“Oh, nonsense. Who cares about one baby?” And all the voices of the past came back to remind her in a great chorus—Frank, her mother, Benny, her father, even Meredith—that one baby could change everything.
“You don’t really understand the way things are around here.”
“Nonsense! I’ve lived in Mount Mason since long before you were born.”
“No, ma’am. You live at Blessings. That’s totally different.” He looked toward the kitchen. “Like here’s an example. You bought the kitchen table from Harrison’s furniture store around fifteen years ago. You got it on sale. I think maybe it was about two hundred dollars. Is that right?”
Mrs. Blessing nodded grudgingly.
“See, my dad is a long-distance trucker, but sometimes to make extra money he used to do deliveries around town. He delivered this table. And Mr. Harrison told him you bought the cheapest piece in the showroom. And my dad told all his friends at the bar that you didn’t tip him, and when he asked for a drink of water you sent him to the pump.”
Mrs. Blessing’s lips were pressed tightly together. “What does that have to do with what we are discussing, Charles?”
“Everybody knows everything about everybody around here. And one of the things they know is that your family is better off than anyone else in the valley. So let’s say some girl has a baby and she figures she has zero money or no good place to live or whatever. Maybe she’s one of those big fat girls you hear about on the news who gets pregnant and no one even figures it out, just thinks it’s too many Quarter Pounders or something. She might think if she has the baby in the bathroom and then leaves it here it will have this great life.”
Tennis in the morning, croquet in the afternoon. A housekeeper, a pond, a rumored pile of money. She realized he must be right. Still she said, “Charles, I am eighty years old. My daughter, who never had children of her own, is now sixty. No reasonable person could imagine this family could care for a child.”
“People think all kinds of things about this place. But then someone who thought they’d give a baby to rich people is at the Wal-Mart or the drugstore and hears that I’m walking around with this baby, and now instead of the baby getting to live at Blessings the baby gets to live over the garage, which maybe isn’t any better than where the mother was living herself.”
“I beg your pardon. The Fosters found that a perfectly fine place to raise three children. They never complained.”
“No, ma’am. I bet they didn’t.”
She should have called him in and fired him. That was what she had intended when she had had Nadine fetch him from the woodshed. She did not know why she hadn’t. It was so difficult to find decent help. And the baby had slept all the time she had waited for him during that terrible storm, while he reset the alarm and checked that the smoldering corner of the barn roof was not going to spread with the heavy July rain.
“I’ve been working with her in a front pack for two weeks now,” Skip said, talking fast. “It doesn’t work all the time, but it works most of the time. And I’ve got her on a pretty good schedule now. I have to keep her a secret for now. And this is a really good place to do that.”
Mrs. Blessing sat up straight. “I have to give this some thought,” she said. “In the meantime, the split-rail fencing on the south side of the drive appears to be leaning. Is there anything we can do short of replacing the fence?”
There was that crooked smile again. “I already ordered some steel supports to hammer in behind the uprights,” he said. “I’ll tie them together and we’ll get at least another couple of years out of that section.”
“And the child?”
“I’ll put her in the front pack.”
“You could leave her over here from time to time. There is a back bedroom with a cradle.”
“I can’t take the chance with Nadine,” he said. “Besides, she should really stay at my place. She’s my baby.”
“A child needs a name, Charles.”
“I’m working on it,” he said. “I figure most people get nine months to figure that out. Besides, until now I wasn’t sure I could still keep her. I just couldn’t stand to name her if I couldn’t keep her.”
Later, as Mrs. Blessing ate her dinner at the table by the window, the sun melting orange into the pond, she remembered there was a bear somewhere upstairs, sitting on an old chair in a back bedroom that was used for children who came to visit, although none had come in years. It had been Benny’s bear when he was small. Its fur was rubbed thin on the stomach and pate, and it was stuffed with something that made it hard and not huggable. Five-year-old Meredith had been clutching it one morning after she’d been driven all night in the Cartons’ big car from Newport. Mrs. Foster had made her a cup of cocoa and some muffins. Sunny had been there, too, staying in his old room, and he had heard the car arrive and had come downstairs in a big plaid bathrobe, his golden hair every which way.
