I didn’t turn around and look back at him. I just ran up onto the porch and pounded on the door until finally the lock clicked. The door opened, and I felt my body melting. I pushed a hand over my mouth, but it didn’t help. My lips shook, and a sob came out, and when I saw J. Norm on the other side, I started to cry.
“What in heaven’s name?” His raspy voice was a whisper against the rush of blood in my ears. His hand slid under my elbow, and he pulled me through the door. “Good heavens, what’s happened to you?”
Another sob busted out. I tried to swallow it. It came again. I heard J. Norm close the door and lock it. His hand touched my shoulder, like he wasn’t sure he should put it there, and he moved me to the sofa in the front room. The cushions squished and leaned when he sat down next to me. I felt something soft in my hand and saw his hankie.
“All right, now. All right.” He patted my shoulder with stiff fingers and cleared his throat, like he didn’t know what else to do or say. “What’s happened? Did you fall down? Get hit by a car? You’ve scratched yourself up a bit.” He touched the raw skin, and I jerked away. I let my head drop forward, so that my hair went over my shoulders, covering the scratches and the ripped shirt.
“Now, then, no real harm done.” J. Norm’s voice got softer. “It doesn’t look too bad. Just a skin contusion. We’ll put a little peroxide on it. Are you injured anywhere else?”
I shook my head, wiped my eyes with the hankie, hoped it wasn’t one that’d already been used. I tried to think of what to do next. DeRon had all my stuff. Mama and Russ were gone tonight. As soon as I headed home, I was dead.
Another sob came out. I pushed the hankie over my eyes.
“There, now.” J. Norm patted my head like a puppy’s. “It’ll be all right. Tell me what’s happened. You’re safe now.” His voice was soft and kind. I would’ve never thought he had a voice like that in him. It broke me wide-open, and without even meaning to, I started babbling out the whole thing—Mama and Russ fighting, the bus stop, DeRon, his friends, the car, the loading dock in back of the old grocery store, DeRon taking off with my backpack in his car.
The words came out like a river, rushing and crashing against each other, breaking over the tops of all the walls inside me. I didn’t want to tell J. Norm that stuff. I didn’t want him to see me like this, but I couldn’t help it. I needed somebody to promise me it was gonna be all right. I needed somebody to help me.
“There, now,” J. Norm said again, when I’d calmed down a little. He went and got a kitchen towel, and when he came back, he took the soaked hankie and put the towel in my hands. “Enough of that, now. Dry those tears. We’ll clean up the scratches, and then we’ll figure out what to do.”
Chapter 9
J. Norman Alvord
We went to Annalee’s closet to find a shirt. It seemed strange to be in there among her things—neither Deborah nor I had yet attempted the handling of Annalee’s personal belongings—but what else was I to do? I could hardly let the girl run around in disarray, and short of my attempting to operate a needle and thread, which had always been Annalee’s domain as well, a loan of clothing seemed the wisest choice. Annalee would have done the same. She was a few inches shorter than this girl’s lanky frame, but I surmised them to be roughly the same size.
The girl stood in the doorway of the walk-in closet, watching while I held up various shirts I thought might serve. My judgment of women’s clothing being rudimentary, she laughed at some of my choices, still sniffling and choking on leftover tears.
Her gaze took in the long row of Annalee’s suits and dresses, then the wide rack of shoes at the back of the closet, and finally the stack of hatboxes overhead. In my corporate days, there were always banquets and Christmas parties, awards ceremonies and speeches to attend. Those events were never to my liking, but Annalee was a butterfly, brightly colored and fully alive in all social situations. She rescued me from my own awkwardness, and when the need to maintain polite conversation became too oppressive, she whisked me off to the dance floor, where no conversation was required.
The girl selected a red plaid shirt that Annalee had used for gardening; then she stood gazing at the section of dancing dresses. “Whoa. Your wife was, like, totally a fashionista.”
