Free Water from Stone - a Novel by Katherine Mariaca-Sullivan Page B

Even with the air conditioner rattling away in its window perch, the trailer is hot. The two ice cubes had quickly melted in the glass of Root Beer she’d insisted he take. Now it is lukewarm and watery. Even under the best of conditions, Sy can’t stand the stuff. “No, thank you. You were saying?”
    “Yes, well, you can imagine,” Esther peers at him from under her bushy eyebrows, emphasizing her point. “Here I was, almost fifty and with a baby. Plus, a husband in a wheelchair. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you that, even with Earl’s army pension. We lived in Toledo then, or outside of it. I had a job at PPG, cleaning the offices. Here, let me show you.”
    Putting her hands on her knees, Esther pushes herself up and moves to a small book shelf filled with photo albums. Tracing a finger over the hand-printed titles on the spines, she chooses one and returns to the sofa. Opening the book, she flips through a few pages, a private smile lifting the edges of her mouth.
    “Here,” she says, passing the book over to Sy. “That was our house. We got it after the war. The government used to help people back then.”
    The single-story house in the photo is small, but neat. There is a ramp up to the front door, presumably to help the man who lost the use of his legs for his country. Standing in front of the house is a laughing young woman. Even in black and white, it is easy to see that Esther Burrows had been a beauty in her youth.
    As she had, Sy flips through a few pages. As time passed, Esther smiled less and less and her beauty began to fade. Suddenly, there she is, a middle aged woman with a baby. The toll her pregnancy had taken on her body and spirit is obvious.
    “Yes, sir, it was hard. I had to switch my schedule around to work nights while the baby slept so’s I could take care of her during the day. Earl, he tried, but he wasn’t very good at babying. More’n twenty years in the chair had drained him and he needed to take lots of naps. Elie, though, you’d take your eye off her for a second and the house might be burned down or she’d’ve disappeared. She did that, you know, disappeared a lot. I think it was a trial for her, too, having parents so much older than she was. We tried, but we couldn’t keep up. By sixth grade, she was takin’ off least once a month. She’d be gone a day or two, stay at a friend’s house, not bother to tell us where. Pretty soon, the police wouldn’t even come anymore, I’d filed so many missing person reports. One time, a lady from Social Services come by and Elie got scared. She behaved for a while after that. Eventually, though, her spirit was just too big for that little house. When Earl took real bad, Elie was about fifteen. I had to quit my job to take care of him. Elie couldn’t stand the ‘smell of sickness,’ is what she called it, and took off for good. Haven’t seen her since.”
    “Have you heard from her since then?”
    Esther retrieves a cookie tin from on top of the small television, removes the lid and hands the tin to Sy. It is full of postcards. Sy glances through them. From their postmarks, he can tell that they’d arrived every few months for years. “How long has she been gone?”
    “A little over eight years.”
    “And she’s been writing all that time?” Sy glances up.
    “She was real good about it at the beginning. Sent me one every now and then to let me know she was doin’ OK. After Earl died, I moved down here to be near my sister. The couple that bought the house’ve been sending me her postcards over the years. But the last one I got was about two years ago.”
    Sy sifts through them until he finds the latest postmark. He flips it over. The Statue of Liberty stares back at him.
    Ten
    Mar.
    “You’re going to have to paint her awake sometime, you know.”
    Jumping at the sound of Diane’s voice, the paintbrush flies from Mar’s hand. “Jesus! Don’t do that.”
    “I made enough noise to start a stampede,” Diane says.