Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  “Yes?”

  “Asheboro,” Jerene said simply.

  Dillard nodded soberly. “The baby. Your daughter.”

  Jerene reached for her sister’s hand. “I couldn’t have made it through without you being there with me, Dillie. I remember Mother was on the warpath, wouldn’t hear of you accompanying me but you did anyway.”

  “Of course I did.” Dillard squeezed Jerene’s hand back.

  “And you helped scrape the money together for Miss Grace and Halliford House. Bless your heart.”

  Neither said anything for a minute, surprised by the power of this wordless moment, this minute of closeness, when in truth they hadn’t historically been overly sisterly at all. They had mutually survived their home but that gave them closeness of soldiers in a battle, and often soldiers return from wars never choosing to see their comrades again, preferring to start fresh once their war is over, and it had been that way for them a bit, formal, cordial, respectful in allowing an envelope of space to re-invent and assemble another life. Their formality was a final act of survival and coping, but when it had counted, when one needed the other, they were indeed sisters. Dillard and Jerene, though, had not completely honored it until this moment.

  Jerene slowly opened the manila envelope and slid out the few sheets of paper inside. “He found out about her.”

  Dillard put her hand over her mouth.

  “Yes,” Jerene said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Despite declining the Diet-Rite, Jerene reached for Dillard’s can and took a small sip. Jerene found her reading glasses in the pocket of her overcoat, then she read: “Shawna Jane Mabe, born September third, nineteen sixty-six.”

  Dillard sat again, at the other end of the breakfast-nook table, putting the length of the small kitchen between her and her sister. “September—I remember that hot-as-Hades September.”

  “The adoptive parents were Jane and Edwin Mabe of Fayetteville, North Carolina. He was in the service. That seems a gamble, letting a soldier and his wife adopt in the middle of the Vietnam War, but that’s what the Children’s Home did. The father’s dead now, according to that next piece of paper.”

  “My goodness. What do you intend to do now that you know she’s … she is alive, isn’t she?”

  “Forty-one years old. She got married late, at thirty-two, to a Kyle Crotts, but is divorced. Two kids by him, a baby from somewhere else. Living in Matthews, North Carolina. Darnell’s man got me an address. Carolina Acres … Could be some kind of gated community or something.”

  Dillard shook her head. “I suspect a trailer park, more likely. You’re just going to drive out to Matthews and say, surprise, here I am, your long-lost biological mother?”

  “I have no idea what I will do so I’ve barged over here to ask my big sister.”

  Dillard felt an unaccustomed giddiness: Jerene seeking the counsel of her big sister. In the last decades, the polarity reversed itself; it was always Dillard coming hat in hand to Jerene, and Duke, and Gaston, who lent her money, then just flat out gave her money, money they’d never see again for her divorce, her setting up a new life after Randy, and then once for a drug treatment clinic for Christopher. She became the classic poor relation. No one that one would go to for help.

  “I suppose,” Jerene said, “we should drive down there and take a look.”

  “Sneak around in the bushes? And if we like what we see, knock on the door … and then what?”

  “Get your car keys. Let’s go, and we’ll think of something.”

  * * *

  Dillard drove Jerene in her Toyota, reflecting how she much preferred others to drive her places. The deep joint pain associated with fibromyalgia could flare at any moment but perhaps adrenaline was holding her pervasive physical maladies at bay. This unexpected expedition, however serious, was also a bit exciting and Dillard found again that earlier sense of giddiness, almost so overwhelming that she thought she might laugh the way others might sob, unbidden, up from the diaphragm.

  “I’m worried,” Jerene said, “about the Jarvis Trust, Dillie. All the time. I lie awake wondering what will become of it, after we’re gone. Since we’re halfway to the poorhouse.”

  Dillard didn’t quite see the connection to events at hand.

  “I wonder about this Shawna Crotts, what she’s like … if she has an eye for art, perhaps.”

  Now Dillard was dumbfounded again. “Jerry. That is what you are thinking about now?”

  “Among a long list of other things, yes.”

