“Okay, okay,” Charlie muttered, backpedaling a bit. “So it’s not too old, I guess. But you have to admit, that really is a random spot for meeting the woman who torpedoed Grammie’s engagement.”
“Granted,” I replied. “And it seems the man in question is no longer with us, but Miz Annabelle still likes to rock to racy britches.” I giggled.
“That’s too much,” Charlie said, on her own fit of giggles. “So you think she’ll tell you?”
“Actually, I don’t think it’ll take much persuading,” I said with a confidence I felt down to my toes.
“Good,” she said, suddenly sounding a bit sad. “I wish I could be there to hear it all.”
The devilish grin on my face was wiped away by the melancholy that I felt creeping in.
“Me, too, Charlie. I wish you were here.”
“Promise to tell me everything?”
“Every last little bit,” I swore.
Annabelle’s Facebook page was quite the flurry of activity. I’m always amazed at just how much time people can spend on social media—Check out what I had for breakfast… I’m trying this shade of lipstick… My dog did the cutest thing…
All very fascinating and clearly relevant to the world at large—so much more so to their waiting public and adoring fans.
Still, it did come in handy when you were trying to get a bead on someone’s personality and social habits. Kind of like observing monkeys in the wild, sometimes.
Fortunately, Annabelle’s page wasn’t overrun with selfies of her holding breakfast bowl aloft or pouting at the camera, but she did keep the feed going. And apparently, she was giving ABC a good tongue-lashing for something that had happened today on Good Morning America. Many comments and “Likes” ensued.
The number of friends she had was staggering—although, as old as she was, it certainly wasn’t unlikely that she truly knew most of them. Especially since most of these friends were her contemporaries. Further adding to my list of revelations was the sheer volume of the senior set who seemed to be keeping social media busier than a Catholic confessional after Fat Tuesday in the French Quarter.
Annabelle was quite the social butterfly, if the photos on her page were anything to go by. She was on four different committees at her church, a proud member of the Junior League—surprise, surprise—on the board of trustees for both the Hampton Historical and Genealogical Societies, and a lifetime supporter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Upcoming events she was inviting everyone to included a church bazaar to raise funds for the local women’s shelter and the youth group’s mission trip to Haiti.
I gawked at my computer screen.
All this, at her age?
I scratched my head, wondering how on Earth she managed such a taxing schedule. I was tired just looking at it.
Her Twitter feed was just as frenzied, boasting 1,945 followers. My eyes bulged at the number.
The woman was truly impressive.
Tiny, but very, very impressive.
Obviously, that iPhone of hers was on fire; it seemed as though she was tweeting about something or other every hour, on the hour, uploading pics and posting comments at a rate that would rival even the most Twitter-obsessed tween. Still, she somehow managed not to be annoying. In fact, most of what she posted was really interesting. Some of it was even helpful, like tips on how to get strawberry preserve stains out of tweed and quick fixes for a headache, all boiled down into 140 characters or less.
Simply amazing.
I hesitated a moment before I picked up my cell, the age and outdated-ness of it glaringly obvious as I remembered Annabelle’s sparkly piece of Apple’s latest ingenuity.
I was going to do this. I was seriously going to do this, I resolved. It was the only way to get the details on what had happened all those years ago. True, Grammie had countless friends and a handful of family members who had probably been around then, but I really wasn’t comfortable putting any of them in that position of being the one to spill the story. Especially if this ended up being something that Grammie and Grandpa had asked them not to talk about.
Like, ever. And especially not to any of us.
I tapped the icon next to her contact info and held my breath as the line began to ring.
It seemed like an eternity before she answered.
“Hello?” Her voice on the phone was just as vibrant as her personality.
“Hi, Annabelle, it’s Dellie. Merry Samuelson’s granddaughter?”
“Wonderful to hear from you, Dellie! I was hoping you’d call!” There wasn’t even the barest hint of insincerity in her words.
“Oh, good. So I’m not bothering you, then?” I asked.
