Dust

by Eva Marie Everson

  And so the deed was done. Afterward, the doctor placed me on oral chemo along with a clean slate and orders to return for regular checkups.

  “Mom,” Michelle said one evening after dinner had been cleared away and Sturgill began the process of putting the twins to bed. “Stu and I want to talk with you about moving in. Permanently.”

  I curled my feet under me in the family room chair I’d taken up residency in and breathed out her name. “What? No …” I had already mentally packed my bags and pointed the car toward southwest Georgia.

  “Mom, I’m serious,” she said from the sofa. “Our guest suite has everything you need including a private entrance. We can bring some of your things up to make it more like your home and—”

  “And, what about my job? I love my work, Michelle.”

  “Sell the stores, Mom. I know you love your work, but you don’t need the cash flow and—if you do this—you can enjoy your life a little.”

  “But I do enjoy my life,” I protested. “I’ve always worked, you know that. And I’ve always enjoyed it.”

  “I know that, but, Mom … Be with us … be with Faith and Charity. I promise we won’t get in your way. We won’t expect you to babysit every time you turn around. You can come and go as you like. Besides your best doctor is here.”

  I started to say that I would love nothing more than to babysit my grandchildren, but Michelle interrupted with, “Look.” She leaned toward me. “You’re my mother. I want you here with us.”

  For the silliest moment, I delighted in her words. I was her mother. Without Michelle, I would have never heard that declaration. Ever. And without Westley, I would have never had Michelle. Without Westley …

  Would the spirit of him come with me or stay in Odenville? Or did the spirit of him live within me because I had felt the beat of it in his last moments dancing around my wedding set to trail up my left arm and reside within my own heart? I wondered about the first question; I believed I knew the answer to the last.

  “All right,” I said.

  Her mouth formed a silent “o” as if she’d expected to fight harder for what she wanted. “Seriously?” she asked, her eyes wide. Michelle clapped like a teenager, then leapt up, crossed the room, and gathered me in her arms, kissing my cheek repeatedly. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! I love you to bits.”

  I laughed with abandonment. “I love you, too, baby girl. To bits.”

  I brought our bedroom furniture.

  I brought my favorite chair and the sofa Westley stretched out on nearly every evening after dinner. I brought odds and ends. The day before I left, I drove out to see Ro-Bay who, thanks to Miss Justine, had invested well. She and her husband now lived in a quiet neighborhood of sprawling brick homes surrounded by tended gardens and made up of spacious rooms with thick carpets so “walking isn’t so hard on these old bones.”

  After our last visit, she kissed my cheek soundly and said she would miss me “something awful.”

  “I’ll call you every Sunday night,” I told her. “Without fail. Eight sharp.”

  “You best.”

  I held her amazingly unwrinkled face in my hands and stared into eyes that had grown cloudy with time but still held all the wisdom of the ages. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”

  “Haven’t I always?”

  I released her, allowed my hands to travel down her arms, less muscular than they’d once been. Fleshier. Tears bit at the rims of my eyes, threatening. “We sure had ourselves a time, didn’t we?”

  She chuckled. “Lawd, I remember that little girl who walked through the door with our sweet Westley that Sunday afternoon …”

  “I didn’t have a clue.”

  Her cool fingers cupped my chin. “But you had love.”

  “I did have that,” I said, swallowing past the memory of how I’d almost thrown it away after Westley told me about Michelle, and then again with Biff, a man now retired and living in Key West doing, as Ro-Bay once put it, “God only knows what.”

  But that near infraction was something only Ro-Bay and I knew about. Ro-Bay and God and me. Ro-Bay, I hoped, had forgotten. God, I prayed, had forgiven. But as for me, I would simply have to live with the truth of my own weaknesses. Although, as the years had passed, I’d finally been able to nearly convince myself that if I’d had more male attention as a teenager—as Elaine once argued—perhaps the second man in my life to show such attention wouldn’t have been able to turn my head with sugar-laced words and butterfly-wing touches.

