“Gallivanting!” Ralph roared. “Neglecting your duties.” He reached into a bag, pulled out a package of Oreos, his favorite; Nora had gotten them as a peace offering.
Or, she thought, opening the package for him, as a bribe?
“Want some tea?” she asked him. “Patty?”
“No, thanks. I’ll be going.” Patty glanced at Ralph, who was stuffing cookies, and lowered her voice. “Um, you probably should have a look at your mother; she seems—I don’t know. Kind of, you know, dopey. Not dumb, I mean,” she added hastily. “Like sleepy-dopey. She didn’t say much the whole time I was here, didn’t want much either.”
“I will,” Nora said. “Anything else?”
“Nope. Good luck,” Patty whispered, giving Nora’s arm a little squeeze as she left.
“Thanks,” Nora called.
“For what?” said Ralph, dark brown crumbs cascading down his chin.
Nora reached up and brushed them away. “For looking after you. Sit down, Father. I’ll put the kettle on, then go check on Mama. Come on.” She took his arm and settled him in a chair. She felt calmer, more amused than angry, as if the glow of her afternoon out with Liz was protecting her, insulating her from her father.
“You got those towels,” Ralph said reproachfully, peering into a bag after he was seated.
Nora handed him another cookie. “Yes, I did.” She planted herself in front of him. “Father,” she said boldly, “since I’m the one who does the cooking and cleaning and everything else, don’t you think I ought to be the one who decides what to buy? If I need something in order to make my job more efficient, I think I should get it. Don’t you?”
“Well, Miss Fancy Pants, I’m the one who pays for everything around here.”
“Not quite everything.” But Nora felt the protective wall begin to crumble. She stopped, built it up again, and said, “In any case, what’s done is done. Paper towels are cleaner than rags and cloth towels.” She bent close to him and playfully tweaked his nose. “Fewer germs,” she whispered sepulchrally, then turned and filled the kettle.
“My back aches,” Ralph whined. “I have a lot of gas, Nora. I can’t move my bowels. You better find the magnesia or something.”
Nora reached the blue bottle down from the cupboard and handed it to him with a spoon, took the tea out of the canister, and headed for the door leading to Corinne’s room. “I’ll be right back.”
“Help me,” Ralph said softly. “Help me.”
She turned, alarmed; he’d unscrewed the top of the bottle and was holding it out in one hand, the spoon in the other. Both hands were shaking.
In an instant she was at his side and had taken both bottle and spoon, pouring out the dose and feeding it to him.
“Thank you,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “You’re a good girl.”
“Father,” she said. “Hold up your hands.”
He did, and it was just as she thought; there was no tremor. As an experiment, she handed him a glass. “Here, hold this, please, while I put some water in it for you.”
“What for?” he asked suspiciously, his eyes snapping open. But he took the glass and held it while she transferred water from a pitcher by the sink into it.
Again, it was as she expected. No tremor.
Well, maybe the shadow of one, but nothing like before.
“Oh, I just thought you’d like a water chaser,” she told him. “Be right back.”
“You’re a good girl,” he called after her.
***
Corinne’s eyes were closed, her breathing heavy. She looked a little pale, Nora thought, bending over her. “Mama,” she said, touching her shoulder. “Mama?”
Corinne didn’t stir.
“Mama?” Nora said more loudly, shaking her gently. “Mama, it’s me, Nora.”
Corinne’s eyes fluttered, twitched, finally opened. She stared at Nora blankly, then said “Ahhh!” weakly and recoiled.
“Mama, it’s me, Nora, your daughter.” Nora kissed her and brushed back her hair. But fear caught at her throat.
Corinne smiled crookedly. “Oh,” she said. “Dearie. I was dreaming. A bear, I think, a big bear.”
“Chasing you?” Nora asked. “How horrible!”
“No, staring.” Corinne’s gaze shifted and she clutched Nora’s arm, her eyes wide with fright. “Oh, there—there, see?” Shakily, she pointed to the corner where her rocking chair was heaped with clothes. “What’s he doing there, Nora? Is that Peter? I don’t want him in my room, Nora. Make him go.”
