Back at the Sprague house, they eat turkey casserole and fresh green beans for supper, neither of them speaking, Stella’s father staring at his plate, perhaps wishing the answers to how his life has brought him to Seabury are among the rich turkey gravy, the thin carrot slices. Stella scrutinizes her father’s face, his downcast eyes, his unshaven cheeks with the silver stubble, and wonders at how it has come to pass that she is alone with her father, a man she realizes she hardly knows.
The phone clangs and echoes through the hall, into the kitchen. They both jump. “Good God, that sounds like an alarm system left over from the war. My God.” The ringing stops briefly and then immediately starts again. Stella’s father squeaks his chair away from the table and stomps over the creaking wooden floor and down the hall.
“Hello, William Sprague speaking . . . why hello, Frank . . . yes, yes, that sounds fine. Lunch the day after tomorrow . . . yes, another try at lunch. Yes, later. That will give us some settling-in time. Fine . . . yes.”
He comes back to the table and dishes out more turkey casserole. “We’ll have lunch with Frankie and Cynthia in a few days, okay? If you feel better. And once I finish this paper I’m working on, for the November conference at the university, I’ll take you on a road trip, just you and me.”
Stella smiles as she chews. It’s unlike him to suggest this. He’s planning ahead. Stella swallows and puts her fork down. “Dad, where is Cynthia’s mother?”
“Gone.”
“Like . . . dead . . . gone?”
“May as well be. Frankie told me she left at the end of July. He didn’t want to upset us, what with all we’ve been through. She wanted to take Cynthia with her down to Florida, but Cynthia won’t leave her grandmother. Who moves to Florida in the summer? I guess she has a man-friend down there. She wasn’t from here to start with. Maybe Georgia? Somewhere down south. It’s a terrible thing, a woman just abandoning her family. Apparently she wants to be a painter. Poor Frank.”
Poor Cynthia, Stella thinks. Cynthia who didn’t even let on. It must be too painful for her to talk about. It occurs to Stella that maybe Cynthia blames herself, that she’s full of shame. Stella thinks Sally left the paintings behind because they belong to another life, the life she has deserted.
Later, lying in her bed, Stella hears her father pacing. She knows he’s downstairs in the front room he’s using as a study, with his whiskey and beer, looking through his notes. She wants her own books placed on the bookshelf in her room — even if she can’t read them without her brain hurting. In the morning, she’ll ask him when the moving truck will arrive.
Wandering Wednesday.
Wayfaring Stranger.
Now
After breakfast, Stella and Dianne were herded from the cafeteria down to the activity room to make table decorations for Nurse Calvin’s blueberry-themed retirement party. It was late in the planning. This was why they were doing crafts on a Wednesday and not on a Tuesday. And Grace had cancelled their appointment on Tuesday. It was now on Thursday. Nurse Calvin was disrupting things. It seemed she would always be getting ready to retire, striding down the halls with her nurse’s cap and her white dress, holding her clipboard.
“Take your jar, and you paint with these markers that work on glass.” Betsy, the head of the activities programs, demonstrated as she talked, which made it seem as if they were watching a television show. Cooking shows and home reno shows were the most popular with the residents. For a long time they didn’t have any craft programs, and many residents spent hours in front of screens. The Covid had ruined the whole schedule and Stella partly blamed the virus — and not just the medication changes — for disrupting her memory. Betsy was short-staffed today due to summer vacation and people coming down with summer colds, so she was running the craft program herself. “Well, people, at least it’s not the same as the last few years. It can always be so much worse.” She laughed.
She was especially fond of Dianne, who sometimes joined in the concerts when Betsy brought in bands and choirs. Dianne played the banjo and could belt out gospel songs, usually “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” and “Wayfaring Stranger,” and if she got on a stage, she tended to loop through them, again and again.
“We’ll use these lanterns outside as table decorations for the blueberry retirement barbeque for Nurse Calvin,” Betsy said. “We’ll have an outdoor canopy set up, so if it’s hot we’ll have shade and if it rains we’ll have shelter. We sure could use some rain, right, gals? Dianne, maybe you can sing your songs for her, at the barbeque. Your new banjo should arrive soon.”
Dianne’s banjo had been destroyed by a patient who was taken away to the institution in Dartmouth. The NS, as everyone called it. One day he not only stopped talking but stopped getting out of bed. When they lifted him out, he ran suddenly down the hall, screaming into the lounge, grabbing Dianne’s banjo and hitting himself in the head with the white resonator. Dianne snatched at it but he wouldn’t let go, and she hauled the banjo and the man across the room. He was sedated, although he had eaten so little he was weak and his fight was only a flare, fizzling out into weeping. He left on a stretcher and never came back. And Dianne was still waiting for a new banjo.
“Hope it comes soon. But I don’t think Missus Calvin understands the Mountain music. More a
