Ladder of Years Read online

  Delia would have bothered anyhow, if it had been up to her. But she didn’t argue. When she left, Mr. Miller was still slumped on his stool, staring down at the measuring tape in his hands.

  She and Noah did all his Christmas shopping at the hardware store—dark, old-fashioned, wooden-floored Brent Hardware, across the street from Belle’s. Noah had very definite ideas, Delia discovered. For his mother he chose a screwdriver with interchangeable shafts, because she lived alone now and would need to make her own repairs. For his grandfather, who had trouble bending, a tonglike instrument called a “grabber” that would help him retrieve dropped objects. And for his father, a device to hold a nail in position while he was hammering it in. “Dad is all the time banging his thumb,” Noah told Delia. “He’s not a real great carpenter.”

  “What is it that he builds, exactly?” Delia asked.

  “Shadow boxes.”

  “Shadow boxes?”

  For an instant she pictured Charlie Chaplin shadowboxing in baggy trunks.

  “Those, like, partitioned-up wooden shelves. You know? To hang on a wall?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Because my mom collects miniatures. Teeny little kitchen utensils and furniture and like that, and he used to make these shadow boxes for her to keep them in.”

  And now? Delia wanted to ask.

  As if he had read her mind, Noah said, “Now he just piles them behind the tires in the garage.”

  “I see.”

  She couldn’t tell from Noah’s tone how he felt about his parents’ separation. He had mentioned his mother only in passing, and this coming visit would be his first since Delia’s arrival.

  “I want to pick out one more thing,” he told her. “You go wait outside a minute.”

  So he was buying her a present too. She wished he wouldn’t. She would have to act appreciative; she would have to make a big show of putting whatever it was to use, not to mention the necessity of buying something for him that was neither more nor less serious than what he’d bought her. Oh, how had she worked her way back to this? She should have stayed at Belle’s; she’d known it all along.

  But Noah was so gleeful as he hustled her out the door, she couldn’t help smiling.

  “Will you need money?” she asked him.

  “I’ve been saving up my allowance.”

  He closed the door after her and made a comic shooing motion through the glass.

  She waited on the sidewalk, watching the passersby. It was hard to resist getting caught up in the spirit of things. Everyone carried shopping bags and brightly wrapped parcels. From Rick-Rack’s Café, next door, the cheering smells of bacon and hot pancakes drifted into the frosty air. When Noah rejoined her, hugging his own bag, she said, “How about I buy you a soda at Rick-Rack’s?”

  He hesitated. “You going to put it in the book?” he asked.

  He meant the little notebook Mr. Miller had given her. She was supposed to keep a record of reimbursable expenses, and Noah always worried she might shortchange herself. (He viewed her as someone less fortunate, which she found both amusing and slightly humiliating.) “Today it’s my treat,” she told him firmly, and even as he opened his mouth to protest, she was nudging him toward the café.

  Rick waved a spatula in their direction; he was busy at the grill. Teensy, though, made a big fuss. “It’s Delia! And Mr. Miller’s boy. Look, Pop!” she chirped, turning to an old man seated at the counter. “This is Delia Grinstead! She used to live across the street! My father, Mr. Bragg,” she told Delia. “He’s come to stay with us awhile.”

  Teensy’s father, Delia seemed to recall, was a snarky man who had not behaved very graciously toward his son-in-law; so she was unprepared for his timid, meek expression and wilted posture. He sat up close to his breakfast like a child. When she said, “Hello,” he had to work his mouth a minute before the words formed.

  “I’m having cocoa,” was what he finally said.

  “How nice!”

  Her voice came out sounding as false as Teensy’s had.

  “That your boy?” he asked.

  “This is … Noah,” she told him, not bothering with a full explanation.

  “Come sit here, boy.”

  “Oh, we’d better take a booth, with all we’re carrying.” Delia gestured toward Noah’s shopping bag. The handles of his grandfather’s grabber extended from it a good two feet.

