Donna Vitucci

Brady Alden

Michael Shorb

Shut In, February, 1954

A freak February thaw tempted Patrice into walking along the creek they called Paddy's Run. Jep raced into the woods, then double-backed, herding her in the direction of the rabbits and squirrels he'd nosed out. Her dog was frantic and lovely and alive. An azure sky hardened above her while balmy air wormed through the spaces between buttons and her blouse's neckline. Except for working at Fernald, the winter had kept Patrice cooped up, caring for her mother's season-long bronchitis, a tickle her mother said just kept tickling. A rush of feeling rose up inside Patrice for the surety of things, for the land's constancy, for trees and for streams which did not change course over a season, or over dozens of years. Water tumbled down the tiny falls in Paddy's Run. Chipmunks burrowed in the tree roots. Another month or two, and dead sodden grass would thicken there green.

In her papa's old galoshes she slogged, the muddy bank sucking at her soles. She didn't mind the splash and mire, nor the pull working her leg muscles, nor Jep excited and brandishing her with his sopping tail. The creek ran high and noisy with the recent rain, winding into the woods Jep rejoiced in and around and through.

Walking along Paddy's Creek, she saw where the past week's rain had caused water to rise and then die back, leaving the long grass pressed into the creek bank. What was left of her mother's thin hair Patrice had held between her hands and the brush that morning. When Patrice didn't have to rush to work, she could take time to address her mother's body. Attention, or inattention, mattered little to her mother. Patrice missed the woman's old sharp, reproving tongue.

Jep ran ahead, then doubled to tag her as Patrice turned to trudge back the way she'd come. She imagined him her contrary brother in the way he sprinted away before she could pet him. Even from this far off she could see that inside the house her mother hadn't budged from her place at the kitchen table. Patrice had left the heavy back door open to encourage fresh air through the screen and affording a wider view of the backyard than the one window over the sink. Her mother would have plenty of time, Patrice imagined, to see her and Jep approaching. She'll have a mouthful of criticism for when I step in. A thought of hope, and a wish for the return of her mother's flinty spirit.

No scolding, not even when Jep galloped into the living room, rubbing his burrs against the sofa. No Where you been? or There's work to be done around here. Only vacant blue eyes that had turned to ice over the winter.

Patrice crouched to rub her mother's fingers, swollen and knobby with arthritis. "A warm-up's what you need."

"The dog's loose."

At least they inhabited the same present moment. Her mother lately had been collapsing into the past, speaking to Patrice as if she were a child, and Daddy'd be expected to walk in, scraping the field from his work boots on the rag rug.

Patrice dove into the reality of dog dragging a mess in front of their eyes. "I know," she said. "We'll get him later. What if I bundled you up in your Sunday coat and we sat out on the porch?"

Her mother's watery focus caught Patrice and then slid away. The old woman lifted the fingers that no longer straightened and used them to tuck a lock of Patrice's hair inside the shoelace that held her ponytail.

Patrice patted her mother's lap, two thin legs with slack muscle beneath her housecoat. "I'll get your things."

At which her mother began coughing. Patrice brought her a cup to spit in and a soft dish towel for her mouth. When the woman waved her empty hands to shoo her away, Patrice stood with cup and cloth, confounded.

"We'll stay in then," she said.

She mourned for the dips and trills of the day, which would now be lost. That is, she mourned for herself.

Her mother cleared a last scrape from her throat. "A nap maybe." She could still voice her wants.

Patrice assisted in the walk from kitchen to bedroom, bearing both their weights. Her mother's was nothing, really. To override the foul breath her mother exhaled with each step, Patrice focused on motion, thinking how the body's joints made themselves known, how they normally worked without drawing attention to feats against gravity. She imagined the bones in her mother's hips grinding in their sockets as they shifted and supported her. Weariness was contagious. Soon it would rush Patrice's body, every tendon and tiny bone. Her fingers ached.

Finally at bedside, her mother fell onto the mattress, shifting it off the box springs. Patrice would have thought the woman didn't weigh enough to shove it, but she did.

"I'll fix it."

"Leave it."

But too-efficient Patrice stood on the other side, pushing with all her might against the bed where her mother sat, abandoned, the toes of her socks barely brushing the braided rug. The messed bedclothes were a tide rising to engulf her.

"It's a downhill road I'm on," she said.

Patrice flipped her hand at the nonsense. "It'll pass. Just rest awhile."

"I don't want to."

"Then what do you want?"

"My back..."

"What?"

"My back aches."

Patrice swallowed the exasperated sigh bellowing up inside her. Through the window she watched the birds dip between the porch gutters and the forsythia, those bushes bare, as everything still was in February. She gently rubbed her mother's back, measuring the come and go of her breath with her fingers. Patrice felt herself confined by the old woman's shallow inhale. Outside, the birds ticked their feet and beaks in the metal gutters.

