by Deb Caletti
“Well, we’ve got to do something,” Harold said.
“Lillian will die in there,” Anna Bee said. She looked near tears. Her thin wrists stuck out from beneath a sweatshirt with rows of butterflies on it that was labeled with their names. It continually astounded me how the old ladies always dressed like it was the middle of winter when it was so hot out.
“We will not allow this,” Mrs. Wong said. She sounded fierce in spite of her red slippers. “Lillian is not strong like Grandfather Wong. She will die in that place.”
We’d heard the news that morning. Four days after our joint night of rain-drenched heartache, Lillian had been taken to the Golden Years Rest Home. Delores and Nadine and their husbands had come to her home and packed up a few of her belongings. Lillian’s attempt to run away and her other recent behavior showed she was a danger to herself, they’d said. Mrs. Wong was sure that it really had to have been planned long ago. When her father-in-law, Grandfather Wong, required twenty-four-hour nursing care, they had been on a waiting list for months. Peach said they’d been at Lillian’s every day since, packing up and taking boxes from her home. She expected a FOR SALE sign to go up any day now. Peach said she couldn’t bear to watch. She’d closed all her drapes, but still couldn’t help herself from peeking between the curtains, seeing the sad parade of Lillian’s life being packed into the back of Delores’ minivan.
We’d had other news since that night too. Travis Becker was miraculously alive and all right, except for a broken pelvis and collarbone. He’d be coming home in a few days, they thought. My mother had also talked to Libby, who would be pressing charges against Travis but not me. I was fired, of course. But worse, she did not want to speak to me.
“So this is why I’ve called an emergency meeting of the Casserole Queens,” my mother said. “I have something very important to tell you.”
“The hippie proposed,” Harold said.
“Lillian in a rest home isn’t enough?” Miz June said. She was ripping off the cellophane from a box of chocolates from one of her admirers. Harold hadn’t had time to prepare food. My mother had called them all that morning. She’d come in my room too, and told me we were gathering and I had to be there. I hadn’t wanted to go there or anywhere else. I preferred to stay in my bed, wrapped in a quilt cocoon. I was busy imagining myself as Claudia in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, running away to New York and hiding out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I used to love that book. This is not ‘you made your bed, now you have to lie in it’ time, my mother had said. This is ‘you made your bed, now get up and change the sheets.’ I’d wished I’d used the same technique on her in the past.
In the car, she refused to tell me why we were meeting. Why should I? she had said. It’s not like you tell me anything before it happens. This is what I’d been getting over the last few days. She was a balloon full of air, yet her anger would not come out in one explosive pop, but instead through a slow leak. I wished in some ways we’d just have it out in a big fight, but that wasn’t what my mother did. She preferred the small, brief jabs, then retreat. Small seeps of hurt that still drew blood. We drove a little further. You’ve decided we should have secrets, so secrets it will be, she said.
Miz June set the box of chocolates on the table.
“That one’s the cherry,” Harold helpfully pointed it out. He made a face. We all took a piece, avoiding it.
“Orange cream,” Peach said. She’d taken a bite, looked at the other half as if it were something she’d found on the bottom of her shoe. “I hate orange cream.”
“Caramels are the best,” Harold said.
“They are not good for dentures,” Mrs. Wong said.
“I spoke with Charles Whitney,” my mother said.
This stopped all talk of chocolates and of anything else. The room was silent except for the soft thrum of Beauty’s purring from where she sat on Mrs. Wong’s slippers. Miz June, who had delicately pinched a chocolate between two fingers and was heading it toward her mouth, stopped in midair and changed her mind, setting it back on the napkin in her lap.
“Well?” Anna Bee finally said.
“Goddamn it, Ann, speak,” Peach said.
“I called him. Just like that. I was surprised he was listed. Monterey, California. You would not believe how easy it was to find him. Five minutes on the Internet. I just . . . It seemed crazy, but not crazy. I just couldn’t get past my own curiosity. Damn it, you got me again.” She shook her finger at Peach.
“She’s Rose, I know it,” Peach said. “The first time I called I got a woman.”