  “Go on, now,” Ro-Bay told me, bringing me back to the moment. “I got things to do and you got miles to go.”

  We hugged a final time and then … I walked away from my dearest friend.

  I sold off the things I would not take, then put the house Wes and I had raised Michelle in on the market. The movers loaded a truck with the items I kept, then hoisted themselves into their seats and drove away after assuring me, again, of their ETA. I took a final look around the rooms—cavernous and echoing in the absence of that which had given them life—allowing myself a precious memory from each room. Something to savor.

  Michelle waited in the car—my car—with the garage door up in anticipation of our departure. Finally, when I knew I could wait no longer, I retrieved my purse from the kitchen counter, walked out the door into the garage, and locked it behind me. After I settled in the passenger’s seat and Michelle backed the car out, she pushed the remote to close the garage door. It jostled to life, then edged its way down until, with a shudder, it hit the cement.

  My heart burst; the dam holding back my tears went with it. “Mom,” Michelle said, wrapping her arms around me. “It’s okay.”

  “I know it is,” I said between sobs. “It’s just that … it’s my life, Michelle. And so much of it was here. Right here.”

  “But you have so much more life to live,” she reminded me, her tone that of her father’s.

  I reached for one of the brown Dunkin Donuts napkins I kept in the console, then dabbed at my eyes and blew my nose. “I know.” But something nagged at me. A puzzle with missing pieces. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Yet it was there all the same, hovering under the surface of my soul.

  It wasn’t until we reached Wilmington, and, in my unpacking, I found the box of small photos that I began to find a few of those pieces. Pieces that revealed their precisely cut edges as I arranged the silver frames atop a marble and mahogany occasional table and stared at the faces of the women within them.

  There was Hillie … with her sleepy eyes and wispy head of hair piled atop her head.

  Miss Justine … with her bangles and jewels, her arched brows and bright, painted-on smile.

  And Grand … who, even after all the years since her passing, spoke to my heart from time to time. I felt her spirit, strong and resolute, remembering my mother’s words concerning her. “Something rose up in your grandmother that day,” Mama told me time and again, speaking of the day Grand found my grandfather dead on the side of the road. “Something strong and powerful. She’s never lost it.” Well, I knew what it was, even if Mama didn’t. A fist holding a radish. Like Scarlett.

  There was a childhood photo of me and Elaine … who, with her husband, had won countless awards and accolades for their work with Native American children, and who declared that she’d stop working when God snatched her last breath from her lungs.

  And, Ro-Bay … who had family of her own, but who had made Miss Justine’s—and mine—as much hers as those who shared her bloodline.

  Mama … who frustrated me often but comforted me more. Just her presence in a room brought all that it should.

  Julie … a grandmother five times over. She and Dean remained in Nashville, Dean now retired, Julie still the quintessential and contented homemaker. She’d sure lived a happy life for someone who married a “bum.”

  DiAnn … brilliant businesswoman who had become my unlikely ally. My sister-in-law in the truest sense. My friend, even more so.

>   And Michelle … my daughter. My world. My unique and special gift. From Westley.

  And so it was that, sometime many days and weeks and months later, Michelle found me sitting in the silence of an afternoon made gray with rain. I’d been listening earlier to one of my Pandora radio stations—Simon and Garfunkel—but had since turned it off, wrapped so tightly in a memory I almost couldn’t breathe.

  That’s the thing about music; it evokes both the brightest and darkest of emotions tied to the happiest and saddest of times.

  “Hey … what are you doing?” she asked, flipping on a table lamp. “Did you forget how to turn on a light?”

  I shook my head, knowing the telltale signs of my tears would give away the state of my unusual mood. Since reaching an older, hopefully wiser, age, I’d not been one to dwell too much on the negative, but today I allowed myself the luxury of it.

  “Mom? Hey—this isn’t like you.”

