“Do you wonder what happened to it?”
He didn’t answer.
“Oh, Jimmy. Why did we never talk about it?”
He sighed, his big shoulders defeated. “When I married Fern, I just hoped it would go away.”
“It didn’t for me,” I said, hoping just a little bit to hurt him like I’d been wounded all those years ago.
“I didn’t hear from you, so I thought you’d be okay.” I knew he was sincere. “I was wrong, wasn’t I?”
Hear from me? What was I supposed to do? Interrupt your wedding day?
“I wasn’t okay. I needed you to come to me.”
“I’ve known it, all these years, Joy.” The way he said my name could still melt my heart, but I held my feelings about that inside. I needed more.
“Joy, I did . . .”
“You didn’t do enough.” I was surprised at the conviction in my voice. I could almost pretend I was tough.
“But, I tried . . .”
Tried? He is the crazy one. After all, his dad was lots crazier than mine.
I wanted to hurt him in that moment.
“What can I do now?” His eyes were intense, piercing. I had to look away.
“You owed me something . . .” I searched for words. What did he owe me? A promise kept? An explanation? “It was hard living with it on my own, not even having you as a friend when you were the only one who knew.”
“Would we really have been happy that way?” My stomach tightened.
Absolutely not.
“And if we’d openly been friends, Joy, it would have constantly dredged up the past for Fern. And then there was Fernie. I didn’t want our daughter to know how she came to be, to think she was a mistake. I only wanted her to know that I wanted her.” His voice cracked and it occurred to me, with a certain amount of pain I’ll admit, that no matter how he and Fern came together, they’d willingly had more than one child. They became a family and nobody had forced Jimmy to stay and be part of that.
Only then, as I thought about Fern and Fernie, instead of the secrets between myself and Jimmy, did I realize my mistake. Jimmy created a life with what he could salvage, while I’d lived in the past with the shadows of ‘what might have been,’ if that dark thing had never happened at the creek. Only when I’d acknowledged that part of the truth, did I reach across the gap to comfort him, as a friend; and I did want to be his friend, I realized. How could I be his enemy after what we’d been through together? I reached out, my hand trailing along the couch cushion, but he kept his hands clasped.
My hand lay there on the couch between us and I was about to pull back, my face tinged red with the embarrassment for my boldness, when his strong hand curved around mine. Friendship or not, a bolt of lightning snaked its way from my palm to my chest, but after that, I soaked in the goodness of it, the protection in his grasp, as if he’d reached out and caught me before I could fall off that precipice and back into the secrets of Spavinaw Junction Creek.
I want you back, Jimmy. But what about Doc?
I exhaled a long slow breath. His hand was warm and safe, just like I remembered, but, I reminded myself, without the romance. He still missed his wife. We sat there a very long time staring into the fireplace together, and my thoughts lingered on the dark memories that it represented for both of us.
“Are you glad it’s gone?” I didn’t turn to look at him, even when he squeezed my hand, and I didn’t mention Ruthie’s part in finding the secret or that I disposed of it in the well.
“Yes.” A relieved whisper.
“Why did you come today, Jimmy?”
Why today and not years ago?
“To make amends, and to . . . I know I didn’t do enough, Joy.”
Enough? Try nothing at all.
“I want to make up for it now.”
“I’m getting married,” I said, “As soon as Kyle gives me the ring, so if you came to offer to buy the house again, there is no need. Kyle and I will take care of things.” But even as I said it, I wasn’t sure if Kyle wanted to be saddled with the house.
Jimmy let go of my hand. His sigh was deep, heavy with a regret that transferred itself to me. “To begin with. You’re right. I did want to talk to you about this house, but it’s not the real reason . . .”
“It was never for sale,” I interrupted.
“I know,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that I was only trying to help when I tried to get your brothers to let me buy it. I wasn’t trying to take it from you. After everything that’s happened, at least I could help save this place for you.” He reached for my hand again. I moved to let go, but he held tight.
