Teddi had been living with Mamie for only the past four months. Before that, she’d lived next door since she was six years old.
Mamie and Mrs. Stuart, Teddi’s mom, hadn’t been close friends. They were, after all, a generation apart in age. But they’d been cordial, calling out greetings, accepting package deliveries for one another, sometimes talking about the flowers and vegetables that Mamie raised.
That time seemed far in the distant past. Before her mom got sick, Teddi hadn’t found it necessary to seek out another mother figure, but she and Mamie had been friendly enough. Once in a while Mamie had hired her to help pull weeds, which they had done together. After an hour or two in the hot sun, Mamie had invited her inside for a cold drink before she went home.
When Gloria Stuart was diagnosed with cancer and became unable to do all the things she’d done earlier, however, the situation had changed.
Everybody in the neighborhood had rallied around with casseroles and cakes and offers to run errands. Nobody was more attentive than Mamie, though she’d kept it all low-key.
“I had extra asparagus and thought you might like some,” she’d say, popping in with a small casserole dish. Or, “I baked bread today and thought you might like a loaf.”
Occasionally, when Teddi was coming home from school, Mamie would call out to her from the doorway, “Cookie day, Teddi. Would you like a few?”
At first Teddi had simply eaten the cookies and gone home. Gradually milk was added to the cookies, and during periods when her mother had to be hospitalized, she joined Mamie for simple suppers because her father stayed with his wife.
And gradually, too, they’d talked and begun to share their lives.
Ricky was still living at home until about a year and a half ago. He was a tall, dark, good-looking guy, always joking and teasing when he saw her. He was a lot older than Teddi, so he didn’t really pay special attention to her, of course.
She’d had a crush on him since she was about eleven, in that silly hopeless way little girls have. One day he’d given her a ride home when it was raining, and insisted on treating her to a hot chocolate because, he said, he wanted one.
He hadn’t talked down to her because he was twelve years older. Teddi appreciated that.
Although it didn’t happen often, Teddi was pleased when Ricky was home when she went over to see Mamie. Even with the difference in their ages, they discovered they liked a lot of the same books, though Ricky had outgrown some of them. Still, he remembered how he’d cherished the best of them, and he was willing to talk about them while Teddi was discovering them.
Once, she sat behind him at the movies when he was with a pretty girl. She was distracted from the screen by his profile when he turned to the girl, and by his laughter, which was contagious.
And then, during a romantic scene in glowing Technicolor, she had watched as Ricky bent his head and kissed the girl.
Teddi felt her stomach twist with a sensation she’d never experienced before. She envied the girl. Someday, she hoped, a boy would kiss her that way.
It was disappointing when Ricky left home, though of course she’d always known he’d never pay any real attention to her. Mamie told her he’d gotten a job in San Diego.
Teddi remembered how happy Mamie had been to get a letter from him. “He’s not much for writing,” she confessed. “His dad was like that, too.”
Teddi’d sort of hoped that someday he’d come back to Marysville and stay. Maybe, by then, twelve years’ difference in age wouldn’t matter so much.
Of course he never had, and now he never would. Instead there was Dora.
Dora was a totally unexpected development. She was rather quiet, and after she’d rested a bit there was more color in her cheeks, making her more attractive.
She was commendably solicitous of Mamie. “Would you like to rest a bit? I guess my coming here was really a shock.”
Mamie, who never rested in the daytime, agreed. “Maybe I will lie down for half an hour or so.”
Dora’s smile encouraged her. “I’m tired, too. Being pregnant is exhausting. Would you show me where I’ll be sleeping?”
The words jolted Teddi anew. Clearly Dora was taking it for granted that she was staying, moving in with Mamie.
“I had thought maybe . . . Ricky’s old room?” Dora suggested.
Teddi felt prickles along her arms, as if a cold wind had blown over her.
“Well, Teddi’s in Ricky’s old room now,” Mamie said uncertainly. Mamie was almost never uncertain about anything.
“Oh.” The word was heavy with disappointment. “Well . . .”
Teddi didn’t want to say anything, but she didn’t want Mamie put on the spot, either. “There’s that storage room upstairs,” she said. “That could be cleaned out.”
Dora proffered a grateful smile. “You wouldn’t mind moving up there? Stairs aren’t so handy for someone who’s pregnant. Especially with my getting up so often during the night.”
So it was Teddi who adjusted, of course. What else could she do?
Even before she moved out of Ricky’s room—which she had come to think of as her room—Dora took a nap on Teddi’s bed.
“You don’t mind, do you? I’m just awfully tired. A nap before supper would be wonderful.”
So Teddi went upstairs and surveyed the room that had never been intended for much more than a storage place.
At one time Ricky and his older brother, Ned, had played up there on rainy days. In Washington State there were a lot of those.
Today was sunny, but the windows hadn’t been washed in years, so it was gloomy enough to be a rainy day. Luckily Mamie hadn’t stored a whole lot of stuff in the room, or clearing it out would have been a problem.
There were half a dozen cardboard cartons, marked CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS and SUMMER CLOTHES and RICKY’S STUFF. There was an old-fashioned radio in a tall cabinet, a chair with a broken leg, and a bed.
It was Ned’s bed, dismantled and moved up after Ned had left for college, so that Ricky would have more room in the quarters they had shared downstairs.
The mattress and springs leaned against the wall, covered with an old sheet to keep them from getting dirty. Nevertheless, when Teddi pulled off the sheet, dust rose in a cloud that made her sneeze.
She needed dust cloths and some soap and water, she supposed, sighing. She wondered if the windows could be opened enough so she could reach outside and clean them.
Amazingly enough, both of them slid free after only a moment of resistance, letting in some welcome fresh air.
Teddi went back downstairs to get rags and a bucket of water and detergent. The house was quiet. Mamie’s door was closed, with only silence behind it.
