Proper Goodbye

by Connie Chappell

  When Yates was ready to move chronologically to the following summer, Terri spun out on a tangent.

  “Where is Bobby?”

  “West Coast, still. He asks about you.”

  “He’s a good kid. You both are.”

  Yates wanted to tell her he loved her, that she was a good soul, but he knew she refused compliments of any kind. Something else to honor.

  “Before the crowd leaves, Yates, get me out. Sit me on that bench up there, then back the Jeep up, so you can’t be so easily seen.”

  His eyes passed from the sidewalk bench to Terri, dragging shock with them. Summer memories crashed to the concrete. “No, Terri, please.”

  “Do it. I’ll be all right.”

  She would not be all right. That was the point of this entire exercise. He blinked and suddenly all he could see and feel was his own misery, not hers. During his childhood summers, she looked after him in her own way. But she’d done this to herself, damn it. Got AIDS. Who knew how. She was leaving him and asking him to fast-forward the ending. Only respect made him open the Jeep’s door. Respect, and the summer she avoided speaking of.

  He climbed out. Words did not come. Something was balled in his throat. Anger, he told himself. Anger for the needless loss: his, with their imminent and final separation. Anger for the lost need: hers, the drugs now behind her, and yet those addictive days ruled her through the disease. Another breath, another heartbeat. By his own hand, he facilitated her abandonment of him. That was tantamount to emotional abuse, and testament to the strength of character she knew he possessed. She never asked him to perform more than his capabilities. That was how Terri honored him.

  Yates lifted Terri out, giving extreme care to the process. He carried her to a sidewalk bench thirty feet or so from the senior center. He placed a blanket over her and kissed her cheek. She nodded. Their eyes met. Love rebounded. The child and the drug addict.

  “Go back,” she whispered.

  “Please,” he begged.

  “Go. Back.”

  “But Terri—”

  She pushed him. “Hurry now. Be a good boy.”

  The boy who first loved Terri did hurry. He jumped in the Jeep and started it. For a moment, the boy thought about peeling out. For that rash move, the man would hate himself forever. Self-loathing funneled through Terri, too, he knew, for what she did to someone in her past. And how she tried to make up for that grating mistake with him. He slammed the transmission into reverse and parked in front of the drycleaner, three doors down.

  He waited and kept his eye on Terri. She looked like a pitiful waif, sitting in the shadows, the light from the closest streetlamp was blocked by a curbside tree. He could see that Terri’s head was turned toward the bricked storefront and away from him. Just as with the start of school each fall, Terri passed out of his life. She returned to the homeless world and, he fully suspected, took up her addiction again. He always wondered, always worried that she would not return the next summer, and was always delighted when she did.

  The summer after the ice cream job eased into his memory. Terri’s pattern of summers only in town changed without ceremony when Yates was seventeen. Yates’s mother was slowly dying. Between Yates, his father, and Terri, they nursed his mother and kept the small neighborhood hardware store his father owned going. From Yates’s seventeenth birthday to his next, Terri remained a constant in his life, housed, dressed, and fed in his parents’ home. She saved his father’s life, and now she would make the loss of his mother’s life easier for the Strand family. When the end came, that closely held cluster included Terri, too.

  He was absolutely sure she remained substance-free throughout the ordeal. Yates’s mother, Naomi, was never a fan of Terri Miller’s presence, despite her heroic rescue of Naomi’s husband. Terri strapped a tourniquet around his leg to save it. She groped through the car’s wreckage for his cell phone and placed the emergency call. Then she conned the paramedics into letting her ride up front in the ambulance taking Arthur to the emergency room. Yates and his mother arrived after a call came from hospital admissions to find Terri hovering outside the treatment cubicle.

  Terri’s stint at sobriety lasted over a year, all while Naomi’s pain medication sat within easy reach. Yates thought when Terri got through that ungodly period, she’d remain free of the addiction. But old haunts, like the cemetery, preyed on her, coaxed, and cajoled. Terri was gone, just gone, three days after the funeral. None of his mother’s unused medication was missing. Terri wouldn’t let Yates experience that. Never did she use during those childhood summers, nor any summer between his years at college.

  Summer memories faded abruptly when the bingo crowd disbursed. Laughing and talking, they headed away from Terri and toward the parking lot across the street. Then, a man came out and stood on the stoop under the porch light. Yates tilted the folded website page he used for directions toward the moon’s glow. The man’s face was there. Vincent Bostick. He operated the center.

  On the stage before Yates, the tragedy played out. Terri pushed up from the shadowy bench. She stood in silhouette and found enough strength to pitch her voice through the still night air. Even from this distance, Yates swore he heard her. “Please. Help me.”

  Vincent Bostick ran. He caught her just before her knees gave out. Quickly, he got her up in his arms, took a few seconds to look around, then carried her to the door, kicked it open, and disappeared inside.

  Like her departure from his life on school’s first day, Terri entered a world that didn’t welcome him. She timed her exit to coincide with his nursing boards, miles away in Lansing. She would never forgive him for missing the test. If any person could die on command, that person was Terri Miller.

  The flame went out under his small pot of anger, and he wept.

