Restore

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Read how this story came to be in the Process... 
 Restore

a collection by

Michael J. Brien

For Debra.

In Memory of Pépère, Mémère, and Ann LaLonde.

Accompanying Digital Imagery by

Charlie Lemay

Initiation: Head Over Heels in Love Over You

Albert Bergeron first met Irene in a crappy delicatessen on a narrow shoreline drive along the Detroit side of Lake Erie. He was illegal, not even a green card then, still a Canook—out of work only a week from the asbestos mines that had closed in the wispy town of Thetford Mines, Quebec, Canada. But still, here he was in America, standing in a call line for machinists. He listened to the words of the men who stood with him, not understanding, but nodding his head from time to time, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, pretending he too was a machinist.

          In his walk through the shop, toward the foreman's office, he watched the hands of every machinist. He walked slowly and deliberately. He let his misunderstanding of the ranting of the foreman to "hurry it up" get lost in the high-pitched sound of drill presses machining steel. He paid close attention to how and where the men's callused palms were placed on each lever bringing just the right amount of pressure to bear. At the end of the first aisle, he listened intently to the soft whine of the slender high-speed drill as it bore down into a thin metal plate.

          By the time he reached the front office, he had convinced himself that he was a machinist. Convincing the foreman was much easier than that.       

          He was hired to start that night on second shift. The second-shift foreman assigned him to one of the same high-speed drill presses that he had listened to so intently on his walk-through earlier that day. With a nod and a wink, the Canook running the press, handed his remaining sheet work over to Albert. But before he wiped his blackened hands against his apron, le pépère took Albert's white hands and showed him where to drill on the mold, how to set the levers, and though he had a much better grasp of English than did Albert, he explained in French how many holes he should drill by the end of his shift. He never let Albert utter his, "Mais, non, je ne sais pas."

          At eleven o'clock, Albert walked out into the cool night air and toward the river. He was not tired. He was in America, and he had a job. Crossing a wide concrete expanse, Albert slid down the embankment and made his way along the streets. In the rear of an empty factory, he found a flattened corrugated refrigerator box. He wedged it between the brick back corner of the building and against the surrounding chain link fence, rattling the fence until he settled like a boy in his tent, his coat pulled tight around him, lying on his back watching the dark, smelling the wet cardboard and listening to the whining of passing cars nearby.

          His first week in America, he didn’t notice his hunger. Instead, he watched the faces and hands of people he passed on the street and his co-workers, learning what he could of the country and its language. On the first shift, he shadowed the old Canook, the foreman shrugging his shoulders but insisting Albert would not be paid for his time on the floor. Albert didn’t care. He needed to learn the detailed language of the high-speed drill press—its stubbornness, its quirks—more than the English he struggled with. He rented a room with his first paycheck, and only after that did he consider getting some food.

          Not far from the machine shop, he found a small corner market. And there he saw her. A petite Quebec-Quois, long pink fingers working the gleaming stainless steel meat cutter behind the deli counter. Discovering her smile and his delight in her own difficulty with the language, Albert went every day to buy a pound of coldcuts.

          "C'est pour mon chien," he told her when she asked.

          She laughed and told him he was a liar.

          "Comment t’appelles-tu?" He dared ask.

          She answered, "Irene."

          He didn't hesitate. "Irene? Voulez-vous sortir avec moi?” he asked.

          Months later on the frozen edge of Lake Erie, they made love in the snow. When Irene stood to straighten her clothes, he looked up at her and at the stars speckling the black sky just above her, and he pushed the limits of his newly acquired tongue to ask, "Will you marry me, then?"

          "Mais oui!" she said, falling on him and pressing him back into the snow.

         

          It was Irene’s mother, Marguerite, who he had to please. It was she whom he had to ask for permission to marry Irene.

          It wasn’t until Irene invited him for a Groundhog Day Dinner, just a silly custom she had told him, and the perfect time to enjoy a meal with her and her mother. When her mother was well-fed and sitting back at the end of the meal, only then would he broach the subject of marriage and Irene leaving home. But Marguerite had come out onto the front porch, as Albert walked up the steps of the tenement. She was a short woman, the top of her head coming only to his shoulders, with brown hair set in a tight bun and stained grey at her temples. He stopped on the second stair from the top. “Bonjour, Madame.” He nodded.

          Her right hand waved him to the wooden bench under the window. She remained standing. Her French was fast and clipped. She rushed through what was on her mind—her only daughter, her little girl, her husband dead, all she had, did he understand what he was taking away from her. She began to cry, wiped the tears from her face with her heavy wool shawl, then pulled it tight around her shoulders, the bright red color giving blush to her face.

          Albert‘s hands shook. He turned his face and looked away. He began to count the specks of light in the night sky, his mind wanting to drift to them, not to be here so uncomfortable. The sobs of Irene’s mother were strangely quieting, and he dropped his eyes back to the woman who had suddenly sat beside him. The curtains in the first floor window stirred, and he looked past Marguerite at Irene, shrouded in the opaque curtains held close against her face, her finger at her lips, her eyes pleading. He stayed silent.

Her mother finally lifted her face. She smiled, “Mais je va avoir un fils que je n'ai jamais eu, non?” She put her arms around Albert, her shawl falling from her arms onto his shoulders, swaddling him.

          He held her, his awkwardness extending through his arms. Irene, stepping out from the shroud of curtains clapped her hands then held them to her lips, the glass blocking any sound that might have escaped.  

          “Oui,” he said. She would gain a son.        

          Marguerite released him and invited him in for dinner.

          They had a small, private service with a reception held immediately afterwards in the parish hall—Albert and Irene like children, moving from table to table, arms around each other’s waist, laughing with the pastor, Marguerite and Irene’s neighbors, Irene’s best friend, Charlotte, the old Canook who had helped Albert those first few months at the machine shop, and the delicatessen’s owner and his wife. Each had their stories, chastising the couple, or wishing them well. There was limitless coffee and strawberry shortcake that the delicatessen owner’s wife had made. It was enough. “C’est bon! C’est tres bon!” Marguerite cried.

          He and Irene stayed with Irene’s mother for six months before Bolton Emerson made the announcement that they were closing the Detroit plant. They had offered Albert a first machinist position at their Lawrence, Massachusetts plant, nearly fifteen-hundred miles away.

          On Friday, after his shift, Marguerite made them a simple meal of steak, green beans and mashed potato. But there was no lively conversation, only small talk. Sly smiles and tears punctuated the silence. Irene had already packed the two brown suitcases with their clothes, a gilded framed picture of her mother, a few gifts from friends, and the bonus money from the owner of the delicatessen.

          After dinner, Marguerite handed the keys to her husband’s DeSoto to Irene. “Votre père veut donnez le cles pour la machine."

          In the morning there were hugs, kisses, “Au revoir,” and they were gone.

          Albert drove. Irene penciled over the blue routes on the map that she folded and unfolded as the miles passed. They stopped for lunch once they crossed into Pennsylvania, and stopped again for dinner at a small Dutch restaurant near Syracuse, Albert insisting after each meal that they continue driving. So they went, through the day, and then as long into the night as it took.

          In the loneliness of farmlands outside of Albany, Irene allowed herself to sleep.           When he looked down at her with her long brown hair like a blanket on his lap, Albert hesitated to touch her cheek with his rough fingers. Instead, he waited and watched as the moon broke out from behind clouds and caressed her cheek from time to time.

          He did not wake her when he drove down Route 28 into Lawrence. He pulled the car into a field just off the road, and slept.

          In the morning, Irene bought the local paper and read the classified ads. It did not take long to find a third floor apartment in South Lawrence in a tenement lost in a long line of tenements along a narrow street a block from the Bolton-Emerson plant.  It was owned by a middle-aged couple, Canooks as well, who were delighted to rent to them.

          From their third–story porch, Albert and Irene could look off in the distance and watch the cars and trucks rush past on Route 28, exhaust from the mills of the city billowing behind them and blotting out the sky like a row of fat men puffing on great big smelly cigars. In front of their tenement, the rusted steel tracks of the Boston and Maine railroad ran straight and far as the eye could see. They did not know it then, but this would become their home for the next 40 years.

          The tiny landlady seemed especially drawn to Irene. The first time Albert paid her husband the rent, the woman took Irene’s hands in hers and kissed them, speaking “Bienvenue, bienvenue,” again and again.

         

          It was only a few days later when Irene began to feel the swelling grow in her belly. She hid it from Albert at first, saying she had had too much to eat. She pulled his arms away when he snuck up on her from behind, brushing her hair aside, kissing the back of her neck, his arms grazing her breasts and collecting at her belly. She turned and laughed and spun away, pretending she wanted to dance. Albert laughed, then smiled, and gave her space.

          But she couldn’t hide the blood. It soaked the sheets for two nights. In the middle of the third night, she woke from her dream as though drowning. “Albert, Albert”, she called to him softly, touching him, waking him. He reached for her, his hands pressing down into the mattress, into the wet, blood-soaked sheets.

          “Mais, no, no, no.” It was all he could think to say.

          Early the next morning, the old woman took Irene to a doctor. He placed his palms against Irene’s belly and pushed on it slightly. She whimpered. Her eyes teared.  He told the old woman to bring Irene to the hospital. He called ahead and ordered her a bed.

          The surgery lasted a couple of hours, the surgeon scrapping the wall of her uterus, and when the blood would not stop, he cut away the uterus itself. He told the landlady and Albert that Irene would be fine, but there would be no children.

          For awhile after that Albert and Irene’s lives moved as if in a dream. Each evening Irene held Albert's face in her hands believing that as she sighed so did the angels in heaven, beating their wings until Albert's kisses fell away from her lips. "Mon petite chou-chou," each would say, lips wet and rounded at the other's ear.

          They began to see change in the neighborhood slowly, coming most noticeably in the haggard looks that gradually overtook the faces of the landlord and his wife, and in the scents that filled their noses on their early morning walks.

          For nearly a dozen years, the bakery at the corner of the street reminded them of Canada. The smell of French rolls wafting through the open bakery door drawing them in each morning; the owner pouring them a cup of black coffee after tearing open hot moist buns, to hand one first to Irene and then to Albert. After this simple breakfast, Irene would buy a loaf of French bread, and at the open door of the bakery, kiss Albert goodbye, watching him walk the next block to the plant before she turned to walk back to their apartment.

          They were sad when the owner of the bakery died. The soaped windows of the bakery were a heartache that Albert and Irene also grew to bear, until one afternoon on his way home from the plant. Albert smelled the rich aroma of Italian sticks coming from the newly fired ovens. The soaped windows were gone. Racks of Italian loaves were set in the window. For nearly a dozen years more, Albert bought a stick of bread each afternoon on his way home from the plant.

         

          In the last decade, a Puerto Rican market replaced the bakery. The smells from the sidewalk produce had become sweeter and spicier, but only rarely did Albert and Irene dare taste the exotic foods.

          Each spring, Irene and the old woman planted a garden of roses along the backyard fence. As the thorny branches reached toward the sun, they wrapped themselves along the chain-link fencing. Then in the shimmering heat of summer, red bursts of colors pushed through the diamond shaped links. Irene and the old woman would rush to cut them and put them in buckets filled with cold water. They would take them to the side of the road and sell them to motorists as they slowed for the traffic light and were lulled by the spicy aromas of the Hispanic foods and the sweet scent of the cut roses.

          Roses were both women’s passion. In the winter, when Albert helped the old man around the house, Irene and the landlady would pour over catalogs of roses, selecting new breeds to try the following spring. They composted their food scraps in the wooden bin Albert had built beside the garden. Often, when Albert came home from work, he would find one or the other of the women walking back to the house through the snow, an empty pail in her hands, lips rose-red and smiling and eyes shining with thoughts of longer days and an early spring thaw.

          Albert spent his evenings and Sundays with Irene. On Saturdays, he and the old man would tinker. They gradually replaced all of the lead piping in the tenement with copper tubing. They replaced the old knob and tube electrical wiring with flexible armored cable, snaking it along the attic floor and into the ceilings and walls. Just as one project was completed, the old man would dream up another.

          On Pearl Harbor Day in 1974, the first floor tenants moved out, leaving behind a broken-down Maytag washing machine. The old man was going to throw it away, but before he did, Albert removed the great throbbing heart of a motor. He replaced the copper windings and the brushes and set the motor inside the metal frame of an old twin bed that he had hammered and shaped into a table. He carefully plied, measured and cut the washing machine sides, finally setting a circular saw blade on a finely balanced pin. Then he presented it to the old man.

          “Quest’ce que c’est?” He peered over the smooth metal top.

          Albert flipped on the switch. The basement lights dimmed. The centrifugal force of the whirring twelve-inch blade firmed the table legs against the concrete floor. The low hum of the blade gripped the inside of Albert’s guts. He looked into the old man’s eyes. They were wide, delighted.

          The old man’s hand went against his belly. Albert could sense the tightness in his as well.

          That winter, the old man stayed hours in the basement every afternoon, cutting lengths of pine boards and stacking them in the corner, until the pile grew to the height of the ceiling. On March 21st, because the calendar said it was the first day of spring, the old man asked Albert to carry armfuls of boards to the doorway of each porch. As Albert placed the wood in neat piles, the old man ripped up the floorboards and tossed the rotting wood into the yard. More than once Albert had to warn away Irene and the landlady from their plots of turned earth.

