by JoAnna Carl
But his answer was evasive. “I don’t know much.” His eyes sort of bounced off mine.
“But you did know something about it.” I made it a statement. “Why didn’t you ever mention this?”
“I tried talking about your mother a few times, thinking you’d tell me the whole story. But when you didn’t seem to want to . . .”
“I didn’t know the whole story! I didn’t know there was a story!”
“I see that now. But at the time, I just thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Do you know whom Mom was planning to marry?”
“I don’t remember his name.” Joe shrugged.
“Is he still around?”
“No.” Joe’s voice was final. “Come on, we’re going to be late meeting Tony and Lindy.”
Tony and Lindy Herrera were our closest friends. They both worked—Tony days and Lindy nights—and they had three school-age kids, so an evening out was a big treat for them. I didn’t want to spoil it.
“Don’t mention this tonight,” I said to Joe. “I’d better get the family’s official line from Aunt Nettie before I say the wrong thing around Warner Pier.”
I admit I was absentminded at dinner, but I managed not to say anything too dumb. Oh, I talked to Lindy about a “runaway” for the wedding reception, when I meant a “runner” on the main serving table, and I told her my dad wanted to “escape” me. “I mean, escort!” I said quickly. “He says he didn’t get to give me away the first time I got married, so this time he wants to take a powder. I mean, do the honors!”
My dad wasn’t the only parent concerned with the second-time-around aspect of our wedding. It was also giving Joe’s mom trouble—which meant she was giving us trouble.
Joe and I had both been married and divorced. We wanted our wedding to be simple—with more emphasis on meaning than on pomp. I was wearing a streetlength dress, and Joe was wearing a business suit. I didn’t have an engagement ring; Joe had had his mother’s engagement diamond set on a wide gold ring that I planned to wear as a wedding band. Lindy and Tony would be our only attendants. The ceremony was to be held in Aunt Nettie’s living room, with family only. We saw no need to have a rehearsal dinner.
The only thing that was getting out of hand was the reception. We were planning to invite all our friends to that, and it kept getting larger and more elaborate every day. Especially if Joe’s mom had her way.
Joe’s first wedding had been an elopement, just as mine had, so Mercy Woodyard hadn’t been present. This time she wanted to be involved, but we weren’t cooperating.
As soon as we picked a date, Mercy offered to give a rehearsal dinner, of course. She hadn’t been too disappointed when we told her we didn’t want one. As a successful insurance agent, she declared, she had plenty of money to spend on her only son’s wedding, so she would be hostess for the reception.
She hadn’t asked. She’d announced.
I hated this idea, and I’m happy to say that Joe did, too. I’m sure Mercy meant well, but letting her be hostess would mean we lost control of the event. Neither of us was willing to do that, and we’d tried to make it clear to her. But every time we thought we had her convinced, she popped right back with a new approach.
Aunt Nettie wasn’t being a lot of help either. In the two years since I’d come to Warner Pier to be business manager for her chocolate company, I’d lived with her in a hundred-year-old house built by my great-grandfather. Aunt Nettie thought having the wedding in the family home was fine. It was giving her a good excuse for redecorating.
I didn’t think this was a good idea. For one thing, I loved the old house—slightly shabby and full of hand-me-down furniture—just the way it was. Besides, there wasn’t enough time to bring in paint, to order and hang new draperies, and to shop for new furniture. Not with Easter, one of the most important chocolate holidays of the year, to fit into our professional lives. But Aunt Nettie kept coming up with new ideas about updating the living room.
That night it helped me to talk the reception over with Lindy, who’s been a friend since I was sixteen and who in her job as a caterer would be doing a lot of the hands-on work for the event. But the news that my mother had fled her hometown on the eve of her wedding haunted me. All through dinner I was more concerned about what Aunt Nettie was going to tell me than about socializing with Lindy and Tony.
So I asked Joe to take me home right after dinner, and I invited him to stay and learn the family secrets from Aunt Nettie.
