Sadie
SADIE RANDOLPH HAS ALWAYS seen the sunnier side of life and she’s not sure why that is, just that it is. People criticize it. A lot of people don’t like looking at a half-full glass, but she has spent her life doing just that and feels now that she is eighty-five and bound to a wheelchair, she wouldn’t have chosen to live any other way. Even now, there are things to be happy about. She was born to good people. She got to go to school and become a schoolteacher when many of the people she grew up with were not so fortunate. She married a nice boy from right there in the county she had known her whole life and he continued to run the hardware store and feed and grain sales, just like his father and grandfather before him. They had three fine children, all college educated and now with families of their own, lived in a two-story brick house across the street from the Methodist church they attended and she taught the third grade for forty years. Horace died young, a sudden heart attack while playing football on Thanksgiving afternoon. It was what he and their sons did every Thanksgiving, a town pickup game known for years as the Giblet Gravy Bowl. He dropped dead and he could not help that. He looked to be in great shape and there was no warning whatsoever. And of course she was angry and scared at first and then so heartbroken and disappointed, but he couldn’t help it; she had to keep going. At the funeral she told people she felt lucky and blessed to have ever had him at all. She feels the same about her mother who also died young; she would never trade a minute she had with them. The pain of losing people you love is the price of the ticket for getting to know them at all. Horace once told her that if something ever happened to him, she should go, find somebody, but she was sure he didn’t really mean that, especially when he added, But they better be every bit as good as I am.
“Well, then that’s impossible, isn’t it?” she had said. It was eight years before he died, a plain old night in the winter of 1963, the whole world so focused on the young Jackie Kennedy and what on earth she would do now. Sadie almost asked what he would do if she were the one to die young, but she didn’t want to go there. She doesn’t even like to go there now with her eighty-five and him dead nearly forty years. Of course he would have found someone else, but ultimately it was she left behind and she didn’t want to think about any of it. When she doesn’t want to think about something sad or hurtful, she does what she instructed her own children and those she taught to do: Close your eyes and go somewhere safe and good. Picture something good. One child even made up a big sign with what he thought were the rules to being happy: PRETEND YOU AIN’T DIRTY FROM PLAYING EVEN IF YOU ARE, THINK GOOD THOUGHTS, THINK ABOUT AN ANIMAL YOU WOULD LIKE TO HAVE. She hung the rules in the front of her classroom and they stayed there for years. Now the boy who wrote them is very rich and owns a horse farm in Montana. Sadie has gotten a Christmas card from him every single year except the one time he was getting a divorce. He always says his work keeps him very dirty, but it never gets in the way of his happiness. He always tells her thank you.
Sadie herself had always wanted a little dog that would follow her from room to room like a shadow and that is exactly what she got after Horace died. She loved the big yellow Labradors they had always had as a family: Honey and Goldie and Spitz, after the swimmer who won all those gold medals, but Rudy was all hers, a little Pekingese she misses to this day, but sometimes if she lays her sweater just right at the foot of her bed, it looks just like him, and sometimes she can even get to a place in her mind where she can hear him snore. She loves when Harley comes meowing at her door and spends some time purring on her lap. Bless poor Harley, the way he is treated these days. She wants to tell those who are so mean to him that the one they should really fear coming and sitting beside them is little Joanna Lamb; she’s the one who comes to usher out those ready to go. She is the real sweet angel of death and, Sadie suspects, is very good at what she does. She was always a fine student even though she had some trouble finding her way. She liked to do jobs like beat the erasers or straighten up the cloakroom and Sadie assigned her these things often in hopes it would build some confidence. Her parents were fine hardworking people, but they were hard on her to succeed, maybe too hard. Some children just can’t take that; some just don’t have the makeup and they need to be handled in a gentler way. Joanna was one of those who always looked like she needed a hug and Sadie was big on hugging. Now they have all kinds of rules about hugging and touching. What on earth would you do with the boys like Bennie Palmer who wanted to hug and kiss everybody? Children used to baaaa when Joanna came in the classroom and there were some who wanted to make her always sit beside Bo Henderson, a tiny boy with a terrible stutter, who some of the children who had not grown out of being mean called Bbbbo Ppppeep. He turned out fine, too—went to a school that broke down and rebuilt his voice, grew to be over six feet tall, started selling high end real estate and now could buy and sell most every one of those who were cruel to him. People say Joanna has been married too many times to count, but Sadie does not like idle gossip and never has, besides, what does it really matter. She knows how Joanna treats her and that is all the business of hers it is. Some people struggle harder than others and that has always been true. Take a classroom of eight-year-olds. Some will be good readers and not mind a bit standing and performing. Others cannot put any expression into it because they are having to concentrate so hard on the pronunciation of each and every word. Then some could be fine readers but are so frightened to be looked at and on and on. “Each child moves in his own way,” she often told parents. “My job is to help that child find his natural speed and not to pit him against another.”
