“How many?” He looked at me with the face of a bulldog. “How many?” he repeated a little louder.
“A lot,” I said quietly.
“All of them,” Mom corrected me, which immediately sent Dad back to pacing the floor, shaking his head with disapproval.
“I can’t believe my own, big ears,” he said when he finally sat down. He gestured toward Mom. “My own lovely, trustworthy wife and beautiful, honest daughter,” he said and pointed in my direction without looking at me, “they both went behind my back even though I was very clear about how I felt about those letters. Those are private letters. Christ.”
For a while there was nothing but silence between us. The three of us just sat there picking at our sandwiches, picking our brains until Mom, all of a sudden, flung herself back in the chair and let out a weird and loud cry. Dad and I both looked at her. She was staring down at the table with her mouth wide open, tears dripping from her face as fast as they could.
“Dad?” I whispered, looking at Dad. Immediately the look on his face softened; he was back to the teddy bear.
“But honey,” he whispered and reached for both her hands. “Yes, damn it, I’m mad. You shouldn’t have. The both of you,” he added, looking at me from the corner of his eyes. “It was wrong and disrespectful to them and me, but I think I’ll live. It’s only letters, you know.” He smiled. “So, what’s with all the tears, then?”
Mom looked down at their intertwined hands and kissed them. “It kicked,” she sobbed, placing twenty fingers on top of her belly. “It kicked, I mean, she kicked. Little Miss Apple Pants the Second kicked. I guess she doesn’t like it when Dad’s mad at Mom.” She looked up at me and smiled through a few more happy tears. “It feels like it was only yesterday when I felt you kicking for the very first time. It’s a very wonderful, but weird, feeling, right?”
I nodded and looked at Dad. He was already down on his knees gently rubbing Mom’s belly. I guess he had already forgotten all about his not-so-trustworthy wife.
“Come feel your little sister kicking.” Mom held out her hand.
I grabbed her hand and smiled. “I’m already feeling a lot of kicking from where I am sitting.” I lifted up my sweater and looked down. From the moment Dad had started yelling at me and Mom, Junior had started kicking like crazy. I guess he didn’t like it either.
Still on his knees, Dad moved from Mom’s belly to mine and put his warm, fuzzy hands on it. It had only been a few days since I had felt those very first kicks myself.
“I wish you would have called for me,” Mom had said when I told them at the breakfast table.
“It was four in the morning. Not the best time to wake up a pregnant woman,” I had said, looking at the sleep marks all over her face.
“True,” she had said, smiling and rubbing her face. “But next time you have to come get me ASAP.” I had promised, but Junior hadn’t kicked since. Not until now.
Dad looked up at me with tears in his eyes. “I think we have a little soccer guy in there. He sure is kicking a lot more than his, um...?” He looked up at Mom for help. “His what? Niece?”
“Aunt,” Mom corrected followed by a hysterical fit. “Isn’t it just crazy?” she laughed, almost choking on her own words. “The nephew is going to be born almost on the same day as his aunt. Seriously, the grandmother’s child might be younger than the grandchild. Isn’t that funky?”
“Uh-huh.” I couldn’t help smiling, mostly because she was using the words “seriously” and “funky” in the same sentence.
Dad looked up. “Speaking of funky, how much juice did you have? He’s going all mad in there.” He leaned over and pulled Mom and the other kicking baby over next to me and sat down between us. And there we were: Mom and I—with our growing and kicking bellies out—and Dad in the middle with one hand on Mom’s belly, the other on mine. The Woodstock images were back!
The mix up
The next week everything had been arranged. Mom, Dad, and I (and two approximately twenty-week-old kicking babies) were all going to meet up with Martha and Frederick Jensen, the other Jensens, as it turned out.
“Can you believe they would be the Jensens as well? What are the odds?” Dad looked down and gave Johnny Boy a friendly kick.
