A Place We Knew Well (22 page)

Real
news? “Any updates from out at McCoy?”

“Not lately. Though”—Avery heard the suck-kiss—“my milkman says they got bombs stacked up along the tarmac, high as a man's head and far as the eye can see. You imagine that?”

No imagination required, Avery thought grimly. Bombs lining the tarmac like that were SOP, standard operating procedure, for Curtis LeMay's trademark fire jobs.

Peace
talks? Avery's jaw hardened against yesterday's hope.

A
T ONE O'CLOCK,
their traditional lunchtime, Avery told Steve that he needed to run home and give Sarah her prescriptions.

Steve, carrying his own lunch pail to the desk, nodded impassively. He'd noticed the white Rexall paper bag bulging with pill bottles, the fact that Avery's real-life problems were taking precedence over their daily lunch-and-chess routine; but, uncharacteristically, he refrained from comment. And Avery was profoundly grateful.

In the truck, he set the bag of pills on top of Beauchamp's record album, still on the passenger's seat from…Was it only yesterday he'd been to the school to drop off Charlotte's baton?

Time—usually divided into predetermined blocks, the set and regular rhythms of waking, working, eating, and sleeping—had somehow turned fluid. Without the usual markers, it meandered like a stream across new and old territories. He was finding it too easy to lose track.

Driving toward the cottage on Princeton, he had to remind himself that he and Sarah and Charlotte no longer lived there. Though surely somehow, their younger selves still inhabited it, still breathed in Avery's mind. Charlotte learned to ride her bike just there on the walk, where the
FOR RENT
sign now swayed in the wind. And when he and Sarah planted that tabebuia tree in the corner, it had been a single stick with a few leaves, not quite waist-high. Now its branches arched high overhead, sheltering both his and the neighbor's yard with an umbrella of yellow trumpets each spring.

Avery felt his heart groping backward, grasping like a greedy toddler toward those innocent days—days he couldn't begin to reconcile with the two-days-ago memory of his and Kitty's secret meeting in the kitchen. What a fiasco that was! And still might be if he wasn't very, very careful.

Closer to the lake, the lot sizes and house volumes increased; the youthful striving of their old neighborhood gave way to the perceived serenity, the outwardly calm façade, of lakeside success. His new neighbors weren't going anywhere. They'd already arrived.

And several of them were out on the sidewalk, staring in the direction of the obnoxious intrusion: the loud, machine-gun-like
rat-tat-tat-tat
of a jackhammer emanating from an unseen space beyond his carport.

Avery downshifted, gave the neighbors a flat-handed wave, and turned the pickup into his driveway. Through the opening in the hedge between his property and the Stouts', he spotted the aqua-blue, three-quarter-ton truck from Bob's Pools & Igloos, and deduced they were installing the gol-durn shelter in their hard clay side yard instead of the back.

He got out quickly, slammed his door hard, aiming to confront the guy over the noise—
My wife is under doctor's orders not to be disturbed!
he intended to say—when the side door to his own home opened. And there was Sarah, bleary-eyed, one hand clutching her navy-blue bathrobe, the other clinging to the doorjamb. Her right cheek was creased and red, her hair a tangled mess. “Oh, darlin',” he said impulsively, taking her arm.

“How about a little lunch?” he asked her gently. “Bowl of soup maybe? Some buttered toast?”

She nodded distractedly. “Hot in here. How 'bout the back porch?”

“Of course.” Mercifully, it appeared the jackhammer guy had reached a stopping place.

“Hey, fellas,” Avery said, “look who's here.” The parakeets fluttered, chattering to be fed. “You'll get yours in a minute. Ladies first.”

Back in the kitchen, he opened a can of Campbell's soup, added water to the pot, set it on the stove to warm, and got out the bread to toast. Tomato soup and buttered toast was what Sarah always fed them whenever he or Charlotte was sick. It was what her mother fed her, she'd explained. And Kitty, too, Avery presumed, though Sarah never mentioned her.

He served her on a tray and, while she stared at the bowl as if summoning the strength to eat, he replenished the birds' food and water, and retrieved her prescriptions and Beauchamp's album from the truck.