"Hear that?" she said.

Her mother cocked her head, did her own bird imitation, concentrating. "What is it?" Suspicious, as she always had been, and wasn’t that a good sign?

Patrice smiled. "Robin."

"Ah." Her mother nodded. "Spring."

A moment of clarity, and in that clear-headedness a recollection. "What ever happened," her mother said, "at that company frolic last year?"

Calamity shot through Patrice's lungs and halved her breath. "Nothing to tell."

Her mother peered over her shoulder, interrupting the circles Patrice drew between her wing bones. "You came home with spirit. I thought maybe you'd met someone."

"I met several people that night, and since. Fernald is a big place."

"I thought maybe you'd met Mr. Wonderful."

"Not so lucky." Patrice shook her head. She was twenty, with no prospects.

Her mother faced forward and shrugged, Patrice's cue to resume the back rub.

"Luck has nothing to do with it. You need some gumption, girl, to go after things . . . your father would have said."

How dare she resurrect Papa? She had no idea what his words would have been to Patrice on the subject of husbands, and she had no idea what confusion had been offered by Evan Wunder during one slow dance. His name sent up a spiral of smoke inside Patrice she struggled to smother.

"I doubt Papa would have said anything at all."

"He'd have said it to me, to tell you."

"So you two connived behind my back?" Patrice stood.

Without her support, her mother slumped on the mattress, then drew her slim, small body under the covers. "I think I'll nap now."

It would require effort for her mother to arrange and straighten the bedding, but Patrice let her struggle with it.

Her mother coughed. "I just thought there might have been a man, some man, who might take you off my hands."

Her hands! Who was the invalid and who the nurse?

Patrice stumbled to the dresser, yanked open the top drawer where she'd stashed bills and important documents. She wanted someone to hurt as much as she was hurting. She held up the tissue paper invoices and past due reminders. "These doctor bills are killing us."

She riffled through papers and yellow envelopes. "I don't see how we can pay them."

Her mother's lucidity began to evaporate along with her voice. "Maybe the cash from the sugar corn." She coughed and cleared her throat. "Your father banks on that crop to carry us through each year."

They hadn't planted more than a dozen rows in the back garden since Papa's disappearance. Her mother floated, confused about their inability to plant big, but Patrice had no pity. Everything she turned up in the drawer read cancelled, read useless. A closed out savings account, a cashed in insurance policy. "Don't you have anything stored away from Papa?" she said.

She had dressed too warmly for the weather, especially after her walk and ministering to her mother. Perspiration trickled where her dungarees pinched her waist.

Her mother blinked, turned her head in a bird kind of jerk. "Now when would I have done that?"

Patrice's palms left a dark imprint on the envelope she held. She gave her mother one incredulous look. If she was about to slide into anger or grief, anger had more purpose.

She faced the drawer and the mirror. "There was a man, if you must know. But guess what?" She laughed. "Just my luck—he's married. Wife, and daughter too. How do you like that?" Patrice had no close girlfriends. Details she'd kept to herself tripped past her lips. He could dance, and he had a sense of humor, a smile that slayed her, a touch she couldn't forget. She'd had so little opportunity for another's hands on her, for any reason.

She took a breath, curved her knuckles on the dresser top, and pressed them hard into the wood.

"He came to see me the next Monday at work. Forget the office. He strutted right down the middle of the cafeteria, swung through those big double doors, and paraded in the space that separates hourly from salaried. Not only did he cross that line, but he came right up to my table, eight of us office girls. Men lunching with women, it's just not done, don't you see?"

The mirror revealed that her audience had nodded off. Patrice walked over and dabbed her mother's lips with the dish towel she'd brought in their trek from the kitchen. She helped scoot her off her back, so she lay straight under the quilt like a lone matchstick in its box.

"With seven girls from the administration building sitting right there alongside and across from me, he apologized for Beth. That's his wife." She said this to clarify things. "He apologized for himself, asked my understanding of the situation, which was, I mean is, he's got to tread lightly. Something to do with Beth's temper and his little girl's safety. Mazie's her name. Said he'd like to dance with me again. He squeezed my fingers, bruising me because of his wedding ring."

In Patrice's ears the summary rang silly. For a moment she didn't know where she was. The birds ticked against the porch gutters, noisy and ready for nesting.

"Not in the cards," her papa would have confided among his circle at Carson's.

Carson's Store, the center of their universe, until the Feed Materials plant soaked its roots in the same fertile ground. Weekdays Patrice rode into work with some girls from Layhigh Road, girls who were nice in their way, but strictly acquaintances. To Patrice, Fernald was a big happy family of workers, everybody helping out everybody else with rides and favors, the whole company full of people working toward one effort, all nice people.

That's the point her mother would emphasize. "Patrice, you're in with some good folks. For that, I'm happy."

