Dad doesn’t have red hair. He has white hair.
“Hey, Betty Sue,” Connie calls to the other waitress, who is setting a table across the room. “Ain’t that what happened to Mary Lynn? Got knocked up by a married guy, had a kid. Didn’t her sister raise it?”
“Sure did,” Betty Sue calls back.
“No one in your family could take her, huh?”
Billie is busy mopping the gravy up with what’s left of her biscuit. I suspect she’s pretending not to hear the question. Poor Billie. Why should she be judged by these strangers in a highway diner?
“Oh, Billie did the right thing,” I step in quickly. “I’ve had a wonderful upbringing. A wonderful life.”
“And now you’re back home.” Connie has tears in her eyes. “Well, c’mere.” I’m made to stand up. Connie’s mighty arms pull me to her ample bosom and hold me there.
We eat for free on the road to Georgia.
Chapter Eighteen
BILLIE’S CABIN ONBUCKMOUNTAIN,Georgia, is twenty miles from the nearest shop. You get to the sitting room through the deck, from which you can look out over the mountains and a huge front lawn that has seen better days.
Billie tells me that my grandfather saw the land from the air one day, while flying one of his little planes, and fell in love with it. After building himself a log cabin, which he calls his “getaway place,” he built this house for Billie right next to it. Billie says it was his way of giving her some of his money before he died and “it all got into the hands of my greedy stepmother.”
It’s a wild but peaceful spot. I spend most of the evening sitting in a large bamboo chair on Billie’s deck, with Heathcliffe on my chest purring loudly. The air is cool, sweetened by the flowers growing wild in the uncut grass. The evening light fades to a soft orange and yellow, while Billie chats away about our genetic ancestors and thefact that creative talent is in the genes.
“Honey!!!” Billie’s voice wakes me suddenly at eight o’clock the next morning. “It’s time to meet your grandfather! Hurry! He’s here!”
I leap out of bed, throw on a dress and my Marks and Spencer cardigan, and run out to the deck. A silver Lincoln purrs up the narrow white drive and stops next to the creek. Out comes a tall old man wearing buckled boots, black pants, a black suede jacket with long tassels, and a big black cowboy hat that hides his face. He moves slowly toward the house. Halfway up the steps to the sitting room, he lifts the hat and looks up at me. His face is old and white and his eyes are startlingly blue, and full of laughter.
“Hallo, Granddaughter,” he says. “How’s the queen today?” He speaks slowly. His voice is resonant and southern and I feel like I’ve heard it before.
“Well,” I say, “last time I spoke to her she had a bunion.”
He stops walking.
“And where is this bunion?” he asks, poker-faced.
“On her left foot,” I say solemnly. “But it’s doing better now. I’ll tell the queen you asked after her.”
He walks up the last three steps. Then he holds out his arms and I walk into them. His jacket feels rough against my skin and smells of tobacco. I feel comfortable in his arms.
“How are you?” I say.
“Well, I’ve only got another three weeks or so to live, but apart from that, I’m fine.”
I start to laugh.
“Well, who’d have thought it. My long-lost-grandbaby’s got a million-dollar smile,” he says, laughing with me.
We walk into the sitting room, arm in arm, my grandfather, Earl Joe Stanford, and I, both of us direct descendents of Governor McKay of Georgia and proud of it. We sit down on the shiny tan leather sofa that stretches L-shaped across half the room, while Billie makes us all a cup of tea. The American way. Which means she sticks three coffee mugs half full of water in the microwave for thirty seconds. Then she dunks the same Lipton tea bag in all three mugs until a nasty brown swirl appears. Then she adds a squidge of lemon and tells us to “come and get it.”
If you are English, you will know how I feel about this. If you are not English, let me take this opportunity to tell you how to make a drinkable cup of tea.
First, you warm a teapot. Then you put in tea leaves—Earl Grey, Lapsang, or Darjeeling, ideally. One teaspoon for each person, and one for the pot. Then you pour in water that has been boiled. In a kettle. After waiting a few minutes for the tea to brew you pour a little milk into the bottom of a teacup. Then, using a tea strainer, you pour in the tea. Then, if you take sugar, you add sugar. Then you drink it.
