The Umbrella Lady Read online

  “I wasn’t sure whether or not the wind blew it away. I know now that your father took it. That’s how he was able to mail this letter.”

  I thought for a moment. That couldn’t be true. Why wouldn’t he have come to get me?

  “So if he knows your name, he could have looked up your telephone number, right?” I said.

  “I used Mazy Dazy. I don’t have my phone listed as Mazy Dazy. I have nothing listed as Mazy Dazy.”

  “I want to call his cell phone,” I said, just as firmly as she said anything.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Okay. Let’s see if he picks up.”

  We went to her phone, and she stood back to watch me. I pressed the numbers carefully and listened. A voice came on and said, This number is no longer in service. I turned to her, panic surely smeared all over my face. She took the receiver out of my hand and asked me the number. She waited as it rang, and then the same voice came on with the same message. She hung up the receiver and smiled.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that. Very often when people change where they live, they get a new phone service and a new number.”

  “Can’t we find out the new number?”

  “I’m sure there are a number of Derick Anderses in the country. We might have to call dozens, and besides, maybe he has an unlisted number.”

  “Well, what will I do?”

  “Wait, just like he told you. You’re not suffering, are you?”

  Of course I’m suffering, I thought. I’m living with someone I really don’t know, and both my parents are gone.

  I pondered it a moment and then brightened with an idea. “I could write him a letter and tell him he can call me now. We’ll put your name and number in the letter.”

  “That would be very smart, only… he didn’t put in his current address. If you write a letter, it will just sit here.”

  “But why did you put the note on the station door if you thought he took the one under the coloring book?”

  “I told you. I didn’t know if the wind had blown it off. Besides, you wanted me to, and I didn’t want you to think I didn’t try. I might as well take it off the door now. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “But why would Daddy leave me here?”

  “You heard what he wrote. He must have found out that you were in a good place and wanted to get everything ready before he came for you. Can you think of any other reason?”

  She studied me. There was a dream I sometimes had that always began and ended quickly. My father was starting up the stairway. He had his hands cupped and pressed together. A small flame was coming up out of his palms. For some reason, that dream flashed. I thought about telling her, but before I could say anything else, she stepped toward me and put her hands on my shoulders.

  “You have a very nice father, a man who doesn’t want you to go through all the turmoil of setting up a new home. I think we should devote our energy and our time to doing the things a young girl your age should be doing, besides the chores, of course, until he has everything ready for you. It will make the time pass faster.

  “That means I’ll start your homeschooling. We’ll pick up where your mother left off. You’re very lucky, because I was a very good teacher, and I happen to have kept the books and workbooks I used and other teachers used. I was an assistant principal, really. Nothing was formal about it, but because I was there so long and was so efficient, they decided half my time would be devoted to assisting the principal. So you’re luckier than most girls your age.

  “Wipe your hands and follow me,” she ordered.

  I looked at the phone again. I had been so hoping to hear Daddy’s voice.

  “Saffron?”

  I turned, and she led me to the stairway. We walked up, and then, instead of turning right toward her bedroom, she turned left and stopped at a closed door.

  “This is supposed to be a guest bedroom, but since I never had a guest, I never furnished it as a bedroom.”

  She smiled and opened the door.

  I stepped up and looked.

  There was a classroom desk and chair, a blackboard, and two shelves of books on the left. There was nothing else in the room.

  “Well?” she said. “You said you never went to school. Now you will. You’ll do your lessons in here, and I will teach you everything you would be taught in a regular public school by now. You won’t have to go there until I take you to do a test run by another teacher. I’m sure you’ll do better than her own students.”

  She waited and then put her hands on her hips.

  “What do you say? Isn’t this wonderful? Don’t you feel lucky now?”

  “I won’t have any friends,” I said.

  “Of course you will. You’ll have me, and someday, when you are ready, you’ll go to the public school and be ahead of everyone in the pack. Everyone will want to be your friend, many because they’ll want you to help them with their homework. Don’t trust those students. They’re users, selfish.”

  I stared at her, maybe scowled. This sounded like it would take a long time.

  “When will Daddy come for me?”

  “Are you deaf? I read it to you. You heard it… when he has everything ready. I swear, the first lesson you’ll learn is to appreciate what someone like me does for you.”

  She pulled the door closed roughly and started for the stairway.

  “Well?” she said, snapping at me. “Come along. Finish cleaning up. It’s almost time for dinner.”

  I walked toward her slowly. “Can I have Daddy’s letter?” I asked.

  “Of course not. I need it in case anyone asks about you.”

  She started down the stairs. I followed slowly, pausing only when I saw Mr. Pebbles staring up at me with the same cat-ate-the-bird smile as on the cat I had colored black with golden eyes in the book Daddy had given me.

  Now that the Umbrella Lady had gotten rid of my clothes and old shoes, it was all that I had left to prove I even had a daddy.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairway, she stopped being angry and smiled.

  “From now on,” she said, “you can call me Mazy. Just like a friend would, okay?”

