The Cape Ann by Faith Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page B

illustration in
Happy Stories for Bedtime
so that she could start planning the window seat.
    She might sleep all afternoon. Mama almost never napped, but she’d been up the whole night waiting for Papa and me. I watchedher, her chin set even in sleep, hand clutching the bright, rose-strewn handkerchief as if it might be stolen from her.
    The westbound passenger train descended upon us, blowing and groaning. Mama didn’t stir. We were so used to the sounds of trains, they could not rouse us from sleep unless we were ready to wake up. Out on the platform, I heard Papa calling to a brakeman or conductor or maybe to a baggage handler.
    When at length the train pulled out of the station, the wall beside the crib hummed beneath my fingers. A passenger with a grip in one hand and a sample case in the other walked east, toward the Harvester Arms Hotel, sweat darkening his gray suit between his shoulder blades and under his arms. The May afternoon had grown unseasonably warm.
    The freight wagon rumbled over the uneven brick platform. Papa pulled it around the end of the depot and off-loaded several heavy cartons onto the back of the pickup. I lay down, shy to have him see me through the window. He had not come home for lunch. Probably he had gone downtown to the Loon Cafe, where he ate when Mama was out of town. No one at the Loon Cafe would be surprised to see him.
    Sometimes he took me there in the afternoon for a root beer. Freckled and pink, the two waitresses were unmarried, Irish Catholic women approaching middle age. They teased and pampered Papa, and he laughed at everything they said and left them a big tip no matter what we ordered.
    They asked him about his fancy new Oldsmobile, and he said he’d give them a ride whenever they were ready. He never talked that way to Mama, and she never flattered him as they did. Mama and Papa did not like giving in to each other for fear of being defeated.
    Would Papa come home for supper? I thought of him staying away through supper and maybe through the night. It made my stomach feel hard and sharp, as though it had corners.
    On the wall beside the crib was a banjo clock. In addition to a clock face, it held behind glass an idyllic country scene. Green meadows rolled away to an intensely blue sky. In the foreground, hollyhocks and larkspur and poppies bespoke a pretty cottage just out of sight.
    I lay in the crib, willing myself, as I often did, into that landscape, which I had furnished with everything I could desire: a smallgrape arbor like Grandpa Erhardt’s; a big, red tricycle to replace the little one that somebody had run over out in the parking lot; and a tree house perched among the spreading limbs of an old shade tree.
    When I visited the clock, my hair curled and returned to the blond color it had known before kindergarten, my bony arms and legs responded to my every command, turning perfect cartwheels and tapping out pulsing, staccato dances like those Sally Wheeler was learning at Martha Beverton’s Tap and Toe classes.
    Picking some of the larkspur to carry into the cottage with me, I skipped down a flagstone path to a trellised doorway.
    At half past three, I woke, sweaty and rumpled, my starched, red dress drooping like sad, old curtains. Mama was not on the big bed. In the kitchen a spoon scraped the inside of a saucepan. Climbing out of the crib with the Cape Ann booklet, I picked up my shoes and carried them to the kitchen.
    “What’re you making?” I asked, sitting down at the table to put on my shoes.
    “Penuche frosting.”
    “Is there enough for candy?”
    “Yes.”
    Mama usually made extra penuche frosting for candies, which she spooned out on waxed paper, pressing a walnut half into each.
    “Can I show you a house plan called the Cape Ann?”
    “Not now.”
    “Can I go outside?”
    She looked at me. “Put on an old dress. Why did you wear that one to bed?”
    “I couldn’t undo the buttons.”
    She set down the big spoon and unbuttoned the back of