The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  But sometime before dawn that morning, Jimmy had heard a bump loud enough to wake him up. Still groggy, he’d instinctively reached an arm over to Mary Lynn’s side of the bed. Empty. It took several minutes of calling and looking before he found her.

  “Heart attack,” George had said to Linda. “Total, catastrophic heart attack.”

  Mary Lynn and Jimmy’s house on the hill was only a mile from East Bay Township’s fire barn, which, although remote, was still equipped with a state-of-the-art ambulance and staffed twenty-four hours a day. Paramedics had arrived within minutes and worked for a long time trying to revive her, but there wasn’t anything they could do. What George had called “catastrophic,” the paramedics had called “electromechanical dissociation” and “myocardial infarction.” For once, knowing the right words for something didn’t matter to me at all. Whatever label the living gave it, the mother of Bradley and Christopher, the stepmother of Bridget, the wife of Jimmy, and the Drummond Girls’ funny, sarcastic, naysaying, redheaded lady was gone.

  “Mary Lynn was a graduate of Bangor High School and the Cosmetology School in Kalamazoo, where she maintained her license to date,” her obituary read. “Mary Lynn enjoyed the company of her many friends and neighbors and especially the neighborhood haunt at Peegeo’s. She will be greatly missed by all who knew her.”

  Mary Lynn Dewart died Sunday, March 24, 2002, at 6:18 a.m. She was fifty-one.

  Why is it that the only way for small towns like ours to preserve their Victorian mansions is by turning them into funeral homes? I was so angry over Mary Lynn’s death, even historic architecture pissed me off.

  Built in the 1890s, the Perry Hannah House, named for Traverse City’s founding lumber baron, was a mix of Queen Anne and French Chateau styles with four floors, forty rooms, ten fireplaces, an endlessly swirling front porch, and a grand staircase fit for Scarlett O’Hara. When Hannah’s descendants could no longer afford its upkeep, they donated it to the American Legion, which then sold it off for a funeral home.

  It was on that elaborate front porch, wearing black tights and somber dresses yanked from the backs of our closets, that most of the Drummond Girls gathered together before Mary Lynn’s funeral. Susan would come later with George, Pam with her husband, and I didn’t know if anyone had thought to call Jill, but the rest of us stood outside, huddling together and stamping our feet against the spring cold.

  For a group of women who never seemed to stop talking, nothing we could have said seemed sufficient, so at first we didn’t say anything. I found it difficult to so much as look at these women’s faces, my best friends in the world for God’s sake. It made me mad at Mary Lynn for putting us through it, and I looked up at the ceiling of that porch instead. It was delicate beadboard some long-dead carpenter had bent to his will. I didn’t feel awe at his craftsmanship, though, just a dizzy emptiness.

  Jimmy had opted for cremation but decided for her actual funeral, the service would be open casket. We knew that and were both preparing ourselves to go inside yet also pretending we were somewhere else.

  I’d only ever seen three people in caskets—my paternal grandfather, my maternal grandmother, and a friend who’d horseshoed his wife’s car around a tree. The experiences had forced me to accept the people I’d loved were really dead and I felt both nervous and afraid of seeing Mary Lynn in one. What if she didn’t look like herself? What if she did?

  “Is it usually this warm in March?” Andrea asked, fanning herself with a copy of the order of service. It was only twenty degrees outside, yet her green suede coat, the one with the fake fur collar, was unbuttoned all the way and her face was flushed.

  “What the hell, Mary Lynn?” Linda said to the air, her arms flung uselessly out from her sides. “I mean it. What the hell?”

  She walked away from us and lit a cigarette, waving her hand through the smoke before it could float toward Bev or me. I’d never smoked a whole cigarette in my life and Bev, a smoker for years, had recently quit.

  “Do you think Jimmy got our flowers?” Bev asked, rummaging around inside of her purse. “We did the green arrangement, right? The one with the pinecones and the driftwood?” She waved a ten-dollar bill in the air. “Who am I supposed to give this to?”

