White Picket Fences (6 page)

Neil caught her eye and winked. She smiled back.

He was just too accommodating, that’s all. Neil expected the interruptions and had started tucking business cards in his pockets whenever they were out socially.

Today he’d put on a salmon-colored Henley and khakis instead of the carpenter shorts and T-shirt that she’d laid out for him. Amanda hadn’t said anything. She liked that shirt on him.
The slight gray at his temples accented the rosy orange hue. He looked very handsome.

But still. No one came up to her at parties and picnics wanting to know how to get their kids to read better. She’d stuff her pockets with business cards if she thought they would. Maybe that’s why Neil didn’t mind chatting about business at social events—it didn’t feel like business. Likewise, she loved her job in the remedial lab at the elementary school. Every day she saw miracles. An unmistakable veil lifted when a kid finally grasped the concept of words on paper and at last the world of books lay before him like the threshold to the universe. Everything about the child’s countenance changed. It was like Helen Keller at the pump, understanding that the wetness on her hand had a name.

She sat up in her chair, looking for the kids and Tally. The picnic was well attended. Groups of people milled about, awaiting food from the hissing gas grills. A volleyball game intensified at the far end of the parking lot, and young kids tossed water balloons across the far lawn.

“Wondering where your kids are?”

Amanda looked up. Gina Kliever stood beside her, holding a can of Coke. Her daughter Kelly was the same age as Delcey, and Gina had been to their house many times to drop her off or pick her up. “Oh. Hi, Gina. Yeah. I’ve kind of lost track of them.”

“May I?” Gina pointed to Neil’s empty chair beside Amanda.

“Be my guest. I don’t think Neil will be coming back anytime soon.”

Gina plopped down on the chair and eased her feet out of her flip-flops. “I think a bunch of teenagers went inside to play
basketball in the gym. Kelly did. Delcey and Chase are probably in there too.”

“Mmm. I just…” Amanda searched the crowds of people for Tally’s fuchsia-streaked hair. She didn’t see her. “I’m just hoping they haven’t forgotten about their cousin. She doesn’t know anybody here but us.”

“You have family visiting you?”

Amanda turned to face her friend. “Just my niece. My brother’s daughter. Her name is Tally.”

“Tally? That’s a very unusual name.”

Amanda grinned. “I have a very unusual brother. It’s short for Tallulah.”

“Wow. Now there’s a name you don’t hear too often. Is this the brother you’ve mentioned before? The wild and mysterious one?”

“Yeah. That’s Bart.”

“Darn. I would’ve liked to have met him. He’s got something going on this weekend, huh?”

Amanda exhaled. “You could say that.”

Gina hesitated and then nodded. “I see… He kind of dumped her on you this weekend?”

“Not exactly.”

Gina waited.

“He’s off again on one of his schemes. I’m sure it has something to do with fortune or fame. It usually does. He’s in Europe somewhere.”

“Really? He goes off to Europe a lot?”

“No. He just likes to
go off.
Usually he takes Tally with him, but not this time.”

“How old is she?

“Sixteen. He left her with her maternal grandmother in Tucson but—get this—she died unexpectedly early last week. Heart attack. No one’s heard from Bart, and he didn’t leave us a way to get ahold of him, which is typical. So now we’ve got Tally until he decides to come home.”

“I take it there’s no mom in the picture?”

“Tally’s mom died when she was a baby. Accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills. So they say.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah.”

Gina took a sip of her own drink. “How long’s your brother been gone?”

“We’re going on two weeks.”

“And no one’s heard from him?”

“No.”

A trio of grade-school girls skipped past them, laughing. “Do… do you think something’s happened to him?” Gina’s tone was soft.

Amanda sighed. “I don’t know. Bart’s gotten himself in and out of more sticky situations than I care to admit. I’m not worried yet. But I do wonder if maybe he’s trying to disappear for a while. I’m not entirely sure what Bart was doing for money just before he left. I wonder if maybe…” She didn’t finish.

“Maybe he’s running from the cops?” Gina said.

“Or from people you just don’t mess with.”

“So he’s purposely not contacted his daughter…”

Amanda shrugged. “I don’t know. He told Tally he was going
to look up our relatives in Poland, which is the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“You don’t have relatives in Poland?”