If you are English and have the misfortune to find yourself drinking tea with an American who has made it incorrectly, you do not give any indication that the tea is anything other than delicious. Instead you say something like what I say to Billie, which is, “Thank you. How lovely. Do you by any chance have any milk?”
When your American watches you pour in the milk and declares that next time she’ll put the milk, the sugar, and the tea in the teapot all at the same time, because it’ll be so much quicker that way, you do not flinch. Instead you smile, politely, and pretend to drink the mug of tea in front of you. You can’t of course, because apart from everything else, the lemon has made the milk curdle. So you pour it down the sink when no one’s looking.
“She’s got Mother’s legs, don’t you think, Daddy? And she’s got my arms,” Billie says.
“And my father’s breasts?” I quip.
“Honey, your father had no breasts at all,” Billie says, taking me literally. “Mother was flat-chested too, which mean clothes hung on her just beautifully. Which reminds me!”
Billie disappears and comes back in a flash, carrying an electric-blue dress made out of something silky on a hanger.
“This is for you, dear daughter of mine. It was one of Mother’s favorites.”
She hands me a pair of high-heeled shoes and white silk stockings to go with it. “Try it on,” she commands.
I hate trying on clothes as much as I always do whenever Charlotte begs me to try on something of hers. But I go into the bathroom and, alas, it fits. I come out. “Ta da!” Billie says to her father.
“Don’t you look just as pretty as a picture! If I were thirty years younger…”
“Oh, Daddy,” Billie says, with tears in her eyes. “She looksjust like Mother. Don’t you think?”
Earl’s voice is soft.
“I do,” he says.
“Oh, Daddy!” Billie says, suddenly laughing in delight. “What is Molly Alice going to say when she sees this?”
Chapter Nineteen
DURING THE EARLY AFTERNOONS,while Billie is napping, I walk through the trees to Earl’s cabin, to sing to my long-lost-grandfather-now-found, at his request. Unlike Billie’s house, Earl’s cabin is ordered and clean. Actually it feels a bit like being inside a boat because it’s tiny and the walls and floors are made of dark polished wood.
Earl has one of those chairs that recline backward at the touch of a button and are so comfortable you never want to leave. As I sing, he lies in his recliner with his eyes closed, dressed in a pair of white cotton pajamas. Everything about him is white, apart from his toenails, which are yellow with age.
After I’ve finished singing, I tickle his feet with the long white feather he keeps for that purpose on the shelf by the door.
“Thank you for granting the wishes of a dying man,” he says.
I smile. Billie has already told me he’s been cajoling people into tickling the soles of his feet with a feather for the past thirty years.
“Now, listen up, Granddaughter,” he says. “I want you to remember something.” His voice is frail and old, but his eyes are clear.
“You sing like an angel, which confirms my suspicions. You, dear granddaughter, have got the family gift. It’s an artistic gift and it comes out in different ways. Your grandmother had it too. I wanted her home, loving me and my family, so I stopped her using that gift. Hell, I treated her gift like it was her lover, and that was wrong. A little higher now.”<
br />
The skin on the instep of the feet that have carried my grandfather for eighty years is as smooth as a child’s.
“Make sure you use your gift. And don’t go and do something stupid like getting married. But if you gotta marry, whatever you do, marry the kind of man who will let you do everything you gotta do.”
Someone who understands the artistic spirit. Someone like Nick.
Mum and Dad’s parents died in their early seventies. I haven’t had grandparents past the age of ten. How I would have loved this man had I known him growing up.
When Billie joins us, our conversation turns to the subject of Earl’s wife, Molly Alice. The wife he left Billie’s mother for. Billie calls her Malice for short.
“Biggest mistake I ever made,” Earl says. “Lost a great secretary and gained a lousy wife.”
