'Til I Want No More

by Robin W. Pearson

  “But that doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

  “Well, I got stuck trying to finish my article before tonight, so I thought I’d gather my thoughts over a cup of tea. But then I was out of chai, so I walked over here to raid your tin. And here I stand.” Maxine used another square to snuggle a crystal angel.

  “And here you stand . . . in front of the Christmas tree?”

  Maxine reached over to the coffee table on her left. She raised her mug in a mock toast and took a sip. “This is your last bag of chai by the way.”

  “Find any inspiration in that cup? You seemed pretty lost in thought when I came in.” Vivienne retrieved the olive chenille blanket she kept on the arm of the sofa and bunched it on the table before reaching for an ornament. “Ouch!” Vivienne sucked on her thumb and mumbled, “What’s stoppin’ up your creative flow, besides gettin’ stuck by this dead thing?”

  As her mother stretched for bulbs hanging near the top of the tree, Maxine walked toward the pocket doors to the hallway and glided them closed. Then she turned and answered simply, “You.”

  “Me?” Delicate tinkling provided a musical backdrop to Vivienne’s exclamation. Red, green, gold, and purple bulbs clinked against each other when she whirled around.

  “Yes, you.” Maxine slowly drained her cup. “Not what you expected? Or rather, who you expected?”

  Vivienne swaddled the ornaments in the nest on the table and then sat near the tree. “Is there something specific you want to talk about?”

  In no hurry to answer, Maxine eyed Mother as she placed her mug on the coaster. Vivienne used to tell them that the only thing allowed to rest on her Queen Anne chair was their gaze. Now Maxine could see why. Her mother, her lips compressed and eyes narrowed, didn’t look comfortable at all perched on the edge of the antique.

  “Maxine? I asked you if there was somethin’ specific on your mind.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, it sure sounds like it.”

  “But now that you bring it up—”

  “I didn’t bring anything u—”

  “I do want to ask you something.” Maxine reached for her tea but remembered she’d finished it. Itching to occupy herself, she popped a few bubbles on the wrapping squares instead. “Did you ever think of leaving me with Mama Ruby and Granddaddy for good?” Pop! Pop!

  “What are you talking about, girl? And stop messin’ with that bubble wrap.”

  “When I was little, after Daddy died . . . ?” Pop-pop-pop-pop!

  Vivienne leaned forward, snatched the plastic from Maxine, and threw it to the side. It floated down until it landed atop her daughter’s bare feet. “I know when you’re talking about. I just don’t understand why you’re bringin’ this up twenty years after the fact.” She scooted back in the chair and crossed one stockinged leg over the other.

  Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Unable to sit any longer, Maxine kicked aside the bubble wrap and stepped over a box of ornaments she’d started packing before her mother returned. She walked to the bay window and focused on the trees hugging the yard.

  “Maxine?”

  “After Daddy died, you explained why you had to leave me.” Maxine’s soft response bounced off her shimmery reflection. Her eyes never left Milo sniffing around inside the wrought iron fence. “That you just hurt too much after Daddy’s death. You didn’t think you were able to raise yourself and me.”

  “So I asked my parents to watch you a little while.”

  “For almost two years.” Maxine caught and held Vivienne’s eyes reflected by the pane. “I didn’t think you were coming back.” That’s when Maxine was forced to find a substitute in Mama Ruby.

  “I was comin’ back, Maxine. I came back, for heaven’s sake. This was—”

  “A long time ago? It didn’t feel like that to me. And it still hurts. I feel like I never got over it. Never. I was always looking for you, even when you got back. With First John.”

  “Your father.”

  “My stepfather. If you hadn’t married him, would you have ever come back for me?”

  Vivienne rose and stood beside her daughter. “Maxine Amelia Clark Owens, you know that even if you don’t know nuthin’ else. My love for you and your father healed me. God brought y’all into my life, and that enabled me to recognize love when I found it again with your stepfather. You brought me back, not John. He just furnished the transportation.”

