That was Anna, brutally honest, even about herself. “Well, you look good,” Karla said. “Better than I’d expected.”
“I hope that’s not disappointment I hear in your voice.”
“What a terrible thing to say.” A defensive anger as old and familiar as the pain of being misunderstood wiped away any hope that somehow this visit would be different. Some chores fell to Heather and Grace, this one fell to Karla. Someone had to see Anna through her death, to assist with her estate, to give her some small peace of mind that she would have the final say over the disposition of the money she had so carefully hoarded all her life. But from the moment Karla had decided to come, she’d feared it was a mistake. She just hadn’t imagined she’d be proven right so soon.
Anna came forward in her chair, paused, and sat back again. “Yes, it was,” she said after several seconds. “I’ve been waiting for you for so long I started getting scared that you weren’t going to come. It’s not much of an excuse for such an inexcusable statement, but I’m afraid it’s all I have.”
“I spent a lot of time looking for reasons to stay away,” Karla admitted.
Anna turned tired eyes to her granddaughter. “I know. But I’m so glad you came. We have a lot of things we need to get settled between us before I go.”
Karla drew her crossed arms closer to her body to ward off a sudden chill. She hadn’t come there to visit the past. Anna needed to know that before it created problems between them. “We tried going down that road the last time I was here, Anna, and look where it got us. We’ve barely spoken to each other for six years. I don’t want to do that again. I can’t. I especially don’t want to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty because we fought through the end of yours.”
“Why did you come, then?”
“To help you settle your estate.” Lacking another, she’d finally accepted this as the reason for her being there. None of the rest—the compulsion, the nagging need, the voice insisting she go—made sense. “It’s about time you got a return on all the money you spent sending me to college. I was a pretty good accountant before Jim and I opened the coffee shop.
“If you don’t want my help, tell me,” Karla said. “I didn’t come here to force myself on you. I can get back in the car and leave right now, if you don’t want me here.”
Anna put her hand out to Karla. “Right now the one thing I need from you is help up.”
Karla hesitated. “Answer me first.”
“What is it you want me to say?”
Again Karla hesitated. Emotions she didn’t understand stuck in her throat like a pill swallowed without water. “Whether I go or stay is up to you. Either way, I want you to promise me we won’t spend the whole time I’m here fighting.”
Anna’s outstretched hand began to tremble. “How can I promise that, Karla? All we’ve ever done is fight—from the day you first stepped off that plane from Tennessee.”
With resignation, she went to Anna and helped her out of her chair. “Your hand is like ice.” The skin was as soft as a newborn’s. “You have no business being outside without a coat.”
Anna paid no attention to the chiding. “The sunset was beautiful.”
“I know. I saw it.” Karla put her arm around Anna’s waist and was horrified at how little of her there was under the baggy dress. “When was the last time you ate anything?”
“I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, and Susan—” Before she could finish, a car pulled into the driveway. “There she is now.” Anna straightened her shoulders and smoothed the front of her dress. “Susan brings me dinner two or three times a week. I think Heather put her up to it the last time she was here.” She paused to catch her breath. “She’s such a dear. I don’t know what I would do without her.”
“Susan?”
“Susan Stephens. You remember her. She went to school with Heather. Her name was Grad back then. Susan Grad. They were on the swim team together.”
Karla had been in her freshman year at UCLA when Heather started high school. She’d missed out on most of her sister’s friends and activities. “The one who got the scholarship to Stanford?”
“Yes, but she never went. Her brother was the one who got into trouble with the Perkins girl. Her parents said it was rape, because she was only fifteen and he was twenty-two when she got pregnant. Susan stayed home to be with her mother during the trial.”
“I see you’ve got company,” Susan called as she came up the gravel walkway carrying a paper grocery bag.
“It’s Karla,” Anna said.
“So it is.” There was no missing the it’s-about-time-you-got-here look Susan gave Karla.
Karla nodded. “Susan . . . it’s been a while.”
“Too long.” She climbed the steps and gave Anna a kiss on the cheek, then looked affectionately into the old woman’s eyes. “How are you feeling today?”
“Wonderful—even better now that Karla’s here.”
“Still, it’s a little chilly for you to be out here without a sweater, don’t you think?” Susan put her arm through Anna’s and guided her inside the house. “I stopped by the pharmacy today. They said your doctor needs to authorize the refill on the Lasix, so it won’t be ready until tomorrow, but I got everything else.”
“You’re an angel.” Anna led the way into the small kitchen, lightly touching the walls for balance.
“I appreciate all you’ve done for Anna,” Karla said, feeling chastised. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t figured out what needed to be done for Anna herself and made arrangements for someone to do it.
“Well, now that you’re here, I’m sure you’ll want to take over.” She put the grocery bag on the Formica-and-chrome kitchen table.
Anna took the teakettle off the stove and filled it with water. “I hope that doesn’t mean you’ll stop coming by to see me.”
“Not a chance.” A genuine warmth filled her voice when Susan directed her words to Anna.
“What do we owe you for the medicine?” Karla asked, remembering she’d left her purse in the car.
