Janice Macdonald - Return To Little Hills

“So you’re just back for a visit?” Honey asked.

“A month. Mom’s decided the house is too much for her, living alone and everything. My sister thinks Mom would be happier in a…more structured environment, so I’m back to help her find something.”

“Viv’s such a doll,” Honey said. “So patient. Always a smile. I don’t know how she does it.”

“Yeah.” Edie forced a smile of her own. “Mom’s lucky to have her living close by.”

“Edie’s giving a talk at Ray’s school tomorrow,” Maude said. “Ray’s the principal. He’s married to my daughter Vivian.”

“I know, Mrs. Robinson,” Honey said, kindly as though to a child. “I was a bridesmaid at their wedding.” She looked at Edie. “Assistant principal, right? My kid’s a junior there. I guess you’ve heard all about the new principal, huh?”

“Yeah. Viv filled me in. Everyone seems all agog.”

“That’s small-town life for you,” Honey said and shook her head. “I can’t even imagine your life. The farthest I’ve ever been is New Jersey. Do you get scared? I mean, all that shooting and everything.”

Edie shrugged and thought about the bullet in Sarajevo. She’d left her room for five minutes to talk to a photographer about the story they were working on. She returned to a cloud of dust and a .50-caliber slug embedded in the wall behind the desk she’d been using. If she’d been there, the bullet would have gone right through her forehead. She’d kept the bullet. “You take your chances,” she said. “It’s part of the deal.”

“I’ve got coupons,” Maude announced. “Here, Edith, you sort them out. Don’t know why they make the writing so small. Did Edith tell you about her big award?” she asked Honey. “Twenty-five cents off the coffee, the coupon is here somewhere. And the canned salmon is two for three dollars. Edith, look at these coupons. I know you can’t be bothered with that sort of thing, but it’s a savings, let me tell you. My daughter thinks money grows on trees,” she said with a glance at the cashier. “Always been that way. I remember Vivian used to save her allowance until she could get something she really wanted, but not Edith. As soon as she got it, she spent it. Still that way.”

Edie exchanged glances with the cashier, who smiled sympathetically.

“In your mother’s eyes you never grow up.” Honey scanned a roll of paper towels. “Doesn’t matter if you’re fifteen or fifty, you’re always this kid who doesn’t have sense enough to cross the road.” She reached for a can of pineapple chunks. “So. Tell me about your award.”

“Oh…” Edie started sorting Maude’s coupons into little piles. “I got a Pulitzer for a series on the rebels in El Salvador.” She picked up a ten-cents off coupon for grape jelly and checked the contents of the basket to see if she’d actually picked up the jelly as Maude had asked her to. “It was a team effort though, three other reporters and myself. I couldn’t have done it without them.”

“Wow.” Honey’s eyes were shining. “I am so proud of you, Edie. But, hey, we always knew you were smart. So…no husband on the horizon?”

“You got grape jelly.” Maude shoved the jar under Edie’s nose.

“I know, Mom.” She looked at Maude, whose eyes, brimming and clouded by cataracts, could look frighteningly hostile. “You said that’s what you wanted.”

“I said strawberry.”

“You said grape.”

“Strawberry,” Maude said. “That’s my daughter for you,” she said with a sigh. “Never listens. Never has. Snaps at me too.”

Edie held her breath. I won’t snap again if it kills me. And it might.

Honey winked at Edie. “So, no handsome man in your life?” she asked, rephrasing the question this time.

“No man, handsome or otherwise.” Edie took the grape jelly from Maude. “Wait right there, Mom. I’ll go back and get the strawberry. Anything else while I’m at it?” Maude didn’t answer, but as Edie walked away, she could hear Maude’s voice telling Honey, “Edie’ll never marry. Too darn independent and set in her ways.”

LUTHER HIGH SCHOOL principal Peter Darling stood in the sweltering heat at the side of the quad watching the faces of the assembled students for signs that they were actually listening to the tall woman up at the podium. To his vast relief, he saw no signs of the pushing and snickering and not-so-muffled yawns that had turned last week’s spotlight-on-careers program into an embarrassing fiasco. The assistant principal, openly skeptical about a weekly spotlight on careers, had smirked afterward that maybe they should line up hookers and pimps to discuss their work, with possibly a spotlight on auto theft and strong-arm robbery—the lines of work for which most Luther High kids were destined. Then to Peter’s surprise, Ray had done an apparent about-face and suggested that his sister-in-law would be willing to speak.

Peter watched the kids who, from their intent expressions, all appeared to be contemplating a career in journalism. Of course, Edie Robinson—with her sleek toffee-colored hair and photogenic smile—was no doubt part of the appeal.

“What do I like best about my job?” she’d just asked in response to a question thrown out by a girl in the front row. “Everything. The excitement, the variety. I think people often become unhappy because they’re just dissatisfied with the way things are in the place where they live. That doesn’t happen to me. I’m always going somewhere else. If I don’t like my current circumstance…oh well, tomorrow I’ll get on a plane and be on the other side of the world. New situation, new country, new experiences. I live in hotels. I eat in restaurants. I leave my laundry in a plastic bag in the hall outside my door. Almost all my friends are other journalists. My life is exclusively travel and work. And that’s exactly the way I like it.”

