by Jill Barnett
Perhaps I had set myself up, because I had been too anxious to find a new life, or maybe because I was alone after a lifetime of never being alone. But what I discovered was that I actually didn’t know what to do with myself.
One of the good things about age was I had experience to nibble at my thoughts and guide me. I knew that life worked out best when you took charge yourself rather than letting life take charge of you—no getting sucked into the whirlpool of poor me.
I was alone. Okay. Mike wasn’t coming back. So now what? I had to find my new path.
At the top of the mountain I knew so well, paths snaked down in every direction—so many possibilities to my future, so I closed my eyes and touched the trail map with a finger, trusting that the Grand Scheme of Things would lead me where I needed to go.
Methodically I rode every trail on the mountain, and when I was done, I had a plan: each day I would ask something new of myself—a test I had to do alone, completely alone.
My first self-test was the easiest. I went to the movies the next night. Sitting alone in a dark theatre seemed doable, and it was. I ate a small bag of buttered popcorn and watched a charming film about a young teenaged girl who bravely chooses to give her baby up for adoption. As I observed the family and friends fictionalized acceptance of this girl’s situation and her choice, I found it fascinating how much times had changed over the past decades.
The movie took me back in time, when I was so obviously pregnant at my wedding, which pushed the morality boundaries, more so than nowadays when stars and celebrities proudly announced their pregnancies on the tabloid shows, and the ones with big souls sold photos of their children for charity before a wedding ever took place.
Even Rio Paxton and his model didn’t marry, but then I had no idea what their circumstances were, except that he must have been around twenty at the time, which was young, and no birth of a son made the news then that she could recall.
My parents would have preferred that Mike and I had done things in the right order, like the old jump rope rhyme:
First comes love, then comes, marriage,
then comes March with a baby carriage.
Even after so many years had passed, I can still remember being so shaken when I left the clinic that day first I found out I was pregnant. My knees were weak and my head swam. Other than sheer fear, I hadn’t known what else I was feeling, so I took some time for myself to get used to the idea and sort out my conflicting thoughts before I told Mike.
I sat under that same tree in Golden Gate Park, which was why I wanted so badly to be married there. Beneath that tree was where I came to terms with the birth of my first child and the knowledge that Mike was going to want to get married. My whole future took root under that tree.
Before the wedding, there were times when I was made to feel uncomfortable about my pregnancy, not by my parents, who seemed to accept the situation, my father taking a lot longer to come around than my mom. I chose to ignore those other responses: shock, embarrassment, censure, and lived my life with bravado I didn’t feel deep inside. It took a lot for me to pretend I didn’t care when people treated me badly, and to pretend I wasn’t scared.
In the park that day, I had a made a decision: the baby was a gift to us, not a moral thermometer, or visual proof that I had done something to be ashamed of. I had loved Mike long before there was life growing inside of me. I refused to let people’s opinion color all that was good about Mike and me and our baby.
At twenty, my dreams were big, real, and in my mind, absolutely attainable. Everything I wanted was just waiting for me to reach out and grab it. With all that assurance of youth; marriage and kids sounded so romantic. Not in the traditional sense, like some housewife from the 1940s or 50s. I was from a generation who shook their fist at tradition. I thought we would do it our way. A new way.
Just the two of us and our babies in our own place, with all the freedom and uniqueness that was San Francisco laying out before us like some board game from my childhood. I trusted we would roll the dice, choose our paths like we chose the colored game pieces when we were kids, and then we would draw our cards and collect our winnings along the way.
Considering that was how I went into marriage and motherhood, pretty much with blinders on, I was lucky, not like so many other women, women like Sukie. Mike and I had weathered the years and come out winners, had picked ourselves up at those times when the game was over and our world seemed to be coming down around us. Both of us ran on the belief that no matter how dire things appeared, everything would work out.
Mike and I just meshed, almost from that first night we met at the Fillmore, we formed some kind of rare and unflappable partnership. Our challenges were not based in testing our love and respect for each other, but in tackling the world together, raising our kids and starting a business—one that was based on something no one but Mike and I believed in. The business was our struggle.
So those early years were on my mind when I came home from the movies, stood on the front porch and stomped off the snow—which had started falling while I was inside the theatre—and once in the house I hung my coat, tossed aside my gloves, and immediately called Scott.
“Mom, is everything okay?” Scott said when he answered. Coloring his voice was the edge of panic that had become so familiar in the past year.
“I’m just calling to talk to my firstborn,” I said, a little annoyed because he always felt he had to protect me nowadays, and knowing if I explained that the movie took me back in time and made me want to call him, he would think I was being silly and emotional. “No arrests, I swear.”
He laughed on the other end, and I asked about his family and the business, and we talked about both for a few minutes.
“You doing okay up there by yourself?”
“Of course,” I said brightly. “It’s snowing right now and the mountain has been great, the runs are good. If it snows for a couple of days, the runs will be even better. You should come up.”
“So many of the employees wanted to be at that meet next month, we moved the roving week to the end of the month, closer to the meet. But maybe Phil and I can come up. Molly can’t. She’s flying out Friday to meet Spider at an event in Vermont.”