“Was my daddy a good daddy?” Meredith had asked Lydia, and Mrs. Foster had paused just a moment as she spooned fresh whipped cream into the cocoa.
Lydia had been trying to think of what to say when Sunny dropped down next to the little girl and put his face up close to hers. “Benny Carton was the best daddy in the whole wide world,” he said, and held her tight. Lydia had gone upstairs and wept. She did not know it, but that was what Meredith would always remember, that she had peeked into the bedroom and seen her stern and undemonstrative mother crying, and for the rest of her life, even when she was a grown woman, she would recall that moment and feel as though her childhood had held something sweet and deep. She had not known, of course, that Lydia Blessing wept for herself, and for her own lost life, and for something in Sunny’s voice that she had never heard before. Lydia had not known it, either.
Slowly she rose from her desk chair, and went upstairs, down the hallway of closed bedroom doors, to find the bear.
Nadine’s daughter, Jennifer, walked across the lawn with the muscles in the front of her thighs rolling beneath the skin. She was built like a swimmer, which was what she’d been at Mount Mason High School. Her hair was black and hung halfway down her back in a loose ponytail. Skip tried not to look at her too long. At his feet the tangle of willow roots splayed into the pond, and two large-mouth bass fluttered their fins and seemed to stare up at him; back in the blackberry bramble behind him was a basket with the baby asleep inside. There hadn’t been rain for two weeks, since the storm on the Fourth of July, and he could hear the grass crunching as Jennifer Foster walked. Skip tried to sniff himself without raising his arm. Not too bad, although he thought maybe the smell of diesel fuel from the chain saw was mixed with the smell of Desitin from the baby, who had some kind of rash. Maybe Jennifer Foster didn’t know what Desitin smelled like. It actually smelled a little like diesel fuel.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
She had a funny way of talking, as though she were older than she was. She didn’t bother to say her name, and he didn’t bother to say his. Nobody in Mount Mason was ever introduced to anyone else. Skip knew that her father had been in some peacekeeping force in Korea and had married Nadine there and brought his wife and kid over when he could finally manage to get them out. Skip knew that Craig Foster didn’t speak to most of his family because one of his uncles had said at a Memorial Day barbecue that Craig was sleeping with the enemy and most all of the other Fosters had sided with the uncle, who, they said, didn’t mean any harm, and how come Nadine had to be such a bitch anyhow. Skip knew that Jennifer worked part-time at the hospital and went to nursing school at the community college, which surprised him a little, since she seemed like the kind of girl who could go to State, maybe even someplace better. Skip knew that she’d never had a serious boyfriend, and that that made the mothers of Mount Mason pretty happy because, as well mannered and pretty as she was, she still wasn’t white. She was more or less tan. In every way she was the opposite of most of the other girls he knew in Mount Mason, who got out of high
school, got pregnant, and got fat.
“Come right back!” Nadine called from the kitchen window, all the consonants flat in that funny way she had of talking, like a person who was deaf.
Jennifer Foster didn’t roll her eyes exactly, but she raised her brows a little bit. She probably knew that Skip’s mother was dead. She probably knew that in high school he’d lived in one of those listing frame houses with the narrow front porches on Front Street with his aunt and uncle instead of in one of the brick ranches tented over by trees out in the valley with parents, like she had. And she definitely knew, by the way she was smiling so nicely but with a little bit of an edge in her eyes, about the stretch in the county jail.
“She want you,” Nadine shouted.
“First she sends me out here to give you some message about the barn. Then she yells at me to come back.” Jennifer Foster shook her head, then looked up. “Isn’t this a great tree? When I was a little girl I used to sit under it and read. If it rains you don’t even get wet, unless it’s pouring.”
