Silver Threads

by Bette Lee Crosby

  As she climbed into the back seat he turned and smiled. “How was school today?”

  She gave her usual shrug and answered, “Okay.”

  Up until now he’d accepted that answer, believing she needed space. This time he didn’t.

  “What did you study?” he asked.

  “Fractions.”

  “Just fractions? A full day of fractions seems kind of boring.”

  “We did world history too.”

  “Oh? And was it better than fractions?”

  She gave a funny little snort. “Anything’s better than fractions.”

  Drew knew he had a dozen calls to make that afternoon, but he pushed them to the back of his mind and said, “I bet I have a fraction you’d like.”

  She leaned over and glared at him through the rear view mirror. “Daddy, there is not one single fraction that I like. None.”

  “How about this.” He glanced at the mirror and saw her eyes still on his face. “I buy one ice cream soda for us to share. Then you get to choose what fraction of it you’ll have and what the remainder is that I’ll get.”

  She giggled. “What if I say I’ll have the whole thing?”

  “That’s not the game. You have to choose a fraction.”

  “Okay, I’ll have three quarters of it.”

  “Ha, you picked an easy one.” He chuckled. “Well, if you have three quarters, how much will that leave me?”

  She thought for a moment then grinned and said, “One quarter.”

  “Very good,” he replied and turned toward Commerce Street. He parked in front of the Shake Shop, the same shop he’d passed earlier that afternoon.

  Brooke looked at the place with a wistful smile. “I used to come here with Mama.”

  Not giving her time to slide into the sadness of those unspoken thoughts, Drew said, “I’ll bet you’ve got some pretty good memories of this place then. Any you’d like to share?”

  Again she shrugged. He could see her pulling back, hiding inside herself.

  “Nothing, huh?”

  They slid into the booth and sat across from one another. Drew plucked the menu from its holder and passed it over to her.

  “While you decide if you want a snack to go with that three-quarter soda, I’ll tell you something I remember about your mama. Her favorite flavor was vanilla, so I think we should have a vanilla soda.”

  Brooke scrunched her forehead into a puzzled frown. “No, it wasn’t. It was strawberry.”

  “Vanilla,” Drew repeated.

  “Strawberry.” Brooke’s voice grew more adamant. “I know because when we came here she used to order a strawberry milkshake or a strawberry sundae.”

  “Ah, so you do remember.”

  She looked across at him and gave a reluctant nod. “I remember Mama and me had a lot of fun.” Her eyes grew teary, and she turned back to the menu.

  “I know how much you miss your mama,” he said. “I miss her too.”

  Brooke didn’t answer and kept her focus on the menu.

  “If you’re missing Mama and I’m missing her too, maybe instead of each of us missing her by ourselves we could try missing her together.”

  “How can we do that?” she asked curiously.

  “Well…I guess we could start by talking about her and thinking of all the nice things she did. That way we’d be remembering her but we wouldn’t have to do it all by ourselves; we could be doing it together.”

  “Won’t talking about Mama make you feel sadder?”

  “I don’t know.” Drew gave a single shoulder shrug and smiled. “One thing I do know is that losing your mama has left us both with a whole lot of sadness and tears. If a person keeps all those tears inside, they’ll drown in their own sorrow.”

  Brooke pushed back a loose curl that had fallen across her forehead and gave him a look of skepticism. “A person can’t really drown in tears.”

  “Well, maybe not technically, but they sure can be miserable.”

  She gave a grim nod.

  “I realize I haven’t been a whole lot of fun these past few months,” Drew said. “I guess it’s partly because for so many years I was busy working and didn’t take time to relax and have fun. Now I seem to have forgotten how.”

  “That’s what Mama used to say.” Brooke held back the grin tugging at one side of her mouth.

  “Don’t be a smarty pants,” he replied jokingly. “I’m willing to admit I need help, but the question is are you ready to lend a hand?”

  “I’m just a kid. What can I do?”

  “Well, you already seem to know a bit about having fun, so I was thinking maybe you could teach me.”

  She hesitated for a few moments then finally said, “It wasn’t me. Mama was the one who knew fun things to do.”

  “Oh. Well, then. I guess we’ve got a problem, don’t we?”

  She gave another solemn nod.

  “Since neither of us knows much about having fun, I guess we’ll have to try different things until we can figure out what’s fun and what isn’t.”

  “What kind of things?”

  He cradled his chin in the valley between his thumb and index finger and sat there for a while acting as if he were pondering the thought.

  “I suppose we could start with cleaning out the garage,” he finally said.

  She frowned. “That’s not fun at all.”

  “Well, then what do you suggest?”

  “Maybe make cookies.”

  He grinned. “I guess that might be a better idea.”

  On the way home they stopped at the Food Giant supermarket and bought three kinds of slice-and-bake cookie dough. That evening as they worked they spoke about Jennifer, not in terms of sorrow but in fond remembrances. Brooke told of the time they went to a Christmas party where everybody traded packets of homemade cookies. Drew shared the story of a time just after they were married.

