by Karen White
As her focus rested on the mirror above the sink, her recovered good mood took a nosedive. She did look like she’d been pulled through something backward—and then beaten and dragged for several miles. With angry strokes, she splashed soap and water on her face and at her hairline where mud was starting to congeal. Keeping her eyes shut, she patted around the basin looking for a towel but succeeded only in grabbing a roll of toilet paper.
After tearing off a large wad big enough to dry her face, she missed the edge of the counter when she moved to put the roll back. Dabbing at her eyes with the wad of toilet tissue, she bent to retrieve the errant roll, only to knock her head on one of the shelves on her way up. She winced as she heard each and every clay person take a suicide dive to the linoleum floor. Shit! She cursed through clenched teeth, but she was sure it was loud enough to be heard outside the door. “Don’t worry—I’ll pay for any damage,” she called out.
She sopped up the rest of the water on her face, then dropped the tissue into the garbage pail. It wasn’t until she was facing the door that she saw the sign. EVERYTHING MUST GO! The needling restlessness now boiled out from inside her, making room for the panic, grief, and anger that she’d been pushing below the surface ever since the waverunner had poked a hole in her bubble of imagined serenity.
Her hand shook as she pushed open the bathroom door. “You can’t sell this place, Rainy. . . .” She stopped talking when she realized that Rainy wasn’t alone and that the last words the visitor had spoken were just now registering, something about a title transfer and remaining inventory. A man—a very large one, judging by the way he towered over the five-foot-nine Rainy—was leaning against the life-size carved bear that had guarded the cash register since the beginning of time.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t realize you had company.” She was about to give him a polite smile when she saw that the man was holding her teacup—the New Orleans mug with the chip at the top—and he was wearing a bright plaid shirt with white buttons running down the front. She stopped in front of him. “Excuse me, but do you drive a black Nissan pickup?”
He straightened, making him the same height as the bear, and smiled at Caroline. “Yes, I do, but she’s not for sale.”
She felt the blood rush to her head at about the same time all of her doctor’s warnings took refuge somewhere outside conscious thought. A tinge of conscience brushed her brain as she realized that this man was a total stranger and probably had no clue that he had nearly killed her. Then she remembered what he and Rainy had been talking about, and how the closing of Rainy Days would be like another death to her, and that was the last thing she would ever give up.
She jabbed her index finger at him like an angry wasp. “You have a lot of nerve. You almost ran me over with your stupid truck, dumped mud and muck and God knows what else all over me, and then you have the audacity to even think you could possibly buy this store and pretend you belong here just so you can yuk it up with your buddies from whatever city you crawled out of.”
She didn’t even pause for breath or consider that she was essentially just a visitor from Atlanta, even when she noticed that Rainy was trying not to smile and the stranger had a similar expression. “I wish all you damned tourists would just go home. You come up here with your fancy cars and funny clothes and do nothing but pollute our air and crowd our roads. It’s too late in the season, buddy. Why don’t you just go on home to Charlotte or Atlanta or wherever you’re from and shoot each other so there’s less of you all to bother us.”
Neither Rainy nor the stranger had moved during her entire tirade, and he continued staring at her with that strange half smile. Caroline remained where she was, taking deep breaths and waiting for a reaction. Finally she turned to Rainy. “I’m sorry; I’m not in the mood to chat anymore. I’ll stop by another time so we can catch up in privacy.”
She kissed Rainy on the cheek and headed for the door, feeling completely righteous.
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
Caroline turned to face the stranger, tossing around in her head whether she should accept his apology or not. “Yes?”
“You might want to remove that patch of toilet paper sticking to your cheek before you leave. It looks kinda funny.”
Rainy had the good sense to keep quiet as Caroline, with as much dignity as she could summon, pulled open the door and left the shop.
