When Jason had not arrived by a little after ten the next morning, Teddi decided to save a few minutes by walking over to meet him. Heidi and Annie were sitting on the front steps, reading.
Annie looked up reluctantly. “Jason’s in the garage, fixing a tire on my bike,” she announced. “Just go find him, why don’t you.”
For a moment Teddi hesitated. Her mouth had suddenly gone dry. Slowly, her knuckles turning white on the handle of the racket Jason had lent her for the duration of the tennis lessons, she forced herself to move.
She got as far as the open garage door and felt totally unable to proceed any further. She stood there, staring into the dim interior, heart hammering.
Jason was kneeling, doing something with a tire on the floor. When her shadow fell across him, he looked up.
“Hi. I’ll only be another minute or two. Come on in.”
Teddi scarcely recognized her own voice. “I . . . I can’t.”
“Can’t?” Jason’s hands went still. “What do you mean, you can’t?”
Feeling suffocated, Teddi stepped backward. “I’m sorry. I . . . can’t go in there.”
For a matter of seconds, Jason registered only confusion. And then his eyes narrowed. “Is this where it happened? Where your dad committed suicide? Here in the garage?”
Teddi gulped audibly, beyond speaking.
Jason came swiftly to his feet, abandoning the bike. He emerged into the sunshine, one hand with a firm grip on her arm, propelling her away from the house. Behind him, the opening to the garage was a yawning black hole.
He swore softly, inoffensively. “Breathe deep. Sit down on the bench for a minute.”
Knees close to buckling, Teddi obeyed. Jason sank onto the seat, too, keeping his hand on her arm. “Did you find him?”
Teddi nodded, closing her eyes against the sight of the open garage, yet continuing to see it behind her closed lids. She heard her own voice, as if coming from a long way off. “Sorry. This was the first time . . . since they took him away.”
“I should have asked you before, but I thought Charlie was just shooting off his mouth when he told me he was surprised we bought the house after your dad died here. He’s kind of an irritating slob. I think he likes to say things that upset people. You feeling better now?”
Teddi opened her eyes. “Yes. Except for Mamie and Callie, I . . . I haven’t talked to anybody about it. He . . . closed up the garage and piped the exhaust fumes into the car. . . .
Jason’s hands gripped her upper arms as he swore again. “And he left it to you to find him and deal with the mess. Look, Teddi, we don’t have to have a tennis lesson this morning. You want to skip it for today?”
Teddi made an effort to pull herself together. “No. No, I feel like I need to move, to do something physical.”
Jason’s hand slid down one arm and clasped her hand, drawing her up with him.
“Come on. Let me get my racket and we’ll go. Annie,” he called out to his sister, “I’ll finish with the bike when I get back, okay?”
They walked slowly and, at first, silently toward the park. Finally Teddi cleared her throat. “Would your folks have . . . bought the house, if they’d known?”
“Oh, sure, they love the house. And they’re not superstitious or anything like that. If nobody ever bought a place where somebody had died, three quarters of the houses in the whole country would be vacant, wouldn’t they? It must hurt a lot, knowing your dad did that without thinking you’d be the one to find him.”
Her throat was tight and painful. “It does. There was a suicide clause in his insurance, which meant there wasn’t even anything to take care of me. If it hadn’t been for Mamie, who came in and fought for me to get to take me as a foster child, I don’t know what would have happened to me.”
“Mamie seems like a real nice lady. She’s had her own troubles; she knows what they feel like. I’m glad she took you in. And now Dora and her baby.”
Teddi stirred a little, inwardly, thinking about Dora. “It was a real shock when Dora showed up on the front steps, looking ready to deliver that baby. I wondered if that would mean I’d have to . . . go somewhere else, find a different foster home. It’s different, with Dora and the baby there. Sometimes I feel really uncomfortable about them, for some reason, but Mamie’s so happy with a grandson. How can I begrudge her that, without being a . . . a selfish pig?”
