by Ted Staunton
The old man’s eyes close again. GL makes her way back to the desk. AmberLea moves in to help her. We’re all staring. Little Mike is leaning forward, mouth open, both hands on the countertop. “Are—?” he starts to say, but GL cuts him off, stabbing with her cane at the damaged glossy on the wall.
“I’m Gloria Lorraine,” she says. “I’m also your Aunt Wanda, and this is your second cousin, AmberLea.”
TWENTY-FIVE
“Is that camera ready?” says GL. “It better be, because I’ve only got one take in me.”
She’s propped up on a flowery couch. Her feet don’t reach the ground, but that’s okay; they won’t be in the shot. We’ve moved a couple of lamps for extra light.
“My left side, don’t forget. Get left profile and full face; no right side. Move the lamp more that way!”
I’m setting up the camera on its little collapsible tripod.
“Right beside you,” she says, “so I look at you, not the camera. More natural.”
We’re all in the living room of Little Mike’s house, up behind the parking lot. It feels empty. It turns out Mike has three kids, all grown and gone, and right now his wife is away visiting her own mom in a nursing home. Big Mike has been helped off to bed, and the night clerk is on at the motel. Little Mike has rustled up snacks for us and glasses of scotch for Al and GL. “This is wild,” he says, slowly shaking his head. “I think I knew Pop had a sister who went away a long time ago, but I’m not even sure how I knew. Whispers, I guess. The whole thing was out of bounds, especially around Grandpop and Baba.”
“I guess nobody mentioned the money I sent Mikey every month, as soon as I could afford it,” GL says drily.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” says Little Mike, “money was tight when I was a kid, but somehow there was a nest egg waiting to send me to university. The day I left, Pop said, ‘Don’t thank me, thank your aunt.’ So I asked who my aunt was, and he laughed and said, ‘She’s a movie star.’ He had your picture on the wall with a few other celebrity types that had come to the old place for the hunting and fishing. I didn’t take him seriously; I figured he was just being modest, sorta deflecting the praise from himself, you know? He’s that kind of guy.”
“He was a sweet boy.” GL nods. “I’m glad the money helped.”
“I owe you one,” Little Mike says, raising his glass. “A late thanks.”
“Cheers.”
“Gramma,” AmberLea cuts in, from a chair beside Al. “You were born in Topeka, Kansas!” Her chin has had time to reappear, but she’s scratching her ankle like mad. “And your family moved to—”
“I know, Washington State. Claptrap. Studio fairy tale.” GL waves her hand. “The PR department at Republic made that up to turn me into an all-American girl. Kansas was big that year. Thank The Wizard of Oz. They lied about my age too; made me four years younger.”
“But Mom—”
GL cuts her off. “Your mother doesn’t know anything about this. Nobody does, because I’ve never told anyone before. I’m doing this for you, AmberLea, and for David McLean.”
Grandpa. I look up from plugging in the adaptor. “And for Spencer.” GL nods at me. “If it weren’t for you, none of this would have happened. I have to tell you about David too, if you’re going to understand.”
I can’t believe it—not just about Grandpa, but that she finally got my name right. “We’re ready to go,” I say.
“Good. Let’s do it. Quiet, everybody. Give me a finger count in.”
I raise my right hand, three fingers up. “Three… two…one…go.”
I press the button. GL starts her big scene.
TWENTY-SIX
“The first time I saw your grandfather,” says GL, “it was 1935. I was seventeen and he was fifteen, I’m guessing. How we all got this old is beyond me. Anyway, he was yelling in the dining room—if you could call it that—of the Superior Hotel in Jackfish. The hotel was my family’s—the Karpuski’s—business. My father and my Uncle Pete ran it, and we all worked there. We did all right too, especially after we got beer in. Twenty-five cents a bottle; expensive because we had to ship it in, of course. Jackfish was busy, and we were the only game in town. There was a coal dock and stop for the railroad, a little fishing fleet, and for a year or two they were building the North Shore highway past us and the work crews all came in.
