The Fragrance of Geraniums (A Time of Grace Book 1) (9 page)

E
mmeline woke
with a jolt. Dread rose in her chest, numbing her, as she realized what had
broken her sleep: Her legs felt sticky and moist. Her abdomen panged with
cramping.

Geoff slept
solidly beside her, his breathing calm and deep, such a contrast to the ragged
gasps making their way up her throat. Resolvedly, Emmeline pushed back her side
of the bedcoverings and forced herself to look at the sheets, illuminated by
the moonlight.

Blood soaked the
linens where she’d lain.
The life is in the blood…

The loss had
begun in earnest, then.
Doctor Philips was right. I will never carry a baby
to full-term.

Emmeline’s nails
dug into her palms as she struggled to contain her sobs. When she realized she
couldn’t, she dropped to the floor beside the bed, pulling her pillow with her.
Face buried to muffle the weeping, she spent a long, dark night.

T
he smoke coming
from behind the barn alerted Grace.
Papa’s burning.
In the quiet after-supper
darkness of her bedroom, she leaned against the windowsill, arms crossed,
breathing in the earthy scent of orange flames consuming orange leaves. She
hadn’t seen Gertrude since yesterday when Papa’d brought the woman home. Sometimes,
Grace tried to push the whole idea of it out of her head, tried to conceal it
as a corpse in the clods of her heart. But, like a vampire not buried at a
crossroads, the knowledge that
this
really was happening continued to
resurrect in her mind and heart.

Maybe if I
talked to Papa…
True, Evelyn always held first-place in Papa’s heart, just as she did in
Mama’s. But occasionally, Grace had seemed to see a regard for herself in
Papa’s eyes. Perhaps if she talked to him, let him explain, she could
understand… Maybe he could show her that the situation really wasn’t as bad as
it seemed, that he wasn’t the gross monster whom Ben had understood him to be.

I’ll talk to
him,
Grace decided and rose from her kneeling position.

C
harlie threw
another chunk of yard debris and garbage into the barrel. The container’s sides
rose up four feet, rusted tangerine from years of use. His father – an Italian straight
from the Old Country – had always burned his garbage along with leaves and wood
waste, and Charlie Picoletti saw no reason why he, his father’s son and proud
of it, should do differently, town garbage ordinance in place or not.

His eyes fell on
the large brick homestead towering over the nearer barn. His father had built
that too, and now Charlie’s own family dwelt there, made safe and secure by the
sweat of his brow and the work of his large, rough hands. This Depression had
turned out to be a tough time for the state – no, for the country - and Charlie
had done a little of everything to get by: junk-collecting, other folks’
butchering, gambling, and, yes, even politics. He was a smart man, Charlie was,
and he knew it. He would get by in life. He always did.

Now if only
stupid Sarah could get it through her thick skull: that this thing with
Gertrude had nothing to do with her. Charlie shook his head. Sarah’d moaned and
whined a bit in the past when he’d had flings – truth was, he’d rarely
not
had a girlfriend in the years since they’d been married; he was, after all, a
very attractive and fascinating man – but his wife’d never carried on like this
– as if it was the end of the world!

“You brought
that woman into my own house!” Sarah had screamed at him, tears running down
her cheeks like a lovesick teenager. ‘Cept she weren’t a teenager no more, with
rosy cheeks and honeyed glances that could melt his heart.

He’d stared at
her. Was she serious? “Into
your
house?” He’d stated the question. “Into
my
house, you mean. I’ll bring whoever I want into my home. You got
that?”

And he’d not
even kept Gertrude in the house! He’d gone to all the expense and trouble of
fixing up that old ramshackle cottage for her, when they all could’ve saved a
good deal of money by her staying in the guest bedroom. And yet he’d done all
this to please
Sarah
; she was so finicky!

Charlie gave a
kick to the barrel.
Women.
You couldn’t live with them… and he, for one,
certainly couldn’t live without them.