  Yates fled the town, back past the cemetery, where, no question, she would be buried. His headlights grazed the nameplate on the mailbox in front of the caretaker’s house. Walker, it read.

  Propositions

  It was a dewy April morning in Cassel, Maryland. Beebe sat at her dining room table with her second cup of coffee. Six weeks passed since she said goodbye to Olney Jones in Trydestone’s parking lot. Out in front of her house, the rising sun winked off the windshield of a car pulling to the curb. It caught her eye. A man got out. Just the way he pushed his glasses up into his thick and curly crop of chestnut-colored hair told her who he was.

  Vincent Bostick, her ex-fiancé, looked up at her wood-shingled bungalow with its covered front porch. For several moments, Beebe sat transfixed while Vincent’s elongated shadow preceded him across squares of concrete that led to her front door. He rang the bell. Beebe set her coffee cup down hurriedly with a thud. She crossed the living room and swung the door wide.

  The man who was Beebe’s first love in high school and through college peered in. Her heart channeled through a range of emotions in record time: from inquiring, to astonishment, which bowed to disbelief, and finally, the smile she never denied him broke onto her face.

  “Vincent! Wow! What a surprise. Come in.” She stepped back.

  The tall forty-six-year old man, neither stocky nor thin, reached for the screen door’s handle. Once he was inside, she gave him a tight hug that still felt familiar, but the warm hello emanated only friendship at this point in their lives.

  When the embrace ended, Beebe stared up at his tentative smile. “Sorry to just drop by unannounced,” he said.

  Still stunned by his turning up on her doorstep, she wrestled with a moment of speechlessness before she managed, “No. I’m glad you did.” Although in truth, Beebe knew she looked a little rough. This was a day off, so she hadn’t tried too hard. She wore a T-shirt that hung over baggy pants, the hems of which met a pair
of pink clogs.

  “Here, let’s sit down.” She cleared the cushions of her afghan-covered couch. The living room was Beebe’s center of operations, and it showed. Some of her clutter extended to the dining area beyond. Two cardboard boxes were stacked behind an easy chair, angled into the room, the same two Olney and she loaded into her car.

  After they settled themselves on the couch, he read the expression printed on her white shirt. “Where are you taking me? And why am I in this hand basket?” it said.

  “I hope you don’t believe I’m here to take you to hell in a hand basket?” he teased, unscrambling the quote.

  “No. Of course not. Well, I hope not.” Her hand jumped out and squeezed his arm. “I can’t believe it’s you.”

  “It’s me. Believe it.” He flicked a glance out the picture window across from the couch. “I was, um, down at the church. I met a man named Dixon.” Vincent took pains to keep up with her over the years, the places she lived and the churches she pastored. He still resided in Larkspur, the town in Michigan where they were raised.

  “Trydestone. Yes. Dixon’s the new pastor. I took an interim post. The board of deacons thought Dixon suited better,” Beebe said, purposely short on details.

  “So what are you doing now?” Vincent’s conversational chatter followed a logically curious path.

  “I made a change. I’m a grief counselor,” she said, upbeat.

  “A grief counselor? Not a minister. No church.” He frowned.

  “No church. I’m at Swanson’s. It’s the local funeral home. Swanson’s offers counseling services to the community. You know me: I thrive at a slower pace. There’s nothing slower than recovering from grief.” She added a smile to the playacting that was intended to steer him toward her new life. This temporary misdirection would eventually bend to Vincent’s prying. He would want the story that severed her relationship with the church. Oh, how she didn’t want to go into that today.

  Her comment about grief’s slow recovery was true, not only for people who lost loved ones, but for those who lost a house to fire or flood, a friend to a long-distance move, a loss of livelihood, or, in her case, the loss of the only way of life she knew. As the boxes still sat behind the chair, largely ignored, she made no attempt, once the dust settled, to reexamine her decision to give the church the mighty heave-ho. And the dust had certainly settled on that, now a month and a half later.

  The curious discomfort she felt at Trydestone was a precursor to the stages of recovery that left her feeling ill at ease in her own life. Just because she counseled people about the grieving process didn’t mean she mastered her own grief with no effort and no repercussions.

  The classes Beebe led taught that grief was comprised of three distinct stages. Each stage contained three characteristics. She liked the symmetry of her formula: three by three. She stressed to those who attended her classes that the characteristics often overlapped, ebbed, and then rose again. The characteristics of the stages were shock, denial, and numbness, followed by fear, anger, and depression, then understanding, acceptance, and moving on. On different days, she regressed. On others, she could be all over the chess board.

  “So, you’re busy?” Vincent said.

  Initially, the question struck her as banal, then its double-edged element made her sit up. She knew him. He was hunting, but not about her resignation from the church. “I’m mostly busy. This is a two-week hiatus between sessions.”

  “Nice.”

  “And you, Vincent, how are things with you?” She could hunt, too.

  “Well, that’s why I’m here.” His tap dance stopped sooner than she thought it would.

  She closed one eye. This was a tell he would remember about her. It meant she attempted to read his thoughts.

