by Robyn Carr
“I know, I know,” Krista agreed, though reluctantly. “But, Ma, you have to come to the lake right away...please? Charley has it all fixed up—it’s more beautiful than it’s ever been before.”
“It is at that,” Charley said from behind them. They both jumped in surprise and turned to look at her over the back of the park bench. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I parked over there,” she said, jutting a thumb over her shoulder. “Hi, Aunt Jo. It’s been a while.”
“Charley, look at you! Pretty as on TV!” Tears sprouting anew, Jo jumped to her feet and reached for Charley over the bench. They embraced, nearly crushing Krista in the process. “It’s so long since we’ve been together,” she wept. “So, so long...”
“Well, this doesn’t even resemble the welcome my mother gave me.” Charley chuckled.
“Oh, don’t you pay any attention to her,” Jo said, wiping at her tears. “She can’t help herself. That’s just her.”
“I agree with you on one count, but I do believe she could help herself. Which reminds me—I have something for you.” Charley pulled away so she could reach into her purse. She pulled out the recipe card. “I hope this makes you laugh.”
Josephine looked at the scrawled note from her sister. A small huff escaped her, but she was not as overcome as Charley had been. “It will be hard to pass up an invitation like that,” she said. She passed the note to Krista. Krista did not laugh at all.
“Good, I hoped you’d say that,” Charley said. “There was a little travel agent’s shop not far from Mother’s. I ducked in and picked up some round-trip bus passes for you. I don’t know what your schedule is like, but you should have these passes...” She flipped through the small envelopes as though counting dollar bills. “Three for you, three for Krista... Now you can get back and forth to see each other whenever it’s convenient. Aunt Jo, I know how you feel about Mother giving her okay for you to visit the lake house, and I know this note isn’t quite what you had in mind, but you’re just going to have to swallow your pride. Hope and the girls are coming in July.”
Josephine didn’t even look surprised. She just stared at the tickets. “I know, I know. Thank you, Charley. It’s a little more complicated than pride, but that will have to do for now.” She looked up at her tall, slender niece. She smiled appreciatively. Charley was elegant looking even in shorts and a T-shirt. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you, sweetheart?”
“Not everything. Have you had lunch? I’m starving!”
“Mom says she couldn’t eat and—”
“And I can’t take too much time,” Jo said. “There are a lot of orders today for some reason. If I don’t finish up, I’ll be staying late.”
Krista frowned. She didn’t like the way her mother fidgeted over that job. It didn’t look like the kind of flower shop that had too many orders. And that Margie... Well, Krista hadn’t been around civilians in a long time. But if Margie worked for Jo, shouldn’t she be more accommodating?
“Charley? Want to get us a couple of sandwiches from that sub shop and just eat them here? If my mom only has a little time, I don’t want to waste it ordering food in a restaurant.”
“Good idea,” Charley said, lighting off for the sub shop immediately.
Krista pulled her mom back down on the bench. “Isn’t it amazing how I can ask a TV star to run an errand, go get me food, and she goes?” Krista laughed. “Ma, no one’s going to fire you for taking an hour or two with a daughter you haven’t seen in years. Come on, relax. I can only stay a little while, anyway.”
“Oh, Margie will probably try,” Jo said. “She’s ornery. But the owner is not, so I’m going to spend what little time I have with you.”
“When are your days off? When can you come to the lake?”
“That Charley,” Jo said solemnly. “She’s just thought of everything, hasn’t she?”
“I don’t know, Ma. You tell me. Can you come to the lake pretty soon? Maybe before Hope and the girls come? So I can have you to myself?”
“I’ll try, honey. I’ll talk to Margie today and find out when she’s free to help out. She’s a good worker—I just worry about her scaring off the customers. Maybe I can take a couple of days here and there...”
“What about your vacation?” Krista asked.
Jo merely laughed. “Krista, honey, we never even talked about it.”
Chapter Seven
As Charley drove toward Megan’s house so Krista could see her, she yakked excitedly. After all her hard work, things were coming together pretty much the way she had hoped. Even though items that had been ordered would continue to arrive for the next couple of weeks, the house was basically ready enough to take on summer visitors, once a couple more mattresses arrived. They could get Megan settled when John brought her in a few days. Hope and the girls were due in a month and Aunt Jo and Krista had their bus passes so they could see each other. “And as long as my mother keeps her word and promises not to come—” She laughed suddenly.
Krista was quiet.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Krista—you must have hated to leave your mother so soon,” Charley said.
“What do you suppose she’s hiding?” Krista asked.
“Hiding? What makes you think she’s hiding something?”
“She was so fidgety. So nervous about little things—taking time off, her job, going to the lake...”
“Krista, she’s probably worried and nervous about everything! Not the least of which is what she’s going to do if she pisses off my mother! You know, you haven’t seen Louise in a very, very long time, but she’s changed. She’s so bitter, so angry. It’s understandable that losing a child would take a serious toll, but nursing that anger for this long? I can’t imagine the effect on Jo. Jo always depended on my mother. Go easy—Jo wasn’t expecting you and she’s got a lot to juggle. Louise, having you home, seeing Hope and darling little Brattie and Turdie...”