“No, thanks,” he said. “Aunt Nettie may want to tell you something that’s not fit for masculine ears. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He gave me a big kiss and held me for a long moment. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure Nettie will make everything clear.”
Over coffee and Baileys Irish Cream bonbons—yes, Aunt Nettie and I work with chocolate all day, then eat it at home—Aunt Nettie told me about my mom’s adventures as a runaway bride.
“I want to warn you that I don’t know a lot,” she said. “All this happened the year Phil and I started TenHuis Chocolade. We lived over the shop, and we might as well have lived inside it. We were the only two employees, and we worked night and day. We had to. If we hadn’t made a success of it that summer, we would have had to give up the idea of having a chocolate shop in Warner Pier or anywhere else—ever. So when your grandfather died, we were not a lot of help to your grandmother and Sally. Looking back, I see that Sally was in a dangerous emotional state, but at the time all I could think about was making and selling chocolate.”
She sighed. “If we hadn’t failed to help Sally, maybe things would have been different.”
I patted her hand. “She must have been a prickly teenager.”
“Well, Sally and her mother were at odds all the time. Phil was ten years older than Sally, and he felt that he had to take his mother’s part, so that put Sally at odds with us. Mother TenHuis was terribly shocked by your grandfather’s death—we all were. I guess we felt that Sally should carry on bravely and support her mother. We didn’t really notice that she also needed support. But the arguments with her mother were getting worse all the time; I’ll admit we were relieved when she and Bill Dykstra told us they were going to get married.”
“Bill Dykstra? That was her fiancé’s name? There are lots of Dykstras around here. You said I didn’t know him, but do I know any of his relatives?”
Aunt Nettie’s eyes dodged mine. “I don’t think you do,” she said. Then she went on with her story.
Bill Dykstra had been my mom’s high school sweetheart, Aunt Nettie explained. She described him as “a nice boy,” two years older than Mom. He’d just finished a two-year course in electronics at a Holland technical school. That branch of the Dykstra family was “hardworking,” rather than wealthy, she said. Bill’s mother had been a science teacher. His father was an electrician, and like many local craftsmen in the Warner Pier area, he also opened and closed cottages for the summer people—the people who own the hundreds of vacation homes on the shore of Lake Michigan and in the countryside around Warner Pier.
Like my mom, Bill had been eager to leave Warner Pier and see the world. He had landed a job in Chicago, and the two of them had been excited about moving to the big city. Their wedding had been scheduled for the first Sunday in August at the Warner Pier Reformed Church.
“It wasn’t going to be large,” Aunt Nettie said. “Just the immediate families and a few friends. None of us had any money. Your grandmother hadn’t worked in the thirty years since she got married, but with your grandfather gone, she was trying to find a job. She was also trying to sell your grandfather’s service station. Phil and I were barely scraping by. Sally had been working as a waitress that summer, but she didn’t have much money saved. I think Sally was disappointed at not having a big wedding, but she could see that it was smarter to save what money she and Bill had to set up their apartment in Chicago. The church did give her a shower, but her wedding wasn’t getting too much atte
ntion.”
Aunt Nettie sounded apologetic. But I could understand the way she and Uncle Phil must have felt. They had had their hands full with a new business and his recently widowed mother. Turning the responsibility for a rebellious younger sister over to a young man who seemed pleasant and reliable and whose family was “hardworking”—it could have been the answer to a prayer. They hadn’t worried a lot about whether or not my mom was making the right decision.
Then, at four a.m. on what would have been the day of the wedding, my grandmother had called Uncle Phil and Aunt Nettie to say Sally hadn’t come home.
“Phil and I weren’t too worried,” Aunt Nettie said. “After all, it was Sally and Billy’s wedding day, and we thought they’d simply—well, spent the night somewhere. But your grandmother was more puritanical. She was also hysterical. Phil tried to calm her down, but we finally had to get up, get dressed, and go out to the house—this house—to talk to her. That’s when we discovered Sally had taken a lot of her clothes with her.”
