“Thanks so much,” she said over her shoulder.
“You’re quite welcome,” I said as they hurried away. I’m sure if she had anything to say about it, they would be in a jewelry store within the hour.
I got in the car a few minutes later and drove to a place where I could park by the lake. I got out of the car, leaned against it, and drank in the calm beauty of the water. Then I held out my hand and looked at my ring, more beautiful than it was the night I opened the little gray box and looked down at it for the first time.
“I did it again,” I whispered.
I had spoken of Tom in the present tense.
Do you want to get well?
There is probably a sense in which I will always think of Tom in the present tense, but he is not sitting at home in his recliner or working in his garden or waiting for me back at the hotel.
Except to have it cleaned or a prong repaired, I hadn’t taken off my ring since Tom slipped it on my finger over thirty-two years ago. Closing my eyes as if in prayer, I stood in the warmth of the sun and worked it off my finger.
Gift of love and promise, the ring didn’t travel far—I merely moved it to the ring finger of my right hand. There it will remain until the day I die.
August 24
I could hardly do the Lyndon B. Johnson State Park and Historic Site justice in one day, but I did what I could. It seemed the least I could do, penance for wondering in my youth if LBJ had something to do with the assassination of President Kennedy.
At the farmstead I spent some time with a guy dressed in period clothing pounding horseshoes on an anvil. He might have been thirty or sixty—I couldn’t tell behind the beard— but he was more talkative than I imagined a blacksmith “back then” would have been. On the other hand, it was I, the only visitor in the vicinity at the time, who unaccountably started the exchange.
“So,” I said when I walked over to where he worked at one end of the barn, “you must be the resident blacksmith.”
“Sure am,” he said. “You like horses?”
“Sure,” I said, keeping it simple. “Looking at them anyway.”
He began to tell me all kinds of horse facts, including how often the animals need to have their hooves trimmed—I think he said every six weeks!
“My goodness,” I told him as I headed toward the open doors of the barn to find the farmhouse, “their feet need more maintenance than mine.”
“Yep,” he said, pounding away.
It seems to me the jobs on a farm at the turn of the century were difficult and endless, and while I might find that life fascinating, I can’t imagine that I could have possibly been fit for it. If I’d been Laura’s mother, stuck in a little house on the prairie, I’m afraid the kids and I would have died the first winter while Pa took too much time in town getting our meager supplies and having his horse shod. If Molly were here, she’d probably pop up with some objection, but I’m more realistic about my limitations than she. Sometimes driving by the take-out window of Taco Bell seems taxing.
The right word for how I feel just now eludes me.
After I did my reading, I went online to write the kids and was surprised to find two messages in my in-box that weren’t from Mark or Molly.
One was from Willa. She said she had been calling and calling, and what was up with that? Finally she called Molly and learned that I was on a trip, somewhere in the middle of Texas at the moment. I don’t see how I could have overlooked her name when I sent out the group e-mail saying I’d be gone and unavailable for a while.
“CALL ME!!!” she wrote. “At least answer this e-mail. I want to know what’s going on! Plus, I need to tell you something!”
Willa’s favorite end punctuation is the exclamation mark. In high school she passed a one-page note in first-hour biology, and I counted no fewer than twenty-five of them. Exclaiming is a strand in her DNA.
I really thought I might be home before Willa had time to worry about my trip. We’ve gone as long as two months without talking to each other, though I guess it hasn’t happened often in the forty years since I first met Willa Kay Ball in PE on the first day of high school.
We bonded almost instantly, because, despite her surname, we shared an abhorrence for any activity with the word ball attached to it: basketball, softball, volleyball, even dodgeball. We hated even more the gym clothes issued to us by our irrationally proper PE teacher, and we hated the locker room scene more than that. It was my misfortune to know no one when I walked into the gym that morning. Or maybe it wasn’t, because when I plopped on the first row of bleachers beside Miss Ball, she recognized something in Miss Austin and soon became my best friend.
That our fathers were both named William might have furthered our bond. Her mother, having heard of the author Willa Cather, thought Willa the perfect name for her only child.
“Why, oh why,” Willa lamented many times during our high school years, “couldn’t my mother have named me Audrey? Or Pam?”
I never had an answer for her, really, but I did say once that there are worse names. For a girl with the last name of Ball, Lucille came to mind.
Willa’s message I didn’t mind so much; in fact, I was almost glad to hear from her, exclamations and all. It was the other message that upset me. I didn’t recognize the address and there was no subject line, so I almost deleted it and wished I had when I saw who wrote it.
I haven’t spoken to Andrew Ackerman in twenty-seven years. His message was proper and brief, but even so, I considered it an intrusion.
“I ran into Willa,” he wrote, “and she told me about your husband. I’m sorry. Andrew.”
nine
August 25
I slept late and wanted to sleep later still. Once I bothered to open my eyes, I lounged in bed with the remote until I couldn’t find one program capable of keeping, of even capturing, my interest. When I threw the covers back shortly before noon, I actually considered packing the car and driving home.
But that had as many cons as pros. And there’s this: It didn’t seem the right thing to do.
