What Makes a Family

by Colleen Faulkner

  “Sarah’s been asking me questions all morning. Abby’s girl. About you. Wanted to know your maiden name.” I stare at the wallpaper, fighting the lump in my throat. “I feel bad, Mrs. Brodie. I don’t remember it. I know I must have known it. Once upon a time.”

  I sigh and pick up my empty coffee cup and the sandwich plate. More dishes to wash. Always more dishes to be washed. “She’s picking through the old photo albums. The ones you put together. I don’t know why she’s all of a sudden so interested. But who knows the ways of a teenage girl?” I give a little laugh. “The sweet Lord knows I was an odd one at her age.” When I was fifteen, I got the notion in my head to run away. I was going to go to Hollywood and be an actress like Julie Christie. Mrs. Brodie had taken me to the movies for my birthday, and that was when I saw Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago. She was so beautiful up on that big picture screen. We had gone all the way across the bay to Baltimore. Mrs. Brodie took me out to eat in a fancy restaurant and shopping, too, but the movie was the best part.

  I never got the nerve to run away, but I dreamed about it for years. Until Little Joe and I married, and he got me in the family way.

  I slowly make my way to the door. My feet aren’t too bad off today, but I woke up with a stiff hip. At the door I turn back to her. “Soaking chicken in buttermilk to fry up for supper tonight. Just the way you taught me. Having baking powder biscuits and limas. Joseph is coming. And Little Joe promised to be home on time. So the whole family will be here.” I look at her thin white hair and remember the color it used to be. Same color as Abby’s, pretty near. Prettiest hair I ever saw. That’s the thing I remember most from the day Mrs. Brodie came for me at the orphanage.

  “Sorry you can’t have any. The chicken. But you’ll be able to smell it, I guess. If you can smell anything . . .” I fall quiet because I feel silly saying that. I know I’m just babbling. Chances are she can’t hear me. But just in case she can . . .

  “I’ll be back to look in on you shortly,” I say. I start to say “call me if you need something,” but then I realize how stupid that is.

  In the hallway, on the way to the kitchen, I poke my head in the living room. It’s always been Mrs. Brodie’s room more than mine, with all those bookshelves lining the walls and her knickknacks. Sarah’s sitting on the floor in front of the brick fireplace, leaning over a picture album. She’s got them stacked around her.

  She glances up after a minute. “Birdie. You startled me. I didn’t hear you.” She waits, looking at me. Expecting something.

  I run my thumb over the lip of the coffee mug, looking for something to say. “So . . . looking at family pictures.”

  “Mmm-hm.” She nods and holds one up. “Is this Grandpop? Or is it Great-Grandpop? They look so much the same, I can’t tell.”

  I walk into the living room to get a closer look, leaving the mug and plate on the end table. I’ve left my reader glasses somewhere. On the kitchen counter, likely. I wish I had them so I could get a better look. “Let me see.”

  I take the photo from her. It’s a square one, the way they were printed in the fifties and sixties. “This is your great-granddad, all right. Big Joe. Before I knew him. Taken on that dock right out there.” I point toward the bay, the lifeblood of the Brodie family since they came to the island in the 1600s. Back then they were farmers and fishermen, too.

  I hold up the faded picture toward the light coming through the east windows. Big Joe’s wearing dark pants and a white T-shirt, the arms rolled with a cigarette pack in one cuff. He’s barefoot and wearing a smile that I imagine turned heads in his day. He was a good-looking man. Not plain like my Joe. He was a charmer, too, but not the pull-the-wool-over-your-eyes kind. The kind that made you feel as if you were pretty and smart . . . even though you knew you weren’t. I always liked Big Joe. I took it hard when he fell dead of a heart attack.

  I hand her back the photo. “Early 1950s, from the look of him.”

  Sarah holds the photo in her hand, studying it. “Big Joe met Mom Brodie in New Jersey, right? At church?”

  “1933 or ’34. Revival meeting. They used to be big in those days.”

  “What’s a revival meeting?”

