“Okay, Joe, I think we should go,” said Jenny. “Flora’s roommate is going to think we’re strange.”
“Oh, my parents were the same way,” offered the young woman who sat on her bed, going through papers.
I held out my arms. “One for the road,” I said as Flora walked into them. “Although for all we know, we might be on the Ventura Freeway and decide we have to come back for more.”
“The Ventura turns into the Hollywood Freeway way before the airport,” said Flora’s roommate. “So I’d catch the 405 in the Valley.”
“Thanks,” I said, and then to Flora, I whispered, “Tu est la meilleure fille dans le monde.”
“And you’re the best dad,” she whispered back. “Merci pour tout.”
I had to pull myself away then or risk dissolving in a puddle at Flora’s feet, which I was certain wouldn’t win her any points with her know-it-all roommate.
“Call me as soon as you get home!” yelled Flora as we left the building. “And tell Ben and Conor I love them!”
Chicken pox had prevented her brothers from going with us to settle Flora in at UC Santa Barbara; they were staying with my mother and Len, their misery over their sister’s leaving compounded by their blistered, itchy skin.
“Can you drive all right,” asked Jenny as we got into the rental car, “or should I?”
I put the keys in the ignition but didn’t switch it on.
“Maybe you’d better,” I said, opening the driver’s door.
“Let’s go by the store,” said Jenny as we left the campus. “That’ll make us feel better.”
“And then maybe we can come back and say good-bye to Flora again,” I said.
Jenny laughed. “And then we’ll go back to the store.”
“And then go back and see Flora.”
She reached across the console and took my hand.
“Did you think it would be this hard?”
“Yes. Did you?”
Jenny shook her head and pressed her lips together, blinking hard.
“Don’t cry,” I said softly, squeezing her hand. “We can’t afford to get into a fiery crash—this is a rental.”
Smiling, she nodded and put both hands on the wheel. She exhaled a puff of air, and after assuring me that she was okay, she said, “Darva would be so pleased.”
I looked out the window, thinking how many times Flora had inspired us to say that.
“That was the wrong thing to say,” I said, feeling myself tear up all over again. Trying to steer the emotion in a different direction, I laughed, but if laughter was medicine, there was no way the FDA would approve this weak dosage.
Jenny had been right: walking through Haugland Foods, Santa Barbara, was a tonic.
“You’re back!” said Stella, the woman we’d hired as the store’s general manager. “Just when I thought we could start goofing off.”
“You’ll be fired if you don’t goof off,” I said.
“Well, then I’ll just go ask the vendor waiting in my office if he’d like to run off to Mexico with me. He’s awfully cute.”
“Send us a postcard,” I said.
Jenny and I wandered through the aisles, admiring the displays. The produce section was big and bountiful, with the fruits and vegetables looking like props out of a movie set. The floral department had arrangements of the flashy flowers indigenous to California, and the health and fitness aisle had balms and lotions and elixirs that the rest of the country wouldn’t catch onto for another year or two.
I waved to the bakery manager, who held up a danish he was putting on a tray.
“Shall we?” I asked Jenny.
“Well, it is the first day of school,” I said, alluding to our tradition of celebrating the start of the school year with donuts.
After we seated ourselves in the little bakery section, with our complimentary coffee (all Haugland Foods offered free coffee) and chocolate donuts, Stella joined us.
“Oh no,” I said. “The trip to Mexico fell through?”
Stella rolled her eyes. “The jerk. All he wanted was my signature on a couple of orders.”
“Men,” said Jenny, rolling her eyes in solidarity.
“So, you got Flora off with a minimum of tears?” asked the manager, pulling a chair up to our table.
“We got her off,” I said.
Stella laughed. “Well, don’t worry—we’ll take good care of her.”
“Please call us as soon as she’s done,” said Jenny. “We’ll want to hear all about her first day here.”