She tried to teach her children to be positive—to dream but to also do it with their feet on the ground. If you let loose that balloon, you will lose sight of it, she said. The best way to enjoy it is to hold tight to the string and plant your feet on a good solid path. She thinks now that maybe part of why she was so happy and positive is because she saw so much that was not good. She got to be quite good at figuring out which children were neglected at home, but then she was never sure what to do with that information except to love them a little more, hold them close whenever the opportunity allowed. Sometimes it was hard to be cordial to parents she suspected of misdeeds, and it was hard not to quiz the children a little too much. People think it’s a problem of economics, but that is not always true at all. There can be just as much neglect and abuse in a big fine house with professional parents as out in the trailer park. Alcohol is alcohol and meanness is meanness. An eight-year-old heart is just an innocent eight-year-old heart—fragile and wanting.
In the classroom, she often told stories about her own household and she painted pictures of all that should happen in a home, the good things people should strive to possess. Eight is a good age for this. They are bright-eyed and know so much, but they are still such babies in so many ways. She told how she apologized to her son after falsely accusing him of eating the last cookie. It was eaten by the plumber, who happened to mention it, or she might have forever thought her son was lying and he would have thought she falsely accused him, teaching him a terrible lesson way too young in life. Old-fashioned stories with little morals were great in the classroom. She got tired of all the younger teachers coming through and saying how old-fashioned she was because she still believed in dictionaries and manners. And she didn’t like the shift away from just good old pencils and paper and regular spelling tests. She hated this creative spelling mess. She loved cursive and phonics. For years her favorite thing was the lessons in cursive—taking children from a world of boxy print letters to beautiful script. It was like teaching a language and suddenly notes home and envelopes in their mailboxes didn’t seem so foreign and foreboding. Learning and facing language teaches children to learn and face other things as well, and no, she didn’t learn the computer with only one more year before her retirement. The typewriter and overhead projector were just fine to get her to the finish line of a long and lovely race.
Of course, who writes anymore? She has a whole box of letters from her husband, each a little masterpiece, at least to her it is. She taught her own children the importance of a handwritten note or tried to. And she loved spending time on manners. Those boys busting to be first in line. Slow down! she would say. There’s no fire! But it was like they couldn’t help themselves, like those jumping-bean bodies were on fire and she was constantly needing to remind them to use their indoor voices as opposed to the outdoor voices. She said that all the time and still does. There are people here at Pine Haven who constantly need to be told to use their indoor voices, not to touch or invade the space of their neighbors and to please slow down. Where is the fire? she asks Stanley Stone all the time when he goes tearing down the hall to be first at the cafeteria. Please, just tell me where’s the fire. Of course, poor Stanley is not the best example since his mind is so far gone. But at least he is on foot. It’s those in wheelchairs, like herself, who are so dangerous when they pick up speed. Please use your manners, she often says. Were you raised in a barn?
There was a time when a child who squirmed too much in class was thought to have worms, but now they call it ADD.
“Worms?” little Abby asked one day when Sadie told this, and Toby had to tell the full tale of how childrens’ bottoms had to get checked at night with a flashlight to see if they had the pinworms.
“Not in Boston, they didn’t,” Rachel Silverman said, and that tickled everybody good. Someone Sadie worked with in the schools used to say to children right there before the others, You need to have your bottom checked, and you know that child was likely embarrassed to death. Even an overly confident child would have to find that humiliating. Sadie told the woman that she thought that was a very unkind way to handle the problem. She was the same woman who taught what an improper fraction was by first making the smallest boy in the class, Edward Tyner, sit on her lap, and she would say “proper” and then she’d turn and sit on top of him and say “improper.” The children, of course, thought it was hilarious, yet Edward never did do very well in life and Sadie has always thought this was likely a factor in that. Sadie has always tried to observe a code of ethics and manners.
Mom, her youngest son, Paul, had said years ago, please fart just once so we know you aren’t an alien. They were in the kitchen; he was working on homework and she was frying country-style steak. He was so full of himself and got away with so much because he was the baby. Horace would have been home any minute and she would have heard his car and seen Honey go running. Oh, she would love to see his face and feel him beside her; that is the most wonderful thing that could happen. Sometimes, she can feel him there. Sometimes when she is almost asleep she will feel his head heavy on her shoulder and his breath on her neck.
Who said aliens don’t also break wind? she asked, and Paul screamed with laughter. They called her Ann Landers because she often referred to some bit of good common sense of advice she had read there. “Wonder if Ann Landers farts,” Paul said. It is hard to believe a boy so obsessed with body sounds and what he could mine in his nose has grown up to be an ophthalmologist, but he has, and she has his picture right there on her dresser with his wife, Phoebe, and their beautiful babies. They live on the West Coast, which is where Phoebe is from, and they always send her lots and lots of pictures. One time they sent a package that got wet, and when she opened it one picture had stuck to another, and when she carefully pulled them apart it was like a double exposure. The picture of her youngest grandson had somehow wound up there in a picture of Paul and Phoebe on their anniversary trip to Europe. He had stayed with her right there in Fulton, North Carolina, but the picture said he was in Paris, France. And there is such power in what you see that way. She said, Look, he’s in Paris with his mom and dad and that is what—all these years later—gave her the whole idea for her business, which she calls Exposure. It was so hard not to believe what she saw right there before her eyes.
