by Sydney Avey
“You can’t give me the money for it now?”
“No. I didn’t plan on having to take a taxi to the bus station.”
“You don’t have to, you know. Why do you feel you have to leave today?”
“I just do.”
“I could drive you to the station.”
“It’s okay. I’ve already made arrangements.”
Christine flushed, and the conversation stopped. A few moments later, she padded into the kitchen in the puffy slippers she had found under the bed. Nana would have sent her back to get them if she had shown up barefooted. Leone sat at the far end of the table, drinking coffee. Christine slid into her chair, and Nana slipped a plate of her favorite cinnamon toast in front of her. Generous sprinkles of sugar and cinnamon melted into warm butter spread on toasted white bread. Christine bent over and inhaled the sweet spiciness.
“Mmmmmm.” She looked up at Leone. “Do you like cinnamon toast?”
“Never had it.” Leone began to push herself away from the table.
“Pshaw, I made it for you all the time,” Nana said.
“I don’t remember.”
“Aren’t you going to finish your coffee?” An edge of pleading embroidered Christine’s voice. “Because I have something for you.” She jumped up from the table and ran into the bedroom. When she returned, Leone picked up her coffee cup and set it in the sink. Opal retrieved the cup, emptied it’s cooling contents into the drain, and added it to the soapy dishwater she had prepared.
“Always making me look bad,” Leone half-joked.
Christine thrust a piece of ruled paper into her aunt’s hand. “Here. I wrote you a poem.”
“You write poetry?”
“Some of my poetry has been published in the newspaper.” Christine rocked back and forth on her feet.
“Your school newspaper?” Leone set the paper down on the table and folded her arms across her chest.
“No, the Times; the one that gets delivered in the afternoon. It’s not as important as the one that comes in the morning.” Christine sat back down at the table and shoveled a spoonful of oatmeal into her mouth.
Leone picked up the paper and looked at the poem. “Is this one of the poems that got published?”
“No. I wrote this one last night.”
“The Bay City,” Leone read the poem aloud. “Why did you write a poem about San Francisco for me?”
“Because you like that city, and I do too.”
“This isn’t bad. You should send it to the paper.”
She shook her head. “No. This one is for you.” She pushed her half-eaten oatmeal aside and began to trace the ivy vine pattern in the tablecloth with her finger.
“Well, I have something for you too.” Leone went to the bedroom and returned with her bag and a folded sheaf of yellowed legal-sized papers held together by rusty paperclips. Opal looked over from where she was washing dishes in the sink.
“I wondered where those went. How long have you had my mother’s stories?”
Leone didn’t answer. She unfolded the papers and laid them on the table in front of Christine, “Look at these.”
Opal wiped her hands on her apron and walked over to the table to stand behind Christine. Peering over the girl’s shoulder, she clucked her tongue. “I’ll be. I haven’t seen those stories since we all left Oregon.”
“These are stories your great-grandmother Nellie Belle wrote about her life,” Leone told Christine. “You keep them, and someday when you are a famous author, you put Nellie Belle Scott’s stories in one of your books.”
Two short honks on a taxicab horn saved Christine from having to say anything. Leone folded Christine’s poem and put it in her pocket, picked up her bag, and walked briskly to the front door. Opal followed but stopped in the kitchen doorway. Christine joined her grandmother, who drew her close. Together, they waited for Leone to say something.
Leone pulled open the door and fumbled with the latch on the screen. Just before she disappeared down the steps, she turned around and flashed a big smile, her audience smile. “Bye, you two.”
Opal walked to the front doorway and looked through the screen at Leone’s back. “Will we see you again?” she asked.
“Of course,” came the response from the bottom of the steps.
Back in the kitchen, Christine wrestled the window up far enough to where she could stick her head out. She strained to catch a glimpse of her aunt’s face as the taxi backed out of the driveway, but Leone wasn’t looking their way. When the taxi turned into the street, she thought she saw a hand wave, but she couldn’t be sure.
36 - Last Call
36
Last Call
Los Altos, 1962
Sometimes the telephone rang in the middle of the night. Christine would hear her mother’s slippered feet shuffle down the hall and the receiver click as it was lifted from the desk phone. “Hello. Yes, what is it?” Then, long silences broken by low monotone answers. Always, her mother would be snappish the next day.
Her father put a stop to it. One night, the mattress creaked a second time in her parents’ room. The floor groaned as he passed Christine’s bedroom door, down the hallway to the living room. There she imagined her mother hunched over the desk telephone, wrapped in her chenille robe, shivering against the cold. Then, her father’s voice on the phone, the receiver settled back onto its base, feet in the hallway, a door scrape against the frame, muffled voices, quiet.
Early in the morning, her bedroom door opened and light from the hallway illuminated the foot of her bed. She was awake anyway, staring up at the ceiling. She sat up in bed. “Was it Leone?”
Her father pulled the door half shut and sat down on the edge of her bed. “Yes.”
“You didn’t hang up on her, did you?”
“No.”
“Well then, what did you say to her?”
He was quiet for a moment. Through the high window, the last of the moonlight transferred its reflection to her father’s tired face. Even with the dark stubble of a night’s beard growth and sleep-mussed hair sticking out from the sides of his head, he looked like someone she could always count on to tell her the truth.
“I told her she was upsetting your mother and not to call here anymore.”
“But …”
“No but.” He stood up and walked to the door. Christine sniffed air into her lungs and held her breath. When he reached the doorway, he turned back to face her.
“You have to understand. When Leone calls in the middle of the night like she does, it’s because she’s drunk. There’s nothing we can do for her. It upsets your mother, and I can’t have that.”
