Sometimes A Light Surprises

one

Not on Sundays

Sitting at his desk, Ben stared at the photo, an old one with faded colors It had been in his wallet for at least twenty-five years, stuck behind an expired library card and his voter registration, but transferred every time he changed wallets. He rarely looked at it and wouldn’t be looking at it now if he hadn’t been searching through his wallet for something. In the picture Ben was standing in front of a fireplace, holding the twins, one in each arm, as if they weighed no more than five-pound bags of sugar. They must have been around six years old, which would have put him in his early thirties. Chloe was standing next to him, holding Grant, and Shelly was in front of her, smiling stiffly at the camera as if worried that the automatic timer wouldn’t go off. The twins were wearing princess dresses and silver ballerina slippers, with sparkly crowns on their heads. Each one had an arm around his neck. Hard to believe, since they had no use for him now. “What I Lost”—that could be the title of the photo. Or “What

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Ja m ie La ngston Tu r ne r I Gave Up”—that might be closer. A wife and four children. One dead, the others as good as dead. Just then Caroline stuck her head in the office door. “Good, you’re here. I was hoping you hadn’t forgotten about the interview. She’ll be here any minute.” She shut the door just short of a slam. Why Caroline thought his mere presence meant he hadn’t forgotten, Ben couldn’t say. As a matter of fact, he didn’t know a thing about the interview even though he was sure Caroline must have written it neatly on his appointment calendar, something he usually failed to look at each morning. He put his wallet back in his pocket and closed the book on his desk. It was a book he often consulted, a thick volume of word and phrase origins titled Say It Ain’t So, Joe: A History of Common Expressions. He had been looking for high on the hog, but he hadn’t found it among the entries. Ben stood up and replaced the book on the shelf where he kept it. Probably not many people knew that the title of the book came from the notorious baseball scandal involving Shoeless Joe Jackson, an outfielder for the Chicago White Sox in 1919. Supposedly some kid had tugged on Jackson’s sleeve when he came out of the courtroom after admitting his guilt in selling out to gamblers: “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” the kid had said. Probably not many people knew that Shoeless Joe Jackson had grown up right here in Greenville, South Carolina, either. Time had been kind to his reputation. There was a life-sized statue of Shoeless Joe downtown in the West End not far from the Liberty Bridge. Turning back to his desk, Ben shuffled through some papers and found the application. He took it over to the window, held it at arm’s length, and squinted down at the name. Kelly Kovatch. Female. Age twenty. He shook his head in disbelief. Kovatch? Surely not. But yes, that’s what it said. Not exactly what you would call a common name around these parts. Could it be that this girl was the daughter of Kay Kovatch? The 10

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age would be right. The name, too. Kay Kovatch would have been the type of mother to give all her kids names that began with the same letter as her own. He looked at the address on the application. He didn’t recognize the street name, but that didn’t mean anything. It was a Derby address, which would fit. Ben couldn’t remember exactly how many children had trailed along behind Kay Kovatch the last time he had seen her, coming out of the Derby Public Library one summer evening, but it was an immoderate number by today’s standards, that much he knew. It could have been as few as five, but he thought it was probably more. And she was obviously in the last few weeks of another pregnancy. That would have been over ten years ago now. He had sat in his car and watched her corral them all into a red minivan, talking and laughing the whole time. It had been only months after that last sighting of Kay Kovatch that Ben had finally packed up and moved from Derby, South Carolina, over to Greenville, something he should have done long before. He hadn’t been back to Derby since, though he had continued to subscribe to the Derby Daily News for reasons he couldn’t explain— until a year ago, when he had canceled his subscription after being blindsided by a headline one morning: LOCAL MURDER STILL COLD 20 YEARS LATER. He wished he had looked at the application before now. He could have told Caroline to call the girl and tell her not to bother coming in, the position was already filled. Caroline would have tightened her mouth at the lie, since it wasn’t her own, but she would have done it. If there was one thing Caroline understood the value of, it was a well-timed lie. Ben glanced at the clock on his wall. Maybe he could still get out of it if he acted immediately. He could tell Caroline he had just remembered something urgent and would be back in an hour. He could tell her to cancel everything for the rest of the afternoon and . . . But he heard her voice now on the other side of his office door. 11

