“Easy.” She tapped my shoulder. “I predict that part of everything you want to happen will happen,” she droned. “Part of everything you don’t want to happen will happen. Everything you never thought about happening will happen. Nothing will ever stop happening. It will just go on happening all the time.”
“Did you read that someplace?”
“No. It’s my own crystal ball. It’s just life, Jessie, it’s like the weather, you get something of everything.” She noisily drained the last drops of tea. “Why can’t I make good tea like this?”
“You leave the tea bag in too long.”
“I know. I put it in, and then I walk away and forget to take it out.… So you’re fifteen? Come here.” She patted her lap.
“Are you kidding? No, thanks!”
“Come on,” she said. “We’ll be friendly and snuggle a little, the way we used to. You’ve only been fifteen for five minutes.” She reached toward me, hands out, as if she were going to pull me across the table.
“Maybe another time,” I said.
But then I got up and plunked myself into her lap. It was ridiculous. I was nearly as big as she was. I sniffed her skin, her hair. She wrapped her arms around me, and I leaned back against her. I let myself be held.
THIRTY
Raspberry Ice Cream
“Look over there,” my mother said. We were in the supermarket. “It’s him.” She pointed to the end of the aisle. Just her index finger moved.
He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Sleeked-back hair, dark hair like mine, ending in a thin, small ponytail.
He pushed his cart around the corner of the aisle. I walked after him. “Jessie,” my mother said. “Jessie—” Her voice was like a bungee cord; it pulled me, released me, pulled and released.
I saw him leaning over the freezer section. I went and stood next to him. “Hello,” I said.
He looked at me. “Hello.”
“There’s the raspberry,” I said, pointing.
“How’d you know that was my favorite?”
“I know quite a few things about you,” I said. “For starters, I know who you are, James Wells.”
He threw me a startled glance, then a deep guilty flush spread across—
No, it didn’t happen like that.
I didn’t say anything when I stood next to him at the freezer. I just watched him.
He did take a pint of raspberry ice cream, though. He threw it into the cart. Then he took a big white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands, wiped each finger, before putting the handkerchief back.
I’d never imagined him as the sort of person who would wipe his fingers so carefully. I wanted to ask him about it, and I might have. At the moment, it seemed to make as much sense as asking him if he recognized me. As much sense as anything.
Maybe I didn’t say anything because there were so many things I could have said and I didn’t know which to choose.
I’m Jessie Wells. Remember me? …
Hello, James, this is Jessie Wells, your daughter, standing in front of you.…
Do you have any idea, James, how much I’ve thought about you? Do you have any idea how I’ve hated you and loved you and wanted to see you and hoped I never would, and cared, and didn’t care? …
So, listen, just tell me this—do you think of me as your daughter? I think of myself as your daughter, but am I, really, if you don’t know me?
He pushed the cart toward the front of the store.
I followed him and stood in line behind him. Tell me where you’ve been, tell me why you left me, tell me why you’ve stayed away from me, tell me why it never mattered to you that I was here.… Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.…
He picked up a magazine. He saw me and smiled briefly. It was the smile you give to a stranger. It was the smile a man gives a girl. Kind, meaningless, empty.
THIRTY-ONE
Jumping for the Sun
I’m not quite sure how it happened that Jack and I found ourselves at the motel where James Wells was staying on Erie Boulevard. I mean, I know the sequence of events. But that doesn’t completely explain it. The first thing was that Jack had to buy a shirt and he asked me if I would come along and help him choose.
“Sure,” I said. “As long as I don’t have to pay for it.” I could say almost anything to him and make him laugh.
So we met at the mall, and we did that, we found a really nice shirt. Blue. He looked great in it. Then it wasn’t very late yet, I still had time before I had to catch the bus, so we went outside and walked around. And I looked across the boulevard and noticed the sign for the motel blinking on and off down the road.
This is where it’s a little murky to me. I’m not sure if I told Jack, and he said, “Why don’t we go over there?” Or if I said, “Let’s walk over on the other side.”