I felt Annalee there beside me, smiling at the comment. She was fashionable. Always. Many of the gowns she’d either sewn or altered herself, merely because she enjoyed clothing. She’d even sewn the bridal gown for Deborah’s late-in-life wedding, two years ago. After waiting all these years for our daughter to fall in love, Annalee wasn’t about to miss the opportunity. It had been a beautiful wedding on Jupiter Beach in Florida—a place Deborah remembered from her childhood. The trip was a stroll down Memory Lane for Annalee and me, a reminder of the glory days of our young family. I’d let melancholy overtake me more than I should have on that trip. Those years at the cape were the glory days, and they were over. Had I known that the trip to Deborah’s wedding would be my last vacation with Annalee, I would have lived more fully in the moment, realized how easily a perfect day can slip by unnoticed. Any day is the glory day, if you choose to see the glory in it.
“We had many occasions to go out socially over the years,” I said. “There were parties related to my work, technology conferences, and charities in which Annalee involved herself.” The past came back as unexpectedly as the gush of a breeze when a door is opened. It smelled fresh and pleasant. “In my days at Cape Canaveral, the social events were a way to appease the wives, to make penance for the fact that our work occupied so much of our time. We were desperate to get ahead of the Russians, of course. Kennedy wanted to be the first to put a man on the moon. We devoted our lives to it, and when our wives grew frustrated and cross, we took them out for fine food and dancing. Annalee loved to dance.”
The girl’s face brightened, and I was glad to see that the tears had been forgotten. “Whoa, J. Norm, you’re a dancer?” She looked me over, as if it were hard to see Fred Astaire inside the rumpled blue dress shirt and navy pants that hung two sizes too large on what was left of my body.
The memories surrounded me, sweet and fragrant like the gardenias at the cape. Bright, beautiful, pungent to my mind. “I’ve been known to take a turn.”
She responded with a wide, precocious grin that left dimples in her milky brown cheeks. “Like, a
dancer
dancer? Like ballroom stuff, like they do on that TV show? Fox-trots and the Vietnamese waltz, and that stuff?”
“Viennese waltz,” I corrected. “I knew them all. My mother saw to that with several years of charm school.”
“Charm school!” She sniffled and then choked on laughter. “J. Norm, you been to charm school?” Oddly enough, Annalee had offered much the same reaction when, at her college sorority’s spring cotillion, I proved to be reasonably competent in the finer arts.
Norman
, she’d said, after I gallantly dipped her at the end of a dance,
I didn’t know you had that in you!
I was quite pleased with myself at that moment and thankful for my mother. A boy from the lacrosse team had been eyeing my date that evening—a young man known for being good with the ladies. I was afraid to leave Annalee alone even long enough for a trip to the punch bowl.
“I feel certain there’s a graduation certificate somewhere in the attic,” I told the girl. “Mrs. Hardin’s School of the Social Arts.”
“You
graduated
from charm school?” Epiphany coughed in exaggerated disbelief, smirking at me. “I think you oughta go ask for a refund.”
“I’ll have you know, young lady, that I was a model pupil.” I pretended to be offended by the insinuation that I was less than charming to be around. She wasn’t fooled. She laughed at my answer, and I felt a tremble in my stomach, an urge to laugh along with her.
Slipping on the shirt, she moved a few steps into the closet, touching one of the dresses. “Man,” she whispered, trailing her finger along smooth sky-blue satin. “These are, like, red-carpet stuff. What’s up there in the boxes?”
“Hats,” I told her, and she regarded me with such curiosity that I felt compelled to take down a container for her. Inside were two pillbox hats and some gloves, things Annalee might have worn to church on a Sunday, back when such was the fashion. “And gloves, it would seem.”
She peered over the side of the box, moved her fingers toward the hat, then stopped. “Can I touch it?”
“I don’t see that it would hurt.”