The business was suggested to her by Joanna, who sometimes comes to visit after she has left the nursing wing where she has helped someone cross over. She has told Sadie that some days—especially with those she has grown close to—she has to reenter life slowly, like someone coming up from a deep dive slowly so she won’t get the bends. “I get it,” Sadie was able to say. “I know what you mean.” Lord, the bends. She has learned so much from that crazy Paul that she wouldn’t know otherwise. He loves to scuba dive and he has jumped from a plane, too, which scares her to this minute to imagine so she never thinks about that, and if her mind tries to, she conjures up little Rudy with his scruffy flat face and maybe sings a song in her head. Lots of times all she can think is those instrumental songs from that album Stanley Stone plays all day long each and every day, an album that was popular back when her kids were little, Herb somebody or another, loud drum beats and lots of horns. It gets stuck in your head and won’t go away—catchy songs that make her want to sip a highball or smoke a cigarette—things she has only done a couple of times in her whole life.
Stanley Stone suggested Sadie call her business Indecent Exposure, and of course she politely told him she would do no such thing. It is hard to watch him decline so and she goes the extra mile to be kind and courteous. She has known him her whole adult life—a highly intelligent and respectable man—who now late in his life says all kinds of things—ugly things—the kinds of things you would hear teaching junior high school, which she did once in 1965 and then went running and begging to be placed back with her third graders.
“There’s a lot in this place that is indecent and needs to be exposed,” Stanley said one day when they heard that one of the Barker sisters had been drugged so she didn’t wake up for eighteen hours. “And I am not talking about old breasts and asses. I’m talking about laziness, negligence, and incompetence.” He sounded just like a lawyer and then all of a sudden he looked at his poor son, Ned, who has had enough troubles of his own, and threatened to expose himself right there in the dining room. The only person who laughed was Toby Tyler, but she laughs at just about everything. Toby taught school her whole adult life, too, so often they talk about the classroom even though Toby taught high school English and coached field hockey as well as drove an activity bus. Toby grew up in South Carolina but chose to retire here because she threw a dart at a map of Georgia and the Carolinas with the idea she would go wherever it said. Her given name was not Toby, but she gave it to herself because she said that as a child she always wished she could just run off and join the circus. She said at first she just pretended she was related to the real Toby Tyler since they shared a last name, but then one day she thought, Why don’t I just be him? She said as soon as she changed her name, she felt so much better.
Sadie told her that’s what her business is all about. She invites people to bring in their photographs and make a wish, maybe talk about something that might’ve happened but didn’t or a place someone might’ve visited but hadn’t. There is a power in what you see. Seeing is believing. Bennie Palmer, who without a doubt is her very favorite student from all of her years teaching, still comes to see her and they talk about such things. He is a skillful magician and has been since he was a child and he also works as manager of the movie theater even though his wife is eager for him to do otherwise. He was in the same class as Joanna Lamb and he was as loud and cute as a button as she was quiet and kind of lost. Now he seems lost and she is confident, though neither of them fully memorized the opening of the Gettysburg Address as they were supposed to do. Only two children in all her years mastered that whole first part. One is a bank president in Omaha, Nebraska, and came to see her when in town for his mother’s funeral, and the other was a girl who got pregnant and dropped out in the tenth grade, a beautiful girl who just never had a chance coming out of the kind of squalor she lived in. It would break your heart to see and know what some children come from. Bennie, or Ben they call him now, has a daughter, Abby, who also visits all the time. She is an angel, looks just like him and is such a nice girl. It’s hard to say the same for his wife. The wife is that kind of girl who will cheat on a test or steal something from another child’s desk and then act very haughty if she gets caught, no sense of right or wrong or moral guilt. It is clear that Bennie is not very happy and he needs to talk about it more than he does, but that’s a boy for you; a boy will hold in so much bad stuff sometimes until it makes him sick to his stomach, and Sadie believes wholeheartedly that our society is to blame for that. If people would let little boys spend more time with the dress-up clothes and doll babies, it would help, but even Horace was funny about all that, not really enjoying when Paul used to like to wear an apron and rock his sister’s Betsy Wetsy.
Sometimes she and Bennie talk about the things that happened about a hundred years ago when he was in the third grade, but usually they just talk about how they both create illusions and how this can make a person who is feeling sad feel a little better. Sadie believes that this is the conversation that might lead him to open up his heart one of these days soon.