“It’s only natural to think about your own predicament. I guess anybody would. But you’re getting a little bit used to Dora, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” Teddi remembered a few of the oddities, though. “I don’t know what to think about her walking a few blocks to make a call, when there’s a phone right there in the house. And last night, after everybody’d gone to bed . . . Dora went out for a while. I’ve never seen her walk for exercise or anything like that, not in the daytime. Of course Danny’s there, but we’d watch Danny while she was gone if she wanted to walk. She didn’t ask either of us last night. . . . Mamie had gone to bed and was reading with the radio on when Dora left, but she wouldn’t have turned off her light and gone to sleep if she’d known the baby was alone across the hall . . . and I thought it was . . . strange.”
“What seems strange to me is that Mamie’s son would marry some girl and never tell his mom, especially after he knew they were expecting a baby.”
“That seems funny to me, too,” Teddi admitted. “And about the insurance, too.”
“What about the insurance?” Jason wanted to know as they approached the tennis courts.
“He bought it at the airport, before he got on that plane. And he made it out to Mamie as the beneficiary, not to his wife. Wouldn’t you think he’d have made it out to Dora?”
“Yeah,” Jason agreed. “Hmm. Hey, looks like those kids are just leaving the court. Let’s claim it before anybody else gets here.”
It felt good to get hot and sweaty, running around the court, smashing the ball as hard as she could. By the time they walked home, Teddi was almost back to normal.
As they parted, Jason said, “Thanks for introducing me to those other guys. They’ve asked me to do things with them a couple of times. A movie, bowling. It’s kind of hard to get acquainted when it’s too early to meet kids in school. Did I tell you that I’ve got a part-time job, starting next Saturday? At Harada’s Grocery, putting up stock. It’ll be a little spending money, and maybe I’ll get more hours by fall, if one of their clerks quits then to go away to school. He’s talking about it.”
“That’s great,” Teddi said, forcing enthusiasm. If he worked Saturdays, that would end her tennis lessons on weekends. “Well, I’ll see you later,” she told him, and walked into the house.
Everything was quiet except for the muted sounds of the TV. Dora was in her customary position, sprawled on the couch, watching a soap opera. Mamie was nowhere in sight.
Mamie despised soap operas. “I’ve had enough trouble in my own life,” she had once observed, “to want to steep myself in anyone else’s miseries.”
Yet Mamie was the one who always came to the rescue when someone was in trouble. It wasn’t only Teddi and Dora; it was anyone in the neighborhood or the church who needed help. Mamie was always making a pot of soup or a casserole to carry to someone, and attending a funeral or sitting with an acquaintance to talk out a problem or a sorrow.
Teddi didn’t interrupt Dora’s TV. She walked past Dora’s open bedroom door, then Mamie’s, to use the bathroom to wash up. On her way back out, intending to head for the kitchen to see what might be interesting for lunch, she heard the baby begin to whimper.
Teddi hesitated. He wasn’t really raising an outcry yet, the way he would if he were hungry. It was probably safe to leave him alone until he did.
On the other hand, Dora often was the last one to hear him when she was watching TV. It covered Danny’s small sounds.
Teddi enjoyed looking at the baby. She hadn’t yet gotten used to admiring the tiny, perfect fingers and toes, and the little round pink face as it yawned or howled or relaxed in sleep.
The door to the room was open. She didn’t feel that she was invading Dora’s privacy by stepping over the threshold, bending over the bassinet.
Danny’s eyes were squeezed shut, but he was squirming restlessly.
“What’s the matter, you have a gas bubble?” Teddi asked very softly. “You want someone to pat you on the back?”
She picked him up, ever so carefully supporting his head, loving the feel of the downy hair under her hand. Over her shoulder he went, with a cloth diaper under his face so that if he spit up it wouldn’t go all over her.
She patted for a few moments, murmuring soothing words, and eventually Danny rewarded her with a gentle burp.
“That all of it? Okay, back to bed, then,” Teddi told him, and eased him once more into the bassinet.
Dora had rearranged the furniture when they brought in the crib and the big basket on legs. Teddi had forgotten that there was a small square table just inside the door, behind her, until she bumped into it and knocked something off.