The silence hung between us.
“I spoke the unspeakable, right? He-who-shall-not-be-named?”
“I’ve lost my sense of humor where Spider and your sister are concerned,” I admitted grimly.
“It’s Molly, Mom. The harder you try to get her away from Spider Olsen, the more she’s going to want to be with him.”
“She’s not seventeen anymore. I thought she’d outgrown that stage.” I paused and took a long breath. “I hate this.”
“We know. She knows. Spider knows. You don’t hide your feelings all that well. Look, if it’ll make you feel any better, it seems to me that he cares about her.”
“I’m certain at some point he cared about all the women he’s dumped. What am I supposed to do? Stand around and wait for the fall?
“She’s an adult, Mom. We all screw up. She gets to make some bad choices, too.”
“But she thinks she’s in love with him, Scott.”
“She also thinks for herself. We need to respect that.”
“I can’t help myself. I want to follow her around, arms out, waiting to catch her when he dumps her.”
“What makes you so sure he’s going to dump her?”
“His track record. Three divorces. Breakups with young starlets and models covered on entertainment TV. Wasn’t he on that stupid dating show with those girls barking like dogs and clamoring after him?”
My son laughed at me. “That was the football quarterback, who turned announcer, not Spider. You’re being unfair. He’s a great guy.”
“I’m sure he is, but I don’t want him with your sister, Scott. Your father would have never condoned this.”
“You know as well as I do that Dad had a soft spot where Molly was concerned. I don’t think he would have
hassled her.”
“He would have had a talk with Spider. Have you talked to him about her?”
“I’m not Dad,” Scott said in a voice that made me turn my worry towards my son.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
The silence dragged out between us and he said, “It’s just work and I worry I’m not making the right decisions.”
“Has something happened I should know about?”
“No. I try to think like Dad would, you know? To make the decisions he would have, but some days I just feel lost about what to do. Dad always knew what to do.” He paused, then added, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m just frustrated.”
“Believe me, your father did not always know what to do. He lay awake nights wondering if he had made the right decision. But long before he had experience to help him, he had great instincts. Trust your own instincts, son.”
Something more was bothering him and I thought perhaps this might not have been the best time for me to leave the city. But I’d seen the sales and order numbers, the financials. Things were good there.
Perhaps I needed to get Scott alone when he came up. He had been forced to take over everything so quickly, and while all of us were still grieving. In his mind, stepping into a role as head of the family was how he coped with losing his dad, but he was young and had a family of his own. He didn’t have Mike’s experience to balance his decisions. He had too much to cope with and it bothered me that I hadn’t noticed.
“Don’t worry about Spider and Molly, Mom,” Scott said, changing the subject.
“He’s going to hurt her.”
“If that happens, she’ll survive it. Molly’s strong. I’m not worried about her.” He hesitated, then said, “I’m more worried about you.”
I bit back the urge to tell him he was worrying about the wrong Cantrell, but he had sounded so down I didn’t want to add to his troubles.
Neither he nor Phil would budge when it came to Molly. They weren’t going to talk to their sister, and with Spider’s endorsement on the line, they were not going to keep him in check no matter how much I wished them to. Perhaps it wasn’t fair of me to expect them to step in for Mike.
“I’m keeping myself busy,” I told him, which was true. “I went to the movies tonight, and I’m going out to dinner this week, and to a show at the casino.” Those actually were on my list of things I needed to do alone, along with stacking wood, going to Mike’s favorite breakfast restaurant, and dancing—although how I would go dancing alone and outside the privacy of my own home and not feel self-conscious I didn’t really know.
“I’m riding during the day,” I continued. “But if the snow keeps up tomorrow, I’ll just hunker down here. There’s plenty to do in the house. I might go downstairs and practice on the Wii and beat you all when we get together next. And I can always raid the wine cellar, pour myself a glass of wine, and top it off with Seven Up.”
He laughed. We used to tease Mike and threaten to make wine coolers out of his prized wines.
Before long we hung up, and I thought about that old photo I’d seen on his desk—my son as a toddler walking in his father’s shoes—and I realized now he was trying to fill them, an impossible task for him. The reason he watched out for me was because I had let him down. Maybe I’d let all my children down, mired in my widowhood.
All those changes that had thrown me for a loop had also happened to my son, except Scott had the responsibility for the whole company on his shoulders as well. And though he was smart and worked closely with Mike, he hadn’t had a lot of years to watch and learn from his father. Mike had still been running referee between the boys and the two divisions of the company when he was killed.
No wonder my son was feeling lost.
I paced for a while, then went to bed determined to continue with my plan to learn to live my life alone. By taking responsibility for my own life, I would relieve some of the onus I believed my children felt. I needed to find a way to be happy again.
Clearly my happiness was not my children’s duty. But learning to find some peace and contentment could only help show them I was okay, and perhaps allow them let go.
Chapter Twenty Six
I went to breakfast the next morning at a Belgian waffle place we all loved and sat down at a table for two. I always ordered tomato juice and a vegetable and avocado omelet.
