Dee seemed always to be working. With my being back, she decided to clean the wallpaper in the living room, dining room, and Sunday room, a chore she had not tackled since I was last there. Rachel came downstairs to help. With wallpaper cleansing putty, the three of us scrubbed the walls from ceiling to floor, removing the dirt until the wallpaper looked like new again. Dee washed all the curtains in those three rooms as well and had Stacey and Man set up the curtain rack, an eight-feet-long, six-feet-high adjustable frame for drying curtains, which were attached to straight pins embedded all along the frame. The walls and the curtains took several days, but after the walls were cleaned and the newly washed curtains rehung, the floors mopped and waxed, Dee nodded with satisfaction.
“I just don’t know how you do it,” I told her as I helped hang the wash on lines strung between the house and the ivy-covered garage. “Do all this work and take care of all these people.”
Dee laughed. “I’m used to hard work.”
“Yeah, I know, but with four single men in the house?”
“Just made it clear to them,” Dee said. “There’s some things I’ll do for them, but other things they have to do for themselves. I’ve got one husband I’m taking care of, and my girls. I’m not their wife, and I’m not their mother. They need to take care of themselves and help me keep this house clean. I can’t stand a filthy house.” I laughed; Dee didn’t. “I wasn’t kidding with them! I’ve got two little girls to take care of and I’m teaching them how to take care of themselves, so I’m certainly not going to be cleaning up behind a bunch of grown men.”
“I admire you,” I said. Together we pulled a sheet from the washtub and folded it to pin on the line. It was a sunshine day and there was a soft wind that blew the fresh wet sheet back against us. As I pushed the sheet away and pinned it, without looking at Dee, I said, “Dee, I think I’m pregnant.”
Dee, clothespins in her hand, turned toward me. “Really, Cassie? Have you seen a doctor?”
“Did you ever see one when you thought you were?”
“No, never. You want to see one?”
“No. I’ve pretty much had it with doctors.”
“You tell Flynn you thought you were pregnant?”
I finished with the sheet and stared out at all Dee’s bright multicolored petunias growing in large flower beds around the house, the garage, and along the fences. “No.” I told Dee about Faye and how things were when I had left Flynn.
“You know you have to tell him.”
I was silent.
“You know you do. It’s not like you don’t love him.”
“No. It’s not like I don’t love him.”
“You think he’s been unfaithful?”
“I just don’t know, Dee. He wouldn’t say.”
Dee finished pinning a pillowcase on the line and turned to me. “From what you’ve told me about Flynn, you’ve got a good man, a really good man. Whatever’s between you, you need to go back and work it out. Don’t throw it away, Cassie. Like they say, a good man is hard to find. Not only that, I’ve seen a picture of this man and, believe me, he’s not hard on the eyes!”
We both laughed, and I felt my heart race at the very thought of Flynn.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
When I returned so unexpectedly to Toledo, my brothers and Dee had pretty much guessed there was trouble between Flynn and me. Dee even asked me outright if Flynn had done something to make me leave and Stacey had said, “Dee, it’s not our business.” It wasn’t their business, but I had to tell them something. What I told them was the truth. Flynn and I had had a disagreement. But that was all. Now I had told Dee the full story, but not my brothers. Whether they accepted my explanation or not, they had not questioned me further.
Now, as I sorted out my feelings about Flynn, I settled back into life on Dorr Street. Clayton Chester had a new white Buick convertible, and I teased him about it. “I suppose being so near to getting your engineering degree and working too, you had to splurge on something. Oh, yes, I heard about you riding all around town with your hair blowing in the wind. Dee wrote me. Heard about all these pretty young ladies riding around with you too. I suppose you wouldn’t want to be taking your big sister for a ride.”
Little Man smiled at my teasing. “I’ll do you one better, Cassie.” He dug into his pocket, pulled out his keys, and tossed them to me. “Anytime you want to take it out, you got it.”
I took him up on that. It was fun driving the Buick, top down, when I wanted to get away from the house and be by myself. Sometimes I took ’lois and Rie with me. Sometimes Rachel went with me too. We always had fun together. I noticed that Rachel also went riding with Man, and Rie and ’lois tagged along with them as well, like little chaperones. But both Clayton Chester and Rachel firmly insisted that they were only friends, just as they had been since childhood. We took them at their word, though we speculated that Rachel would be a perfect fit to the family.
Although I was missing Flynn, I was enjoying my life in Toledo, enjoying the busy days and the family-filled evenings. On some of those late summer evenings when the weather was fine and the house felt stuffy and hot from the heat of the day, all the family both from upstairs and downstairs spilled out onto the tiny back porch and onto the small lawn sandwiched between the house and the garage, and everybody began to talk about back home. Stories that had been told time and time again were now told again, and we all enjoyed the retelling. As Rie and ’lois chased lightning bugs in the soft dusk of the summer evening, I wondered how much of the stories they would remember.
There were new stories, too, to tell. One was about Joe Louis. Christopher-John told the story. “Cassie, you hear about Man here driving around the champ?” Dee had written me about it but I didn’t know all the details. Christopher-John filled me in. “Seems there was this real pretty young lady Clayton Chester was seeing and she really liked that Buick of his. Her family liked it too. Now, her family was somehow connected with the champ and heard he was coming to town and needed someone to drive him around. That young lady figured Man and his white convertible would be perfect. So, when the champ came to Toledo, it was our little brother here took him all over town. Worked out well for him. Got to meet a lot of important people and got to drive that pretty girl!”
I turned to Man. “You’ve been doing big things here in Toledo! You still driving that pretty girl around?”
“No.”
“No? So, what happened?”
Man glanced over at Rachel sitting on the porch swing. “You’re looking at her.”
I smiled and so did everyone else as we all turned to look at the shy Rachel. “I thought you two were supposed to be just friends,” I said.