by Larry Brill
On the other hand, she wanted to kiss Nate because he was fun and unpredictable and he brought that out in her. She had forgotten what that felt like. Even the juvenile way he stole that kiss, and it was theft without a doubt, almost moved her to kiss him back just to see how he’d react. That scared her. They drove mostly in silence back to the Barnes & Noble, where he dropped her off at her car. He apologized and she forgave him, and even with the tension that followed her as she got out of his car, she was a happier person than when they’d met that morning.
Russell sat on the armrest of Carla’s sofa slightly above Julie to her right. She looked up and then nibbled at the mouthpiece of her party horn. It was one of those moments when she was back to wanting to smack Nate silly because she had no right to think of him with Russell at her side. That was dangerous territory. On the drive back, Nate promised he would toe the line, keep a sensible emotional distance as well as a physical distance as best he could on a tiny school campus. That made Julie want to smack him for the past. Smack him for the present. And maybe one good one for the future, too, whether he would deserve it or not.
“How are you doing?” Russell laid his palm on the back of her head, then let it slip down, where he stroked the base of her neck. She tilted her head back to nuzzle his hand in response.
“Me? Just peachy.” Julie laughed and blew her party whistle in his direction. It uncoiled with a toot, filled with her breath, and stretched up to him like a snake’s tongue. Then she rested her arm along the top of his thigh and squeezed his knee. She looked at her new bracelet, a Christmas gift from Russell. He brought it back from New Mexico, where he had spent the first part of the holiday with his brother and visited his mother. He skied Angel Fire, hit most of the casinos in the area and drove all the way to the pueblo in Taos to buy this little pixie turquoise bracelet from a Native American artist. It wasn’t something Julie would have bought for herself, but he went to a lot of trouble. Russell left for New Mexico in a foul mood. The school board had fired the superintendent, and Russell couldn’t do anything to help his own case for the job. Whatever he did or drank out there must have calmed him down. He came back in a better frame of mind, and his show of affection was a wonderful side effect. Julie had pressed him about a wedding date before his trip. She pointed out that Seth and Angela had decided on Valentine’s Day, and they’d only known each other for three months. He promised to talk about it when he returned home.
They had dined that night at a New Year’s Eve party at the Doubletree Hotel. It was scrumptious, but the band after dinner was loud, and the music had a new-wave edge to it that got everyone to their feet—the younger customers to dance and the fogies to head home early.
After pouring the champagne, Carla, bless her prying little heart, asked the question in Julie’s mind. “So. Don’t you think it’s about time you kids set a wedding date? Seems like a great way to start off the new year.”
Russell brushed the strings of tinsel from Julie’s brow. “I don’t see why not.”
She waited for him to add something more. A little emotion would be nice. He treated the idea of setting a date with the kind of enthusiasm she might schedule a vacation. Sure, it would be fun. Something to look forward to. Something you do every year.
Larry went to his study and came back with a calendar. Julie knew the best dates between the end of school and Tiffany’s planned exodus to Texas by heart. She had a church picked out and brochures for places to hold the reception and others with definite honeymoon potential. She wouldn’t have trouble convincing him to keep it a small affair, and Carla had a cousin who owned a catering business to handle that with a special family discount for Carla. None of which she wanted to share with Russell until he agreed to a date, just in case that seemed too pushy. But his months of foot-dragging and now that evening’s tepid response led her to say something that, a few months earlier, she would have considered heresy. “Maybe we should wait until we find out how this shake-up with Dr. Fox is going to affect things. You might still get promoted. Whatever he did or didn’t do shouldn’t reflect on you. They’d be silly not to.”
“The school board? Unreasonable? Surely you jest,” Carla said.
“That’s my girl,” Russell said. “Always practical. Thinking logically. That’s why we’re such a good team.”
Practicality had little to do with it. She wanted him to step up for her and he failed. She gave him an out and he grabbed it like a drowning man goes after a life preserver. She had been thinking recently that there was one other course. She was tired of being a part-time part of his life. If she couldn’t pin him down to a wedding date that night, she was going to press him to live together. She would do that when they got home.
Russell went on, “But I say let them work their schedule around us. Or better still, let’s not wait. Spring break, we can fly off to Las Vegas and find one of those Elvis preachers.”
He was teasing, of course, and tipsy. Maybe it was the fact that they had been apart for nearly two weeks, but Russell was in great spirits. He was loose and a little naughty, slipping an occasional double entendre into otherwise innocent conversation. He fondled her knee or stroked the back of her hand, his fingers danced up and down her thigh, and Carla returned from a trip to the kitchen and caught him kissing the back of Julie’s neck. That was the Russell she had fallen in love with.
They were gathering their coats shortly after midnight to the music of Carla’s chuckle when Julie’s cell phone rang.
Why Tiffany needed to call and wish her happy new year was beyond her. She could let it go to voice mail. Maybe it was cautious paranoia or intuition honed by years of waiting up and worrying for her children to get home safely at night, but she chose to take the call and make it quick.
