Bless Kate—she understood immediately and smiled to let Jamie know it was all right. “He was kind of a bumhead,” she said.
“He was a total bumhead. I am so mad at him.” He had withheld from her all the things she needed to know, and now he was dead, and he would lie smirking in his coffin with all her secrets inside him.
Yet Jamie felt guilty, as if she had killed him. If she hadn’t made him yell and strain his heart, might he still be alive?
“It was his own stupid fault if he never went to a doctor,” Kate said, reading Jamie’s thought again.
“I feel bad because I didn’t always—you know. I didn’t like him much.”
“Oh, well, who could? Never mind. Have a ham sandwich before somebody needs you for something.”
Jamie had seen her friend eyeing the meat hungrily. “You have something. Good grief, look at all this food. Help me out.”
“Well … only if you have some too.”
They both piled ham and Swiss cheese on somebody’s home-baked marble bread, then munched silently. They were slicing into pineapple upside-down cake when there was a slow old sound in the next room and Grandma shuffled in.
“Mamaw.” Kate got up and hugged her. Grandma hugged back a little, but mostly just leaned against Kate and rested her head on Kate’s shoulder.
“Katie,” she murmured. “Sweetie. Don’t ever get old and married and stupid.”
Jamie saw Kate’s eyes widen. Kate did not know what to say. “Have some cake, Grandma?” Jamie offered, though she knew it was no use.
“No, thank you, honey. I can’t—”
For about the dozenth time that day, the phone rang. Jamie answered it and sighed when she learned it was not something she could handle.
“Grandma, can you talk to this lady? She needs some information for the obituary.”
“Oh, dear.” Her slippers dragging on the linoleum, Grandma went to the phone.
Sitting at the table with Kate, Jamie heard only the Bridger end of the conversation. “Yes … yes, he died at home. Six P.M. He was sixty-four; he would have retired next year … pardon?” Grandma was faltering her way through this, but she gave Grandpa’s parents’ names and his birthplace without too much trouble. “No, he wasn’t a member of anything. He just worked hard every day of his life and came home again. He was a good provider … me? Resurrection Lily Lutz Bridger.” Having given her full name, Grandma then had to spell it before the questionnaire continued. “Just me and our granddaughter, Jamie Lee Bridger. No, no children.” Grandma listened a moment, then repeated, “No children.”
Kate and Jamie, eavesdropping, looked at each other and cringed. “That’s logically and physically impossible,” Jamie whispered to her friend.
“Agreed,” Kate whispered back. “You can’t have grandchildren but no children.”
The woman on the other end of the phone must have been insisting the same thing, because Grandma’s face changed. Jamie saw it coming and clutched at Kate’s arm, frightened of that over-the-brink stare she had seen once before in those china-doll-blue eyes. Grandma stood very still, too still, too rigid. Out of her frozen face she shouted into the phone. Screamed, really. Not fumbling for words anymore. Even her voice had changed, going high and rapid and sure.
“No, he is survived by no children! No, he was preceded in death by no children! No sons! No daughters! No children! Just Jamie Lee, don’t you understand? Yes, she is our granddaughter!”
Kate sat gaping. Jamie bolted to her feet and grabbed the phone out of her grandmother’s hand. “Listen, we don’t care what you put in the damn newspaper,” she yelled into it, and she hung up.
Lily sagged and started to cry. Jamie put her arms around her. “Never mind them,” she said, forcing herself to speak softly.
“We couldn’t have children!” Lily sobbed. “Daddy—didn’t approve.”
She could have been talking about her long-dead father or her dead husband. Jamie could not tell which and felt so stunned by fatigue and the craziness of everything that she did not care.
“Grandma,” she whispered, “shhh. Here, sit down.” She helped her grandmother to a chair beside Kate, who reached over to pat the old woman’s hand.
“There’s—nobody left—to take care—of me,” Lily sobbed.
“Kate and I are going to take care of you,” Jamie told her, and she meant it, yet how could they? Panic buzzed in the back of her mind, and her chest hurt with wanting something she might never have. I’ll try to take care of you—but who’s gonna take care of me?
