Agnes

by Jaime Maddox

  As Bobby grew and began to explore his world, their small and affordable apartment became crowded. Jeannie began house hunting, and the gods were on her side. She found an old home in Mount Airy, not far from Temple University Hospital, where she and Bob taught and practiced. The place was in simply deplorable condition, but it had land and character, two essential qualities. The rest could be remedied.

  With Bob’s debt and credit rating, they couldn’t get a mortgage. It was difficult to ask her mother to help, but when desperation set in, she overcame her hesitancy. She loved, loved, loved this house. It reminded her of their house on Canal Street. It was a huge old Victorian with original molding and pocket doors, stained glass, hardwood throughout. She needed to put down roots, felt as if she had been drifting since the flood. Her mom, of course, had bought a new home, but Jeannie started college soon after the flood and lived on campus. The house in Mountaintop never felt like home to her. A series of apartments in Philadelphia provided shelter from the cold, but she’d moved so many times during school and residency that she couldn’t even remember all the addresses. This house, though, would finally bring her home.

  She decided to ask her mother to co-sign the loan that would give her the house of her dreams. Not willing to risk a rejection over the phone, and wanting her mother to know how important this was for her, Jeannie drove to the mountains.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d taken Bobby “home” by herself. Since that day at the restaurant, she and her mother had become closer than ever. After Bobby’s birth, her mother made frequent trips to Philly—unprecedented in the nearly seven years Jeannie had been there before that. Helen helped design the nursery, and she paid for everything her new grandchild could ever desire, from a crib to clothing to a giant stuffed giraffe. Giraffes had been a favorite of Jeannie’s when she was a child. It wasn’t surprising, then, when Jeannie phoned to tell her mother she would be paying a visit.

  Never one to waste time, Jeannie sat down with her mother and asked her to co-sign her mortgage. While bouncing a giggling Bobby on her knee, Helen looked across her living room and stared her in the eye.

  “Under no circumstances will I ever enter into a financial agreement with that man,” she informed her.

  Before Jeannie’s shoulders had a chance to sag, however, her mother said, “However, I think a home is a good investment, and I’ll be happy to help you in any way I can. I’ll give you the money for the down payment and help you with the loan and any repairs to the house, whatever you need, Jeannie. But you must promise me to never put his name on the deed. It’ll be your security some day, and I don’t want his financial misdeeds to come back to haunt you.”

  So Jeannie entered the realm of homeownership, not with her husband, but with her mother. Bob had no objections to the arrangement; in fact, he was thrilled that his mother-in-law was making the down payment on a house he would get to enjoy. He couldn’t count on his own parents for anything, and there was no other way for them to obtain a mortgage.

  Helen didn’t stop with the loan, however. Her years at her husband’s side hadn’t been wasted, and in fact, she’d been completing tax returns and helping people with investments since Paul’s death. She was explicit in her instructions to Jeannie, and Jeannie in turn followed them to the letter. She set up three checking accounts—one for Bob, one for herself, and a joint account. Out of his account, Bob issued a monthly check to his wife to cover the costs of the house. Jeannie deposited this “rent” into her own account, which she used to pay the mortgage and all expenses related to the house—landscaping, appliances, roof repairs, everything a house needed. From their joint account came the money for the utilities and other common expenses.

  The young Jeannie had been a social creature, but after Sandy’s death, she became more of an introvert. She could bury her pain in work and study, but found that socializing and relaxing was difficult. Filling her hours with caring for her son was not only easy, but it was also fulfilling. Her life was simple, a clean division between work and motherhood, and with the birth of her daughter Sandy three years after Bobby, it was even more so. She worked twenty hours weekly curing disease and spent the rest of her time raising her children. They spent much of their time at parks and playing in their yard, and when Sandy turned one, Helen decided the trip to Philly was getting to be too much for her and she bought Jeannie a house in the mountains, where she could spend all the time she wanted to out of doors.

