We continued until we turned on a street with more houses and no stores. The lights I could see through some windows were dim, if they were lit at all. Some looked lighted only with candles, like when the electricity was broken. It seemed like everyone was asleep. I wished now that Daddy had saved Mama’s watch from the fire. He could have given it to me before we had left for the train. If I had a watch, I would have known that it was much later than I had imagined it to be while I was sitting at the station. Now it was probably so late that even parents had put themselves to bed.
I couldn’t tell if the Umbrella Lady wore a watch, because her thick black wool coat sleeves reached her hands. The sleeves looked too long for her. Maybe she had shrunk since she had bought this coat. Mama told me people could shrink, but mostly inside. I didn’t understand and I had stopped asking Daddy about the strange things Mama often said, because he would simply shake his head or close his eyes and put his hand on his throat as if he was going to choke himself.
If I had seen the time and added up all the hours that had passed after Daddy had left me, I would have been more worried, and probably, I would have cried out my concern immediately to someone who was rushing to a train or coming off one before the Umbrella Lady had approached me. Seeing how late it was now, I was tempted to pull my hand free of the Umbrella Lady’s hand and run all the way back to the bench on the train-station platform.
I nearly did, but she said she was going to make us a pizza, and afterward we would have ice cream. I stopped thinking about how late it was and how much past my bedtime. She said I could choose vanilla or chocolate. I thought only about that and wondered if I could ask for a little of both. Daddy did that once, and Mama accused him of not being able to make a decision.
“I did make a decision,” he had said. “I decided to choose both.”
He had looked at me and smiled. She had left the kitchen without having any dessert.
“She leaps on me every chance she gets,” Daddy had said. I didn’t think he was talking to me. He had looked like he was talking to himself, just like Mama often did. “There is no forgiveness in that woman. Every day she drives in another nail.”
“In where, Daddy?” I had asked him, and he had looked at me, surprised, as if I had heard his thoughts and not his words. He had simply shaken his head and eaten more ice cream, both flavors. I had, too.
“I think you’re going to be very happy soon,” the Umbrella Lady said now. “One thing’s for sure, you’ll be happier than you were back at the train station. Maybe than back where you lived, too,” she added. “There’s my house,” she said.
It was a real gingerbread house, orange-brown with a white roof. The house was on the end of a street like our house was. I knew it was called a cul-de-sac, which meant the street didn’t go anywhere, and at the end it circled. People who didn’t pay attention to the sign that read No Through Street would have to turn around in front of our house to get out. Mama said she hated all that traffic. That was why she had insisted on keeping the curtains closed in the front windows, but Daddy had said it made our house more valuable for us to be on a cul-de-sac, and closing the curtains all day made it dreary.
“It’s not ‘all that traffic,’ either, Lindsey. You exaggerate everything.”
“Not everything,” she had replied. “Some things exaggerate themselves.”
He had shaken his head, glanced at me, and walked away.
Our house was a two-story house, and so was the Umbrella Lady’s, but ours was bigger. Hers had more land around it, so the nearest house was what Daddy called “too far away to hear an elephant scream.” Mama didn’t care about having neighbors. She said they asked too many questions and lived to make senseless chitchat. If I was with her and we saw someone come out of his or her house, she would rush us over the pebble-stone sidewalk that led to our front door, telling me not to look back at him or her.
“You’ll turn into stone,” she would say. I had no idea what that meant, but I would walk as fast as she did over the sidewalk.
There was a short but wide walkway of silvery square stones that looked more like metal plates in front of the Umbrella Lady’s house. They went from the gate to the three cement front steps. Bushes almost as tall as me were on both sides. The patches of lawn had grass the color of straw. Her porch went only a few feet to the right or left of the front door, and it had nothing on it, not even a chair. One of the spindles under the railing was split. The lights were on in the house, so I wondered if my suspicions back at the train station were right. Maybe there was someone else living with her, someone who was waiting for her to come home and would be surprised she was bringing me, like that grandchild I had imagined, actually hoped, was there.
“There’s no one else but me,” she said, as if she really could hear my thoughts. “I’m a widow. Do you know what a widow is?”
Before I could answer, she said, “Widows are women who were married but whose husbands have gone on to heaven first to get everything prepared for them. At least,” she said, leaning toward me a little, “you hope they went to heaven.”
She laughed, and then she opened the gate and led me to the steps. I looked behind and down the dark street to see if Daddy might be hurrying after us after he had read her note, but there was no one there. Shadows looked thicker and wider, because some of the houses I had seen dimly lit had no lights on at all now. Her hand tightened a little more around mine, and I looked up at her, surprised. It was as if she was afraid I would run off.
“You must watch your step,” she said, shaking my arm for emphasis. “You must look where you’re going. Most accidents happen at home. Did you know that? People fall when they don’t pay attention or they are thinking too many things at once. People are careless mostly at home. That’s how most fires happen. Someone might smoke in bed or leave the gas on in the kitchen stove.”
I felt my heart begin to beat faster.
Who had told her what Daddy said Mama had done?
She smiled. “You won’t have any accidents here. Don’t worry,” she said, softening her grip. “I’ll make sure of that. I’ll be like your guardian angel. Who else but a guardian angel would have rescued you from a closed train station on a cold, dark night when who knows what was scampering about you?”
She paused, put down my bag, and opened her door. She stepped back to urge me in. The short entryway had a full-length oval mirror in a maple wood frame on one side and a maple wood coatrack on the other. There was a bench made from the same wood beneath it with a pair of shoes and a pair of furry boots on it. The floor looked like it was the same stone as the walkway.
“Let’s take off our coats,” she said, and helped me take off mine. She hung it on the rack and then took off hers. She didn’t have a watch. Her dress had long sleeves buttoned at the wrist. “We take off our shoes, too,” she said, “and leave them under this bench when we come in. Did you have to do that at home? It keeps your house cleaner.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to tell her how clean Mama kept our house, probably cleaner than hers, even though we didn’t take off our shoes. She removed her black shoes and then sat me on the bench so she could slip off my shoes.