by Pamela Morsi
I was sitting in the dining room looking through the photo albums when the doorbell rang. I was just getting up when Mom walked into the room.
“I’ll get it,” she told me.
I glanced over at her. I know my mouth must have dropped open like a broken hatch.
Mom had ditched the attractive Sunday suit and was wearing her shortest shirt, her highest heels and a tight low-cut top that gave a perfect look at the rose heart tattoo. A leather newsboy hat had replaced the chic turban and her makeup was heavy almost to the point of garish.
“Mom?” I asked. “What are you doing? What happened to Sierra’s suit?”
“It’s Sierra’s,” she answered calmly. “This is what I wear on dates. I decided that pretending something else is just stupid. This is who I am. This time I’m not pretending to be anyone else.”
“What do you mean ‘this time’?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.
Sierra was as disheartened as I was. “Mom, what if he takes you someplace…someplace nice?”
I was pretty sure that Del Tegge was the kind of guy that would take a woman someplace nice.
“If he’s slumming,” Mom said, “then I don’t expect we’ll be headed anyplace but a noisy bar or a crowded dance hall.”
“What if he’s not slumming?” I asked. “What if he really likes you and wants to be with you?”
“Well, then we’ll find that out, won’t we?”
My dismay must have shown on my face.
“Hey, what’s this?” she asked me, laughing and clucking me under the chin. “You’re the one who’s kept reminding me that he’s not my type.”
I should have told her he was a Sonny. I should have given her his name. But I hadn’t. I’d held it back and now, now it was too late.
“Wish me luck,” she said as she headed to the front door.
My heart was in my throat.
A minute later I heard the front door open. Sierra and I both sat not moving a muscle, listening.
“Whoa!” I heard him say to her. “You surprised me.”
“What do you mean?” Mom asked him.
“I expected you to make me cool my heels at least ten minutes chatting with Vern and Phrona,” he told her. “It’s nice to have you answer the door. Are you ready?”
Then they were gone.
I turned to Sierra.
“He’s a Sonny,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Del, his name is Delbert Tegge, Jr.,” I explained. “He could have been called Sonny.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t,” she said.
“But don’t you see he could be her type?” I said.
“Type? Type only works in soap operas,” Sierra told me with a smug smile. “The people there never change who they are no matter what. If they are bad or gullible or jealous it doesn’t matter what happens to them, they will be like that. Even if they get amnesia, they continue to be like that. Real life is different. When things happen in real life, it changes people.”
“But Mom only dates guys named Sonny.”
Sierra shrugged. “Maybe it was easier than remembering a lot of names,” she said. “That way you know that in the middle of the night, you’re not going to accidently call out the wrong one.”
She thought her explanation was funny. I wasn’t so sure.
Sierra had her own date that Saturday night and Seth showed up just a few minutes after Del.
I had to let him in. As soon as the doorbell rang, she hurried back to the bedroom for one final check.
“Hey kid,” he said, by way of conversation.
I didn’t have much to say to him, either. I’d decided that he was okay. As far as a boyfriend for Sierra was concerned, he’d do fine. I just didn’t personally have anything I could say to him. So we just sat there in the living room, not saying anything until finally my sister showed up.
“Here I am,” she announced as she walked in.
“Has your mom said anything about school?” Seth asked first thing, without even acknowledging how good Sierra looked and how much time she’d spent getting that way.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Mom hasn’t said anything yet and I tried not to really bug her too much about it today.”
Seth rolled his eyes, obviously frustrated. “Enrollment ends on Tuesday,” he said. “If she doesn’t agree by then, we’ll spend the whole year in separate schools.”
Spence was at his mother’s house for the weekend. So it was just me.
I thought about making some new fractals, though I already had dozens of them. You never really knew what you’d get. I looked in on Vern. He was sleeping in his chair, a copy of New Scientist lay open on his lap.
Rocky, on the floor at his feet, got up and trotted over to me. I petted him and he followed me as I wandered through the house. In the dining room, I closed the photo albums I’d been looking at and glanced over at the top of the mantel. The area had been cleaned a dozen times since I’d stolen the soccer photo, but apparently nobody had noticed. It still looked glaringly missing to me. But I figured it was my own guilt exaggerating its importance. It was just one photo and the Lelands had hundreds.
I had no friends to call.
I turned on the TV. I flipped through the channels. The silly sitcoms didn’t interest me. And the reality shows now all seemed the same. I caught a quick glimpse of a newscast. They were talking about getting back to school. They showed shoppers out buying clothes and backpacks and supplies. School was still more than a week off. I knew from experience not to start counting on being here by the time classes began. The summer had been long and tough. But Mom seemed better now. She might be keen on hitting the road any day now.
Just the uncertainty of that had me on my feet. I paced a couple of minutes in the living room and then went to the bedroom I shared with Sierra. I would miss this place if we moved. I would miss these people. Mom had probably been right to always keep going. The longer you stay in a place, the harder it was when you have to run away.