The call was indeed quick. Julie listened for all of two minutes, asked clipped questions while fighting off tears. She kissed Russell good night and drove like a madwoman to the hospital.
Another Bad Lang Syne.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
You Can’t Fool Mother
A week later, Julie stroked the back of her mother’s hand. The hospital room’s light was soft; overhead lamps had been dimmed for the night. Occasionally a staff member would glide past the open door, pulling Julie’s attention away from the bed. Occasionally her mother patted Julie’s hand and held it with their fingers interlocked. Occasionally she grinned.
“You’d better stick around. I’m not through with you yet.”
“I didn’t mean to cause such trouble,” Mother said. “I thought it was just a little tumble.” She had repeated that, apologizing over and over, sometimes with tears, in the week since she took her spill on New Year’s Eve. Thank God Tiffany was there when it happened.
“Dr. Richards said today you’re making good progress.” The surgery to repair Ethel Cooper’s hip had gone well. The doctor was more optimistic about recovery than Julie. Though he advised her to take a serious look at moving Mom into an assisted living center.
It was well past visiting hours. The first few nights she slept in the chair near the bed. Now she only needed to stay until her mother checked out for the night. Mom was having a good day, and even with the IV dripping painkillers into her system, she was more lucid than earlier that afternoon, when she slipped into a fitful snooze right in the middle of their conversation. Julie had taken the week off work and told Russell she planned to burn her sick days through the end of the month. It all depended on how much her mother needed her. Dr. Richards expected to send Ethel to a rehabilitation center for another week or two before she was ready to go home.
Her mother asked, “How is your father, dear? I’m sure this has been hard on him, too. They fixed up my hair today. Do you like it? I was hoping he’d come by so I could show it off to him.”
“Very nice, Mom. But Daddy won’t be stopping by.” Julie flinched. A heart attack took Tony Cooper six years earlier. For all her eroding memory, this was the first time that Mother had resurrected her husban
d.
“Mom. You know that Dad is…gone.”
Ethel sighed. “Yes, that’s right. Sometimes I wish it wasn’t so. So much that I forget. Or maybe I don’t want to remember. I miss him.”
“I do, too.”
Ethel put on a happier face. “Well, dear. Tell me. How is that young man you’ve been seeing? As soon as they let me out of here, I think we should invite him over for meatloaf.”
“Sure, Mom. We’ll do that. Russell is doing well. He sends his love.”
The hint of delight was gone in a blink of her mother’s eyes. “Russell? Do I know Russell? Oh, of course. Mr. Principal.”
“That’s right.”
“No, dear. I meant Nathan. That Evans boy. Didn’t you tell me he’s back? Aren’t you seeing him again?”
“Only at school, Mom.”
“Of course it’s at school, where else would you see him? Do you have any classes together this year?”
Mom wasn’t as lucid as she imagined. She must have thought they were students again. So Julie explained they both had jobs on campus. She saw him at school but wasn’t going to be seeing him. "That’s not going to happen.”
“Oh, dear. Don’t tell me he broke your heart again.”
Julie felt her face flush. Maternal radar was a glorious thing unless it was your mother tracking your thoughts. Julie had spent too much time thinking of Nate over the holidays. Like her two-dollar splurge on lottery tickets each week, it had become a guilty pleasure that snuck in like a thief during quiet moments between worrying about her mother’s health and all the tasks necessary to prepare for taking care of her in the future.
“Julie? Are you all right?”
“Sure, Mom. And Nate never broke my heart.”
Her mother was losing steam. “If you say so, dear. I guess those tears had me fooled. Or I imagined it. It was so long ago; you were kids.” Ethel closed her eyes and a smile crossed her lips. “I’m glad to hear that. Maybe we should invite him over for meatloaf. I love meatloaf.”
“I’ll work on that.”
She didn’t remember tears. She remembered buying a prom dress that she never got to wear. She remembered falling asleep on prom night, dateless, lying on top of her bed with the gown wrapped in her arms. She remembered trying to patch a shattered picture frame with glue and tape. The frame held a copy of the yearbook photograph that showed the two of them sitting close enough to be a steady couple that she had taken a ribbing for. Maybe there were tears. She had forgotten about tears.
“You know, your father really liked that boy. He was always so polite. Such a nice boy. Except…” Ethel opened her eyes and brought a hand to her mouth as if something jumped to the front of her memories.
“Except what?”
“Well, imagine if it had been your father who came home and found you two in your bedroom that afternoon. Oh, my, I was so embarrassed.”
Julie let go of her mother’s hand, leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. She couldn’t work up a plausible way to deny it. “After all these years, are you telling me you knew? You knew all along? You never said anything.”
“Of course I knew. But Nate was such a nice boy it was hard to believe. Well, maybe not so hard to believe. Your father was a nice boy, even when he was naughty.” Mom closed her eyes with the kind of grin that comes with loving memories. “Ah, they were so much alike.”
“Take it from me, nothing happened.” Julie patted her mother’s hand. “You made sure of that. Your timing couldn’t have been better to stop whatever was going to happen.” She couldn’t fathom how that episode had remained unspoken for so long. “And it made us think twice afterwards.”
