The Reading Lessons (29 page)

Once they were settled in the car seat, Nina asked her cousins what they thought of Crump while he brushed wisteria blooms off the windshield.

“He’s okay,” Rich Rich said. “He’s got a mean arm.”

“What’s so mean about it?” Nina wanted to know. She thought of the mean-looking marks on his back.

“He throws good, dummy,” Rich Rich said. He made like he was going to poke her in the eye.

Guido said, “He fixed my Rollfast for me last week. Uncle Dickie ran over the handlebars and said it was wrecked, but Crump got a hammer and hammered the thing up good as new. Aunt Lucinda says he’s the handiest man she knows.”

“He’s handy alright.” Nina smirked. 

“What are you asking about him for, Neen?” Rich Rich said. “You got a crush on him or something?” 

“Shut up, you little monster,” she said. “The man’s as old as God.”

“So what? Del has the hots for Aunt Lucinda, and she’s old.” 

Nina would have let Rich Rich have it right there except Crump slid into the front seat just then. Guido scooted over and took Nina’s hand. “He’s only teasing, Nina.”

Nina barely heard. She caught Crump looking at her in the rear view mirror. 

On Wednesday afternoon, Nina accompanied her father to Big Black Lodge to watch Buster Wiggin demonstrate how to carve decoys. Buster Wiggins was the President of
The Happy Hunting Club
and, like most of the other members, he was in the house-selling business, but he was best known for his realistic-looking ducks.

Mother was not a fan of the lodge. She said it smelled of armpits and a waste of time. She supported it for the sheer reason that it got Father out from under foot. Occasionally when she tagged along, Mother sat next to the window holding a perfumed hanky under her nose. The men never got put off by her disdain. They were too appreciative of the way her skirt rode garter-high every time she kicked her toe in boredom. Del Wiggins (son of Buster) recorded the club minutes most months with a thoroughness that made the Bible look like a post card. When he posted the minutes following one of Mother’s visits, the single sheet read: “What gams!”

Once, every few years, the members of the
Happy Hunting Club
would discuss replacing the curling screens with glass windows and purchasing a furnace. It was noted that other clubs had Adirondacks on their porches and nice leather club chairs inside their lodges instead of folding ones and hand-me-down lawn furniture. 

“We could buy a poker table,” Mr. Wiggins suggested every time the subject came round. 

But then Mr. Tart would worry that a real table might ruin his luck, and Mr. George would point out that leather was sure to be ruined if they sat on it in their muddy gabardines, and everyone would inevitably agree that more would be lost than gained by fancying up the lodge. 

The Happy Hunting Club
was started by four brothers who longed for a rugged place where they could hunt, fish, and be dirty. Much as they might enjoy staring at Lucinda Worther-Holmes’ gams, they wouldn’t like to give up their shabby paradise for anything. 

Nina liked it rough herself. Most of the time, it kept Mother away and it kept other women away, too. Outside of Mr. Lusk’s wife, Claudine, Nina was the only female who ever came down to the lodge to hunt. The men all brought their sons. Rich Rich had been banned from using the club grounds after he shot a reindeer in the butt. The dastardly deed occurred the previous winter when Blitzen escaped from a nearby Christmas display. The animal was wearing two big red bows and a harness of jingle bells, but Rich Rich evidentially wasn’t paying attention. He was too reckless, even for Father, who had a reckless streak himself when it came to driving fast. But as Father put it, “I’d rather go out in a fiery ball of flames than take a bullet in the ass from that nitwit.”

Nina fell in love with hunting for two reasons: The first time Father mentioned teaching Nina to shoot, her mother turned
vermilion
with fury and said he was out of his stinking mind if he thought she was going to let him turn their little girl into more of a snot-nosed boy than she already was. This alone made Nina determined, never mind that she was seven. But the biggest reason she fell in love with hunting was the true blue smile her father gave her the first time she nailed a rabbit with her brand new Steven’s Single Shot. And because of the frown he gave her when she first blew a shot at a deer. Nina liked the fairness of it all. Father’s pride or disappointment reflected the same pride and disappointment the other members gave their boys. On their first real hunt, Nina got the same ritual blood-smearing that all the sons got after their first kill. And on her second real hunt, when she missed the deer, Father cut off her shirt tails and nailed them to the lodge wall to commemorate the miss. Mother was abhorred by such behavior. 

