Read Online The Vagabonds by Nicholas DelBanco - Free Book Online

with glee and clap their hands at what she bought and wrapped. Birthdays and holidays were a bonanza, an overflowing cup. In December, she had driven to the farmers’ market in order to purchase a Christmas bayberry wreath. As always she took Division Street and turned left on Ann, and there were a group of men huddled waiting for soup at St. Andrew’s, shivering but orderly: the homeless and the wretched of this earth. She had offered up ten dollars to a toothless black man on the corner; it had been sleeting, Claire remembers, and the streets were slick . . .
    But now she cannot imagine what matters to her daughters: which cats she should take from the shelf. Therefore little by little, imperceptibly, with her hand on the small of her back and her mind on the counting of sheep and the telling of jokes, then the waters of the Caribbean, green and warm and lapping at the bright white beaches—Caneel and Cruse and Montego Bay and Negril and others she had traveled to that second winter with Jim—with her mind awash and drifting to the little pink drink with salt on the rim and an umbrella and a cherry and a slice of lime awaiting him, awaiting them, Claire knows she is falling asleep. And when she stands in that black scoop-necked bathing suit he liked so much, wearing her sun hat and sandals and touching the rim of her glass to his glass, SOHCAHTOA, when she laughs and laughs at the flock of four-footed sheep on Division Street she knows she has been dreaming, has fallen asleep in the furnace-generated warmth and sees her mother’s powdered face, the lipsticked mouth, her past, their past, the past.
    Her brother and sister have changed. David has thickened and Claire has lost weight, but when Joanna pictures them she sees the way they used to look when young. Her brother is a handsome man, with that air of aloofness about him arrival from a distant place confers. She had watched the waitress shift her hips when tending to their table, the way she came back needlessly to ask if everything had been OK, if anyone wanted anything else. Her nose ring looked like Leah’s, and Joanna hopes that, years from now, Leah will not wear a nose ring and not be waitressing; she lights a cigarette.
    When she told her daughter, “Granny died,” the girl had been sweetness itself. That’s one of the things about Leah-Artemisia: you never can be certain which card will come out of the deck. Joanna had been waiting, and as soon as school was over, while her daughter shrugged out of her backpack, said: “It happened. Granny died.” In a heartbeat the girl became Li-li again, the hard abrasive shell of her sliced open and shucked free. She said, “Oh,
Mom,
” and flung both arms wide and they hugged each other and didn’t stop hugging; then they drank tea and honey in the kitchen and sat together, knee to knee, staring at the wallpaper and discussing how long Joanna would need to be away. Li-li offered to skip school and go to Saratoga too, but they were doing
West Side Story
and she was playing Anita and opening night was this Friday and it would be hard.
    “I’m sorry, Mom. It’s, like, the pits.”
    “Don’t even
think
about coming along.”
    “I’ll stay with Stacey, OK?”
    “OK.” The wallpaper was trellised grapes, and Joanna had been noticing where the trellis matched and where it failed to and where the pattern was curling and would have to be reglued.
    “It’s tech rehearsal, and then dress. Will you be back by Friday?”
    “Yes.”
    “Promise?”
    “Promise. Cross my heart and hope—” She stopped herself. “Claire and David will be there.”
    Her enormous-eyed daughter was crying, a little, and she herself was trying not to; snow drifted past the pane. She would leave for Saratoga in the morning, said Joanna, and spend a night there, maybe two, then return by curtain time. “We’ll make Harry hold the fort.”
    Leah did a little stutter-step and twitched her hips. “
A boy like that . . .
”
    Joanna