Thomas stopped crying and rubbed the top of his head. “Well,” he said. He thought a moment. He said, “You know how people have those blood veins one in each arm?”
“Blood veins, ah …”
“So how come any place you prick will bleed? Wouldn’t you think there’d be places that don’t?”
“Ah, well …”
“I apologize for this,” their mother said. “They promised they’d behave. Come on, children, I’m taking you home.”
“No, Mama! I behaved!” Agatha said. She didn’t want to leave the air-conditioning.
But her mother said, “Nice talking with you, Murray.”
“Hurry back, okay?” the man said, and he walked them to the door. Agatha could tell he was sorry to see them go.
Out on the sidewalk their mother started humming. She hummed “Ramblin’ Rose” while they waited for the traffic light, and she took them to Joyner’s Drugstore for Lifesavers. Just trailed her fingers across the candy counter, brush-brush, nothing to it, and dropped the two rolls in her bag. Then she twinkled her eyes at Thomas and Agatha. They giggled and she instantly looked elsewhere as if she’d never met them.
While she collected her prescription, Agatha rocked the stroller because Daphne was starting to fuss. Thomas dawdled up and down the aisles, hunting dropped coins. At Luckman’s he’d once found a nickel and put it in the gumball machine, but all he got back was gum. He’d been hoping for a set of silver plastic handcuffs the size of finger rings.
The pharmacist saw them to the door, saying, “Still hot out there?” Thomas and Agatha smiled up at him, remembering to look attractive—Thomas not sucking his thumb, Agatha not letting her mouth flop open—but their mother said, “Mmhmm,” and wheeled the stroller on through without a glance. You never could be sure, with her, who you had to be nice to and who you didn’t.
Standing at the front window and holding back the curtain, Agatha watched for the first star. In the summertime she had to be alert, because the sky stayed light for so long that the stars would more or less melt into view. Agatha knew all about it. She waited at this window every night. Sometimes Thomas waited too, but he wasn’t nearly so faithful. Also he said his wishes aloud, no matter how often she warned him not to. And he wished for definite objects—toys and candy and such—as if the sky were one big Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog. “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight … I wish for a front-end loader with real rubber treads on it.”
Agatha, on the other hand, wished silently, and not even in words. She wished in a strong wash of feeling, instead. Let everything turn out all right, was the closest she could put it. Or, no, Let us be safe. But that was not exactly it either.
She looked from the sky to the street and saw Ian and Grandma Bedloe coming up the sidewalk. Ian carried a picnic basket covered with a red-checked cloth, and Grandma Bedloe carried a cake tin. Agatha loved Grandma Bedloe’s cakes. She made one last sweeping search for her star and then gave up and ran to answer the doorbell.
“Hello, dearies,” Grandma Bedloe said, and she kissed Agatha first and then Thomas. It was just since Danny died that she’d started kissing them. It was just since Danny died that she’d dried out so and shortened, and begun to move so stiffly. But the stiffness was rheumatism, she said: her knees acting up. A matter of humidity.
“See what we brought you!” she told them. “Devil’s food cake and fried chicken. Where’s your mother?”
“She’s having a nap.”
“A nap?”
She glanced over at Ian. He wore his most faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt; he must have just got off work. Agatha thought he resembled those handsome teenaged hoodlums on TV. She wished the girls at school could see her once in his company, but it never seemed to happen.
“I hope you haven’t had supper yet,” Grandma Bedloe said. “Has your mother started anything cooking? How long has she been in her nap? Does she usually nap at this hour?”
Each question brought her further into the house. She pressed forward, passing Thomas and Agatha, heading for the kitchen, where she set the cake tin on the table and turned to look around her. “Oh, my, I’d say she hasn’t started cooking,” she said. “Goodness. Well. Try and make space for that basket on the counter, Ian. Agatha, dear, shall I put a few of these dishes to soak while you wake your mother?”
“Or we could eat without her,” Agatha said. “We could let her rest.”
“No, no, I’m sure she’d want—where’s Daphne?”