  Linda leaned on the porch railing, staring out at the snow-covered lawn. March was a hard month in northern Michigan. Still so cold, still a good three weeks left of snow, an insult when all you wanted was spring. Linda said nothing, but stuck out a hand for the money. Bev gave her the ten, then pulled a wrinkled piece of newsprint out of her purse. It was Mary Lynn’s obituary. Bev had cut it out of the paper and brought it along in case any of us had wanted to read it.

  No one did, but it struck me right then how good Bev was at difficult occasions like this one. She’d suggested we all pitch in for the flowers and had gotten us a deal at one of the nicer florists in town because she knew the manager. She didn’t subscribe to the newspaper but she’d taken the time to buy a copy on the right day and had gone to the trouble of cutting out the obituary. She’d suggested where to meet—the porch was out of people’s way but close to the entry door. And, she was the only one who didn’t seem angry. Sad, sure, but not mad like the rest of us were.

  Bev had lived longer than we had, which also meant she’d had more people she knew and cared about die. She didn’t avoid funerals the way some of us were tempted to do, because she knew how much having people show up comforted the grieving.

  I watched the sidewalk and saw many of the people I’d often waited on when I worked at Peegeo’s walk up and then into the funeral home. I pictured Mary Lynn, but not Mary Lynn, lying inside a dolled-up wooden box displayed on a stand somewhere inside. It was cavernous in there, and she’d become so small after losing all that weight. I hoped they hadn’t lost her. Or put her in the wrong room.

  I hoped I didn’t get lost somewhere in there, and a dreadful image of what I might see if I did, if I walked down the wrong hallway or opened the wrong door, filled my brain. Cold people. Tubes. Strange fluid.

  Just then, another woman walked up those ridiculously grand steps. She was alone, and I was sure she was probably the only person in the whole world who could have made us all smile on that awful day just by showing up.

  Jill.

  She had on a gray dress and a new wool coat and was walking slowly up those stairs in a beam of pure sunshine. She made it onto the porch, and we enveloped her in a hug.

  “I can’t believe it,” she’d said, looking stricken. “I just can’t believe it.”

  The rest of us had repeated that sentence a hundred times or more. Even Bev, who’d seemed to be handling Mary Lynn’s death better than the rest of us, had said it. We couldn’t believe Mary Lynn was gone. We couldn’t believe we were all together and not in a car, or in a bar, or inside Fairview, or even at Peegeo’s, but at a funeral home. We couldn’t believe Jill had been gone for so long or that she’d suddenly appeared to us again. Most of all, we just couldn’t believe a Drummond Girl had died.

  We were just girls; girls didn’t die.

  We’d planned everything about our friendship so well, too. We’d reserved our rented log house a year in advance, we’d all made our particular food just the right way, brought along particular games, and we’d even packed carefully, bringing just the right clothes for any kind of weather. We’d just never planned for this.

  Andrea put her hands on Jill’s apple-shaped face and squeezed. It’d been two years since I’d seen Jill, and she’d divorced, moved, remarried, moved again, and acquired a stepson since then. I didn’t say it out loud—it wasn’t the time—but when she walked up those stairs, a sense of renewal came up them along with her. We’d lost Mary Lynn and gained back Jill on the very same day. It felt like a miracle. Except that I didn’t believe in miracles.

  “Well,” Linda said, as if she’d read my mind, “if this isn’t just a miracle.”

  “Yes,” Jill agreed without a trace of irony. “Yes, I am.”

 
Bev opened her arms and gave Jill a hug.

  “Here’s the obituary if you want to read it,” she told her. “It mentions Peegeo’s.”

  Jill took the clipping but only glanced at it. She was back in our circle for a moment or for good, I wasn’t sure which, and the surprise of seeing her again took away some of the awkwardness of death. Someone asked if Mary Lynn had known about her heart problems and just not told us; someone else wondered if the diet was to blame. Since when did women get heart attacks? Since when was fifty-one years long enough for our friend to be with us on this earth?

  “It’s really good to see you, Jillsy,” Linda said, the sarcasm gone. “How you been?”

  “I’m all right,” Jill said, but her voice held not a trace of conviction that was true.

