Dillard came back to work on Monday. As always, he tended to his chores in silence. If he hummed, only Alice heard it, and if he said anything to her, she kept it to herself.
It took Emilia Mae days to work up the nerve, but finally on Thursday she said, “I guess dinner was a bust the other night. How are you feeling?”
Dillard looked at his shoes. “I’m fine. I probably shouldn’t have come. Maybe it was too early.”
“Early for what?”
Dillard shook his head and looked down. “Nothing,” he said.
The winter of 1961 was unrelenting. When it didn’t pour, dark clouds shaded New Rochelle. The wildflowers that usually colored in bare earth by mid-April stayed blanketed under mud. It was the kind of cold that dug in despite the scarves and mittens resisting it. One Friday afternoon, when business was slow and most of the day’s chores completed, Emilia Mae found herself in the bake room alone with Dillard. Both were rubbing their hands trying to warm up. Emilia Mae saw that the tips of Dillard’s fingers were bone white and that the rest of his hands were tinged blue. She remembered how her dad’s hands were often like that.
“Raynaud’s disease,” she said. “My dad had it. I used to rub his hands to warm them up. He said I had the touch; that I heated them right up. Seems to be more common in pale and thin people. Obviously, I don’t have it.” She held out her pink sturdy hands. “Can I give it a try?”
Dillard looked to each of his hands as if for agreement, then gave them over to her. She took one at a time and massaged it until the blood started to flow again. His hands were like a child’s in hers.
“Your dad was right,” said Dillard, flexing his fingers. “This is the first time I’ve felt them all winter.” He thought back to his two days on the construction job and shuddered.
“It must be hard to play the flute without feeling them,” said Emilia Mae.
Dillard laughed or coughed; it was hard to tell which. “I do enough damage to the flute with my fingers intact. Numb ones would simply add insult to injury. Thank you for this.”
“Any time. This is one of my very few talents.”
“I doubt that.” For the first time, he looked Emilia Mae in the eyes.
Emilia Mae had never been keen on eye locking. She never understood those couples who could stare at each other, cow-eyed, forever. Until now. This man cracked open a door inside of her. It was as if light fell on places in her that had become dark. He aroused thoughts in her that no man ever had. She wondered what it would be like to kiss the back of his neck between his hairline and shirt collar. She felt protective of his ravaged face and gaunt fury, and wanted to hold him, stroke his head, and put back whatever had been taken from him. She thought back to the days of tending to those lost souls at the Neptune Inn and wanted to tell him that she understood despair. She wanted to talk to him about real things. She understood how neglect could make a person hungry for everything. She fantasized about feeding him, not only crullers and pies from the bakery but meat, spinach, citrusy juices. Not since Alice was born thirteen years earlier had she felt this way about anyone. So yes, she would lock eyes with him and in doing so, hope she could convey some of these thoughts.
By early May, spring finally settled in. Crab apples, daffodils, columbine blazed by the roadside. The water reflected the new greens, and New Rochelle was restored to its pastoral splendor. As if to mirror its landscape, Emilia Mae’s world was graced as well. Dillard started asking her small things, like did she think they might add some honey to the cream cheese frosting on the cupcakes (yes), or where was the nearest lake (Glenwood Lake). Their conversation became more comfortable. Small talk, something she could never endure, became her currency.
One afternoon, the two were sitting on the stone wall drinking iced tea. Dillard asked how old the bakery was, and Emilia Mae said she wasn’t sure but that her mother’s parents started the bakery when they came over from Italy, so it had been around a long while.
“Oh, she’s Italian. That explains her dark eyes and skin. She’s an attractive woman.”
Emilia Mae shook her head. “She was a real knockout when she was young. Then I came along, and apparently sucked the life out of her.”
“Your coloring’s just the opposite, the light skin and hair.”
“From my father. Oh wait…” Without thinking, she grabbed Dillard’s wrist. He wore one of those watches that showed the date and time. “What’s today? May fourth, 1961. Geez. In four days, he’d be…” She used her fingers to count. “Wow, in four days he’d be fifty-two. Pretty old.”
“May I ask how old you are?”
“Getting up there,” said Emilia Mae. “I’m thirty-two. How about you?”
“On my next birthday I’ll be thirty.”
“When is your next birthday?”
Dillard opened his mouth to speak, but Emilia Mae stopped him. “Let me guess.” She closed her eyes and waved her hands around her temples the way she’d seen mind readers do it in the movies. “Ummm, I’m seeing May. Late May!”
She opened her eyes in time to catch the startled expression on Dillard’s face. “Did I tell you that before?”
“Nope.”
“Did I write it down anywhere?”
“Nope.”
“Well then, that was amazing. Yes, my birthday is May twenty-eighth. How could you know that?”
“Dunno, I just felt it.”
“What do you mean, you felt it?”
She rubbed her eyes with her palms. “Can’t explain it. You look like someone born in late spring. Your smile, maybe. Also, Alice’s birthday is June ninth. My father died on June thirteenth. Everything important in my life seems to have come around then, so it made sense.” Emilia Mae blushed, realizing how much she’d given away.
