Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel

by Tori Whitaker

  “It’s not just our bank’s policy, Mrs. Glenn,” the banker said. “It’s everywhere.”

  “But the money’s mine.”

  He picked up a pencil and tapped it on his desk. “Do you have something to hide from your husband, Mrs. Glenn?”

  “Pardon me?” How dare he ask me such a question? How dare he insult my character? I couldn’t get my mouth to close.

  “Here’s an authorization form,” he said, “in case you decide to return with your husband’s signature.”

  I snatched it out of Mr. Hatter’s hand, and it was all I could do not to rip the page into pieces and toss them in his face.

  Back at home I awaited my husband’s return. Dennis would grant his permission with the bank. Wouldn’t he? But why should he have to? Why did I have to lower myself to ask him? He wasn’t my parent. We were partners. He was my husband. I’d worked hard for that money.

  I poured myself a glassful of water and swallowed a big gulp. Without me, Dennis’s business—our business—wouldn’t be where it was. He’d said so himself.

  2015

  By the time Kelsey arrived at the gym, I’d already squirmed into my one-piece swimsuit. Several blogs had recommended water aerobics as one of the best forms of exercise for pregnant women, so Kelsey had asked if she could come to my class on her next day off. I was delighted. It would be just us two, a grandma-granddaughter moment like we’d had before her mother returned. Kelsey located me in the rear of the ladies’ changing area and hugged me. I was resting on a low bench in the most remote U-shaped alcove of lockers, wrapped in my extralong towel like a pig in a blanket. A skinny pig.

  “Am I in the right place?”

  I turned. “Jane?”

  “Finally found my bathing suit stuck at the bottom of a box of underwear yet to be unpacked. One of several boxes decorating my bedroom in the apartment.”

  “Yay,” Kelsey said. “You came.”

  “Thank you for inviting me,” Jane said, boring holes through me with her eyes, “Kelsey.”

  I was ashamed to think my territorialism where Kelsey was concerned still lingered. A better mother would never feel this way. Kelsey smiled, and I knew what I had to do.

  “Jane. I’m glad you came. And as for your boxes, you are both always welcome to store anything—boxes, furniture, what have you—in my basement. Plenty of room.” I lightly clapped my hands. “Best hurry now, girls, as class starts in five minutes, and we’ve got to pull our plastic barbells out of the bin.”

  Kelsey pattered off to a restroom stall. “Did you bring water-safe shoes?” Jane said, but Kelsey didn’t hear her. Indeed, the deck around the indoor pool puddled in spots, and I didn’t want Kelsey slipping on the concrete in her condition either.

  “We’ll get her when she comes back,” I said. “Best hurry up and change.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Jane said. “I’m one step ahead of you.” She pulled her sweatshirt over her head, revealing her swimsuit underneath. “Voilà. I do hope that pool’s heated.”

  “It’s heated. But it’s not bathwater,” I said. “You’ll have to buck up.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I locked my locker. I used number 103 every time, so I wouldn’t have to try to remember where I’d stowed my clothes. When Kelsey strutted back out of the restroom, towel in hand, I said, “Good heavens, I see the baby poking out.”

  “I’m eighteen weeks along today,” she said, and twirled around, her feet bare. The protrusion at her midriff didn’t stick out that far, but it was nicely rounded. She glowed. Four and a half months? I still counted terms of pregnancy in months, like in the old days, not in weeks the way Kelsey did.

  As if by instinct, Jane reached out her palm to touch her daughter’s belly through the hot-pink one-piece suit. “I’m Nana,” she said in a squeaky-grandma voice as she rubbed Kelsey’s tummy with reverence. Then I had to have a turn. Kelsey’s belly was warm and taut. To think, this was my great-grandchild growing inside. Would we have another girl?

  “You two do know, of course,” Kelsey said, “you’re the only people in the world I’d let do that.”

  “Do what?” Jane said.

  “Touch my body without permission. These days it’s not cool to touch a pregnant woman’s stomach without asking.”

  “Well, we’re not just anyone,” her mother said with a hmph.

  “The swimming shoes?” I asked.

  “I haven’t forgotten, Mother,” Jane said, and sighed. “Kels, put on my rubber shoes. I’ll go without.”