“Ah, he’s a ladies man!” Mrs. Wong said. “Like Mr. Wong.”
“No, it was his daughter, I guess. She told me he was at a game.”
“Baseball fan!” Harold said. “Good man.”
“No, a soccer game. I guess he coaches his granddaughter’s team. Can you picture him, big beard and all, coaching little girls’ soccer?”
“A scholar and an athlete,” Miz June said.
“Go on, Ann,” Anna Bee said.
“Well, as I said, I asked for Charles Whitney. The woman said he wasn’t there, and asked if she could take a message. I felt like an idiot. ‘Is this his wife?’ I asked. I was worried. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable if it was, talking about Lillian/Rose.”
“That was very sensitive of you,” Miz June said.
“The woman laughed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘His daughter. He’s wifeless.’ She sounded so friendly. ‘Wifeless.’ I told her everything. I told her I ran a book club for seniors in Nine Mile Falls and we were trying to unravel a mystery of sorts. We had a feeling that one of our members, silenced by a stroke, might have known him. I just let it all out, foolish or not. She didn’t say anything. It was silent on that phone except for a dog who started to bark in the background.”
“An animal lover too!” Anna Bee said.
“I thought she’d left me hanging there. I pictured a phone dangling on its cord in some kitchen. But then I could hear just a small intake of breath. Like a sigh, only in reverse. And then she said something that nearly knocked me over. She said, ‘Nine Mile Falls? You don’t happen to mean Lillian Hargrove do you?’”
“Holy shit,” Harold said. Mrs. Wong munched her second chocolate and reached for another. You could just imagine how she would pound a box of Raisinets in a movie theater at the exciting part.
“You guys were right. I couldn’t believe it. After the dead body. After the Nazi. You guys were right.”
“I told you!” Peach shouted. She stood up from her chair, did a little dance, her old body a symphony of looseness, chin swag swaying, her chest swinging to and fro. “Lillian is Rose, Lillian is Rose!” I felt it too. A surge of excitement. I wanted to get up and dance too. Lillian, so frail in her chair. A secret life. Possibilities for those who seemed to have run out of them. The quiet people.
“I said, ‘Lillian Hargrove, yes,’” my mother said. “‘That’s right. He does know her, then.’
“‘I’m going to call my father right now and have him call you back,’ Joelle, his daughter, said. “‘He’s at a soccer practice. My daughter’s. He coaches her team. But trust me, he’ll want to be interrupted.’
“I sat by the phone,” my mother said. “I just looked at it. It seemed . . .” My mother’s voice broke a little, and she swallowed. “It seemed to have the power to make miracles.”
Mrs. Wong had her hankie out. She dabbed her eyes. I felt a lump growing in my own throat.
“It rang not three minutes later. ‘Is this Ann McQueen of Nine Mile Falls?’ he said. Charles Whitney! The real him. I couldn’t believe it, I tell you. I mean, the man is a two-time National Book Award winner. He had this deep, rumbly voice, like a ship’s engine. My hand was shaking.
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘Lillian Hargrove’, he said. No, he breathed. He told me everything I needed to know when he said that name. I could hear kids in the background. Little girls, a whistle. Anot
her man’s voice giving directions.
“‘So you do know her,’ I said.
“‘Indeed I do,’ he said. ‘Indeed I do.’” My mother’s eyes were bright. Tears were rolling down Mrs. Wong’s cheeks and Harold had his head down, twisting his wristwatch and clearing his throat a lot.
“I could almost see him,” my mother said, “hunched around that phone, soccer bags and balls and water bottles at his feet, girls in little uniforms running on a green field. He told me he and Lillian were lovers during the war. He told me they’d been in contact over the last year or two, since Walter died. They’d been writing letters, calling. They’d been making plans to be together. Secret plans. Lillian had tried to tell her daughters about Charles, but they disapproved. Protective of their father. So they kept their plans to themselves.”
“That bitch Delores,” Harold said, but his voice was a squeak. Mrs. Wong still clutched her hankie. A bit of black mascara had rolled down her cheek, underneath her eyeglasses.