Christine let out the breath she was holding and fell back on her pillow.
“Can you get back to sleep?” he asked.
“I’ll try.”
After he had pulled the door closed, Christine folded her hands behind her head. She tried to picture Leone at the end of the telephone line. Did she prop herself up in a barroom phone booth? Or sit on a sofa in a lonely room surrounded by empty bottles? What did she want to say at three in the morning that she could not say at any other time? To keep the peace, Christine would have to obey her father. There is nothing we can do for her, he had said, but it was his departing words that chilled her.
“We will speak of her no more.”
Epilogue
EPILOGUE
San Francisco, 2009
Christine looked out over the audience and took a centering breath before hitting the button on her remote to bring up her first slide. Each audience was different. Younger people had to be convinced that genealogical research was worth the long hours, the detours, and the dead ends they would encounter. Older people needed to be encouraged that it was not too late to tackle such a daunting project. Her job was to paint a vision of life both temporal and timeless. Hardest of all, both groups needed to learn to use their imaginations.
She always watched for the moment when the energy dropped in the room.
Then she would depart from the data projected on the screen. The statistics would remain on the screen for a time, and then go dark. She would close her computer and open up her life.
“Some people live forever in the hearts of those who loved them. Others live in the imaginations of those who barely knew them. To tell a good story, you must depart from data. Recall what you learned from the cautionary tales your family told around the dinner table. Study your ancestor’s photos, puzzle over scrapbook clippings. The black sheep in your family fold have stories to tell.”
The inevitable question would come during Q&A. “Is the story you told in your book true?” Christine always gave the same answer, even though it rarely satisfied.
“Every family story is a fiction. Some parts are fact, but what we don’t know, we make up. It’s living history. As you interpret what you see and reenact what you’ve heard, your story gains some and loses some. That’s what makes it worth revisiting.”
Then she would pull an old scrapbook out of a green canvas bag, set a letterbox on the table in front of her, unfold yellowed sheets of legal paper covered with faded, typewritten copy, and tell her stories.
R
Author’s Note
Author’s Note
The Trials of Nellie Belle is a fictional story based on events in the lives of my great-grandmother, Nellie Belle Scott, and my aunt, Leone Barry. What I know about these events, I learned through conversation around the family dinner table, photographs, preserved writing, and research. I have used the real names of most of the historical characters, with some alterations.
Because family stories that pass down through generations are notoriously unreliable, it is safe to say that much of this story is pure conjecture. I believe the stories that Nellie wrote for her creative writing class derive from her courtroom experiences, but how much is true and how much is embellishment I have no way of knowing.
R
About the Author
About the Author
In our beautiful, terrible world, people struggle to find their footing on uneven paths. Sydney Avey writes about ordinary people who muster faith and courage to step over uncertainty and continue the journey. Her novels invite compassion for the stumbles of the past and offer hope for the future, if only a glimmer.
Sydney has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a lifetime of experience writing news for non-profits and corporations.
Other titles by Sydney Avey include The Sheep Walker’s Daughter and The Lyre and the Lambs. Her poetry, short stories, and articles have appeared in Foliate Oak, Forge, American Athenaeum, Unstrung, Blue Guitar Magazine, Ruminate, and MTL Magazine. She has participated in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival as well as many other conferences and seminars. She is a choral singer and enjoys travel, theater, and spending time with family and friends.
Sydney and her airplane enthusiast husband divide their time between the Sierra Nevada foothills of Yosemite, California, and the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.
Follow Sydney online:
[email protected]
www.SydneyAvey.com
Facebook.com/YosemiteSyd
Pinterest.com/yosemitesyd/
Twitter: @SydneyAvey
Resources
Resources
South County Historical Society, San Luis Obispo Counnty, CA. Copies of Dune Forum may be read online at:
http://www.southcountyhistory.org/duneforum.htm
Linda Austin and Norm Hammond, Images of America, Oceano, Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, South Carolina, 2010.
Ella Thorpe Ellis, Dune Child, El León Literary Arts, Berkeley, California, 2011
Luther Whitman, The Face of the Clam, South County Historical Society, Inc. 2010
Other Books by Sydney Avey
Other Books by Sydney Avey
The Sheep Walker’s Daughter pairs a colorful immigrant history of loss, survival, and tough choices with one woman’s search for spiritual identity and personal fulfillment. Dee’s journey will take her through the Northern and Central California valleys of the 1950s and reach across the world to the obscure Basque region of Spain. She will begin to discover who she is and why family history matters.
A Korean War widow’s difficult mother dies before revealing the identity of her daughter’s father and his cultural heritage. As Dee sorts through what little her mother left, she unearths puzzling clues that raise more questions: Why did Leora send money every month to the Basque Relief Agency? Why is her own daughter so secretive about her soon-to-be published book? And what does an Anglican priest know that he isn’t telling? All this head-spinning breaks a long, dry period in Dee’s life. She might just as well lose her job and see where the counsel of her new spiritual advisor and the attentions of an enigmatic ex-coworker lead her.
The Lyre and the Lambs explores the passions that draw people together and the faith it takes overcome trauma.
It’s the ‘60s. Modernity and tradition clash as two newlywed couples set up house together. Dee and her daughter Valerie move with their husbands into a modern glass house Valerie built in a proudly rural Los Altos, California, neighborhood. When their young relatives start showing up and moving in, the neighbors get suspicious. Then a body is found in the backyard and the life they are trying to build comes undone.
Father Mike is back to guide Dee through a difficult time with humor and grace, even as his own life is unraveling. Now he’s going to have to take some of his own advice about love.
If You Liked The Trials of Nellie Belle
If You Liked
The Trials of Nellie Belle
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