His eyes roamed her face; she had his attention.
Maybe it was that, or his memory of her warm hands massaging his frigid fingers, but after that, they were more at ease with one another. When she shopped for the bakery, he’d come with her to carry the heavy loads. If the weather was nice, she’d sit with him on the back stairs as he took his dinner. Other times, she’d invite him home with Alice and Geraldine.
Geraldine also liked having Dillard around. As he filled out, he looked less skeletal and more handsome. She let her fantasies override her worry that maybe he was an ex-convict. Yes, he and Emilia Mae had gotten friendly, but Dillard’s compliments to Geraldine were more than friendly. He made her feel noticed in ways she most enjoyed being noticed. One day, after she returned from church, he told her, “That dress really emphasizes the curve of your neck, Mrs. Wingo.” Another time, when she and he were folding the tarp they kept over the well outside the bakery, he stared at her arms before saying, “Mrs. Wingo, you have the smooth skin of a young girl.” It was not out of the question that he was flirting with her. The way he looked at her, how he always held the door for her and poured her coffee in the morning with just the right amount of sugar and milk, was certainly admiring. His flattering words filled up parts of her that had long gone empty. She hadn’t had a fling in so long. Jesus, no one had even looked at her indiscreetly in years. These thoughts, which had once been second nature to her, had all but evaporated. She told herself it was as if God himself had delivered this young man to her doorstep. Hell, their union was practically preordained. She was twenty-two years his senior. Who cared? Much older men used to flirt with her all the time; why should it be any different for a woman?
The next time he called her Mrs. Wingo, Geraldine gave him a gentle jab on the shoulder. “Who’re you calling Mrs. Wingo? I’m Geraldine, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Dillard.
“I’m not ma’am either.” She laughed. “It’s Geraldine. Just plain Geraldine.”
She began wearing her hair piled on top of her head in order to show off the curve of her neck. She wore boatneck blouses made of luscious fabrics that draped around her shoulders just so and made sure to refresh her fire-red lipstick every few hours. To her delight, she even found a bottle of White Shoulders cologne at Ware’s Department Store. Every morning, she’d douse herself with enough of it that she smelled like a field of gardenias.
Dillard became such an integral part of the bakery that Geraldine increased his wages. After a few weeks, the green and blue shirt disappeared. He bought himself a pair of white linen trousers and a few crisp white and blue button-down shirts. The brown tweed flat cap remained. Because Earle and Dillard had roughly the same build, Geraldine gave him some of Earle’s old clothes, hemming the cuffs that were slightly too long. One day in midsummer, when he showed up at the bakery in white pants and one of Earle’s white rayon shirts, Geraldine grabbed him by the arm and trilled, “Oh my God, you look like Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. Emilia Mae, doesn’t he look like Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind?”
Her mother’s voice was coquettish. Emilia Mae had noticed the perfume and lipstick, but not until this moment did it dawn on her that her mother must fancy Dillard.
“Mother,” she said. “Clark Gable had a mustache and dark slick hair and was taller than six feet. But sure, other than that Dillard looks exactly like him.”
Later, when Dillard left, and Geraldine and Emilia Mae were alone in the shop, Geraldine shook her head and said to her daughter, “You really can’t stand to see your mother have a little fun, can you?”
“It’s not that. I just don’t want to see you make a fool of yourself in front of Alice.”
“Alice is not the one I worry about,” said Geraldine. “She accepts me for who I am. It’s you who have never given me a break.”
“And I suppose you’d call pulling me out of school and sending me away from home when I was fifteen your idea of giving me a break?”
“I thought it was your choice,” said Geraldine, picking the polish off one of her nails.
“I suppose it was, but what choice did I have?”
“We did get Alice out of all that,” said Geraldine in a meeker voice. “There is that.”
“There is that, thank God,” said Emilia Mae.
For the next weeks, Emilia Mae watched her mother dance around Dillard, calling him “honey this” and “honey that,” as if the dark-eyed beauty had returned. It surprised Emilia Mae how happy it made her to see this version of her mother.
Dillard always responded to Geraldine’s compliments the same way: “Thank you, ma’am, that’s very kind.”
It drove Geraldine crazy. “No need to call me ma’am. Geraldine will do.”
Emilia Mae also saw how Alice was always by Dillard’s side and how she’d watch him with her wide brown eyes as they sang or talked together. One afternoon, when she was coming out of the bake room, Emilia Mae saw Alice say something to Dillard, though she didn’t quite catch the words. Dillard started laughing. Alice laughed with him. Dillard had tears streaming down his eyes, he was laughing that hard. This is what he looks like when he’s really happy, she thought. I wish I could make him that happy.
Alice had become his surrogate. “Dillard prefers pancakes with bananas,” she’d tell them. Or “Dillard says that rock and roll has become more important to the culture than jazz.” She also taught him how to cup his hands around a ball of bread dough, rub his thumbs against the surface, sink his fingers into it, tug at it to see if it stretched. In turn, he taught her how to ride a two-wheeler and how to play the harmonica.
