by Lisa Wingate
I shook my head. It didn’t sound perfect to me. “A man in a perfect package wouldn’t be out behind the building on his knees cryin’ like a baby. That’s what I think.”
He nodded, his eyes a map of pain and confusion. He didn’t seem to care that I seen him break down behind the armory. “You see, that’s it. That’s the problem. It’s all an illusion. It’s evaporating faster than I can make smoke, and pretty soon everyone’s going to see that I’m losing my wife, I’m losing my kids. I’ve lost my faith. I’m not even sure how it happened—just a little bit at a time, I guess, one day after another while I was working to become the biggest and the best, and she was home getting the kids dressed, so she could take them to school without me, soccer without me, church without me. I come home, they’re all in bed; I don’t even stop to look in the girls’ room anymore. Don’t even go up to bed anymore. I just fall asleep in the chair for a few hours, then get up in the morning, and do it all again, and hate it all a little more.”
“Well, that ain’t much of a life,” I said. “Why don’t you think about doin’ something different? What I mean is, if that don’t make you happy, then why is it ever gonna matter if you get to be chief of surgeons? If it don’t make you happy, and it don’t make your family happy, what’s it worth?”
He stared at me for a long moment, drawing in a slow, labored breath, then letting it out again, taking on a look of peace. “I think that’s what I’ve finally figured out. I read those old letters, and I thought, ‘There’s nothing in my life that’s strong. I’ve built a house of straw.’ But I’m not sure I have what it takes to tear it down and start over.”
I reached over and give his hand a squeeze, because I knew how he felt. “I’m not sure I do either, to tell you the truth, Doc. But I figure you start with the people you love. That’s the foundation. That’s the only thing that lasts. You always gotta keep tending them bottom blocks.”
The doc nodded. “I think that’s what I’ve figured out too, these last few days. It started the moment I walked in here and saw Jenilee. For just a minute she looked so much like my wife when I met her back in med school. It took me back in time. I remembered how I felt back then, how we all used to sit around and talk about saving the world. I see that fire in Jenilee, and when I look at her, I can feel that piece of myself coming back. It isn’t just her I want to see have a chance. I want the chance to get that fire back myself. I want to put my life back together, and my marriage back together. I want to get to know my kids before they’re gone. I’ve got three girls—eight, thirteen, and sixteen. When I come home, nobody even bothers to look up from the TV anymore.”
“Then get rid of the TV,” I said. “Them girls will thank you one day.”
I reached out and stopped him just before we come within earshot of the breakfast line. “Doc, I got something else I want to ask you. Something I ain’t talked about to anybody these past couple of years. It probably ain’t your specialty, but I figure you come from a big hospital, so you ought to know some about it. Besides, if I don’t ask you now, I ain’t ever gonna get the courage.”
A wrinkle of worry crossed his brow. “What is it?”
I looked at my feet, watching them old black grandma shoes scrub in the dirt. “Well, Doc, my mama got dementia when she was about my age, and I think now I got it, too. Sometimes I can’t recall things that happened. I’m forgettin’ people’s names.” I didn’t look up. I just kept staring at them old black grandma shoes. “And the last few days I been … well, I been seein’ an angel that looks like my dead sister. I wondered … well, I guess I wondered if there was any way to tell if I was getting old-timer’s disease, or if I’m just an old lady with a bad memory and a good imagination?”
He was quiet for what seemed like the longest minute of my life. I stood there with my heart rapping so hard, I thought I might have a heart attack, and then it wouldn’t matter whether I had dementia or not.
“It isn’t at all my specialty,” he said finally, “but I can tell you that there are a number of treatments for Alzheimer’s, including drugs and nutritional supplements. You should be checked by a specialist in geriatric medicine, however, because memory loss can also be the result of a minor stroke, low hormone levels, or even electrolyte imbalance. If you have been noticing virtually the same level of symptoms for two years, the doctor will most certainly want to investigate possibilities other than Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s is typically a progressive disease.”
