By Summer's End

by Pamela Morsi

  “I’ve never been overly fond of them, either,” Mrs. Leland said as Rocky sat at her feet and allowed her to stroke him.

  “Why’d you get Rocky?” I asked.

  “Oh, we didn’t,” she told me. “Sonny got Rocky for you girls. He picked him up at the pound one day and brought him home.”

  “For us?” I was really surprised. “Well, for Sierra, I guess.”

  “I think he just wanted a pet for his children, both his children,” Mrs. Leland said.

  I knew she was just trying to be nice to me. But I liked it anyway.

  An image on her computer screen caught my attention. It was a hazy black-and-white photo of a man in a military uniform.

  “Who’s that?” I asked her.

  She glanced over at the screen herself. “That’s one of your great-uncles, Lemuel Clafford Leland,” she said. “I’ve been searching records for him this afternoon, pondering his fate.”

  “He was a soldier?”

  “He fought in the Civil War,” she said. “But I don’t think the military was his natural calling.”

  “He was like drafted or something?”

  “No, he joined up,” she said. “He was an educated man, probably could have gotten a commission, certainly he would have in the Confederate Army, but he joined the Union as a private.”

  “And what happened to him?”

  “We don’t know,” she said. “He never returned from the war.”

  I nodded. “So you’re trying to figure out where he was killed?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure that he was,” she said. “His name doesn’t show up anywhere among the Union dead.”

  “They could have just missed him,” I said. “Like those MIA people they have the flags and T-shirts for.”

  “That’s possible,” Mrs. Leland said. “But there is one other strange little piece of information that I have.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, before he left for the army he was involved with a married woman, Essie Milbank, Essie Medford Milbank, to be exact,” she said, pursing her lips to express disapproval. “It was quite a scandal here in Knoxville. I’m sure it played a big part in his leaving for the army. Toward the end of the war, Essie just disappeared. Her husband was known to beat her and everyone suspected that he’d killed her, but her body was never found.”

  “So you don’t think she was killed?”

  “I did,” Mrs. Leland said. “Until just recently, I assumed that neither of them survived the war, so many did not. But I was thinking about your mother and the way she is. If this woman had been Dawn, she would have just packed up her things and headed into the sunset. That’s a solution for her. Other people might have done the same.”

  “Maybe they met up somewhere,” I said.

  Mrs. Leland was nodding. “That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “I was looking through old records to see if their names ever resurfaced later in some other state.”

  “They could have gone anywhere,” I said, hopelessly.

  “I think they would have headed west,” Mrs. Leland said with certainty.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “The south is all knitted together with relatives of relatives,” she said. “They had to get away from people who might recognize them. The only way to do that was to go farther west.”

  Mrs. Leland pulled up a Web site for the 1880 federal census.

  “If they survived the war and went off together,” she said, “I’m sure after fifteen years, they’d feel safe enough to answer some questions, maybe even use their real names. Or some version of their real names.”

  “That makes sense.”

  We started with Texas and began the slow, painstaking process of looking for people who fit those names in the mostly indexed, handwritten documents.

  “So how exactly are these people related to me?” I asked her again, after squinting at the screen for way too long.

  Mrs. Leland chuckled. “Uncle Lemuel is your great-great-grandfather’s brother, there were six boys and three girls.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I always wondered what it would be like to have a big family.”

  “You’re like your father in that,” she said. “Sonny once asked me why he had to be an only child. I didn’t have an answer, but I started getting interested in genealogy.”

  “You wanted to give him a family,” I said.

  She nodded. “Yes, I guess I did,” she said. “But he managed to get one for himself.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said quietly, sadly.

  There was a moment of silence between us.

  “I remember the day you were born,” she said.

  I’m sure my jaw fell open.

  “Were you there the day I was born?”

  She nodded. “Your grandfather and I rushed up to the hospital as soon as we heard,” she said. “I didn’t try to go in to see your mother. She and I…we weren’t getting along that well. So Vern went in to see her and I stayed out by the window at the nursery.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” She smiled at me. It changed the whole look of her face. “You were such a tiny little thing, a couple of weeks early,” she said. “And just howling as if you were mad at the world.”

  “Maybe I was.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I didn’t know you ever saw me as a baby,” I told her. “I thought my mom left town as soon as I was born.”

  “No,” Mrs. Leland said. “She didn’t leave right away.”

  “What made her go?”

  “A lot of things,” Mrs. Leland said. “She wanted to get away from bad memories.”

  “And she wanted to get away from you.” The words had just slipped out of my mouth. I hadn’t intended to say that.

  “Did your mother tell you that?” she asked. Her tone was very formal once more and she was back to that way of looking at me without looking at me.

  “No,” I assured her. “She never said anything like that. She never said anything. Just that she had to get away.”

  Mrs. Leland mellowed somewhat. “Well, I suppose there is a grain of truth to that. But I didn’t run her off. I wanted her to stay. I wanted to keep you girls right here with us. But as soon as she got that money, she was already gone.”

  “What money?”