“Hardly. When you get to be my age, a phone call is a lovely thing. Most of the time, anyway,” she allowed.
With the social calendar she was maintaining, I had a teeny-tiny bit of trouble imagining that she was hard up for phone calls, but I certainly wasn’t going to argue the point.
“Well,” I began, feeling unsure of myself and hoping that it wasn’t obvious by the tone of my voice. “I was calling to see if you’d like to have coffee sometime this week, if you’re not too busy.”
“I would love that, my dear!” she answered without hesitation.
I hadn’t anticipated such an enthusiastic response, and I was even thinking she might tell me she’d have to consult her schedule and get back to me.
“Would tomorrow work for you?” she asked.
“Tomorrow?” I repeated, trying to recall if Grandpa had mentioned any plans for tomorrow. “I think tomorrow would be okay,” I said after a slight delay, having come up with no reason not to.
And then I remembered my lack of transportation. Grandpa’s very logical solution had been simply that he could drive me anywhere I wanted to go. Now that he was technically retired, he made his own schedule for his whatever construction projects going on and was more than willing to play chauffeur, but I still wasn’t so sure that was the best option. Probably it would behoove me to bite the bullet and look into a car rental. One of my uncles lived only a few minutes away, but I doubted that he had a spare set of wheels to lend me. And while I could ask the neighbor across the street, who had lived there as long as my grandparents had been in this house, if I could borrow one of her grandchildren’s bikes, that would only do for relatively short distances.
Ouch. Renting a car for a whole month was bound to be expensive, but at the moment, I didn’t see any way around it. I decided to push the thought to the back of my mind and come back to it later.
“I don’t have a car, Annabelle, so I’ll have to see if Grandpa can drop me off,” I trailed off, feeling like an idiot for not having thought of this part of the plan to meet with her. How had I been so shortsighted?
“Oh, pish,” she said, “no need to bother your grandfather with that. I can come on by and pick you up; don’t you worry.”
My eyes narrowed, and I felt my stomach tighten. The woman was itty-bitty and pushing ninety years old… How did she manage to even see over the steering wheel? Did she sit on phone books? And really, how was her vision? Suddenly, the idea of borrowing a bicycle seemed much more appealing that it had initially.
Annabelle must have sensed my hesitation, because her next words seemed like an attempt to offer reassurance. “I may be old, child, but my eye doctor says I have better eyesight than a hawk, and my driving record is cleaner than a surgeon’s hands,” her raspy voice insisted.
I blinked, letting the information sink in. Not even mine was that good, and she was almost three times my age. That was a really, really long time to maintain such a pristine driving record. And comparing our eyesight? Last time I’d been to the ophthalmologist, he’d shaken his head in sympathetic wonderment at my spectacular optical deficiencies.
I kept silent, knowing I didn’t have a leg to stand on when it came to questioning her ability to drive a car. Out of the two of us, she definitely had more going for her than I did.
�
��I’m an early riser, so does morning work for you?” Annabelle asked, breaking into my erratic thoughts.
“Um, that should be fine?” I knew the upswing at the end made it a question rather than an affirmative statement, but I was still feeling a bit apprehensive at the thought of it all. Much as I wanted to be able to pick Annabelle’s brain about the whole George-Merry-Annabelle love triangle, something about the whole thing was making me nervous.
“Lovely,” she said. “I’ll come by to pick you up at nine, then,” Annabelle chirped, sounding excited.
“Do you need the address?” I asked, hoping that Grandpa wouldn’t care that I was making plans with Annabelle. I really didn’t want to have to explain all of this to him. He seemed not to understand my interest in knowing more about it, and I wasn’t so sure I would be able to communicate my need to know more in a way that made any sense. Charlie seemed to understand, in her way; she was looking at things through the desire to hear more about the family she was part of, to know more about who our grandmother had been as a young woman. I wanted to know for that reason, as well. But even more than that, I wanted to hear the story of how she had worked through the loss of one love to find a new one. I wanted to hear the story of how she had built a life that made her happy and whole, and this was part of that story.
