He did accomplish one important thing with that two-hour lunch: He made sure I understood a relationship wasn’t going to happen, though he was “certainly glad” we could meet.
Like an idiot I hugged him when we parted and said, “Thanks for coming.”
“I wish I had more time,” he said, hurrying outside to grab a shuttle, though I had offered to drop him off at the terminal. “You take care of yourself now.”
No doubt I’d have to. Or if someone contributed to my care, it most definitely would not be Mr. Cliché. I drove back to the condo, disappointed that my “father” was so unbelievably self-absorbed. He was a flat character in the play of life, a most reprehensible type. I summed up my impression to try out on Paula when I returned to Indy: “As deep as a thimble.”
Still, I couldn’t say I was sorry we’d met. My curiosity was satisfied and my silly illusion that my father was impatiently waiting to meet me and love me was irrevocably shattered—far beyond the help of Super Glue and a steady hand. I had also learned about my grandfather’s serious hypertension and my grandmother’s bout with breast cancer. Those are important things to know.
“You were right, Mother,” I said when she got home that evening. “My father is useless.”
She put down her briefcase and walked over to the couch, where I was sitting with a book in my lap. Then, to my great surprise, she cupped her hand under my chin and kissed the top of my head. As far as memories of my mother go, that kiss is right up there with the blizzard.
Maisey
Marcus is walking outside, holding a cell phone to his ear. He pivots the phone away from his mouth and whispers, “Blair emergency.”
My heart stops. And I must look like I need resuscitating, because he holds up a hand to stop my imagination in its tracks and quickly adds, “Minor emergency.”
He speaks into the phone now. “Don’t worry, Mom, I’m sure we can work out something.”
He snaps the phone shut, pulls a chair up beside me, and squeezes my hand. “My calm and capable mother is uncharacteristically freaked.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Pete.”
“Pete? Do I know a Pete?”
“Pete the dog?”
“Oh, Pete!”
“Yes, Pete the ten-year-old dog, as cherished as any one of us sons. Mom likes to say he’s caused her a good deal less trouble, has not had any use for higher education that would continue bankrupting them, and has never strayed farther than the yard.”
“Is he sick?”
“No, but his regular sitter had to go to Wisconsin this morning. Her daughter had her baby early.”
“How rude.”
“Very. Mom said she’s pretty disgusted with the whole lot of them.”
“Can’t Pete stay in a kennel?”
“Excuse me?”
I laugh.
“I believe she’d miss the wedding first—or rent Pete a tux.”
“Well, Marcus, your mom really has no problem. We have an empty pen. Pete can stay right out there.” I point at a pen beside Dad’s outbuilding, one long side of it being the building itself.
“He’s a house dog, honey.”
“The outdoor pen is on a concrete slab and there merely for his enjoyment of nature. There’s a hole cut into the side of the building, an entrance into lovely quarters. If those accommodations were fit for my darling dog, Lady, they’re fit enough for Pete, trust me. You’ve seen it, haven’t you, when you were out there with Dad? Believe me, we’ve allowed few people to see such excess. There’s even a fan on the wall, pointing straight at the unreasonably luxurious doggie bed. Honestly, it will do. I’ll put a rug in there if that will make your mom happy. We can go right now and buy a carpet remnant so you can tell her the outbuilding is a guesthouse.”
Because Marcus hasn’t paid all that much attention to the dog pen on any excursions to the outbuilding, we walk out so I can show him I do not exaggerate. After the inspection, we return to the patio, where he calls his mother to convince her Pete will be fine in the “guesthouse” and that the Laswells will be glad to have him occupy it for the weekend.
I head into the house to get us sodas. I fill glasses with ice and conjure up my dog, Lady, as she was—so lively, so loyal.
It’s been a while since I’ve thought about her, which surprises me. There was a time I was sure I’d look for her every day of my life.
I loved her a lot.
She was the best dog a girl could have. She was officially Dad’s dog, but from the time I could toddle to the pen, she was really mine. Dad had bought the beautiful yellow Lab the year before I was born, choosing her out of a litter of ten. He bought her to hunt with, but he didn’t get around to taking her hunting more than two or three times a year, if that. Grandpa and Clay hunted with her more often than Dad did, mostly out of pity, I think. They didn’t need to bother; Lady was a companion much more than a hunter. I rarely spent the night with my grandparents or Clay and Rebecca without taking Lady. She especially liked to be at Clay’s, because she could run all over his twenty acres and swim in his pond.
Most of the time, Lady sat on our patio, waiting for me to come out. Mom could have the loungers; I preferred to put cushions on the concrete to lie on, using Lady for a pillow. With this dog, my pillow and willing listener, I shared my considerable joys and occasional sorrows. Or we just lay there quietly, looking for cloud sculptures in the blue of the afternoon sky or clusters of stars at night. She had looked up with interest the day I exclaimed I had found a cloud that looked exactly like her. Mother said I was lucky to have such a good dog, that when she was a girl living in the condo, she couldn’t have anything but a fish. She said there was absolutely no comparison—try laying your head on a fish!