  Mrs. Leland’s lips came together in one thin line of disapproval. “The logging company,” she said. “The one responsible for Sonny’s death, offered her five thousand dollars. That’s it. A young, promising life just wiped out. I don’t know if the company had been negligent or if they’d been greedy. I wanted to know, but we could never find out. They bought off everybody who might have known. And they bought off your mother so cheaply. She took the money. Without any hesitation she took their blood money and left town.”

  “She felt trapped,” I lamely tried to explain.

  Mrs. Leland shook her head. “The life she ran to, the life she’s brought you up in, that’s the trap, not here with the people she left behind.”

  REAL LIFE

  25

  Spence and I were hanging out at his house. The thermometer was hovering near one hundred, so it was one of those days to stay inside with the air-conditioning. We were playing video games on the TV in the living room. Del sat in a big lounge chair reading a book.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught movement and glanced out the window.

  “Here comes my mom,” I said.

  I was surprised and curious. She had never been over to the Tegges’ house. And she didn’t look happy. I knew I hadn’t done anything and I wondered who had.

  Del was on his feet before the doorbell rang and opening it up the instant after.

  Mom didn’t bother with hello. “You gave these people my number!” she accused.

  “Yes, I did,” Del answered. “Won’t you come in?”

  “Are you out of your mind? Why would you give out my phone number to strangers?”

  “I gave them Vern’s number
,” he said. “And ‘these people’ are not strangers, it’s my friend Marcy. Now are you going to stand on the porch letting out all the cool air or are you coming inside?”

  With a sigh of frustration, Mom stepped inside and Del shut the door behind her.

  Mom looked around. There was a strange look on her face.

  “What is this place?” she asked. “Geez, I expect Beaver Cleaver to be doing his homework at the dining room table.”

  “No homework today,” Del said. “Just a couple of slackers playing video games.”

  “Hiyya, Dawn!” Spence said excitedly.

  “I think that’s supposed to be Mrs. Leland,” Del corrected.

  “No, please, I told him he could call me Dawn.”

  “Well, then,” Del said, hesitating. “Ms. Dawn would be better.”

  “Gawd, you are a prig,” she told him with a laugh. “Don’t you know that sending a kid to middle school with those kind of manners can be dangerous to his health?”

  “As if your Dakota is not just as well behaved and well spoken,” he said.

  Mom waved that away. “My girls just raise themselves,” she insisted. “They do a better job at it than me anyway.”

  That wasn’t true, of course, and I could see from Del’s expression that he didn’t believe it, either.

  “But if I was teaching decorum, I would, for sure, cover giving out other people’s phone numbers without permission.”

  Del nodded. “Why don’t you have a seat, I’ll fix you a nice cool drink and you can go over the rules for me.”

  “Yeah, you’re thinking that you’ll ply me with liquor and make me forget how pissed I am at you,” she said.

  “I don’t actually have any liquor,” he said. “But I’ve got some fruitless powdered fruit drink. The sugar in that is the biggest buzz in the house.”

  My mom shrugged. “Then fruit drink it is,” she said.

  Del headed for the kitchen.

  “You want to play?” Spence asked her. “I’d let you have a turn.”

  Mom laughed and gave him a skeptical look. “I’m not so good at these games as you kids. My reflexes aren’t that fast.”

  “You don’t need reflexes for this one,” I told her.

  “Yeah, you get to create a whole world from cave dwellers to space and try to expand your land and influence without getting overrun by other civilizations.”

  “You can do all that in a video game?” She grinned at him. “Who knew?”

  “I’m Caesar,” Spence told her. “Dakota is Elizabeth I. You could be…ah…” He was quickly looking through the leaders of all the different groups. “You could be Joan of Arc.”

  “Joan of Arc?” Mom laughed.

  “Don’t get stuck in gender roles,” I scolded Spence. “You can be Abraham Lincoln, Mom,” I told her. “American history is probably your best anyway.”

  He showed Mom how to play, but she was content just to watch us.

  Del returned with soft drinks and pretzels.

  “Don’t you kids know that video games are supposed to involve wrecking cars or decapitating people?” Mom said. “Where are the guns? Where are the hos and pimps?”

  “You are too funny, Dawn,” Spence said. “My mom is not nearly so cool.”

  “Thank God!” Mom told him, reaching over to tousle his hair. “And I bet she’s not bald, either.”

  “I like the do,” Spence assured her. “It’s very hip and now. Maybe you should think about a head tattoo.”

  “I like this kid,” Mom told Del.

  “‘He’s a rebel and he’ll never be any good,’” Del responded in song.

  Mom laughed.

  Spence and I didn’t get the joke.

  “Do you two want to go upstairs and play that in Spence’s room?” Del suggested.

  “The TV’s broken, remember?” Spence said.

  I shot Del a look, wondering if he’d ever mentioned my destructive accident to my mother. He gave me a quick reassuring wink. I knew he’d kept my secret.

  “I guess this living room is big enough for all of us,” Del said. “I won’t tell you and Dakota how to conquer the world if you won’t interrupt me as I impress Miss Dawn with my brilliant wit and humor.”

