by Lynne Hinton
“Did Maxine or Deborah get a letter like that?” Roxie had asked when she heard about the correspondence. She was referring to Louise’s sisters.
“I don’t know,” Louise answered.
“Don’t you think you ought to ask them?”
Louise and Roxie had been sitting on the front porch of the boardinghouse. It was a Saturday, and neither of them had to work. They were planning to take a drive out to a lake. George and a few other boys were going with them.
“Why would it matter whether or not they got the same letter as I did?” Louise responded. “She’s still asking me for money.”
“Louise, how much do you send your mother?” Roxie was leaning against the porch railing. Over the years that they had been working and living together, she had made a few critical comments about Louise’s constant contributions to her parents, but she had never confronted her friend and she had never asked such a personal question.
“I send her half,” Louise replied.
“Every month?”
Louise nodded.
“Do you save anything?” Roxie asked, surprised to hear the answer.
Louise shook her head. “After rent and groceries and gas, there isn’t really anything left to save.”
“And now she’s asking for more?”
Louise recalled how Roxie had bent close to her at that point, knelt down in front of her, in fact, putting her hands on Louise’s knees. She recalled the words Roxie had said that endeared her friend to her even more.
“Louise, you are a good person. You are the best friend I have ever had and you are a good sister and a good daughter. But understand that you will never hear these words from your mother. She does not see you for who you are and she probably never will. Sending your father a little money every month is a kind and generous thing to do. It is honorable, and I think you should keep doing that. But you cannot buy what you want from your mother, and you do not have to try and repay her for being your parent.” She had stood up at that point and leaned over Louise.
“You and your sisters need to talk and decide upon the amount you are going to send your parents, and then you need to save some money for yourself. And you need to get out from under your mother’s cloud. It is time to be your own woman and to take care of and love yourself.”
And Louise had taken Roxie’s advice. She and her sisters had talked, and that was when she discovered how much more she was sending home than her siblings. Together, they decided upon a set amount, and they contributed toward that amount and refused to send more. Her mother had written some terrible letters following that decision, but Louise, with the help of Roxie, had stuck to her guns, and she was finally able to save enough money to buy her own car, her own house, and even go to community college and take a few courses.
“So, what would you tell me now, dear one?” Louise asked again after remembering that cherished story about Roxie’s advice.
She envisioned her friend sitting beside her on the swing, her mind clear, her thoughts rational. She imagined Roxie snuggled next to her, the two of them sharing the blanket, Louise with her arm wrapped around Roxie’s shoulder, and she could almost hear her voice.
“You do not owe George anything,” she thought she could hear Roxie say. “He treated you badly when we were friends, and I know it was hard for you when I got married.”
Louise smiled. She closed her eyes, listening to the make-believe conversation she was having.
“You are a good friend, an honorable woman, and you deserve to be happy in whatever way you define that.”
Roxie would have taken her hand then, slid her long fingers in between Louise’s short, stumpy ones. And they would have sat like that for hours without needing to say another word between them. The shadows lengthened as the morning edged into the afternoon.
“Do you still love George?” Louise asked the ghost of her friend who she pretended was beside her, the woman she remembered as being completely honest and straightforward.
“Of course I still love George,” Louise was sure that Roxie would answer. “But that doesn’t mean you owe me more than you’ve already given me. It doesn’t mean you have to do something that isn’t yours to do.”
“So, maybe I want to know how it feels to be married. Maybe I want to see my name on some legal document that connects me to another human being. Maybe it would make me feel closer to you.”
Louise waited for some reply from her dead friend, waited for some smart but imagined response from Roxie, but there was nothing else she could hear or sense, no counsel or wisdom or instruction. Just a sweet sense of peace and acceptance, the light breeze blowing around her, and the knowledge that she was already and completely loved by the one who had mattered most.
Louise blew out a long breath, opened her eyes, and made up her mind just as the phone started ringing.
James’s Pigs in a Blanket
4 packages Pillsbury Crescent dinner rolls
16 8-inch sausages
2 eggs, lightly beaten
pinch salt
pepper to taste
hot sauce to taste
Unroll dinner roll dough without separating. Cut into 16 small rectangles. Cook sausages in skillet and cut each sausage into 4 equal parts. Roll each sausage in a rectangle of dough. Place on a lightly greased baking sheet. Combine eggs with spices and brush each sausage with egg mix. Bake at 375 degrees for about 10 to 15 minutes.
