Hoving, so the more promising Paige could be given more of what Ruth had to offer.
Paige is a sweet thing, so helpful. But it was the dead of winter, their father pointed out, as if that were relevant. As if when the snow lifted, Courtney might bloom again. This point was met with silence.
When the spring finally came, the orchard filled in with blossoms and then the buds of tiny apples-to-be. The fruit already at Mr. Kemp’s farm stand was imported. Ruth shopped there and one evening told their father that Mr. Kemp had made a pass at her, had tried to rub his nasty fingers where they don’t belong.
The girls didn’t believe it.
Handed me my bag of cherries and nearly twisted a you know what off me. Their father laughed, and Ruth laughed, too.
Oh, such a rookie, he said.
At afternoon cocktails, Ruth often related the woes of her new life. The girls were stubborn, selfish, contrary, though never rude. I’ll give their mother that much, she’d say. She taught them manners. Too much, if you ask me.
Never rude? Of course not! Their mother was born in England, her own mother, Bess, gone early in the war. Her father earlier still.
Sometimes Ruth pumped them for information so urgently the girls wondered if their father ever told her anything at all.
They do the snaky dance and that’s it, said Paige. Courtney caught their father in the kitchen rubbing his front against Ruth’s bottom. When Courtney arrived with dessert plates he wheeled back and pretended a golf swing. He doesn’t even play golf, said Courtney later to Paige.
One thing Ruth really wanted to know was who found their mother first. She didn’t lead up to it, just asked outright. So? Ruth pressed. The girls looked astonished. Or at least that’s how Ruth described them to the afternoon ladies. Mouths hanging open, eyes like marbles, she said. She had her work cut out for her with those two, all right.
Sometimes a shock like that does brain damage, she said.
The women agreed, but also said they liked her new egg salad. Catsup, Ruth confided. It’s my secret.
When Ruth whimpered late in the night on the other side of the wall and woke up the girls, they decided that their father was shaking catsup on her bottom. This was the funniest thing in the world but also nauseating. Paige would go into the yellow bathroom and put her finger down her throat until nothing came up but green. She’d come back into bed, stinking of stomach juice.
Are the boys nice to you? asked Courtney.
What boys? said Paige.
Let me show you something, said Courtney. She got up and gathered her seashells off the top of her dresser. Sometimes, if I put these in a special order—she arranged a circle of shells with two brownish sand-encrusted fragments in the center—Mama just appears.
Shut up, said Paige.
Not in the firm way, more in a dreamy way.
On your canopy, I suppose. Just shut up.
That was only a story, said Courtney. That was pretend. Then she swept up her shells and put them in a drawer where they wouldn’t get contaminated.
It wasn’t Paige, as they’d sworn to Ruth, but Courtney who first found their mother. And right away, Courtney knew she was the lucky one. Worse to have to make up a picture in your mind to fill such a giant meaning. The actual picture was of their mother asleep on the lion rug. Curled almost like a kitten, one leg stretched out, the other tucked in. She lay on her side, and the cheek not covered by her hair rested close to but not exactly on the lion’s paw. Her cheek was mottled and only slightly gray. Courtney came in to tell her that nothing Mrs. Hoving said on the ride home from school made sense yet and it had been a whole week of speaking French in the car and it still didn’t mean anything beyond bonjour and je t’aime. Her mother’s sundress was lifted all the way to her waist as if to cool her legs off. Bonjour, Maman. Je t’aime. Her favorite bathing suit, the black one, was loose around the tops of her thighs. Je t’aime, Maman. Her mother was being too careful lately with her diet.
Thirty-three years old is awfully young to have a tricky heart, said one of the women in the den. My goodness.
It wasn’t quite so simple, said Ruth and then whispered her motto about small ears and big mouths. They could all see Courtney at the kitchen counter.
Looking for the oranges, dear? called out Ruth like she was the darling wife and mother in a black-and-white movie. So many people liked her for what she was doing. The neighborhood women who sat with her, drinking gin and tonics, admired her and said so. You’re a trooper, Ruth.
They’d never seen her in the days when she wasn’t a trooper at all. Ruth at the Beach Club snack bar, dipping the French fry basket into bubbling oil. Then she was Mrs. Carter, and one day she had a chevron-shape burn like a red arrow stuck on her forearm. Hard not to get hurt in such tight quarters.
She’s blind and foolish just like me, their mother said. It was a hot day and her temper got the better of her. That’s how she explained it. Later when they were back over the fence, back on their own rocks, tiptoeing toward the back steps. The heebie-jeebies, the creeps.
It’s not that poor woman’s fault, their mother said.
The first summer on Honeysuckle Lane and the first without the Beach Club. In fact no ocean at all, which was strange. They were still quite close. But Ruth preferred a day camp for the girls, with itchy woodland hikes and swim practice in a scummy chlorine pool.
They were both older now than their mother had been on the day she returned to London from the safe countryside to find only the crater where her house had been. And when Ruth was being annoying, going through their dresser drawers, insisting on a particular order to their underwear, Paige would whisper to Courtney: At least she’s not as bad as the crater. Which was funny but not very.
When she was returned by train to London, with the other children, their mother was able to find an aunt to help her—really only a courtesy aunt, a neighbor named Florence Kinney. And their father liked to say how resourceful their mother was and, for a little girl, how very brave.
In the ocean house, down the hall from her bedroom, their mother made a kind of dressing room of a windowless storage closet. There, inside a cigar box, she kept the striped handkerchief she wore around her neck in case she needed it as a mask at the end of the war. In Hampstead the air was often filled with ash. And every single day, Florence Kinney would say it was all beyond her. The care of a child in this misery was completely outside her ken. Every other person had a crater, after all, but not everyone had an orphan thrust her way.
That’s why when their mother was very tired or had the heebie-jeebies or the creeps, their own father knelt beside her and put his arms around her legs, as if she were only a tiny girl, like them. In the house by the ocean everyone who needed a mother had one. This was their joke as a family. A surplus of mothers. Mrs. Hoving thought this was funny, too, because of course she was one of them. Their father held their mother tight around her knees until she laughed, saying: Off! you’re a nuisance, her fingers curled soft around his wrists.
In mid-August, everyone on Honeysuckle Lane was asked by the Long Branch township to stay home and indoors as much as possible while the authorities cleaned up the mess and the danger after the surprise hurricane. This came over the radio.
Though the