“No, Mama, no, it’s not Peter. It’s just your clothes on the chair. Look.” She picked up the clothes and took them to the bed. Corinne fingered them doubtfully. “See, Mama? Not Peter.”
Corinne shook her head. “He was there,” she insisted. “He must have left quickly. You wouldn’t let him do anything, would you, dearie?”
What would he do, Nora wondered. “No, of course not. I never would.”
“That’s all right then,” Corinne said comfortably. “How was school?”
“Fine, Mama, fine. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Oh, my, that would be lovely.” She struggled to sit. “But mustn’t neglect horse—horsework. No, that’s not it.” She put her hand to her head, rubbing it, frowning.
“Homework, I think you mean. I don’t have any today.”
“How nice for you, dear.”
In the kitchen, the kettle shrieked and Ralph yelled, “NORA! The tea!”
Corinne moved her good leg off the bed.
“Coming, Father!” Nora called. “Mama, wait just a minute, okay? Let me set the tea to steeping and then I’ll come in and help you get up.”
“Help me?” Corinne asked, obviously puzzled. “But why on earth? I don’t need help.” She wiggled her hips and arched her back, inchworming herself forward, then tugged at her paralyzed leg. “Something’s wrong with my leg!” she cried. “You knew that. Did you know that?”
“Yes, Mama,” Nora said. Ralph’s walker thumped toward the bedroom. “You had a stroke a while back. You have trouble walking. That’s why I said I’d help you.”
“Nora, what the hell are you doing?”
“Helping Mama.”
“Hello, sweetheart.” Ralph pushed Nora aside as he moved to the bed. Bending clumsily, he put his arms around his wife.
“Ralph,” Corinne said tearfully, “Nora says I had a stroke! Is that true?”
“Yes, sweetheart. Yes, it’s true. But it’s all right. You’ll be fine.”
“But I can’t move my leg! Or”—she looked at her useless arm in surprise—“or my arm.”
“I know, dearest,” Nora heard Ralph say soothingly as she left to start the tea. “I know.”
Thank God, she thought, he’s still gentle and sweet to her.
Chapter Nineteen
“Dear Mrs. Brice…” Nora began after church that Sunday—it was almost July now, hot and humid; Nora felt the backs of her thighs sticking to Louise’s car seat through the thin fabric of her summer Sunday dress. “Dear Mrs. Brice, you’ve been so wonderful to me for so long. I’ve been thinking, that nice Liz Hardy, you know, the woman who’s fixing up the old cabin at the lake?”
Louise wove the car around an object in the road; a plastic bag, it looked like. She glanced at Nora, her raised gray eyebrows making horizontal ridges in her forehead. “Yes?” she said tentatively, more a question than an answer.
“Well, you know she took me shopping that time when you had company. And she’s offered to do it regularly, for the summer. She’s a teacher, so she’ll be going back to New York in the fall. But in the meantime…”
“But Nora, dear!” Louise veered toward the right as she fixed her eyes more firmly on Nora. Nora winced, trying not to be obvious about bracing her body; there was a tree at the edge of the road, and a ditch. “It’s no trouble at all for me,” Louise said, “since I do my shopping then, too. It’s nice of Miss Hardy, but wouldn’t it be silly to bother someone else when I’m w
illing, ready, and able?”
“Oh, I know you are! And you’ve been so wonderful. I don’t know what I’d have done without you all this time! Or what I’d do without you come fall, but…”
“That’s settled then.” Louise patted Nora’s knee; the car lurched a little to the left.
“Well, but you see,” Nora said, avoiding Louise’s eyes, “Liz—Ms. Hardy—has asked me to help her restore her mother’s garden. In exchange for taking me shopping,” she added hastily, though that was not true; there’d never been any question of “exchange.”
“Oh.” Louise’s voice was flat, abrupt. “I suppose that’s different, then.”
“The trouble is,” Nora said apologetically, “I don’t think I can get away on another day. Father pretty much accepts Friday shopping and Sunday church, but I don’t think he’d take kindly to my going out another day as well. You know, to help with the garden.”
Louise turned down the road to Tillot Farm. “No,” she said stiffly. “I suppose not.” She swung—literally, Nora said to Liz later, on the telephone, “Literally swung”—the car around the bend at the front of the house. “I’ll see you next Sunday then.”