It was Dora’s purse, an inexpensive sling-type black bag, and in falling it spewed out its contents across the floor.
Teddi bit back an exclamation, glancing apprehensively to the doorway, afraid Dora might show up and resent finding her here.
Quickly, before that should happen, Teddi dropped to her knees and began to gather up the contents to return to the purse. It was a simple one, with only one compartment, and Dora didn’t carry much in it. Lipstick, a few coins, some Kleenex, a compact, a comb, a ballpoint pen, half a package of gum.
Teddi scooped them all up, then returned the purse to the table.
She was halfway out the door into the hallway when she stopped, suddenly struck by the thought that something was missing.
She turned, glancing toward the living room where voices were raised in some sort of confrontation on the TV. Then she stepped quickly back into Dora’s room and opened the purse up wide to verify the impression she’d had.
There was no wallet. No I.D. of any kind. No driver’s license, no Social Security card, no credit cards. No personal correspondence, no snapshots.
Wasn’t that kind of odd? Teddi had often enough been sent to get something out of her mom’s purse, and even a few times from Mamie’s, to know that most women carried more than Dora did.
Teddi’s own purse, sparsely filled as it was, had a Junior High Student Body I.D. card and a wallet with a few pictures, even though it didn’t often have much money in it.
How did anyone get along with no personal identification? Even teenagers carried something to show who they were. How come Dora didn’t?
In the kitchen, she saw a note on the table from Mamie.
Salad in the fridge. Fresh fruit in the bowl. I’m over at Mrs. Hall’s, helping with her laundry. She burned her hand and can’t do much today. If the paperboy comes to collect, take the money out of the jar.
The jar had once held mayonnaise, but now it was where Mamie dropped her change. It sat inside the cupboard next to the sink. Teddi glanced at it as she got down a glass for milk, noting that it had a few bills in it this time, too, including a twenty clearly visible among the ones.
She carried her lunch out onto the back porch to eat and read a few chapters in the latest library book.
It was several hours later when she saw the paperboy coming and got down the jar to pay him.
“Thanks,” the boy said, and handed over the current paper.
It wasn’t until Teddi reached up to put the money jar back on the shelf that she noticed the twenty-dollar bill was missing.
She paused, then reached in to pull out the currency, laying it out on the counter. Three one-dollar bills and assorted change. But there was no twenty.
Teddi replaced the bills in the jar, feeling uneasy. Mamie hadn’t taken the twenty; she was just coming in the front door right now.
Danny set up an outcry, and Teddi moved to the hallway in time to see her pick up her grandson and cuddle him. “I think he wants his mama,” Mamie said, patting him as she carried him toward the living room. “That sounds like a hunger cry to me.”
“He’s always hungry,” Dora agreed, accepting him. “This time you get to eat in the living room, kiddo. I want to see the end of this program.”
Mamie smiled a little. “I need to make a phone call. If you don’t mind, I’ll turn down the TV a little bit.”
“Sure,” Dora said. “I guess it would be better if I had a set in my room so I could watch whatever I want when you want to watch something else out here, wouldn’t it? Do you suppose that insurance check would stretch to something like that? Another TV set?”
“We’ll talk about it,” Mamie said. “Of course the money won’t be here for weeks, probably. Maybe even months. Insurance companies don’t work very quickly.”
Mamie went into her room and closed the door, stretching the phone cord out behind her. Dora was unbuttoning her blouse to feed the baby.
Teddi hesitated as heat swept over her in a guilty flood at what she was thinking.
Instead of going upstairs, as she’d intended, she slipped boldly into Dora’s room. Her heart was pounding, and she didn’t know what she’d use for an excuse if she were caught, but she moved swiftly to the purse still standing open on the table.
One glimpse inside was enough.
There was a single twenty-dollar bill in plain sight, and some quarters Teddi didn’t think had been there before.
There was a pain in Teddi’s chest. It hurt to breathe. She pressed the heel of her hand over the pain and walked quickly out of the room, scarcely aware of anything except that Mamie’s new daughter-in-law apparently was a thief.