The Confession Club (ARC) Read online

  He planted behind the barn, never mind that it was only the third week of May. Imagine. Tomatoes. Basil. Carrots. Butter lettuce and romaine. Sweet peas. Cukes. For free, more or less. He swept out the house with a broom he found in someone’s trash, cleaned the windows with newspapers and a half-full bottle of Windex he found there, too, brought home a busted-up bicycle he might be able to fix. When his phone rings with a call from Proud Mary, who was nominally his girlfriend, he doesn’t answer. When it rings with a call from anyone else he used to hang around with, he doesn’t answer, either. Lift the page on the Magic Slate, man. Got to.

  It’s warm today, and after John checks on the garden, he sits down, leans against the barn wall, and settles in for some thinking time. This is the most peaceful place he’s ever been, and maybe the most beautiful. At night, in the absence of city light, he sees so many stars that the dark sky looks salted. Laura wanted to live out in the country, and what did he say? No. But maybe she was right. Maybe it would have saved them.

  He is relieved to know that he can still use a library for so many things. It’s a little library, of course, but they have plugs for charging his phone, they have a couple of computers for public use. He hasn’t seen any other people he thinks are homeless, but then he doesn’t look particularly homeless, either. In the farmhouse, he found a stash of men’s clothes in a plastic bag on the floor of a closet. There were also shoes that fit him well enough: sneakers, some black dress shoes, and a pair of barn boots. He washed the clothes at Lila’s Laundromat (WHERE KLEAN IS KING!), and, voilà, he could practically run for office now. He found some chipped dishes in the kitchen cupboards, he found tarnished silverware in a stuck drawer he pried open, and there were a few pots and pans way back in one of the lower cupboards. He found a girlie calendar from 1959, and a stack of record albums, mostly jazz, which surprised him. He found a metal bed frame in the rafters of the barn and brought it into the living room. He stuffed some shirts with hay for a mattress. His backpack is his pillow. There’s an armchair in the basement he might bring up if there aren’t too many mice in it. The kitchen table he did bring up from the basement. It’s one of those old 1950s Formica ones, a turquoise color, and there are four turquoise-and-white vinyl chairs, rips in every one of them, but they are sturdy enough for sitting. He ferries back and forth plastic water containers—he bought a couple of containers new and now refills them in the bathrooms of gas stations. Next time he goes to town, maybe he’ll find some cheap towels. He knows that Our Lady of Peace has a thrift store but it’s only open on Thursdays—hard for him to remember when it’s Thursday. Without a job, he finds that his life lacks the kind of structure that makes specific days matter.

  He builds a little fire outside when he needs heat; the nightly breeze is his air conditioner, the woods his bathroom. What else does a man need?

  A yellow butterfly lands on John’s knee and he suddenly crashes. Under the blue sky and in view of the milkweed, he sobs. Because … oh, you know. The warmth of the day, the sun like a blanket across his shoulders. The near-lyrical pattern of the butterfly’s flight away from him. Himself alive, and that a sin when he watched so many others fall. Himself still upon the earth: a man with fingers, feeling fingerless.

  But. He gets up. He’ll see what he can afford at the hardware store to maybe fix the bicycle. He’ll see if the bakery has thrown out yesterday’s day-old. He’ll find out where the dump is; always good stuff at a dump. Begging on the streets won’t work here; soon, he’ll need to find day jobs. It scares him, but he’ll do it so he can stay here. For now.

  A Favor

  Wednesday morning, on what she thought would be a day off, Iris Winters rings Joanie Benson’s doorbell three times before Joanie yanks it open. She’s wearing a white bathrobe and has a towel wrapped lopsidedly around her head.

  “I’m so sorry,” Joanie says breathlessly. “I’m running late. I was in the shower, and I took way longer than I meant to. I always do that. I go into the shower wanting to be an environmentalist and come out a hedonist.” She steps aside. “Come in, come in, I’m so grateful you were able to come. You’re the real cake doctor!”