CHAPTER 3
JEWEL REED PAUSED FOR A MOMENT WITH HER BACK AGAINST THE bedroom door, listening for the sound of the buzz saw coming from her father’s workroom. The reassuring whine of the tool started up again, drowning out even the waverunner on the lake and giving Jewel a chance to sneak into the unused bedroom, snapping the door shut behind her.
The blinds were closed, blocking out the morning sun. Small arms of escaped sunbeams reached toward the stack of cardboard boxes, the packing tape still sealed along the seams. One year wasn’t a long time to have lived in a new place, but it was sure long enough to have unpacked all the moving boxes already.
She listened furtively again for the sound of the saw before turning back to the boxes. It wasn’t as if her father had actually said she wasn’t supposed to be messing with her mother’s things, so what she was doing wasn’t technically wrong. Besides, if she was real careful, he’d never find out.
She headed to the trunk pushed up against the wall between the windows with three boxes stacked on it. Jewel grunted as she tried to lift the one on top. Inch by inch, she shifted it closer and closer to the edge of the box beneath, then stumbled backward to catch it as it pitched forward. Unable to grab the smooth surface, she watched the box slide to the hardwood floor, landing with a loud thump.
Jewel froze, holding her breath and listening for her dad to call up to her. She heard the sound of the buzz saw instead and she sighed with relief before turning her attention to the box that had conveniently landed on its bottom. With nails nearly chewed to the quick, she managed to pick at the packing tape until she could pry it up and pull it off with a satisfying rip.
Crumpled white packing paper lay on top, and Jewel placed her hands on it, ready to toss it aside, but paused. These were her mother’s things—things she had owned, touched, and used during her brief life and were deemed too personal to be given away by her father. She felt her first twinge of guilt and glanced back at the closed door. It was almost like prying into her parents’ personal love story, the quieted words between them now contained inside the cardboard boxes and trunk in front of her.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Thinking about her mother always made her want to cry, but she had promised herself that she wouldn’t. Ever since her mom had died almost three years ago, her dad had been looking at her funny, as if wondering why she wouldn’t cry. She couldn’t tell him. She didn’t really know him, after all. It had always been mostly her and her mother because her dad was always working. But if he had asked, she would have told him that crying for her mother would have been like a permanent good-bye. It was what people did when they said good-bye to people they wouldn’t see for a while, or when something precious was broken. Or at a funeral. It was acknowledging that something was gone from your life for good.
Lifting the first wad of paper, she threw it to the floor. Her mom wasn’t gone from her life. Jewel couldn’t see her, but she was there. She felt her. And she saw her mother every time she looked in a mirror—just the thirteen-year-old version of herself with the same long red curly hair.
As she grabbed the next wad of paper, she had the reassuring thought that maybe her mom was making her do this. Her dad seemed to be frozen when it came to grieving for her mom. Sure, he had packed them up and moved them from Charleston to Hicksville, quit his job as a lawyer and started making furniture. He said it was a new beginning for both of them. He had even started trying to have conversations with her.
As if that wasn’t retarded enough, he’d left her mom’s things in boxes in the extra room, like monuments to dead people you saw in old cemeteries. But her mother hadn�
�t wanted a monument. Her ashes had been scattered into the Atlantic Ocean, flooding the wind with the spirit of the wonderful person who had been her mother. Jewel remembered how the sky had darkened for a moment, then brightened with sharp bands of sunlight electrifying it. But only she and her Grandma Rainy had noticed, probably because everybody else had been busy crying. Crying over things you couldn’t bring back made you miss out on the really cool things life seemed to throw at you when you least expected it.
She bent inside the box and lifted wrapped items that felt a lot like the metal and glass holders for her mom’s yoga candles and placed them on the floor beside the box. She leaned in again, her hands grabbing hold of a soft, cotton gauze skirt, and she knew before looking at it what it would be. It was the red-and-gold sari her mother had brought back from her parents’ honeymoon to India. Every time her mother wore it, she’d say how she and Jewel’s father were going to go back again someday when he wasn’t so busy at work. But they never did.