          “Eyeeee,” the old woman would scream up at her husband, shaking her fist while Irene pulled her back against the fence.

          The old man handed the hammer and an apron full of nails to Albert, and sheepishly made the hazardous journey out into the backyard to soothe his wife. Albert watched from the third floor porch. The old woman scolded her husband in the clipped French Canadian dialect that Albert had not heard since he had left Thetford Mines. He wanted to sit on his haunches and listen for awhile, but Irene caught his eye, and with a wag of her finger waved him back to his work. 

          The old man spent the winter of ’84 cutting pressure-treated 2x2‘s  into three-foot lengths. Whenever Albert went into the basement to check on him, the old man would laugh.

          “Seeing you Albert, reminds me of the stupid thing I’ve done,” he’d shout over the whine of the blade.  

          Albert would smile. The old man would tell him again how he had forgotten to replace the porch railings when they replaced the rotted floorboards ten years before. As Albert turned to walk back up the stairs, he would read the old man’s lips—Oh, mon Dieu, mon Dieu! His left hand slapping the side of his head.

          That spring, as Albert finished nailing the final rail on each porch, the old man slapped the side of his head and spoke with a hoarse laugh, “This work will outlive us both, Monsieur.”

          When the landlady called Irene into her apartment the morning after the porches were completed, it was to tell Irene that the old man was dead. There were no tears. Irene said that the old woman was very matter-of-fact. She had met Irene at the door, brought her into the bedroom and pointed at her husband lying in bed, the sheet tucked under his chin. She asked Irene to help with the funeral arrangements.

          It rained the day the old man was buried. The ground was muddy. Both Irene and the old woman thought they could smell roses.

          Later that night, the old woman called Albert and Irene down to her second floor apartment. The apartment was warm. The old woman sat by the stove in the kitchen and said that since she had no family, would they take the house but let her stay until she died.

          "Mais oui, Madame," Albert brought his hands together as if in prayer, touching the tips of his fingers to his lips.

          Irene cried like a baby.

          Albert insisted on repainting the old woman's apartment, and putting in a new kitchen sink.

  

          The day he finished, the old woman walked into the kitchen where he was polishing the new faucet.  "Merci beaucoup", she said and sat down at the kitchen table, staring and smiling at Albert for nearly twenty minutes before he realized that she was dead.

          Irene had lost her friend.

          In the last two years, Irene has moved much more slowly and deliberately in preparing for her spring planting and in working the garden. To Albert, it seems she had taken on the ghost of the old woman. More and more, in the evenings and early mornings, sitting in the kitchen, watching the blue gas flame burn beneath the tea-kettle, she talks to Albert about returning to Canada. Only last month, at sixty-six, full of the rot diabetes had brought on her, she had arranged to visit her older sister in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

          Seven nights ago, the caboose of a Boston and Maine freight train, howling through an early morning light, derailed. Albert had woken at the first odd creak of the caboose's steel frame shifting to a place it did not want to go. He went to the window and watched as the caboose left the track and toppled over onto the chain link fence that had permitted Irene’s flowers to wind their way in intricate patterns, ducking in and out of sunlight and shadow, along the length of the garden. The monstrous freight box slid across Irene’s flowerbeds, churning up the dark topsoil, mixing it with the yellow clay inches below, before coming to rest against the pear tree, just beside the compost box. When he turned from the window to scold Irene for not leaping up with him to witness this astonishing event, he saw how peacefully she was sleeping.

          He went to her, pushed the strap of her nightgown back onto her shoulder, and leaned down to kiss her. Her lips were dry, a foul odor rising up between them. Au revoir, mon cheri.

          Albert hired a fat Canadian Mémère to sing the Canadian national anthem at the church. He leaned from his pew under the whirring ceiling fan, and rested his right hand on top of Irene's casket, listening to the loud, confident French proclamations of the Mémère. When she had finished, he stood and walked up to the side altar where the woman sat behind her music-stand. "Merci beaucoup," he said, taking her hand and kissing her cheek.

          He buried Irene, and went home to sit in the rocker on the front porch.

          As he and Irene had done for forty-four years, he pulled the rocker close to the porch rail, and leaned far over to watch the city change. In the last few years, the city had cleansed itself in its urban renewal, and instead of housing, a park was added where a dozen three-tenements had stood. In the center of the park, the huge spokes of a ferris wheel brought up the laughter of teenagers through early evening mists.

          In the heat, the laughter pops continuously. The shaved heads of Lawrence and Methuen High boys, the bobbed hairdos of their tender blondes, brunettes, and redheads peek over Albert and Irene's third floor porch rail each time the wheel comes around. Albert listens to the faint bursts of cherry bombs being set off far in the distance, across the bridge, in the woods by Malden Pond.

          In the overgrown field, beside the ferris wheel, somehow forgotten in the city’s rush for renewal, sits an abandoned, rust-colored 1955 Volkswagen Beetle. To Albert it is like a broken-backed mouse being toyed with by a monstrous cat. It has lain limp there since the afternoon before Irene’s death, and suddenly he can’t bear it.

          A loud knocking on the back door draws him into the house. He walks slowly, through the parlor, past Irene’s empty chair, and into the kitchen, pausing to pass a hand over the teakettle, smudging it with his callused thumb.

          When he opens the door, a pizza delivery girl smiles at him. She hands him the warm box. "From your neighbors," she says.

          The small round shape of the young woman's lips, glistening from being so moist, and reflecting the white shine from the pizza box, intrigues Albert. He takes the box from her and balances it on his left arm as he pushes the fingers of his right hand into his pocket. “Here”, he says, drawing out a fistful of one-dollar-bills and giving them all to her. She is as beautiful as he remembers Irene being at their first meeting.  It was Irene’s smile that drew him in.  The touch of Irene’s fingers that kept him at the meat counter longer than perhaps he should have, taking pleasure in her smile.   

          The pizza delivery girl shakes her head, no. "It's already paid for," she says.

          But her hand feels soft and warm.  Albert holds the money there until she makes a fist around it. "Thank you," she says, and smiles.

          She is on the first stair of the landing when she looks up at him and says, "The sky looks so green tonight".

          Albert looks past her. The stairwell is dark. He listens as she takes the stairs quickly; the first floor door opening and slamming shut behind her.

          He walks quickly back through the kitchen, glances over at the closed bedroom door, passes through the parlor, and opens the screen door onto the porch. He looks into the night sky. It is the color of the mist in the early morning sky above the asbestos mines.

          From the street, the pizza delivery girl looks up at Albert and waves. She ducks into her small car and it bounces a little. It needs shocks, Albert thinks. The car pulls away from the curb without signaling, moving slowly into the lane of an oncoming garbage truck. She should put her headlights on, Albert thinks. He waits, but they do not flicker on.         

          Albert leans forward in hope and memory, wanting to hear the soft whine of a high speed drill press make its indelible mark on an unblemished sheet of steel. Instead, he sees the young woman's face in the glare of oncoming headlights. A moment later he hears the sickening shatter of glass, and the paperbag-like crumpling of German steel. As he leans further over the rail to see more, a blue tarp unleashes itself from the truck's bed and is picked up by the breeze.  

          Unsteady at the pain that suddenly overwhelms him, Albert sits back in his rocker. His heart hurts. His chest feels heavy. The blue tarp blends with the darkened sky, rising, swirling like one of Irene's favorite dresses. It settles lightly on Albert’s face. He smells the stink of it, recalls the foul odor escaping from Irene's lips, and closes his eyes.

Into the Lighted Hall

When Albert wakes, there is an ambulance and police cars in the street. The ferris wheel is not spinning. Only the cackle of short-wave radios disturbs the silence, competes with the strobe of blue and red lights. Albert goes downstairs and stands with a crowd that has gathered to witness the pizza girl’s terrible sudden end. He moves to the front of the crowd and leans over the yellow tape to touch a policeman’s shoulder. “Sir,” he whispers.

          The officer turns, folds back the cover of his notebook, and pushes it into his back pocket.

          “Sir,” Albert hesitates, “I know this is an awkward time, but who would I talk to in your department about an abandoned car?”

          “Traffic.”  The officer begins to walk along the line of yellow tape, away from Albert.

          Albert calls softly after him, “Traffic?” The question gagging a little at the back of his throat.

          “Give the Traffic Division a call, Sir.” The officer nods his head and turns to break the yellow tape, letting the ambulance pull out into the street.

          Albert watches until the strobing red and white lights drift into the mist and are gone. One of the police cars leaves, then the other. Albert walks slowly back to the tenement, the young girl’s smile still charming him. He pushes the heavy door into the stairwell and climbs the stairs, hearing only the sound of his labored breath.

          In the morning, he calls the police department and asks to speak with someone in the Traffic Division. He is put on hold, and a moment later he hears a click.

          A brusque voice answers, “Officer Riley.” “Officer. I’d like to report an abandoned car near my home.”

          “Thank you, sir. And where would that be?”

          “And I would also like to make a request?”

          “Yes?”

          “If the owner is not found, might I take the car?”

          “Sir?”

          “I want to restore it, if there is no one who claims it.”

          “Sir, can I have the location of the car, your address and your telephone number.” Albert responds, then after a moment’s pause, Officer Riley says, “I’ll see what I can do.”

          A few days later, Albert gets a call to come down to the station and sign for the release of a 1955 rust-colored Volkswagen Beetle.

          “You got to pick it up at the lot over on Marston Street,” a bald-headed Officer Riley tells Albert as he signs the release papers. “But you won’t have to pay any charges for it, if you can get it out of there before 5 o’clock tonight. After that,” he scoops the papers back up in his hand and waves them in the stale smelling air between them, “You’ll be held legally responsible for all costs incurred.”

          “May I see a telephone directory?” Albert asks.

          Without a word, Officer Riley reaches under the counter, brings up the thick yellow volume, and slaps it on the counter top. Where the book hits, a tiny sliver of wood splits off at the edge of the counter. Officer Riley follows it to the floor, then looks up to meet Albert’s eyes.

          Albert can’t see it, but he imagines the splinter of wood lying on the floor by Officer Riley’s feet.

          The policeman reaches down, picks it up and drops it in the trash container at the end of the counter. Then he pushes the phone directory towards Albert.

          “Thank you,” Albert says.  He turns to the yellow pages, runs his finger along the edges of a dozen pages before he gets to Towing Services. His finger stops at the first AAA station he comes to, But Officer Riley pushes the nail of Albert’s pointer down to the listing for Mark’s Towing. “Give the kid a chance. He's new and needs the business.”

          So, Albert calls, and has the car towed back to the three-tenement. He has the young man let it down beside Irene’s bed of roses.

         

          After he settles with Irene's life insurance company, and pays the funeral expenses, Albert takes what is left and buys an abandoned two-stall garage, two streets over from the house. Again, he calls Mark’s Towing to move the car.

          Only when the front tires are off the ground, and the red flashers are blinking from the roof of the Beetle, does Albert ask the young man if he wouldn't mind giving him a lift as well.

          “It’s gonna need plenty of work,” the young man says as they drive out of the driveway.

          “That’s okay. I got plenty of time.”

          When they pull into the lot, the young man stares at the dilapidated garage in front of them. “You got a permit for this place? You got the city’s okay to work out of here?”

          Albert watches worry lines work their way into the young man's jaw. Then he turns, looks out of the front window, and laughs. “The garage? Oh, I’ll have it cleaned up in a few days. Then I’ll move myself in upstairs. There’s a loft up there. I don't need much, and it will keep me close.” He turns to look at the young man and says, “Son, always live close to your work.”

          The young man drops the car, takes the check from Albert and shakes his hand. “Good luck. Call me when you need it moved again.” He smiles, climbs back into the cab and leans out of the driver’s window. “I’m Mark.”

          Albert watches him drive away, then walks the neighborhood. In the street behind the garage, he finds two Hispanic kids playing catch in a backyard with their father. Albert leans against the low picket fence and motions the man over. He explains that he needs help in cleaning up the old garage around the corner, and would he permit his sons to help him.

          But the man only shrugs his shoulders, staring back at Albert. Then he turns and waves his sons over.

          And Albert begins again. When he says that he would pay the boys twenty dollars each per day to help him clean, they excitedly translate it back to their father.

          Their father smirks at Albert, then at his sons, and says, “Si.”

          They began by tossing broken glass, rotted window frames, dirt and papers into a rented dumpster that Albert had dropped in the driveway. Then he had the boys wash the walls down with paint thinner. With the bay doors open, he waited a full day after they had finished, before having them whitewash the same walls.

          When the garage was clean, he brought them upstairs. It was in much the same condition as the garage, except that pigeon and rat crap covered huge sections of the floor beneath the kitchen windows. The boys waved their arms in front of their faces, as they followed Albert through mists of cobwebs.

          “Palos?” one of the boys was afraid.

          “Maybe,” said Albert. They followed him, as he pushed open the door into a smaller room. The door swung open wide and the slight breeze disturbed the thin layer of dust that covered the floor.

          “No bats,” said Albert.

          “Bueno,” the boy who was afraid said.

          In the corner, below an air conditioner propped up in the window by 2x4’s, were bags of empty beer bottles.

          “Come back tomorrow,” said Albert.

          They kept coming back. And at the end of each day when Albert handed them both twenty-dollar bills, they said, “Gracias, Signor Alberto.”

          “Mañana,” the shorter one would sing out.

Albert bowed slightly, “Gracias,” he smiled.