“That’s why I let it go, dear. Lesson learned. It might have been different if you two had stayed together and I thought it might happen again, but I guess that wasn’t meant to be.”
“No, I guess not.”
It had taken a while for Julie to make peace with prom night. In a way, it was hard to fault Nate. He had tried to explain it to her before the prom. He wanted to make a girl in a wheelchair happy. Eppie Johnson had had a rough life and deserved better, even if it was only for one night. It wasn’t as if he had stood up Julie. He had never officially asked her to the dance; she simply took for granted what all of their friends assumed would happen. That didn’t make the night any easier, but in wanting to give Eppie one night of happiness, he never thought about how he sacrificed Julie’s happiness in the process.
“Your father. I was thinking about how he liked Nate because those two were so much alike.”
“You’re kidding. They weren’t anything like each other. That’s not how I remember Daddy. Nate is, I don’t know, so full of life. Silly, sweet, irresponsible and unpredictable. Juvenile is a good way to describe it.”
“Oh, you don’t know what you are missing, Julie. Your father could be quite the stinker when he wanted to.”
Julie thought about how little she saw of her dad. He worked tirelessly to build his accounting firm, only coming home for dinner and the solitude of his den in the evenings. That and to ground her every time she got less than perfect on any test or, Lord help her, a B on her report card.
“You came along too late, I suppose. He was so much fun when we were courting, and when we were married, young and poor. At some point he outgrew it. And he gave us a good life.”
“That he did,” Julie agreed. She loved her father, she was sure of that, but if there was a playful side to him, he rationed it through the years. Her date-night curfew was impossibly strict, but Tony Cooper believed that if a young girl hadn’t had enough fun by eleven p.m., she wasn’t going to have fun at all.
“You just get better, okay? We’ll see. Right now you need to get some rest.”
“I’m so glad you’re here.” She grimaced as she shifted her body to slip deeper into the blankets.
“I’ll be here whenever you need me. Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of you.”
“I know, dear. And I want you to know it’s okay to take care of yourself, too.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Oh? Well, you’re a smart girl. You’ll figure it out. Take care of yourself.” Her mother drifted away, nodding to the sound of Julie’s voice. It was easy to dismiss her mom’s words to the drugs or the creeping onset of dementia or exhaustion, but they worried her. Would she have anyone to take care of her when her time came and she was the one in the hospital bed? Tiffany had been with Mother when she fell, but how fast could she get there from Texas if Julie was in need? The prospect of that worried her, so she sat back and tried to not think of anything at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Kodak Carousel of Life
Julie took the least direct route home, sobbing at stoplights as she drove aimlessly across the valley and back. First it was her son, Daniel, who abandoned her to raise his family in Oregon, and then Tiffany and Joe announced they were moving, taking her grandchildren to Texas. Her father left them all behind when he died, and now her mother was going to die too. The doctor and the nurses assured her they were optimistic about Ethel’s chance of recovering, but as much as she wanted to believe them, she couldn’t find any room in her heart for hope that night.
Carla tried to be encouraging when Julie called her from the hospital. She said all the right things, but because it was exactly what Julie expected to hear, her sympathy had only a modest effect. Driving the streets of San Jose an hour later, she was just as sad as if the conversation never happened, but even if it had eased her sense of loneliness, she needed more. She needed a hug. From a man. One who would make her feel safe and loved.
But Russell wasn’t home. That depressed her even more, and she didn’t bother to leave a voice message when she called him. When the time came and she was on her own deathbed twenty or thirty years down the road, he probably wouldn’t be there then, either, and she’d go straight to voice-mail hell. She was ashamed she would think that but angry with him nonetheless for not
being there when she needed him most in the same way she was angry with her mother for growing old.
She put a kettle on the stove for tea when she got home. Reaching for the teabags in the cupboard, she knocked a stack of papers and envelopes off the counter. Julie began crying again, crushed by the weight of the present and fear of the future when she knelt on the floor to pick them up. They were all the bills, bank and credit card statements, insurance policies, financial information and attorney correspondence—the paperwork she had collected from her mother’s home necessary to keep Ethel’s life in order. Keeping Mom’s life in order was going to be her job now while she was forced to watch her mother waste away in the grip of dementia.
Later she went again to the closet in Daniel’s old bedroom full of keepsakes and searched for a plastic tub full of photos, slides and a carousel projector. The talk about her father at the hospital earlier that evening made her miss him more than ever. She carried the projector to her bedroom, pointed it at the wall from the corner of her bed and then doused the lights. The carousel hadn’t been changed since the last time she used it years earlier for the reception after Tony Cooper’s funeral. Daniel had done a great job of sorting and collecting the old family slides of her father’s life from before Julie was born until about the time she got married. Daniel had even managed to get more recent pictures converted to finish the project.
Julie went through them slowly. Tony and his first motorcycle before he married Mom. Tony wearing a sombrero on their honeymoon to Mexico. Tony helping Julie as a toddler learn to walk across the living room. Dad and Mom dressed as a gangster and twenties-era flapper for a costume party.
