“Yes,” Sandy answered, and her eyes brimmed with tears.
“We’re going to visit Florida,” Lou said crossly. Sandy shouldn’t have told.
“That’s a long walk for three little girls.”
“We’re just walking to the subway,” Lou said sarcastically.
The old man winked at Sandy. “I’ll bet a drink of cold lemonade would dry up those tears,” he said.
Sandy nodded, letting the tears fall.
Norma put the suitcase down. She was thirsty, her arm was sore, her feet hurt because her saddle shoes were too small. But it was up to Lou to decide.
“Do you own that house?” Lou asked the old man, pointing to the white mansion behind him. If he did, if he wasn’t just a workman, they’d stop for some lemonade. She wouldn’t mind seeing the inside of one of these places.
He said he did. As they walked across his lawn, he took the suitcase from Norma and held Sandy’s hand. All around the edge of the lawn were bright flowers like the ones on his shirt.
In the middle was a fountain with a statue of a girl pouring water from a jug. Birds flickered in the trees, and there were two orange and green birds—parrots, the girls realized when they were closer—in a cage that hung from the patio roof.
“Naughty!” one of the parrots squawked.
“Does he mean us?” Sandy asked. The old man twinkled.
The kitchen was almost as big as their entire house. It had two double sinks with old-fashioned taps, two stoves, and cupboards with glass doors, like the kitchen in
Leave It to Beaver.
The old man let them turn on the taps and open the cupboards. When they asked what the string hanging from the ceiling was for, he said for opening a vent, and he lifted Sandy up onto the counter so that she could pull it. Then he lifted Lou up to pull it, then went to pick up Norma, but she stepped back, thinking she’d be too heavy for him. “No, that’s all right,” she said. He got her under the arms anyway and swung her up. For an old man he was strong.
He made the lemonade with lemons. They hadn’t known you could do that. Why didn’t he buy it in a can? Lou wondered; he could afford to. At home all they had were cans. “Sometimes,” she told the old man,“when it’s my turn to make dinner and do the dishes, I just open the cans and put them straight on the burners.”
“And then you don’t have to wash pots,” the old man said.
“Yeah, right.”
The old man took out four glasses from the cupboard. They were all different sizes, and one had red balloons painted on it.
“Nothing matches here,” Lou said. “The houses are all different, and these glasses, and …” she looked around,“the windows.” She pointed to one with stained-glass panes and then to the circular one over the sink.
“What do you think about that?” the old man asked. He poured out the lemonade.
“It’s neat,” Lou said sincerely. She took the glass he handed her and was so thirsty she gulped it all down. He poured her another. “Not bad,” she said. “A bit sour, though. And you left some seeds in.”
He gave them a tour of the rest of his house. “You really live all by yourself?” Lou asked in disbelief. There was so much furniture, so many rooms. He could sleep in a different bedroom every night of the week. In the bedroom where he did sleep, the walls were covered with paintings and drawings of girls who weren’t his daughters or his granddaughters, or even anybody he knew. Just pretty girls, he said, like they were.
“Are you a long way from home?” he asked.
“Yes,” Norma answered. She told him that they had been walking all day long.
“Your poor little legs must be tired,” he said.
“They sure are,” Norma said, leaning toward him. Nobody had ever called any part of her “little” before. But then she saw that his eyes had moved to Sandy, and she stood straight and looked out the window, at the fairyland of flowers down there.
“Shall we give your legs a rest?” the old man asked, lifting Sandy up.
They all went downstairs, Sandy sitting in his strong arms as if in a chair. She touched his bushy white beard. There were balls of wax inside his ear, she saw. She thought that his ear was like a pink rose with pollen in it. “Can I call you Grandfather?” she whispered.
“I’d be honoured,” he said.
In the kitchen, while he made more lemonade, Lou told him the story she’d thought up for the orphanage, about an uncle who beat them. “He whips Sandy with his belt,” she elaborated. “With the buckle end.”
The old man frowned.
“And sometimes he bites her.”
The old man went still, holding the paring knife in midair. Then he cut a lemon in half and asked Sandy if she would like to make the juice.
“Oh, yes, Grandfather,” she said, thinking of Heidi learning to milk the cow.
