Blessings Read Free

lemonade, was coming over the Blue Mountains when Skip Cuddy opened his eyes and turned toward the window. He couldn’t remember at first where he was, just knew by the fragile fog of the summer light that it was early, that his alarm clock would sleep longer than he had. That was all right. For his whole life, as far back as his mind could wander, he’d woken up early, easy, as though morning held a nice surprise, which had never been dimly true.
    Still, he’d never, ever woken up entirely sure where he was. Joe and Debbie’s trailer, where he’d slept on the pullout couch in the living room, beer bottles and played-out butts on the end tables on either side of his pillow, half of them smeared red-black from Debbie’s lipstick. The county jail, top bunk, with the sprayed concrete ceiling only a foot from his face and the sounds of people hawking and snoring and farting in their sleep. Even his room in the back of his aunt and uncle’s house just off Front Street in Mount Mason, where the maple tree outside had grown so big that the room was dark day and night. Almost four years he’d lived in that room, after his father moved south, and four years he’d woken befuddled and adrift. He thought that maybe he’d known where he was when he’d lived in his parents’ house, before his mother died, when he was little. But he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember anything except that his bed had a quilt with a cowboy on it, riding a horse that was trying to throw the cowboy off. And that his mother hung her stockings to dry over the tapsin the tub. And that his father had a strange little stand-up thing in the bedroom that he hung his shirt and pants on overnight. First the pants, then the shirt. Shoes at the bottom. It wasn’t a whole lot to remember. His whole childhood seemed to have gone up in smoke with the little Cape Cod where he grew up.
    Skip’s pants were lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. He tried to get two days of wearing out of a pair of pants, since he wasn’t allowed to use the washer and dryer in the big house, and there wasn’t one in the rooms over the garage. Blessings garage had bays for five cars and a small but complete machine shop in the back, but no washer and dryer. Old Mr. Blessing had had big ideas when he bought the place in 1926 and hired Mr. Foster to run it. He’d had the carpenters build an apartment over the garage, not too big but big enough for Foster to move his family in, so that the caretaker was always around to see that the stone walls stayed straight, the paths stayed mowed, the roofs stayed sound, always around to fix the leaks and the cracks that came with a house with eight bedrooms and ten baths. After that first Foster got arthritis in his hands and gave in to his wife’s nagging about being closer to town, a second Foster, the first’s middle son, took over. His name was Tom, but everyone at Blessings just called him Foster, as they had his father. “Just like a plantation,” Sunny Blessing had murmured once. That Foster liked to work on cars and his wife cooked for Mrs. Blessing, meals that were always described as good plain food, which meant meatloaf, stew, and homemade pie. The couple had had three boys, and Edwin Blessing had died happy, thinking there would always be Fosters to keep the grass trim and the paint fresh. But those three grew up and got jobs in town and later buried their parents and carted some of their stuff away and gave the rest to the Goodwill or just abandoned it in the garage apartment.
    Now Skip cooked with Mrs. Foster’s pots and pans, which the sons had left behind. When he cooked, which wasn’t often. Canned soup, mostly, that he ate in front of the little television he’d put in the living room at the end of the hallway, on an oldsteamer trunk that actually had hotel stickers on it. If he put his soup bowl dead center, at his right hand was a big blue-and-white sticker that said “Stateroom number,” then an 18 that