It was the first time Norman didn’t come into my room to say goodnight. When I fell asleep, he and Freddie hadn’t even come home yet. At some point in the night, Martha crawled into my bed. I woke up with my face pressed to the back of her nightgown. She didn’t stir when I slipped my feet onto the floor.
I took my sketch pad and pencils downstairs to do my morning exercises. Martha’s bedroom door was shut. There was a pair of ladies’ brown lace-ups at the foot of the stairs. Freddie’s car was parked out front. Norman was in the kitchen reading the newspaper, his finger following the line. His knuckles were red-raw.
I opened my sketch pad to a clean page and sat there looking at it for a while. Then I pushed it away and crossed my arms on the table and rested my head on my arms, and my eyes drifted back to Norman’s hands. I thought about how Johnny seemed all grown up when he was only twelve and what David had said about how him seeming bigger when I was smaller. That’s what artists call perspective. How things look depends on the angle you’re looking from. But there’s another kind of perspective, like how Mama says that hindsight is twenty-twenty. I think that means things seem a lot clearer when they’re in the past. Makes me wonder how far away you have to be from something before you can see it.
His father’s been beating the tar out of him.
I raised my head. “Norman?”
“Bean.”
“Where’s Freddie?”
“Dropped him off last night so’s we could borrow the car today.”
“Did you bring back Aunt Izzie?”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
“Thought it would be nice for Mama to have her sister around, seeing as how she’s got a few more weeks to go with that cast.”
“How did you hurt your hand?”
Norman glanced at his knuckles. “Banged it on the doorframe when I was taking out the suitcase. Your brother shouldn’t let an old geezer like me do the lifting.”
“Norman?”
“Hey?”
“I think you been lying to me.”
Norman looked up from his paper, then folded it and set it next to his coffee cup. He reached across the table. His palm felt rough on my arm. “Oh, Bean.”
“Why did you go get Aunt Izzie?”
“Well. Things have been rough for her lately.”
“Because of Uncle Ezra?”
“That’s right.”
“And with Johnny gone off?”
“Ach,” said Norman. “Course you know. I guess I should have figured, eh? I don’t know why we think we can make things easier on you kids.”
“You didn’t tell the others, either?”
Norman shook his head. “Just your brother. A few days ago.” That made me feel a little better. As better as you can feel when the worst thing possible turns out to be the stone-cold truth. “It’s a hard situation. Your mother and I, we were hoping it would work itself out.”
“Why didn’t he tell anyone where he was going?”
Norman shook his head. “That’s not for me to say. But, you know, there’s a lot of people who don’t have an easy time of growing up.”
Like Norman himself. And David. I thought about what Norman had said about how a person’s never quite right when they lose their mother so young. Mama had lost her mother young, too.
“I’d forgotten that Uncle Ezra could be rough sometimes,” I said. “Mama said that Granddad could be rough after he took to the bottle, but he still had a healthy respect for God.”
Norman didn’t say anything for a long while. His lips were working a bit, like they were trying on different words. Finally, he said, “Your uncle has a healthy respect for the bottle.”
He picked up his coffee cup and took it to the sink. “I know you want to understand better than I’m telling you, Bean, but I don’t want you asking your aunt about this. It’s her private business until she makes it someone else’s. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my good girl. Now look, I got to check the warehouse, then I’m taking the rest of the day off. How do you like that?”
“I think that’s maybe the first time you ever did.”
Norman checked his watch. “Tell you what. You get yourself into some outside clothes without disturbing your sister, and I’ll show you something.”
Norman always worked at least a half day on Saturdays. Sometimes he drove the company truck to the warehouse to make sure everything was okay there. Today, we took Freddie’s car. After he undid the padlock, Norman hauled open the big doors. He reached up into a cranny and took down a light bulb and he screwed the light bulb into the fixture hanging down over the doors.
Inside, blinking back at us, were cats, everywhere, curled up among the bags of seed and peat and fertilizer. They stretched and yawned while Norman took the lid off a barrel and pulled out a bag of food. He put the food in little cardboard crates that had been stacked beside the door.
“I thought you didn’t like cats,” I said. “You shoot at Mrs. Hewitt’s when they get into the garden.”
“These are working cats. They keep the mice down.”
The cats came down from their perches and the bolder ones swirled around our legs. My heart just about broke when the kittens ventured out, with their tiny ears and tiny, pink-padded toes and tiny mews.
“Can’t we take one home?” I begged when Norman had finished his rounds. I had a kitten in each hand, their tiny hearts beating against my palms.
“Why do you think I never bring you down here?” Norman chuckled. “You know they’ll make your sister’s asthma worse.”
“We can’t just leave them.”
“You see any dead cats? It’s not like we force ’em to live here. But you can choose one for your friend.”
“Who? . . . David?”
I guess it was clear enough from my face that David and I’d had another fight.
“Pick a good mouser. And then you take it over to him and see if that don’t smooth things over.”
I surveyed the kittens. Three of them tumbled around together by the food barrel. Another slept on an empty burlap sack, and a little tabby leaned against Norman’s shoe. Then I spied a black-and-white one pouncing on a hose. I picked him up, and when I went to snuggle him, he batted my glasses with his feet.