He pulled a chair up for her to stand on and showed her how to twist the lemon halfback and forth on the juicer cone. They did it together, her hand on top of his. He had a smooth, round, brown-spotted hand and round fingers like gloves when you blow into them.
“She knows how to sew,” Lou said, opening and slamming a cupboard door.
“Does she now,” he said.
“And Norma and I know how to do the laundry and ironing and vacuuming and grocery shopping.” She gave a sigh of responsibility. “Norma and I, we know how to do pretty well everything.”
“Not only are you pretty girls,” he said,“but clever girls as well.”
“Lou gets all A’s in school,” Norma contributed. She guessed what Lou was up to, and she supposed spending a while here, maybe having something to eat, would be all right. But she didn’t really believe anymore that they could run away for good. Upstairs, when the old man’s eyes dropped from her to Sandy, she’d wondered why she ever got her hopes up about anything.
He carried the lemonade outside on a tray. Although Lou put her sunglasses back on, Norma left her clip-ons in her pocket, in case they made her look sneaky. She and Lou sat on the velvet grass in front of the old man’s lawn chair, and Sandy sat leaning against his legs. He touched Sandy’s hair where Lou had cut it. “What happened there?” he asked.
“Our uncle did that,” Lou answered like a shot.
The old man shook his head.
“Grandfather,” Sandy said, brushing the white hair on his
legs with the tips of her fingers,“can we live here with you?”
“If you like,” he said.
Lou jumped to her feet. “Really?”
“We can’t have you going back to your uncle, can we?”
“But can we live with you forever?” Lou asked. “For years?”
He spread his hands. “For as long as you want to.”
“Gee,” Lou said, beaming at him. “That’s great. Okay, I’m going to look around.” She tore across the lawn and into the house, and Norma stood with the intention of following her, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave Sandy and the old man by themselves. She looked at him. He was watching her.
“Why would you want us to stay?” she asked shyly.
“Because you have nowhere to go.”
“But I mean why would you want all the trouble and everything of three girls you don’t even know living in your house?”
“Because girls are honey in the heart.”
His smile was so kind that she felt ashamed. He asked if she would pick some flowers for the empty lemonade pitcher. He handed it to her, holding the bottom as if it were something else. A precious gift.
“Okay,” she said gratefully.
The garden surrounded the entire yard, enclosing it like an enchanted moat. Between the high trees sunlight fell in tinselled shafts. The only garden Norma had ever seen like this one was in a book their father had, called
Twenty Years of Composting.
But he never planted anything other than petunias and geraniums. Six red geraniums in a line under the living-room window; ten white and pink petunias, five each, in a pink, white, pink, white line under the kitchen window.
Some fluffy white flowers that looked as though they’d been made from Kleenex caught her eye. Out of politeness she picked the smallest one. Then she glanced over her shoulder to see if the old man was still watching her. He wasn’t. He and Sandy were sitting on the grass, Sandy’s bare feet in his lap.
“He only wanted to get rid of me,” Norma thought. From this distance all she saw was a strange old man. A strange old man who was tickling her sister’s toes. Why wasn’t he worried about their uncle coming after them? she wondered. She had an awful thought: What if he planned to kidnap them and sell them on the white slave market in Africa?
Keeping her eye on him, she moved down the garden and picked a few daisies and then a purple flower. The perfume here was as strong as a roomful of dressed-up ladies. Had their mother seen the goodbye note? She would drink straight from the bottle. Norma let out a jagged breath. They should never have left. They’d better go home right now.
But when she walked back across the lawn, intending to order Sandy to put her shoes and socks back on, the old man spoke first.
“A remarkable selection,” he said. He came to his feet and reached out both hands to receive the pitcher. “Norma,” he said, holding up the pitcher with its four measly flowers,“you are an artist. You have the artist’s appreciation of what is not there.” And then he kissed her forehead.
She was too overwhelmed to speak.
“You know what?” Lou said, coming out of the house as Norma was returning from the vegetable garden. “He doesn’t have a t?. No t?! I even went up into the attic and down the basement and looked. You know what else? He doesn’t have a radio. And you won’t believe it, but I couldn’t find a phone either. Boy, there’s going to have to be some changes made around here.” She picked up a beet from the apple basket Norma was carrying. “What the hell’s this?”