Amanda shook her head. “No, I’m sure we do.”

“So?”

“I don’t see how he’ll find them. My grandmother immigrated here after World War II when my dad was a kid. She was Catholic but she’d married a Polish doctor. A Jewish man, actually. But then the war came, and, well… I’m sure we have distant relatives, but they’re going to be impossible to find.”

“How come?”

Amanda ran a hand through her hair. She didn’t often talk about what she knew about her father’s side of the family. The little her father had shared of it wasn’t pleasant. “My grandparents were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto when the Nazis invaded Poland. My grandfather wasn’t a practicing Jew, but that didn’t matter. The two of them had been hiding my grandfather’s mother and sisters during the first six months of the occupation, which of course didn’t sit well with the Germans when they discovered them. They were all sent to the ghetto. Somehow my grandmother and father escaped to England. My grandfather didn’t, though. He died at Treblinka.”

“Treblinka?”

“A concentration camp.”

“Wow.” Gina’s eyes widened.

“Yeah. Kind of a sad story.”

“You don’t think any of the others survived?”

Amanda took a drink of the lemonade and grimaced. It was
souring as it grew warmer. “I’d be very surprised to hear that any of my grandfather’s family members are alive since they were all Jewish. My grandmother’s family might’ve survived, but so many families scattered during the war. I honestly don’t know how Bart expects to find any of them.”

Gina poked at a dandelion with her toe. “So here you are—one-quarter Jew and one-quarter Catholic, at a Protestant church picnic.” She looked up at Amanda and smiled. “Getting ready to eat grilled pork chops.”

Amanda smiled back. “Very funny. You know, my dad never talked about his parents being so different from each other culturally. And my grandmother never talked about her deceased husband at all. Well, maybe she did. Her accent was always so strong, I could hardly understand her. She sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger in falsetto, back in his Conan days.”

Gina threw her head back and laughed.

Amanda grinned and then continued. “I was kind of scared of her growing up. She always had this faraway look in her eye, like she didn’t really feel she belonged here.”

“She never remarried?”

“She did, when my dad was a teenager. And the funny thing is, I was closer to her second husband than I was to her. To me, that man was my grandpa, not the Jewish doctor who died in the concentration camp. I’ve never really considered my Jewish heritage, you know? That part of my past seems like someone else’s.” Amanda tossed her lemonade onto the grass.

Gina was quiet for a moment. “What’s she like?”

“What?”

“Your niece. What’s she like?”

“Oh. She seems okay. She came complete with magenta streaks in her hair, multiple piercings, and a tattoo.”

Gina’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, but actually she’s very quiet. Polite for the most part. A little distant. But that’s to be expected. I think she knows more than she’s telling me about why Bart’s in Europe.”

“Really?”

“Not that her telling me why he’s there would help much. I don’t think Bart left her with any way to contact him. If she knew how to do that, she wouldn’t even be here.”

Gina nodded. “Meaning she’s not thrilled about staying with you?”

Amanda shrugged. “Yeah. Go figure. She finally has a nice roof over her head, decent food to eat, a safe school to go to, and people her own age to talk to, and she can’t wait to go back to a rented trailer in the worst neighborhood of San Antonio.”

Gina stretched her legs out in front of her. “Maybe the white-picket-fence lifestyle’s not for everybody.”

“I guess.”

The two women were quiet for a moment. Then Gina sat up in her chair, her eyes squinting into the sun toward the row of barbecue grills. “Hey,” she said. “Isn’t that Chase?”

Amanda sat up and followed Gina’s line of vision. Twenty yards away Chase stood in the shimmering heat of a grill. Her son leaned forward, and he seemed to be studying—very intently—the fire that pranced crazily around sizzling pieces of meat. He was facing her, but she was sure he didn’t see her. His lips were
moving as he stared at the flames. An aproned man standing in front of the grill grabbed a squirt bottle, and Chase took a step forward.

“What’s he doing?” Gina asked.

Amanda barely heard the question. An arm of fire shot up from the grill, and the man took a step backward and squirted a jet of water. But Chase didn’t move, and the man turned to her son, a mixture of surprise and concern on his face.