“Anna and I have that all worked out.” As comfortable as if it were her own kitchen, Susan began putting away groceries. “Allen and Bobby are at the coach’s soccer meeting tonight,” she said to Anna. “I was hoping I could talk you into going out to dinner with me. A little wine, a little pasta . . .”
Anna looked at Karla. “What do you think? Are you up to going out tonight after your long drive?”
How was it her grandmother inspired friendship and loyalty, even admiration, in everyone except her eldest granddaughter? “You two go ahead. I’ll stay here and unpack.”
As soon as Anna moved the teakettle to the stove and had her back to them, Susan shot Karla an angry look. “You have to eat. It might as well be with us.”
She’d been there less than fifteen minutes, and already she’d infuriated one person and hurt another. If Jim and his roommate hadn’t already set up housekeeping, she would have gotten in her car and headed south. She wasn’t wanted here, she wasn’t needed, and she didn’t want to stay. “You’re right, I do have to eat. And it’s been a while since I had pasta.”
“It doesn’t have to be pasta,” Anna said. “I’m sure Susan wouldn’t mind going somewhere else. You’d be surprised how many new restaurants have opened since you were here last.”
“How long has it been since you were here?” Susan asked.
“A while.”
“Heather comes up pretty often, and I’ve seen Grace a couple of times during holidays,” Susan said. “But it seems like . . . oh, I don’t know, five, six years since you’ve taken that long drive up from Los Angeles.”
“Solvang,” Karla corrected her. “I would have thought—”
“Susan, why don’t you tell Karla about that sweet little boy of yours?” Anna said. “And then she can tell you about the wonderful coffee shop she owns in Solvang.”
Two sentences and Karla felt like a misbehaving little girl again. She was only
one sentence short of being told to stand in the corner. “Why don’t we save it for dinner?”
They went to Pasta Morelli, an Italian restaurant in Roseville across the street from a new Kaiser Hospital and around the corner from an auto mall that advertised itself as the largest in the world. All had been empty fields when Karla first moved to Rocklin.
After dinner, Susan took a circuitous route back to Anna’s house. By way of an apology for her part in their earlier run-in, she assumed the role of tour guide, taking Karla to places that should have been familiar but were barely recognizable, showing her how in less than a decade, a population explosion and industry had turned what was long considered an isolated town in the foothills into a bedroom community for Sacramento.
The once-sprawling Stanford Ranch now contained more houses than it ever had cattle, and Susan said she never heard coyotes howl anymore. The roadways tallied the cost of the missing open fields in the dispossessed skunks and possums and rabbits that littered the asphalt.
Karla was stunned into silence at the sense of loss she felt for a place she’d only that night come to realize she had once considered home.
Chapter
4
Anna cracked an egg on the side of a large ceramic bowl, her attention focused on a pair of Brewer’s blackbirds and their enthusiastic morning dip in the birdbath. She’d been thinking a lot lately about weaning the finches and blackbirds and doves from their dependence on the feeders that she had hanging from trees and posts in the yard. If she did it slowly, letting the feeders stay empty a day or two at a time, the birds would begin to look elsewhere for food. Perhaps then it wouldn’t be so hard on them when she was gone.
So much to do. So many things to think about. Still, she procrastinated. It was almost as if she believed she couldn’t or wouldn’t die until the last chore was finished. Part of the blame she laid on the good days, the mornings like this one, when her heart seemed to beat as strong and confident as it had when she was a young girl. But not only had those days come less often lately, by the time she was parked on the porch at night watching the sun leave the sky she was invariably back to believing in her own mortality again.
She shouldn’t overdo on the good days, at least that’s what her doctor had told her. After months of patiently listening to his well-intentioned advice, she’d asked him if not overdoing would make any difference at the end. He’d admitted it wouldn’t, and they’d never talked about it again.
She was dying. She’d known it for a long time now. Slowly, a beat at a time, her heart was on its final countdown. Everything that could be done to make the going easier was being done. She had a cupboard filled with pill bottles, a book on living with congestive heart failure, and another on the light that would greet her at her death. Best of all, she had the sure, comforting knowledge she’d not wasted her eighty-five years. She considered herself one of life’s fortunate ones. While she didn’t like what was happening to her, it was a hell of a lot better than the way so many of her friends had gone. Especially her dear sweet Frank . . . He had suffered the pain of the damned before Saint Peter got around to opening the gates of heaven to let him through.
She’d been warned that the very end could be bad, that every breath would be a struggle as her lungs filled with fluid, but there was nothing the books or her doctor had described that she was worried she couldn’t handle. However the end turned out, she wouldn’t trade a quick easy exit for the time she’d been given to set things right with Karla.
Anna had never known anyone as lonely or as alone as her oldest granddaughter. She had an emptiness inside that nothing, no one, could fill, not even the sisters she cared for above all else. She’d come that way to Anna, a defiant fourteen-year-old determined to take on the world in defense of her sisters who, at six and ten, wanted nothing more than a safe haven, a lap to sit on, and arms always ready to wrap them in a hug.