          At the end of two weeks, it was ready to be moved into.

         

          The three-tenement sold quickly. A young Hispanic couple with a baby girl bought it. The husband was a janitor, working for the school system during the day and with an independent contractor in the evenings, cleaning downtown offices. The wife helped out at a daycare center, part-time. They aren’t lazy, thought Albert. They’ll be able to survive off of the rental income if times got tough. The tenement was a good investment for them. He was happy to sign the papers and even take back a little on a second mortgage to help them with financing. He was sure the old man would have liked that.

          There was a little confusion about the moving day though. Albert had wanted to be out before the couple began moving in. But at 9 a.m. on the first Saturday in October, his Atlas Van Lines people were complaining about the Ryder rental truck sitting in the middle of the driveway.   

          “We’re on a tight schedule,” the Atlas crew chief spoke harshly to Albert, his second time up the stairs. The crew chief pointed to the Ryder truck from Albert’s third story kitchen window.

          “I’ll take care of it,” Albert said.  He handed him the keys for the garage and the loft, and said he would meet them there.  Then he went down into the yard.

          He liked the way the baby girl smiled up at him from her mother’s arms. “Señora,” he said to the woman, “Please wait until these men have finished moving my belongings out. Why don’t you come back after lunch?” He watched her smile drop as she took a step back.

          “What’s the thing, here?” the woman’s husband stepped down from the rear of the truck.

          “I’m sorry,” said Albert, “But we agreed that today would be my moving out day.”

          “Si,” said the man, “But it is also the only day for me to move my family in.”

          Albert put up his hands and noticed that he had blocked the sun from the baby’s eyes. He looked down into the shadow that fell across her face. The baby smiled up at him.

          “I asked your wife to come back after lunch. Would that be okay?”

          The wife touched her husband’s arm, her eyes pleading with him.

          “Si, Señor.” The man turned back to the truck, reached up and pulled down the steel door. Then he put his arms around his wife’s waist, and they walked off.

          Albert stayed by the rear of the truck until they turned the corner, then he went and stood alone in the back yard. He sniffed the air that for the first time in forty-three years held no scent of roses. He wondered what kind of gardeners the new owners might be. It would be good for the little girl to have a garden. He hoped some of the flowers Irene had planted might seed and return, but if they didn’t, well…. He kicked at the huge scar in the back lawn that only last week he had raked out. He glanced over at the fence. He had pulled it up off the ground but had never reset the poles or recalibrated the chain links. He hadn’t felt the need to do it. The new owners might. He couldn’t bring himself to tell the folks to keep their daughter away from that chain-link fence. Keep her far away from the tracks. Learn the sound of the train, he wanted to tell them, and know at all times where your little girl is.

          When he got back to the garage, the Atlas Van crew members were each carrying their last box up the narrow back stairs to the loft. Albert could hear them up there knocking about in the dark. He hadn‘t replaced any of the burnt out light bulbs.

          “Thank you,” he told the crew chief as he met him at the bottom of the stairs. “Are you done for the day?”

          “Yes, Sir," he said, wiping a blue bandana across his grimy forehead. "Time for a cold brew.”

           “Would you do me a favor?”

          The crew chief looked at him, but didn’t say no.

          When Albert handed him three crisp hundred-dollar bills, he took it and shrugged, “Why not?”  “Gentlemen,” he hollered back into the apartment for the rest of his crew. “We got a job to finish. We got the new owners of this Pépère’s old three-tenement to move in before dinnertime.”

Against All Odds

Albert spent the next 8 months restoring the ‘55 Beetle. He woke every morning at dawn and worked until the bells from the small Catholic Church atop the hill rang out the noontime Angelus. Then he would go upstairs to make a ham sandwich or heat a can of pea soup. Sitting at the kitchen table, he felt as on fire as when he was just learning the machinist trade at the old Bolton-Emerson plant near the shores of Lake Erie with the bone-chilling wind blowing through the broken panes of glass in the high windows near the ceiling. Mark had given him a car repair manual, and he fingered every diagram as though they were blueprints of molds he had made long ago. The work took up the emptiness he felt without Irene.

In the shop he set his machining tools alongside clumsier mechanics’ tools. The odor of enameled paints and lacquers incited him to work longer than he should have. Living upstairs kept the smell close and vivid. In his dreams he envisioned the next move, and the following day he would go down the back stairs, lit from a single 60-watt bulb, to implement his premonitions.

Most of all, he enjoyed the tug and play of the Volkswagen’s rusted bolts.  He used his knowledge of physics to heat the metal around the bolts, expanding and freeing them from the rust that had become a thick, dirtied, second layer of skin over the years.

When he needed to move the car, Albert called in Mark. He liked the young man’s enthusiasm for broken-down cars and old men who were willing to spend their time restoring them. They had become close business associates.

             When Albert first turned the engine over he called Mark. “She roars like a stage Mémère,” he boasted. "Listen to her.” Albert held the phone over the engine for a full minute, feeling pleased with himself and his effort. “Come over for a beer,” he shouted into the phone and hung up. Mark came. He sat behind the wheel, turned the key and listened to the engine for a few seconds. “You done good, Pépère,” he said and shook Albert’s hand. He stayed long enough to have a beer.

When Mark found a 1959 Corvette Convertible stashed away in a downtown parking garage that was scheduled for demolition by the city for back taxes, he hooked it up to his tow truck and dropped it off at Albert’s door.

            “Oh, Mon Dieu.” Albert stood in the empty second bay of the garage hesitantly leaning forward to slide his finger along the Corvette's dirty trunk.

“The city would have taken it for taxes I suppose, but what they don’t know won’t kill ‘em," said Mark. "I figured you could use it.”

          Albert’s eyes glistened. His head and heart ached. Mark thought the old coot might kick the bucket right there.

In less than six months, Albert had it completely restored.

“It’s a beauty,” Mark whistled looking back at Albert from across the hood of the car. Albert looked pleased.

 “I read the magazines,” said Mark. “I’ve been to car shows. You got this one correct down to the last nut, bolt and washer. It’s in concours condition.”

Albert breathed in the smell of the car. He had taken to restoration, as easily as he had learned the art of machining.  But he needed to test himself. “Will you help me enter one of those car shows,” he asked?

Now it was he and Mark pouring through catalogs, not of seeds and roses, but the listings of car shows. Albert realized the pleasure Irene must have felt sitting at the old woman’s kitchen table choosing and planning their garden.

It was Mark who saw the call for entries for the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. “This is the one,” he nearly shouted, turning the magazine so Albert could read the regulations.

“Okay, c’est oui!” Albert looked up at him.

Mark spun the catalog around, tore out the registration form, and began filling it out.

Albert went into the bedroom for his checkbook.

The next night Mark borrowed his fiancé’s digital camera. He snapped pictures of the Vette while lying on his stomach, at a squat, and then full on—front back and sides. He printed the photos on glossy stock back at his own shop, packaged them in a manila envelop and brought them back to Albert.

Albert stood holding them between his fingers. He thought of the old Canook who had taught him machining. As he turned each picture over, he thought of Officer Riley, Irene, her mother, the young girl, the family he had sold the house to, the ferris wheel and the 360 seconds each ride lasted. He selected three angles. Then sent off the entry and waited.

Six weeks later, the notice of acceptance arrived. Albert was giddy. He called Mark to come over immediately.

“This is a good thing, no?” asked Albert, handing the letter to Mark.

“A very good thing, yes.” Mark’s hand trembled as he returned the letter.

They loaded the Corvette onto Mark’s flatbed and drove down to Pebble Beach.

The judges, stodgy polyester dressed old men, awarded the car a perfect 100.  They shook the old man's hand, and welcomed him into the club. Newcomer or not, the restoration work deserved recognition. It deserved its perfect score. Albert stood beside the car, holding the winning trophy like a precious newborn in his arms.  Mark took his picture.

On the drive back, Albert suddenly turned to Mark and said, “I can teach you how I do it.”

Mark held tight to the steering wheel, looking straight out at the road. The sky at the horizon still held a mixture of the blue and gray hues of early morning.

Albert said it again. “I would like to teach you.”

“I’d like that,” Mark finally answered.

On weekends Mark began driving out into the country, stopping at farms, haunting salvage yards, looking for rundown cars abandoned at the back of barns, or in fields far back from the main house.

Early in June, he stopped at a yard sale with his fiancé. An old widower caught his arm, drawing him past the trunks full of woman’s clothes and tables littered with knick-knacks and back into the barn. In the dark, sunlight sifting in through butted slats of wide pine boards, the widower pulled away the tarps on two antique roadsters.

Mark had never seen anything like them, but he could sense, even in the torn upholstery and flattened tires, that they still held what Albert called soul. He gave the old farmer all the twenties he had in his wallet, then called out to Marie for any money she had with her.

She didn’t like doing it, but she handed the farmer four more twenties. “That’s just to hold them ‘til I come back with someone who can tell me

more about them.” Mark lifted a corner of the tarp the old widower had let drop over the roofs just above the windshields.

“No need,” said the widower. “I can tell you something. This one’s a 1938 American Bantam Roadster, and that one there’s a 1940 Desoto S-7 Custom.” He wiped his dirty fingers over his mouth. “If you can fix ‘em so’s they run, I’d like to see that. I haven’t run ‘em since my wife died. That’s been twenty-five years. They’re yours for the fistful of bills you gave me so long as you run ‘em by here once they’re ship shape.”

Marie pulled on Mark’s arm. “Come on Marky, it’s cold in here,” she whined. Mark felt her nails digging into his arm. He looked at her, then at the widower. “Thank you, Sir.”

The farmer pulled the tarp back over the cars and walked out of the barn with them.  When Mark looked back over his shoulder, all he saw were two oversized bales of hay.

Mark drove the flatbed out to the farm and towed in the Bantam first.

Albert shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a beauty.” When he saw the DeSoto on the rear of the flatbed Mark’s second trip, he began to cry. “It is a gift from God.” He wiped his eyes with the rag in his back pocket. “My wife so much loved this car.” Like a schoolboy, he drew a heart on the dusty door and traced the initials AB + IB. He looked up at Mark. “It was our first car. A gift from Irene’s papa. Irene was so thrilled by it.”

Mark touched the fender, surprise in his eyes.

Albert shook his head. “Oui. I get my chance again.”

Albert caressed the DeSoto, moving over it like a lover, gingerly removing every part, to refashion it, polish it, and love it back to life. He rarely left it except to walk upstairs for a mid-afternoon nap, and again to catch a few hours sleep between midnight and six a.m.

 He left the reconditioning of the Bantam to Mark. Let the car work its own spell, he thought.

Mark worked on it like it was a newfound drug that kept him alive, moving too quickly at first, stripping it like a young puppy pulling at a bone. Then he slowed, becoming more deliberate, trying to see it as the skeleton of some great beast. He knew there was a story it was telling him, if he could only learn to read the bones. Beginning to piece it back together, he realized that he was still too anxious.

One morning Albert stopped him. He took him and sat him behind the steering wheel. “Attention ici,” he said. Mark looked out over the stripped dashboard.

“Feel her soul,” Albert’s gravelly voice spoke quietly at Mark’s ear, then moved away. He stood by the left fender and raised his hands. “Watch.”

Mark began to note the gentle application of Albert’s hands to the fender. He watched Albert pass his bare hand over the fender again and again, then stoop to scoop some filler from an open container. He buttered it over one spot, then another. Soon the fender glistened.

“Curb your desire for more,” Albert said, finally looking up at Mark through the empty windshield. He bent down, put the lid on the pail of filler, and went back to the DeSoto.

Mark worked to slow himself. Albert began checking on him more often, encouraging him and calling over to him to check his wants with his needs.

"Be careful," Albert said between teeth brown and rotted by sugar and caffeine, "The devil, she is in the excess."

When Mark became so anxious that he would snap a bolt, scratch a wheel cover, or smooth too much filler into a dent, Albert would stop him. He would pull an index card and a twenty-dollar bill out of his back pocket. On the index card Albert had written a simple list: ham, white bread, sugar, coffee, bacon, eggs, pea soup and beer. By the time Mark came back from the grocery store, Albert would have the damage repaired.

          Mark needed to replace the right rear fender of the Bantam Roadster, but he hadn’t been able to find a fender in the local salvage yards, or through the Classic Car Restoration Buyer's Guide. He began molding it out of sheet metal and fiberglass. Albert came up behind him and reached down to shape Mark’s hand, molding them into his.

          Albert plied Mark’s fingers, showing him the delicate touch that was needed, taking his fingers and applying them to the fender until Albert felt sure Mark understood. Then he let go of Mark’s hands and watched as they moved on their own across the surface, smoothing the lines into the fender.  Only once did he lean forward, touch Mark's arm, and say, "Less hip there, mon fils." His limber fingers pointed to the barely visible rise in the fender, warning, "Once you lose the shape, it's not authentic. You might as well turn it into a parts car."

          Mark learned to steady his hands, to keep them from becoming giddy with the power to transform.

          One night in the spring, the dryness of fiberglass still in Mark's throat, the old man called him upstairs. The stairwell, narrow and dim, seemed to Mark like a channel to a nether world. He groped along the wall until he reached the top landing and pushed open the hollow-core door.

         

          The old man sat in an orange, overstuffed chair. He got up slowly, beckoning Mark in and away from the door. "Can I get you a beer?" he asked, shuffling over to the fridge.

