I should never have suggested perfume. If I’d stuck to something plain vanilla like a lacy bed jacket or some pretty note cards or even a box of assorted chocolates, it would have been fine. But no. I had to stop at a cosmetics counter in Crabtree Mall for a tube of my favorite moisturizer and say to Cal, “What about that?”
“That” was a small white porcelain bottle shaped like a single perfect gardenia.
My stepson shrugged and said, “Okay,” plainly bored with this shopping trip. He and Dwight were going to drive up to Virginia the next morning. Dwight hoped to finish cleaning out the house Cal had inherited from his mother and to put it on the market, before driving on up to Charlottesville to teach a couple of sessions at a law- enforcement training seminar. Although Cal would be staying with a friend while Dwight was gone, he would certainly be seeing his grandmother during the visit. Yet he was no more enthusiastic about buying her a gift than he had been for the new jeans and shirts and sneakers he so desperately needed.
Cal turned nine last month and he’s going to be as tall as his dad. A recent growth spurt now puts him almost shoulder-high to me, which means that he’s outgrown almost every article of clothing he owns except for socks and the oversized Carolina Hurricanes T-shirt he was wearing—a shirt I have to wash by hand so as not to fade the team signatures on the right shoulder.
“Is that a gardenia scent?” I asked the clerk behind the counter.
“Sure is!” she chirped, and spritzed the back of my hand with a sample bottle.
“What do you think?” I asked Cal, holding my hand under his nose.
He took one sniff and went pale beneath his freckles. His brown eyes filled with sudden tears and he slapped my hand away, then bolted from the store and out into the mall.
Belatedly I remembered that smells can be even more evocative than music and I realized that I had thoughtlessly brought back all the grief and terror he had felt when Jonna died. He hadn’t reacted at all to the first few blooms of the season that I had cut for our dining table last week, had even given them a cursory sniff, their sweet aroma diffused by cooking odors. But here on my hand? In concentrated strength just when the return to Virginia had to be on his mind?
Six months of healing ripped away in a moment by the exaggerated smell of gardenias that must surely evoke the circumstances surrounding his mother’s death.
I took some of the clerk’s wipes and scrubbed the back of my hand till it was almost raw and every trace of the gardenia perfume was gone, then I grabbed our shopping bags and hurried out into the mall to find Cal.
I was halfway down the long space and beginning to panic before I finally spotted his red Hurricanes shirt. He was scrunched down beneath an overgrown ficus plant outside a video store. His back was against the wall, his shoulders slumped, and his face was buried in his arms, atop his drawn-up knees.
I so wanted to go put my arms around him and say how sorry I was, but he usually reacts awkwardly to my hugs and kisses or else shies away completely, and this wasn’t the time to try again. Not when I was the reason he had fallen apart. There was a bench several feet away, so I parked the shopping bags and sat down to wait for the worst of his misery to pass.
A mall guard paused to look inquiringly at him and I caught her eye.
“It’s okay,” I murmured softly.
She grinned. “Can’t have the video game he wants, huh?”
I smiled back as normally as I could and she moved on. If only Cal’s hurt could be eased by something as simple as an electronic game.
Eventually, he raised his head and looked around. He did not immediately see me among all the people passing back and forth and his eyes darted apprehensively from one face to another until they met mine. Was that resentment or resignation on his face?
Whichever, there was nothing I could do about it, no matter how much my heart ached for him, no matter how much he missed his mother. He was stuck with me—had been stuck with me ever since Jonna was murdered back in January and he came to live with Dwight and me, less than a month after our Christmas wedding.
I held out the bag with his new sneakers and he dutifully got up and walked over to help.
“That’s enough shopping for one day,” I said briskly. “Let’s go home.”
As soon as we were in the car, he stuck the buds of his iPod in his ears and stared out the window without speaking.
Normal behavior.
What wasn’t normal was the way he unplugged one ear after we had been driving a few minutes and looked over at me.
“Do I have to go to Shaysville? Can’t I stay with Aunt Kate while y’all are gone?”
Kate is married to Dwight’s brother Rob, and she keeps Cal during the week while Dwight and I are working. Unfortunately, Kate and Rob and their three children were flying up to New York the next day to spend some time in the city. Kate still owns the Manhattan apartment she shared with her late first husband and the tenant was happy to have her and her crew to come dog-sit while he went off to Paris for a week.
When I reminded Cal of this, he went to Plan B. “Then can I go with you?”
Another time and I might have been thrilled that he would choose me instead of Dwight, but this?
“What’s going on, honey?” I asked gently. “Don’t you want to see your grandmother and your old friends?”
He sank lower in his seat and didn’t answer.
“Your dad’s going to need your help with the house, Cal.”
