The Year that Everything Changed

by Georgia Bockoven

  Despite the baggage they all carried there was a strength of character that shone through. Ginger felt a wondrous and deep sense of pride knowing she was connected to them.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Christina

  Christina looked at Ginger across the walnut dining table. Ginger fascinated her. Four out of the four times they’d been together she’d looked as if she was about to step onto a runway—makeup, hair, clothes, skin, everything perfect. “Have you ever had a bad hair day?”

  Ginger looked up from her shrimp and avocado salad. “No. Never. Well, maybe when I was on the track team in high school, but I try not to dwell on things that upset me.” She reached up and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “I wake up looking exactly like this every morning. Don’t you?”

  Christina self-consciously ran her hand through her recently cut and colored hair. Lucy had recommended a hairdresser who’d done miracles with what remained of the coal black and pink mess she’d lived with for the past six months. “Okay, I admit that may have sounded a little sarcastic, but it wasn’t intended. I was just curious how someone like you always looks so put together.”

  Ginger took a second to wipe the corners of her mouth. “Someone like me?”

  “You know—beautiful.” Hell, all she’d been trying to do was liven up the luncheon conversation. She’d decided that as long as she was forced to spend time with these women she might as well learn something about them. “Haven’t you ever wondered how some people seem to have it all and others look like they were beaten by an ugly stick? Or maybe you don’t notice things like that.”

  “We’re both freaks of nature.”

  She said it so easily, it was obvious she had given it thought—lots of it. “So, is it hard being that different from the rest of us?”

  Ginger smiled, exposing impossibly white, perfectly aligned teeth. “Are you baiting me?”

  “Leave her alone,” Rachel said in tandem. “She’s had a rough week.”

  “So have I,” Elizabeth said softly. “I found out I’m going to be a grandmother.”

  They all looked at her. “That’s bad news?” Rachel asked.

  “I don’t know why I said that,” Elizabeth answered. “Of course it isn’t bad news.”

  “Then why do you look as if you caught your best friend in bed with your husband?” Christina asked.

  Rachel flinched, Ginger shot Christina an angry look, Elizabeth looked as if she was about to cry. “Sorry—bad analogy,” Christina said. To Rachel she said, “I didn’t mean anything by—”

  “It’s all right. I think we’re starting to get the picture, Christina,” Rachel said. “You spend a lot of time with your foot in your mouth.”

  “Boy, do I. Even when it was wired shut.”

  “Are you ever going to tell us about that,” Elizabeth asked.

  Christina hesitated, looking from one woman to the next. Innately she understood that she could trust them not to judge her the way her mother had. “My boyfriend broke my jaw.”

  Ginger gasped. “What a low-life bastard.”

  “I hope he’s in jail,” Elizabeth said.

  Rachel didn’t say anything. But then, Christina hadn’t expected her to. She’d figured it out a long time ago. “I don’t know where he is. He stole everything, including the movie I’d financed and we’d worked on together for two years, and bailed while I was in Mexico recuperating.”

  “What are you going to do?” Rachel asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have to do something,” Ginger said, outraged. “You can’t let him get away with assault and battery—and, and robbery, or theft, or whatever you call it when someone steals something like that.”

  “He already has gotten away with it. He had a half-dozen witnesses swear he was with them the night he hit me. There wasn’t anything the police could do.”

  “What about him stealing your movie?” Elizabeth asked. “You have to be able to do something about that.”

  “I’ve been watching to see if he’s submitted it to any of the film festivals, but if he’s changed the title and submitted under a different name, there’s no way I would recognize it without being there or at least seeing a synopsis.”

  “Can you prove it’s your movie?” Rachel asked.

  “Yes—at least I think I can. He’ll have the same people lined up to lie about my involvement in the production, but it won’t work this time. When he stripped the house he stupidly left behind all the receipts showing that I was the primary investor. I’m going to talk to Lucy to find out what she thinks I should do.”

  “I agree with Ginger,” Elizabeth said, animated with anger. “You can’t let him get away with it.”

  Christina sat back in her chair bemused and more than a little surprised and pleased by their fierce concern. “If I were a sheriff I’d want the three of you on my posse.” Ready to change the subject, she looked at Elizabeth. “You never did say whether congratulations were in order about being a grandma.”

  Elizabeth chased a shrimp around her plate with her fork. “My daughter is twenty-one, she’s never worked a day in her life, she’s dropped out of school because she’s too embarrassed to go through the pregnancy in front of her friends, she decided against an abortion because someone showed her some pictures, she can’t decide what to do with the baby when it’s born, and she’s annoyed because she’s going to miss the rest of the summer in the Hamptons. Oh, and to top it all off, she doesn’t want to tell the father because she doesn’t like him and she says the feeling is mutual.” She folded her napkin and put it beside her plate. “I’m not even fifty and I feel like there are three generations instead of one separating me from my daughter. When—no, how—did women start treating sex like a box of tissue—use it, toss it, forget about it? Is that the equality everyone fought for? I’m not saying you should wait for the honeymoon, but shouldn’t you at least feel something for your partner? You don’t have to love him, but shouldn’t you at least like him?”