“Yes, of course.” Impulsively, Nora leaned over and gave Louise a quick kiss on her cheek; it tasted of powder. “Thank you for understanding. We’ll probably meet in the grocery store anyway,” she said, “since Friday’s your day, too.”
***
But they didn’t. “I do not,” Louise said stiffly to Henry, her husband, “like that Hardy woman. I think she’s interfering.”
“Nonsense.” Henry peered through thick glasses over the top of his newspaper. “You’re just jealous. You’d think Nora was your own daughter the way you fuss over her like a regular mother hen. You’re too protective, Louise.”
Louise sniffed. “Well, perhaps if we’d had a daughter…” Henry glared at her, and she let that go. “Mark my words,” she went on, “the Hardy woman will do more harm than good, befriending Nora like that. She’s going to make that poor child long for things she can’t have.”
“What, a garden?” Henry said. “Nora Tillot’s got the best one in the county already!”
“No, not a garden.”
“What then, Louise?”
“Young friends. The modern world.”
Henry put down his paper, revealing a spot on his yellow sport shirt. “Wouldn’t you like that for her?” he asked curiously.
“Yes, of course I would,” his wife snapped, noticing the spot with annoyance. Grease, perhaps butter from the breakfast muffin he’d taken out to the shed in which he frittered away countless hours each day and evening, fiddling with that ridiculous short wave radio of his. “But it’s just not possible, don’t you see? Ralph will never let her out of his clutches till he dies, and he shows no sign of doing that. And she’s too meek to break free.”
“Maybe this Hardy woman will give her the strength to break free. Wouldn’t that be good?”
“For Nora, of course, although I suspect she couldn’t function without someone to take care of. But what of Corinne and Ralph? How would they cope?”
Henry shrugged. “I thought long ago they should both be in a home of some sort.”
“I doubt very much there’s any money for that.” Louise shook her head mournfully. “It would be far, far better to let everything stay as it is. You’d better let me have that shirt, Henry; there’s a spot on it.”
By the following Friday, everyone in Clarkston agreed they were in the middle of the worst heat wave in many years. Nora used the cook stove as little as possible, and that night even wheeled her mother into the back yard and fanned her till she slept. Luckily, there were few mosquitoes, it had been so dry. Ralph sat nearby in a chair she had lugged out for him, drinking glass after glass of ice-chip filled tea till there was no ice left. “And there’ll be no more coming till Monday,” Nora said, handing him the last glass.
“You could use that infernal telephone to call what’s-his-name and get another block in the morning,” said Ralph. “No reason why he has to stick to his regular day.”
Nora shook her head. “I tried, but he said there won’t be any more till Monday anyway. He’s having trouble making it in this heat.” She leaned forward. “Father,” she said, “he also told me that he’s probably going to go out of business soon. There’s not enough market for his ice any more, except for campers and fish stores, and he wants to retire anyway. So I think we’d better get the electric company to hook us up, and buy a real refrigerator.”
Ralph banged his glass down on the table she’d put beside him; the amber tea sloshed out, puddling. “Someone must still make block ice,” he bellowed. “Find out who does, and we’ll get it from there.”
“What? Where?” Corinne whispered, opening her eyes. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear.”
“What is it, Mama?”
“That man, that man!” Feebly, Corinne lifted her good arm and pointed across the yard.
“There’s no man there, Mama. Just the trees at the far edge of the garden. It’s getting dark, so it’s hard to see.”
“Nora’s right, sweetheart,” Ralph said, leaning forward. But Nora noticed he, too, had peered into the growing darkness.
“Where is the house?” Corinne cried in alarm, her eyes darting around and her good shoulder twitching as she tried to move. “Did it"—she clutched Nora’s arm, panic in her eyes—"did it burn down?”
“No, no, sweetie,” Nora soothed her, “no. See?” She turned Corinne’s chair around. “You just had your back to it. We’re all out here, you, Father, and me, even Thomas, out in the yard to catch the breeze, it’s so hot inside. Would you like some cool water? There’s no more tea or ice, I’m afraid.”
“Thomas?” Corinne twisted around to face the garden again. “That man? Thomas?”