  Jerene’s sense of vulnerability had passed once they were on the road. She had transformed into the sister Dillard was most familiar with, Jerene’s face aimed determinedly, lips set, eyes narrowed, the committee woman taking charge, the military commander with a plan under way.

  “Annie has made a joke of the Trust for years,” Jerene continued, “saying she’d sell off the collection, and now that she’s struggling with her real estate business, she really would sell the lot and recoup her losses, I predict. And Jerilyn, poor thing, can’t be in charge of it, since she’s a walking scandal—she’ll always be the woman who shot her husband, even decades from now.”

  “That might be why you should let her do it, so she could find some social redemption.”

  “Do you see any gift for speaking or dealing with the public or … She’s my own dear little Jerilyn, but she is not a charmer. She is earnest and thoughtful and … after this civil suit is over, she has mentioned she might go to graduate school very far from North Carolina and start over.”

  “She needs to talk to a therapist. It sounds like she has a world of trouble she has not dealt with or processed.”

  “I agree, but Darnell McKay says she shouldn’t see a therapist until the trial is over. The fact that she is seeking counseling will be seen as a sign that she has psychological problems, that she shot Skip on purpose and is only now dealing with her anger issues or male-hatred issues or whatever the prosecution will come up with.”

  “What is she doing with herself all day?”

  “Sitting in her room upstairs. We take every meal together. She just drags around the house, watches a lot of TV. She and Skip went to their seventh grade prom together, then he came down from Carolina to escort her to the senior prom, then he was her guest for the Debutante Ball at Charlottetowne, then she dated him in Chapel Hill, then they married—has she ever been apart from this boy? But now she acts as if she doesn’t care if she ever sees him again. She’s not lonely for him, never takes his calls when he rings up. But back to the Trust, Dillie.”

  Dillard, who had ceded her seat on the Jarvis Trust for American Art to her nephew Bo’s wife, Kate Johnston, was happy the Trust and all its bureaucratic drama was out of her hair. So far from being offended that she was “passed over,” that her little sister had taken over from her mother in the running of the Trust, she was elated to be spared the importuning curators at the Mint or the half-competent caterers or the unctuous fund-raising consultants or the empty-headed society grandes dames that Jerene had packed the committee with. Dillard then saw on a sign that she was eleven miles from Matthews, and they still didn’t have a plan, but Jerene was determined to talk about the Jarvis Trust.

  “I suppose,” Dillard suggested, “your sons could end the female tradition. Dear Joshua might be suited to it.”

  “Yes, it will likely be Josh to take it over. But I had always thought it should be something for the women of the family. Some added piece of security, some status, some reason for them not to simply be decorative Southern women while their men decided their fate in every other aspect of life. It would make it up to her, don’t you think? This…” She looked at her Xerox again. “This Shawna Jane Mabe Crotts. My land, those are ugly names all together.”

  Dillard was slow to see her meaning. And then she did. “My dear, dear, poor deranged sister.” Dillard allowed herself a laugh. “Oh my. Are you suggesting this woman raised in military housing in Fort Bragg, North Caro
lina, married, divorced, and no doubt with a house full of children and no husband, living in Matthews, working … where did that say again?”

  Jerene looked straight ahead without a flutter. “The detective’s report said she had part-time work at the Dancy Corporation. Maybe she’s middle management.”

  “That’s just a prettified name for Dancy Mills. She probably does shift work on the line, Jerene. Maybe on food stamps and government aid!”

  “Perhaps she will not be right to take over the Trust but I don’t see why I shouldn’t hope for it. She is a Jarvis, after all. One would like to think a certain intelligence, certain survival skills fought their way to the surface genetically, whatever her adoptive circumstances.”

  Dillard decided to concentrate on driving, and not say any more.

  * * *

  It was a nice trailer; the faded exterior, the sad metal rusted at the eaves belied a rather cozy home inside. The furniture was old but comfortable; there was a smell of dog and boiled pasta. The dog outside was barking.

  “Magnum, shut up!” Shawna yelled. “He hates missing out on the party,” she said, smiling.