  Now I hoped Jane wouldn’t fall.

  I grasped the metal rail and lowered a foot onto a step in the slightly cool water, careful not to slip. The first time I’d gone swimming, I was a child in Washington Park in my old neighborhood. The shallow wading pool had been in view of the old, grand music hall where rich people went to concerts. I’d worn rolled-up shorts, because my mother couldn’t afford a bathing suit as some other girls wore. But to this day, I could feel Opa holding me up by my armpits so my face wouldn’t go under the water.

  “Good morning, ladies,” the instructor said. “Let’s warm up!”

  We began with walking in the water, increased to a water jog, and then advanced to doing jumping jacks—those were hard on my shoulder joints, but I wouldn’t relent. I wanted to prove to my girls I was fit.

  Out of nowhere Jane said, “Marco!”

  “Polo!” Kelsey called back. They giggled. The game was reminiscent of what they’d played in the apartment complex pool when Jane was in college as a nontraditional student.

  She’d gotten financial aid when she returned from Arizona with the baby, unwilling to let Dennis and me help. She had a part-time job on campus, too, where they had a childcare center for employees. I was proud of Jane’s independence, though we always wanted to help, especially given that Kelsey had no father in the picture. Having the girls nearby had given me new purpose after Jane was away so long out west. Yet even when Jane went to work full time here, Kelsey didn’t wear expensive Nike Airs or play Nintendo games. Jane got down on the ground, taught her about ant colonies and how all the ants had jobs—including the females. That made me smile. Jane took her camping in the Smoky Mountains, borrowing a pup tent from a friend. Although I had starched and ironed little Janie’s shirts and shorts when she wasn’t at the farm, Jane had always let Kelsey get dirty. If that child splattered Kool-Aid all down her top, “so what!” was Jane’s response. They visited us most weeks during Kelsey’s school years. And sometimes, like when Jane had finals to study for, we babysat for the weekend. Those days before Jane moved to Georgia—once Kelsey went off to Ohio State University—were simple days, because we all had Kelsey’s best interest at heart. For the most part, Jane and I got along as if we were close, though something undefinable in our bond was missing. She spent more time in the garage with her dad and his tools than in the kitchen with me and the dishes. And if ever she thought my overprotectiveness horned in, like when I questioned her decision to let Kelsey ride a two-wheeler in the street, Jane let it be known who the mother was around there. So too with my hovering over Jane herself. Was the apartment kept too cool? Should Dennis install a humidifier? Did Jane have her annual pap smear yet?

  One time when Kelsey was running a cross-country meet, I asked Jane as we sat in the bleachers: “Do I hear you’re dating?”

  Jane’s lip had curled as she growled: “My private life is called private for a reason. It’s my private life. Not yours.” A typical reaction. Though whatever fling she’d had turned into nothing.

  After aerobics class, Jane, Kelsey, and I dried off in the locker room where we’d begun. Thank goodness no one had slipped and fractured their tailbone. Or worse.

  The remaining dripping-wet swimmers from class gravitated elsewhere. My granddaughter’s cheeks were rosy from exertion, the way they were when Dennis had pushed her on the tire swing in our backyard during the summers. “Higher, Papaw, higher,” Kelsey would yell. I hated that he hadn’t lived long en
ough to play with the great-grandchild we were soon to have.

  “Did you notice,” Kelsey said as she pulled off her rubber swimming cap, “my breasts are swelling already too? Aaron sure has.”

  “TMI,” I said, and Kelsey cracked up. I’d learned that acronym from her: too much information.

  “Yeah, your boobs are getting bigger,” Jane said, “while mine continue to shrink. Thanks, menopause.” We all laughed. It was an unexpected moment of bonding, and I treasured it. Her wet swimsuit was unpadded and it clung to her torso, revealing every ripple and bulge of age and the cold perkiness of her nipples.

  “Wait till you get my age,” I said. I’d been a “sweater girl” back in the fifties—round, high, and firm, or pointy when wearing the right brand of bra. One would never know it now, to look at my deflated sacs of skin made flatter by the stretch of my suit.

  “Well, actually,” Jane said, “I might not have any boobs at all one day.”

