The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  “You needn’t bother,” Mother said, and turned back to Dr. Urich. “There would be two conditions on the gift. First, it must always be used as the president’s residence, or be given back to the family.”

  Dr. Urich said, “I think I can assure you that this president and future presidents will be grateful and proud to reside in such a grand home.”

  Mother nodded. “And there will be a memorial fund to help defray the expenses of running the house, in addition to the endowment you and I spoke to aid the president in maintaining his own academic research.”

  Dr. Urich leaned back against the window sill. He seemed out of breath and beyond speech. “That would,” he finally managed, “be quite generous of you.”

  “There is another condition.” Mother said. “The house must be called the Catherine Wakefield Memorial Hall. In honor of my late daughter, a proud graduate of Loudon.”

  This last made Dr. Urich pause in his expressions of gratitude. After a moment, he went to my mother and bent so that he was almost kneeling before her. In a low, trembling voice, he said, “It would be our great honor to memorialize your daughter in such a way.”

  Mother nodded in her magisterial way. “So, Mr. Wampler, please modify the will to create the two endowment funds, and bequeath the house and all its contents to the college”

  “All its contents?” Now Laura had given up entirely on discretion, and was regarding Mother with outrage.

  “Yes, dear,” Mother continued calmly. “It wouldn’t be fair to expect the college to pay to furnish a house that is meant as a gift.”

  I wanted to protest, but couldn’t. I told myself I didn’t want the house, didn’t want the responsibility, and that the college would doubtlessly make better use of it. But I couldn’t believe Mother would have made that choice, when all three of us were willing to take on the responsibility of the house.

  Unwillingly, however, I understood. We would take on the responsibility. Dr. Urich was grateful. He was beyond grateful. I could hardly blame Mother for preferring his response to ours. But that didn’t keep me from feeling—oh, desolate.

  Theresa was still calm, however, and asked, “So, Dr. Urich, do you have a family large enough to fill this house?”

  The college president rose quickly. “I have a son. He lives with his mother in Maryland— but he visits. But I have no anticipation of living in the house, as I’m sure Mrs. Wakefield will quite outlive my tenure as president.”

  Mother considered this. “We must consider alternatives. I’m not certain how long I’ll be able to maintain the house, and might want to move into a smaller facility. If so, then I’ll be transferring it to a trust. Mr. Wampler, you can work out such details, I’m sure. The Catherine Wakefield Memorial Hall trust. It’s best to start planning early.”

  Laura rose and went to the wide window overlooking the town square. “Well, Mother, now that everything’s settled to your satisfaction, I think I’ll go. I see they’re getting ready to dedicate the new police lockup. That passes for high entertainment here in Wakefield, so I can’t miss it.” She thanked Mr. Wampler, murmured well done to Dr. Urich, and left the office.

  There didn’t seem much point in further discussion. I stood and slung my handbag over my shoulder. “I’m having lunch with Janie and Linda, and then I have to go get that part for my computer. Would you like me to drop you and Theresa at home first?”

  Dr. Urich immediately claimed chauffeur honors, and offered lunch first—the least he could do, considering. But Theresa said she’d rather walk. We left together, silent as we went down the marble stairs to the street. I wanted to ask her if she really meant it when she spoke of coming home to live in the old house, if that meant she was leaving the convent. But that would mean calling attention to what Mother had just done to all of us.

  Across the town square was the shiny addition to police headquarters, and in front of that was a temporary stage, where a band was setting up. Laura was headed over there, strolling across the courthouse lawn with that carefree grace of hers. Theresa glanced at her, then over at the crowd in front of the new building. I could almost feel her shrink back into the doorway.

  Then she surprised me again. She took a deep breath, and said, “I think I’ll go over and listen to the band. I’ll see you back at the house later.”

  I almost went after her—to keep her company, to protect her from the crowd. But that would be too intrusive. So I watched her walk away, her back straight, her stride purposeful, the light breeze teasing at her long gray skirt. How brave she was, I thought, in her own way, when so much of the world was a challenge to her.