  While Jeannie took such pleasure in the simple things that had always made her happy, Bob hadn’t changed either. The Porsche he drove had to be the most current model. The lake house her mother had bought them wasn’t satisfactory without a speedboat at the dock. His season tickets to every Philly sports team kept him away from home, but when he was there he listened to the finest stereo equipment and watched the biggest television on the market.

  Jeannie saved, Bob spent. Then one day, when he left her for a woman half his age, he expected Jeannie to give him her house so he would have some financial security. That didn’t sit well with her. Not because of the affair. Not because of his reckless approach to finances. It was her house, something she loved, and she had promised her mother she would protect it from this man. She had made a wise investment in the house, and it would have come back to haunt her if not for her mother, because the property value had increased so exponentially in the nearly thirty years they were married, she could not have easily afforded to buy him out. To give him half of the value of the house in cash, she would have to sell it to someone else and would be set adrift once again. She would have lost her husband, broken up her family, and lost her home in yet another catastrophic event. Divorce.

  So Jeannie had done nothing to push the divorce. Bob hadn’t either, until now, when he apparently needed the money for a home to share with his new bride. Jeannie guessed the carriage house wouldn’t be a suitable abode for the wife of a prestigious orthopedic surgeon.

  Jeannie watched her daughter pacing as she talked to her son and worried that what was best for her would be so hard on her kids. “Is everything okay?” she asked when Sandy hung up the phone.

  “I have no idea! He needs to talk to me, and I didn’t want to get into it until I finish talking to you. I can only handle one crisis at a time.” Shaking her head, she plopped down on the other end of the sofa and put her feet in Jeannie’s lap. Without being asked, Jeannie placed her water glass on the table and began to rub Sandy’s feet.

  “You’re the counselor in this family, my darling. That must grow tiring.” Sandy had been born a peacemaker, with negotiating skills she began to reveal as soon as she could formulate words. Jeannie often thought her marriage would have collapsed years before it actually did if Sandy hadn’t been between them, coaxing her and Bob into a compromise they both found palatable. From choosing color swatches to paint the family room to choosing food for dinner or family vacation destinations, when a disagreement erupted, Sandy negotiated until someone gave in or gave up.

  No one had ever asked this of her; it was simply a role she was born to. And Jeannie knew she loved it, was thrilled to be in the middle, solving other people’s problems. Law had been a natural choice for her, and she had just finished law school at Penn. Jeannie thought her daughter would make the perfect judge one day. She was fair and impartial and pursued justice with a passion. Sometimes, though, she needed a break, even from a job she loved so much. And this particular job—as mediator of her parents’ separation—had been ongoing for a decade.

  Sighing in acknowledgment, Sandy appeared defeated as she drew a shading hand over her eyes. “I just want everyone to be happy.”

  “Honey, no matter how much you love someone, you can’t make them happy. You aren’t responsible for your dad, or for me, or your brother, either. We all have to take responsibility for ourselves.”

  “But you won’t listen to Dad.”

  “Why is that your problem?”

  “Because he’s my father and I care about wh
at happens to him.”

  “I’m your mother. Don’t you care about what happens to me?”

  “Of course I do! But you’re just so much more…capable than he is. And you have more money than he does.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Dad.”

  Jeannie had never discussed any of their troubles with the kids, and it frosted her to think that Bob did. They didn’t know of his liaisons, not from Jeannie, anyway. They didn’t know about gambling debts or credit-card bills. They only knew that the guy who had tucked them in at night was asking them for something that seemed reasonable, and they expected a fair and reasonable response from their mother. Sandy and Bobby had no idea how Bob had screwed things up for himself, and Jeannie loved them too much to expose his flaws for them to see.

  Sipping her water, Jeannie leaned back and looked at her daughter’s troubled face. She debated telling Sandy everything, but only for a second. She’d had this discussion with herself before, and she knew it was wrong to rat him out to their kids. She’d try a different strategy instead.

  “You realize, don’t you, that to give him half of this house means I’d have to sell it. I don’t have that kind of money to just hand it to him. And if I sell the house and give him half the money, I won’t have it to give to you one day. If he takes it and blows it on—” Jeannie had to choose her words carefully. What was the word she needed? Whore? Bimbo? She decided to drop that train of thought. She cleared her throat and paused, then changed the subject.

  “As things stand, you and Bobby are my heirs. If I give twenty dollars to the Girl Scouts for cookies, that’s ten bucks less for you and ten bucks less for Bobby.”

  Sandy sat up and looked pleadingly at her. “Dad needs the money, Mom. All of his money is tied up, and he always thought he had the house to fall back on.”

  This was a lie, told by a desperate man to an impressionable child, and Jeannie had to fight hard to control her anger. Bob knew the terms of her mother’s loan and had wholeheartedly agreed to it. Why couldn’t he just be decent enough to walk away without dragging this on and dragging their children down?

  “You can afford it, Mom. What’s the big deal?”

  Apparently, Sandy hadn’t heard a word she’d said. The big deal was an agreement with her mother. The big deal was adultery and recklessness. The big deal was her children’s future. The big deal was her house, the safe haven that had sheltered her for nearly three decades. It was on these floors that her children learned to crawl and walk. She’d listened to them practicing the piano from the kitchen while she’d cooked her family dinner. She’d taught them to throw balls in the yard and ride bikes in the driveway. So many memories were made under this roof, that she couldn’t bear the thought of losing it. She’d lost her house on Canal Street and she didn’t want to lose this one, too.

  But Jeannie was tired of arguing. If this was what her children wanted, and if this made peace for them, Jeannie would do it. She would sell her house. She would move downtown, close to the theaters, and take the subway to the office for rounds. She could do it…but she didn’t want to!

  Jeannie sighed. She never regretted marrying Bob, because their union had resulted in her children. She tried to not dwell on the past, on the what ifs and what could’ve beens. Yet, sometimes, she couldn’t help herself.

  Why hadn’t she just insisted on the divorce years before? It would have been all over now, and she’d be sitting in her living room having a much more pleasant discussion with her daughter. Dragging it out hadn’t made it any easier. Yet she knew it wouldn’t have been easier then, either. In truth, it had been a pretty bad time in her life.

  She hated to admit it, but Bob’s infidelity stung. She had cared for him, and about him, and his betrayal was a blow to her spirit. Her mother had been ailing at the time, battling advanced colon cancer, with surgery and chemotherapy and a multitude of issues that pulled Jeannie to the mountains for days at a time. Her son was threatened with expulsion from college after hosting a party where no one in attendance, including him, was old enough to drink alcohol. And just before her discovery of her husband’s infidelity and his subsequent move out of their home, their daughter confessed that she was a lesbian. It was a difficult argument to convince Sandy that her father didn’t leave because of her sexuality, and it had taken months for her to settle down after coming out.

  Although that was a difficult time, it passed. Since then, she’d had plenty of time and opportunity to finalize this divorce, and she sat there now wishing she’d just gotten it over with.

  Now, Bob had the children convinced that she, Jeannie, was the bad guy. They had no idea about their parents’ finances; they only knew what he told them. Jeannie wished she could show them, in black and white, without having to go into the details of Bob’s transgressions. But how? Then an idea occurred to her.

  “I just have one thing to show you, Sandy. Wait here.”

  Jeannie was back in a moment with a large white envelope. She opened it and pulled her tax return from it. She found the item she was looking for and showed it to Sandy and asked her to read it.

  It was Jeannie’s income from wages for the prior year. The sum was a little over a hundred thousand dollars.

  “Is that all you make? You save people’s lives! This is an atrocity!” Sandy’s sense of fairness always prevailed. It was why she waged this misguided fight for her father.

  Rubbing Sandy’s shoulder, she laughed. “Somehow, I manage.”

  Sandy laughed softly, apparently getting the joke, and when their eyes met, Jeannie could see the tension had left her eyes. Jeannie took her hand and squeezed.

  She had completed her husband’s taxes for years, and she was intimately familiar with the disparity in their incomes. If she looked hard enough, she might even be able to produce a copy of one of Bob’s old tax returns for Sandy to view. That wouldn’t be right, though. It was Bob’s business, and she had no right to share that information without his consent. There was another way, though. “I want you to ask your father for a look at his tax return. After seeing it on paper like this, if you’re still convinced I should give him half of this house, I will.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Out of the Mouths of Babes

  “Hey, little sister.” Bobby greeted Sandy with a kiss on the cheek. “I hope I’m not keeping you from that hot babe of yours.” He noticed she’d been texting as he approached the bar, and he knew he was probably interfering with her Saturday afternoon plans. Unlike him, she was a social creature, always on the move, always doing something.

  “As a matter of fact, you are.” She sipped her margarita and smiled tellingly. “Jennifer is sitting on the beach in Rehoboth, and as soon as I finish this drink I plan to head south to join her.”

  “Why are you drinking if you have to drive?”

  “Tough day,” she said simply.

  “I’m sorry for holding you up, but I really need to run something by you.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m not sure, but knowing Jane—it’s trouble.”

  Sandy sighed. “Why? What did Jane do now?”

  Bobby shook his hair out of his eyes and looked at her. The scowl on her face told him she understood his concerns. They’d spent a good part of their childhood in the mountains, and that time inevitably involved some encounter with Jane and her family. Their summer home on Lake Nuangola wasn’t far from their grandmother’s and Jane’s houses, and while they’d loved seeing Helen, Jane was always a pain in the ass. Even as children they could sense the resentment Jane felt for their mother, the hostility she often displayed toward her. Jeannie was able to somehow ignore her sister, and in fact he knew Jeannie loved Jane, but neither Bobby nor Sandy was fond of their aunt. Bobby had been named executor of Helen’s estate, and he would never forget the trouble Jane had caused after her mother’s death. It infuriated her that Helen had chosen Bobby over Jane’s son Steven and over Jane herself. The arguments over trivialities like canned goods
left in Helen’s cupboard were simply ridiculous, and finally the Percavages as a group just picked out a few personal items from Helen’s house and told Jane everything else was hers. She of course then complained that they’d left her to dispose of all the garbage. There was just no winning with her.

  Bobby turned toward Sandy. “About two weeks ago, just as I was boarding my flight for Paris, I received a call from a woman named Sandy Parker. She told me she was an old friend of my aunt’s. I called her, but I missed her and told her I’d call her when I got back.” Bobby sighed and sipped his water. “So, I walk through the gate at the airport when I get back, and there’s Aunt Jane waiting for me in a golf cart, escorted by security guards.”

  Seeing the look of surprise on Sandy’s face, Bobby nodded in agreement. “Bizarre, right? I immediately panic, figuring you or Mom or Dad or all three of you are dead. I go running over to her and ask her what’s wrong. She tells me there’s an emergency, but she won’t say what.” Bobby sighed again. “So we retrieve my luggage, and when I can’t stand the torture any longer, she sits me down on a bench by the luggage carousel and tells me a crazy woman’s going to be contacting me and I should ignore her.”

  “She was talking about Sandy Parker?” Sandy asked.

  “Yeah. She told me that Sandy had done something awful to Mom when they were kids, and now she wanted to make up with Mom, but I shouldn’t help her. Jane said that it would only upset her. I was so relieved that you guys were okay I just agreed. It was no big deal. But today, Sandy called me again.” Bobby pulled out his smart phone and manipulated the screen with his thumbs. “Listen to this.”

  “Hi, Bobby, this is Sandy Parker calling again. Bobby, I was your mother—Jeannie Bennett’s—best friend when we were kids. I’ve spent the last forty years thinking your mother was dead, killed in an accident on the night of the flood. I just found out that isn’t the case. I really don’t want to upset her by contacting her directly, but I hope you can call me and advise me about this—about whether your mother would like to hear from me after all these years. Please call me, either way. Thank you.”