by Lisa Samson
Praise for
Straight Up
“Like an expert barista, Lisa Samson takes bits and pieces of her characters’ lives and fixes them into a story that is fascinating and profound. Loss can lift you up … or destroy you. Straight Up shows both options and then lets you decide. Which will it be? This is one good book!”
—ROXANNE HENKE, author of After Anne; With Love, Libby; and other books in the Coming Home to Brewster series
“What if we chose differently in life? Straight Up is pure Lisa Samson—original, raw, and laced with grace. As always, Lisa’s characters came to life in my imagination, becoming my friends. This book made me cry and also allowed me hope. What a treasure.”
—ROBIN LEE HATCHER, best-selling author of A Carol for Christmas
“Lisa Samson’s writing is an extravagant gift to her readers. I am eternally amazed at the benevolence that spills so generously from her pen. She is not only a compassionate writer but a young poet with an old soul, a woman that uses her writing as a dance in which her readers can revel.”
—PATRICIA HICKMAN, author of Earthly Vows and Whisper Town
“In Straight Up, Lisa Samson draws us into the joys and consequences of this free-will thing called choice. It is a story that is at once both tough and tender, with Samson exhibiting unusually keen insight into human nature—the longings of the heart, the failings of the flesh, the need for redemption. A powerful read, too important to miss.”
—ANN TATLOCK, awarding-winning author of Things We Once Held Dear
“Lisa Samson is one of my favorite authors. Her characterization is always brilliant, and Straight Up is no exception. Samson just keeps getting better and better.”
—COLLEEN COBLE, author of Fire Dancer
OTHER BOOKS
BY LISA SAMSON
Apples of Gold
Club Sandwich
Tiger Lillie
The Living End
Songbird
Women’s Intuition
The Church Ladies
Indigo Waters
Fields of Gold
Crimson Skies
STRAIGHT UP
PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS
12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921
A division of Random House Inc.
All Scripture quotations or paraphrases are taken from the King James Version.
The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Lisa E. Samson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
WATERBROOK and its deer design logo are registered trademarks of WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Samson, Lisa, 1964–
Straight up : a novel / Lisa Samson. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-55054-5
1. Cousins—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.A46673S77 2006
813′.54—dc22
2006013436
v3.1
for Heather
true blue
Acknowledgments
I’ve never had a book come out of me with greater frustration. So thank-yous abound:
To Claudia Cross, Dudley Delffs, Shannon Hill, Laura Wright, Jeane Wynn, and always, my partner in crime, Erin Healy, who simply makes it so much better!
To my family: Lori, Will, Ty, Jake, and Gwyn.
To my friends: the Carrington Road girls, Leigh, Marty, Claudia B., and B.J.
And to my blog buddies: too many to mention.
Finally, to my readers!
Find me at www.lisasamson.com. I love being in contact with my readers.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Part I - Blue Georgia
Fairly
Mary-Margaret 1991
Georgia
Mary-Margaret
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Part II - Purple: Two Years Later Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Clarissa 1994
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Mary-Margaret
Georgia
Fairly
Clarissa
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Clarissa
Fairly
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Clarissa
Fairly
Clarissa
Fairly
Part III - Pink Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Mary-Margaret
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Clarissa
Fairly
Georgia
Clarissa
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Clarissa
Georgia
Clarissa
Georgia
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
Clarissa
Georgia
Clarissa
Fairly
Georgia
Clarissa
Fairly
Georgia
Fairly
About the Author
Summer 1980
Georgia Ella Bishop sways her narrow, squeaky little hips in time to the jazz music emanating from her mother’s piano, carnival spins and whirls of sound twirling in her ears, around her brain, and down to the toes of her red rubber sandals.
Polly Bishop plays without looking, timing her music to her daughter’s movements, swaying and smiling, kindred of angels.
PART I
Blue
Georgia
Why are wine velvet curtains, soft carpets, and mellow lighting reserved for the dead? Why do we whisper around them, these people who are the least likely to hear anything we have to say? Even less likely than when they lived and we tried to communicate—dire, quiet pleadings somehow lost in our throats and the airwaves.
He looks good, strangely so, considering his passing.
Odd to say that about a corpse, yes, but my dad is handsome, even in death. His hair shifted years ago to colorless darkness rivered with silver. I watched the transition happen on the cable news channel to which he gave
his life, if not his frequent-flyer miles. I have no idea who received those.
Not the gals assembled here.