Jewel lifted the sari and several more items of clothing out of the box, raising them to her face and sniffing deeply, smelling her mother’s scent of floral soap and earth. I miss you, Mom. I miss you so much. She swallowed thickly as she put the clothing on the floor next to the candleholders, wondering if her dad had kept her mother’s nightgown to help him go to sleep at night. Jewel didn’t hear him stumbling about the darkened house in the middle of the night anymore, so maybe he’d found something of her mother’s to help him get through the long nights.
She peered in the half-empty box again and saw what looked like a folded quilt—something she’d never seen before. Wrinkling her brow, she pulled it out, catching the scent of mothballs as she did. The fabrics were dark blue and maroon, colors she didn’t associate with her mom. In fact, she didn’t associate quilts with her mom at all. She looked closer at the panel covering the top fold and read the quilted lettering: HPHS 1992. Hart’s Peak High School? Below it was a brown fabric football, the hand-stitching around the edges tiny and perfect. Nineteen-ninety had been her mother’s graduation year, but what was the football all about? To her knowledge, her mother had never willingly watched a football game in her entire life. Or quilted.
But this quilt was different from other quilts she’d seen. It looked like it had been pieced together from a scrapbook—with silk-screened photos and pieces of material that looked like they were from baby blankets or favorite shirts.
As she moved toward the window to get a better look at it, something fell from inside the folds of the quilt and hit her on the foot. Crying out in pain, she dropped the quilt and bent down to see what had fallen.
The large floral journal had landed on its side and was now propped up against the wall, the stiff front cover opened and lying flat on the floor, the pages waving at her as they flipped through to the end.
Picking it up, she placed it in her lap and studied the inside cover. In a young girl’s hand, doodles and circles chased flowers and bees along the border, and sketched in large, cloudlike letters were the words, This diary belongs to Shelby Ann Martin. Keep Out. Private Property.
Mom, Jewel thought, brushing her fingers over the lettering in the same way her mother had brushed her fingers over her face when she was a child.
She stared at it for several minutes, listening to the intermittent sound of the buzz saw coming from her father’s workroom. Her mother’s girlhood diary. Some small part of her told her to put it away. But a greater part wanted to read it, to read about her mother and the girl she had once been. Jewel hugged it to her chest. Maybe this was her mom’s way of sharing her past. Sort of a compensation for there being no more years to share.
With confidence now, she opened the front cover, pausing for a moment to stare at the first page covered in various incarnations of her mother’s signature. The last was close to her adult signature, recognized by its similarity to the one she’d used on Jewel’s report cards and permission slips for swim team.
She sat back against the wall and began to read.
August 22, 1984
I had another big headache today. It was one of the headaches I get where I see stars and faces and other things that aren’t really there. I thought I saw a little red-haired girl that looked familiar to me, and I tried to paint her in art class with the new middle school art teacher, Miss Mikrut. She took away my paintbrush because we were supposed to be using pastel chalk to draw a dumb vase of flowers. Miss Mikrut is stupid and dumb and I hate her. She made my headache worse so my mama had to come get me and bring me home. Jude was in the fourth-grade language arts room and saw me go to the nurse’s office. He pretended he was sick, too, so Mama brought him home with me and we watched The Wizard of Oz with the sound off and ate chicken soup until Mrs. Collier came and got him. I heard her tell Jude that he had no business playing with a girl who was two years older and already in middle school. He didn’t say anything because I knew he couldn’t explain. Nobody but Caroline really understands how we’re like shadows of each other. Later I tried to draw the red-haired girl but I had already forgotten what she looked like.
Jewel lifted her gaze from the small, rounded cursive lettering and stared at the closed door, realizing that the buzz saw sounds had stopped. She stood and placed everything except the diary back into the box, stuffing the quilt on top. She had to leave the top open because the packing tape was all gone but she shoved the quilt in far enough so that it didn’t stick out over the edges of the box.