“Daddy couldn’t understand why she was so mean about me until I sent him an article I read, entitled ‘When Paranoia Comes Home,’” Billie says. “It makes it much easier to have compassion for her, knowing she’s mentally ill. Malice is not going to like Pippa’s arrival one bit,” Billie says happily.
“Oh dear,” I say. “I didn’t want my arrival to upset anybody. Maybe I could talk to her and try and help?”
Billie looks at me with a gleam in her eye.
“Now, Daddy, what do you think? ’Course she’ll say no if youask her, so why don’t you just…I know, Daddy! Why don’t you take Pippa with you when you go down the mountain and surprise Molly Alice with her?”
Earl shakes his head slowly. Molly Alice’s hatred of Billie goes back many years. Seems to me there’s a fierce competition going on for Earl’s affections, which Billie is winning hands down.
“Weelll,” Earl says slowly, “the situation can’t get much worse than it is already…”
An hour later I am driving Earl down from the mountain.
“It’s the right side of the road in America,” Earl says. He’s gripping the door handle tightly.
“Sorry,” I say, hunched up at the wheel, concentrating like mad. “I do know that. It’s just that the road is so thin.”
I hit a rock.
“Sorry,” I say.
We drive past the trees and the mountains, down through Main Street, which looks clean and pretty, with old-fashioned dark yellow traffic lights hanging from a wire above the center of the road. We drive on to Pine Drive and pull up outside a pretty old colonial house painted white and light blue, with a swing on the porch.
“You stay back,” Earl says. “And when I signal to you, step forward and give her a hug.”
I get out of the car and stand by as a tiny, reed-thin, immaculately dressed woman with jet-black hair scraped off her face in a tight bun hurries out of the house.
“Earl, you’re late,” she says.
“Well, yes I am, Molly Alice,” he says, “but look what kind of a reason I got.”
She squints at me. “Who’s this?” she says.
“This,” my grandfather says, pausing theatrically, “is Pippa Dunn. My granddaughter.” She looks blank for a second and then it dawns upon her.
“No! Not Billie’s…not the one she…” Her voice is sharp and thin.
“Yup,” says my grandfather, signaling for me to make my move with the arm bent behind his back.
“Which makes me your step-granddaughter,” I say, coming toward her and holding out my arms with a smile, waiting for the usual reaction. I’m getting quite fond of being hugged by everyone I meet.
Molly Alice stares at me open-mouthed and just as I reach her, she jumps back.
“Keep away from me,” she says. “You just keep away from me!” And then, “What d’you want? The money? That what you come for?”
“Of course not!” I say, horrified. “Of course not!” Apart from anything else, money is never, ever discussed in England.
Earl is a wealthy man, and part of the battle between Billie and her stepmother is over who will inherit that wealth when he dies. I am mortified by the thought that anyone would think I wanted anyone’s money.
“I’ll be back in a while,” Earl says, getting into the driver’s seat of his Lincoln. “You two girls have a nice talk now.” And suddenly he’s gone.
Molly Alice and I watch the dust from the Lincoln settle back on the road and look at each other.
“What you come for?” she says. She’s standing on the porch steps, so we’re almost the same height. “If it ain’t the money, what you come for?” Molly Alice’s face is white with fury. “She thinks she’s really got me this time, pulling you out at a time like this, her little English trump card.” And then, bringing her face an inch away from mine, she says, “Don’t you ever forget what they did to you! They abandoned you!”
Along with most English people, I have spent a lifetime perfecting the craft of hiding what I am really feeling, particularly when it’s something strong and difficult. But at this moment, my years of training fail me.
“Your mother back home, she’s your real mother. Nother .”
I feel as if I’ve been punched in the stomach. Suddenly I’m crying. “I know that!” I say. “Of course Mum’s my real mother, I just wanted to find out where I’d come from. I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”
“Why’d you surprise me like that? Was that her idea? Was it?”
“No,” I lie. “It was my idea. It was very immature of me. I’m sorry.”
“Well, it was immature,” she says. “Don’t use your sleeve, I got tissues somewhere here.”
