On the Right Side of a Dream

by Sheila Williams

  “You have some . . .”

  “Listen here, I have had about enough of this. I love this place, but life is too short to have your head pounding, your stomach churning, and staying up nights wondering what shoe is gonna drop next. The attorney told me to be civil with you but my civility has run out. Your mother, and that’s what she was, your mother. She was a lady, I don’t care what you think.”

  “I know all that I need to know,” H-Smith snapped back. “My father married the woman, he knew all about it . . .”

  “I don’t care what your jackass daddy thought he knew, he was wrong. Worse than that, he was a liar.” If you’re going to jump into something, you might as well jump in up to your thighs. Right?

  “She was irresponsible and greedy.” Hayward-Smith’s voice was booming now, a deep baritone that might have sounded good in an opera or something. But now, its tones echoed off the walls of the room and sounded angry, hollow, and cold. “My father paid her off and she took the money like the money-grubbing tart that she was.”

  “Millie didn’t leave you because she wanted to. She left you behind because your daddy told her that he would take away your inheritance if she didn’t.”

  Of course, I couldn’t prove that. I only had a short story that might or might not be based on truth to go on, but, what the hell, there was a whole lot in those words that had the ring of truth. And I was now pulling the rope and ringing that huge bell.

  I had been fanning myself with the file folder even though it was thirty degrees outside. Now, I just threw it in his face.

  “Your momma was a writer, too,” I told him. He was too shocked to say anything. “You might want to read one of her stories.”

  I slammed the door so hard the chandelier swayed from side to side.

  I stormed past Inez, grabbed my coat, and trudged down the hill and around the corner to the diner, where I could get something to calm me down.

  I don’t drink but I sure needed a drink now.

  Well, I wasn’t going to inherit any bed-and-breakfast. Maybe Hayward-Smith would prove that Millie was nuttier than a fruitcake. I was way past caring. I had just taken care of one of my full plates.

  I was so mad that I was practically blind. I was charging along as if it was sixty degrees outside and the walks were clear and dry instead of covered with snow and slush and patches of ice. So, of course, I slipped and fell on my butt. Tried to stand up and slipped again. Good thing I have some extra padding on my backside. By the time I got going again, I was still mad but I was sore, too.

  When I walked into the diner, I could tell by the expression on Jess’s face that one of my other full plates was about to spill over.

  I stomped the snow off my feet and opened the door of the diner. Jess was standing right in front of me.

  Do you remember that shoe that I was waiting on? Well, it dropped on my head and flattened me like a pancake.

  “Your daughter just called,” he said with an expression that would stop a train in its tracks. He paused before he went on, as if he was thinking something over. “She says that Teishia is sick.”

  Long after I hung up the phone, I just sat there and stared at it.

  “Momma, you got to come home . . . 104-degree fever . . . Children’s Hospital ER . . . convulsions . . . Momma, I need you . . .”

  I heard the sound of a mug sliding across the counter toward me. Hot chocolate, just the way I liked it with more whipped cream than chocolate. But I couldn’t drink it. Not now.

  “Momma, I need you to come home . . .”

  It had not been a nice conversation.

  I looked up at Jess, who was filling a tray for a table of cross-country skiers.

  “I don’t believe her,” he said simply as he walked past me.

  I said nothing. I didn’t believe her either.

  Just hearing Bertie’s voice, I got a knot in my stomach. Talking with Randy, even with Rashawn, didn’t touch me that way. But the sound of my daughter’s voice, transmitted loud and clear across the digital microwaves of long distance, came in on a high-quality frequency. And it brought with it more than words. Vocabulary was the runner-up to anger and arrogance and blame, especially blame. The boatload of blame came through just fine and left a sticky, ugly residue of guilt behind as if I hadn’t wiped down the counter right. So that when I finished talking (or should I say “listening”?) to Bertie, there was a sharp, sick coldness in my gut as if I’d swallowed Pepto-Bismol laced with sliced razor blades that had just come out of the Deepfreeze.

  “She is your granddaughter,” Bertie had said, as if she was telling me that two and two were four.

