Where the Heart Is (32 page)

“Beautiful, isn’t it, Novalee. And so apt.” Miss Holloway dabbed at the corner of her eyes. “Longfellow went to Bowdoin, too. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And now . . . it’s Forney’s turn.”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“Anyway, I have some papers for Forney to sign. Just some legal work for the city. So we can close things out.”

“But what about the library?”

“We already have an architect to draw up plans for the new building. And Mayor Albright’s daughter will take over, run things for us. A lovely girl. She has a degree in library science and she’s a librarian now in Dallas, but she wants to come back here. Her mother’s our incoming Literary Guild president. A fine family.”

When a car pulled up at the curb, Retha Holloway motioned to the driver, an elderly man. “Well, Novalee, here’s my ride. Nice to talk to you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And when you hear from Forney, please tell him to get in touch with me.”

Novalee stood on the sidewalk until the car was out of sight, but the sound of Retha Holloway’s voice had been left behind.

. . . now he can get on with his life . . .

Novalee had been in bed an hour when the phone call came, but she wasn’t asleep. She dressed quickly, woke Lexie to tell her she was leaving, then slipped out of the house as quietly as she could.

The night was muggy and still. When she drove past the bank, she noticed the temperature was eighty-four.

She parked across the street from the Majestic Hotel, then sat in her car for a few minutes watching the windows of Forney’s room, watching his shadow cross the shades.

The lobby was empty except for one old man, shrunken like a museum mummy and slumped into a corner of a stained couch.

Forney’s smile was in place when he opened the door as if he had been rehearsing while she knocked.

“Hi.”

His hair was still wet from the shower and he had a fresh razor cut on his chin.

“Hello.”

She started to hug him, but it caught him off guard and by the time he realized what was happening, she had backed off a step and stood awkwardly in the doorway, her hands hanging at her sides.

“Come in,” he said.

As she stepped through the door and slipped past him, she smelled the soap he had bathed in. Something lemony and sweet.

“I’m sorry I called so late.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Did I wake everyone up?”

“No.”

The lights were on now, an overhead bulb and a lamp by the bed, so for the first time she really saw the room. The walls were papered with faded forest scenes; the furniture looked like painted army surplus.

The only decoration was a framed print of a sad clown.

“How was your trip?”

“Long.”

“Did everything go all right?”

“All right?”

“I mean with the ceremony. Your sister . . .”

“Mary Elizabeth.” Forney nodded, then said her name again as if he needed to hear the sound. “Yes. Well, there was no service, nothing like that. There was no one there. Just me. And Mary Elizabeth. But no one else.”

“Forney, are you okay?”

“Oh yes,” he said, but he turned away, looked at the clown on the wall. “Well, I guess I am.”

Novalee shifted her weight from one foot to the other and Forney shoved his hands into his pockets. A toilet flushed in a room above them. To cover the sound, they both spoke at once.

“While you—”

“I wanted—”

“Novalee, would you like to sit down?” Forney made a hospitable gesture, but there weren’t many choices. A metal office chair with a cracked vinyl seat, and the bed. Novalee took the chair.

“You must be tired,” she said.

“A little.”

“I was beginning to worry. When you weren’t back by Wednesday . . .”

“I stayed longer than I intended. Rented a car. Acted like a tourist.

I had forgotten how lovely it is there. Very different from here.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You know, my mother and father were born there. Mary Elizabeth, too. I never really lived there, except when I was in college, but it felt almost . . . familiar.”

“Skowhegan, you mean?”

“Well, that whole part of Maine. Skowhegan, Waterville, Augusta, Brunswick.”

“Brunswick. That’s where you went to college?”

“Yeah. I drove over there to poke around for a couple of hours and wound up staying two days. Spent some time on campus. Bowdoin has a great library. Saw a couple of professors I studied with. One of them has a new book coming out.”

“Sounds exciting.”

Another silence settled on them, but this time they waited it out.

“I thought about you, Novalee.”

“Forney . . .”

“I wanted to talk to you, but I thought what I had to say . . . well, it wouldn’t seem right over the phone.”

