“I’ll have Janet send out for something.”
“Not pizza.” His cholesterol had risen fifteen points, and the doctor had warned him he needed to control it with either diet and exercise or medication.
“Not pizza,” he echoed, reaching around her to take a cup from the cupboard. “Back to Stephanie—”
“Can we do this later?”
“All I was going to say is that when she calls you to plead her case you can tell her that you talked me into matching funds. Whatever she earns—up to a grand—we’ll kick in an equal amount.”
Elizabeth smiled. “That’s fair.”
“It’s more than fair, but she’s not going to think so.” He poured his coffee. “Did you tell her how much you were counting on having her home this summer?”
“No. What’s the point? She’s not going to change her mind, and it would only sound like I was trying to lay a guilt trip on her.” Elizabeth put a muffin on a plate and handed it to him. She and Stephanie used to be so close. What happened that turned hour-long phone calls four or five times a week into a rushed five minutes between classes? “You’re going to be late.”
He set the plate on the counter. “Just tell her how you feel. I’m sure—”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I want her to come home because she wants to, not out of a sense of obligation.” Most of all, Elizabeth didn’t want to spend the summer being reminded of how much fun Stephanie was missing with her friends. For all of her wonderful qualities, Stephanie wasn’t hesitant to express her unhappiness when things didn’t go her way. Reluctantly, Elizabeth had finally acknowledged what Sam had been saying for years. Elizabeth was spoiled. And not the self-aware kind that came with appreciation for all she had and all she was given, but the kind of spoiled that led to a sense of entitlement that came across as more arrogant and demanding than grateful.
“What difference does it make how she gets here as long as she’s here?”
“Can we just drop this? Please?”
“If that’s what you really want.”
“It is.”
He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. Steve’s car is in the shop, and I told him I’d give him a lift.” Sam snatched a muffin as he leaned over to kiss her. “Why don’t you do something fun today? Go shopping. Call Kathy and see if she’s free for lunch.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“At least get out of the house.”
“I am getting out of the house. I have a library meeting this afternoon.”
He stuffed a banana into his pocket to go with the muffin. “If we’re going to have the summer to ourselves, let’s do something. Just the two of us. What about a cruise?” When she didn’t respond, he tried again. “Okay, how’s this? Since Stephanie doesn’t want to come home to see us, we’ll go to Long Island to see her. We could take in a couple of plays in the city, pop up to Boston for a little history. We could even stop by to see the boys on the way home.”
“She didn’t say she didn’t want to come home.” She followed him outside.
“Just that she got a better offer.”
“Nice, Sam. Just what I needed.”
He made a face. “I did it again, didn’t I?”
“Big time.”
“Sorry.”
“Drive carefully.” She gave him a dismissive wave.
Their normal routine was that he told her he would, she watched as he got in the car, waved good-bye when he reached the end of the driveway, and went back inside when he turned the corner. Today he tossed his briefcase into the passenger seat and came back to take her in his arms. “If Stephanie knew how much this meant to you, she’d be here.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said, relenting enough to put her arms around him. “I just need a little time to get used to the idea.”
“I know.” He kissed the frown line between her eyebrows. “But that’s tomorrow. Today is the shits and I’m sorry.”
Not exactly what she needed, but enough to make her feel a little less alone. “Maybe something will happen and she’ll decide to come home after all.”
“Isn’t that supposed to be my line?” he said.
“No, your line is to tell me to go shopping and buy myself something I don’t need.”
“Ouch.” He let her go and went to the car without saying anything more.
Her guilt set in before Sam reached the end of the driveway. She would call later and apologize.
Before she went back inside, Elizabeth took a minute to glance around the yard, noting the impatiens that were thriving and the ones the snails had decimated. She checked the roses for aphids and the flower beds for weeds, the spent tulips and daffodils that needed attention and the dead branch on the birch tree. She’d gone through three gardeners in a year, each one younger and less reliable than the one before.
Complaining about laziness and lack of pride in the younger generation made her sound older than the forty-eight she reluctantly admitted to, so she rarely said anything aloud. But she thought about it a lot. At times the sense of separation she felt around her own children and their friends in ideals and standards and goals left her speechless.
Drawn by the parched look of one of the lilacs near the bird feeder, Elizabeth crossed the lawn to check the sprinkler. She was still working out the problems in the drip system Sam had installed the year before to conserve water. When they’d built the house twenty years ago Sam had designed a simple landscape for the near-acre-size lot, one that he could take care of on Saturdays with a gas edger and riding mower. Over the years she’d added shrubs and flowers, while Sam added a pool and built-in barbecue. Their yard became the showcase of the neighborhood, featured in the garden section of the Fresno Bee twice and visited by garden clubs every spring, and every year it became more labor-intensive.
The work hadn’t mattered so much when the kids were home, when there were weekend parties and friends to enjoy and appreciate her efforts. Now, with the occasional exception of a barbecue for friends or the employees at one of the tire stores, it was she and Sam sitting outside on Sunday morning drinking coffee and reading the newspaper.
