Return to Virgin River

by Robyn Carr

  Then she got a little melancholy. “Last Thanksgiving is a holiday I never want to forget. It was the best ever.”

  “I don’t remember anything about it,” he said.

  “You weren’t there,” she said with a laugh. “Mom had given up on the chemo, had some pain meds, was feeling pretty good, and we had a girl party. Mom was too weak to put the meal together, but she felt good enough to eat and enjoy the day. She even had a little champagne. It was Janette, Michelle, Korby, Maggie and Terri. We had a blast. We had a pajama party. Lots of food, everyone but Mom had lots of drinks. We played cards, ate desserts, watched movies.” She was quiet for a moment. “We talked about all the best old times. Memory gathering.”

  “I know Janette and Michelle,” he said.

  “Korby, Maggie and Terri are my friends—one writer, one florist, one teacher. They all ditched their families for the day, knowing it would be Mom’s last Thanksgiving. And instead of being dark or sad, it was awesome. I didn’t sleep that night, even though I had a full stomach. I just wanted to be with her till the sun came up. She did great. She totally had a good time. A few days after that she began sinking. Her last three weeks were pretty hard. You remember.”

  “I remember.”

  She stroked Tux. “She wanted to talk about it and I wouldn’t let her.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Oh, she said things like, ‘You know, when I’m gone, you should...’ And I would cut her off and say, but you’re not going, so don’t say that. I kept begging her to be positive, to fight it. But she had been fighting it and didn’t have any more fight in her. I wish I could have let her talk. Who knows what she had to get off her chest?”

  “Don’t worry about that, Kaylee. I think she was at peace. She told me she’d been proud of her life, that it was a good life, that she had very few regrets. And why should she have regrets? She was nearly perfect.” He glanced at the kitty she was holding. “Is that the stray you found?”

  “Tux,” she said. “He’s not the only one I found. I found a dog and her four puppies tied up in the woods not far from here. My neighbor is a part-time trainer and has a kennel and lots of supplies so she’s over there, her puppies safe from predators. I go visit with her; we call her Lady. She’s very well behaved and there’s just no reason for a person to treat her that way.”

  “I’m impressed; you always avoided animals.”

  “Not all animals, but I was always scared around big dogs. Especially big dogs I didn’t know, until I rented a little house from a dog trainer. He helped me get past my fear. When I found Lady, my heart melted. I’m thinking of keeping her.”

  “I worry about you being alone out here,” he said.

  “Actually, one of the reasons I came up here to finish the book is because people were dropping in at Mom’s house all the time. Friends, neighbors, even the UPS guy came to the door to see how I was doing. If I didn’t have someone drop in, the phone was ringing. Add that to living in my mom’s house and I couldn’t escape the overpowering grief—it never left me. I fell asleep to it at night and woke up to it in the morning. I’m anxious to get home, but even though I sorted through Mom’s things and gave a lot of stuff away, I’m afraid it’ll be just too familiar again. It’s a very contradictory feeling—don’t want it to go away, I don’t want it to be so constant in my life. It can be overpowering.”

  “Why don’t you make some changes?” he suggested.

  “I’ve thought about that,” she said. “I feel like I’m cheating on her. She loved that house and decorated it from floor to ceiling.”

  He shook his head. “That house should reflect your taste. Maybe a few choice things to remind you of Meredith tossed in. You should hire one of her decorator friends to help you. I can help with the cost, if you need me to.”

  “It’s not necessary. I have what I need. And the house is mine now.”

  “Then if you find the memories aren’t letting you move forward, you can always sell it.”

  “I know. I do love the house, I just loved it better when my mom was in it.”

  “I feel the same,” he said. “Sometimes I drive by to look at it because I miss her.”

  “Just out of curiosity, when did you realize you missed her so much?”

  He chuckled, but it wasn’t an amused chuckle. “It didn’t take me too long to realize I’d made a mistake in leaving my marriage to your mother. It took a long time beyond that for her to decide she didn’t hate me for it. My second marriage was difficult and my third was a freak show. The kids seem to be good and well-adjusted in spite of that. Those marriages were supposed to make everything better, but they only served one purpose—to make me realize what a fool I’d been. Why do men who have everything blow it off and lose it all? When you can answer that one, you should write it up and charge a million dollars for it.”

  “Weak ego?” she suggested.

  “Half a brain?” he said. And they both laughed.

  They spent another hour talking about Meredith, what a comfort she was to each of them. Over the years, Howard continued to talk to her about his business problems or work frustrations. But never his family problems. “She flatly refused to listen to any of that. She said I had made my bed and I should lie in it.” And she never mentioned any romantic problems of her own because, as she told him, that was not his concern. “But at least we were friends.”

  Kaylee talked about how encouraging her mother had always been, how supportive when she wanted to change careers from something as stable as teaching to something as unreliable as writing fiction. “But she always encouraged me to take a chance. That’s what she had done with her business.”

  It was growing late in the day when he said, “Is there any hope we can have a closer relationship?”

  “I don’t know, Howie. Like I said, it’s been a long time since I fantasized about having a daddy.”