With Dillard’s pale, slender good looks and gentle nature, it was as if a version of Earle Wingo had been returned to each of the Wingo women.
On one of their walks, Dillard asked Emilia Mae about her parents. “The first thing to know is that my mother believes I was born with the devil in me. She’s always resented me for stealing away her beauty and sex appeal. She sent me away from home when I was fifteen. I don’t think she’s ever liked me very much, but Alice has made things easier between us. My father saved me from her when he could.”
“His death must have been hard for you.”
“It was. He was the only man who was ever kind to me.”
Dillard winced. “Well, now there are two of us.” He put his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. There was nothing tentative about his gesture. He kept his arm around her as they continued walking.
“What about your parents?” she asked.
He spoke faster than usual. “As I might have mentioned, I’m from Skyville. It’s the most beautiful place in the world, tucked down there in the Smoky Mountains. It’s becoming a bit of a tourist trap now, but when I was growing up, it was just the folks who came from there. My father sold antique musical instruments. I still have them. My mother wanted to be a singer. What I remember about her is how I’d sit on her lap and she’d sing this song: ‘Lavender blue, dilly dilly…’ She called me Dilly because her name was Lily. She liked that our names linked. Funny, your mother thought you were the devil; mine thought I was an angel. I guess they were both wrong. What I most remember about her was her leaving when I was four. She said she couldn’t stay with us and become who she wanted to be and that I’d understand when I got older. I never did find out if she became a singer, or where she was. I guess we also have that in common, mothers who didn’t want us. Anyway, my father traveled a good deal, and left me with his sister, Aunt Denise. I tried to be a good companion to her and always helped with chores around the house: toilets, lamps, broken faucets. I became quite the young Mr. Fixit. But I think she wanted more than a handy nephew. She’d call me her little man. I learned how to talk to grown-ups and would go with her to visit her friends. They’d ask my opinion about things like what dress they should wear to this or that or how to respond to a friend who’d been rude to them, and I’d always try to have smart answers. They never treated me like a little boy.
“Aunt Denise had these violet circles under her eyes. No matter how long she slept, they seemed to get bigger and darker. She didn’t leave me a lot of time for my own life, so while I had friends and was popular at school, I was pretty miserable at home. I knew I had to get out of there.”
“Where did you go?”
“I went to this wonderful music school, right outside of town, called Black Mountain College. After I graduated, I worked there for four years as a teaching assistant in the woodwinds department. The teachers and faculty were mostly foreign artists who’d been persecuted and kicked out of Europe. Many of them barely spoke English. It was a very progressive place, all about music and art. Kind of too good to be true. It closed down a few years ago.”
“Geez, I wish you’d known my father,” said Emilia Mae. “He loved jazz and knew a lot about it. It must have driven him nuts that my mother was such a Mantovani fan.”
“Sentiment has its place in music,” said Dillard.
“That’s kind of you to say,” said Emilia Mae. “But have you listened to Mantovani?”
“Not for long periods at a time.”
Emilia Mae laughed. “Then what? What did you do after college?”
Dillard shook his head. “That’s when things started going bad. What does anyone want with a musician who isn’t really an expert in any one thing?” He told her about working odd jobs and suffering through his job in the Catskills. “I did that for two years, then quit and vowed I’d never play music again. I went back to Skyville. Worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office for a bit.”
“Did you like being a receptionist?” asked Emilia Mae.
He smiled. “That was a happy time, but when that job ended, I took work wherever I could get it tending bars, waiting tables, digging ditches. That’s what eventually brought me here.”
Dillard still had his arm around Emilia Mae. A lifeline. No man had ever touched her that way without the intention of taking something from her. The parts where Dillard’s arm touched her back and shoulder tingled. She was afraid to turn her body, lest he take his arm away. She sensed that Dillard could use his own lifeline, and though these gestures did not come naturally to her, she reached out her arm and placed it around him. She felt his ribs and the place where his waist went concave. He smelled like roots and pine, and she wished she could nuzzle into his neck and taste him. Locked into each other as they were, they must have looked like a couple in love.
“You have a girl tucked away somewhere in Skyville, right?”
“Nah,” said Dillard. “No time for that.”
Aware that they were at an impasse, Emilia Mae changed the subject. “Skyville sounds like quite the place. Do you think you’ll ever go back?”
“I hope so. How about you? Anywhere you’d like to go?”
Emilia Mae squinted. Her world was so confined to here, the wish to wander never occurred to her.
“Umm, I’d like to go to a night game at Yankee Stadium. I hear it’s something to see. But you, I wonder, how in the world did you end up in New Rochelle and not New York City?”
He dug his fingers into her shoulder. “Oh, that’s a story for another time.”
Tethered to him as she was, Emilia Mae felt emboldened. With her free hand, she grabbed his cap off his head and said playfully, “Come on. I’ll tell you my secrets if you tell me yours.”
Dillard went rigid. “No,” he said, grabbing the hat and plopping it back on his head.
It scared Emilia Mae, the sudden switch in his tone and body. It reminded her of that night he walked out of the dinner party. Reverend Klepper was right. He did have secrets.
They dropped their arms at the same time.