“No, Mama,” Nora said patiently. “There’s no man. Thomas is the cat. You remember.” She scooped up Thomas, who’d been lying at her feet, panting, and held him out for Corinne to see.
“Oooooh, no, not a dead thing!” Corinne moaned, recoiling. “Not that dead thing from the road!”
“He’s not dead, Mama, he’s very much alive. Here, touch him, see how warm he is!”
But Corinne shook her head and pulled away.
“It’s the time that dog was hit on the road,” Ralph said to Nora, “and the people came here thinking it was our dog. It frightened her.” He edged his chair closer to Corinne’s and took her hands. “Sweetheart,” he said. “My sweetheart. It’s all right. The dead thing’s not here. ‘In my sweet little Alice blue gown…’” he began singing.
Nora put Thomas down again and looked up at the sky, trying to let his crooning comfort her, too. A star fell as she watched.
Chapter Twenty
A slightly revised pattern emerged. Sarah Cassidy, the nurse, continued her regular visits, and on Sundays, Patty still came to stay with the old folks while Louise drove Nora to church and to get the Sunday paper. But Patty’s Friday sessions lengthened, matching Nora’s lengthening visits with Liz for lunch, gardening, and grocery shopping.
In late July, at Nora’s urging, Sarah brought Dr. Cantor, who examined Corinne and told Nora gravely that her increasingly frequent hallucinations seemed to be “a result of an irreversibly deteriorating neurological condition brought about by the stroke and by the numerous small strokes that apparently have followed it.”
“But I can’t confirm this,” he said, “unless I put her in the hospital and do some tests.”
“And that,” Nora had said, sighing, “as you know, Father won’t allow.”
Dr. Cantor opened his mouth as if to object, but Nora quickly added, “Besides, it would terrify her. And anyway, there’s not much you could do for her, is there, even if you knew what was happening?”
“No,” Dr. Cantor admitted, slightly bending his tall body in a courtly, acquiescent half-bow. “I’m afraid there probably isn’t. But”—he handed Sarah a hastily scrawled prescription—“try
these. They may help.”
So Sarah picked up the new drug, which did seem to make Corinne calmer and more docile; at least she was less frightened of the hallucinations and more easily soothed when they were explained away. “But she still has them,” Nora told Liz one Friday.
They were sitting on the dock; Liz had lent Nora a pair of shorts, and Nora was dangling her legs, dabbling her feet in the water, which was almost as tepid as the air.
“Poor lady,” Liz said. She splashed Nora’s leg gently. “It must be so hard for you to see her like this.”
“It is,” Nora said. “She was such a sweet, strong woman. Even though she always gave in to Father, she was strong. And she and I used to have little conspiracies whenever he wasn’t around, especially once I was in high school and he got more like he is now. He’d been fun sometimes when I was little, but something must have happened, maybe to do with his work, to make him change. Anyway, Mama and I would take long walks in the woods, looking for wildflowers; we’d cook extravagant desserts—we even invented some; we’d read aloud to each other. She’d make up stories…” Nora felt her eyes fill, and to her horror tears spilled over. “Sorry,” she gasped, batting at them with her fingers. “Sorry, I…”
“Shh,” Liz said. “Shh.” She put her arm around Nora, and for a moment Nora leaned against her, weeping silently. “It’ll do you good to cry,” Liz said softly, stroking her hair.
“I can’t seem to stop.” Nora pulled away and laughed through her tears in a surprised sort of way. “I’m sorry. Let’s do something.”
“Okay. But no apologies. I know.” Liz stood up. “How about a swim? I could lend you a suit. I’ve got an extra one.”
Nora sniffed; her eyes, Liz saw, were still bright with tears, her cheeks slightly flushed. And her hands still had dirt caked under the nails from weeding. “All right,” Nora said, scrambling to her feet. “But guess what?” She looked embarrassed. Sheepishly, she said, “I don’t know how to swim.”
“Then I’ll teach you.” Liz hesitated, then rushed to say what she’d been thinking for a few days: “I could teach you to drive, too. And if you want, I could get my dad’s mechanic—I found out he’s still in business—to look at your father’s old Ford. If he can make it run, you wouldn’t be dependent on anyone for errands. Or emergencies.”