by Sandra Kring
Mom answers it and listens for a time, her mouth falling open in disbelief. She stands up and paces as Oma and I watch her and wait. “Run that by me again?” Mom listens and then tosses her head and flattens her bangs back with her palm until her eyebrows lift. “A notice would have been nice, for crissakes!”
Mom hurries into the kitchen, Oma and I following her, Oma uttering, “What is it, dear? What’s wrong?”
Mom dips her head to the side to hold her cell against her shoulder, then riffles through the stack of unopened mail. She picks up an envelope and rips it open. She skims the papers inside, then lifts her head and asks the caller, “How long will this take?” She mutters a couple of choice cuss words and tosses her phone on the table. Oma and I follow her back into the living room.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” I ask. She’s skimming four stapled pages, her face bunched with worry.
“Apparently the department of health caught wind that this place is full of asbestos, lead paint, and about every other hazardous material known to man. They’re condemning the building until it’s cleaned up.”
Oma gasps. “Oh, my God! So that’s what those inspectors were doing here last month, when you thought it was only a routine check.” Her gaze sweeps over the apartment and she pulls me to her, her hand subconsciously drifting to my neck, as if she’s trying to keep the lurking toxins from slithering down my throat. She glances over at Milo, who has his head up, staring. I stare back at him. “Oh, my. No wonder that boy’s had so much trouble breathing,” she says. She keeps me tucked under her arm and hobbles me across the room so she can place her arm protectively around Milo too.
“We have to have our stuff out of here by the end of the month. They’re promising us relocation benefits for displaced tenants, but what in the hell is that going to amount to? And how long will it take to get it? Shit.” Mom’s face has gone the color of asphalt—the color of the “yard” she no doubt imagines for us when we are forced to move into a cardboard box. “I paid off my past-due bills and my credit cards with my advance, then had to run them up again, and it’ll be a couple more months before I see any royalties. Who knows how long these repairs will take. Shit!”
“Honey, your language,” Oma says.
Mom collapses on her office chair and lets the letter drop onto her lap. Her arms fall over the armrests and dangle limply. “It looks like we’re going to have to barge in on you for a while, Ma, though how we’ll all fit into your tiny utility apartment is beyond me.”
“You can’t,” Oma says, but there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of regret in her voice. “They’re changing the carpets and renovating the bathrooms in our complex. They did the first floor last week, and they’ll start in on mine next week. I’ve already told them that I won’t be there. I can’t bear to be around all those horrid glue fumes. I could even smell them wafting up from the first floor, and they made my sinuses and throat burn like they were on fire. Lord knows what they would do to Milo’s asthma if he were there.”
“Oh, this is just great,” Mom says.
“It is great, honey! Now things will work out perfectly.”
“What things?”
“You and the children coming to Timber Falls with me.”
Mom stops blinking. She stares up at Oma like she’s gone mad.
“Honey … your father is dying. Your aunt Jeana called last night. She’s been taking care of him since his first stroke, but now she’s convinced that her Chihuahua has a brain tumor and she wants to hurry him back to his vet in Pennsylvania. Besides, she says she’s fulfilled her sisterly obligations to Sam and that if I don’t relieve her immediately, she’ll put him in a nursing home. He developed congestive heart failure after his second stroke too, so she says it won’t be long.”
“And this is our problem how?” Mom says, once she can close her mouth enough to say anything.
“Tess, I promised your father years ago that I’d never let him go to a nursing home if it ever came to this. That man never kept one of his promises to me, but still it’s important to me to honor mine.”
My ears are perked up like a German shepherd’s at the mention of my grandfather, because if there’s any topic Mom views as more taboo than her Christian romance writing, it would be the topic of fathers. Hers or mine.
“You’ve got to be kidding, Ma. You divorced that man twelve years ago, and neither of us has spoken a word to him since. And I certainly never promised him anything.”
“No, you didn’t. But you owe it to yourself to go.”
“To myself?”
“That’s right.” Oma stands taller. “You’ve got unfinished business with him, Tess. And that unfinished business has ruined every relationship you’ve ever had.”
