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Chapter Twenty-One
The Christmas of 1944 was the strangest one I’d ever had. Peggy and Rosie went to the ranch, of course, but I had enough gas coupons to drive to San Angelo.
It was hard to find toys that year. Everything was going for war materials. Miss Grace made new clothes for the girls’ rag dolls, and Edward found some little cars for Will in a department store in San Angelo.
I’d planned to stay in San Angelo through the first, but when Edward and Valerie were invited to a party on New Year’s Eve, I decided to go home and get a head start on Macbeth, which I planned to read with my seniors in January. Just outside of town, I passed the package store. Later, I couldn’t explain what made me stop, because I hadn’t had a drink in two years. I hadn’t even wanted one.
By mid-afternoon, I was already very drunk, but I knew there was plenty of time to sober up before Peggy came in from the ranch the next day. So when I heard her key in the door that evening, I grabbed my bottle and glass and tried to make it to the bedroom before she saw me. Unfortunately, I forgot to latch my brace and pitched forward head first into the sharp edge of the coffee table.
“Peaches, what in the world. . .” She was on her knees beside me, and I could hear her sniffing the air. “You’re. . .you’re drunk!” She rolled me over carefully. “And you’re bleeding!”
“I’m okay,” I mumbled. “Want to go to bed.”
She pushed and pulled me into a semi-upright position. “That’s a nasty cut. It needs stitches.” She pulled my hair as she examined my head again. “Three, maybe four stitches.”
I tried to get away from her hands. “Leave me alone.”
“You stink worse than Aunt Min!” she said angrily. “It’s a good thing I left Rosie at the ranch. If I’d known you were home, I’d have figured you could watch her for me when I go to work tomorrow, but you couldn’t watch a fly on the wall like this!”
“Leave me alone, dammit!”
“I can stitch you up,” she said, more to herself than to me. “I’ll go get what I need from the hospital, and Doc won’t have to know you’re drunk.” She got up. “Where are the keys to your car?”
“Not going anywhere,” I said thickly.
She got down on the floor again and took off my brace. I heard her drop it on the floor across the room, and if I could’ve gotten my fingernails into her, I’d have gladly scratched her eyes out.
As soon as she was out the door, I reached for the bottle, but it had spilled when I fell. I felt nauseated, then realized that I needed desperately to go to the bathroom, but I was helpless to move. When Peggy got back, before she could even start taking care of the cut, she had to clean me up, and afterwards she had to clean the floor. By the time she came to the bedroom to check on me, I was too humiliated to do anything but lie in bed and cry
“Peaches, why?” she asked, sitting down carefully on the edge of her bed.
“I’m so alone,” I moaned, turning my head away from her.
“You have Rosie and me and everyone at the ranch, and your students adore you.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I’m trying.” I looked around the room. “Do you have another bottle? You know I’ll find it.”
“In the closet.”
“I’m going to pour it out.”
“I sure as hell can’t stop you!”
She found the bottle and said she was going to empty it down the kitchen sink. She came back with a glass of Coca-Cola. “This’ll help settle your stomach,” she said, putting her hand behind me head so I could sip from the glass. “I’ve known you’ve been unhappy for awhile, but I didn’t know what to do.”
“You can’t do anything. No one can.”
“You’re not helping things any by drinking.”
“What would you know about it?”
“You could’ve really hurt yourself when you fell. You could’ve broken some ribs. . .punctured a lung. . .”
“I don’t care.”
“But I do!”
“Too bad.”
“Peaches. . .”
“Leave me alone, Peggy. I should’ve told you I was a bitch to live with.”
She got up. “I’ll check on you later.”
Apologies had never come easy for me, but I owed Peggy a big one, and I made it sincerely. “I won’t do it again,” I added.
She’d left Rosie at the ranch after telling them I was sick, so it was just the two of us. She regarded me thoughtfully from across the kitchen table. “What did you do it this time?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Sometimes it’s like I’m suffocating inside a huge black cloud, and it terrifies me. A drink helps me not feel so afraid.”
“You had more than one,” she accused me gently.
“Yes, I did, and I’d have had more if you hadn’t come home!” I returned angrily. I could only grovel so much.
She played with her coffee cup in silence.
“I’d never do anything like that when Rosie’s around. . .when I’m responsible for her. I’m not stupid.”
“Maybe coming back to Danford wasn’t such a good idea.”
“Do you want me to move out?” I asked coldly.
The tip of her nose turned pink. “Of course not! I just meant that maybe being back in Danford had something to do with that big black cloud.”
“No. It followed me to DC.”
“I don’t want you to go, Peaches. I love having you here. I was so lonely in that garage apartment, and this place is so much more cheerful. You and Valerie did a wonderful job fixing it up! I feel real cozy. . .almost like I feel when Vic’s around.”
“I’m glad, krolik. And I’m telling you the truth. What happened the other night won’t happen again.”