  The fingers of my old life were longer and more patient than I thought. I had figured, after a year or so, they would have given up looking for me, trying to “talk some sense” into me, give up trying to make me come to Jesus and take care of the responsibilities I had to raise my grown children. Like a bank robber from the thirties, I thought I had got away clean.

  No way. That old life had tentacles that were long and sticky like a giant squid and they were reaching out to me, grabbing and pulling me back.

  Jess slid a thick white envelope toward me.

  “What’s that?” I was afraid to touch it. I was only getting bad news today.

  “Don’t know but it’s from your favorite person.”

  HAYWARD-SMITH, INTERNATIONAL LTD.

  NEW YORK SAN FRANCISCO LONDON NAIROBI

  My already-sinking stomach dropped to my knees. Hayward-Smith and Bertie were tied for my Least Favorite Person Award.

  “It’s probably a letter bomb,” I told Jess. I had no desire to open the envelope—ever.

  “Maybe he’s withdrawing the will contest.”

  He wasn’t.

  Once I got past all the where-asses and fourth-wits, the letter was very clear: Broderick T. Hayward-Smith “was prepared” (boy, that sounded just like him) to pay me a “substantial sum” to deed the inn to him. “Substantial” is a good word. It makes you think of things or people that are sturdy, reliable, conservative. But “substantial” did not come close to the dollar figure that Hayward-Smith was “prepared” to offer. I counted the zeros twice then asked Jess for his reading glasses. Hayward-Smith was offering enough pennies to buy into Nina’s business—three or four times. What could I do with that kind of money?

  Jess whistled.

  “That’s a hell of an offer.”

  According to the letter, I had ten days to make up my mind. Ten days.

  I threw my coat over my shoulders, pulled a cigarette from a pack that Peaches had left a hundred years ago, and went out onto the porch. I didn’t feel the cold. Jess raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything even though he knew I’d quit smoking. He probably figured that I was having a hot flash and needed to cool off.

  Questions, questions, and more questions. Where were the answers?

  I looked out across the lake into the north forest where it’s green and brown. But spring had put on boxing gloves and was fighting her way into Montana. I heard the voices of birds that I hadn’t heard in a while. I wondered, if they’re singing to keep warm, that maybe they’re thinking they came back too soon. A flash of burgundy from the road, the Ram truck of one of the families that lives farther up the ridge. A roar and the smell of diesel fuel, then silence and clean, cold air.

  There is a poem about a road not taken. I think that it’s really about the road that was taken. I, of course, had never taken any roads anywhere in my life so when my time came, I just picked a road out of the atlas. I was not poetic about it at all. I think the poet was saving the other road for another day. I wasn’t sure there’d ever be another road for me. I had only two—the road out and the road back in.

  Chapter Twelve

  * * *

  Just like a bad-luck charm, the situation with Bertie brought back everything in my life that I didn’t want back, most of the garbage that I thought I had left behind when I caught that Greyhound. All of the anger, the helplessn
ess, and the screaming and fighting. I had fought with each of my ex-husbands, sometimes just yelling and screaming. Sometimes more than that.

  I just never thought I’d get into an argument with Jess. At that time, of course, I thought it was a real fight. When the fog finally cleared, I realized that it wasn’t. But at that time, I was so upset, confused, and tired that I couldn’t tell my head from a hole in the ground.

  And Jess, who always seemed to know just what could make me feel good, also had the talent for saying just the right words to make me want to rip his face off.

  The bad part about it was, I knew that he was right.

  He kept saying it over and over again.

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  My jaw was set tighter than the vault doors at Fort Knox. I turned my head away and looked at the few scraggly-looking elk grazing in a field off in the distance. Jess and I had already had this conversation over and over.

  I was going back to Columbus and that was that.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Jess said again, louder, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.

  “I heard you. And I’ve said all I’m gonna say. I’m going.”

  “I think she’s puttin’ you on, Juanita. I don’t think that Teishia’s sick. Randy would have called. KayRita would have called. I really think . . .”

  “I don’t care what you think,” I yelled back.