He left the record on the kitchen counter, filled a glass of water, and returned to Sarah. He noticed she'd forgone the spoon, instead dipping a strip of the toast into the soup and making an effort to nibble at it. He set down the water, then carefully checked the labels on each pill bottle and gave her three of the white Miltowns plus four of the small, green Dexedrines.

“This should help,” he said.

“Hope so.” She sighed, taking them. “Tell me the plan again.”

“I'm picking up Charlotte at two-thirty, then Emilio right after. I'll drop Charlotte off here to change, and take Emilio to the station to change and pick up The Admiral. He'll follow me back here and take off with Charlotte to muster for the parade. You and I will head to the bank, where they've set up reserved seats for parents of the Homecoming Court.”

“What time do we have to leave?”

“Three-fifteen at the latest. I'll be here around three if you need help.”

“I'll be okay. It's Charlotte's big day.” She set her tray aside. “I have to be.”

Avery watched her eyes flutter shut, her head fall back tiredly against the chaise. Heading back to work, he heard the echo of Martell's advice:
One bridge at a time.

“
H
OW'S
M
OM?”
C
HARLOTTE ASKED,
climbing into the truck.

“Doc Mike prescribed some pills. She just took them.”

“So she's up?”

“She was. Had lunch and now she's getting ready for the big parade.”

Charlotte blew a relieved exhale. Avery handed her the folded sheet he'd pulled from the linen closet at home.

“What's this for?” she asked him.

“You'll be sitting on top of the backseat. Thought you'd need something to put your feet on, protect The Admiral's tuck-and-roll.”

“Thanks.” She flushed, fingering the pleats of her madras plaid skirt.

“Piece of cake, kiddo. All you have to do is smile and wave to the nice people.”

“Yeah, and pretend everything's just fine.”

“Everything
is
fine, Kitten. Or will be soon, I hope.”

Emilio hailed them from the curb, stepping out of a crowd of kids in Bishop Moore's blue-and-white uniforms waiting in front of the school. The boy scrambled in next to Charlotte, his mood buoyant, expectant. She handed him the sheet and explained its purpose.

“Good idea,” he said. At the same time, he studied her. “You okay?” he asked.

Avery kept his eyes straight ahead and concentrated on his driving.

“I'll just be glad when this part's over,” he heard her answer.

“Rather be marching with the band, worrying about dropping your baton?” Emilio asked.

“Yes, actually.”

“But then I'd be stuck pumping gas at the station. Wouldn't I, Mr. A?”

“ 'Fraid so.”

“Instead of driving The Admiral and the best-looking girl in the parade.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Avery caught Charlotte's blush, the glimmer of her smile.

“So this is all about you, huh?” she teased him.

“Me? No way. I figure it's The Admiral on parade. All we have to do,” he said, leaning back expansively, “is sit back and enjoy the ride.”

Avery was impressed by his effect on Charlotte's mood; he shot Emilio an
atta boy
wink. At the house, Charlotte stepped lightly to the curb, calling, “See you at three!” then bounded up the drive, ponytail and pleats tick-tocking behind her.

At the station, Steve had The Admiral's top down and was buffing its already glossy hood to a near-blinding shine.

Emilio placed the sheet in the backseat, beside Kitty's gloves, retrieved his hanging bag from the storage room, and went to the men's room to change. Minutes later, he emerged transformed, head high with the acquired confidence of his handsome new suit.

Avery was checking the time—
two forty-five, right on schedule
—when the station phone rang. “Orange Town Texaco, Wes spea—”

“Dad! You need to get back here. Hurry!”

R
ETRACING THE ROUTE HOME,
Princeton to Northumberland to Bryn Mawr, Avery kept an eye on the rearview mirror to make sure Emilio and The Admiral were behind him. Meanwhile, his mind replayed Charlotte's phone call, the rising panic in her voice as she told him, “Please hurry, Dad. Mom's gone off her rocker!”

Both hands firmly on the wheel, he was willing himself calm. “Steady as she goes,” a different voice—his grandfather's resonant bass—urged him.

When Old Pa arrived at their farm in central Georgia, he was surprised to learn that the only son of his only daughter had never even been on a boat.

