Page 14 of The Life of Chuck

Grandma was plump (and getting plumper), but Mrs. Stanley was twice her size, a widow who wheezed like a leaky tire when she walked and always seemed to be dressed in the same pink silk wrapper. Chuck felt vaguely guilty about bringing her treats that would add to her girth, but he needed information.

She thanked him for the muffins and asked—as he’d been pretty sure she would—if he would like to have one with her in the kitchen. “I could make tea!”

“Thank you,” Chuck said. “I don’t drink tea, but I wouldn’t mind a glass of milk.”

When they were seated at the little kitchen table in a flood of June sunshine, Mrs. Stanley asked how things were going with Albie and Sarah. Chuck, mindful that anything he said in this kitchen would be on the street before the day was out, said they were doing fine. But because Poirot said you had to give a little if you wanted to get a little, he added that Grandma was collecting clothes for the Lutheran homeless shelter.

“Your gramma’s a saint,” Mrs. Stanley said, obviously disappointed there wasn’t more. “What about your granddad? Did he get that thing on his back looked at?”

“Yeah,” Chuck said. He took a sip of milk. “The doctor took it off and had it tested. It wasn’t one of the bad ones.”

“Thank God for that!”

“Yes,” Chuck agreed. Having given, he now feltentitled to get. “He was talking with Grandma about someone named Henry Peterson. I guess he’s dead.”

He was prepared for disappointment; she might have never heard of Henry Peterson. But Mrs. Stanley widened her eyes until Chuck was actually afraid they might fall out, and grasped her neck like she had a piece of blueberry muffin stuck in there. “Oh, that was so sad! Soawful! He was the bookkeeper who did your father’s accounts, you know. Other companies, too.” She leaned forward, her wrapper giving Chuck a view of a bosom so large it seemed hallucinatory. She was still clutching her neck. “He killed himself,” she whispered. “Hunghimself!”

“Was he embezzling?” Chuck asked. There was a lot of embezzling in Agatha Christie books. Also blackmail.

“What? God, no!” She pressed her lips together, as if to keep in something not fit for the ears of such a beardless youth as the one sitting across from her. If that was the case, her natural proclivity to tell everything (and to anyone) prevailed. “His wife ran away with a younger man! Hardly old enough to vote,and she was in her forties! What do you think of that?”

The only reply Chuck could think of right off the bat was “Wow!” and that seemed to suffice.

Back at home he pulled his notebook off the shelf and jotted,G. saw ghost of Jefferies boynot long before he died. Saw ghost of H. Peterson4 or 5 YEARSbefore he died. Chuck stopped, chewing the end of his Bic, troubled. He didn’t want to write what was in his mind, but felt that as a good detective he had to.

Sarah and the bread.DID HE SEE GRANDMA’S GHOST IN THE CUPOLA???

The answer seemed obvious to him. Why else would Grandpa have talked about how hard the waiting was?

Now I’m waiting, too, Chuck thought. And hoping that it’s all just a bunch of bullshit.

5

On the last day of sixth grade, Miss Richards—a sweet, hippy-dippyish young woman who had no command of discipline and would probably not last long in the public education system—tried to read Chuck’s classsome verses of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It didn’t go well. The kids were rowdy and didn’t want poetry, only to escape into the months of summer stretching ahead. Chuck was the same, happy to throw spitballs or give Mike Enderby the finger when Miss Richards was looking down at her book, but one line clanged in his head and made him sit up straight.

When the class was finally over and the kids set free, he lingered. Miss Richards sat at her desk and blew a strand of hair back from her forehead. When she saw Chuck still standing there, she gave him a weary smile. “Thatwent well, don’t you think?”

Chuck knew sarcasm when he heard it, even when the sarcasm was gentle and self-directed. He was Jewish, after all. Well, half.

“What does that mean when he says ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’?”

That made her smile perk up. She propped one small fist on her chin and looked at him with her pretty gray eyes. “What do you think it means?”

“All the people he knows?” Chuck ventured.

“Yes,” she agreed, “but maybe he means even more. Lean forward.”

He leaned over her desk, whereAmerican Verselay on top of her grade book. Very gently, she put her palms to his temples. They were cool. They felt so wonderful he had to suppress a shiver. “What’s in there between my hands? Just the people you know?”

“More,” Chuck said. He was thinking of his mother and father and the baby he never got a chance to hold. Alyssa, sounds like rain. “Memories.”

“Yes,” she said. “Everything you see. Everything you know. Theworld, Chucky. Planes in the sky, manhole covers in the street. Every year you live, that world inside your head will get bigger and brighter, more detailed and complex. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Chuck said. He was overwhelmed with the thought of a whole world inside the fragile bowl of his skull. He thought of the Jefferies boy, hit in the street. He thought of Henry Peterson, his father’s bookkeeper, dead at the end of a rope (he’d had nightmares about that). Their worlds going dark. Like a room when you turned out the light.

Miss Richards took her hands away. She looked concerned. “Are you all right, Chucky?”

“Yes,” he said.

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