Lady, fourteen by then and old for a Lab, died the fall of my seventh-grade year. Could the timing have been worse? She had cancer. Inoperable cancer. Dad would have spent a fortune if it would have helped.
When she was too sick to wobble to the fencing, he said, “We need to put her down, Maize.”
“No, Dad,” I said. “She might get well.”
When she could no longer eat and couldn’t even get up to greet us when we came out to check on her, Dad refused to put it off any longer. “She’s a dog, honey, and suffering too much. We’ve got to let her go.”
He let me sleep in the outbuilding with her that night before taking her to the vet the next morning. I’ve always believed Lady spared me that agony, though I had been slow to spare her. I woke up as the sun began to rise and reached over to pet her. When she opened her eyes and looked at me, I kissed her furry head and watched in wonder as she took her last breath and slipped away.
I must have scratched her gently behind her ears and whispered, “I love you, girl,” ten times before I went inside to get Mom and Dad. He wrapped Lady in a white blanket Mom contributed and buried her close to the pen. Lady, I wrote with green latex paint on the marker we had made for her, trying to keep my hand steady, my best friend.
Dad patted me from time to time as we worked, and when we were finished and returned to the house, Mom brought a cold washcloth for my swollen face and held me while I sobbed.
My parents helped me get through that awful loss, and the next summer when the three of us went through a different kind of trauma, one I could never have imagined, Mom and Dad went to their room, and I gathered blankets and pillows and spent a lot of time in the outbuilding next to Lady’s pen, wishing she were there to lie beside me and help me through the utter misery of loss upon loss.
Kendy
Mother is sleeping.
Her nurse said the procedure went very well but that she would be asleep for a while. She is paraphernalia free, except for one bag of fluid hanging from a hook, an intravenous drip that had better be doing something terribly helpful for her, because when she awakens, Superwoman won’t like looking down and seeing a needle embedded in her arm. She can’t handle needles. When I was a child and immunized for one thing or an
other, she was the one who squeezed her eyes shut, and she was the one who needed reassuring. It was a strange role reversal: I always reached out and grabbed her hand and said everything would be fine.
Her private room is shadowed and cool with the curtains drawn to block the afternoon sun. I stopped in the gift shop and bought the nicest vase of flowers in the cooler. I’ve placed them on the bedside table nearest the windows, so she can see them as soon as she opens her eyes. Even before I saw her, I felt the need to do whatever I could in the short time I have today to make her feel cared for. Sitting here, I’m shocked at how vulnerable she looks. I prepared myself for the worst, and she looks better than I thought she would, yet I did not anticipate this vulnerability, this smallness.
Maybe a heart attack, since it was a mild one, will turn out to be a good thing for Mother. She isn’t wired for introspection. But perhaps this will force her to ponder the years ahead and quit dreading the idea of retirement and look forward to what life has to offer outside of the four walls of her office—or an equivalent. During one of our semiannual trips to St. Louis a few years ago, I got up in the middle of the night to get a drink and found my mother sitting at her desk, working away on some sort of report.
“Mother!” I said, “you and your computer have got to quit meeting like this!” On my way back to bed a minute later, I bit back a snide question: Is that computer your best friend?
I can’t say Mother’s obsession with work hasn’t given her satisfaction, but I’ve been sitting here praying that from now on Mother’s life will be filled with wonder and joy. Satisfaction is good, but joy and wonder are better.
“Kennedy?”
She has opened her eyes, and I walk over and stand beside her bed. “I was saying a prayer for you.”
“Well, that’s good,” she says, trying to smile.
I nod at the table on the other side of her bed. “I brought you flowers.”
She turns and sees them in all their glory. “Oh,” she says quite spontaneously, and I’m glad I bought the prettiest flowers the gift shop had to offer.
I look around her room. “Can you see them there? I want them where you can see them. They’re absolutely the only cheer in this room, Mother.”
“Well, that’s just not true.”
I looked at her doubtfully.
“You’re here,” she says, her voice hardly more than a whisper.
Excuse me? What’s in that IV? What have they done with my mother?
I smile. “Yes, I’m here. And after the wedding, I’ll come back and stay with you for a few days. Someone needs to make sure you recover properly.”
“Oh, Kennedy,” she says. “The wedding. I wanted to be there. I wanted it very much.”
“I know you did, but you don’t need to worry about that right now. The wedding will be recorded. You can watch the DVD with the kids when they return from Hawaii.”
“But the dress.”
“I’ll pick up the dress when I leave here.”
“I said I’d bring it.”
“And you would have except for a little technicality called a heart attack. I’m just so glad that I can go home and tell Maisey you’re going to be fine.”
I hear the door open and turn to see Mother’s boss standing in the doorway. So she wasn’t completely alone. I’m relieved.
“You’re awake,” he says, smiling at her.
“Phillip,” she says, “what are you still doing here?”
He comes into the room and sits down like this is his place. He smiles at me and tells Mother that she can just get used to it, he isn’t going anywhere. I look from one to the other and try to process this display of loyalty. Phillip must see something resembling consternation on my face.