“But they had an argument,” my mother said. “Lillian worried that her daughters needed her. She had second thoughts about leaving them. And then . . .” My mother paused.
“And then Lillian had her stroke,” Peach said. “Oh, God.”
“Lillian had her stroke. Charles didn’t know what happened. He called and called. He wrote, but he never heard back. His calls were not returned. He thought she had left him again.
“‘I’ve been miserable without her,’ he told me,” my mother said. “‘I thought I’d lost her.’”
“I told him what had happened. I told him about Delores and Nadine putting Lillian in the rest home. ‘Bring her to me, Ann,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of her.’
“I explained that Lillian wasn’t in good shape. She would require a lot of care. She couldn’t take care of herself.
“But he said I didn’t understand. ‘None of that matters,’ Charles Whitney said. ‘Lillian is my soul mate.’”
The Casserole Queens ordered pizza. My mother called home and found out that Joe Davis had done the same—he and Chip Jr. were sharing a Canadian bacon with extra cheese and watching a show on nature photography. Harold pretended to be dissatisfied with the quality of the food, but scarfed down four pieces before I stopped counting. He even used his finger to scrape the cheese stuck to the top of the box.
“Delores and Nadine knew he was trying to reach her. What about all of the phone calls?” Peach said.
“They saw the letters. No one can tell me they didn’t,” Mrs. Wong said.
“Children don’t like to see you live your own life sometimes,” Miz June said. “They chaperone you like you are a wayward teenager.”
“They forget you’re a woman and not just a mother,” Peach said.
“They think they are the sole owners of a sex life,” Miz June said.
Yikes. Open brain, remove image. Maybe she was right.
“Someone needs to talk some sense into Delores,” Anna Bee said.
“Maybe she’ll understand if we explain,” Miz June said.
“One thing I’ve learned,” Harold said. In his exuberant pizza eating, he’d dropped a splotch of red sauce on his white polo shirt. “Talking sense to people who are not sensible is as productive as talking into your underwear drawer, and a whole lot less pleasant. Delores and Nadine are the defenders of their dead father’s memory and their mother’s virtue. Stand aside.”
“We’ve got to do something,” I said. The hollowness I’d felt over the last few days was gone. Filled with a sudden urgency. Purpose, I guess. I never knew how powerful purpose is, how large. The way it can find the grooves and furrows.
“If we phrase it in the right way, maybe they’ll come around,” Anna Bee said.
“If we steal Lillian out of the rest home, we don’t have to care whether they come around or not,” Mrs. Wong said.
“What are you saying?” my mother said.
“I have connections,” Mrs Wong said.
“We could steal her out of there,” Harold said, as if it were his idea.
“Drive her down to California,” Miz June said.
“We’d have to make sure she really wants to go,” my mother said.
“I’ll go see her,” Peach said.
“We’ll both go,” Anna Bee said.
“This can’t work,” my mother said. Harold’s face fell. The voice of authority was speaking. I was about to open my mouth, give her a lecture on taking a chance—soul mate! when she said something surprising. “My car would never make it.”
“I’ve got a car,” Miz June said. “The Lincoln. I’ve only driven it a few times. It barely has any miles on it, from when it belonged to Chester Delmore’s dead wife.”
“Gas guzzler,” Anna Bee said. She was always environmentally responsible.
“Room for lots of people. Four seat belts in the back. Three in front.”
“Well,” my mother said. “It’s decided. It’s a mission for true love, which I, for one, had lost hope in.”
Miz June opened a drawer of a side table and brought out a pen and a page of stationery, decorated around the edges with roses. You could smell a faint whiff of sweetness—it was scented. “I’ll have to go, of course, since I’m driving.” She wrote her name down. I had an image of her driving twenty miles an hour all the way to California, her nose pressed to the windshield. It would be faster to take Anna Bee’s Schwinn. “Ann, as the leader of the group and only sane member. Which means Ruby and Chip Jr. too, I assume. And of course we can’t forget Lillian. That leaves two seats.” Miz June waited for agreement. Everyone nodded.
“We’ll draw straws,” Harold said.
“Mrs Wilson-now-Mrs. Thrumond will be sorry she left now,” Peach said.
