Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [111]
Di balanced her cigarette while she sipped her tea. The mug said DR. GERALD F. STEIN, D.D.S.: BRIGHTENING THE WORLD ONE SMILE AT A TIME. It was strange to be here and yet strangely familiar; she felt as uncomfortable here as she had in Les’s apartment. The house even smelled a little like Les. It smelled lived-in, the air dense with dust motes and cigarette smoke and the gas from the stove. The cushions of the couch were slightly damp, as though they were sweating.
“I would hate to think,” Harriet went on, “that she had been forced to give him up. That I had stolen him from his rightful mother.”
Di smiled around her cigarette. She couldn’t help it. She brushed a tuft of cat hair from her pants. “What on earth is a ‘rightful mother’?” Were they rightful mothers? In Di’s mind, there was no such thing. No parent ever acted in her child’s “best interest”; no parent was a hero. A parent wrote her child’s story every day; the story was what the parent left behind. Teenage pregnancy had not been in Di’s script for Eliza. Di had the power to revise this scene; she could excuse Eliza from her own bleak future. She didn’t want her daughter to be trapped in telling someone else’s story before she’d had the chance to tell her own.
“I guess I have no idea,” Harriet admitted. She blew two tunnels of smoke from her nostrils. All these abandoned children, she was thinking. Jude, and poor Teddy, and she guessed Johnny and Eliza, too, and Prudence—lost, inscrutable Pru. All left by one parent or both, in one way or another.
Yet here they were, Di mused (snatching up the thought like a cigarette): Les’s two exes, trying to recover them, and now it was they—the mothers—who had been deserted by their children.
How odd! thought Harriet, that Les was the least they had in common. It was their children’s desertion that mattered to them, that left them alone. Jude and Eliza and Johnny had devoted themselves, fiercely and exclusively, to one another, but Harriet and Di weren’t capable of forging an alliance together, despite what they shared. The only people they’d ever felt that kind of loyalty toward—perhaps this was the mistake they both had made—were their children.
Well, that was what loyalty did, didn’t it? It corroded. It collapsed on itself. Harriet thought of the songs Jude sang. About Loyalty. About Purity, Brotherhood, Trust.
Originally a cheery two-tone—the bottom half white, the top robin’s egg blue—the Dodge A100 van was first owned by a Canadian cannabis farmer, who had converted it into a camper by the time he sold it to Lester Keffy in 1970. Back then, with its split windshield, its bug-eye headlights, its overall grooviness, you could almost pretend it was a Volkswagen bus, which was the effect Les had been going for. Later, to mask the pockmarks of rust, Les painted the van lavender, baptizing it the Purple People Eater. Over the years, the elements had worn away the paint; behind the greasy prints of muted purple, streaks of rusty white and blue shone through.
Intent on renovation, back in Lintonburg, Jude had administered his own streaky coat of paint, this time with the nearly empty can of green Les had once used on the greenhouse, and to Jude’s satisfaction, the camper van now looked more like an army tank than a hippie bus. He’d taken down the flower-print curtains, and over the rust-eaten IMPEACH NIXON—HE “BUGS” ME, he’d affixed a newly pressed bumper sticker: GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS.
Inside the shining armor, however, the contents of the van