Seventeen Against the Dealer

  “Sure thing. See you,” Roger said.

  Probably not, Dicey thought, which was too bad, because she liked Roger. She liked almost all of Jeff’s friends.

  She was just sitting there, looking at the phone as if she didn’t have anything else to do. But she didn’t have anything else to do. There was an echoing hollowness inside her—not hunger—it was in her chest, not her stomach, an empty hollowness locked inside her rib cage. Like an empty house.

  CHAPTER 21

  Maybeth at breakfast Wednesday morning ate little. Dicey had the feeling that if she hadn’t been there watching, Maybeth might not have eaten anything. Sammy, spooning up his oatmeal, looked over the top of his spoon at Maybeth and then at Dicey. Dicey looked at Sammy and then at Maybeth and then back at Sammy.

  Maybeth looked frightened. She had drawn herself closed, like a clam retracting back into its shell when you finger it. Like a clam, Maybeth couldn’t get entirely into her shell, and she knew it, and that made her more silent and less hungry.

  Dicey met Sammy’s eyes. “It’s only a test, Maybeth,” she said.

  Maybeth’s bent head nodded obediently.

  “You’ve taken lots of tests,” Dicey reminded her.

  “I know,” Maybeth said, her voice soft.

  Dicey almost got angry. Why should her sister have to go to school, anyway, and be made to feel like this? “It doesn’t matter,” she announced. “I don’t care if you pass it, and neither does anyone else here.”

  “Right,” Sammy echoed her.

  “I know,” Maybeth said.

  “Then don’t let it get to you, okay?”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “But why?” Dicey asked.

  “Because this one we’ve studied for—and I know more. I do.”

  Sammy laughed. “But that’s crazy. If you know more, you should be feeling confident.”

  Maybeth shook her head. “It makes me nervous, because I’m not used to it. I’m sorry. Because—what if I know more and I still don’t pass? Because I know how to fail because I always fail the tests. I don’t know how to pass them,” she explained.

  Dicey wanted to promise her sister that this time would be different, but she couldn’t do that. All she could tell Maybeth was the truth. “You just have to take it, and then wait and see.”

  Maybeth nodded. “Don’t worry,” she said.

  “I’m not the one who’s worried,” Dicey pointed out, and was rewarded with a little shy smile.

  After she had seen them off down the driveway, she got to work, busying herself with chores. She put together a piecrust for dessert, wrapped the dough in wax paper, and put it into the refrigerator to chill, and then looked in on Gram.

  Gram was sitting up straight, with music playing—light, intricate music, like patterns of sunlight on waves. “Who is this Vivaldi?”

  Dicey didn’t know. “Do you want a snack?” she asked. “A nice bowl of Jell-O? We’ve got green or yellow. Or another piece of toast?” She looked at the dishes she was picking up. Gram wouldn’t ask for anything, so she had to think of everything to ask Gram about.

  “No and no,” Gram said. “I feel better, but not hungry.”

  “Tea? Ginger ale? Water?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “How about a book? Are you ready for a book?”

  “You know, I might be.” Gram sounded surprised. “Can you find me David Copperfield?”

  Dicey thought she could.

  “It’s Dickens,” Gram said. “I feel like Dickens. What was all that at breakfast?”

  “Maybeth has a test today.”

  “The perversity of children seems unlimited,” Gram said. Dicey stared at her. “You should be in school, and you refuse,” Gram explained. “Maybeth shouldn’t have to, but she wants to. You tell me if it makes sense.”

  “Does it have to make sense?” Dicey asked.

  “No, but it would be easier on me if it did. I’ve left the farm to Maybeth, in my will. I’ve been meaning to tell you that. She’s the one who might need to have it, and she’d always give a home to any of you. In fairness, I should leave it to all four of you, and I know that, but I also know that Maybeth—if she’s not lucky—and there’s no guarantee of luck, girl.”

  Dicey knew that. She knew what Gram was thinking, who Gram was remembering.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you what I decided about my will,” Gram said. Her tone of voice said that even if Dicey wanted to argue about it, it wouldn’t do any good. But Dicey didn’t want to argue.

