Proper Goodbye

by Connie Chappell

“Start at the beginning, jump around, it makes no difference. We just want to hear you talk about her,” Beebe said, carrying the conversation.

  “Beginnings,” Yates repeated. “There are so many beginnings with Terri. I hope you don’t mind if I call her that. Beebe said it was okay.”

  “Sure. I guess. Go ahead,” Cliff managed, befuddled, still processing.

  “The fact that I’m a nurse and Terri was a nurse isn’t the only parallel. She was my inspiration in choosing that field because she came on a one-car accident about ten years ago. The car flipped, and the man was partially ejected. His leg was cut badly. That man was my father. He would have died if Terri hadn’t been there.”

  Cliff realigned the scenario. “You mean if Terri, or Abigail, was here with her own family, your father would have died.”

  “Well, I guess that’s one alternative, but given she was homeless and wandering, she could have been anywhere. But she wasn’t. She found my father’s car accident.”

  “I lost my wife for thirty years, Beebe doesn’t have a mother, but you get your father.” Cliff’s voice was harsh.

  “Daddy, you’ve got to accept that Mother left. She was scared. She didn’t want to go to jail, be convicted of a felony. I’m glad someone benefited from her life. I had sixteen years with Mother. Yates had ten.”

  “Ten years?” Cliff raised his voice. “She stayed around? Where?”

  “Up north. Otsego County. She came and went from my life, but she showed an interest in me. And quite frankly, I adored her from day one. Dad allowed her to hang around. He trusted her. She told me parts of her story. I knew she was running away from somewhere. I knew drugs were the reason she left, and there was a warrant out for her, no doubt. As a kid, I thought that was cool. I saw her as a female Robin Hood, almost. Bobby and I were her band of merry men. Bobby lived down the street. My best friend. She was all about saving lives and doing good deeds.”

  Cliff watched Yates’s eyes cloud over for a moment before he went on.

  “After Beebe invited me over, I spent some time wondering what portions of Terri’s life were most important to tell. I decided on the two things I didn’t understand until after she was gone. First, she was sober by the time I met her. I knew about the addiction, and based on the homeless life she led, I assumed she still used. That was wrong. From the day she saved my father’s life, she was sober. I guess as a kid, I would have been disappointed. As an adult, I find it amazing. On the streets. The willpower needed. Awesome.”

  Yates glanced from Beebe to Cliff, his pride showing for this Terri Miller woman who Cliff did not know. He tried to take in all that Yates related. It came too fast, and Yates pushed on without a breath.

  “She only spent summers in town, but just like clockwork, she showed up the first day school was out. I never saw her again once summer was over. She and summer were synonymous, like fraternal twins. I didn’t cry around or mope. I just couldn’t wait until summer came again. Which was always the case for any boy, but after Terri, it was different. Better.”

  Cliff’s emotions melted. He felt the same about his wife. She was a season he could never forget.

  Beebe eased Yates out of the reverie he’d fallen into along with Cliff. “You said there were two things?”

  “Yeah, and this one is even news to you, Beebe.”

  Cliff watched his daughter. A morsel of Christmas anticipation lit her face.

  “But let me start back a bit farther. Terri’s disease began to get the best of her during my junior year at college.”

  “Wait a minute,” Cliff interrupted, needing to clear his confusion before the young man continued. “First you said you knew about the drugs, then you said she was sober. How did she get AIDS? I assumed she used an infected needle.”

  Beebe clarified. “She told Vincent she stepped in to keep one woman from being beaten by another. That woman bit her in the scuffle. Her mouth was bleeding. The bite broke Mother’s skin, and the disease was transferred.”

  Cliff’s thoughts wound around the facts. It seemed so unfair to be killed by a disease related to the addiction she successfully fought.

  “She moved into my apartment off-campus. I wanted to take care of her. She never let on that she was planning a return to Larkspur. She found out about Crossroads on the internet, printed the directions attached to the website and kept them somewhere, hidden among her things, waiting for the time when she felt she was close to the end. Before that happened, she moved to Gaven House. She needed more care than I could give. In March, she said she wanted me to drive her here. The thing is, we didn’t go straight to Crossroads. We spent about forty-five minutes parked outside, across the road.”

  The meaning behind those words hit, and Cliff instantly dissolved into tears. His chin and right fist trembled. “She came here?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t tell me why. I saw the house and the cemetery. She could be stubborn, and that night, she wasn’t answering any questions. We sat there until the light went out in the upstairs window. When the house was dark, we moved on.”

  “She came back,” Cliff cried.

  “She came to find you, Daddy. You were on her mind.” Beebe got up and came to sit beside Cliff on the couch. He felt the weight of Barleycorn’s head on his knee.

  “She still loved you guys,” Yates said. “I knew that. She never talked about a family, but she never forgot. I knew I benefitted because of something she gave up. It was you two.” His eyes welled. “I’m so glad she led me here. Like Vincent said, she wanted us to learn each other’s story. She didn’t say it. In fact, by working the secret the way she did, I couldn’t resist. I had to dig for answers.”

  Though a flood of tears hindered Cliff’s vision, he never took his eyes from Yates. Beebe held his hand, squeezing it hard. A warm droplet slipped from her cheek onto his arm.

  “I’m sorry, Cliff. It’s hard,” Yates said, his voice choked. “The hardest thing I ever did was drive away from Crossroads and leave her behind. I always thought she was leaving me, but really, I was leaving her. I know what that feels like. So I know what she felt leaving you. I never want to feel that again.”

  Yates’s words assaulted Cliff, pelting him, making him somehow feel deficient. In his time, he did not know the pain of leaving someone. It segregated him into a lesser category. Yates knew the pain. Abigail knew. He could imagine the long ache of being torn from another, of knowing the way back, but life’s uphill battles not permitting it.

  He knew the agony of standing at the open front door, and wondering. The aimless, hopeless wondering. All these years, he kept his life just as she knew it, in the same place she knew, so if she tried, she could find him. He was home, and he felt lost. She escaped her addiction, but died an addict’s death. No, not a lesser category, Cliff thought. There was symmetry between his life and hers.

  The idea of symmetry was borne out when they went into dinner. Yates talked of other parallels between Abigail’s life in Larkspur and Abigail’s life up in Otsego County. Cliff devoured every word Yates spoke, like his stories were the sustenance he needed, not the lasagna. Yates’s fond memories told of a woman who lived in the back room of his father’s hardware store, of an ice cream truck, and a grass-cutting business.

  It was difficult knowing Abigail lived a life without him. But Cliff had to wonder: Was she somehow trying to share his and Beebe’s lives? He looked at his daughter, always fond of hot fudge sundaes. He thought of his endless hours on the cemetery’s extra-large riding mower. Were husband and daughter there in the distance, guiding her? He thought they must have been.

  He went to bed that night feeling better for having played this small part, but that feeling deteriorated in the darkness when he couldn’t find sleep, as thirty y
ears ago, he couldn’t find his wife.

  Companionship

  Saturday morning, Cliff woke at odds with the world. He was overjoyed that his first sight of Beebe didn’t take place until he saw her in the kitchen, pouring two glasses of orange juice, rather than hovering over his alarm clock. Cliff was dressed for mowing the eighty-five acre cemetery. It was an all-day job.

  “Good morning,” Beebe said.

  “Have you taken the obituary to the paper yet?” he asked, instead of returning the courtesy.

  “I just called. The counter is open until noon. I’ll go there first, then I want to see what Crossroads is like on Saturdays.”

  “I was thinking about the obituary,” Cliff said, struggling to maintain level composure.

  “Yes?”

  “I want you to rewrite part of it.”

  “What part?” Beebe’s eyebrows drew down.

  “I want Yates included.”

  Her face lit. “Oh, Daddy, that’s sweet.”

  Cliff didn’t respond in kind. Stepping out the kitchen door, he realized how so much of Beebe’s tribute to her mother made sense now. She had time to process Yates’s stories before she sat down to write the death notice—actually, volunteered to be the sole author of the death notice. In her years away, Beebe learned the trick of conspiracy. He capped his thoughts in that vein. In spite of his daughter’s acquired talent and her ability to use that talent while, metaphorically, leaving him out by the cemetery’s back gate, he wanted the sensitive young man mentioned in the obituary.

  With a day of cutting the grass ahead of him, Cliff would drive his pickup out to the equipment garage. It was a hike from the house so he always took the truck. The first thing he saw through the windshield when he started the motor was Abigail’s grave. On this morning, his beloved cemetery haunted him.

  Fifteen minutes later, he sat astride the large mower. He pulled on work gloves and pushed earplugs into place. All routine. But today, the earplugs he wore to protect his hearing seemed to act as stoppers that captured the most oddly vivid scene, and the sounds that accompanied it, inside his head.

  The scene was the one he had not witnessed yesterday. His mind chose to dispense an eerie view of the backhoe’s scoop as it dug Abigail’s grave. Over and over, the scoop’s full weight dropped. It met firm resistance from the hard-packed earth. With each attempt, a reverberating mechanic clamor jolted the scoop’s attached arm. When the earth cracked and gave way, he swore he felt the ground tremble. He gripped the mower’s wheel tighter while the backhoe’s large steel hand forced itself past the top layer of grassy soil. It returned to view with a measure of dirt.

  Cliff heard the hydraulics of the arm’s passage over to an unsuspecting spot where the bounty would be released. The fall and tumble of dirt were audible. First, a long swish, followed by a finishing twang as the last clots of earth bounced off the pointed fingers of the scoop.

  He saw the movements and heard the hydraulics so keenly that he kept glancing out to the front section, expecting to see the working backhoe. Nothing met his gaze. Clearly, he fought a losing battle with reality.

  Soon, the repetitive sounds became melodic. The cascade of dark earth took its place as a backdrop for the many memories of his wife that he relived. Its effect was bittersweet.

  Cliff stopped mowing when lunchtime rolled around and went into the kitchen. He saw that Beebe left a copy of Abigail’s obituary on the counter. He scanned the page. It contained the revised sentence:

  She chose a loving husband in Clifford Walker, and she blessed her daughter, Beebe Walker, and her young friend, Yates Strand, with her open heart, her values, and ever-emerging examples of her influence on the lives of others.

  This was what he wanted. The few words Beebe added were enough. Cliff took a deep breath and let it out. By now, Cliff knew the job of getting the obituary placed in the newspaper was behind them.

  The remainder of the mowing task left him feeling boxed in by the mismarked grave, his daughter having returned from town and sitting in that swing, and the waiting grave in the Walker plot.

  Still, he attempted to shake off the ravages of his day during his short drive back to the house, before he spoke with his daughter. He came around the bend at the block building, steered the truck just off the road, and parked beside the house.

  “Hi, Daddy. Home from the wars?” Beebe said when he was close enough. She was the image of her mother. He blinked back the reverie of his day. It was not Abigail who smiled up at him, but Beebe, perched in the swing, setting it adrift with the toe of her pink clog.

  “Home, and glad it’s over. I saw the copy of the obituary you left. I’m glad that chore is done. It’s one less—” His daughter cut him off.

  “Um, Daddy. I’m sorry.” Her words stumbled out, tentative. “I didn’t get to the paper this morning as planned.”

  There it was, all the reason he needed to allow the torment of his day to lash out. The pressure built, and Beebe’s pitiful explanation continued.

  “I stopped at Crossroads and spent some time with Vincent on programming policies. Time got away from me. Before I knew, it was past noon. The newspaper counter was closed. I’ll get it there Monday. Despite the holiday, the counter’s opened. I checked.” Her words dragged a bit. He knew she gauged his rising anger.

  “So, your mother’s obituary was not placed,” he said, hands on hips. “Makes sense, though. Here you sit in the glider where she sat to tell me lies.”

  “Daddy, what’s wrong? What happened?” She wore concern and confusion on her round face.

  He spat an answer back. “The cemetery is not a haven for me anymore. You should know that. I spent the day consumed by an open grave and a closed one.” Repelled, he shook, like ants crawled beneath his clothes. “An open wound, and skin having grown over an abscess.”

  “An abscess? Why are you fixating on Terri’s grave so?”

  “Do you understand? An emptiness is oozing out of me.” His hands were in motion from shoulders to waist. “I feel covered in it. I’ve spent thirty years without my wife.”

  “I do understand—”

  He stepped in front of her words. “Don’t use that grief-counselor voice. Tell me how to bury this emptiness in that grave after the disinterment.” His finger jabbed first at himself, then in the general direction of the blue spruce. “And tell me how to put it behind me.”

  Beebe rose. He could see her try to straddle the line between a daughter’s anger over her father’s wild and overly sensitive ranting and a grief counselor’s patience with a client. “Daddy, we will get through this.”

  She patted his arm. He shook it off. “What’s for supper?”

  “Leftovers.” She sighed. “We have oodles of leftovers.”

  Stomping off, he said, “Fine.”

  Cliff allowed his frustration to carry him up the stairs to his bedroom. He did not slam the door, but he threw himself with such force into the chair beside the nightstand that he felt it hop. He scrubbed his face with his palms and left them like blinders over his eyes for a moment. The desire to calm his spirit was strong. It was necessary. He wanted peace. Shortly after Abigail left, he discovered a path to the very serenity he sought.

  He opened the nightstand drawer and took out a hinged picture frame made of gold metal. It was tarnished in places, he thought, because he held it so often.

  He stared down at two photographs he took on the same day. Abigail’s likeness inhabited the black-and-whites. She looked so young at twenty. In the picture on the left, Abigail stood at an angle to the camera, gazing off. The scene was set on the wooden railed porch of the tiny two-bedroom cottage they rented. The lens captured the effect of an unseen
wind. It blew her long hair off her shoulders and caused her small-print cotton dress to press against the swell of her womb. She was six-months pregnant.

  After he snapped the picture, they walked hand in hand around the cottage. He squeezed hers. She recognized it as his way of starting a conversation.

  “Hmm?” she said, lazily.

  “You gave me confidence when I had none,” he confessed. “But for you, I would still have none.”

  “How could anything I did give you confidence?” she asked her husband of ten months.

  “But you did, Abigail.” He stopped, and she, with him. “You married me.”

  She smiled and tugged him into motion.

  Living in that tiny home, carrying his child, she smothered his worries, every one.

  Abigail posed for the photo on the right side of the frame a few minutes later. He caught her sniffing the lilac bush in the front yard. The smell of that sweet summer—as if it was there, filling the room—infused him once more.

  Memories of that woman, on that day, still beat in his heart.

  * * *

  Cliff stood on the front walk, fists planted on his hips, eyes trained on his daughter, who was bent down, deadheading a circle of marigolds around the maple tree.

  “Beebe!” Cliff drilled, and she jumped.

  With her hand on the tree trunk, she pushed herself to her feet. She worked off the gardening gloves and let them drop to the grass. She came over. “You look nice.”

  Cliff wore his gray suit and burgundy tie. “I looked for you everywhere. Why aren’t you ready?” His hands moved in an up-and-down motion. It was just after ten on Sunday, and Beebe was dressed in a long cotton shirt, a pair of denim capris, and those wretched pink clogs.

  “Daddy,” she said with a laugh, “I haven’t gone to church since March.”

  “Well, I didn’t know.”

  “I take Sundays for myself. I do other things.” Despite his cranky tone, Beebe remained pleasant.