Just One Thing

by Holly Jacobs

  She didn’t even bother to wonder why.

  “My father died, and I didn’t have a chance to say good-bye. To tell him how much he meant to me.

  “When the family got up and got ready for church that Sunday, I didn’t go.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I know I should be able to come up with something better to say than that, but . . .” He paused as if searching for that something better, then gave a small shake of his head. “There simply aren’t any words other than I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I’d often wished I could come up with something better than just a “thanks” or “thank you” as an expression of appreciation, but like Sam, I’d never been able to.

  “You haven’t gone back to church since then?”

  “No. I might have. I was actually planning to, but . . .” I took the last sip of my beer. “I’d better be going.”

  Sam nodded. “I understand.”

  I was walking toward the door when Sam called my name. “Lexie?”

  I turned.

  “Thank you.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was thanking me for, but I didn’t ask. That memory had taken too much out of me to care. I just wanted to walk home and nudge Angus over so I could crawl in bed.

  As I reached the end of the bar, a hand snagged my wrist. “I couldn’t help overhearing,” the regular at the end of the bar, who I’d recently learned was named Jerry, said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Jerry was a man on the north side of fifty. Maybe even sixty. His face was lined, as if years in the sun had left a road map on it.

  “It was years ago,” I said.

  “Time doesn’t matter when you’re talking about the pain of losing someone.”

  Maybe it didn’t, I reflected as I walked down the road toward the cottage.

  I walked in the ever-darkening evening, very much aware that God was there . . . and wishing I could figure out how to reach him and wondering if I found a way to do it, would it help?

  I dreamed that night. It was a snow day in Erie, which meant the city schools were canceled. The twins were maybe seven, which would have made Gracie six. We built a tent in the middle of the living room out of blankets and quilts. We played there all day as the city got buried by a horrible lake-effect snowstorm. In our tent, we didn’t even see the snow.

  Gracie crawled on my lap and whispered, “This is a magic tent, Mommy.”

  And it was magic. In that tent, for that day, the rest of the world ceased to exist.

  When I woke up, I could still smell Gracie’s shampoo. I could hear the kids laughing. We’d all felt safe in that magic tent.

  I tried to hold on to the memory . . . to the dream. But Angus nudged me, telling me it was time to wake up and feed him.

  I did, but the dream left me with a lingering feeling that I needed to see the kids.

  Since I moved to the cottage, I’d made it a point to call them at least once a week, but it had been months since I’d seen them in person.

  Talking about losing my father had loosened something in me. Even after I lost him, I held on to the knowledge that he had loved me.

  I needed to be sure the kids knew I loved them.

  I called them and invited them to dinner at the cottage. I thought about saying, “Meet me at the city house next weekend,” but I wasn’t quite ready for that, so I settled for inviting them to the cottage on Saturday night.

  Cleveland is a couple hours away, so I told Connie that she was welcome to spend the night. She’s the only one to move away from Erie. Morrows have lived in Erie for generations. It was as if that initial migration from Ireland here was all the travel the family could manage. Morrows never moved.

  Except Connie. Sometimes it made me sad, but since I’d come to accept that I now lived outside Erie myself, I understood. Even before everything happened, I understood. Conner had always been my easy one. Gracie my peacemaker. Connie my restless spirit.

  Maybe it was wrong to label your kids, but I don’t think I chose their labels. I don’t think I forced them into some niche I’d created. They invented themselves. I just understood them, or at least tried to.

  I spent the Saturday making a nice dinner. I rarely cooked anymore. It didn’t seem worth it when it was just me and Angus. Sometimes I made an occasional omelet, but rarely much more than that.

  At dinner, the kids caught me up on their lives and their adventures. Conner had a new girl he was seeing, but not seriously. He offered to come mow what yard I had here at the cottage, but I assured him I could manage.