“Oh,” I muttered, not knowing what to think. “And what about the angel, Doc? Ain’t that a little strange?”
He wrote a phone number on the back of a card. “Here is the name of a good geriatric specialist at the hospital where I work. Call his office and schedule an appointment.” Our eyes met, and he smiled deep into my soul. “And as for the angel, who can say? We’ve seen our share of miracles, haven’t we?”
I took the card. “Yes, Doc. We certainly have.”
“There’s nothing to be gained by sitting around fearing the worst. Call and make an appointment with the specialist as soon as possible.”
“I’ll do that, Doc. I’ll do that right away.” I reached out and grabbed him in a bear hug. “I’ll do that, Doc. I surely will. Oh, thank you. I feel like the weight of the world’s been lifted off my shoulders.”
I turned loose of him, and he stumbled around. He turned red in the face, but smiled. “Glad I could help.”
“Oh, you did help! You helped more than I can say!” I spun around and headed up the hill, feeling like I could of outrun a jackrabbit in the fifty-yard dash. “Thanks, Doc!” I called over my shoulder. “You send them forms for Jenilee. And take care on the way home. Turn off that TV and kiss them girls, you hear?”
“I’ll do that, Mrs. Gibson!” he hollered, sounding like he had the wind in his sails, too.
By the time I got to the top of that hill, my heart was pumpin’, and I was puffing like a steam engine. I burst in the door to find June standing by the picture wall, leaning on the back of a chair, looking at the old letters. Hunched over that chair, crooked, weepy-eyed, and unshaved, he looked old and tired.
“June Jaans,” I said, and he jerked back like he thought I might slug him. “I got something to say to you, and I don’t want you to say a word until I’m done.”
“All … all right,” he stuttered. “Should … should I sit down?”
“No,” I said, catching a whiff of him now that he was out of that bed. “You come with me. You need a bath and a shave, and I’m gonna take you back to your house so you can have both. We’ll talk on the way. I got some things to say.”
June was speechless. He stood there flapping his gums, looking at me like my head had popped off my body and rolled across the floor.
“Come on, I’ll help ya,” I said, moving to get under his shoulder by his bad leg. “My mind may be going, but my legs are stout. Come on. One step at a time. That’s it.”
We made our way toward the door, one baby step at a time, June and I. Who would of ever thought it?
I could hear the garden club ladies whispering in the back of the room. When we got to the front door, there was Mazelle Sibley with one of her sandwich trays. She dropped her mouth open, lost her balance, and spilled the sandwiches all over the steps.
“Eudora!” She gasped. “Why … what in the world?”
“I’m helpin’ June back to his house. He’s healed up enough, and it’s time someone helped him get home.” I lifted my chin and looked her hard in the eye, because I wasn’t about to deal with any of her snooty attitude. “Come on now, and help me get him down these steps.”
She jerked back like a cat bein’ fed castor oil. “Well, I surely—” I didn’t let her finish. I pointed a finger at her and kept going. “Mazelle Sibley, you’ve known this man all your life. You gonna just stand there and take a chance on him falling down?”
“Well … I … I guess … I suppose … I suppose not.” She got under June’s other arm, and together the two of
us moved down them steps with June slung between us like a side of beef. He didn’t dare say a word, I think, just hung there and groaned a little while we got him down and put him in the car.
I had to shoo Mazelle out of the way to shut the door. She was standing there, gap-mouthed, lookin’ from me to June and back again.
“Thank you very much, Mazelle. You got a high sense of charity,” I said, then stuck my chin up, walked around the car, and got in. “You might want to go pick up your sandwiches now,” I called out the window just before backing the car out.
June looked at me wide-eyed as we started out of the parking lot.
“Don’t say anything.” I sounded meaner than I meant to, but I didn’t want June to start talking and muddle my mind now that I knew what I needed to say. “I got something to say, but just give me a minute. I don’t want to say it here.”
