by Gary Parker
“It’s probably not the best thing to throw on you just before the wedding.”
“Religion can get tricky.”
“And you’ve never seen much of it in me.”
“Exactly. I’m not opposed to it, mind you, just not in big doses.”
Allie picked up a roll. The waiter checked on them, but they told him they were fine. Allie took a bite of her roll, then put it back on her plate. “I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead,” she said softly.
“Your dad?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t your mom have gotten some notification or something if he had died?”
“Maybe, but what if he had nothing on him to indicate he was even married?”
“You got me there.”
“I just wish I knew one way or the other.”
“I know it’s tough,” Trey said. “My dad’s gone too. You know that.”
“At least you know where he is,” she said. “Out at Greenview Cemetery overlooking the valley below Harper Springs, row twenty-six, right by the stand of pines.”
Trey took a bite of lasagna, and Allie took his hand. She knew the story; his mother made sure everyone knew it, how she’d struggled and scrimped and sacrificed to put Trey through NC State after his dad died of a heart attack.
“So who should do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Walk me down the aisle.”
“Your uncle Todd?”
Allie pondered the suggestion. Her mom’s brother Todd had taught her how to shoot a basketball. “That’s a good idea,” she said.
“I’m sure he’d be honored.”
Allie took a bite of salad, and they began to talk about the wedding again. Before she knew it, they’d finished their meal, Trey had kissed her good night at her car, and she’d driven back home, her mind calmer but not completely settled about much of anything, much less the matter of whether or not she believed in a God who actually tried to talk to people through pictures or songs or basketball players or anything else.
Two hours later, after eating two chocolate chip cookies with milk, Allie brushed her teeth, crawled into bed, and flipped on the television with the remote control. For several minutes she flipped aimlessly from channel to channel, hoping to see something to distract her from the troubling thoughts that kept racing through her mind. Every now and again, she glanced at the picture of her and her dad, which now sat on her bedside table. Every time she looked, she felt foolish, like a woman who had just found out she’d walked around all day with old chewing gum stuck to the back of her pants. The television controls landed on a documentary about the advent of television commercials, and she halted her channel surfing for a moment to take a look. A parade of old black-and-white images flashed across the screen.
“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh what a relief it is. Alka Seltzer.”
Allie smiled as she watched the classic ad and listened to the somber voice of the narrator as he spoke of the medicine’s effect.
When that ad ended, a blond boy appeared on-screen. He stood at the front door of a house and asked the woman standing at the door if a friend could come out to play. The mother explained that the friend had a fever and she had given him Bayer aspirin to make him feel better.
The boy’s sweet voice concluded the spot. “Mothers are like that... yeah, they are.”
What a timeless promo! A couple of others Allie didn’t recognize flashed across the television, and she almost flipped away to find something else. Then the face of a dark-haired woman with long black eyelashes filled the television screen, and Allie halted.
The woman’s eyes expanded as she lifted a brush to her eyelashes as she stared into a mirror.
The sounds of a jingle played in the background.
The hair on the back of Allie’s neck stood up, her body tingled, and she held her breath.
“Jeepers creepers. Where’d you get them peepers? Jeepers creepers. Where’d ya get those eyes?”
Allie almost screamed as the ad ended and the station went to a commercial. Her breath came in ragged gulps, and she dropped her feet to the floor and stood, not sure where she was going but knowing she had to move, had to do something to shake off the sense of weirdness she felt.
Her cat, Patch, a gray stray who had shown up at her doorstep about a year ago, suddenly padded into the room and jumped onto her bed.
“It’s too much!” Allie muttered, picking Patch up. “Too much!”
She rubbed Patch’s stomach and tried to figure it all out. In spite of Trey’s confidence about coincidences, she didn’t see how everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours could be connected by nothing more than random chance. Somebody—she didn’t necessarily want to say God, but somebody—or something wanted her to pay attention. But what was the message?
Allie carried Patch to the kitchen, poured some cat food into her bowl, and dropped her to the floor. Then she moved to the cabinet, pulled out the cookies, and lifted two more from the pack.
“I’m not going to fit in my wedding dress,” she told Patch as she munched a cookie.
Busy with her own food, Patch seemed to have little interest in the effects of the cookies upon Allie’s waistline.
Carrying the second cookie with her, Allie moved to the small deck just outside her kitchen door. For a long time, she stared into the woods past her yard. Stars twinkled overhead, and she finished the cookie and gazed into the heavens. Below her the little town of Harper Springs—all three thousand people of it, all mountains in the distance and blue haze in the late afternoons—blinked its lights up at her.
“What?” she said into the night air. “What am I supposed to hear in all this?”
Nobody answered.
Allie left the deck, eased back to her bedroom, and picked up the picture of her and her dad.
“I’m listening,” she said to the picture. Again she got no response.
Still holding the picture, she moved to the deck once more, propped her elbows on the railing, and squinted at her dad’s face. The light from the kitchen seeped through the window and lit up his eyes. They penetrated through the shadows and burned a hole in her head and heart, and Allie suddenly knew what she had to do. In spite of Trey’s irrefutable logic and her own doubts, she knew that something greater than reason now beckoned her. Although she didn’t know what it was—her own subconscious, the spirit of her dad, God, whatever—she had to respond to the summons or forever wonder what she’d missed by ignoring it.
