Fifteen
The girls had a ball retrieving my decorations from the attic that night after supper. In fact, they found a good bit more than just decorations. It had been years since I had climbed the narrow steps to my attic, but the girls would not have it but that I join them there to see the treasures they had found.
A cedar chest full of my grandmother’s old clothes and my mother’s wedding dress lay in one corner. One box held a variety of crocheted doilies and embroidered handkerchiefs and other various tablecloths and linens. There was an entire stack of hatboxes and a hall tree sporting a half dozen more hats on its hooks. Another box held scrapbooks full of pictures dating to the late 1800s. My wedding album was there and I sat down at my mother’s old dressing table to look through the evidence of my innocent hope. In one picture, I sat in an ornate chair, smiling up over my shoulder at Walter with an expression of unabashed adoration on my face. He was returning my gaze with a beguiled grin of his own.
Funny, I hadn’t remembered adoring Walter like that. Nor did I remember him ever being particularly captivated by me. As I sat there in my attic, with three little girls busily rooting through and trying on various costumes of another era, I wondered if time had so altered my memory that I had forgotten such things as love, or if pictures did indeed tell the story.
I finally dragged the girls away from their plunder by promising hot chocolate while we decorated the tree. I also assured them we’d return to the attic to play at some later date.
Patrice, sufficiently recovered from the afternoon trauma, washed the dishes and made the cocoa while Blanche rested in Walter’s recliner and watched our festive doings. Blanche would normally have gone home much earlier, but it was Friday and the girls wouldn’t have to go to school the next day, so we were all carried away with our merriment. Before we knew it, the clock chimed eleven times and we looked at each other in amazement. Blanche was snoring softly from the chair and Grace had fallen asleep on the couch, but the rest of us were still going strong when we put on the last ornament, a brightly lit angel to adorn the treetop.
I sent the twins to the guest bedroom and Patrice to Walter’s old room, which hadn’t been used once since his death. Blanche kept it clean and changed the sheets every couple of weeks, but I had scarcely opened the door in the past year.
I couldn’t remember exactly when or why Walter had moved out of our room and into what used to be the guest room. Something about his snoring disturbing my sleep - or my restlessness disturbing his - I can’t remember which came first. One day he moved to the extra bed in the middle of the night. Then he moved his clothes from our closet so that he wouldn’t wake me up when he got ready for work. Eventually we started calling it his room, which necessitated the decoration of my old sewing room as the new guest room.
Patrice was just happy to have a bed to fall into after her long, long day. I took blankets down to cover Grace and Blanche, turned off the tree lights, locked all the doors and returned to Patrice’s room to check on her before retiring myself. She was buried in the covers with pillows piled high under her head.
“You comfortable?” I asked, knowing the answer already.
“This is the best bed I ever slept in, Miz Beckworth. I slept at my friend’s house a couple of times, but I’ve never slept anywhere all by myself.”
“Never?”
“No’m, not ever once.”
“You don‘t have your own room now?” I asked.
“There’s only two bedrooms in our house. One’s got two twin beds and Mama just has a double.”
“Goodness, that’s not many beds for all you children! How do you manage?” I couldn't seem to help being nosy.
“Well, me and Gracie sleep in one bed and the twins in the other. Marcus used to sleep on the sofa when he was home or, every once in a while, with Mama. I guess I could sleep on the sofa if I wanted to sleep by myself, but it just doesn’t seem right somehow.”
“You miss your brother, don’t you?”
“Yes, Ma’am, I do sometimes. Long as I just pretend he’s away at boot camp I do pretty good. I can’t hardly look at a semi truck now, though. It makes me remember too much.”
“I’m sorry about that, Patrice.”
“Nothin’ for you to be sorry ‘bout, Miz Beckworth. You didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”
“Anything wrong,” I replied. I can’t for the life of me figure out why correcting her grammar seemed like the thing to do at the time.
“Yes, Ma’am,” she smiled sheepishly.
“You sleep tight now, okay?”
“I will,” Patrice murmured sleepily. “Real tight in this comfy ol’ bed.” She turned away from me then, rolling to her right side.
“I sure am sorry about what happened today,” I said gently.
She turned her head back to look at me with calm acceptance. “Oh, it’s all right, Miz Beckworth. I’m kind of used to it by now.”
Her reply stung me worse than the horror we faced in the department store, because she told the pure truth of it.