“In her crib,” Agatha said.
“She’s napping too?”
“No, she’s just … Mama just set her there a while.”
“Well, let’s go get her!” Grandma Bedloe said. “We can’t leave our Daphne all alone, now!” And off she went, with Thomas and Agatha following.
In the children’s room, Daphne poked her nose between the crib bars and cooed. “Hello, sweetness,” Grandma Bedloe told her. She picked her up and said, “Somebody’s sopping.” Then she looked at the supplies lined against the footboard—a filled nursing bottle, a plate of darkening banana slices, and one of the breadsticks Daphne liked to teethe on. “What is all this?” Grandma Bedloe asked. “Her lunch? Her supper? How long has she been in here?”
“Just a teensy while,” Agatha said. “Honest. She just did get put down.”
“Well, I’m going to change her diaper and dress her in some nicer little clothes,” Grandma Bedloe said. (It was true that Daphne’s undershirt didn’t seem very fresh.) “You and Thomas go start your suppers.”
So they went back to the kitchen, where Ian was unpacking the basket. He didn’t ask what parts of the chicken they preferred. Agatha had been going to say the keel, a word she’d heard last week at a fast-food place. “I’ll have the keel, please.” Whatever that was. She figured it might make Ian stop and notice her. But he served each of them a drumstick without a word and went to the refrigerator for milk. He filled two glasses and thought a minute and then bent forward and sniffed. Then he took both glasses to the sink and poured them out. Agatha pinched a piece of crust off her drumstick and placed it in her mouth, meanwhile waiting to see what other drink he would offer. But he didn’t offer anything. He just pulled out a chair and sank down onto it.
“Aren’t you going to eat too?” Thomas asked him.
But he must not have been listening.
“Ian? You can have our mama’s share. I bet she won’t be hungry.”
“Thanks,” Ian said after a pause. But he didn’t reach into the basket.
Grandma Bedloe was talking to Daphne. “Now, doesn’t that feel better?” she was saying. “Let’s go show Mommy.” She knocked on their mother’s bedroom door. They heard her turn the knob and walk in. “Oh, Mom-mee! Look who’s come to see you, Mommy.”
Their mother gave one of her sleep-moans.
“Lucy?” Grandma Bedloe said. “Are you all right, dear?”
Poor Grandma Bedloe. She didn’t know their mother had to wake on her own. Finally she came back to the kitchen, carrying Daphne in a white knit romper that showed off her curly black hair. “Does your mother tend to sleep like that till morning?” she asked.
Agatha said, “Oh, no.” She was glad to be able to tell the truth. “She’ll get up again! Don’t worry! She wakes up after dark and then she’s awake all night, just about.”
Grandma Bedloe settled Daphne on her hip. She said, “I certainly hope …” Then she said, “I wouldn’t blame her a bit, understand …” Finally she said, “Tell me, Agatha, do you think she might be taking a little too much to drink?”
“Drink?”
“I mean, alcohol? A beer or two, or wine?”
“No,” Agatha said.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking. And you know I wouldn’t blame her. We all like a little cocktail now and then!”
“Mama doesn’t,” Agatha said.
“Well, that’s something,” Grandma Bedloe said with a sigh.
Then she started pesterin
g Thomas to eat his chicken. She claimed he was skinny as a sparrow. Come to think of it, he was kind of skinny. But she was wrong about the cocktails. Their mother never drank at all. She said drinking made her say things.
She also said that dead people don’t really leave us; they just stop weighing anything. But Agatha didn’t know who was right there, her mother or Grandma Bedloe, because when she’d asked Grandma Bedloe why they had needed six people to carry Danny’s coffin, Grandma Bedloe said, “What do you mean?” Agatha said, “Couldn’t just one person do it? With just the tips of his fingers?” Grandma Bedloe said, “Why, Agatha, he was a full-grown man. He weighed a hundred and seventy pounds.” Then she had turned all teary and Grandpa Bedloe told her, “There, hon. There, hon.”
