The Magician's Assistant (39 page)

“That one,” Guy said, tapping the correct choice on the far left. How nodded, sorry that he hadn’t beaten his brother to the punch.

“And if there was money here, would you bet money?”

“Sure,” Guy said.

“Then you would lose.” Sabine lifted the middle cup and the ball rolled obediently forward. “And if you learn to do it, other people will bet you money, and they will lose.” She shifted the cups around again, quicker this time. “Now?”

Guy kept still and let his brother tap.

“Incorrect,” Sabine said, lifting an empty cup. “And if I add another ball?” She slipped one under the empty cup, let Dot choose this time, and lifted up a cup to show two balls, then did it again, this time uncovering the egg. “I know this set is old hat to you, but I think we can find a way to drum up some interest.”

“You can teach us to do that?” How looked longingly at the thin metal cups, the egg, the little rubber balls.

“Can and will,” Sabine said.

“Now we’re officially late,” Kitty said, pulling on a coat as she walked into the kitchen. “Let’s move it out.”

“We can’t go yet,” Guy said. “Sabine is finally going to teach us a trick.”

“Well, then, won’t we be happy to see Sabine later on?” Kitty said.

They moaned together, the sound of a low, lingering belly pain, and shuffled off in search of boots, hats, gloves, and scarves, the extraordinary preparation for a trip outdoors. “Get all your books,” she called to them.

“I will see you tonight,” Kitty said, and kissed her mother on the cheek. “Tonight,” she said to Sabine, and kissed her hard and fast on her forehead. It was a complete surprise, that kiss, as startling and cool as an egg pushed from an ear canal. Kitty was out the door, in a hurry to start the car, while the boys fell into a ragged line behind her.

“Later,” Guy said, and slapped Sabine’s hand, as if they were happily colluding now.

Dot looked around at the kitchen. It was a wreck of mixing bowls and hot griddles, of bacon that had not yet finished cooking but spit grease on every surface. Vast quantities of uneaten pancakes weighted with syrup littered the plates. “You’re going to tell me it’s too early for a drink.”

“Probably not,” Sabine said, picking up a plate and taking a bite, not because she wanted to, but because she knew she should.

“Well, the boys are okay.” Dot sighed, defeated by her own maternal instincts. “Kitty seemed happier today than I’ve seen her since I don’t know when.”

“You think?”

“It won’t last. Howard will come around. The boys will want to go home, but hell, let her have a little rest. She needs one.”

“So you think she’ll go back?”

Dot cut a triangle of pancakes stacked three deep and delicately mopped up a small puddle of syrup on the side of her plate. “Only if history tells us anything.”

“Sometimes things change, every now and then.”

Dot nodded, chewing thoughtfully. “Things changed for me and Al. I don’t mean that to sound crass, but we kept doing it the same way over and over again, and then Guy stepped in and changed that. Not that I think Howard is like Al. They’ve got a whole other set of circumstances over there.”

“So what could change it for them? Assuming that How or Guy doesn’t—”

Dot put up her hand. “Don’t even say that.”

“No, I don’t mean—”

“I’ll tell you the one time I had hope was when Howard had himself a girlfriend. He moved out of the house, moved in with her. That made a real difference. He wasn’t interested in going back and Kitty wasn’t interested in having him. I could see her starting to get on with her life. It lasted more than six months. That was promising.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, the girl threw him out, of course. If she’d had a grain of sand in her head she would have figured him out sooner or later. God, I would have given her every cent I had to keep him. She threw him out and then there was no place to go but home. He’s got his name on the deed to the house. There’s not enough money to buy another house. Howard and Kitty are fighting and he’s sleeping on the couch and then one day, bang, he’s not sleeping on the couch anymore. What do you say?”

“I don’t know,” Sabine said, not sure whether the question was rhetorical.

“You say, ‘Hello, Howard, haven’t seen you around here lately.’”

“How long ago was that?”

“Three or four years now.” Dot pushed up from the table and started picking up plates. “There are some little birds around here who’ll be mighty happy with these pancakes.”

Sabine stayed at the table, tracing lines through her syrup with her fork, her mind full of her sister-in-law.

“Listen to me, Sabine. I know you like Kitty a lot. I knew you would from the first time I met you. I’d like her even if she wasn’t my daughter. But you can’t let yourself become overly involved with how her life’s going to turn out. Bertie and I go around about this all the time. She thinks I should make Kitty leave Howard and come home. She thinks I can do that. But I can’t and you can’t, either. Kitty’s going to play her hand. There’s just no saying how long it’s going to take her.”

Sabine nodded. She had spent the better part of her life in love with one basically unobtainable Fetters. The idea of somehow setting her sights on another one, one that she had no idea what to do with anyway, was ludicrous. “You’re right.”

“‘You’re right,’” Dot said. “Now, why don’t my own children ever say that to me?”

Together Dot and Sabine cleaned up the kitchen, washed and dried the dishes and wiped the bacon grease off the stove, wiped up every amber bead of syrup that had been dripped off plates. When the hot-water heater had warmed itself up again, Dot went to take her bath while Sabine brought her work back to the now clean kitchen table and began to cut out the supporting beams for Phan’s house. She found the task immensely soothing, the order she had to follow, the lining up of glue and razor blades and straight edge. In the monotonous details of the task she was able for a moment not to think about anything. She did not think about missing Parsifal, nor did she wonder about Kitty. She did not think about what it would be like to leave or stay. She cut and measured. She wrote long lists of numbers on the back of an old envelope and worked the math out in her head. Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world’s unhappiness on the advent of calculators.

“You look like you’re set for the day,” Dot said.

Sabine looked up from her work. “Are you leaving already?”

“I’ve got to pick up some things for Bertie. I feel like with all the other stuff that’s been going on the wedding is getting short shrift. They should have gotten married six years ago. It feels a little anticlimactic now. I keep forgetting it’s on Saturday.”

“It took me twenty-two years to get down the aisle, and Haas likes girls, so don’t complain. By the way, why did Bertie wait all this time just to get married in the dead of winter?”

“She’s turning thirty. They were going to get married next summer, and then all of a sudden she decided she wanted to get married before she turned thirty.”

“Good a reason as any.” Sabine arranged a line of toothpicks.

“Are you going to be sitting right there when I come home?”

“Probably.”

“Well, at least put some slippers on.” She waved to Sabine and blew her a kiss.

As soon as she had closed the door Sabine understood what Dot wanted, just to have the house be quiet for a while, to have a couple of hours alone. She understood because the quiet was wonderful.

Sabine did not get up. She did not take a shower. She stayed in Phan’s pajamas, in Parsifal’s robe, and worked through the morning and afternoon in a state of transcendent concentration. Her hands pursued their delicate, complicated mission. She went over every detail of the house in her mind: the shape of the planters on either side of the front door, the curve of the driveway, the size of the swimming pool in relation to the house (Sabine made beautiful swimming pools, cut them to their proper depth on a plywood base, painted the inside blue, and covered the top in a rippling cellophane. Maybe she would make a yellow raft.) Every time Kitty’s face floated towards her she shook her head and refocused her attention on a task. She liked to skip around in the way they had told her never to do in architecture school. She would connect two outer walls, stop to sand the base, gesso some cardboard, work on the garden. She cut out pansies the size of baby aspirin from a sheet of white notebook paper, cut slits in two matching shapes, and then slid them together using tweezers. Then she ran a violet streak across their faces with a toothpick. She had made an entire saucer full of pansies when she heard the high whining brakes of the mail truck. She put down the tweezers and flexed her fingers open and closed. Getting the mail was one of the tasks that Sabine had come to think of as hers, like shoveling snow and washing dishes. She hurried to get dressed, suddenly anxious to be outside for the sixty-second round-trip that mail retrieval required. She stepped into a pair of boots by the door (there seemed to be no sense of ownership about boots when it came to short trips) and went out the back door rather than the front, just to make her walk a few feet longer. Sabine barely noticed the freezing cold, the blue sky, or the howling wind. She was getting used to them.

She was thinking about the placement of the windows in the front hallway of the house on Oriole, trying to remember the number of panes in each window. She had walked all the way down the driveway and reached into the mailbox before she noticed the man across the street leaning on the front bumper of a parked Chevy Cavalier. The sun directly above their heads made Sabine squint. No one simply stood outside in Nebraska in February.

“Howard?” Sabine shaded her eyes with her hand.

He gave a curt nod of agreement but didn’t say anything, as if he were waiting for someone else and didn’t want to be disturbed.

