All Manner of Things Page 9

  The second man crossed his arms and shrugged.

  “What do the blacks want anyhow? They can get jobs, they’ve got places to live, they get protected by the police. Heck, they got the vote. What do they want?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “It’s all those marches, got them riled.” He shook his head. “With that Martin King. He makes them think they’ve got it worse off than the rest of us. I don’t buy it.”

  The men both paused in their conversation, staying quiet the way men have of doing with one another. I looked at David; he kept his eyes on the paper as if he didn’t hear a word they said. The way he was able to turn the other cheek astounded me.

  “Order up,” Bernie called through the window between the kitchen and the dining area.

  I carried it over to David.

  “I’ll get your milk in a minute,” I said.

  “Thanks.” He gave me a quick smile before turning his face back to look at the food and the paper.

  When I turned, I noticed that one of the men was looking at David out of the corner of his eye. It wasn’t a friendly look, not one that I would have wanted trained on me.

  “All they’re doing is burning their own town,” the one with the stink-eye said. “I say we just let them do it. Be less trouble for us if they’d just leave.”

  “That’s an awful thing to say,” I muttered, hoping it was loud enough for him to hear it.

  It was and he turned his unfriendly eye on me. Turning my back on him, I went to pour David’s glass of milk.

  The men got out of their seats, dropping a few coins on the table. Without looking, I knew it would only be enough to cover the cups of coffee. They were never the kind to leave a tip anyway.

  “Thank you,” David said when I brought his glass of milk. Then he looked straight into my eyes. “I don’t let them get to me. It’s just talk.”

  “Well, they don’t have to be mean,” I said. “I’ll let you get to your lunch.”

  When he was finished, I brought him his bill and the last doughnut out of the bakery case, wrapped in a napkin. “On the house,” I said.

  “You don’t have to do that.” He grinned and pulled out his billfold. “But I’ll take it anyway.”

  Sliding out of his seat, he followed me to the counter, doughnut in hand. I told him his total, and he handed me his money.

  “I have a question for you,” he said.

  “All right?”

  “Did you know there are loons in Chippewa Lake?”

  “They come every year. Maybe not the same ones, but it doesn’t matter to us.”

  “I’ve been hearing them lately.”

  “Kind of spooky, huh?”

  “You got that right.” He put his wallet into his back pocket. “But a beautiful kind of spooky. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anything like it.”

  “You’ll get used to them.”

  “Hm. I hope I don’t.” He held up the doughnut. “Thanks for this.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Have a good day, Annie.”

  “You too.”

  I took my time setting the fresh place mats on the tables along with the place settings for the next morning. Then I wiped the lunch special off the chalkboard and wrote in the breakfast deal. Two fried eggs, two pancakes, and two sausage links.

  Bernie liked to have a new Bible verse on the board for each day. He said it let customers know what kind of establishment they’d come to. Never had he elaborated on that thought, and I’d not asked him to. But he kept a stack of index cards under the counter for me to copy in chalk on the blackboard.

  Iron sharpeneth iron, I wrote. So a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.

  Just when I finished writing it, the bell over the door dinged, letting me know we had another customer. Of course, right before we were supposed to close for the day.

  “I’ll be right with you,” I called over my shoulder, climbing down the step stool. “Go ahead and sit anywhere you’d like.”

  “It’s me.”

  I turned and looked to see Mom standing in the doorway. When she stepped closer, she was hesitant.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I have some bad news.”

  Slowly, as if I was dreaming, I stepped around the counter.

  “It’s your grandpa,” she said.

  “Is he . . .” I couldn’t bear to finish the sentence.

  She nodded. “He went in his sleep just a little while ago. Just like a light turning off. It didn’t hurt at all.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do.”

  I covered my face with my hands and cried. It was all I could do.

  16

  Grandma didn’t want to go home. She asked us to take her to our house where at least she didn’t have to look at an empty chair that should have held Grandpa. Mom had gone to pick her up, having taken the rest of the day off of work.

  I’d gone home early too. Bernie had let me know that he didn’t need my help, that he and Larry would make do for a few days. From him, that was as good as a sympathy card.

  The moment Oma heard, she rushed over, taking her place in our kitchen, making it smell of baking bread and sausages and butter.

  Grandma stepped into our house, letting her eyes scan the living room and breathing in the good smells of food. Joel went right to her, pulling her into a long hug. She patted his back as if she wanted him to let go, but he didn’t. Finally, she let her hands be still on his back when she realized he was crying.

  “That’s all right,” she whispered to him. “That’s all right.”

  We stayed at home all day, welcoming half of the town as they came to offer their sympathies to Grandma. She sat in a rocking chair, looking shrunken and glossy eyed. No matter what someone said to her, she could only muster two words.

  “Thank you.”

  After a while they stopped coming. I didn’t know if it was the rain that kept them away, but I was glad. Grandma’s eyes were heavy, her skin looking pale. I wondered when she’d last slept a full night.

  “We have to write the obituary,” she said, crossing her arms. “It’s been so long since I’ve written one . . .”