  Iris waves her hand. “Don’t give me too much credit. I’ve never made Black Cake.” She does not add that she’s never heard of it.

  Joanie leads her into the kitchen. Ingredients and bowls are all over the place. There’s a cutting board with a knife lying on it that has yet to be used, from the looks of it.

  “I have to have this cake done by five, and I also have to make dinner for six. I don’t know what I was thinking. I printed out the recipe without really looking at it, thinking, you know, ‘Oh, it’s just a cake, how hard can it be?’ But then this morning, I read it all the way through, and, Lord!”

  “May I see the recipe?” Iris asks. Joanie hands her the printout and Iris surveys the long list of ingredients: ten eggs; a pound each of prunes, raisins, dates, currants, cherries; candied citrus peel; cherry brandy; Angostura bitters … The time to make it is five hours, and it’s now eleven-fifteen. She looks up at Joanie. “First of all, do you even have all this stuff?”

  “Well, of course I don’t have all that stuff! I was going to get up this morning, go to the store, get what I needed for the cake and the dinner. But then when I read the list of ingredients, I just … well, I panicked and called you.”

  Iris scans the directions. Grind macerated fruit to a coarse paste; caramelize sugar until it’s almost black, add boiling water (furious steam here); it may stiffen up when you try to add it to the batter.…

  “This is pretty advanced,” she tells Joanie.

  “Right?” Joanie clutches her bathrobe under her chin.

  “How about if I help you make another kind of cake?”

  “Oh, no. I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I told everyone I was making Black Cake.”

  “I see.” One thing Iris likes about living here is the way you can pretty much count on everyone keeping their word. There are times she misses Boston, where she moved from, but more and more, she’s happy to call this place home.

  “Why don’t we see if there’s another recipe for Black Cake that might be a bit simpler?” she asks Joanie.

  “Oh, I didn’t even think of that!” Joanie says. “I was just so happy to see a recipe for it at all that I printed it out right away. They were making it in the 1800s—can you imagine? Probably before. And they didn’t even have microwaves!”

  “Where’s your computer?” Iris asks, and Joanie takes her to a little desk in the living room. Iris googles “Black Cake” and finds a much more user-friendly recipe. “This is the one,” she says, “but we’ll still need to get going—it takes several hours. And we’ll have to make browning for this one. Hmm. I’ve been meaning to try that—it’s basically just burnt sugar and water.”

  Joanie sits down on the sofa and sighs. “I don’t know, maybe this is too hard. I’m going to have to serve something else. I’m so disappointed.”

  “We can do it,” Iris says. “Why don’t you start on dinner? Don’t worry about the cake for now. I’ll go to the grocery store and then to the liquor store—the one on the county line is huge. I forgot the name of it, but it should have port wine and white rum.”

  “County Line Liquors?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “I never go there. It’s way too far.”

  It’s a ten-minute car ride, at the most. Iris says, “It’s no problem. I’ll head out now. When I come back, we’ll make the cake together. It’ll go much more quickly with two of us.”

  “Let me give you some money.”

  “Pay me later. Just put a check mark by all the things on the recipe that you need.”

  After Joanie checks off the items she needs and thanks Iris again (and again), Iris gets in her car and heads for the grocery store. Miraculously, she finds everything she nee
ds, though the brandied cherries and candied orange peel are retrieved from some apparently little-used storage space in the back, and have the dust to prove it. “Still good, though!” the man who got them for her proclaims, pointing to the expiration dates. “Makin’ a fruitcake?” he asks.

  “Something like that,” Iris says.

  “I hate fruitcake!” he says cheerfully, and Iris says, “I do, too.”

  “Why you makin’ it then?” he asks, and Iris says, “Long story.”

  “I bet you got some old aunt or somethin’,” the man says, and so Iris feels obliged to hurriedly fill him in.