Anna Bee scurried to the kitchen. I’d never seen her move so fast. This was like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with the golden tickets. “Do you have straws?” She shouted to Miz June. It wasn’t like her to shout, either. She had a surprising set of lungs.
“In the pantry. Top shelf. I like them with my lemonade. Scissors in the drawer under the phone.”
“Ann will hold the straws,” Harold said, though he was the only one we had to worry about as far as cheating went.
Anna Bee came back with the straws. My mother turned her back on the group, put the straws in her fist. Everyone chose. It was solemn as a church service.
“Yippee,” Peach said. “I’m in.”
“Long straw,” Harold said. You could tell he was suppressing his glee.
“Short,” Mrs. Wong said.
“We’ll still need you to help steal Lillian,” Miz June said.
“That’s the most important job,” I said.
“I’m out too.” Anna Bee said. Her face dropped.
“Thank goodness,” Miz June said kindly. “Someone’s got to stay behind and look after the pets. Beauty and Harold’s fish. And, oh, my sweet peas.”
“Joe Davis can look after Poe now that they are best friends,” I said.
“Joe Davis, the minister?” Miz June asked. One eyebrow shot up.
“Ann, you’re blushing,” Anna Bee said.
“He’s helping us fix a few things,” she said. “Poe just has a new leash on life, ha ha.”
“Things are looking up!” Peach said.
“As long as I don’t have to sit by the viper,” Harold said.
“I wouldn’t sit by you if I were dead and couldn’t tell the difference,” Peach said.
“Road trip,” Harold said.
That day, the day we stole Lillian, we were all capable of magic, each and every one of us who had gathered on our front lawn holding a copy of the plan for the human heist that my mother had copied on the library copy machine. You could see it later, that magic, in the pictures Chip Jr. was running around and snapping maniacally with the old camera Joe Davis had given him that morning. The camera was a present after their discussion the night before, when Joe Davis told Chip Jr. that he thought Chip Jr.’s noticing and curiosi
ty were the best kind of compliments to God, like an art lover’s appreciation and study of a painting. If so, his new compliments were going to cost Mom a fortune in developing, as Chip Jr. was noticing and capturing everything. Click, Harold in an uncharacteristically tacky orange baseball cap, knapsack over one shoulder, posing with one arm around Peach and making rabbit ears with two fingers behind her permed head. Click, Joe Davis with his eyes fixed on my mother, a beautiful blur at the outside frame of the photo, as Poe sat upright at his feet in perfect focus, looking up at the minister adoringly, as if he’d just found the Supreme King of Red Meat. Click, Miz June’s puff of blonde hair in the Lincoln, which sat at the curb all gold and chrome glinting in the sun like a carriage in a modern fairy tale. Click, Anna Bee and Mrs. Wong sneaking a look at the Playboys that Mrs. Wong brought along for Grandfather Wong, Anna Bee’s face red as a geranium and Mrs. Wong’s wearing the expression of a lost soul stuck by a roadside trying to read a map upside-down. And click, me, a pencil behind my ear, caught by surprise, glancing over one shoulder as my name was called, looking relaxed and happy and, most amazingly, myself. Not small or narrow, but full and alive, and for a moment, not racked with thoughts about Travis and Libby.
You could see the magic we all had that day. The magic that comes with the force of a mission, lit with a fine and rare energy. The magic of purpose and of love in its purest form. Not television love, with its glare and hollow and sequined glint; not sex and allure, all high shoes and high drama, everything both too small and in too much excess, but just love. Love like rain, like the smell of a tangerine, like a surprise found in your pocket. We were all part of that.
Miz June wanted to get going. She kept revving the accelerator of the Lincoln, urging us to get a move on. My mother went to the bathroom five thousand times like she always does when she gets nervous. Joe Davis kissed her goodbye behind the hydrangea bush. Every time Chip Jr. kneeled to take a picture, Poe would trot over and stick his nose up to the lens, wanting another closeup. Later, we’d have six fine shots of this one segment of Poe’s face—huge smeary black nose, slightly wet lips, enormous, slightly deranged-looking eyes.
