Ladder of Years Read online

  She turned into Value Vision and took another Bugle from the stack just inside the door.

  “I wouldn’t like for my son to think people are checking him over,” Mr. Miller said. “Filing through to see if he’s up to standard. That’s why I asked you to come while he was out. Then if you find you’re interested, you could stay on and meet him. He’s eating supper at a friend’s, but he’ll be home in half an hour or so.”

  He sat across from her in a chintz armchair that he seemed to dwarf, as he dwarfed the whole overstuffed, overdecorated living room of this little ranch house on the edge of town. To Delia’s surprise, he’d turned out to be someone she recognized. Joel Miller: he had consulted Mr. Pomfret several months ago on a visitation matter. She remembered admiring his undisguised baldness. Men who scorned the subterfuge of artfully draped strands of hair, she felt, conveyed an attractive air of masculine assurance; and Mr. Miller, with his large, regular features and his olive skin and loose gray suit, seemed positively serene. Underneath, though, she detected some tension. He had told her three times—contradicting the entire gist of his ad—that his son would be at school for the vast majority of every day, in essence all day, and that even when he was home he required not much more than a token adult in the wings. Delia had the feeling that no one else had applied for this position.

  “He eats at friends’ houses often, in fact,” Mr. Miller was saying. “And in summer—I don’t think I mentioned this—he spends two weeks at sleep-away camp. Besides which there’s computer day camp, soccer clinic—”

  “Summer!” Delia said. She rocked back in her chintz-padded rocking chair. Summer, with its soft, lazy afternoons, tinkling glasses of lemonade, children’s peach-colored bodies in swimsuits! “Oh, Mr. Miller,” she said. “The truth is, I seem to be in a changeable stage of life right now. I’m not sure I could get that … invested.”

  “And in summer I’m around more myself,” Mr. Miller went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Not the whole day, exactly—a principal doesn’t have quite the same leeway his teachers do—but quite a lot.”

  “I probably shouldn’t have come,” Delia said. “A child your son’s age needs continuity.”

  Then why did you come? he might reasonably have asked, but instead, poor man, he seized on her last sentence. “You sound experienced,” he said. “Do you have children of your own, Miss Grinstead? Oh.” The corners of his mouth jerked briefly downward. “I’m sorry. Of course not.”

  “Yes, I do,” she told him.

  “So it’s Mrs. Grinstead?”

  “I prefer ‘Miss.’”

  “I see.”

  He thought this over.

  “But, so, you are experienced,” he said finally. “That’s excellent! And do you come from this area?”

  Evidently he didn’t keep up with Bay Borough gossip. “No, I don’t,” she told him.

  “You don’t.”

  She could see him reconsidering. Desperate he might be, but not foolhardy. He wouldn’t want to hire an ax murderer.

  “I’m from Baltimore,” she volunteered at last. “I’m perfectly respectable, I promise, but I’ve put that part of my life behind me.”

  “Ah.”

  Oh, Lord, now he was envisioning some drama. He surveyed her with interest, his head slightly tilted.

  “But!” she exclaimed. “As far as the job goes—”

  “I know: you don’t waht it,” he said sadly.

  “It’s nothing to do with the job itself. I’m sure your son is a very nice boy.”

  “Oh, he’s more than nice,” Mr. Miller said. “He’s really, he’s such a good kid, Miss Grinstead. He’s wonderful! But I guess I overestimated how well we could do on our own. I thought as long as we knew how to work the washing machine … But things have gotten away from me.”