Speaking of
women – well, girls, at any rate – his middle daughter had come out of the
house just now. Grace paused on the back stoop, hesitating like she was waiting
for something, someone, or maybe she was just catching her breath. Grace was
turning out to be pretty good-looking, if Charlie did say so himself. Small of
stature like all the Picolettis, her thin frame caused her to take on the
appearance of a tiny bird, golden-feathered, soft-featured, except for her slightly-bigger-than-average
nose.
That nose comes from her mother’s side.

Grace’s face
stayed turned away from him, looking toward the sky, and Charlie stood studying
her, wondering if she was waiting for a boyfriend to swing by, or whatnot. She
was fourteen; she must have one, he figured. Not that it mattered to him at
all. Grace would talk to her mama, or to Lou and Nancy about all of that. Let
the women handle themselves.

Back when he and
Ben had been on speaking terms – before his son had bashed in his tooth for no
good reason – Ben had said something about Grace having a nice voice, too. It
was why his eldest son called her, “canary-bird” or some such silliness.
Charlie sniffed in the smoky air, appreciating the melded scents of burning
rubber and wood. Now, if you wanted hear a good voice, all you had to do was
listen to Grace’s mama, Charlie’s Sarah. He smiled in the gray light cast by
the fiery barrel. There was a time, past now – long past – when he and Sarah’d
sit at that old piano for hours, singing one popular tune after another. Charlie
remembered that season in their life together the way a little boy remembers
his birthday cake from the year before: sweet and rich, and he didn’t care if
it didn’t have no nourishment. He liked the taste of it; that was for sure.

He poked at the
flames rising up over the side of the rusted barrel, eyes smarting from the
smoke.
That time’s past, Charlie,
he reminded himself, even as the
picture of Sarah, bright-eyed and lighthearted, pushed itself into his mind.
Her fingers had flown over the ivory keys like a swallow catching bugs at the dusky
lake nearby. Her voice had combined with his, challenging Charlie with the ease
with which Sarah switched keys and changed harmonies.
Sometimes, she
overreached herself
, he thought with a brisk poke at the pile of smoldering
debris.
As if she wanted to outdo me.

And such could
not be borne. It wasn’t a woman’s place to tell the man what to do or how to
live. Which was why Charlie had every right to bring Gertrude into
his
home. What did it matter to Sarah, as long as she and the kids ate good? Why
did she care whose bed he slept in on the nights he wasn’t in hers?

Sometimes a man
just got sick and tired of coming home to the same barefoot porridge of a
woman. Couldn’t Sarah understand that? When Charlie walked in the door, night
after night, he saw Sarah standing there at the stove, making his dinner with
her once-smooth hands roughed up by housework. The sight certainly didn’t lift
the cares of the world from Charlie’s shoulders. And she’d invariably have one
kid or another bothering her about something – school, chores, whatever.

And then there
were the potatoes. How many potatoes could a man eat, no matter how your woman
tried disguising them, mashing them, buttering them, boiling them? Of course,
she blamed him for that, too – said there weren’t no money for anything else.

And her hair…
Charlie could remember when Sarah’s hair ran lush and heavy down her back, a burnished,
enticing path. She’d not cut it when all the running-around women had bobbed
theirs. But she
had
sacrificed it on the altar of motherhood, snipping
it right around her shoulders. Charlie spit in disgust at the memory of Sarah
sitting in the rocking chair, the first day she’d had her hair cut. She’d not
even asked him, as if his permission wouldn’t have mattered. That’d been right
around the time Sarah’d disappointed him in another way too; she’d lost three
babies, one right after another. And when he’d done all in his power to make
sure she’d get pregnant each time, knowing she’d felt bad about it all! Women!
You just couldn’t please them.

Whereas,
Gertrude…

Charlie tossed
more rubbish into the barrel, feeling the heat on his fingertips. Well, last
night was a good example of the difference in the way Gertrude and Sarah
treated him. Right after supper, Charlie had run down to that snug little cottage
he’d fixed up for her. Gertrude had met him at the door – thrown the door open
actually and pulled him inside. She’d smelled like fresh-cut roses; the scent
lingered in her hair, washed over her petal-soft skin, wafted through her
ready-made clothes. Her lips had met his, and he’d tasted mint on her mouth,
covering up her cigarette habit. Now
that
was how a woman ought to
prepare herself for her man!