          "Sure." Mark squinted in the light of the bare 60-watt bulb that twisted from a cord hung from the plastered ceiling in the center of the room.

          Albert pulled two bottles of Michelob from the fridge.  He looked at Mark and, still holding the necks of the two bottles, pointed at the cabinet over the stove.

          Mark moved from the door, and walked to the cabinet.

          “You got yourself a place over on the West Side, don’t you?” Albert asked, pulling out a chair and sitting at the formica table.

          “Yeah,” Mark opened the cabinet and took out two glass mugs.

           "I got this place, interested?"

          "No," Mark said, clearing his throat. "I got a place over on the West Side."

          "I know," the old man took a slug of beer from the bottle.

          There was quiet for a moment. Mark remained standing, as he poured from the bottle and listened to the air conditioner kick in from the next room.

          "If you really want to know a car, you got to sleep with it," Albert continued.

          Mark smiled and sat down at the table.

          "I don't have any family left myself," Albert said. "There's nobody I know more interested in restoring cars than you. I don't need any money. The fridge is stocked with bread and ham and beer. I'll be dead in a week." He sucked in a deep breath. "I just want you to know that this place is yours, this apartment, the shop. Taxes are paid in full. I leave you no debt."

"You're crazy?" Mark gave a hollow laugh.

          "No, I got cancer."

          The next two bottles of beer went down quickly and quietly between them. Each time Albert had stood up to get another bottle, Mark watched the small of his back. He pictured the cancer churning beneath the stained green work shirt.

          When Albert had downed his third Michelob, he held the empty brown bottle sideways so it glistened in the light. “I’m still sober as a fish,” he started. "I don't want them to cut me open and rearrange things in here. I figure to go out with what I came in with." He stabbed his chest once with the bottom of the bottle, "Only original parts."

          Mark thought about the offer through his next beer, and then said, "Okay." He was stone cold sober.

          Albert smiled. "I got one more request."

          Mark put his glass on the table, and leaned into the table edge, his hands clamped around his thighs.

          "Before the cops see me dead, I want you to make sure these buggers are shut tight." Albert touched at the corners of his eyes.

          Mark nodded in agreement.

          In a week, both cars were finished. Mark and Albert stood like a proud father and son over work well done.

          "Thank you," Mark held out his hand to Albert.

          Albert wiped his own hands across the bib of his overalls, before pulling Mark in and hugging him.

          "I want to show mine to the world," Mark beamed when he broke away.

          "As you should," Albert smiled back at him.

          The next morning Mark came into the shop to cold coffee and no smell of heat. He listened for any sound from upstairs to indicate that Albert was up and about. When he heard none, he called the police. Then he headed upstairs to close the old man's eyes.

          Albert lay in bed, clutching a handmade quilt to his chin; his eyes already shut tight. Around him on the floor were boxes sealed with the masking tape Mark and he used to tape off the windows and lights on the cars in the shop. Each box had written on it in black marker—St. Vincent De Paul.

          Mark leaned over Albert, touched at his folded hands as if to smooth the creases of skin, brushed back a lock of white-hair from his forehead, and gently pressed his thumbs against his eyelids.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Mark had told his fiancé about his work with Albert, but never about the giddiness he had felt in his hands when Albert guided them in restoring the '38 Bantam. Marie had never met Albert, never knew him as anything more than the old man, never came to see where the old man and Mark spent most of their time. Mark had never told her of Albert’s wish for him to inherit the business. The old man's death came as only a bit of news that Marie did not see should concern her.

          When the police and the undertaker left with Albert’s body, Mark suddenly felt very alone. He went to the diner where Marie waitressed. If he couldn't be with Albert, he thought he should be with her.

          She leaned too gently against him when he told her about how he had found the old man dead in his bed. She pecked once at his cheek saying, "Oh, that's too bad, Marky."

          He watched her walk through the line of tables toward the kitchen and stop to speak to a well-dressed woman sitting alone at the back table. Mark recognized the fur throw that half-hung down the woman’s back, and he began to walk toward them. Marie's back blocked the woman’s view of his approach. When he got close he heard Marie say, in a tone of voice that he wished she had used in consoling him at Albert’s passing, "Now mother, don't cry so."

          The woman's voice rose, shrill and high pitched, "But where will I shop? They are closing Jordan Marsh forever."

          Mark quickly turned away. He did not look back until he was out on the street, his hands on the door of the Bantam Roadster.

          When he got back to the shop, he called The Society of St. Vincent De Paul and made arrangements for them to pick up Albert’s donations the next day.

          Mark stood in front of the open bay door and waved the U-Haul truck in close. When he held his hand up to signal it to stop, the bald guy who had been sitting in the passenger seat, suddenly opened the door and jumped down beside him.

          "I drove a truck my whole life,” he told Mark. “I never had a chance to let my eyes wander, so being a passenger is nice. “Sam," he jerked his head toward the white-haired driver, "is a retired accountant. He's intent on bearing down on the gas pedal as hard as he bore down on ciphers in his past life.”  The bald guy fit the edge of the clipboard on his belly and waited for the driver to step out of the truck. Then the two of them followed Mark up the narrow stairway.    

          The three of them walked into the apartment like they were walking into church. Sam and the bald guy looked at the boxes piled around the bed and then at Mark. Mark nodded. He sat at the edge of the bed and watched them with the keen eye that Albert had at last passed onto him. The men genuflected, their fingers sliding under one of the corrugated boxes, weighing the contents, their thumbs pressing against the tape running up the sides, legs straightening up, and moving through the kitchen, down the stairs. Mark thought to help, but he didn't get up. After that it was easy to stay seated. They took away the boxes, one or two at a time. When they had loaded all of them onto the truck, Mark asked, "Can you take more?"

          The retired guys looked at Mark, then at each other. The white-haired one winced. The bald guy said, "Whatever you say, pal."

          Mark got up and let them take the bed.

          After that, each time they came back through the door, he pointed at another piece of furniture—the bureau, the recliner, the television, the kitchen set, the fridge, and even the aquarium. The white-haired guy said he didn't think they should take the goldfish, so Mark flushed those down the toilet. Finally, their fingers pushed into the pleats of the rolled and tied braided rugs.

          "Thanks a lot," the bald guy said after he had Mark sign off on everything listed on the rumpled sheets of paper held under a rubber band on the clipboard.

          When the truck pulled out of the driveway, the only thing that gave witness that Albert had ever lived in the apartment was the 5" X 7" black & white photograph of him holding a trophy beside the 1959 Corvette Convertible that he had received a perfect 100 for at the Pebble Beach Concours.  Mark placed the picture on the kitchen counter.  He looked out of the small window above the sink and watched the truck back out of the driveway. The roof of the white box-truck was scarred down the middle, the aluminum gleaming like a narrow stream trickling through a field of snow.  Mark followed it to a stop at the lights. It took a left and headed up the on-ramp to the highway. From there, it fell into the mob of traffic heading north.

          The quiet now was too much for Mark to bear alone. He moved from the sink to the back door, into the dark stairwell, pulling the door closed behind him. Downstairs, he glanced around, listened for a few seconds, shut the fluorescent work lights over the first bay, pulled down the overhead door, and drove over to Marie’s apartment. The silence stayed with him. He felt obligated to carry it. He didn’t hear the usual traffic noises. At the light, he touched the knob on the radio and then drew his hand back quickly. He waited for the light to change and then slowly eased behind an old Dodge Dart, watching the sun slowly drop through thickening clouds.

          After he shut the car off, his hands held tight to the steering wheel. He stared out through the windshield at the bus stop.

          It was the smell of diesel fumes that got his attention. He didn’t even see the bus. As he leaned forward, he heard the low roar of the diesel engine push the bus up the hill. When he looked again, he saw Marie walking toward him. He let go of the steering wheel and stepped out of the car.

          “Marky!” She put out her arm and leaned against his shoulder. Bending her left leg back, she pulled off her shoe and rubbed the bottom of her foot. “What do you want for dinner?” she asked looking into her shoe, tipping it until a small pebble fell out, then slipping it back on her foot. She let go of his arm and walked off in the direction of their front door.

          Mark followed her into the apartment.

          At dinner, she insisted on recalling her mother's hysterics over the closing of Jordan Marsh. "The poor woman, that store was her life. I told her she's got to get over it. Cut up your credit cards and go over to Macys, I told her. When I thought I had her attention, I served her a kiwi salad. She felt better. Where did you go? I turned my back, and you were gone."

          "I needed some air," Mark said.

          She leaned over to him and kissed him, "Silly."

          When they went to sit on the sofa to watch TV, Marie sat at the edge of the cushion, the side of it pushing up against Mark’s thighs like another lap, separating them. He tried to pull her back against him. He wanted her close.

          She got angry, pushing him away. “My hair, you didn’t notice it, did you?” She twisted her head to look at the TV. “My mother made me so aggravated, I went to Tish’s after I got off my shift. She gave me a perm.”  She looked back at him, tapping his chest and shoulders with her hand like she was arranging a place setting at one of her empty tables. “Do you like it?”

          He grinned, felt stupid, nodded yes, and was thankful she turned her back to him to watch TV. He reached out and gently began stroking her back, following the line of her spine between her shoulders to her tailbone.

          “Ooo, that feels good.”

          Just before the news, Marie clicked off the television. The room was suddenly black. Mark couldn’t see, but he felt Marie rise from the sofa. He listened to the soft padding of her footsteps, as she walked in the dark to the bathroom. He moved from the couch, his hands out in front of him until he touched the wall leading him to the bedroom. He undressed, lay down in the bed and watched the thin line of light that cut through the dark along the floor of the closed bathroom door. Marie took her time getting herself ready, leaving Mark imagining the night at the drive-in this past summer when she couldn’t keep her hands off him. A family with kids in their pajamas watched from the cars on either side of them.  “I brought a blanket, silly,” she had whispered, nibbling at his ear. He remembered the soft round shape of her fanny as she knelt on the seat to reach into the backseat. She didn’t care that the kids might have seen her paisley panties under her short skirt. When she spread the blanket over them, he reminded her of their audience, and she pouted. She leaned against him, a soft weight, then took his hand and drew his fingers over her covered breasts, along the bottom edge of her brief top. He caressed her warm belly.

          The bathroom door opened, and the light went out. Mark listened to the rustle of Marie shedding her clothes. The bureau drawer opened, and he pictured her slipping a thin, silky gown over her head. When she came to bed, she turned her back on him and spoke into the room, “I’ve got to get to the diner early tomorrow. We’re shorthanded.”

           He brought his hand to the small of her back. The rough cotton nightgown rose and fell. Still, he traced a finger along her shoulders, down her spine   and massaged her tailbone, but she did not respond. In a few minutes, she began to snore. He stared into the dark for a long time. He did not want to sleep for fear Albert would come to him in his dreams.

          But he did sleep, and Albert did come. Albert stood in a field with a small child, a girl, laughing. She spread out her arms and twirled. Albert held his arms out, either reaching for her or letting go. Mark seemed to be watching from somewhere near the edge of the field where the wood began. The girl came running toward Albert. He watched flowers bend as she ran past. He tried to catch her, but she spun out of reach, falling into tall green stalks of corn, where she disappeared. Albert called for her, but no sound came from his mouth, and she did not come back.

          When Mark woke, Marie was already dressed.

          “Gotta go,” she leaned down and kissed him, and then turned away before he could even raise his arms to hold her.

Buster’s Enlightenment

Over the next three days, Mark cleaned Albert’s apartment from ceiling to floor. He replaced the 60-watt bulb in the kitchen with a polished brass candelabra fixture. He scrubbed the kitchen linoleum twice before covering it with a new layer patterned after twelve inch blocks of fieldstone. Then he stripped the hardwood floors in the living room and bedroom before recoating them with two coats of a durable satin-gloss urethane finish. The work was cathartic. It brought him closer to Albert, and it also seemed to bring him closer to Marie. He wanted her to like the place. He wished she had met Albert. He hoped she would understand why he needs to move into this apartment.

          At last, when even the toaster gleamed, he showed her the apartment. He watched her carefully. She tilted her head as she walked from the kitchen into the living room. Her long brown hair covered her bare shoulders. He watched her concentrate on the sound of her footsteps, as she crossed and re-crossed the living room floor in heels. She slipped off her shoes and walked soundlessly out of Mark's sight, into the bedroom.

          From where he stood at the back door, it was as if she had suddenly transformed herself into a ghost. He took a few steps to lean against the kitchen counter, closing his eyes, listening more intently, feeling her move toward him from room to room in her nylon-stocking feet.

          When he opened his eyes, she was standing in front of him.

          “Do you know what I learned today at the diner?” she asked him.

          “No.”

          “I served an old Chinaman. He asked me how old I was. When I told him, he became very stern faced and said I was dangerous, born in the year of the tiger.”

          “Oh?”

          He said, "I was aggressive and short-tempered.”

          Mark laughed, “You?”

          "I told one of the other girls to wait on him after that. I didn't want the table." She put her arms around his middle. "Marky? Do you really want to live upstairs from where you work?"

          He didn't want to tell her that Albert had said that to be good at restoration he ought to sleep with the cars.

          She rested her head on his chest. “I remember when I little and my Daddy lived with us. Mother would be getting supper ready, and I’d ask her how long before Daddy got home. It was always, “Another half-hour”. When he came in the house, I wanted to run to him and have him lift me high and kiss me, but my mother had told me not to bother him when he first got in the door. “Give him a chance to settle in,“ she told me again and again. One day, I asked him why he worked so far from home and why it took him so long to come home.