  “Little kids get sick, Juanita. You’ve had three of ’em, you know that,” Jess countered.

  “Yeah? And you’ve had none so you don’t know anything. They get sick, those fevers spike, what you think is just a little head cold turns into God-knows-what overnight. I’ve seen it happen. She said T’s fever wasn’t coming down and she’s taking her to Children’s. And she said to come and I’m coming. She’s my daughter; T’s my granddaughter. That is the end of it.”

  Jess’s hands tightened on the wheel.

  “What’d your sister say?” he changed direction on me.

  KayRita was at a hair show in Cleveland. I finally reached her on her cell phone, screaming in her ear because she was on the main exhibition floor and couldn’t hear. She’d told me that she would get her oldest girl, Marlena, to check in with Bertie. Marlena had called me. But the news didn’t make me feel good.

  “Aunt Juanita? I’ve called the apartment, Bertie’s cell, and Lee’s cell. There’s no answer. I even went by there. No one’s home.”

  Randy’s phone had the voice mail on but I knew that he was out of town, too. He was on a cooking team and there was a competition in New York. I’d talked with him just before he left. He said T was fussy and that her head was a little warm but that she seemed all right and that Bertie wasn’t that worried about it. She and Lee had got a sitter and were going out.

  “If she’s going out, then you don’t need to be going out there,” Jess said flatly. “She’s putting you on, Juanita. She’s been calling you for weeks, trying to get you to come back. And now she’s finally found the one thing, the bait, if you want to put it that way, that she knows will work like a voodoo spell.”

  My jaw was so tight that I could feel my teeth grinding into each other until my temples and my jaw hurt. My fists were balled up and my shoulders tightened until it felt as if I had a band of steel across my back climbing toward my ears. I don’t like fighting with Jess. Maybe because he doesn’t fight dirty. He just tells you what he thinks. No posturing, no mind games, no bring-you-down-on-your-knees remarks, just the truth, whether you see it or not.

  For a few seconds, I wouldn’t say anything. I couldn’t. The thought that Bertie would use her own daughter to manipulate me in this way . . . no, she wouldn’t do that. Those other situations? They were small potatoes. But this, this was major, this was hard-core. Bertie was a lot of things: selfish, sometimes lazy, and almost always looking out for her own interests. But I never would think . . . no, I would not admit to myself that that girl would stoop so low. When I could finally speak, I said, “Bertie wouldn’t do that.” It was all that I could get out because my throat was so tight. I didn’t look at Jess when I said it.

  We drove the rest of the way to Missoula International without speaking. As we approached the lane for “Departing Flights,” Jess said, “Looks like security took the meters out, so I can’t park. I’ll drop you right here.”

  “OK,” I said. My fingers were wound like steel cord around the handle of my duffel bag.

  Jess pulled behind a black Yukon and put the truck in “Park” then got out.

  “You don’t have to . . .”

  The door slammed.

  He came around to the curb side and opened the truck door and held my elbow as I stumbled down. I did look at him then. His eyes were even blacker than I remembered, if that was possible.

  “When you finish with this nonsense, Miz Louis, you come home, you understand? And if Northwest won’t fly you, I’ll come and get you.”

  It wasn’t until I felt the lift of the plane in the pit of my stomach that I realized that Jess had said something to me that he’d never said before. On all of my wanderings, he’d always said, “Come back, Juanita,” or “Don’t forget to come back.” And in our conversations, Columbus was always “back home.” But not this time.

  This time, he’d said, “You come home.”

  After I’d waited an hour for Bertie to pick me up from the airport, I began to wonder if Jess wasn’t right.

  “I’ll pick you up, Momma,” she’d told me in a message she left on the answering machine. “Just tell me what time.” We’d played phone tag but I had left her a message with that information.

  But she wasn’t there.