She’d given “retirement” three years, and it was driving her nuts. If she didn’t find something, if she couldn’t come up with a new reason for getting up every morning, she was going to go out of her mind. And take Sam with her. She knew her moods were wearing on him, and she tried to stay upbeat for his sake, but it was hard to be bouncy in lead shoes.
Elizabeth bent to check the soil around the lilac. It was dry and rock-hard. She broke off a leaf and rolled it between her finger and thumb. There was still enough moisture to save the plant with a couple of deep waterings. As she headed for the hose, she saw a Federal Express truck stop in front of the house. Seconds later a young man sprinted up the driveway, a clipboard in one hand, an overnight envelope in the other.
Elizabeth motioned to him. “Over here.”
He smiled and crossed the lawn to meet her. “Great yard,” he said.
“Thanks.” Assuming the letter was for Sam, she was surprised when she spotted her name. She looked closer. It was from a law office in Sacramento. She didn’t know anyone in Sacramento. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been there.
He handed her the clipboard and pointed to the signature line. “Sign there, please.”
She did, her curiosity growing.
She waited until the truck was gone before she looked inside and found two business-size envelopes, one unaddressed with a travel agency logo in the corner, the other from the law office and addressed to her.
She opened the one from the lawyer first.
Dear Ms. Walker:
I’m writing to you on behalf of your father, Jessie Patrick Reed. I regret to inform you that Mr. Reed is dying. He has expressed a desire to see you again, and in light of the finite time left him, I’m sure you will understand the urgency involved.
Elizabeth’s structured worl
d imploded, a star collapsing into a black hole. The sun, the birds, the crisp morning air were no more, in their place a phalanx of rancorous memories.
Mr. Reed has asked me to tell you that he understands why you might feel a meeting is not in your best interest, but he is prepared to do whatever necessary to encourage you to change your mind. To facilitate your travel to Sacramento I am enclosing a round-trip airline ticket and information about the arrangements for the car and driver that will be waiting for you when you arrive. It is not necessary to confirm. If you have any questions, please feel free to call me at any time.
Regards,
Lucy Hargreaves
“You bastard.” Long-repressed pain and anger flared through her like flames through a summer-parched forest. He was summoning her as if she were supposed to care that he was dying?
“Well, I don’t,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, old man, you died a long time ago.”
Chapter Six
Jessie
Jessie peered at Lucy over the top of his menu. She studied the list of Italian dishes as if she might really be considering something besides a salad. They were at Biba’s, one of Sacramento’s finest restaurants. The food came in reasonable portions, and the bill was rarely less than what someone who worked in fast food made in a week.
Lunch had been Lucy’s idea. A good one, but not for the reason she’d tendered. He didn’t need an excuse. He liked being with her. Always had, and always would, even if it meant letting her think he needed company while he waited for the meeting she’d scheduled with his daughters that afternoon.
He was ready for fireworks—more than ready, he was looking forward to it. But he was more than a little nervous, too. He had a lot to say and a nagging certainty he wouldn’t be given a lot of time to say it. He’d finally reached the point in the dying process where he could feel the difference between the pain that came with the disease, which the doctor had told him was no longer in remission, and the signs that his body was shutting down. He hated being aware of such things. Most of all he hated thinking about them.
Lucy laid her menu to the side. “What are you having?”
“The lobster ravioli.”
“Kind of rich, don’t you think?”
He chuckled.
“Habit,” Lucy said.
“Since when?”
“All right, so it’s not. But maybe it should have been.”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference.” He took a sip of the pinot noir the waiter had recommended. It slipped over his tongue with an elegant fruitiness that managed to penetrate the metallic taste of medicine in his mouth. He did love a good wine and was grateful he could still appreciate this small indulgence. “And think of all the incredible meals I would have missed.”
“Kind of like skipping dessert on the Titanic.”
This made him laugh. “Precisely.”
“Still, I think I’ll have the spinach and pine nut salad.”
“Live a little, Lucy. For me. Just this once try the ravioli.”
Long seconds passed before she picked up the menu again and replied, “I’ll make you a deal.”
He sat back in his chair and nodded for her to go on.
She, too, sat back. “For twenty years you’ve changed the subject every time I asked you about your past.”
“I didn’t want to bore you.”
“You knew you wouldn’t.”
“How can you be so sure? Wouldn’t you rather talk about something that matters now? Like this rumor I heard that you’re thinking about retiring.”
“You’re doing it again, Jessie.”
“So I am,” he admitted.
She folded her arms across her chest. “I’ll up the stakes. You know that chocolate cake you’re always insisting I try?”
He’d never lacked for women in his life, but until Lucy he’d never known what it was to love one intellectually as well as emotionally. God, he was going to miss her. He glanced up and saw the waiter working his way toward them.
“Why do you want to know about my past?” It was a meaningless proposition, a means for two old friends to pass the time. Nothing he could tell her would change anything.
“Curiosity—pure and simple. I’ve been thinking about your girls and that they all come from different mothers. I know you’ve been married twice. . . .”