          “Marie”, he told me, “the distance helps me clear my head."

          Mark felt Marie’s voice like a gentle tickle in his chest. He pulled her closer. He didn’t know what she was trying to tell him, but he wanted to tell her that he was destined to live in this place. He told her, "Marie, this way you'll never even leave my head."

          She lifted her face and smiled at him. She tip-toed to reach his lips, and kissed him.  "Okay, Romeo."

          She decorated the apartment.  The color of the drapes, the style of the living room sofa, the dark Mediterranean bedroom set really didn't matter to him. She had him replace the candelabra with track lighting. In the remaining two weeks before the wedding, Marie turned the apartment into something she could call hers.

          In the shop, Mark hung the picture of Albert with the '59 Corvette on the head of a rusty nail sticking out from the wall by the telephone.

          He stayed in the shop those two weeks buffing out the lines in a '61 Mercury Comet Sedan.  The old man had become Mark's shadow. His hands were everywhere and on everything that Mark touched. Mark smelled Albert’s breath, the stench of two-day old coffee, warm and sour, at the back of his neck whenever he turned quickly to reach for a rag or a tool. He could hear Albert wheezing, the breath passing between cracked lips and yellowed teeth. He felt Albert’s leathery hands pressing on the back of his, urging the buffer to move more slowly over the fender, rounding it ever so gently into the shape that a ’61 Mercury Comet Sedan needed to hold.

          Even the night before his wedding, Mark worked past midnight. He had called Marie earlier in the evening to tell her that he needed to finish the project, reminding her that the customer wanted to pick it up in the morning, before the wedding, and before he closed the shop for the few days they were taking for a honeymoon.

          “That’s Okay, honey. Would you be a dear and talk to Mom?” and she handed the phone to her mother.

          “Mark, I’m insulted. Why aren’t you here? Can’t your silly cars wait? You’re marrying my daughter in the morning.”

          Mark apologized to Sophia for skipping out on the dinner and asked her to save him some leftovers.

          In the morning, dressed in a new grey suit, Mark delivered the ’61 Mercury to its owner. The paperwork was completed, and the owner had gladly written out a check.  Mark asked him for a ride across town to the office of the Justice of the Peace.

          Mark arrived first and watched the road from behind the glassed front doors. In a few minutes, the Bantam Roadster pulled up with a hired white-haired driver at the wheel. Marie and her mother sat in the back seat. Mark watched Marie slide her long white-stocking legs over the granite curb. She stood tall, elegant, in a white suit. It was a gift from her mother, purchased on her new Macy’s account. Mark was surprised at the tiny steps Marie took walking into the vestibule. In her white heels, she stood almost an inch taller than he. He kissed her softly on her lips and took her arm. Sophia stayed at her side as her maid of honor. Mark didn’t have a best man, so the eighteen-year-old son of the Justice of the Peace stood in and held the rings. When it was time, he placed them on the pewter plate.

          That night, they made love in the loft. Marie’s head lay in a nest of her dark hair on his chest. Mark gently fingered long strands away from her forehead, while he whispered anecdotes that first belonged to his grandmother. “Every time I brought home a good report card, or she heard a compliment about me from one of the neighbors, she would wag her finger and tell me, Within each individual lies an astounding potential for greatness.” He spoke his grandmother’s lines in a high-pitched falsetto voice and looked for some reaction to appear on Marie’s face.  All he saw was the slightest flutter of her eyelids.  Marie turned her head. She snored lightly, her lips pressing against the underside of his jaw.

          They drove along the seacoast into southern Maine, stopping for lunch and a walk along a small piece of private beach, then drove further along Route 1 into central Maine. At Booth Bay Harbor, they decided to stay for the night. They drove slowly along the shore road, passing motel after motel posted with No Vacancy signs. Mark was ready to drive back to the turnpike to find a Holiday Inn when Marie saw the one-story, pink, cinder block motel on the beach. She read the blinking neon sign, Buster’s.

          “It’s a funny name for a motel,” she told the man at the desk.

          “It’s my name,” he glared at her. “You want a room?”

          “Of course,” she laughed.

          "You got ID?"

          Mark showed the owner his driver's license, but Marie just stared back at him.

          "You married?"

          Marie had their marriage certificate in her purse. She glared back at him.

         

          The man's wife came out from the back room. She nudged her husband. "You giving these kids a hard time?" She handed the room key to Marie and gave her a wink.

          Marie didn’t like the room. The picture window in the bedroom didn’t look out onto the beach; it looked out onto the road. When Marked opened the small bathroom window to let in the sea breeze, she insisted the room smelled musty. They watched TV in bed.

          In the morning Marie complained to the owner. “I couldn’t sleep, the room smelled so bad.”

          He looked up at her and took the key she dangled from her finger. “You couldn’t sleep ‘cause you had other things on your mind.”

          All that day Marie was dissatisfied with anything they did. She kept telling Mark that she was anxious to get back home. She didn’t want to stop for lunch. Instead, they ordered at a McDonald’s drive-thru. She had a Happymeal, eating only the French fries for the next ten or fifteen miles.

          That night they stopped in Wolfboro, New Hampshire. She agreed to a bed and breakfast in the center of town. Mark brought the suitcases up to their room, while Marie stayed downstairs in the front parlor. When he returned, she told him, “I’ve never seen a mime,” pointing through the lace curtains at the dinner-theatre marquee across the street.

          The meal was simple, spaghetti and meatballs with Italian bread and a salad, but it satisfied them both. Marie grew anxious. There were only a few tables with anyone sitting at them.

          “Well, where is he?” Marie queried Mark after the lights dimmed.

          A small spotlight came on, and a white-faced figure dressed in black stepped out from behind some curtains. With incredible speed and accuracy, the clownish face stopped Marie’s malaise and seemed to soften her attitude. Mark watched him carefully. The mime seemed to work only on winning Marie over, paying little attention to the rest of the audience. Marie’s eyes never left him. His hands fluttered into doves and blown kisses, then he graced the space with movement depicting the stages of a man’s life, finally ending with the frailty of old age. Mark was delighted. He wanted to pull Marie to his side and tell her that this is what he had learned from his relationship with Albert, how subtly it had developed, and how tangible it had become. Butterflies still beat in his stomach, weeks after Albert’s death. With a sudden clap of thunder and a merciless downpour on the tin roof of the theater, the mime covered his head with his arms, then slowly lowered them to his sides. He stood there, shivering. The spotlight shrunk until all they could see was his face. He shut his eyes and the light vanished.

          Mark heard Marie gasp, and when the spotlight snapped back on, the mime was standing over her, a pantomimed umbrella shielding her from the rain. The mime tried to hand the umbrella to her, but to Mark’s surprise, she refused it and seemed to return to her malaise.

          She insisted Mark drive home.

          When they walked into the apartment, the sensor switches flicked on the lights. Marie turned to him and told him she wanted wall-to-wall carpeting installed over the hardwood floors in the living room and bedroom.

          When he asked her why, she said, "It'll muffle the racket you'll be making in the shop."

          Three days later, Mark stood at the apartment door, drinking his morning coffee, watching two young men install a double layer of foam padding in the living room. When they began unrolling the wall-to-wall Berber carpeting, he went downstairs to start work on the 1958 Rambler Rebel, Series 20 that had just come into the shop. 

          When he came up for lunch, Marie yelled at him to take off his greasy shoes.

          Only a month after the carpeting was installed, Marie told him she was pregnant. She walked past him in the shop, stomping up the back stairs, not even bothering to turn on the light. Wiping his hands on an old rag, he left the '65 Mustang he had just begun to buff out and followed her,.

          He had his right foot lifted to take the first step when he heard her crying. He put his foot down gently on the step, his left foot holding above the second stair like a cat, attentive to the slightest movement of its adversary.

          Marie laid into him when he walked through the back door. "I don't like the way my body's been tinkered with," she yelled. "I resent it," she hammered at her still firm belly.

          Mark held her wrists. "You are so beautiful," he whispered into her wet cheeks. Still she cried, horrible big tears. He held her head against his, waiting for the trembling to cease. When the tremors calmed, he whispered  "Let me tell you a story. I was sixteen. I had just walked into the house from school, and my grandmother was telling a neighbor woman who had just found out she was pregnant that her husband would love her even more. She was already like a sweet tasting fruit, my grandmother told her, but now she would ripen and bear more fruit." Mark pulled away from Marie's thick hair and smiled at her.

          Marie stopped crying, glared at him. "You want fruit, raise bananas." She stiffened and stalked off into the bedroom.

          She put on weight from the start. Her fingers swelled so much that she couldn't wear her wedding ring. Mark replaced Albert’s old air conditioner with a bigger one. He moved the bed into the living room so Marie could lie there with the air conditioner blowing full over her. During the afternoons, while Marie watched her soaps, Mark would stand outside the last bay and watch the water drip onto the hot-top, sizzle, and within seconds, disappear.

          Two days before Christmas, during the eleven o'clock news, the first pangs of labor kicked the hell out of her. Marie grabbed Mark's hand and squeezed so tight it felt like the wheel of a car had rolled back on his fingers. In the glow of the television light, her face looked gray. Finally, she blew out a breath and said, "This is it, Romeo."

          Mark turned off the television just after Jay Leno finished his opening monologue and was introducing that night's guests. Mark helped Marie put on her slippers. He guided her down the narrow stairs and out into the back lot, one hand weighted down by her overnight bag.

          Twenty-four hours later, during Jay Leno's opening monologue, the laughter of the Tonight Show audience rose from the lounge at the end of the hall. He kissed Marie on the top of her head, as he applied pressure to the bottom of her back. Marie pushed one more time, and cried out like a wounded animal. She panted, and screamed for anesthesia.

          The doctor shouted back at her, "I see the baby’s head. Push."

          She pushed.

          A wet, dark-haired baby girl slid into the doctor's waiting hands.

          "I'll never do this again," Marie breathed, as she closed her eyes briefly. The doctor passed the baby to the nurse. She walked over to a table in the corner of the room and weighed the baby, then turned, smiling, as she centered the baby in Marie's arms.

          Marie began stroking the baby's face and head, loosening the towel the nurse had wrapped her in.  She counted the tiny fingers of the baby's left hand, then screamed and pushed the baby into Mark's arms as if it had bitten her.

          In his rough palm, lay the lump of a tiny disfigured hand. To Mark it looked like pancake batter dripped onto a skillet. He touched it gently, turning it over, looking to see if all of the appendages were there. The thumb and the index finger were indistinct and fatty. The ring finger and pinky were fused together. He lifted her and kissed the palm of the tiny hand. The infant pressed her hand against his lips.

          "She's beautiful, Marie," he tried to sound encouraging.

          "Take her out of my sight, now!" Marie pulled the bed pillow over her head and began wailing.

          Mark followed the nurse into the nursery.

          "I'm sure it can be corrected," whispered the nurse as she took the baby from him and laid her in an incubator.

          In the morning, the pediatrician suggested to Marie and Mark that they wait until the baby is much older before deciding on corrective surgery, though she insisted it was a viable procedure and would certainly recommend it. "Get to know your baby first," she suggested.

          The surgeon, too, suggested they bide their time. "I'd like to assess the bone growth over the next couple of years. Then, if surgery is the recommendation, we can talk about the possibility of doing it before she starts school, before any peer pressure upsets her."

          But Marie would have none of it. She refused to look at the baby. When mother and daughter were released from the hospital, Marie made it crystal clear to Mark that if he wanted the baby to live, he would have to feed it.

          "I will not have that thing sucking from me," she said. When Mark pulled into the yard, she threw the breast pump into the open dumpster.

          Within two days, she returned to her job at the diner and enrolled in modeling classes. For the next three months, Mark tried to get her to hold the baby, acknowledge her, love her. Instead, she worked both breakfast and lunch shifts. She came home only to practice what she called runway walking. Her small feet twisting to follow one behind the other, stepping heel and toe, heel and toe, across the living room floor.

          Mark had learned to stay in the apartment even when Marie got home from work. He sat on the sofa, reading classic car restoration guides, pencil in hand, erasing the slight deformities in the lines of some of the show cars pictured there. He would glance up at Marie, but she never met his eyes. She walked, listening only to John Williams and the Boston Pops playing sweet sentimental Hollywood show tunes.

          When the baby cried, Mark rose to get her. Marie would sit down on the sofa where he had been sitting and rub her ankles, leaving for class just as he entered the room with Mary Jo.

          On the evening of April Fool’s Day, Mark told her that she needed to see a counselor, she couldn’t close herself off forever to her little girl.   

          "She is not my daughter," Marie whined. "She is a joke. How could I ever let you convince me to have a baby? And why did we have to listen to the doctors. I wanted her fixed right away." Marie clenched her teeth. "She's not perfect. I want my baby perfect."

          At six months, when Mary Jo was just beginning to crawl, placing her deformed hand flat and strong on the carpet, holding her head up, the weight of her body bearing down on both hands, Marie walked out.

          Mark did not chase after her. He focused all of his efforts on Mary Jo. He crawled on the carpet beside her. When she began pulling herself up on the corner of his bed or at the recliner, he knelt down, putting his arms out to her, cooing at her, telling her to take a step toward him. When she fell, he picked her up and stood her against the bed or the recliner, and had her start again.

