The Trouble with Joe

by Emilie Richards

  Lucy headed right for the screamer and lifted her as naturally as if she had a brood of her own. Adrian hovered in the doorway.

  “My goodness!” she told the baby, a girl—no, probably a boy despite the golden curls, given the blue striped T-shirt. “Is nobody paying any attention to you at all?”

  The mother laughed. “Lucy. Here, I’ll trade you. Unless you want to change his diaper?”

  A boy then.

  “I don’t mind,” Lucy said, expertly laying him out on the table vacated by a little girl now being set on the carpeted floor.

  “Cruising for a new church?” the mother asked.

  “No, we just wanted to talk to Father Joseph. But he’ll be awhile. I have to get my baby fix.” She nuzzled the little boy, whose legs kicked wildly.

  The woman gave Adrian an idle glance that became more interested. “Come on in,” she said cordially.

  “I’m, uh, fine.” He eyed a couple of toddlers squealing and running straight toward him. Thank God, they veered at the last second.

  Adrian continued to hover while Lucy chatted companionably with the other woman and even the teenager, helping out with an ease that told him she’d spent plenty of time with children. All those cousins once-removed? Or maybe she’d babysat her way through her teenage years.

  Did she dream of having her own children? Of course she did; she obviously adored these little ones. Lucy Peterson was made to be a mother. She hadn’t mentioned a boyfriend or fiancé, but then why would she? Adrian frowned, disliking the idea of her confiding in this unknown man, maybe telling him all about the hat lady and her arrogant lawyer son.

  Or did he just dislike the idea of her with a man at all?

  Ridiculous. He was simply avoiding thinking about his mother and her sad life. Impatient with himself, Adrian looked away from Lucy and watched the older kids finger-painting instead.

  His mother had chosen to spend her mornings changing soggy diapers and wiping snotty noses? If she liked children so much, why didn’t he have a host of brothers and sisters?

  He knew the answer, of course: his father. Adrian couldn’t imagine him changing a diaper or enjoying a two-year-old. And once he realized his wife was unstable, that would have been a further deterrent. Assuming he’d ever wanted children at all. Certainly he hadn’t chosen to have more when he remarried.

  Adrian was surprised by a peculiar emotion that was something like jealousy. The kid in him who’d lost his mom didn’t like the idea of her snuggling giggling toddlers, of her laughing with them or telling the older ones knock-knock jokes. His knock-knock jokes. She’d loved her Sunday mornings here, but she didn’t remember him.

  Annoyed to feel something so irrational, he frowned. Finding out what his mother’s life had been like was one thing; regressing into childhood himself was another. So his mentally ill mother had disappeared from his life when he was ten. What if she hadn’t? The average thirteen-year-old boy was embarrassed by his parents anyway. Imagine how hurt she’d have been if he’d rejected her, when Mom and me ceased to be a unit and became a lonely woman and a teenage boy who didn’t want to be seen with her.

  Footsteps and voices and laughter on the stairs heralded the arrival of parents to pick up their youngsters. Some ignored Adrian; a few stared covertly. Lucy chatted with nearly everyone while they claimed their offspring.

  Only a few were left when Father Joseph appeared, beaming. “Lucy! I knew I’d find you down here.”

  She laughed. “Where else? I wouldn’t need to lurk in random day-care centers if I could just persuade Samantha to get married and start a family....”

  Adrian’s eyes narrowed. Why did she seem to assume her sister would get married first?

  “Or choose a good man and start one yourself,” the good father suggested.

  Lucy’s gaze strayed to Adrian, waiting to one side. Immediately, color ran over her cheeks. “Um, Father Joseph, I’d like you to meet Adrian Rutledge, the hat lady’s son.”

  “Ah.” Father Joseph held out a hand, his generous smile holding no hint of the accusation Adrian had felt from nearly everyone else. “What a blessing that Lucy found you.”

  Adrian accepted the handshake. “And that all of you took such good care of her.”

  “I think those of us lucky enough to become her friends received more than we gave. Lucy told you how much she loved the children?”

  Adrian nodded, that uncomfortable feeling swelling in his chest again. “Yes.”

  Father Joseph’s smile didn’t waver, but his hazel eyes seemed to read everything Adrian felt. His tone became especially gentle. “She brought joy to them, and they brought joy to her.”

  Adrian swallowed. “I’m glad.” He was a little surprised to realize he meant it. “I understand you let her sleep here at the church sometimes.”

  “Yes, we have a room with a cot. Occasionally a parishioner needs a temporary refuge from troubles at home, or feels poorly during a service and must lie down. Your mother took advantage of it rarely.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “She came only on the coldest or stormiest nights.”

  “It was good of you to offer the room.”

  “Does she show any improvement?” the father asked, looking from Adrian to Lucy and back. “I haven’t visited since Thursday, but I pray every day for her.”

  Lucy shook her head. “Not yet. Unless...?” She, too, turned her gaze to Adrian.

  “Not that I could see.”

  He waited while Father Joseph said goodbye to a family taking the golden-haired boy, then asked, “Did my mother ever talk about her past?”

