The Painted Table(58)

Saffee used to reason that if she didn’t try new things, technically she wouldn’t fail. Now, with Jack, she has begun to try a little, but her lifelong reality has been found out—her cocoon. The word makes her squirm and threatens to ruin a good day. Neither one speaks for several moments.

“I didn’t mean to be rude or critical,” he says. “Cocoons are good things, you know.”

“No. I don’t know.” She is curt. “Why?”

He gives her the unself-conscious smile she’s come to love. “Because from cocoons come lovely butterflies.”

If she had been frozen to the bone on Buck Hill, his fact-become-poetry would have melted her entire being.

Inspired by what sounds like approval, she dares ask, “The cocoon is opening a little, don’t you think, Jack?”

“Yes,” he says, “I think so.”




A few weeks later, after several more dates, Jack says he won’t be seeing her during the month of April because of an intense study schedule prior to his May actuarial exam. Throughout the month she misses him terribly and worries he’ll forget her. But when the exam is over, and the trees are beginning to show spring buds, he calls. They go biking along trails bordering Minnehaha Creek. She doesn’t tell him that she didn’t learn to ride a bike until after sixth grade.

The summer before her senior year, Saffee again doesn’t consider going home to Miller’s Ford. Even another summer of typing catalogue cards sounds more appealing.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX



LOYALTY





1963





Saffee and Nels sit in a back booth of a Dinky Town hamburger joint. This is the first time Nels has visited his daughter at college, even though the hospital Joann frequents is only about an hour from the university. During infrequent telephone calls, Saffee has sensed it is even harder than before for him to communicate with her, a college girl. When he’s not telling jokes, he has never had much to say. It was a surprise when he called to take her out to eat.

She will inquire about her mother first—because that’s the right thing to do—then she’ll tell her dad about Jack. She reaches for the ketchup. “What’s going on with Mom, Daddy?”

Until April went to France, she had supplied Saffee’s only updates on her mother. Saffee has not been back to Miller’s Ford since the disastrous Thanksgiving her freshman year, more than three years ago. She almost never has taken the initiative to inquire about Joann by phone. To her, her mother is dead. No one asks about the dead. By extension, neither has her father occupied much room in her thoughts. She rarely remembered her past resolve to pray for them.

Instead of answering her question, Nels eats his coleslaw. He looks downcast. His left arm is deeply tanned from hours out the open window as he drives day in and day out for his job.

“Daddy?” she repeats.

“Ahh,” he says, shaking his head. He puts down his fork and crumples a paper napkin. “She’s back in the hospital. She was doin’ more awful stuff.”

“Like what?”

Nels takes a deep breath and glances at the ceiling, the way he does when pushed to confide and doesn’t want to. “She was throwin’ stuff away.”

“What stuff?”

“Stuff that shoulda been saved, important papers, like insurance policies, bills . . . the pitures.”

“What pictures? Our baby pictures?” Other than a box full of photos of April and Saffee when they were very young, she recalls few pictures in the house.

He nods. “Plus other things,” he says. “The toaster, the radio, perfectly good lamps, anything she thought might be dangerous to her.” He sighs heavily. “I’ll never understand her. When she don’t take her medicine, she talks to things, listens to things.” He drops the shredded napkin onto his plate and drums the table. “It’s good April’s gone. Home ain’t no place for her no more.”

In July, Saffee had received a postcard from April. “I’ve decided to celebrate my seventeenth birthday in Switzerland!” Later she wrote that with the money she had earned during the nanny stint, she planned to backpack through Europe. She saw no reason to return home for school. “What could be more educational than climbing the Alps?” she wrote.

“How did you find out about her throwing things away, Daddy?” More pain crosses his face. He tells her that he realized various things were missing, and eventually the garbage collectors noticed and started saving “the garbage” for him. And now, he laments, the whole town knows and that was the last straw.

“So I come here to tell you—we ain’t gonna live in Miller’s Ford no more. I can’t take this kinda embarrassment.”