DAHLIA
FOR WEEKS, JIMMY HAD BEEN WORKING ON THE BLOCK OF WOOD Jon brought home from Cub Scouts, carving and sanding it into a sleek race car. By the time he was finished, it flew across the kitchen floor so fast Jon and Agnes whooped like it had won the Pinewood Derby. After the little kids painted it, Zaidie added a perfectly even white stripe, and their lucky number: 100—same as our house.
Then wouldn’t you know? Old Josie Pennypacker had to go and ruin everything by dropping dead on the night of the event. Right in front of our house, no less. I blamed Flufferbell. Damn cat disappeared regularly, but this time was different.
A WEEK PASSED and then two. Still, old Josie wouldn’t give up. All hours of the night, you’d hear her calling that fool name—more desperate every time. Only the day before, Agnes had heard her whimpering on the porch and gone over to share her Hawaiian Punch.
“Sometimes they just don’t come back,” Agnes tried to tell her, as she passed her the glass of punch. “Nothing you can do.”
Josie shook her head, rejecting both the drink and Agnes’s words, and that night she was out calling louder and longer than ever—right outside the girls’ window.
She was at my door first thing in the morning, too—bleary-eyed and still in her bathrobe. “Agnes was cruel,” she blurted out, sounding like a kid tattling on a friend. “I didn’t think she had it in her.”
“She doesn’t,” I answered quick—like I always did whenever anyone said something about one of my kids. There was a lot more I wanted to add. It’s not Agnes that’s mean, Josie; it’s life. My kids knew that practically from birth. I shook my head at her. Look at you, half-toothless with a head of snowy hair, and you still haven’t got the news? Sad—that’s what it is.
But before I spoke, I took in the rings below her eyes, the tear-stained ruts in her cheeks, and for once in my life, I held back. Good thing, too, because within twenty-four hours, the woman was dead. A massive coronary, the know-it-all neighbors were repeating even before they carted the body away.
“Killed by a damn cat is more like it,” I told Louie, when I called him at the garage. “Imagine if your last word on this earth was Flufferbell? Dear Lord.”
Louie took a breath so sharp, it cut through the phone. Then he fell quiet. “Poor woman,” he finally said, sounding like his mother. “God rest her soul.” A minute later, he reverted to form. “This couldn’t wait till I got home? I’m in the middle of a damn engine job here.”
Outside my door, Edna O’Connor from the next street and Jeffrey’s mother, the one I called Gina Lollobrigida for the way she flaunted herself around, were carrying on. Like they ever gave a damn about the woman. Old Gina had even got herself all fixed up to go look at a dead woman.
I stepped out onto my porch.
“That little cat was all she had in the world,” Edna sobbed when she saw me. If I felt like arguing, I would have told her Josie had a lot more than a fool cat.
She had my kids—though you wouldn’t read about that in her obituary.
Oh, she’d started off like everyone else in the neighborhood—moaning about the trouble we’d brought onto their perfectly respectable street. When the cops had been called for one thing or another, Louie and me knew who it was right away. That damn Josie Pennypacker, he’d say before I added my bit. The hag.
But everything changed a couple of years ago when Jimmy went and told Agnes he loved her. Maybe the first time the kid ever heard the words. Did he have any idea how dangerous that could be?
Don’t get me wrong; I’d thought about saying it a few times myself—especially when I caught her looking at me with those hungry eyes of hers. But you have to be careful about giving Emergencies—or yourself—the wrong idea.
Sure, Agnes was settled in like a member of the family and all, but as long as there was talk about getting her to a home closer to her mother, I held back.
THAT NIGHT WAS the high school dance, though, and well, you would have thought Jimmy was going to meet the queen. Boy spent twenty full minutes in the bathroom looking at himself. When he came out, it wasn’t just his hair that was gleaming; it was like the whole world had a sheen to it.
“I love you, Z,” he yelled to Zaidie, before telling Jon the same thing. Shad, he called him like always—short for Shadow. Then he’d picked up Agnes and whirled her around. “You, too, Sky Bar. I love you.”
