Authors: Anne Leclaire
I was checking out the car in the drive, an ancient blue Volvo, more rust than metal, when a girl came out of Luke's room, leading the black dog. She wore tooled turquoise boots and low-rise jeans that went so far beyond tight, they could cause internal injury. Tendrils from a tattoo snaked up out of the waistband and disappeared beneath an orange cropped T-shirt. She had hard, dark eyes and yellow hair the wrong side of unruly that framed a slender,
strong-jawed face. The total effect was what Grandma Ruth called trailer trash. Over the years, I'd had this type in my classroom. They always looked tougher than they were, and often, curiously, they were the most creative. Usually they ended up being the ones I missed the most at graduation. I held out my hand. “You must be Paige,” I said. “I'm Jessie. From hospice.”
“I know,” she said. She barely brushed my hand with hers before placing the dog's leash in my palm. “Rocker needs to go out.” The dark eyes defied me to argue.
The Lab came right to me, sniffed my crotch. I nudged his head away.
“When he's finished,” Paige went on, “just bring him in. Then you can go along.”
“Nona's gone out,” I said.
Paige gave me a well, duh look. Obviously Nona was not there. “I'll stay with Luke,” she said. “There's really no need for you to hang around.” She returned to her father's room before I could get out one word.
Difficult. Can be confrontational. The notes in Luke's file didn't half sum up his daughter. I was thinking more along the lines of Impossible. I didn't bother to put on my jacket and got rain-soaked while Rocker sniffed around for a spot to take a dump. (Rocker. What was he? A chair?) While he deposited a remarkably rank pile, I replayed the scene with Paige. No How are you? Nice to meet you. Just Rocker needs to go out. If Ashley were here, she would demand an apology from the girl, but that was another way I differed from my sister. And apparently from Paige. I tried to avoid confrontations. No doubt Paige felt like she was the only one in the universe to ever lose a parent or to be estranged from her mama. If opportunity presented itself, I would tell her that, in some ways, she was fortunate, in that she could tell Luke that she loved him and he could say it right back to her. At least, they still had time. They had been given that.
Inside, I unclipped the leash while Rocker shook his coat dry,
spraying water three feet in every direction. I yanked a couple of squares from a roll of paper towels and blotted my hair and face. While I waited for Paige to reappear, I found a stainless steel mixing bowl, which I filled with tap water and set on the floor. The Lab attacked it with doggy enthusiasm. I found a ballpoint pen and a small pad of ruled paper by the phone and jotted a couple of lines for Nona, telling her the wash was ready to put in the dryer, and tucked it beneath the tumbler of daffodils.
“Are you all set, then?”
Paige stood in the doorway, arms akimbo. I saw in her eyes a familiar expression, one I'd seen reflected in every mirror I had passed during the summer and fall that I turned fifteen, the year my daddy died. Anger and defiance. The twin masks of fear.
A long moment passed before I let out a deep breath. “All set,” I said.
“Okay,” Paige said.
“I've left a note for Nona.”
“Yeah. Whatever,” she said, enunciating it in that bored two-word way that drove me nuts. What ever.
I bit back a retort.
She watched as I gathered up my things. Listen, I wanted to tell her, I know what you're going through. My daddy died when I was fourteen. It sucks. Before I could open my mouth, the girl turned and went back to Luke's room. Rocker looked up with grave retriever eyes.
“It stinks,” I told him. “Big time.” Even after seventeen years, the sense of missing my daddy hit me hard and left me dry-mouthed, like I was sucking on a stone.
But as I headed back to the cottage, despite my encounter with Paige, my mood lifted. I recalled Nona's smile, her confidences, the birds at the feeder. Small matters, and yet I felt that things were changing. I was making a difference. I could feel it clearly, like spring. Rebirth was in the air.
S
ATURDAY DAWNED CLEAR
and beautiful. Earlier that morning, I had opened the south-facing windows of our cottage, and now the air spread around me, heavy with the raw, marly smells of spring. Armed with a cup of coffee and a pad and pencil, I settled in by the phone.
The previous week, I had received an Easter card from Lily, and at the sight of my mama's handwriting, I was so overwhelmed with home-longing that I actually considered flying down to Richmond for the holiday weekend. I'd been trying to justify the cost of the flight on my overstretched budget when Nona called and asked if I would come over on Sunday morning to stay with Luke while she went to a church service, and that settled the matter. For the first time, Nona had actually asked me for something. My feeling of hope was reinforced. We were making progress.
