Proper Goodbye

by Connie Chappell

  “Daddy, do not, do not treat me this way,” she said, her face flushed. “She left us! After that, whenever you looked at me, all you could see was her. I look like her, yes, but I’m not her. It wasn’t until recently, with all this churning again, that I realized how, subconsciously, I must have chosen the church to break the connection you always made between us. I wore a clerical collar for years, so in your eyes, I would stop resembling her. You’d probably argue the point, that it wasn’t much, but it was something, and I think it’s true. Her absence has controlled our lives since the day she left.”

  “So you left, too.”

  She banged her fingertips against her chest. “It was better for me to get away. I couldn’t stay.”

  “But you’re back now, just like her.” Cliff stated his comparison emphatically, then watched reality whoosh by Beebe.

  Her chin lifted. “You’re right. I’m back because she’s back.”

  Between mother and daughter, a pattern existed. They came and went from Cliff’s life in unison.

  He turned his unflagging persistence Vincent’s direction. “Why didn’t you call me about Abigail?”

  “It was all over so quickly. I think she used all she had left just to get here.”

  “And in that depleted condition, she kept you from calling.”

  Vincent’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “She didn’t want that. I respected her wishes.”

  Neither did Abigail call her husband the day she drove off in the new Caprice he scrimped to buy. Abigail’s orthopedist and neurologist released her, and she returned to her nursing job at Lakeview General. There, she had access to medication that fed her addiction. Seasons passed. She slipped up one day and didn’t cover her tracks. She got wind of a hospital investigation and panicked. She raced home to fill a suitcase. Beebe came home from school that day and found the bedroom Cliff shared with Abigail a wreck. The Caprice wasn’t parked in the driveway. Hospital and law enforcement authorities pieced together Abigail’s downhill slide out of town to Cliff the evening of her departure. Cliff’s grief turned him bitter, then numb. He never recovered. The best he could do was weather.

  “The last call I got about Abigail was when she sold the Caprice for drug money. I put the title in her name. They always say, put the vehicle in the wife’s name because the husband goes first. It’s easier when the time comes. Abigail flipped that scenario to her advantage.” He felt his lips turn up with a cruel grin. “You had to call the authorities when she died, Vincent. What did you tell them?”

  “I told them just what happened. She showed up at the door. She gave her name as Terri Miller. She said she had AIDS. I didn’t have to do anything else. The county coroner confirmed the cause of death and automatically contacted you for a spot in the cemetery.” His tone softened. “You took it from there.”

  Cliff gritted his teeth. His right fist shook violently. The day the call came ripped back through his memory. An indigent burial. The cemetery had such a burial every three or four years. He felt bad for the poor indigent, so he asked Hal Garrett to add a marker. It was small, but something. He didn’t like burying all the indigents together. There was always a straggler grave left here or there, and he liked to fill the sections in. It gave the indigent a family of sorts. Abigail’s grave closed the gap between the Paulsons and Thorndykes. Funny, he thought, Abigail never liked Patsy Thorndyke.

  Suddenly, another thought bombarded Cliff.

  The quilt.

  Vincent’s disloyalty continued with the packing and shipping of Abigail’s clothes. “The other night.” Cliff sneered at the other man. “You said nothing. You came in here like a thief.”

  “No, Cliff. I want that quilt to help you both. It was just the timing of the thing. The clothes had to be shipped, but I knew Beebe wanted me to wait before we talked about Abigail.”

  Cliff waved Vincent’s excuses away. “The point is, Beebe gets a quilt from her friends. I get scammed from mine.”

  “Daddy. No.”

  Cliff recognized his daughter’s best reasoning voice, but he shot his gaze through the dining room to the window and cemetery beyond. “It can’t end this way. This isn’t an ending I will permit. Not this time.” He pushed himself out of the chair.

  Beebe and Vincent got to their feet.

  “Daddy?”

  “Where’s he going?” Vincent asked.

  “To see Mother.”

