother, if you can convince me that you actually took a pot, filled it with water, and stirred oatmeal into it, I’ll take you at face value.”

Pauline stiffened slightly. She shot a glance at Agnes.

“She watched,” said Agnes.

“But I was in the kitchen. You know cook never allowed us in our own kitchen. It was—”

“A learning experience,” Agnes finished for her.

Pauline beamed. “Right.”

“Mother, for more than twelve years, I’ve had to keep you two apart, shuffle visits on holidays—”

“That’s all in the past.”

“Worse, you’ve been going at it like a pair of alley cats fighting over dead fish ever since you, Mother, decided to make the move with us.”

“I know, dear. I behaved frightfully. I don’t usually. It was just that I could bring so little—”

“Fifteen suitcases and half the moving van is so little?” murmured Agnes.

Beneath Pauline’s scrutiny, Agnes shriveled.

Justine had never known Agnes to retract her claws quite so quickly. It almost convinced her of the grandmothers’ sincerity.

Pauline continued. “As I was saying—that dreadful law clerk inventoried everything…watched what I put in my suitcases even. Agnes and I are in the same boat now. Neither of us has any place to go if you were to decide you didn’t want us here. Isn’t that so, Agnes?”

“Well…”

“Isn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“There, you see. Now, Justine, you just run along to the grocer’s. I’ve made a list.”

“I had planned to put my office together today, set up my computers; I have a September first deadline on the contract. If I blow it—”

“You won’t. You’re a computer whiz, your father always said so and he was seldom wrong. And anyway, it’s for an insurance company, isn’t it? They never do anything on time. Evan used to own stock in any number of them and he was always complaining how slow they were to pay dividends.”

Justine’s slowly widening smile took in both grandmothers. “Give me a minute to get used to the idea that you two have buried the hatchet outside of one another’s back.”

Pauline relaxed, and wore a look of supreme virtue; Agnes’s expression was of more modest proportions and a lot less readable.

Out by the line of persimmon trees a rooster crowed. Justine sipped her coffee and mused on good fortune. She felt a little like crowing herself.

If the grandmothers were sincere about a truce, then she would be allowed the concentration necessary to produce the program she had contracted to write. It was a plum of a job and had come her way only by accident.

Philip had not wanted her to work after Judy Ann was born, but obstinately, she had persevered until she’d been able to sway him, though not without compromise on her part. She had been able to accept only a part-time job with a software distributor.

She had hoped to get full-time work after the divorce, but the computer industry had suffered an inopportune slump and she, being only a part-time employee, had been the first let go. Yet, the last week on the job had been fateful.

A representative of an insurance company had called asking for the name of a company in Silicon Valley. Justine had taken the call and had given the number. On her last day at work the representative had called back. Could she recommend another company? The first was too expensive. His employer, the rep had said, was relatively small, licensed to do business in only five states. He chatted a moment to give Justine an idea of what was needed, and the upshot was that the following day she had an appointment to meet with him.

Since he had mentioned the outrageous figure the Silicon Valley company had proposed to charge for the job, Justine clinched the contract by quoting a figure of only half as much. Her overhead was nil. She had the equipment, and she could work at home, and she could work anywhere under the sun, as long as she had the electricity to run the computers.

Later that evening she’d suffered a crisis of confidence and had almost picked up the phone to refuse the contract. But a review of her finances had convinced her confidence or not, she needed the work.

A lot rode on bringing the program in on time. A lot—as in their entire future. If the job was done well and priced right, she was certain to make a name for herself in the software industry; especially if she could develop a clientele that the software giants considered too small to take on.

Justine sent a thank you heavenward to her father, who had had the foresight to fill first his brokerage office and later his study with computers and allow her access to them even as a small child. Early on, the machines had been huge, bulky, and sensitive. Now they were small, not so sensitive, and much smarter.

Thinking of smart, Justine mused on the notion that the grandmothers were outsmarting
her.
Somehow.

She reminded herself she had promised to “go with the flow.” And right now harmony was flowing like a flood. Who was she to dam it up?

Justine eyed the grandmothers. “Just how long is this truce between the two of you supposed to last?”

“We expect to have differences,” enunciated Pauline. “We’ve just decided to handle them in a more conservative fashion.”

“What’re you going to do while I’m shopping? If I go…”

“Unpack,” said Agnes. “The hall is barely navigable.”

“Arrange the great room,” said Pauline. “I made a sketch of where things can go.”

Judy Ann, hair brushed and plaited, came hurrying onto the porch carrying her shoebox of paper dolls. “I can’t find my scissors.”

“Go put on your sandals, sweetie,” Justine said. “You can go shopping with me.”

“I wanna stay here.”

Justine was nonplussed. For weeks the child hadn’t wanted her out of her sight, yesterday in the kitchen, for example. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, Judy Ann was suddenly blasé on the subject?

“I may be gone for more than a couple of hours. In fact, I’m certain I will.”

“That’s okay.”

“The telephone’s not installed yet. I won’t be able to call and check on you.”