  After an apple crisp dessert, he headed back to Erie, which left only Connie and me. I was used to the silence when I was out here with only Angus, but it seemed too quiet with Connie here. After years when they were kids and chaos ruled, the silence was unnerving. “Would you like to go for a quick walk with Angus and me?”

  Somehow being quiet outside didn’t seem as bad.

  “Sure, Mom.”

  We walked for a while. Angus flushed a turkey from some underbrush. It scared Angus more than it startled us. We both laughed at the sight of the giant dog, quivering because a turkey had flown at him.

  “He does keep things interesting,” I said. “This spring, he met up with a skunk. I’m not sure I told you.” Connie shook her head, indicating that I hadn’t. “I bathed him in tomato juice, then finally in peroxide and baking soda.”

  “That’s a lot of dog to bathe,” Connie commented.

  He was. I’d bought Angus long after she’d left the house, so they were friendly, but they weren’t overly attached. She’d made comments suggesting I might have been better off with a smaller dog, but there were a lot of empty spaces in my life and I figured it took a very large dog to start to fill all those voids.

  “Mom,” Connie said a while later.

  “Yes, honey?”

  “When’s the last time you left the house? I mean, other than running to the grocery store or bank.”

  I knew that she was asking about more than if I’d become a total recluse. “I’m busy here. I’ve been working on a new project and it’s going really well.”

  “Can I see it?”

  No, I couldn’t share the piece yet. I wasn’t sure why. It had as much to do with her as it did me. But right now, I needed to be selfish, to hold on to it myself.

  “When it’s done,” I promised. “But just to set your mind at ease, I go out every Monday night.”

  “Where?”

  “I meet friends in town.”

  Now, maybe a month ago, that would have been stretching the truth to the point of being a lie, but things had changed. Mondays were no longer me forcing myself to leave the house. Somewhere along the line, I’d started looking forward to going out. And it wasn’t the Killian’s, though it was a very good lager. It was Sam. He’d become a friend. Telling him just one thing a week . . . it helped.

  I thought of Jerry, offering me condolences. Maybe he was a friend, too.

  If Sam, or anyone, had wanted to know the whole of my story, I’d crumple under the weight. But telling it in dribbles, well, it was like deflating a balloon. It released just enough that I could let it go and adjust to my new dimensions before going out the next week and letting some more out.

  “A girl friend, or a guy friend?” Connie asked.

  “A guy, but—”

  “Friends. Is that all?” she teased.

  I must have looked . . . well, I’m not sure how I looked, but Connie’s teasing stopped abruptly and she said, “I’m sorry, Mom. You know, you have every right to date,” she added in one fast sentence, as if she felt she’d better say the words quickly in hopes I’d listen.

  “Right doesn’t always matter, does it? If what was right and fair mattered, then I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

  “Mom.”

  Then my daughter, my beautiful daughter, hugged me. She hugged me as if I were the child and she the mother. Only my mother would never have hugged me like that. Not th
at she didn’t love me. My mother just never knew how to show her love the way my father, or even my daughter, could.

  “Would you like to know something . . . one thing about your grandmother?” I asked Connie.

  “Sure, Mom.”

  I took her hand, this daughter of mine, and whistled for Angus. We started back toward the cottage. The woods were dark, but they were my home now and I knew the way.

  Then for the first time, I shared one-thing with someone other than Sam. “I spent most of my life not knowing my mother could laugh.”

  Lexie and her mother stood next to a large, black headstone in the middle of Laurel Hill Cemetery.

  Lexie had no idea what was the proper thing to say about a headstone. “It’s beautiful, Mom,” she tried. To be honest, she found it disconcerting that her mother had her name and birth date already put next to her father’s. All that was left was filling in the date of her death.

  Lexie didn’t tell her mom that she wasn’t sure she liked that part. Her mom, being her mom, would simply say that it was expedient. That it made sense.

  Lexie knew her mother believed in making sense.

