10. This book begins with a tragedy—with an accident that claims lives. Yet it ends with great joy—a child is born and friendships have blossomed. So would you call it a sad book? A happy book? An honest book? Why? Have you had experiences that you feel are similar to what the women here have shared? Do you believe we can heal from the tragedies we’ve endured? Do they weaken us? Strengthen us? Or perhaps simply change us?
READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT JENNIFER SCOTT’S NEXT NOVEL,
THE HUNDRED GIFTS
COMING FROM NAL ACCENT IN NOVEMBER 2015
It was what should have been dinnertime in the Epperson house when the phone rang. Of course, it wasn’t actually dinnertime. Not officially. It hadn’t officially been dinnertime in the Epperson house since Kevin, leaving a trail of balled socks and loose change and mementos of a lost age—football cards stuck upright in the cracks of the baseboards, a Sanibel sand dollar plucked from the ocean an impossibly short decade ago, figurines from the imaginative days of childhood—left the house with a passport and only half a harebrained plan. And quite a bit of cannabis, from the smell of him. Oh, he could deny it, but a mother knew when the eyes of her child weren’t right.
Her youngest. Her baby. A once-treasured bedroom now home to only forgotten Super Balls and soccer pads and slippers, rock band posters and a rat’s nest of old phone chargers, and the college textbooks he’d foolishly purchased before he’d decided to admit that he wasn’t planning to go, all abandoned.
He’d left with a jacket, a pocketful of snacks, and a sleeping bag harnessed along the underside of a backpack, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t he taking this backpacking-across-the-world business a little far? How can he possibly have packed enough to live off of in that thing? Brenda had asked Gary, who’d sat on his parked motorcycle looking one-tenth worried for Kevin and nine-tenths envious out of his gourd. Oh, he’ll be fine, Brenda. Let him explore. This is important. You don’t want him to turn around in thirty years and regret that he never went. Bren had rolled her eyes. Of course Gary would make this about himself. Ever since the man turned the corner into the back side of his forties, he’d managed to make everything about himself. God love the old oafish bastard.
And so Kevin had hugged her and made promises about phone calls and postcards and a future that she knew would never come true and had hopped into his friend Tony’s idling 2000 Toyota, checked his pocket for his passport one last time, and set off for the airport—a flick of his wrist through the passenger-side window for a wave, a fog of alternative music the last souvenir of her son to leave the block he’d grown up on.
Epperson family dinners whisked away, just like that.
At last check-in—it must have been at least three weeks ago—Kevin was just pulling into Cesky Krumlov, which Bren had made him spell so she could look it up on the Internet. Somewhere in the Czech Republic, he’d said. He’d dropped his iPod in the Vltava River, but he didn’t care, he’d said. He’d met a girl, he’d said. Her name was Pavlina; she was an artist—like, a real artist, not one of those weird girls who use creative stirrings as their excuse not to shave their pits, Mom. Pavlina didn’t believe in shoes, and she was the most beautiful thing he’d seen yet, and that included all the Roman sculptures and paintings combined. He was smitten, but was telling Bren this as if dictating a travelogue, as he always did. Sounding removed, dutiful. Bren forever fretted that there would be a test at the end of his phone calls. She never talked to him without a pencil and a pad of paper—what she thought of as her telephone pad—so she could write down all the confusing foreign-sounding things he said. When they hung up, she felt like a completed chore. A confused completed chore.
This time, the ringing phone had a +66 country code at the front of it. Bren, eating cheese on toast—her fourth piece—and idly filling out a magazine quiz while the news droned on the tiny kitchen TV, a persistent buzzing of negativity and fear-mongering that both frightened her and made her feel superior, jumped at the receiver.
“Hello?” and then, covering the mouthpiece with her palm, “Gary! It’s Kelsey! Kelsey is calling!” Then, back into the phone, “Hello?”
A strange click, some faraway hissing. “Mommy?”