“Okay,” she said to the picture, a sense of excitement mixed with fear rising in her bones. “You win.”
The picture said nothing.
“Tomorrow,” Allie whispered. “Tomorrow I’ll start looking.”
Patch slid through the open door and rubbed against the back of Allie’s legs. Allie turned and picked her up. “Everybody will think I’ve lost my mind,” she whispered to Patch.
Patch stared into the dark, obviously content to let everybody think whatever they wanted. Standing on the back deck as the spring breeze fingered her face, Allie felt a sense of peace and knew she’d made the right decision. Insane or not, before she walked down the aisle to marry Trey, she had to know what had happened to her dad and what message she was supposed to learn from it.
SECTION 2
The search for truth is the most important work in the whole world, and the most dangerous.
James Clavell
3
Allie woke up early on Saturday, showered, ate a bowl of cereal, and called her school principal at his home right after eight and told him she needed to take the rest of the year off. He needed to get a substitute for her.
“Getting last minute things ready for the wedding?” he asked.
“You could say that.”
“You were already going to be out the last week, weren’t you?”
“Yes, a substitute is already lined up for that.”
“Then it’s just a week.”
“Yes
.”
“Okay, you’ve got more than enough time built up. No problem.”
After she hung up, she dressed quickly in jeans, a University of North Carolina T-shirt, and running shoes and drove straight to her mother’s house. Although she didn’t plan to come right out and tell Gladys what she hoped to do, she did need her help digging around.
She found her mom wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and gloves in the flower patch of her front yard. Sweat poured down Gladys’s face as she pulled weeds. She stood and wiped her brow as Allie climbed out of her white SUV.
“You’re out early,” Gladys said.
“Lots to do.”
Gladys slipped off her gloves, left the garden, and led her into the kitchen. Allie poured two glasses of orange juice and set them on the table. Gladys pulled out a couple of muffins and placed them on a plate. Both women sat down.
“You got something on your mind,” Gladys said, taking a swig of juice.
“What makes you say that?”
“Wild horses couldn’t usually pull you out of bed on Saturday until at least ten.”
Allie nibbled a muffin, then said, “That picture of you and Dad—who are the other folks in it?”
“Beth and Walt Mason, our best friends at the time—your dad grew up with Walt. Played baseball with him in school. They had a little band too; your dad picked the electric guitar some. Then they went to Vietnam together. “
“Mrs. Mason a friend of yours?”
“Only through Walt and your dad.”
Allie drank some juice. “You know where Mr. and Mrs. Mason are now?”
“Why you ask?”
Allie wasn’t sure how to proceed without risking upsetting her mom, but she didn’t see any other choice but to go ahead. “I thought I might call them or something. See if they know where Dad might be, what happened to him.”
Gladys shifted, raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see how digging up old bones that have long since decayed can be a good idea.”
A touch of anger rose in Allie. How could her mom not care more than she did? “Don’t you ever wonder what happened to him?” she asked.
“Every day of my life.”
“Then why don’t you do something about it?”
Gladys nibbled her muffin. “I tried at first,” she said quietly. “Called every friend of his I knew—a few I didn’t. Spent money I didn’t have taking a couple of trips to places he’d mentioned he wanted to visit someday—down to Orlando, up to Nashville.”
“No sign of him anywhere?”
“Not a trace; it was like he’d dropped off the face of the earth. After a while, I decided your dad didn’t want me to find him. Why else would he leave like he did? I figured it best to follow his wishes and let him be.”
Allie tried to soak it all in. After all these years, she and her mom were finally talking about something they should have addressed years ago. “I’m sorry he left you,” she said.
“It’s been hard on both of us.”
Allie’s eyes watered as she realized she’d focused on her own loss so much that she’d largely forgotten her mom’s. “Thanks for the way you’ve provided for me,” she said.
Gladys waved her off. “You’re the best thing I ever did,” she said.
Allie touched Gladys’s arm, then leaned back and took a bite of muffin.
“Walt and Beth lived in Knoxville for a while,” Gladys said.
“You have an address?”
“They sent Christmas cards for years. Maybe I’ve got one stuck away somewhere with an address on it.”
“You mind if I look for it?”
“I already said I’d advise against contacting them.”
“I don’t see how a phone call can hurt anything. Dad might have visited them over the years, phoned or something.”
“What will you do if you find out he did?”
Allie paused, not sure how to answer.
Gladys leaned closer. “Look,” she said. “Your dad left us. It’s a hard truth to hear, but you’ve known it all your life. What’s so urgent right now—right before your wedding—that causes you to go scraping around in the past? Nothing good can come of it. I know that as certain as I know this muffin—” she held hers up “—is a day past stale.”
Allie rubbed her eyes, again not sure what to say and what to keep silent. Would her mom think her addled if she said what she was thinking? But how could she keep it quiet? Before she could change her mind, Allie told her about the odd happenings over the past day and a half, how everything focused on the resemblance between her eyes and her dad’s. Gladys listened quietly, then chuckled a little as Allie finished the tale.