I had planned on picking up a box of chocolates at the Candy Manor, and in fact had been on my way into Chatham, when I had gotten the idea of making Nona the Easter bread that has been a holiday tradition in our family for as long as I could remember. I turned right around and headed back to the cottage, all the while imagining Nona's face when I handed her the bread, an intricate braid of raised yeast dough with eggs nested in the plaits, their shells colored with natural infusions. Onion skins for the yellow, beets for red, spinach for green. “Jesus be, Lily,” my daddy said one year as he watched our mama steeping the vegetables, “wouldn't it be a damn sight easier if you just bought an egg-dyeing kit at Winn-Dixie?” His suggestion was so blasphemous, Lily hadn't even bothered to respond; this, after
all, was a woman who used a toothbrush to clean the insides of the Lucite faucets in the guest bathroom. Dyeing eggs with vegetables was kid's play for her.
As I dialed, I pictured my mama's delight at the reason for my call. For years and years, Lily had been after both Ashley and me to make copies of family recipes.
“Sweetie,” Lily said when she picked up, “I was just thinking of you.”
“You were?”
“This very minute. Just last night, I was asking Ashley if she'd heard from you lately. I've been wondering how you're doing.”
“I'm fine. Busy. Missing you all.” I fiddled with the pencil and tried to calculate what was so different about my mama's voice. It sounded like Lily and yet not like her. “I wish I could be there tomorrow,” I said. “Ashley's boys must be big enough now for the egg hunt.”
“The egg hunt,” Lily said, and gave an easy laugh. “Well, that brings back memories.”
“It does, doesn't it?” I remembered how Ashley and I would wake at dawn and race outside, our bare feet and the hems of our nightgowns quickly soaked through as we looked for the foil-covered candy eggs our parents had hidden in the tulip beds. Now that ritual had passed to another generation. Another generation. Talk about feeling old. “And then we'd have brunch,” I said. “With Great-grandma Helfgott's Easter bread.” I drew a quick sketch of a circular braid on the pad, added the eggs. “In fact, that's one of the reasons I'm calling.”
“Now that was a good deal of work,” Lily said before I could continue. “Lord knows I'm not grieving to see the last of that.”
“The last of what?”
“The Easter braid. That's what you're talking about, isn't it? God, when I think of all that work. I swear I must have been brain-dead.”
“What do you mean the last of it? You aren't making it this
year?” I pictured Lily standing at the marble-topped counter kneading dough, the kitchen fragrant with the scent of cardamom. “I always thought you liked making the bread.”
Lily laughed again, and in the laugh, I identified the change in my mama's voice. She sounded lighter. Younger.
“There's a hard way of doing things,” Lily continued, “and an easy way, and the hard way isn't always the path to virtue. More often it's a downhill road leading directly to a martyr's grave.”
“You're really not going to make it this year?”
“Not if you paid me in emeralds.” Lily said this with the exaggerated weariness of a woman who had a whole string of Easter brunches under her belt and didn't plan on one more. “In fact, I'm not stepping one foot in the kitchen. I'd rather herd cats.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Jan and I are sailing up to Baltimore for a few days. As a matter of fact, you were lucky to catch me. We're leaving in a couple of hours.”
Jan and I. I didn't like the sound of that. Exclusive of others. “You're not going to be home for Easter?”
“Not this year.”
“What's Ashley going to do?”
“I'm not sure. I think she said something about how she and Daniel and the boys are going to his parents'.”
Lily wasn't sure what Ashley was doing? This didn't sound at all like our mama. Our entire lives, she had been hands-on, involved with the daily details of our lives. Perhaps too much so. Our rift had begun when I had started to rebel against the constraints of her involvement. Now suddenly she'd gone AWOL, turned into an absentee parent, no longer interested in keeping traditions. No longer worried about me. No longer checking in daily to circle around her concerns. Was I tired? Any headaches?
“So what have you planned for tomorrow?” Lily asked.
“I'm going over to Nona's in the morning.”
“Nona?” she said.
I tried to conceal my impatience. “Nona Ryder. Her son is the hospice patient.”