Bren’s breath caught. She loved that her daughter had never gotten too old to call her Mommy, but had to admit that hearing the word Mommy coming out of her daughter’s mouth, even at twenty-four years old, even married and a whole continent away, brought to mind skinned knees and Barbie dolls, an eight-year-old Kelsey who would never grow any older.
“Kelsey!” she exclaimed. “How’s Thailand?”
“Oh, Mommy, it’s beautiful. The rain has stopped and it’s so warm. Perfect, really. We’re getting ready for Loi Krathong here. Do you know what that is? Have you ever seen it?”
Bren scrambled for her telephone pad and pencil, flipped to the Kelsey page, and scribbled down Loy Rithong. “I’ve never even heard of . . . Did you say Rithong with an R?”
Kelsey giggled. “A K, Mommy. A K. Krathong. We make these little boats and fill them with flowers and candles and coins. We’re making ours out of bread to feed the fish—our boat. That was Dean’s idea. Isn’t that a great idea, Mommy, to make it out of bread?” Bren nodded, but there wasn’t time to speak between Kelsey’s breathless sentences. Kelsey always got that way, especially when she talked about her new husband. “He’s so smart about things, even though we’re still learning. It’s like he’s lived here his whole life. Anyway, so, you float these little boats down the river during the full moon. It’s like an offering, Mommy, but it’s also symbolic. It symbolizes letting go of your hatred and anger and bitterness, and there are lanterns, so many lanterns, and, gosh, it just sounds so beautiful. Doesn’t it sound beautiful?”
“Yes, beautiful,” Bren said, but she’d gotten behind on her notes. “Wait—you have hatred and anger?”
“It’s symbolic, Mommy.”
“Symbolic hatred,” Bren said, writing down the words as she spoke them.
“So, what are you and Daddy doing this evening? It must be about dinnertime there. I just woke up. I’m waiting for Dean to get out of the shower. We’re playing hooky and going to the beach today. I’m telling you, Mommy, someday you and Daddy simply must come visit us. We have space. Dean said he would make space—isn’t that the sweetest? He’s so thoughtful that way, you know. Always worrying about everyone else. He would probably give you our bed and would sleep outside on the ground if that was what you wanted. You must come and let him be thoughtful to you, Mommy. It would mean the world to him. And you would be amazed by these beaches. The water—it’s so clear. You’ve never seen water like that in Missouri—I can tell you that much.”
Ah. There it was. The requisite Missouri-bashing that both her kids had to do on a regular basis now that they had moved on to such exotic locales. As if nothing good ever could have come from a place as bland as the Midwest. As if they both had not come from the Midwest themselves.
Bren wrote the word beache—misspelled, after overthinking that it might have some foreign iteration like all the other things she’d been writing down—then scratched it out and wrote hooky instead, then scratched that out, too, and put down her pencil.
“So?” Kelsey asked.
“So what?”
Impatient grunt, followed by a giggle. Kelsey’s signature. The girl moved like a hummingbird, always zooming on to the next thing, the next conversation, the next song, the next location. “So, what are you and Daddy doing tonight?” she repeated.
“Oh, that,” Bren said. Her head felt swimmy, stuffed too full of information. She placed her hand over the phone receiver again. “Gary!” Nothing. She went to the garage door and pounded on it with the flat of her hand three times, marital code for Get your ass in here. “Gary!”
“Daddy in the garage again?” Kelsey asked. “Still working on that motorcycle?”
“Yes and no,” Bren sai
d. “He’s onto dune buggies now. It’s a long story. I suppose we’re not doing anything tonight. Although I’d hoped to catch up on some of my recorded shows.”
“Well, that’s boring. Honestly, Mommy, you should get out sometimes.”
Bren’s hand went to the back of her head. “I get out. I went to the hairdresser today.”
“The hairdresser? What, are you ninety? I mean get out get out. Do something fun. Go dancing. You’re empty nesters now. You have freedom!”
Don’t remind me, Bren thought, thinking for the thousandth time what an awful term empty nester was. So lonely, evoking images of things dried and barren. It was bad enough to feel that way without putting a name to it, too.