  “Where would we have to start?” he asked. “Because I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”

  “I don’t think we can recapture that father-daughter thing now. You just don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Tell me, Kaylee.”

  “I’m not sure you really mean that,” she said with a rueful laugh.

  “I do mean it. Tell me where I failed you.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think you can possibly understand. Try to picture your six-year-old daughter whose daddy is coming to pick her up. She’s in her favorite outfit and even has a purse, and of course that stuffed rabbit that went everywhere with her.” Kaylee paused for a moment and took a deep breath before continuing. “I sat on the chair in the foyer for what seemed like hours. You didn’t come.” She shook her head sadly.

  “You took me to your new house when I was about ten and there were so many people there, I sat on the sofa until it was time to go. Your wife wanted me to call her Mom; your mother-in-law wanted me to call her Mimi. I’d never met them before and they had a big fight in the kitchen before we left. Then there was the father-daughter dance when I was in junior high. You weren’t available for that. I spent most of my childhood either waiting for you or being stood up by you.”

  He frowned. “I remember going to your house to see you on a regular basis,” he said. “I walked you down the aisle at your wedding.”

  “Most of the time if you came over I would go watch a movie in my room and you and my mom would talk in the kitchen. As for the wedding, thank you for that. And thank you for not bringing your third wife.”

  “You must feel you never really had a father...”

  “No, what I felt was that I had a father and my father left us. I’m sorry if you were unhappy, but I learned at an early age that I couldn’t make you happy. And Howie, I’m having a little trouble being happy right now myself. So if you’re counting on me to make you happy now...?” She shook her head. “My mother asked me to be
kind to you because despite all evidence to the contrary, you love me.”

  “I do. And I think there’s hope for us. Maybe down the road a bit. I’m going to keep trying.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t help you with your grief over losing my mother because my own grief is just so heavy.”

  “If there’s any way I can help you, will you tell me?”

  “Of course. Thank you for asking. But I need to be alone to finish my book now.”

  * * *

  The Monday before Thanksgiving, Mel called Kaylee to remind her about putting together the charity baskets. At that precise moment Kaylee felt like she should stay home and write like the wind to get her book finished. She was close and it was finally going quickly. But she liked Mel and didn’t want to let her down.

  When she got to the bar, she saw an assembly the likes of which she had never seen before. The tables were all lined up against the walls, forming a big circle around the room. In the center of the room were boxes and boxes of groceries. Huge boxes of groceries. The place was full of men and women, mostly women, many of them she knew or recognized. Jilly and her sister Kelly, Vanessa Haggerty, Paige Middleton. She saw the pastor’s wife, Ellie Kincaid, and Nora Cavanaugh, the wife of a local orchard owner. There were also a few townsfolk she’d met, Connie from the store and a couple of the Riordan men. And Mel was standing at the center of the room, barking orders.

  “We have lists of what goes in each box. Some of our families have six kids, some are widows or solitary men, and we’ve stocked their boxes accordingly. We have turkeys and hams, cooked and frozen, and the rest is nonperishable. Take a list, fill a box, and check it off my master list. And Vanessa and Paige have made plates of cookies and bars and those are a sweet treat for us! Let’s do it.”

  Mel saw Kaylee and came over and gave her a hug. “I’m hoping you’ll come with me to do a little delivering, some today and some tomorrow,” she said.

  “How many boxes will you fill?”

  “Oh, I think fifty. At least as many as we can.”

  “Is the poor population so high around here?”

  “No, it’s not too bad. But we do have working families who feel the strain and we want to help them as well. The very poor get assistance from the county, but it’s never quite enough.”

  Mel handed her a list and she got to work. She wrote the name of the recipient on the side of the box and began to gather the groceries. She learned that Jack and Colin Riordan had gone to one of the big box stores on the coast and filled up their truck beds with supplies. And the gift boxes weren’t limited to food—they also had soap, toothpaste, feminine hygiene products, diapers, baby wipes, bleach and shampoo.

  While she was loading the boxes with essentials, Kaylee became profoundly aware that all her life, even in the leanest of times, she had always had what she needed. Her mother, a single mom, had managed not only to feed and house Kaylee, but there were also lots of those special things. A new outfit for a party, a day at Disneyland every now and then, a prom dress, a wedding. They’d never received a box of food over the holidays because they were in need.

  And she made a silent pledge to remember that Howard had contributed to her well-being and education, which had been costly. She might have a grudge because he left, but he had been there with the checkbook when it counted.

  Of course, the women were all talking and laughing. She got Vanessa’s recipe for lemon bars and fudge; Ellie started them singing Christmas carols and oddly enough, Kaylee survived a little Christmas spirit. The men were joking around, making the women laugh or scold them. And the thing that Kaylee noticed most was the affection that passed between these couples. Even the preacher leaned close to Ellie to give her a little squeeze and kiss on the cheek. Every couple, it seemed, took a moment for a touch or a hug or a whisper. As if they were all still madly in love.

  Kaylee realized that’s what she wanted. Not just a boyfriend or lover. She wanted a future. Permanence. Something that lasted and endured. She wondered if that was even possible.