This is her craft and it is the craft she started when everyone else was doing scrapbooks. The most famous scrapbook at Pine Haven is that of Mrs. Marge Walker who keeps a murder and crime scrapbook. Her husband was a judge for years and years and so it all comes natural to her she says, just like Lorice Boone believes she is the best haircutter because her father was a barber. Lorice had a booming business among those who are out of touch with reality until management confiscated her scissors. Rachel Silverman is the one who reported her after seeing her snip away the waist-length braids of someone on the nursing wing without asking. Sadie wanted to ask why Rachel was even way over there in that part of the building, but she hasn’t yet. Rachel is very secretive about her comings and goings and has to be treated with great care. There was always at least one child in class who needed this kind of extra attention. They appear so strong and tough and yet you know there is a tender place just aching to be healed—so tenderhearted you could tap with a knife and it would fall right off the bone.
“You have to stop her,” Rachel said when reporting Lorice. “Otherwise this place is going to look like Auschwitz.”
Stanley Stone said he’d never heard of Auschwitz and asked was that the new grocery store out on Highway 211, and Rachel Silverman raised her open hand like she might slap him and then said something about him being a g-d demented idiot, marched into her apartment, and slammed the door so hard that the plaque with her name on it fell off.
“I did a good thing,” Lorice told management when they came to take her scissors. “She looks a sight better with a haircut.” Lorice pointed to the woman who was dozing in the solarium, not a hair on her head longer than a half an inch. If the woman had family that ever visited, Sadie suspects they’d be upset, but as far as she knows, no one has visited that woman in years. Lorice said the sisters, especially Vanessa, had never minded if she cut their hair, especially if she gave them cookies. Rachel Silverman had made Daisy, the other sister, cry one day, saying she did not want to crochet or buy or eat a g-d cookie, and then Sadie explained to her that the sisters are sweet as can be, would never hurt a flea, which is why they allow Lorice to do their hair in the first place, and so now Rachel is so good to them, always buying those crocheted Oreos and Fig Newtons and then slipping them back into Daisy’s bag when she’s not looking so she can sell them again.
Rachel Silverman says she has no family either, which makes it easy to make all kinds of big decisions. Sadie is getting closer to her, no doubt about it, like luring a stray cat or dog into your home. Rachel is not very trusting and you can see it. People get old, but in the eyes they might as well be eight—always they are about eight—and so Sadie is well versed in eight-year-old fear. She knows the heart of eight-year-olds and believes when all is said and done and hard times come, that’s how old we are in the heart—forever eight years old. She used to love to set up the abacus at the front of the room and have children tell what they know of their lives one bead at a time. Holding to the little round wooden bead gave them confidence as they spoke the facts of their lives. I was born in Hamlet. I have a sister and a dog. I love grits. I hate mayonnaise. Things like that. They loved seeing the beads accumulate, transferring over to the ten spot. It was a lesson in math and English. It was a lesson in socializing.
Marge Walker is the only person Sadie has difficulty socializing with. Marge is lately fixated on the way people are stealing copper wiring out of air-conditioning units, most recently a church in town, and she is quite certain the Mexicans have done it. Mexicans or coloreds. She says all this loud as the PA system at school and there sits any number of people of different races from different places.
“How stupid is that?” Rachel asked in a loud voice, and Sadie was the only one who returned her gaze. She allowed eye contact, which said, I am listening to you. I am hearing what you say and I am in agreement. Sadie bets it won’t be anytime at all before Rachel shows up with a picture or two, and if it turns out she doesn’t have photos either, it’s no problem at all. For those who have no pictures—as sad as that is, it is sometimes true—well, Sadie has a Polaroid camera her oldest son sent her and so she takes the photo herself and then puts the person on a backdrop of a particular place. She put the woman who got all her hair cut off (before it all got cut off) out on the grandstrand on a beautiful sunny day pictured in Southern Living. She used her Sharpies to turn the wheelchair into a beautiful red beach chair and then added a little yellow sand pail as if the woman might get up and go hunt for shells any minute.
Paul said to slow down on the film, it’s getting hard to replace and thus very expensive. He says he will teach her how to “do digital and print,” which she has no idea about, but Abby does. Twelve years old and the child knows all about digital and print and all sorts of other things you might plug in that Sadie has never heard of. What will you do when the power goes out? Sadie has asked her, but nobody seems too worried about that. Sadie’s children all send her travel magazines and such and call so many times during the week she can’t keep up with it all. Paul wants her to move to where he is, but no, she keeps saying no; she says Horace is next door and this is her home. She did not tell them where to move and live and they owe her the same consideration. Paul is stubborn and keeps trying, but in the meantime he just reads every word of her monthly bill from Pine Haven, makes phone calls and asks lots of questions as she taught him to do and, of course, best of all, sends pictures of the children and all the brochures from conventions and retreats for ophthalmologists so she can send a customer anywhere in the world. There was even one trip advertised to go down the Amazon and she pulled it out to show Benjamin and Abby just the other day because he knows that The African Queen is one of her very favorite movies and he has promised to bring a copy for her to watch someday soon. Toby saw that photo and claimed it immediately because her whole room is decorated with her travels around the world, compliments of Exposure and Sadie’s skill as an illusionist, which is what Ben calls her. Just yesterday she took Stanley Stone’s photo and put him in the ring with a wrestler man he called the Undertaker, a horrible-looking big man with long stringy hair and ghoulish eyes. His picture was in a wrestling magazine Stanley’s son, Ned, had brought to him hidden in a bag. She doesn’t blame him a bit for hiding it.