Oma is referring to Mom’s most recent boyfriend, no doubt. Peter. The man I hoped would become my dad. Peter is tall, built like a logger, and has sandy-colored hair just a shade darker than mine, so strangers would probably think he’s my birth daddy. He keeps it tethered in a ponytail that hangs halfway down the back of his leisure jackets. He teaches poetry and poetics—the analysis of the art of poetry, if your IQ score happens to be even lower than mine—at the university. He fishes, hikes, grows violets, and writes poetry, of course.
Every time Peter came over, he’d stop at Mom’s desk, give a kiss to the top of her head, or her lips, depending on which she presented to him, then walk over to our work-table. He’d come to me first, pick up whatever book I was reading, flip back a chapter or two, read me a sentence at random, then ask, “Where?” I’d close my eyes, turning pages in my mind until I found the passage he’d quoted, and answer something like, “Page one fifty-six. Fourth paragraph!” Peter would laugh every time, shaking his head in admiration for my photographic mind, and shout, “Yes! Yes! She does it again!”
Then, in the exaggerated swagger of a pompous professor, he’d move to Milo’s side of the table, take a haughty, comical stance, lift his finger into the air as he thought, then ask questions such as, “Mr. McGowan, 17.5 raised to the power of 653?” or, “Mr. McGowan, what day of the week will it be on January twenty-fourth, 2046?” Milo would give him a swift, accurate answer, and Peter’s laughter would fill the whole room like warm sunshine. When the little game was over, Peter would set one Hershey’s Kiss with an almond inside on each of our palms, then grin with the pride of a real dad before heading to the kitchen for tea.
Peter was going to take us to Vermont next spring and we were going to help tap maple trees and make syrup, a yearly tradition for Peter and his family. We were going to meet his dad, a widower who, at the age of sixty-four, can walk on his hands clear across his yard (so he would probably appreciate a woman with Tina Turner legs), and his niece, who is twelve and has read Little Women fifteen times. A week ago, though, he showed up and handed Mom a poem he’d written on a coffee filter. A poem, he said, that would explain why he needed to break things off with her. He didn’t pick up my book or ask Milo a question that day, but after he handed Mom the poem, he hugged me goodbye, squeezed Milo’s shoulder, and left our Hershey’s Kisses on the table next to our computers. I still have that Kiss.
Mom’s hands trembled as she read the poem while still standing by the door where he’d left her, and when she was finished, she tossed it into the paper shredder. Then she rested her hands on her scarred desk to steady herself and sat down to resume her work. I ran to the window and looked down to watch Peter waggle through the old people and little kids clogging the stoop. “Don’t let him go!” I screamed. “Mom, please! Call him back! Call him back!” But she didn’t. Instead, she asked me if I’d finished my report on archetypes and warned that, if not, I should get busy.
Later, when Mom disappeared into the kitchen to nuke our frozen dinners, I dug through the paper shredder and tried to find the strips of coffee filter. It would have been impossible to put them back together, so it probably didn’t matter that Mom caught me and scarfed up the scraps and shoved them into the trash. “That’s okay,” I shout
ed, crossing my arms across my chest. “I know why he broke up with you, anyway. You have an attachment disorder, that’s why. I don’t need his poem to tell me that.”
“It’s like my intuitive, Sky Dreamer, says,” Oma announces, her voice grabbing my attention and yanking me back to the here and now. “Sometimes we need to go home to find the parts of ourselves we left behind before we can truly become whole.”
“Your intuitive? What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Sky Dreamer, my intuitive. I told you about her, Tess. I met her at that psychic convention I went to in California last November. Remember?” Oma pauses to cough. “She told me that each of us—you, me, Lucy, Milo—we all left parts of ourselves back in that town, in that very house, and in our relationship with Sam. She said that this trip will help us reclaim those parts and cleanse our family.”
“The twins were newborns when they left Timber Falls. What could they have possibly left behind but spit-up? Besides, the only things that sound like they need cleansing to me are your lungs. Did this Sky Walker tell you to quit smoking too?”