She looked up at me then with those wide, honest eyes, and I almost flinched at the vulnerability I saw in them. “All right,” she said softly. “If you’re really feeling better, I’ll go get Rosie tomorrow morning.”
I thought I’d feel happier when I was taking care of Rosie again, but the big black cloud kept hovering around. Rosie was mine. . .or she had been once. I’d given her away, and now a part of me was sorry. It was painful to realize that she was better off with Peggy and Vic, but that’s the way it was. I’d never tell them. Never tell anybody. That night I went to bed early and wished desperately that Peggy hadn’t poured out that other bottle.
The year began well enough. As spring approached, I wondered what I was going to do with my summer. When summer came, I didn’t have to wonder. The Allies invaded France early in June, and we all knew Vic was probably in the middle of things. Then the dreaded telegram arrived at the front door one afternoon just about the time Peggy got home from the hospital.
I’d never forget how Peggy just stood there with the telegram in her hand, so still she might be dead and still standing somehow. I got to her as quickly as I could and led her back to the sofa. “I can’t,” she said finally, holding the envelope out to me. “I can’t, Peaches.” Her eyes were dry, but there was something in them that frightened me more than tears would have.
My hands were shaking, but I managed to slit the top of the envelope with the handle of my spoon and take out the message inside. Regret to inform you. . .your husband. . .reported missing in action 10 July. . .should more information become available. . .” I crumpled the paper in my fist.
“Missing,” I said, but it came out a whisper. “Missing, krolik, not dead.”
Her head went down the way it used to back in high school. “Oh, Vic,” she moaned softly. “Oh, Vic.”
I called the ranch to tell them what had happened. Dutch and Miss Grace made it to town in record time. “I have to show up at work tomorrow,” Peggy insisted when they suggested taking her back to the ranch. “We’re short-handed as it is, and I’m the only scrub nurse if Doc has to do surgery.”
“We could take Rosie for a while,” Miss Grace said.
Peggy nodded. “Yes. Yes, that would help.”
At two, Rosie was in perpetual motion, and it was getting harder for me to corral her even for a few hours, so having her safe at the ranch for a few days was better for everyone. “That’s the right decision,” I told Peggy. “She’ll be fine, and you can have some time to process things.”
When they’d gone, we sat in the living room in silence. “He’s missing, krolik, that’s all. He’ll turn up.”
She nodded. “I know he will. We’re so much a part of each other, Peaches. I’d feel it inside if he…”
“Of course, you would.”
We got up the next morning and went our respective ways. That night, after she’d called the ranch to check on Rosie, she told me about Min Bailey. “Someone found her at the bottom of the stairs. She’d been there a while. Doc says it’s a stroke, and her liver’s gone, too.”
I didn’t trust myself to offer an opinion.
“He said I didn’t have to take care of her, that he’d get a temp from San Angelo, but I told him no.”
This time I exploded. “She nearly killed you!”
“She needs me, Peaches. She’s all alone.”
“That’s good enough for her.”
“Besides, I already started taking care of her. Ruby Bullock and I managed to get her reasonably clean and comfortable, and I think she recognized me. She can’t talk, but…”
“I wouldn’t do it.”
She looked straight at me. “I know you wouldn’t, but I have to. It’s the last chance I’ll get to put the past behind me forever.”
Min Bailey hung on overnight and through the next day. Peggy said she’d spent as much time with her as she could and told her about going to college and then to Brazil and about Rosie. “Then I told her about Vic, and there were tears in her eyes.”
I shook my head in silence.
“I told her that I forgave her and that I hoped she’d forgive me for not understanding how she was even more alone than I was. I had Vic, but she didn’t have anyone. Maybe if I’d understood that, things would’ve been better.”
“You were fifteen years old! She knocked you around, and she didn’t protect you from that boarder who…”
“I don’t want to talk about that, Peaches. It’s over.”1"
“Of course, it’s not over! You'll live with the physical effects of what he did for the rest of your life
“I’m all right. I need you to do something for me. Stop by the drugstore and get some nice lotion for me to take to the hospital. I remember how good it felt when Mrs. Friedman brought me some, and Miss Grace rubbed my arms and back.”
I nodded. “I’ll do it tomorrow on the way home from school.”
Three days later, Min Bailey died peacefully—or so Peggy said. “I told her that God loved her and that I loved her, and she just sort of closed her eyes. Doc called Friedman’s and apparently she’d paid for everything in advance. We’ll just do graveside for her tomorrow.”
Only Doc, Brother Baxter and his wife, Miss Grace and Dutch, and Peggy and I went to the cemetery. I only went for Peggy, and she seemed to know and appreciate it.
When it was over, Doc told Peggy to take a couple of days off. “If I have an emergency, I’ll call you.”
So we went back to the ranch for the weekend and tried to figure out what was next.