by Jaime Maddox
Suddenly Sandy’s brain made the connection. Chaz and Linda were brother and sister. Annette was at Linda’s pool party. “You married Chaz?” Sandy asked.
Annette smiled. “We’re married thirty-five years.” She nodded at a beautiful young lady seated beside her. The woman was no doubt Annette’s daughter, with the same facial structure and dark eyes, but with Chaz’s brown hair. “This is our daughter, Tara.”
Sandy shook the woman’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Linda continued to introduce Sandy. “My sister Lisa and her partner Susan, and their son Jamison.” Sandy shook hands with Susan and Jamison, then hugged Lisa, who’d stood to greet her. “Wow, what a birthday surprise. My sister never ceases to amaze me!”
Sandy would never have recognized this woman, who was just a little girl at the time of Agnes. She was amazed that Lisa remembered her, and told her so.
Lisa laughed. “How could I forget you? I poached cookies from your house, stole your bike, and chiseled free cones from you at Farrell’s. And you taught me to dribble a basketball!”
Sandy laughed as she remembered all those details and a few others, which, to Lisa’s dismay, she shared. “You were a quite an energetic little girl,” Sandy summarized her recollections, drawing the laughter of everyone in the group. Lisa had been the most precocious four-year-old in the world, smart as could be and with a sense of curiosity that bordered on dangerous. Her fascination with the river often took her to Sandy’s block, where Nellie fed her cookies and Sandy shot hoops and rode bikes with her until one of her older siblings came to escort her safely home.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me these things about her before I agreed to have children?” Susan asked of the crowd.
“Mama,” Jamison exclaimed, to everyone’s delight, “are you suggesting that I’ve inherited Mommy’s bad qualities?”
All the adults laughed again, but Sandy could see more than a physical resemblance between the little boy and his mother. He was a smart one, and if he was anything like Lisa, they certainly had their hands full.
“Not you, your brother,” Susan answered.
“How many children do you have?” Sandy asked, when the laughter died down.
“Just two. Twin boys.” Lisa pointed at another boy in the pool. “That’s our son, Max.”
Sandy smiled as she looked toward the other boy splashing around with his cousins. In a few years, Leo would be doing the same thing. “That’s wonderful,” she replied after a moment, then turned her attention to her other old friend. “How about you, Annette?”
“Tara has two brothers, and all together I have six grandchildren. They’re all in the pool.”
Linda contributed without being surveyed. “I have two boys and five grandchildren.” She handed Sandy the promised beer and asked, “How about you?”
Looking at all of them, she smiled. “My partner and I adopted a little girl who’s now all grown up. She just gave me a grandson.” Sandy noted a smile of recognition on Lisa’s face when she mentioned her partner. None of the other women seemed to notice the comment, or perhaps they just didn’t care. They were obviously very accepting of Lisa and Susan, so she supposed news of another same-sex couple wouldn’t bother them.
“That’s exciting. When was he born? Just recently?” Lisa asked.
“November. He’s starting to get interesting.”
“Crawling yet?” Lisa asked.
“Yeah.” Sandy laughed, nodding.
“Let the games begin!”
“What’s his name?” Jamison asked.
“Leo.”
“Cool, like from Little Einstein’s.”
Sandy already knew about the Baby Einstein series and had met the Little Einsteins as well. “Do you like that show?” she asked him.
“When I was four I watched that, but now I’m eight.”
“What do you watch now?”
“Game shows. I want to be a game-show host when I grow up.”
Sandy nodded and told him that sounded like a great job.
“Where’s your partner?” Lisa asked.
Sandy had answered this question a thousand times, and she was happy to say it had become easier. Still not easy, though.
“She died a few years ago. Breast cancer,” she answered, knowing that would be the follow-up question.
“I’m sorry. Cancer sucks.” Lisa offered a smile and a supportive hand on Sandy’s knee.
“Yep.”
“I’m a breast-cancer survivor,” Linda said. “Five years in February.”