“Or to put it another way,” Ray Jenkins muttered in Peter’s ear, “Edith never has to think about anyone but herself. Which she never did anyway, even before she got to be a hotshot journalist. Kind of explains why she’s forty and never been married. You wanna hear about the stuff she’s not telling you, ask me. I used to go with her before I came to my senses and married her sister.”

Apart from mild surprise that the assistant principal might have anything at all in common with the woman at the podium, Peter had no interest in Ray Jenkins’s personal life, so he ignored the remark and made his way over to the stage just as Edie, having wrapped up her talk, was stepping down. He motioned for her to stay put and addressed the students himself, inviting them to show their appreciation for the interesting and informative talk. They complied with great enthusiasm, punctuating their applause with a few whoops and whistles.

He followed Edie off the stage, where she was now regarding him with very faint amusement in her light, amber-colored eyes. Her face and throat were lightly tanned and she wore an off-white trouser suit in a thin material that draped gracefully on her tall, angular figure. There was a cool confidence about her that made it quite easy for him to imagine her calmly reading in a bathtub as mortar shells flew around. The image intrigued him.

“Riveting talk. The students were captivated and, trust me, they’re a tough audience.”

She eyed him for a moment. “North of London, but not as far north as, say, Birmingham. Lived in the States for…oh, ten years or so. Long enough to have lost a little of the accent.”

He laughed, taken aback. “Very good. Malvern, actually. And I’ve been here twelve years. You’ve spent time in England, have you?”

“Five years in the London bureau, some time ago, though. I used to be a whiz at identifying regional accents. I thought I might have lost my touch.”

“Clearly, you haven’t.”

“I’m sure there’s an interesting story about how a man from Malvern, England, came to be a high-school principal in Little Hills, Missouri, but—” she glanced around “—I see a line forming to talk to you, so I’ll just…invent my own version of the facts.”

“Or you could call me,” he said, surprising himself. “And we could exchange life stories over dinner.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But I think I’ll stick with my invented version.”

“Pity,” he said. And then as he was about to let her go, he said, “I’ve noticed that your brother-in-law calls you Edith. Is it Edith, or Edie?” he asked.

“Edie,” she said. “Only my family calls me Edith…and I tolerate that very poorly.” A moment passed. “I’ve noticed that my brother-in-law calls you Pete. Is it Peter, or Pete?”

“Peter.” He grimaced slightly. “I suppose it sounds terribly formal, doesn’t it?”

“It sounds fine,” she said.

ZOWEE, Edie thought as she walked back across the campus to Maude’s car. Zowee. Zowee. Zowee. In the car, she pulled off her jacket, tossed it in the back seat, kicked off her heels, which had elevated her exactly to the level of Peter Darling’s gray-green eyes, threw them in the back, too, and sat grinning idiotically at the cracked, green vinyl–covered dashboard. Zowee. Shaking her head, she pulled down the driving mirror to look at her face: flushed scarlet. The car, she noted belatedly, was a furnace. She rolled down the driver’s window, still seeing Peter Darling’s face. Zowee. If every female in that school wasn’t having indecent dreams about him, she’d…eat her press pass.

THE OLD BLACK DIAL PHONE in the hallway was ringing when Edie let herself into Maude’s house some thirty minutes later. Her mother, Edie thought as she picked up the heavy receiver, should at least have a portable that she could carry around the house, but Maude wasn’t about to go easy into the digital age. The old one suited her just fine, thank you very much. Edie dragged the phone to the stairs and sat on the bottom step, listening to Vivian describe the pot roast she’d just put in the oven for dinner that night. Edie should bring Maude over at about six, Viv said.

Edie leaned back against the stairs and stifled a groan. Family gatherings ranked low on her list of ways to spend a pleasant evening. Viv would outdo herself with the food, then complain of being exhausted. Ray would be smarmy and insinuating. She’d lost touch completely with her nephews. And Maude would spend the whole time telling everyone that she didn’t know what she’d done to deserve the way her youngest daughter was always snapping at her.

Home sweet home. Thank God it was only for a month. Looking on the bright side, Viv would probably continue her rant about Peter Darling. Funny how much more interesting that prospect was, now that she’d met him.

“Mom doesn’t feed herself properly,” Viv was saying now. “And I’m sure you’ve probably forgotten all you never learned about cooking. I’ll do the roast and then I’ll wrap up what’s left and you can take it back to Mom’s. That way, you’ll both have something decent to eat.”

From the stairs, where she remained after hanging up the phone, Edie could see Maude at her chair by the window. “She spends hours there,” Viv had complained on the ride from the airport. “Just staring out at the street. That’s why she needs to get out of that house and into a place where she can be with other people her own age.”

Elbows on her knees, Edie sat for a while watching her mother from the dim and musty hallway. Maude, at her lace-curtained window post, in a fusty room crammed with knickknacks, crocheted mats, knitted cushions, cuckoo clocks and all the detritus accumulated over a lifetime, seemed so organic to the house that Edie found herself wondering whether uprooting her might cause Maude to just wither and die sooner than she might if she were left to live out her life at home.