—James Jenkins
Chapter Twelve
Jessie was cleaning out the bedroom closet when the letter fell out from between two suitcases. She didn’t notice it at first. She was standing on a stepladder, pulling down shoe boxes and cartons of wrapping paper and bows. Jessie enjoyed a good day of cleaning, and since the weatherman had called for a cold rain that particular day in April, it just seemed like a good time to sort and clean for a new season.
It wasn’t until later, after she had finished arranging the luggage and the summer shoes and the plastic bags of extra sheets on the long shelf above the rack and had stepped down from the ladder, that she saw the faded envelope caught under the edge of the closet door. She bent down and picked it up.
It was addressed to James, postmarked in 1990-something, from Maryland, sent to his apartment in Washington, D.C., during the time he had left Jessie and was living out of state. The return address, written in the top left corner of the envelope, included just three initials, RWH, the letters, small and curled, offering no more information than just that. She held the letter in her hand, somehow feeling the weight of it, somehow knowing it was more than just a bill or random statement about investments or monies needed, that it was more than just a note giving information about a family gathering or news from home. Somehow, just the way his name was written, so matched up to the initials in the corner, Jessie could sense it was personal and, at least at the time it had been sent, important.
She sat down on the bed, unsure of whether to open it. She knew James had lived another life while he was away. She knew he had never filed for a divorce so she assumed that meant he had never married again, at least legally, but she had never asked him about what things had been like for him while he was so far away. In the years they had been together since he had returned, they had not spoken of the time they were apart. They had not discussed whether they dated or whether one of them had fallen in love with someone else. They had not talked about their lives as single people, and neither of them had confessed to anything more than their lonesomeness for the other.
She turned the letter over and over in her hands. It could be nothing, she thought. It could be a newspaper clipping sent to him from an old friend. It could be a letter telling of birth or death or even something about a happening in Hope Springs. But she would never know unless she opened it to read it. And opening other people’s mail was never the way of Jessie Jenkins. She did not snoop. She did not busy herself with the activities and happenings of her friends and family unless she was invited into the situation.
She got up from the bed and placed the letter on the dresser next to an ashtray that James used to empty his pockets every night. She decided to keep at her chore of spring cleaning. She pulled out everything from under the bed, assessed what needed to stay there and what could be put in the attic or taken to Goodwill. She straightened the blankets and quilts in the trunk, and started in on the drawers where she and James kept their clothes. She arranged and folded all of his and then had moved over to the dresser where she kept her clothes, the one with the letter resting on top, when she heard the back door open and knew that James had come home for lunch.
While Jessie stayed at home, cleaning, cooking, taking care of various and assorted grandchildren or great-grandchildren, making calls for church or for a campaign of some kind, James helped their son, James Jr., as he tried to make a living farming. Having his father around had certainly helped things, but it was still hard, and even with the second set of hands, James Jr. still had to work nights just to make ends meet.
Jessie finished folding the shirts and sorting the socks and slid the drawers back in. She glanced over at the letter and waited for James to come back to the bedroom. She heard his steps coming closer.
“Hey baby,” he said as he rounded the corner and stood inside the door. “You still cleaning this room?” he asked.
“We got too much stuff,” Jessie commented, and pointed to the piles of clothes and linens she was planning to bag and give away.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” he asked, shaking his head. “We grew up with one set of clothes for work and one set of clothes for Sunday church and that was all we ever needed. Now it seems like we got to have a set of clothes for every day of the week.”
“More like every day of the month,” Jessie added. She sat down on the bed, and James came over and sat down beside her.
“You get the ground plowed?” Jessie knew that her husband was driving the tractor that morning since he and their son were planning to start breaking and turning the soil for the spring planting.
“We got the upper field done but then the tractor just cut off and we couldn’t get it started again. I think the carburetor is dirty.” He glanced over at the clothes on the floor. “Did you clean out my stuff too or is that just yours?” he asked.
“That’s just mine, if you can believe it,” she replied. “You’ll need to sort through your own stuff since I don’t know what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.”
James nodded. He looked back in front of him and saw the letter on the top of the dresser. “What’s that?” he asked, and leaned up to get a closer look.
“Fell off the shelf in the closet,” Jessie answered. “I thought it might be important.”
James reached for the letter and held it in his hands. He folded it and stuffed it in his front shirt pocket. It was clear to Jessie that he recognized the letter and that he didn’t want to open it in front of her.
They sat in an awkward silence.
“You ready for lunch?” Jessie asked, and stood up from the bed. She brushed off the front of her blouse and pants and headed out of the room into the kitchen. Once there, she started preparing lunch for herself and James. In a few minutes he joined her.
“Leftovers okay?” she asked as she pulled dishes from the refrigerator. They had eaten chicken and rice and a few vegetables the night before, and there was plenty for them to enjoy another meal. She opened containers and poured them into pots on the stove.
