“Mom, you have to talk to Aunt Iva Lou.”
I feel my eyes burn. “I can’t.”
“Why? Don’t be a dork. It’s not like she’s fifteen and you need to have ‘the talk.’ What are you afraid of?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you are afraid.”
“Maybe I’m scared it will change everything.”
“That’s lame. That’s not it. It’s something else, Ma. You aren’t thinking clearly. What does Dad say?”
“To mind my own business.”
“Easy for him to say!”
We laugh. For twenty years, Jack has always said the most obvious, practical thing. His advice is so bland, we usually don’t even seek it. He avoids confrontation with such regularity, he’s turned it into an art form. I’d call him a fence-sitter, but at the first whiff of a conflict, he doesn’t sit, he passes through. He wants no part of it.
“Etta, are you happy over there?” I ask.
“Ma, it’s an adventure. I’m always happy. I know that sounds silly, but it’s true. I love a great guy, and I’m around my family. I miss you guys, but I had you for nineteen years, and now I have to experience something else. It feels completely natural to me.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“I really do. You’re so much more sophisticated than I was, and I guess I was holding you to my marker. That wasn’t fair.”
“It’s okay.”
“What’s the best thing about Stefano?”
“Every night, after dinner, we go for a walk. And we talk about our day, the good stuff and the bad stuff. And when I tell him things, he really listens. I’m sort of learning how to listen from him. He is so focused on me—it’s as if my welfare is more important to him than his own. Can you imagine that?”
“I’m so glad.”
“I mean, I don’t listen, Ma. He’s so thoughtful. I’m hoping it’s rubbing off on me. I think we’re forever, but even if something terrible would happen and we’re not—and I’m not saying that’s gonna happen—but if it did, I’m better for having known him.”
“That’s how I feel about your dad.”
“I know. He’s feeling much better, isn’t he?”
“Like new.”
“How was his last PET scan?”
“The artery in his neck is clear. They’re keeping an eye on his heart.”
“Did they see something?”
“Not yet. But when you have one blockage, sometimes there’s a chance of more.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Yeah, don’t worry,” Jack barks into the phone.
“When did you pick up?” I bark back, but I’m teasing.
“When you were talking about potential blockage. You make it sound worse than it is.”
“I thought there was nothing there,” Etta says, worried.
“See there, Ave, you’re triggering a chain reaction around the world.”
“I didn’t mean to. Sorry, Etta.”
“Believe me, Etta. Your mother worries enough for all three of us. In fact, I’m thinking about putting in an eight-hundred number so people can call in and let your mother worry for folks across the country—she’s that good at it.”
“You’re hilarious, Jack. Okay, I’m getting off the phone now so you two can talk. I love you, Etta.”
“I love you, Ma.”
“Thank you. And love to Stefano.”
After I hang up, I take the last of the laundry out of the dryer and dump it on the worktable on the sunporch. I begin to fold it. On the windowsill, Shoo the Cat raises his head off his paws, looks at me, and blinks, then curls up and goes back to sleep. I hear Jack laughing from the phone in the living room. Lord knows how long he’ll be on the phone with Etta—those two can talk for hours.
The sun is long gone over Cracker’s Neck. I turn on the outdoor porch light and watch the woods, as I have done every day since September, when I thought I saw a young man hiking through. Jack doesn’t know it, but I go out and walk the woods every afternoon or early evening, looking for what or who, I don’t know—just walking. If I told Jack I go into the woods alone, he’d say I was looking for Joe, and then he’d get concerned, and pretty soon he’d call Iva Lou or Father John or somebody to talk some sense into me. So I keep my little hikes to myself.
