“I bought half-a-dozen.” Clarice returned with a little bag, already blooming butter. “It’s a nice treat for all of us, unless Daddy sees them before I set them out for dessert.”
Benny put the car in gear and pulled back onto the road. “Speaking of Daddy, I was just wondering something.”
“What’s that, honey?”
“You said he waited a long time for you to agree to marry him.”
“Five years in all.”
“And you worked and lived on your own for two years after college.”
“I did.” Clarice’s laughter seemed slightly forced. “Where is this going?”
“I have no idea what your job was. Or his, for that matter.”
“I worked for the Museum of Natural History in New York,” her mother answered in a breath exhaled. “In the archives. The pay was terrible, and I only got the job because my father knew someone who knew someone, but it was very prestigious. At least, I thought so.”
“And Daddy?”
“He was a freelance photographer. He worked the department stores taking portraits, and pictures with Santa during the holidays. He made enough doing that to allow what he really loved, doing piecemeal work for the local papers for the most part.”
“Daddy lived in the City?”
“We did, for those two years. I loved it. Those were exciting times.”
“Why’d you move up to Connecticut, then?”
“Because your father was convinced I wouldn’t marry him because he had no steady job. He wanted to be a photojournalist so badly, but he got a job with a big real estate firm taking pictures of houses in Stamford and presented me with this ring.” She held out her hand, the tiny diamond there all the years of Benny’s life sparkling in the day’s last light. “How could a woman refuse after a sacrifice like that?”
“His wasn’t the only sacrifice. You had to give up your apartment in New York.”
“Yes, well…” Cheeks were definitely a shade too pink, Clarice fidgeted. “Our…my apartment was on the shabby side, so…”
“Ma?” she asked, trying not to smile. “Where did Daddy live during those two years?”
“Where did he live? I thought I already told you. In New—”
“—York. Yes, I got that part. But where? In proximity to you, I mean.”
“In proximity to me?” She checked her lipstick in the visor mirror, opened and closed her window. Finally, she said, “We lived together, Benedetta Marie, and you’d already guessed, so I don’t see the reason for torturing me.”
“You could have just said it.”
“It was the seventies. And I told you, your father was an anarchist.”
“You don’t have to defend it to me. What did your twenty-years-behind-the-times family have to say about it?”
Clarice bit her lip. “We hid it from them. And it wasn’t easy when they insisted on dropping by to surprise me all the time, I’ll tell you.”
“And you claim Daddy was the rebel.”
“It was the seventies. Everyone was a rebel back then.”
It wasn’t true, and Benny knew it. Even when she was a kid watching re-runs of Three’s Company, unmarried couples cohabitating was still taboo.
“You had a whole life I’ve always been clueless about,” Benny said. “How is that possible?”
“Children think their parents will only ever see them as children, and it is kind of true,” Clarice answered. “But kids are way worse when it comes to seeing their parents as actual people. I’m your mother, the woman who baked cupcakes on your birthday, and went to PTA meetings, and had sex only the three times it took to conceive you and your brothers.”
“Ew, Ma.”
“See? You know what you want to, and let the rest go.”
“I would prefer to stay blissfully ignorant of your sex life, but I do like knowing about your life before Bitterly. And I liked when you told me about Miranda.”
“I liked telling you,” Clarice said. “I should have done it when you were younger, so you wouldn’t have to feel the need to keep things from me. We are women, Benny. Mother and daughter, yes, but not mother and child. I think it’s time we saw one another as adults, who can share things about their lives instead of shield one another from them, don’t you?”
The hair on the back of Benny’s neck prickled. That cold heat of knowing what she should have all along rushed through her. Pulling the car over to the side of the road, Benny put the hazards on. Hands gripping the wheel and eyes straight ahead, she said, “You know about the baby, don’t you.”
Clarice took Benny’s hand from the steering wheel, kissed it. “Of course I do, honey.”
“Since?”
“Oh, since around April when I realized you hadn’t been coming around to whine about cramps like you’d been doing every month since you were twelve.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“It was your news to tell, Benny. Why didn’t you?”
Benny slumped in her seat. “I broke it off with Dan because I was falling for him, Ma. It felt like such a betrayal. To Henny, I mean. I promised him forever. And Dan was one of his best friends, of all people.”
“Oh, honey. He was your best friend, too. You both loved Henny so much, but he’s gone, and there isn’t anything wrong with you two finding happiness together.”
“I know that. Now. But I think I might have messed up really bad.”
“What do you mean?”
“I never told Dan about the baby,” Benny confessed. “I was going to, last night, but he found out before I got the chance and freaked out.”
Chapter 22
The Spirit That For Ever Talks
Clarice drove the rest of the way home while Benny spilled her guts. She told her mother everything from falling in love to pushing him away. From realizing she was pregnant to Peter finding the ultrasound picture in his car. From making the decision to let Dan back into her life to completely messing it up by waiting too long. Through it all, Clarice only expressed her surprise that Peter had known but never said anything. As they pulled into the driveway, Benny finally asked, “So what do you think?”
“About what, honey?”
“About Dan, Ma. What have we been talking about for the last half hour?”
