The Patron Saint of Liars (44 page)

"No, you look fine." I took a hand towel from the refrigerator door and gave it to him.

"My hands look terrible," he said.

"They're fine." I looked at them hard. I went under his fingernails with mine, dislodging little flecks of paint. I brought a bottle of lotion from the sink and worked some into his hands. "See?" I said. "There, good as new."

"Thanks," he said. He touched the top of my head.

"I'm going to go over and get Mr. Clinton," I said.

"I can go," my father said.

"It's no big deal. I said I'd do it. You go on over and check on Lorraine, make sure dinner's okay."

My father and I went to the front door. "Sure I don't need a tie with this?" he asked again.

"Positive." We went down the steps together and then parted halfway across the field.

It was so insane, my father worried about his clothes, the nervousness in his voice. He was afraid he would lose her to this man. He was so busy worrying that, for a little while at least, he had forgotten she was already gone.

I knocked on the door of my mother's house and Thomas Clinton answered it. He was still wearing his suit. He even had the jacket on. It looked better somehow. I wondered if he had found my mother's iron or if he had one of his own in the trunk of his car. "Did you get some rest?" I said.

"I did."

I didn't come in the house. I waited at the door for him. "Should I lock it?" he said.

"Not here. Nobody locks anything in Habit." The light was just beginning to turn as we crossed the pasture and headed up toward Saint Elizabeth's. We were both trying to get a better look at the other one while keeping our eyes as straight ahead as possible. I kept wanting to say, stop, let's just look. We'll both look. But we kept going.

"It's awfully nice here," he said. "It must have been a good place to grow up."

"It's hard to say. I guess it was. Kind of dull, not like California."

"But it's quiet here." He stopped for a second to look around. It was like he was trying to figure out exactly where the quiet was coming from. "I like that. California is pretty noisy now."

"Where do you live?"

"Oh, I'm still in Marina del Rey," he said, like I was asking him if he'd moved.

"Is that where you and my mother lived when you were married?"

He nodded. "It's changed so much. Rose would never recognize it now. We'd made a down payment on a house just before she left. If we hadn't bought it then I never would have been able to afford to stay there." He looked at me, and then looked down at the ground. "Did she ever go back?"

"To California?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Not that I know of. No," I said. "I'm sure she didn't."

"It doesn't matter," he said, but he sounded relieved. "I was just wondering." If someone is gone, it's better to think of them as far away. I knew that.

It was such a pretty time of night. The sky was a bright dark blue and there was still a little bit of color at the west edge of the field from where the sun was going down. All the lights in Saint Elizabeth's were on and as we approached it, I thought it was the Hotel Louisa. It looked like there was a wonderful party inside. We went up the back steps into the kitchen.

"Hi there," Lorraine said, smiling at Thomas Clinton.

"Hello," he said, and then to my father, who was standing behind her, "hello."

"This is Sister Evangeline," I said. "She was my mother's best friend."

Thomas Clinton reached down and shook her hand as she sat in her chair. Don't ask me how I knew this, it was something about the look on his face when he saw her: he was a Catholic down to his bones. There's a way a Catholic looks at a nun, even more than at a priest, like she's a holy relic or something. The Shroud of Turin sitting in a chair. "Sister," he said.

When he tried to straighten up, she didn't let him go. She held his hand, in fact, she covered it with her other hand, as if she was trying to make it safe. "I'm sorry for your troubles," she said.

He smiled a little and nodded. He understood. They both did.

"I asked Mother Corinne, and she said we could have dinner in the dining room tonight since everybody's out already," Lorraine said.

I looked up at her and felt a sort of panic. I didn't want Mother Corinne to know about Thomas Clinton, who he was really. Not when she thought so badly of my mother. But Lorraine caught all of this and smiled at me. "I told her you had a relative visiting from out of town," she said.

