Left to Chance

by Amy Sue Nathan

  “I don’t believe in that kind of thing.”

  “In what kind of thing?”

  “Spirits.”

  “That’s neither here nor there. You can talk to her no matter what you believe.”

  “I’m not a fan of cemeteries.”

  “You’re overthinking this, Teddi. Just talk to her inside your head. You can do that anywhere. Right here, if you want. Go ahead. I’ll wait.”

  I stared at Lorraine. “Um…”

  “I’m kidding!” She laughed as she reached across the table and rubbed my arm. “Relax.”

  “That’s the problem. I can’t relax. I feel like I really screwed things up and I’m too late to fix them.” I gathered my cup and napkin, and stood. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to lay all this on you.”

  “Sit. I don’t mind. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want, but stay. Unless you have somewhere you need to be.”

  Lorraine and I sat in a companionable and soothing silence. The sounds of Perk simmered around us—the hiss of the espresso machine, the swoosh of the broom, the scrape of chairs as they were pushed into place.

  “Since you have two daughters, can I talk to you about something?”

  “Of course.”

  I slid my chair closer to Lorraine’s.

  “Shay’s only twelve, but I have to have a difficult conversation with her and I don’t even know how to start.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No, why would you think I was sick?” Did I look sick? I thought I looked okay.

  “She’s a little girl whose mother died. If you approach whatever this is by beating around the bush, she is going to think the worst. And it’s not the worst, is it?”

  “No.”

  “She’s been through the worst.”

  “Yes, she has. Which is why I don’t want to make anything harder for her. And I don’t want her to hate me. I couldn’t stand it if she hated me.”

  “Kids fling words around they don’t mean sometimes, remember that. They do it for effect. Be direct, but kind. And you can tell her it’s hard for you to talk about, that it’s not easy for you to disappoint her or upset her. For some reason teenagers think we enjoy making them miserable. Just ask your friend.” Lorraine tipped up her chin toward the door so I turned around.

  Josie bounded through the door as if pushed by the wind. “I so need a latte.” She placed her briefcase, handbag, and shopping bags at my feet and hurried to the counter even though no one was trying to outmaneuver her.

  “She’s a firecracker, that one,” Lorraine said.

  “How do you know Josie? Oh, that’s a silly question.” I laughed at my own naïveté. Everybody knew Josie.

  * * *

  Perk’s tempo rose to meet the end of the day and the need for caffeine. Josie placed a plate of cookies in the middle of the table.

  “What are these for?” I asked.

  “Lorraine loves the lemon cookies here. I’m so glad you two met. Didn’t I tell you she was great?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Lorraine.”

  “You didn’t tell me anything about Lorraine. We met the other day when I walked past my cousin Maggie’s house. And Lorraine was none too pleased at first, I might add.”

  Lorraine smiled, and covered her mouth again.

  “Then it was kismet!” Josie said.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Lorraine is the counselor who helped us with Jonathan. You didn’t know? I gave you her card!”

  “No, I didn’t know. I, uh, sorry. I didn’t really look at it yet.” I turned to Lorraine. “You’re a therapist? I had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “That’s how you know Shay.”

  “I really can’t say yes or no.”

  “Why do you work as my cousin Maggie’s caretaker if you’re a therapist?” I half expected that to be the answer. That cousin Maggie needed a psychologist, not a companion.

  Just then someone poked me in the back between my shoulder blades. “Because she likes me.”

  I turned around to see Cousin Maggie.

  “I didn’t mean anything by that, I just didn’t think—”

  “That I’d want to be around someone well read and educated who didn’t treat me like an invalid?”

  “No, that makes perfect sense.” It actually didn’t really make sense to me at all, but I didn’t want to be chastised by Cousin Maggie. She harrumphed and walked to the other side of Perk with her librarian friends.

  “I’m going to leave you two to chat some more. Call me later?” Josie tapped my shoulder and gathered her bags.

  “Sure.”

