When had she died?
She grabbed a t-shirt from her suitcase, and slipped on a pair of jeans. She left her feet bare. When she was sixteen, she had spent all her free time with Skeeter Jackson and thought herself daring. She had learned how to hotwire cars and siphon gas and hold a gun. She had learned how to spot a cop car from the position of its taillights, and she had learned how to pass for a woman ten years older so that she could get in bars. All the while, she had remained the model student and the perfect daughter. Her mother was too busy to notice who Violet spent her evenings with, and Violet was too involved to mention it. Her mother hadn’t even met Skeeter until two months before the shooting when he came by during a small family reunion picnic wearing a blue nylon muscle shirt with small holes all the way through it, revealing his as-yet-unmuscled chest. He smelled of cigarettes and beer with the faint hint of pot, unfamiliar odors at her house, and her mother had invited him to share some fried chicken and to meet the relatives.
He had. He had been personable and charming, and he had eaten as though he had never had a homemade meal before. Then he had left on his older brother’s motorcycle, and her mother had watched him disappear.
“Looks like Vi has her own James Dean,” her uncle Robert had said.
“Every girl needs one,” her mother had said slowly, and then turned away. Everyone grew quiet, and Violet had known, from long practice, that her mother had just made a rare mention of her father.
She smoothed her hair back, felt the sweat on her scalp. She pulled open windows in the study, and gazed out them at the funeral home where there were still cars.
Skeeter’s was gone.
Who would have thought that he would drive a Jag, that he would wear a suit that cost more than her monthly salary? He had come from one of the poorest neighborhoods. His sister had died two years after the incident, beaten to death by the local pimp. His brother ended up doing twenty to life for a series of burglaries, the last involving a gun and a motorcycle dealership. She had always assumed that Skeeter would end up the same way.
Skeeter. She would have to get him out of her mind. He no longer had a place in her life — he hadn’t since the shooting. She was here to honor her mother, and to clean up the home her mother had lived in for forty years. Not to dwell on Skeeter Jackson.
She touched the smooth scar beside her eye, felt the reconstructed bone, wished she could remember more about the incident than she did. It was forever gone from her mind, just a tantalizing hint of the night — the new drug Skeeter’s friend Jake brought, the buzzing, elliptical feeling that it gave her, the way the entire room seemed both larger and smaller. The sadness, the deep welling sadness, and the beauty of the gun in Skeeter’s hand. And then there was nothing except pain, the incredible throbbing in her head that didn’t leave for months, maybe, if she were honest, maybe even years. The hospital bed against her back, the pillow beneath her head, and the nurse’s voice, Anita’s voice, asking her if she wanted flowers from Skeeter, and the way she had screamed then, remembering the gun and the pain and —
She shook it away. That was why she never thought of Skeeter. That was why she never saw anyone from this town, why she visited only her mother, and only then for short periods of time. Being trapped here for the week before her mother’s death, and now for at least a week afterward was like being in hell, and she had just had a vision of the devil himself.
The house was finally getting cooler. The streetlights had kicked on, and given the room an odd sort of gray light. She flipped the green desk lamp that she had purchased for her mother on one of her last visits.
Her mother had kept her important papers in a box beside the narrow table she used as a desk. Beside the lamp were expensive pens — one of her mother’s few indulgences — including a quill pen complete with inkwell. The makeshift desk had a blotter, unsoiled by doodles, and it also had account ledgers nearby, all of them neatly labeled by year.
Violet grabbed that year’s ledger, and opened it to the place marked by the ribbon. Her mother’s handwriting, still the perfect cursive she had learned in grammar school six decades before, recorded each bill paid whether for utilities or a credit card, and each check received from the Social Security stipend to her retirement. Her mother’s bills had been up to date as of two weeks before. Despite her illness, she had sat at this desk and filled out that week’s bills, making certain that she remained a responsible citizen all the way to the end.
The bills were small and inconsequential. The house payment was gone long ago. Violet thumbed through the ledger, looking for the tax payment to make sure the property taxes had been paid, and also to see what the county considered a fifty-year-old suburban ranch house to be worth. The farther back she went, the sturdier her mother’s handwriting became. Cable, telephone, groceries, heat — fluctuating with the weather — electricity, insurance, gifts. The property tax payment might have been in the fall of the previous year. Her mother had enough money set aside; she had probably paid the bill the moment it was incurred. That had been how her mother had done things.
Violet removed the previous year’s book, and opened it to the ribbon marker. The only notation on that page was in red: underlined and followed by an exclamation mark. Paid in full! She turned to the previous page, and froze.
The notation was simple: 12/31 Stephen White Jackson (Loan: cf. 8/14/80) $42,125.14. It was a payment to her mother of forty-two thousand dollars. The repayment of a loan her mother made to Skeeter, three years after the shooting.
The shaking had returned. Violet left the ledger open and rummaged until she found the 1980 volume. She found August easily and turned pages until she reached August 14. The notation was in the middle of a pile of mundane bills, including one for Violet’s medical expenses.