“I have the means, Joy, and it’s the least I can do after what was taken from you.” He let that sink in. My heart was wrung out with the memory of it, but I soaked it up like a sponge mop.
“And what I took, too, Joy.” I nodded. That was fair, even though I was realizing in that moment that some of it had been my fault, too. I’d wasted my life based on a promise that I now knew he couldn’t have kept. “But there is something else.”
He pulled my hand to his lips and softly planting a kiss across our entwined fingers. My surprise must have been evident in the way my body quivered. It was probably a sin, a badly chosen moment, considering he still wore his wedding band and my hunky young boyfriend was about to give me one of my own. I held my breath for several heartbeats. Images of Fern, her gorgeous face gaunt with disease, flooded the moment. Ill at ease, I tucked my hands between my knees.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice thick. I bit my tongue because there wasn’t an appropriate response. I wasn’t sorry. Just torn between the past and present. “I want to be friends with you, Joy.”
“Okay.” But nothing felt okay. I’d wished for just this moment over the years, but under very different circumstances. And I didn’t want to just be friends. Now, we sat together by the fireplace that had once harbored our biggest secret, both of us mere husks of who we once were to each other. It seemed so much had been lost to each of us and getting it back was impossible. I was glad when he changed the topic.
“Fern knew some of the truth,” he began. “And she told Fernie about it before she died.”
So, Fernie had told Nanette the truth.
I could always tell from the way she stared at me with those beady eyes at church on Sunday mornings that she’d suspected something.
“She’s been bugging me to make amends with you. She likes you. I guess you helped her through some stuff when you were her Sunday school teacher.”
My heart warmed. Those were the days when I was so blinded in my faith that I handed out advice too freely, but I was glad I had helped. Now, my faith had been tested. For the first time, I felt it was real, but only after being shown true kindness from people I thought were my enemies.
I felt humbled, undeserving of compassion from Fern or her daughter Fernie.
“So, what exactly did you tell Fernie’s mother, Jimmy?
He sighed, his chest rising and falling. I tried to block out memories of my head resting against his heartbeat on the banks of Spavinaw Junction Creek, in the church balcony, and oh let’s face it, in my wildest fantasies.
“Mostly about the chimney, not about what my dad did.”
My heart stopped for a beat.
“Of course, as we got older, she began to realize there had to be an excuse for what we did. She asked questions and made some accurate guesses. I didn’t confirm them, but she knew in her heart, Joy. She was a woman. Things happened to her, too, before I met her.”
I couldn’t stop the feeling of shame. It burned my eyes and sprang from beneath my closed lids, to think that maybe Fern understood my pain, and that she had known, even as I’d sat with her to make amends during her final days. She never breathed a word.
“How long did she know about the chimney?”
“I told her the truth a long time ago, Joy. Even before we were married. She never stopped wanting to know the reason we did it. S
he knew it had to be terrible.”
I was standing now, meeting his gaze at eye level while he remained seated. If the anger burning in my eyes wasn’t what made him look away, I don’t know what did.
“I trusted you.”
“It was a stupid thing I did, telling her.” He stared at his boots and for a second I wanted to hit him over the head like I’d have done to River or Rory when we were kids. “It haunted her throughout our marriage.”
“Haunted her?” I planted my hands on my hips.
“We were so young, Joy. I did everything wrong.”
He looked at me for understanding, but I just planted my fists harder on my hips.
“I’d been hanging around her a lot,” he explained. “When I wasn’t with you. I had cousins over in Jay where she lived and I just wanted to get away from the heaviness of what you and I went through here. I was drinking and—Fern was different then, more manipulating. And well, it’s no excuse for how I abandoned you.”
He looked down at me and his eyes were deep wells of anguish.
“I can’t believe I failed you, Joy.” And when he said my name, it didn’t sound like ‘happiness.’