  Josie walked out of earshot. “It’s none of my business why you’re working with Maggie,” I said to Lorraine. Had she been trying to hide something from me? “Like my mother used to say, ‘Grown-ups get to make their own decisions.’ I hated when she said that, but it’s true.”

  “Chance is the place you ran away from.”

  “Uh-huh.” I gulped.

  “Chance is the place I ran to.”

  Lorraine replenished her tea. She talked about the private practice she’d built and the daughters she’d raised with her husband in Shaker Heights.

  “We had everything but the picket fence. And that was next on the list.”

  “Sounds too good to be true.”

  “It was. Vincent had always had a temper but it got out of control when the girls went away to college. I took on more patients and worked longer hours, just to be out of the house. He accused me of having an affair.”

  “Did you?”

  “I could have, but I never did. I filed for divorce without telling him, and maybe I shouldn’t have done it that way. There was just no reasoning with that man. I knew I’d need a plan to minimize the fallout, so I had everything ready. He was never physically abusive but he was making me question my sanity. Me! There’s no one saner than me.” Lorraine wrung her hands. Time was still working to heal her wounds. “His whole family was born and raised in Cleveland, and with them, Vincent would always be the good guy they thought he was.”

  My phone buzzed. “Answer it, it might be Shay,” Lorraine said.

  I glanced at my phone. A call from Annie. I tapped Decline. Another call came through almost immediately. Annie again. I tapped Decline and shut off my phone. “I am so sorry. It’s work and they don’t know when to leave me alone. I shut it off. Continue.”

  “What if Shay calls?”

  “She’ll call back. Please continue.”

  “Thank you,” Lorraine said. “My mother-in-law was not loving like you might think a mother-in-law might be if she’s never had a daughter. But when the girls were in elementary school, she said something to me while we were cooking Thanksgiving dinner. She’d continued peeling potatoes and then turned on the faucet and said, ‘If Vincent gets out of hand, you leave his ass, you hear me? You go far away. He won’t follow you. He’s not motivated enough for that. But you are.’ Then she turned off the water and never mentioned it again until right before she died, about eight years ago. ‘You go if you need to go.’ I thought she wanted me to leave the hospital room but she grabbed my hand and looked me in the eyes, which she never had, not in the more than twenty years I’d known her. I thought maybe she’d finally decided to thank me for taking care of her, since Vincent did nothing at all, but then like a smack in the head, I remembered the first time she’d said it. My whole body got cold and I started shaking, even though the temperature in the hospital room had been turned up to almost tropical. She’d known it wasn’t going to stop, that he wasn’t going to stop, that it was only going to get worse.”

  “So you left.”

  “The day after she died.”

  I shivered. “And you chose Chance?”

  “Chance chose me. I took a position as a psychologist at Union County Hospital for a year. About six months in, I found a house I loved here in town; it’s the sm
all Victorian on the corner of Grand and McGuffy. I moved in right before Celia was diagnosed. I only met her once in passing.”

  Lorraine and Celia had been neighbors. They would still be neighbors. They would have been friends. I was sure of it.

  “I bet your mother-in-law would be happy that you have a nice life here.”

  “I think she would. And I think Celia would be happy you have a nice life away from here.”

  * * *

  The sun warmed the top of my head, the line of my nose, and the apples of my cheeks, but I didn’t seek shade. Sometimes I needed to feel the sting of the sun, to close my eyes and still see light, to warm myself from the outside in. Sometimes I was on a beach. Sometimes I was on a mountain. Today I was on the sidewalk outside Nettie’s. I wouldn’t burn, but I’d slathered ample sunscreen anyway, to be safe.

  Like Lorraine, I calculated my risks when I could manage it.

  Chapter 17

  “AUNT TEE, YOU DON’T really seem like the bowling type.”

  “What? These red-and-blue-striped shoes aren’t my style for a night out on the town?” Shay chuckled while she tied her shoes. “Well, I am! It’ll be fun. Did you know your mom and I used to come here all the time when we were your age? They’ve renovated it and renamed it a few times, but it’ll always be Big Top Alley to me.”

