Читать книгу Blind Shady Bend - Adina Sara - Страница 11

THE ROAD FROM SCHOOL to home ambled along a seven-mile stretch of highway, which usually put both kids to sleep. The hard right onto Route 49 usually stirred them awake, then past the boarded up vegetable stand, the brand new health food store, the field of cows and horses that no longer held their interest. But the smell of livestock woke them fully, preparing them for what was coming up at the next bend, Highway Hardware, and by now they were craning their necks to see.

“There's Grandpa’s store,” Timothy announced at the juncture, then checking off the next few landmarks, Ervin's Gas and Oil Change, the Chinese restaurant, the old Lutheran church that seemed to have more weeds than worshippers, and finally the field of buried automobiles that sprouted clover in the winter and wild iris in the spring.

Maybe ten feet past the car cemetery, the truck swerved hard and left onto an unpaved, unmarked stretch of road, milepost 4.8, and before the steering wheel had a chance to straighten came the next hairpin, to the right this time, causing the kids to sway back and forth across the seat. “Whoa!” they called out every single time, one of the highlights of the long trip home. Not many people ever made that second hairpin turn. The faded wooden sign marked Blind Shady Bend was known to only a few residents, and they liked it that way. “Make a sharp left just after the car cemetery” was all anyone said, should directions be called for. They rarely were.

As usual, Robin had been the last to pick the kids up from school. The teacher never said anything, she didn’t have to, she just sat at her desk, art supplies and tinker toys and books all stacked neatly on the shelves, so quiet you could hear the scratching of her pen as she finished up the details of her day. Blackboards washed down with a thoroughness that suggested he was later than his usual late this time, and her eyes confirmed it when at last she acknowledged his presence.

“Today is teacher training day. Did Grace give you the notice? School ended at 2:00.”

He didn’t recall reading any notice, but it was most likely his oversight and not Grace’s. She was the one who remembered to put the fruit rolls in their lunchboxes.

“Sorry. I never saw it.”

“They are in the library. You’d better hurry, it closes in 15 minutes.”

Well it wasn’t Miss Larner’s fault either. She was paid to teach, not babysit the children of frazzled parents.

He heard Timothy crying before he opened the library door. The way Grace explained it, he had kicked her when she was leaning down to pick up her pencil, so she grabbed his shoe and threw it across the aisle to teach him a lesson.

"Gimme back my shoe” Timothy screamed, “I want my shoe.”

"Knock it off” Robin yelled not at his bossy daughter, but at the crying, shoeless little boy.

“Stop acting like a baby,” he shouted to the little boy who still sucked juice out of Batman cups with nippled lids, still kept his frayed blanket tucked safe on the bottom of his backpack, rubbed its silky edge against his lips when he thought his dad wasn’t looking.

“Get up, get your things, we gotta go.” He gave his son a quick propelling pat on the rear that only made the crying worse.

Robin grabbed the shoe, holding the crying boy in his other arm. By the time they managed to get to his truck, Grace was already stationed in the middle, in the place right next to Daddy’s, seat belt locked, hand on the emergency brake, ready for his signal to push in the button and let it down. She was nothing like her brother who preferred to curl into the window seat, thumb in mouth, staring out at nothing.

Robin lifted the boy into his seat, helped him with his belt, and tossed the loose shoe in the back of the truck, together with their backpacks.

“Where's your shoe?” Grace demanded, as though the health and safety of her brother’s feet really mattered to her.

“In the back.”

“You have to put it on.” She sounded just like a mother.

“No I don't. I like wearing one shoe.”

Robin backed down the path of the school driveway, turned up his music station to where “ashes of love, cold as ice” overwhelmed the endless drone of "No I don’t, yes you do.”

“That's stupid, you can't wear just one shoe. Daddy, Timothy is only wearing one shoe.”

“Daddy threw it in the back so mind your own business.”

Robin heard his name registered in shrill, high tones, blasting over Kelly Clarkson’s latest. Sometimes, the back and forth of their diatribes rocked them into a kind of submission, an exhausting lullaby, and all it took was turning up the radio a decibel or two to quiet them down.

None of this was his idea, not the marriage, not the pregnancy, and then the second one, also her idea. Every child should have a sibling, Cynthia had insisted. He knew only one thing: if she wanted to leave her children because some guy tells her she has ‘healing hands’ she could go to hell.