“A vegetable. He asked me to dig up some for dinner.” She had four beets, a clump of radishes and eight carrots.
“Hey,” Lou said, looking across the lawn,“get a load of this.”
Norma came around the edge of the patio to see. The old man was on his hands and knees, crawling in circles, Sandy riding on his back. “He thinks she’s three or something,” Norma said distantly. She looked at Sandy’s bare pink foot tickling the old man under his arm, and she felt as if she’d woken up in traffic. She put down the basket of vegetables. “We have to go home,” she said.
“No we don’t,” Lou said.
“Why does he want us here? He must be crazy.”
“He likes us. He likes pretty girls.”
“I’m not pretty.”
Lou paused too long. “You are too,” she said.
“We’re going home,” Norma said. “I’m the oldest and I’m taking us home.” She ran onto the lawn. “Sandy!” she called. “We’re going home!”
The old man crawled around to face her. Norma wouldn’t look at him. “Come on,” she said, trying to lift Sandy off his back,“we have to go home now.”
“No!” Sandy cried.
“Leave her!” Lou shouted, running up.
“Come on,” Norma said, pulling Sandy.
“Don’t!” Sandy cried.
“Simmer down now, simmer down,” the old man said.
Norma let Sandy go. “We’re going to be late for our dinner,” she said, keeping her eyes from him.
He said,“But you’re having your dinner here.”
Norma shook her head. Sandy shook his collar as if it were reins.
“Do you want us to cook dinner?” Lou asked the old man, to change the subject.
Norma said,“We have a father and mother. Our father never hits Sandy. She’s the one he never hits.” She looked at the old man now, kneeling there. His face was startlingly red, his glasses were falling off. The top of his underpants was showing
at his waist. “Fruit of the Loom,” she read upside down. She was on the verge of crying.
But he was the one who started crying. A broken moaning that they thought at first was coughing. Sandy climbed off his back and bent down in front of him. “Grandfather?” she inquired. He hung his head like an old horse.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Lou said to Norma. She couldn’t have been more disgusted if he’d gone to the bathroom in front of them. She wondered if he was an alcoholic. That was all they needed.
“Grandfather, what’s the matter?” Sandy asked.
He shifted into a sitting position and tugged a red handkerchief out of his shorts pocket. Blew his nose. Took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “Forgive me,” he said. “I was so happy, that’s all. I was so happy today.”
“But I’m not going to go home,” Sandy said. “I
told
you.” She squeezed his beard and opened her fingers to feel it spring back.
“Yeah,” Lou said. She said that they were all going to stay and that Norma had made it up about their parents, that Norma acted mental sometimes.
Norma walked back to the house. “Hello, beautiful!” one of the parrots screamed. She considered calling the police. She wasn’t brave enough or traitorous enough to call their father.
The old man got up and walked, bent over, to his chair. With his socks down, Lou saw that there were bulging purple veins twining around his calves. Sandy came and knelt at his feet, and he brought down his hand on the top of her gold head, covering the hair that Lou had cut. A crow lounged like black paper right above the two of them.
“Would you like some booze?” Lou asked him.
But he was asleep. His hand dropped to Sandy’s shoulder,
where it lay heavily. As Sandy lifted it off, she checked the time on his wristwatch. “A quarter to five,” she whispered.
“Wake him up,” Lou said. “He’s got to cook dinner. I don’t know how to cook those damn vegetables.”
Sandy gently pumped his arm, saying,“Grandfather.” His head fell back.
“Hey, wake up,” Lou said. She gave his shoulder a hard shake. “Boy, he’s a deep sleeper,” she said, looking around and seeing Norma walking toward them from the house.
A few feet from the chair Norma stopped. What told her? The position of his head? The way his arms drooped over the sides of the chair? “Listen for his heart,” she said.
Lou frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Do it, okay?”
Lou pressed her ear against his chest. It sounded like underwater. “I can’t hear it,” she said, straightening and taking a few steps back, a little repelled by his chicken-gumbo soup smell.
Sandy got up on her knees and roved her ear over the front of his Hawaiian shirt, thinking she heard his heart and then not hearing it. She stood, took off his glasses, pushed up one of his eyelids and screamed to see the white eyeball.