  “I prearranged my funeral with Kloecker’s Funeral Home, where we had Dad—”

  “I remember, Mom.” Did her mother expect her to say thank you for taking care of it? Lexie didn’t know, and she was saved from gracelessly fumbling when her mother added, “Oh, of course. And I bought a third plot when I bought ours.”

  “What?”

  “It was here, all by itself, so the cemetery made us—” She stopped short and corrected herself. “Me. They made me a deal. You never know . . .”

  Lexie lost track of her mother’s words as she spun around and walked away from her father’s grave. Her father would have understood how her mother’s particular brand of expediency bothered her. She’d always had a particularly rocky relationship with her mother. She was not the daughter her mother had dreamed of, but unfortunately, she was the daughter her mother got.

  “Alexis. Wait for me.”

  So Lexie stopped. She’d have loved to just keep on going. To walk away from her mother. To quit trying to please her, when it had long since become apparent that her mother would never approve of Lexie’s choices. But she couldn’t. It would have broken her father’s heart.

  Her mother put her hand on Lexie’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know you hate this kind of thing. I do my best to shelter you from it, but you’re all I have left now. When I die, you’ll be the one trying to take care of the arrangements and I wanted to make it easier on you.”

  “Easier on me?”

  Lexie tried to tug away from her grip, but her mother didn’t let go. “Alexis, I . . .” She stopped, then started again. “The kids are in school until two thirty, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then we have a few hours. Come down to the peninsula with me.”

  Lexie loved the peninsula. Presque Isle was a small spit of land that jutted into Lake Erie, creating a sheltered bay on the Erie side, and rocky beaches on the lake side.

  And to the best of her knowledge, her mother had never gone there with her. Lexie had gone with her father, with friends in school, with Lee and the kids, but never with her mother. “Uh, sure.”

  Her mother drove with clipped efficiency down Sterrettania, which turned into Peninsula Drive, and finally drove out to Beach Five. Her mother drove past the tourist hotels and restaurants as if she came this way often.

  “You’ve been out here before?”

  Her mother turned and gave Lexie one of her famous mom-looks. The one that said, I don’t know what goes on in your head. “Alexis, I’ve lived in Erie all my life. Of course I’ve been out here.”

  “Oh.”

  When her mother parked the car, she took off her Marc Jacobs heels and her trouser socks, then cuffed up her Michael Kors pants.

  Lexie only knew about Marc and Michael because her mother always introduced her clothes, just as she might a colleague. “Look at my new Marc.” Or, “What do you think about these Michaels?” Lexie knew her mother had probably told her the name of her blouse’s designer as well, but she couldn’t remember it. Designer names meant nothing to her. She spent her days working with clay and paint. She shopped generic brands, not designer names.

  Ready for the sand, her mother took off up the beach.

  There was nothing left for Lexie to do but follow.

  Her mother walked at the water’s edge and occasionally leaned over to pick up a piece of beach glass, or wave-polished stone.

  Lexie expected a talk, or a lecture, but instead they walked in silence until a giant dog came barreling toward them, splashing in the leading edge of the waves.

  “King,” someone farther down the beach yelled.

  It was too late. King honed in on her mother and practically knocked her down with his very affectionate greeting.

  “Hold on, Mom, I’ll get him.”

  “He’s fine,” she said, laughing. “You’re fine; aren’t you, King?”

  Lexie stood there watching her mom, someone she’d always thought of as remote, playing with a dog in the water, ruining her designer clothes.

  King’s owner finally caught up and retrieved the dog, while offering her mother profuse apologies. “It’s fine,” she said graciously. “I love dogs.”

  She laughed out loud and stroked the sopping, soggy dog.

  Lexie couldn’t remember ever hearing her mother laugh, at least not like this. Joyful. That was the description.

  She knew her mouth was hanging open, but she just couldn’t seem to adjust her reality to this mother . . . this laughing mother.

  After King’s owner left with the dog, Lexie said, “Mom, you hate dogs.”