“No, no,” Annabelle confirmed. “Lord knows I’ve been there enough times to pick up all those cakes I’ve ordered over the years!” She laughed.
I felt a smile creep across my face, picturing Grammie’s dining room table laden with sheet cakes in various stages of completion—some having just received a crumb layer of frosting, while others were fully decorated and waiting to be picked up. Grammie had never had an official business—it had always been more of a word-of-mouth operation, but it had certainly been effective. One bite of Grammie’s cake was all it took for those mouths to become chattier than the Fox News Twitter feed, and this had all begun decades before social media employed technology.
“My, but she did make some wonderful cakes,” Annabelle murmured, her voice softening at the memory.
I pulled my attention back to the plans we were making.
“She did,” I agreed, feeling a twist in my gut at having to use the past tense whenever I referred to her. “So, nine tomorrow morning, then?” I repeated, just to confirm that I hadn’t missed anything while I was off in the La-La Land of my memories.
“Yes, dear. See you then!”
“Tomorrow,” I echoed, wondering what new information she might have to impart.
I clicked off from the call, then pulled up the list I had created and stored on my phone, my bucket list of things that would help me reclaim my life. So far, I’d really only addressed three of the items on my list, and even those weren’t fully executed. I’d bought two pairs of panties, taken a trip, and left Florida to come to Virginia—which was certainly a start on getting out of my routine. But there was more. I needed to make getting out of my routine bigger than simply taking time out to go to Virginia, only to go home and pick right back up where I had left off—living under the shadow of anxieties that were unhealthy both for my mind and for my body, not really living so much as I was simply existing. There was more, and I wanted to learn how to claim it. Maybe hearing Grammie’s story would teach me something, I thought as I scrolled through the list. Maybe it would help me heal.
Chapter Eleven
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when Annabelle pulled up to the curb of my grandparents’ house the next morning that her car of choice would be a pink and white Mini Cooper. It was fitting, actually—a compact little piece of machinery that seemed to command much more attention than its size would imply. It was, in essence, just like the tiny woman who sat behind the wheel, all four-feet-whatever of her, dressed to greet her public in a bold blouse that, judging by the colors and style, could only have been this season’s Lily Pulitzer, belted at her tiny waist with a lime green leather belt over a pair of raspberry pink slacks that played off the raspberry swirls in her top. Her eyes were shielded, Jackie-O-style, from the sun by a pair of oversized round sunglasses in white plastic frames studded with a sprinkling of pink crystals.
As I pulled the seat belt across my chest to buckle myself into what I hoped would not be a vessel of candy-coated doom, I caught a glimpse of her feet, which sported a pair of lime green oxfords. I looked down at my own understated, very serviceable black cotton tee and jeans that were pushing the decade mark and felt a hint of jealousy at her wardrobe.
“Good morning, Dellie,” she chirped, tossing a quick glance at me as she put the car back in drive. “You look—” She paused, giving me a longer look this time, though I couldn’t really see where her eyes were or what they were doing as she assessed me from behind the black shield of her sunglasses. “Awake.”
I blinked. Now that was one I hadn’t heard before, a nice way to sidestep telling someone that they looked like crap, but at least they had that one factor of wakefulness going for them.
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered, hoping that this wasn’t an indication of how the morning was going to go. My self-esteem was on its last legs as it was—I didn’t need any help in taking it down further.
“Now, now, I wasn’t being mean,” she tutted as she pulled out onto the busier thoroughfare of Todd’s Lane. “What do you want me to say? That you look like you’ve been styled by a blind man stumbling through the Goodwill?” She shook her head. A pair of simple but obviously expensive diamond studs gleamed brightly from her earlobes.
Ouch. I felt my intestines clinching as I looked forward, hoping that, for once, the burning in my nose didn’t really mean I was on the verge of tears. Yes, I knew my appearance was something that needed some work—hence the Get a Makeover that came in at number four on my bucket list—but still.