“You probably don’t know this, Kennedy,” he says, “but your mother has been a great friend to me since my wife died three years ago. I’m not sure what I would have done without her friendship.”
He shifts his gaze to Mother. “So, Carolyn, you’re stuck with me.”
“You need to get to the office,” she says.
“You’re not the boss,” he replies. “Besides, the office will get along just fine without us. Weren’t we just talking about that last weekend?”
While I listen to their exchange, I notice an envelope on the floor, halfway under her bed. “What’s this?” I ask, bending over to get it.
Mother reaches for it. “That’s nothing, Kennedy.”
I turn it over, surprised to see my name written across the front of it in Mother’s neat handwriting. “Well, my goodness, it’s something, and it has my name on it.”
“I wrote you a note in case anything went wrong, but as you can see, it didn’t.”
“What does it say?”
Mother closes her eyes and sighs. Phillip says he’s going to step outside and make a few calls.
“I’m just curious,” I say, clutching the envelope, unwilling to relinquish it. So unlike me, to push my mother.
“Open it if you want, Kennedy,” she says, fidgeting with the hem of the sheet that covers her.
“I do want.” I sit in the chair Phillip has just vacated, slip the note out of the envelope, and unfold it.
My dearest Kennedy~
I have only a few minutes before I’m taken to surgery. They say I’ll be fine, but in case things don’t go well after all, I need to tell you something that has been dominating my thoughts these last months: I’m sorry I didn’t take you shopping for your wedding dress. I’m sorry for many things we missed. Maybe I failed you as much as your father did, but I hope you believe that I love you, that I have always loved you. You have made my life worthwhile, Kennedy. You are everything I know of joy.
Mother
I am holding a treasure.
I am thankful to be here, thankful I thought to bring lovely flowers, thankful beyond what I can say that my mother has actually written the words I love you.
When I gather the courage to look at her, she appears to have fallen back asleep. I stand up and walk over to her bed. Slipping my hand into hers, I bend over and kiss her forehead. “Thank you for this note, Mother. I love you too.”
She doesn’t open her eyes, but she squeezes my hand, and I see tears slipping from under her eyelids, dampening her temples.
I reach for a Kleenex and blot her tears. “I’m going to get the dress now,” I say. “You rest. I’ll see you on Monday.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Maisey
Marcus and I are relaxing after the Dottie and Pete crisis has been taken care of, at least to the extent I can relax, knowing that any minute, Mother will surely be home.
Instead it is Dad who opens one of the French doors leading from the kitchen and comes out on the porch. I am relieved until I get a look at his face and know something is terribly wrong.
“I have some bad news,” he says.
I hope the bad news is along the lines of Dottie’s bad news, relatively easy to fix, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t. I’m horrified when he says Gram has had a heart attack. Sheer panic fills me, and I look at Marcus as though he can make it not so. But Dad has good news too. The damage to Gram’s heart is minimal and she should recover completely. He consoles us so much that, for one brief, naïve moment, I think she might be able to make it to the wedding after all. But Dad says there is no way that will happen.
Since she is apparently out of danger but unable to come to the wedding, my next concern is my wedding dress, hanging in one of her closets. I need that dress! My mind is racing.
“Dad, if Marcus and I leave for St. Louis right now, we can get the dress and still make it back before everyone starts arriving tomorrow—if you can pick up Sarah in the morning.”
“Hold it,” Dad says. “That’s under control. Your mother has gone to see your gram and to get your dress.”
So that’s where she’s been all day.
“When did she go?” I ask.
“She left shortly after you and Marcus left for Indy this morning. She
should be back tonight by ten or eleven.”
“We could have gone. Why didn’t you call us?”
“She wouldn’t let me. She wanted you to have a nice day, a calm day. She didn’t want you to worry.”
“Well, I should have gone to see Gram.”
Dad looks at me like he can’t comprehend my simple sentence. He shakes his head, and for the second time today he seems exasperated with me.
Marcus stands up and walks over to Dad. “Have you heard from Kendy lately?” he asks. “Carolyn is really okay?”
“Yes. Kendy called after she left the hospital and said her mother was doing very well, better than they hoped for.”
“That’s great,” Marcus says.
“When I spoke to Kendy, she was on her way to get the wedding dress. She should be on the road soon.”
I sit here while they talk, thinking things are going to be okay: Gram is recovering, my dress is on the way, and Mother will be in so late, I won’t have to talk to her. And of course we’ll be too busy tomorrow.
Then Dad snatches away the piece of hope I have just picked up and brushed off. He pulls up a chair and sits across from me with a look of resolve on his face that makes it plain this will not be a cheerful chat.
“Your mother will be in late,” he says, “but however late it is, you need to be ready to talk to her.”
“Good grief, Dad. She’ll be exhausted! We can talk after Marcus and I get back from Hawaii. If we even need to. Let’s just forget it.”
“Like you’ve forgotten it all these years?”
Things Worth Remembering Page 18