“Did you love her?” I needed to know. Some folks might thing I wasted my entire life on a silly teenage crush, but the truth is, it was more. The story was bigger, darker, and mattered more than anyone in Spavinaw Junction knew.
Jimmy stared at his hands, fiddling with his gold wedding band. I stared at his profile, at how his cheeks were slack in a frown.
“To say I have regrets wouldn’t even begin to hold everything I’ve felt about the past, how we got to this.” He raised his hands to encompass both of us. “I can’t even tell you how much I missed you, but everything was set in motion. Once the wheels started turning, I just couldn’t go back.”
My resolve weakened. “You missed me?”
“Of course.” He smiled, a guilty glint in his eyes, but then that sadness came back.
“Back then, Fern was obsessed with getting away from her family. Her home life was almost as bad as mine. You already know how bad mine was.”
Oh boy, did I.
“Fern was going to get out of hers no matter what,” he explained. “She was trying to get pregnant on purpose.”
Of course, I already knew that. Everybody in Spavinaw Junction had known that.
“Not that it makes me feel any different about our daughter,” he said, his voice growing stronger. “I had all these fatherly feelings going through my heart and I wanted to take care of that baby. In my mind, that included the mother of my child. Even if I’d realized she was using me back then, Joy, I think I would have married her anyway.”
Well, why don’t you punch me right in the gut?
“Because of the baby.”
Of course. That’s what people did back then. If there was a baby, the kids got married. Soul mates? Nobody asked.
You are such a good person, Jimmy. Not like me.
“She was already pregnant when you brought her to the church that day,” I stated, thinking of the day she’d cast me that sulky-teenager, triumphant look in church saying, I won.
“She was pregnant then,” he said.
My hands grew sweaty and I wiped them along the skirt of my dress. We didn’t have an air conditioner in our house and I’d forgotten to open the big living room window to let the breeze in. I did so now and stood in the window letting the breeze blow in around me, the skirt of my sundress alternating in between clinging to my thighs and the breeze picking it up to swish around knees.
“But be honest, Jimmy. You’d already abandoned me weeks earlier in your heart.” I turned around to face the truth that I’d been dead to since I saw Fern’s pregnant belly. Still seated on the sofa, he raised his eyes to mine and I saw my own grief reflected.
“No,” he said. He stood to his full height. “Not in my heart.”
The heaviness of what we were digging up made me slump back onto the windowsill. I saw a younger Jimmy in my mind’s eye again, trapped and confused with no adult to trust, a young man with problems that would’ve even been big for an older man. I, at least, had Momma and my brothers and sisters even if they didn’t know what happened. I even had my daddy—at least a living memory of him if not an actual spirit.
“I’m an idiot, Joy. I let my emotions govern me.” He walked toward the window.
Just like a politician.
“There’s nothing wrong with letting your emotions govern what you do for your baby,” I said. I knew it was the truth. Wasn’t I the beloved aunt of passels of nieces and nephews? If I’d lived for anyone besides Jimmy my whole adult life, it was for those kids. I may not have known what it was to be a mother, but I’d been a second mom to many. And Lord knows, they needed it.
“I did try to get a hold of you right before I got married,” Jimmy said. Now this was a surprise.
“No, you didn’t.” I would have remembered. I would have gone running to him if he had been trying to reach me.
“I did.”
“Maybe you remember it wrong,” I said. “Because if you had, I would have wanted to talk to you.”
“I’m pretty sure you didn’t want to talk to me, Joy. But it was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now.” But didn’t it? The regret in his eyes told me that it did. I tried to remember what he was talking about. He was quiet, perhaps turning it over in his mind.
“The point is, I don’t blame you if you thought I was the worst boyfriend ever, the worst man ever. I wasn’t patient enough for you, Joy. I let you deal with that horrible . . . truth . . . by yourself. No man should abandon someone like that.” He was standing in front of me now. The breeze picked up, billowing my dress and fluttering the curtains around us, wrapping us in a sort of embrace. “I don’t blame you for—”
It was an entirely involuntary movement to reach out and lay my hand on his shoulder. My words came automatically, interrupting him in mid-sentence.