In that husky - some
mistakenly called it hoarse - voice, she’d murmured right into his ear, “Here’s
my handsome, hard-working man. I’ve been waiting for you, Chuckie.”

Handsome.
As if he was a
young man of twenty again, vigorous with the spirit and good looks of youth.
She’d captured him in an embrace, and he had no desire to resist her. “I can’t
stay tonight,” he’d protested, weak as a toddler in her soft arms. She’d
changed into a silky robe and had taken her hair down from its pinned-up style.
“Sarah ain’t happy with me…”

She’d laughed
the way she might laugh at a silly, roly-poly puppy, and he’d stiffened,
insulted. A man had his dignity, after all. But then she’d drawn herself
against him again. She’d whispered, “Now, you just tell me, why Chuckie
Picoletti minds what that old-woman-in-a-shoe thinks? Let her stew her life
away in misery; it’s none of
our
concern.” She’d kissed his cheek,
gentle as a spring breeze through the lilac bushes. “Come…”

The very memory
of Gertrude’s fingers – smooth and light as butter made from Bessie’s fresh
milk – tracking through his hair made shivers run down Charlie’s arms now. He
poked at the fire, anxious for it to burn down so that he could let his feet
run over the field beyond the barn, out to the cottage at the back of his
property.

G
race swallowed
hard, staring up at the night sky. She’d not glanced over the expanse from the
house to the barn, but she knew Papa stood out there, tending to his
barrel-fire. All during Grace’s growing-up years, Papa had burned a fire nearly
every evening. When she’d been young, no more than five or six, she clasped
Papa’s finger, big and meaty, in her whole hand, and he’d led her out into the
yard to help him tend the burning trash and wood stuff.

Standing here
now on the back steps, Grace remembered what it had been like when she was a
little girl, tiny and innocent, knowing hardly anything at all about Mama and
Papa’s problems. Mama had cried from time-to-time, had peered out the curtains
when the hour was late and Papa had not returned for supper, had whispered
quietly in a worried voice with Aunt Mary at the kitchen table over coffee. But
nothing that much disturbed the simple sweetness of a five-year-old’s natural
trust in her papa or love for her mama. How Grace longed for those times back
again now, nearly a decade later!

In the darkness
of nights like this, standing here on the back step, Grace recognized the real
reason that nobody but Ben and Aunt Mary dared bring up the festering wounds so
blatant to the rest of the world: Grace – and Mama and Nancy and Lou, even Evelyn
– they were all afraid that voicing the terrible possibilities might award them
breath and life. That acknowledging the ghosts might give them leave to walk
the earth.

But Grace found
she could be silent no longer. Not with Mama beginning to swell with her
seventh baby; not with a strange, permed woman living in the cottage beyond the
barn; not with Ben running off after knocking Papa’s tooth out – so he said; Grace
hadn’t seen the hole yet, and Ben sometimes exaggerated.

Papa’s tooth
aside, the questions burned in Grace’s heart, and she feared they’d consume her
without her consent. Thus, here she stood on the back step, willing courage
into her chest as she thought about approaching Papa, burning at his trash
barrel.

“Mary, Mother of
Jesus, help me,” she begged aloud, barely moving her lips, afraid her papa
would see and think her crazy for talking to herself. “Mary, Mother of sweet
Jesus, answer my prayer.” Grace knew she would have better luck trying Mary
than directing her prayer straight to God, like the Protestants did. Mary was,
after all, a woman like Grace and hopefully would sympathize with her human
weaknesses.

“Bring my prayer
before your Son, Mother of God,” she whispered. While Grace herself had no
claim on the Son of God, surely Jesus would listen to His mother. “May it… may
it
all
be alright,” she stammered, her tongue lame, then stopped, silent,
trying to find the right words. Her heart and mind swarmed with so many
thoughts that she couldn’t get a single one clear. “Help me,” she implored and
hoped it would be enough. She was taking a chance, she knew, since she hadn’t
gone to Confession since last week. But her prayer would have to do.