  In the rear corner booth, Mr. Lamb sat hanging his head over a bowl of cereal. Two teenage girls had a window table—Underwood students, Delia assumed, judging by how they perked up at the sight of Noah. (Already she had turned several away from the house, briskly thanking them for their plates of homemade fudge and pretending not to notice how they gazed beyond her for Joel.) One of them sang out, “Hey there, Noah!” Noah rolled his eyes at Delia.

  “What can I get you?” Teensy asked, standing over their table.

  “Coffee, please,” Noah said.

  “Coffee!”

  “Can’t I?” He was addressing Delia. “Dad lets me have it, sometimes on special occasions.”

  “Well, all right. Make that two,” Delia told Teensy.

  “Sure thing,” Teensy said. Then she bent so close that Delia could smell her starched-fabric scent, and she whispered, “When you leave here, could you say goodbye real loud to Rick, so Pop can hear you?”

  “Of course,” Delia said.

  “Pop can act so hurtful to him sometimes.”

  “I’d have said goodbye anyhow, you know that.”

  “I know, but …” Teensy flapped a hand toward her father. He still appeared harmless, the X of his suspenders curving with the hunch of his back.

  Noah was one of those people who like gloating over their purchases even before they get them home. He was rustling through his bag, first pulling out the screwdriver, then burrowing to the bottom for a furtive look at something there and shooting a tucked, sly glance at Delia. When she craned across the table, pretending to be angling for a peek, he laughed delightedly and crumpled the bag shut again. His two front teeth were still new enough to seem too big for his mouth.

  And see how his hair fell over his eyes—the bouncy thickness of it, the soft sheen that made her want to press it with her palm. And the tilt at the tip of his nose, the knobby cluster of little-boy warts that showed on the bend of his index finger when he gripped the mug Teensy brought him. One point of his jacket collar stuck up crookedly. The knit shirt beneath it bore scratches of ballpoint-pen ink. His jeans, she knew, were ripped at the knees, and his sneakers were those elaborate, puffy high-tops that could have been designed for walking on the moon.

  He was telling her a dream he’d had—something boring and impossible to follow. His teacher changed into a dog, the dog came to visit at Noah’s house, which was somehow the school auditorium too, if Delia knew what he meant …

  Delia nodded, smiling, smiling, and folded her hands tightly so as not to reach across to him. When they left, she told Rick goodbye with such feeling that her voice broke.

  Belle claimed the cat had developed an eating disorder. She brought him over in a Grape-Nuts carton late Monday morning, so he could adjust to the house while Delia was the only one home. Still in the carton, he was borne directly to Delia’s room and set on the floor. “It’s like he’s bulimic,” Belle was saying. She sank onto the edge of the bed to watch him nose his way out of the carton. “The minute his bowl is half empty he starts nagging me for more; I swear I never knew a cat could plan ahead that way. And if, God forbid, he should finish every bit of it, we have this heartrending melodrama the second I walk in from work. Great yowling and wringing of paws, and as soon as I fill the bowl he staggers over all weak-kneed to eat and makes these disgusting gobbling sounds and then darned if he doesn’t throw up in a corner not ten minutes after he’s done.”

  “Oh, George, did I do this to you?” Delia asked him. He was investigating the room now, sniffing daintily at the luggage stand.

  “About six times a day he
goes to the cupboard and looks up at his sack of kibble, checking to make sure I’m keeping enough in stock.”

  “All my life,” Delia said, “I’ve been the ideal cat-owner. I lived in one place; I had a routine. I was motionless, in fact. Now I’m flitting about like a … He must feel so insecure!”

  She bent to stroke the black M on his forehead, while Belle gazed around her. “This room is awfully small, isn’t it?” she asked. “Your old one was a whole lot bigger.”

  “It’s okay.” Delia was trying to lure George into the bathroom now. “See? Your litter box,” she told him. “Store-bought; not just cardboard.”

  “What’re you doing for Christmas, Dee?” Belle called after her.

  “Oh, staying here.”

  “Christmas with strangers?”

  “They’ll be gone, at least for the day.”

  “That’s even worse,” Belle told her.

  “I’m sort of looking forward to it.”

  George stepped into the litter box and then out again, as if demonstrating that he knew what it was.

  “Come along with me to my folks’,” Belle told her. “They’d be thrilled to have you.”

  “No, really, thanks.”

  “Or get Vanessa to invite you to her grandma’s.”

  “She already did, but I said no.”

  “Well, granted it’s kind of hectic there,” Belle said. “I’m a little peeved at Vanessa these days.”

  “Oh? How come?”

  “You know what she had the nerve to ask me?” Belle stood up to follow Delia into the hall; they were heading for the bowl of cat food in the kitchen. George wafted after them in a shadowy, indecisive way. “I was complaining about my love life,” Belle said. “Can’t find a man to save my soul, I told her, and she asked why I’d never thought of Mr. Lamb.”

  “Mr. Lamb!”

  “Can you imagine? That dreary, gloomy man, that … Eeyore! I said, ‘Vanessa, just what sort of idea do you have of me? Do you honestly believe I would date a man who’s spent his entire adulthood in rented bedrooms?’ I mean, think about it: no one even calls him by his first name, have you noticed? Quick: what’s Mr. Lamb’s first name?”

  “Um …”

  “Horace,” Belle said grimly. She plunked herself at the kitchen table. “I may be single, but I’m not suicidal. What’s that I see on the fridge?”

  She meant Mr. Miller’s map of the household. “It’s to keep things in the living room the way Mrs. Miller left them,” Delia said. “He’s charted all the doodads, exactly where she used to set them out.”

  Belle leaned forward for a closer look. On the rectangle representing the mantel, tiny block letters spelled blue vase, pine-cone candle, sandbox photo, clock.

  “Well, that’s just pathetic,” Belle said. “And why would he need it? What makes him think these things would go and lose themselves, for Lord’s sake?”

  “You wouldn’t ask if you could see him around the house,” Delia said. “For someone so set on order, he’s awfully … discombobulated. He’s just plain incompetent! Oh, everything’s fine on the surface, but when you look in the back of a cupboard you find pans with scorched bottoms that will never come clean, dish towels with big charred holes in them …”

  Belle was peering at the diagram of the coffee table. “Large paperweight, small paperweight, magazines,” she read.

  “He keeps these magazines that still come to the house in her name, all about clothing styles and cellulite and such.”

  “Ellie Miller never had a speck of cellulite in her life,” Belle said.

  “A new magazine comes, he fits it in the spot where the old one was and throws the old one away.”

  “That’s what you get for worshiping a person,” Belle said. “Poor man, he thought she walked on water! In fact, she was kind of silly, but you know how the smartest men will sometimes go so gaga over silly women. I asked him to a picnic after she left, and he said, ‘Oh, I’m afraid I wouldn’t know anyone; thank you just the same.’ This is a high-school principal we’re talking about! He ought to know the whole town! But he always depended on Ellie for that. Ellie was real outgoing and social, threw these parties with themes to them like Hawaiian Luau, Wild West Barbecue … and a Grade Mothers’ Tea in the fall, but Joel hasn’t kept that up. He just let the grade mothers flounder this year, when needless to say, every gal in town was dying to help him.”

  “I wish …,” Delia began.

  She wished Sam Grinstead had felt like that about her, she’d been going to say. But she stopped herself.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’ll let you help,” Belle said, misunderstanding. “You just have to do it inch by inch, you know? Pretty soon, you’ll be indispensable.”

  “Well, yes, of course,” Delia agreed.

  That much she simply assumed. Already, only ten days into her stay, Mr. Miller had requested another of “her” meat loaves; he had wordlessly laid out a shirt in need of a button; he no longer left his compulsive lists of instructions on the breakfast table.

  But wasn’t it odd that she had assumed it? She seemed to have changed into someone else—a woman people looked to automatically for sustenance.

  The cat wove around her ankles, purring. “See?” Delia told Belle. “He doesn’t have an eating disorder. All he ate was a couple of kibbles, just to be polite.”

  “You’re amazing, Dee,” Belle said.

  Belle had also brought Delia’s mail—a package from Eleanor and a letter from Eliza. Eleanor’s package contained a knitted jacket for reading in bed. Eliza’s letter said she’d invited the Allinghams for Christmas dinner. I won’t press you but you know you’re welcome too, she wrote, and then she hurried on to news of Linda. She says the twins are getting to the age where they want to spend the holidays at home, so I guess it will be just the Allinghams and us and then Eleanor too of course. … The stationery gave off that faint scent of cloves (for positive thoughts) that always hung in the air of Eliza’s bedroom.

  Noah was very excited about the cat. He came straight home from school that day, and he flung his books any old where and raced through the house, calling, “George? George?” George, of course, hid. Delia had to explain to Noah how cats operated—that you shouldn’t pursue them, shouldn’t face them head-on; should do everything at a diagonal, so to speak, with a cat. “Sit at his level,” she said when George finally showed himself. “Look a little sideways to him. Talk in a crooning tone of voice.”

  “Talk? What should I say?”

  “Tell him he’s beautiful. Cats love the word ‘beautiful.’ I guess it must be something in your tone, because they’re not the least bit good at language, but if you draw out that u sound long and thin and twangy …”

  “Bee-yoo-tee-ful,” Noah said, and sure enough, George slitted his eyes in a sleek, self-satisfied smile.

  On Christmas Eve, Delia picked Noah up at school and drove him to his mother’s. The Millers’ car was a Volkswagen Beetle. She didn’t yet feel completely at home with the stick shift, so it was a rocky ride. Noah was nice enough not to comment. He sat forward and watched for the turnoff to Kellerton. “Most times Mom comes to get me,” he said, “but her car’s in the shop right now. She’s had five wrecks in the last nine months.”

  “Five!” Delia said.

  “None of them were her fault, though.”

  “I see.”

  “She’s just, like, unlucky. This last time, a guy backed into her while she was looking for a parking spot. Here’s where you turn.”

  Delia signaled and took a right onto a patchy highway that ran between fields of frozen stubble. This countryside was so flat, at least she didn’t need to shift gears all that often. They were heading east, in the direction of the beaches. Mr. Miller had told her it was a half-hour drive.

  “Tonight at six you want to watch WKMD,” Noah said. “It’s not like I’ll be on it or anything, but at least you’ll know I’m sitting there in the station.”

  It must feel eerie to see your absent
mother deliver the weather report every night. Although Noah never did, to the best of Delia’s knowledge. Six o’clock was The MacNeil / Lehrer NewsHour, which Mr. Miller watched instead.

  The fields gave way to hamburger joints and used-car lots and liquor stores, implying the approach of a town, but soon Delia realized this was the town—this scattering of buildings flung across the farmland. Noah pointed out the television station beneath its Erector-set tower. He showed her where his mother did her grocery shopping and where she got her hair done, and then he directed her two blocks south to a low, beige-brick apartment building. “Should I come in with you?” Delia asked, parking at the curb.

  “Naw. I’ve got a key if she’s not there.”

  Delia was disappointed, but she didn’t argue.

  “When you wake up tomorrow,” Noah told her as she unlocked the trunk, “look on my closet shelf and you’ll find your present.”

  “And when you wake up, look in the inside end pocket of your duffel bag.”

  He grinned and took the bag from her. “So, okay,” he said. “See you, I guess.”

  “Have a good Christmas.”

  Instead of hugging him, she tousled his hair. She’d been longing to do that anyhow.

  By the time she got back to the house, Mr. Miller was waiting at the front window. They barely crossed paths in the doorway—Mr. Miller holding out a palm for the car keys, wishing her a Merry Christmas, saying he’d be back with Noah tomorrow evening—and then he was gone. The cat mewed anxiously and trailed Delia to her room.

  On her bureau, she found a Christmas card with a check for a hundred dollars. Season’s Greetings, the card read, followed by Mr. Miller’s block print: Just a token thank you for setting our lives back in order. Gratefully, Joel and Noah.

  That was nice of him, she thought. Also, he had shown tact in clearing out of the house when he did. It would have been a strain without Noah to serve as buffer.

  She spent the afternoon on the couch, reading an extra-thick library book: Doctor Zhivago. The wind dashed bits of leaves against the picture windows. George slept curled at her feet. Twilight fell, and her lamp formed a nest of honey-colored light.