Before I hit the shower, I did something as unlikely as hurrying to the mall to buy a hip-hop CD: I put on my bathing suit and cover-up and went to the pool. Expecting solitude at that time of day, I stretched out on a white plastic lounger and, with an SPF 25 sunblock and sunglasses to protect my face, lay back to soak up the sun for a little while.
I hadn’t been settled more than a minute when a high-pitched question shattered my hope of solitude.
“Do you mind if I splash you?”
She must have been underwater when I arrived, or quietly contemplating life treading water near the edge of the pool, but now she peeked over the edge of the pool, looking right at me, asking a ridiculous question. She appeared to be four or five, just a bit younger than Jada and Kelsie, and she had crayon-red hair and a face full of freckles.
I told her I didn’t much want to be splashed, but I smiled when I said it. I was considering leaving a place that had only promised peace when she dog-paddled to the steps, marched dramatically up each one of them, and stretched out on the lounger next to mine, her hands clasped behind her head.
“What brings you to Austin?” she asked.
I wondered if she was doing a round-up article for USA Today. Then I decided I’d give her as good an answer as I had.
“The Lord,” I said.
“I’m here for a family reunion. Everybody wants to see me because there are fourteen grandchildren and I’m the only girl!”
“Wow,” I said.
I asked her where her mother was, though it seemed possible this child had taken a cab from wherever she came from and checked herself into the presidential suite.
“Mom had to go to the bathroom,” the little girl explained. “We don’t pee in the pool,” she added, scrunching her nose and shaking her head at the thought.
Before I could think of a response, I heard the iron gate clang and saw a woman with red hair and a sprinkling of freckles rushing
toward us.
“Helen,” she yelled, “I thought you were right behind me!”
I doubt four children could be more trouble than Helen.
“Mom,” Helen said, “the Lord brought this lady to our hotel.”
The woman said, “What?”
I almost laughed at my quandary. Ah, what to say to Helen’s mother.
“Your daughter told me,” I began, “that you’re here for a family reunion.”
She nodded.
“Well, I’m just here. Which is strange for me. I usually have a flesh-and-blood companion and an agenda.”
I felt like I was elaborating more than necessary or desirable. Nevertheless, I continued like I didn’t have good sense.
“And since I don’t think I’m ever really alone, despite how it looks, I told Helen the Lord brought me.”
“See, Mom!”
Abruptly Helen jumped up and hollered, “Watch this!”
She ran to the edge of the pool and cannonballed into the middle of it, soaking her mother and me and a fifty-foot radius of concrete.
“Helen Eugenia!” her mother scolded. “What are you thinking?”
Helen smiled from the middle of the pool. “Sorry,” she said, not looking in the least bit sorry.
Her mother turned to me and apologized for Helen’s exuberance.
“I can’t say the water didn’t feel good,” I said, magnanimous since I hadn’t done my hair yet. “Besides, exuberance is too rare and thrilling to censure completely, isn’t it?”
Her mom smiled at Helen and then at me, the woman the Lord had brought to Austin.
Oh well, either Helen’s mother understood what I had said or she didn’t. Besides, she had her hands full with Helen. While I collected my towel and sunblock, heading to my room to clean up, Helen yelled “Bye” and in the same breath begged her mother to come in the water and play whales with her.
I walked away thinking how much Tom would have enjoyed talking to Helen. Though he was a high school principal, talking with young children was one of his greatest delights.
I had walked out to the garden unnoticed one May afternoon and watched him showing a then three-year-old Kelsie how to plant tomatoes.
“I’ll pour the water, Papa,” she said when he had scooped out the soil and set a new plant into the hole he had dug.
He handed her a plastic cup and held the plant straight while she poured the mixture of water and Miracle-Gro around it. When he began to push the soil back around the plant, she knelt beside him and said, “I’ll help you, Papa.” And she, as gently as her grandpa had done, patted the soil around the plant until it was secure.
“Good job,” he said, kissing the top of her head. Kelsie stood up and stretched like Tom did and saw me standing at the gate with her baby brother on my hip. “We’re making tomatoes,” she said, beaming.
On this August afternoon, I slipped my key into the slot and admitted to myself that Helen had been a pleasant intrusion.
August 26
I’ve wondered how much easier this trip might have been if my car had one of those navigation systems. At the same time, I rather like my atlas. I opened it to Texas and laid it out before me on the bed last night to look at my options. I decided I could make it all the way to Amarillo today, a seven- or eight-hour drive according to my rudimentary calculations.
Make that twelve hours, when you count the four hours I sat on the side of the road.
Between Austin and Amarillo there might be five miles that don’t have cell phone coverage, and that is where the blowout occurred. I was able to get the car to the side of the road, for which I gave thanks, but when my cell phone didn’t work, I began to panic. I am sorry to admit that, at fifty-five years of age, I have never changed a tire or had a lesson on how to change one. Tom tried to show me once, but I didn’t want to fool with it. I always assumed Step One, join AAA, Step Two, get a cell phone, and Step Three, pay your bill.