  “We can ask Jocelyn to help,” I offered. “She writes them all the time.”

  “All right,” Grandma said. “She’ll know what needs to be in there.”

  “She will.”

  “When did Rose say she’d be here?” She shook her head. “I know she’s upset that she has to come back again so soon.”

  “She’ll just have to be all right with it,” Mom muttered. “It isn’t that far.”

  “What about Frank?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we let him know?”

  Grandma narrowed her eyes at me and tightened her lips into a pucker. “You call your father by his first name?”

  I lowered my eyes to the floor.

  “I suppose you don’t think he’s been much of a father to you,” she said. “Maybe he hasn’t been.”

  Mom cleared her throat, setting her jaw as if she was struggling to keep in a burst of temper. At least I knew it wasn’t me she was angry with. I was glad, though, that she worked at defusing her dynamite even if just for the sake of a woman who’d been recently widowed.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “You don’t need to apologize to me.” She folded her hands in her lap, using her feet to rock the chair. It creaked into the quiet room. “I have his address. We should write to him. We should ask him to come home.”

  Mom stood up fast and walked to the kitchen, her spine rigid. Her voice carried to the living room in hisses and hard-edged tones. I thought if Oma wasn’t there, we also would have been treated to the clanging of pots and pans and the slamming of cupboard doors.

  “Do you think he’ll want to come?” Joel asked.

  “He promised he would.” The skin of Grandma’s forehead gathered in the middle and she looked at her shoes. “If something like this happened, he’d come back if
I wanted him to.”

  “Will you ask him to come home?” he asked.

  Joel, the son who hardly remembered Frank, held no bitterness toward him. He inched to the edge of his chair as if in excitement.

  Grandma nodded. “Hand me my purse.”

  I brought it to her, the weight of it more than I’d anticipated. It was classic black with a gold-colored clasp. It smelled of the violet mints she always kept in the little pocket sewn into the lining next to an embroidered hanky and a tiny pair of scissors. She took the purse from me, pulling it open and taking out her wallet that was of the same color.

  From the space behind where she kept her driver’s license, she removed a little piece of paper that had been folded once. She handed it to me.

  “I wish I had a telephone number for him,” she said. “But this is what he gave me.”

  I held that paper, feeling the softness of it from years in Grandma’s wallet. I thought about telling her that I already had the address, that she should keep it stowed away in her wallet.

  “Thank you,” I said instead.

  I didn’t want her to think that Mike had betrayed her.

  She’d already lost so much.

  To whom it may concern:

  I’m attempting to reach Frank Jacobson. If this is not the correct address for him, please write back or call 1-231-555-6986 to let us know as much.

  If, however, this is where he may be reached, please let him know that his father, Rockston Jacobson, passed away and that his mother has requested that he come home. To that end, we’ve delayed the funeral until August 2 at eleven in the morning to be held at First United Methodist Church in Fort Colson, Michigan.

  Frank knows the location.

  Thank you,

  Anne Jacobson

  PS: I can be reached most mornings and afternoons at Bernie’s Diner on Main Street in Fort Colson.

  17

  It had rained most of the week. I hadn’t minded at all. Between Grandpa’s funeral arrangements and the news out of Detroit, the gloomy skies represented well my downtrodden spirit.

  Frank hadn’t come and he hadn’t called. Every time the telephone rang, I jumped, answering it with my heart pounding so fast it made me breathless.

  “The letter might not have gotten to him yet,” Joel said, sitting on the couch.

  “I sent the letter on Friday,” I said. “He should’ve called when he got it.”

  “It’s only Sunday. Be patient, Annie.”

  Mom reached for the TV, turning the volume up. She hushed us. “I’m trying to watch the news.”

  More footage of the Detroit riots moved across the screen. Police, wielding shotguns, walked up and down the sidewalk, passing storefronts with busted-out windows. Crowds lined the streets, examining the destruction as if in shock.

  The anchorman delivered the report of a white woman shot and killed as she stood looking out her hotel window and of a little black girl, only four years old, who suffered the same from the weapons of the National Guard in Detroit.

  It didn’t make sense to me. Not even a little. It seemed like the world was just too hard, too dark. I bit the inside of my cheek, trying not to cry.

  “Their poor mothers,” Mom whispered.

  He walked through the door of the diner at five minutes until closing time and came directly to where I stood refilling salt shakers at the counter. I knew him instantly. He hadn’t changed much at all. Just a little gray peppered his hair and more lines creased his face. But the eyes, they were the same. Dark and brooding.

  The last I’d seen him, his eyes had been like that. He had come to tuck me into bed and listen to me say my prayers like he did some nights. When he’d lowered his face to kiss my forehead, I saw that his eyes held all the sadness in the world.

  Those were the eyes that met mine that Monday afternoon.

  When I noticed that my hands were trembling, I shoved them into my apron pocket. Swallowing, I willed myself to be steady, to be calm. Of all the times I’d imagined him coming back, I’d never thought I’d feel so nervous, so emotional.

  “Hi, Frank,” I whispered, not ready or willing to use the name Dad.