“Damnit. Can’t you ever call anyone by their right name?” Louie snapped. But I knew what he really meant: Be careful there, son.
It was too late, though. Soon as Jimmy set her down, Agnes touched the center of her chest like she did when she first came and was claiming a new word as her own.
“Jimmy loves me. Me,” she told Jon, talking like she’d just won one of their endless competitions.
“So?” Jon countered, sounding confused. “He loves me better. Right, Jimmy?”
The dance mustn’t have turned out like Jimmy hoped because for the next few days, he was under one of those dark spells that gets cast on kids that age. It didn’t break till one night in the middle of supper when Agnes decided to give the words back to him: I. Love. You. Jimmy.
Like each word was a sentence, or more than that—a whole book. And the way she smiled when she said it? It was as if something trapped inside her all her life had been set loose. Heaven help us.
Jimmy looked up from his plate of teenage miseries and laughed out loud. “Wha’d you say, Sky Bar?”
This time she stood up and repeated it like it was the Pledge of Allegiance, hand across her chest and all. Even Louie had to laugh. Well, almost.
Anyway, once it was loose, there was no stopping it. Within the week, Agnes wasn’t just saying those words to the family, she was telling the whole foolish world—from the mailman to that bitch of a fourth-grade teacher (who rewarded her with a trip to the principal’s office for inappropriate behavior) to Flufferbell—and always with that blazing smile.
First time she said it to Josie Pennypacker, the old woman hunched up her shoulders, wrapped her cardigan sweater around herself tight, and scowled. “Are you talking to me, little girl?” Like she’d cursed her or something.
Then, just as she had with Jimmy at the table, Agnes stood up straight and said it louder.
“Probably gone inside to call the cops,” Louie muttered when the old woman walked away, mumbling.
But a couple of days later, Josie showed up at the door with a lumpy-looking cupcake on a plate. “Made it from scratch.”
“Hmm. So I see.” I left the inside door shut as I regarded her sorry-looking creation.
“It’s for the little girl. Agnes,” she emphasized—as if I might eat the damn thing myself.
“I didn’t think you knew her name.” Up until then she’d referred to our kids generically. The teenager. The blondie. The noisy little boy. The Indian.
I opened the screen and took it. A nice treat for Princie, I figured. But before Jon and Agnes had brought the dog back from the park, Josie was at the door again—this time with a whole tray of crooked cupcakes.
“I don’t suppose I could give to one and not the others. There’s a couple on there for you and Louie, too.”
Dear God. What had Agnes gone and done now? Reluctantly, I accepted the plate.
Was I surprised when they turned out to be the best I ever had, or when Josie started remembering the kids’ birthdays with two bucks and a card. She even came flying out of her house to defend Jonny when that bully, Tommy Collier, tried to steal his volleyball.
In return, Jimmy kept her walkway shoveled in the winter, the three younger kids went out to search for Flufferbell whenever she took off, and Agnes told her she loved her every day for the rest of her life—even though Josie ran away every time.
Like I say, sometimes the truest thing about a person never makes the obituary.
BY THE TIME school was out, the body and the terrible white of the sheet they used to cover it were gone. The pack of neighborhood gawkers had mercifully disappeared, too. I couldn’t have the kids getting the news from strangers so I lined them up on the couch—the girls, the surly teenager (Jeez, can’t you just tell us whatever it is?), the restless boy (But Ma, I have to get ready for the Derby!). Sensing it was some kind of family event, Princie took her spot between Jon and Agnes and watched me attentively.
Course they all got quiet when they heard. Even Princie, who must have caught the feeling from the rest. But soon you could see Jimmy hardening himself against it like kids do at his age, while Jon and Zaidie puckered their mouths up the exact same way and began to cry.
Jon only stopped blubbering as he realized the impact it might have on him. “But why did she have to die on the day of the Pinewood Derby?”
That earned him a nudge from Zaidie. “Stop being so selfish! Think of poor Miss Pennypacker.”
Meanwhile, Agnes, who was closest to Josie of us all, just folded her hands together like they taught her to do in school when she really needed to pay attention and looked down, eyes dry as bone. I could tell she was drawing on what she knew, the mean truth she’d tried to tell Josie that day on the porch: Sometimes they just don’t come back.