Every bit of relief I felt when Jack’s PET scan results came back good has been replaced by a new dread. Or maybe it’s just a new version of an old dread: I feel I’m going to lose someone I love again. I don’t know who, exactly, but I remember this feeling before my mother died, and before Joe died, and boy, it was acute right before Spec died. The feeling came back a couple of weeks ago, before Nonna died. Jack can call me a worrier all he wants, but what I’m feeling is beyond worry. It’s a knowledge that the moment is slipping away, and I’m not in it. How can I tell Jack this when he’s more aware of his own mortality than ever. I can’t burden him with my fears. He felt so close to death that he went about making lists. Imagine that! I never make lists. Maybe it’s time I started. Maybe that will slow the clock.
The first snow of winter has turned our holler into a fairyland. The treetops look like crystal chandeliers as daggers of ice hang from the branches. The brook in the woods has frozen into ribbons of clear spun sugar, and the sun, now far away in the December sky, is a cold white diamond set in the vast cornflower blue.
I hope we get a good snow when Theodore arrives. Christmas is only a week away.
I pull on my old boots and yank the laces tight. I throw on a knit cap and Jack’s barn jacket and head down the hill to the mailbox for the paper. I inhale the pure, clean winter air, almost gulping it down. Is there a more perfect spot on earth than right here, right now? It’s so clear. It’s a day you can put your hands through.
The paper boy who drops off the Kingsport Times-News every morning is very dependable. I open the rusty door on the mailbox and pull out the newspaper. I feel something else in the box. It’s a fat business envelope. It’s addressed to Jack, but there’s no postage on it. In the return address box, it says “T. Hutchinson, Bituminous Reserves, Inc.”
Jack is flipping pancakes in the kitchen. On a plate, there are two that folded funny. “I’m practicing,” he explains. “Company’s coming.”
“Theodore loves your cooking. It’ll be nice.” I smile and put the paper on the table and give Jack the envelope. “What’s this?”
“I asked Tyler to run some numbers for me.”
“What sorts of numbers?”
“He’s pitched out a couple of scenarios for me as consultant.”
“So you’re still thinking about it?”
“Yeah.”
“Jack!”
“Okay, how about a little support?”
“Don’t make me the bad guy. I’m very proud of how you’ve made a living all these years—and to be perfectly honest, I’d be ashamed if you hooked up with these people.”
“Ashamed?”
“Ashamed. They’re ruining the mountains. People over in Kentucky are devastated. There is no way to reclaim a mountain that’s gone forever.”
“They are required to put fill back where they mine. Okay? And if I hook up with them—if—I would have a say as to where they did the mountaintop removal—”
“Strip mining.”
“It’s not called that anymore.”
“Of course not. It’s a red-flag phrase. The people in these hills would beat them back with sticks if they knew what this company was planning.”
“I don’t think this company is like the others.”
“Then you are a gullible sitting duck, darling.”
“You know, Ave, I’m not a stupid person.”
“I never said that!”
“You don’t listen. You have your ideas, and that’s the end of it.”
The pancakes begin to burn, their black edges starting to curl with smoke. Jack lifts the pan off the stove and scrapes the b
urning batter into the sink. I move to help him. He turns away.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him sincerely.
“Do you ever think that maybe I know what I’m doing? I’m fifty-four years old, and I collapsed on the job three months ago. I don’t have a lot of options for the rest of my working days. I can’t do what I used to; I can’t lift what I used to.”
“Your strength will come back.”
“You’re dreaming. I’m not thirty years old. Maybe in your fantasy mind, I’m as young as the day I murried you, but trust me, I have aged, and I took a hit with this thing. I am not the same man I was.”
Panic races through me. In all the travails in the hospital, and the entire time Jack was mending, he never once admitted that the surgery took a toll on him, or that he had changed in any way. To hear him say these words aloud terrifies me. “Okay, okay, take the job,” I say quickly.
“That’s not what I want to hear you say.”
I raise my voice. “What, then?”
“How about ‘Do what’s right for you. And what’s right for you will be right for us.’”
I can’t say the words.