  Kelsey frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She means she’ll look like me when she’s my age,” I said.

  “No. Not referring to you.” Jane smiled tightly. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  Kelsey’s eyes met mine as we stood in our wet suits and towels, the three of us in a circle between the low bench and the double-stacked rows of lockers. Pop music blared in the background. The fluorescent lights overhead revealed every line and crease in our faces, and the smell of chlorine hung in the air along with my nerves.

  “Mom,” Kelsey said. “You shouldn’t have told us what?”

  “I don’t know. I had no intentions of saying anything. But all this talk of breasts, well.” Jane waved her hand dismissively, but the note of sadness I’d seen on the day she returned from Georgia was back in her eyes. Dread crept into my limbs. She looked so much older in a bathing cap, too, without her shoulder-length hair to frame and soften her face. More like Opa. Directing her speech to her locker now, she said, “I guess I have a little complication.”

  “A complication?” I said, a rush of adrenaline paralyzing me.

  “It’s nothing, I’m sure,” Jane said lightly. “But before I left Georgia, I discovered a lump.”

  My intake of breath might have been heard two locker rows away. This couldn’t be happening. Not to my daughter. Could life be that unfair? No. It couldn’t, it couldn’t. She and I were just getting a chance to feel our way back together again. We were still trying to—

  Kelsey stepped closer to Jane and put her hand on her mother’s arm and was quick to say, “You’re right, it’s probably nothing. Lots of women get lumps, and most of them are benign.”

  “Exactly,” Jane said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. The last thing we need is for you to be stressed. You’re carrying my grandchild, after all.”

  If I had to describe my daughter’s expression in that moment, I would say it was brave, defiant, reassuring. And troubled. And that’s how Kelsey looked, too.

  How dared I have thought for one millisecond that I’d rather Jane not have come today so I could have Kelsey to myself? What kind of mother was I? My body was numb. I pictured a poor lady at church whose son had recently died from cancer—her weeping over his coffin in the funeral home, and her tossing a fistful of dirt into his freshly dug grave. And Dennis. When Jane’s father was about her age, he, too, had died of cancer.

  “Where is it? The lump?” Kelsey said.

  Jane pointed to the outside roundness of her left breast. Kelsey reached up to touch it, and Jane swatted her hand. Kelsey’s lips were firm as she went in again. “Stop it, Mom,” she said.

  I stood immobile, shivering, as Kelsey pressed the length of her cupped fingers along the sagging curve of her mother’s breast.

  We heard voices coming nearer, women in for spin class. I stretched my towel out in the way a bat spreads its wings, shielding my girls. The pack of spinners turned back for a less crowded alcove.

  “It’s not cool to touch a woman’s breast at the gym,” Jane said sarcastically.

  “I’m not just anyone,” Kelsey said.

  Kelsey moved her fingers up a little and then down, pressing in methodically. “Uh!” came from Kelsey’s throat all of a sudden—and she yanked her hand away as if scalded. Her rosy face turned ashen. “It’s the size of a grape. Mom, you’ve got to get this thing checked right away.”

  My skin went fire-red hot, and an urgent need to vomit was mounting in my gut. My daughter was to be a grandmother, oh yes, but her health was another reason she’d surprised me by moving back home.

  I’d been right to worry after all. But how I wished I’d been wrong.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  April 1949

  I waited in our car, alone, in front of a lot in a neighborhood that already had three of our Gunnison houses. Two white oaks had been spared at the rear of the lot, and it was good to see the leaves in full bloom. The house’s slab foundation was already poured. I rolled down the car’s window, and the air was fragrant with early honeysuckle from a neighbor’s yard. With Dennis at Gunnison’s Indiana factory learning about home warranties and customer repair claims, someone needed to accept delivery of a customer’s three-bedroom kit. That was me. I thrived on handling the advertising, accounting, and some interior decor, but I pitched in wherever else I could. The customer’s kit was scheduled to arrive by truck between ten a.m. and noon. On this particular day, the earlier the better.

  At long last I was getting to plan a big surprise for Dennis. I had much to do before his return home. After more than four years of trying, I was going to have a baby.

  I was going to be a mother.