  “Big Top Alley? That’s lame.”

  “There is nothing lame about a circus tent logo and a poor excuse for Bozo as the mascot for all the bowling teams.”

  “What’s a Bozo?”

  I was officially old, and all because of a clown.

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we didn’t have gourmet food or neon lights or electronic scoring. Everything was old-fashioned. But it wasn’t fake old-fashioned.” I motioned to the retro-chic bar and soda counter. “It was fun because we were here together and with our friends.”

  “So my mom was like, perfect, and she bowled.”

  I lifted the ball from Shay’s hand and placed it on the rack. “Your mom wasn’t perfect, but she was the perfect friend for me. I’ll tell you a secret, okay? We didn’t really bowl so much as distract the boys who were bowling.”

  “Aunt Tee!”

  “It’s true, but don’t worry. It was before she started to like your dad.”

  Shay laughed and bowled a gutter ball. “So my mom thought this was fun when she was my age?”

  “You’re not having fun?”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “I’m kidding, Shay. It isn’t always about the what, it’s about the who. This would be fun with Rebecca and Chloe, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “This was also the site of one of the only fights your mom and I had.”

  “You and Mom had a fight?”

  “We both liked Derek Jones.” I drew my hands to my heart. “He was fourteen and a freshman, so very old. He didn’t know either of us existed but we fought about who was going to marry him. I mean, we argued and didn’t talk for hours that night. Then I decided your mom could have Derek and I’d marry Jeffrey Scott.”

  “You can’t know who you’re going to marry when you’re twelve.”

  “You’re smarter than we were.”

  “Hardly.”

  I bowled an intentional gutter ball and turned back to Shay. “You’re amazing, you know that, right? Your mom would be really proud of you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Shay sat on the molded turquoise plastic line of chairs. I stacked up my own insecurities between us and sat next to them.

  A server stepped into our lane and set a tray on the table in the corner. “Small cheese pizza, cheesy fries, and two lemonades.”

  In between bites of pizza Shay chattered about her collage, her art teacher, the kids in the class and their collages. She rambled off names of the crazy-talented kids and the regularly talented kids, who she admired, and who’d complimented her work. I was just so relieved not to hear her berate or belittle anyone. Maybe Beck had been exaggerating. Maybe “mean girl” had been just a short phase and not a character trait.

  “Want to see the pictures I’ve taken since I’ve been here?” I lifted my camera out of my bag and handed it to Shay without telling her to be careful. “Push that button and you can scroll the other way through the last pictures I took. It’s my secret stash. Just things I’ve seen since I’ve come back to Chance.”

  Shay smiled. “You’re entering the contest!”

  “I am. It’s kind of scary, but I’m taking your advice and being brave.”

  “This contest is scary? C’mon!”

  “I thought it would make me sad. I thought it would remind me of—”

  “My mom.”

  “Yes. But I took pictures for over two hours at Jasper Pond yesterday. And it was amazing.” I didn’t mention Cameron’s encouragement. Or Simon’s lack of enthusiasm for photos for art’s sake. Those weren’t the most important parts. Not for Shay. “I was doing something your mom and I did together. I’d take pictures, she’d paint or sketch. I thought about her, but it didn’t make me sad.”

  Shay nodded slowly, in time to my words and memories.

  “When did you know you wanted to be a photographer?” Shay stared at the little screen, smiling, her mouth shaping into oohs and aahs as she scrolled.

  “As soon as my dad gave me my first camera; I think I was ten. It was a little black disposable one and you had the pictures developed at Fotomat.” Disposable camera. Pictures developed. Fotomat. Did Shay even know what those were? “I took pictures of everything. Lots of pictures of my toys—I set them up in scenes with your mom and she would sketch and I would snap. Then we’d dress up, even when we were too old for that, and I took pictures of her. We laughed like crazy! There were no selfies back then, so if we wanted a picture of the two of us, someone else had to take it, and when Cousin Maggie gave me my first real camera, it had a timer. And I wasn’t much for letting go of control of my camera.”

