Staying Together

  “Thank you, Min. I appreciate that,” Ruby replied meekly. She said nothing, however, when Flora set the clean plate in front of her.

  “You’re welcome,” said Flora loudly.

  Min eyed Flora over her reading glasses. “Anything wrong?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ruby? Anything wrong at your end?”

  “Nope.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  “Actually,” Flora replied, “there is a slight problem. I think there’s something Ruby wants to tell you.”

  “No! No, there isn’t!” yelped Ruby. “Everything’s fine, Min. I promise. Sorry, Flora. Sorry for teasing you. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Thank you for apologizing, Ruby. That’s very nice of you,” said Min.

  “Um, I’m sorry, too,” Flora said, managing a glance in Ruby’s direction.

  “You know, your mother and Aunt Allie used to fight,” commented Min.

  “Really?” said Flora with interest.

  “Like cats and dogs.”

  Ruby glanced down at King Comma and Daisy, who were seated side by side, patiently waiting for someone to be clumsy enough to drop food onto the floor. Every now and then King would glance at Daisy or vice versa. It was as if they were holding a conversation with their eyes.

  I thought those eggs were going to land on the floor.

  Me, too. Bad luck. Remember that time a whole muffin fell down?

  Like it was yesterday.

  “King and Daisy don’t fight,” Ruby pointed out. “Not anymore, anyway.”

  “It’s just an expression,” replied Min. “The point is that your mother and Aunt Allie used to have big fights. Once they didn’t speak for nearly two months.”

  “Why not?” asked Flora.

  “Something about a boy.”

  Ruby rolled her eyes. “Boys,” she said, “are not worth fighting about.”

  It was on the tip of Flora’s tongue to say that lying was worth fighting about, but Min went on, “It’s usually better to get things out in the open.”

  “Usually,” echoed Flora, and now she looked pointedly at Ruby, but Ruby was suddenly very busy opening a jar of jam.

  Flora took great pride in the fact that she had recently become a working girl. She volunteered at Three Oaks, where her old Row House neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Willet, now lived. Once a week, Mr. Pennington drove Flora to the retirement community, and while Flora donned her Helping Hand apron and delivered flowers and pushed wheelchairs and re-shelved books in the library, Mr. Pennington visited with Mr. Willet.

  “See you in two hours!” Flora called to Mr. Pennington one afternoon as he stepped into the elevator. She wound her way through the corridors to the front desk at Three Oaks and greeted Dee, who was typing at a computer. “Hi,” Flora said. “What do you want me to do today?”

  Dee smiled at her. “We’re busy. And we’re shorthanded. Could you help set up chairs in the auditorium? We’re having a speaker tonight.”

  “Sure,” Flora replied. She spent the next half hour happily arranging rows of chairs in the auditorium. After that, she stapled together two hundred copies of Three Oaks’s weekly bulletin; read to Mr. Cooke, who was ninety-nine years old, completely blind, and said he couldn’t live without a daily dose of Shakespeare (Flora was pretty sure she had mispronounced quite a few words, but Mr. Cooke didn’t complain); and finally decided to visit Mrs. Willet in her room in the wing for people with Alzheimer’s disease.

  Flora let herself into the wing by punching in a code on a keypad. She didn’t know how Mr. Willet could bear to visit his wife in a locked wing every day, but when she had once asked Min about this, her grandmother had replied that you would be surprised what you can get used to.

  “But she’s locked in!” Flora had exclaimed.

  “She’s safe.”

  “She’s Mr. Willet’s wife. How can he stand it?”

  “What’s his choice?”

  “She could live with him in his apartment.”

  Min had shaken her head. “No. She needs full-time care. Mr. Willet can’t manage that.”

  “I know,” Flora had said. But every time she punched in the code and waited for the door to click open, she felt a pang like a jolt of electricity delivered to the core of her body.

  Flora greeted the nurses at their station and walked along the quiet corridor to a door with a wreath of dried roses on it. She had made the wreath herself and given it to Mrs. Willet on her birthday. She hadn’t wrapped it, since Mrs. Willet didn’t understand about opening presents. And she hadn’t expected a thank-you, since Mrs. Willet rarely spoke. But she had been surprised and pleased when Mrs. Willet had looked at the wreath and smiled broadly. Later, Mr. Willet had hung it on her door.