“I cleaned rooms, cooked—god, I was a terrible cook; it’s a wonder someone didn’t die—but mostly Mama cooked and I waited table, and even little Mikey swept and bussed. The dining room had long wooden tables with benches that would fill up with working men. When we first opened, the tables were planks on sawhorses.
“A waitress didn’t need much memory back then; there wasn’t much on the menu: stew, fish, corned-beef hash, ham and eggs. What you needed was strong arms, an armor-plate ass—they’d pinch your backside every chance they got—and a temperament to take the kidding, because there was a lot of it. I could give it right back, as good as I got, but my father didn’t like me to. He wanted to keep me away from men, and I’d already decided I liked them.
“What the hell he wanted to keep me for was anybody’s guess. It was the middle of the Depression and we were a million miles from nowhere. We argued enough about it then, and sometimes more than argued. He raised his hand to me and to Mama, and to Mikey, more than once. Anyway, it didn’t matter: he didn’t know I was already crazy in love with a boy, Danny Gernsbach, an American from Michigan, who worked on the fishing boats. And I didn’t know that I was already carrying Danny’s child, though I figured it out soon enough.
“One Saturday night, one of the road crews came in for supper, their big night out in town, because they were in camp through the week. I didn’t notice Davey at first; it was busy and road crews were always a mixed bag anyway. Besides, Danny and the other fellas from his boat were there too, and I only had eyes for him. God, he was a sweet boy: high, wide and handsome.
“Anyway, the old hands on the road crew had a trick they’d play on the new guys, for initiation, I guess. The tables were covered with oilcloths that dropped over the sides. They’d curl the dropped part up to make a trough under the table. Someone at the end would pour water into it and they’d send it down into the lap of the new man, who wouldn’t see it coming. Then he’d yell, of course, and jump up and make a fuss. Some would be angry and some would laugh and some wouldn’t know what to do. But how you handled it put you in or out.
“Well, that night I was coming round with the coffeepot and I saw them start the trough and wink at me, and a second later there’s a shriek just like a girl’s and a big roar of laughter, and there’s your grandpa, leaping to his feet looking like he’s just wet himself. And naturally, they’re all watching to see what he’s going to do after that shriek. Except he was just a kid, and you could see he didn’t know what to do. He flushed to the roots of his hair and, I swear to god, for a second I thought he was going to cry— which would not have been a good idea, let me tell you. He was big, you understand, but all at once he just looked like this little child among all these rough men. Maybe it reminded me of Mikey, I don’t know, but my heart just went out to him. I didn’t know my own troubles yet. All I could think to do was toss him the dishtowel I had over my shoulder, wave the coffeepot and call to him, ‘They must like you. If they don’t, they do it with this!’ My first ad lib, and it brought the house down, if I do say so myself.
“And to give Davey credit—this was how I first knew he was special—he managed to pull himself together while they all laughed, and then he topped it. He slapped on a grin and said, ‘But if they really like you, I bet it’s beer!’ and that brought the house down again and he was in.
“Well, later he thanked me and it got so that every once in a while at night he’d sneak down from the camp and talk to me at the kitchen door. I knew he was sweet on me, but I felt like his big sister, and besides, I was crazy for Danny. David was just a kid and I could tell he was still scared and lonely up here, doing the bes
t he could. Once my father caught me talking to him and chased him off and then smacked me, but even that was good, because it kept him from suspecting about Danny.
“And then it all went south. I found out I was in the family way. I told Danny and he said we’d get married, right away, down in Michigan. And he meant it too. He was a good boy. He sent a wire home, saying we were coming. But we never went: Danny’s boat went out the next morning and there was an accident. He got tangled in a net and he drowned. They brought him back and buried him in the Jackfish graveyard.
“I thought I was going to die too, of grief for Danny and for me with this baby, and I couldn’t show it. I couldn’t tell Mama, though there was something, maybe just the way she looked at me, that told me she knew anyway. But I couldn’t take the risk, couldn’t have her involved. If my father had found out, there would have been no telling what he’d have done.