The waitress walked toward me from the kitchen with her tray and set my juice down in front of me. I put down the newspaper and said, “I’m sorry, I forgot to order the sour cream and salsa on the side.”
Her expression was quizzical as she placed a plate of peanut butter and banana nut waffles in front of me. I stared at the plate. I had ordered Mike’s favorite.
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just forgot what I’d ordered. Can I get some more coffee?” And a new brain with no memory.
As the waitress disappeared into the back kitchen, I laughed quietly, shaking my head at what I’d done. Somewhere up there, Mike would have been laughing, too.
By the time I left the restaurant, overly full with the sweet taste of maple syrup and peanut butter, it was snowing heavily again and the plowed roads were growing plush with fresh snow. Our house was off the Grade, where the snow was usually heavier, but with four-wheel drive, the light weekday traffic, and the storm keeping people off the roads, I made it home before the drifts were bad.
Two cords of haphazardly piled wood, tamarack and live oak delivered before I arrived, met me at the end of the drive.
With a husband and three sons, firewood miraculously wound up in the wood racks in my past life. I hadn’t thought about paying the delivery service to stack it until I first drove up from the city and voila! There it was, a huge mound of wood, lonely and confused waiting to be stacked.
Maybe that was part of my problem. I was, like the wood, dumped into a confused stack, in no order and blocking my own way forward. Worse than that I was just sitting around waiting, waiting for my life to change, waiting, waiting, waiting for everything to come to me. I had never been such a passive person.
When did I become so complacent and accepting of the world? Why was every decision I faced so difficult? Life was unsure now. I thought about that as I went inside and changed clothes, while I shoveled off the porch and a path to the wood box and rack.
With the wheelbarrow from the shed, I began to move the wood. Over the next hours I worked hard, my breath frosty and my nose growing numb, while I drank from a thermos of hot coffee and loaded split logs. I began to roll the wheelbarrow across the expanse of soft snow, leaving whimsical tracks and designs in my wake. Sometimes I walked in a useless circle just for the loop effect the wheels made in the snow. Before long I had painted a full landscape in the yard with wheel tracks. I signed my name across the bottom and drawing a huge daisy next to it, like I had done when I was thirteen and in junior high art class.
But soon the snow picked up and the yard graffiti was slowly erased, and the wood in the racks stacked up into impressively neat rows, the way I thought my life used to be, or wished it would be now. I played that mental if-then game with myself and fitted each log into its rack like a puzzle piece.
If I line up all the wood into perfect rows,
then my life will align perfectly, too.
My face was half frozen and I was sweating under my hat and clothes by the time I had finished, muscles sore, but endorphins flying high. As I stood back and looked at the wood racks, I was feeling great. My rubbery thighs however were not, so I trudged limply inside to take a long sauna and bath. Afterward, I ignored my natural urge to throw on some flannel pj’s at four in the afternoon and just eat a bowl of cold cereal by the fire.
Instead I dressed in jeans and a sweater and spent time making myself a full dinner. Just for atmosphere, I put Dean Martin on the stereo, singing along as I cooked, set the table, complete with folded cloth napkin and pewter ring, opened a nice bottle of re
d wine from an famous Italian director’s winery. I plated my meal like a chef from the Food Network and set down at the kitchen table to a spread of antipasto atop freshly chopped romaine, Marsala Bolognese sauce over rigatoni, and double baked garlic cheese bread.
I looked through the wide bay windows overlooking a great expanse of the Tahoe Basin and the veil of falling snowflakes. All that snow looked like the white dots on my mother’s old enameled roasting pan. The lake was only a grainy oval of gray in the distance, the mountains flanking it just saw-like shadows at the edge of the storm.
I hadn’t thought about that old roasting pan in years. I hadn’t thought about my mom in a while, but those moments when I did, I missed her achingly. I don’t know that May felt the same.
My sister had gone off to her great Ivy League college and stayed on the East Coast, a journalist who eventually married a National Geographic photographer and spent her lifetime traveling the world, never stopping long enough to have babies or spend time or holidays with the family.
Before Mike’s death, contact from May was rather like a fly-by-fruiting. She called, found out you were okay, talked for five minutes, and was gone again for months.
I should call her. The last I’d heard from her, she was off to South America. They had trains and five-star tours, but I doubt they had cell service near Machu Picchu.
Odd how time changed things, and my perfect round-peg-in-round-hole-Glamour-Magazine older sister grew away from mother while I, the misfit and rebel, grew closer. My mother and I found our strongest bond around the time Scott was born, and I understood quickly that it took impending motherhood and my own children to make me appreciate and understand my mother, who I had unfairly seen in my blinded and arrogant youth as hopelessly square and old fashioned.
The voice of reason and calm in almost any storm, the strong spine of our family, that was my mother. She and I used to play canasta for hours when the kids were young. I haven’t played canasta since she died.
Outside it was dark and pretty much invisible by the time I washed up my dishes and went into the living room, where the fire was burning a deep red-orange flame, and I turned down the lights and sank into the sofa, curled up my feet, and settled into a deep downy corner as the logs spat and crackled.