  So I took a cab and watched the flags of many countries flapping in the wind as the car made its way down Port Columbus International Boulevard. There were so many new buildings built since I’d left; even the McDonald’s looked different! The airport had been built up, of course, although even when I lived in Columbus, I was hardly ever at the airport. I mean, when was I ever going anywhere? The cab turned onto I-670 and the skyline of the city came into view. Despite the fact that I was as mad as a hornet because Bertie hadn’t been there to meet me and worried sick to my stomach over what might be wrong with Teishia, I smiled. The county jail, the Nationwide Center, the bank building that looked like a granite tombstone, the monolithic state office tower: All of those buildings stood like fortresses from future time, their squared-off tops disappearing into the haze of the early spring day. And there, off to the side, dwarfed by the cold-looking, glitter-and-glass wonders, stood the little Leveque Tower, the tallest building I’d ever seen when I was a kid. And, now, its gargoyles and Art Deco curlicues sneered at accountants on the sixteenth floor of this building or lawyers on the twenty-first floor of that one.

  The cabdriver let me off in front of the apartment and his tires peeled as he left the driveway. I still had my key. And it still worked. But I barely recognized the place I’d left over a year ago.

  For one thing, it was clean. Not what I would have expected from my daughter, who was never going to win a happy homemaker award. And yet, what could I say? The apartment was neat. For another, it had been completely redecorated. There was a wall full of sleek silver-and-black sound equipment and a television large enough to carry a family of four down the Scioto River on a Sunday afternoon. The couch was new, the end tables were new, and the kitchen (Lord Almighty!) was spotless. Then I had another thought: Maybe Bertie had moved and they hadn’t changed the locks? But, no, there were pictures of Teishia on the shelf next to one of the black electronic whatchamacallits, and some of my pictures were still on the walls.

  But the apartment was empty. The bed was made in my old room, and the room that Rashawn had used, Bertie had given over to T because it was furnished with a pretty white daybed and a toy box of stuffed animals set in the corner.

  And no one was there. No notes on the refrigerator. No messages blinking on the answering machine. Had I missed her? No. I had called her
cell phone. Only the voice mail. I had called her boyfriend. Only the voice mail. With shaking fingers, I punched out the number for Children’s Hospital but the friendly voice on the other end informed me that, “for privacy reasons,” she could tell me if Teishia was not there, but she wouldn’t be able to give me much information if she was. “No Teishia Jackson, ma’am.”

  Well, that was a relief. Or was it?

  I heard Jess’s words in my head again: “She’s putting you on . . . it’s all a head game.”

  Like I always do now when I need to sort things out, I took a walk. But this time, I wasn’t able to charge up a mountain road or meander down a path and look at a Montana lake. I put my bag and my purse in the back bedroom and headed out the door and down Mount Vernon Avenue. It was April, it was a little chilly, but the sun had come out and, as long as I kept moving, I didn’t feel cold. Shoot, I’d just come from a state that wouldn’t come out from under winter for another month. What was forty-five degrees to me?

  Champion Middle School; it was junior high when I went. Union Grove Baptist, Reverend Hale’s church, the old Beatty Rec Center. I walked as far as where the old folks’ home used to be; what was it called? Looked at the skyline that had changed and the new houses, the marquee lights blinking brightly in the sunlight: the Lincoln Theatre and the old Knights of Pythias Hall—not old anymore—was now the King Center. The more I walked, the more I noticed what had changed. The more I walked, the more I noticed what had stayed the same. And, through it all, even though the memories came back, pushing, shoving, and sometimes, kicking their way into my brain, I didn’t feel homesick. I was able, without feeling bad, to remember my smiles as I jumped double-dutch with my friends when I was twelve. I was able to remember the apple crisp that we ate in the cafeteria at Champion; the black and orange of the cheerleaders’ uniforms going up and down at the football games at East; my joy when Rashawn was born at old St. Ann’s Hospital; the pain when I had my jaw set in the ER room at Grant. The little baby that I’d buried in Evergreen. It all came back, but as I walked back to the apartment, this time on Long Street, I didn’t feel sad about it. I didn’t feel like I had made a mistake. I thought that I had come back because of Bertie and because I thought Teishia was sick. But maybe, I also came back for me. You know me, I’m a slow learner, and it almost always takes me one more go-round before I catch on.