  I settle myself down on the edge of the sofa, liking the idea of talking to my granddaughter this way. Just the two of us. I don’t remember ever talking to her like one person to another. Mostly we just talk about what she will and won’t eat. Sometimes I tell her to bring down her dirty wash. “It’s . . . like Sunday services, only bigger. Longer. We used to call them camp meetings. Someone would put up a big tent, and preachers would come and preach, and there would be singing and altar calls and . . . it was like a big party.”

  “A church party?” my gorgeous granddaughter asks.

  I think on it. “Something like that. We used to have one every summer here on Brodie when I was a girl. Not just for locals. It was before there was the bridge. People would come in boats. Some would stay and sleep on the beach. Put up tents.”

  I loved the tent meetings. I looked forward to them all year round. Mrs. Brodie always made me a new dress for them. I got one every summer. And she’d roll my hair up in rags to make it curly. Or try to. Humidity never let me keep those curls, but I loved them the short time I had them. And Mrs. Brodie let me go hear every preacher. They had traveling preachers come through, like in the old days, they told me. I went to every singing, too. No cookin’ or cleaning for me that week. Mrs. Brodie brought in girls out of the fields to work in the house.

  “I was hoping I might find Mom Brodie’s maiden name on one of these old pictures.” Sarah picks another one up off a pile next to her bony knee. She’s pretty all right, but could use some meat on her bones. Of course, she don’t eat meat.

  “You think Grandpop would know where her birth certificate or her marriage certificate is?” Sarah asks me.

  “You can ask him come suppertime. But I know we haven’t got any birth certificate. Burned up in a fire when she was a girl.” I nod, remembering. Mrs. Brodie never shared much of her life before she came to Brodie, but she did tell me that once. “We’re all going to have a big supper together,” I tell Sarah, excited about the thought of seeing my children around the table again. Us a family again. It’s too bad my grandson Reed couldn’t come. He’s a good boy. Sweet. Smart as a whip, like his dad. Which makes him a bit of an odd duck. But that’s okay. I’m a bit of an odd duck myself.

  Spotting one of Mrs. Brodie’s Hummel figurines cockeyed on the mantel behind Sarah, I get up and go to straighten it. There must be two dozen of them in this room, all staring me down. I never liked them much, but it made it easy to know what to get Mrs. Brodie for birthdays and Christmas. Little Joe always left gift-giving to me. I just used his credit card. I use his credit card for everything, even though I got one of my own now. With my own name on it and not his. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

  I give the little girl with the sheep staff on the mantel a push and she spins round to look at me. I glance down at the pile of photo albums, and a turquoise cover catches my eye. “Where’d you get this?” I ask. I reach down and snatch it up.

  She shrugs, looking up at me. “I don’t know. One of those shelves, I guess.” She points to the bookcase against one wall. “What is it?”

  I feel my heart all fluttery in my chest and sweat beads up over my upper lip. I’ve always been a sweater. It used to embarrass me in my younger years. Mrs. Brodie was always handing me a hanky from inside her sleeve and telling me to wipe my face. It doesn’t bother me much anymore. It’s not like I stink. I just get wet.

  “It’s mine,” I hear myself say. I hold the scrapbook tight against my chest. It’s my own fault she found it. I must have left it down here last time I was working on it, around when Mrs. Brodie took sick this last time. I don’t know how I could have been so dumb as to leave it for just anybody to see. Of course it wouldn’t have been likely anyone would have picked it up. Little Joe sure wouldn’t have given two toots. But this one, my grand
daughter. She’s a nosy one.

  “O . . . kayyy,” Sarah says, drawing out the word, sounding like I’m talking crazy. She looks down at the picture album in her lap, and I feel like I’ve been dismissed. Mrs. Brodie used to do the same thing to me. When she was done talking to me, she’d just go back to what she was doing without a how-do-you-do.

  “I don’t like my stuff touched,” I tell my granddaughter, and I turn around quick and walk right out of the living room, leaving my dirty dishes right on the end table. I don’t stop ’til the book is tucked safe in my drawer under my nighties.

