Five Tuesdays in Winter(3)

This is how it went for the first six days. Then Hugh arrived. He pulled up in a scraped-up Malibu sedan. We were at breakfast, which I ate with the rest in the dining room to help manage the kids’ morning energy. Margaret was the one to notice. We all went out to the loggia, as Mrs. Pike called it, a covered portico held up by a series of arches facing the driveway.

“But Thomas is supposed to get you at Logan this afternoon,” Mrs. Pike called to him as she began making her way down all those steps.

Hugh leaned against the car. “Then I’ll go back to the airport this afternoon and wait for him.”

“Don’t be silly.” Mrs. Pike, in stockings and pumps, took each uneven step carefully.

“Look at him. He won’t move an inch toward her,” Kay said to me. Then, down to him, “Where’s Molly Bloom?”

“Molly Bloom’s got a new job.”

“She’s not coming?”

“Nope.” He tugged a canvas duffel out of the back. “You get me all to yourselves.”

When Mrs. Pike reached the gravel, he put out his arms and said, “Motherlode.”

She lifted her heels off the ground to kiss him.

“Who’s Molly Bloom?” I asked Kay as we waited for them to come up. I had Elsie in my arms and she had Stevie in hers. They were both squirming but we ignored them. Kay and I had already gotten to that point of not having to communicate about the kids, not having to point out how perilous those steep steps would be for them.

“Hugh’s wife.”

Hugh looked too young, too disheveled, to have a wife. He looked like a boy coming home from boarding school. He was lean and seemed to be still growing, his torn, unwashed pants an inch short, his arms waiting for more muscle. And he had wild teenage hair, frizzy and unable to lie down. He climbed the steps with his arm around his mother and they looked like a pair in a movie, the rich old lady befriending the hobo.

When he got to the top he wrapped his arms around his sister and Stevie and squeezed till they squealed.

He turned to me. His eyes were a pale, watery green. “An alien in our midst.”

“This is Carol. She’s my mother’s helper.”

“Hello, Cara.” He ruffled Elsie’s hair instead of shaking my hand.

“Carol,” Kay said.

But he didn’t pay attention. He reached down and lifted Stevie high in the air and broke into song about someone begging a doctor for more pills.

Stevie shrieked his laughter.

The song continued in my head. The Stones. “Mother’s Little Helper.” It thrilled me that he hadn’t spelled it out, that he’d been confident I would get it.

“Put him down or he’ll wake the dead,” Mrs. Pike said.

Hugh set him down on his feet with exaggerated alacrity, then pressed his mouth to Stevie’s ear. “You’ll wake the dead,” he said in a slow growl. “And the dead are our only friends around here.”

Stevie sunk his face in his mother’s leg.

“Hughie, he’s four, for pity’s sake,” Kay said.

“Pity’s sake? Who are you, Mrs. Milkmore?” He turned to me. “You know Mrs. Milkmore?”

“Talk about waking the dead. Jesus,” Kay said.

“You think she’s dead?” Hugh raised himself up and thrust out his chest and spoke with his jaw slanted to one side and a wet frog in his throat. “For pity’s sake, Kay, go change that skirt. Your school is not called the Ashing Nudist Colony!”

“Oh God, you sound just like her. She really said that, didn’t she?”

Behind them, Mrs. Pike slipped away through the door. I saw the white of her shirt and the tan of her plaid skirt flicker in a window on the way to her writing desk. Hugh was looking off toward the pool and the ocean beyond it. “I’m having wedding flashbacks.”

Kay watched her mother through a window. “Well, we chased her away in less than a minute. Might be a record.”

“Easy come, easy go.”

“The thing I remember the most,” Kay said, turning back, “is that minister weeping.”

“That’s the thing everyone remembers. He stole the show. Where did she find him?”

“I think he’s the summer church guy.”

“No, it wasn’t. That wasn’t Reverend Carmichael.”

“Reverend Carmichael? How on earth do you know these things? We never once went to that church. I never know if you’re shitting—” She covered her mouth.

Hugh stretched open his glowing green eyes. The whites were full of bright-red threads. He bent his head in front of Stevie’s. “Mommy said a bad word.”

Stevie giggled uncomfortably.

“So, flashbacks in a good way?” Kay said.

He looked off again, nodded slowly. He had more to say but did not say it. He scratched one of his bony elbows. Then he said, “It was magical. It was like a long dream.” He turned back. He looked at me. “Elsie is making you a lovely runny poop bracelet.”

Elsie’s diaper was leaking onto my wrist. As I raced up the wide dark stairs, I felt light, my chest full of something new and exciting, a helium that lifted me from step to step and made breathing difficult but somehow unnecessary. The poop had soaked through the useless cloth diaper and rubber cover and I had to change her whole outfit. I hurried back down to the front patio, but they were gone.