Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [37]
Mara didn’t respond for a moment. Her eyes darted from me to Tillie and back again. Finally, very quietly, she said, “Yes, ma’am, he is.”
“That’s good to know. Mrs. Anthony’s car could use some work and I need a good mechanic. I’ll call Tinkerman’s on Monday, see if Mr. Tinkerman can get Willie to look under the hood.”
Mara lifted her chin in a small nod even as her eyes rolled toward me. Something unspoken passed between us, something sad and hurtful. When the wagon started up with a jerk, she looked away.
Our first real conversation as friends, and already she had lied to me about her daddy.
chapter
12
Dr. Sawyer gave me a shot of penicillin and ordered three days of bed rest. Tillie played nursemaid, making chicken soup, bringing me aspirin, tracking my temperature. I read and worked on schoolwork and slept.
On Monday afternoon I awoke from a nap to find Tillie propped up on pillows on the other bed in my room, another pillow beneath the heels of her stocking feet, the newspaper spread open across her lap. But she wasn’t reading. She was staring off into space with that glazed-over look in her eyes that I’d seen before. She could sit motionless like that for long stretches of time, gazing out the window or down at the floor, her eyes dull and more or less sightless, as though someone had pulled down the shades. Mom decided when Tillie got like that, she was napping with her eyes open. Wally complained that she’d gone catatonic on us. Once he said it loud enough for her to hear, and she snapped out of it long enough to say, “Keep it up and I’ll show you catatonic, young man.”
I pushed myself up on one elbow and asked quietly, “Tillie?”
No answer.
A little louder this time. “Tillie?”
She turned to me then, and it was almost as though I could see her coming back from far away. Once she was there, she said, “Yes, Roz?”
“What are you doing?”
“Oh.” She smiled a small wistful smile. “Just remembering.”
“Remembering what?”
Instead of answering my question, she said, “Do you realize how much of our lives we forget?”
She waited for an answer, but I didn’t have one. I simply frowned and shook my head.
“Just think of it,” she went on. “Every day has one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“That’s a whole boatload of minutes.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“So if you multiply that by the number of days in a year, you get more than half a million. Every year you live more than half a million minutes, unless it’s a leap year, and then you live one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes more. Like next year. Next year is a leap year, you know.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know that.”
“Now, when you’ve lived for seventy years like I have, do you know how many minutes that is?”
She didn’t go on. I fidgeted on the bed. “You don’t want me to figure that out, do you, because I’m not that good at multiplying.”
She smiled, shook her head. “No, you don’t have to figure it out. Because by the end of the day – well, just by the end of the hour – it’ll be a different number anyway. They’re always going by, on and on and on, never stopping. So by the time you’re my age, it’s not just one boat you’re talking about but a whole fleet. A whole fleet of minutes have sailed on by. And where do you suppose they all sail off to, Roz?”
By now my face was scrunched up into a tight ball of puzzlement. “I don’t know, Tillie,” I said.
“Well, I’ll tell you, then.”
“Okay.”
“They sail right on over the horizon, and you never see them again, and most of them, you forget they ever were at all. Off they go, and” – she waved a hand – “they’re as good as lost. You might as well never have lived them. Unless,” she said, looking intently at me now, “unless you make the effort to remember. If you go after them, you’ll find some of them. A few, not many. But some.”
“So is that what you do?”
Tillie nodded. “Oh yes. I ask God to help me remember the forgotten moments, and he always brings something good to mind.”
“Like what?” I pushed my pillows up against the headboard and leaned