“I’ll never know how I ended up with a filthy little tomboy,” she complained. That Nina danced and played piano was of little consolation. “You’re a savage, Nina Worther-Holmes. A vulgar little savage!” 

God, how Nina loved to hunt.

On Wednesday evening, the decoy-carving did not hold Nina’s attention. She was too busy working out the proper phrasing to keep her father in town on Thursday. The truth seemed largely appealing until Nina actually scripted out the telling of such painful news: 

If you leave town tomorrow morning, Mother will make whoopee with the gardener. Again.

The truth was sure to spark his anger, and anger might lead to the both of them going out in a fiery ball of flames on the drive home. As such, Nina considered various lies that might keep her father home. Unfortunately, none seemed drastic enough. Father looked irritated when she tugged on his sleeve halfway through Mr. Wiggins’ instructions on band sawing a breast. 

“We could both play hooky and go hunting tomorrow,” she cheerfully proposed. 

Father’s eyes were still on the duck. “Will you lookee how realistic that breast looks.”

This response tended to rule out the only other option she could think of: subtlety. If Nina were to say, for instance,
Did you ever notice how little gardening actually gets done while you’re away?
Father would probably just shrug and say that he didn’t care about flowers anyway. 

After they got home, she thumbed through the dictionary and wrote down the new words of week in her
Fibber McGee and Molly
notebook: 

Fruitless

Impervious

Bollixed 

By Thursday, Nina was frantic with the
fruitlessness
of it all. Father was never good at concentrating on more than one thing at a time. His dreamy smile was such that, Nina reckoned, he was more in love with that auto show than he was his cheating wife. Maybe he even felt grateful to Crump for keeping her busy. Still, Nina gave it one more try. 

“Don’t go, Father.”

“Tell LuLu I’ll be home by six,” he said.

All day at school, she pictured her mother and Crump kissing amid an avalanche of tumbled books. She didn’t hear one thing the teacher said. Thanks to the window seat, she could envision the act more clearly than a girl ought to be able to envision such things. She could hear it, too—hear them grunting like pigs under the big white dome that, much like a giant blister, covered Mother’s putrid pus of lies.

Oddly, each time Nina re-played the lurid scene in her head, her stomach would begin to tickle when she got to the part where Mother said, “Yes! Oh! Yes! Oh! Yes!” The reaction baffled her, seeing how she’d been revolted when Mother was saying the words for real. 

This wasn’t the first such instance either. The first time the tickle happened, Crump was holding the umbrella over her head after they left Miss Maple’s lessons. Miss Maple had given Crump a whole big
William’s Anti-Pain Ointment
tin full of homemade cookies. 

“I know how you like my ginger snaps,” she’d said, her homely old piano-teacher cheeks blooming like Mother’s prize roses. Nina looked from Miss Maple to Crump and wondered if he was keeping company with her, too. 

“They are to die for,” Crump said, and Nina wished she were old enough to decode adult innuendo. Surely there was more to their exchange than a simple cookie compliment? 

Before Nina hid away in the window seat, the man had never seemed like anything much, certainly not the cookie-loving, sigh-inducing poet she saw sweeping women off their feet from Twilight Street to Wisteria Walk. Yet, when she looked at him under that dripping umbrella, her mind returned to those impassioned Reading Room cries, and for the first time, Crump made her stomach tickle. She shivered to think that he could cause a cold-hearted beast like Mother to lose all hold of her senses. Best of all, when she looked at him under the umbrella, he wasn’t looking at that gushy twit, Miss Maple. He was looking at her. 

“Do you like ginger snaps?” he whispered as he steered her by the elbow toward the Phantom.

“I consider them a fruitless waste of stomach space,” Nina said.

“Me too,” he confided.

Tickles aside, by the time she arrived home from school on Thursday, Nina wanted to put a bullet in his brain on behalf of her foolish Father. 

“How was school, Miss Nina?” he asked as he tossed fertilizer on his jonquils.

“Hideous,” she snapped. “How was your day?”