“Keep up the fight.” Sandy offered her beer in a toast, and all of the women raised their bottles and glasses.
“To boobs,” Lisa added, and her sister frowned at her, but then they all laughed.
Their pleasant exchange was interrupted by a booming male voice. “Who the hell is this?” someone demanded. Turning, Sandy saw a much balder and heavier Chaz smiling at her. She stood and hugged her old friend. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. “We all thought you’d died!”
“Really?”
“Hell, yeah! No one ever saw you again after the flood, so I figured the rumor must’ve been true.”
Sandy shook her head in disbelief, then searched the face of her old friend. “Linda?” Sandy asked. Linda didn’t seem to think she was dead when she’d greeted her on the hillside.
Linda nodded sadly. “It’s true. I don’t know where or how it started, but that’s what we all heard.”
“How did I die?” Sandy asked.
The siblings looked at each other and shook their heads. It was Linda who answered. “There was such chaos after the flood, half the town was displaced. I don’t know what happened to half the people who lived here before Agnes. They were just gone. So when I heard you were dead, I just accepted it, no questions asked.”
Although her pain was great and she hadn’t wanted to return to her hometown after Agnes, Sandy occasionally wondered what had become of all of her friends, and why they never tried to track her down. Now, she knew.
“Where did you go?” Annette asked.
It seemed to Sandy that everyone wanted to hear the answer, so she sat back down and told them about moving to Mount Pocono and then to New York City.
“Do you live by the Plaza?” Jamison asked.
“Not really. It’s about fifty blocks from my house.”
“I want to go to the Plaza and order room service, like Kevin did on Home Alone. My two moms are going to take me there for my birthday. And I have to bring my brother Max, because we’re twins and it’s his birthday too.”
Sandy couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, maybe you can come visit me when you’re in New York.”
“Okay, I’d like to meet Leo. We’ll go to the top of the Empire State Building and ride around on a bus that doesn’t have a roof and we’ll see all the tall buildings.”
“That sounds like fun.”
The woman who had been grilling delivered a tray loaded with burgers and hot dogs and placed it on a table already laden with cold salads, chips, pickles, and condiments. When she put the food down, she came to Sandy and offered her a hug.
“Babe,” Sandy said when she recognized yet another sister. Carol was the leader, Linda the fun sister, and Babe the bookworm. She’d worked with Annette and Sandy in FBLA, and although she was a year younger than the others, Babe was by far the smartest in the group. She was sweet and funny and brilliant, but so shy she wouldn’t speak to anyone she didn’t know.
Babe sat beside Sandy and Lisa as they ate their burgers, and they caught up. She and her husband ran several successful businesses in town, which didn’t surprise Sandy. She traveled to New York often to shop and take her children and grandchildren to the theater. She was still a Phillies fan.
“You haven’t become a Yankees fan since moving to New York, have you?” Babe asked to tease her.
Babe and her brother Lute had been the Parkers’ guest at Phillies games every year, but it was Babe who talked for
hours with Sandy’s grandfather about their favorite team.
“Mets, actually,” Sandy admitted. “But not when they play the Phils. How about you? Do you still go to the games?”
“Lisa and I have season tickets, so we go a few times a year. In fact, talk about a small world—our tickets are in the row behind Jeannie Bennett’s.”
The look on Sandy’s face must have showed confusion, for when Lisa spoke she looked directly at her.
“You remember Jeannie, of course. Of course you do, you were neighbors,” Lisa said, letting out a little nervous laugh.
Sandy faced her, trying to remember to breathe. “You’re friends with Jeannie Bennett?” The sun suddenly seemed a million times brighter, and the features of Lisa’s face were fading in contrast to the light surrounding her. Her words echoed and caused an unpleasant pressure deep in Sandy’s ears. The pulse in her throat was choking her, seemingly preventing air from reaching her lungs.
“She was one of my instructors in medical school. Our moms remained friends over the years, and when I was thinking of medical school, Jeannie really helped me out. We’re friends to this day. We stay with her when we go to Philly.”