  Maybe I will, I thought, but I’ll always think of you as the Umbrella Lady.

  I had no idea why I should think that, or if it would always be true.

  But in time, I would know.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After she had read me Daddy’s letter, the days were longer than any days I could remember, including the day he and I stepped on the train to go to a new home. It was probably because Mazy wouldn’t let me have any time to do nothing, unless taking a nap was doing nothing. Days wove into each other. Months must have passed. She had no calendars on the wall, nor did she get newspapers from which I could keep track of dates. It was almost as if she wanted to keep time secret.

  Until the moment I realized that I was going to be here in her home much longer than I had imagined, I wasn’t aware that she didn’t have a television set, not that during those early days she would have given me time to watch it, anyway. She had every part of my day organized, down to when I would brush my teeth. If I moaned about additional work, she claimed that she didn’t want me to think too much about anything sad.

  There were always kitchen chores when I wasn’t in her schoolroom learning more math, reading more books, and writing to practice grammar. It wasn’t long after I began that she had me start work on a science text. She said she was surprised my mother hadn’t. She made me read it aloud to show her I could read it, but I think she was really trying to show me what I could do. Then she surprised me by telling me it was for seventh-grade students.

  “I’ll give your mother credit for how well she taught you to read and sound out words,” she said. “But why stop there? It’s like launching a rocket ship and immediately tying it down.

  “I’ve seen too many good students turn lazy. Everything you do and everything you learn from now on should be a challenge. Maybe your mother had too many challenges of her own to provide
you with any. But you won’t grow without them. If it’s too easy, it isn’t worth doing.”

  She had what she called quotes of wisdom, new ones almost every day. She didn’t want me simply to hear them and believe them but encouraged me to use them as well. “When you’re older, just tell that to people,” she would say. “You’ll see how much more they will respect you. That’s what happened to me.”

  I think she dreamed of turning me into a younger version of herself or maybe just to be her when she was my age. It was always “I would do this” or “I would do that.” And therefore, “so should you.” There was even a wisdom quote for it. “Appreciating and benefiting from my mistakes means you won’t make them. You don’t resent what older people tell you. It’s like getting something for free, and besides, don’t you want to try to be perfect?”

  Sometimes I would snap back at her like a rubber band. I know it surprised her.

  “No one can be perfect,” I said once after she recited her own quote. “My mother told me that.”

  “Why doesn’t that shock me to hear it coming from your lips? I’m not saying you will be perfect, but you should try to be. Otherwise, if you settle for just this or that, you’ll be mediocre. That means you’ll be ordinary. And any little girl I tutor will not be barely adequate. Years from now, people will ask you how you got so smart, and you will smile and say, ‘Mazy Dazy.’ ”

  She laughed, but I just stared at her and wondered what it would be like to live in her imagination, even for only a day. She could see me years from now? How could she fantasize so much and about me, too? Anyone else would be so dizzy she’d faint.

  But she wasn’t all wrong. As time passed and my hair grew back, I could feel myself changing. Maybe it was simply wishful thinking, but I did sense I was getting stronger, tougher, which was what she wanted, what she taught me to be.

  “You have to shed the little girl in you just the way your textbook explained how and why a snake sheds its skin,” she said.

  I rarely cried, and my complaining didn’t go over well with her. It would have the opposite effect, anyway. If there was something to do and I moaned, I had to do more of it. If there was something at dinner that I didn’t like and didn’t eat, she had me eat it at breakfast. It reminded me of my mother telling my father why I didn’t whine like other little kids. I understood what she meant now, why it was futile. I learned to seal my lips.

  But although she was quick to jump on any mistake I made, whether it involved some household chore or some math problem, she was also quick with a compliment, if I deserved it. I couldn’t help but feel proud when she paused one day and said, “I’ve had literally hundreds of students. I can count on the fingers of one hand any who were as bright as you or had your promise.”

  Weeks ago, I wouldn’t have understood what she meant by promise, but she was expanding my vocabulary quickly. She had me reading at least three books a week, especially since there was no television set. Some nights, I read until my eyes closed themselves. And the minute I told her I had finished a book, she peppered me with questions to be sure I was telling the truth. The lie as a tool was almost impossible to use with her. She truly seemed to know every move I made. I had this theory that because it was her house, the house would tell her any secrets I had hoped to have. She could put her ear to the wall in her room and hear whatever I might have said to myself in mine.

  As she had predicted, Mr. Pebbles moved himself into my room. He was just there every morning, sleeping on the rug beside my bed. One day, she brought his bed down from her bedroom and set it next to mine on the left with his water dish.

  “It’s all right,” she told me. “You passed a big test by winning over Mr. Pebbles. Cats like him know more about you than you can imagine. You’ll feel safer with him around. He can sense a roach crawling across the floor.”

  “Roach?”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t have insects in your home,” she said.

  I didn’t want to argue, but my mother would pounce on the hint of one. Still, it was nice knowing Mr. Pebbles was on the lookout, and hearing him purr always made me feel less nervous and afraid. I liked talking to him, liked the way he would stare back at me as if he understood every word. It became my job to feed him and clean his litter box, but I was more than happy to do it and add it to my daily routine. When I worked, I didn’t think, I didn’t remember, and most important, I didn’t cry.