  “I think it’s exactly the right thing to do, Gram,” she said.

  “And you’re right.”

  “You’re thinking about Momma.”

  “Maybe about all my children,” Gram said. “The ones I know where they’re lost, and the one I don’t know.”

  “Is it a secret about the farm?” Dicey asked.

  “Not a secret,” Gram said carefully, thinking about it. “A privacy, though, between us.”

  “I’ll get David Copperfield,” Dicey said.

  “Have you by any chance retired from business?” Gram asked.

  “If you’ll promise not to get out of bed,” Dicey answered.

  “How can I promise that?” Gram snapped. “I’m going to have to go to the bathroom, aren’t I? Brush my teeth and hair, wash my face—maybe even have a bath.”

  She’d answered her own question and Dicey didn’t need to say anything more.

  While Gram read, Dicey cleaned up the mess she’d made in the kitchen, wondering how it was that Maybeth could get a piecrust made and the kitchen kept clean at the same time, then she went upstairs to see what needed doing up there. The woodwork could use a wash, she decided, seizing on a chore that would take most of the day.

  “How was the test?” she asked Maybeth as soon as her sister walked in the door.

  “I don’t know. But it’s over,” Maybeth said. “It only lasts as long as it lasts. So I never mind, once it’s over.” Sammy grabbed a sandwich, then took the truck to work. Dicey barely had time to say hello to him. He looked in on Gram and was gone.

  “There’s mail for you,” Maybeth told her, taking a glass of water and her day’s news into Gram’s room.

  Dicey didn’t count a phone bill as mail. She was going to have to deposit that check to pay it, and she always paid her bills right away. She put the envelope from the phone company into her checkbook, with Claude’s check, and put both back into the rear pocket of her jeans. There was no need to carry Claude’s check around with her, she knew, but it made her feel better. She had three months in her pocket, March, April, May. By the end of April, all her storage boats would be picked up, and who knew if a new job might turn up. Maybe she should call Ken and see if he could find somebody else to order a boat from her. She didn’t think there was much chance of that; she knew there wasn’t much chance; Mr. Hobart’s boat had been a fluke.

  But Gram was right—she hadn’t been to the shop for days. Cisco was working alone.

  Once she got the check into the bank, she’d write him one for—$200? No, $150, that was the most she could afford, really, and she ought to make it cash. Cisco was the kind of person who would much rather have cash, and it would be more fun to give it to him that way, anyway. Although, she reminded herself, she wasn’t—properly speaking—giving him anything. He’d earned whatever she decided to pay him.

  The next afternoon, when Sammy and Maybeth were home to see that Gram stayed in her bed, Dicey drove into town. She hadn’t been to the shop for four days. She was ready to get working on something, even Claude’s cheap boats. She could sympathize with her grandmother, being stuck in bed. Maybe over the weekend they’d let Gram move to the sofa, and light a fire in there, cover her with a blanket. Gram was being pretty docile about obeying Dr. Landros’s instructions. It wasn’t like Gram to be that obedient, Dicey thought, and then she thought that it was. Gram said she’d learned her lesson, and she meant it. When Gram made mistakes, she thought about
them, to understand them.

  Dicey walked into the shop, shedding her jacket, asking, “What coat are we on?” Then she looked around her.

  Cisco sat leaning against the wall, reading, his stocking feet stretched out toward the stove. “Miss Tillerman.” He stood up. “I didn’t expect you. I got a library card,” he said, mocking himself and her. He looked glad to see her, that, too. “I used your name as reference, which I hope wasn’t imposing. How’s your grandmother?”

  “Getting better,” Dicey said.

  Looking around the shop, she saw that none of the boats had been given even the first coat of paint. The top of the worktable was piled with pizza boxes and napkins, Cisco’s jacket, and empty bottles, both soda and beer. Undershirts and Jockey briefs were stretched out drying over the side of the boat nearest the stove.