“That would be Bobbi and Trude.” Krista laughed.
“Oh, heavens, my mistake! You know, when Eric was ten years old I had a business trip to Philly and I took him along so he could meet his cousins. I had already scared the shit out of him with Louise, then we went to Philadelphia, where Hope was struggling with these two subhuman creatures... Wait till you meet them, Krista. At fourteen and sixteen, spoiled and rich, they’ve got to be a treat. Just what Hope puts in the Christmas letter about them is enough to—”
“I don’t suppose you saved any?” Krista asked.
“Hope doesn’t send you her world-famous Christmas letter? The one that lists their latest vacations, brand names and important people they’ve socialized with during the year? I swear to God, she includes everything but Frank’s annual income.”
“She wrote me once,” Krista said. “When she was addressing her wedding invitations it occurred to her that if she was going to keep me a secret, she’d better tell me not to put the prison’s return address on the envelope if I ever wrote to her.” Krista cleared her throat. “That turned out not to be a problem.”
“Does she know you’re out of prison?”
“Well...I didn’t tell her.”
Charley chuckled and it had a decidedly evil sound. “This should surpass interesting,” she finally said.
* * *
After a brief reunion between Krista and Megan, Megan could not sustain the wait to get to the lake. She begged and pleaded until John brought her two days later, provided the new mattresses had arrived. They had. John and Megan both raved about how perfect the cabin looked, how homey and welcoming, making Charley proud.
John stayed only one night, then left to get back to the city to work. “I think he really left because he wasn’t able to stand three women talking and laughing nonstop,” Megan said. “That’s okay. He’ll be less in the way once we’ve had a chance to catch up.”
“Everything except these three boxes—I told John to leave them alone. I shouldn’t be the only one here who gets her own room this summer,” Megan said. “I can double up, too.”
For the time being Krista was keeping her belongings in the master suite but taking the third bedroom for sleeping, keeping the drawers and closet free for Hope. When Hope and the girls arrived, Krista was okay sharing the big bed with Charley.
“Maybe. We’ll see. Depends on how you feel,” Charley said. “I just don’t want you to have any trouble sleeping, that’s all. And you should have a room of your own that John can share on weekends.”
“I’ve been sleeping like the dead lately,” Megan said. Then she winked at Krista, whose mouth hung open.
“It takes a little getting used to,” Charley told Krista.
“I have a surprise you’re going to love,” Megan said. “In one of these boxes...let’s see...” She read the contents as described in black, heavy marker on the outside of the boxes. Dishes, pans, linens, clothes, shoes... “Ah! Here!” She began to tear open the box.
“Shoes?” Krista questioned. “I’d heard you women on the outside were very big on shoes, but...”
“Not this time,” Megan said. “We don’t need many shoes at the lake. This was just a ruse in case Mother stopped by.”
Charley turned her attention to them now—the idea of getting something over on her mother held instant appeal.
“I stole these,” she said, lifting several large photo albums out of the box to expose a cache of loose pictures in the bottom of the box. There were also a couple of large padded envelopes full of old snapshots. “When Grandma went to the nursing home and Mother was getting ready to have an estate sale and get rid of the Grand Avenue mansion, I went over to Grandma’s in the dark of night, with a flashlight and my key to the back door, and poked around in an old box of photos. John came with me. That was before I got sick. We had a blast.”
“Why didn’t you just ask for them?” Krista wanted to know.
“Well, I asked for and got a couple of the big albums...the formal ones... Remember how we used to pore over them when we were little? Our mommies’ proms, parties, coming-outs, weddings? And the years and years of formal sittings after we started being born? I’m surprised they held together for all the little hands pulling at them. So, she said I could have these, but to tell the truth, I didn’t trust Mother with the rest of the pictures. She’s so damn angry about the past, I figured she’d either hide or destroy them. Like all the lake pictures, there are hundreds of them, and we’re all ages. There are a lot of faces in here I don’t know. We’ll have to sort through them, identify them, maybe make some new albums.”
“Look at this,” Krista was saying, leafing through piles of loose pictures. “Our mothers in puberty...out on the dock...”
“Oh, my God, the Berkey-Hempstead cousins in braces!” Charley said, howling with laughter.
“Oh, Jesus, is this what I think it is? This was taken moments after Beverly was born, in Grandma Berkey’s bed, here at the lake!”
“Let’s see. Oh, boy, you’re right, look at them grin! Mother and Jo, like they planned it. Mother said Jo had miscalculated, as usual. You know,” Charley said, putting the photo down and looking upward as if for an answer of some kind, “for years that event was told as a funny story, but after the summer of ’89, it became another example of Josephine’s incompetence.”
“Of course my mother says she could have made it to the hospital, but Louise was bossy as usual and insisted they stay at the lake.”
They looked at each other and laughed. Then they dug around to find another picture to tell another story.
“I knew they’d come in handy,” Megan said softly, watching Charley and Krista plow through them, laugh, groan, gasp, light up in recognition. Meg pulled out the largest of the albums, leather bound and gold embossed. She sat on the sofa with it on her lap. Small as she was, she resembled a child reading an oversize book.