           When Sophia called to tell him that Marie had settled herself in another state, he offered to send her the furniture before Sophia had a chance to ask. He called in a moving company to pack it all up—the living room set, the leather recliner, the queen-size bed, even the wall-to-wall Berber carpeting.

          Then he waxed and buffed the hardwood floors. At the St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Store he bought a twin bed and a chest of drawers for his room, a refinished maple kitchen set, and an ill-matched sofa and chair for the living room.

         

          When he put Mary Jo in her crib for her naps, he went downstairs into the garage and continued restoring cars. He put in five or six hours at night while she slept, stopping now and then to listen for her cry over the monitor he kept where Marie's GE radio had once been.

Dissolution

As a toddler, Mary Jo never seemed to notice her deformed hand. It was just her hand. She spoke the appropriate noun. Mark lifted her hand from the table in order to wipe away the crumbs at her place. “My hand”, she said, smiling. He agreed. She seemed unaware of its excess weight and clumsiness.  She had simply become accustomed to its shape and lack of dexterity.

          In summer, by the wading pool Mark set out in the first bay, she delicately peppered the air with her hands. The puffs of wind pushed the fat ladybugs into a kind of tizzy, sending them off into the invisible rises of heat like fat ladies swooning to the floor after dancing with strangers.  In her innocent waving of her deformed hand through the air in front of her face, Mark saw the only thing in her that reminded him of Marie, but he remembered that it was also the one thing that had attracted him so strongly to her the first time they met.

          In a similar blistery heat of summer, under the whirring ceiling fan of the diner, Marie had pulled at the collar of her white blouse and funneled the cool air from the fan down into the cleavage between her breasts. Her hands fluttered so furiously, they were a blur to Mark sitting at the counter watching her reflection in the mirrored glass. When she caught him staring, she suddenly stopped. She stepped up behind him, tapped her pencil on his shoulder and asked if he was ready to order.  Later that night she used those same giddy hands to stroke his cheeks and bring his face in close to hers.

          There was nothing else of Marie that Mark could see in his little girl. Where Marie seemed always to need, Mary Jo wanted nothing. I can do it, she insisted. He would watch her hold the material tight against her tiny chest with her right hand while she threaded the white buttons with her left hand. Mary Jo was determined. She seemed to sense that she could make her own place in the world. Marie had never quite been able to attain that confidence.

          There had been nights when Marie got out of work late and called him to drive her home from the diner. He hadn’t minded. He looked forward to it. She would ask in a tone of voice that he thought meant I want you so much, baby, but when he parked at the back door of the diner, she would jump in the passenger seat and sit as still as a car part he might have picked up at a salvage yard. She leaned hard against the passenger door until they got to her apartment. He would sit on the sofa as she perched at the vanity in her bedroom. He watched her through the open door. She combed her brown hair until it glistened, all the while talking, hinting at dark stories about her father, or an uncle who used to live with the family. He realized now that she told only the parts that felt safe for her to share with the man she was about to marry.

          He was determined to keep those kind of men away from his daughter.

          Since Mary Jo never brought up her hand’s queer shape, neither did Mark. When she entered pre-school, he considered seeing a surgeon to begin exploring what steps might be taken.  But Mary Jo was so content, her classmates so accepting of her, that Mark decided not to do anything that might disturb that contentment.

          One day, after Mark had just sprayed a Black ‘62 Studebaker Hawk with a thin coat of lacquer that gleamed like one of Marie’s black silk slips, Marie phoned.

          “Is her hand taken care of?” she asked.

          “No,” he answered.

          There was silence, then the faint click of a long distance connection gone dead.

          The day before Mary Jo entered her first grade classroom, she sat in the front seat of a '54 Pontiac Chieftain that Mark was detailing.  He let her color in her coloring book as long as she kept her crayons in a clear plastic sandwich bag. From the back seat he watched her group and select crayons with her left hand. She used her right hand to hold the book steady against her thin legs. He moved into the front seat, sliding in behind the steering wheel. "Come here, honey," he said.

          She pushed the coloring-book off her lap, laid the bag of crayons on top of the book, then crawled up on her daddy’s lap.

          "Let's drive to a far away place," he said. He put her hands on the steering wheel, his on top of hers, and closed his eyes.

          Mark dropped his hands to the seat and opened his eyes. The steering wheel continued to gently rock back and forth, with Mary Jo's left hand curled around the helm, her right hand flat on top of the hard tubing. He watched the exaggerated movement of her deformed hand, and suddenly felt like crying, grinding his molars to stop the tears. Marie had asked for a perfect little girl, and Mary Jo had not noticed that she wasn't perfect.

          "Boy, you're really going to town there," he whispered at last.

          Mary Jo grew stern and scolded him, "No, Daddy, I don't have time to go to town. I have to be back early. I'm going to school tomorrow,"

          From the moment Mark walked Mary Jo into the classroom, he saw that her classmates accepted her as one of their own. At the end of the day, Ms. Worcheck, the new first grade teacher, assured Mark everything would be fine. Within the first few days, Mary Jo had adapted each activity to the awkwardness of her deformed hand. She told him she was best at the Pledge of Allegiance, she pledged better than anyone else in the class. Her right hand stayed where she put it, firmly over her heart.

          The Saturday before Thanksgiving, Mark and Mary Jo volunteered to handle the first grade table at the school craft fair. They stood behind the table, taking orders for environmental T-shirts, Mary Jo explaining to every potential customer that a dollar from the purchase of every shirt went to helping animals stay safe.  She promised each customer that all orders would be delivered to the school the Friday before the Christmas holiday break. She even offered to model the size large T-shirts because they were the easiest to slip on and off over her clothes. She twirled like a ballerina, and twirled again if the fingers of the customer beckoned.

Mark stood behind her writing up the orders. By lunch, they had sold a dozen T-shirts.

         

          But on the first day of class after the Christmas Holiday break, two new boys arrived in Mary Jo's classroom.

          From their first introductions, the boys insisted that no one in the class could know a thing about how it felt to move away from their old friends, their schools and neighborhoods. “I lost everything,” the fatter boy declared.

          “Well, you found us,” said Mary Jo.

          The fatter boy saw her hand. He pretended to gag. The other boy stared at Mary Jo’s hand and he too put his middle finger into his mouth, forcing a gag. At recess, whispering between themselves, the two of them stalked Mary Jo, taunting her as the kid with the claw. Her funny-looking hand, they had decided, would keep them from thinking about their own predicament.  

          Even Mrs. Worcheck was unsure of how to stop the boys’ teasing.

          When Mark came to pick up Mary Jo at the end of the day, she was sitting at her desk drawing, the guidance counselor and Mrs. Worcheck standing over her.

          "Daddy!" Mary Jo got up to hug him.
          Mark sensed her nervousness in the way she clung to his pant leg.

          The guidance counselor shook Mark’s hand. ""Mr. Plante, would you come with me to my office? Theresa will watch Mary Jo."

          Mark hesitated, "Is that OK with you, Baby?"

          She looked up at him and stepped back to her desk, "It's OK, Daddy."

          The guidance counselor tried to explain the row that the two new students had caused in Mary Jo's classroom during the day. "These boys are coded as ADHD. That means they have an attention deficit combined with a hyperactivity disorder. They can be unruly. They're at a new school. Moving can be a traumatic experience for a child—especially in the middle of a school year. These two boys were taken away from all the friends they knew and thrown into this group of strangers by parents that they feel did this to them just to make their life miserable." He shrugged his broad shoulders. "I expect their behavior toward Mary Jo to change pretty quickly once they settle in. It’s nothing more than the way they've chosen to cope. I’ll speak to their parents.”  He paused, seeming to study Mark’s face.  “I don’t think it’ll be a prolonged thing. I’m pretty sure that as soon as they get to know Mary Jo, it'll pass."

          Mark knew that restoration was not so simple. "And in the meantime, my little girl gets destroyed?" he spoke the words softly, the way the nurse the night of her birth had told him it would be Okay.   

          "We'll do our best to not let that happen, Mr. Plante."

          Mark's eyes had settled on a poster at the back wall. Fat tanned fingers displayed the alphabet in American Sign Language. They were caricatures, Mark understood that, but each finger was separate and able to bend into the various shapes demanded of it by the alphabet. Mark shook the counselor's hand and walked from the room. He strode down the hall to the play area where Mary Jo waited for him.

          Mary Jo smiled when he walked in, running over to him and throwing her arms around him. "How'd it go, Daddy?"

          "Just fine, Honey."

           Within a week, the fat boy, Colton, had become Mary Jo's closest friend.

          It wasn't until the Labor Day weekend before Mary Jo would begin third grade, when Mark had just replaced the clanking air conditioner with one so quiet he could hear the bark of a dog three or four streets away, after he had tucked Mary Jo into bed and stood at the doorway watching her sleep, listening to her breathing, seeing her deformed hand weigh heavily against the thin cotton sheet covering her small rising and falling chest, that he let himself cry. He turned from her room and walked into the kitchen, picked up the phone book, and in the yellow pages, under physician, traced down the page to surgeon.

Seeing Through Me

When the surgeon took the x-ray pictures of Mary Jo's hand and clipped them to the light board, the bones in her fingers looked like transparent tubes overstuffed with cotton balls glued on black paper. Mark thought he was looking at the hand of an old woman.     

          Mary Jo felt along the bones under her skin, trying to match them to the thick white lines on the black film. She was intrigued. The two bones in her thumb were sleek, shiny as the plastic ring she wore on it. A tear dropped on her hand. She looked up at her father, “Why are you crying, Daddy?”

          Mark couldn't answer her. He picked up her deformed hand and pressed it into his palm. He traced along the line of skin where the index finger and middle finger were fused, then touched at the knuckle that held the ring finger to the pinky.

           The surgeon answered Mark's tender pointing by saying, "We can make them all as sleek as God meant them to be, Mr. Plante. After the operation, we'll take more x-rays and show you what we've done to the bone." The surgeon smiled down on Mary Jo. "And a few months from now, young lady, you'll be throwing a ball like there’s no tomorrow."

          The day before Mary Jo went into the hospital the class gave her a party. Some of the mother's sent in punch and cookies, and after reading time, a clown came in with balloons.

          After the party, when the children were out in the hall getting their book bags and sweaters and lining up for the busses, Colton led Mary Jo into the resource room. It was empty. Colton brought her over to the copy machine and opened the cover. He gently laid her right hand on the glass. Even more gently he laid the cover on top of it. Then he pressed the green button. Mary Jo turned her eyes from the bright light, and watched a copy of her hand slide out onto the tray.

          Colton pulled it from the tray.

          Mary Jo stared at it. The lines in her palm were muddied and deep. The Band-Aid she wore on her thumb to keep the plastic ring from falling off looked like a beehive.

          "I'll keep it while you're gone," Colton whispered. She thought he was going to kiss her, but Ms. Maroni walked into the room and scooted them out.

          That night Mary Jo's father talked with her about the surgery she would undergo the next day. He hugged her and told her everything was going to be fine. "Now get some rest," he said, kissing her on her forehead, "God bless." He stood in the doorway, his back blocking the light coming in from the living room.

          Mary Jo closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. When she heard the door close, and her father's footsteps cross the kitchen floor and open the door at the top of the stairs, she opened her eyes.  She listened for his footsteps on the stairs, then heard the light buzz of the electric drill sound in the shop below her room.  Only then did she pull out the flashlight that she kept hidden under her mattress. She shined the light on her hand, the spot of bright white moving up and down each finger, even through the pretend space between her fingers. She imagined wearing the plastic gumball ring on her ring finger. She continued watching and imagining, and soon fell asleep.   

Transitioning

Mary Jo dreamed of a beautiful lady. She had long brown hair that bounced against her bare back as she ran along a stretch of beach between two cliffs of rocks that rose up on either side of the beach. The lady stopped in the middle of the beach and her arms went up over her head, her long brown hair feathering over her shoulders. She turned and looked back at Mary Jo. She was calling to her, but Mary Jo couldn’t hear her voice.

          Mary Jo began to run to her. The fine beach sand softly cut against the soles of her feet. As Mary Jo got closer, the lady fell to her knees, smiling up at her, beckoning Mary Jo to come kneel in the sand beside her. There was no one to tell Mary Jo not to, so she knelt. The lady scooped sand into her cupped hands and dropped it on the beach beside her.  She kept reaching deeper into the hole, drawing out more sand, letting it trickle through her fingers onto the mound of sand growing higher beside her. Then suddenly she stopped digging and lifted out a white egg. It lay in the palm of her hand until cracks began to appear in the shell.  The top of a scaly head began pushing through the small opening, making it wider and wider until a long neck poked out from it and a baby turtle began to wriggle free.

          The lady laid the turtle at Mary Jo’s knees, then reached down and uncovered another egg. She lifted it out, her lips moving but still making no sound. She seemed to be inviting Mary Jo to take that egg too. Mary Jo brought up her hands and the lady placed the egg in Mary Jo’s deformed hand.

           When Mary Jo woke, the dream stayed with her, but her father was holding her hand. Still in a half-sleep, she looked over at her right hand and saw only a ball of white bandages. Through tears, she looked up at her father.        

          He smiled at her and said, "Everything went just fine, Honey."

          As he leaned over her, she smelled the warm, sweet smell of his aftershave. She closed her eyes and heard herself mumble, “I know, Daddy”, and went back to sleep.

          In the x-rays taken after the surgery, all of her fingers looked as sleek as her thumb, but when the surgeon took off the bandages, Mary Jo didn't recognize them at all. There were splints taped to each of them, forcing them apart. The skin was raw and pink. They didn’t seem to be part of her. She wanted to shake them loose.

          "You'll need some physical therapy for a few months, Mary Jo," the surgeon told her. "We'll get someone to teach you how to use your new fingers." The surgeon smiled, her breath slightly sour.

         

          That night, Mark read to Mary Jo from the children's bible that he had taken from the bookcase in the patient lounge. He read a story about ten lepers who were healed by Jesus. Only one of them returned to say thank you.  “Weren’t there ten of you?” her father’s voice whispered. “Where are the others?”

          Mary Jo looked up to see tears in her father’s eyes. She touched his arm with her bandaged hand.

          "Baby," her father said softly, "I'm sorry about all of this." He took her bandaged hand and held it, stroking her forehead with his other hand until she fell asleep.

                                                             

          In a week Mary Jo was back at school. She wore her father's brown leather work-glove on her right hand. When a substitute teacher asked her why she was wearing a glove in school, Mary Jo smiled and said, "Motorcycle accident."
          Colton though, insisted on seeing her hand. "Show it to me, Mary Jo. Please. Show it to me."

          She was strong that first day and said, "No."

          The second day, Colton's continued insistence excited her and she wanted to see his face when she showed him. So outside at recess, she took the glove off.  Colton watched as Mary Jo unraveled the gauze.  When her fingers were revealed, he marveled at how different her hand looked from the photocopy he held in his hand. "Can I touch them?" he asked.

          She nodded, yes.

          He traced the log thin scars down the sides of each finger. "Awesome," he breathed. He looked into her eyes.

          She looked into his, and saw the sparkle and wonder the brown pebbles held.

          "Wow," he said, and held her glove while she wrapped the gauze around each finger, then he helped her put the glove back on.

          Her father arranged for a physical therapist to come to the house. She was young and pretty, and Mary Jo liked her a lot. Her name was Pauline Sheridan. She worked with Mary Jo for an hour each day, shaping her fingers around a pink rubber ball, or the narrow part of a baseball bat. When the hour was over, she stayed to help Mary Jo with her math and reading homework.

          In the shop, Mary Jo's father worked at restoring a Ford Fairlane. Once in awhile, through the hardwood floors, Mary Jo and Ms. Sheridan would hear the sound of a chrome bumper being dropped, or if the backdoor wasn’t closed all the way, they would catch a whiff of lacquer. Her father never came up to check on them.

          Mary Jo enjoyed the softness of Ms. Sheridan’s hands. She liked the rose-sweet smell of her skin and the warmth of her breath against her cheek as they both leaned over Mary Jo's fingers or a book, kneading the flesh and bone, or words, or numbers, until they worked, until they made sense to Mary Jo.

          One day Ms. Sheridan asked Mary Jo, "Do you know the difference between right and wrong?"

          Mary Jo remembered Colton lifting the cover to the photocopy machine and not being found out, not being scolded when Ms. Maroni walked in. She said, "Yes," still looking down at her fingers squeezing the hard skin of the rubber ball.

          "Give me an example, then."

          Mary Jo looked up at her. "Stealing is wrong."

          "Good," she smiled, her eyes asking for another example.

          "And lying is wrong."

          "Yes, it is. In the church that I attend, we call wrong things, sins, and sins hurt us, and the people we live with, and most of all they hurt God."

          Mary Jo thought about this. “God is big and powerful, right?”

          Ms. Sheridan nodded, yes.

          “Then how could God feel hurt?”

          Ms. Sheridan was surprised but pleased by Mary Jo’s questions.  “I don't mean hurt in a physical sense. God doesn't feel pain like you do in your fingers," she touched at them gently, "but he feels it here and here." She touched at her own head and at the white button in the center of her chest. "In His mind and heart and spirit."

          From the shop below, came the dull thud of an axle falling to the floor, and then came the long hiss of lifters lowering the car.

          "Oh," said Mary Jo, not at all like she understood what this pretty woman had said. 

          "What have you taught your daughter about religion?" Ms. Sheridan asked Mark.

          Mark looked up after pulling a couple of twenty-dollar bills from his wallet. "Well, we say our prayers before she goes to sleep at night."

          "Is that it?"

          "Mostly."

          "Has she been to church? Have you?"

          Mark hadn't really considered it. He wasn't against it. "Well, no."

          "What religion are you?"

          "My parents were Catholic."

          Ms. Sheridan nodded.

          Mark felt warmth creep into his cheeks.

          "Mary Jo's old enough to receive her first sacraments. Has she been baptized?"

          "No."

          "Then that's where we start."

          It turned out that Ms. Sheridan had first received a Bachelor's Degree in theology before she got her Master’s Degree in physical therapy.  She tutored both Mark and Mary Jo in the basic tenets of the Catholic faith. At the end of a month, with Mary Jo's fingers working as well as if she had had the use of them her whole life, Ms. Sheridan brought her and Mark to meet her pastor.

          Father Dempsey was a white-haired priest who smelled too much like Dove soap for Mary Jo, but he had just the right combination of tact and ease for Mark to feel welcomed.

          "Mary Jo," the kindly old priest said to her when they were sitting alone in his parlor, "Ms. Sheridan says you're ready to be baptized and receive the sacrament of reconciliation." He looked straight into her eyes.

          How deep, Mary Jo wondered, could a priest see into you? Could he see as deep as your soul? The place God lived?

          "Well, are you?"

          "Yes, Father," she answered him.

          He called in her father and the therapist. "You'll both be witness to this." He picked up the phone against the wall and waited a moment. "Mr. LeClerque, I'd like you and your wife to proxy as god-parents for a child's baptism. Now." He hung up the phone and turned to the three of them. "Nothing like the present, I say."

          On the short walk from the rectory to the church, Mary Jo walked beside Fr. Dempsey. A breeze cooled her face. Broken glass lay shattered on the bottom stair at the back entrance of the church. Mary Jo hesitated and looked up.

          Fr. Dempsey stopped. He looked at Mary Jo and then up at the broken window in the steeple high above their heads.

          “Maybe a bird flew into it,” offered Mary Jo.

          “Maybe.” Fr. Dempsey said. “More likely it was some young hooligan.” He looked at the bits of colored glass by their feet. “I’ll get the janitor to clean it up later.” He stepped over the glass.

          Mary Jo walked deliberately on the glass, feeling it shiver under the soles of her shoes.

          Once inside the church, Fr. Dempsey busied himself in the room behind the altar, leaving Mary Jo at the side of the altar peering into the baptismal font. Soon, he brought out a towel, a clear bowl, and a glass pitcher filled with water. On his second trip, he brought out Mr. and Mrs. LeClerque. They nodded at Mary Jo and smiled at her father and Ms. Sheridan.

          “Let’s get started, then,” said Fr. Dempsey. He spoke softly and mostly to Mary Jo, explaining to her about Jesus coming to humankind to wash away our sins. At a certain point, Fr. Dempsey asked her father and the LeClerque’s what they expected from the church.

          Mary Jo strained to hear what her father would say, but it was the LeClerque’s who answered. “Baptism,” they said, and her father nodded his head, agreeing. Then she felt Fr. Dempsey’s hands on her shoulders. He tipped her head into his fatty palm. She let it rest there, closing her eyes as Fr. Dempsey poured the pitcher of warm water so it trickled across her forehead. She listened to him say; "I baptize you, Mary Jo, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." Then Father Dempsey stood her straight.  She opened her eyes to see her father bless himself and wink at her. Father Dempsey handed her a white towel. "Dry yourself, before you catch cold," he said.

          In the room behind the altar, Fr. Dempsey sat in a chair opposite her. Mary Jo stared at his hands. They were pink and soft, not at all like her fathers browned, cracked hands. He asked her what Ms. Sheridan had told her about sin.

          She was quiet for a moment. Then she remembered quite clearly what Ms. Sheridan had said about sin. She repeated it word for word. "It's a hurt against God's spirit. It's telling him in what you do that you don't love him."

          The priest nodded. He sensed the child had more to say, and waited. The room was quiet. He listened to his own breathing.

          "I know what a hurt like that is like," Mary Jo whispered. "My mother left my Daddy and me when I was just a baby. She wasn’t sorry. She’s never even called me to talk about it now that I’m older."

          Interesting, Father Dempsey thought, how a child can come out, so out of the blue, with a statement like that. "And you would like that?” he finally said.

          Again there was silence, and then the sharp cry of a blackbird flying just outside the church. “I don’t know,” Mary Jo answered, her voice still hushed.

          “Maybe someday you shall," he said. He leaned over to the window and moved the curtain aside with his hand.

          Mary Jo strained to see the blackbird.

          Fr. Dempsey dropped his hand and the curtain fell back against the sill. He looked at Mary Jo for a moment, then said, "In the meantime, you can talk to God any time, and you can talk to me whenever you like. Okay?"

          "Okay," Mary Jo answered.

          He made the sign of the cross in the air in front of her, blessing her, then saying she could leave. "Send in your father," he told her.

Lessons in the School of the Heart

           

Mary Jo pushed open the heavy front door of the church and leaned her back against it to keep it open. Ms. Sheridan walked past her and turned around on the granite landing to face her. “Well, young lady?”

          Mark put an arm around Mary Jo’s shoulder and drew her away from the door. He picked her up and kissed her.  "Well what?" he answered Ms. Sheridan, putting Mary Jo down.

          “What did you think of the service? What did you think of Father Dempsey?”

          "He's an understanding guy."

          She laughed, "Did you think he'd bite?" She looked down at Mary Jo, "And how about you?"

          "It was easy," Mary Jo answered.

         

          As they walked, Mary Jo heard her father call Ms. Sheridan by her first name for the first time—Pauline. She mouthed the first syllable of her name several times, before she heard her father invite Pauline to supper.

          Back at the apartment, Mark insisted that he do the cooking, and Mary Jo keep Pauline entertained.   

          Mary Jo wanted to read Pauline a story from the same children's bible that her father had been reading to her from since the surgery. The first story she read Pauline was about Jesus being changed on the top of a mountain into a very handsome man. So handsome, he glowed. Mary Jo could imagine that.  The close friends who had hiked the mountain with Jesus though, were amazed. And when a voice from the sky above them told them to listen to my Son, they were even more amazed.  They were so amazed, that they couldn't leave the place until Jesus turned off the bright lights, and told them they had to leave.  Mary Jo smiled and watched Pauline’s eyes sparkle.  She turned a few more pages and found the story of The Last Supper.

          “This is an interesting one,” Mary Jo said.  She began to explain it to Pauline instead of reading from the book.  “You see,” Mary Jo began, “Jesus, was at a party with his friends, when suddenly He slowed the party down and said, ‘I want to give you something so you will always remember me.’  His friends didn't understand what he was talking about, but each of them took a piece of the cracker that Jesus offered them.  ‘When you eat this,’ he said, ‘remember me’. Then He took his glass of wine and shared that with them too.  He said, ‘When you drink this, remember me.’

          Mary Jo looked right into Pauline’s blue eyes.  “He’s so mysterious,” she said.

          “He was trying to tie a lot of things together that night, Mary Jo.  At that party they were also remembering a very important Jewish feast called Passover.  It was a night long ago when God sent his angels to kill the first-born children of the Egyptian people.”

          “Why would God do that?”  Mary Jo interrupted.

           “Well,” Pauline leaned forward on the sofa.  “A long time before Jesus was born, a great leader of the Hebrew people, Moses, who was a very good friend of God, had been trying to get the Egyptian Pharaoh to let all of the Hebrew people who were held as slaves in his country, go free.  God had Moses ask the Pharaoh nine times to let the Hebrew people go, and nine times the Pharaoh said no.”  Pauline spoke in a hushed voice. “On the tenth time, God had a deadly warning for the Pharaoh.  He told him that if he did not let the Hebrew people go, the first-born child of every Egyptian family would be killed by God’s angels.”

          Mary Jo’s eyes widened.  “God would do that?”

          Pauline took both of Mary Jo’s hands and smoothed her fingers along the knuckles. “Mary Jo, God was trying to teach that bad Pharaoh that the harsh way he was treating the Hebrew people was not the right way.”

          Mary Jo tasted Pauline’s words between her dry lips, speaking out only, “Oh.”

          Pauline’s voice rose. “So Moses told his people to get ready to flee the country because he thought surely the Pharaoh would not disobey God this time.  But . . .”

          “All of the children were killed, weren’t they?”

          Pauline had tears in her eyes, “Yes.”  She wiped away her tears and grabbed Mary Jo’s hands. “So at the last supper that Jesus had with his friends, he knew that later that night he too would be killed, just as the children of the Egyptians were. He loved children, and their needless sacrifice was one that he held close to his heart.  With his coming death, he knew his friends would also be very sad for him, so he wanted to leave them something that they would remember him by, and would be encouraged by."

          “Like a souvenir?” questioned Mary Jo.

          Pauline smiled. "Yes, like a souvenir. He left himself behind in the form of bread and wine. We call it, Eucharist.”