Easier to talk about work at the plant instead of what sat right under their noses, the upcoming spring and all that came with the growing season, or the fall, when Patrice suspected she'd be left alone to sell the farm.

Through the open window she inhaled the earth's damp smell. They'd had enough rain to keep the soil soggy for a good long time. Farmers, who needed something to complain about when they stood in line down at Carson's, groused about the wet pushing back planting. If not rain then drought, if not drought then storms or a cold snap. Weather sat front and center in most of the stories they had to tell. Papa'd been like them in every way, whole calendar years stored away in his memory, ready for taking down and flipping through when conversation called for it. The Flood of '29. The drought of '37. Last summer's hailstones big as softballs and hornier than nettles. In her mind, Patrice could hear Papa’s gravelly voice instructing her how to plant lima. His hands had dwarfed her little girl fingers when he scooped the dirt out from under her nails with the tip of his pocketknife.

"You plant, you got to plan on getting dirty.” He'd tapped her breastbone with the knife's smooth edge.

She looked at her mother and put her hand on her own ribs, which felt freshly bruised. She thought she'd lie down and rest there just a minute.

When dusk fell, it fell quickly. Patrice saw her mother sleeping half off her pillow. She saw how shadows had set the room caving in on itself, while she worked at rising from the bed. She'd slept curled like a lover around her aging mother. Her arm tingled from her fingers to her elbow, and she shook it as she stood, woozy.

"That's what comes from sleeping mid-day," her mother would say, had she been any aware. But she was snoring.

Time had gotten away from Patrice. She patted the pockets of her dungarees, in a search for money, trying to assess the hour, settling her feet firmly on the ground. She hadn’t even done the grocery shopping. To Carson's then. She wavered. Either leave her mother alone or endure her criticism when the woman woke and cried hungry. Her mother's peaceful dreams smoothed her angles so she looked less hawk-billed, merely big-nosed there, sheet tucked to chin. Patrice would just have to bank on that continued sleep while she slipped away and grabbed a few staples.

She walked the mostly deserted aisles of Carson's. Elliot Carson himself manned the counter. Ten minutes till six, just enough time to scoop up into her arms eggs, bread, milk, butter, soup, and peaches in a can. Elliot eyed the clock above the penny candy racks, then returned to reading the Hamilton Journal he had folded in fourths and held at arm's length, as Patrice struggled to add a box of Ivory Snow to the load she balanced within the circle of her arms.

"You're my last customer," he said, punching the register keys. He didn't need to pause to locate prices stamped purple on the items. He knew the cost of everything.

"I'm sorry to stop in so late," Patrice said.

He looked at her. The guy thought everyone’s business was his.

She shrugged. "Got caught up in my spring cleaning, I guess."

Elliot nodded. "A pretty one today, wasn't it?" He bagged the groceries, eggs on top. "How's your mama?"

"Getting by. The sun shining helps some." Patrice lied through her teeth. "It seemed to put her in a finer mood."

Again Elliot bobbed his head. "All of us," he said, like they were in the same boat, though he had no idea. He turned a key in the drawer of the register once he put Patrice's money inside. "That's it for tonight."

Her turn to nod.

"I'll walk you out," he said.

"Oh, no need." She gathered the bag to her chest, which still ached. "I'm used to handling things," she said.

He held up his keys. "Wait a minute, and I'll be with you."

She relented, overcome by courtesy instilled from hundreds of times she and her daddy had gone to Carson's for necessities or just conversation. Ned Carson ran the store then, and when he passed on, it fell to Elliot. Elliot, who had to be twenty years her senior, wore a cardigan like Daddy always did.

Elliot's back appeared here and there as he checked the ends of each aisle and shut off lights. The one fluorescent he kept burning twenty-four hours by the butcher counter backlit him as he approached her in the near dark. Elliot parted his brown hair in the middle which made him look like an old-timer merchant in a Western show.

Her mother would have said, "It makes him look like an idiot."

He smelled of cigarettes and paper money.

"Don't you have to count the till?" Patrice said.

"I'll come in early tomorrow and reconcile before opening."

Elliot surrounded her with his own tidy purpose.

Her mother's voice cackled in her head. "Your idiot's a prospect!"

In such a rush to Carson's before it closed, Patrice hadn't paused to button up. Now the chill caught her. She hugged her brown bag of purchases to keep closed the crossed flaps of her father's cardigan she wore as Elliot propped open the door, as she stepped beneath the arch his arm made. The bell over their heads rang but his thick body absorbed the sound, partly sheltering her as they stood on the threshold. The metal plate hammered there to reinforce the entry made Patrice's instep ache through the thin soles of her loafers. Her feet wanted to fold over. They stood poised, not in, not out, a snapshot of a moment in which she felt the world's kindness shift away. The gravel parking lot was level, and she longed to step down, but Elliot blocked her exit. Even as she eyed all those pebbles over there, he leaned so near that the parking lot view was partially overruled by his jaw and his smooth neck above his shirt collar. Elliot looked not very used by the world. No creases. Comes from not being a farmer, she thought.