From the back garden glass doors I saw the light from Mrs. Leland’s office. After only a moment’s hesitation, Rocky and I decided to make our way in that direction.
She was sitting sort of primly, as always, on a stool by the filing cabinet, sorting papers. She glanced up immediately and smiled at me.
“Did Dawn and Sierra get off all right?” she asked.
“Yeah”
“What’s your grandfather up to?”
“He’s sleeping in his study,” I said.
She nodded. “So I suppose you have a little time on your hands,” she said.
“Yeah, I thought I might look for Lemuel and Essie,” I told her. “I’ve still got a lot of states to go.”
She nodded. “Well, don’t be discouraged if you don’t find them,” she told me. “They may have changed their names or died between the end of the war and the 1880 census. The census takers might have missed them. Or, of course, Lemuel could have been killed in battle and our whole premise of the two of them getting together may have been wrong.”
“I’d hate for that to be true,” I told her.
She nodded. “The most likely result is the one that we’ve got already,” she said. “We don’t know what happened and never will.”
“That one is the toughest,” I told her.
Mrs. Leland agreed.
I sat down at the computer and pulled out my list of states and territories from the drawer. She’d given me my own folder, so that I could keep up with where I’d looked and anything that I’d found. Most of the west I’d already looked through. We’d thought they would have headed that way. But I was down to checking Ohio and Michigan. There were Lelands everywhere. But no body matched their names or even their dates of birth.
All the records were available on the Internet, but each state and territory had to be queried separately. And many of the states were indexed by county, which could really
add up to a lot of search time.
The list of last names could be located, but I’d have to look through photos of the handwritten record pages, trying to find details that matched up among the questions they asked, like age, occupation, state where you were born, state where your parents were born. We had to assume that they would stick close to the truth, even if they fudged on their names. It was our only chance to find them.
I thought it would be a boring thing to do, but it was actually exciting. It was like a mystery with lots of clues and red herrings. But it was real and it was people whose DNA was very close to my own.
It was amazing, really, how easily Mrs. Leland had accepted me as a genealogist. Much quicker than as a granddaughter, which I thought might still be a little hard for either of us to really get our minds around.
At first I’d decided to try to get close to her only to distract her from Mom. But amazingly, that didn’t seem necessary anymore. For one thing, Mom was doing better. She didn’t require as much defense. And then, Mrs. Leland wasn’t so much on her case these days. It was almost as if she’d accepted us into her life. Or at least she’d resigned herself to it. Anyway, we were here and she was apparently making the best of it.
“What do you think of my mom dating Del Tegge?” I asked her.
She hesitated.
“Dawn is a grown woman, she may date whomever she likes.”
There was something about the way she said the words that made me curious.
I glanced over at her. “Are you happy about it or not?”
“It’s just a date, Dakota,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, I know,” I told her. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion.”
She smiled at me. “When you’re like that, so politely determined, you remind me a great deal of your father.”
“Thanks.”
She turned back to her papers.
“That doesn’t get you out of answering the question.”
Mrs. Leland shook her head and sat thoughtfully for a moment, choosing her words.
“I like Del,” she said. “I think he’s a nice man, smart, interesting, a good father. I’m very sorry that his marriage didn’t work out. His ex-wife is a lovely young woman from a fine family. She’s very active in the community social whirl. I think Dawn is a diversion from that.”
“So you think he’s slumming? Mom thinks that, too.”
“Oh, my goodness, no,” Mrs. Leland said. “I didn’t mean anything so…well, so unpleasant. I only meant that Dawn is quite different from Spence’s mother. That marriage obviously didn’t work, so perhaps Del finds himself drawn to the antithesis of that relationship.”
“Is that good?”
Mrs. Leland shrugged. “They do say that opposites attract,” she said. “Whether they can maintain a relationship over time is still open to question.”
I thought about that as I squinted at the screen, deciphering handwriting over a hundred years old.
“Do you think my mom and Sonny Leland would have been able to stay together if my dad had lived?”
“There is no way to know something like that.”
I glanced over at her, about to repeat my “you have an opinion” comment, but it wasn’t necessary, she took the hint.
“When they married,” Mrs. Leland said, “I didn’t think that they would be able to stay together. I didn’t think that your mother would be capable of forming long-term, stable relationships.”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess you were right about that.”
Mrs. Leland crooked her head slightly and gave a strange little smile. “Actually, Dakota,” she responded, “I was just going to say that I’ve decided that I might just have been wrong about that.”
REAL LIFE
31
At the last possible moment Mom decided that Sierra could go to Seth’s art school. My sister’s nagging had become incessant. I groaned every time the subject came up. But Mom didn’t even appear to notice it. She never responded to it. She never discussed it.
Then it was like she woke the very last morning of school enrollment and decided that we were staying for a while and a private art academy was exactly what Sierra needed.