  Flora peeked into the room. “Mrs. Willet?” she said softly, and saw that the old woman was snoozing in her armchair. She hesitated and stepped back into the hallway, then changed her mind and entered the room anyway. She stood for nearly a minute watching Mrs. Willet sleep. Mrs. Willet’s face was peaceful, but her hands, fingers interlaced, bounced up and down in her lap. Her eyes remained closed, though, so finally Flora whispered, “See you next week,” and tiptoed away.

  She made her way to Mr. Willet’s apartment then and found Mr. Willet and Mr. Pennington deep in conversation.

  “Am I interrupting something?” asked Flora.

  “Not at all,” said Mr. Pennington.

  Mr. Willet added, “We’re just a couple of old geezers.” He held up a T-shirt. “Look what my niece sent me.”

  Flora peered at the writing on the front of the shirt. “‘Old Geezer,’” she read, and personally thought that the shirt was not a very nice gift but refrained from saying so.

  Ten minutes later, Flora and Mr. Pennington and Mr. Willet said their good-byes, and soon Flora was on her way home. One of the nice things, she thought, about being a working girl was that it kept her mind off of herself. And off of Ruby and their fight.

  Min had not returned from Needle and Thread when Flora stepped into the Row House, so Flora checked her assignments, realized she could do all her homework after dinner, and set about preparing the meal. She chopped vegetables for a salad, decided to bake potatoes, and put one of Min’s casseroles in the oven. She was feeding King Comma and Daisy when Ruby came home. Wordlessly, Ruby began to set the table, and she was just finishing up when the front door opened. Moments later, Min appeared in the kitchen.

  “Oh, wonderful, Ruby. Thank you for setting the table.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Hi, honey,” Min said to Flora, and kissed her cheek. “How was Three Oaks?”

  “It was fine.” Flora waited for Min to comment on dinner, which everyone could smell. When she didn’t, Flora finally said, “I started dinner.” The problem with having been responsible and helpful your entire life, Flora reflected, was that eventually people took you for granted. On the other hand, if Ruby so much as blotted up a spot on the counter, Min practically bought her a ticket to Disney World.

  “Well, dinner,” said Ruby dismissively. “I think that’s a casserole you made, isn’t it, Min?”

  Flora fumed but held her tongue until dinner had been eaten and the kitchen tidied. The moment Min stepped out for an evening visit with Mr. Pennington, Flora raged up the stairs to her sister’s room. The door was ajar, and Flora pushed it open with a bang. “Okay, that’s it!” she exclaimed.

  Ruby was sitting on her bed, her math book open beside her, a comic book spread across her knees. When the door flew open, she jumped and the comic slid to the floor. “Hey!” cried Ruby. “What are you doing?”

  “Listen, Little Miss Perfect, you have to tell Min about the owl. Now.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I can’t take one more second of what you’re doing to Min.”

  “What am I doing to her?”

  “You’re going out of your way to make her think you’ve changed —”

  “I have changed.?
??

  “But you haven’t told her the reason you’ve changed. I think she might like to know the reason, don’t you?”

  Ruby glared at Flora. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you have to tell Min the truth. You can’t keep covering this up. It’s too big.”

  Ruby shrugged at her sister, popped her gum, and retrieved her comic book.

  “I’m not kidding, Ruby. Tell her the truth. Or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else I’ll tell her myself.”

  Ruby’s eyes widened. “You’re not going to do that! You’d just be a tattletale.”

  It was Flora’s turn to shrug. “It’s up to you. Either you tell her or I will.” She looked at her watch. “Min said she’ll be back in half an hour.”

  “Wait, Flora. Don’t tell her. Please. I’ll do it. I promise. Only … I need time to figure out what I’m going to say to her. And not half an hour. More than that.”

  “How much more?”

  “A month?” said Ruby in a small voice.

  “I’ll give you two weeks. Period. The end.”

