We left Daisy alone the rest of the winter. Spring came late.
Doc’s beard still grew, untrimmed, his hair long and uncombed. He’d sold the printing factory in the country for far less than it was worth, and he had begun work on converting the newspaper offices into his little shop of oddities. He’d been inspired by a store in Kansas City that sold drawers full of porcelain doorknobs and tin coffee cans full of drawer pulls and a few faulty-wired vintage lamps that didn’t light but could hold candlesticks beneath their stained-glass shades. He planned to call the shop the County Paragraph and sell off the newspaper’s history as art—its brass and wood-block letters and numbers from printing presses; old pages of advertisements and comic strips suitable for framing.
He took me for a tour of these offices I’d known all my life. I leaned on my umbrella and stepped forward, puzzling over the architecture. The owner of the hardware store on the other side of the town square had been helping nights to build new walls and knock out old ones.
Doc’s enthusiasm for the project had rendered him incapable of feeling any guilt of any kind. He’d given his former employees severance pay; he’d arranged for some of our writers to freelance with other newspapers. He’d attended to his conscience all he’d felt he’d needed to.
“I want to show you these,” he said, but as he fussed with a box, my attention was drawn to the trash can. Atop the overflow sat a very unexceptional shaving brush resting in a useless, broken mug. The brush had a tortoiseshell handle, and its bristles were of boar’s hair. I knew because it had been my father’s, and I had bought it for him. I’d given it as a birthday gift one year so that he could shave at the office when the news kept him from coming home at night or took him from the house before dawn. The gift had had manipulative intent; I’d meant to cause a pang of regret. I’d meant for him to toss the mug and brush away upon first sight, to take me in his arms, and to apologize for always putting the paper first, always rushing off to follow runaways, houses afire, public drunkenness, devastating storms rapidly approaching. Instead, he’d thought me practical.
“Glass-plate negatives,” Doc said, taking one from the box and holding it up to a stream of light from the front window. “This one’s of an old baseball team. Look at their socks.”
“Yes, look at their socks,” I said, looking down at my shoes. All the revisions to these walls and floors I’d known for decades made me nervous and claustrophobic. One good blast from a sparkler bomb and the whole shoddy operation would shatter into twigs.
I shrugged. “Well, I’m off,” I said. “I have a cake turning to poison in the pickup.” From the bakery down the street I’d bought strawberry angel food with a seven-minute frosting, its peaks whipped from real egg whites, tempting salmonella.
The late-winter months had been so harsh—blizzard after blizzard, the same dirty drifts thick in our yards and streets for weeks—that these early hints of summer had brought everyone out, especially the children. They fled from their houses and schoolrooms with a vengeance, racing their bikes down the middle of streets and covering every inch of pavement with chalk drawings. On the sidewalk in front of the newspaper offices, I opened my umbrella, though there’d only been clouds, no rain. As I walked away, I stepped through the squares of a hopscotch grid.
“You’re not going to be able to stay mad at me about all this,” Doc said from where he leaned in the doorway.
“I’m already not mad at you,” I said. Standing within the end square, I pivoted on the ball of my right foot to turn to him. “But I don’t much care for the direction that beard’s going, to be honest.”
“Just so happens, I’m cutting it off.” He nonetheless stroked his beard possessively. “I told Hailey I’d shave before the wedding.” I cocked my head and raised an eyebrow, as if to say, Wedding? He smiled. “The plan was to tell everybody tonight at dinner. I bought a fifty-dollar bottle of champagne, so you can all congratulate us.”
Again I cocked my head, as if to say, Fifty dollars? He had to have gone out of town for it—there wasn’t a fifty-dollar bottle of champagne to be bought within miles. “How long ago did you propose, anyway?” I said.
“I asked her a few weeks ago. But she only just said ‘yes’ yesterday. Finally.”
“She was smart to take her time,” I said. “You should never rush into a second marriage.”
“Essie, we were kids together, for God’s sake,” he said. “We’ve known each other for thirty years.”
How could that possibly be true? I thought.
“When we tell you tonight,” Doc said, “act surprised.”
“Oh, it’s no act,” I said. “I’m constantly surprised.” I proceeded to my pickup, and once inside, I opened the cake box to tear at the angel food and eat pieces of it with my fingertips.
It was only May, but I heard the electric snapping of a chain of fire-crackers from somewhere nearby, and I was pleased the children were speeding toward the holiday, all their fingers and thumbs still intact. I decided to take a drive along the country roads I’d avoided most of the winter. I would visit the Crippled Eighty and share my cake with Daisy. The last time I’d seen her, way back on that cold January afternoon, I’d promised to look after her. And yet I hadn’t. None of us had.