“You have to keep after it,” Skip said, putting the pruners down in the wheelbarrow. “The branches get too long, and then some of them aren’t really as strong as they need to be, and they can come down pretty hard if there’s a storm, and take the healthy ones with them. She’s sort of let them go. Mrs. Blessing, I mean.”
Jennifer Foster smiled. “I know who she refers to around here,” she said.
It was hard to believe, looking at her, that Jennifer Foster was Nadine and Craig Foster’s daughter. Together the parents looked like a sight gag. Craig was a huge man with narrow shoulders, a high pale forehead, brown hair fading to gray, and a mustache that somehow made him look silly, almost as though it were fake. Nadine was something else. She had the small and sexless body of a young boy, her legs slightly bowed, her arms muscled and bowed, too. Her face was flat, with an ugly mysterious scar across one cheek, part cut, part burn. All the times he’d seen her, Skip had never seen her hair any way but pulled tightly back into a ponytail, had never seen her wear anything but jeans and a man’s shirt. The only jewelry she wore was a digital watch that beeped every fifteen minutes and a wedding ring. “Be like beating your meat against a board,” Chris had said once when they’d seen the Fosters in town together.
It was cruel even to picture Jennifer with the two of them. He couldn’t understand how two people who looked like that had produced one who looked like this. “Mongrels, Skippy,” Chris had said. “They make the best dogs.” Chris always had a mean mouth on him. One night in McGuire’s he’d bought Shelly a beer, when Skip had just started dating her, if you could call it dating, getting drunk with someone in a bar, going home with them, sleeping with them, then sleeping it off. And Chris said, “Shelly, your tits wouldn’t be so big if you weren’t so fat.” Skip waited for Shelly to throw her beer in his face, which would have at least made Chris respect her. But instead she ran into the ladies’ room and cried. Skip went home alone that night. Sometimes he wondered if it was Chris who had knocked Shelly up. Chris loved sleeping with girls he hated.
Nadine was marching across the driveway turnaround, carrying a red-and-white striped dish towel like a flag, or a weapon maybe, like she was going to flog them with it. “You deaf?” she said.
“I’m coming.”
“She want to see you,” Nadine said to Jennifer, and then she turned and looked at Skip, narrowing her eyes that were already slits in her small flat face. She had the gift, or in her case the curse, of making you see yourself as she saw you. Skip could imagine the circles of sweat on his gray T-shirt, the dirt that must be smudged on his face, the grease on his hands. “She want to see you, too. She say you go to garage, take things back there, straighten up, come see her.”
“Why?”
“Don’t ask me,” Nadine said, waving the dish towel, heading back toward the house.
“I imagine you know who she is, too,” Jennifer Foster said.
He sure did. He and she had become part of a conspiracy. The instructions Mrs. Blessing had given Nadine meant that she was watching with her little birding binoculars and knew he was out with the baby, that he should settle her in the apartment before he came over to the big house. Two days before, a woman delivering some slipcovers that had been cleaned had come from town unexpectedly while Skip was working on the fences with the baby in the basket at his feet, and he had been flabbergasted by the sight of Mrs. Blessing waving him away from the house from a second-story window, her flowered scarf a bright flag of caution in her hand. “Charles,” she had said the night before, “if you must go to town you must leave her here with me. You can wait until Nadine has left for the day.”
“What will you do if she wakes up hungry?” he said.
“For pity’s sake, I’ve had a child of my own,” she said, but something in her pinched face told him she was wondering the same thing.
He looked closely at all the windows facing the pond and then put the basket in the wheelbarrow. The baby was awake, staring at the sky and trying to cram her fist into her mouth. There was a star-shaped swirl of hair at the crown of her head of which he was oddly proud, and her pointed tongue moved between her lips as though she were tasting the air. She had a scratch down one cheek from her sharp little nails, and Skip knew that Mrs. Blessing would have something to say about that, although he’d just trimmed the nails himself, an operation that made him so nervous he’d had to start and stop a couple of times. Skip never knew how to put her down to sleep either. He had one book that said on the back so she wouldn’t die of crib death, and another, that he’d gotten at a yard sale for a quarter, that said on the stomach so she wouldn’t die inhaling her own vomit. He’d decided to alternate, although sometimes he forgot what he’d done the night, or the nap, before. Reading the books had made him wonder how anyone came out of infancy alive. Or fatherhood. They’d had one more bad night, when she wouldn’t sleep and wouldn’t eat and never wanted to be put down for even a minute. Her head lurched from side to side on her thin stem of a neck, and she stopped crying only to suck noisily on the shoulder of his shirt, then on his nose. Luckily it had been a Sunday and he hadn’t missed any work, but he’d had to put her on the daybed in the back room again and walk away to get his bearings.