June folded his hands in his lap and sat silent in his seat while I drove out of town. He watched me, his hands kneading the worn fabric on the knees of his old brown pants. I glanced at them pants and thought they needed washing and mending, and I could do that.
June sniffed when I pulled the car onto Good Hope Road. He looked around at the destruction brought by the tornado and shook his head, like he didn’t want to believe it. He barely seemed to notice when I pulled off the road about a mile before his house and drove down the old gravel path to Good Hope Cemetery.
When we got to that place, tears come into his eyes, and he laid his head back against the seat, blinking at the sky out the window.
I stopped the car outside the fence, right by Ivy’s grave. I looked at the headstone with that picture of a mother and baby carved in it. A lump welled up in my throat, and I didn’t think I’d be able to talk at all.
“I been …” My voice was just a whisper. “I been keeping this hatred inside me all these years. I been most of my life with that small, dark thing inside me, and I want to let go of it. Here. Now. It’s time, June. I want to let go of the past and move on from here. I been wrong to carry these mean feelings in me all this time. I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m sorry I stayed away from Ivy after the two of you run off. I’m sorry I wasn’t with her when she was pregnant and afraid. I know she needed me then, and I turned my back on her because, the truth was, I was in love with you, and it hurt me awful bad that she was the one you really loved. It wasn’t right of me to hang on to that all these years. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
Tears filled my eyes and I watched them drip onto the flowered fabric of my dress. I held my breath, wondering what he would say, here at the place where Ivy and their baby daughter were buried. “Sometimes I think if I would of been there for Ivy … well, maybe the baby would of …” I sobbed, not able to finish the sentence. Maybe the baby would of survived… . Maybe Ivy would of survived.
I felt his hand move slowly over mine, his fingers warm, damp with his own tears. “I ain’t never held anger toward you, Eudora. Ivy didn’t either. She loved you, and she never forgave herself for what her and I done, running off and getting married like that.”
I shook my head, laying my face in my hand. “Oh, June, I should of understood. I should of seen that the two of you were in love, but the thing was, I just didn’t, and then when it happened, when the two of you run off, I just couldn’t get past it.”
June reached out and took me in his arms, and I remembered the way he felt all those years ago when we were young.
“I never thought about how you felt after you lost them both.” I sobbed. “I just thought about myself, and how hurt and angry I was. I never thought about how hard it was for you to put your wife and your only child in the ground and say good-bye.”
“It was a hard time,” he whispered against my hair. “I was glad to go off to the war and forget about Ivy and what happened here. I thought I would forget about you, too, but I never did. I never forgot you, and I never had the guts to tell you that Ivy’s baby wasn’t mine.”
I pulled away from him, hearing those words in my mind, seeing them in his eyes. “But, June …” I whispered. “June … how? How could that be?”
He sighed, his hand trembling as he wiped his eyes and gazed out the window at Ivy’s grave. He shook his head. “Even all these years later, I can’t say, Eudora. I … I don’t know. Ivy took that secret to her grave. There was a world of guilt and shame in her, and she didn’t want to talk about it to anybody. Not even me. I wouldn’t of known she was pregnant except I caught her out behind the USO dance that night, crying and talking to a lady about getting rid of the baby. I took her away from there, and we run off and got married.” He touched the window, tracing the outline of her headstone. “Neither one of us thought about what would come of it.”
I looked at Ivy’s grave, shaking my head, feeling everything I had believed all these years tumbling down around me like Doc Albright’s house of straw. “My God, June,” I murmured. “My God. My God.”
His face hardened, and he wiped his eyes. Rolling down his window, he took a breath of the air, which was just beginning to warm and smell of afternoon. “It’s all in the past now, Eudora,” he said, leaning back in the seat and looking at me. “It ain’t like either of us have to regret our lives. We had good lives, both of us. Not the lives we might have had, but good lives.”