Bren found herself stuttering, nothing intelligible coming out, as her daughter continued to talk over her with suggestions of things to do—fancy dinners, romantic river cruises, day trips, double dates, clubs—followed by condemnation for sitting around and rotting at home, then doomsday predictions of what happened to old couples who didn’t thrive, old people who didn’t leave the house.
“They die younger, Mommy. Did you know that? Retired people who get out and do things live longer.”
“We’re not retired,” Bren found herself saying bewilderedly. “I’m only forty-five. Your father’s not yet fifty.”
“It’s here before you know it,” Kelsey said in a very sage voice, as if a twenty-four-year-old knew the first thing about the advancement of time.
There was a thundering of footsteps, and Gary came into the room, reeking of gas, wiping his hands on a filthy towel. Grateful for the excuse to interrupt this discussion, Bren set the phone on the table and hit the speaker button.
“Hey there, princess!” Gary said without waiting for an opening. Exactly where Kelsey got the chatty gene—right there.
“Daddy!” Kelsey squealed. If they’d been visiting in person, she would have wrapped her entire body around him the way she always had. Such a daddy’s girl. He took her marriage and moving much easier than Bren thought he would. Although Bren still wasn’t allowing herself to fully think about it yet, either, so she had no real idea how hard she was going to take it when she finally let down her barrier and allowed it to sink in full force.
She’d always had a vague fear that one of her children would move away. Away away, not college away or different town away or even different state away. But she’d never have guessed that one of them would actually go and do it. Not to mention both of them. Where had she gone wrong that both of them suddenly wanted to be away away?
Kelsey had been married for exactly forty-six minutes before she’d made her way to the middle of the reception dance floor, grabbed the mic, and announced that Dean was accepting a new job (pause for polite applause) and that it was a really great opportunity (pause for excited grin) and that they would be moving (pause for hopping on toes) to exotic and beautiful Thailand (pause for confetti and balloons and a goddamned unicorn shitting heart-shaped puppies all over the place). Bren had smiled and clapped with the others, all the while trying to remember whether Thailand was a place with big, scary insects or a place with big, scary diseases or a place with big, scary kidnappers. Or maybe all of the above. She was quite possibly the first mother of the bride in all of history to wonder aloud, at the reception, whether her daughter was up-to-date on all her immunizations.
Oh, Gary had taken it hard at first. But he’d gotten over it so quickly. How did he do that? Kelsey had now been gone for six months and it already felt like six years, but to listen to Gary, to watch him as he putzed around on his dune buggy without a care in the world and as he casually chatted with his daughter on the phone—no pad and pencil required—you would never have known the girl had been gone at all.
“How are things Down Under?” he asked.
This got the usual giggle from Kelsey. “We’re not that close to Australia, Daddy.”
“Oh, does that mean you haven’t a pet kangaroo yet? Well, then, I’m never coming to visit.”
More laughter. They were so cute together, those two. It made the bridge of Bren’s nose ache. She pinched it, wondering whether she should write down kangaroo. Out of nowhere, her shoulder itched. She shrugged a few times, the friction from her bra strap scratching it.
“How’s Dean-o?” Gary asked, his voice booming, making Bren flinch.
“Oh, he’s just great. His project is going well and it looks like he may get a contract extension, which we’re so excited about. We haven’t seen nearly enough of Thailand yet. We’d like to stay a few more years.”
“Years?” Bren barked, and then slapped her mouth shut. She’d vowed to never make either of the children feel guilty about their decisions to live lives separate from hers—even if they were so carelessly breaking her heart—but she couldn’t help it. Years was a long time. Years was long enough for her to miss the birth of a grandchild. Years was long enough to put down roots, real roots, the kind of roots that you don’t want to dig up.
“Well, you tell him we said hello and to keep up the good work,” Gary boomed as if Bren had never said anything at all. Thank God.
“So, I can’t talk for much longer,” Kelsey said, her voice going down at the edges. “Trying to save money where I can.”
“That’s my girl,” Gary said. “Levelheaded.”