“I’m kidding, Benny. You know the answer. He loves you, and will love the baby. Everything is going to be fine, and that’s not just a mother consoling her child. I truly believe it, and have all along.”
“Do you think I should go see him? Or wait for him to come to me?”
“Well”—Clarice put the car in park—“you owe him an apology. And I suspect he’s already been here today, looking for you. I say you go find him.”
“What makes you think he was here?”
She leaned over the dash, drawing Benny do to the same, and pointed awkwardly up at Benny’s apartment, to the bit of paper fluttering in the evening breeze. “Something tells me that’s a note from Daniel.”
Benny was out of the car, taking the stairs two at a time before her mother even opened her door. The ligaments in her groin protested. She slowed down, but ripped the note from the door with the enthusiasm of a child at the candy counter.
Tried your cell. I was looking for you. Sorry about last night. Call me. Dan
No teasing. No joke. But he’d been looking for her, so that was something. Benny pulled out her cell phone. Two missed calls from Dan. How had she not heard it ring? Finger poised to return the call, Benny changed her mind and put it away again.
She wouldn’t call him. She needed to see him, to see his face when he said what he had to say. Note tucked into her pocket, she ducked into her apartment, grabbed her helmet and hurried—carefully—back down the stairs.
“I’m going out,” she called in to her mother, but didn’t wait for a response. Clarice Grady would know where she went, and she’d be very happy about it.
Benny tossed her backpack in
to the makeshift carrier alongside her gardening tools, and kicked-started her scooter. Only after she hit the first bump in the road did she wish she’d taken a moment to use the bathroom. Cricket was starting to take up more interior space. For the first time since seeing the line appear on the pee-stick, Benny happily imagined herself round as a harvest pumpkin, waddling to the bathroom every ten minutes because her bladder was the size of a grape. The image made her smile, and then it made her laugh. Back was her certainty Dan was going to be happy about this. Maybe he was angry she’d waited so long, but he’d get over it. He loved her. She was certain about that too.
Happiness, pure and untainted, started in Benny’s toes and bubbled up inside her like soda in a glass. The sensation was as familiar as it was alien, once a part of her every day and forgotten. Still too near the apathy marking the last six years of her life, Benny remembered it with a clarity she didn’t have when entrenched in it.
He rode out of this life and onto another road that goes on and on and on. He wants to see where it leads, if it’s okay with you.
“I won’t go back there, Henny,” she said aloud. “I swear I won’t. For both our sakes.”
Instead of driving through town and out to Division Street, Benny continued south to the cemetery. Dan had been waiting all day, but Henny had been waiting six years. For this last time, he came first.
Old habits died hard, but they did die. Benny parked on the road just below Henny’s grave rather than beneath the familiar shade tree. She grabbed her trowel, and headed up the hill to that place for her husband’s bones. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but Benny wasn’t sad. Not really. Kneeling on the ground outside of the gravesite flower garden she’d maintained for years, she wiped the tears from her eyes. She dug up his grave garden, flower by flower. She gave the marigolds to Frank and Louise Dillard, gone since 1946 and 1951. The snapdragons went to little Sally Feldman, all alone in her grave since 1973. Pansies and salvia and petunias, Benny spread them around.
The morning glory seedlings wouldn’t survive a transfer, and she didn’t have the heart to kill them, all things considered. She left them to grow through the summer and to die a natural death at first frost.
As she bent to the forget-me-nots, an engine revved on the street beyond the cemetery, lifting Benny’s head. A motorcycle whizzed by, one she had seen around town. Signs and signals made tangible in the living world—she had once been a big believer, and then lost all such faith. At the moment, Benny was content to keep her mind open in both directions, and in any other direction that presented itself.
She turned back to the forget-me-nots, digging them up carefully, taking a bit more dirt than she had with the others. She found an old plastic grocery bag containing the remnants of a lunch long-ago enjoyed in the bottom of her backpack, and placed two of the three plants into it. The third she took to Harriet Farcus.
“You already have a garden,” she said, “but I wanted you to have these, too. I’m not sure how any of this works, but I have a feeling there is no single way, no single afterlife, but a whole bunch that sort of overlap. Or maybe I’m just a little nuts-o. That’s okay too. Anyway, it’s time I let Henny go. There’s a road he wants to travel, and I am—was—holding him back. I hope digging up the garden freed him in a way words couldn’t, like Carmen said. You’d like her. She was pretty amazing. Anyway, it just seemed right. And it seems right for you to have these.”
Benny moved some of the petunia near Harriet’s stone and replaced it with the forget-me-nots. Sitting back on her heels, she patted the soil down. On her wrist, the forget-me-nots inked into her skin tickled just enough for her to notice. She wiped the dirt from her arm, traced the tattooed mural, her homage to Henny, and this time she smiled with the memories instead of wept.
Grief was so hard to let go of. She couldn’t count the years since his death as wasted. It brought her to this, to Dan, to their baby. It brought her Augie and Harriet. As her mother said, Benny was waking up from too long a sleep, but she was awake now. Wide awake. And that was the important part.