  “You have no idea how hard it is to wash anything in that sink,” Cisco said. “The boats are all ready to start on, if you’re ready.”

  In four days he could have finished two of them. She would have finished two of them.

  “What have you been doing?” she asked. She tried to keep the anger out of her voice, but he heard it and his shoulders stiffened under the work shirt. His smile faded.

  “Sanded every bleeding one of them,” he said.

  About one day’s work, Dicey thought, chewing on her lip.

  “Which still leaves you ahead, in this particular labor exchange,” he pointed out. “Even if you’re thinking of minimum wage. Since you can’t describe the quarters as exactly luxurious,” he told her.

  That was true, Dicey reminded herself. It wasn’t as if she’d actually hired him, she reminded herself.

  “In fact, if we were figuring numbers, you’d owe me a bundle,” Cisco pointed out. His easy smile returned, now that he had proved to her how right he was. “But since we never were, there’s no problem. Is there?”

  Dicey shook her head. If it mattered so much to him to prove he was right, he must feel awfully wrong. That was pretty weird, that feeling wrong would make him start a quarrel to prove he was right.

  “I’ll just put these things away.” He moved into action, quick and graceful as a cat. “And we can get to work.”

  Cisco could work, and working with him was easy. In just the couple of hours she had before she had to get home for dinner, they got the first coat on the inside of two of the boats. Working made Dicey feel better.

  She listened to Cisco talk, and watched the smooth lines of paint gradually cover the inside of the boat she was working on. Cisco, she decided, just wasn’t any good at working on his own. However he felt about taking orders, and she’d just been given a taste of how he felt about it, he didn’t get things done working alone. If she’d thought about it, she’d have predicted that. After all, she’d worked with enough people to know how they worked, and she knew enough about enough people to know how different people were. But when she thought of all the people in the world, so many of them and each one different, her mind went on to another idea.

  “Do you ever think,” she asked Cisco, “about how much you don’t know?” Dicey was beginning to think it was wonderful how much she didn’t know—in the sense that to think of it filled her with wonder.

  “You want to hear the truth? The truth is, I don’t. I’m more impressed by how much I do know. It’s alarming how much my brain has stored away in it.”

  The answer was so like him that Dicey grinned.

  “I know the grandmother is better, so tell me, how’s the boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know,” Dicey admitted.

  “Uh-oh. Uh-oh and uh-oh.” He kept on painting while he talked. So did Dicey. “Looks like you’ve painted yourself into a corner, Miss Tillerman. You played hard to get—which is about the oldest trick in the world. Granted, it’s the oldest because it’s the best. I have to grant you women that. Something women seem to be born knowing. You women,” he said, looking across at her, the wrinkles spraying out from the corners of his eyes.

  Dicey didn’t know what he meant. He’d already told her she wasn’t particularly feminine, and now he was telling her she was just like every other woman. Cisco meant things only temporarily, she guessed. He probably didn’t even remember that he was contradicting himself. Before, he’d said that about her to make her cross, and make her feel inadequate, as if there were things she didn’t know that she ought to know; now, she thought, he was trying to make her feel as if there were things she knew, and did, to get her own way, to make her cross and make her feel guilty. She wasn’t about to believe anything he told her about herself.

  “My advice is: switch tactics,” he said. “Try chasing him. Try it, I’m serious. Unless you want to get rid of him?”

  Dicey didn’t want to answer that. It was none of his business. But he outwaited her, until she shook her head no.

  “Chase him a little—let him think he’s the most wonderful thing in the world, desirable, wise, strong—all those things men like to hear about themselves. It’s the second oldest trick. You should try that, Miss Tillerman.”

  Dicey didn’t even want to think about Jeff. She could stand it, she could accept it, she could even understand it—but she didn’t want to think about it.

  “You should try working, Mr. Kidd,” she snapped back at him.

  “Nag, nag, nag,” he said.

  After a long, silent time he asked, “You going to be back in tomorrow?”

  “In the afternoon.”

  He grimaced.