  Finally, she’s on the old two-lane blacktop that still has telephone wires running along either side of it. What is romantic about telephone poles? Nothing, Iris supposes, and yet she finds them romantic. Birds on the wires lined up like notes on a staff. Many of the poles listing slightly to the right or the left. You might even see a heart carved into one here and there, initials inside it. What tender hope is in carved initials, affection made public that old-fashioned way.

  She turns off the radio and lowers her car window all the way. Spring and fall are her favorite seasons, with spring having a slight edge: the robins, the reemergence of life that was buried under snow. There are banks of lilacs blooming in front of many houses, especially as she gets farther out into the country, and when she drives by them, she slows down. Iris likes the scent of lilacs as much as anyone, but she also likes their beautiful colors: white, light violet, dark violet, pink. In her bedroom, she has a small oil painting of deep-purple lilacs that she bought at a Newbury Street art gallery, and it’s her favorite painting. She’s just thinking you don’t see that dark shade often enough when she spies an overgrown stand of them in front of a farmhouse. The house is clearly abandoned. What would be the harm? On the way back from the liquor store, she’ll take a bunch of them.

  It takes longer than Iris anticipated at the liquor store, because the cashier—FRITZ, his name tag says—and the customer ahead of her are showing each other pictures of their grandchildren on their phones. “This one here is potty-trained already,” says the customer.

  Next the customer wonders aloud whether he should buy some beef jerky. “It ain’t gonna go bad, Fred,” says the cashier. “And take it from me. A day will come when you’ll be setting at a train crossing, one of those long freight trains going through, and you’ll be wishing you had something to chew on, and there it will be in your glove compartment. Wa-la.”

  “Oh, all right,” Fred says. “I’ll get some.” He takes his time sorting through the various flavors and peering through the bottom portion of his bifocals to read the ingredients. Despite her time crunch, Iris doesn’t get irritated. To her, the man is fascinating to watch. He’s about eighty, she supposes, dressed in clean bib jeans and a white T-shirt, with a red flannel shirt serving as a kind of jacket. He’s got wire-rimmed glasses and a comfortable paunch, thick white hair and beard. He looks like an off-season Santa Claus. And Fritz the clerk is an interesting counterpoint: in his forties, Iris would guess, a thin and wiry frame, a nervous talker, a wildly prominent Adam’s apple, a few strands of light-brown hair raked over his head. He wears a dark-green apron over a white shirt and black pants; a wristwatch is loose on his arm. She stands waiting. And waiting. She doesn’t pull out her phone to pass the time because she might miss something.

  Iris has changed since she moved to Mason. In keeping with the pace of life here, she’s slowed down in everything but her morning walks. She’s become more tolerant and appreciative of people’s eccentricities. It’s the way folks are here; there’s a willingness to let people be that rubs off.

  Jason and Abby Summers, the people who live next door to Iris, own the small but well-curated Menagerie Bookshop. They are relatively new to Mason as well, having moved here a couple of years ago from Chicago, and sometimes Iris goes over for dinner with them and their twelve-year-old son, Link—casual, last-minute affairs, the invitation issued from their front porch to hers. After dinner, when Link has gone off to his room, the adults sometimes talk about whether the charm they’ve found here can last, whether small towns can continue to retain their character, their kindness and basic sense of decency. They agree that it has something to do with the smallness of the population. It’s harder to be horrible to someone you see every day.

  It takes a good twenty minutes before Iris is back on the road with the ingredients for the cake—and with her own beef jerky, it might as well be said, teriyaki flavor. When she approaches the lilacs, she checks her watch. It wouldn’t take long to get them, but she’d be in a hurry, and she doesn’t want to be in a hurry when she gathers lilacs. She might want first to sit under the tree and lean against the trunk and do absolutely nothing. She’ll come back. Her class tomorrow (Super-Fast Sticky Buns) isn’t until eleven. She’ll have plenty of time in the morning; she is now and forever an early riser. All hope is in the early morning, is what Iris thinks.