“I won’t be cemetery gardening much anymore. But these should grow back. They aren’t perennials, but they do re-seed. I’ll let Charlie know not to let the landscapers mow them down.” Rising to her feet, Benny brushed the dirt from her hands. She tucked the trowel in her back pocket, and picked up the plastic bag holding the other two plants.
“I won’t forget Henny. And I won’t forget you, Harriet. It’s a sworn promise.”
Benny placed the last two forget-me-nots into the carrier of her scooter. She drove slowly to the place she and Dan had watched the fireworks—and made some—the night before. Digging a hole near Miranda Greene’s tombstone, she smiled a little self-consciously. She planted the flowers.
“My mother misses you,” she said. “And sorry about last night. I meant no disrespect, but your son, well…whatever Dan said about this just being a place for bones, I have it on good authority it’s a bit more complicated than that. I hope we didn’t gross you out.”
Benny chuckled softly, her body aching with memory and quickly quelled. For now. Maybe later.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen with Dan and me, but I want you to know I love him. Gads, I really, really do love him. Crazy, huh?”
Back on her scooter, Benny had one last stop to make. No sorrow attached itself to this one, only joy so tangible she felt like soda in a glass again. She dug Flora’s cigar box of soil out of her backpack and brought it along with the last plant to Augie’s grave. Wending her way among the tombstones, Benny found a rock slab on the ground where there hadn’t been one before. Not a rock slab. A concrete one, embedded with tiny handprints.
Falling to her knees, only just saving the flowers and cigar box from toppling, she touched the slab of concrete once part of Augie’s patio. Little handprints, and the initials PF, VF and AF scratched beneath. Had Dan done this before leaving the note on her door? After? It didn’t matter. He had done it, not for Augie, but for her.
She sunk the forget-me-nots into the ground between the headstone and the concrete slab. Sitting back on her heels, Benny lifted the cigar box in her hand, flicked open the brass catch, and poured the contents into the hole. Soil from a small village in Campania, Italy mingled with the soil from Flora’s garden in Brooklyn, into the good earth of Bitterly, Connecticut. It covered the exposed roots of the flowers, closing the circle left open too long.
“She knew you, Augie,” Benny said. “Flora knew who you were all along, and she loved you. There is no forgiveness to be had, because there was never any necessary.
“Love doesn’t have to be shouted,” she quoted. “Sometimes, love can just be. You loved Flora and she loved you, no matter the circumstances. Let go, Augie. Let go and see where the road goes next. Maybe she’s waiting for you, with Katherine. Maybe they’ve both been waiting for you all along.”
A slight buzzing in her ears became a sensation that began in her midsection and spread. Up to her shoulders, her cheeks, the roots of her hair. And down through her legs, calves, toes. Not the soda-in-a-glass sensation, but warm and fluid, like maple syrup on pancakes. It seeped into her blood, her bones, her beating heart. It surrounded Cricket, soothing her incessant wriggling. Benny wrapped her arms around herself, rocking side to side. Love. That was all it could be. Like her earlier and lingering happiness, it was pure and untainted by life or death, by sorrow or fear. It bridged the intangible, made it real. And when Benny closed her eyes, that flash of Augie she’d accidentally seen superimposed itself over the image from Carmen’s album and for an instant, held. Benny kept her eyes closed tight, drew the instant out as long as possible.
“Got it, Augie,” she whispered. “I’ll never forget you, either. Now go, while you can.”
The image faded from behind her eyes. The maple-syrup warmth absorbed completely, but didn’t vanish. It would never vanish completely. Cricket, kept still for too long, gave a good kick Benny felt on the outside
as well as in. She gasped, and then she laughed softly, cradling her belly and the baby inside.
“Do that when we go see your daddy,” Benny crooned, “and he’ll be the happiest man on earth.”
Benny rose to her feet, brushed herself off, and tamped the soil around the forget-me-nots on Augie’s grave. Tomorrow, she’d get her mother started on finding Augie’s children, or grandchildren if that was all who remained. Tonight, right this moment, she was going to see Dan and tell him she’d been a fool, she loved him, and they were having a baby—all of which he already knew, but she’d tell him anyway. Benny picked a stem of forget-me-nots from Augie’s bunch. She tucked it into the buttonhole of her shirt, got back on her scooter, and left the cemetery just as evening twinkled into night.
* * * *
“That’s it then, eh? Another one gone. Good riddance, I say. Bah! That’s a lie. I’ll miss the fool. He was good company. There used to be so many more. Now there’s just me, here inside the gates. I can see others out there, in town. I can feel others nearby. I wonder what it’s like, remembering enough to step out. I don’t even remember why I don’t try, only that I’m a’feared too.
“I’ll miss the girl, too. Benedetta. I’ll miss her jabbering. She’ll come back now and then, bring the little one to see me, but it won’t be the same. She knows too much now. If anyone understands knowledge isn’t always a good thing, it’s me.
“Oh, too close. Entirely too close to remembering. Augie wearied me, made me want things I shouldn’t. It’s time to get my senses back. It’s time to get some rest.
“Maybe a year.
“Maybe ten.
“Maybe just until Benedetta comes back with her wee one.”
Dreaming August Page 19