  Bill Willet sat in an armchair in the living room of his apartment at Three Oaks. He stared across the room at the couch where he had tossed the loathsome Old Geezer T-shirt. He couldn’t imagine what had possessed his niece to send it to him. She must have thought it was funny. But there really wasn’t anything funny about old geezers, particularly when you were eighty years old and had no hair and lived in … Well, let’s face it, as nice as Three Oaks was, and no matter what you called it, it was still an old people’s home.

  Mr. Willet sat and stared. The more he stared at the T-shirt, the more he hated it. And, he realized, the less he felt like an old geezer. Maybe that was what was wrong with the T-shirt. If he wore it, then people would think he really was an old geezer, but eighty or not, hair or not, and home or not, he didn’t feel like he was eighty. And he certainly didn’t feel like an old geezer. He was just Bill Willet, who at birth had been given the slightly unfortunate name of William Willet. He could be Bill, who was three, or Bill, who was thirty, or Bill, who was leaning pretty hard on eighty-one.

  On the other hand, he walked with a cane and needed a hearing aid in his left ear, neither of which helped much where the old geezer image was concerned.

  Mr. Willet sighed. The day was absolutely gorgeous. It was the kind of spring weather that once would have beckoned him and his wife to the backyard of their Row House to work in the flower beds, but for some reason this memory didn’t cheer him. He stood up and opened the door to his terrace. He sat on the squeaky wicker chair and breathed in the scent of lilacs. His neighbor in the apartment below had a patio with a garden that he worked in nearly year-round. Mr. Willet longed to have a garden of his own again. He longed to have a job. He longed to take Mary Lou’s hand and walk the paths in front of Three Oaks with her. He longed to tell her he loved her and hear her say the words back to him.

  “Pity party,” he said aloud, standing up. “That’s what I’m having. A pity party.”

  He strode back into his apartment, closing the sliding door behind him with just a bit too much force. Across the room, Sweetie jumped at the noise, leaped up from the Old Geezer T-shirt, where he had settled for a nap, and fled into the kitchen, tail fat.

  “Sorry, Sweetie,” called Mr. Willet.

  He sat in the armchair again. Well, this was some exciting morning he was having. Eat breakfast, sit in a chair, sit in another chair, sit in the first chair again. Maybe I’m an old geezer after all, he thought.

  He continued to sit there until, for no reason he could figure out, the title of a children’s book popped into his head: Higglety Pigglety Pop! Where had that come from?

  After a while, Mr. Willet let out a long sigh. He could add that to his exciting list of things to do: eat breakfast, sit, sigh, sit again, sigh again.

  “Enough is enough,” he said at last. “Sweetie, where are you? I’m sorry I scared you. I’m going out.” He found Sweetie crouching on the kitchen counter, returned him to the Old Geezer shirt, put on his jacket, and reached for his cane, which was leaning by the front door.

  Mr. Willet stumped along the hallway. He realized he was walking in rhythm to the words higglety pigglety pop.

  Higglety pigglety pop. Higglety pigglety pop.

  He reached the elevator and pressed the button. As he was riding to the ground floor, he suddenly remembered the rest of the title of the children’s book: Higglety Pigglety Pop! There Must Be More to Life.

  “I’ll say,” he muttered. He checked his watch. It was only 9:40. The day stretched ahead of him. Mr. Willet suppressed a third sigh as he stepped off the elevator. He began the walk through the corridors of Three Oaks to Mary Lou’s room.

  “Morning, Bill!” called his friend Evie as Mr. Willet passed her in the hallway. “A fine day, isn’t it?”

  “Perfect weather. I’m going to take Mary Lou for a walk.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Willet!” called Dee from the front desk.

  “Good morning.” Mr. Willet gave her a wave.

  He passed the coffee shop, the gift shop, the library, and the exercise center. Ordinarily, these familiar sights made him smile. Today he passed them stonily. He reached the keypad by the door to the wing where his wife now lived and punched in the code.

  Before the door had even clicked shut behind him, he saw Mary Lou. And as he walked across the lounge, what he saw was a very young Mary Lou: Mary Lou, with smooth strong hands and an unlined face, studying a textbook, then looking up at Mr. Willet with clear eyes and smiling in pleasure at the sight of him.