“Let her cry it out,” Mrs. Blessing had said when he’d made the mistake of mentioning it the next day. “That was the belief when my daughter was small. Otherwise they’ll be terribly spoiled.”
Skip hadn’t said anything. He thought everybody needed a little bit of spoiling, particularly when they were no bigger than a groundhog.
He looked down at her sleeping, and he filled up with the simple fact of her, that she was alive and breathing and getting bigger day by day with nothing and no one but Skip Cuddy to care for her. Sometimes she seemed as though she was trying hard to see him, although the books said she couldn’t really focus her eyes yet. In the evening, he would take her outside for an hour or two, take her to the far end of the pond and lay her down on a blanket folded double so the damp earth wouldn’t touch her romper. “Charles,” Mrs. Blessing complained, “it’s far too damp down there. Bring her up closer to the house.” But sometimes he just wanted to have her all to himself. The bats would make loop-the-loops above them, and the birds would trill to one another, hidden away in the top branches of the darkened trees. He wished he could bring her out into the sunshine more instead of keeping her curled up in the chest carrier so much. The books said sunshine was good for newborns. His next day off he’d drive somewhere far away, a half hour or so, and find a park and push her around in the stroller. If anybody asked, he’d say he was her father. He’d actually practiced in front of the mirror. “I’m her father,” he’d say. “Four weeks. Yeah, a girl. Oh, about ten pounds. Good baby, sure, really good baby.” He’d looked pretty good until he remembered he was alone and felt like a moron.
When he’d given her a bottle, put her down on her side in her Portacrib, and put on a clean shirt, he knocked at Mrs. Ble
ssing’s back door. Nadine brought him to the living room. It reminded him of a class trip he’d gone on in sixth grade to George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon.
There was a big oil portrait of a man over the stone fireplace, and some watercolors of flowers on the far wall. Mrs. Blessing was sitting in a wing chair between the fireplace and the window, her binoculars on the piecrust table next to her. A teacup was there, too, and a newspaper with a magnifying glass atop it. She was wearing what she usually wore, a white blouse and a long blue skirt. In the light from the window he could see her scalp through the thin waves of her silver hair. Jennifer was sitting at the piano. It looked like no one ever sat on the living room furniture, except for Mrs. Blessing.
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Blessing was saying to Jennifer. Skip had noticed that it was one of her favorite words.
“Well, it’s only my first year,” Jennifer said. “At the end of next year maybe I’ll have a better idea of what to do.”
“You should be at a fine four-year college,” Mrs. Blessing said. “One of the Seven Sisters, perhaps.”
“People mind their business,” Nadine muttered behind him, but loud enough so that the woman and the girl turned and saw him.
“Charles,” said Mrs. Blessing. “This is Jennifer Foster. Nadine’s daughter. I trust her implicitly.” She laid a hand on Jennifer’s shoulder, the white thrown into relief by the golden skin of the girl. The bones of Mrs. Blessing’s hand were articulated, each one clear through the spotted skin, as though she were being whittled down by the constant pressure of the years. It was one of the first things Skip had noticed about her, that, and the fact that the only jewelry she wore was a wedding band. On the piecrust table was an old black-and-white studio photograph of a young woman in a white dress. He could see that as a girl Mrs. Blessing had not been girlish: straight nose and mouth, large eyes and forehead, nothing rounded or soft, as though she had been designed specifically to age gracefully.