  Both Dillard and Jerene heard it, a speech impediment of some kind, mild, an inability to convincingly do the t in hates and party, which came out pah-ee. Dillard looked briefly at Jerene, who held a pleasant expression, but her eyes had already passed through regret and rejection and she was spiritually long gone from this trailer.

  “Y’all can understand me, right?” She wiped her hands with the dishcloth and set the colander in the sink, steam rising in plumes. “You can sort of tell my jaw’s not right. And I have to sit on this side of you. Deaf in this one.” She pointed to her right ear.

  If there was any doubt she was kin, Dillard thought, her leaning forward, fixing them with her eyes, her smile—it was Daddy looking back at them.

  Dillard laughed lightly. “It doesn’t seem to have slowed you down any.”

  “No, s’pose not. Pa always tried to get me to go on disability.” Dis-a-bee-lee.

  “Disability,” Dillard said, getting it in a second.

  “But I said disability was money for people who really were disabled, and I’m not disabled. He always felt so guilty about it. There were other things that made him take his own life but I’m sure all that info was in your file.”

  Jerene’s file had mentioned the adopted father was dead, but the suicide was news.

  “My my,” said Dillard, feeling useless as she said it.

  “How sad,” Jerene said simply, real sadness in her voice.

  “It’s an old story, I guess. Soldier back from Vietnam.”

  “Yes,” said Dillard. “You say he was guilty…”

  “Now I think the VA does a lot better by the Iraq and Afghanistan boys, but it’s still what they went through and they have to all live with what they seen and done. I’m sorry, you were asking something and I didn’t get it.” She leaned in with her good ear.

  “Nothing. You were saying he felt guilty about…”

  “You read his file, right?”

  Jerene cleared her throat. “Actually, we weren’t permitted to read the file, not being with the VA but an auxiliary organization.”

  “Well, I was five. And he was back from Vietnam, right from when it was going to complete hell and, um, we were all so happy to see Pa get home. And he was sleeping on the sofa, and I just loved him to death—I barely ever saw him, you know, except on leaves and holidays and little letters he sent me. So I snuck up on him to crawl on the sofa beside him and he just exploded. Forced his hands out quickly, the way you would if you were sleeping in-country and someone touched you.” She laughed. “It’s good, I guess, he wasn’t armed with a knife or something—I’d be dead. As it was, he broke my jaw, severed a nerve so my tongue is lazy and my hearing, just in this ear … well, he didn’t mean to do it. Ma just about left him over it. He carried me crying all the way to the base hospital—I mean, we both were crying. All that’s in the file, of course.”

  Jerene and Dillard sat still a minute. Jerene then went into her purse and brought out a checkbook. Dillard assessed her sister’s calm deportment. Money would be her escape plan—a quick check for some too big amount and then they’d get out and that would be that. Jerene had no intention of revealing she was Shawna’s mother. It ended the minute they drove into the trailer park and the speech impediment finished any hope of appeal. It wouldn’t do, would it, for the head of the Jarvis Trust for American Art to have a speech impediment.

  “Well now,” said Jerene, taking out her pen.

  “I am a bit confused,” said Shawna. Now the dog was barking again, and the baby in the playpen began crying, too. She hopped up to get her bawling son, his nose now running profusely. “I thought … now hush you, it’s some of Daddy’s friends here, hush Magnum. Hush both of y’all. I thought the insurance people said there couldn’t be a settlement because he took his own life within two years of the policy. I have a stack of letters that say it over and over.”

  Dillard had no idea what to say.

  Jerene didn’t miss a beat. “Well, we’re not your insurance company and we’re not the military, but we’re the Veterans’ Auxiliary and we can do what we please. It’s not maybe what you were hoping for, but…”

  Shawna laughed, now that her son was quieting down. “We don’t hope for too much ’round here, do we, Nathan?”

  “May I ask the rent here?”

  “One-twenty for all the utilities. I own the trailer.”

  “Here is five thousand—”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Five thousand will tide you over a while and keep you in diapers. It’s a very small gift for your father’s service to this nation, but the Mecklenburg County Auxiliary of,” she took a breath as she made up the organization’s name, “the Veterans of Foreign Wars wants you to have this.”

