From the crest of Partridge Hill he sees the void of the frozen lake and the Narrows and swoops down on it, shooting across the Causeway and over the town line into Greenspark. His first impulse is to roust out Rick and give him a ride, but the quietness of the town reminds Sam it is getting late. The conjunction of his lack of a license and Rick’s dad being a cop gives him further pause. His own father is waiting at home. Worrying about him. He wheels the bike around and heads back.
Reuben is reading the paper and drinking tea at the kitchen table.
“I took the bike out,” Sam says.
His father looks over his reading glasses. “Looks like you’re still in one piece.”
“It’s beautiful,” Sam blurts fervently. “Thank you.”
Reuben laughs. “It is, isn’t it?”
Pushing back his chair, he glances at the clock on the wall. “My mother used to say tomorrow comes early. My experience has been it’s usually already here.”
Sam pegs his jacket and rattles the doorknob to confirm he’s locked it. “I shouldn’t ask this, Dad, but it must have cost—”
“Then don’t.” Reuben cuts him off. “It’s used, Sammy. We found a way. I wish I could have swung the insurance too but I couldn’t. It’s not a free and clear gift. You can’t ride it again until you’ve got the insurance, you know. Except at the farm. Big deal, right. So basically you got yourself a fancy paperweight. I suppose you’ll have some fun working on it, anyway.”
“I shouldn’t have asked for something that expensive,” Sam says. On the way back from the farmhouse, he recalled the blowup over the new furnace. How much of the tension between Reuben and Pearl over that had proceeded from already having committed a major chunk of change to the bike for Sam?
For a moment, his father looks at him. “Don’t apologize for wanting what anybody might want. I made a choice to try to give you what you wanted.”
Sam nods.
“Finish locking up, will you?” Reuben says. “I’ve got just about enough beans left in me to make it up the stairs one more time tonight.”
15
Mother and child make a picture framed by the bedroom door as Sam stops, intent on saying thank you again to his stepmother for his Christmas. The baby is suckling inside her mother’s pajama top while Pearl reads a novel. From the bathroom beyond comes the sound of Reuben brushing his teeth. Sam goes in and kisses his stepmother, who puts aside her book with a sigh.
“Thanks for the bike.”
“Sure, baby.”
Wanting to say goodnight and thank you again to his father as well, Sam loiters.
On the dresser, Pearl’s jewelry box is wide open as usual, pieces strewn on the fringed silk scarf that protects the old oak. Often she sits Indy next to the box while she picks out her earrings or whatever she’s going to wear and lets the baby rummage among the sparklies. It’s all costume stuff. Once she had some fancier real stuff but when she left her first husband, she found he had emptied the safe-deposit box not only of the pieces he had given her but of several things that had been hers alone, earrings and rings inherited from her mother and a ring given her by a man she had loved and lost in youth. Telling Sam this story, she said with a rueful laugh that it had been a lesson in the futility of storing up treasure in this world.
Sam stirs the baubles with his thumb, churning up the stuff at the bottom. He thinks about the Johnny who gave her that fancy jewelry and took it back. She hasn’t cut him out of her photograph albums, the way his mother has his father from the photographs she kept. Sam likes Johnny’s face in the first pictures, the ones around the time she married him. Then Johnny’s face grows closed and the two of them, Pearl and Johnny, are literally farther and farther apart in the group photographs of family gatherings as the years of their marriage pass.
The dogtags seem to come to his fingers without him really looking for them. Tangled with them is a gold rope chain with a small Celtic cross on it. The cross is engraved with the name on the dogtags. Looking down at his fingers, draped with the chains of the tags and cross, Sam thinks of his brother, wearing tags of his own now. He recognizes the tags and cross—there is a snapshot in one of Pearl’s oldest albums of a young man, with Pearl, on a boat in nineteen-sixty-something. In the picture, that bare-chested young man—her lost first love—had been wearing the tags and cross.
Her voice startles him. “Would you like to have those things? The tags and the cross?”
It’s so unexpected at first he thinks he has misheard her.
“The cross was like a civilian dogtag. All the shrimpers and sailors wore something like them for identification. He used to say a face doesn’t last long in the water but gold lasts forever.” Very gently she slides Indy from underneath her pajama top. “Those things went all the way to Vietnam and came back. He died after the war. I used to wear them to remember him until I married Johnny.”
Blinking, Sam touches the chains again, lifts them out. “Really?”
“Unh-huh,” she says. Her hands are quick and practiced under the quilt and her pajama top, discreetly slipping a breast pad into her nursing bra and closing it. “I hope they’ll be the only dogtags you ever wear, Sam.”
Reuben emerges from the bathroom. “What’s this?”
“Pearl says I can have these. Gonna ward off the draft board.”
Reuben shudders. “God, I hope so.”
Sam says his goodnights and thank yous and Merry Christmases one last time. As he bends over Pearl to kiss her forehead, she closes her hand over his, the one