Jack continues, “I was born in this house. The morning I was born, my father cleared the back field so I’d have a place to play. Silly, right? He had a couple of years before I’d use the field, but when I was born, he got right to it. And that mountain over there—Stone Mountain—it was there that I learned to hunt and shoot a gun. It was the first place I camped with Pa. I saw a bobcat up there, and I wanted to shoot it, and my pa told me that there weren’t many bobcats left in these hills, so let ’em be. So I did. We ate the berries that grew in those woods. Mama cured us with the herbs she found there. When I had the colic, she made catnip tea that grew wild under the brush. She’d make a poultice from the milkweed she found growing near the creek, and Pa knew which mushrooms we could eat and which were poisonous. All those things came from these mountains. I would never jeopardize this place. I love it as much as you do. But you seem to think I don’t.”
“I know you love these mountains,” I say.
“What is precious to you is just as precious to me,” Jack insists.
“Okay.” I have a way of ending an argument that has always worked in my marriage. I give up; I stop fighting. I pretend to agree, and then we move off the hot topic and on to the business of life.
Men are very delicate instruments. Their egos are like delicate eggshells, and yet physically, they have the brute strength of a bear. When their health is challenged, they recede quickly and quietly into such despair that no one can pull them out of it.
A woman has a whole different way of coping—at least the women I know. We make things pretty when the road gets rocky. We put a new dress on an old body and temporarily fix what ails us with something new: a big ring, a dangling bracelet, anything with a lot of shine. I can go to the third aisle at the Mutual’s and turn my hair back to ebony. I can perk myself up with the right lipstick and beat back the fine lines on my face with alpha hydroxy acid. I’m more than happy to rent a cabin in the Revlon land of delusion when I need a lift.
My husband won’t. He is wood and nails. He wants facts, answers, and drop-dead ultimatums. Though I like to pass through pain as if it’s not really happening, that’s not the Jack MacChesney way. He feels everything, and he holds it close. He’s a true mountain man.
The next day I load up all my overdue library books in the Jeep. They’re just an excuse, really—an excuse to go and see Iva Lou. I have a conflict going on inside me: to do as Fleeta says and ignore it until Iva Lou says something about her daughter, or to follow my gut and open up the conversation. I roll down the hill in reverse, watching our old stone house against the lavender sky. There’s a part of me that wants to throw it in drive and go back up the mountain and mind my own business.
I take the road into town slowly; it gives me a chance to think.
Iva Lou and I became closer after Theodore left Big Stone Gap to live his dream in Knoxville as the band director for the University of Tennessee. It was a great job, but he took it for personal as well as professional reasons. It was time for Theodore to begin living a real life, to find himself, to fall in love. That wasn’t something he was ever going to do in Big Stone Gap—not with me here, and not with old attitudes about new freedoms as firmly in place as chin straps on the Tuckett twins. So off he went, leaving Iva Lou and me, and we’ve been close ever since.
I’ve never had an argument with Iva Lou. We’ve never had a rift in our friendship; we could always talk about anything. So the silence between us has led us into unfamiliar emotional territory. I very much want to hear Iva Lou’s side of things. I pull in to the library parking lot, and instead of parking next to Iva Lou’s Miata, I park at the far end of the lot. I’ve never done this, because there’s always a space next to her car. (Iva Lou parks a certain way because she’s afraid of getting dinged. As meticulous as she is with her appearance, her car is a close second. It’s always washed, buffed, and waxed—thank you, Gilliam’s Car Wash). Tonight I park with the public. I need a little distance.
I pull the tote bag out of the backseat and climb the steps to the library. I push the door open and inhale the sweet smell of books. I take my tote to the front desk. Serena Mumpower, the assistant librarian, is working behind the desk.
“Hey, Serena. Iva Lou around?”
“She’s in her office.”
“Thanks.”
Serena grunts. She hasn’t been friendly since word got out that my daughter married Stefano Grassi. Serena and Stefano went out on a few dates the summer he came to work in Big Stone Gap, and you would think my son-in-law jilted Serena for Etta. The last thing I need is to get caught up in some stale drama from years ago.