  Her reappearance was because of Andrea. She’d called Jill, broke the news about Mary Lynn’s death, and explained that some of us were going to the service together. Andrea hadn’t mentioned the call to the rest of us in case Jill didn’t show.

  When we asked her where she’d been, why it had been so long since we’d heard from her, Jill explained that her new husband was dealing with grief of his own and didn’t like the idea she had friends from before they’d met that he didn’t know.

  I thought he sounded like a jerk, but my opinion on men back then, any man, actually, wasn’t particularly objective, so I kept that one to myself. Andrea was a capable person, and maybe she had talked Jill into coming, but there was still something miraculous in her presence on that porch. Andrea could not have ordered that startling bit of sunshine that followed our lost friend like a spotlight when she’d walked up those stairs.

  March is a dark month in northern Michigan. Winter isn’t quite over yet, and from February to May, almost every day is cloudy and dreary. It was the time of year when it seemed like the sun had forgotten we even existed, all huddled and waiting for spring there on the 45th parallel.

  Before we went in, I decided that where miracles were concerned, I could adjust my thinking.

  We waited until the last possible moment before we went in that funeral home. Depressing music had already started playing. Getting lost turned out to be impossible. The room assigned to Mary Lynn’s service was obvious because it was so full. We found seats together, though, and saw Jimmy slumped in a chair up at the front. He was sitting next to Bradley, one of Mary Lynn’s sons. Even with all the people crowded into that room and talking softly, even with the organ music playing, Jimmy still must have heard us come in, or felt our presence, because he turned around and gave us a tired wave.

  We waved back and tried to give him a smile. I’d never seen him in a suit before. It was nice, but it was too big for him. Mary Lynn had been the couple’s planner, fixer, and problem solver and he looked lost. Lost and scared.

  The room was elaborately decorated with wallpaper and light sconces and swirly wood trim. It was supposed to make you forget how terrified you were, I supposed.

  I remember nothing about the actual service, but afterward the five of us with Bev in the lead walked down the center aisle and up to Mary Lynn’s casket. It was pretty, if you can say that about a casket. Dark wood lined with white satin ruffles.

  Her face was okay; I could look at her face, even though her head was lying on a lacy pillow I’m sure she never would have chosen for herself. You know how sometimes people leave funerals and say the dead person looked like they were sleeping? She didn’t look like that. But staring at her face wasn’t terrible. Her makeup wasn’t garish and her strawberry blond hair was perfect.

  What got me were her hands. They looked like someone else’s. Too small, too pale, and way too still. Bev wasn’t at all put off and clasped Mary Lynn’s hands with her own, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The worst part were Mary Lynn’s fingernails. They were bare. Thinking of how perfectly she’d always kept her nails; how she’d favored tropical pinks and oranges, even in winter; how pretty her hands looked whenever she was holding a euchre hand; and how uncared for they looked now, I started to cry. Then Bev did a little bit, too. Jill wiggled in between us and put her arms around our shoulders.

  I thought about that night at Peegeo’s, rolling silverware with Linda. The night she’d told me that Mary Lynn was going to be one of the new Drummond Girls. How I’d doubted she’d be able to keep up with us. How I’d thought she’d seemed so old.

  Now I couldn’t understand how someone so young could just up and die. How someone just fifty-one years old could go to bed on a Saturday night and be inside an oak casket by Thursday afternoon. That wasn’t possible. Until it was.

  Did it hurt to have a heart attack? I wondered. Had the last thing she’d ever felt been pain?

  Linda wiped her eyes; Andrea rested her purse on the edge of the casket and pulled out a deck of cards, and the surprise of the gesture was enough to make my chest stop heaving.

  Andrea handed us each an ace or a face card and then passed around a black permanent marker. We signed our names, Andrea put the cards back in the deck, wrapped a rubber band around them, and slipped the bundle under Mary Lynn’s hands. Her nails weren’t polished, but at least she could still play euchre.

  “Okay,” Andrea said, her voice husky and thick. “Now she’s ready. Now our Drummond sister can go on her next trip.”