  “So . . . I guess we can assume you haven’t been spending a lot of time setting up the nursery,” Christina said.

  “Sorry. I had no right to dump my problems on all of you, but this is something that’s been eating at me since Stephanie dropped her little bomb.” Elizabeth tried to smile but couldn’t pull it off. Instead, she started crying. After several stunned seconds passed in silence, Ginger went to her and gave her a go-ahead-just-let-it-all-out hug.

  “Well, hell.” Rachel tossed her napkin on the table. “Elizabeth’s daughter screwed up Elizabeth’s life, Christina’s boyfriend screwed up hers, Ginger dumped the man she thought she was going to marry, and I can’t decide what to do with my philandering husband. There’s no way Jessie can top any of this.”

  Jessie’s Story

  It took me almost a month and over a thousand miles on the old Studebaker I bought when I got to California to discover it wasn’t going to be the piece of cake to find my family that I thought it would be. They weren’t any of the places Ma had told me to look when they left for California, and no one at any of the camps remembered them. I finally ran across a cousin in Salinas, and he told me, last he’d heard, they were living in a Farm Security Administration camp near Bakersfield.

  I passed a ragged city of tar-paper shacks a half-dozen times looking for their camp before I stopped and asked about them. Never once did it cross my mind that she and Pa would have come to this, not with four able-bodied people in the family to work the fields and put money aside. Yet, there she was, living on the generosity of people who had nothing to give.

  I’d let myself believe they were getting on all right because it was what I wanted to believe. Pa had always found a way to get by, even in the worst of times. I was busy living an adventure, the hero of my own dime novel, never for a minute thinking the people I’d promised to help could be dying and discarded like so much roadkill.

  Ma told me my brother went first, in a senseless fight. No one knew what started i
t, Bobby Ray using his fists, the other guy a knife. Grandma caught a cold the second winter that took her in the spring. My sister just up and disappeared one day, leaving for the fields in the back of a truck with a dozen others in the morning, missing when it came back that night. Ma never saw her again. She said she believed losing his girl that way was what finally did Pa in. She couldn’t get him to eat after that, even when out of desperation she traded her wedding ring for a side of fatback and cooked up his favorite beans and cornbread. He left her long before he stopped breathing. When it came time, burying what was left was just a formality.

  I tried to get her to come back to Texas with me, thinking she’d want out of California any way she could. But she said she’d never liked Texas much and didn’t feel right leaving Pa behind. I think it was more the hope my sister would turn up one day that kept her there.

  I bought her a house with a bus stop close by and as much new furniture as I could before she told me that it was more than she wanted to take care of and she was sending the next delivery back to the store. I’d come with money enough to buy a farm, money I believed would make me a man in my father’s eyes. I was determined not to take any back with me, so I bought a good-sized piece of land outside Bakersfield, thinking eventually Ma might want to settle on something where the neighbors couldn’t see in her windows.

  I had a long time to live with the guilt of knowing I could have come sooner if I’d been willing to come with less. Ego never carried a heavier price tag.

  When I got back to Texas I proposed and Denise accepted. We were going to be married that next summer, but then Pearl Harbor came along, and a year or so later I wound up a paratrooper in Europe instead. We jumped on D Day, fought in France for a month, and came back to England. I had a letter waiting for me from Ma’s neighbor saying that she’d died peacefully in her sleep and asking what I wanted done with the house.

  About all I remember of the next two months is drinking or being hungover. I sobered up in Holland and, with the exception of a couple of memorable lapses, stayed that way until the fighting was over.

  The war changed me. Growing up changed Denise. If us getting married hadn’t been something her family thought of as certain as the sun coming up every morning, and if I hadn’t owed what I did to Wyatt for taking care of the pipeline business while I was gone those three years, I don’t know that we would have gone through with it.

  The wedding pulled ranchers and oil men from all over the panhandle and west Texas. The party was big and wild and still in full swing when we left on our honeymoon two days later.

  We came home not knowing each other any better than when we left. We moved into a house just outside town that was too small to keep Denise busy past ten in the morning. She was bored, and I was gone too much looking for ways to put excitement and growth into a business that had become static. The life we settled into bred discontent instead of the babies Denise wanted to give her purpose.

  We were two years into the marriage before Denise got pregnant. She was sick most of the nine months and laid up the rest, but I’d never seen her happier. It was a good time for us. I was home more, and we were talking like we hadn’t talked since we were kids, making plans and looking forward like we believed again that we were meant to be together.

  We had a boy. I didn’t get to see either of them for more than five hours after they took Denise into delivery. I’d paced a gully in the linoleum floor before someone finally came to get me.

  A nurse with a starched white hat appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Reed, you can come in now.”