  Dillard was sure her scorn was written on her face. Such adept lying.

  Suddenly, along with the dog, there was a racket from the back of the trailer. A nine-year-old girl, her hair the identical straw color of her mother’s, and a ten-year-old boy ran down the short hall, slamming into things, screaming accusations, she cut me on purpose, no I did not …

  “You two? Terry, what did you do to yourself?”

  The boy was bleeding on his hand. “She smashed my hand into the broken Coke bottle.”

  “Well, lordamercy, why is there a broken Coke bottle back in your room?”

  “He’s got all kinds of stuff he’s hiding!” tattled the girl.

  Now the baby was crying again. Shawna looked pleadingly at Dillard. “I don’t suppose you could change a diaper, could you?”

  “Why yes. I’d … I’d be happy to,” Dillard said, leaning forward, hoping without too many grunts or theatrics to get to her feet, standing slowly, and then going to meet Shawna and take the infant to the kitchen counter. Shawna reached to the top of a shelf to get first-aid things and lectured both children to be quiet, to behave, but judging by the children’s volume and general air of disobedience, that seemed rarely the case around here.

  Dillard turned to Jerene … who was not there.

  The screen door was just pulling closed. She had escaped.

  Write a check and run, Dillard thought. Facing the vicissitudes of life, of other people’s lives, was hard work, she said to herself. Dillard had done more than her share of staring into the shadows where human lives take residence, she thought with stern pride, as she undid the synthetic pants of the boy, the first time she had changed a diaper since Christopher. It was all cloth diapers in her day, and a truck that drove around Charlotte trading soiled for clean. The little boy was laughing, reaching out to touch Dillard’s nose, engaged by her. Dillard nuzzled him back. And then an even stranger thought …

  A thought which stopped her, froze her in her task.

  What if she told Shawna that she, Dillard Jarvis Revelle, was her biological mother? Shawna looked more like her than Jerene. What if Dillard
were to enter the world again, the world of motherhood and, given the mob inside the trailer, grandmotherhood. There would be visits and news of the children, little gifts and cards and celebrations. They could say she was a great-aunt—nothing too complicated or upsetting need be told to the children until they’re older. What would Jerene say? Who cares, in this instance, what Jerene would say, when there is such a good deed afoot. Ha, wouldn’t that be something, Dillard thought, straightening up the diaper, then holding the boy Nathan close to her bosom. He was content to be there, not crying, gurgling peacefully. Wouldn’t that be something, to dive back full force into life. She would, of course, have to do less with the fibromylagia support group—

  “Lord, I can’t thank you ladies enough,” said Shawna, now washing blood and iodine off her hands in the sink. “Changing the diaper was way beyond the call of dooey,” she added, meaning duty, followed by her strange nasal laugh. Dillard wondered if she properly heard her own laugh, how strange it was. “Um, where’s your friend?”

  Dillard smiled weakly. “We have a few more stops and she’s out on her cell phone, I suppose, lining it all up.”

  Shawna reached over and took Dillard’s hand. Shawna looked like she might cry, but she leaned forward and kissed Dillard on the cheek, and said in a ragged voice very quietly, “What good work you ladies do.”

  Dillard thought she might cry, too. But she blathered to hold it off: “Servicemen and their families do not get nearly enough from the government. We, the ladies of…” Oh for God’s sake, she couldn’t come up with Jerene’s made-up organizational name. “We hope what little we do will help.” Dillard leaned in to kiss her biological niece’s cheek in return. “You take care now.”

  Would she do it? Would she declare herself Shawna’s long-lost mother? But the truth would come out, wouldn’t it? It was Jerene, not Dillard. And resentful of Jerene as she was, that was still her choice to make, to own and include a daughter and her unruly brood into the Johnston family. No, what a foolish whim, the more she thought about it. Maybe that’s what Jerene understood. Maybe that’s why she left before she said anything that would have consequences, consequences of family dynamics, of scandal, of money. The family secret, so close to the surface, visible for anyone outside looking in, slowly began to return to its home below the surface, down to the dark reaches unfathomable, where secrets belonged.