8/14 Stephen White Jackson — interest free loan $10,000.
Interest free. Given to Skeeter when Violet was attending college downstate, and the other students were looking away from the angry redness that marred the right side of her face.
Why?
A door banged in the front of the house. Violet jumped, heart pounding.
“Violet?”
The voice was Tom’s. She took a deep breath and put a hand over her stomach. She hadn’t realized how tense she was until that moment.
“Violet?” he said again, and this time his voice was closer.
“In the study,” she said.
He came in, blocking the door with his large build, and flicked on the overhead light. “How come the house is so dark?”
She blinked at the brightness. “I was looking through Mom’s financial records.”
“You didn’t have to do that tonight.”
“I couldn’t do anything else,” she said. Her voice sounded strained and strange to her own ears.
He hadn’t moved, as if her strangeness had put a wall between them. How hard this had to be on him. He had known her mother for fourteen years and had respected her. He had to have some feelings about her death as well, but he never spoke of them, instead taking care of Violet, letting her needs come first.
He was a caring man. He had always been. That was part of the attraction for her. He was the only man she had met since the shooting who made her feel as if she were the most important woman on earth.
“I found something,” she said softly, unable, as usual, to keep something from him.
He came in the room almost too quickly as if he had been waiting for an invitation. He put a hand on her shoulder. “What did you find?”
“Mom loaned Stephen Jackson $10,000 in 1980.” Her voice was shaky and brittle, rather like she felt.
“Stephen Jackson? The man at the funeral home?” Tom was pretending ignorance, but she could tell that someone had already told him who Skeeter was.
“Yes,” she said. “He paid her back in full and with interest last year. I don’t know how long he’d been paying her before that.”
“Why is that important?” Tom’s question wasn’t about
the payments. It was about the loan.
“Stephen is the one who shot me,” she said, marveling that she couldn’t keep anything from Tom now, but that she had never told him that detail before.
His hand tightened on her shoulder. “Then why did you let him in the funeral home?”
“I didn’t have a choice. It’s a public place.”
“No,” Tom said. “It’s not.”
“Mom lent him $10,000 interest-free. That had to be some of the money she inherited from Grammy. And she did it three years after the shooting, about the time Skeeter — Stephen — would have been released from jail.”
“Why would she do that?” Tom asked.
Violet ran a finger across the old notation, feeling the impressions left by her mother’s pen so long ago. “I don’t know.”
“And your mother never said anything?”
Violet shook her head. Then she frowned. “But Skeeter did. He said tonight that he had stayed in touch with Mother, that there were a few things I should know.”
“You spoke to him?” Tom sounded alarmed.
Violet turned slightly in the chair. The desk lamp illuminated Tom’s face, made it seem even paler than it really was. “He was in the parking lot.”
“Waiting for you.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way, but he probably had been. “I don’t know,” she said.
“And you spoke to him?”
“I told him I didn’t want to. I left him there. He didn’t have a chance to tell me whatever it was he started to say.”
“He’ll tell me,” Tom said. He was starting to bluster, his grip on her shoulder too tight, his body growing tense.
“No,” Violet said.
“He will.” Tom seemed to grow taller. He knew how to use his build to advantage.
“He might,” Violet said, “but it doesn’t matter any more, don’t you see? Whatever was between them was finished last year. The loan was marked paid in full.” She smiled ruefully. “And emphasized with an exclamation point.”
“But it’s got you upset,” Tom said.
“Mother’s got me upset,” Violet said. “Skeeter Jackson is simply part of my past.”
***
The following morning was too beautiful for a funeral. The sky was a light blue; the sun bathing everything in a soft golden light. The day promised to be hot, but the type of heat that made Violet think of spreading a beach towel, grabbing a fat novel, and spending the afternoon on a nearby beach, listening to children scream and splash in a lake. Instead, she would be wearing her new black dress, listening to condolences, and sitting on a narrow pew in a church she hadn’t attended since she was seventeen years old.
Tom had gotten up before her. He had cleaned out the car, and taken it to a nearby gas station for a wash so that everything looked good for the funeral procession. He had pressed his own suit, something he hadn’t done since they were married, and then made her breakfast. He had even put the ledgers away.
It felt odd to be in her mother’s house, eating from her mother’s dishes, drinking her mother’s coffee, without her mother standing near the sink or reading the newspaper in her chair by the window. The house was quiet and there seemed to be a waiting in the stillness, as if her mother would come through the door at any moment, and flick on the television.
Violet hadn’t slept much, and she had gotten up twice so that her tossing and turning wouldn’t wake up Tom. They were crammed together in the sleeper/sofa, neither of them willing to take over the queen-sized bed her mother had slept in. As dawn had arrived, Violet had stood before the living room window, staring at the street. She could remember it in a million incarnations — with snow blocking the view, with a line of blooming roses between their house and the neighbor’s, with children skating on a thick yellow plane of ice. She had walked down that street with every boy friend she had ever had — except Tom — and she had held various hands, kissed her first kiss beneath a long-gone maple, ran back from the seventh grade Christmas Dance excited because Scotty Turine had danced with her.