For the next year, after chores and homework, they worked nights building a small sailboat, a Biloxi dinghy, together in the barn. His grandfather was a skilled carpenter and a retired chief engineer. He was exacting in his work, and spare in his compliments. One night, however, having carefully mortised the battens and fastened the planks with inch-and-a-quarter copper nails clinched two inches apart, his grandfather pronounced, “You got your good looks, your head for figures from your daddy, boy; but the talent in these hams”—he grasped Avery's oversized hands with his own—“is from me.”

The day they finally set sail for the first time, having hauled the boat fifty-five miles northeast to Lake Sinclair, his grandfather insisted that Avery man the stern for their maiden voyage. “Feed the sail and starve the tiller, son.” “Firm hand, steady as she goes!” It had become Avery's motto for life.

Now, looking at his hands on the wheel, hands that grew more and more like his grandfather's with each passing year, Avery prayed he was up to whatever lay ahead.

C
HARLOTTE, STANDING IN THE
open front doorway, took his breath away.

With her dark hair piled high on top of her head and her long dress, a white sheath shimmering with silver threads, she was
transformed
—no longer the ponytailed teenager he'd dropped off less than an hour ago. Like in that movie
Sabrina,
Avery thought, when Audrey Hepburn went off to Paris a gawky schoolgirl and came back a stunner. In a gesture that reminded him of Kitty at the cottage, she touched the pearls in the hollow of her throat.

“She's in the dining room,” she whispered, eyes wide.

“You go on ahead,” he told her. “We'll be all right.”

Charlotte gnawed her lip. “I don't know, Dad….”

“Go,” he assured her, and flicked a hand at Emilio, parking in the drive, to come and get her. “Take care,” he called after them. “Wave to us in front of the bank.”

Inside, the dining room appeared empty. Had Sarah moved to the kitchen?

She was on her hands and knees under the table. He spotted the bottoms of her stockinged feet first, then the glow of her red skirt, a flash of white blouse.

“Sarah?”

She didn't respond, so he called again. “Sarah? Sarah!”

She was intent on
something
under the table. And what was she saying to herself so urgently, over and over?

He placed one hand on the tabletop, the other on the floor, and squatted down to listen. Beyond the mounds of her hip and shoulder, he saw her long fluttering fingers picking rapidly through the carpet, loop by loop. And heard the rise and fall, the repetitive rhythm of some kind of rhyme. The third time through, it came to him. His mother used to say the same thing: “Drop a pin, let it lie, rue the day you passed it by.”

She was looking for lost pins?

“Sarah, can I help you?” he asked, gently touching the heel of her nearest foot.

Her yelp—a short, high animal cry of alarm—surprised him; as did the sudden, ruthless kick of her foot, and the blazing look she shot him over her shoulder. Her eyes, normally slate gray, had pupils so enlarged they were gleaming black; their expression hooded and hostile. “No!” she insisted, then resumed her picking and muttering.

Avery stood. Beside her sewing machine, he saw the empty pin box, the picked-clean strawberry pincushion, the neat rows of shiny pins separated—it appeared—into groups of ten. He ran back through the kitchen and outside, around her car and his truck to the small workshop that buttressed the carport on its far side. He grabbed the red horseshoe-shaped magnet he kept on a hook by the door, returned to the dining room, and knelt down in front of her, all the while wondering which of the pills she'd taken—the white Miltowns or the green Dexedrines—might be fueling her apparent agitation.

“Try this?”

She seemed startled by his reappearance and leery of the magnet.

“I use it for dropped nails and screws. Should work for pins, too,” he promised her.

She shrank back warily to watch him.

Slowly, he drew the magnet over the carpet just in front of her. “Well, looky here,” he said, smiling, showing her the pin attached to the magnet.

Sarah snatched the pin and studied it. After a moment, she rocked back on her heels, her head barely missing the table rim, and put it on the tabletop.

“See a pin, pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck, right?” he told her. “How many are we missing?”

“Five—”

“Minus that one, four.” He moved the magnet in a wider arc around the chair, where earlier in the week she'd been sewing, and came up with three more. Once again, she took them and placed them on the table.