It took a moment before Sandy could speak. She needed to clarify Lisa’s words, Babe’s words, because what they said just didn’t make sense. Jeannie Bennett was dead, so how could she be a physician? How could she own Phillies tickets? How could she be friends with Lisa? Sandy didn’t want to overreact and appear insane, but one of them was, because Jeannie couldn’t be dead and living in Philadelphia.
“Are you okay?” Lisa asked, leaning toward Sandy, the physician in her taking over.
She wasn’t okay, but how could she explain that to all of these people? She looked from Lisa to Babe, waiting for one of them to laugh at their cruel joke. Jeannie was dead, and it was wrong for them to say the things they did.
“Let’s get you in the house, out of this heat.”
Lisa and Babe walked Sandy inside and she tried to focus on making her feet move. “Just the heat, I think,” Lisa said to everyone as she asked Sandy a series of questions about medication and her health status.
Inside, a cold cloth on her forehead and the cool air helped to revive Sandy a bit. Babe, always a bit squeamish, took advantage of her sister’s medical skills and excused herself. “She’ll fix you up in no time,” she said as she closed the sliding-glass door behind her.
It took a few minutes for Sandy to regain her composure. When she was sure she could speak, she looked directly at Lisa, who sat beside her. “So, you’re friends with Jeannie Bennett.”
“Yeah.” Lisa smiled. “She’s been a very positive force in my life.”
Sandy leaned back into the cool embrace of the leather couch. “I haven’t seen Jeannie since the flood.” She sipped the water Lisa had proffered and remembered that afternoon at Hazleton General Hospital forty years earlier when she’d been looking for Jeannie and instead met Helen Bennett in the lobby. “She died an hour ago.” Jane’s words from just a couple of weeks back rang in her ears. “Jeannie isn’t buried at Riverview…my mother donated her body.” Robbie’s voice from an hour ago. “She paid me five thousand dollars NOT to tell you.”
It was so obvious now, looking back with the gift of 20 / 20 hindsight. Somehow, Helen had discovered their affair and told the mother of all lies, told Sandy the only possible story that would have kept her from Jeannie. And Jane was in on the charade as well. Forty years later, Jane was still lying to her.
Knowing that Lisa—who had a partner of her own—might understand this, she decided to share her story. After shaking her head in disbelief, Sandy sipped the water. “I think I need a stronger drink,” she said as she leaned back into the couch and turned to face her. The concern was evident in Lisa’s eyes, and Sandy was comforted by the hand that gently rubbed her shoulder. “I thought she was dead.”
“What?”
“We were lovers,” she began after a few moments, but tears quickly choked off her voice and she simply sobbed. Once again, Sandy found herself crying for Jeannie, not because she was dead, but because she was alive and because of hatred and prejudice she’d been taken from Sandy just the same. “Her mother must have found out…about us…” Sandy tried again, but she couldn’t finish. She closed her eyes and leaned into Lisa, whose arms pulled her tightly against her.
Lisa gently stroked Sandy’s hair, as tears fell from her own eyes. She told Sandy that her confession didn’t surprise her, and she shared her own story with Sandy.
Lisa said that although she was just turning five when Agnes struck, she already had an understanding that she liked girls much better than boys. Boys were great for building rafts and climbing trees, but when it came time to lie down and rest inside one of their cool forts beside the Susquehanna, Lisa always wanted her friend Cindy beside her. Even at that young age, Lisa had felt a special connection to both Sandy and Jeannie, and although she didn’t understand it at the time, when she was old enough to grasp the concept of sexuality, she often wondered about the girls from Canal Street. As a medical student, when she reconnected with Jeannie, she discovered the topic of Sandy Parker made Jeannie very sad. After that one time, neither Lisa nor Jeannie ever mentioned Sandy’s name again. Lisa drew her conclusions, and Sandy just confirmed them.
After many, many minutes, Sandy pulled back and looked at Lisa. “Can you tell me about her?”
Lisa laughed. “What would you like to know?”