  What a contrast to my own cowardice.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Linda and Janie and I never changed. At least, that’s what we told ourselves. We still looked the same, we still listened to the same music, and we still had the same friendship. We made this possible by always lunching at the same place, the old Olympia Candy Kitchen around the corner from the bank.

  So we sat under the old slow brass ceiling fans, which did little to cool the air, but did stir the dust motes glittering in the noon sunlight. Of course we took our traditional oak booth, the one across from the glass display cabinets, so we could gaze at the handmade chocolates in their neat little plastic bins and discuss which we’d buy if we weren’t on a diet. And we ordered the same food we ordered in high school—chili-cheese fries to share (no calories in shared food, everyone knew that), burgers all round, and sundaes. I got the Mountaineer Special (marshmallow crème, hot fudge, and walnuts in syrup over vanilla), Linda went for the Loudon Loaded (strawberry ice cream and strawberry syrup), and Janie stayed loyal to the high school with the Wakefield Warriors Wonder (chocolate ice cream, caramel sauce, and butterscotch bits).

  If the Candy Kitchen ever went out of business, our friendship was doomed.

  Linda had waited tables here back in high school, and still acted as if she owned the place. Well, at least she felt entirely justified in bussing our table and going behind the counter for some dishcloths and hot water. She brought one back for each of us, wet and faintly steaming, so we could wipe the sticky sauces off our hand and clean up the ice cream dribbles on the scarred oak tabletop. “So . . . ” she said, “how’s it working out at the church? Any sign of a schism ahead?”

  We were, by virtue of email and five cents a minute long distance, still intimately acquainted with each other’s complicated lives. Except, of course, I hadn’t told them about my mother. Or the college president and his encroachment. Or my sister leaving the convent. Or Tom and his late-arriving son.

  But work was a safe subject, and it was easy to move the focus to Janie, who had been appointed acting principal last year when the old principal suddenly died. Linda and I teased her about now being the disciplinarian instead of the disciplined. But of course, what none of us could ever admit aloud was that we never were the ones being disciplined—we’d always been the good girls, the ones who stayed after school to help the principal stuff envelopes, the ones who won the perfect attendance awards and the school service medals.

  It was sort of sad, looking back on those wasted high school years.

  Janie was just as conscientious as ever, planning on raising the graduation rate and the percentage of students going on to college—an easier task now that the coalmines weren’t hiring high school dropouts, or anyone else. “Kids might as well stay in school these days. Staves off 40 hours a week flipping burgers for another year or so,” she said, holding up her glass to signal for another iced tea.

  “You get any kids going to Loudon?” I asked casually.

  “Loudon? Oh, sure. Your mom endowed two scholarships for the high school, so we can count on two going every year. And I have to give it to that new president.” Janie absently stirred three envelopes of sweetener into her tea. “He hasn’t forgotten the town like the last one did. He’s recruiting locally, now that enrollment’s fallen off. Gone back to having his summer science camps for my kids, and person
ally takes groups of them on a tour of the college every fall. Free tickets to the college soccer games, that sort of thing. But there’s this new gender gap. Boys are much less likely now to go on to college, so all the ones who went to Loudon are girls. And most of the top students head up to WVU.”

  “Anyone with any ambition gets out,” Linda said sourly. She’d gotten out for awhile, starting an insurance brokerage in Pittsburgh. But her marriage broke up, and she couldn’t afford to house three kids in the city. One advantage to West Virginia—housing was very cheap. “I don’t mean you, Janie,” she added hastily. “You could have made it anywhere.”

  Janie acknowledged this with a nod. “Probably. And I’d probably have been principal five years ago somewhere else, where I didn’t have to wait for old Heath Johnson to finally choke on chalk dust and die.”

  I glanced around quickly, to make sure that the sixteen-year-old waitress was safely behind the counter. But I supposed this sort of candor was what made Janie popular with the adolescent set. Just in case Janie really had been offended by Linda’s bitter remark, I said, “You came back to help the community. That was great. My mother used to sigh and say, at least Janie knows what she owes her hometown.”