The clothes had been packed up, ready to be moved to Chicago, Aunt Nettie said. Getting several boxes and a suitcase out of the house without disturbing a nervous mother would not have been easy, but my mom had managed it—Aunt Nettie said my grandmother might have taken a sleeping pill. The wedding dress—street-length, with an Empire waistline and lace sleeves that puffed at the top and were tight down the rest of the arm—had been left hanging in the closet.
It was Phil who found her note. My mom had left it in the kitchen cupboard, propped against the coffeepot. “Bill and I have called the wedding off for now,” it read. “I’m going on to Chicago. I’ll write when I find a place to stay.”
There was no apology, no explanation.
I had never known my grandmother—she died before I was born—but I could imagine the hysterical scene Uncle Phil and Aunt Nettie had on their hands.
Aunt Nettie tried to comfort my grandmother, and Uncle Phil called Bill Dykstra’s house. Surely Bill would be there and would tell them what had happened, would provide some explanation, they thought.
When Bill’s parents heard the news, his dad rushed to Bill’s room, eager for information. But Bill’s room was empty. Bill had also disappeared—without leaving a note, even one as cryptic as my mother’s had been.
Now there were two sets of frantic parents. Friends and relatives were called in. The roads of western Michigan were thick with people looking for Sally and Bill—either alone or together.
“It was late in the morning when someone thought to check the bus station in South Haven,” Aunt Nettie said. “Then we found out that a girl matching your mother’s description had gotten on the seven a.m. bus headed south.”
“I guess that was a sort of relief,” I said. “Did you have someone meet the bus in Chicago?”
“The bus had already arrived in Chicago by that time. We didn’t know where Sally was for six months.”
“My grandmother must have been nearly crazy! But what about Bill? Had he gone with her?”
Aunt Nettie didn’t answer.
“Did he turn up?” I asked.
“His father found him late that morning.”
“Did Bill have any explanation for the whole thing?”
Aunt Nettie shook her head.
“No explanation? No excuse? What did he have to say?”
Aunt Nettie looked at me with eyes that were full of grief. “Bill couldn’t say anything,” she said. “His father found his car parked on a back road. A garden hose had been stretched from his exhaust into the driver’s window. The engine had run until the gas tank was empty.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes. Bill had committed suicide.”
Chapter 3
I could feel tears welling in my eyes. “How horrible,” I said. “Those poor parents.”
“Yes, it was awful for Bill’s parents. They had two boys—Bill and his older brother, Ed. Ed—well, Ed had protested the Vietnam War, the draft. He was a real rebel. He wasn’t around then because he had gone to Canada. He’d been a terrible worry to them for years. Bill had been the ’good’ boy.”
“It would have been awful for my grandmother, too.”
“She really never recovered. Losing her husband in May, then her daughter in August . . . True, she and Sally communicated after that, but their relationship hadn’t been very strong anyway, and they never became close.”
“And I’m sure a lot of people around here blamed Mom for Bill’s suicide.”
Aunt Nettie frowned. “It’s always a ’chicken or egg’ question. Did Bill commit suicide because Sally left, and he was upset? Or did Sally leave because she sensed some basic instability in Bill and decided she’d better not marry him? I leaned toward that explanation.”
“Has Mom ever told you her side of the story?”
“No! As I said, Sally didn’t contact anyone for six months. Then she called Phil. She told him she had enrolled in airline school in Dallas, but she refused to give him her address. And she refused to talk to her mom for six months after that.”
“Do you think she blamed her mother in some way?”
“I think she was ashamed to talk to her.”
“When Mom called, had she even heard about what had happened to Bill?”
“Yes, she had. But she never told anybody how she found out.”
“It wasn’t in the newspaper?”
“Just an obituary in the Warner Pier Gazette. The Chicago or even the Grand Rapids papers wouldn’t be interested in the suicide of an obscure young electronics repairman on a back road in rural Michigan.”