“Sky Dreamer. Her name is Sky Dreamer.”
“A rose by any other name is still a charlatan,” Mom says.
Oma looks down at the chair opposite Mom’s desk, and I hurry to remove the stack of books, folders, and notebooks from its seat. Oma pats my back as she sits down and props her other hand on the baggy white purse now resting on her legs. “Tess, you’ve always had an aversion to the concept of ‘going home.’ When you were three years old, you’d plug your ears every time you heard Bing Crosby’s ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ play on the radio. And do you remember what you did to that Home Sweet Home pillow Marie made me for my birthday?”
Mom picks up the Bible and her pencil and runs the tip of it down one of the parchment pages. “I don’t think we need to go into this, Mother,” she says. Mom calls Oma “Mother” only when she’s upset. The rest of the time it’s simply, “Ma.”
Oma turns to me. “My best friend in Timber Falls, Marie Birch, made me a needlepoint pillow for my birthday one year. It was beautiful. Burgundy and peacock blue, some gold. Your mother hated that thing from the moment she saw it. She swiped the seam ripper out of my sewing box and hid it under the sofa cushion. Then, whenever I left the house in the evening, she’d take it out of hiding and pluck at those tightly woven threads, letter by letter, word by word, until the whole adage was gone.
“I couldn’t for the life of me understand how the threads could have come loose, period, much less over the words only. That is, until I found the seam ripper under the cushion.”
“That’s enough, Mother!” Mom snaps. “Crissakes, like I don’t have enough on my mind now, and you have to bring up old crap that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the problem I’m dealing with today.”
Oma turns her attention back to Mom. “Oh, but it has everything to do with your problems today. Don’t you see that?”
Oma sets her purse on the floor, then parks her arms on Mom’s desk and leans in. “Scoff if you want, Tess, but I believe that you’ve always had these aversions because, deep down, you’ve always known that one day you’d have to go back home and deal with the pain you never dealt with. Did you think you could rid yourself of it simply by leaving Timber Falls? Honey, it just doesn’t work that way. Think of the toxic waste they dumped in the ocean back in the sixties. Was it gone because we couldn’t see it? No. It washed up on other banks, just as toxic as ever. Tess, you know what I’m talking about. On a soul level, you know.”
I look at Mom. I don’t know what Oma is talking about, but Mom certainly does, because her navy-blue eyes pool with water. My throat tightens then, because when I see her pain, the emotion swelling under my breastbone makes me want to cry. I glance over at Milo to see if he’s empathizing with Mom too, but he’s not even looking at her. I know Mom would have to start wailing before he’d notice that she was in distress. And considering that Mom’s lids are already blinking like windshield wipers, I know Milo isn’t going to notice.
Oma leans over and presses her hand—the one sporting a sapphire half-moon ring surrounded by diamond chips—over Mom’s hand that’s holding the Bible. “Honey,” she says, her voice soft and pleading, “I need you to drive me to Timber Falls. Would you do that for me?”
Mom leans back in her chair and slams the Bible down. “Take the bus. I’m not doing it.”
Oma sits erect and gasps, “Oh, Tess. I can’t do that! You’ve seen the people who take the buses. God bless their pitiful souls, but I’m afraid of them.”
“Then drive yourself. You have a car.” Mom is referring to the 1965 wine-red Mustang coupe that Oma’s last boyfriend, Roger, gave her. The one he had a new CD player and Bose speakers installed in, so that after his heart bypass surgery he could take Oma to see New York, Frank Sinatra crooning the whole way. He had a heart attack the day before his surgery and died, leaving Oma his car. It’s sitting in a parking garage somewhere in the city, the storage paid for two more years.
“You know I can’t drive a standard, Tess.”
“Then sell the damn thing and buy an automatic!”
Oma takes a deep breath, then drops her hands to her legs and positions them in shuni mudra—the tips of her middle fingers touching the tips of her thumbs—to give her patience. She takes a cleansing breath as Mom mutters, “Oh, Jesus,” and rolls her eyes before she looks back down at the Bible.
