He nodded, and she seemed pleased by her own abilities of recall. “I remembered it because it’s a funny name for a boy. It’s a nice enough girl’s name but I’d never give it to a boy.”
The sky was pink as she pushed on the door of the post office. It was a surprise that Clare had written her letters, and yet it was not, but he couldn’t think of that now. He needed to say the words that would allow this girl to trust him. She walked ahead of him into the big tiled room and stood behind two others waiting in line. It surprised him to remember the post office so well: the black-and-white pattern of the tiles on the floor, cracked near the counter where something heavy had fallen once, the brass edges of the counter deeply buried in the wood, like fingernails in flesh. The door behind them opened and another patron joined the small line, nobody speaking. When it was Glynis’s turn, she pushed a letter across the varnished oak counter. There was something almost fierce in the gesture, and he looked down to see the words McKenna and Salt Lake City, Utah. The postman touched a stamp to a wet sponge, pressed it crookedly down, and then canceled it, saying, “That’ll be two cents, miss.”
Glynis pushed the two cents across the counter and the letter was gone.
When they had gone out into the cold blue twilight, he said, “I thought she told you she’d rather die.”
“People say that,” Glynis said. “But they wouldn’t.”
“So she’s gone to her sister’s,” he said, full of despair instead of the relief he expected—after all, her sister would take care of her. But that wasn’t what he truly wanted. He wanted her to be with him.
Glynis kept walking, and Ansel kept walking with her. “The other letters,” she said after a time, “the ones from Clare, she left in a drawer. Yours she put in a little box. I used to hear her crying when she read them, especially as it got plain, you know, what had happened to her.” Glynis shrugged her black woolen shoulders and touched her red nose with an embroidered handkerchief.
“Please give me her address,” he said. “I do love her. In the purest way. I want to find her and make it right.”
She stopped under a streetlight and studied him again. He was aware, this time, of her smallness beside him. She was looking up at his face, and he was looking down into her determined eyes. A car went past them, popping through ice that had glassed a pothole. She came to some conclusion but said only, “Well.” She removed a stubby pencil from her bag and then a scrap of paper, which she held against the brick wall of the post office as she wrote an address for him.
80
Mrs. Odekirk always went to bed early, but on that Tuesday night Aldine was sewing a crooked yellow blanket stitch along the edge of a cream-colored flannelette baby jacket and wondering if she could sneak a tarry. She felt as heavy as a turtle and dragged herself like one. Her swollen feet even looked like fat old turtle feet. She dreamed some nights that she had fallen over the rail of an ocean liner and was plunging through pale green freezing water, her belly a cannonball. She was prone to little nightmares even when she sat working on the tiny frocks Mrs. Odekirk had set her to making. She’d be sewing, and then she’d be dreaming, and that’s why Glynis’s soft knocking seemed at first like a subterranean noise. But when she hoisted her turtle body and scuttled to the window, there was a person on the back step, and that person was Glynis, her breath coldly visible as she turned her face toward Aldine.
“I saw him,” Glynis said and walked right in, taking Aldine’s wing chair even though the pincushion was right there on the footstool. Glynis had crocheted a pair of booties for the baby last month, and before that, a yellow bib.
Aldine lowered herself onto the stiff velvet love seat and pointed at Mrs. Odekirk’s closed bedroom door. “Asleep,” she whispered.
Aldine liked Mrs. Odekirk, and had visited her several times before Mrs. Gore fired her. When she was turned out of her quarters, she’d come here, and Mrs. Odekirk, without asking any questions, had offered her a room.
“I saw him,” Glynis repeated in a whisper that was almost a hiss.
“You saw who?” Aldine assumed it was some man Glynis didn’t like. The giver of the randy postcards came to mind.
“Ansel,” Glynis said.
“Here? You saw Ansel here?”
“This afternoon. He came to look for you at the Harvey House.”
The words pulled her like river water. “Where is he now?” she asked, holding herself fast against the love seat.
“He’s gone. He went off.”
“Went off where?”
Glynis let her gaze slide away. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“What did you do, Glynis?”
“He wanted to know where you were,” she said, her words trailing off. Her air of dramatic regret made Aldine want to shake her.
“Didn’t you tell him that I’m here?”
Glynis shook her head. She touched a snag on her skirt with the green finger of her gloved hand.
“Why not?” Aldine stood up and as she did so reflexively touched her belly.
“I don’t know. I thought you’d be better off. But then later he did seem to care so much that I felt maybe I’d done wrong and that’s why I’m here now.”
“What did you tell him? You’re not making any sense!”
“I wrote to your sister,” Glynis said, looking up tearfully. “I knew you wouldn’t do it, that you were too ashamed, but I know how it feels to be looking for someone. I thought she should have the chance to help you. After Ansel came to the restaurant and I told him I didn’t know where you were, I decided to write to your sister. Then he—Ansel—found me on my way to the post office, but that was when I was still thinking he should just let you be.”
“So you just told him you didn’t know?”
Glynis let her eyes drop. “I gave him your sister’s address.”
Aldine was horror-struck. “He came here looking for me, and you sent him to Salt Lake?”
Glynis nodded less distinctly. “He didn’t say flat out that he’d go find you there. Honestly, he didn’t look very good. I mean, well enough for much travel.”
“He looked tired, you mean?”
“Maybe,” Glynis said. “But more sickly I think.”
“What kind of sickly?”
“He said it was a cold.”
Aldine could think of nothing to say, so she pressed her fingertips down hard on her closed eyelids.
“He’s a married man,” Glynis said. “What would you have done if I’d sent him here, anyway?”
Aldine shook her head and said nothing. Ansel had come to find her, and she didn’t get to see him. That was all she knew, and it was too much. “Please go,” Aldine said.
“I’m sorry,” Glynis said. “I’m very, very sorry.”
Aldine didn’t look at Glynis or answer her but instead pressed her hands harder over her closed eyes, felt the heaviness of her body, and listened to Glynis go quietly out the door.
81