Taking out a pale green hat with a feathered clip and gloves that had undoubtedly been perfectly matched at one time, she clicked her tongue against her teeth, then whispered, “Whoa. These are cool.” She stepped back into the room and stood in front of the mirror to put them on. Her face lit as she braced her hands on her hips, admiring herself from side to side, the bruised shoulder and torn shirt seemingly forgotten. “Whew-eee! Look at me. I look like Jackie O. Kennedy. I read about her and Camelot and stuff in those magazines you gave me.”
My mind fell into a memory—one of Deborah as a child, dressed in one of her mother’s gowns, her tiny feet hidden in the toes of Annalee’s heeled shoes. I’d passed by the doorway as she was gazing at herself in the mirror.
Look at me, Daddy! Look at me! Am I a pretty girl?
It matters more for a girl to be smart
, I’d said.
Beauty is subject to the beholder, but intelligence is undeniable. Shouldn’t you be attending to your studies? It’s after seven thirty. . . .
I’d continued on about my business without looking back. The moment had seemed insignificant then. Now I wished I could stand in the doorway again and watch my daughter pretend in her mother’s shoes. I wished I had told her how beautiful she was.
The girl frowned into the mirror, her bottom lip pouching on one side. “You think I look like Jackie Kennedy, J. Norm? You think I’m ever gonna be pretty, like she was?” Her face narrowed, as if she were trying to imagine the answer for herself.
I think it’s more important for a girl to be smart.
The words were on the tip of my tongue, but it’s a foolish man who willingly tastes the dish of regret once he knows how bitter it is.
“I mean,” she went on, her gaze sliding over and catching mine, her odd silver-green eyes bright in this light, “I was just wonderin’. Not in some kind of weird way, ’cause I’m young and you’re old and stuff, but if you were young, would you think I was, like, pretty?”
For reasons I could not grasp, the words that had never come to my lips for Deborah came now for this child. “I think you are beautiful. A beautiful young lady. Like Jackie Kennedy.”
She smiled, bashful for the first time since I’d known her. Looking down at her hands, she slipped off a glove. “No prince from Camelot’s gonna be sweeping me off to Kitty-bunkport, though, probably.”
I felt obliged to make a point. “Well, certainly that boy, that Dron, is no prince, now, is he? Not the sort a princess should be going around with.”
Her gaze slid toward me again. “
De-
Ron,” she corrected.
“Precisely. That sort of boy isn’t worth the trouble.”
She drew back, offended. “You don’t
know
DeRon. He scored more points in basketball than any high school player in Dallas last year. He’s set to get a college scholarship. Every girl in school wants to be DeRon’s girlfriend.”
I suddenly wondered how I’d allowed myself to be drawn into such a ludicrous conversation. I knew nothing of high school romance. “In my day, there were standards. A young man was expected to behave in a proper way. A young woman who thought anything of herself insisted on it.”
“Whatever.” She reached for the hat, wincing when her lacerated skin touched the fabric of the overshirt. “Well, that’s not how it is anymore. You go acting like you’re some kind of princess, you can sit home by yourself on Saturday night.”
“Would that be the worst thing?”
Her thumb caressed the feathers on the hatband, as if she felt the need to admire it a moment longer. “It would be in my house. I hate it there.” The words ended in a sigh. “DeRon’s just . . . I just want someone to . . . want me around, you know?” Her chin trembled and she swallowed hard, then fluttered a glance my way, as if she were waiting for an answer. What was I to say? I could guide a rocket to the moon or design systems to track missile launches halfway across the world, but I knew nothing of advising a teenage girl, of offering comfort or pertinent information. Yet, there she was, her eyes soft and round, the color of spring leaves, expectant.
I remembered something an elder colleague once told me when I was considering a position overseas. The job included a long-term contract requiring me to be absent for extended periods in the lives of our young children. I repeated the advice now, because it seemed to apply. “We all make trade-offs to get what we want. But no matter what you stand to gain, when the thing you’re asked to trade is yourself, the price is too high.”
What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
My father, with whom I’d engaged in perhaps only one or two lengthy conversations in my life, was a successful oilman who often quoted the wisdom of Proverbs.