I make my way back to Iva Lou’s office. The break room is filled with posters from book campaigns. There’s one from the 1970s of Bette Midler in pajamas announcing National Book Week. I knock on Iva Lou’s office door.
“Come in,” she says from inside. I open the door and enter. She says, “Hey, girl. Take a load off. Are you here to fire me from the musical?”
“God, no. You’re the best thing in it. Well, you and the dark horse, Ravi Balu. He’s really doing a good job as Rolfe.”
“Imagine that.” Iva Lou offers me a seat. She gets up and reaches for a tin of cookies on a shelf. She opens it and offers me some. “Faith Cox’s ginger snaps. She only makes ’em at Christmastime, so I try to make them last.”
I take one as well as a deep breath. “I’ve got a problem,” I say nervously.
“Spill.”
“I don’t know how to say it.”
“Honey-o, you just tell me. You know I take any morsels about you and Jack Mac to my grave.”
“It’s not about him.”
“Who, then?”
“You.”
“Oh, Lord. What have I done?” Iva Lou rolls her eyes dramatically heavenward, like Saint Teresa in the alcove of Sacred Heart Church.
“Lovely Carter came to see me.”
The mention of the name causes Iva Lou to snap the tin shut and put it on her desk. I wait for Iva Lou to say something, but she just sits there.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask her.
“Tell you what?” Now, Iva Lou is a smart woman, and she knows she’s stonewalling. I won’t let her.
“That you had a daughter.” I try not to sound accusatory, but I’m hurt, so it comes off as shrill.
Iva Lou rolls her seat away from me. It’s a small office, so she has nowhere to go. It reminds me of the time we had a squirrel in the house, and the only way to get it out was to corner it. Iva Lou turns her back to me. It seems like minutes go by. I don’t know what to do, whether to stay or go.
“Iva Lou?”
“Yes?”
“Are you going to talk to me?”
Iva Lou turns to me so quickly that I lean back. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want to understand why you didn’t tel
l me and why…”
“Why I’d give my own baby away? Is that what you’re concerned about?” Iva Lou asks angrily.
“Hey, I’m not judging you.”
“You most certainly are. You set me up. Trapping me in here like this. It’s my place of work. I can’t hardly have feelings here, can I?” she whispers.
I lower my voice. “I’m sorry. I should have come to your house. But I didn’t know if Lyle knew—”
“Of course he knows!” she thunders.
I’m confused. “He knows?”
“He’s my husband. Of course he knows.” Iva Lou stands and starts shuffling papers.
“Do you want me to go?”
“I think that’s a good idea.”
I turn to open the door. My heart is pounding. I can’t believe what is happening between us, and at the same time, she is so dismissive of me, it makes me angrier still. Instead of opening the door and leaving, I want to shake her. I feel rage burn through me. I want to hold her accountable. I turn and face her as I stand against the door. “How dare you.”
“What?”
“How dare you treat me this way? Who do you think you are? I’m not here on some small-town gossip mission. You’re my friend, and I found out something—not from you, by the way, from an outsider—that you should have told me.”
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
I ignore the comment. I am angry, and I want her to hear why. “Fleeta knew. Spec knew.”
“Oh, so you didn’t get to know, and that’s why you’re upset with me?”
“Partly. I guess,” I stammer.
“Maybe I didn’t think I could tell you.”
“What? Why?”
“You have definite ideas about things. There’s very little room for human error with you.”
“Maybe I don’t look at Lovely Carter like she’s a mistake.”
Iva Lou’s eyes fill with tears. “I want you to go.”
If I leave, it will be one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I should stay here and work things through. But it takes two people to solve this kind of problem, and Iva Lou doesn’t want to.
“Good night,” I tell her as I go. She doesn’t answer. As the door snaps shut, I wait outside for a moment, hoping that she will push it open and say, “Come on back in here, we need to talk.”
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