“Are you all right?” Sabine said from across the street.

“Oh, hell, I’m fine. My wife left me and took my kids. How are you?”

“Do you want to come inside, have some coffee?” Sabine said, turning slightly towards Dot’s house to show which way she meant to go. “It’s awfully cold out here.”

“I don’t mind the cold.”

“Well, that makes one of us.” Sabine stuck the mail under her arm to put her hands in her pockets. “What are you doing out here?”

“Waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me?” Sabine said. “Why didn’t you come to the door?”

“You all made it real clear about how you felt about me coming around. You don’t want me anywhere near you.”

“I never said—”

“I’ll talk to you where I want to.” He stayed on the other side of the street, his long, thin legs angled down like a loading ramp.

“Okay,” Sabine said. “Talk to me.”

But her asking only seemed to make him wait. He looked down the street, his eyes fixed so hard on something that Sabine looked in that direction to try and see what it was. There was nothing down there. It was only more of the same. “She sure does talk a lot about you,” Howard Plate said, looking off. “Used to be she talked about that brother of hers all the time, but once you came into town she fixed on you.”

Sabine shivered. She hadn’t planned to spend this much time outside. She had only dressed to survive the cold for a minute. She had left her hat and gloves inside. She had left her coat. “It’s a big surprise, finding family you didn’t know you had. It’s been a surprise for me.”

“You think we’re family?”

“Dot was my husband’s mother. Kitty and Bertie were his sisters. I think that makes us family of a sort. I certainly care for them a great deal.”

“That explains why you came to see them so often.”

Sabine took her hands from her pockets and rubbed them quickly along the outsides of her arms. It didn’t take long for your skin to turn brittle, to feel the hard bite of the wind. “Howard, I’m freezing. I’m going inside.” Where were all the neighbors? Where were the cars driving by in the middle of the day? Why was everything so quiet?

“I still haven’t told you why I came to see you.”

“Okay.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, trying not to hop. “Why?”

“I want you to stay away from my wife and I want you to stay away from my sons. Things were fine when you were out in California.” He said the word with particular hatred. “I want things to be fine again.”

“Listen, this is Alliance,” she said quickly, hoping to wrap this encounter up. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go to avoid seeing Kitty and the boys, especially now that they’re staying here. Besides, I hardly think you can blame this breakup on me. Things were going great before I came to town and now they’ve all gone to hell?” I kissed your wife, she wanted to say to him. The words came up in her throat with a powerful urgency, and it was all she could do to push them down. I kissed your wife.

“Things might not have been great, but we were all living in the same house.”

“Sometimes,” Sabine said.

“Most of the time. Don’t you tell me what goes on in my family. That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m not the problem.”

“It’s worth nothing,” Howard Plate said. He detached himself from the car and stood up. The street seemed remarkably small. With all the snow banked along the edges it would have been difficult for two cars to pass one another.

She didn’t tell him she was leaving, that he would get exactly what he wanted if he held on for a few more days. I know your wife, she wanted to say. “I’m going inside.” Sabine turned around and walked down the driveway. The boots were an old pair of Dot’s and they were too small for her. She was half walking on her toes.

“Maybe I’ll take you up on that cup of coffee now,” Howard Plate shouted at her as she turned around the corner of the house.

“I kissed your wife,” she said quietly as she let herself in the back door.

Distracted now from the formerly seamless flow of work, Sabine took a shower, changed her clothes, and nervously straightened up the house. Howard Plate was not outside, she looked. There was only a perfectly harmless Chevy parked across the street. She was not afraid of him. He was a bully, a deep annoyance. She would not see him as a dangerous man. She made the twin beds in Parsifal’s room and hung up the clothes, knowing it was probably not her business to do so, but it calmed her. The room, since she had so recently vacated it, had become mysteriously average. The baseball trophies and Hardy Boys books that had held her undivided attention for the past two and a half weeks were now simple decorations on shelves. She fluffed up the pillows and picked up three glasses (three?) from the night table. Then she went into the living room and folded up Kitty’s bedding from the couch and put it back in the hall closet. For a minute she dipped her face into the sheets and smelled Kitty, the soap and cigarettes and wintergreen, which brought back the kiss, which led Sabine to close the closet door tightly.