  Their voices drifted away. Cliff entered another time. He stepped out the back door and hurried down the porch steps. He glared at the glider under the sycamore as he passed.

  By the time he reached the bend in the asphalt road that wound south through the cemetery, a sheen of perspiration covered his face and neck. A warm August wind skirted the blue spruce that marked the section he sought. The wind met the perspiration and chilled him, making him feel like, on top of everything else, he fought the flu.

  Ignoring the shiver and lightheadedness, he marched between two rows and proceeded six plots down. He watched his scuffed shoes cross the grass. Soon his steps slowed. The sod covering the new grave still resembled a checkerboard or, God help him, a quilt. Lifeless blades of grass succumbed to summer’s heat and dryness. They outlined the squares in a brown crosshatched pattern.

  Cliff came around to face the grave and the small headstone that misidentified its occupant. In the distance, the caretaker’s house watched.

  At that moment, he wanted so desperately to hold something in his arms, draw something of substance to his heaving chest. His arms and heart ached with the need that something should exist between them. He collapsed to his knees when emptiness would support him no longer. Finally, he hugged himself and wept. Two columns of hot tears streamed his cheeks. He swiped at them and spoke to the stone marker with a seriousness that begot the ages.

  “I am so angry with you. I can’t get my head, my feelings around this, Abigail. Why come back, just to do this?”

  Silence rang in his ears. With it, he realized he didn’t know Abigail Walker any better than he knew Terri Miller. He couldn’t imagine what Abigail would say in response. Her lack of argument, even in his mind, caused his fury to retreat. He sank to the ground at the foot of his wife’s grave. He sat with his back bowed over bent knees, his fingers laced at his ankles, the tremor still visible. A slow, passing cloud dimmed the scene.

  Staring back at the grave, he pictured his wife’s gray eyes, her china-doll face surrounded by loose sienna curls.

  Resentment for her ability to somehow rule his thoughts caused Cliff’s red-hot anger to bear down anew. “I have not had one pain-free moment since you left. It’s been thirty years. My life stopped! How could you come this far and—” He choked. “Not ask for me? So close. Did you think I hated you? Did you think I ever could?”

  So many questions that simply pulsed and died.

  He stumbled to his feet. “All right. Fine. I fully shoulder the blame. I saw the signs,” he said, crossing back to her addiction, “but wouldn’t let them register with enough force to intercede. How could you not come to me?”

  His silent partner remained so.

  “I thought I lost you after the car accident. I thought God was with us when you weren’t paralyzed. But He was just setting us up for another horror.”

  He growled a shout toward the heavens. His frustration rained down on the headstone carved with a stranger’s name.

  “After you left, your life was my life, too. The awful need, Abigail. I craved you! How can I describe it? How can I make you understand?” He ran desperate fingers through his hair. “I felt helpless. I worked at the hardware store, and I couldn’t fix this. No tool existed.” He laughed bitterly. “How’s that for irony? Funny, huh?”
r />   Pulling a dingy handkerchief from his back pocket, he ran it across his nose. He balled it back into his pocket while his chin quivered viciously. “You don’t know how watching faces has consumed me all this time. How I searched every crowd for you.” His throat nearly closed with the swell of heartache. “Thank God I knew Beebe was coming because I would have taken her for you. God forgive me. I would rather she be you. God forgive me,” he sobbed. The railing truth pulled his shoulders down with its weight.

  The sun warmed his back, superimposing his shadow along the narrow path separating two rows of graves. Long-ago memories stretched into view.

  He spun to face Abigail and the house. “We sat there in that glider every night, weather permitting.” One finger jabbed the air. “We talked about our lives. We talked about everything.” His hand flew up. “Wait a minute. Back up. I guess it’s really supposed to be one life for a husband and wife. Two people in love, one life.” His fingers reiterated the numbers in play. “God, I loved you. Why didn’t I help you? Why didn’t you reach out? Those moments are indelibly etched on my mind.” His sigh skidded across a choppy breath. “I sat in that glider the night you left, my heart bleeding. I watched the sun go down and prayed you’d come home. I flat out refused to believe this day would come. Your loss shattered me. Not knowing. That’s what dug in and twisted in the wound. I told myself a year later, it would have been easier if you died. Three, four years later, I believed you must be dead.” His hands flapped to his sides.

  Cliff needed time and space. He followed the road back to the house. The chill dogged him, as did doubt, anger, and numbness—characters he knew well from three decades past.

  Weakness, too. Weakness crept up as the sun crept down. Feeling bruised, he lowered himself gently to the glider. The empty seat beside him seemed to mock the ancient ritual.

  He heard the screen door squeak behind him, then quietly close. Seconds later, Beebe eased onto the seat, just like her mother.

  Cliff reduced the tally for this awful day to one lingering thought. He spoke it to his daughter. “Every night for too long, she told me lies at sunset.”

  The Day After

  The bedside alarm drilled into Cliff’s sleep. Eyes closed, he batted at the clock, silencing it. He dragged his pajama-clad legs out from under the sheet, dropped them to the floor, and waited for the cobwebs to beat themselves down. That was aided by the aroma of coffee. He sniffed, and in that instant, time receded. Yesterday hadn’t happened. Abigail was downstairs, getting breakfast. He turned his head toward the door, slightly ajar after she wandered through barefoot. Then the memories subsided. They clouded and darkened. Reality took shape.

  His bedroom door shouldn’t be open. He latched it last night when he came in to sleep alone.

  He heard the barest sound behind him. He twisted around. His heart leaped. “Beebe! Jesus Christ! You stopped coming in here when you were ten.”

  She sat on one hip in the chair beside the other nightstand. She wore a lightweight cotton gown and matching robe and held a coffee mug in both hands. Her fingernail tapped the ceramic. Her face was drawn, her eyes puffy.

  “Funny how old habits creep up. Of course, you slept well. I didn’t sleep at all,” she said casually, then sipped the brew. “I thought we’d talk a minute.”

  He whisked his eyes away to the bedside rug, a rectangular weave that corralled his slippers. “I need to get moving. I don’t want to be late.”

  Unruffled, she said, “I knew you’d want to work so I reset the alarm. We have half an hour.”

  “Reset?” Only one foot shod, he shot a look at the clock. It read six-thirty, not seven.

  “As you can imagine, I spent my sleepless night deep in thought,” Beebe said, speaking to his back. “I thought and thought. I weighed options, and I decided I want you to know what my life was like after Mother left. Not that I’m minimizing your feelings, either then or now. With Mother’s actual death, and me back in this house, it’s like she’s left us all over again. Here we are, Daddy, you and me, doomed to repeat history. I can’t go through that again. So I’ve come up with the two worse moments that defined my life back then. I want you to hear about them. They involve Grandma. She’s gone, too. So there’s nothing you can do about them, or her involvement, at this juncture.”

  The grandma Beebe referenced was Cliff’s mother, Emma Walker. She lived her whole life in the farmhouse on the other side of town, where she raised her son.

  “First, I want to explore the phrase you used last night: ‘Every night for too long,’” Beebe said.

  Cliff heard the coffee mug tick against the glass lamp on the bed stand and knew Beebe put it down. For all intents and purposes, Cliff allowed his mulishness to drape his shoulders. He wore it like armor. It instantly became protection against his own words, drudged up by Beebe and reloaded as ammunition against him.

  “You connected those words to you and Mother, but it covers you and me, too,” his daughter claimed. “After Mother left, I felt cut off from you. All I had was Grandma. She missed Mother, too. I could talk to Grandma. She kept me going. She told me to keep trying with you, that women need to be strong, that it was good I learned that early. But, Daddy, nothing worked for us. Every night for too long, I went to bed in misery.”

  A trace of that misery grazed Cliff. He heard it in her voice even now, but her next revelation rocked him.

  “After a while, I asked if I could live with her. I begged. I pleaded. I gave her excuse after excuse, example after example. She gave me encouragement, but she would not let me give up. Then, like always,” she said, with attitude, “the guilt rolled over me, and I said, ‘Grandma, please, please, don’t tell him.’ Mother had secrets, yes, but Daddy, Grandma and I kept secrets, too.”

