by Lisa Wingate
When I entered the house, Mother was in the kitchen, sipping coffee at the breakfast table. The uncs were nowhere to be seen. That was fortunate for me, because the person I really needed was Mom. Alone.
“The delivery man usually comes around three,” she offered, just as pleasantly as if we sat down to coffee every morning. “It’s a good thing today is Friday. They deliver on Fridays.”
“What?” As usual, we were on two different astral planes. Opening the cabinet to search for a coffee cup, I noted that all the dishes were still in place. In fact, everything in the kitchen was more or less where it had been sixteen years ago. There was no sign of an estate auction having taken place or the packing up of any personal items.
“Your purse,” Mom answered pleasantly. “I’m sure you’re missing your cell phone and all those gadgets.”
I poured a cup of coffee and sat down. “I just hope some guy in Hackensack isn’t stealing my identity.”
Looking out the window, Mom sighed, as if my presence were a black cloud over her morning. “Terrible, to be in your twenties and be such a cynic. Have a little faith in people, Heather. He was a very kind man. A good spirit. I could tell it when he called on the phone.” Her eyes, a soft, mossy color in the morning light, turned my way, filled with disappointment.
“I just wish you’d told him to take my purse to the nearest police station, or the bus company. Someone official.” Maybe I was being cynical, but losing your ID, your money, and your iPhone a thousand miles from home was about the most vulnerable feeling in the world. I didn’t do vulnerable well, especially not in Moses Lake. “And I’m thirty-four, Mom. Clay is the one in his twenties.”
She lowered her head into her hand, groaning. “Ugh, don’t remind me. Where does the time go, anyway?” Pausing, she looked at me as if I were a stranger she was trying to cipher. “Thirty-four . . .” Her brows drew together.
In some families, I suppose it might have seemed strange, even offensive, for your mother to not know how old you were, but it felt normal enough for us. Mother could have discussed any writer from Aristotle to Maya Angelou ad nauseam, but she couldn’t tell you how old her daughter was.
“Seems like yesterday we were here.” She breathed the words softly, turning to the window again. There was a melancholy tone to her voice that drilled deep into me and lit a fuse I feared had the power to reach the bedrock of my soul and blow things apart. “The four of us,” she added.
I felt sick, then angry. All the emotions from that year came back—every day of watching her slowly fade after my father’s death, of wondering whether she would disappear completely, pass through the bed sheets by osmosis, and be gone. Every long night of listening to her moan in her tranquilizer-induced stupor and call my father’s name, until my baby brother, frightened and distraught, came into my room and crawled into bed with me.
I felt the heat of teenage anger, long dormant, volcanic, rising to the surface, hot and fluid. I hated my mother all over again. “Why are you here?” The words were sharp. “I want the truth.”
She swirled her coffee in the cup. “I just . . . needed to be. Here.”
“Why is Clay here?” The absolute worst thing for Clay was to be offered one more distraction from finishing law school and beginning a stable, self-supporting life. Didn’t Mom ever get tired of paying his way? Didn’t she get tired of rescuing him from his mishaps—wrecked cars, tuition payments that came up short because of impromptu ski trips he couldn’t afford, the time he missed taking his finals because campus police found rolling papers and a Baggie of marijuana in his dorm room. . . . He claimed those things were left there by a friend, but still. He wouldn’t ever grow up if Mom didn’t stop treating him like a kid.
She smiled, even laughed a little, staring down at her coffee, reading the blobs of creamer like an oracle. “Oh, Clay loves to come here. He comes all the time.”
“What do you mean he comes all the time?” Clay and I might not have kept in touch particularly well, but I did have some idea of where he was and when. He’d never mentioned spending time in Moses Lake.
“Roger lives here some of the time,” Mom said simply.
I studied her—took in the loose-fitting plaid shirt, the khaki pants that were just as likely to have come from Goodwill as L.L.Bean, the carelessly plaited brown hair, tinseled with strands of gray. She was dressed in her usual garb for rambling around the English department, discussing quatrains, iambic pentameter, and Haiku as an expression of self. Her appearance was normal enough this morning, but maybe she really was having some sort of a breakdown. “Roger the dog?”
“Do you know another Roger?”
I bit my lower lip. If I’d had my money, ID, iPhone, and car keys, I would have walked out the door right then. Even the prospect of being project manager on the Proxica facility design wasn’t worth losing my mind. I was starting to rue the day that Mother had contacted me to ask if I could remember where the deeds to my father’s portion of the family farm had been stored after his death. She was practically gleeful at the news that Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley were finally ready to sell out. Shortly after that conversation, I’d happened upon an article in the Proxica shareholders’ magazine that said the company was planning major expansions in Texas. I’d asked Richard to quietly make some inquiries, and that had started the ball rolling. I should have known it would swerve badly off course and compact me into the soil before the deal was done.
The insanity of this sudden shift, combined with the ghosts in this town, was too much to bear. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t sit in this house, talking about Roger the dog over coffee. “I want. To know. What. Is going on. There isn’t any competing offer for the real estate, is there? No one in their right minds would pay the price Richard got for us—not with the economy the way it is. Even if we hang on to the property until the economy improves, we’d never get that kind of money.”