These women knew him best years and years ago, high-school friends now aging, some of them grandmothers with suedelike skin and clothing ironed into angles. They stand in respectful pumps, feet comfortable in their cocoons of suntan nylon. They skinned their knees with him, failed geometry tests, understood when he became famous and forgot them.
But they’re with him in this small funeral home that’s buried more people than can be found right now in these humble blocks of Highlandtown. Conkling Street’s claim to fame will soon be covered by the earth. Brave, good-looking Gaylen Bishop, intimate with the whole world, come home to Baltimore, back to the neighborhood to end the final journey.
Charm City calling.
They wind their rosaries around knobby hands, fleshy hands, callused hands, and scarred hands, and pray, “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
They’ve gone to the beauty parlor for the occasion.
Some men pray as well. Not as many of them, and not with the same gusto, and I wonder how they knew my father. Dad didn’t seem like the type of man to carry friendships from decade to decade like that school picture your first child gave you during kindergarten. No. Dad wasn’t the type to value childhood friends. Truthfully, he’s fortunate any of them came at all. That’s what I say. He would have been put off by their plaid pants, clip-on ties, and inexpensive sport coats.
It’s a private viewing today. No network bigwigs I haven’t the foggiest notion about. And I’m the queen of foggy notions.
The media highly publicized his death. I suppose when you’re decapitated in some obscure Iraqi town, you’re going to show up on the news. The sutures around his neck hide beneath the collar and tie. I can’t bring myself to lower the collar and take a look. The resulting lifelong haunting isn’t worth the firsthand knowledge. I have enough hauntings. Like the day my husband, Sean, left.
Dad didn’t beg for his life. He knew that culture as well as his own, both equally unbending, and so he appeared on the television screen, blindfolded and sitting more stiffly than a suicide bomber on a crowded bus. He knew he would die. I’m certain of that.
Gaylen’s emotions suffered at the hand of his brilliance, though. But then again, do we ever really know our fathers?
The floor lamps guarding the casket shine through opaque, tulip-shaped bowls. Their pinkened light illuminates the mellowing faces of these forgiving souls who came anyway, not so much because they wanted one last brush with Gaylen’s fame, but because they never stopped remembering the days when they ate fried codfish cakes at the summer carnival at church and tended the altar at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Oh, Dad. All those letters. All those cards. Sealed up tight.
“Hail, Mary, full of grace—”
I kept promising I’d read them. How many nights I stared at the box under the bedroom chair … stared and sipped … stared and sipped … hoping somehow that your ink would bleed through onto the cardboard of the white storage box, or that whispers of your contained words would seep into my heart. But they never did.
“Blessed is the fruit of thy—”
I hate the smell of gladiolus and spider mums.
Tomorrow. I just have to make it through to tomorrow.
“Now, and at the hour of our death.”
A hand grasps my shoulder, and I know before he speaks who it is. “Uncle Geoffrey.”
I turn and melt into my uncle’s arms. Mom’s baby brother. All the way back from business in Pakistan.
“Georgia, Georgia.”
I can’t cry. I guess I really didn’t know my dad well enough to cry. “Yeah. Unbelievable, huh?”
He smells like journeys and spices and wind. He smells like warmth and tears and sadness. He smells like lonesomeness and smiles. Like goodness and strength. I settle inside his circle. I smell his neck, the crude wooden cross underneath his shirt poking into my cheek.
“You’re too young to be an orphan,” he says in a whiff of wintergreen.
“I’m thirty-two.”
“As I said.”
I close my eyes.
The wake ends. The women and the husbands who brought them file out of Lilly & Zeiler’s. And the carpet stays clean, and the lighting stays pink, and Gaylen Bishop stays quiet and still, and I hope and pray that my mother was right when she said “We really do go to a better place, Georgia” just before she died.
“Believe that if it makes you feel better,” Dad said to me the night after we buried her and he left on assignment for Bangladesh.
“Let’s get a cup of coffee, Georgie.” Uncle Geoffrey tugs my ponytail. I tug his. “Right.”
Georgia Ella could stare into her mother’s eyes for hours if the days were full enough. They snuggle under the puffy quilt for a few minutes more. The bus will be by soon, but there’s time to gather the shiny new folders and pencils, pack the lunchbox, and begin a whole new way of life.
“You’re a big first grader today,” Polly says. “I’m so proud of you!”
“Let’s snuggle some more.”
So Polly draws her daughter close, enfolding her in sunshine.
