“You have to listen if you want to hear,” the Umbrella Lady said, her voice sharp and her eyes turning steel-gray. “My mother told me that when I was your age. If you don’t listen and words go in your ears, they’ll bounce right back out and bump right into all the new words coming, and then everything will sound all jumbled up.”
I didn’t say anything. That sounded as silly as putting pennies in a jar to stop sadness. She continued to look at me hard, with her eyes small, swimming in a little pool of anger. I think she wanted me to say I was sorry that I had ignored her, but I really wasn’t. I was still thinking about Daddy, and that was more important. Anyway, I hadn’t asked her to bring me here; she had asked me to come. I tottered on getting up and running out, but I was hungry, and the aroma of the pizza baking was circling around me.
Suddenly, as if shocked with another thought, she widened her eyes the way someone who was surprised might. “What is your age?”
“I’m eight,” I said.
“Eight. Didn’t they feed you? You look like five, maybe six. What grade are you in?”
“I think third. Mama was my teacher.”
She smiled. “Of course. You were homeschooled. Your mother was using books children in the third grade would use. Did she tell you that?”
“I don’t remember, but I’m going to start school when we’re in our new home,” I said.
“Um.” She looked thoughtful. “You’re quite bright, but I don’t know as your mother challenged you enough, and your father dropped the ball.”
“What ball?”
“Never mind. Just know that you can’t always use your age as an excuse for disappointing other people, like not paying attention to what you’re asked or told. I’ll let you do that this once since we just met, but when you’re with me for a while, whether you like it or not, as I said, you will grow older quickly. There’s no baby time for you anymore, no baby time for someone left at a train station.”
“Why would I be with you for a while? Daddy’s coming to get me,” I said.
She smirked and acted as if I hadn’t spoken. “There was no baby time for me when I was your age, and I had problems just as big, if not bigger. I never went to kindergarten. I had house chores to do. We didn’t have preschool, either, and there were no iPads and smartphones like the cell phones now so I could go lock myself in a closet and secretly talk about things to other girls that would shock and even frighten my parents. I don’t even own a cell phone now. I never owned one. There is no one I just have to talk to and can’t wait until I get home to do so, anyway.”
“My mother stopped using hers,” I said. From the way she was talking, I thought she would be happy to hear that. “She always forgot to charge it, which upset my father. But I want to have my own cell phone someday.”
“Of course you do,” she said. “You’re the ‘look at me’ generation. You dream of doing selfies, don’t you?” She pressed her lips together so hard it created crevices that ran up her cheeks.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember a dream about that.”
“Doesn’t matter what you dream. You won’t do them. You’ll be different. You won’t grow up like most of the other children your age, and you’ll be a better person for it.”
How did she know all that?
“Did your mother have a computer?” she asked.
“She did, but she didn’t use it very much.”
“She didn’t use it very much?”
She put her hands on her hips and looked at the wall. Her face seemed to be in constant movement, her tongue licking at her lips, her cheeks going in and out, and her eyes blinking rapidly. The lines in her forehead seemed to ripple. I couldn’t help but be fascinated. Then she spun on me.
“Well, didn’t she teach you how to use it?”
“She did and then stopped,” I said.
“Stopped?”
She had stopped doing a lot with me, but I didn’t want to talk about Mama. Daddy never told me not to talk about her now. I simply felt that if I did, it would bring back all the sadness and relight the fire. When that happened, I would cry and, sometimes, fight back a scream.
“So what did your mother tell people she was doing?”
“She used to teach in a public school, but then she became a housewife and mother,” I said, remembering how Mama would answer the same question if anyone had asked while we were all out doing something together. It had been a long time since we had been.
“Well, lucky you. You had your mother always there when you needed her.” The Umbrella Lady wagged her head, but it didn’t sound like she really meant I was lucky. “My mother left us when I was just a little older than you. Matter of fact, she got on a train at the station where I found you and never returned. My father was a lot older than she was, so maybe that was the reason. Never marry a man a lot older than you are. Your husband won’t keep up with you. He’ll be cranky and full of aches and pains, while you want to go dancing. Or even just for a walk down the street!”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if she had to fight off the attack of bad memories. Then she burst into a smile again. It came like a small explosion on her face, widening her eyes and deepening the corners of her mouth.
“You’ll be happy to hear that I had to grow up quickly, just like you will. I had to become the little lady of the house and take care of my father. Later, mainly because he had suggested it, I became an elementary-school teacher and worked right here for twenty-five years. He was hoping I would remain a spinster so I would have no one else but him. But I fooled him.”
I stared at her, because her face changed from happy to angry and back to happy so quickly.
“Hello. Do you know what a spinster is?”
I shook my head.
“So many good words are rotting away like unpicked apples. A spinster is an unmarried woman who probably won’t marry. But I fooled my father.”
I was just looking at her. It didn’t seem interesting, and I didn’t want to stop thinking about Daddy.
“Don’t you want to know how I fooled him? Aren’t you full of curiosity, like Mr. Pebbles?”
I really wasn’t, at least about her right now. Right now, I was tired and wanted my father to come take me away, but I nodded because I knew she wanted me to.
“I met a widower who was happy to find a woman like me to marry. My father was so unhappy about it that he had a stroke, but he survived and then ended up in the old-age home, clinging to life like a spider to a web. By then I had to retire. That’s what I got for getting married to an older man. I could have gone on teaching right up to today, but I had to take care of my husband, who was an accountant who suddenly could no longer remember numbers.”
She stared at me a moment. I was sure I was gawking at her now. No one I had met with Mama or Daddy ever told me so much about himself or herself as quickly.
“Maybe it was my own fault,” she said, thinking aloud. She looked up, as if she could see those thoughts in a cloud, just the way they appeared in the newspaper cartoons Daddy read. “You can’t always blame the choices you make on someone else, or fate.”