  “I don’t quite know how to say this.” He emitted a nervous laugh. “I practiced my speech all the way in the car, but now, none of the phrasing seems right. It’s not Cliff,” he jumped to say. “He’s fine.” Beebe’s father, Cliff Walker, still lived in Larkspur, too. “But the problem sort of includes Cliff. He needs to hear something. After that, he may not be fine. I’ve come to enlist your aid.”

  Even without the tap dance, he was being too circumspect, forcing Beebe to react. “With what? Stop driving the wagons in a circle, Vincent.”

  “You’re not going to believe this, but I swear it’s true.”

  “Tell me.”

  He drew in a breath. “One night a few weeks ago, bingo let out for the seniors. I stepped out front. Down from Crossroads, a very ill woman sat on a bench. She got up, calling out for help. I rushed over and caught her just before she collapsed. I got her inside and into a bed. She told me she had AIDS and was living her last days. I was struck by her phrasing: Not dying, but living her last days. That’s how she put it. I sat with her day and night. After the second night, well, early the next morning, she died.”

  “Why are you telling me this? What does this have to do with Daddy?” In the time it took for a sour chord to sound, Beebe put it together. She felt the blood drain from her face. “Mother. The woman was Mother. Oh, my God.” Her hands flew to her face. He touched her back. In the next second, she was up. She went to the desk across the room and stared down at a jumble of papers, the telephone, a potted cactus, all while her heart pounded in her chest.

  “Beebe. Beebs. I didn’t know who she was until just before she died. Well, just before she slipped into a coma. It was like she knew she was heading that way. At first, she gave her name as Terri Miller. I didn’t know your mother. You and I dated after she, well, left.”

  Beebe spun around. “Abandoned us! We were a family!” Vincent knew the full course of events. That knowledge came after the fact. Beebe was nearly sixteen when her mother disappeared. The next year, Vincent came into her life.

  She felt herself losing control. Why was she so upset? But God bless it, she felt caught in an endless loop. Every time she completed a cycle, she passed her mother, then her father, then the church. She wound back to the starting block with her mother again, the nurse who fled town with her addiction in tow, not her daughter, and not a word of explanation.

  Maybe her break with the church would break the cycle. Or would it leave her to grind around with her grief indefinitely? Which now reached out, thanks to Vincent’s visit, to incorporate past grief: her missing, and now dead, mother. And her father, who raised lack of understanding to an art.

  Her eyes closed and her stomach sank. If the grief passed, she’d be stuck with her father. Which squarely matched Vincent’s proposition.

  “Beebe, I know it all hurt back then. She knew it, too, of course. She told me stories about her life. I thought she really was Terri Miller—”

  “Terri Miller,” Beebe scoffed. “An assumed name. A fake name. Why? AIDS?” She threw up a hand that slapped her thigh when it fell.

  “Come sit down.” He patted the couch cushion, which lured her over. He turned his knees toward hers. When he spoke, his voice was soft as a prayer. “She couldn’t seem to play out the scene she’d written, so she came out with the real story. Beebe, she begged me not to tell you or Cliff. I argued. But she begged me.”

  “Not to tell?” He nodded. “You agreed?” He nodded. “When was this?”

  “A month ago.”

  “In March! And you’re just telling me now.”

  He cringed at her response. “It takes a while to build enough courage to break a promise to a dying woman.”

  She pinned him with a glare. She didn’t want to hear about courage or promises related to her mother.

  “You have to understand,” he said, “for a woman as sick as she was, she grabbed my hand with the power to break bones. She was dying. This was her l
ast wish.”

  “I appreciate the fact that you came to tell me about Mother face to face. I do. But a wish?” she spat. “She gets to have wishes. It was a lie.”

  “She begged me, Beebs. What could I do? I promised to keep her secret. But I couldn’t. In the end, I couldn’t. I’d see Cliff, and...” His eyes dropped to the triangle of cushion between them. “Pretty soon, I avoided him. I crossed the street. I saw him going into church one morning... And I went home.”

  When he renewed eye contact, she said, “Ashamed, were you?”

  She saw his lips tighten. That was the effort necessary to push past her hardness. “You’ve got to come with me. You’re off for two weeks. It’s perfect. We can tell Cliff together. You’ve got to be there. He’ll need you. And you haven’t been home for a while.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “You can’t? How can you say that?”

  “I’m suffering a bit myself, Vincent. It’s not that I have no church, it’s that I left the church. That’s not easy.”

  “What?” Vincent jerked back with the revelation.

  “I’m not going to bawl my eyes out for my father. I’m not going to leap to my feet and run pack a bag. This is your complicity, not mine. You feel loyalty; you want closure.”

  “Look, I know things with Cliff became strained over the years. You grew apart. This could bring you back together. I’d love to see that. I’d love to see you spend time in Larkspur. A lot of time.”

  “No. No. No. I’m running on the dregs of emotion these days. That’s not pretty.” She indicated her clothing and untidy home. “I give what I have to the people in my grief sessions. There’s nothing left for my father.”

  “How can you be that cruel?”

  “You should have thought about cruelty before you joined forces with my mother.”

  “What do you mean, joined forces? She was sick. She needed help. I would never walk away.”