Vern and Mrs. Leland gave each other a surprised glance when Sierra told them, but he stepped up immediately to offer assistance.
“I don’t know how much this is going to cost,” he said to Mom. “It may be quite expensive. Phrona and I have a little money tucked away….”
Mom waved him off.
“I couldn’t let you help me,” she said. “You’ve done more than we can ever repay already. Sierra and I are going down there to enroll her this morning. We’re going to throw ourselves on their mercy and see if we can get some kind of break on tuition.”
I don’t think the Lelands actually believed in that possibility, but Mom seemed infused with confidence.
“What kind of school would turn down a deserving young girl just because she is economically disadvantaged?” she asked rhetorically.
Most of them, I thought to myself, but managed not to comment aloud.
Mom put on her gray funeral suit and Sierra looked stylish, but modest, in a new skirt and blouse that Mrs. Leland had bought her.
“I’m so excited!” Sierra said, though her constant giggling had already suggested that. “And Seth is just over the moon with it. I mean it’s total ups.”
“I’ll run you down there,” Vern said. One of Mom’s antinausea medications made her drowsy and the doctor said she shouldn’t drive.
“No need,” Mom assured him. “I’m a licensed driver, Sierra has her permit. I’ll just have her drive me.”
My sister screamed and began jumping up and down like some crazy contestant on The Price Is Right.
“I’ve got to call Seth and tell him,” she said, racing out of the room.
“She ought to call the highway patrol and get them to clear the streets,” I said.
Mom laughed. “Your day will come,” she told me. “And after facing cancer, I figure that I’m up to risking my life with one of my daughters at the wheel.”
I stood on the front porch as my sister backed out of the driveway in a slow, careful creep.
Mom rolled down her window and hollered at me. “If we’re not back in two weeks, send help!”
It was a good joke and I laughed, but there was still that uncertainty in me. Today we were staying, otherwise she wouldn’t be bothering to enroll Sierra in a new school. But things could change so quickly. I couldn’t let myself get attached. I had to be careful. I had to be ready. Mom was feeling so much better. If she was better, she might not finish the chemo. Even if she finished, we had only three months of treatment left. That wasn’t even a whole semester. We might be on the road by Halloween.
I spent the morning looking through my clothes and thinking about school. Sierra was headed exactly where she wanted, but I didn’t know anything about Whittle Springs Middle School, or as Spence called it, Whittle Middle. I was going through my school clothes, wondering what would still fit and whether I would be too dopey to ever make friends. But then, what was the use in making friends? I was in my third year of middle school and this was going to be my third school. I’d left the last one without so much as a word of goodbye. It was easier, really, if you didn’t let anyone get close.
From its hiding place inside my suitcase, the soccer photo of my dad fell out and landed on the floor. I picked it up and smoothed the now familiar, smiling face with my fingers. I’d seen so many photos of him now. When I’d seen this one, I thought he looked like me. But now, it only looked like him. I carefully rewrapped it in a blouse that I could no longer wear and hid it away once more.
I heard the doorbell and was grateful to have the interruption. When I opened the door, I was surprised to see Marcy. I wanted to roll my eyes. I couldn’t believe she was back. Couldn’t the woman take no for an answer? Actually I liked her. She was funny and bubbly and grandmotherish. But, I didn’t
want to help Mom dodge her or be forced to make up excuses for why she couldn’t come in. Fortunately today, I could be completely honest.
“My mom’s not here,” I said.
“Oh, rats, I’m sorry I missed her,” Marcy said. “But it’s nice to see you. You’re Dakota, right? The younger one?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry I missed your mother,” she said. “Is she at the clinic?”
Was this woman going to try to track her down?
“No, she’s enrolling my sister in school,” I said.
She nodded. “Did your sister decide to go to Fulton?” she said. “It’s a good school.”
“Actually, Sierra’s going to the art academy downtown,” I admitted.
“That’s wonderful. I’m so happy for her,” Marcy said. “That will be a really fine place for your sister. There’s lot of individual attention and a real appreciation for the nontypical child.”
“Yeah, well Sierra is that,” I told her.
She chuckled. “Do I detect a little sibling rivalry?” she asked. “You are certainly far from ordinary yourself. Just in a different way, I think.”
I shrugged. “She’s the beauty, I’m the brains.”
“My goodness, who told you something silly like that?” she asked. “I think your sister seems very smart in her own way. And you are very pretty.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Your mother told me that you look like your father and Sierra acts like your father,” Marcy said. “And I believe she mentioned that he was both smart and handsome.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “But Sierra looks like Mom and I…I guess I act like Mom.”
Marcy smiled at me and reached out to touch my cheek. I was surprised by the gesture. People didn’t touch me. Affection was never all that readily available outside of home.
“You are like your mom, I think,” Marcy said. “You’re the young girl she might have been if her own mother had loved her as much as she loves you.”