  “Not like now.”

  “I don’t hand that over to many people, believe me.”

  “I understand,” Shay said. “I don’t like when anyone touches my art supplies. Vi tried to organize everything once. She thought she was helping me but then I couldn’t find anything and when I went to reach for something, it wasn’t there.”

  “Do not mess with the artist’s tools.” As soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn’t have.

  Shay chuckled. “Exactly. She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get me.”

  “She’ll learn, but you might have to help her. She’s going to be your stepmom.”

  I slid onto the seat between us, knocking some of my fears out of the way. I took Shay’s hands and turned her toward me.

  “We’re friends, right? Friends that are like family, right?”

  Shay nodded.

  “We need to be honest with each other, okay?”

  She nodded again.

  “I’ll start. Uncle Beck told me what happened. At school.” Shay’s eyes opened wide.

  “They made such a big deal out of it. I was just joking around.”

  “Hurting people’s feelings isn’t a joke.”

  “No kidding. I got in a shitload of trouble. They suspended me.”

  I pulled back. “Shitload? Really, Shay?”

  “Sorry. I got in a lot of trouble. And I am sorry about all of it. I know it was wrong. But I was just joking around but then they all turned on me. It still pisses me off. Oh crap. Makes me mad. I mean, not oh crap. Sorry. I’m not supposed to curse. Damn.”

  Shay apologized so many times I wondered if she thought it didn’t matter what she did as long as she said she was sorry. I didn’t have experience with the good-job-you-did-your-best-everyone-gets-a-trophy-for-trying culture of parenting but I’d witnessed it aplenty in Chance and at the Hester hotels.

  “This have anything to do with your dad and Violet?” I knew it did. Did Shay realize that?

  “That’s what they tell me. I’m ‘acting o
ut’ because of all the ‘changes’ going on.”

  Shay’s air quotes added teenage sarcasm to the therapy-speak.

  “I really am sorry. And I get it. That’s why they don’t trust me. That’s why I like Rebecca and Chloe. They don’t know what happened so I don’t have to worry that they’ll change their minds.”

  “About what?”

  “About being friends with me.”

  I pulled her into a hug. “Oh, Shay-Shay. They’ll want to be friends with you, and so will lots of other people, for your whole life. You just got a little bit lost. Happens to the best of us. Just be your best self.” Now I sounded like a therapist. Or maybe just like a grown-up.

  “My best self is still a freak in this town.”

  I stepped back. “What are you talking about? Did someone call you that?”

  “No, but not only do I have no mother but I have no brothers or sisters or cousins. I don’t play sports, I’m not in band, and I’d rather stare at a tree and paint than hang out at the ballpark gawking at boys.”

  “Oh, sweetie, if there’s one thing you’re not, it’s a freak. You’re an artist, like your mom.”

  “A lot of good that does me. She’s not here, is she?”

  “No. But I am.”

  “You have no clue what it’s like.”

  “You are so wrong. Why do you think I was always at your mom’s house? I had no brothers and sisters either. And then when I grew up I didn’t get married and have kids like all my friends here—including your mom. I had a career that took me away from here on weekends when they were doing married and baby things. It made it really weird for me sometimes.”

  “Did it make you mad?”

  “Maybe, sometimes. But that wouldn’t have been an excuse to be mean or to make anyone feel bad. I think it would have made me feel worse. I also had something a lot of them didn’t have, the way you have your art. You’re lucky, and so was I.” Thank you, better-late-than-never revelation. “It’s one of the reasons it was a good idea for me to leave Chance.” My chest quivered as Celia’s wish for me transferred to her daughter. “Just like it’s good that you made new friends in an art class. You’re expanding your horizons. You’re finding what’s right for you. And who’s right for you.”