“Sounds like X-Files stuff,” Gladys said. “Psychic phenomena.”
“You’re telling me.”
“If you know it’s bizarre, why dwell on it?”
Allie sighed. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing, but... I don’t know... I just feel I have to see what I can find out; it’s like a hand pulling at my belt, yanking me toward it.”
“Have you talked to Trey about this?”
Allie told her about her conversation with Trey and how he’d responded.
“I think I’d tend to agree with him,” Gladys said. “It’s a bunch of odd happenings, that’s it.”
In spite of the logic on her mom’s side, Allie still felt her jaw setting. “It’s more than that,” she insisted.
“I raised you better than to go off half-cocked like this,” Gladys argued. “Taught you to use your head, be rational.”
“Maybe it’s ESP or something,” Allie said, ignoring her. “Maybe Dad is in trouble; he needs me and is sending me a message.”
“You’re talking hocus-pocus.”
“You don’t believe in anything like that... anything supernatural?” The word sounded strange on her tongue, spooky even.
Gladys looked at her hands, calloused from the yard work that kept her busy most of the time when she wasn’t working at the department store office she managed. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“No belief in God at all?”
“None that makes any difference in my life.”
“But we go to church sometimes. You put me through confirmation.”
Gladys shrugged. “A little religion is fine,” she said, “and I wish I did believe, could believe. It might have made things easier, helped me find some explanation for what your dad did. But those answers never came, not from God or anyone else.”
“But didn’t your folks take you to church when you were a child?”
“A good bit. Solid Methodist people, my mom and dad. But God never did enough for me to give me any reason to really believe. Took both of them early, and then your dad disappeared.”
Allie nodded sympathetically. Her mom’s parents had both died early—her dad from a car accident involving a teenager on drugs and her mom from cancer. Although an aunt on her mom’s side had done the best she could raising Gladys, money was scarce, and Gladys took her first job at twelve at the Cut and Dried Hair Salon and never looked back. For the most part, except for the years Jack was around, Gladys had survived largely by her own efforts. She paid for community college by working lots of hours. She had a degree in accounting and a solid job. She’d never been wealthy, but in Harper Springs a little money stretched a long way.
“I don’t know that God has a thing to do with what’s happening to me,” Allie said, “but I still want to contact the Masons if I can.”
Gladys drank from her juice, then set down the glass. “You’re a grown woman. Do what you want. I’ll see if I can find the address, and maybe you can track down a phone number from it.”
“Thank you.”
“You plan to tell Trey what you’re up to?”
Allie weighed the question. “I don’t want to deceive him in any way,” she said.
“Then you best talk to him soon as you can.”
“I will.”
“I’d like to be a fly on the wall when that con
versation happens.”
“He’ll be fine; he’s an understanding man.”
“You about finished with that house?”
“A lot of work yet to go.”
“He may be understanding, but his mama might not be.”
“I can’t live my life worried about what Ruth Thompson is going to think of me.”
Gladys lifted an eyebrow, and Allie took her hands and held them close. A question arose that she’d never even considered but now felt she couldn’t avoid. “Why didn’t you divorce him, Mom?”
Gladys shrugged. “I took vows,” she said. “‘Till death do us part’ meant something to me.”
“But you just told me you’re not religious.”
“A vow is a vow; religion has nothing to do with it.” Allie searched her mom’s face and saw something she’d never before realized. “You still love him, don’t you?” Gladys covered her mouth with her hand, and tiny tears glinted in her eyes as she nodded quietly.
“I admire you for that,” Allie whispered. “That’s why you never remarried, isn’t it?”
Again Gladys nodded. “You better love Trey the same way,” she said, wiping her eyes. “You marry a man, you better love him enough to stay with him come what may.”
Allie swallowed hard, the seriousness of what she would do in just three weeks settling over her. But why should she worry? She loved Trey just as much as her mom loved her dad, didn’t she? Nothing could come between them that would ever make her want to leave him, could it? But who knew what life might bring? What if Trey treated her as poorly as her dad treated her mom? Could she still love him after all that?
Allie shuddered, then pushed the scary questions away. The morning sun warmed her face through the kitchen window. “I really do believe dad is trying to tell me something,” she said softly.
“If you’re right, I just hope it’s something good.”
“Me too, Mom. Me too.”
It took Gladys until late that evening to find the address, so Allie waited until Sunday morning after ten to call directory information in Knoxville. The operator told her she didn’t have a Walt or a Beth Mason, but she did have the number for a Walter Mason III. Not knowing what else to do, Allie wrote down the number and tried to call it four times between ten and one. To her dismay, she reached a computerized voice message every time, one of those that gave her no clue whether or not she’d actually reached the right people. For the rest of the day, she called back every chance she got but had no luck. Finally she left a message with her number and her mom’s. She met Trey at six for dinner, ate a light supper, and talked about the hotel arrangements for the guests coming from out of town. Apparently, a couple of the guests had discovered some trouble making online reservations, and Trey had spent several hours that day trying to get it all straightened out.