  She shrugged. “I like the place. And I went to college here. I must be rooted here.”

  I considered Dr. Urich yet again. I shouldn’t think of him as a threat—Mother was just using him to punish us, or whatever her purpose was. But he still felt like a rival. “Was Urich teaching there when you went to Loudon?”

  “Oh, yes, he was head of the life-sciences department. After I graduated, he wrote some major book on some plant, and got snapped up by—I don’t know, Johns Hopkins? Maryland maybe? A major promotion.”

  “I wonder why he came back here,” Linda said. She made here sound like a bad place to be. “If he was somewhere big somewhere else. Where they don’t get 200 inches of snow every winter.”

  “Maybe he likes to ski,” I suggested. “Plus they brought him back as president. I mean, that’s a promotion too, right?”

  Janie shook her head. “Only job worse than high school principal, we say in the education trade, is college president. They get canned quickly if they don’t bring in the bucks. At least I don’t have to do fundraising.”

  I decided not to tell her how easy fundraising was proving to be for President Urich. But Linda was studying me. It was hard to get away with anything with old friends.

  “What’s your interest in Urich? You’re married—can’t be that you want to date him.”

  Offense is the best defense. “Why? Do you?”

  Linda ducked her head. “Well, you know, I just happened to meet him when he spoke to the Rotary Club. I thought, you know, I might give him a quote on liability insurance or something, for the college. I know he’s too old for me—must be close to sixty—but he’s well-kept, and it’s not like there are that many eligible men my age here. So I took him out to lunch afterwards.”

  “So?”

  “Interested in the insurance. Not in me. I mean, he was nice and all that, but he did not pick up any of my signals.” She shook her head decisively. “Must be gay.”

  Janie and I exchanged grins. Linda had the benefit of a cast-iron ego. “He was married before,” I pointed out.

  “So? He’s a college president. He’s got to at least pretend to be conventional. Anyway, no hope there, if you were planning on getting rid of Tom and going after him.” She paused. “And if you’re planning on getting rid of Tom, I have first dibs.”

  Fortunately, she meant that only rhetorically, so I ignored it. “Dr. Urich has become a great favorite of my mother’s, you see.”

  “Aha!” Janie said. “That’s the problem, Linda. You’re way too young for him.”

  “And way too poor,” I couldn’t help but mutter.

  “So that’s what’s bothering you,” Janie said. “That’s why you’re looking so grim.”

  I glanced at my reflection in the candy display case. I didn’t look grim. I looked anxious, which was worse. But better they should blame it all on Dr. Urich than start asking about Tom again. “It’s no big deal. My mother has always been a major supporter of the college. Naturally the new president is going to—to, uh—”

  “Cultivate her?” Linda put in. “He is a botanist, right?”

  “Pay attention to her,” I said austerely. Now they were going to think that Mother was in thrall to the president. Well, I knew they wouldn’t gossip about it, except to each other.

  Clumsily, I turned the subject to what was really obsessing me, that long-lost summer. “Gee, Janie, it’s just so amazing. Principal. I remember Linda and I were sitting right here when you burst in that day and said you’d been offered that first teaching job.”

  “Yeah, you seemed happy about it, for some reason,” Linda said. “Little did you know you’d signed on for life, Janie girl.”

  “What year was that?” I mused, as if I didn’t know very well. As if it wasn’t my whole purpose here.

  “1990,” Janie said promptly. “The summer after college graduation. And the beginning of the great career of Wakefield High’s greatest principal.”

  “Nothing great happened to me that summer,” Linda said gloomily. “Except we got to go to the Bon Jovi concert, back when Jon Bon Jovi still had big hair.”

  “I don’t remember that,” I said, trying to place Bon Jovi somewhere in the middle of that depressing span of time.

  “That’s because you wouldn’t go,” Janie recalled. “It was in DC, and you had this dumb idea that you might run into Tom there, and you’d be humiliated. Like Tom, of all people, would go to a Bon Jovi concert.”