“A trillion to one?” I suggested and looked at Mom, who leaned against a couple of moving boxes. We were back with the boxes in the shed, this time taping them together. “A trillion to one,” I repeated to myself and smiled. I still couldn’t believe that I was actually going to meet her—Martha. The thought was both weird and wonderful. Weird because it felt pretty much the same as if the main character of your all-time favorite book suddenly stepped out of the book and became a person in flesh and blood—a real freaking person. And wonderful because it was Martha!
“Still not quite convinced?” Mom teased.
Mom had spent almost the entire week trying to convince me that it had to be Martha and Frederick. “There may be a thousand other Martha and Frederick couples out there,” she had reasoned, “but only one would name their house after the Queen’s castle in Denmark.” She made it sound so obvious, but, still, I wasn’t fully convinced. Not until one afternoon, where I was sitting in my room, in her room, looking around like it was the first time ever. And all of a sudden it had all made perfect sense; everything—even down to the little daisy hooks in the bathroom—was just like she had described them in her letters. Not only had we been reading her very private letters—her most inner thoughts—we had also been living in her house, sleeping in her bed, playing Itsy Bitsy Spider on her piano, sitting on the very same porch, wishing we could see the sun setting somewhere in the world. We had literally breathed the same air. It had all been right there, right in front of us, but, still, we never made the connection.
“You excited?” Mom leaned over and grabbed the tape from me.
I nodded. “You?”
“Am I?” she almost cried. “I’m so excited I’m afraid I might pee my pants.” She crossed her legs and leaned forward. “But I might do that anyway.” She bit down on the tape and smiled.
I grabbed another box and was about to tape it up when I spotted the bottom of “my” Indiana Jones cup through the green bubble wrap. I had almost kept it, since I now knew who had made it, but I didn’t. Of course, I didn’t. Martha was probably thinking about that cup every single time she got up and made herself a cup of coffee in the morning.
“I still don’t get it,” Mom said in Dad’s direction. “I know what you said, but I still can’t see how we could have swapped trucks, just like that.” She snapped her fingers and looked at me. “I mean, we’re talking about two different trucks with two separate license plates. How in the hell is that even possible without us knowing it?”
“Oh boy!” Dad sat down on one of the boxes and wiped his face. “Here she goes again,” he said, rolling his eyes at me.
Even though Dad had explained it to her at least a thousand times, he still hadn’t been able to convince Mom that what appeared to be mission impossible actually had turned out be quite plausible.
“It actually makes perfect sense,” he’d said when he’d explained it to us the second time around. It turns out the other truck had been returned the very same morning at the same U-Haul office as ours. So far, so good. Both trucks returned. The name on the leasing papers had in both cases been F. Jensen. Even the addresses had been the same since when Dad had rented our truck, he had given out our new address, and apparently Frederick had given out the old one which, as it turned out, was the same one Dad used.
U-Haul hadn’t made a mistake after all. When Melanie found that the name F. Jensen had appeared twice in their computer system, and she thought it was a mistake, returning our deposit, it was, in fact, not a mistake. The only mistake Melanie had made was she that hadn’t noticed that the two apparently identical leasing contracts had two different license plate numbers on them. No one could have seen that one coming from miles away.
Dad informed us that Melanie to
ld him our story had become quite the talk around all the little U-Haul offices across the country. A corporate email with the title “God is in the details” had been sent out to all employees with a little sarcastic footnote emphasizing the importance of always double checking every single detail. They had even talked about interviewing Dad and Frederick to get a firsthand perspective of the whole incident. The Jensens, Dad explained further, had sold their old house to us before they could move into their new condo, which was being remodeled. They had hired two guys to help them load the truck and drive it to a Public Storage facility near Kirkland. Martha and Fredrick had driven their own van, carrying all their personal belongings (Mom had been spot on), including all Frederick’s file cabinets, their flat screen TV, a radio, and an espresso maker.
“We can’t live without her. We call her Betty,” Frederick had told Dad on the phone, laughing.
“That’s why no one ever contacted U-Haul. Frederick and Martha didn’t know that their stuff was sitting here with us and vice versa. They didn’t know that it was our load that was taking up space in their new storage unit in Kirkland. Not until I told them, that is. It’s as simple as that, honey,” Dad explained to Mom once more, still rolling his eyes at me.