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Ja m ie La ngston Tu r ne r “Yes, he’s expecting you. Have a seat and I’ll let him know you’re here. You can leave your coat and umbrella out here if you want to.” He heard the click of Caroline’s heels as she approached the door again. She was two years older than Ben but seemed to have twice the energy. Brisk, busy Caroline, an overripe Barbie doll with her dyed strawberry blond hair, all her matching clothes, complete with shoes in every color—today it was purple. Ben couldn’t imagine how much room a woman like her would take up at home. She was divorced, though, so she didn’t have to compete with anybody for closet space. He sighed. He’d have to see the girl now. But he would make it fast. He would act very apologetic that she had made the trip over here for no reason, especially in the bad weather. He would tell her that the job had just been given to someone else only minutes before—too late for him to contact her. He would wish her well, stand to see her out, shake her hand if she offered hers, and act solicitous about her safety on the way home during this unseasonable cold snap. He would urge her to be careful in case the roads were slippery. Then he would close the door and throw her application into the trash can. Caroline tapped on his door and opened it. “Next applicant is here,” she said. “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” Ben said without looking at her. Caroline frowned at Ben. He was always saying that. He was standing over by the window as if in deep thought. Sometimes he aggravated the fire out of her, the way he always talked in circles and muttered things to himself, but other times she almost felt sorry for him, as she did now. He looked beaten down. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand, staring down at it. No doubt he had misplaced his glasses again. Catching sight of them on the bookcase, she came forward swiftly, whisked them off the shelf, and handed them to him. “Here, you might need these.” They were an old pair of reading glasses with oversized black frames. Clark Kent glasses. 12

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Ben nodded. “Helpful Caroline, always Johnny-on-the-spot,” he said. He put his glasses on and gave her a distracted smile. Caroline returned to the door. “Are you ready for her?” she said. He looked a little rumpled with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his necktie loosened, but that was nothing new. He was actually a fairly nice-looking man and would be even nicer-looking if you could disregard his quirks, which were many. Caroline often watched other women when they talked to Ben. He was the kind of man a lot of women liked, quiet and smart yet with a needy look in his eyes. Many of them acted as if they would like to take him home and meet those needs. “Big old lonely guy like you,” their eyes said, “shouldn’t be living by yourself. You need some female companionship.” She was sure at least two of the employees here at work, both too young, had their caps set for him. In Caroline’s opinion, he needed someone closer to his own age. Not herself, though. Not on your life. She knew too much about men in general and this one in particular. He would drive her out of her mind. “Yes, yes, let’s go ahead and get this show on the road,” he said, waving the piece of paper at her. Caroline opened the door and stood beside it. “You can come on in,” she said to the girl. She swung the door open wider and added, “Don’t be nervous. Mr. Buck’s harmless. Most of the time.” Kelly Kovatch, Caroline’s appointment book said. A tall girl with a long neck. Lots of things about her were long, in fact. Long matronly looking brown skirt, long-sleeved apricot blouse in a shiny fabric, long feet in brown loafers. Caroline liked to compare people to animals. This girl was a giraffe. Her blouse, buttoned all the way up to the top button, looked a couple of sizes too big around the neck but too short at the wrist. And very long eyelashes, Caroline noted as the girl passed her at the door. But then there was her hair—a short little shiny bob, much too neat to look stylish by today’s standards. She wore a small tan cap of some loosely woven fabric, which gave her head an 13