Whichever, there we were. It was a kind of rambly, sleazy-looking place, shoved in between a carpet cleaning business on one side and a gas station on the other. We walked around to the back, to the parking lot, which faced on a residential street, and then one of those things happened that you think can’t possibly happen in real life. The door to one of the rooms opened, and James Wells came out.
He had a couple of bags over his shoulders and he was carrying several heavy square black cases. “That’s him,” I said. My head started burning. My eyes blurred and his features were blurred. Was it really him?
“That’s my father,” I said.
I stared at him with the same stupefied feeling I’d had when I phoned him and that I’d had again in the supermarket. I had gone right up to him, followed him like a dog with its nose to the ground. And then I hadn’t said a word.
“You going to talk to him?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I will, if you want.”
“What?”
“Break the ice for you.”
“No … okay.”
I couldn’t think. But while I stood there, half-frozen, Jack walked over and said, as easily as if it was nothing, “Hi, need some help?”
“No,” my father said.
“Sure?” Jack said, in his nice way. “I don’t mind.”
“Okay. Open the trunk.” He handed Jack keys and pointed to a green car. Honda, like ours, only a lot newer.
I watched my father load the bags into the car, and I thought, Tight guy, he’s suspicious when help is offered, and he won’t say thanks.
Jack looked over at me and nodded as if to say, Come on, come on over here. It dawned on me that my father was leaving, and I might never see him again. Golden opportunity, Jessie. Those words came into my mind, but they seemed far away, weak, fragile. Birds in my stomach beating their wings, wings in my head …
Jack said something to my father that drew a smile. It was the first time I’d really seen him smile. I saw the boy in the picture. The boy before he became the man who was my father. My heart beat hard, I almost resented that smile. I didn’t want him to be charming, I didn’t want Jack to come back to me and say what a nice guy he was.
While I was thinking this, I was also thinking that I should go forward and say something to him. I should say hello, at least. I should get him to talk to me. But I still stood there and thought the same thoughts I’d had so many times before. Why did you do it? Why did you leave me? You’re my father, why didn’t you love me enough to stay?
Suddenly he looked over at me, and we looked straight at each other. He looked right into my face. He knew me. That’s what I think. I don’t know if it’s true, it’s just what I feel.
Then he moved his shoulders, like straightening his jacket or shrugging off something. He got into the car and closed the door. Jack stepped back. The engine turned over, and I calmly walked forward. I don’t know what was in my mind. My jaw was aching. Later I thought I should have yelled, I should have used my big voice to stop him from driving away.
Jack and I walked back the way we’d come. We waited to cross the boulevard at the light. I looke
d down at my feet and then up at the sun, and then down at my feet again. Now I’ll never know, I thought, I’ll never know why he did it.
But maybe there are some things you can never know. Some things you can never understand. Some questions that can never be answered. And some things that will never be.
Maybe wanting something isn’t enough. But still, you can try. It’s like jumping for the sun. You know you won’t make it, but why not jump as high as you can?
THIRTY-TWO
Blue Lake
On the way upstairs to call Jack, I stopped and looked back down into the living room. The food was just about destroyed, which meant it must have been good. When we had laid everything out on the table, serve-yourself style, Aunt Zis had said it looked like something that should be in a magazine.
Ma and I had made three different salads, including fruit salad, and Aunt Zis had made a tray of baked chicken with her special orange-juice sauce. Aaron brought a pan of lasagna, bags of chips, and fresh Italian bread. Plus, we had the cake Randy had made at the diner. It was magnificent, it looked like a wedding cake. My mother had asked him to bake it, then she felt guilty and invited him to the party.
“In that case—,” I said, and I invited Meadow and Diane. So what started out to be a family party for Aunt Zis’s birthday—the three of us, plus Aaron—grew into a bash, including Aunt Zis’s senior tap group, our neighbors on both sides, and even Brenda, my mother’s favorite of her three bosses.
I toyed with the idea of inviting Jack, but I didn’t, because of Meadow. He was still a slightly sore subject between us, although Meadow swore up and down that she was over her crush and never gave him so much as a passing thought anymore.