When Oma is done breathing, she looks at Mom with tofu-soft eyes, but she doesn’t say anything. She just stares until Mom looks up.
Mom studies Oma carefully under a hem of bangs. “Okay … now that you’re all ‘centered,’ maybe you’d like to come clean and tell me the real reason you’re so determined to get me back there. Or to go yourself, for that matter.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Oma says in a voice higher pitched than normal.
“Of course you do. Cut the crap, Mother.”
Oma takes another cleansing breath. “Okay,” she says.
“Maybe there is another reason, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sincere about honoring my promise, because I am.”
“And what would that other reason be?”
“Your father’s leaving you the house, Tess.”
“What?” For a moment, the only sound in the living room is the sound of Milo’s pencil scratching paper.
“Well,” Oma finally admits, “it wasn’t exactly his decision. It was your aunt Jeana’s. Sam made her executor of his will a couple of years back, and Jeana’s decided that you should get the house.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You get the house only if you spend this time with him. Now, before he dies.”
Mom bolts out of her chair, pacing behind it, one hand on her hip, the other rubbing her forehead. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” Mom says, smashing Oma’s calm to bits with that f-word. Before Oma can respond, Mom puts her hand up. “Okay. I’m sorry. It just slipped out, but, Ma, you’ve … I … God, I don’t even know how to respond to something this absurd.”
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. That this is typical Jeana behavior, manipulative and controlling. But I believe that her intentions are good.”
Oma gets up, circles the desk, and puts her hand on Mom’s arm. “Honey, please. You have to stop and think this over. What are you going to do until you get your royalty check? Run your credit cards up even higher? I know you’re almost broke, and I’m not in a position to help you. And now with you having to move out of here for a while … Well, it can’t just be a coincidence that Jeana called when she did. It just can’t be.”
Oma lets go of Mom—probably because Mom has just deflated and is suddenly too emotionally drained to stomp away—and Mom leans her back against the wall, rumpling her chapter-by-chapter outline on oversize paper tacked behind her. She grabs the sides of her face, stretching her eyes and mouth into a replica of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
�
�Tess, you know I wouldn’t ask you to go back there with the children if … well … if he was the same man he used to be. But he’s not. He’s old and frail, and he’s dying. You need this for your spirit, and you need this for your bank account. I talked with Marie last night, and she said that property prices are going up astronomically now that so many folks from here and Milwaukee are buying land up there so they can vacation and retire in the pristine north woods. Your father’s house sits on forty acres of hardwood. As soon as he passes on, you can sell the place and rest assured that if these romance books you’re writing don’t do more than this one run—which they probably won’t, only because your intentions aren’t genuine, I might add—you’ll be able to support these kids for a good long time.”
Mom sits back down on her chair. Hard. She sighs and runs her fingertips in tiny circles over her temples.
Oma turns to look at me and then at Milo, who is wheezing over his books. “It would do the children good to get some fresh country air and sit a little closer to the earth. They’d have acres of trees to climb and grass to run on.”
I get a lump in my throat when Oma says this, because besides dreaming of being a figure skater and a shaman, I dream of running barefoot on grass. There’s grass and a few trees in the park we pass on the way to the university where we borrow our books. Whenever we pass that park, I press my face against the grubby bus window and ask Mom if we can please stop. And every time, she says that we will when we aren’t in such a hurry. But I know that a lack of time is not the real reason. The real reason we can’t stop is that the park is filled with homeless people stretched out on park benches, their small bundles wadded into pillows, and with crack whores who do obscene things with men for money so they can buy more crack. And then there are the bangers from the People Nation, or the Folk Nation, who congregate there at night sometimes to exchange money for drugs, or shoot each other, or whatever else it is those scary gangsters—the same boys who will stab or shoot Milo if he goes to school—do. After the bus passes the park and I sink back against the seat, Mom always promises that one day soon, when we have more time, we’ll take a different route and stop at a nicer, safer park, but we never do.