  Preacher put out a buffet of sandwiches and salads and the women took breaks to eat and chat. Kaylee heard about the kids, how they were doing in school, what they wanted for Christmas, how the local football teams had done this year. A couple of women were knitting and talking while others were eating. A great stack of big boxes was lined up in the middle of the floor, ready to go.

  After lunch, some of the men began carrying them out.

  “Kaylee, would you like to come with me?” Mel asked.

  “That would be great, since I don’t really know my way around these mountains yet,” she said.

  “I’m going to deliver five, as long as I can get them all out before dark. And I’ll do it again tomorrow.”

  They bundled up against the cold and once they were in Mel’s SUV, Kaylee asked who paid for the food baskets. “We take donations. We’ve been passing the hat since spring. Whenever we have a town party, Jack puts out a jar just for holiday food baskets and it’s amazing how well we do.”

  “Can I make a donation?” Kaylee asked.

  “We will never turn down money!”

  They drove out of town to a tiny isolated house in the mountains. The road to the house was not well kept or smooth and inside the little house they found an old man wearing long johns on the outside of his jeans. “Well, aren’t you looking good, Cyrus,” Mel said.

  “You’re looking mighty good, too, miss.”

  “And how have you been feeling?”

  “Just fine, ma’am, thank you.”

  “I’m going to put this right on your table and you can go through it. Is there anything you need? You need a doctor or a pastor?”

  “No, ma’am.” He laughed. “I don’t wanna see both of ’em at once, that’s for sure. That usually means bad news.”

  “How’s your firewood holding out?”

  “Plenty good.”

  Those same questions were asked everywhere they went. There was a young woman with three small children in a small house out on the ridge, no man in sight. There was an elderly couple in the lower valley in a little weather-worn house with a barn behind it. There was a family with four children near Highway 36. And their last delivery was to a mother and daughter—the mother was in her eighties and the daughter in her sixties and they occupied a very small, very old house that was scrubbed clean as a whistle even though the wallpaper was peeling and the linoleum was cracked.

  Kaylee felt good down to her toes to be doing some good for others and said so to Mel once they were finished their deliveries.

  “It usually gets everyone stirred up and ready for the holidays. Have you decided what you are doing about Thanksgiving dinner yet?” Mel asked. “We have room at the table in the bar if you’re interested.”

  “I’ll be cooking and eating with Landry,” she said. “The two of us are alone out there and he’s going to drive over to Eureka and poke around the seafood market.”

  “Fantastic,” Mel said. “And what about Christmas? You’ll still be around here then, won’t you?”

  “Yes, I’ll be leaving after Christmas.”

  “And do you have plans for Christmas? Do you know about our tree?”

  “No, I don’t believe I do.”

  “We put up a huge tree in the center of town and decorate it with military unit patches that we’ve been collecting for years. Some of the guys chop it down, put it up—it usually falls down at least once in the process and they do a better job of putting it up after that. Jack rents a cherry picker so he can string tinsel and hang lights and ornaments, and half the town turns out to watch because there’s a lot of swearing and a lot of laughing. But it is always a magnificent tree. We have to borrow a flatbed truck from Paul Haggerty to bring it out of the forest.” Mel grinned. “You should put bows around the necks of those puppies and display them around the tree at Christmas.”<
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  “Will they be ready?” Kaylee asked. “They have to be eight weeks and get their first shots, right?”

  “Something like that. So, will you be having Christmas dinner with Landry? We would love to have you both if you don’t have other plans.”

  Kaylee sighed. “I haven’t made any commitments for Christmas day. To be honest, I’m not looking forward to it. I’ll probably lie low. Maybe read a good book. Or take a couple of long walks. I knew for sure I didn’t want to be in my mother’s house on that day.”

  “Is this because of your mother’s passing?” Mel asked.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m doing much better with that, however. I think it’s because of my new experiences and new friends in Virgin River.”

  “I hate to think of you alone on Christmas Day. Wouldn’t it take your mind off things to be with friends?”

  “It’s complicated,” she said. “My mom was very sick. We had Hospice care the last weeks of her life. And she died on Christmas Day.” She was quiet a moment. “I just don’t know how I can manage Christmas. I don’t know how I can face it.”

  “Oh, Kaylee, how difficult that must be. Think about what I can do to help,” Mel said. “Anything that would make you happy or even just take your mind off the sadness of the experience. Maybe it would be a good day to celebrate her life. I bet she didn’t die in sadness.”

  “She definitely did not,” Kaylee said. “She was never afraid and never angry and God knows she had enough morphine in her to make the passage smooth. But that was the day I lost my best friend and I’ll never get her back.”

  Mel was quiet for a moment. When she pulled into the bar parking lot next to Jack’s truck, she asked, “Have you had some counseling, Kaylee?”

  “Yes, right after she died, for several months. I’m not sure it helped.”

  “But this will take time. Of course it will take time. I’m not a religious person but I bet your mother is not very far away. I bet she’s your guardian angel. I bet she helps put the right people all around you so that you can feel her love even from a distance.”