“You’re our boy.” I laughed. “Like to see you take on a Flynn, though.”
I took him out to Freddie’s car while Norman put the food crates away. Just before he unscrewed the light bulb, he reached down and scooped up the little tabby that had followed him to the door.
“People need a little company in this world,” he said, reaching through the car window to put the tabby next to the scrapper on my lap.
Which is true enough. Even though, strictly speaking, cats aren’t people.
After we got home we left the kittens in the car until I could find a basket or something to put them in. Soon as we passed between the front hedges, we could hear Mama and Martha inside. Laughing. We followed the sound into the kitchen, where Martha had her head down on the table, shoulders shaking, and Mama’s face was buried in her apron. Aunt Izzie was pouring tea with one hand and wiping her eyes with the other. She was the same height as Mama, but where Mama’s hair was white, Aunt Izzie’s was steel-grey. Her skin was darker and she had the same brown eyes as the rest of us and she was heavy and sturdy but softer-looking than Mama. And when she came over and put her arms around me, she had a smell that was half spice, half flowers.
“It’s like looking in a mirror!” she said when she saw me. “A mirror that’s forty years old!” She laughed a raspy laugh that yanked the corners of my mouth in all directions. “Look at you! Grown up!” She spun me round and hugged me tight. “Norman, this can’t be your Bean.”
“I should have been calling her Sprout, eh?”
“Hewo,” I muffled into Aunt Izzie’s housedress, my glasses smushed into my face.
When I was able to look at her again, I saw that her eyes were leaking tears. “I get from A to Zed so fast these days,” she said, wiping her face again.
“Good Lord, she’s not a piece of dough,” Mama scolded as Aunt Izzie turned me around for the fifth time. “Stop manhandling the poor girl.”
“We’re old hens, Lily. You can’t boss your baby sister,” Aunt Izzie said. “All right, fine. Norman, we’d better get to those errands. We got to prepare for a certain someone’s birthday tomorrow, and no one’s going to neglect the youngest’s big day on my watch. Now that I’m here to keep your mother from serving her vanilla cake, it’ll be a real party!”
The stone walk leading up to the Flynns’ house had little bits of clover growing in the cracks. As I got closer—as slowly as I could manage without taking any backwards steps—I saw the white paint around the front windows was chipping. Underneath were cheerful pink, red, and orange flowers planted in tidy rows.
David opened the door before I even knocked.
“What are you doing here?”
“That’s not very polite,” I said.
“Oh. It’s just you never come over before.”
I pulled back the towel covering the old milk crate I was carrying and thrust the crate towards him. “I heard you like kittens for breakfast.”
The moment I said it, I caught a whiff of something sweet—wild strawberries, maybe—carried on the breeze.
That made me think of jam.
And jam made me think of the jelly cupboard inside the Flynn house.
And the jelly cupboard made me think of how really dumb Marcy could be sometimes.
“You got cats? That’s a bad joke.”
“I know. Sorry. I’m sorry,” I said. “They’re for you. The Nelson Seed warehouse is full of them and Norman was thinking you could use a good mouser. Or two. What’s the matter? You don’t like cats?”
“No. I mean, I like them fine. I’ll have to ask my dad if it’s okay.”
“Okay.”
David took the milk crate from me and stepped out of the house, closing the door behind him. “It’s not too clean in there,” he said. “You need a woman for that, I guess. There’s just my Aunt Eileen, sometimes, when she comes up from the Valley.”
We sat down on the stoop. David’s neck was flushed where his hair curled above his shirt collar. He put his hand in the crate to scratch the little tabby under her chin. She closed her eyes and purred. The little scrapper was trying to chew off David’s cuff.
“That one’s Flynn,” I said. “Haven’t named the other one.”
“Flynn Flynn?”
And just like that, the fight was broken.
I told David about Aunt Izzie arriving in the night and what Norman had told me that morning. “Strange about Martha walking by the shipyard, then,” I said. “I wonder what she was doing down there.”
“You’ll have to ask her,” David said. “Where do you think Norman’s taking your aunt?”
“Errands, I think.”
“Anywhere else?”
“Where else?”
“Think about it. Did Norman tell you he didn’t know where Johnny is?”
I whacked David on his knee. “You think Norman’s taking Aunt Izzie down to the shipyard? You think they’re gonna see Johnny?”
“Dunno. Gotta wonder, though.”
“What should we do? Should we—let’s go down there!”
“Hold up, hold up. I told your dad I’d stack firewood today and I’m gonna. Besides, maybe what he’s thinking is they’re going to bring your cousin back.”
“For my birthday!”
“It’s your birthday?”
Sometimes a person can pour a big bucket of shame over her head all by herself. I never thought to invite David to my birthday dinner.
“It’s tomorrow.”
“That’s it then. But I suppose they gotta wrap him up first. Put a little bow on his perfect little head. Or what did you call it? His dark-black-night-dark hair?”
“Hey!”
“Hey, yourself. I got firewood to get to.”
David stomped down the steps, flattening the clover, the kittens bouncing inside the milk crate tucked under his arm.
“Just shows!” I yelled. “You can take the Gravedigger out of the cemetery, but you can’t take the grave . . . or the, the . . .”
I took my time walking back to the house.