“What did you want to say?”

“It was about the last time we were together. I was afraid . . . I mean, I wondered if I might have, uh, hurt you or something.”

“Hurt me?”

“I suppose I wasn’t very . . . well, I was worried that I might have been clumsy . . . not exactly . . . gentle.”

“No, Forney. You didn’t hurt me.”

“I wouldn’t want to, Novalee.”

A noisy compressor in the window air conditioner kicked on and the lights dimmed for just a second.

“So, what’s happening here?”

“Not much. Lexie found a place. A duplex. They’ll be moving out on the first.”

“You’ll miss her.”

“She won’t be far away. Right across from the school.”

“How’s Americus?”

“Fine. She’s going to be Annie Oakley in the Western Days Parade on Saturday.”

“I brought her a book.” Forney dug in an opened suitcase on the bed behind him and came up with a package wrapped in red paper.

“The Maine Woods. Thoreau. We had two copies in the library here, but . . .”

“Retha Holloway wants to see you.”

“Any plans yet for the new library?”

“Yeah, but I don’t think you want to hear it.”

“What?”

“Well, Retha said the mayor’s daughter is going to be the new librarian.”

“Oh, I’m not surprised. Albright’s wanted to move her in for a long time. But that’s okay. It’s time for something new.” Forney wiped his hand over his face, then rubbed the back of his neck. “I hear they’re hiring at the plastics plant.”

Novalee had seen the workers from Thermoforms come into Wal-Mart to get their checks cashed—tired men and women, their ID

badges still clipped to their pockets.

“Novalee?”

Unsmiling men and women waiting for the thin stack of bills they got paid for pushing the same plastic forms down the assembly line day after day, week after week.

“Novalee, are you okay?”

“Sure.”

“You were a thousand miles away.”

“Forney, what about teaching. You said once you wanted to be a teacher.”

“Well, that was a long time ago.”

“But if it’s something you want, then time doesn’t matter. Time doesn’t matter at all.”

“What I want, Novalee . . . what I want, is to be with you. To be with you and Americus.”

“Forney.”

“I love you. I love you more than anything in the world and when we were here together . . . when I had you in my arms . . .”

“Forney, maybe we made a mistake. I don’t know how it happened or why it happened when it did. But maybe it wasn’t the right time for us. Maybe we . . .”

“Novalee, did you . . . did you make love to me because you felt sorry for me. Was that it?”

“Oh, no. Don’t think that.”

“Because if that was the reason . . .”

“No, Forney. It wasn’t.”

“Then what? Just a bad decision? Just a spur-of-the-moment thing?

Or one of those times when you were feeling low, needed a boost?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . do you care for me at all?”

“Care? Of course I care. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, Forney.”

“But do you care?”

“You delivered Americus.”

“Do you care!”

“You taught me to learn, Forney. You showed me a new world.

You—”

“But do you love me, Novalee? Do you love me?”

“Forney, if I . . .”

She tried not to remember the way he held her after they made love

. . . the way his lips felt on hers, the way his hands . . .

“You know, Forney, that I . . .”

She knew if she let herself remember, she couldn’t tell him the lie he had to hear.

“Forney . . .”

She wouldn’t be able to break his heart . . .

“No, Forney. I don’t love you. Not in the way you need to be loved. Not in that way.”

. . . and she wouldn’t be able to break her own.

FOR THE FIRST FEW WEEKS after Forney left, Novalee thought she might be going insane.

She cried for no reason and in the strangest places. Once while she was pumping gas at the Texaco, she wept openly, didn’t even try to hide her face. When she went to Parents Day and the second-grade teacher told her Americus was reading at eighth-grade level, Novalee sobbed uncontrollably and had to be led to her car. And one day when she was working in electronics, she saw—on three TV

screens at once, Julia Child preparing orange almond bisque, and she cried so hard she couldn’t finish her shift.