He nudged her through the doorway with his elbow. "After you, ma'am." The formality sounded fake and tinged with bullying. She clasped her hands around her purchases to keep from jabbing him as she walked from beneath his protection.

She didn't want a farmer, but neither did she care for a storekeeper. She preferred to dream on an unavailable man who worked Fernald maintenance, who danced on the balls of his feet, who drew her up off her own as if she were weightless, who could infuse spring down the middle of winter.

As she walked, she said, "My mother’s alone. I should get back to her right now."

Elliot's shoes toed her heels all the way to her car. She said to his slightly confused look when she turned to face him: "She needs me."

"Can't argue with duty," he said, his too-close voice and face brimming with disappointment she'd set brewing.

"Not hardly," Patrice said.

"I wouldn’t dream of it." But he didn't step aside, which prevented her from opening the driver door.

She faked a coughing fit. Elliot patted her back.

"Now, now," he said.

Although her spasms slowed, his hand remained on her shoulder blade.

Beyond the exaggerated cough, she experienced a hitch in her windpipe as she suspected Elliot in a role suddenly more sinister than suitor. She scraped and cleared her throat while her mind spun with getaway alternatives. How to reject him without insulting, to turn cleanly from what he really hadn't even offered. A sense of foreboding, in that she'd been unable to deflect him with neighborliness that had defused past ardor from him, because, yes, this wasn't the first of his attentions. Always, before, there'd been other customers begging his notice and a crowd of three or more at the butcher counter for her to slip behind, then disappear down the furthest darkest aisle—the necessities Elliot had stacked high for hardware, house repair and cleaning.

Her mother's declaration, You're in with a good group of people, Patrice, wormed again through her head. Would Patrice categorize Elliot good or bad? Who was she to judge, and relying on what evidence? She dismissed him because he wanted to escort her to her car after dark? Wake up, she could hear her mother scold. He might be as good a prospect as you’re ever going to attract. Patrice's blood drew back home to her heart, turned her lightheaded. When she tilted, her bags crumpled into Elliot. No one could prove that had been on purpose.

He caught the groceries. Poised between Patrice and the other, inventory, with which he was familiar, won out. They each retreated as if the earth had been going to open up and they'd escaped the fissure. She felt sprung from jail, bouncy on her feet. She’d shed the earlier achiness of the doorway, even the weariness her mother'd tried sloughing onto her.

"The bags were heavier than I thought," she said.

"I've got them."

She seized the opportunity to open the car door and flip forward the driver's seat. She had energy to spare, but somehow managed to contain it. Elliot settled her groceries on the floor and patted them to emphasize their security.

Patrice got in behind the wheel.

As a way of softening her departure, she said, "Thanks for steadying it all. Don't want the eggs to smash if I have to brake suddenly." The forced gaiety in her voice annoyed her, but she felt she owed him that.

He nodded and leaned his arms on her open car window. "Deer're roaming these woods all around."

She didn't mind him being a Know-It-All now that the key in the ignition was turning the engine over. She didn't mind a few last pleasantries. "I heard a few've even been shot by Fernald guards from up in their watch towers when the animals tripped the fence alarms."

"Can't be too careful."

"I will be. So long. And thanks, again." Superfluous thanks because she'd paid him for the groceries, had endured his little moonlight stroll with her across the parking lot, allowed him to pat her head as he told her to take care.

During the short drive home she considered the poor slaughtered deer, shot for no good reason other than they wandered. She wondered if the guards dumped the carcasses into the pits out back behind Plant Nine, where she imagined them being devoured by the bubbly sludge of a horror movie. More likely, they'd been removed carefully from where they' been taken down, and gutted so the liver and kidneys could be handed over to Fernald for testing like they insisted. The venison would be packaged for sale by someone as mild-mannered as Elliot, standing at his butcher's counter, the fluorescent light beaming down, spotlighting him and his bloodied apron and the sharp tools he used. And, as with every other time he'd been stuck behind the butcher counter, catering to the appetites of his neighbors, Patrice would silently slip away from Carson's as she did now, her gratefulness for solitude swelling like a loosed bouquet of all the wildflowers still so far from bloom or stalk or seedling.

Donna D. Vitucci's fiction has appeared in dozens of print and online journals, including Hawai'i Review, Meridian, Natural Bridge, turnrow, Faultline, Gargoyle, Zone 3, SNReview, and Literary Mama. "Shut In, February, 1954," is one story from a collection of interconnected narratives that features fictionalized characters in the very real town of Fernald, Ohio, where a uranium processing plant operated from 1952 until the late 1980s.