  He nodded as if to say that he knew he didn’t deserve more. “Anne,” he said.

  “I still go by Annie.”

  “Okay.” He looked straight, his hands at his sides. His right he held in a fist. To calm the trembling, I imagined.

  I felt at a loss as to what to say. Turning, I saw Bernie peek out through the pass-through window, checking to see if I was okay. I nodded at him to say I was.

  “Do you want some coffee?” I asked. “I can make new, but you’ll have to pay for it.”

  “Just whatever you have on hand,” he said. “I don’t mind old.”

  “Why don’t you go have a seat.”

  He picked the table closest to the window, taking the chair that put his back against the wall.

  I made my way to the coffeemaker, holding the air in my lungs a good ten seconds before letting it back out. Mike should be here, I thought. He’d know what to do.

  What I imagined Mike would do was take the cup of coffee to Frank and ask him how he’d been all those years. He’d have some charming way to ease the tension, to iron out the wrinkles that had formed after years of estrangement before giving him the third degree to find out why he’d left and where he’d been.

  Behind me I heard the sloshing of Larry’s dishwashing and the radio Bernie had on a station that only played classical music. Pouring the last of the coffee into a mug, I allowed the complexity of wanting Frank to leave and hoping he’d stay wash over me.

  Both anger and relief burbled inside of me, as if they grumbled different songs.

  “Annie,” Bernie called out to me through the pass-through. “He going to want anything from the grill?”

  Turning, I shook my head. “I didn’t ask yet.”

  “Well, find out, would ya? I want to clean this thing if I can.”

  “It’s Frank,” I whispered. The two words were out before I realized it.

  “It’s who?” He lowered his eyebrows and squinted. Lifting a hand to wipe at a line of sweat on his forehead, he looked in the direction of our sole customer. “Frank? As in your father?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  He didn’t wait for me to finish. He moved from the pass-through to the kitchen door, pushing it open and joining me behind the counter.

  “You want me to make him leave?” He crossed his arms, looking at Frank.

  “No,” I said, overeager. “I need him.”

  Trying to pretend I hadn’t said those last words, I took the cup to Frank’s table, not bothering to grab a pitcher of cream or a cube of sugar. He’d want it black.

  I didn’t know much about him, but of that I was sure.

  “When did you get here?” I asked, putting the cup in front of him. “Into town, I mean.”

  “Just now.” He looked at the coffee as if it were from an alien planet. “This was my first stop.”

  “Are you going to order food?” My voice was more clipped than usual. It surprised me how much I sounded like my mother. “Bernie wants to shut down the grill.”

  “I’m not hungry.” He lifted the cup to his lips, taking a sip. “You have time to talk?”

  “My shift isn’t over until quarter after three.”

  He sighed and nodded.

  “I’m sure you’re in a hurry to get out of town, but we all have lives to live,” I said, barely over a whisper. I looked at my wristwatch. “If you want to talk, you’ll have to wait twenty minutes. You think you can manage that?”

  He looked at me with a half grin, one that reminded me of Mike. “You sure are like your mother.”

  I pushed up my glasses, feeling the heat of my cheeks with my fingertips.

  “That’s a compliment,” he said. “I can wait here. Unless you need to clean the table.”

  “You can stay,” I said. “Just as long as you o
rder something to eat. The special is meat loaf.”

  He grimaced. “How about a piece of pie.”

  “All right.” I jotted a note. “Ice cream?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll have that out to you in a few minutes,” I said as if talking to any customer who had walked in off the street. “Anything else?”

  “Nope.”

  I turned away from him, leaving his table.

  “Annie,” he said.

  I looked at him over my shoulder.

  “You look like your mother.”

  I’d heard that my whole life from just about every single person who lived in Fort Colson. Never before had it made me feel anything. It was just something people said. But then Frank said it, and I thought it was a roundabout way of telling me that he thought I was pretty.

  I’d waited my whole life for my father to say something like that to me.

  I was sure to stuff away that warm feeling, trying to ignore how good it was.

  I couldn’t afford to let him break my heart again.

  Bernie agreed to let me punch out early, before the cleaning routine at the end of the shift. Larry said he didn’t mind covering my tasks. He didn’t have anything else to do and could use the extra half hour’s pay.

  “If I were you, I’d tell him to take a hike,” Bernie whispered. “You want me to tell him? I don’t mind.”

  “No.” I hung my apron up on the peg behind the kitchen door. “I need to talk to him.”

  “All right. But if you change your mind, I’ll be around,” he said. “Get yourself a glass of Coke. You can talk to him right here if you want. When you’re done, just lock the door behind you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I mean it. If you want me to kick him to the curb, I’m more than happy to.”

  “I hope that won’t be necessary,” I said, pushing my way through the swinging door and into the dining area.

  Frank read a paperback at his table. I had a flash of memory cross my mind of when he used to sit in his recliner, the one Mom had sold to a neighbor for three dollars after he’d left. In the evenings of his good days, he’d read something out loud to Mike and me while Mom cleaned up after supper. He liked reading Kipling the most.