But crying wasn’t what upset her most. It was the fear of losing her memory that would cause her throat to tighten and her skin to go clammy. Her first indication that she had a problem came when she read a novel called An Episode of Sparrows, read it all the way through, before she realized she’d read it before. A few days later she signed a check and misspelled her name. Then at work she clocked in on somebody else’s time card and twice gave customers too much change.

By then she’d already bought a book called Memory Magic and she’d started taking large doses of Vitamin E, which she had read was

“the brain vitamin.” But she couldn’t tell much of a difference. It seemed the harder she tried to concentrate, the more she forgot.

She’d find herself lost only blocks from the house. Dial the phone, but forget who she was calling. She’d go shopping, but buy things she didn’t need. One day Lexie counted eighty-four carrots stuck in the crisper drawers of Novalee’s refrigerator.

Her friends wanted to help, but they didn’t know how. They couldn’t ease the ache in her chest, the place that felt tender and bruised. They didn’t know how to bring back the light to her eyes.

They couldn’t rewrite her dreams or fix her hurt or help her repair her heart.

Americus, as devastated by Forney’s absence as Novalee, turned quiet and strangely detached. She took in another stray, a lame rabbit she named Docker, and she alphabetized all her books. She learned to make root beer floats and she got Dixie Mullins to teach her how to sew on buttons. She memorized the names of the Supreme Court Justices from John Jay to Mahlon Pitney before she began writing poems that she hid in a box under her bed. And in her prayers every night at bedtime, she asked God to bring Forney Hull back home.

If Novalee had only herself to worry about, she might have just gone to bed . . . crawled between the sheets, pulled a pillow over her head, and prayed for a deep, dreamless sleep. But she couldn’t do that because her daughter needed her. So she forced herself up, Where the Heart Is

faked an energy she didn’t have, feigned a cheerfulness she couldn’t feel and pretended Americus believed her performance.

She found places for them to go and things for them to do, but everywhere they went, there was Forney. He was the tall man under the umbrella running across the park . . . the thin guy who sat behind them at the movie. He was the figure in the stocking cap at the top of the ferris wheel . . . the lone skater at the rink . . . the face they saw through the window of the doll museum.

Then one evening at the mall in Fort Smith they heard Forney Hull paged over the intercom. They ran from one end of the mall to the other and arrived breathless at the security office where they met a boy too young to shave, a boy named Farley Hall.

Minutes later they crossed the parking lot trying to hide their tears, but when they crawled into the car, they gave up on being stoic. They cried and held each other, then went home and ate ice cream. Then they cried some more.

Forney’s first letter came the very next day.

Dear Americus,

Enclosed please find a study schedule I have made out for you. This schedule will take you through the rest of The Latin Primer by the middle of August. It is imperative for you to finish it before you start third grade. And don’t forget, conjugation of verbs is only memory work. I love you. I stopped at the library in Washington, D.C., and stayed four days. Did the chocolate stain come out of your yellow dress? I reread I Hear America Talking and now realize that you must read it, too.

The book is, unfortunately, out of print, but I have a used bookstore mailing you a copy, which you should have by the end of the week. You cannot know how much I miss you.

Americus, you must keep pushing to get Latin added to the curriculum in your school Remember this: change is brought about by good purpose. I dreamed about you three times and you were always smiling, but you had cat whiskers. Be sure to add Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories to your reading list. You will find it fascinating.

Sincerely,

Forney Hull

Please tell your mother I extend my best wishes.

The letters to Americus kept coming, but with little regularity. She might get three on the same day, then wait a month for the next one.

Sometimes they would be wrinkled and stained, dated weeks ahead of when they were mailed—or weeks after. They arrived smelling of shoe polish or mustard or glue. One had a bit of brown lettuce inside.

Another came with a cracked green button.

They were written on recycled paper, hotel stationery and the backs of letters addressed to “Occupant.” One came on the back of a menu, another on a flier announcing a poetry reading.

They were postmarked from St. Louis, Washington, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Baltimore, Akron and Louisville—and in that order. Americus traced his route on the map he had tacked up in her room. But if he was working his way toward some destination, she couldn’t tell it.