“Well, in the middle of all that, one night Davey came to the kitchen door, all excited. He said something about how he’d seen a plane flying over that morning and now he knew what he wanted to do: he wanted to fly. I was trying to keep everything in, but he saw I’d been crying and he stopped and asked what was wrong and it all came spilling out. The first thing he said was—and this is the kind of man he must have grown up to be—the first thing he said was, ‘I’ll marry you.’
“I can still see him there, looking in at me, his hands on the screen door, a big kid with big eyes. I don’t think he even needed to shave yet. I said, ‘Davey, that’s awful sweet, but you’re not even sixteen. You can’t marry me, and it wouldn’t be right anyway.’ And he said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, but I have to get away from here. I can’t stay.’ Because, I think, as soon as he’d said he was going to fly, at that moment I’d made up my mind to go. How I was going to do it, I had no idea. I had no money and no place to go, but now that I’d said it, I knew it was what I had to do.
“The next night, Davey was back at the kitchen door. He’d gotten an advance on his pay and he gave me everything he’d saved, all of it. He said I needed it more that he did. We both knew there was a westbound express that made a coaling stop in Jackfish after midnight. He promised he’d be at the station to see me off, and then he was gone.
“I put a few things in a little overnight case some guest had left behind. I kissed Mikey goodbye, even though he was sound asleep, and I slipped out. I waited in the shadows on the platform till the last second, but Davey never came. As we pulled out, I thought I saw someone running, but it was too late; I never got to give him a thank-you kiss goodbye.
“Davey’s money got me away. In Saskatoon, I bought a wedding ring in a pawnshop for seventy-five cents and wore it as soon as I started to show. I said I was Mrs. Danny Gernsbach. No one believed me when I said I was a widow, even though I thought I truly was. They all thought I was just another tramp who got what was coming to her. When the baby was born, a little girl, I called her Danielle. They all tried to persuade me to put her up for adoption, but I couldn’t let her go.
“Somehow I got Dani and me out to Vancouver, and then down to Seattle. I got a job slinging hash in a luncheonette there. I rented a room and the landlady looked after Dani sometimes and sometimes I took her to work.
“But there was never enough money, even for proper food, even working at a lunch counter. Everyone was scraping by. Dani took sick and I had to quit work to look after her. The medicine was expensive and so was the doctor. I did some things I’m not proud of…But the medicine didn’t help and Danielle died anyway. The next week I was wiping the counter at the luncheonette and wondering what the best way was to kill myself, when a fat man with an ugly tie came in and looked at me and said, ‘Turn to your right.’ I was in such a daze that I did it and just went on wiping. Then he said, ‘Kid, how’d you like to be in pictures?’ And that was the way I chose to kill Wanda Karpuski.
“As soon as I could, I started sending money to Mikey, along with that picture. Looks like my father got a hold of that. I never saw or spoke with any of them again, and I’ve never had a good man in love with me since. I used up my quota in Jackfish. I tried to come back, but the closest I got was buying that cabin on Lake Muskoka. Even that was too close, so I rented it out. I had no idea David was right across the lake.
“And I never thought I’d come back, until my granddaughter got as headstrong as I did and a young man asked me for a kiss, David’s kiss. Then I knew we were going to come here. So tomorrow we’ll finish things off. I’m here so she can help me to put a picture of his daughter on Danny’s grave. Then I’m going to give Spencer the kiss on the cheek that David never got. Then I’ll be done with it all.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The room stays quiet after Gloria Lorraine stops talking. Nobody moves. After a moment I hit the Stop button and GL sags in the couch. “You didn’t say ‘Cut,’” she whispers. Then AmberLea is beside her, holding her.
I go outside. It’s clouded over, but still not dark. The streetlights and the SUPERIOR MOTEL sign have come on though. I don’t know what to think, except, It’s all true. Which means, among other things, that we really were chased by mobsters. Almost out of habit, I look up and down the highway: no black Lincoln Navigators. That all seems a million years ago anyway.
