Some stories refuse to stay cut. This one belongs to Maybell, the schoolteacher with the emerald eyes and the long memory. Her story first appeared in an early draft of A Hundred Ways to Say I Love You. Though it slipped from the final pages, it’s still part of Radiant’s heart.
AGNES LOVED MAYBELL’S stories.
But her favorite was about how she met George.
Maybell was a teacher, and George, the school janitor—a tall, quiet boy, with a shock of blonde hair so bright it was almost white. He never spoke to her, but whenever Maybell appeared in the hall with her class, first grade in her first year teaching, he’d stop whatever he was doing, emptying a trash can, pushing a broom, to nod his head and give a little smile, one that just lifted the right side of his face. He’d also turn as pink as a spring rose. He did that for the whole school year.
Maybell was smitten at once.
“I waited and waited for him to speak to me. A lady didn’t speak to a gentleman first, not in those days!” Maybell’s emerald eyes were bright with the memory. “But he never said a word, so I figured he just didn’t like me.”
But George didn’t speak to anyone. Maybell didn’t know it yet, but he was deaf.
She came back to school in the fall after a summer spent thinking about the tall, silent boy with the almost-white hair and the crooked smile. She would get him to speak to her.
Her class included several rambunctious boys, who she often escorted to the principal’s office. She didn’t mind. There was George, wearing a herringbone newsboy cap now, tipping it to her with a bright smile.
The skip in her heart doubled, and her knees felt weak and wobbly. But still, he didn’t speak to her.
As winter neared and the cold hunkered in, George started growing a beard, red and full. It made him look so handsome, Maybell couldn’t even make eye contact, afraid her legs would fail her. She’d hurry past him, her black hair fanning away from her face as she rushed by, and he’d leaned on his broom, smile spreading wider, all the way to his ears, now as pink as the petals she’d pull from the stems.
He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me . . .
She could feel his eyes following her. But still, he didn’t speak to her.
“I think he likes you, George, the janitor,” Shirley, the kindergarten teacher said one chilly December afternoon, as the children played outside during recess.
“What makes you say that? He’s never said a word to me.” Her ears burned hot under her woolen cap.
“Well of course he hasn’t, you silly girl,” Shirley said, her breath coming out in giant white puffs. “He doesn’t talk to anyone. He’s deaf. But he does read lips. Really well, from what I hear.”
Maybell wondered what on earth she was going to do now. Somehow, in the span of eighteen months, she had fallen in love with George. Even though a lady didn’t talk first, when the gentleman couldn’t speak, well, what was she to do?
During the winter break that year, she spent every spare moment she had studying the only book she could find in the local library on American Sign Language. When January came around, she asked George, with shaking hands and clumsy signs, if he would have lunch with her.
His broad smile told her yes. He didn’t have sign a thing. When he met her at the picnic table in the schoolyard, he had lunch pail in one hand and a bunch of spring roses in the other. She never thought to ask how he’d come upon them in the dead of winter.
“And that was it,” Maybell told Agnes. “We were married that summer. He stood more than a foot taller than I did, but he made me feel like I was the biggest thing in his world. Each and every day,” she said. “Each and every day.”
Agnes could listen to Maybell tell stories for hours, and she told them like they’d just happened yesterday, not fifty years before.
They had three daughters, born in three successive years, the older two signing before they could speak. They knew their father was different from other fathers, but not in bad ways, just special ones. For one, he was a giant, towering over all the other dads—able to swing them to heights that made their mother lose her breath as they shrieked with excitement. And he had a secret language only they shared, with magic hands that flew through words like swallows feeding in the summer sky at dusk.
But not all of Maybell’s stories were happy.
Her youngest daughter, Margie, died as a baby. She’d been a surprise, and her father’s special girl. He never quite shook the sadness of losing her, and it weighed him down. He walked a little slower, lifted his two remaining daughters a little less high.
“When you reach the end,” Maybell told Agnes, “You realize how quickly it’s all gone by, and how things you thought you’d survived, you really didn’t. They’re waiting for you. They’re not really finished at all. Margie’s waiting for me, and I can’t wait to see her.”
In the early days after the child died, Maybell sat alone at the kitchen table late into the night, holding a pink bonnet her mother had made. Each baby had worn, but it still smelled of her lost daughter. She didn’t cry, just rubbed the cotton stitches between her fingers, listening to the breeze rustle through the fall leaves of the backyard trees.
That winter Maybell’s hair turned completely white, whiter than George’s, and it stayed that way for the rest of her life.
Agnes wept as Maybell told Margie’s story. “Oh, don’t cry, dear,” she said. “It will be set right soon enough. Soon enough, you’ll see.”
Outside, the wind moved through the trees, soft as breath. Somewhere in the rustle, Maybell heard a child’s laughter again.
Long after Maybell was gone, Agnes still told her story—the teacher, the janitor, the roses blooming out of season—because some loves refuse to fade.
