He raised the wattage on his smile to tanning-bed levels.
“Come in then, Ainsley Prescott.” She sounded amused, but not fooled. I got a nod. “You come, too.”
We followed her up the hall that divided her tiny house. In my sister’s neighborhood, the garages were bigger than this house. Grace’s place smelled of time and detergent.
I kept an eye out for photos. I’ve always liked the display of past and present in an oldie’s house, but there was only one picture out-an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven black and white of a young man with a ’50s haircut that showed way too much ear.
“That’s Mr. Ott,” Grace said. “He keeps me company.”
The kitchen would have seemed smaller if it hadn’t been so spare. White cabinets. Yellow Formica. No knickknacks. No pasta-espresso-processor gadgets. No mess at all. There was a drop-leaf table and chairs, a wall-mounted phone with two yards of well-stretched spiral cord, and a calendar with a farm scene.
“I’ve got lemonade in the ice box. Sit right down.” Grace’s heavy-soled shoes clunked across the tile. “Television, hmm? Didn’t I warn you you’d come to no good without another year of history?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ott.” College hunched his shoulders humbly. She turned her back to get the lemonade out of the fridge, and he grinned at me. Thumbs up!
“So what’s all this about Thomas?” she asked.
“We’d like to do a story on him,” I explained.
“Have you heard-” Ainsley started.
“I heard.”
Even in profile, I could see how the thought stiffened her entire body. You live as many years as Grace, you’ve got to take a surrender like Tom’s personally.
“We understand from his captain at the fire station that he visited you now and then.”
“Sure. Amish leaves the community around here, they’ll need to get their GED, sometimes take tests for college and such. I help with all that.” She busied around the cabinets, taking out glasses and setting up a tray.
“How long have you been teaching over at North, Mrs. Ott?” Ainsley asked politely.
“Since before you were born.”
“You still teaching high school?” I asked.
“They put me in administration two years ago. Part-time. I do the GED paperwork for the district. Used to teach history. And German. Ainsley knows about that.”
“Ja. Himmel,” he answered.
She gave a snort at that. “What do you want to know about Thomas?”
“Whatever you can tell us,” Ainsley answered.
Preparation of the lemonade tray continued without comment. Ainsley looked at me and shrugged.
Interviewing people for a living can be a bit like burglary. What the Boy Wonder didn’t understand yet was how to slip into someone’s house. You aren’t selling vacuums. You don’t necessarily go in the front door.
“Tom seems like a good guy who got stuck.” I struggled to phrase it right. “So stuck that life ended up crushing him from opposite sides. I want to know why.”
“Oh, do you?” She turned those old eyes on me and looked hard enough to make me nervous. After a minute, like a soft dissolve, I realized she wasn’t looking at me anymore, she was looking into her own head. “It wasn’t really opposite sides, you know, more like from the inside out.”
The lemonade came to the table on a tray with extra sugar and long spoons for stirring. There was a fruit bread and jam in a lumpy glass jar. Good omens.
“Did Ainsley tell you I grew up Amish?” Grace asked. She sipped her drink with a frown, once, twice, then finally approved. “Youngest of ten. Things were different for me than for my eldest sister, of course. My mother was barely eighteen when my sister was born and nearly forty when I came along. I’ll save you the trouble of calculating. My eldest brother was sent to jail for a short while for refusing to fight in the Second World War. My husband and I both were jailed for participating in a protest against the Vietnamese War. Times change even for the Amish.”
“I thought the point was not to change.”
“The point is to stay humble, and focus on something besides yourself,” she said. Not angry, more like a teacher pinpointing the danger of a little bit of knowledge.
Ainsley coughed. “Speaking of times changing, I’ve seen guys drag racing that empty stretch of 39 in the middle of the night. They go out in horse buggies with boom boxes blaring and high-power flashlights.”
That won him a twinkle of a smile. “Sure. Those are courting buggies. Shine a light into a girls’ room at midnight, she might climb out and join you for a ride. In my day, it was pebbles against the glass. There’s another change for you.”
“I don’t get it. No electricity but halogen flashlights are acceptable?”
“Oh, heavens, I can see your hackles rising all the way over here.” Grace waved at me. “People are never as simple as rules, Ms. O’Hara. You’re old enough to know that by now. That’s why everyone has to make their own peace with the contradictions.”
“What about Tom? Did he make his peace?”
The question deflated her. “Tom was the kind of boy who needed the rules. Not because he didn’t want to do good. He needed rules to be at peace. He wasn’t like some of the ones who go away from the community. They stretch and try new things; they experiment. Tom didn’t do that. He held the Ordnung inside as a shield, and kept to much of it. The fire service was the same for him. Rules to a greater purpose. A sense of order, routine. He would have liked the military, I think, except for the fighting. Only man Tom ever hurt was himself.” She took off her glasses and pulled a tissue from up her sleeve.
Ainsley sipped his lemonade. I shook my head at the waste, of both Tom and the image of the moment. I’d never get her to tear up again, even if I could convince her to repeat the interview for the camera.
“Tom liked structure,” I restated to keep her talking. “He played by the rules.”
“Yes. It’s prideful to analyze a person too much. We can never know someone’s heart without walking in their shoes, but maybe…” She sighed in speculation. “Tom’s childhood shook him. He had good reason to wish for security. When he first came to me, I could hardly imagine how he lay down to sleep, he was so stiff.”
“Did he visit you often?”
“More so in the beginning. I gave him a list of chores I needed done and told him what time dinner would be on the table-‘If you’re late,’ I says to him, I said, ‘might be nothing left.’ He was raised on a dairy farm. He wasn’t late.”
Ainsley laughed, but Grace could see I didn’t get the joke.
“All farmers aren’t the same, you know. Dairy farmers have a schedule to keep, every twelve hours. Those cows got to be milked. Now a seed farmer, what with the equipment people have today, they barely have to show up once a week.” She curled her knobby fingers in front of her mouth and pressed, holding a memory back. She nodded until she was calm again. “Thomas would have made a good dairy farmer.”
All together, we preserved the quiet for a moment, imagining a good life un-lived.
Finally I had to ask, “Why do you think he did it?”
We locked eyes. I’ve seen the same look in women’s eyes in every part of the world I’ve stood upon-fire, flood or fighting-the pain of failing the one you’ve tended.
“I keep asking myself, why didn’t he come to me?” Grace leaned back in her chair and rested her hands in her lap. Her cotton print blouse was buttoned all the way to the neck. She was built wiry, and her collar gaped at her throat. The soft loose skin that circled her neck made her look fragile, exhausted by time. “Something happened to Thomas at the fire station, oh some weeks back. I’m sure it was before school started. I was bringing in tomatoes that day. Most of those firemen, Tom revered them. I don’t know exactly what all went on, but somebody on his shift did something that put Thomas in a real twist. Wouldn’t say much to me, but I gathered some fellow broke a rule. Something that put a terrible weight on Tom’s conscience.”