  The chill from his slipperless foot ran through him.

  “I remember the words I blurted out to Grandma the afternoon she came over with the doctor’s diagnosis.” Beebe moved the story ahead in time.

  About eighteen months after Abigail’s departure, Emma’s mitral valve deterioration progressed to serious. The doctor gave her six months before her health would fail.

  “Grandma didn’t sugar-coat anything, and she didn’t sugar-coat that. She’d be gone before I left for college. Without a second thought, I said, ‘Grandma, I want to go with you!’” Then Beebe strung a matter-of-fact quality to her commentary. “So there it was, splat on the cushion between us, words I couldn’t take back. As always, guilt flooded to the surface, and I said, ‘Oh Grandma, don’t tell him I said that!’”

  Her words stung. They were meant to. His retaliation carried a little spitfire. “You can’t really mean you wanted to follow your grandmother into death, just to be away from me?”

  “I couldn’t stand the thought of being on this earth without her, with no confidant in sight, for the rest of my life.”

  Cliff heard the chair’s one squeaky spring release. Beebe rose with the rest of her life dramatically left in the balance. The cup scraped across the nightstand’s wood surface. The floor took her weight as she crossed toward the door. From the corner of his eye, Cliff saw that her hand rested on the knob.

  On the tail of this eye-opening experience on the first morning of their reunion, Cliff sputtered a question. “Did you hate me?”

  “I probably did then. A little. I don’t, now.” She delivered her words without a shred of emotion. “I understood what Grandma understood: She might have let me live with her, but she knew she was sick. If she died after I moved in, what would that do when I realized I had to move back to you? Until that day on the couch, she kept the secret of her health to herself.”

  “Do you think your mother told her about her addiction? Did she keep that secret?”

  “No. Gr
andma didn’t know about Mother’s drug dependency.”

  “I wonder. Those two were close. It didn’t start out that way. Early in our marriage, Abigail seemed standoffish with my mother. Emma Walker could intimidate. Quickly though, the relationship changed. Something smoothed it out. I’ll never know what it was,” he said with a skim of defeatist’s pity in his voice.

  Learning certain things now that he knew he would never learn back then seemed unbelievably important. Beebe showed her disinterest to his long unanswered question by closing the door after she stepped out on her bare feet.

  Cliff entered the kitchen twenty minutes later. He wore the McKinley Hardware uniform of striped shirt, blue trousers, and work boots. Beebe was dressed in a long cotton shirt, white pants, and pink clogs. She prepared breakfast. Now, her back to him.

  “There’ll be bacon and toast in a minute, Daddy.” She sidestepped away from the skillet on the stove to plunge two slices of bread into the toaster.

  He passed behind her neutral attitude with the cup he snagged from the small table laid with breakfast dishes. He was finally within reach of coffee. He carried the cup back to the table. The spatula rocked the spoon rest. While Beebe stood at the counter, buttering toast on a paper towel, he picked up the plate sitting at his place and went back for bacon. She dropped the toast on his plate beside the bacon, then headed outside to retrieve the newspaper from the mailbox by the road. With her absence, she didn’t witness the tremor, still prevalent when he poured milk over Cheerios.

  Beebe lay the folded-over paper at his elbow. Along the way, she must have dug down to go another round with her father.

  “You won’t argue with me about moving the grave? Mother should be reburied in our plot next to Grandma.”

  He frowned. “Why would you put it that way? Of course, I won’t argue with you. But I want things done right.” This time, he grabbed his ground early. “The day the grave is moved, I want Abigail’s obituary to run in the newspaper.” He tapped the morning edition on the tabletop. “I want the rest of the town to know there is an ending to this story. That’s the process. That finishes things. We won’t run from this. There’s respect in holding our heads up through controversy. The obit closes the book.” He focused in on his daughter. “Are you going to argue with me?”