Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,151

you?”

I don’t answer. When Travis was a newborn, I would go in to nurse him at night and I would raise his T-shirt to watch him breathe. His stomach moved up and down so rapidly it pained me. I would look at his soft spots, afraid of them, see the pulsations from his beating heart. After a few weeks, he would interrupt himself while he was nursing to look up at me and smile, milk running down his chin. And I would tighten my hold on him, renew my vow that nothing would ever, ever hurt him. This is what I want to tell Rita. But I can’t. King is right—the words would only hint at all I mean to say.

“What’s David say?” Rita asks.

“What does David say? Yank it out.”

“Well, that’s a little crude.”

“When I told him, I felt so … We didn’t talk much. I wish I hadn’t told him.”

“Why did you?”

“I don’t know.”

Not true. I know. I told him because I wanted his face to soften and for him to say, “Oh, Sam. That’s wonderful. Listen, we’ll work it out. I’m not happy away from you and Travis, this was wrong. Let me move back in.” And then I would not worry about retirement planning, David could do that. And I would not think that I would grow old alone and demented in some filthy apartment with a chair by the window.

“I’ll let you know,” I tell Rita. “I’ll tell you when I know.”

In the dream, I am standing by a large tree, the bark with a deeply etched pattern like dried earth. Out of one of the cracks a red tulip is growing. A hand is reaching toward it, ready to pick it. “Oh no, don’t,” I say. “Don’t pick it. It’s new life. It’s a miracle.” I awaken, blink in the darkness, close my eyes again.

31

Two days before the appointment, I take a day off from work, tell Travis as he is eating breakfast that I’ll be cleaning out his closet today.

“No!” he says, his mouth full of scrambled eggs.

“I have to! You can’t shut the door anymore!”

“I’ll do it,” he says. “You’ll throw everything out!”

“First of all,” I say, “you won’t do it. Secondly, I will not throw everything out.”

“Yeah, just the good stuff.”

“If you would keep your closet clean, then I wouldn’t have to clean it for you. I don’t enjoy cleaning it any more than you do. I’ve told you a hundred times—”

“Oh, don’t give me one of your lectures.”

“Travis, don’t you take that tone of voice with me. I swear to God. Do not speak to me like that again or I’ll slap your face. I have never hit you yet, but I promise you I am entirely capable of it.”

His eyes widen. “Boy. You’re crabby.”

“Yes, I am.”

“I know!”

“Go to school.”

He stands. “I am!”

“Fine.”

“Fine!”

As I watch Travis go out the door, Lavender comes up the basement steps and into the kitchen. “Hi,” she says, her voice croaky with sleep.

“Hi.”

I watch her grab a spoon, then head for the refrigerator and take out a carton of plain yogurt. She sits at the table and pulls off the lid, smells it. “I really hate this stuff.”

“Well, why eat it, then?” I ask tiredly.

“ ’Cause everything else is, like, poisonous,” she says. “Everything else will give you cancer. The planet is so totally wrecked.” She swallows a mouthful of yogurt, shudders.

“Lavender?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you tell Travis that if he eats snow he could die?”

“It’s true!”

“And that in a few years we’ll all have to wear gas masks?”

She shrugs.

“You know,” I say. “I’ve been thinking. I don’t think things are working out too well with you living here.”

She looks up, sighs deeply. “You’re, like, kicking me out, right?”

“Not ‘like.’ ”

“I knew it.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“So … end of the month, right?”

“Right.”

Lavender nods. “This always happens.”

“Frankly, I’m not surprised.” I want to ask Lavender who her references were. Probably relatives who wanted to make sure she didn’t end up with them. But what’s the difference?

I go upstairs to Travis’s bedroom, sit at his desk, look around his room. He has made his bed, more or less. I reach over to tuck in one edge of the sheet, pull on the quilt to straighten it, find a sock, hold it in my hand. I look out his window, remember when his chin barely came to the ledge, remember him later sitting on my lap while I helped him undress for bed, looking out that same window at the setting