  I blinked. Looked up to the concern on her face. “Sorry, sweet pea. Just … I heard a song earlier and …”

  She walked around my chair—she was still dressed in her work clothes, her hair still pulled up in a messy bun—and took a seat across from me. “Did the song get you to missing Dad? Is that it?”

  My smile wobbled. “Something like that.”

  Michelle rested her elbows on her knees, her keys dangled from her fingers until she clasped them in her palm. “Want to tell me about it?”

  I shrugged. Did I? At her young age, would she understand what I had to say? Did I even have a grasp on the cascade of sentiments flooding over me? Through me?

  “Okay, how about I help you out … what was the name of the song?” she asked, encouraging.

  “Dust,” I began, then swallowed and glanced at the floor. “‘Dust in the Wind.’”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know that song. Kansas. Mid-to-late seventies.”

  Startled, I looked across the room and caught her gaze. “You know Kansas?”

  She chuckled. “I lived with Cindie for a while, remember?”

  I nodded, no longer bristling at the mention of a name so tightly wound with my past and the man I had married. “What does she have to do with it?”

  “Patterson. The man knew everything about music and musicians. He also thought he had to teach everyone what he knew. So, thanks in part to him, I learned about everything from classics to country, rock to the great jazz musicians.” Her green eyes widened. “Ask me anything about Mozart. Or the Grand Ole Opry. Or Hank Garland.” She pointed toward me. “Or Dylan. Lord help us, that man loved Dylan.” Her eyes rolled. “He also played a lot of Sinatra, which I still love, and Fleetwood Mac and, well, Kansas.”

  Her attempt at humor only mildly consoled me. I said nothing.

  “Sorry,” she finally said. “So … ‘Dust in the Wind.’”

  I would tell her, I decided. I would share this special moment in my life she had not been privy to. “Your father and I were on our way from Uncle Paul and Aunt DiAnn’s to Miss Justine’s for the first time. We were in his old Caprice convertible—”

  “I remember that car. Blood red. He had that until I turned—what—about eight?”

  I laughed lightly. “Yes. About that.” I took a breath. Worked my fingers, picking at a cuticle until it turned red with anger, then moved my hand over the pearl bracelet I’d worn since Michelle gave it to me as a teenager. “That song came on the radio and … I remember asking your father if he thought that it was true. About us only being dust in the wind.”

  “And what did he say?”

  I chuckled at the memory. “He quoted from the Bible.”

  “For dust you are and to dust you will return.”

  Again, she surprised me. “How did you know?”

  “Well, I didn’t think it would have anything to do with sackcloth and ashes,” she answered with a grin. “Or offspring being as numerous as the dust of the earth. That sort of thing.”

  I could only stare in wonder. “How did you get to be so smart?”

  Her smile curled naturally. “I had two pretty sharp parents.” Then she waited, but when I said nothing, she continued. “So, the song made you think about that day with Dad?”

  “No,” I answered honestly. “That song made me think about me. Question my worth. My value. My purpose for having ever been born. I honestly—I honestly don’t think I ever knew …” A pitiful chuckle escaped me. “…what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

  “Mom …”

  The tears threatened again. “I’m sorry, Michelle. But I—I’ve just been thinking, is all. I mean, maybe losing your dad … and then my breasts … and the gamut of emotions that goes along with that … and the move here … and … and getting old and then everything we all went through when the country shut down and all that happened afterward … just everything. I mean, what will I leave behind when I die? I’m certainly too old to do any great, monumental thing now. And I keep thinking that all anyone will ever be able to say about me, other than that I was a fairly decent person, is that I married Westley, moved across Georgia to Odenville, and entered some numbers into ledgers day in and day out until I entered them into computer spreadsheets and then I sold a business and moved to North Carolina.” I stood. Started for my bedroom.

  “Where are you going?” Michelle called after me.

  “I have no idea,” I said, returning on nearly the same footprints as I’d left.