          Mary Jo had seen pictures of Jesus with his hands tied. She had seen him with nothing on but his underwear, his arms spread wide and nailed to a cross. She had seen his body shining on the top of a mountain. She had seen pictures of him walking in his sandals and long robe along the beach. She believed that he could do anything that he wanted with his body. He could leave it, if he wanted to. She pushed her hands against the cushion and straightened herself up.

          “The next sacrament you receive, Mary Jo, will be the sacrament of the Eucharist. We call it First Communion. At your First Communion, you'll receive the body of Jesus Christ."

          "How?" Mary Jo asked.

          Pauline reached out and took Mary Jo's left hand and placed the back of it into the palm of her right hand. "Very, very reverently, Fr. Dempsey will place the host, a piece of bread, the body of Christ, into your left hand."

          Pauline pressed the tips of her fingers into the center of Mary Jo's palm. "And then you will take the piece of bread, the Body of Christ, with your right hand and put it in your mouth and swallow it."

          Mary Jo stared into the palm of her left hand, and then slowly she took her right hand from beneath it and covered it.

          Pauline continued. “Mary Jo, today, you became a child of Jesus. Fr. Dempsey baptized you into the Catholic faith. Receiving the Body of Christ in the

form of a piece of bread is one of the sacraments that will show the world how much you believe in the transforming power of Jesus.”

          Mary Jo looked up to see her father standing in the doorway.

          “OK, enough evangelizing you two,” he said clapping his hands, “let’s eat.”

          The next day, as Pauline held Mary Jo's hand in hers and massaged the tendons in each finger, she asked Mary Jo. "Did you ever believe that your hand before the surgery could be this perfect? Did you ever imagine it would look like your other hand one day?"

          The scars were only thin silver lines now, and her fingers moved as if they had always been separate.

          "Your hand has been transformed," Pauline spoke it as softly as they had spoken in church the day before. "It's still the same flesh and bone it was when you were a baby but now it's been healed. It's brand new."

          Mary Jo pulled her hand out of Pauline's and rested it in her lap. It hadn’t changed. Not really. It had always been the way she saw it now.  It had been her hidden secret. She flattened the palm against her jeans and slid it down to her knee. She closed her eyes and now saw the deformity as clear as she could see the new way her fingers spread. She could see the skin and bone that held her fingers from spreading apart. No, she was not any different today than she had been a year ago, or when she was a baby. She was Mary Jo Plante.

          Pauline touched the index finger of her right hand to the fabric of her blouse just above her left breast. "Christ wants to be here in our hearts always," she said. "Eating the Eucharist, His Body, each week at church, is a reminder to us of how close He wants to be to us. He wants to come inside of us and change us." She touched the back of Mary Jo's hand. "He wants to make us brand new. Do you see?"

          Mary Jo listened to an engine rev up in the shop below. She pictured a long plume of smoke drifting out from the tailpipe toward the exhaust fan at the rear of the shop. She pictured her father smiling as he bent over the carburetor, adjusting the idling arm, getting it to run as smooth as if it were its first day out of the assembly line. "Yes," she said.

Opening the Heart

At the end of the week, at lunch recess, Colton unfolded the photocopy of Mary Jo's deformed hand. He smoothed down the torn edges and well-worn creases on the corner board of the sandbox, careful not to tear it. "Do you remember this," he asked?

          Mary Jo nodded.

          "I can't forget it," he said. "It was so different."

          Mary Jo looked at the picture. With her three fingers, she covered the thick sausage-like middle finger. "My mother told my father it was a bad hand. She told him it was ugly and deformed, and needed to be fixed. It chased her away."

          Colton stared at Mary Jo’s hand, and then looked up at her. "Did your father tell you that?"

          "No, but I could guess."

          "When I first saw your hand I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was jealous," Colton said.

          Mary Jo lifted her hand and held it above her head. She held the three fingers tight so that they blocked the sun from her eyes. "It's still there," she told Colton "If you believe, really believe, you can see it like it’s always been.” She waved her hand in front of her face. “This is just a charade.”

          Colton looked from the photocopy to her hand. "But I don't see it," he said.

          "My mother had very pretty hands. They were smooth as glass.”

          “I thought you never knew your mother?”

          “She must have held me when the doctor first took me out of her.” Mary Jo shut her eyes tight trying to remember. “Maybe it wasn't wrong for her to want my hand to look like her hand,"

          “You’re lying.” Colton said. “You don’t know.”

          “I can imagine,” Mary Jo countered. She dropped her hand. "It wasn't wrong for my father to finally have it fixed."

          Colton’s eyes widened. “It was,” he said. “Why did you let him?"

          "Because he loves me, Colton.” Mary Jo began to scoop out a bowl in the sand. “Besides, it doesn’t change the rest of me connected to it. It doesn’t feel any lighter now that they’ve cut away the extra skin and bone. The flat pancake of a hand is still there. It won’t let me forget it.” She pushed the small mound of sand back into the bowl. “I can close my eyes and see it." Mary Jo closed her eyes. She leaned back against the board, resting her head against the worn edge. The sun warmed her face. She watched a red-orange light seep in at the edges of her eyelids. It was blurry, but behind it was the sun, strong and warm and white.

          Then a shadow moved to block the sun, and a woman’s questioning voice called her name, “Mary Jo?”

          Mary Jo opened her eyes. A lady stood outside the sandbox, across from Mary Jo and Colton. Mary Jo couldn’t see the woman’s face because of the sun.

She lowered her eyes and looked at the woman’s knees. They were knobby, covered with light brown nylons. Mary Jo got up and moved out of the sandbox to stand beside Colton

          “Come on, Mary Jo.” Colton took her hand.

          The woman’s eyes dropped. “Your hand,” she said, “It’s fixed.”

          “Who are you?” asked Mary Jo.

          “I held you in my arms once, when you were a very little baby.” The woman moved around the corner of the sandbox, coming toward them.

          Colton clenched Mary Jo’s hand. Mary Jo felt him wanting to run, but Mary Jo didn’t want to leave. The woman stood right beside them. Mary Jo watched the woman’s hands suddenly move like giant monarch butterflies. They crossed over the front of Mary Jo and touched her shoulders, perching a moment and trembling slightly. Then the woman’s hands dropped along the sides of Mary Jo’s jacket, touching her thighs, coming together again as though in prayer. Finally the left one rose to touch a finger to the woman’s red lipsticked lips, the right hand slipping into the pocket of her jacket. Then she reached out toward Mary Jo again with her left hand.

          Mary Jo stepped back.  Colton tripped and fell.

          “It was so horrible,” the woman whispered. “I couldn’t stand it. I was so afraid of you. Now look how beautiful.” She touched Mary Jo’s left hand with two fingers before Mary Jo could jerk away.

          Mary Jo screamed.

          Colton got up and ran. He ran for the front doors of the school. A group of junior high boys were playing marbles by the entrance. They stood and stared across the schoolyard as Colton yelled that the woman was going to kidnap Mary Jo.

          Suddenly the playground fell silent. In the distance, Mary Jo was screaming. “You hated me. You couldn’t even look at me.”

          The woman was kneeling in the grass in front of Mary Jo.

          Mary Jo lashed out at her. “You never called me. You never wrote to me. I know who you are. You’re not my mother. You’re an imposter.”

          Colton was running back toward Mary Jo, the junior high boys running with him.  The playground monitors began sprinting from their positions near the street entrance back toward the middle of the schoolyard.

          Mary Jo turned when Colton got closer. “Colton, do you have it?”  She was teary.

          The woman sat back on her haunches, her face in her hands, crying.        

          Colton pulled the wrinkled photocopy from his jacket pocket.

          Mary Jo grabbed it from his hands and pushed into the woman’s fist. “This is me.”

          The playground monitors stood on either side of the woman now—two fifth-grade teachers, as young and as pretty as this woman who was kneeling in the grass, dirtying her nylons.

          The woman opened the crinkled paper that Mary Jo had forced into her hand. "No. That’s ugly and disgusting.” She lunged for Mary Jo’s hand, but Mary Jo stepped out of reach. The woman fell forward, screaming at Mary Jo, “It’s fixed now. Don’t you see?”  She sobbed. “It’s fixed.”

          Mary Jo looked at the woman, then at the small group of people gathered around her—Colton, the fifth-grade teachers, the fifth grade boys—and behind them she saw all of the children in the schoolyard moving slowly toward her.

          The woman tried to stand. Her fingers pushed into the soft green grass. She pushed up on the toes of her shiny black high heels.

          “I don’t want to know you,” Mary Jo told her.

          The woman looked down at the photocopy of a grotesquely deformed hand, smeared and torn against the palm of her own smooth tanned hand. The deformed hand joined to a slender wrist. A forearm as thin as a stick disappeared up into the blackness at the edge of the page. Slowly, the woman stood. “You bitch,” she snarled. She ripped the photocopy in half and let it fall to the ground. The heel of her shoe pierced one of the half-sheets as she stumbled away.

          Colton picked the pieces up off of the ground.

          The fifth-grade teachers moved to either side of her, to stop her.

          “Let her go,” yelled Mary Jo.

          The woman took a step and nearly fell. The teachers reached out to her, each one taking an arm. They began walking off together across the schoolyard.  Like sisters, Mary Jo thought. The fifth grade boys trailed after them.

          Mary Jo listened to the quickness in Colton’s breathing. She turned to him. “Were you scared?”

          Colton held up the torn pieces of Mary Jo’s hand. “I can tape it,” he said.

          “Don’t bother,” said Mary Jo.

          Colton looked like he was going to cry.

          “You'll leave it out in the rain someday and the rain will wash it away." Mary Jo said. She turned back to watch the three women. They were nearly at the opposite side of the schoolyard.

          Colton’s hands were shaking. "I hope that never happens.”

          "It will,” Mary Jo said, watching the fifth-grade teachers help the woman into a small blue car. They shut the door and stood there looking over the roof of the car back in the direction of Mary Jo.

          “Now they’ll ask me who she is,” Mary Jo spoke out loud.

          Colton had folded the pieces of the photocopy back into his jacket pocket.

          The blue car began to pull away. Mary Jo watched it drive down the street until she couldn’t see it anymore. “I should have tried to make out the model of the car, Colton. My Dad would have wanted to know.” The fifth-grade teachers had suddenly changed direction after first starting back across the schoolyard toward Mary Jo.  They were now heading for the front doors of the school.

          The entrance doors swung open wide. The janitor reached up and forced something in place that would hold the doors open. He stepped back inside the opened doors and then came out pushing a wheelbarrow. In the wheelbarrow was a broom. He moved a few feet from the building and stopped. He took the broom and began to sweep along the edge of the building.

          Mary Jo caught her breath. She let herself drop down to the ground.

          Colton stood over her for a moment and then knelt down beside her. From his jacket pocket he took out a crumpled waxed paper cup. "Here, Mary Jo. This is for you."

          She took it. The woman in the blue car was gone. Behind Colton’s head was a blue sky. “What is it?"

          "A flower pot."

          Her mother had never seen her climb a tree, or ride her bike. Her mother had never held her hand. She never would. Mary Jo wanted to tell her father that. She held the wax cup, turning it first in one hand and then in the other. "Thanks, Colton."

          Colton pushed his hand into his jean pocket and took out a sunflower seed. "Put out your hand," he demanded.

          She did, and he placed a cracked gray seed in the center of her right palm.

          “Seeds are such small things that grow to be big things,” Colton said.

          “Yep,” Mary Jo got up and walked to the edge of the playground, near where the woods began. She kicked at some grass and then bent down to dig up some of the dark black soil that was there beneath it.

          The bell rang. Kids began running back to the main entrance of the school from all over the school grounds.

          Colton had been kneeling in the grass beside her. He got up and wiped his hands against his pants. Slowly, he and Mary Jo walked back across the playground. “If you water it and give it sun, it'll grow,” he whispered to her as they got in line.

          Mary Jo held her cup carefully in both hands, not wanting to spill any of the soil or the seed. "I know."  She didn’t want to go back to class. She would go to the nurse’s office instead and ask the nurse to call her father, tell him to come and pick her up. She needed to talk to him, tell him about the danger she had gotten herself out of. She started to cry. She wished she had seen the model of the woman’s car. Maybe her father could guess what it was. Maybe he knew where to find her. She could have him take her there. There were so many tears clouding her eyes now. Colton took her arm and led her through the doors, into the hall. She listened to the soft pleading of his voice. He sat her on the bench outside the principal’s office. She would tell her father how brave Colton was. She held tight to the paper cup. Bye, Mary Jo, she heard Colton call. Bye. Bye. She held the cup in the sunlight coming in through the window.  What a marvelous gift Colton had given her.

The End

Charlie Lemay is a photographer, graphic designer and digital artist working in Manchester, NH. He began his series of digital collages in 1995 and he continues to create black and white work with traditional film cameras. Charlie is currently a full-time Associate Faculty at St. Paul's School, Concord, NH, where he teaches Photography, Computer Graphics and Fine Arts Foundations. He maintains a website where his fine art digital and black and white images can be viewed: www.charlielemay.net.

Michael J. Brien is on the adjunct faculty at Southern New Hampshire University, where for over 20 years he has taught English composition, American literature, and creative writing courses. A member of the New Hampshire Writer’s Project, he is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has published nearly 100 short stories, poems and feature articles in various regional and national magazines, and on public radio. He is a New Hampshire Humanities Book Discussion Scholar. He resides in Meredith NH, and can be contacted at brienfamily@hotmail.com.