“Amanda?”

Amanda stood up, turning her head to see if Neil was seeing what she was seeing. Half turned away from her, Neil was fully engaged in conversation, arms gently crossed across his chest, nodding to the man pouring out his nest-egg woes. She swung her head back around. The aproned man was saying something to Chase. But Chase just stared at the flames going about their merry charring business. He seemed to be speaking to them.

He was not listening.

The blissful sounds of the picnic fell away, and her mind flooded with alarm.
He can’t possibly remember.

nine

C
hase was the last to come downstairs for breakfast Monday morning. He’d had trouble falling asleep the night before and overslept.

“I was just about to come up and see if you were okay,” his mother said as he stepped into the kitchen. She smiled at him. It looked forced.

“Didn’t hear my alarm.” Chase grabbed a glass out of the open dishwasher, aware of his mother’s eyes on him. She watched as he poured himself a glass of juice.

He moved to the table to sit next to Delcey as she slathered Nutella on a bagel. On his other side, Tally munched on dry Cheerios, eating them from the bowl with her fingers. Neil was mostly hidden by the newspaper but said good morning to Chase from behind the business section.

Amanda set a half-circle omelet down in front of him, and again her gaze lingered. Chase leaned toward his food, away from her.

His mother had approached him at the grill the day before, as he began to step away from it. She asked him nervously if he knew where Tally was. He didn’t know where Amanda came from. She seemed to materialize out of nowhere. It took him a second to answer. His heart was hammering in his chest as the
moments at the grill pinged around inside his head, poking into the darkest corners of his memory.

“She’s with Delcey. I told you Delcey wanted Tally with her.”

“Yes, but…” She faltered then and bit her lip.

“I don’t see what the big deal is, Mom. I’m sure she’s having more fun with Dels than she would with me. I’m, like, the only person here my age, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“You’re not having fun?”

“‘Fun’ is not the word I would use, no.”

“Matt couldn’t come, then?”

“His family went to the beach.”

“So…” She looked back at his father, chewed on her lip some more, then turned back around. “You think Tally’s okay, then?”

“Yeah, Tally’s fine. Can I go now?”

“You mean leave?”

“I mean, are we finished here?”

She’d held his gaze for a second. “Sure.”

Chase reached for his fork.

“Did you sleep well?”

Chase peered up at his mother. Her hands rested on the back of Tally’s chair, but her eyes were on him. “Uh, yeah. Sure.” He took a bite of the omelet.

She nodded, her gaze lingering a second longer. He could feel her unease. Again he looked away from her.

She had seen him transfixed in front of the flames.

She had seen it and didn’t know what to make of it.

Chase shoved a large forkful into his mouth and raised his head. Their eyes met. She said nothing.

His mother slowly turned to Tally. “It’s no trouble for me to go with you this morning, Tally, and get you settled. First hour is my prep time, so really, it’s no trouble at all.”

“I’ll be okay,” Tally said.

“Well, all right. Your schedule’s waiting for you at the front office. They told me someone would be waiting to give you your books and get you to your first class.”

“You told her that already, Amanda,” Neil said from behind his paper wall.

“I’ll be fine. I’ve been to new schools before.” Tally stood and took her cereal bowl to the sink.

Delcey glanced up from her bagel and looked at Tally’s bowl. “How come you don’t use milk?”

Tally shrugged. “I just like cereal without it.”

Chase shoved the last bit of omelet into his mouth and grabbed his phone to look at the time. “We gotta go.”

Amanda turned away.

Tally nodded and grabbed the worn backpack she’d brought with her from Arizona. She had declined his mother’s offer to buy her a new one.

“Okay, so you two have your lunch cards?” his mother said.

“Yep,” Chase said. Tally nodded.

“Did you put air in the passenger-side tire?”

Chase turned around. His father’s face was now peeking out from the open newspaper.

“I’ll do it today after school,” Chase replied.

The face hovered and then disappeared behind newsprint. “You don’t want to let that go, Chase. It’s not good for the tire, and it’s not safe for you. Or Tally.”

“Yeah.”

Neil lowered the paper. “Oh. Chase, you’ll be able to help me deliver those bookcases today when I get home from work, right?”