I turned away from Ivy, away from the past, and thought about my life. I thought about Olney and his trains. I thought about the farm, and the children we made, and the grandchildren who ran to me with their arms open. I understood that if I had gone a different path, none of that would be. All of the things that mattered to me, all of the things that would last, would never have come into being. The other life, the one I could have lived with June, might of been good, but so was this one, and it wasn’t over yet.
“Yes, we have,” I whispered, slipping my hand into June’s, feeling our fingers twined together like it was all those years ago. “We’ve had good lives. I don’t suppose a person can ask God for much more than that.”
“I don’t suppose.”
I sighed, feeling peace settle over me. It isn’t every woman who gets to go back after all those years and hold hands with her first love. “You know that song you asked me about? The one that Dorothy sang?”
“Um-hmm,” he murmured.
“I remembered the name.” I looked at the old trees, thick with glossy green, and felt like one of them, just opening to a new summer. “ ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow.’ That was it.”
I felt his fingers squeeze mine, and I heard the words to the song. I wasn’t sure if he was singing quietly, or if I was just remembering the way things used to be.
CHAPTER 22
JENILEE
It seemed that hours passed while Drew and Nate were in Daddy’s ICU room. I sat there thinking about my father and me. I couldn’t remember the two of us ever having a real conversation about anything. Daddy barked instructions, and I did what I was told. Daddy criticized, and I tried to do better. That was pretty much all there was between us. There was nothing to prepare us for talking about the future, or surgery, or Daddy’s life.
What are the right words? I thought. What words can I say that will change his mind? What can I say that will change him? Is it possible for things to be different now?
That hope wound through me like the line from one of Nate’s fishing poles—invisible, strong, twisted around every part of me.
He’s reeling you in, Jenilee, a voice said inside me. How many times are you going to let Daddy do this to you? You’re asking for something he doesn’t have to give… .
But still there was that hope. That part of me that wanted my father to change. If it could happen to Mrs. Gibson, couldn’t it happen to him?
I stood up, pacing to the window to clear my head.
Darla glanced at me, twisting her hands in her lap. Finally she got out of her chair too. “I can’t just sit here. Would you like a cup of coffee or anything?”
“No, thanks.” Eating or drinking anything seeme
d impossible.
She paused in the doorway, turning back to me. “Jenilee, I want to thank you for what you said on the phone … for what you told me about Drew. It really made me think. It made me think that I’ve been looking at our relationship only from my own frame of reference. I thought that when Drew didn’t want to talk about the past, when he didn’t want to get married or have me meet his family, that meant he didn’t love us. I never, ever considered that, in his mind, he was trying to protect us.”
“Drew’s a good person,” I said. “It’s just that you were trying to make him face things he’s spent the last eight years running away from. It’s hard to go back.”
“I know.” Darla sighed, folding a tissue in her hands. “I think I started to understand that after I came here the first time and sat with Nate. All he could think about was how mad your father was going to be when he woke up. You know, Drew never told me what his childhood was like. He just said he was estranged because he went into the army against his parents’ wishes. I thought that was such a stupid reason to stay away from your family. I told Drew I wanted to get married, and I wanted him to invite his family to the wedding.” She shook her head, meeting my eyes. “He refused, and that night I packed up all our stuff, and I left.”
I sat down and pressed my hands into the warmth between my legs and the sofa, not sure how much more I should say. “He loves you and the kids, Darla. I know he does.”
She nodded, looking down. “I know he does, too. Thanks, Jenilee.” She walked out the door, leaving me alone. I sat in the silence, listening to the low hum of machines, wondering what was happening in Daddy’s room.
Finally I heard Drew and Nate in the hall. I rushed to meet them at the doorway. Nate didn’t stop, just limped across the room on his crutches and collapsed on the sofa, sobbing with his head in his hands.
“What happened?” I whispered to Drew.
His dark eyes glittered like chipped flint. “Daddy hasn’t changed,” he told me.