  This time when Joanie answers the door, she’s dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. Beneath a yellow kerchief, her hair is in rollers, and she points to them, saying, “I think I’m the only one in America who still uses these. My grandson calls them ‘roller coasters.’ How much do I owe you?” After Iris tells her, Joanie goes upstairs and returns with cash. “I keep my money in a pillowcase in my linen closet,” she says. “I’ve had it with banks.”

  My goodness, Iris thinks, but says nothing. They don’t have time to explore the erosion of trust in American institutions; they have a cake to make.

  When they go into the kitchen, Iris is glad to see that the cake ingredients Joanie did have are neatly lined up. Iris adds what she bought to the assemblage. “Ready?” she says.

  “Ready.” Joanie stretches out her hands and cracks her knuckles. “I got everything all done for dinner, so we can just concentrate on the cake. I went and got a premade salad and some nice dinner rolls and I have five-hour stew in the oven. You throw everything together, stick it in the oven, and then nothing to do until you serve it.”

  Iris turns to face her. “Five-hour stew?”

  “It’s real good. Everybody who tastes it loves it.”

  “It cooks for five hours?”

  “Yup!”

  “At what temperature?”

  “Two-fifty. You have to keep it low, of course, when you cook it that long.”

  Iris sighs. “Do you have a roaster oven?”

  Joanie frowns. “No.”

  “Because the cake has to bake at three-fifty for an hour and a half.”

  “Well, I thought we could just cook the cake longer.”

  “If you do that, your crust will be gummy and pale.” Iris can practically hear Lucille Howard, the woman who taught her how to bake, saying that, in her pleasantly aggrieved way.

  Iris looks at her watch. “What time does your club meet, again?”

  “Five o’clock.”

  “It’s a bit after twelve now,” Iris says. “The fruit has to soak in the rum for two and a half hours, so—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Joanie says. “I’m just going to make Rice Krispie Treats! Everybody makes fun of them, but you find me one person who doesn’t like them.”

  “You can still have Black Cake,” Iris says calmly. “Pack up the ingredients, and I’ll make the cake at my house. I’ll deliver it to you. It might not be right at five, but I’ll get it here in time for dessert, maybe seven at the latest?”

  “Really? My goodness, that would be wonderful! How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “How much do you charge for that?”

  “Oh. Nothing. I’ll do it for free.”

  “Why would you ever do such a thing?” Joanie asks.

  Iris shrugs. “You’ll take another class from me, won’t you? And tell people about it? And anyway, I kind of love a challenge.”

  “But this is jus
t above and beyond! How will I ever repay you?”

  “Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me.”

  Joanie stares at her. “The Godfather?”

  “Right. I just watched it again the other night. It still holds up.”

  “Well,” Joanie says, “I know you’re kidding, but whatever favor you ask, I will do. That’s a promise from the heart. I really, really mean it.”

  “Could you put all the ingredients in a bag for me?” Iris asks, and Joanie packs them carefully. On her face is that oddly pained expression people sometimes get when they feel guilt mixed with gratitude.

  Back home, Iris walks into the kitchen with her heavy bag and drops it on the table. She is just about to start unloading it when she freezes. Upstairs, there is the sound of someone walking around. She swallows, then looks up at the ceiling. “Hello?”

  No answer. She moves toward the door, pulling her cellphone from her purse. She is caught between fear for her life and irritation that she can’t get going on that cake. But then she hears a familiar voice calling her name.

  “Maddy?” There is the sound of someone thumping down the stairs. And then there she is, the beautiful young woman who used to live in this house with Arthur and Lucille, the two old people who took her in as a pregnant teenager. The house is Maddy’s—Arthur willed it to her—and she rents it to Iris. The last time Iris saw Maddy was a bit over a year and a half ago, when she’d gotten married. Then her hair was black. Now it’s a smooth honey-blond, worn long and wavy, old Hollywood style. She’s dressed in black pants and a black T-shirt, black flats.