  “We were just out for a drive, and right there by the side of the road was a tree so full of apples some of them had already dropped to the ground. Your mama told me to stop the car; then she got out and gathered up all those loose apples. We brought them home, and she made the best apple pie I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Mama has a recipe for that pie,” Brooke said brightly. “We could go back to the tree and get more apples.”

  Drew laughed. “The apples aren’t ripe enough this early in the year, but if you can wait until fall we could give it a try.”

  “I can wait,” she replied. She suggested that while they were waiting for the apples to ripen, they could practice by making some other dishes.

  “Mama said anyone can learn to cook if they set their mind to it.”

  That evening they pulled the hand-painted box from the shelf of the pantry and poked through clipped-out recipes and handwritten notes until they came across one for crunchy mac and cheese.

  “This looks easy enough,” Drew said. “How about starting with this and working our way up to apple pie?”

  “Good idea,” she replied.

  When the cookies were done Brooke said while they were not quite as good as the ones Mama made, they came close. She packed an assortment of cookies into a basket and headed for Marta and Walter Feldman’s house next door. Since it was after dark, Drew trailed behind her.

  “Daddy and I made these,” she said and proudly handed Marta the basket.

  At that moment Drew could almost see Jennifer standing there and doing the same thing. He smiled.

  You’ve still got the best of me in Brooke.

  That evening before she went to bed Brooke came to Drew.

  “Thank you, Daddy.” She wrapped her tiny arms around his neck and squeezed her face up against his. “I’m glad we decided to miss Mama together.”

  He lifted her into his lap and said, “I’m glad too, baby.”

  They sat like that and talked for almost a half-hour, Brooke telling him all the things she’d thought of for them to do after next week when school was out for the summer. There was the beach,
a trip to the zoo, a day of shopping for summer clothes, an afternoon at the park…

  As she went on and on, Drew wondered how he was going to fit all of that in and still take care of business.

  One day at a time, he thought. Just one day at a time.

  After she’d gone to sleep he walked through the house studying the bits and pieces Jennifer had left behind. Curtains stitched by hand, framed photographs of the three of them in happier days, a collection of Southern Living magazines that kept coming every month as if she was still there to read them. A thousand reminders of the precious moments that were now gone forever.

  Don’t try to forget your loved one; it’s an unrealistic expectation. Remember them, but understand these are now only memories and move forward with your life.

  He looked at the handwritten recipe clipped to the refrigerator door and again wished he’d been there to change the events of that day. There was no way he could alter the past, but hopefully he could do something about the future. The warmth of Brooke’s hug meant he’d made a start. He would build on it. Take each day as it came and make his goal to make her life better. It’s what Jennifer would have wanted.

  When Drew fell asleep that night he was comforted by thoughts of a better future; he had no idea of the trouble that lay ahead.

  The Weight of Loss

  The Keeper of the Scales saw the thoughts in Drew Bishop’s mind and smiled. It was a good thing to see a father watching over his child, a thing that deserved to be rewarded. He took a large rose-colored stone from the pile and placed it on the happiness side of Drew’s scale.

  For a moment the scale found perfect balance, and then without a visible cause sorrow began to outweigh the new stone. Without lifting it from the scale, he rolled the stone over and examined it carefully. On the bottom, nearly hidden from his all-seeing eye, was a splattering of small dark spots. They appeared to be growing larger by the moment, spreading, connecting one to another and coloring the underside of the stone an ominous gray.

  How can this be? the Keeper wondered.

  His great eye traveled down the spire of the scale and found at the bottom a silver thread twined around the base.

  He followed the delicate thread across the landscape. It traveled first one way and then the other, touching nothing until it came to a spot where it was caught beneath another scale. The scale of Eddie Coggan.

  The Keeper gave an angry roar, and lightning snapped across the sky. In all his centuries of watching over the scales, he had never before encountered such an injustice. He railed at the power above him but was helpless to change the pathway of the thread.

  For the first time since the dawn of mankind, the Keeper tried to remove the stone he had placed on the scale. It wouldn’t budge. It had grown so heavy that not even his great power could lift it.

  There was nothing he could do to change the course of events. Everything would happen as it had been destined.

  A Free Man

  A week before Eddie Coggan was to be released, he stood in line and waited for a turn to use the prisoner telephone. Three times he dialed the number for Tom’s cell phone, and three times his call slid into the same empty void. No ring, no wrong number, nothing.

  That night he wrote a letter.

  “I’m getting out July 13th,” he wrote. “Come get me.” He added a P.S., saying he hadn’t heard from Cassidy for well over two years and wasn’t planning to look her up. On the day of his release he expected Tom to be there, so when the guard asked if he wanted a lift into town he said no.

  The first thing Eddie did when he stepped outside the gate was suck in a deep breath of air. It smelled differently on the outside. Fresher. Freedom had a good smell. It smelled like something he’d been missing.