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Ja m ie La ngston Tu r ne r acorn-like effect. No jewelry, but she carried a tan shoulder purse, strapped diagonally across her chest. She had a pretty face and conscientious eyes. “I’m right out here if you need anything, Mr. Buck,” Caroline said, and then to the girl, “We’d sure love it if you were the right person. When Trish up and moved to California on us, we sure didn’t expect to have so much trouble finding somebody to take her place.” Then she closed the door. So much for telling the girl the position was already filled, Ben thought. He waved a hand toward the two wing armchairs in front of his desk. “Have a seat,” he said. He hadn’t yet looked at her directly but was aware of her height. He was guessing she was an attractive girl if she looked anything like her mother. Physically attractive, that is, which in her mother’s case hadn’t begun to make up for all the other ways in which she was anything but attractive. He sat down at his desk and pretended to be studying the application. He turned it over and saw the section marked Educational Background. Of course—he might have known. The girl had been homeschooled from grades five through twelve. That was exactly the kind of thing Kay Kovatch would have thrown herself into. She would have become convinced that the public schools were dens of wickedness. And private schools would have been out of the question for a woman who stayed home and kept having babies, a woman whose husband drove a UPS truck for a living. If Ben’s own wife had lived, Kay would no doubt have tried to rope her into the homeschooling thing, too, for she had been the kind of woman who had considered it her mission in life to teach other women how they should run their families. She had been outspoken about the fact that a woman belonged at home with her children instead of holding a job in the workplace. And she had been very persuasive. Chloe had known Kay only a few weeks when she had told Ben one night in bed that she was praying about whether to quit her part-time job at the animal shelter. Praying about it—that’s exactly what she had said. Chloe, his intelligent, 14

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strong-willed wife, who had never said a prayer in her life until she had met Kay Kovatch at an evening exercise class at the YMCA. “Well, let’s see, Kelly Kovatch,” he said now, deliberately mispronouncing the last syllable. “It’s Kovatch, Mr. Buck. It rhymes with watch. My father said it was a common name in Hungary, where his ancestors came from— as common as Smith is here.” Ben nodded. “And my name’s Buckley,” he said. “Caroline likes to take shortcuts.” He lifted his eyes now and looked at her. She sat very tall with her back away from the chair, her chin lifted slightly, her dark eyes boring a hole through him. The phrase spitting image came to his mind. He quickly glanced away. He had read in his Say It Ain’t So, Joe book that the phrase spitting image had originated in the South, perhaps as an altered form of “spirit and image.” He wondered what Kelly would say if he said right now, “You are the very spirit and image of your mother.” Except that her mother had been more filled out. This girl was all skin and bones. And flat-chested as a boy, a fact accentuated by the purse tightly strapped across her torso. A very pretty face, though. With longer hair she could pass for Natalie Wood in West Side Story. He remembered the very first time he had set eyes on Kay Kovatch over twenty-one years ago. She was at his house visiting Chloe one day after lunch when he had run home to get something. She and several of her children. He glanced down at the date of birth noted on the application. Not this girl, though; she wouldn’t have been born yet— not quite yet, though it struck him now that her mother must have been pregnant with her that first time he saw her. Kay and Chloe had been sitting at the kitchen table with an open Bible between them. No doubt he had noticed Kay’s good looks at the time. But after what she had done to his wife, he had never again thought of her as pretty. When she tried to speak with him two months later at the graveside, he had turned and walked away. And afterward when she had called and offered to help with the children, he cut 15

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Ja m ie La ngston Tu r ne r her off and told her they were taken care of. The last time she called, he had said nothing, only hung up on her. “So now that we’ve got our names straight,” he said to the girl, “let’s get started. This shouldn’t take too long.” He looked back down at the application. He had done dozens of these interviews in the past couple of weeks, but suddenly he forgot how he usually started. All he could think of was how he had come home another day shortly after that first one to find Chloe down on her knees by their bed, a Bible spread out in front of her. “Mr. Buckley, may I say something first?” Kelly leaned forward. She was sitting directly in line with the floor lamp by the door so that its soft glow appeared to emanate from her head. Ben nodded and made an inviting motion with his hand. “I didn’t write this on the form,” the girl said, “but I need to tell you up front that I’m willing to work as much as you need me, except not on Sundays.” Of course. He might have known this, too. Kay Kovatch’s kids wouldn’t violate Sundays by going to a job out in the big bad world. Their God was a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, and all that. Actually, this part was good. It would make it even easier to tell her she wasn’t right for the job. He already knew exactly what he would say: “Well, Ms. Kovatch, then I’m afraid we can’t use you. You see, it wouldn’t be fair to the other employees. We need to have everyone available anytime the store is open and the need arises.” In fact, he opened his mouth to say the words, but she spoke again. “I’ll work extra hours any other day of the week. And I’ll work hard. I have a good eye for design.” She looked at him steadily. No cajoling or begging. She was simply stating a fact. If he had felt like being rude, he could have pointed out that her good eye for design was nowhere evident in her appearance. And it wasn’t that he didn’t have the capacity for rudeness. He had told the last applicant as soon as she walked into his office that 16

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since clean air was important to him, they might as well not waste their time with a job interview. The woman had reeked of cigarette smoke. After she had stalked out, Caroline had come to his door, her arms folded disapprovingly. “What did you say to her?” she had said. “The truth.” There was absolutely no reason to apologize. “You could help me screen some of these people, you know,” he had told Caroline. “I assume your nose is in good working order.” Ben looked back down at Kelly Kovatch’s application, frowning and shaking his head. He would make it seem that he regretted deeply having to turn her down. Just as he opened his mouth again to speak, however, his eye caught something on the application that almost made him laugh. At the bottom of the back page, under Previous Job Experience, she had printed very neatly “baby-sitting, cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, giving flute lessons, pet care, yard work, tending vegetable garden, painting, car care, selling bread, teaching Sunday school, organizing parties, sewing, drawing, piano, calligraphy, home decorating, carpentry, cutting hair, writing plays.” And under Previous Employers she had written “Parents (Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kovatch), Pastor (Rev. Ian Shamblin), Neighbors (Whitleys, Hodges, Dillards, Gerbers),” with addresses and phones numbers for each one. What a child she was to think she could venture out into the marketplace with such credentials. No college education and no real work experience. Ben wondered if she had ridden her bicycle over here. Maybe it had those little pink plastic streamers on the handlebars. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, then opened it again. “Ms. Kovatch,” he said, “you are . . .” The phrase manifestly unqualified was the one that came to mind, but for some reason he couldn’t get it out. “I can do the job,” the girl said. “In fact, I brought pictures to show you.” “Pictures?” Ben asked. 17

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Ja m ie La ngston Tu r ne r “Yes, I have a pictorial portfolio of my work.” And the girl unzipped her purse and pulled out a small photo book. A pictorial portfolio. Kay Kovatch had probably coached her to call it that. They had probably acted out the whole job interview at the kitchen table while younger brothers and sisters read history lessons and did math problems. Or maybe the entire family had gathered to watch the mock interview, clapping proudly at the end. Kay Kovatch would be in her fifties now, so surely she was done having babies. Still, there could very well be close to ten children, with this girl most likely somewhere in the middle. He leaned forward and took the photo book, scolding himself for not having already ended this interview. There was no chance he was going to hire this girl, so why drag it out? He would hate having someone around who constantly reminded him of the woman who had brought about such a change in Chloe during those last couple of months of her life and, in doing that, had made his own life so miserable. What made a girl like this one actually think she could succeed in today’s business world anyway? He wondered what she would do the first time she heard Lester and Morris in the break room. And he wondered what Lester and Morris would do when they saw the likes of Kelly Kovatch working on the showroom floor, when they had to take directions from her about what to install or where to move things. He could imagine their eyes as they looked her up and down, took in her sharp bones and angles, her clothes hanging off her broomstick frame, every button securely fastened. Ben opened her photo book and flipped through a few pages. Maybe as soon as next week this would strike him funny, but it certainly didn’t right now. The pictures had been printed on regular paper, so the images were fuzzy. It looked like she had tried to cover all the bases, though; he’d give her that. She had evidently had a hand in decorating every kind of room you could think of. Below each picture was a caption rendered neatly in a variety of 18

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calligraphy scripts. One picture showed the inside of a playhouse, with the caption “Karla and Kitty’s New Playhouse.” “I helped my dad design and build that for my sisters two summers ago,” Kelly said. “I made the braided rag rug out of all our old clothes.” Ben nodded. Kay Kovatch’s kids would know how to recycle old things. Another picture showed a nursery with a half-dozen cribs and three baby swings. “Charity Bible Church Nursery,” the caption read. The walls were painted green, with a wallpaper border depicting a cartoonish Noah leading pairs of animals to the ark. The curtains were green with white trim, and the carpet was dark green. Toys were stowed neatly in white bins against one wall, and large colorful pictures hung above them. There were close-ups of these: Mary and Joseph with baby Jesus, Jesus blessing the children, Jesus teaching on a hillside, Jesus walking on the water. “I drew the pictures,” Kelly said. “They were chalk drawings I did for Vacation Bible School two years ago, and we had them framed.” Ben looked closer. No doubt the grainy quality of the photo made the drawings look better than they actually were. “One of my brothers helped me paint the walls and put up the border,” she said, “and I made all the curtains and the cushions for the rocking chairs.” Ben turned a page and saw the caption “Mrs. Hodges’ FifthGrade Classroom.” The photo showed a bulletin board with a big pink flamingo standing on one foot and the title “Ornithologically Speaking” in cutout letters across the top and winding down the side. Pictures of different kinds of birds were mounted and displayed all around the flamingo, with typed paragraphs beneath each one. “That’s our neighbor’s classroom,” Kelly said. “She teaches fifth grade at Derby Elementary School. She gave me two boxes of old National Geographic magazines and asked me to come up with some bulletin boards. That was one of the last ones I did for her.” 19

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Ja m ie La ngston Tu r ne r Ben looked at the girl. She was staring at him. He heard sleet pelting against the windowpane behind him. He swiveled his chair to the side and looked toward the wall. His office was stark—beige walls, only the barest furnishings. He could guess what the girl must have thought when she walked in—that whoever got this job would do well to start here. This is how he liked it, though. He didn’t want an office with stuff all over the walls and tabletops. He couldn’t stand clutter, although he knew people would find that hard to believe, given the perpetual state of his desktop. Ben turned back to the photo book on his desk. The next page showed a picture of a long table covered with dozens of science projects. The caption read, “Piedmont Home Education Association Science Fair.” “They asked me to organize the display for that last spring,” Kelly said. “There were about a dozen more tables as big as that one. I did all the posters and labels and award certificates and then arranged all the projects by age groups. That big one of the model oil rig was the winner for the high school division.” Ben wished he had thought to ask Caroline how many more applicants were scheduled for interviews. He knew this girl was the last one today, but what if she were the last one, period? He doubted that she could handle the job of floor designer long-term, but maybe she could tide them over until they could find somebody professional. And he could always use another floorwalker; the newest one had already given notice that she had found another job. If nothing else, at least they would have another pair of hands to do all the packing and dismantling when it came time for the move later this year. Ben hadn’t told anyone except Caroline about the move yet, but he knew they were all talking. They had to suspect something was up when they were practically the only business still open in the whole mall. He had known when they first leased this space, a former department store, that it would be only temporary, three or four years at the most. When they had moved in, the owner had told him there 20

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were plans to close the mall, maybe to tear it down unless someone came forward with an offer to buy it. There had been talk of a German firm wanting it for office space or the city using it for a new vocational school. But nothing had come of any of it, and a deal was now in the works to sell the whole tract of land for a subdevelopment, which meant everything would be leveled. Still, there was the question of whether he could tolerate the sight of Kay Kovatch’s daughter every day. Ben picked up the girl’s application again and turned it over. “So has the work around the neighborhood and church dried up?” he said. “Is that why you’re interviewing for a job?” “Well, not really. We just felt like it was a good time. I’ll be twentyone in a couple of months. And it sounded like an interesting job.” Ben closed the photo book. “This is a big enterprise we’ve got here at the Upstate Home and Garden Bazaar, Ms. Kovatch. Just over a hundred different vendors and growing all the time. It’s not quite the same as sewing curtains or putting together a science fair.” “Right,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect it to be.” Her eyes never left his face. “I can do anything you give me to do, Mr. Buckley.” He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. For some reason he remembered one of the last things Chloe had ever said to him. It was only days before she died. “You’re not nearly as gruff on the inside as you try to make people think you are.” She had been leaning over him from behind, tickling his ear with a strand of her hair. He hadn’t even answered her but had gotten up and walked away. He straightened his chair and looked back at Kelly. He took his glasses off and pushed the photo book across his desk toward her. “And if someone decided to let you try,” he said at length, “could you start on Monday?” When she left his office a few minutes later, Ben swung his chair around to face the window. “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” he said aloud. “Please, say it ain’t so.”

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