Return To Little Hills

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AS HE APPROACHED the booth where Edie sat opposite an elderly woman in a natty white knitted hat, Peter acknowledged, reluctantly, that Edie did not appear overjoyed to see him. By contrast, her companion was all smiles as she patted the booth beside her.

“Didn’t recognize you from across the road,” she said. “You’re that assistant principal at my son-in-law’s school. Saw you when my other daughter took me there so she could drop off Ray’s lunch. He’s on a low-sodium diet. You met Edie? She’s a foreign correspondent, got shot at last year. I’m having the fish and chips. Edie’s having the chicken potpie.”

“Mmm.” He met Edie’s eyes across the table. As he remembered, they were amber, only slightly lighter than her hair. “I wasn’t really hungry, but I quite like chicken potpie.”

“They don’t have chicken potpie.” Edie looked as if she might have a headache. “I’m having a salad.”

“If you don’t mind the green peppers, the chicken potpie is good,” Maude said.

“I think I’m going to sit here and go quietly insane,” Edie said. “Hi, Peter. This is my mother, Maude Robinson, in case you weren’t previously introduced. Mom—” she leaned across the table to Maude “—you remember Peter Darling?” She looked at Peter again. “School day over already?”

“No,” he said. “I just came for the chicken potpie.”

“Don’t do this,” she said.

“You ever seen Edith slap her head?” Maude asked. “That’s what she did just before you got here. I said I wanted fish and chips and she slaps her head. She shouted at me, too.”

“I should be locked away,” Edie said. “What are you doing here?”

“I placed two students at the hardware shop across the street,” he said. “It’s a great arrangement. The school district partially subsidizes the shop owner. He gets a couple of assistants and the students get some real work experience while earning credits toward graduation.”

She eyed him for a moment. “That must be gratifying.”

He looked straight back at her. “It is. Very.”

“I meant it sincerely,” she said. “I wasn’t being facetious.”

“I didn’t suspect for a moment that you were,” he lied. Edie disquieted him. It was nothing overt; an enigmatic smile, the faint whiff of cynicism about her. He imagined that she saw him as painfully earnest, which he supposed he was. Well, earnest—not painfully, he hoped. Perhaps he should cultivate a new persona. Cavalier and brutish. Take that insolent smirk off your face, wench, and get thee to the bedchamber.

“My daughters both think I’m a senile old woman who doesn’t have a clue in the world what’s going on right in front of her eyes,” Maude said. “They’re trying to put me in a home.”

Edie set down her water glass. The air went still. Peter tried to think of something to say. At his side, the old woman was sipping water, seemingly unaware that she’d just sparked a match to the conversational tinderbox.

“Edith hasn’t been back here for donkey’s years,” the elderly woman said. “Too busy with her high-powered job. Now she decides it’s time for poor old mom to be put away, so she comes out here to drag me around to these fancy high-priced places that are nothing more than storage rooms where you sit around and wait to die.”

“Are you living in your own home at the moment?” Peter asked, trying only to defuse the tension. He didn’t look at Edie, but he could feel her presence, glowering across the table. Beside him, Maude fiddled with her ear.

“Sorry. It’s not that I’m deaf. I only wear my hearing aid when there’s something I want to hear. Do I rent? No, I own my home. My husband and I bought it when our oldest daughter, Vivian, was born. Both the girls were raised in that house and now they’re trying to make me move out—”

“Mom, that’s absolutely not true,” Edie said. “That’s what we’ve been talking about. That’s why I’m back. Viv said you want to move—”

“I didn’t until she started showing me all these fancy brochures and then you come back and…” She looked at Peter. “Now they’re both on at me. I never said stick me in a warehouse though, did I?” She glared at Edie. “I didn’t say come out here and turn my life upside down—”

“Ah, food,” Edie announced as the kid waiter approached. “Too bad I’m suddenly not hungry.”

HALF AN HOUR, still shaking with anger, Edie helped Maude back into the car. As she walked around to the driver’s side, Peter caught her arm. He’d gamely sat through the meal, engaging Maude in small talk about roses and gardening and preventing an incendiary situation from erupting into a wildfire. As they were leaving the restaurant, Maude had invited him and his daughters to dinner. Edie had been too furious to even listen for his reply. She looked at him for a moment, not trusting herself to speak.

“So.” She forced a bright smile. “Here you have the real truth. Heartless daughters evict poor old mother…no, daughter. Singular. As Maude would have told you if you’d waited a little longer, Viv would never be so cruel. But then Viv didn’t kill her father. Funny how Mom’s never quite forgiven me for that.” She stopped, appalled at what she’d just said. She could see confusion in Peter’s face and something else, something tender and soft that made her want to run. “Sorry for that little outburst,” she said. “Could we please rewind the tape?”

“Consider it done.” His hand was on the top of the car now. He hadn’t taken his eyes from her face. “It would be an understatement to say you’ve got a tricky situation, and I don’t want to interfere in a family matter. But, if you need someone to talk to, you know where to find me.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean that.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a card and scribbled something on the back. “That’s my number at home.” He handed the card to Edie. “You’re likely to get one of my daughters, and if it’s Delphina, she’ll want very much to read you a poem. She’s quite talented. Of course, she’ll be too shy to tell you that…but with a little coaching, you can draw her out.”