  “Listen,” she asked, “will you do me a favor? I got a check—for the first two-thirds of this job. Could you deposit it for me? I’ve got a phone bill to pay, and I can’t leave my grandmother alone, so I can’t get into town during banking hours. Could you?”

  “If you want me to. Sure. It’s no trouble. I usually pick up breakfast downtown, the drugstore does a nice breakfast for a dollar nineteen, I’d be happy to.”

  Dicey took her checkbook out of her pocket. She ripped out a deposit slip, dated it, entered the bank number and the amount of the check—since Claude banked where she did, she could draw on the money tomorrow afternoon if it was deposited in the morning—then signed the back of Claude’s check and entered the amount into her records before passing the two slips of paper to Cisco. He looked at them, holding them in his fingers like a hand of cards.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “Are you sure you want to trust me with this much money?”

  “I’m not trusting you with the money,” she pointed out to him. “I’m trusting you to deposit it in the bank for me, and save me from bankruptcy.”

  “You can’t go bankrupt,” he informed her, mocking. He took out a wallet, to put the slips away. Then he grinned at her. The expression on his face had the same kind of confidence that Sammy’s did when he knew that scoring the crib would win him the game.

  So Dicey answered as she would have answered her brother: “Oh, yeah?”

  “Not unless you’re earning a living. Since this business doesn’t make enough to support you, you’re absolutely safe.”

  Listening to the twisting of his mind, Dicey remembered a question she had for him. “Do you know something called Machiavelli?”

  “Some-one,” Cisco corrected her. Standing beside him at the worktable, she had to look up at him. Cisco liked her, she could see it on his face. She didn’t know why, but he did.

  “Machiavelli was a Renaissance political theorist.”

  “I knew you’d know,” she told him. She didn’t mind Cisco, either. You couldn’t expect much of him, but if you took him on his own terms, he was good company.

  “Who wants to know?” he asked.

  “I do. My brother used the word. I was talking to him on the phone.”

  “Your brother at Yale?” Cisco asked. “Well, I am impressed with myself. And so should you be.”

  Dicey just got into her jacket and went to the door. She could see right through him—through the vanity and pride to the fear that she wouldn’t t
hink much of him. Since it pleased him so much to be asked to deposit the check, she was glad she’d thought of it, although she’d thought of it only because it suited her own convenience. Deposits made after noon weren’t credited until the next business day, the bank made that clear. She had plans for some of that money tomorrow afternoon, plans that included Cisco. Thinking of that, she smiled to herself: she guessed he’d be pretty surprised.

  “I’ll see you late tomorrow, then,” Cisco said. “And I’ll get some work done in the morning, I promise you. I don’t think I could take disappointing you again. You’re much too disapproving when you’re disappointed,” he told her.

  “You can tell me all about it tomorrow,” Dicey said, laughing, leaving him there in the shop.

  CHAPTER 22

  By Friday afternoon Gram was starting to argue that people healed at different rates, that just because most people took a week in bed with pneumonia it didn’t mean she was going to need that long; she pointed out that Dicey was chained to the house, and announced that surely she could just move out to the living room, because she was going heartily crazy staring at these four walls. Leaving Maybeth and Sammy to restrain their grandmother, Dicey went downtown. She went first to the library, where she exchanged Gram’s tapes for more Mozart, more Beethoven and, since they didn’t have any more Vivaldi, some trumpet voluntaries, because that also was a name she liked. It made no sense to choose music because of words, but if you had no other way of choosing, words made it possible actually to make a choice, instead of just grabbing the first three tapes you came to.

  The bank was open from four to six on Friday afternoons. She parked the truck in the lot and went inside, to write out the check for Cisco. She made it out to cash, and decided while she stood in line that she’d ask for it in fifties. It was more than she could afford, but it was less than he deserved, for the work he’d done. Besides, the checks for storage and maintenance would come in next week; she could pay Gram and have two months rent clear. They’d finish up Claude’s boats in the next week or so, and that would be five hundred dollars more. She was okay for a while, and that was all she needed.