  10

  Abby

  I pull up next to my dad’s new red truck in front of the old cannery and throw the pickup into park. The gears grind a little, but it’s been doing that for at least a decade. It’s got a three-on-the-tree. One of the last F-150s made with shift on the column. Drum says he imagines it’s worth something. Not as if my dad would sell Old Blue. I grab the lunch sack off the seat and climb the rickety steps to the loading dock; the floorboards creak beneath my feet, and I wonder if they’re even safe to walk on.

  I hear a dog bark, and my father’s black Labrador retriever comes barreling through a hole in a wall right for me. My dad’s definitely nearby.

  “Daddy?” I call as I walk through one of the open bays.

  The dog keeps barking excitedly.

  “Hey, Duke,” I greet. This is Duke the Seventh. Daddy always has a black Lab; has since he was a kid. It goes everywhere with him in his truck. Sleeps on the floor beside his bed at night. Mom Brodie used to jokingly call the Dukes Daddy’s black angel; she said she never worried about his safety, no matter what time of day or night or where he went on the island. One Lab dies; Daddy gets another. Always black, never yellow. And names him Duke.

  The big black Lab makes a circle around me, barking another greeting, and then takes off again. This Duke is young, only two, and full of youthful puppy exuberance. He’s big, too. Bigger than the last Duke, with a big, broad head and powerful hindquarters. He scatters bits of torn newspaper and other junk that litters the wood plank floor.

  The cannery is where women once washed and cut tomatoes and put them into tin cans to be sealed and shipped to the mainland. The tomatoes came in this set of bay doors in the back in farm trucks from the fields and left canned, in cases, out the doors on the far side where the old docks are. The place is mostly empty now; everything salvageable has long been hauled off. There are a few splintered wooden crates, a broken lawn chair, which is clearly a recent addition, a truck tire of all things, and just some other worthless junk. But I remember, in my mind’s eye, what the place looked like when I was kid. Long after this kind of hometown cannery had closed on the Eastern Shore, Daddy kept ours open. He said he had some families who had been working for the Brodies for five or six generations. Where would they go if there weren’t tomatoes to pick and can?

  I remember the rows of wooden tables where the women stood, in long aprons, peeling hot tomatoes. The tables were just cut from oak from the woods near our house and slapped together, but Drum and I managed to save one we found in the barn when we were first married and too poor to buy furniture. Eight-foot long and refinished, it’s still the centerpiece of our dining room. I wouldn’t part with it for the world.

  I accidentally kick a rusty Fanta soda can with the toe of my flip-flop, and it startles me. “Daddy?” I call again, walking further into the open warehouse. A bird flutters over my head and flies out a hole in the roof. Duke has disappeared through a hole in the exterior wall, and I hear him in the distance barking. He barks at ducks constantly. Daddy says he got a dud with this one. Who ever heard of a dog raised on a Chesapeake Bay island that barks at ducks? They’re as common here as seagulls. Duke barks at them, too.

  “Abby?” My dad comes out of the room on the far end of the building, once his office. He’s wearing his ever-present green and yellow John Deere ball cap. “Girl!” he calls.

  I hurry to him, dodging a piece of timber that’s fallen from the ceiling and a pile of unidentifiable excrement. I throw my arms around him, and he squeezes me tightly. I rest my head on his shoulder. Daddy’s shorter than I am, and round and soft and balding. He was never a good-looking man, even in his younger years, but I don’t see the thin, gray hair, or the gut, or the fact that his dark eyes have faded. I see the man. I see his heart. And I see the happy childhood he gave me. I was always Daddy’s girl and never attempted to hide it, and neither did he. I think he was always trying to make it up to me for the fact that Birdie didn’t know how to be a mother, didn’t know how to give me what I needed. What I wanted so desperately from her.

  “Sorry I missed you last night, and again this morning. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to stay out of the house.”

  He mumbles something like, “Don’t want to be underfoot.”

  I release my grip on him, reluctant to let go of the smell of him and his warmth. I think about the bluebird tattoo on his mother’s thigh, and I know there’s no way I can tell him. Ever. “I’m sorry about Mom Brodie, Daddy.”

  He nods and looks away, but not before I see him tear up. My daddy’s a crier, which is funny because he’s also the strongest man I’ve ever known. He’s our rock. Always has been.