“It’s a long story.”
“I have time.”
He looked at his watch. “Not that much.”
“Then give me a chapter.”
It was then he knew just how afraid she was that the meeting with his girls was going to turn out badly. “You want me to play your Scheherazade and spin tales for you?”
“Maybe.”
“It won’t work, you know.”
“Indulge me.”
“I’ll give you twenty questions.”
She smiled, satisfied. “One—why did you leave Oklahoma?”
“That’s easy. It was leave or starve.”
“You’re going to have to do better than that if you expect me to put cream sauce in this mouth.”
The waiter hovered expectantly. Jessie smiled. “You drive a hard bargain.”
Lucy returned the smile before she looked at the waiter. “We’ll both be having the lobster ravioli.”
Jessie rarely looked back. The past put too much weight on a man’s shoulders and made it harder to move through life than it needed to be. But some memories were etched in his mind like daguerreotypes. His last day in Oklahoma was one of them. Although filled with a crimson sorrow, an acorn dust, and an indigo of broken dreams, the image always came to him in stark black and white.
In his mind’s eye he saw himself standing on the porch of his grandfather’s farmhouse outside Guymon, Oklahoma, watching his father check the knots on the ropes he’d used to secure the family’s belongings in the back of their old Ford truck. His mother stood to the side, her hand resting on the brass handle of the wardrobe that had been passed through her family from mother to daughter for six generations.
His father had promised to make room for the wardrobe—a promise he couldn’t keep.
Jessie looked down at his hand. “I can still feel the splinters in the porch pillar of that old house and still remember thinking how I’d sanded and painted it just two summers before. The land, the building, the trees, the wells—everything was in ruin from two years of wind and dust. And yet all I could think about was how hard I’d worked on that damned old porch pillar. . . .”
The past took hold of Jessie. He slipped into memories of Oklahoma so vivid he wasn’t sure which he gave voice to and which he only heard in his mind.
Jessie’s Story
It was my birthday. September 19, l935. I was sixteen years old. Old enough to be on my own. Older than my uncle had been when he struck out on his own, and argument enough to talk my ma and pa into letting me stay behind while they went to California to be with Pa’s brother now.
No one wished me happy birthday. I figured they didn’t remember, or if they did, Ma told them not to say anything. No sense in making the leaving any harder than it already was.
I was careful not to let on that I wasn’t as sad as she expected I would and should be. Being on my own was an adventure I’d been living in my head for weeks, and now it was about to happen for real. I would have felt different if I’d known that they would never find my uncle and what the move would do to Pa, how all that happened to him and the rest of the family in California would drive him so deep into himself that he would stop talking two years later and stop eating the year after that.
When Pa decided it wasn’t possible to add one more thing to that old truck, Ma lined everyone up to say good-bye. She made my sister, Rose, hug me, but my brother, Bobby Ray, refused. He punched me on the arm harder than I felt was right or fitting, so I hit him back. We would’ve been down on the ground rolling in the dirt if Grandma hadn’t stepped in to pull us apart. She put her hands on my shoulders and held me there, looking at
me like she knew it was for the last time.
“You got no business staying behind by yourself. There’s nothing for you here. It’s done with, Jessie. Leave it be and come with us to California.”
Somehow she’d gotten it in her head that I was staying behind to work the farm. Pa never could tell her that it didn’t belong to them anymore, that the bank had foreclosed. “I gotta try, Grandma,” I said figuring it was what she needed to hear.
When it came Pa’s turn to say good-bye he shook my hand like I wasn’t just his boy anymore but a grown man. “You stay out of trouble, Jessie.”
Ma was crying when she put her arms around me, squeezed me like it would hurt to let me go, and whispered in my ear, “If things don’t work out the way you want, you come lookin’ for us.”
“I will.”
She wasn’t taking the easy answer. She grabbed hold of my wrists and looked me straight in the eye. “You promise me.”
“I promise,” I told her. And I meant it. Finding them in California one day was part of my plan. But I wouldn’t go there because I needed something. When I arrived it would be with pockets full of money that I’d use to buy them another farm.
Ma didn’t look back at me when the truck pulled out on the road, only my brother and grandmother. And then it was just Bobby Ray. He stood in the back of the truck, balancing himself on the trunks and mattresses and pots and pans, swinging both arms in the air like he was cheering for me and not mad anymore that he couldn’t stay, too.
It was the last time I saw my brother. I’ve been back there a thousand times in my mind looking for something, wishing I could find a look or word that let him know I thought he was the best brother a kid could have and that I loved him. But I never do. Bobby Ray wasn’t much for sentimentality and would’ve been all over me if I’d have tried something like that.
I stayed rooted to the spot like one of the dying sycamore trees out back watching until there wasn’t anything to see but a long trail of dust hanging in the noon sky. When I was sure they weren’t coming back for something they might have forgot, I went inside to get the suitcase that Ma and I had hidden in the front bedroom closet.
The Year that Everything Changed Page 6