  “Yeah, he was more, you know, the Cure type, or the Pogues,” Linda said. “But that’s right, Ellen stayed home and moped, while we got to wait outside the club by the band’s bus, and we even met Jon.”

  Janie sighed. “Just think. If we’d just given in and become groupies that night, we could actually have a great sordid memory to share with Ellen now.”

  “We could make one up. She wasn’t there. She won’t know we’re lying.”

  “I’m sure you would have told me about it before this,” I commented.

  “We were too ashamed,” Janie said promptly. “Plus we knew you’d be so jealous you probably would have hated us.”

  “And then you wouldn’t have invited us to your wedding.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said with an attempt at a laugh. “I got married the next month, didn’t I?”

  “Trumping our night with Jon real good there,” Janie retorted with mock bitterness.

  Linda said, “Just as well we didn’t tell you about Jon. And Richie Sambora. I forgot about him. This way, we still got to be your bridesmaids, which was pretty amazing, considering you have—had—three sisters.”

  Right. It had been the hastiest of weddings—okay, so I was afraid Tom would change his mind, and he was afraid my mother would change my mind—and with only a week’s notice, I couldn’t get my sisters back into town. Cathy was somewhere down in North Carolina, hiking the Appalachian Trail. And Laura was out in Montana, playing Sacajawea in a summer outdoor theater production. Theresa was home, of course, but she decided she didn’t want to be junior bridesmaid—she was the only twelve-year-old girl I ever knew who wasn’t into weddings.

  Hmm. Whoever put my name on that birth certificate had to have known Tom had recently married me. Someone who knew Tom—well enough, at least, to have a baby with him—and also at least knew about me. Maybe I was projecting, but I sensed hostility there. Someone meant to hurt me or get me back? But who?

  I could, of course, lay out the whole dilemma to my friends. But I couldn’t. It was too humiliating—not just the belated appearance of the love child, but what all this said about my marriage . . . and about me, still holding on to a man who refused to be honest with me. So instead I tried subterfuge. “Boy, was I generous to you guys. I could have chosen a couple sorority sisters instead.”

 
; “There were a few of them at the wedding, I think,” Linda said. “Do you remember, they sang a serenade to you at the reception? I mean, it was sort of creepy. Like they’d rehearsed.”

  “Well, we did rehearse,” I said. “We learned songs for every occasion. And that one was the one we’d sing at a sorority sister’s wedding. Sort of giving the bride away.”

  Linda and Janie had never been the sorority sort, and I could tell this nugget of Tri Delt tradition amused them. So I added, a bit defensively, “It’s a sweet custom, I think.”

  “Oh, yeah, real sweet,” Janie said. “The whole time, I remember, that crinkly blonde-haired one was making eyes at Tom. I was about to walk over there and smack her.”

  “You mean Tansy Milhone?” Tansy was the only one I knew who actually used those awful crimping irons on her hair. And it was true, she did occasionally make a play for Tom, but mostly, I thought, to aggravate me. “You think,” I asked slowly, “that she wanted him?”

  “Oh, who knows. She was such an airhead anyway,” Janie said. “Tom didn’t give her a second look. I’d had about four glasses of champagne by then, and I was ready to smack him too if he responded to her. But he only had eyes for you, and all that stuff.”

  With something like relief, I acquitted Tansy. Mad as I was at Tom, I couldn’t believe he’d be as carefree as he was that day, if we were being serenaded by his former bedmate. That also eliminated the other two sorority sisters at the wedding. There were, however, a couple dozen other Tri Delts unaccounted for—all of them on my Christmas card list, getting my cheery little annual letter with its news of Tom and Sarah and all the events of our lives.

  That mailing list was on my laptop, which was sitting at the house, waiting for parts.

  “Are you okay?” Janie asked gently.

  I gave myself a mental shake and managed a smile. “Oh, you know, just remembering back when we were all so young and excited about life—”

  “And Cathy was still with you,” Linda said. “I suppose even happy memories make you remember losing her.”