Silence echoed on Lily's end of the phone.
I pushed on. “And later in the afternoon, I'm having dinner with Faye.”
“Well, that sounds lovely,” Lily said.
“I guess,” I said, lost. Here was what was bothering me. Throughout my life, even if I wasn't as close to my mama as Ashley—thick as thieves, the two of them—Lily had been the compass I could count on. Ashley could get knocked up, get married, have kids, I could move, date and break up with dozens of men, develop a tumor—our daddy could die—and Lily would always be there. Steady. Okay, annoying, too. But dependable. Until now.
“So did you get my card?” Lily asked.
I pulled myself back to the conversation. “Yes,” I managed. “Thanks.”
“And?”
“What?”
“What did you think?” Lily prompted, her voice again girlish.
I knew exactly what Lily was asking. Tucked inside the card was a photo of a couple in shorts, backpacks, and hiking boots. Scrawled on the back: Jan and me on the first leg of the Appalachian Trail.
“You look different,” I said. True enough. Although Ashley had been harping on the fact for months, I wasn't prepared for our mama's transformation into a stranger with gray hair. “I didn't even recognize you.”
Lily waved this comment aside. “What about Jan?” she said. “What did you think of him?”
“It's hard to tell from a snapshot,” I hedged. In truth, I'd dug out a magnifying glass from the desk, the one my daddy used to pore over his stamp collection, and had studied the new man in my mama's life. Sandy blond hair and—if the color reproduction was true—bluish green eyes. Muscular legs. He looked more like a carpenter
than a dentist. The photo alone was enough to make me want to fly home and straighten Lily out.
“I really want you to meet him,” Lily was saying. “I know you'll be crazy about him.”
This I very much doubted. Who knew who this Jan was or what he wanted with my mama. Daddy had been good with money and left Lily fairly well off. It was entirely possible this dentist wanted a meal ticket. You heard about that kind of thing all the time, and Lily could be really naïve. Who was watching out for her interests? I made a mental note to bring this up with Ashley. Okay, maybe I was the one meddling this time, but I was honestly concerned. Lily, alone and aging, was vulnerable.
“He's looking forward to meeting you, too,” Lily said.
“You look so different with your hair gray,” I said—a deliberate subject shift. I remembered what Ashley had said during one of our earlier conversations: Why would a person deliberately choose to look older? Especially if she was dating someone ten years younger.
“For God's sake, don't start,” Lily said. “I get enough of that from your sister.”
“And what's this about hiking?” I asked. “The last thing I knew, you wouldn't go across the street without taking the car.”
“We've been getting in shape for the voyage.”
“So you're still thinking about doing that?” I said.
“Not thinking about it. It's set. We leave early in June.”
“I think it's crazy.”
“It is kind of crazy, isn't it?” Lily laughed. “I guess that's part of the appeal.”
Now I didn't even try to conceal my exasperation. “Why are you doing this, Mama?” I didn't just mean the sailing. I meant all of it: allowing herself to go gray, dating a man nearly a dozen years younger, dropping family traditions. Again I thought about flying down to straighten things out, but even as the idea occurred to me, I knew its futility. Lily had always regarded my input with amused tolerance.
There was a pause. “I don't know if you'll understand,” Lily said.
“Try me.”
“Because I want to feel alive.”
“Alive?” Alive?
“Exactly.”
I felt the sudden flash of guilt I had had when I learned about the tumor. “Is this about me?”
“What about you?”
When I'd first been diagnosed, I used to feel guilty around Lily, knowing the worry I was causing. Now I wondered if in some way my having cancer hadn't shaken her life in an unhealthy way and led to all of her recent actions: The dentist. This crazy idea of crossing the Atlantic. “You know,” I said.
“This isn't about you, Jessie,” Lily said. “It's about me. I want to feel excited about something again.”
Jesus, I thought, if she starts talking about sex, I'm out of here. “Do you have to sail across the world to feel alive?”
Lily laughed. “Would you rather I buy a motorcycle?”
“What, Mama? Those are the choices?” I took a deep breath. “I'm just worried about you. I mean, think about it. You're sixty-five years old.”
“I'm perfectly aware of my age, thank you.”
“And you're talking about sailing across the ocean. Can't you see how dangerous that is?”