Fairly
My mother held her hand up to her mouth as the smoke and ash poured into the sky. The fascinating image that filled up the screen of our television cast my third birthday into the backseat like the coat you needed in the morning but found unnecessary in the warmth of the afternoon. For some reason, I didn’t mind this. I watched the news coverage from my miniature rocker, and we ate all our meals that day in the living room off TV trays bearing stylistic pictures of cats.
Mount St. Helens lay in peace for generations, but beneath the quiet crust, another world vibrated and bubbled and eventually swam its way up to the surface only to burst forth like a red-spangled lady from the top of a bachelor-party cake. Without the smile.
That’s how I see it, anyway.
Something about volcanoes has fascinated me since that day, which is my earliest memory. Even as a little girl, when my mother and father rigged up one of those curious baking-soda volcanoes in the kitchen, I wished to stand on the edge of one. I wouldn’t be frightened. I wouldn’t care to jump. I’d simply stand there, feet planted, or sit with my feet dangling over the edge, and I’d think about everything going on beneath my feet. About how I’m a quarter breath away from death, how there’re always ten more explosions hidden from the eye, how in one second an eruption can change a person for good.
When they completed Hort’s diagnosis, I stood in a flow of lava, desiring total engulfment. Twenty-six years old and widowhood looming ahead of me? And now here I sit at his bedside in our apartment.
I don’t blame him for refusing treatment any longer. Enough is most definitely enough, the poor man. How beautiful he is, my older man, my lovely man. I’m only twenty-six, wondering if my life is over, wondering if when he dies I’ll ever feel alive again.
He may seem aged compared to me, but fifty-two years old is young to die by anybody’s account.
It’s a good thing he’s asleep. If I voiced these thoughts, he’d probably tell me to hike myself down to ABC and sign on as a writer for General Hospital.
My cell phone rings in my handbag, and I swirl my hand down into the contents, feeling for the plastic. I pull it out, scope the number, and press the button. “Uncle Geoffrey?”
“Hi, Fairly. How’s our man?”
“Not good.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve got some terrible news to tell you. Are you sitting down?”
“Yes, right here by Hort’s bed.”
“Your Uncle Gaylen died a couple of days ago.”
“Give me just a second.”
I can handle only a few seconds of grief. I’m already drowning under Hort’s illness.
But where to cast some sort of blame for my inadequacies?
“Georgia never called me.”
“No. Georgie’s in bad shape, Fairly. You can imagine.”
Still. I mean, people die all the time, and their families make rounds and rounds of phone calls. “When’s the funeral?”
“Tomorrow. I just got in from Pakistan.”
“Oh, so she called you.”
He chuckles a little. “Fair—”
“Okay, I suppose you’re right. It’s not like I can leave Hort anyway.”
“I know. I’ll come up to New York and see you two after I’m done here in Baltimore with your cousin.”
“What funeral home?”
“Lilly & Zeiler at Foster and Conkling.”
“I know it.”
We ring off. I’ll have to call the florist. I think about waking Hort, but he sleeps so peacefully without any wires and tubes attached. The crisp sheets smell like mountains and glow golden in the small bedlamp that rests on the nightstand. Outside, somewhere above the lights of the city, stars shine down on us. We just can’t see them right now.
Solo stands in the doorway of the bedroom. “I’m about to leave for home, miss. Anything else for tonight?”
“No, Solo, but thanks.”
Solo has worked with Hort for ten years on a publication that will never come to fruition now. Something about world literature and God. He came over as a young Congolese refugee, a widower with two small children, and asked for work one day after Hort came home from school. Right there on the steps of the apartment building. Solo’s going to school now, and he takes care of us in between his research for Hort. Not for long, though. Once he finishes his master of divinity, he’ll be off to much greener pastures than this apartment overlooking the park.
Maybe someday I’ll be as wise as this gleaming man.
“I made up some fresh pili-pili for you. There’s some leftover chicken in the icebox.”
Solo’s food somehow waters any bit of hope you have left.
“How is he?” Solo asks.
“Come on in. He’s sleeping.”
Solo lays a dark hand atop Hort’s head. “Yes. Won’t be long now.”
Solo can tell truth in a way you don’t mind.
“Yes.” I lift my face toward his. “You’ll stay when he goes? Won’t you?”
“I will not leave you to be alone, miss.”
“Thank you.”
“Must go pick up my kids. I’ll be here as usual tomorrow. Nine o’clock. Hort must see the work going on.”