When Saint Elizabeth's was the Hotel Louisa, the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson, sat at the same table every night. It is the round one that sits in the alcove of the window and looks out over the pasture, the front section of which was a formal garden back then, and the edge of the woods. The way the dining room is designed, this table is set off from the others. You really can't help looking at it. It's where the nine-month girls sit now. The head table, the best. It's their reward for being pregnant. Their reward for being so big and uncomfortable. When this was the Hotel Louisa, there was a special set of everything used for that table alone. The silverware was plated with real gold, the linens came from Ireland, the crystal was so heavy that Louisa would only drink out of white wine glasses. There were pink orchids on that table every night. Those were her absolute favorites. You can see them in the background of every portrait that was painted of her.

The Nelsons would invite anyone who was very important to sit at their table with them, mayors who were visiting, bankers, every now and then a movie star, the one who was never the star of the picture but whose face you saw everywhere and seemed so familiar. On the night that the hotel opened the Clatterbucks came and they sat at this table. June told me about it, how she made herself a yellow organdy dress and her father bought her a pair of shoes that were dyed to match. "There was music all night long," she told me. "Two bands, so that when one of them got tired the other would just step right in and start playing the same song. It never ended." It was the only time the Clatterbucks ever ate at the hotel.

"All these years I've been here and I've only eaten in this room twice," my father said. "The first night I came here and on my sixtieth birthday." Then he turned to Thomas Clinton. "Course, I'm in here all the time, painting, steadying tables, keeping up with things."

"I remember the night you came," Sister Evangeline said. "You couldn't look at the girls, you were so embarrassed."

"I thought I'd be here a couple of days, a week at the most."

"Things don't always work out like you think they're going to," Thomas Clinton said, and even though I knew he didn't mean anything by it, it put a kind of shadow over everything.

"Dinner's good," I told Lorraine. "You're getting the hang of this."

"I'm not Rose," Lorraine said, not caring a whit about saying her name to this nervous crowd. "But I'm getting there."

"Rose was a good cook?" Thomas said.

"The best," my father said. "She cooked three meals a day, every day she was here."

"That's funny," Thomas Clinton said absently. "I don't really remember her cooking at all."

"It's hard to imagine Mom not cooking," I said. "What was she doing if she wasn't cooking?"

"Driving," Thomas Clinton said. He got a look on his face like the old men in town get when they're telling war stories, like it should be an awful memory but it's been so long ago it's turned into something else. "I couldn't get her out of the car to save my life. Rose was a born driver. There were times I would think I never should have taught her how."

"You taught her to drive?" I said.

Thomas Clinton nodded. "I remember the day she got her license."

"She taught me to drive," I said. It made me so happy. For just that minute things fell into a line. Things made sense.

"She didn't drive so much," my father said. "When she was here."

It was like candy, talking about her this way when we were all together. We all knew we shouldn't, that at any second it would flip over and be too much. We could get angry or brokenhearted at one wrong turn, so we stopped. If people do have more than one life in a lifetime, they should be careful to make sure the different versions of the past never overlap. My mother had tried to do that, and when she knew she couldn't hold the two worlds apart anymore, she left.

"What will you do when you leave us?" Sister Evangeline asked.

Thomas Clinton ran his finger idly along the side of his dinner fork. "Go back," he said. "I have some time. School doesn't start for almost two months."

"You're a teacher?" I said. I had never thought to ask before what he did.

"Math," he said. "I guess I should try to have a vacation, go and see something. I don't know. It doesn't seem very appropriate."

"But you won't keep looking for her?" I said.

Thomas Clinton looked at me, and I knew from the expression on his face that that was exactly what he had been planning on. "No," he said. "I wouldn't know where to start."

"Go away for a while," my father said quietly. "Take some time off. Go fishing on your way back, through Arkansas. Great fishing in Arkansas. Do you fish?"

"I have," said Thomas Clinton.

My father nodded. "Then that's the ticket," he said.