She reaches into her handbag and takes out a small packet of Kleenex.
“Thank you,” I say, blowing my nose loudly. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m so sorry. This must all be so hard for you, Earl being so ill.”
“It’s more than hard,” she says. “It’s more than hard. It’s been terrible, living with an alcoholic. Then when he finally stops drinking he gets cancer, then she comes to the mountain and starts doing her usual, making everybody crazy, interfering in people’s lives. Ruining people’s lives.” Her eyes are black with fury.
“Ruining people’s lives,” she says again. “Make no mistake, she’s not a good woman. She’ll sweet talk you all right, till you think you’re safe, then she’ll hurt you real bad. That’s what she does. That’s what she’s always done.”
She believes what she is saying. Poor Molly Alice.
“He’s only got three weeks, they say. Time’s special. He should be with his wife, not up on that mountain with that no-good daughter of his.”
During the hour we spend together, which I shall never forget, I watch this strange little woman struggle with her innate good manners and her hatred of my birth mother. I’ve never seen hatred face to face before. Its hardness disturbs me.
When we’re not talking about Billie, Molly Alice seems almost normal. When we are, her eyes narrow, and she tenses and a completely different expression crosses her face. Then she relaxes again.
“Earl Grey?” she says, almost smiling, making the tea the English way, perfectly.
“Thank you,” I say.
Silence, apart from the sound of the antique grandfather clock ticking in the corner of her beautifully decorated early American sitting room.
“You had a good life?” she says.
“Oh yes,” I say. “I’ve had a wonderful life. I have wonderful parents who I love dearly.”
“Well, I’m glad about that,” she says.
“Oh yes,” I say, finally on familiar ground and holding a decent cup of tea, to boot. “And we lived in Africa and Hong Kong, and they live in the country, and I have a sister, and we’re very happy. I just came to find out where I’d come from, that’s all.”
“Well,” she says, “I can understand that.” We sip our tea in unison.
“I’m pro-choice,” she says, suddenly. “I marched in the pro-choice rally they had in Mapleville last month. You pro-choice?”
“Oh yes,” I say. She still needs reassurance. “If they had pro-choice rallies i
n England I’d march too, but there it’s really not an issue.”
“You’re prettier than she is,” she says as I am leaving. To me Billie is beautiful. But I feel warmed by the compliment.
And then: “You poor child, you don’t know who you’ve found, do you? She’s…” Her face has tightened again and I am astonished to see what look like tears of pity in her eyes. “She’s…You poor, poor child…”
Chapter Twenty
BILLIE ANDIGO OUT BIKINGand stop to have a sandwich by a small farm owned by a man who really does make moonshine, just like in theDukes of Hazzard . He’s old and gray and gives me a sip from a tin bucket in a small shack with a dirt floor attached to the side of his house. It tastes like turpentine. When we leave his house, Billie starts telling me about her sisters.
“Octavia’s three years older than me. She’s a poet, I think. Or she might run a store, I’m not sure. We haven’t seen her in a couple of years. But I talk to my sister Marcie all the time. She’s the one you most resemble. Only she’s obese. And a manic-depressive. And she’s married to Otis, who’s obsessive-compulsive, but he plays the banjo beautifully, and you can’t have everything.”
“Oh,” I say. I saw a film about a manic-depressive once. I can’t remember much about it—except the man stood on a rooftop and tried to fly.
“What about your brother?” I say.
“Your Uncle Irv? Well, that’s another story. It’s not so much that he’s mentally ill, he just has an impulsive personality and a serious drinking problem…I wish to hell he’d get some help.”
“Is he unhappy?”
“Very.” We’re riding two feet away from each other. I can hear every word, despite the noise of the tires hitting the rocks on the long mountain path.
“The thing that frustrates Daddy so much about it is that Irv had so much. In addition to gifts of intelligence and good looks, Irv has good business sense. He was making more money than he knew what to do with as a financial consultant. I think the real reason he turned to illegal pursuits was because the edge wasn’t there.”
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