The road was not busy today, but the cars that were on the road zipped by like my Solara and I didn’t exist. It was discouraging at first, and then maddening. I’m happy to say my irritation did not escalate to using inappropriate language or hand motions. I told myself, Surely some kind soul will call the highway patrol when he or she gets close enough to a tower for a cell phone to work.
But nooooo.
Two hours later, I was thinking about opening the trunk and seeing if I could find a jack and intuit how to get it on my car. What kind of death did I want to die?
My answer was pulling over in his beat-up pickup truck.
“Got a problem?” he asked, spitting tobacco on the side of the road and wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.
I hoped that question wouldn’t prove to be ironic.
“It’s a hot one,” he added
I looked at his black hat, black shirt, black jeans, and black boots and thought a man driving without an air-conditioner might consider wearing white. He didn’t smile, and his truck and demeanor didn’t comfort me.
He bent over and looked at my right back tire. Finally he smiled. “This ain’t good.”
“Do you happen to have a cell phone?” I asked.
He laughed.
“Mine doesn’t work out here, I’m afraid.”
“Well,” he said, rolling up his sleeves, “let’s get you taken care of.”
“Oh, thank you!” I gushed, but he was in the trunk pulling out the jack and spare and didn’t appear to hear me.
“So,” I said while he made short work of replacing the old tire with the spare, “do you live around here?”
“Over in Nazareth,” he said.
“Nazareth? Well, my goodness.”
We didn’t talk much after that, but when he had the tire on, the jack removed, and everything where it was supposed to be in the trunk, every bit as neatly as I would have done it, he said, “Well, you’re fixed up.”
I wanted to hug him, but that seemed rather inappropriate. “I’d like to pay you,” I said, reaching through the driver’s window for my purse.
“I won’t take nothing,” he said, heading back to his truck.
“But, sir,” I said. He turned and looked at me, and I wondered why I had stopped him. He wouldn’t take recompense, and I had no words to thank him for coming to my rescue, for saving me more trouble than I could imagine. But I had to say something.
“I hope someone helps someone you love someday.”
“They already have, ma’am. You be careful now.”
“I will. You too.”
I stood waiting for him to leave until I realized he wasn’t budging until I was on the road. He followed me a few miles to the next intersection, and I waved when he turned off, and I asked God to go with him to Nazareth. The cowboy in black actually made me glad I had a tire to replace, time to make up, and an unwarranted scare.
It was late when I hauled my stuff inside the hotel and ate peanut butter and cheese sandwich crackers I’d purchased from a machine down the hall. I was starving. Relishing the crackers, I thought it was appropriate that I flipped to John 6, where Jesus is feeding over five thousand hungry mouths with no vending machine, just a little boy’s five small loaves of bread and two fish.
After everyone was fed, Jesus tells the disciples to “gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.”
In God’s economy, it appears nothing is wasted. Could that include the nothingness of my last fifteen months? Could that mean a flat tire, or even a warning ticket? Could it mean a frightening clerk or a friendly one? An Indian sculpture or a grieving mother? A cowboy from Nazareth?
When I opened my laptop to tell Molly and Mark about tonight’s reading, there was a message from Willa. I had answered her last night in as few words as possible, a study in short, simple sentences: “I’m fine. I just needed to get ‘out.’ I decide where I’m going from day to day. I’ll be in Amarillo tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.”
I should have realized she’d have a message wa
iting for me.
“If you don’t stop in Phoenix, I will hate you forever!!!”
After that introductory statement, she went on to tell me they had just opened the house. She and Ed, who is semiretired now and consulting when something good comes along, still spend their summers in Iowa, but they built a house in Phoenix two years ago and spend the other nine months there. She had seen Andrew when they were out to dinner last weekend. She had forgotten he lived there, if she ever knew it.
“Until he literally backed into me in the crowded vestibule,” she wrote, “I hadn’t seen him since our twentieth reunion, the one you refused to attend.”
Willa always has her own take on things.
“Anyway,” she said, “when Drew asked about you, I told him about Tom. I hope that’s okay.”
“No problem,” I wrote back. “And I’ll see about Phoenix.”
I could have said, I wish you had told him nothing about me. If he ever asks again, tell him I don’t exist.
He doesn’t either. Tell him that too.
ten
August 27
I designated today as Weird Day, and not counting what I’d call a wonderful church service in a beautiful and expansive new structure not far from my hotel, it was.
For years I’ve seen a billboard on a stretch of I-44 near home advertising a free seventy-two-ounce steak. The first time I saw it, I turned to Tom in amazement and exclaimed like Willa, “It’s in Amarillo, Tom!” I just couldn’t fathom an advertisement for something that far away. The size of the steak, of course, struck me as amazing too. Make that horrifying. I usually have to work at eating an eight-ounce fillet.
Today I made it to the Big Texan Steak Ranch and felt like I had done something. I walked through the doors and thought, Here I am, Tom.
It was long before the dinner crowd would descend, so the man behind the bar, dressed much like the cowboy who had rescued me on the side of the road, looked up and gave me an Amarillo welcome.
“So,” I said, flopping my purse on the bar between us, “can I get a hamburger basket to go?”
Tender Grace Page 6