  “But why wasn’t your love for me strong enough to keep you here? Or to take me with you in the first place? As bad as it was for me, I didn’t leave my baby. I was barely eighteen, practically living on the streets. But I was tied to her. I couldn’t have left Celeste, ever. I still can’t.”

  “I never really left you—”

  “Yes, you did!”

  Vivienne clasped Maxine by both shoulders and turned her away from their dim reflection. “How was what I did any different or less forgivable than what you did when you gave us Celeste to raise?”

  “But I didn’t leave her.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Maxine reeled back, but Vivienne’s words had struck her full on. A direct kick to the gut that wrenched her insides.

  Vivienne pinched her nose between her closed eyes. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes, you did.”

  Vivienne winced. “Max, I don’t like to think about that—”

  “And you think I do? Seems you’ve impaled yourself on your own rusty sword.” Maxine twisted out of Vivienne’s grasp and walked away from the window so she wouldn’t have to face her mother or herself. She stalked to the table and knelt by the ornaments nestling in the blanket.

  “Maxine, I’m not sayin’ you abandoned Celeste. But you did leave her with us, to raise her and care for her because you felt we could do a . . . a . . .”

  “Better job?” Maxine’s hands stilled on the box, her back to Vivienne.

  “An adult job. You were a child.”

  “Okay, I was a child. ‘I thought as a child.’ But I was a mother, just like you. And you . . . you were an adult, as you put it, when you left me with Mama Ruby and Granddaddy. Why weren’t you capable of taking care of me—or did you just not want to?”

  “You can best be sure I wanted to, Maxine. It’s just that when Henry died, I didn’t know if the sun was yellow or the sky blue. Comin’ and goin’ was all the same for me. I didn’t much care about either one. Mama and Daddy stepped in when they saw I wasn’t doin’ either of us any good. They loved me enough to do that, just like John and I loved you and Celeste enough to do what was right when you couldn’t do right by yourself. I didn’t have to come back from anywhere. I didn’t leave you at a firehouse or on a neighbor’s stoop with a note pinned to your blanket. I didn’t abandon you, Maxine. And John didn’t have to convince me to return to the only daughter I had at the time. I just had to heal. My heart had to start beatin’ again.”

  Maxine looked away from Mother. She fiddled with the bulbs as she recalled what it was like living with Vivienne in those days, weeks, and months after the accident snatched Henry Clark from them. It had stolen her mother just as surely—but not in one swift, decisive blow. His death had been a bleaching agent. Vivienne had slowly faded, wasting away. She nibbled on nuts, grapes, or slices of American cheese, on anything that didn’t require cooking or preparation. Maxine survived on the well-meaning hugs and food from visiting family and friends until mercifully, Lerenzo and Ruby packed up their daughter and granddaughter and trucked them over to their farmhouse in Spring Hope.

  Maxine’s mind churned, her memories as distorted as her mother’s image in the Christmas bulb she twirled. A newly widowed Vivienne, floating as a dust mote through her grandparents’ house, nothing solid Maxine could cling to. When she had her first cycle, it was Mama Ruby who helped her see the beauty in shedding childhood. Granddaddy wrote her prealgebra problems for her after she fell from the elm in their backyard and broke her wrist. Uncle Roy took her to the movies on Saturday afternoons. Evelyn’
s Granny B, introduced her to liver pudding and grits while teaching her to know the Bible for herself, showing her that just because folks said Jonah got swallowed by a whale instead of a big fish didn’t make it so.

  Yet those lessons hadn’t hurt as much as the day Vivienne turned her frail profile from Maxine and left her standing on the top step. She hadn’t stroked her daughter’s hair or kissed her good-bye. She’d just picked up her small suitcase and nudged Maxine out of the way. The child had felt her mama was gone long before her taillights disappeared around the corner.

  But standing there with her jaw squared and a fist on one hip, Vivienne seemed no longer content with being a figment of her daughter’s imagination. She looked ready to fight for what was rightfully hers—Maxine.