  However, more chores seemingly fell out of the air after a while. When she thought I was capable of using the vacuum cleaner correctly, I was vacuuming the upstairs as well as the downstairs. It was something of a struggle to carry it up. She knew it, but she never offered to help me when it came to lifting or pushing something heavy, even when I nearly toppled and fell down the stairs.

  “Straining will cause you to grow faster and stronger. Parents baby their children right up to college graduation and then some. They have no grit. You’ll have grit,” she predicted. “Something I’m afraid your parents were forgetting to develop in you because they had so little of it themselves.”

  How would she know so much about my parents? I thought, but didn’t ask. I suspected she was making it up, but I was careful about my questions. Some were like lighting matches under her feet. She would leap at me with her answers, jerk herself as if she could come out of her body.

  In the early days, she would take me out in the back but stand there watching me look at everything. I didn’t hear the voices of any close neighbors. I asked about Daddy practically every day, and then every other, and then every other week, and then I stopped for a while after she came into my room one evening and said, “I have another letter from your father. I wasn’t going to read it to you yet, but I’ve decided you’re mature enough now to hear it and deal with it.”

  I put the book I was reading aside and sat up. Even Mr. Pebbles yawned and stepped out of bed to listen.

  Dear Mrs. Dutton,

  It is taking me longer than I thought to organize my new life. One reason is I’ve met someone new whom I think I could marry. A new mother for Saffron would be a wonderful thing, but a young woman would certainly be nervous about taking on a little girl so soon. Consequently, I haven’t told her about Saffron. I beg you to give me more time to ease her into it. I know Saffron is in good hands, safe and well cared for.

  Thank you.

  And of course, give her my love.

  Derick Francis Anders

  This time, she handed the letter to me. It had been printed. I imagined Daddy had gotten himself a new computer. I reread it, the tears welling in my eyes.

  “Do you know where he is?” I asked.

  “Not exactly, no. Like the first letter, he didn’t put a return address on the envelope, and the postal stamp could mean a lot of places.” She nodded at the piece of paper. “You can keep that one.”

  I looked at it. Keep it? I wanted to rip it up.

  “Why didn’t he put his new address on it? Why wasn’t there a new phone number?” I asked.

  “It’s the way he wants it. For now. Soon we’ll talk more about it all,” Mazy said. “Now that you’re going to be with me longer, it’s important that I know as much about you as possible. I’m sure you have lots to tell me about your mother and your father, how they treated each other and how they treated you. I could have asked you to tell me things immediately, but I wanted you to be comfortable and trusting first.”

  “What things?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that now. It’s late. We won’t do it all at once, anyway. Just a little at a time. Go to sleep,” she said, and turned off the light as she walked out of my room.

  I still sat up with the letter in my hands. Then I folded it and slipped it under my pillow. But when I laid my head back on it, I couldn’t close my eyes, so I pulled it out, crumpled it in my hand, and tossed it on the floor.

  Mazy Dazy was right. I had a lot to tell her, a lot to take out of the closet. Maybe I was ready to do that even more since I had read D
addy’s second letter. I was so angry that I wanted to read it aloud but this time spit the words. What some new woman thought and felt was more important than what I thought and felt? How had he met her so fast and gotten to love her so fast?

  I was afraid to fall asleep now. Just thinking about it threatened a storm of nightmares.

  When I rose in the morning, I picked up the letter, straightened it out, and reread it before I put it under my socks in the second drawer. I could see from the way Mazy was studying me occasionally that she was waiting to see what my real reaction to my father’s second letter would be. I did think about it most of the day. Another mother loomed out there. Was I supposed to forget Mama and learn to love someone who first had to get used to the idea of me? That didn’t sit well in my stomach. I went from surprise and shock to anger before finally thinking about her.

  How old would she be? How much different from my mother would she be? Would Daddy love her more than he had loved Mama when they had first met? Did she have a job? Were they living together already in our new house? He didn’t say anything about any of that, but could she have been married before, too? Could she have children? Was he worried I wouldn’t get along with her children? When would he tell me more? Every time Mazy went for her mail, I would watch and wait anxiously as she sifted through it, mumbling about bills and garbage mail. Nothing new came from Daddy. Mazy just had to take one look at me to know the disappointment I was suffering.

  One night, weeks later, after the dinner dishes and the table were cleaned up, Mazy told me to go into the living room. During the past months, I had, almost more on my own than at her command, begun to clean it up the way Mama would have. I vacuumed under the chairs and the sofa, worked at taking out rug stains, straightened up magazines, polished furniture, and even began to wash the windows, especially the one in the kitchen. She said nothing, but I did catch her smiling to herself. I wasn’t doing it for her; I didn’t want to sit and read or do a puzzle in a pigpen. Because it was still so cold, she rarely opened a window, and I did not like the stale, dank odor.