“He used to say he was getting a paunch, and he’d have to start watching what he ate,” Grandma Bedloe wept. “He never dreamed how little time he had! He could have eaten anything he wanted!”
“There, honeybee.”
Now it occurred to Agatha that what had weighed so much was the coffin itself. Maybe that was why they’d needed six people.
After supper Grandma Bedloe tidied the kitchen while Ian played Parcheesi with Thomas and Agatha. He held Daphne on his knee and gazed down at the board with a sort of puzzled expression. When Thomas miscounted on purpose, he didn’t even notice. “Cheater!” Agatha told Thomas. “He’s cheating, Ian.”
“Really?” Ian said.
“He should be up in front of you where you could take him off next move.”
“Really,” Ian said.
He had been a lot more fun in the olden days.
When Grandma Bedloe had finished the dishes she came to stand in the doorway, wearing a flowered apron of their mother’s that Agatha had forgotten about. “Ian,” she said, “I cannot in all good conscience walk out and leave these children on their own like this.”
Ian shook the dice in one cupped hand and spilled them across the board: a four and a six. “You hear me, Ian?” his mother asked.
Agatha watched their faces, hoping. They could stay, she wanted to tell them. Or they could take the three of them home with them. But then what about their mother?
“Maybe you could bring her too,” she suggested to Grandma Bedloe.
“Bring who, dear?”
“Maybe you could bring us all to your house. Mama too.”
Ian moved one man four spaces. Then he reached toward another man.
“If you wrap her in a blanket, she can walk pretty good,” Agatha said. “Stir coffee into her Coca-Cola and make her drink it and then hold her hand; she can walk anywhere you want her to.”
Ian’s fingers stopped in midair. He and Grandma Bedloe looked at each other.
Just at that moment, footsteps creaked in the hall and here came their mother, tying the sash of her kimono. It was the shiny gray kimono she hardly ever wore, not her usual bathrobe, so she must have known there were visitors. Also her hair was brushed. It puffed around her shoulders and down her back, dark and cloud-shaped, so her face stood out brightly. She gave them all her best smile. “Oh! Mother Bedloe. And Ian,” she said. “This is so embarrassing! Caught napping in the shank of the evening! But I took the children on a long, long walk this afternoon and I guess I must have worn myself out.”
Grandma Bedloe and Ian studied her. Thomas and Agatha held very still.
Then Grandma Bedloe said, “Why, my heavens! Pushing a stroller, on a day like today! Of course you’re worn out. You just sit yourself down and let me bring you some supper.”
Agatha let go of her breath. Thomas was smiling too, now. He had a smile like their mother’s, sort of dipping at the center, and he looked relieved. And Grandma Bedloe was moving toward the kitchen, and Ian reached again for his Parcheesi piece. Everyone was relieved.
So why did Agatha suddenly feel so anxious?
It was past their bedtime but their mother hadn’t noticed yet. She was perched on a stool in the kitchen, reading a cookbook and munching one of the drumsticks Grandma Bedloe had left on the counter. “Beef Goulash,” she read out. “Beef with Pearl Onions. Beef Crescents. Agatha, what was that beef dish Grandma Bedloe told us about?”
“I don’t remember,” Agatha said, switching to a yellow crayon.
“It was rolled up in Bisquick dough.”
“I remember she talked about it but I don’t remember the name.”
“Bisquick dough sprinkled with herbs of some kind. She had it at their neighbors’.”
“Maybe you could call and ask her.”
“I can’t do that. She’d want to know who I was making it for.”
Her mother set down the drumstick and wiped her fingers on a paper towel before turning another page. “Beef a la Oriental,” she read out.
“Couldn’t you just say you were making it for the typewriter man?”
“These things are touchy,” her mother said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
That hurt Agatha’s feelings a little. She scowled and kicked her feet out. By mistake, she kicked Thomas. He was drowsing over a plastic cup of grapefruit juice. He opened his eyes and said, “Stop.”
“Always serve a man red meat,” her mother told Agatha. “Remember that for the future.”