“Did you read the letter?” James asked as he eased himself into a chair at the kitchen table.
Jessie just shook her head. “You want any bread?” she asked.
“No,” he answered. “No bread.”
She stirred the rice and chicken together and turned up the gas on the green beans. “Tea or water?” she asked.
“Tea,” he responded. “And I’ll get that,” he added.
Jessie nodded.
James stood up and got glasses out of the cabinet. He filled them both with ice and reached into the refrigerator and got out the pitcher of iced tea and poured both glasses full. He then placed them on the table while Jessie stood at the stove. He sat down again.
“You wanted tea, right?”
She nodded in response. Jessie kept stirring the chicken and rice, the beans, and then walked over to get plates. She seemed to have nothing else to say.
“Her name was Ramona. I dated her off and on for six years. She had a daughter by her first husband. We met at work. She was a bookkeeper. Mostly, we were just friends.”
Jessie spooned out a plate full of food for each of them. She placed the plates on the table, turned off the stove, and sat down across from her husband. She closed her eyes and prayed, “Lord, for the bounty of this, thy table, we give you thanks. And may this food nourish our bodies so that we may be of greater service to you. In Christ’s name, amen.”
“Amen,” James repeated, and lifted up his eyes to look at Jessie. She simply started eating her lunch. “Don’t you want to ask me something about her?” he asked meekly.
“Her name is Ramona and she has a daughter and mostly you were friends,” she recapped what she had just been told. “What else do you think I might need to know?”
James glanced down at his plate of food, picked up a fork, and took a bite. When he had swallowed, he continued. “I didn’t tell you about her because I didn’t see the point,” he explained, even though he had not been asked.
Jessie ate a few more bites and took a drink of her tea. She wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Six years is a long time just to be friends,” she noted. “Which six years were they?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” James responded.
“Which six years were they? The six years as soon as you got to D.C., the six years at the end of the time you were there, or six in the middle?”
James thought about the question. “I guess they were the six years near the end.” It appeared as if he hadn’t really measured the time of when he was seeing someone else.
Jessie nodded and kept chewing.
“I didn’t mean for anything to get started,” he explained. “I just felt sorry, I guess, for her and her daughter, all alone like that in the big city.”
Jessie looked up at her husband. “You felt sorry for her?” she asked, the anger starting to show. “You felt sorry for her and her daughter, all alone like that in the big city?”
James dropped his head.
“You left me with four children, took off without as much as a good-bye, and you found a woman in D.C. for whom you felt sorry and became her friend? Is that pretty much what you’re saying?” Jessie could feel her throat tighten, and she could tell she wasn’t hungry anymore.
“Our children were grown,” he responded.
“The girls were fifteen and sixteen. James Jr. and Robert were barely out of high school. None of them were what I would call grown.” She placed her fork down beside her plate. “And even if they were, you think I wasn’t lonely or hurt or broken when you left? You think I didn’t need support?”
James had no reply.
“And what kind of rationale is that anyway? You think that would somehow make it okay that you had a girlfriend? Because she was alone with a child?” Jessie shook her head, got up from the table, and emptied her plate in the trash can.
“Did you leave me for her?” she turned around and asked.
James loo
ked up at Jessie, then he glanced away.
“Oh my God, you did! You left me for another woman? And then you came back and pretended that you missed me the whole time, that you don’t know why you did what you did. I always thought it was the need to get out of Hope Springs, that you wanted to live somewhere else, but it wasn’t somewhere else that pulled you out of here, it was someone else!” Jessie dropped her plate in the trash can and turned to place her hands on the sink to steady herself.
“It wasn’t like that,” James said as he made his way from the table to his wife. “I didn’t know Ramona when I moved. I swear. I met her later, a lot of years later,” he confessed. “I didn’t leave you for her.”
He stood behind her, waiting for something more. Jessie turned around and faced her husband. She studied him, studied his face, his eyes, trying to find the answer she knew she would never have.
“It doesn’t really matter when you met her, does it?” She shook her head. “You left me and you took up with her and you didn’t come back until what you had with her didn’t work out. That’s about it, right?” she asked.
James turned away from Jessie. He didn’t reply right away, and then it was as if he wanted to say something more, explain in some new way, and then suddenly realized it was futile. He nodded. “Yes, if you put it that way, I suppose that’s about it.”
“All this time and we never talked about your years away. I thought I could get past it all. I guess I thought you were in D.C. pining for me and just not able to make your way home. I don’t know.” She stopped, turned to the sink, and looked out the window, and then turned back to her husband.