  I followed her down a hallway and into a green-and-white room. Denise sat propped up in the bed, a white bundle in her arms. She wore a pink nightgown and a blue bow in her hair, her cheeks had twin circles of rouge, her lips a slash of red. She looked like she’d been ridden hard and put away wet and someone had come along to try to hide the evidence.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She gave me one of the smiles she saved for special times, the kind that turned her eyes into pools I wanted to swim in the rest of my life. “Come see your son.”

  My son. I couldn’t imagine sweeter words. I went to the bed and kissed Denise, believing I said what needed to be said in that kiss, that she would understand how I was thanking her for what she’d gone through and how proud I was. I should have used words. I should have seen the light leave her eyes when I picked up the baby and walked to the window to show him the world instead of settling in next to her. I named him Frank, after my grandfather, foolishly assuming it was a man’s prerogative to name his son. If it had been a girl, I figured Denise would have picked the name. It was the way it had been done in my family for generations. Had I known it would start the wedge between Denise and our son that lasted and grew over a lifetime, I would have let her name him after her father the way she’d secretly planned.

  I had something pushing me even harder now to make the business grow—I had a son who one day would be a part of everything I built. Oil was what I knew, so when I heard about new fields opening in Colorado, I went there to see for myself. What I didn’t stop to realize was that it wasn’t the finding, it was the transporting where I could hold my own. I went in a sheep ready for shearing and came out as naked as one of those Greek statues. In the end I had enough left to get us to California and settled on the land I’d bought for Ma.

  I’ve always believed real luck comes from the blisters you get working. But then there’s dumb luck. That’s the only way I can think to describe what happened while I was looking to sell the land to get enough money to buy into a couple of blacksmith shops—oil was discovered half a mile down the road. As quick as that, I was a recognized player in the California oil business.

  Denise wanted another baby, but no matter how we kept to schedules and the crazy doings that Denise’s mother and grandmother said were never-fail ways to get pregnant, it didn’t happen again. We started thinking the only way we’d ever get another one was to adopt. Turned out those were the magic words. A month after we started looking into it seriously, Denise was pregnant. She was as sick as she’d been the first time, so I took Frank to work with me, thinking I was doing her a favor. Most days we’d leave before sunup and not come home again until after dark. It was an exciting time in the fields with new wells coming in every week. I wasn’t needed there to oversee it, but staying home was like setting up a high-stakes poker game and telling a gambler he had to sit out.

  Denise might have forgiven me for not being around all those months if I’d made it to the hospital when Elizabeth was born. I knew she was ready. I’d cut my days down to a couple of hours in the fields in the morning and a quick trip to the office in the afternoon. But that day we had a gusher come in that we couldn’t get a cap on, and I didn’t get home until almost midnight. Elizabeth had arrived at four o’clock.

  I left Frank at a neighbor’s and rushed to the hospital. I used to wonder if it might have helped her feelings for me if I’d taken time to wash up a little or pick some flowers from the yard instead of coming as I was, my clothes covered in crude, smelling like I’d been living in a barn, bare-handed. But lookin’ back, I can see our troubles ran deeper even then.

  “It’s a girl.” This time there was no smile. “She’s mine, and she’s the last. I’m not going through this again.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. There was—”

  “Don’t. I don’t want to hear it. I know all I need to know.”

  I nodded. “The baby’s okay?”

  “Her name’s Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth . . .” I let it roll around my mind. “I like it. Did you pick a middle name?”

  I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. The light was low, and Denise had looked down at her hands folded across her belly. But then I heard a quick intake of breath and knew I was right. She was crying. I came closer. I put my hand out to touch her and pulled back at the stark contrast between the black coating my nails and knuckles and the white of he
r skin. “It seems I’m always telling you I’m sorry about something,” I said. “I know you’re tired of hearing it, but I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Her middle name is Mary.”

  My mother’s name. I thought for a minute that I was through breathing. My chest felt so heavy, I simply couldn’t make it move. That was when Denise looked up and saw that there were tears in my eyes. She frowned when I said, “Thank you.” I didn’t understand why until I remembered that she’d never heard me call my mother by name. It was an accident, one I’m sure Denise would have rectified had I told her. I let it be. She’d find out one day when I told my baby girl about the woman whose name she carried.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Christina

  Christina shuffled her feet on the concrete floor, rolling her chair closer to the editing monitors at the studio. “I’d go with the second shot,” she said. “The lighting is better on the mustard.”

  Greg ran the tape backward to get another look. “Yeah, but I think the catsup looks better in three.”

  “It’s a dancing hot dog, for Christ’s sake,” Dexter Landry said from the doorway. “And it’s already over budget.”

  “And it’s never going to make it off cable,” Greg said in a singsong voice without looking up.

  “And we’re not being paid to be artists,” Christina added, mimicking Greg’s voice. “The client just wants to get the job done as cheaply as possible.”