Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [88]
After the first night, the night she woke him to tell him to take care of Alex, he had started waiting for her. He figured that if she came once, found a way to reach across the divide between life and death, heaven and earth, and get to him, she would find him again. So he lit candles and built a little altar, calling her to him, started making a place for her at the dinner table, on the sofa in front of the television, even in their bed. He fixed supper for her, buying extra tortillas from the diner, pouring two glasses of milk, setting places for them both. He washed the extra set of towels, placing them by the sink in the bathroom, and even cleaned out a drawer in the nightstand in case there were things she wanted to put there. He bought a hairbrush and the rose-scented hand lotion she used to love to wear, her favorite candies, the butterscotch ones with the soft centers, and reading glasses, and he set them all around the house to make her feel comfortable, make her feel at home, make her never want to leave.
No one else knew what Oris was doing. Since he stayed all day at his daughter’s house, watching over his great-grandson, and since Roger and Malene were preoccupied with Alex, they didn’t seem to notice his curious new ways. Malene never suspected that Oris was waiting for Alice, making space for her, holding on to the belief that she’d come again. He pulled his curtains late in the afternoons so his nosy neighbor Fedora Snow wouldn’t see him and tell everybody what she saw. He even kept it from Millie Watson, his oldest friend, the neighbor who knew everything about Oris, including what he looked like without pants.
He drove along and recalled the night a few days before when Millie showed up at his door about suppertime. He had answered and stood in the doorway, trying to block her view.
“Oris,” she asked, peeking around him, “you got company?” She had seen enough of his sneaking around to go and ask the man directly. She cared about him enough to confront him. She worried about Oris, even if she didn’t tell him, and she knew he was up to something, she just didn’t know what.
He denied it, even though she finally was able to use her cane and maneuver herself around her neighbor. When she saw two places set at the table, she raised her eyebrows at Oris, looking like she had caught him in a lie, which she had, and then she just shook her head and walked away. “Whoever she is, I hope she don’t mind her dinner burning.”
And Oris had run back to the stove, realizing he had left the burner on high and scorched the potatoes. He wondered about Millie, whether she’d say anything to anybody, but he knew he didn’t really care. They could say he was entertaining a woman or had a girlfriend or even that he was losing his mind, he didn’t care. Alice had visited, and that meant she would come again.
Still, he didn’t understand this dream. He didn’t understand what Alice was trying to make him see when it came to Father George. What did that man have to do with his family? he wondered. What could that young priest do that would comfort his dead wife?
Oris considered Father George, how strangely he had been acting since the fire, how he had visited Alex when Oris was there and couldn’t stand still, wouldn’t look the boy in the eyes, didn’t pray. Oris had asked the priest if something was wrong, if he needed help of some kind, but the man had just shaken his head and mumbled something about it all working out.
Alex had noticed it too. When he asked to speak to the priest alone, Oris had left the room. Father George came out a few minutes later looking even more disturbed, as if the boy had said something that spooked him. When Oris asked his great-grandson if everything was okay, the boy had just shaken his head and said that things were not right at all and that he didn’t know how to fix them.
And