The man didn’t have the gall to look up from the manure. “Just fine, thank you.”

She pictured him running his manure-blackened hands over Mother’s yellow hair, and proceeded to flatten the jonquils on her way in the house. 

She was still thinking of Crump’s hands when she marched up to her father’s closet and chose a shirt with a tag that informed her it was
Made in Hawaii
. Father had recently taken a liking to shirts Made in Hawaii. His favorite had coconut shell buttons and featured at least four colors that had never been invented before. When Father came home at six o’clock, he was livid to find the tails of his beloved
Hibicus Lady
shirt hammered to the front door. 

###

Crump was an ordinary man. Very ordinary. A half-breed with probably no schooling to speak of. He could fix bicycles and grow jonquils. So what? Father had the physique of a prosperous man, and he was heir to a virtual empire. He wouldn’t grunt over a woman, nor would he betray his beloved wife the way his wife so carelessly betrayed him. Crump was an adulterer, and he was dirt-poor to boot. He didn’t have his own wife and kids like a respectable man his age. He just snuck around taking what wasn’t his, pretending all the while like he was a kind and loyal servant. 

Crump was disgusting. 

On top of that, any man in love with Mother had to be a shallow pig, Father excluded because he had been too young to know any better when he married her. Where was the imagination in loving a woman like Mother? Outside of herself, the woman had no interests except for reading smutty books, sleeping with servants, and flirting with school boys. She wiggled good, that much was true. She had the prettiest fingernails in the whole wide world. These were her accomplishments. 

It was obvious now that Crump was a deceiver. Every shy smile made him just that much more of a hypocrite. Who knew what he was up to all that time when he was acting like gardening and painting and fixing bicycles was the only thing he cared about. She hated him for liking Mother. Nina watched Crump like she would watch a clay bird: with an eye toward picking him off.

Then something happened.

It started with a flower. On Nina’s seventeenth birthday, she came down to find a Lily of the Valley waiting on her breakfast plate. 

“Tilly?” she asked. “Did you put this flower by my poached egg?”

“No, miss. Weren’t me.”

“Rich Rich?”

“Are you kidding?”

“What about you, Guido?”

Guido shook his head. “It was probably Crump. Do you know anyone else who likes flowers?”

The Lily of the Valley arched around her egg like one half of a heart. Nina thought about the way his dark eyes snuck a look at her in the rear view mirror. Saw his mischievous smile when he confessed he didn’t like Ginger snaps. Remembered the way he hacked up weeds in the flowerbeds until his face was pouring with sweat. 

She found him after breakfast, replacing the hinge Father had recently broken on the front door. “Did you give me this flower, Crump?”

Crump smiled that phony shy smile of his. There was a smudge of grease on his chin. “Everyone should get a flower on their birthday.”

Nina dimly recalled other flowers on other birthdays. “Do you mean to tell me that you keep track of our birthdays?”

“Just yours and the boys.”

“What about Mother’s?” 

Crump nodded. “I grew up at Browning House so I know your Mother’s birthday, too.” 

“What did you give her on her birthday?” she asked nastily.

“Hemlock.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Hollyhocks.”

Nina shook her head. “You said hemlock.”

“I meant hollyhocks.” His eyes sparkled like pancake syrup. 

“Will you be working at my party tomorrow night?” she asked.

Crump opened and closed the door, testing the new hinge. “I most definitely will.”

He needed a haircut. Badly. The way things stood, a person was tempted to drag their fingers through all those big loose curls just to see what they felt like. At that moment, standing there beaming over his new hinge, Crump seemed boyish for a man, yet manish compared to the boys at school. 

“Thank you for the Lily of the Valley. It’s very nice,” Nina said.

He looked surprised to be thanked. Probably because she had never thanked him all those other years, or even paid his flowers much notice at all. He nodded and went back to opening and closing the front door. 

Nina took the flower to school that day and twirled the white bells under her nose every chance she got. 

Then there was the accident. 

The night before Nina’s
Moonlight Serenade Birthday Extravaganza
, she and her mother were hanging up little tin foil moons over the bandstand when the whole thing collapsed. Boards snapped, moons flew, and Nina and her mother crashed through the floor in a hail of curses and screams.