If death is a surprise to most people (Such a shock! my mother always said whenever it had the gall to come near), it was something my kids knew all too well. In fact, no one even had to die for them to understand. They were used to people walking through doors and vanishing without a trace. Poof. No explanation. Not even a pretty write-up in the paper or a guy standing on an altar who claimed to know where they’d gone. Or why. Or to promise you’d see them again someday because maybe you would, but most likely not.
Gone is gone, see? as Zaidie explained to Jon when his hamster got eaten—probably by Flufferbell. I wondered if she was thinking of the mother, who she’d seen lying beneath another terrible sheet, just like Josie.
All you could do was fold your hands and look out on the world the way it was and somehow, somehow try to keep them in the only place where they could be reliably found: inside you. And oh yes, you could—and if you were Agnes, you had to—go out on the street and give your I love you to someone else. Didn’t matter whether they deserved it or not.
Glowering at me like I was the one who killed the woman, Jimmy grabbed that hoodlum leather jacket of his. “I’m going to Jools’s. No need to wait up.”
I was about to remind him he hadn’t had supper and wasn’t likely to get any at the Bousquets’ place. Besides that, he was sixteen—he still needed to ask.
But before I could speak, Jon let loose with a stuttery yell, “B-but, tonight’s the—the Pinewood Derby! You—you—you promised, Jimmy, you—”
Jimmy turned around, hand still on the doorknob. “For Pete’s sake, Shad, did they have to do it on a Friday night? I got my own life to live here. Supposed to be a parent who takes you, anyways. Why don’t you ask your mother?”
I’m telling you the way he said the word mother, the way he looked at me, I wondered if those Woods had gotten to him somehow. Told him God knows what.
There was no time to think about all that, though—not with Zaidie sobbing into her hands and Jon downright wailing over Josie Pennypacker or the Pinewood Derby or the both of them rolled into one.
“Maybe Jeffrey’s dad can take you—”
“They’re already taking their c-c-cousins, Ma. There’s no room in the car.”
“Well, Dad, then.”
“But Dad hates Cub Scouts. And he thinks the Pinewood Derby’s stupid. Says so every night. And ’sides that, he’s had a long day.”
“Don’t worry, Jonny. Dad won’t let you miss it. Not after all the hard work you kids have put in.”
When Zaidie and Agnes looked up from their separate forms of grief, I could tell they were both thinking the same thing: Louie’s not gonna like this.
SURE ENOUGH, LOUIE grumbled his way through dinner. “Nope, not doin’ it.” He set into his meat loaf, arguing with himself. “Is it my fault Jimmy backed out on him? Whose idea was it for Jon to sign up for the stupid Cub Scouts anyway?” (He shot me a look.) “Whole thing’s nothing but trouble.”
He paused to gulp his water. “Useless busy work. He wants a badge? Send him down the garage to help out and I’ll be happy to give him one.”
But when Jon’s lower lip began to judder, Louie pushed his plate away and got up—just as we knew he would.
Jon rushed to hug him—probably about to blurt out the words that sent old Josie scurrying every time, but Louie stopped him.
“Hurry up and get that car of yours before I change my mind. And soon’s that race is over, we’re leaving, understand? Got a truck waiting for me in the bay tomorrow with a problem six mechanics ain’t been able to figure out.”
Agnes had been angling to tag along ever since she’d seen Jon’s racer flashing across the floor, but had been told repeatedly it wasn’t for the likes of her. “You’re supposed to go to Girl Scouts like Zaidie,” Jon explained with an exaggerated patience that almost made me laugh. “You’re supposed to sew and sell cookies. Right, Zaidie?”
Ignoring him, Agnes went to the closet for her shoes. She was at the door, her shamrock barrette clipped to the side of her head all lopsided and hopeful, before anyone else.
“Absolutely not,” Louie said. “Tell her, Dahlia.”
“If she really wants to go so bad, what’s the harm, Lou?”
Louie shook his head. “Come on, then. With any luck, they’ll throw us out.”