“What happened to Bill’s family?”
“His dad died about five years after this happened. I have no idea what became of the brother.”
“How about the mother?”
“Vita Dykstra? Oh, she still lives here.” Aunt Nettie got up and began to collect the cups that had held our coffee.
“But you say I don’t know her.”
“You’ve probably seen her on the street or at the Superette, but I can’t think of any reason you would have met her.” Aunt Nettie yawned rather ostentatiously. “And now I’m going to bed. But first, Lee, I had one more idea about what to do to the living room windows for the wedding.”
“Aunt Nettie! We don’t have time for you to order draperies! And it’s not necessary.”
“Oh, this would be simple. We could do it ourselves.”
“When? In between the Easter rush and the Mother’s Day rush?”
“It would only take an afternoon. We buy fabric, and we hem the edges so it’s long panels. Then we get wooden drapery rods—I’m sure Joe wouldn’t mind putting them up—and we simply drape the panels over the rods, letting them hang down on one end.” Aunt Nettie smiled confidently. “Wouldn’t that look pretty?”
“Maybe. But it wouldn’t look like home. And I want to get married at home. If you want new window treatments, please wait until I move out.”
Aunt Nettie laughed, and I realized she hadn’t been making a serious suggestion. She had been dodging questions about Bill’s mother.
So I quit asking questions and started turning out the lights, ready to go to bed myself. But I had one final comment. “Unless Mom decides to tell her side of the story,” I said, “I guess it will remain a mystery.”
“Mystery!” Aunt Nettie suddenly looked scared. “Don’t call it a mystery!”
“Why not? It is one.”
“But we know what happened.”
“But we don’t know why.”
Aunt Nettie crossed the room and gripped my hand. “Lee, please restrain that curiosity of yours. Please don’t try to find out what happened.”
“I wouldn’t do any more than ask Mom.”
“Don’t! This whole affair was a terrible mess, a tragedy. It was heartbreaking. Please don’t open it up again.”
I gave her a hug. “Don’t worry,” I said.
I lay awake a long time that night. Aunt Nettie had called the situation
a tragedy and that was exactly the word for it. Bill Dykstra—by her account a nice young man—had died. My mother had left home and had apparently felt too ashamed to come back again. As far as I knew she’d only returned to Warner Pier once in the thirty-plus years since she’d left. Her mother had been buried in Grand Rapids, and Mom had shown up, I knew, but that was still sixty miles from here. She had come to Warner Pier for Uncle Phil’s funeral, but stayed only a few days. I’d been along on that trip. I remembered that Mom refused to leave the house, even to go to the grocery store.
The effect on my grandmother and on Bill’s parents had also been dramatic. My grandmother had “never recovered,” Aunt Nettie had said.
Apparently Warner Pier hadn’t gotten over it, either. At least a dozen people who were longtime residents had asked about my mother. I hadn’t thought a lot about that until now. I guess I had felt that their curiosity was based on friendly memories. Now I wondered if that was true.
As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about Mrs. Dykstra. Vita, Aunt Nettie had called her. She still lived in Warner Pier. I wondered what her life was like. How had she coped? Had the scapegrace son, Ed, ever returned from Canada? Apparently he didn’t live in Warner Pier.
Aunt Nettie obviously didn’t want to talk about Mrs. Dykstra. But maybe Joe or his mother—both Warner Pier natives—would be willing to tell me.
Aunt Nettie had urged me not to look into the whole affair. I could see why she didn’t want me to. But I hadn’t promised that I wouldn’t.
Next morning I called Joe at his boat shop and invited him to lunch. “I’ll meet you at the Sidewalk Café,” I said. “My treat.”
“Oh, I can buy lunch,” Joe said. “I made some headway on the credit cards this month. And in less than three months I’m going to have a professional accountant take over my personal finances.”
“Ha! Today I’m not feeling financially savvy. We can go dutch. I’ll see you at the Sidewalk at one.”