  He waved a hand toward the room in general, which puzzled Delia, because it seemed painfully neat. Fat little cushions with buttons in their middles filled the skirted couch, each one propped at a careful angle. Glossy fashion magazines lapped at mathematical intervals across the coffee table. But Mr. Miller, following her glance, said, “Oh, the surface I can handle. I’ve posted a chart in the kitchen. Each day has its special job. This afternoon we vacuumed, yesterday we dusted. But it seems there are other issues. Last weekend, for example, he asked if we could have penny soup. ‘Penny soup!’ I said. Sounded kind of weird to me. He said his mother used to serve it for lunch when he was little. I asked him what was in it, and it turns out he meant plain old vegetable soup. I guess they call it penny soup because it’s cheap. So I said, ‘Well, I can make that.’ I heat up a tin of Campbell’s, he takes one look, and what does he do? Starts crying. Twelve years old and he falls apart, kid who didn’t so much as whimper the time he broke his arm. I said, ‘Well, what? What did I do wrong?’ He said it had to be homemade. I said, ‘God Almighty, Noah.’ Still, I’m not stupid. I knew this soup had some meaning for him. So I haul out a cookbook and set to work making homemade. But when he saw what I was doing, he told me to forget it. ‘Just forget the whole thing,’ he told me. ‘I’m not hungry anyhow.’ And off he went to his room, leaving me with a pile of diced carrots.”

  “Sliced,” Delia told him.

  He raised his straight black eyebrows.

  “You should have sliced the carrots,” she told him, “and also zucchini, yellow squash, new potatoes—everything coin-shaped. That’s why they call it penny soup. It’s nothing to do with the cost. I doubt you’d find it in cookbooks, because it’s more a … mother’s recipe, you know?”

  “Miss Grinstead,” Mr. Miller said, “let me show you where you’d stay if you took the job.”

  “No, really, I—”

  “Just to look at! It’s the guest room. Has its own private bath.”

  She rose when he did, but only because she wanted to make her escape. What had she been thinking of, coming here? It seemed she could feel within the curl of her fingers the urge to slice those vegetables as they ought to be sliced, to set the soup in front of the boy and turn away briskly (twelve was too old to cuddle) and pretend she hadn’t noticed his tears. “I’m sure it’s a lovely room,” she said. “Somebody’s going to love it! Somebody young, maybe, who still has enough …”

  She was trailing Mr. Miller down a short, carpeted hall lined with open doors. At the last door, Mr. Miller stood back to let her see in. It was the sort of room where people were expected to spend no more than a night or two. The high double bed allowed barely a yard of space on either side. The nightstand bore a thoughtful supply of guest-type reading (more magazines, two books that looked like anthologies). The framed sampler on the wall read WELCOME in six languages.

  “Large walk-in closet,” Mr. Miller said. “Private bath, as I believe I’ve mentioned.”

  In another part of the house, a door slammed and a child called, “Dad?”

  “Ah,” Mr. Miller said. “Coming!” he called. “Now you get to meet Noah,” he told Delia.

  She took a step backward.

  “Just to say hello,” he assured her. “What harm could that do?”

  She had no choice but to follow him down the hall again.

  In the kitchen (cabinets the color of toffees, wallpaper printed with butter churns), a wiry little boy stood tugging off a red jacket. He had a tumble of rough brown hair and a thin, freckled face and his father’s long dark eyes. As soon as they entered the room, he started talking. “Hey, Dad, guess what Jack’s mother gave us for dinner! This, like, cubes of meat that you dunk into this …” He registered Delia’s presence, flicked a look at her, and went on. “… dunk into this pot and then—”

  “Noah, I’d like you to meet Miss Grinstead,” his father said. “Should we call you Delia?” he asked her. She nodded; it hardly mattered. “I’m Joel,” he said, “and this is Noah. My son.”

  Noah said, “Oh. Hi.” He wore the guarded, deadpan expression that children assume for introductions. “So the pot is full of hot oil, I guess it is, and each of
us got—”

  “Fondue,” his father said. “You’re talking about fondue.”

  “Right, and each of us got our own fork to cook our meat on, with different, like, animals on the handles so we could keep straight whose was whose. Like mine was a giraffe, and guess what Jack’s little sister’s was?”

  “I can’t imagine,” his father said. “Son, Delia is here to—”

  “A pig!” Noah squawked. “His little sister got the pig!”

  “Is that right.”

  “And she cried about it too, but Carrie cries about everything. Then for dessert we each had a bag of chocolate marbles, but I turned mine down. I was polite about it, though. I go to his mom, I go—”

  “Said.”

  “Huh?”

  “You said to his mom.”

  “Right, I’m all, ‘Thanks a lot, Mrs. Newell, but I’m so full I guess I better pass.’”.

  “I thought you liked chocolate marbles,” his father said.

  “Are you kidding? Not after what I know now.” Noah turned to Delia. “Chocolate marbles are coated with ground-up beetle shells,” he told her.

  “No!” she said.

  “No,” Mr. Miller agreed. “Where’d you get that information?” he asked his son.

  “Kenny Moss told me.”

  “Well, then! If Kenny Moss said it, how can we doubt it?”

  “I’m serious! He heard it from his uncle who’s in the business.”

  “What business—tabloid newspapers?”

  “Huh?”

  “There are no beetle shells in chocolate marbles. Take my word for it. The FDA would never allow it.”

  “And guess what’s in corn chips,” Noah told Delia. “Those yellow corn chips? Seagull do.”

  “I never knew that!”

  “That’s what makes them so crackly.”

  “Noah—” his father said.

  “Honest, Dad! Kenny Moss swears it!”

  “Noah, Delia came to talk about keeping house for us.”

  Delia shot Mr. Miller a frown. He wore an oblivious, bland expression, as if he had no idea what he’d done. “Actually,” she said, turning to Noah, “I was only … inquiring.”

  “She’s going to think about it,” Mr. Miller amended.

  Noah said, “That’d be great! I’ve been having to fix my own school lunches.”

  “Horrors,” his father said. “Don’t let on to the child-labor authorities.”

  “Well, how would you feel? You open your lunch box: ‘Gee, I wonder what I surprised myself with today.’”

  Delia laughed. She said, “I should be going. It was nice to meet you, Noah.”

  “Goodbye,” Noah said. Unexpectedly, he held out his hand. “I hope you decide to come.”

  His hand was small but callused. When he looked up at her, his eyes showed an underlay of gold, like sunshine filtered through brown water.

  Outside the front door, Delia told his father, “I thought you didn’t want him to feel people were checking him over.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Miller said. “Yes. Well.”

  “I thought you were trying to spare him! Then you went and told him what I was here for.”

  “I realize I shouldn’t have done that,” Mr. Miller said. He spread one hand distractedly across his scalp, like a cap. “It’s just that I wanted so badly for you to say you’d come.”

  “And you haven’t seen my references, even! You don’t know the first thing about me!”

  “No, but I approve of your English.”

  “English?”

  “It kills me to hear him speak so sloppily. ‘Like’ this and ‘like’ that, and ‘I go’ instead of ‘I said.’ It drives me bats.”

  “Well, of all things,” Delia said. She turned to leave.

  “Miss Grinstead? Delia?”

  “What.”

  “Will you at least think it over?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  But she knew she wouldn’t.

  Vanessa said Joel Miller was the most pitiful man she knew of. “Ever since his wife left, the guy has been barely coping,” she told Delia.

  “Isn’t anyone in Bay Borough happily married?” Delia wondered.

  “Yes, lots of folks,” Vanessa said. “Just not who you choose to hang out with.”

  They were sitting in Vanessa’s kitchen the following morning, a cold, sunny Saturday. Really it was her grandmother’s kitchen; Vanessa and all three of her brothers lived with their father’s mother. Vanessa was filling out labels with an old-fashioned steel-nibbed pen. Highly Effective Insect Repellent, she wrote, in hair-thin brown script on ivory paper ovals. Highly Effective was an ancient family recipe. When Vanessa had finished her daily allotment of labels, her youngest brother would glue them onto the slender glass phials in which various dried sprigs and berries bobbed mysteriously underwater. Delia found it hard to believe that people could make a living this way, but evidently the Linleys did all right. The house was large and comfortable, and the grandmother could afford to travel once a year to Disney World. Vanessa said the trick was pennyroyal. “Don’t let this get around,” she’d told Delia, “but insects despise pennyroyal. The other herbs are mostly for show.”

  On the floor, Greggie was building a tower with stacks of corks. After Vanessa finished her labels, she and Delia were going to take him to visit Santa. Then Delia might do a little Christmas shopping. Or maybe not; she couldn’t decide. She had always disliked Christmas, with its possibilities for disappointing her family’s secret hopes, and this year would be worse than ever. Should she just, maybe, skip the whole business? Oh, why wasn’t there an etiquette book for runaway wives?

  Which brought her back to Mr. Miller. “How come his wife left him, does anyone know?” she asked Vanessa.

  “Oh, sure; everyone knows. Here they were, together for years, sweet little boy, nice house, and one day last spring Ellie, that’s his wife, found a lump in her breast. Went to the doctor and he said, yup, looked like cancer. So she came home and told her husband. ‘In the time that I have left to me, I want to make the very best of my life. I want to do exactly what I’ve dreamed of.’ And by nightfall she had packed up and gone. That was her deepest, dearest wish—did you ever hear such a thing?”

  “So where is she now?”

  “Oh, she’s a TV weather lady over in Kellerton,” Vanessa said. “The lump was nothing at all; they removed it under local anesthetic. Now Mr. Miller and Noah can turn on their TV and watch her every evening. Or you might have seen her in Boardwalk Bulletin. They ran a profile of her last August. Real pretty blond? Hair like that shredded straw we pack our bottles in. Course, no one here was impressed in the slightest—person who’d leave her own child.”

  Delia looked down at her lap.

  “All the women in town have been trying to help Mr. Miller out,” Vanessa said. “Bringing pans of lasagna, taking his kid for the afternoon. But I guess by summer he realized it wasn’t enough, because that’s when he put the ad in the Bugle.”

  “The ad’s been in since summer?”

  “Right, but his neighbor tells me the onliest answers were teenaged girls from the high school. Every girl at Dorothy Underwood’s got a crush on Mr. Miller. I did too; it’s part of being a student there. I was a senior the first year he was principal, and I thought he was the sexiest man I’d ever laid eyes on. But of course he can’t hire some airhead, so he’s just kept running the ad. It never crossed my mind you’d want the job yourself.”

  “Well, I don’t, really,” Delia said. She watched Greggie start a cork train across the linoleum. His little hands reminded her of biscuits, that kind with a row of fork holes pricked on top. She had forgotten what a joy it was to rest your eyes on young children. “It’s just that I’m so fed up with Mr. Pomfret,” she said. “Do you suppose they have any openings at the furniture factory?”

  “Oh, the furniture factory,” Vanessa said, dipping her pen. “All’s they ever need there is oilers. Stand all day rubbing oil into chair
legs with these big mittens on your hands.”

  “But they must have office positions. Typist, filing clerk …”

  “How come you’re not taking the job at Mr. Miller’s?”

  “I don’t want to just … step into a little boy’s life like that, in case I decide to leave,” Delia told her.

  “Do you always up and leave a place?”

  Delia wasn’t sure how that question was intended. She looked at Vanessa suspiciously. “No, not always,” she said.

  “I mean I never heard you speak a word against Zeke Pomfret. Now you want to quit.”

  “He’s so bossy, though. So condescending. Also, the pay is ridiculous,” Delia said. “I didn’t realize how ridiculous when I took the job. And he doesn’t even provide health insurance! What if I got sick?”

  Vanessa sat back to watch her.

  “Well,” Delia told her, “yes, I do seem to up and leave a lot.”

  As she spoke, she saw a lone, straight figure marching down the coastline. It was strange, the feeling of affection the image summoned up in her.

  For her family’s Christmas, she decided to buy nothing at all. Maybe Greggie’s trip to Santa had depressed her. He had appeared to grasp the concept before they went, but once they got there he started screaming and had to be carried out. Vanessa was crushed; even the Santa looked crushed. And their shopping expedition afterward was spiritless, with Greggie hiccuping tearfully and slouching in his stroller in a brooding, insulted manner. Delia told Vanessa she thought she would call it a day. “I need to go to the laundromat anyhow,” she said—a flimsy excuse.

  When she got home, Belle hailed her from the living-room doorway. “You had a phone call,” she said.

  “I did?”

  Her knees seemed to melt. She thought first of the children, then of Sam’s heart.

  But Belle said, “Mr. Miller from the high school. He wants you to call him back.”

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t know you knew Joel Miller.”