“I didn’t think it was that bad,” I said quietly, trying to hold on to my shredded dignity.
“Maybe not quite that bad, but pretty darn close.” She still wasn’t looking at me—she was staring straight ahead, her eyes trained on the road as we barreled toward whatever destination she had in mind.
“Dellie, you’re a pretty girl, but you’re not doing yourself any favors with the way that you’re dressing,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact without even the barest trace of malice. “And Lord knows you could stand to put some meat on your bones.”
I was still so surprised at the tack our conversation had so swiftly taken that I was struggling to find a coherent string of words.
Fortunately for me, she saved me the trouble.
“I’m guessing the fact that you’re not wearing any rings means that you’re not married; and you’re not engaged, either. Which would also mean you’re probably single, and you should be taking advantage of that.” More shaking of the very white-haired head. “But, honey, you look like you’re trying to hide.” Annabelle’s head turned slightly in my direction, so I was assuming she was finally looking at me, rather than at the light traffic ahead of us. “I’m not trying to be harsh, dear, I’m just being honest.” She paused, letting that sink in. “When you get to be my age, you stop tiptoeing around everyone’s feelings and start telling them like it is. And this is how it is—Dellie, you need some help.” She turned back toward the road.
Maybe it was simply the fact that someone small enough to shop in the children’s department was putting me under a microscope, but it seemed like this drive to wherever we were going was taking forever.
I opted out of speaking, my mouth set in a grim line that was born of perplexed bewilderment.
“And I’m not talking about the two-hundred-dollar-an-hour-my-mother-never-loved-me kind of help. I’m talking about the kind that comes from spending five extra minutes in front of the mirror with some good makeup and a pair of tweezers. And some better clothes.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said, finally deciding to stand up for myself a little bit. Show some backbone.
“Maybe not, but it sure as heck is a pla
ce to start,” she replied.
I felt a strange mix of anger and embarrassment at the easy way she seemed to be reducing what I might possibly be going through. She was right—she didn’t know me that well; and just because she’d known my family for forever, it didn’t give her the right to be so critical.
I shook my head, feeling the words that were formulating in my head work their way to my lips. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
“Why? Because I called you out on your wardrobe? Really, if that’s all, you gotta learn to have a thicker skin with people. Or at least give it back to them as good as they give it to you,” she went on.
“If you want to know the truth, Annabelle, right now, you’re being an absolute—” I stopped, sucking the word back into my throat before it leapt from my tongue. Just because I really wanted to say it didn’t mean that I should.
“Don’t swear, dear, it’s common,” Annabelle scolded.
“So you do realize you’re being one, then,” I said, feeling slightly satisfied.
She cackled. “Of course. But as I said, you don’t get to be my age and still care about not hurting anyone’s feelings. I’m eighty-six. I’d say I’ve more than earned the right to call it like I see it.”
“And I’d say you’ve probably been doing it for much longer than you’ve been qualified for AARP,” I shot back.
“Well said, Dellie, dear. Maybe there’s some Southern steel in there after all,” Annabelle said with another cackle of delight. “It’s not too late for you, Dellie. We just have to make that steel shine.” Her whoop of laughter made me smile, and somehow the anger that had been pooling in my belly melted away into an oddly sweet awe of this teeny-tiny woman who seemed to embody so much fire and spirit, so fearless and sure of herself.
Maybe I had more to learn from her than just a yellow-edged chapter of ancient family history.
“What can I get you, hon?”
The woman asking the question was, by my estimation, somewhere in her mid-forties, her face softened by the slightest bit of extra weight. On her, the softness seemed to work to her advantage. She was pretty, with warm amber eyes rimmed by an obviously steady and practiced hand in violet eyeliner, her eyelashes long and thick in their coating of mascara. Her shiny hair was the color of raw honey, caught up in a hinged claw at the nape of her neck; and raspberry-colored lips curled up in a friendly smile as she spoke.
Life Without You Page 8