“You said a bad word Daddy.”

Grace had been listening to him. She surprised him that way more and more lately, seeming more like an adult than a kid.

“Sorry honey. Guess I’m thinking out loud again.”

“What's thinking out loud?”

She was starting to annoy him. Asking questions Robin didn’t have the energy to answer.

“Just when you have words in your head and you say them out loud even when you don't mean to."

“Like when you dream in the middle of the day?” Grace ventured.

The girl's too smart for me, he thought, careful to keep it to himself this time. He ruffled her hair with his free hand, let his fingers get caught up in her soft brown waves. She smiled up at him, clearly loving how the two of them understood things that Timothy didn’t. They sat knee to knee, and at the stoplight, Robin bent down to smell the sweet shampoo of her hair. "You're my big girl,” he whispered, as if that made up for having a mother who didn’t gave a shit about her.

“How many mailboxes to Grandpa's?”

“Seven” said Grace, it was the same number every time and this game was getting too easy for her. But she still enjoyed winning, enjoyed how Timothy still wasn’t fast enough to say seven first.

“Seven,” said Timothy in automatic echo, and Grace rolled her eyes up toward her dad’s, and he recognized briefly the smug self-assurance of his ex.

“Let's count, to see if you’re right.”

The counting game united them for the short distance ahead. Mailbox number one said Livingston, marked by a sheet metal gray box riddled with bird droppings. The Livingstons may or may not have inhabited the place any time during the past century. The mailbox was always empty, the name barely distinguishable from the bird blotches surrounding it. There were no other life traces, but it was hard to know with the long and twisted driveways and weed covered asphalt.

Up a ways and to the left was the newest mailbox — huge circled letters announcing The Daschle Family, twinkling with moons and stars and nonsensical stickers that they must have bought on sale at Highway Hardware. What kinds of people decorate their damned mailboxes, Robin wondered. The fancy mailbox wasn’t the worst of it. The new neighbors had installed a lawn and white picket fence that made the place look like a tornado had picked the house up from some suburban housing development and dropped it mercilessly in the middle of this godforsaken stretch of road. Poor suckers. Robin and his Dad were convinced that Lundale had sold the new owners a bill of goods. “An up and coming neighborhood,” Robin imagined Lundale telling them.

After the Daschles, the road narrowed a bit, branches of sweet birch and scrub oak slapping at the sides of the truck. Grace reached across her brother to roll up the window so the branches wouldn’t scratch his arms. Next came the mailbox series, three in a row, utterly abandoned, the likely remains of a cluster of mobile homes that had dropped there in the late ‘60’s and dissipated over time. Timothy kept track on his hand, number 3, number 4, number 5 this came to, one of his hands was now finished and he set his other hand on his lap to prepare his last two fingers to reach number 7.

Pete's mailbox, to the right about 200 yards further on, was over-sized regulation green. P.S. was scribbled on the outside of the mailbox as an afterthought, its wide throat slung open like a hungry bird that perpetually retched out catalogues, envelopes, wrinkled wads of mail. Come spring the mailbox would be mercifully hidden by a dramatic display of day lilies, iris, and columbine. But in early November, only a mass of prickly thorns jutted out from the thick mulch of junk that heaped higher year by year at the mailbox’s base. Pete the garbage collector. You didn’t have to know Pete to know him just the same.

One more to go, they were bracing themselves for the scream SEVEN! Grace bounced up in her seat, readying herself for another win, but Timothy saw it first, across from Grandpa's, just past where the magazine man lived.

“Look Daddy, there's someone in the bushes.”

Robin stopped the truck a few yards shy of his father’s driveway, cranked his head up over the two little heads, and saw sure enough, a sign of life. The property across the road from them hadn’t been inhabited for years, not since he was a kid. The idea that life was stirring again on Ray’s old place caught him off guard.

The place had been deserted for so long, it was as though none of those years had happened. Every once in a while Robin would think about snooping around to see if any of Ray’s old owl carvings were still around.

Timothy was right. Robin could see what looked to be mounds of dark fresh dirt scattered across the gravel driveway. He leaned across the kids, rolled the window down, strained to see if anyone was in the bushes but saw no one. He thought about getting out to take a look, but not with the kids, not now.

“Daddy, I think I saw a baby stroller.”

“No you didn’t,” he refused her, putting the truck back in gear, jerking forward toward his father’s place.