“Thank you,” she said again. She would never call, she knew that, but it was a sweet gesture. “I appreciate it.”

“I mean it sincerely. The offer. I’m a very good listener. I also used to have an elderly mother…”

She smiled.

“I don’t know why Ray doesn’t like him,” Maude said as they drove away. “Seems very nice to me. ’Course, you can never tell.”

PETER HAD FELT some misgivings as he watched Edie drive away with Maude in the car. Perhaps he should have done more to calm her down. He could imagine the headlines in tomorrow’s Little Hills Union. Noted Foreign Correspondent Throttles Elderly Mother. He’d felt the tension radiating off her.

He stood in the quad now, almost an hour later, watching a troupe of young actors, all dressed in black, perform for the assembled students. Perhaps he would ring her this evening, just to make sure everything was all right. He remembered that he’d meant to tell her how inspired the students had been by her talk. She’d like to hear that, he was sure.

Sophia might be right about the unsuitability of a foreign correspondent as a wife, but it would be very agreeable to get to know Edie as a friend. That said, how could it hurt to call? He did wonder, though, at the remark about killing her father. What was that all about? Bit of melodrama, maybe. One would hope.

On a stage across the quad, an antidrug message was being conveyed through mime, dance and ear-splittingly loud rap. His temples throbbing, he snaked a hand down over the shoulder of a boy in the back row and plucked a bag of sunflower seeds, forbidden on campus because of the mess they created, from the surprised boy’s grasp. He wondered if, at forty-one, he was too old for this sort of thing.

And then Beth Herman tapped him on the arm. He shot her a quick sideways glance and did a double take. Normally, he didn’t pay a great deal of attention to women’s clothes—a shortcoming of which Amelia had frequently complained—but Beth’s blouse was really quite extraordinary, patterned with brilliant butterflies that danced over her entire upper body. Another surreptitious glance revealed small black script identifying the various species. By then, mercifully, the music had stopped and he turned to take an even closer look, realizing as he did so that he was ogling her left breast.

“Sorry,” he said, although Beth did not seem at all offended. “Very nice blouse.” The students were now ambling off to their classrooms and Beth was smiling and it seemed necessary somehow to say something else. Would you like to be a mother to my children? seemed a bit peremptory. “Very nice cupcakes, too,” he said instead.

“Cupcakes?”

“The cakes you brought in this morning with the little silver balls. Quite delicious.”

“Oh,” she said. “They weren’t mine. One of my aides brought them in. I’ll thank her on your behalf,” she said. “Actually though, I do love to cook.”

“And I’m sure you do it very well,” he said, trying to imagine Amelia’s response if he were to suggest she bake cakes. Probably about the same as if he were to suggest they marry and raise a dozen children together. Edie would react similarly, he suspected. But he must stop thinking about unsuitable women. Which reminded him of Edie again—or, rather, her mother. “I have a proposal,” he said.

“A proposal?” Beth’s face reddened and the pile of papers she’d been carrying like a baby slipped from her arms and fell to the ground. “Sorry.”

Peter joined Beth on the grass to help retrieve some papers that had been scattered by a sudden breeze. For a moment or so they were both on their hands and knees, and he glanced up to find Beth’s nose inches from his own.

“A proposal?” she said again.

“A proposal.” Peter held out his hand to help her up. “You seem a little…flustered.”

“Flustered?” She raked her brown curls. “Oh no, no. I’m fine. I mean, this is the way I always am. Sorry. Um, what can I do for you?” She laughed. “Sorry, that didn’t come out right—”

“Beth, you’ve just apologized for the third time in as many minutes,” Peter said. “Stop it. You’re making me feel like an ogre.”

“An ogre? Oh no, I’m sorry I…”

Peter shook his head. She’d caught her lapse and was looking at him with such dismay that he couldn’t help laughing. “I’m sorry…” He grinned. “God, you’ve got me doing it. Look, all I wanted to suggest—”

“Would you like some tea? I could make some if you’d like to walk back to the center. Peppermint? Apple? Chamomile?”

“Oh no, thank you.” He loathed tea, particularly the herbal variety, but people were always offering him cups of it. “About my proposal, though. You do know Edie Robinson? I met her mother today and I rather had the sense that time hangs heavy on occasion and she becomes depressed. I know you’re always short of volunteers and—”

“Perfect.” Beth beamed. “The girls would love having a surrogate grandmother to help with the babies, and if Mrs. Robinson is anything like my mother, there’s nothing she’d enjoy more than being surrounded by babies and young people.”

“Good. I’ll ring Edie today,” he said, quick to grasp at any excuse. Perhaps he could determine whether there really was a safari-suited boyfriend, or if that was just a polite excuse, in which case… He realized that Beth was watching him as though she had something more to say. He smiled and she glanced down at her feet, then up at him.