“You weren’t really a man, Jimmy. You were a kid.” I squeezed his shoulder, sorry for my anger, sorry for not ever thinking of what that terrible day had meant to him. “We both were.”
He swallowed, obviously wanting to say more.
“My wife—”
The word wife made me flinch, so I pictured Kyle in my mind. After all, I was not free either, was I?
“She always thought I was still in love with you. It drove her crazy. I can’t tell you how many times we argued over you.”
It was my turn to stare at my feet in hopes that he couldn’t see my feelings reflected on my face.
“It was awful to see how much she was hurt by everything, too.” His pain was evident and for a minute I wasn’t sure how to respond. Fern and I had talked during her last week on earth. We’d apologized for the distance that had always been between us. I replayed the conversation in my mind, trying to remember . . .
“I don’t know if she was even happy,” Jimmy said. “How could she have been?”
“I’m sure she probably was,” I lied. It seemed the right thing to say.
I guess I knew, deep down, why Fern hated me, because it was the same reason I’d hated her. But with her lying in that hospital bed, the beautiful life Jimmy had afforded her not at all reflected in her cancer-ridden body, explanations were pointless. It had been enough to forgive and accept forgiveness.
*
“I forgive you, Joy.” Fern had reached her hand and I’d taken it in my own. Her arms were so skinny, nothing like the shapely arms she’d liked to show off in sleeveless shirts in church. Her eyes were hollow and dark, but she smiled. “I want you to really know it.”
“I do,” I said. She seemed to not hear me.
“I want you to remember this conversation, Joy. You’re going to need to know it deep in your heart, that I forgive you for loving my husband for all these years. But it’s true, I took him from you when you are the one he wanted to marry. Of course, he fell in love with me, but it took a long time. I blamed you for that
.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“But when I figured out what his dad did that day, I forgave you for all of it. What a terrible thing to have to go through, Joy.”
My heart had caught for a beat. She knew?
“If I had known,” she said, but she couldn’t seem to find more words.
“I forgive you, too, Fern.” And I remember how my eyes had filled up for this woman who had hated me and I her. It had been confusing, emotion thick in the air.
“Thank you.” She had laughed then, a hoarse, deep sound. “You know that silly saying, ‘It is what it is’?”
I nodded, but I was starting to worry about her. I thought I needed to go get a nurse to help her relax, maybe give her some pain medicine, because I knew she hurt. It was all over her face, but I had no idea then that no pain medicine could’ve taken that away. She’d always seemed the luckiest woman in the world to me, to have the life I’d always wanted. It never occurred to me that anything was hard for her.
“It is what it is, Joy.” She caught her breath. “And it doesn’t matter anymore.” She laughed again. “And it feels so good to be free of old grudges.” She squeezed my hand, her grasp weak. “Come on, Joy. Admit it. It feels good doesn’t it?”
I smiled and the longer she gently shook my hand, I started to laugh, too, just a little.
“It does.” I assured her. “It really does. I. I’m sorry for being so mean, Fern. All those dirty looks, I’m ashamed.”
She took a breath and gazed at me with a tiny smile.
“You do live up to your name, Joy. I think that in another life, we might have been friends.”
*
“Fern and I might have been friends in another life,” I said. Jimmy looked surprised, but his sudden smile was grateful.
“I understand,” I said. “You don’t have to explain anymore.” At least I’d never married, so nobody ever had to compete with his memory, the way Fern thought she had with mine. Thoughts of Kyle drifted through my mind and I wondered if I would ever tell him the truth about Jimmy. I wondered if I would even be able to be with Kyle after what I now knew about the past.
A part of my heart, obviously a very selfish part, wanted to ask, are you still in love with me? Instead, I said, “So in the end, you did fall in love with her.”
Waking Up Joy Page 19
