Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [6]
“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Anthony.”
“All I ever wanted was just to be allowed to finish up here.” Tillie Monroe had both her hands clenched into fists on the tabletop. The one hand clutched her spoon like a flag on a rampart. “This is where my heart is, Johnny. And there’s so little time left. It’s really not too much to ask, is it?”
I was surprised to see tears in her eyes. Mom turned toward the sink, and Wally looked down at his feet. A sense of awkwardness hung in the air, as though a scene were being played out that we weren’t supposed to be watching. To my chagrin Valerie chose that moment to pull her thumb out of her mouth and laugh.
Tillie looked at her and smiled. She laid a solid old hand on Valerie’s head and stroked her hair. “That’s right, honey,” she said. “No use crying when you can just as well laugh.”
With that, she finished the last few bites of her oatmeal and left the house without another word.
chapter
3
Grandpa Lehman and his wife, Marie, lived four blocks away in an old Victorian house with a mansard roof and flower boxes beneath the first-floor windows. It was not the house he’d shared with his first wife, Luella, my grandmother. Grams died when I was six, and not long after that Gramps was offered a job in Chicago, which took him away from our native Minnesota. He wanted to go. With Luella gone, he said he needed the chance to make a fresh start. He decided Chicago was too corrupt to live in, though, so he settled in Mills River, a small town on the train line, about a half hour outside of the city in DuPage County. Though alone, he bought a house in Mills River big enough to hold three generations; he was somewhat claustrophobic and always liked to have a lot of room to live in.
He wasn’t alone for long, though. After less than a year in Mills River, he met Marie and married again. She moved into the house and brought along her maid, her cook, and her part-time gardener, which meant that Gramps never again had to wander around that big old house by himself. Mom said that’s how it was with men; they didn’t like to be alone. As for women, she added, they often prayed to be alone, but finding solitude was sometimes a whole lot harder than finding a mate.
Grandpa was a chemical engineer, though I’ve never been sure what he actually did for a living. When I was a child, I thought he painted shoes. That idea was born on a winter day in Minnesota when Gramps and I were snuggled together on a couch in his home, studying the illustrated cover of a magazine. The picture was a cartoonish depiction of a huge machine with robotic arms and all sorts of cogs and wheels and rubber belts. As complicated as it was in its mechanism, it apparently had only one purpose – to paint shoes. I stared at the ladies’ high-heeled pump, newly splashed with red, rolling off the final assembly belt, and pointing to it, I said to Gramps, “Is that what you do at work?”
Gramps smiled and had a funny little twinkle in his eye when he said, “Well, yes, something like that.”
Of course he knew a five-year-old wouldn’t understand his job as a chemical engineer, so he gave the easy answer. But even years later I still imagined the morning train carrying Gramps into Chicago, where he worked with the big machine that painted shoes.
Marie owned a women’s clothing store on Grand Avenue, the main shopping street that cut through the center of Mills River. She’d grown up in a working-class family and, with no chance for college, had started out as a buyer at the store straight out of high school. But Marie O’Connell was a hard worker and a shrewd businesswoman, and on top of that she had a gift for naming winning horses, placing her bets with her uncle, the bookie, in Chicago. Mom told me in confidence that it wasn’t the best way to make your fortune, but Marie was lucky and seemed to have done very well. At any rate, she’d eventually managed to buy out the original owners of the store, which officially became Marie’s Apparel in 1949.
When Mom was making final plans to move away from Minnesota, Marie offered her