  But when he stood before her wheelchair, the hand that he reached for was creased, the bones of her fingers bulging painfully in impossible directions. And the eyes that she turned to him were blank, as if he were looking into the eyes of a doll.

  “Good morning, honey,” he said. He realized that her hand was shaking.

  “Is it … today … here?” she asked vaguely.

  “Yes!” exclaimed Mr. Willet. “It’s today, and it’s ten minutes to ten in the morning. Would you like to take a walk?”

  Mrs. Willet glanced down the hallway and lowered her voice to a whisper. “He doesn’t know where he’s going,” she said conspiratorially. (The hallway was empty.)

  “He doesn’t?” replied Mr. Willet.

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s all right. Let’s take a walk, shall we? It’s a beautiful day.”

  Mr. Willet didn’t expect an answer. He turned to an attendant. “Mary Lou and I are going to take a walk outside,” he told him. “We’ll have lunch in the coffee shop before I bring her back.”

  “Enjoy the day” was the reply.

  Mr. Willet draped a sweater around his wife’s shoulders, and soon he was pushing her chair through the main entrance of Three Oaks and along a sidewalk.

  “Look at the gardens,” he said. “Everything’s blooming away. Narcissus, daffodils, bleeding hearts, grape hyacinths. Remember our gardens?” There was no answer from the wheelchair, so Mr. Willet continued. “Pretty soon the azaleas and the rhododendrons will be in bloom, too.”

  The hands clasped in Mrs. Willet’s lap bounced up and down, and her left foot began to wag back and forth. Mr. Willet paused by a wooden bench, set the brakes on the wheelchair, sat heavily on the bench, and gazed at the gardens.

  Flora had mentioned the gardens to him the day before when she’d come to his apartment. “They look like English gardens,” she had said. “Or what I think English gardens look like. I’ve never actually seen one. Have you?”

  Mr. Willet had smiled. “Yes. Mary Lou and I took several trips to England. One of them was a tour through the Cotswolds in spring. We saw beautiful gardens.”

  “Lucky,” said Flora, who had stopped just short of embarrassingly saying, “Lucky duck.” Then she had turned to Mr. Pennington and added, “Have you seen a real English garden?”

  “I have.”

  ??
?I wish I could get out and see the world,” Flora had replied. And then she had done something unexpected. She had turned back to Mr. Willet and said, “I think you need to get out and see the world again.” Moments later, she had gathered up her things and left with Mr. Pennington.

  Now, why had Flora said that? wondered Mr. Willet. She hadn’t told Mr. Pennington that he needed to see the world. And Mr. Willet hadn’t mentioned anything about feeling restless or like a useless old geezer. But as he sat by the gardens and recalled his conversation with Flora, who was an unusual girl, and as the phrase “there must be more to life” ran around and around in his head, an idea came to him.

  As soon as he had finished lunch with Mary Lou and walked her back to her room, he settled himself in the Three Oaks library and began to look up information on trips for seniors. He found walking tours (those must be for people who were a little less senior than he was) and cruises (he had never been a big fan of boats) and trips to places that seemed a bit too exotic. And then he found a description of a bus tour through the Cotswolds.

  “A bus tour,” he murmured. “I could manage that.”

  He copied down some information, a phone number, and a web address. He wasn’t sure how he would feel about traveling without Mary Lou but — higglety pigglety pop — he was going to see the Cotswolds again. Surely he would meet some other nice seniors on the trip. Maybe he would even invite Mr. Pennington to go along. He would bring his camera with him. And he would take a photo of an English garden for Flora.

  Hilary Nelson walked slowly down the stairs from her apartment to the door that opened onto Main Street. Spencer ran noisily ahead of her and jumped down the last three steps, landing with a thud. He flung the door open and announced, “It’s summer!”

  It was April 30th, and not particularly warm, but Spencer had convinced his parents that he could wear shorts that day.

  “Come on, Hilary!” he called, holding the door open for her with his foot.

  “I’m coming.” Hilary felt grouchy but tried not to show it, since it wasn’t Spencer’s fault. She increased her speed by an infinitesimal amount, edged through the door, and stood outside the window of the diner.