  After Mary Lynn’s funeral, Andrea made it her mission to get Jill back to being an active Drummond Girl. Her plan was a good one, and it should have worked, too. If we would have foisted it upon any normal man with half a personality, I’m sure it would have worked. But no, we’d foisted it on Tony.

  The only reason any of us could think of for Jill’s new husband to forbid her—forbid? What the hell?—from going with us to Drummond was that he didn’t know us.

  “Once he meets us, and we meet him, it’ll all be good,” Andrea said.

  “I don’t know…,” Jill said. “Tony’s not a real people type of person.”

  Immediately after the funeral, we’d convinced her to come with us to Peegeo’s for Mary Lynn’s wake, and right away we could tell something was wrong. Jill shared just as many Mary Lynn stories as the rest of us did, but when the conversation shifted to her, she shut down. How’s your job? Fine. How’s the house coming? Fine. How’s everything with Tony? Fine.

  Jill, usually so animated and outgoing, had gone suddenly flat when the subject of her homelife came up, like a can of pop after all the bubbles had gone out of it.

  “Look,” Andrea said. “As soon as we get a nice day, I’ll have a cookout. Not just for Tony, but so all the guys can meet each other. Kids, too. We should have done it a long time ago.”

  The cookout didn’t happen until September, but it did happen, and it really was just for Tony. Our husbands already knew each other, or at least knew of each other, and besides a friendly hello at Peegeo’s, they didn’t socialize much. And our kids were so far apart in age, they had nothing in common, either. Linda and Pam didn’t have kids. Bev had a son and a daughter, but they were both grown and in their late twenties. Susan’s sons were in high school, I had three sons in elementary and middle school, and Andrea’s daughter was still a toddler.

  But on an early Saturday evening in September, we’d assembled at Andrea and Steve’s, ostensibly for hot dogs and hamburgers, but actually so that we could meet Tony, and he, us.

  He was tall, well built with short sandy-blond hair, and might have been handsome if he didn’t look so uncomfortable. His jaw was so square, he looked like a manly cartoon character. He ignored all of us, shook the men’s hands, poked a boot in the campfire, moved the logs around, and scowled.

  “What’s that for?” he’d asked Andrea’s husband, pointing toward the building with an adjacent parking lot that sat at the front of their property.

  “That’s Roots and Wings,” Steve said proudly. “My wife’s preschool. We had it built and then furnished the whole inside just how she wanted it. During the week there’s two dozen kids in there every day.”

  Jill had
never seen Roots and Wings and neither had some of the other men, so Andrea offered to give everyone a tour. My two younger sons had both been her students, so I knew exactly what it looked like inside. Colorful, busy, and fun, just like she was. But I went on the tour anyway. I missed seeing all those creative little bodies, careening around the room from dress-up to finger painting to the book corner.

  Andrea went to get her keys, then unlocked the door and turned on the lights. They flickered at first, then caught, and shone down on great big paintings taped to the wall, a rectangular tub of water at waist level, and two furry beanbag chairs. One corner had cots and blankets, another bulging bookshelves.

  The place was her creation and Andrea just beamed. I had my writing; Bev, Susan, and Linda each had elaborate flower gardens; Pam liked to cook; but Roots and Wings was Andrea’s work of art. It was her creative outlet but also her job, and I thought how lucky her young daughter was to have a mom who owned a preschool.

  Everyone but Tony had gone inside, walked around, and touched everything, just like I’d seen the three- and four-year-old kids do. Jill gravitated to the art supplies. Up close, the big paintings on the wall were actually bright outlines of children. I knew they’d lain down on the long sheets of paper, had someone else paint their outline, then colored it in themselves.

  “That looks like it was really fun,” Jill said, looking up at them.

  After a few minutes, something must have changed Tony’s mind about coming inside because I saw him take two manly strides past the threshold and look around. He slouched, put his hands on his waist, threw his shoulders back, and scrunched up his face.

  “Smells like kids,” he’d said, then lumbered back toward the door and left.

  Jill gave me an apologetic look, put down the jar of poster paint she’d been holding, and followed him out.

  There was no other way to say it. Sometimes, Cupid was just an asshole.