The door to her own room—now Dora’s room—wasn’t quite shut, and through the narrow crack Teddi saw Ricky’s wife stretched out on the blue-and-white spread.
Dora looked very young and vulnerable in her sleep. Her hair drifted down over her cheek, and her mouth was slightly open. If it hadn’t been for the bulge of her belly, Teddi might have guessed her at about her own age.
How sad it must be, to have lost the husband she loved and to be facing the birth of a baby without him. Without any family at all, apparently, except for a mother-in-law she’d only just met.
Teddi walked quietly, so as not to disturb her, and gathered up her supplies.
There was a package of pork chops defrosting on the drain board when she entered the kitchen. Two chops. Teddi hesitated, then opened the freezer and got out another package. There would be three for supper now.
The upper bedroom wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it might be to put in order, though it was awkward reassembling the bed by herself. Under other circumstances she’d have asked Mamie to come up and help haul the springs and mattress onto the frame, but she kept remembering how Mamie had looked when she had gone to her room to rest. Much older than only a few hours earlier, certainly.
Teddi didn’t know for sure just how old Mamie was. In her early fifties, probably. The shock of having Dora show up on her doorstep had momentarily aged her beyond that. At least Teddi hoped it would be momentary.
She had to make several trips up and down the stairs. Once for the vacuum cleaner, to get rid of the dust. Then for the mop to wipe off the linoleum that covered the floor. And again for sheets for the bed.
She had brought her own bedding when she’d moved from next door, but it was on the bed downstairs, in the room where Dora was resting. She didn’t have another bedspread. Maybe she’d be able to get it later and put Ricky’s old spread in its place.
It wasn’t very homey in the attic room. There was Sheetrock on the walls, but it had never been papered or painted. She’d have to bring her clothes up, out of the dresser and the closet downstairs, but there wasn’t much of any place to hang them or put them away, she thought. She might have to pound some nails into the unfinished walls in lieu of a closet, and maybe the old radio would serve as a place to put stacks of underwear.
The windows were the last thing she cleaned. One of them looked out on the street, the other over the house that for most of her life had been her home.
She stood at that window for a time, remembering.
There had been good times, before her mother got sick. Some people got cancer and died very quickly. It had taken her mom a long time. There hadn’t been many good times then. No more games or reading together, or just sharing confidences. The chemo made her mom so sick much of the time that she hadn’t been up to doing much of anything. Teddi had prayed and prayed that her mother would get well, but it hadn’t happened.
Sometimes, when the pastor or a church member had visited her, Mom had smiled and seemed a little better for a few hours. But the pain always came back; she had grown weaker and weaker, less and less interested in whatever was going on with anything outside her bedroom.
Teddi could see into that room now, because the curtains had been taken down when the room was painted before the house was put on the market. The second floor of that house was on the same level as this attic room at Mamie’s. The soft blue carpet was still there. Blue had been Gloria Stuart’s favorite color. She had been buried wearing her favorite blue dress. It had been much too big for her, since she had wasted away during the time she was sick, but the funeral director had arranged it so that it didn’t seem grotesquely large.
Teddi swallowed the lump in her throat that remembering the funeral always brought, and was turning away from the window when a yellow truck pulled into the driveway next door.
It was one of those trucks that people rent to move their household goods.
As her attention was caught by the new arrival, her recollection of her mother in the flower-shrouded coffin, so pale and unnatural looking, began to fade. She didn’t want to remember the funeral. Even after four and a half months, it was still incredibly vivid and painful. She pressed her face against the clean glass to see better.
A man got out of the truck, a rather husky figure in blue jeans and a work shirt. A moment later he was joined by a woman, also in jeans with a flaming orange shirt, and together they went up the steps to the front door. They had a key to open it.
Teddi knew the place had been sold. The realtor had reported that to Mamie. The deal hadn’t gone through yet, because the new family needed to get a mortgage, but they also needed to move as soon as possible, so they’d arranged to pay rent for a month or two.
Mamie said that when it sold, Teddi might get a little money out of it. Not much, though, because there were bills to settle first, and the Stuarts hadn’t owned the house free and clear. Because of the way her father had died four months ago, only a few weeks after his wife’s death, there hadn’t been any money from his life insurance, so even a small sum would be welcome. The social services agency paid Mamie to keep Teddi as a foster child, but there were things like shoes and clothes that Teddi needed and didn’t think she could ask for. When the house money came, she hoped it would be enough to take care of things like that.
As she watched, a car drove in beside the truck. The driver—who got out, stretched, then opened the back door for a couple of younger children—looked to be in his midteens. Sixteen, anyway, because he couldn’t have gotten a driver’s license before that age.
He was slim hipped, with somewhat bony, wide shoulders under a black T-shirt with some sort of motto on it. From her angle, Teddi couldn’t make out what it was.
There was a little girl of about ten, and another of maybe seven. A family. A nice, happy family, Teddi guessed. She wondered if they would be happy in her old home, or if they, too, might face tragedy as the Stuarts had.
At the moment, there was no sadness. The girls were laughing as they walked toward the house. Then the little one ran back to the car and hauled out a small suitcase, bumping it down to the ground.
“Jason! Come help me!” she yelled.
His name was Jason.
“Teddi! Are you up there?”
She heard her own name and turned away from the window. For a moment she felt a touch of warmth, of pleasure in the knowledge that someone who looked pleasant was moving into the house that had stood vacant since the night she had found her father’s body.
Probably the realtor hadn’t told them about Stan Stuart killing himself in the garage. It wouldn’t have been a selling point for the house.
“Teddi?” Mamie called again.
“I’m coming,” Teddi called back, and started down the stairs. Before she reached the bottom, her fears were once more prickling along her spine.