  “Now I’m not asking your forgiveness,” her mother pronounced. “If you’re feelin’ some kind of way about that time you spent with your grandparents, you need to work it out with God. To tell you the truth, I don’t need you to forgive me for the time you spent with them just like you don’t need forgiveness for entrusting Celeste to our care—”

  “Mother, I didn’t ask for—”

  “I know what it’s like to live with a lie, and it hurts.” Vivienne clenched her side as if she had indeed been pierced. “I did the right thing at that time. It was for good, like what Rahab did for the two spies, I suppose. . . .” Vivienne looked away from Maxine as if she was thinking back thousands of years, picturing herself tucking Celeste under the flax, away from the world’s prying eyes. Or perhaps she was envisioning stowing her in a basket on the Nile and setting her afloat under the watchful eyes of her mother-sister. Hiding in plain sight.

  Maxine shook her head slowly, then faster.

  “What, Max? You stand here accusing me of abandoning you. Of dishonesty. Tellin’ me you haven’t been able to get over my leaving you for what . . . ? Eighteen months, two years, while I went away to grieve and recover after the death of my husband, so I could come back and be your mama. And you’re thirty years old and still dancin’ to that same ol’ song in your head. How do you think your husband is going to feel two, five, or ten years down the road when he learns I’m Celeste’s grandma, not her mama? That her grandma is her great-grandma? That his wife asked him to move into the garage apartment so they could keep lookin’ over Celeste like a couple of guardian angels?”

  Vivienne walked over to the end table beside the sofa and reached for the box of tissues. “I know I’ve always considered this family business, but our family is expanding now. It’s getting harder to keep this to ourselves.”

  “You sound like JD.”

  Vivienne stopped wiping her face and stared at Maxine. “That’s the second time you’ve told me that, and I didn’t like it much the first time. You talked to that boy again?”

  Maxine bent to pick up the ornaments she’d knocked to the floor in her agitation. “Yes, I talked to that man a couple weeks ago. He called. He wants to see Celeste.”

  Vivienne stalked over to Maxine and plucked a pewter figurine of three wise men from her daughter’s hands. The magi huddled together in Vivienne’s palm as her fist closed over them. “He called two weeks ago and got you all worked up? That’s what sent you over here today, shakin’ this old tree?”

  Maxine knew the tree her mother was talking about—the past, whose far-reaching, spindly branches had ensnared her. She couldn’t just lop off the limbs. She had to cleave it at the root to free herself. “JD hasn’t gotten me worked up about anything.”

  “Just what did he have to say?” Vivienne crossed her arms. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh peeked between her knuckles.

  Maxine walked around Mother to the fir. She pretended to search for ornaments, but really she needed a minute to catch her breath.

  “Maxine?”

  “I told you. He wants to see Celeste. He wants a relationship with his daughter.”

  “His daughter!”

  Maxine dug through the dead branches, ignoring the scratches and scrapes on her hands and arms. She unhooked a paper snowflake covered in aluminum foil. She touched the picture of a gap-toothed child glued to the front. When she flipped it over, she read Celeste, age 6. Managing a small smile, she turned around and proffered it to Vivienne. “Do you see this? I remember I was home for Christmas, and Celeste ran in with two of these, screaming, ‘Here, Mommy! Here, Daddy!’ And she ran right past me and gave them to you and First John.”

  Maxine turned back to the tree. “I determined then to move back home as soon as I could so I wouldn’t live on the edges of her life. And as much as it hurts sometimes, I get to see it. I’ve watched her grow up. He’s missed all that.”

  “JD gave up all that.”

  Maxine laughed dryly. “That’s what I told him.” Actually she had told him a lot more during that phone call.

  ________

  “Your daughter?” Maxine couldn’t stop herself from repeating JD’s words.

  “Yes. I want to get to know her.”

  She resisted sticking a finger in each ear to block out the loss and regret that seemed to reverberate from his voice. “What do you want to know? Her favorite color is called punch pink—not hot pink, not light pink. She measured five-two at her last well visit, a mite shorter than I but taller than her best friend—whose name is Jasmine, by the way. Celeste loves to chat to the wee hours. She—”

  “I don’t want you to tell me about her likes and dislikes and vital statistics. I want to discover them myself.”