“I know you’ve told me a gazillion times, honey, but...” She sat down next to Dad and reached for her cup on the floor. “Last night when you were asleep, I couldn’t help thinking... but where?” She took another sip without taking her eyes off him.
“Where what?” He shrugged and put his hands in his pockets.
“Exactly where did we get into the wrong U-Haul truck?” She leaned over and looked at me. “And isn’t it a little weird that we didn’t notice it at all?”
We both looked at Dad, nodding his head, smiling, like he had expected her to ask that exact question. “Well, maybe driving across the United States of America in nearly two days made us a little insensitive to the details of the inside of a rather generic U-Haul truck. As that memo said, God is in the details. But to answer your questions to the best of my ability,” he said with a salesman’s touch, “I can think of only one possible explanation. Starbucks. That’s the only stop we made near the house and Public Storage. I have to ask Frederick when we get there—maybe he knows—but we must have made the swap right there at the parking lot. You and your coffee!” He shook his head and punched her gently on her shoulder.
“Oh, now it’s my fault,” Mom said holding a Starbucks coffee in her hand.
“But he’s right, Mom,” I said, suddenly remembering the two guys sitting next to us at Starbucks. “Don’t you remember those two guys the morning we had just arrived? One was tall, the other kinda weird looking? They were sitting at the table right next to us. They said something about moving some stuff and making an easy buck. There you have it!” I grabbed the tape from Mom and gave her my best smile.
“Hmm.” Mom looked at Dad. He was rubbing his beard, smiling.
“Bust my buffers,” he announced to the shed. “You are right, you are so right. They did say something about moving some stuff for some old people.” He got up and headed for the door. “Come here, I want to show you something.” He looked at Mom. “You too,” he said, looking at me.
When we got outside Dad stood on the running board of the truck. U-Haul had provided both of the F. Jensens with a truck for the entire weekend—free of charge—in order to redo the swap of a lifetime.
“Come look for yourself.” He gestured toward the truck. “And then tell me what the big difference is between this one and the one we rented back then.”
Mom walked up on the side of the truck and took a quick look inside the window. “Okay, you win. Maybe they do all look the same,” she said reluctantly.
“Told you so,” he said, arms high in the air. “They sure do. Only difference would have been the license plate. Insensitive to detail is what got us here.” He smiled.
I don’t know why I suddenly came to think of it, but I did remember at least one detail; my three bags of jelly bears had mysteriously gone MIA somewhere between a gas station in Idaho and that Starbucks in Kirkland. I had left them in the front compartment, and when we were about to leave from Starbucks, I couldn’t find one single bag. I had even accused Dad of eating all of them while I had dosed off for a minute or two, but he had simply denied it.
“No! Remember, I couldn’t find my jelly bears right after we had left Starbucks. Well, they were still there, in the right truck. Problem was, we weren’t.”
“Aha!” Dad looked at Mom and smiled. “See! That proves everything. I didn’t eat them, and Ella has some missing jelly bears to prove it.”
The cat in the hat
And there she was! Just like that, Martha Jensen with an ‘e.’
“You must be Abigail and Eleanor. Please do come in. I was just about to make a cup of tea.”
She looked even more beautiful than the Martha I had imagined in my head about a thousand times. She had the kindest dark-blue eyes, a wide smile, and a long narrow face framed by short, silver-gray hair. She had a few brown spots on her forehead and the wrinkles around her eyes stood out. She was wearing a long gray dress paired with a simple pearl necklace, a pair of eggplant high heels, and a tiny bit of makeup. Even in what had to be her seventies, she looked absolutely stunning in an Audrey Hepburn-classic-beauty kind of way.
“Uh-huh,” I think I said as we—a little hesitantly—stepped inside the house.
She closed the door behind us, and when she turned around and looked at me and smiled, I was overwhelmed with the same feeling I always get when I see Grandma for the first time in a long time, a feeling of longing. I was already on the edge of tears.
She showed us to the living room area, just off the tiny kitchenette. “Do sit down,” she said and pulled out a chair for Mom.