Her eyelids held calmly at half-mast, regarding me with a measure of coolness that hurts coming from your mother. “Which would make you wonder why this broker is offering such a sum, wouldn’t it? Presumably he has to then resell the property for an even higher price. Who, exactly, would he sell it to, if the price we’re getting is so astronomically out of line?”
“Why do you care?” I threw up my hands, let them slap to the tabletop, and affected the look of being completely and thoroughly offended. But an inconvenient smidge of conscience landed on my shoulders, squawking in my ear like a magpie. I had been keeping secrets, too. But that was part of the deal with the broker. I wasn’t at liberty to divulge any information. “When we started this process, you couldn’t wait to be out from under the place. You were tired of having to keep up with the accounting on the farmland and figure out how to divide up the property-tax payments with Uncle Herb and Uncle Charley. You said you wanted to be able to give Clay and me the money from the land, because it was our inheritance. You said that Clay needed the money to pay off some loans. What, exactly, about that has changed?”
Pausing to take a bite of her English muffin, she tipped her chin up and chewed slowly. “We’ve rethought it, simply enough. Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley have owned the farm all their lives, for one thing. They and your grandfather grew up there.” Her gaze met mine in a way that seemed intended to stab. “And so did your father.”
Emotion balled in my throat and dripped downward, burning like acid, threatening to eat away the steely coating of anger and morph it into something raw and unpredictable. My father died there, I thought. There were two houses on the farm—the two-story white clapboard that had been built by my grandparents in the forties, and the modest stone house beside it. The basement of that little stone house was the scene of the accidental shooting that had changed all our lives. Among other memories, the question of whether the word accidental really applied haunted that house. It haunted me.
Even now, sitting here at Harmony Shores, I could feel the proximity of that place, fifteen miles down the rural highw
ay. I could feel the house where my father’s life had ended, where my nightmares took me again and again. I’d never set foot on the farm after the week my father died, and I didn’t want to now. I just wanted that place to be gone. Maybe then the nightmares would stop.
Stay focused. Don’t let her get to you. Don’t let any of this get to you. “Uncle Charley and Uncle Herbert aren’t the problem here, Mom, and you know it. Both of them realize that they have to move closer to Donny. This is about you and Clay, and as much work as I’ve put in on this deal, I deserve the truth.”
She sent a narrow look my way, her lips tightening. I’d finally broken through the layer of serenity, found a nerve. “It’s always about work for you, isn’t it? Your whole life is about work.” She frowned as if she simultaneously pitied me and wondered how I could possibly be her offspring. “You’ll have to talk to your brother about it. Clay can explain everything more clearly than I can. He has a better business understanding.”
Business understanding? My brother? Clay couldn’t even be counted upon not to end up stuck out in the middle of nowhere on a bicycle, with pneumonia. “What business?” Maybe Clay thought he was going to somehow arrange a competing offer on the property—something on which he could turn a dime, perhaps. But as textbook brilliant as my brother was, he was out of his league in this situation. There was no better deal out there to be had. “I don’t want to ask Clay. I’m asking you.”
Mom stood up, took her coffee cup to the sink, calmly rinsed it out, and squirted a little dish soap into it. “Simply put, we’re considering our options, just as I told you on the phone. I know you thought that by coming here you could change things, Heather, but you can’t.”
“What options? What?” I threw up my hands, shook them in the air like a crazy woman. I have never in my life, personal or professional, met anyone else who could bring out that side of me.
“Well, if you must know, your brother thinks we should keep the place in the family.” She smiled as if I should be happy to hear of Clay’s epiphany. “He’s interested in living at the old farm. The renter who was staying in the two-story house has moved out. The place is empty and available. Clay adores the old tractors and the feeling of being close to the land. It suits him. I’ve never seen him so happy.”
“What in the world is Clay going to do to support himself financially, living on what’s left of a dairy farm, fifteen miles outside in the country?” A sarcastic laugh tailed the question. I couldn’t help it. The idea of any of us living on that farm again made me sick. The little stone house had been locked up since my father’s death, and the two-story clapboard next door had been occupied by a series of renters over the years.
Mother shrugged, her shoulders stiff. She hated being challenged. She was accustomed to reigning supreme over underlings and dewy-eyed graduate students. “He is looking into taking over the restaurant and the canoe business. It worked well enough for Uncle Charley all these years. He made enough of a living, and . . .”
My head spun as Mom went on, the insanity growing exponentially, like the 3-D virtual image of a skyscraper, building layer upon layer from the electronic blueprint, the windows and doors filling in, the walls extruding and becoming real. But this entire building was leaning off-kilter. My mother was supposedly considering moving to Moses Lake, too.
“I’m ready for a change,” she asserted. “I’ve been looking for an opportunity to step off the carousel of teaching and lecturing. I could pursue my writing, maybe teach some classes online. These days there are opportunities, and with my credentials . . . Well, it’s perfect, really. Uncle Herb doesn’t want to leave his house, and this way he wouldn’t have to. I could live here in Harmony House with the uncs, and Clay could live out at the farm. It’s crossed my mind that Harmony House would make a lovely bed-and-breakfast. It’s already licensed for public occupancy.”
“Public . . . what . . .” I stammered. “You have got to be kidding.” Bracing my palms on the table, I stood up. There are times when, despite all attempts at keeping things at a rational level with my mother, the fact is that if we stay in the same room any longer, a Jerry Springer moment will erupt. Chairs will fly, claws will come out, and hair will be pulled.
I was conscious of some sort of emotional fault line giving way within me, the tectonic plates sliding and making the ground shake. One more nugget of craziness on my mother’s side of the divide, and things would break wide open, allowing ugliness of epic proportion to spew forth. The only thing to do in a moment like that is walk away before chaos breaks out, and keep walking for however long it takes.
There is indeed, perhaps, no better way to hold communion with the sea than sitting in the sun on the veranda of a fisherman’s cafe.
—Joseph W. Beach
(via Pop Dorsey, proprietor, Waterbird Bait and Grocery)
Chapter 6
The entire conversation had repeated twice in my head by the time I found myself at the picnic grounds behind Lakeshore Community Church. Doves fluttered from branch to branch overhead, their voices incongruously sweet, waves lapped at the shore, and squirrels dashed about gathering leftover pecans as I paced between the picnic tables, muttering and hissing like an alley cat caught in a box.
The situation with my mother and my brother was crazy, even for them. Mom was hardly suited to running a bed-and-breakfast in the country. Who would want to stay in a former funeral home anyway? And Clay had no way of getting the money together to buy Uncle Charley’s restaurant and the canoe-rental business.
Unless . . . unless Mom was bankrolling it with whatever was left of the nest egg that had come from my father’s life insurance. She’d hated it when Clay left with the disaster relief team. She was scared to death something would happen to him. Now that he was back, was this her way of trying to make sure he didn’t wander off to the far parts of the globe again? Was she going to tie him down with fried catfish and canoes? All the money he’d borrowed and not paid back, all his starts and stops in law school were forgotten, and Mom was ready to take care of him, just like always?
Why was it always so easy for him? Why could Clay do whatever he wanted—consume her funds, consume her energy, wander aimlessly through his life—yet remain the object of her adoration? Why didn’t I ever get that kind of consideration? Why did she criticize my life while approving of his, no matter what he did? It had always been this way. From the beginning, I was Dad’s and Clay was hers. But Dad was gone, and I was on the outside looking in, while Mom and Clay flitted through life, two birds of a feather.
Tears came out of nowhere, and I sank onto one of the picnic benches. Trish was right—I’d be better off if I could stop expecting things from my mother. But no matter how old you get, no matter how hard you try, you can’t give up wanting your mother to love you. Somehow, though, I had to find a way to let go of that hope, that expectation. It was hollowing me out little by little, like water dripping on stone.
Taking a breath, I swallowed hard and pushed the tears away. Our family relationships were complicated, confused, upside-down—and they always would be. I had to learn to work from that basis of knowledge. Given a little time, Mother would come down to earth and see that Clay running the restaurant and her turning the funeral home into a bed-and-breakfast was a pipe dream. Surely, I could find ways to help open her eyes and get her to Seattle before the broker offer on the property expired. I could still salvage this thing and save the uncs from certain disaster. . . .
“A little brisk out here for a picnic.” A voice from behind startled me, and I jerked upright, feeling like I’d been caught someplace I shouldn’t be. But I knew why I was there. I felt close to my father in this place. One of the last things we’d done together was go to Sunday morning service. I was cranky about it, of course. The pastor was boring and the music old-fashioned. There were no projection screens. There was no five-piece band rocking out modern worship music, like we had in our church back home. In tiny Lakeshore Community Church, there was only the pastor
droning on while babies made noise, the casserole ladies gave me disapproving looks, and Mama B sang off-key, her voice crackling high above the rest.
I glanced over my shoulder, expecting the pastor I remembered, the one who’d tried to placate me with the usual platitudes as I struggled to comprehend the loss of my father. Instead, a thirty-something man, tall and lanky, with a thin, hawkish face, was headed down the hill.
“Want to come inside?” he asked, thumbing over his shoulder with an amiable smile.
I stood up, the back of my legs now fully chilled from sitting on the frosty stone bench. “No, I’m fine. I just . . .” His gaze met mine, and for an instant I had the weirdest urge to tell him everything. He seemed like the sort who would listen. I wondered if he knew my brother and my mother. Maybe I could gain some information about how long Clay had been hanging around town. I wiped my eyes and introduced myself. “Heather Hampton. I used to live here. I was just taking a walk around town, remembering.”
His face brightened, and he held my hand captive between both of his for a moment. “Reverend Hay. Good to meet you. Any relation to the Harmony Shores Hamptons—Charley and Herbert?” I noted that he didn’t mention my mother or my brother.
“My great uncles,” I answered.
“We’re sure going to miss them around here. Moses Lake won’t be the same without the Hampton brothers. Tell your uncles I’ll get by to see them before they go. I’m a little behind. Been gone three weeks on a mission trip with my fiancée’s church.”