Anna opened the drawer beside the sink and took out a wire whisk to beat the eggs. She then added a splash of milk, the grated rind and half the juice from an orange, and a dash of cinnamon, blended them into the beaten eggs and put the bowl in the refrigerator. After months of her usual fare of tea and an English muffin for breakfast, French toast seemed downright decadent.
Upstairs, Karla fought an intrusion into her blanketed layers of sleep. Incorporating the shrill sounds of the finches outside into her dream, she drifted into the memory of her first morning at her grandmother Anna’s house.
Alone and isolated in the upstairs bedroom while her sisters and grandmother slept on the ground floor, Karla woke to a raucous screeching outside. She crawled out of bed and went to the window, searching the trees and wires for one of the hawks her mother had told her lived in the area. She’d said they would lie in wait for the little birds to show up at the feeders and then swoop down for the kill, taking the unlucky finch back to the tree, where a macabre shower of feathers would rain onto the ground.
Karla opened the window, discovered the noise came from territorial battles over the feeders, and went back to bed. She closed her eyes and listened hard for sounds that would tell her that her sisters were finally up. She needed to know that they were all right, but the need was not great enough yet to let her chance getting caught creeping around the house by her grandmother. This place was the last for her and Heather and Grace. They had nowhere else to go, at least not together.
And it was her fault.
She was the reason they’d been sent here. She knew this because she’d hidden in the hallway and listened at her grandmother and grandfather Becker’s house as they talked about what they were going to do with Karla and her sisters. Her aunt was willing to take Heather, and her uncle said Grace could live with them, but no one wanted Karla. Not even her grandmother and grandfather. She was a troublemaker, always interfering when her sisters got in trouble or needed discipline. She argued, she fought, she went her own way. She might make her bed and clean her room and do her homework without being told, but she never smiled. She was a difficult child.
Karla had pressed her back tighter into the corner of the hallway and told herself she didn’t care that no one liked her. She could take care of herself, even preferred it that way. She looked a lot older than she was, everyone said so. She could get a job, and as soon as she’d saved enough money, Heather and Grace would come to live with her.
But then her grandfather said, “Maybe we should just let Anna have them.”
Her grandmother waited a long time before she answered. “We’ll have to tell her about the money.”
“Do you think it will matter?”
“It would to me,” her grandmother said.
Three days later Karla and her sisters were on their way to California to live with a woman they couldn’t have picked out of a room full of old people. Obviously, Grandma Becker had been right. The money did matter to their grandma Anna.
The first morning that she was alone in her mother’s old room, Karla had pulled the covers to her chin, curled into a ball, closed her eyes, and mentally reached for her mother. Somewhere in this old house there had to be something of her left—in the rooms, the walls, the closets. These were the stairs she had climbed for eighteen years, the yard she had played in as a little girl, the shower she had used as she prepared for her wedding.
Karla knew she wouldn’t hear her mother’s voice or anything crazy like that. All she needed was a small sign, a touch of wind on her cheek in the airless bedroom, one of the pictures stuck in the mirror frame to fall onto the dresser, her grandmother to appear at the doorway and tell her that she’d changed her mind and that Karla could sleep downstairs with her sisters after all.
Now, nineteen years later, the memory of that morning was almost as painful to revisit as it had been to live.
Rolling over in the softly protesting bed, Karla abandoned the lonely little girl who had never found her mother again and opened her eyes. A male house finch, its head and chest a blaze of bright red, sat on the windowsill an
d stared at her. Karla remained perfectly still, resisting even the urge to smile at this lone, tiny member of the welcoming committee.
She imagined the bird to be a part of the fifth or sixth generation of the finches that had visited her window when this had been her room. She’d had four years to make their long-lost relatives her friends—her grandmother never had let her move downstairs to be with her sisters.
Simultaneously, the finch flew away and Karla heard Anna moving around in the kitchen. She swung her legs over the edge of the double bed, stretched, and reached for her robe. An unexpected feeling of rightness and familiarity came over her, as if she actually belonged in this room. She passed it off as the rush that came with bobbing in the eye of an emotional hurricane. Still, she sat a minute on the edge of the bed and looked around the room, giving in to the sentimental trappings as she had the night before when Susan had shown her around town.
The same wallpaper her mother had looked at when she was a young girl covered the walls—a narrow green and white and peach stripe. When Karla went to college, Heather had moved in and added a flower border around the top, something Karla had never even considered a possibility. The only other changes were the green braided throw rug beside the bed and the peach and green bedspread. The furniture and curtains, even the mirror over the dresser with the pictures of her mother and her friends stuck between the glass and frame, were the same.
A second sound came from the kitchen, prompting Karla to get moving. If she didn’t make it downstairs before Anna started the coffee, she’d lose the chance to substitute her own.
She opened her bedroom door to the strong odor of burnt coffee beans. Too late. Living at the top of the stairs, she’d never had to ask what they were having for dinner. Nor had she ever had to sneak around to listen in on Anna’s private conversations with her friends. The narrow stairwell acted like a megaphone for the rest of the house. She only had to be very still and she could hear most of what Anna and her friends said when they were in the living room playing cards. What she didn’t hear was easy enough to fill in.
Things Remembered Page 3