  “So, looking back, what would you have been … if you could have been anything?”

  I blinked. “That’s just it. I still have no idea. I only wanted to be Westley’s wife and your mother.”

  She stood before me, my daughter, arms crossed, lips drawn into a thin line. Her hip was cocked, one foot rested slightly above the other. Then, after a tap of one low-heeled pump, she jiggled her keys and said, “You’re coming with me.” She waved her arm in the direction of the door. “Come on.”

  I followed, not knowing why, only knowing that to do so was important to her. “Where are we going?”

  “Come on.”

  “Just like your father,” I breathed out in frustration. I was hurting, for crying out loud. Let me hurt. No more radishes brandished high! Let me hurt!

  After a nearly silent half-hour ride in her car, we pulled up to the research center where she worked. “I want to show you something,” she said as she popped the car door open and stepped out.

  We walked without speaking, first into the lobby, then—with a wave of a security badge—into the area of the building where she spent her days, so cold, my breath formed puffs of air around my face.

  “You get used to it,” she said in response to my shiver.

  “I suppose you do but remind me to buy you mittens for Christmas.”

  “Cute. Now, then. Do you see all this?” she asked, pointing to the countertops filled with equipment I couldn’t begin to understand, much less title.

  “Of course.”

  “Good.” She took another step, then looked over her shoulder. “Please follow …”

  I started to grin at this daughter of mine with her authoritative voice, then thought better of it. I wasn’t sure I liked the way the tables had turned but was equally sure that I did.

  Michelle led me into her office, which was almost as sterile as the rest of the lab. A desk neatly stacked with papers and files. A black leather executive’s chair. Two occasional chairs made of chrome and white leather. A white Ikea-purchased bookcase filled with books separated by plaques and awards dominated the largest wall. It was to this wall, she took me. “Do you see all these?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Whose name do you see?”

  I blinked toward them, then back at her. “Yours.”

  She took one of the wood-and-brass plaques from the shelf. Wiped it with her hand to scatter the dust that had gathered there. The irony played with my heart and I nodded into a half-smile. “What does it say here?” she asked, now handing me the award.

  I peered down and r
ead: “This award is presented to Dr. Michelle H. Hamilton in recognition for her outstanding work in the area of obstetrics and gynecology, most especially ...” My words caught, my eyes having read the words ahead. “... most especially in the field of infertility.”

  Gently, Michelle took the plaque from me. She placed it back on the shelf, then led me to one of the chairs before sitting in the other. “Mom, do you know how many women have been able to have children because of the work we do here? Women who otherwise would never know the joy of carrying a child in the womb? Of feeling it kick or hiccup?”

  I swallowed. Looked at her. Looked fully at her, seeing the passion she felt toward her job and the compassion she had for me. “No.”

  “Me either,” she whispered, then smiled. “There are too many to count.” She straightened slightly before adding, “Do you know why I chose this field?”

  I crossed one leg over the other. “You told me once it was something you were just interested in.”

  “Well, then I lied. I wasn’t just interested, Mom. I saw—my whole life—I saw what not being able to carry a child did to you.” She reached over and touched my bracelet. Rubbed one pearl between her fingers. Lovingly. Tenderly. “I know how much I mean to you, how much you love me, but I also know that you would have done anything to have given birth to a baby of your own.” She looked around the room, then over her shoulder toward the door leading to the austere laboratory. “I did all this because of your influence, Mom. I did this—all of this—because you were willing to take in a little girl who was a stranger and make her your own, the surprise daughter of your husband and some flaky girl he had a one-night stand with—”

  “Michelle,” I breathed out, pleading with her to stop, hardly able to see now for the tears. Nearly unable to breathe from the knot in my throat that matched the one forming in my chest.

  My daughter’s fingers played with themselves, then stilled. “Can you even imagine what my life would have been like—how I might have turned out—if Cindie had raised me?”