“Thanks,” we both said as we sat down almost cheek to cheek.
“Yes, it’s not much,” she said. “To tell you the truth, it sucks. But it’s home for now. I can’t wait to get all our things and move into our house, well not your house, our new house. You know what I mean.” She smiled and revealed a perfect set of white teeth. “Only a week from Monday,” she added. Her voice seemed almost familiar.
One day, when it had been my turn to read out loud, I had looked at her handwriting and tried to imagine what her voice would have sounded like, and now—hearing it for the first time—it was exactly how I had imagined it: soft, gentle and straightforward. It almost made me cry.
“Is anything wrong, dear? Are you not feeling well? You look so pale all of a sudden.” Martha’s kind eyes met mine and she offered a sweet smile.
I shook my head and tried to say something, but I couldn’t. I could hardly breathe. I was here with Martha—a voice from the past—in my time zone. I almost had to pinch myself. How could she just be right there, smiling—making tea—as if we had known each other forever?
I could feel Mom’s hand on my back. “I guess she’s just so overwhelmed to finally meet you, to actually see you in person. I mean, we both are.” She looked at me and smiled nervously.
Martha placed a hand over her chest and smiled. “Oh, I didn’t know I was such a celebrity,” she joked, winking at me.
“I didn’t mean to, I swear. It was all my fault,” I suddenly confessed without warning. I didn’t expect these to be my first words to Martha, but, somehow, they just tumbled out of my mouth without my permission. Martha looked at me and then at Mom, who was looking down at her hands.
All the way on the trip there, we had talked about how to tell her. Mom had insisted that she—as the mother—should be the one to tell her. I, on the other hand, thought it was only fair that I did it, since I was the one who had found the box. When Dad had dropped us off and headed to the Public Storage with Frederick, we still hadn’t figured out who would say it, or how. I sure hadn’t expected to confess the minute I opened my mouth, but once I saw her and heard her familiar yet unfamiliar voice, I just knew that the words would make th
eir way all on their own—raw and unfiltered. I mean, how could I lie and pretend that I didn’t know her—that I didn’t know almost every little thing there was to know about her? This was Martha!—the woman who could drink a can of soda in a blink of an eye. Martha, who Frederick had fallen in love with the moment he had laid his eyes on her, in some high school drama production; she, wearing braces, he fighting with words. The same Martha who had suffered years of infertility and miscarriages. Just like Mom. Martha, who had watched her own dad die, and who had saved Thomas from his abusive son-of-a-bitch foster dad. Martha ... a woman who had finally owned the word “mom” for the first time, practically before our very eyes. How could I pretend not to know her?
“You didn’t mean to do what, dear?” Martha adjusted her hair in the back and smiled. Of course, a lady like Martha would say “dear.” Just as Miss T, my lovely little Miss T, always had.
“You see...” Mom hesitated. “You see, um, when we found out that we had ended up with the wrong truck-load, well, um, after a few weeks, we, um, finally decided to open up a few boxes and... that’s when we, um....” She stopped midsentence and looked at me, blushing. She was about to continue, when Martha spoke.
“You found the mailbox,” she said, not looking at any of us. “You found the letters, I presume,” she said, now looking at me.
“I did,” I said, my voice, like everything else attached to it, was all weak. Would she ever forgive me? Forgive us?
They both looked at me, waiting for me to go on, and slowly I started climbing the stairs of confession.
“At first, I only read a few,” I explained, looking down at my feet. “See, I just wanted to know where Frederick had gone, but then before I knew it...” I stopped and looked up. Martha stared at me with a distant look in her eyes, nodding, like she was trying to picture me reading the letters, her letters.
I didn’t quite know how honest I should be with her. Should I tell her how the letters had changed my life forever? Should I tell her how much their lives back in eighty-one had had such an impact on me—three decades later— that I often would lie awake at night thinking about her, Frederick, and Thomas? And should I tell her how I had had such a hard time letting go, letting go of the letters, her, Frederick, and ... Thomas? Sweet Thomas.
Lost in Seattle (The Miss Apple Pants series, #2) Page 44