  For almost three hours Eddie stood in the hot sun waiting for his brother. He set his small duffle on the ground, swiped at the sweat on his brow and paced back and forth. Every so often he’d look up at the sun and wonder what time it was. In his letter he’d told Tom to be here at ten o’clock, but the sun had already crossed its high point.

  It wasn’t like him to be this late.

  When Eddie’s shadow grew longer he hoisted the duffle onto his shoulder, walked out to Green Chapel Road and tried to thumb a ride into town. He had no money, no car and no way of even making a phone call. After three years of working in the prison laundry, the only thing they’d given him was the address of a halfway house where he could supposedly stay.

  This is bullshit.

  When a car finally stopped, he jumped in. The driver was an elderly woman with white hair.

  “It’s a good thing I happened by,” she said. “There’s not a lot of traffic out this way, and a person could melt standing in the hot sun.”

  Eddie pulled a hankie from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his face. “Ain’t it the truth.”

  She said her name was Margaret Elkins and asked his.

  “Eddie Chapel,” he replied.

  The name of the road he’d been on was the first thing that came to mind. Avoiding the truth had always served Eddie well, and he saw no reason to do differently now. He said he was headed for Georgia to visit an ailing mama.

  “I’m visiting family also,” she told him. “My sister, Helen.” She spit the sister’s name out as if it were distasteful. “At my age I shouldn’t be doing all this driving, but if I left it up to Helen we’d never see one another.”

  Eddie spotted the pocketbook on the back seat and wondered how much actual cash was in it.

  “Helen don’t drive?” he asked absently.

  “Oh, she drives,” Margaret snapped. “But since she moved into that assisted living place she sits on her rump and waits for jitney to take her everywhere.” She gave a huff of annoyance. “That’s the problem with those places. Once people move in they expect to be driven everywhere! Why, half the cars in that parking lot haven’t moved since the day they arrived!”

  “Really?” Eddie had to hold back the grin tugging at his face. “They just park the cars and leave them there?”

  “Yes. Disgraceful, isn’t it?”

  Eddie nodded as he eyed the loose change in the well of the console.

  For the next seventy-six miles, he let Margaret do most of the talking. He listened, and as she explained the faults of one thing and another he soaked up details of the Millpond Assisted Living Facility. By the time they arrived he knew that every resident was in the dining room between six and seven-thirty and before ten they were all in bed fast asleep.

  “The crime of it all,” Margaret said, “is that Helen is seven years younger than I am. She should be the one visiting me!”

  Eddie again nodded his agreement.

  Shortly before they hit Madison she dropped him on the corner of Route 72.

  “Millpond is just a mile or so down the road,” she said, “but outside of the assisted living place there’s not another thing for miles around. At least here you’ll be able to catch another ride.”

  He thanked her and waved goodbye as she drove off.

  ~ ~ ~

  The walk was shorter than Eddie expected, and the sky was just beginning to turn dark when he arrived at the Millpond Assisted Living Facility. Keeping a good distance between himself and the building, he walked toward the back and eyed the parking lot. Even from a distance he could see what Margaret told him was most likely true. The cars sat like gray ghosts lined up across the lot, layers of dust and pollen covering whatever color was beneath. The front of the building was landscaped with small green bushes and flowering plants that bordered the walkways winding around and back again. Along the walkways were slatted benches for people to sit.

  Eddie heard laughter and voices across the courtyard. He turned away. A face they might recognize but the back of a man, never. He waited until it was quiet then circled around to the far side of the building looking for an open window on the ground floor, hoping to find a wallet left lying about on a dresser within easy reach.

  In the back
he found places where he could look in and see the rooms, but these were not regular windows with a sash that could be raised or lowered. They were large panes of glass cemented into place. Peering into a long hallway he saw clusters of people talking and laughing together, the men dressed in suit jackets and the women with sweaters shrugged over their shoulders. Although a rivulet of sweat ran down his back, when he touched his hand to the window it was cold.

  Air conditioning.

  He circled the building but found not a single window that could be pushed open.

  Lights began popping on in first one room and then another. The residents were now returning from dinner. He’d have to wait two, maybe three hours.

  Beyond the parking lot there was a field of high grass, as good a place as any. He tromped through the grass and found a spot where he could see without being seen, then lowered himself to the ground. He was tired and hungry, but he couldn’t afford to think of food right now.

  First he had to get a car then some cash, at least enough to tide him over until he could get to Tom’s place. Once he’d hooked up with his brother they’d do as they once did, and everything would work out just fine. It would be as it was before he’d met Cassidy.

  As he sat in the tall grass listening to the call of the katydids and the growl of his stomach, he thought about Tom. He remembered the good times, the times when they’d rambled from place to place, grabbing a wallet here and there. It was always enough to get by, and they’d had fun doing it. Tom knew how to keep things in check; he knew when to stay and when to pack up and run. He’d said not to go back to Tennessee, but Eddie hadn’t listened and that’s how he ended up spending three years behind bars.

  No more. From now on it’s gonna be me n’ Tom, glued together like we always been.