On every holiday from the time Josephine and Louise were born, they were dressed up and seated for a formal picture. The photographer would come out to the house. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving—in the study by the fireplace, in the living room on the satin sofa, in the rose garden behind the house. There was also a wedding book for each daughter and then, as would naturally follow, formal pictures of the extended family. Louise and Carl, Charley, Megan and Bunny. Josephine and Roy, Hope, Krista and Beverly. Presiding over them, year after year, the judge and Grandma.
The portraits, all eight-by-ten color behind vinyl sheets, pulled them out of their lives and put them into this fairyland that could be viewed forever. You couldn’t tell, when looking at the portraits, that Roy was frequently drunk and out of work. Nor could you see that it was Lou, in the other family group, who was given to violent rages against her mostly silent husband, more often verbal than physical but in many ways more destructive.
Charley remembered. She was quite young when she heard, You think you can treat me like that and get away with it? You’ll see when I’m not here anymore and it won’t just be me, but me and the babies. I’ll take them with me. Check in the basement when you come home next time and see if we’re not all hanging there, dead!
Her mother, mouth twisted in rage, railed at her silent and stoic father. She might’ve been young but she was old enough to have carried that screaming threat straight into adulthood. There were a few times when, as a budding teen, she came home to an empty house and for a split second wondered if her mother and sisters were dead in the basement.
But no. No. That had not happened, only threatened.
Megan flipped the page of the album to Christmas 1985. They were coordinated in black and red velvet; the men wore dark suits and red ties, the little girls wore red jumpers and black Mary Janes; the women wore black velvet and pearls. In ’86, they wore ensembles of red and white. In ’87, they were decked in black and silver with touches of red and green here and there, on the men’s ties, in bows in the little girls’ hair. In ’88, it was red and green—the Roy Hempsteads in red and the Carl Hempsteads in green. The judge and Grandma reigned over them in black formal attire.
Their last Christmas together as a whole family.
Whatever it was that had held them together, whether it was the controlling hand of the judge or the denial of the dysfunction and brutality, whether it was the need to give an external impression, whatever it was, you had to give it some credit because they sure looked damn good. They didn’t look like screamers or drinkers or bed wetters or nightmare victims or insomniacs or nervous wrecks. It sure didn’t look like pending amnesia or attempted suicide or homicide.
“Did everyone know our homelife was crazy?” Charley asked Krista.
“Your homelife?” she asked with a laugh. “Did your father have to get blitzed to go to the judge and Grandma’s?”
“My dad didn’t drink much, that I recall,” Charley said.
“See, that’s what would be worth untangling,” Krista said. “We remember everything differently. We came from different families. We weren’t the same at all. Just because our mothers wanted us to think we were a set didn’t make it so.”
Megan began to remember what things were like when they were children. She could see it almost as if she was back in her mother’s kitchen and she was approximately thirteen years old. But she was seeing it with a new perspective.
She was pouring two glasses of Kool-Aid, probably for herself and Krista, watching and listening to her mother and aunt discuss the meal, their husbands, kids, parents, their conversation speckled with laughter. Hope and Charley were upstairs in Charley’s bedroom listening to music and reading magazines and talking about boys. Bev and Bunny were in the rec room down in the basement playing Barbies. There
was the distant sound of some sporting event on the television; Carl and Roy occasionally erupted in cheers or groans of misery.
“Don’t slice the eggs yet, they’ll get dry,” Lou commanded.
“I could devil them up?” Jo asked. She would always ask how Lou would have her do things.
“I think we’ll do the eggs last. Here, let’s make the patties and relishes.”
“You betcha.”
“Do those pretty radishes like you do,” Lou said.
“You betcha. Should we put the girls at the picnic table?”
“Let’s keep ’em in. It’s a little cold yet. We’ll put them downstairs.”
“Want to warm the buns in the oven again?”
“Oh, yeah, I loved that before, didn’t you? Toast them a little.”
“Aw, shit! He coulda had that! Jo! Bring me and Carl a beer!” Roy shouted from the living room.
“Don’t bother taking one to Carl,” Lou said. “He doesn’t need another one.”
“Roy doesn’t need one, either, but you think anyone could tell him that?” Jo said with heavy sarcasm.
“How many is that he’s had so far?”
“A hundred or so,” she said. Then she popped the cap off a cold beer, took a swig and passed it to Lou. “I’d rather have one than count his. Share?” she said with a grin.
Lou laughed. “Why not? They’re both a little easier to take when we’ve had our beer.”
“After Roy’s had his, there isn’t anything to take, if you know what I mean.”
“Carl doesn’t need as much as Roy, if you know what I mean.”
Meg remembered there was always lots of laughter. Helpless laughter. Secret laughter. We. Our. Them. Us.
There were many weekend days like that, most of them spent at Lou and Carl’s because Roy and Jo were always moving from one little low-rent house to another. When there wasn’t a command performance with the judge and Grandma, Lou and Jo brought the husbands and kids together so they could be together.