“Red meat,” Agatha repeated dutifully.
“It shows you think of them as strong.”
“What if you served them fish?”
“Men don’t like fish.”
“They like chicken, though.”
“Well, yes.”
“If you served them chicken, would they think you thought they were scared?”
“Hmm?” her mother said.
Thomas said, “Mama, Agatha kicked me.” But his eyes were closing again.
“Well, here goes,” their mother said, and she reached for the phone.
“You’re calling Grandma Bedloe?” Agatha asked.
“No, silly, I’m calling Mr. Rumford.”
She dialed in that special way she had, very fast and zippy. She must know the number by heart. She had called two earlier times that Agatha was aware of—one morning while he was at work, just to make sure he didn’t have anyone else; and then one evening, hanging up when he answered. Also they’d gone in person to see where he lived. They’d ridden the bus out to Ruxton in the company of nothing but colored maids; they’d peered through the window at his red brick house. “Deserted,” their mother had said in a pleased, flat voice. “And no one has tended those shrubs in ages.” Then they rattled back to town all by themselves, having left the maids behind.
“Hello?” their mother said into the receiver.
Her forehead was suddenly creased.
“Hello, is this … who is this?”
She listened. She said, “You mean the, um, the wife Mrs. Rumford?”
Then she said, “Sorry.” And hung up.
Thomas said, “Agatha kicked me, Mama.”
Their mother closed the cookbook and stared down at it. She stroked the cover, the golden letters stamped into the cloth.
“Mama?”
“We’d better go to bed,” Agatha told Thomas.
“You’re not the boss of me!”
“It’s time, Thomas,” she said, and she made her voice very hard.
He slid off his chair and followed her out of the kitchen.
In the children’s room, Daphne was asleep. They undressed in the dark, using the light from the hallway. Thomas wanted his cowboy pajamas but Agatha couldn’t find them. She said he’d have to wear his airplane pajamas instead. He climbed into them without an argument, staggering around the room as he tried to fit his feet through. Then he said he had to pee. “Use Mama’s bathroom,” Agatha told him.
“What for?”
“Just do.”
She’d kept him away from the other one all evening. She worried the toilet would flood again.
She lay down in bed and pulled the covers up and listened to her mother moving around the house. Every sound meant something: the TV clicking on
and then off, a drawer in the living room opening and then closing, the clang of a metal ashtray on the coffee table. Their mother smoked only when she was upset, holding the cigarette in some wrong-looking way with her fingers sticking out too straight. Agatha heard the scrape of a match, the pushed, tired sound of her breath whooshing forth.
Where were the pills? The popping of the lid off the pill bottle?
At least when she took pills she didn’t fidget around like this.
Thomas appeared in the doorway—a black-and-gray shape against the yellow light. He crossed not to his own bed but to Agatha’s. She had more or less expected that. She grumbled but she slid over to make room. His hair smelled like sugar browning in a saucepan. He said, “She didn’t come kiss us good night.”
“Later she’ll come.”
“I want her to come now.”
“Later,” Agatha said.
“She didn’t read us a story, either.”
“I’ll tell you one.”
“Reading’s better.”
“Well, Thomas! I can’t read in the dark, can I?”
Sometimes she noticed how much she sounded like her mother. Same sure tone, same exasperated answers. Although she failed to resemble her in any other way. At a family dinner last winter Grandma Bedloe had said, “What a pity Agatha didn’t inherit Lucy’s bone structure.”
“Once upon a time,” she told Thomas, “there was a poor servant girl named Cinderella.”
“Not that one.”
“Once upon a time a rich merchant had three daughters.”
“Not that one either. I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”
This was no surprise to Agatha. (He liked things that rhymed. Nibble, nibble, like a mouse, who is nibbling at my house?) But Agatha hated “Hansel and Gretel.” There wasn’t any magic to it—no fairy godmothers, or frogs turning into princes. “How about ‘Snow White’?” she asked. “That’s got Mirror, mirror, on the wall …”
“I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”