She stepped back then, and Del said he needed ten minutes before they could go home. He had to take something to the safe. He would make the flight arrangements from the house. June thought she could not bear to be alone, even a moment, but she nodded yes, and then she walked upstairs, to the back of the casino, and knocked on Eddie’s apartment door.
He was getting ready for his late show, and a woman was with him. When June told him, he wrapped her in a big bear hug, and rocked back and forth. June shuddered there. She saw the surprise in the woman’s eyes.
“You’re going home, June. You’re going home, but you’ll be back. You’ll be okay.”
“He never saw Marshall.”
She could hardly get the words out.
Eddie held her. And he hummed as he did it. Just a soft hum, and a rock.
“I didn’t take him home, Eddie. We went to Cuba. But I didn’t take him home.”
Eddie didn’t reply. Just the hum, the rock. They stood that way for long minutes, June collapsed into Eddie’s rocking, and eventually the woman looked away from them, and then she left the room. When June stepped away from Eddie, they were alone. She looked at him—the tears had swollen her eyes nearly shut—and Eddie looked back, his eyes moist, and June thought that if not for Eddie, maybe she wouldn’t have stayed in Las Vegas after all. Maybe she didn’t like running a casino that much, and what did it mean that Eddie Knox was the person who held her while she cried on the night her father died?
4
June and Marshall were in New Jersey for two months. Marshall learned to crawl there, and June tried to share this with Del.
“How’s our little man?”
“He wants to crawl. I’m trying to keep him from doing it. But if I set him on the ground, he rolls on his tummy, sticks up his bottom, and starts waving his arms and legs to get going. When I’m holding him, he flips down and reaches out to the floor. He’s just set on it.”
“Why would you stop him?”
“I want you to see it. I don’t want you to miss this.”
“It’s okay, June. It’s good for your mom to see. And I’ve got a lot going on here.”
Sometimes June wasn’t sure quite what Del meant. She tried to shake off the way her husband’s voice on the phone made her uneasy. Del loved her, he loved Marshall, they talked every night. But there was something in his voice; some distraction even when he was saying he loved her. What did Del feel?
Marshall crawled across her mother’s kitchen, started to pull himself up on the chairs, grew out of the overalls June had brought with her. And still they stayed in New Jersey. Still Del did not insist they come home. Lying awake at night, with her son asleep beside her, June thought often of her father. She remembered how it had felt to hold his dry, bony hand, and how his brow would wrinkle when he asked her about what the teacher had said, about what the neighbor had reported, about what her best friend’s mother had suggested.
“June,” he used to ask, “what are you thinking?”
And sometimes June would feel bad, and she wished she knew what she had been thinking, or why she had done what she did. But other times, she would flash her blinding smile, laugh, say, “Poppa, it was fun.”
June’s father was an amateur photographer. He had built a darkroom in the basement and spent his evenings there. When she was very small, she hadn’t even known he was home. She thought he went to work after dinner the way he did after lunch. Later, when she knew he was in the basement, she’d been afraid to follow him down into it. An eerie red light glowed when he opened the darkroom door, and often it smelled as if he were striking matches, so in June’s mind, the darkroom was associated with fire. In second grade, a new girl in school told June about hell, and when she described the fires where sinners would burn, howling and howling without ever being incinerated, June thought of the basement, and pictured her father, with his sore red hands, as the flaming miscreant. It made her cry. Hazel, the new girl, took this as the sign of a guilty conscience, and for the next four months, until she left the school as abruptly as she had arrived, she called June “sinner” under her breath.
Hazel frightened her, because by eight, June already had the sense that she wasn’t quite good. Why couldn’t she wear a dress that her mother had carefully sewn and pleated without tearing the skirt or getting ink on the pale cotton? How did she lose her book on the way to school, and why did pencils break and cups drop and pages get ripped whenever she came near? June was easily distracted by the sense of things: the rub of a neatly stitched hem on her thigh, the round, hard smoothness of that pencil, the sound of paper fibers splitting one from the other, the intoxicating scent of a pink flower shooting out of a crack in the sidewalk. The idea that her parents had somehow ended up with the wrong little girl—one who was hapless and pell-mell when they were deliberative and precise—had already formed vaguely in her mind.
The great work of her father’s photography was June’s own childhood: hundreds of two-inch black-and-white squares, carefully documenting a little girl with perfectly combed hair sitting at a piano, a baby lifting her dark head to stare at the white muzzle of a whiskery dog, three children dressed as Indians with feathers stuck in their headbands, a toddler resting a fat finger on the base of a flickering menorah. Her father’s photos were perfect. In seventy years, they would still be detailed representations of a time hardly anyone remembered, but to June, even as a child, they spoke to her mostly as depictions of how she was meant to be: clean and silent and still, instead of rumpled and impetuous and inclined to pull at any stray thread.
And yet she had been loved. Her quiet, careful parents, not given to demonstrative acts, had somehow made this clear. She was loved.
So how could she have gone so long between visits? How could she have left them at all? She didn’t know. If there was any answer, it was that she hadn’t done any of it—as she hadn’t knocked over the cup, as she hadn’t lost her sweater—she had merely lived, from this moment to the next, in this day or that, and there had been so much to attract her gossamer attention. June didn’t think forward and back in quite the way that her parents did, but when this caught up with her, when she had made some error she would never have chosen to make, if she had thought it possible for her father to die without seeing Marshall—for her father to die at all—then she grieved her lack of foresight. And again she felt like the little girl who broke the pencils and snorted at the teacher and said the wrong thing when the rabbi asked what it was that a child should do.
“June, what are you thinking?”
“Poppa, it isn’t thinking at all.”