I’m not sure what to feel either, except sad, somehow, and confused. To keep from thinking and feeling anymore, I swat away a couple of insects and check my cell for messages. I have to walk around to get a signal. Finally, down near the motel sign, I do. First I text Bun: almost dun. jackfish ghost town tomorrow morning. There’s another message from Deb, suggesting a restaurant in New York that Gloria Lorraine might like, near the AFI, which I know means American Film Institute. Maybe Jer will tell me what GL and I were doing there. My guess is some kind of interview. Jer has been spinning this one hard. I have to admit it’s not how I thought he’d take me disappearing off the face of the earth. Speaking of which, I wonder where he is. Maybe he’s in New York, faking it for us.
The signal has disappeared. I move toward the parking lot and get it back. I text Jer: thanx. Then I text him again: dun mon am. can u meet in Marathon ON Superior motel or I go to Buf? Now that it’s almost over, it won’t hurt to tell, and besides, it doesn’t sound like there’s a game plan yet for getting home. I wonder if he can get here by Monday morning from wherever he is. It’s not really like asking for a ride home from the mall. But right now it’s too much to wonder about.
That night I sleep in one of Little Mike’s kids’ rooms. I dream Jer and I are driving in the Caddy and the black SUV is catching up to us and no matter how hard I step on the gas we don’t go any faster. What makes it scarier is that somehow I know Grandpa is driving the SUV, except that he’s also with us in the Cadillac and he’s going to pour something in my lap and I don’t know if it’s beer or coffee.
Let’s just say it’s a weird night.
TWENTY- EIGHT
Monday morning comes early. It’s cloudy and gray, and it feels as if I haven’t slept at all. In the kitchen, Al is talking retail baking with Little Mike. They trade business cards. “I’ll be in touch,” says Al. “I know local works for you, but if we go national, you might want a few specialty items, you know?”
I have a piece of toast with peanut butter, make sure the camera is charged and wander outside with it and Mister Bones. AmberLea is stowing GL’s cooler in the trunk of the car, with the helium tank and all the bags of white powder.
“So,” I say, “today’s the day.”
She nods. I guess neither of us really knows what to say. I don’t anyway. AmberLea says, “I won’t be sorry to change my clothes. I wonder how we’re getting home. What do you think Al will do?”
“I dunno. I texted my dad last night and asked him for a ride. He could probably take you and GL too.”
“Oh. Good. Thanks.” She sighs. “I wonder what my mom is doing—besides freaking.” She pulls her phone out of her back pocket. I have completely rethough
t my position on her and tight jeans. They’re a definite plus. AmberLea waves her phone. “There’s about a million texts from her on here. I haven’t even looked at them. I’m kind of scared to.”
“Your grandma will look after it. She said she would, remember?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Well,” I say, “you can’t answer them now. The signal up here keeps disappearing. And anyway”—I wipe my peanut-buttery fingers on my jeans—“we have to get to Jackfish.”
Al and Little Mike come out of the house, helping GL. “You’re sure you remember the way?” Mike is saying. GL is nodding.
“Okay,” Mike says, “but it won’t look the same. It’s all overgrown now. Be careful walking. And don’t try for the town. Since the fire, it’s pretty grim. If you really want to go in there, I could take you in on the ATV.”
“I don’t want the town,” says GL, “I want the graveyard.”
Little Mike looks at Al and me and AmberLea. “Just be careful. I’d feel a lot better if you let me come along.”
“I have to do this myself,” says GL. “I’m a Jackfish girl. We’ll be back for lunch. Anyway, this isn’t your affair.”
“It’s my family,” says Mike.
GL eyes him. She nods. “I’ll give you that one. But I’m doing this my way.”
Mike sighs and smoothes one side of his silver ’do. “Fair enough. Tell you what. I’ve got to run over to Terrace this morning anyway, so follow me along to the Jackfish road now and I’ll meet you up at the top by the highway at, say, eleven thirty.”
“Done and done,” says GL. “Let’s go.”
We drive with the top up, following Mike west on Highway 17. Al is at the wheel and I’m riding shotgun, with AmberLea and GL in the back. Nobody says much. For half an hour, rock and trees and a couple of sort of villages roll by us, a few bugs whack the windshield, and then, up ahead, Little Mike’s arm is pointing left out his window, and there’s a road sign, green and white, reading Jackfish Road. This is it.