“Stanley, how is Ned doing?” she asked while cutting and gluing.
“Okay, I guess. He’s teaching at your old school—weren’t you at Sandhills Elementary?”
“I was indeed except that one year they sent me to junior high. Forty years at Sandhills,” she said, so relieved to feel like the old Stanley was back. He was relaxed in the chair, his eyes closed. “You know, isn’t it funny how in life our paths didn’t cross too much. I mean if you needed a hammer, you went to our store, and I suspect if we’d needed your kind of legal advice we would have gone to you.” She had to pause to carefully cut out the Undertaker, who was so ugly it was frightening. He was one who might be served well to run into Lorice with her scissors, that stringy old mess of hair and Stanley is starting to look a little unkempt himself, though she is not quite ready to tell him that. “But we went to different churches and between my teaching and doing all I did at home, I didn’t venture very far so I really never knew Martha at all except to say hello at the store. I didn’t get to teach Ned; he was in Renee Bingham’s class, but I recall all the children saying how he made everybody laugh.”
“He was definitely the class clown. He had a hard time in those early years.” Stanley opened an eye and then it was like a switch flipped and something blew into him, and he sat up and started talking about the wrestling event he was going to have right there in the common room. He shook his fist and all signs of nice Stanley were gone. “I’m gonna take somebody out,” he said, and she waved her hand, tried to see if she couldn’t lure him back to where he had been. It just breaks her heart to see him this way. Sadie grew up with Stanley’s older sister, but he was several years younger so they ran in different circles. Still he was a person people heard about. “I remember when people were talking about you getting married. First in your law school class and marrying a beautiful girl from northern Virginia. People said how lucky Martha was to meet such a smart and handsome fellow and they hoped she was good enough for you.” Sadie hates when people say such things, but they really did say that at the time and she thought he would like to hear such a fine compliment about himself. “You were the golden prize of this town, Stanley. They said you were Phi Beta Kappa and the best dancer in your fraternity house.”
“I danced the hootchie kootchie nekked every chance I got,” he said. “And the girls sure did like that.” He stood and acted like he might unbuckle his pants, but Sadie held one hand up and shielded her eyes with the other. She used her best teacher voice and told him to sit down and behave that very instant or he would be sent home and not allowed to return. When she looked up he was seated again and staring down at his fists.
“What I was saying is how I was thinking that we’re neighbors all over again but this time we seem to speak and talk more than we ever did in our other lives.”
“Yes.” He was calm again and so Sadie waited a long time as he sat and seemed to relax. Her ceiling fan clicked and clacked and sometimes what she hears it say is I think I can, I think I can just like the Little Engine That Could. Now that is a powerful message for children to hear and learn. Where do people think the president got it in the first place? Yes we can is just another way to say what the little engine said a long long time ago. Most everything worth saying has already been said so the trick is to make it sound new, something a child will find interesting or funny.
“I miss my other life,” she told Stanley, and worked to arrange the Undertaker’s hands so it looks like he’s choking Stanley, which is what Stanley requested. “I miss my kitchen and my black-and-white linoleum floor. My children liked to play hopscotch there. Roger would get a beach towel and throw it over a chair to make himself a little Indian tepee and he would always sit cross-legged and run his Matchbox cars round and round it while making cute little sounds and talking to himself. Do you remember your little Ned at that age? The way a child will make all sorts of sounds with their teeth and their tongues, sounds that nobody else is following.”
“I do.”
“I move room to room through my old house. I see the brightness of a late afternoon. I hear the rumble of the air-conditioning there in the window in the den, what these days they call a family room, which sounds nice, too. I see the hollyhocks at my window, tall and staked upright with their big powder-puff blooms and then just as suddenly I might smell the fire in the fireplace and hear Horace chopping wood. Do it, Stanley. Close your eyes and start wandering.” She waited until he closed his eyes and then she continued; she couldn’t wait to get back. “You will be amazed at what all you can see, how the seasons change, the light and temperature and then people come into the room and you hear the sweet voices of your young children or I smell the cologne I wore for almost twenty years—a gift from Horace every Christmas—Shalimar—just the word made me feel important. One day when a little girl—Susie Otis there in bright-colored dungarees—told me I smelled so good, I had the whole room say Shalimar. Shalimar, and they waved their hands like they held magic wands. I can smell the grilled cheese sandwiches my kids loved for me to make. I cut them in the shape of stars and hearts and I let Goldie wolf down the scraps.
“Sometimes it snows. It gets so quiet and beautiful in the snow. Horace is always there when it snows.
“And sometimes I hear Horace clear his throat. I see him pat his chest for heartburn. He said it was just a little heartburn. Oh, why didn’t I know? So many people get the heartburn and especially at Thanksgiving with all that food. Oh, why didn’t I know it? I have to get past that, I have to tiptoe past him, I have to get back to a good place and oh my goodness, there is that silly, silly Paul wearing a costume I made him one Halloween. He’s a sea monkey. All he wanted to be was a sea monkey and I made him a funny merman looking suit complete with a scepter and a crown, and there I am right there in front of Horace’s mother’s old upright piano. I am holding his little hand and telling him that he is the best little sea monkey there ever was. Yes you are, oh yes you are, sweetheart. Lord, would you look at what shoes I’m wearing! I haven’t thought of those in years. Bandolinos. Everybody thought it was something to have an Italian shoe being sold right here in Fulton and they had little different-colored straps trimming them out, otherwise it would have just been another plain old Mary Jane. They were soft. Mine were black with red straps and I always wore them when I had cafeteria duty because they were so comfortable and I could slip up on somebody doing something he ought not to be, like dotting his milk straw into his beets so he could shoot out little purple cubes at the girl beside him. Oh, Lordy, what a mess. I need to get back home and there I am back in the den and our little breakfast nook. A lot of people don’t like pine paneling, but I do. I love it. My children saw all kinds of things there in the knotholes—so creative. There was a deer and a little elf. I’m not sure why, but our daughter, Lynnette, always called that elf Doo-Doo and she was scared of him and would say at almost every meal for about a year, “Doo-Doo is watching me.” Sadie paused, remembering where she really is—Pine Haven, wheelchair, Stanley Stone across from her. This has started to happen more and more. It takes a minute to know where she is. She opened her eyes, expecting him to roar out some nasty expletive as he often does in the dining room if anyone mentions anything to do with body functions. But instead his eyes were filled with tears, his mouth opened in a silent cry. “Oh, Stanley, I’m so sorry.” She has always known how to comfort others, but she didn’t know what to do with somebody like Stanley—an intelligent, prosperous, and independent man who probably never cried in front of others in his whole life.
“I had an ugly brown car Ned called Doo-Doo,” he said, and they both laughed, Sadie relieved that the word hadn’t taken him off in the wrong direction and that she wouldn’t need to find a way to give him a hug or a comforting pat. “And remember that guy they called Doo-Doo Pendergraft? Ran the Gulf station?” She did indeed. Doo-Doo was in her class in school and so was Boobs Walters and Goat Baumgarten. She laughed to say all those names, to imagine what somebody from out of town, like Rachel, would think.
“I miss my toolshed,” Stanley said. “That’s where I went when you started talking and asked me to imagine. Ned once painted the walls without asking, he painted his name and he painted an airplane.” He sat forward and put his face in his hands. “He loved when we played airplane. I’d lie on my back and he’d hold my hands and press his stomach against my feet, and then up, up, I’d lift and he’d hold out his arms and make engine sounds.”
“Children love to paint,” Sadie said. “And they all love to fly.”
“I made him scrub the walls of my shed and then paint it all white,” he says. “I’m pretty sure I took a belt to him for not asking.”
“But he turned out really fine, Stanley. A fine boy.” She watched him slump forward again, his face hidden and shoulders shaking. “He hit a rough patch, but most of us do.” She was rolling toward him, her hand outstretched, but then he sat up so fast with an awful glare on his face that it made her drop her glue stick.
“But not as fine as the goddamned Undertaker,” he said. “This ain’t the Sistine Chapel, woman, get the lead out.”
“I take my art seriously,” Sadie said, her hand to her chest, still catching her breath. “I don’t do cheap and sloppy work and I never have, so if you are feeling impatient, perhaps you should take a recess and let me get back to you.” She pointed to her glue stick where it had rolled under a table. “And pick that up before you excuse yourself.”
“Hell, you got a whole line of people in the hall waiting for some idiot picture.”
“And I will see them all and I will do so with polite kindness.”
“Don’t you get tired of this shit? Don’t you want something for yourself?”
“Of course I do. I have a whole scrapbook of me.” She reached her hand for him to hand her the glue stick and then carefully went back to work, applying a thin line and then gently blending it. She blew to help dry the glue and then handed him his picture much sooner than she normally would. “Hold the edges or you’ll ruin it. I could show you sometime—my pictures.”
“Yeah, all right, whatever.”
“The first one I ever did was to put myself with my mother. She died when I was four. I only have a few pictures of her so she looks just the same every single time, but I keep getting older and bigger until now, there I am with my beautiful mother and I look like her grandmother. Isn’t that funny? I always try to fix it so we’re holding hands.” She looks up, but he is gone and the clock on the wall says it is ten o’clock, which is milk break at school. It costs three cents a carton and she keeps a jar on her desk to pay for those who forget their money. The note on the wall says not to forget to go to lunch. Do not forget. Do not forget. But Stanley left and then there was Toby wearing those cute puffy boots she loves to wear. She is traveling the world and already has pictures of herself in Rome and London and Paris and Tel Aviv and of course the Amazon and the Taj Mahal and she has even been on the moon with Neil Armstrong. This one is tricky, though. Toby warns Sadie that her new request is likely to be hard. She is taking a break from traveling and wants to do all kinds of different sports. Today she wants to be a jockey. She has brought beautiful pictures of horses, but the real trick will be taking the Polaroid with her legs all pulled up close and her arms holding the reins. She might need to get up on the footstool or daybed to get the right angle. “How many others do I have in line?” Sadie asks, thinking she might need to make Toby last even though Toby is her very best customer.
“Three.”
Sadie asks them in and their requests are pretty simple and ones she can accept and work on later in the day. One wants to go back to the Ocean Forest Hotel at Myrtle Beach like she did as a child, which will require the assistance of Abby, who can print old things off the computer. She is pretty sure that the Ocean Forest got torn down ages ago, but they will find it or something very similar. Another wants to be in the family portrait of her husband’s family. “It was when his mama turned eighty,” she says, “And it was the best day of my life, but I volunteered to take the picture so it looks like I’m not there and I was there and I want to be back there on the back row between my husband and his brother, Buddy.”
“That’s a tough angle,” Sadie tells her, “could you be on the other side?”
“No. I never got along with his sister and don’t want to stand near her.”
That poor child, Millie, is there, but all she wants is change so Sadie tells her to take what’s there in a little bowl by the door. That’s why the change is there in the first place, but of course she doesn’t tell her that or it would be a constant thing. She handled candy and colored paper clips this same way in her classroom. And then there’s Abby, who says she just wants to curl up in the chair or at the foot of her bed and talk. She loves that child dearly and she loves Benjamin and clearly things at home are getting worse. Clearly his illusions just are not working, and she plans to call him this very day to say that he needs to take better care of his child. You need to put her first, she plans to tell him and she plans to use poor Stanley Stone as an example of a father who did not do a good job and is lucky that Ned got through the trouble alive and is now a kind and prosperous man. She will tell Benjamin how one look on the girl’s face can tell you everything you need to know and she is even older than eight! She is twelve—almost a teenager—and old enough to start hiding behind makeup and music and acting silly and she is doing none of those things. She will tell him it might be now or never.
“I’ll be quiet while you work,” Abby says. Her hair needs to be washed and is yanked back in a lopsided ponytail and the T-shirt she’s wearing is big enough for two people. She is carrying some of those flyers with her lost puppy.
“Of course, sweetie,” she says, and motions over to her bed or the big velvet chair beside it—Horace’s chair. On a good day when she lets her room get a little too warm and humid, she can smell his pipe smoke in the fabric. There are some pistachio shells and an old ballpoint pen down under the cushion that she has not been able to throw away. If only she had found them when he was alive, she would have. But she found them late one night with Rudy on her lap and Johnny Carson on the television and she let them be—relics, touchstones, and even now she will reach and grip the pen or rub the smooth pink shells and the clickety clack of I think I can I think I can becomes Sadie? Sadie? Are you awake?
“Sadie?” Toby waves her plump hand back and forth. “Yoo-hoo, Earth calling Sadie.” She looks over at Abby and they both start laughing. “I can come back later if you’re needing a nap.”
“Heavens no!” she says. “I have never been a napper! I was just thinking about the best way to capture your wish.” She turns to the girl. “And actually I have some work for you if you’re up for it. I need a picture of the Ocean Forest Hotel if you can find it. And if you can’t, just find some big brick building, like in Charleston or Savannah, and we’ll make do. And I need a good picture of what was called the Old Man of the Mountain as a surprise for Joanna Lamb, who mentioned that not too long ago, I think she’s the one said it. It was somewhere way up north and the rock jutted out just like a man’s profile, and it, too, is no longer there.”
“He lost face,” Toby says, and claps her hands; honestly, she has the loudest laugh Sadie has ever heard, could nearly wake those over there in Whispering Pines. “I read about that. Face fell right off the cliff.”
“Oh, and hang the closed sign on the door,” Sadie tells the girl. This is the right thing for now, keep her busy and they can have a little heart to heart talk when it is just the two of them. The cloakroom was always a good place to have a little talk in confidence, sweaters and jackets falling to either side and muffling the words so others couldn’t hear. She once bought a cross-stitch sampler with a quote the real Mama from Little Women liked to say: HOPE AND KEEP BUSY and that was good advice. In fact, she bought it on the same trip when she herself saw the Old Man of the Mountain. The children were little and Horace was alive. She is thinking that she’d like to go back, she’d like to take her mother there, and perhaps if she can go back to that place, with her mother present, she might be able to explain what she was feeling there. Hope and Keep Busy! It was not an easy time and she has not wanted to look at it.
