Page 34 of We All Live Here
He raises his eyebrows. “Right.” There is a short silence. “I guess we both have a lot going on, then,” he says.
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, you’re clearly handling it like a Don.”
Lila opens her mouth to respond, flushing, but the door to the school opens then and the children begin to flood out, pushing their way past the teacher in a pint-sized scrummage of brightly colored backpacks and already tattered pictures from the day, immediately welding themselves to their corresponding parents, like penguins returning across the frozen wastes.
“Here’s to cinnamon buns then,” Gabriel Mallory says, and gives her a little salute, as he starts to walk toward the throng.
“Buns!” says Lila, in response, and her voice does something high-pitched and strange.
She repeats “buns” sporadically under her breath, sometimes furiously, sometimes despairingly, the whole walk home.
•••
Whatever therapeutic woodworkingBill has done at home over the past few days seems to have consolidated his more cheerful state of mind: he smiles readily when Lila and Violet return home, and only mentions for the third time that it would have been nice if Gene had bothered to strip, or even make, his bed before he’d left. Lila, who has guiltily wiped the last of the sugary bun from her lips as she walked up the steps of the front door, smiles back. It has been, she thinks, with unexpected pleasure, a pretty good day. Celie is in a reasonably good mood—at least, she deigns to speak at least twice during supper—there is a roast chicken and salad instead of fish and lentils, and Violet, still basking in the secret mischief of their contraband buns, manages to make only one scatological reference during the entire meal. Even Dan calling halfway through to ask to switch his days this week because Marja’s mother is coming over from Holland does not dent her general well-being. The girls eat their food without fuss, Bill discusses a friend with one leg from his teacher-training days who has got in touch with him via Facebook, and Lila spends most of the meal slightly lost in the imaginary arms of a man with a lopsided grin and a pair of sticky buns.
She is so lost in this train of thought that it takes her a while to notice Truant is barking again. The back door is open and she observes that the dog has set up the agitated staccato bark he reserves for blameless postmen and delivery drivers. He has been bad again for the last coupleof days—it’s as if he’s set to high alert, always warning them that the sky is about to fall in.
“You really need to get that dog some training, Lila,” Bill murmurs.
“I know,” she says, muttering, “I’ll do it in the same free hours that I have pedicures, waxes, and meditate.” She leaves the table when she can ignore the sound no longer and heads out to the garden, still basically a war zone of freshly dug earth and slabs of York stone from Jensen’s earlier efforts. Truant is facing the door of the shed, his hackles up, and his teeth bared.Oh, God, she thinks.Itisrats. Jensen had tried to tell her and she had just brushed him off. And now she is going to pay for it. She sees Violet’s bright blue baseball bat in the grass, and picks it up, in case they’re the kind that jump at your throat. She isn’t sure that rats actually jump at throats, but it feels like the kind of thing a rat might do.
Truant’s barking has grown ever more urgent now, and she tries to shush him, worried that if she opens the door he will be involved in some horrific animal-on-animal massacre. She pulls at his collar and, when that fails to stop him, walks a step closer to the door. She can hear Bill calling from the kitchen: “What’s going on? Lila? What’s he barking at?” And waves to him, as if to suggest everything’s fine and he doesn’t need to worry. She pushes the door open an inch with her foot and hears a loud clatter from inside. Her heart racing, she swings the door wide—and there is Gene, half collapsed into the outdoor sofa cushions on the floor, blinking as he registers Lila’s presence.
“Gene?”
He is wearing a sweatshirt, a leather jacket and a pair of tired-looking underpants. He pushes himself upright. Unfortunately this change in position shifts the pile of outdoor sofa cushions and brings an empty paint tin clattering down from a shelf onto his shoulder.
“Ow. Hey…hey, sweetheart,” he says, with a glassy smile, placing the tin carefully beside him.
“What on earth are you doing in here?”
He looks at her, as if considering this question carefully. Then appears to forget it. There is an empty crisps packet on his belly and he blinks at it, as if he’s just noticed it, then attempts to empty the crumbs into his mouth. He misses.
“You know,” he says, collapsing slowly backward into the cushions again, “the weed they sell in this country is way too strong. They should have a rule against it.”
•••
If the neighborswere disturbed by Truant’s barking, that’s nothing to the sight of a seventy-five-year-old man being led across the garden in his pants while singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The curtains at number forty-seven are twitching so furiously it’s as if the entire house is having some kind of seizure. Lila finally manages to persuade him upstairs and into the study, where she remakes the sofa-bed she had stripped and folded up not two hours previously, and finally, with the promise of more potato chips, persuades him to take a nap. “Isn’t it great that we’re back together?” he says, his veiny old hands clasping hers like some kind of sandwich. “The old team together again.” Lila assures him that it is indeed great and, yes, what a team, and now it’s time for him definitely to take that nap, thank you very much.
Bill takes another bottle of wine round to the neighbors to apologize for the commotion and is gone for a dismayingly long time. While they wait for him to return, she and Celie sit in the front room and listen to Violet’s disconcertingly good impression of Lila’s father stumbling across a room and breaking off to sing emphatic and repeated lines of the song.
When she has calmed Bill, and assured him that, no, she had no idea and, yes, she will make sure Gene leaves when he’s straightened out, she disappears up to her bedroom.
•••
Was Gene theproblem in the shed?
Jensen’s response is swift.Yeah. Sleeping like a baby. I did try to tell you.There is a short pause, and then he types again. She watches the pulsing dots.I think he’s been there a couple of days.
Lila stares at the message, then closes her eyes and lies down on thefloor.
Chapter Ten
Penelope Stockbridge is wearing hairclips with little green and turquoise glass butterflies. They are the kind you might normally see on a small girl, but Penelope Stockbridge doesn’t seem to follow the normal codes for sixty-plus dressing, and every time she brings a tuna-pasta bake—and this will be the thirteenth tuna-pasta bake she has brought this year—there is some slightly off-kilter element of her dress that Lila always finds oddly compelling. Two weeks ago it was floral wellingtons, once a mohair scarf in pink and purple that came down to her knees, and occasionally—to Violet’s delight—she wears a small cross-body bag in the shape of a kitten’s face.
“It’s for Bill,” she says, in her soft, precise voice, as she always does. “I wondered if he was eating properly. You know, withoutFrancescaaround.” She always whispers Francesca’s name, as if the mere sound of it might be too distressing.