She picked up the journal and quickly left the room, closing the door softly behind her.
Drew flicked off the power switch on his buzz saw and stopped, listening. The house was perfectly quiet: no loud music from Jewel’s room, or TV blaring from the living room. And no shrieking on the phone to her girlfriends. He had no idea if they actually said anything to one another, but there was certainly a lot of shrieking. He’d hoped that in the year since they’d moved to Lake Ophelia his daughter would have chosen to spend time talking with him instead of listening to loud noises that seemed to obliterate the emptiness that moved around the two of them still. They had not yet found a way to get through it and find a way into each other’s lives.
He looked down at the table he had made, at the rich patina of the cherrywood, at the smooth, graceful lines of the legs, the irregular sides of the tabletop. He was creating something new here, something his years as a lawyer had never prepared him for, but something Shelby had always told him he had within him. It had taken her death to give him the courage to reach inside and pull out the yearning that his father had succeeded for years in suppressing.
If only he could make Jewel understand this. Instead she looked at him with hostile eyes, silently accusing him of running from his grief and ruining her life in the process.
He moved to the door of his workroom and opened it, surprised again at the silence.
“Jewel?”
A muffled response answered him. “What?”
“Why is everything so quiet?”
There was a short pause. “I’m reading.”
That alone was enough to cause worry. He was about to say something else to her when he heard the sound of two female voices outside on the lake side of the house. They were raised in argument.
He walked to the large glass door and peered out toward his dock that sat adjacent to his neighbors’, the Colliers. He spotted Margaret and another woman who sat on the dock in a lawn chair, her back to him, her hair scraped back in a long blond ponytail. She and Margaret seemed to be fighting over some handheld device and were playing a bizarre game of tug-of-war with it. The other woman stood and Drew put his hand on the door as he watched Margaret pull the device into her hand and raise it high over her head. From the younger woman’s stance, Drew had no doubt that she wouldn’t stop at shoving Margaret into the lake to get back whatever it was. Margaret seemed to have the same thought as she drew back her arm and threw it pretty far out into the lake.
Sliding open the door, he rushed outside, forcin
g a smile as he approached the two women. He saw the recognition in the younger woman’s eyes at the same time he registered where he’d seen her before.
“Oh, God. Not you. Please.”
He smiled in her direction, feeling oddly smug at her embarrassment, hoping she was remembering the toilet paper on her face. Rainy had told him who she was the night before but hadn’t had a chance to tell him more before she’d received a telephone call. “It’s nice to see you again, too. Is there anything I can help with? Carry a chair, dive into the lake to retrieve something?”
“You could go sniff the bottom of the lake.”
Margaret moved between them. “Hello, Drew. Please don’t mind Caroline. She’s . . . delicate.”
“I am not delicate, and I wish you’d stop telling that to people. What I am is pissed off. You just threw my BlackBerry into the lake. Now what in the hell am I supposed to do? How do you expect me to keep tabs on what’s going on at the office?”
Mother and daughter faced each other, and Drew almost smiled at how alike they were.
Margaret put her hands on her hips. “You’re not supposed to be keeping tabs on the office because you’ve taken a leave of absence. They’ll survive—but you won’t if you don’t start taking care of yourself.”
Margaret turned to Drew with an apologetic smile. “Please forgive us. I don’t mean to argue in public, but sometimes Caroline forgets herself and will pick a fight anywhere.”
Outraged, Caroline put her hands on her hips, accentuating her strong resemblance to her mother. Drew pulled on his self-preservation instincts and did not point this out. Caroline’s voice practically quavered. “I’m not the one tossing expensive equipment into the lake—equipment that doesn’t even belong to you.”
Ignoring her, Margaret continued to address herself to Drew. “Her doctor has ordered her to get completely away from stress— mostly caused by her job. Dr. Northcutt said that she’s so stressed that not only is it bad for her heart but she’s also started to have digestive problems that he normally doesn’t see in patients under sixty.”