  She’d wanted a dog when she was growing up. She’d wanted one so badly. She remembered pretending her neighbor’s yappy poodle was a giant Saint Bernard. Her giant Saint Bernard. Lexie had begged and pleaded, but her mother always told her no. Her father made her stop bugging her mother, saying that her mom wouldn’t be able to deal with the mess a dog would create.

  Yet, here was her mother, soaking wet and covered with dog kisses.

  “I don’t hate dogs, but your father was allergic,” her mother said quietly. “He didn’t want you to blame him . . .”

  “So, he let me blame you?”

  Mom shrugged. “You were always closer to your father.” Before Lexie could protest, she added, “It’s okay, Alexis. I know I’m not very . . .” She paused and with a small smile filled in, “Cuddly. You were five when you told me that. I knew you needed someone who was more approachable. I was always glad you had your dad.”

  “Mom.” Lexie wanted to hug her, but she settled for simply placing her hand on her mother’s very wet arm.

  “You know what?” Her mother looked determined. “Your father is gone. I’m still here. And I’m getting a dog. Want to come help me pick one out?”

  There was her mother. Standing up to her ankles in the water, wet paw prints on her normally impeccable outfit, and she had never looked more beautiful.

  Connie grinned. “And that’s when Grandma got Jazz.”

  “Yes. I found Bernie there, that same day.”

  “I remember when you brought him home. He was ugly and we couldn’t figure out why you got him. But you always wanted a Saint Bernard.”

  “Every time I looked at him, I remembered my mother, standing in the water, laughing as a dog kissed her. He reminded me how much she loved me. She loved me enough to let me blame her for my lack of a dog growing up. She did it because she wanted my dad to remain my hero. I hadn’t realized how deep her love ran then, but I know now.”

  Connie had tears in her eyes. “I love you, Mom. And I’ve never doubted how much you love me.”

  And Connie hugged me. I’d worked so hard to have a different relationship with my kids than my mom had with me. At that moment, I thought I’d maybe succeeded.

  We walked back to the cottage and I offered Connie the
bed, but she took the couch. Sometime in the middle of the night, she came in, just as she had when she was little, and slipped into the big king-size bed with Angus and me.

  Monday came and I set out for the bar with a different sense about the trip.

  Normally, I went because it had become part of my routine. It was how I justified telling the kids I sometimes left the cottage. But tonight, I wanted to go.

  I wanted to see Sam and even Jerry.

  It was a beautiful evening. The sky was very, very blue, without a whiff of a cloud. In some parts of the country they talk of endless skies, but here in northwestern Pennsylvania, the sky ends abruptly at the edge of tree lines, or over the crest of a hill. Blue butted up to trees, houses, and roads. But as I stood at the top of Mackey Hill, looking down, I was high enough that I could see much farther. The sky wasn’t exactly endless, but it was huge and brilliant. It seemed to match my anticipatory mood.

  I smiled as I entered the bar. It was familiar . . . a haven. “Hi, Jerry,” I said as I passed him and made my way to my stool.

  He looked surprised, but echoed my greeting.

  I took my seat. “Hi, Sam.”

  He smiled at me. “Hi,” he replied as he handed me my beer in its iced glass.

  “One thing,” he said.

  “One thing,” I echoed almost cheerfully. “I didn’t get my first dog until I was in my thirties.” I told Sam about adopting Bernie, an already-aging Saint Bernard who could produce the most prodigious amount of slobber. I told him about the time we took Bernie to camp and discovered that I’d bought a dog who couldn’t swim, and how Lee had to jump into the small, spring-fed pond, fully clothed, and rescue him.

  Then I told him that Bernie had passed peacefully in his sleep and now I had Angus, the less-slobbery Irish wolfhound.

  After that, I’m not sure why, I looked at Sam and said, “One thing?”

  He looked startled. I had changed the rules this time.

  For a moment, I didn’t think he was going to respond, but slowly he said, “I was in the army.”