Brushing away her tears, she smiled. “Everything.”
Lisa laughed. “What she was in 1972 she is now. Beautiful. Vibrant. In charge. Smart as hell. She is an incredible physician. She owns a clinic in North Philly, and everyone who knows her loves her.”
Sandy reflected for a moment. None of this surprised her. Jeannie had been an amazing girl and was destined to be an amazing woman. “Is she…with someone?” Sandy asked tentatively. Instead of an answer, Lisa just shrugged.
“What does that mean?”
“She’s married. To a man.”
Chapter Twenty
You Can’t Pick Your Relatives
Having the Parker name had given Sandy many privileges during her lifetime, but she’d never really taken advantage of her name and the power of her family. Until this day.
She parked her car on North Franklin Street, in the heart of the King’s College campus, and wandered into the first building she found.
“I’m Sandy Parker,” she told the security guard. “My family is making a donation to the college, and I was hoping to look around and see what you do here.”
The man smiled and offered his hand in greeting. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Parker. Your family has done a lot of good things for this region, and I’m happy to hear you’re going to be helpin’ out the college.”
After showing her identification, she received a visitor’s pass and a campus map and was directed toward the library. She’d used her smart phone to try to find information about Jeannie, but she’d struck out. Lisa had offered to contact Jeannie and pass along Sandy’s number, but Sandy wasn’t sure she wanted to do that just yet. If ever. Although Lisa didn’t go into detail, it seemed that Jeannie had a good life in Philadelphia that included a husband and children, and the last thing Sandy wanted was to upset the order in her universe by calling and opening up old wounds.
After the initial shock faded and Sandy began to think about it, she was absolutely mystified to learn that Jeannie was in a relationship with a man. Jeannie was by far the more liberal of the two of them and was ready to come out when they were still on Canal Street. There was no doubt in her mind that Jeannie was a lesbian. How the hell had she ended up married to a man? She might never know the whole story of Jeannie’s life after 1972, but Sandy was determined to find out what she could. King’s College was the first stop.
She might be on a wild goose chase, but it occurred to her that the Bobby she’d contacted might in fact be Jeannie’s son, not Jane’s. She had assume
d he was Jane’s child based on her understanding that Jeannie was dead and therefore couldn’t have a son. Since she was alive, perhaps the grandson who’d taken care of Helen Bennett’s funeral was Jeannie’s boy. She wanted to find out. When she left Linda’s house, she dialed the number she had for Bobby and left him another message. All she’d be wasting was time, but she had plenty of that. She decided to head to King’s College and investigate a bit.
In the library, Sandy began with the yearbooks from 2010. The current year wasn’t yet available. Bobby could have been anywhere from a freshman to a graduate student when his grandmother died, so Sandy decided to look through them all until she found a name that sounded similar to his. She only hoped he’d stuck it out and graduated and that Bobby wasn’t a moniker for a dissimilar name like Theodore.
As she flipped through the pages, she marveled at the number of female graduates. When she’d lived here, King’s had just started accepting women, and now half the student body was female. It was good to see it.
There were no candidates named Robert in 2011. Ditto for 2010, 2009, and 2008. But there in 2004, just after the Ms, Ns, and Os was a handsome young man named Robert T. Percavage, Jr. He hailed from Philadelphia and had Jeannie’s hair color, her eyes, and her smile.
This boy from Philadelphia, who looked so much like the woman Sandy had loved, had to be Jeannie’s son.
She stared for a long time, breathing, calming herself, thinking that this boy wouldn’t be alive today if her own life had turned out as she’d planned. Jeannie had gone to medical school, married, and had a son. According to J.R., the monument salesman, Bobby was an exceptional young man. It didn’t surprise Sandy at all, knowing his mother. How wonderful for Jeannie.
Sandy knew she had no business feeling sad about this turn of events, either. Her life was blessed. She’d traveled and explored and enjoyed life with Diane beside her; she’d loved her daughter and now her grandson. If she’d been with Jeannie, none of those people would have been part of her life.