  “Remembering at all upset her. Once she told me she had a boy. ‘He loved to watch the ferry leave the pier,’ she said. I asked where she’d lived, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. I suggested that one day we take a drive and ride the ferry, thinking it might bring back good memories, but she looked so frightened I didn’t press her.”

  “I worry about the years before she came here to Middleton,” Adrian admitted. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but—”

  “Of course it matters. She’s your mother.” Father Joseph hesitated, his face creasing. “Once she told me about riding a train for days. To go home, she said, only she didn’t have a ticket and they put her off. Wherever it was, it was cold and so flat the land went on forever. She couldn’t remember who she should call and got confused about where she was going anyway. Some nice people bought her a ticket back to Seattle, where she’d come from. ‘I am the queen,’ she said, ‘so I thought I ought to see the king.’ I didn’t know what she meant.”

  Throat thick, Adrian said, “The King Street Station. That’s the train station in Seattle.”

  “Ah.” Father Joseph’s face cleared. “She did see signs in everything. Was she from Seattle originally?”

  “Nova Scotia. But she and my father lived in Edmonds. She must have been trying to go to her parents.” He imagined her, abandoned at some small train station in Saskatchewan, and felt rage at the conductor who hadn’t been able to see how desperately she needed help.

  He told the priest more about his mother and his regret that he had never pressed his father for answers.

  Lucy stood silent as he spoke, listening, her eyes never leaving his face. The priest talked more about his mother, too, her ability to relate to every child at his or her level, to make them giggle, to heal any woe. “Most of the mothers here adored her.”

  “Most?”

  “There are always doubters,” Father Joseph said with unimpaired serenity, but Adrian had no trouble interpreting that. Some parents hadn’t trusted their children to his mother. He couldn’t even blame them.

  Adrian realized the room was empty but for them. Voices upstairs suggested that other people were waiting to speak to Father Joseph. He thanked him and was told, “Bless you, my son.”<
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  Feeling numb, he followed Lucy upstairs and out into the sunshine.

  My mother tried to go home. He imagined the devastation of her failure. Was that when she had sought the next best thing, a place that reminded her of home?

  One phone call. So little, and Maman would have found a way to bring her home.

  Two blocks from the church, he said aloud, “She did try.”

  “Are you going to call your grandmother then?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I’ll have to persuade her not to come. She isn’t well.” She’d want to anyway. Adrian walled off the worry. He’d deal with it later.

  After he went through his mother’s pathetic cache of possessions and tried to be a halfway pleasant lunchtime companion, the least he owed Lucy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IN LUCY’S GUEST bedroom, Adrian sat in an antique rocking chair, one of his mother’s many hats in his hands. He didn’t know what this style was called, but it looked like the ones upper-crust women wore to the Kentucky Derby. Lightweight, cream-colored and fashioned of some woven material, it had a broad, sweeping brim to shade a lady’s complexion and a cluster of peach and white silk flowers sewn to the band. The silk flowers were just a little tattered, and a dirty spot marred the brim.

  Something about this hat hit him. He could see her, real as day, smiling at him from beneath the shade of her hat. She was young, and happy, and beautiful, at least to him.

  He turned it slowly in his hands, then flipped it over—he didn’t know why. A hair clung inside, not blond like he remembered, but white. He touched it with one forefinger and had to swallow hard to suppress...he didn’t know. Tears, maybe.

  Why did his mother seem more alive to him here than she did breathing in that hospital bed?

  With a guttural sound, he laid the hat on the bed, hung his head for a moment, then made himself open another box.

  Lucy had packed his mother’s possessions carefully, the hats in plastic boxes with lids, the clothes and miscellany in cardboard boxes.

  This box held a few books, a plain wooden chest and some oddities. Like a big conch shell. Why in hell would a homeless woman want one? Yet he could imagine her stroking its satiny pink interior or holding it up to her ear to listen for the beat of the ocean.

  A couple of the books were from the library. Adrian guessed that Lucy had forgotten they were there. He set them aside to be returned. His mother wouldn’t be reading them in the near future.

  At the bottom was the single paperback, The Fellowship of the Ring. Hardly breathing, he picked it up. Lucy was right; it looked unread, the spine unmarred, yet the pages were yellowed with age. He started to open it to the beginning, then hastily closed it. Stupid, maybe, but he’d had a sort of superstition about the damn book, one he’d never analyzed. Tolkien made him think about his mother, ergo he didn’t think about Tolkien.

  But now he realized, with a grunt of surprise, that his feelings were more complicated than that. He couldn’t read it without her, not without abandoning hope. Apparently he clung to more sentiment than he’d believed.

  It was in the wooden chest, Lucy had told him, that she’d found the driver’s license, the photo and the handmade Mother’s Day card. When he opened the small chest it contained a few more pictures—a couple of school photos of him and an old black-and-white photograph, curling at the edges, of a little girl. His mother as a child. Blond, thin, ethereal, yet something already sad in her face.

  He didn’t understand the trinkets. A thin gold ring with a single seed pearl, nice enough she could have gotten some money for it. Had his father given it to her? Adrian fingered it. Maybe she’d had it longer than that. As pretty as she was, she’d have had boyfriends along the way. Was this a memento of one in particular, remembered with fondness?