  “Forget your brilliant wit and humor,” Mom said. “Don’t think for a minute that you can distract me from how mad I am at you.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Del told her.

  The adults retreated to the couch. I continued to focus my eyes on the game, but my mind was on their conversation. I could tell that Spence was doing the same.

  “This really is a neat old house,” Mom said.

  “It has a real family feeling about it,” he agreed.

  “It’s more than that,” Mom said. “It’s as if nothing bad could ever happen here.”

  “Ah…well, tell that to my water pipes in the winter,” he joked.

  “Plumbing problems aside,” she said. “It’s a nice house.”

  “I think so,” Del told her. “I was really lucky to get in here. When I left Clarissa I moved into this really dinky, depressing apartment.”

  Mom nodded.

  “I wanted my share of Spence’s time,” Del said. “But I hated to make him spend his weekends in the place. Then one day I was here in the neighborhood to speak to a conservation group. I had a few minutes so I was just taking a walk, looking at the old houses. I was standing in front of this one, admiring it, when Mr. McMann, the old fellow who lived here, keeled over with a stroke.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “One minute he was tending the begonias and the next he was on the ground. I called 911 on my cell, got his wife out of the house and stayed with him until the ambulance came.”

  “Was he all right?”

  “I don’t think he was ever the same,” Del said. “But he got better. The couple had been toying with the idea of moving to a retirement community for years. His stroke was what made them decide to go into assisted living. They needed to sell the house and I’d fallen in love with it. They carried the financing for me and threw in a lot of their old furniture as a gift. It was a great deal.”

  “You’re very lucky,” she said.

  “That’s what I think,” Del told her. “I even thought that at the time, though most people were still feeling sorry for me because of my divorce.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  He nodded. “Being with the wrong person is much worse than being alone,” he said.

  Mom laughed. “I can testify to that,” she said. “But I keep dragging them back to my place anyway.”

  Del didn’t seem to think that was as funny as she did.

  “So you talked to Marcy?” he asked.

  “Not for long,” Mom answered. “As soon as I figured out who she was and what she wanted, I cut her off as quick as I could.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I told you, I’m not interested in foster care,” she said. “It’s something in my past. Something I don’t discuss, something I don’t think about anymore. It has nothing to do with me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” she said. “Are you going to get all moral and tell me that it’s my civic duty to care?”

  “No,” he answered. “I just got the impression that keeping your girls from any possibility of a close-up acquaintance with foster care was what drove you back to Knoxville this summer.”

  There was a moment of complete silence. I realized that I was just staring at the computer screen. Spence was doing the same.

  “Is it my turn?” I asked him.

  “Uh…yeah.”

  “I don’t have to discuss my reasoning with you,” Mom told Del.

  He agreed. “No, you don’t,” he said. “But I’d like to discuss mine with you. You’ve had some hard choices to make, that’s obvious. But there are plenty of parents out there without your options. They don’t have any leftover in-laws. If something goes wrong for them, their kids a
re going to land in foster care.”

  “I’m sorry for that,” Mom said. “But I can’t change it.”

  “Who else can?” he said. “You know a lot. You have firsthand experience and you have the time. These kids need you.”

  She made a sound that facetiously dismissed his words. “Maybe they’ll do all right,” she said. “Lots of kids come through unscathed.”

  “Do they?”

  “Sure. They come up with a strategy that works for them. Some idealize their parents, some demonize them. Some are sweet and helpful and friendly. Some are rebels of any cause. Some do crazy things to get attention, others try to blend in with the woodwork. My plan was to run. That worked for me.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Del said. “You understand where they are and what they’re doing. Some well-meaning socialite from the Junior League is not going to get that.”

  “I said I’m a runner,” Mom told him. “Runners never go back to where they came from.”

  “You’re back in Knoxville,” he said. “I’d say that’s starting a new trend.”

  “I’m here because I have to be,” Mom said. “But I don’t have time or energy to do any kind of volunteer work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Earth to Del Tegge,” she announced in a condescending voice. “I have cancer.”

  “That’s not a full-time vocation.”

  “It can be.”

  “Until it is, it might be better to focus on something besides yourself.”

  Mom’s shocked response was an incredulous in-drawn breath.

  Del lowered his voice. Spence and I kept our eyes glued to the computer, but continued to listen.

  “It takes everybody to change the world,” Del said. “Young people, old people, well people, sick people. There are so many things that need to be done, nobody gets a pass. This is something that you know about, somewhere that you can make a difference. If you choose to ignore it, to be too busy, to let it go on the way it always has, then you are doing to all those innocent, anonymous children exactly what was done to you.”

  “You’re a real piece of…of crap.” She lowered her voice. “Is this why your wife left you?”

  “Probably,” he answered.

  The argument continued on and off all afternoon. Mom was adamant in her refusal. But Del just never gave up. His nagging was positively relentless. I expected any minute for Mom to just storm out of the house. Amazingly, she did not. In fact, it was as if she was enjoying the argument. She was rising to whatever challenge he came up with and every minute of it gave her energy. Bickering with Del worked better than Procrit for perking Mom up. I would have never thought of that. I was blown away with how Del could have known.