After dinner my father went into the pantry and got a bottle of Jack Daniel's off the top shelf. It had been a Christmas present to him from all of the girls a few years back. He made a big deal out of hiding it because Habit was dry, even though nobody cared about those things anymore. He and Thomas Clinton stood out on the porch and had a quiet drink. I couldn't hear what they were saying from the kitchen, only the soft thud of the moths flying into the screen door, attracted by the light. Lorraine cleared the table, and I took Sister Evangeline into her room. "I'm tired," she said.

"It's late."

"That man," she said. "Have you ever seen anyone so sad?"

"No," I said.

She pulled the bobby pins out from the sides of her coife and slipped it off of her head. She scratched her scalp. I saw that the bandage was back on her hand. She'd put it on herself and not done a very good job.

"Is this bothering you again?"

She nodded. "I don't know what it is."

I went into her bathroom and got some Bactine, the box of gauze, scissors and tape. "Let me," I said, and sat down beside her on the bed. I was scared as I took the dressing off, scared that it might be bad. But it wasn't bad. There was just a neat little hole in her hand, like she'd stuck herself with something. "How did you do this?"

"I can't remember," she said. "It just showed up. It only bleeds a little sometimes. I just don't want to get a mess on the sheets."

I squirted it with the Bactine and wrapped it up again. I tried to make it neat, the way my mother had. "That's better," I said.

"It would be nice if he had something," she said.

"Who had something?"

"Thomas," she said.

"Like what?"

"I don't know," she said. "Something of his own. Something to hold on to. Like me and Son have you and you have us. You have to feel for the ones that are alone."

"Maybe we should ask Mr. Clinton to stay," I said, because all of a sudden it made perfect sense to me. He could live in my mother's house and take her place at the dinner table.

"Things don't work that way, pet," she said. I knew that, but it didn't mean I didn't want it.

I helped Sister Evangeline into her nightgown and hung up her dress. "Say your prayers," I said to her when I got to the door. It was a joke. I said it every night.

"Stay a minute," she said.

I came back to her bed and stood next to her. "What is it?" I said.

Sister Evangeline looked out her window and saw the half-moon on the other side of her curtains. I saw it too. "I miss her," she said, her injured hand folding around mine. "I miss her something awful."

Once Sister was asleep, I went back down the hall to the kitchen. "About time," Lorraine said. "Half the dishes are done already."

"Sorry," I said, tying a dishtowel around my waist. I looked out the kitchen window onto the back porch. "What do you think they're talking about?" I said.

"I know what they're not talking about. I can tell you that much."

"I'll kind of miss him," I said. "I don't know why. It sure as hell is awkward. He just seems so lost."

"I know what you mean," Lorraine said, and handed me a plate to dry. "It's like he's familiar or something."

"That's the problem with this place," I said. "Everybody leaves." As soon as it was out of my mouth I realized what a stupid thing it was to say. Lorraine was leaving, too. Not for a while, but she'd go. I never knew how I always managed to forget that about the ones I liked.

"You know what," Lorraine said, resting her soapy hands on the edge of the sink for a minute and staring out the window. "Sometimes I really think I'd just as soon stay."

By the time we'd finished up my father and Thomas Clinton were gone and Lorraine went upstairs to her room with Loelle and I went out into the night alone. I was halfway across the pasture when I stopped and sat down. Then I stretched out in the grass and looked up at the stars. The whole thing seemed a little funny. Funny because it wasn't so bad, when by every right it should have been. It was just a dinner. That was the thing my mother should have seen. How nothing was a big deal, we just ate. Then afterward the two men had drinks on the porch and we stayed inside, talking and cleaning up. I felt nearly hysterical, because really, it was dull. If anyone had come by they never would have known there was anything unusual about the picture. That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.

My father had left the porch light on, and I turned it off when I came inside. I went upstairs and stood by his bedroom door for a minute. I didn't think he would be asleep already. His back was turned to me and I watched his steady breathing. Maybe he felt better now, knowing that it wasn't just him, knowing that it wasn't anything he had done.