“And then can we talk?” Abby whispers. She looks like she’s been crying.
“Sure, honey.” She watches Abby walk away, each foot in a tile like hopscotch. They will solve this problem and if she has to place a call to the parents she will. She has done this before when it was clear a child needed more than he or she was getting at home. Sometimes she made the principal aware, but other times she did not and just handled it herself.
“How ’bout this?” Toby is squatted up on the footstool and looks every bit like a little gargoyle. She screws up her brow like she’s concentrating and raises her arm where she says Sadie can draw in the little crop with a Sharpie. “Giddyap.”
“Perfect,” Sadie says, and the camera whirrs and out pops Toby squatting on the stool. “This is going to take a while if you need to go do anything.”
“I always have plenty to do,” Toby says. “Yessir, I am one busy woman.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of this shit?” Stanley had asked her. “Don’t you ever want something for yourself?”
How odd what that made her remember. Once, years ago, she went into Fowler’s Grocery. It got torn down a long time ago and Food Lion has been there ever since. Fowler’s had those old dark green linoleum floor tiles and poles with clamps they used to reach things way up on the top shelves. The back area, where the butcher worked, was exposed with a sloping concrete floor covered in sawdust, the smell of which she always associated with Fowler’s, and there was Grover Fowler whom she had known since childhood—tired butcher with bloody hands and a good kind heart. One kind exchange and the shared memory of how they stood side by side in their fourth-grade chapel program made her heart beat faster and something in it all made him flush a deep red and lean down closer to the work he was doing. He was a sweet boy from a hard, rough home, but there on the stage his hair was slicked back and he wore a nice dress shirt and together they sang “You Are My Sunshine” and got a standing ovation from the school. Sadie told this; she didn’t mean to. But there was Toby wide-eyed and listening and Abby was there and Rachel, too.
“Sadie had an affair in the grocery store,” Toby announced, and Sadie said she did no such thing ever in her entire life.
“We did not do anything,” she said. “He was a good boy with a sweet wife who also was in my class.”
“Lusting in your heart,” Toby said, and Rachel added that Jimmy Carter would be proud of her. “You never had to worry about Horace catting around, did you?” Toby asked. The question surprised Sadie, though it shouldn’t by now. If Toby thinks something, she says it.
“I have never allowed myself to imagine such a thing,” she said, and she hoped there was nothing there. If he ever did go up some stairs or into a room he shouldn’t, she would rather not know, especially now. She had wondered once, but then it seemed to pass and so she just let it go and held on to what was good.
“I was the other woman once,” Rachel whispered, and there was a long pause of silence. She looked directly at Sadie and Sadie didn’t dare look away. It’s no different from the child who finally reaches out to hold your hand.
“I would never cast stones,” Sadie said. “You are a fine person.”
“Well, I cast stones,” Toby said, and there was heavy silence again. “But not at you. And not for that!” She nudged Rachel and laughed. “Marge might now.”
“I hope I have to respond to a higher power,” Rachel said.
“Higher IQ, anyway,” Toby laughed, and put something in her mouth up against her gum, snuff no doubt. “I say bless the stupid.”
Sadie pulled Abby up close and hugged her. There was so much she would need to explain to her when all the others went home. Adults do things—even good adults who do not always show good judgment. Now she opens her eyes and Abby is standing there with a sprig of rosemary from Horace. He is so dear and likely will be calling soon.
“It’s getting worse,” Abby tells her. “And Dollbaby still hasn’t come home.” The child leans into Sadie and then is sobbing, her shoulders jerking while Sadie pats her back and tries to get her to calm down. They sit side by side on the sofa and watch television, The Price Is Right, which has been on for centuries, it seems. Her eyes are heavy and now that Abby has calmed down she lets them close for just a minute and then when she wakes, one of those programs where everybody has to endure terrible things—lost babies and evil twins and tuberculosis and such—is on and Abby is gone. It is almost time to go to lunch. Sadie is tired, but she doesn’t have time to stop, not yet; the others need her. I do not have time to die, she once heard Lois Flowers say, not today, and they all laughed. Abby has left a crumpled piece of paper on the table along with a sprig of rosemary from Horace. It is a note written on the back of a Food Lion receipt. Somebody bought some Budweiser and some trash bags, some milk and some Clorox, paper towels. On the back there is a note: You better answer me soon! it says. Terrible penmanship. Cursive, yes, but not done well at all. Sadie never would have allowed such cursive without a slant and the esses so misshapen and there’s Harley, big sweet Harley slinking down the hall. She reaches her hand out and calls to him: Big sweet kitty, big sweet purr. Horace and the kids are going to love him. They will be so surprised. Her mother will love him, too.