Her sixteenth year, the boy who kissed her beneath the maple had been Skeeter. He had also been the first to touch her breasts, the first to see her naked, the first to discover the small mole above her heart. He had been very tender, and had shown remarkable restraint for a boy his age: he had been afraid of getting her pregnant, of having them turn out like his parents had turned out: married at sixteen, parents at seventeen, divorced by twenty. She had seen him as her savior and protector then, much as she saw Tom now, only with Skeeter it had ended horribly, shattered in a night she could barely remember.
And then she hadn’t seen him again, until the night before her mother’s funeral.
I stayed in touch with your mother.
And her mother had never said a word. She had loaned him what to them was a small fortune — which he had repaid at more than four times the original amount — and she had never mentioned that either. With that one single notation, her mother had become as strange to Violet as the road. Familiar only in memory, the details now tainted by a slightly different light.
Finally Violet had taken an aspirin, her mother’s old remedy for sleeplessness, and had fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep. She hadn’t felt Tom leave to do his errands, waking only when the delicious odors of bacon and coffee tantalized her nose.
Somehow she made it through the hours before the funeral, arriving at the church to find a group of elderly women in the basement cutting sheet cakes and making more coffee. She had waved hello to Anita, a Ladies Auxiliary member who had also been the nurse who had cared for her during those awful weeks in the hospital. Anita had smiled back, wiped her hands on a towel, and seemed about to come over, when Violet was called upstairs to greet some of the first arrivals.
The funeral itself was short; her mother had insisted on a standard religious ceremony. From the phone calls Violet had received in the days since her mother’s death, it seemed that her mother’s friends would have preferred the memorial service. They all wanted to stand up and give testimonials to her place in their lives. She had had to turn them all down, and give the remembrance of her mother to a minister that Violet had never met.
He acquitted himself well. He spoke of her mother’s life and her friendships and her generous nature; he only spoke of God a few times, and then in the proper context. The prayer was one that Violet herself had offered up every day since her mother’s death but had not acknowledged, a prayer that her mother would be as well received in the afterlife as she had been in this one. The music was beautiful, the service mercifully short, and Violet had only used one purse-sized box of Kleenex: a victory, she thought. Her Midwestern roots showed in that; she wanted to do her crying in the privacy of her own home.
She didn’t notice how full the church was until the ceremony was over. Every pew was filled, and part of the balcony as well. Most of the mourners went to the basement, while a select few attended the grave-side service. Violet watched as her mother’s casket was lowered into a dark hole beside her grandparents’ graves, beneath a cottonwood tree that was shedding tiny white seedlings. It looked as if God had decided to create snow in August, just to honor her mother and her love of winter.
That thought, more than anything else, made Violet cry.
By the time she returned to the church, her eye and nose were swollen, and a new coat of makeup couldn’t hide the redness in her skin. But she put on what Tom called her company face and went to greet all the people who had come to acknowledge her mother and see her safely home.
As Violet started down the stairs, she heard the rumble of conversation. There was little laughter, but there was warmth. The air smelled of coffee, and she found that soothing. She rounded the corner, and saw the dining room was full. The long blond tables were covered with paper tablecloths. On them, the Ladies Auxiliary had placed silver bowls filled with mint candies and peanuts, platters with tiny cake squares, and the china coffee cups that were designated only for sp
ecial occasions. Each table had one Auxiliary member stationed in the middle: it was her job to pour and to make certain the food supplies remained.
Most of the mourners stood in small clusters. A handful sat at tables, mostly the older ones, and all around her, she heard her mother’s name mentioned with affection. People were telling stories, and she wished she could simply flit from group to group to hear those stories without tainting them by her presence.
She took a cup of coffee and a piece of chocolate sheet cake with whipped cream frosting just before she saw him, standing in the back. He was wearing the same suit as he had worn the night before, but he wore a black shirt and matching black tie that somehow made him look even more expensive. A few people were talking to him, but he wasn’t listening.
He was staring at her.
Warmth flooded her face. Tom took her arm. He followed her gaze. “I’ll make him go.”
She shook her head. “They clearly knew each other. He has as much right to be here as anyone.”
“He bothers you. I don’t think your mother would have wanted that.”
Obviously not. Her mother had kept her entire relationship with Skeeter secret, and she had probably done that so that she wouldn’t upset Violet. It was too late now; Violet was upset. There was nothing anyone could do to change that.
“Let him be,” she said wearily. “We won’t see him after today.”
Tom harrumphed as he always did when he disagreed with her, then he went to a nearby table to get his own coffee and snack. She would have to keep an eye on him; when they disagreed this badly he often took matters into his own hands. Whatever her mother would have wanted, it wouldn’t have been a scene at the reception following her own funeral.
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