Flora was going to start working at Haugland Foods, cashiering and playing her flute in the small stage in the area they called Banyan Square. It was right next to us in the bakery section, and it made me happy to look at the stage, imagining Flora there, delighting shoppers with her runs and trills.
“I’ll videotape it if you like,” said Stella.
“Sure!” said Jenny, and after looking at each other, she and I burst out laughing.
“And then will you take a camera into each of her classes?” I asked. “And her dorm room?”
“And the cafeteria,” said Jenny. “We want to make sure she’s eating healthy.”
By the time the rental car shuttle dropped us off at the airport terminal, we had convinced ourselves that Flora would be fine and that we’d be fine.
“If I can get through that,” said Jenny as we walked to our gate, “Conor’s first day of kindergarten will be a piece of cake.”
“We probably won’t even bother to take him to school,” I said. “We’ll let Ben do it.”
Jenny turned toward a newsstand. “Let’s get something to read.”
I was at the newsstand, debating whether to buy the LA Times or the Santa Barbara Messenger, when my cell phone rang. The screen read “Kirk’s cell.”
“My man,” I said into the phone. “How’re our ocean floors looking?”
“Polluted,” said Kirk, and even though his passion was the state of our waters, I could tell from his voice he was worried about something else. “Listen, Joe, something happened.”
I braced myself for news I didn’t want to hear while a large woman wearing a Mighty Ducks jersey reached across me to grab a National Enquirer.
“Are the girls okay? Nance?”
“They’re fine. It’s my mom. Joe, she had a stroke.”
Jenny had sidled up to me and mouthed, “What is it?”
“Kirk,” I mouthed back. “How is she doing?” I said into the phone.
“Not good,” said Kirk, his voice breaking. I heard two deep breaths over the phone, and then he continued. “She was only scheduled to work half a day today and left at the usual time, telling Clarence to bring home some deli food for dinner, because she wasn’t in the mood to cook. He told her he’d take her out for dinner before they went to the library—Thursday night was their library night—and she said okay. When he got home about four hours later, he found her on the kitchen floor. He called the ambulance and then us. She’s in surgery now but…I don’t think it looks good, Joe.”
I wrapped my arm around Jenny and held her close.
“Listen, Kirk, we’re at LAX—we just took Flora to school—”
“That went okay?”
“Okay enough,” I said with a sad laugh. “Listen, I’ll call you as soon as we get back home.”
“You’ve got my cell number?”
“Yup. You hang in there, Kirk. Give our love to everyone.”
“Okay, Joe. Love you, man.”
This time it was my voice that cracked. “Me too.”
“And we’re back from the break, but I’m not going to take any more calls tonight, although you’re still on the air with God. For those of you who saw my PPP program on Sunday, you know that my beloved mother died. I announced it at the end of the show, because I knew I’d break down and I didn’t want to be in front of the TV cameras with the Mascara River running down my face.” There was a pause and sounds of nose blowing.
“My mother woul
d like that—the Mascara River. She was a big reader and liked a surprising turn of phrase. She also liked makeup—she loved all the Perfect Rose products I was able to send her—and swore that they helped her look younger.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Kirk, “she’s plugging her damn skin care crap.”
“My mother, Martha Swenson Casey Selvin—”
“Selwin!” shouted Kirk, Nance, and I.
“—was only sixty-nine years old, but in that all-too short run, she went through a lot. My dad was in an accident and she cared for him until his death. She had her problems—she tried to find consolation in the bottle, although we all know that kind of consolation comes with price tags too high to pay—but she was able to pull herself out of her misery and move into a life of joy and purpose. She met Mr. Selvin—”
“Selwin!”
“—and they settled down to a happy life in Florida, near my brother and his family.”
“Thank God she didn’t say my name,” said Kirk.
“Now, I can’t say my mother’s and my relationship wasn’t fractious—”
“No,” agreed Kirk, “you can’t say that.”
“—but what mother-daughter relationship isn’t?”
Jenny looked at me, and I knew what she was thinking: Flora’s and mine.
“I was a willful child—you have to be willful to get places—but I know it caused my mother pain, and for this I am sorry. Because I could take care of myself at a young age, I figured she just said, ‘Fine, then I won’t have to.’”
“Bitch,” said Kirk, shaking his head.
“It served me from a very early age, knowing that I needed to rely on myself because they’re weren’t always others to rely on, and I consider that self-knowledge a gift, so thanks, Mom.
“Now, my mother’s mother, my grandma, was a very special person to me. It has been said that often a grandchild will resemble its grandparent more than its own parent. Who knows—if I had been blessed to have children, maybe we would have fought like cats and dogs too. Maybe they would have run to my mother for solace, the way I ran to Grandma.” Another pause, more nose blowing.
“What, is she doing coke or something?” asked Kirk.
“One thing I’ve realized in this great, complicated world of ours is that blessings are like seasonings; some are salty, some are sweet, some are bitter, and some are hot.”
“Oh, brother,” said Kirk.
“My grandma seasoned my life with sugar and cinnamon and vanilla—and my mother seasoned my life with paprika and curry and pepper. All those blessings—all those seasonings—helped make me the person I am today.”
“Sugar isn’t really a seasoning, is it?” asked Jenny.
“And I know that inside those great gates of Heaven, through which my mother has most recently passed, God has enveloped her in his arms and told her, ‘Your gifts were great, Martha, and your daughter, Kristi, thanks you.’
“I hope all of you listening will pause to think of your own mothers, who not only gave you life but sprinkled it with blessings, and I pray you’ll be grateful for those seasonings—even the bitter ones. Let Jesus’s forgiveness be a model to us and enable us to forgive those extra doses of pepper when we really wanted sugar.
“Remember, God’s just not on the air, He’s all around, He’s everywhere. Good night.”
I switched off the radio and the four of us sat there, mouths slightly open, as if we’d all been in the path of an underground electrical shock.
“If Kristi were here,” said Kirk finally, “I’d kick her in the ass.”
“Oh, Kirk,” Nance scolded. “That wouldn’t be a very nice seasoning.”
“That’d be like horseradish,” I said.
“Or wasabi,” said Kirk.
“Those are condiments,” said Nance. “Can’t anybody tell the difference between a seasoning and a condiment?”
“Well, Kristi can’t,” said Jenny. “She think’s sugar’s a seasoning.”
“When it’s obviously a staple,” said Nance.
“Dumb bitch,” said Kirk.
There had been a small memorial service down in Florida—Martha had made enough friends down there who wanted to honor her passing—but the big service was held up in Minneapolis, where so many people knew her and Clarence. Poor Clarence had been hit hard—he was convinced that he should have known something was wrong with Martha.
“She just said ‘okay’ in kind of a tired voice when I told her we’d go to the library—and she loved our library nights. I should have known something from that tired little ‘okay.’”
I had invited him to our house after the service luncheon, but he had said he was going to spend time with his sister, who was pretty broken up.
“Myrt loved Martha,” said Clarence. “She stayed with us for three months last winter, and the two of them stayed up watching David Letterman and giggling like schoolgirls.” He paused for a moment. “I prefer Koppel.”
Kirk and Nance had come with us when we drove Flora back to the airport—our beautiful daughter had insisted on coming back even though we had just left her a week earlier in Santa Barbara.
“Dad,” she had said over the phone, “I want to be there. I’ll fly in Thursday night and leave after the funeral Friday. I’d stay the weekend, but there’s this freshman welcome party I’d really like to make on Saturday.”
Her brothers, still slightly speckled with chicken pox scabs but no longer itchy and miserable, were delighted to have their sister back and made use of her one night at home, dragging in their Star Wars sleeping bags and camping out in her bedroom.
They weren’t pleased when she said another good-bye to them before we went to the funeral, and would have put up a big stink save for the fact that Jenny’s sister, Jody, was coming to babysit and bringing along her own two boys, who were the kids’ favorite cousins.
When Jody arrived, Ben and Conor squealed with delight, tackling their cousins before they got out of the entryway.
“I guess I’m pretty dispensable,” said Flora with a shrug.
“No, you’re not,” I said, draping my arm around her.
Her presence had meant a lot to Kirk and Nance and Clarence; at her young age she knew the importance of showing up. But now she was gone again and, according to my watch, due to land in fourteen minutes, and the gloom that our laughter had blown away gathered itself and seeped back into the room.
“Anyone want a drink?” I asked.
“I could go for a walk,” said Kirk. “A walk and then a drink.”
“Ladies?” I asked.
“Do you mind if we stay?” Nance asked Jenny. “I’m sort of pooped.”
“We’ll start a fire,” said Jenny, “and open a bottle of wine.”
It was a cool September night, but not according to Kirk.
“Man, what’s the wind chill factor?” he said before we were even down the front steps. “Twenty below?”
I stepped back into the house and grabbed a jacket from the closet.
“It’s at least forty-five degrees,” I said, handing Kirk the jacket. “Have you gone completely Floridian?”
“Totally,” said Kirk, putting the jacket on over his sweatshirt. “If it’s below seventy degrees, I start digging out the long underwear.”
We walked down the sidewalk in silence for a while, a wind rustling through the leaves that would in a few weeks be on the ground. Kirk was right. It did feel cold, and I turned up my coat collar.
“You know, Coral did a reading at Mom’s service in Cocoa Beach,” said Kirk. “I couldn’t believe it; she didn’t break down or anything. Clarence had asked if I wanted to speak and I…I couldn’t. I wish to hell I could have, but I couldn’t.”
“What did Coral read?”
“A Walt Whitman poem Clarence picked out. Clarence couldn’t read either. But Kristi did. She didn’t even ask Clarence, just told him that she’d be reading.”
“What’d she read?”
“That’s the thing.
I thought she’d read something from the Bible in her big phony preacher’s voice, but she read a poem she had written when she was a kid. It was a typical kid’s poem, rhyming words like ma and law—in fact, the first line was ‘I’m glad it’s not against the law / To love my ma’—but I’m telling you, Joe, it was touching. It made me think maybe I was wrong about her, that maybe she did love Martha.”
I nodded in the dark.
“And then after the service, she pulled me aside and said she hoped we could be better friends now and that she wanted to thank me for loving our mother and father even when they were at their most unlovable.”
“She said that?”
“Uh-huh. And then she said she hated to leave, but she had a flight to catch and shows to tape—blah, blah, blah—but she’d stay in touch and then she hugged me—hard—and handed me an envelope and told me not to open it until I got home. Then she slipped out the back of the church and into the limousine that was waiting for her.”
“What was in the envelope?”
“A check for five thousand dollars. On the memo line she wrote ‘Mom.’ And there was a copy of a picture.”
“A picture of what?”
He stopped, the wind flipping up a side of his hair.
“Let’s turn back,” he said. “I’m too cold to go any further.”
“Maybe I’m wrong about the temperature,” I said as we turned around, both of us tucking our hands deep in our pockets.
“I had never seen the picture before,” said Kirk, “but it was in perfect condition, which makes me think it was a copy. It was a picture of our family—I think it was taken down at the falls, in the pavilion. My mom and dad and I are sitting on top of a picnic table; I’m on my mom’s lap and my mom’s on my dad’s lap and all of us have these big laughing smiles on our faces. And then there’s Kristi—six or so, she’s got braids—standing off to the side with her hands on her hips, her face turned up and away from us, her eyes closed, like she’s shunning us.”
“What do you suppose she meant by giving it to you?”
“I have no idea. On the back she had written, ‘Members only.’”
The View from Mount Joy Page 32