My mother had put some awful syrupy music on the phonograph, but nobody seemed to mind. She was standing by the window talking to Randy and a couple of our neighbors. Diane was dancing with old Mr. Haviski, from Aunt Zis’s tap group, and her brother, Charlie, was off in a corner talking to Meadow. Now that was interesting. Meadow’s face was flushed, although from Charlie’s body language, it looked like they were only discussing guitars. He had his arms extended and was strumming the air. In the middle of everything, Aunt Zis sat with her back very straight, like a little queen presiding over her subjects. Aaron was on one side of her and Victor Perl had drawn up a chair on the other side.
I’d been torn between wanting to keep his appearance at the party a surprise for Aunt Zis and worry that, if I didn’t say anything, she’d insult him by not remembering who he was. He certainly remembered her. “Well, how is she? How is your wonderful aunt?” he’d said when I called to invite him to the party. “Of course I’ll come.”
I took the phone in my room to call Jack. “Did your aunt get a lot of presents?” he asked.
“She cleaned up! We told everybody no presents, but they brought things anyway. She got cologne, hand lotion, an embroidered glasses case from Diane, an African violet from Meadow, and tons of other things.”
“I’m going to have you organize my next birthday party,” Jack said. “Don’t forget to save me a piece of cake.”
“Would I forget that?”
“Would you?”
“I might,” I said, “knowing me. Glad you reminded me.”
He laughed.
“I have to tell you something,” my mother said the next day. We were walking a trail in the state park around Blue Lake. Aaron and Aunt Zis had fallen behind, and we stopped and waited for them.
My mother sat down on a stump. “Remember when we talked about James Wells coming back that time when you were five years old?”
“I remember.”
“Well, you know, I thought of something,” she went on. “He didn’t just drive away that day.”
“But that’s what you said he did!”
“Well, yes, but then he came back. He was halfway down the street, and then he stopped and backed up, and just as he pulled up again in front of the house, you appeared. You’d come up the side stairs from the backyard, and he saw you. I’m sure that’s why he came back—to try to see you. And there you were. Just what I didn’t want! I went flying over to you. He stuck his head out the window and yelled, ‘She’s beautiful.’”
“He said that?” Way across the lake, a couple was paddling a canoe. I could hear the faint slip of the paddles in the water.
“Yes,” my mother said. “He did.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“I forgot. The other day I was thinking about it, and it all came back to me.”
I wondered if it was true. I knelt down on the shore and dabbled a stick in the water. I decided that I would take it as true. I would take it as the birthday gift she hadn’t given me yet.
The two people in the canoe seemed to be a man and a girl. A father and daughter? They paddled around the bend and out of sight.
Sometimes the phone rings and nobody’s there. Silence only. And then I think, It’s him. James. My father.
Sometimes I don’t think of him for days. The thought of him will come when I least expect it. When I’m on my way to school, or going into the drugstore, or setting the table. Suddenly, there he is, passing through my mind, quickly, like a stiff breeze, a hard wind, something sharp and cool. Here and then gone. Sometimes I want to hold on to the thought of him, but I can never make the moment last any longer than it’s going to last.
The next time I see him, if there is a next time, and somehow I think there will be, I know I’m going to speak to him. I’ll be ready. And if he can answer my questions, good. And if he can’t, well, that’ll be okay, too.
But first, before I say anything else, I’ll stand in front of him and look into his face and tell him my name. Jessie Wells. I’ll say, “I just want you to know I’m related to you. I just want you to know this is who I am, and this is how I turned out.”
About the Author
Norma Fox Mazer (1931–2009) was an acclaimed author best known for her children’s and young adult literature. She earned numerous awards, including the Newbery Honor for After the Rain, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Dear Bill, Remember Me?, and the Edgar Award for Taking Terri Mueller. Mazer was also honored with a National Book Award nomination for A Figure of Speech and inclusion in the notable-book lists of the American Library Association and the New York Times, among others.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by Norma Fox Mazer
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1129-7
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Missing Pieces Page 11