  “I just hope the good Lord takes her fast,” he says, pulling a neatly ironed and folded clean white handkerchief from his pocket. He’s the only man I know who still uses white handkerchiefs. He might wear the same pair of work pants four days in a row, but he puts a clean handkerchief in his pocket every single morning. A clean, ironed handkerchief my mother’s put in the top drawer of his old chifforobe. “I know she hates to be that way. She was never one to lie in bed, not even when she caught something.”

  My own eyes get teary. I hate to see my dad this way. Hurting. Knowing there’s nothing I can do for him but be here for him. “She’s not in pain,” I tell him. “She just . . . seems like she’s sleeping.”

  “She hasn’t eaten a thing since we brought her home Monday. Hasn’t taken any water in two days. Birdie tried to get her to drink—” He stops and starts again. “But she wouldn’t.” He wipes his eyes and then blows his nose with the handkerchief. “I can’t imagine she can go long without water.”

  I press my lips together, looking into his lined, suntanned face. Mom Brodie says there’s Native American in the Brodie line; she always said that was why the men tanned so dark. “I don’t think it will be long,” I whisper.

  My father adored his father, but he had a special relationship with his mother. Maybe because they’ve lived together in the same house his whole life. Maybe because they’re so much alike in so many ways. I don’t know. But there’s a bond between them that seems to go deeper than just mother and son. Mom Brodie used to tell me that Brodies feel deep. I never understood what she meant by that, but as I get older, I’m beginning to understand. We feel strongly about our convictions. We love hard. We’re also too slow to forgive. No one can hold a grudge as long as a Brodie.

  “Not long, Daddy,” I say softly.

  He sniffs, wipes his nose, and stuffs his handkerchief into his pocket. He looks up, taking in the big, dilapidated building around us. “I’m letting the fire department burn her down. It’s not safe. I run some teen boys out of here a couple of nights ago, again. Partying. They do it all the time. I find beer cans. Cigarette butts.” He looks up over our heads. “Ceiling comes down on them, someone gets hurt, I’d never forgive myself.”

  “They shouldn’t be here, Daddy. There’re no trespassing signs up everywhere.”

  He shakes his head. “Time it came down. Long past time.”

  My gaze drifts past him, and I spot a faded wooden sign that’s at least six feet long and three high. Brodie is painted in black and gold on it. It’s leaning against the office wall. It had hung on the wall outside on the loading dock for longer than I’ve been alive. “You found the sign.” I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia.

  “
Was turned facedown on the floor,” he says. “Thought it was long gone.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” I ask.

  “Thought I’d put it in my office back at the house, or maybe hang it on the back porch. Against the house.”

  I nod and then hold up the brown paper sack. “Birdie sent your lunch.”

  “What is it?” he asks. We walk side-by-side through the building, toward the back on the bay.

  “Egg salad.”

  He makes a face as we walk through a hole in the wall big enough to drive one of our trucks through. The sunshine is bright and hot, and it sparkles off the surface of the bay. In the distance, I can see the bridge that now links Brodie to the rest of the world. Something I’m not entirely sure has been a good thing. Because along with the positives, like better prices in the grocery store and improved access to medical care, negatives have made their way across that bridge: drugs, crime, a loss of innocence that came so naturally in a place as isolated as Brodie Island had been.

  The smell of the bay is rich and briny. I see Duke bounding along the reedy shore, his big paws splashing in the water.

  “I hate egg salad,” Daddy says.

  We both laugh. My mother likes egg salad. She doesn’t care that Daddy and I don’t. That none of us do. But she never just comes out and says we’re getting it whether we like it or not. She just keeps making egg salad sandwiches. It’s a little joke Daddy and I have shared for years and years. She makes him egg salad sandwiches, and he feeds them to Duke.

  “There are Little Debbies in there, too. And a Granny Smith, I think.”

  We walk to the end of the loading dock, and he leans on a sun and wind-bleached rail. I stand beside him and look out over the bay. In the cannery’s heyday, boats came in and were loaded with cases of Brodie canned tomatoes. The boats carried them to the mainland where the cases were loaded on trucks and shipped up and down the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia.