Believe, page 15
“Hey!” he bellows. His feet scuff against the wet pavement. Tahnie has gone quiet at last.
Suddenly he cries out, as if he’s hurt, and she hears the gun drop—it goes off—she screams, flailing sideways to shield that tiny, fragile body.
The world seems frozen.
Then little hands patting her, warm and safe and whole.
“It’s all right Mama,” Grace can even hear a smile on her daughter’s face. “It’s okay. We’re safe.”
She lies there a few minutes, listening with every part of herself. There is no sound. Finally, she lifts her head and looks behind.
On the sidewalk, half soaked in puddle muck, her things are scattered around. All of them are there. Even her wallet and phone. A few feet away she sees the flinty shape of the gun, lying in the street where it fell.
No sign of him.
Fast as she can, she shoves everything into her bag, grabs Tahnie’s hand, and begins walking. It’s all she can do not to run, but she knows the little girl couldn’t keep up, so she holds back.
In five minutes they are home.
Her hands shaking, she does the necessary things: cleans her face and hands, checks Tahnie for injuries, changes clothes. She pulls something out of the fridge and heats it in the microwave—doesn’t even know what it is until Tahnie’s happy exclamation of, “Mac ‘n Cheese!” Sets the table and dishes it up.
“Mama, you eat, too,” she is watching with big eyes. Grace wills herself to take bites, chew, and swallow.
After dinner she puts Tahnie to bed.
“Early bed time, baby, it’s been a long one for both of us.”
Sitting on her bed, saying good night.
“Mama, what happened to the bad guy?”
“Honey, I don’t know, and I don’t care. We got away and that’s all that matters.”
“But he wasn’t going to hurt us.”
“How do you know?”
“I was scared at first, but then I knew we were going to be okay.”
Grace frowns. “Honey, how did you know?”
“When that wind blew Christmas over us, I knew we’d be all right.”
“Blew Christmas? Tahnie, what are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you smell it, Mama? It was the Christmas bread you always make, that’s all sweet and spicy and tastes like oranges. When I smelled that, I knew we were safe.”
She stared at her daughter. Forced a smile. “Good night, sweetheart. Sleep tight.”
April 10, 2024
James was annoyed. Why his mother loved this dive was beyond him. It had been her favorite place, though, so every Sunday he brought her here for their weekly brunch.
They never got his order right. And he often had to ask to be reseated two or three times before he could find a comfortable chair at a table that wasn’t in an obnoxious location.
Sometimes he thought they sat them at that little two-person table that wobbled, right next to the bathrooms, on purpose. Just to see what he’d do.
They should show more respect for an elderly woman and a man such as himself.
It seemed even worse than usual today. He had to wait 35 minutes for a table, though he watched other groups walk right in.
“They called ahead, sir,” the cheeky little hostess told him when he complained.
He was finally seated at something more the size of a lap tray than a real table. It was shoved up against the wall in the back corner, between a large potted tree and the doors leading to the kitchen.
“Outrageous!” He fumes at the waiter who comes to fill his water glass and hand him a menu. “You can’t seriously expect me to sit here?”
“I’m sorry sir.” Was the man’s tone mocking? “This is the only available table right now. If you prefer to wait in the lobby…”
“I’ve already been waiting almost an hour!”
“Yes sir, on holiday weekends like this we tend to be fully booked.”
James snatches the menu out of his hands.
His mother had always ordered the same thing: oatmeal with fruit, cream, and maple syrup.
“You could make that for yourself at home, Mother,” he’d pointed out each week. “Why come here and order it?”
She always smiled and shook her head. “James, sometimes its nice to have someone else do the normal little things for you. I don’t want fancy,” she raised her eyebrows and he knew she was implying that he was too fussy. She always managed to make him feel too demanding. “Just simple and plain, but…once a week I like to let them do the cooking.”
He orders the eggs benedict with hollandaise on the side---that way, which ever part of the dish they ruin, he could reorder while the rest remained intact with him at the table.
“These eggs are overdone,” he informs the waiter twenty minutes later, “and the hollandaise is separating. Take it away and bring me another.”
Without an apology the man takes away his dishes, leaving him with only his ice water, though all the ice has melted. No one has come by to offer him coffee. It took far too long for his food to arrive. On every level, today’s experience here is the worst it has ever been.
“I hope you’re happy, Mother,” he mutters.
He had assumed that, after her passing six months ago, he would never return to this place. He’d only come each week for her sake. Yet week after week, at 10:00 on Sunday, he found himself waiting for a table, anticipating the poor service, demanding better tables, and critiquing his meal to the maître d’ on his way out.
I suppose it’s simply become a habit, he has told himself. Today makes him decide it is a habit he must break.
Another ten minutes passes, and the waiter does not reappear. His water glass is empty. He scowls around the room, searching for someone to flag down. There seems to be a great deal of commotion a few tables away. He looks more closely.
Two other diners are causing a problem. He sees a silver-haired woman sitting with someone younger—he guesses it’s her daughter. The younger woman is out of her chair, waving her arms and crying out about something, but he can’t hear her words. The older woman looks ill, slumped in her chair and very still.
Now they’ve poisoned someone, he thinks with satisfaction. They deserve to be shut down—this place is execrable!
Several people have rushed over by now and he can’t see what’s happening—the tree is in the way, and he isn’t going to give himself a stiff neck twisting around to watch. The kitchen doors burst open and others run in. Then, just as he’s made up his mind to simply walk out, he smells something delicious.
James leans forward, nose toward the kitchen doors.
Citrus and spices—vanilla? Cinnamon?
He glances down at the menu but sees nothing that could fit that description. Perhaps it is a daily special the waiter has neglected to tell him about. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Resettling in his chair, James glances over his shoulder. The fuss with the two women has settled down. Both of them are still there, smiling now and being fawned over by several of the staff—meanwhile here he sits, completely ignored.
Typical.
Instead of walking out, however, he makes up his mind to tell the waiter to forget the eggs benedict and bring him whatever that was. Its perfume was ambrosial, heavenly. He thinks perhaps his mother would have given up her oatmeal, even, to have some.
October 21, 2056
The daylight is fading. Grace watches the colors in the clouds dim until those glorious, fiery pinks and oranges are nothing but shades of gray. A single star pulses right at the top of the sky.
“Good night, Mama,” Tahnie comes in with a small tray. On it are a glass of water, her night time pills, and a piece of chocolate.
Grace smiles.
“Everyone else asleep?”
Her daughter nods. “You know me. I’m like you. I like to stay up and feel the peace of the house when there’s nothing but quiet.”
“We’ve always been a couple of night owls,” Grace turns back to the window and sees black night outside, a sky full of stars now. She doesn’t remember night falling, thought it had just been sunset. But time is funny like that these days, and she is learning to accept it.
Tahnie bends over to place the tray on her bedside table and kiss her cheek. “Those babies wake up early, though, so we ought to be going to sleep, too.”
The house was full of family this summer. Tahnie came every year for a week or two, but this year she’d arranged a big gathering: Jerome was there, freshly retired. He’d taken on her garden and turned it into a glorious and fruitful plot of wild flowers and vegetables.
“My grandparents were sharecroppers before they left the South,” he told anyone who complimented his work. “I guess some of that came down to me.”
All three of their children were here, too. Renee, whose summer project of bee keeping complimented her father’s gardening efforts. Her wife Tillie made sure there were fresh flowers in every room. Basco and his wife and their twins, Grace’s first great-grand-babies, had arrived a week ago. And Tony and Lola came up from the city too. They couldn’t afford to leave their fledgling restaurant during the week, but they both came for the weekends. They arrived with good news, announcing that Lola was pregnant—finally, after ten years of trying. Their joy was contagious.
The moon is up now, casting long shadows because it’s full. In its pearly light Grace feels young, and she reaches up, touching her own cheeks to make sure.
Behind her, from the dark corner where moonlight can’t reach, she hears the stirring of air. A sound of movement, soft and silken.
Grace smiles.
“I thought I might be seeing you…one last time.”
A lovely, warm perfume fills the room, mingling with moonlight and starshine. Grace feels gravity loosen its hold on her, and shivers.
“When I’m gone, will you keep watch over them? All of them? Like you did for me?”
There is a flourish, like long skirts swishing, and Grace can see the shadows coming together in a tall shape, all in brown, eyes that watch and smile.
She lets out her breath and feels herself rise into the diamond sky.
12
The Last Farewell
Sam loved Frodo.
On weekends and vacations, they were inseparable: a boy and his dog gamboling through summer days, hot and humid and filled with dusty adventures by day, firefly studded camp-outs by night; autumn leaf piles raked up and jumped in and raked up again, foraging for kindling and stacking firewood and playing fetch with the smaller sticks; spring time jaunts through the woods behind the house, a treasure trove of steep-banked creeks filled with fish spawn and tadpoles, nesting birds and mud holes.
Sam was only one year old when the family rescued the funny-looking puppy with a broken leg. Someone had thrown him from a passing car in front of them, and Mrs. Hardin had screamed at her husband to pull over so they could save the whimpering mutt.
They learned to walk together. Mr. and Mrs. Hardin named him Frodo because of his devotion to their little baby, whose nickname was “Samwise.” The pup cried at night unless allowed to sleep beneath the baby’s crib, and later at the foot of his bed. Whenever the family left the house, they returned to find Sam lying on the floor of the foyer, nose touching the bottom of the door, tail wagging like a propeller at the return of his people---but it was Sam who got the face-licking, and whose every step he followed, a furry shadow.
It was a dark day when Sam went off to Kindergarten. For the entire seven hours that he was gone, Frodo waited at the door, whining. Mrs. Hardin could not tempt him away with food or water, not even left-over steak from last night’s dinner, which he had begged for shamelessly until Mr. Hardin banned him from the dining room.
Mrs. Hardin put Frodo on a leash and took him with her as she walked down to meet her little boy at the bus stop after his first day of school. Sam emerged from the bus with tear-streaked cheeks, hurtling himself onto his beloved Frodo, sobbing, “I missed you so much, boy! I missed you so much!”
That night at dinner, Sam informed his parents that he would not be going back to school unless Frodo could go, too. It took some very stern reasoning, and not a few promises involving ice cream, to convince him that he would go…and his mother helped by presenting him with a notebook to take with him. “Any time you miss Frodo,” she suggested, “Take this out and draw a picture of what you’re doing so you can remember to tell him about it when you get home. It’ll be like having him there with you,” she smiled at the watery eyed solemnity with which her little boy accepted the notebook, showing it to Frodo and explaining the idea to him before placing it in his little backpack.
Every day from then on, the first thing Sam did when he got home from school was take out the notebook. He’d sit down with his dog, turning the pages and bringing his best friend up to date on his doings. Kindergarten alone filled five of the spiral notebooks, and though drawings changed to notes as he grew older, Sam kept the habit up, while his mother kept the used notebooks on a shelf in the garage, thinking one day they would be a wonderful keepsake for him.
Frodo grew accustomed to the daily absences. He was eventually willing to leave his post at the front door for food, water, the occasional visit to the back yard. If Mr. or Mrs. Hardin were home sick, he would sit with them, or lie at their bedroom door as they slept. But his inner clock never failed to alert him when Sam was due home, and he was always waiting at the door when Sam turned the nob.
In 6th grade, Sam was allowed to ride his bike to school. The middle school was closer than the elementary school had been, less than a mile away, and so long as he wore a helmet and promised to follow the rules of the road, his parents let him take this small step toward independence. The first morning of the year he mounted his bicycle, whooping for joy and standing on his pedals as he wheeled down the driveway and into the road, not noticing that he’d neglected to close the side door. He heard Frodo before he saw him, barking and loping along behind him, just as they’d done all summer long, exploring neighborhood streets and the long, dirt farm roads beyond the woods that led to the river where they’d fished and napped and played fetch, digging in the sand for pirate treasure, sharks’ teeth, and native artifacts.
“Go home, boy!” He shouted over his shoulder, but Frodo ignored him.
At school, Sam locked his bike up and bent over to take Frodo by his two ears, a gesture that meant pay attention, now, I mean it. “You’ve got to go home, boy,” he said firmly. “I can’t take you back because I’ll be late for the first day. Go home.” He pointed back in the direction of the house, but Frodo merely sat down and panted quietly, letting his tongue hang out, grinning.
Sam had no choice but to leave him there. Several of his classrooms had windows looking out on the playground where the bike racks were located, and every chance he got he looked to see if Frodo was still there. Every time he looked, he saw a mottled furry shape sitting or lying down next to his bike. When the final bell of the day rang, Sam ran to his bike and hugged Frodo.
Back home, Mrs. Hardin had been beside herself worrying about what she would tell Sam. She knew it would break his heart to lose the dog. She’d driven around the neighborhood for hours, even driven to the local pound and checked to see if he’d been picked up. She had to sit down and cover her mouth with her hand when she saw Sam walk in with Frodo at his heels, both of them smiling.
“Guess what Frodo did today, Mom!”
From then on, when the weather was good, Frodo went to school with Sam, waiting for him all day. He became popular with the other kids, and at recess they fed him treats they’d snuck out of the cafeteria, so Sam wasn’t worried too much about Frodo going hungry. When it rained, or got too cold, Mrs. Hardin insisted on keeping Frodo at home. On those days he reverted to his old habits, waiting at the door for his best friend to come home.
One foggy morning in spring, Mrs. Hardin had a difficult time keeping Frodo from following Sam. It was wet, more rain was predicted for the early afternoon, and she didn’t think it was a good day for him to follow along. She also made Sam strap a headlamp onto his helmet and wear a yellow reflective vest over his coat. Although he stayed on quiet, neighborhood streets for the whole trek to school, she still worried about his safety. When there was fog, she was not willing for him to take chances. Sam rolled his eyes and argued.
“It’s this or walk, young man,” was all she had to say. Sam strapped on the light, shrugged into the vest, and was out the door.
Frodo lunged after him, but she grabbed his collar just in time. “Not today, old boy,” she grunted, pulling him back and closing the door. A low growl rumbled in his throat, and Mrs. Hardin let go of his collar in surprise. He’d never shown the slightest inclination at violence, never growled at one of the family before. She shook her head and worried. She’d heard of dogs getting senile and turning on their families in old age. She hoped this wasn’t the beginning of something like that. Frodo was almost twelve years old, after all.
Frodo merely lowered himself to the floor, placing his nose at the corner, and whined.
Sam was eager to get home that afternoon. It was drizzling, but no longer foggy. He had a lot of homework, but first he wanted to show Frodo the new game they’d learned in Gym class. It was a two-person version of Four-Square that he thought he might be able to teach Frodo to play if he used a tennis ball, rather than the large rubber balls in the gym. Frodo had always been a smart dog, quick to learn tricks, and wouldn’t it be fun to show the other kids that his dog could play the game at recess?
He was halfway home when he realized he’d forgotten to put on the vest his mom had made him wear that morning. Oh well, he thought, it’s not foggy now. I’ll just tell her I forgot, and I’ll get it tomorrow.
Suddenly a screeching sound caught his attention, and he swerved out into the road as an SUV peeled out of a driveway, clearly not having seen him. He recognized the car—it was his friend Ben’s mom, probably late to pick up Ben’s little sister from the elementary school. Ben complained a lot about how his mom was always late and had been even more excited than Sam when going to middle school meant he could ride his bike to school.