  “‘I, I, I.’ You’re saying what you want. Where were you thirteen years ago?” Maxine listened to him shift, heard him take in a deep breath and blow it out.

  “The same place you were. Growing up. Going to school. Attending college. Just because you were in the same house with her doesn’t mean you didn’t let go like I let go. You gave her up just like I did, except I didn’t know any better. And then you gave me up.”

  And that’s when she’d hung up on him.

  ________

  “That’s all he said?” Vivienne’s question brought her back to the here and now.

  “That’s all I gave him time to say. That was plenty.” Maxine moved around the tree, pushing aside branches, checking and rechecking to see if she’d missed any ornaments. White chips and needles floated to the floor.

  “And then you come here two weeks later and accuse me of pretty much the same thing. As much as I hate to say it, that boy does have a point.”

  Maxine dropped the tiny ceramic Nativity scene she was holding. It clunked on the hardwood floor with a crack and rolled away from her. “What did you say?”

  “Isn’t that what we were talkin’ about a minute ago?” Mother pulled another tissue from the box and wiped under her eyes. Tucking the used paper into her pocket, she walked forward a few steps toward the blanket and opened her hand, freeing the wise men. Then she knelt and reached under the table. Vivienne touched the hole in the ceramic figurine where baby Jesus used to lay. “You never told me how you felt about that snowflake.”

  “How was I supposed to tell you, her mama? I’m only a bystander.”

  “You gave her life, so that means you’re not a bystander. You should know I’d understand.”

  “I don’t know anything these days! I’m swimming here, Mother. On one hand, I can empathize with JD. I get it, his sense of . . . of missing out, especially since it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Not his fault!”

  “Now living with his mother’s suffering probably heightens his sense of loss. She doesn’t have the opportunity to get it back, but he does.”

  “That woman,” Vivienne tsked and rolled her eyes. “I know Annie Lester wouldn’t care to know Celeste, even if she had the chance. Her memory loss is probably a blessing.”

  Maxine’s mouth fell open.

  Her mother huffed and choked down something that seemed to taste bad. “Lord, forgive me for saying that, but who gives a flyin’ flip about what the Lesters have lost?”

  Maxine’s shoul
ders heaved. “I do, Mother. I care. Isn’t Celeste a Lester?”

  The grandfather clock in the foyer chimed. Though the sound was muted by the closed pocket doors, Maxine jumped and glanced at her wrist. “Oh, shoot. Teddy will be here in less than an hour, and I’m nowhere near ready to smile in Reverend Atwater’s face and pretend all I care about is the beautiful future Teddy and I have.” She took in the evidence of her visit. The green blanket creating a pseudo-picnic spread on the table; the nearly bare, brown tree topped by a crooked star; countless needles and white specks decorating the floor; the box of ornaments, its lid askew.

  And Vivienne’s bleak eyes staring at her from across the room.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. Forgive me for blindsiding you. But I . . . I need to go.” Maxine patted her pockets. Then she carefully lifted the blanket and set it back down, sending the wise men tumbling out onto the coffee table. She scanned every corner but the one that housed her mother. She could feel Vivienne watching her as she scurried about the family room.

  “You’re just going to leave?”

  “I know I’m leaving a mess, but I’ll be back in the morning to finish up.” Maxine knelt next to the couch and tossed back first one cushion, then another. She heard the door open between the mudroom and the kitchen, then slam shut seconds later, rattling the pane.

  “Girl, it’s not the room I care about fixin’. I haven’t put a toe in here once this whole week. What are you doing? Are you prayin’ down there?”

  Maxine rose from her knees and finally faced Vivienne. “I can’t find my keys.”

  Jingle, jingle, jingle. “You mean these?” Zander stood by the kitchen island, holding aloft the missing ring. He walked past Celeste, who was opening the refrigerator, and tossed them to Maxine.

  They landed—clang!—on the floor next to their owner’s left foot.