  There was other jewelry, mostly cheap, and a few items that must have held some meaning. He didn’t recognize any. Or...wait. At the bottom was a shard of porcelain, waterworn but the blue-and-white glaze still visible on one side. The style was Asian.

  In a flash, Adrian remembered himself walking along a beach, gazing intently at the streaks of pebbles among the miles of ocean sand. The Oregon coast? Near Kalaloch on the Washington coast? They’d vacationed at both. He was hoping for something wondrous. A sand dollar, maybe, unchipped. Or a glass float, like the man at the gift shop had talked about, or... He saw something poking from the sand that didn’t belong and pounced. In his hand lay the shard.

  “Mom! Mom! Look what I found!”

  She hurried to him and gazed in delight at his find. “Why, I’ll bet the ocean carried that all the way here from China. See the curve? It must have come from a pot or bowl. I think that’s porcelain, which means it was probably valuable. How do you suppose it got broken?”

  They’d speculated, bending together over the two-inch-long shard. Finally, his hand had closed tightly over it and he’d placed it ever so carefully in his pocket, determined not to lose it. It wasn’t a glass float, but it had come all the way from China. That’s what Mom had said, so it must be true.

  “How are you doing?” Lucy asked from the doorway.

  Adrian started, his hand closing around the shard of pottery just as it had then.

  “Fine,” he said, voice harsh, scratchy.

  She hesitated. “Lunch is almost ready. But there’s no hurry.”

  “I think I’m mostly done.” His gaze swept the pitifully few boxes. “What a life.”

  “Did you find anything else you remembered?”

  He hesitated, then opened his hand. “This.”

  Lucy stepped forward and peered at it with interest. “How pretty! I’ve seen jewelry made with antique shards of pottery like that. Where did it come from?”

  “China.”

  “Really? Did you go?”

  She looked so interested, and was so easy to talk to, he found himself telling her the story.

  “I must have forgotten about it by the time I got home. Or maybe later I lost interest but it reminded her of the fun we had on that vacation. I wonder if you’d asked her, what she’d have said about it.”

  Lucy sat on the edge of the bed, still gazing pensively at the worthless piece of pottery in his hand. “I grew very fond of her, but she never showed me any of her treasures. I don’t know why.”

  “Maybe because she didn’t remember why she’d kept them.”

  She nodded slowly. “That would have bothered her terribly. Or perhaps she remembered snatches but not enough to put them into any kind of coherent narrative. That’s what distressed her the most, when some bit floated through her mind but she couldn’t nail it down.”

  “Some bit, like the fact that she had a son?”

  She frowned at him. “Do you think she forgot you because she didn’t love you at all?”

  Adrian hated the clutch at his throat that would have made speaking difficult. He liked to be in control. He knew underlings at the firm whispered about what a cold bastard he was, and he wouldn’t have argued about the characterization. But something had happened to him since he arrived at this strange little town in the middle of nowhere.

  Middle. Suddenly he wanted to laugh. Now he knew how it had received its name. It was in the middle of goddamn nowhere.

  Depression swept over him. “No. I know she did.” He dropped the shard into the box and closed it. “Lunch sounds good.”

  Lucy let him get away with the change of subject and led the way to her kitchen.

  He liked her house. She’d filled it with antiques, but she hadn’t gone over the top like her sister had at the bed-and-breakfast. No wallpaper, but the walls were painted with color. Moss-green in the living room, a softer shade of it down the hall above cream-colored wainscotting, rust and peach in the kitchen to set off white cabinets. He guessed they were the original ones. Old glass bottles
lined the kitchen windowsill, the midday sun lighting them with soft hues. Every room had potted plants, too, all luxuriant and healthy. African violets lined the sill in the dining room, where the table was set for two with quilted place mats and a jug filled with daffodils.

  The house was comfortable, Adrian decided, as well as...loved. He could see Lucy in it: nothing flashy, but the decor was serene and pretty. His mother had liked brighter colors and whimsical treasures found at garage sales and art fairs, all of which had disappeared from her house shortly after she had.

  “Smells good,” he said, meaning it.

  “I should have asked if you liked Mexican. We’re having black-bean burritos. At home I like to make different food than I serve at the café.”

  “No soup?”

  She laughed. “Well...sometimes. And I do my experimenting at home, although not usually for company. The other day, I tried a coconut-potato soup that—”

  A brisk rapping on the front door brought her around. Almost without pause, it apparently opened, and a woman called, “Yoo-hoo! Are you home, Lucy?”

  “Crap,” she muttered.

  “Lucy, dear!” another voice chimed in.

  Adrian thought he heard Lucy growl.

  “In the kitchen,” she said, unnecessarily, for two women appeared in the doorway.

  Both studied him with interest. “Oh, dear,” one of them said. “Are we interrupting?”

  Lucy had gotten over her flash of irritation—or maybe just hidden it—and said resignedly, “Mom, Aunt Marian, meet Adrian Rutledge. He’s—”

  “The hat lady’s son,” the taller, more buxom of the two said. “Weren’t you at the café the other day?”

  “Well, of course he was,” the other woman said. “You know Lucy’s taking care of him.”