  It meant our family was starting, that I was not defective, that our hopes and dreams would be fulfilled. My husband and I would get to decide on a name. I had ideas on that, of course. I’d toyed with choices for years. It meant that Mother Glenn would assess whether this grandchild of hers resembled Dennis as an infant and pull out his baby pictures to prove it. I would get to dress the little baby in adorable outfits—blue or pink or white. It meant that I would have a little one to play with the Glenn family cousins at future Christmases. I—yes, I, Millicent Glenn—would get to enjoy all the things a mother enjoyed, things that I’d been missing. I could almost feel my baby Glenn growing inside of me; it was the physical definition of happiness. I already loved her or him. And I would create a wonderful nursery to welcome our baby home.

  Dennis and I had a personal Gunnison house of our own now, in a lively nearby neighborhood filled with young families who rode bikes together and borrowed cups of sugar. A real home. It was the smallest model that Gunnison made, but it had two whole bedrooms and one private bath. We’d made friends as well. Pauline and Bob Irving lived next door in their prefab house the next size up. We’d met when they toured our third model. As soon as they’d walked into its light, bright kitchen, Pauline had asked, “What are you baking?” I had opened the oven to show there was nothing. She assured me the room smelled as if I had baked.

  “Can you keep a secret?” I said.

  “I’m the best gal at keeping secrets you’ll ever meet,” she said, crossing her heart with the tip of her finger.

  I told her how, since our first open house, I’d used my trick of dropping vanilla onto hot lightbulbs. Drops would sizzle and send off an aroma.

  “Why, Millicent,” she said, having taken a cue on my name from the flyer, “if that’s all it takes to make a house smell like a bakery, I can give up making Toll House cookies entirely.”

  I’d laughed. She and I might not have ever met under different circumstances, but we’d become fast friends—and she’d called me Millicent from that day forward. Pauline’s family had sent her to college for a year to study home economics and to find a husband. She once referred to herself as “Pauline Loretta Irving née King.” How implausible it was that “Millicent Marion Glenn née Kraus,” once a tenement girl, now resided in a private dwelling surrounded by thick green grass, pristi
ne sidewalks, well-kept homes, a milkman who delivered to her own metal box, and a shaggy-haired mutt named Raggsie.

  It was getting stuffy in the car now. I strained to look down the block. No sign of the Gunnison truck. I checked my wristwatch. Half an hour had ticked by. I rested my head against the back of the car seat and closed my eyes.

  I’d come to have my own home and almost everything else I could have wanted, almost everything my mother and Opa had dreamed of for me—though they hadn’t lived to see it. I’d held Mama’s hand as she died of pneumonia over a year back. When we buried her, Opa said, “I always thought I’d go before her. This isn’t the right order of things, first losing a son in the Great War and now a daughter, too. Losing them both before me isn’t right.”

  A few weeks later, he passed in his sleep when his heart gave way. Losing him felt as if the roof of my house had blown off, as if I were at risk, exposed to the dangerous elements outside. The feeling was irrational, given that I lay safe in the arms of my husband. In time, I would realize how my accepting the deaths of my loved ones was a sacrifice I had to make, so they could be together if only in heaven.

  And finally I was going to continue their legacy.

  I was delirious to tell Dennis that I’d skipped my second monthly cycle—at last—and Dr. Welch, the doctor all the Glenn women used, had confirmed the glorious news.

  Pauline had a baby on the way as well, and she was the only one whom I’d told thus far. She’d lent me her manual by a Dr. Eastman, Expectant Motherhood. I wanted to understand the baby’s development and start planning a layette. The night before, I’d rolled from one side onto my other, alone and wide awake, envisioning my infant’s tiny fingers, dressing him or her in tiny sleepers, pushing my child in a carriage through the neighborhood while the morning birds sang.

  I couldn’t stop celebrating with my own self. I was going to be a mother.

  I glanced out the window of the car and there it was: the long, forest-green truck pulling around the corner. Seeing one of the company’s trucks and trailers—with GUNNISON HOMES painted down its side in big white script—tickled me every time. I was proud to be part of our dealership’s success. I climbed out and waved at the two men who would unload. The driver backed the trailer into the dirt, positioning the rear doors adjacent to the concrete slab foundation.