Bren shot him a look. As if saving pennies by shortchanging her own parents on phone calls while lollygagging on a beach all day instead of working was a fiscally responsible decision.
“I just wanted to say hi. And to tell you I miss you both bunches.”
“Bunches?” Bren repeated. Her pencil scrawled it out of its own accord, but she was drowned out once again by Gary.
“We miss you, too, pumpkin. You take care of yourself down there. Don’t forget to put another shrimp on the barbie.”
Kelsey’s laughter tinkled through the phone speaker again. Bren had more than once wished she could bottle that laughter, keep it safe, keep it handy. It was a sound of such pure joy. But now it only sounded far away, dulled by distance. A joy that she could only admire but never fully experience again.
“Oh, just a reminder, by the by, that Dean and I won’t be coming home for the holidays.”
“Yes, yes, you’ve told us,” Bren said tiredly. Did her daughter have to keep reminding her of that? Did she really think that having her first ever Christmas apart from her children would be something Bren would absentmindedly forget?
“Got big Christmas plans?” Gary asked.
“Not really. It’s mostly Buddhist here, so not a lot of Christmas celebrating goes on, I don’t think. Plus, the place will just be flooded with tourists, from what I hear. We’ll probably have a quiet dinner. Maybe some noodles, some fish. Just the two of us.”
“Same here,” Bren said. “Just the two of us. Only without the noodles.”
“Well, enjoy that!” Kelsey cried out, right back to her sunny self. “A romantic Christmas dinner for two, for the first time in, what . . . ?”
“Twenty-four years,” Bren supplied.
“Wow, twenty-four,” Kelsey said. “You are long overdue.”
“I suppose we must be,” Bren said. She didn’t have the heart to tell Kelsey about their cafeteria dinner plans, or about the dune buggy or the cheese on toast or the pad and pencil with all the foreign words, or even about her incessant nightly scouring of the Internet for cheap flights halfway around the world.
“That we are,” Gary said, snaking an arm around Bren’s shoulders. She resisted the urge to pull away, though she knew she was going to smell like that damned buggy now even if she did.
Their good-byes were, as always, over so quickly that Bren’s head was left spinning. She clutched the pad and pencil, gazing at the words as if trying to memorize the conversation, file it away so she would have it to pull out on her next lonely evening of filling out magazine quizzes and list
ening to the nightly death report.
Gary drifted away, taking the rag and a glass of iced tea with him. Terse, typical conversation would now return, as the amiable guy with the big smile and the cute turns of phrases was snuffed out like a candle on a birthday cake.
“You eat?”
“Just some cheese toast.”
“Huh.”
“You want me to make you something?”
“Naw, I’ll grab a bite later. Working on the buggy.”
A shuffling of footsteps toward the garage again. “You gonna be long?”
Garage door opening, an echoey answer that drifted into inaudible murmurings and then a shut door: “Got to get to bed. Meetings tomorrow . . .”
Bren stared at the pad of paper. Bunches was the last word she’d written.
But off to the margin was the sad face that she’d drawn when Kelsey had told them she hadn’t planned to come home for the holidays.
Suddenly the cheese toast looked congealed and disgusting, postsurgery fleshy. She could feel the bread perching at the base of her esophagus, coiled, ready to launch as soon as she lay down for bed. She could practically see little orange pustules of grease popping into the pores around her mouth, on her cheeks, her forehead, suffocating them, making her skin dull and cheeselike itself. The very thought made her tongue curl back in a gag.
She got up and carried the plate to the sink, snatching up the remote control and turning off the TV as she went. The room hummed with silence. The sun had fallen.
She padded to the bedroom, where her black long-haired cat, George, lay waiting for her, curled at the bottom of the bed. He made a brrr noise as she slid headfirst into the bed, then moved so the cat’s hind end pressed warmly into her side.
It was barely seven o’clock, but Bren Epperson went to bed anyway, thanking God, as she drifted off, for the short days of autumn.
Second Chance Friends Page 26