In the middle of the night, Jamie got up to look for her grandfather’s will.
Grandma lay sleeping. Sedated. She had not been able to stop crying, and Jamie had called the doctor even though it was Sunday, and the doctor had prescribed a tranquilizer. Kate’s mother had picked it up at the pharmacy and put the cost on her charge card. So Grandma was okay for the time being, till morning. Grandma was sleeping, Kate was asleep amid a pile of quilts on the floor of Jamie’s room, but Jamie could not sleep.
I’m the one who needs a tranquilizer, she thought. Just joking. She did not want to ever be a pill-popping poor soul like her grandmother.
Barefoot, Jamie padded out of her bedroom. From the wall above her bed a white-tailed deer doe and fawn watched her with big scared charcoal eyes—they were her best work so far. Their frightened gaze seemed to follow her in the dark. To get to the stairs she had to walk through Grandpa’s room—ick. She felt like he was lying there, not down in the basement of the funeral home.
But she made it through the room and down the dark stairs, because she had to. In the living room she took a deep breath and turned on the green glass banker’s lamp by the rolltop desk where Grandpa kept his papers. Then she stood for a moment. The pool of light seemed tiny in the huge dark night, and Grandpa seemed to have followed her downstairs, seemed to lurk in the shadow of the recliner. Grandpa, who never let anybody near his things.
“He’s dead,” Jamie said aloud, and defiantly she opened the desk.
Pigeonholed ranks of papers faced her. She pulled them out a wad at a time, scanning them and then putting them back where she had found them. Grandpa had lined things up like soldiers: stamps and envelopes, rent receipts, car lease receipts—Jamie wondered, for such a controlling person, why did Grandpa rent a house rather than own one, lease a car rather than buy one? Now that he was dead, there wasn’t even a house Grandma could really call her own, a car she could sell for spending money—not that it wouldn’t have been in Grandpa’s name anyway. Stupid, sticky old man with his life regimented into slots. Jamie searched through old utility bills, old tax bills, product warranties, Super Thrift and Wal-Mart receipts arranged by date, paycheck stubs. She was sitting in the desk chair studying the paycheck stubs when Kate came downstairs like a long-legged ghost in a big nightshirt.
“There you are!” Kate whispered. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Jamie said, but she glowered at the paycheck stubs. “Look how much money he made, and she had to beg for every dollar she spent.”
“Jamie, can’t you look at that stuff tomorrow? Get some sleep.”
“I don’t want to upset Grandma.” Jamie put the pay stubs back in their pigeonhole and opened the top drawer. “It would freak her out if she saw me doing this. He used to take care of everything. Paid the bills, did the banking, figured the taxes, and she would sign at the bottom.” Jamie was sorting through the income-tax forms in the drawer. “He would cover the numbers with his hand so she wouldn’t see.”
“He didn’t want her to see how much he made?” Kate exclaimed.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know if he had life insurance. She doesn’t know if he had a safe-deposit box anywhere.”
Kate folded herself into a surprisingly compact shape and sat on the carpeted floor, peering up. “Didn’t she ever ask him about things like that?”
“I don’t think so.” Finished w
ith the top drawer, Jamie shoved it closed and pulled out the next one. “Look at the way she is. He practically wiped her nose for her.”
“But did he make her get that way, or was she always that way and did he just take care of her?”
“I don’t know.” Jamie blinked rapidly to clear her mind of the question. “Jeez, don’t ask me stuff like that. You’re giving me a headache.” Really, it was Grandpa’s desk that was giving Jamie a headache. All those papers. Bills to be paid, stacked in one corner. Deposit slips, canceled checks. Grandpa’s spare checks, plain cheap ones of course, no pictures. A sheaf of beige-colored bank statements in the bottom drawer.
“The only thing she’s sure of is that he made a will,” Jamie said, “because she says he changed it to put me in it.”
“Shouldn’t your lawyer have a copy?”
Jamie stopped rooting through papers long enough to give Kate a look.
“Let me guess,” Kate said. “She doesn’t remember who your lawyer is.”
“Bingo. You win the prize.” Jamie turned back to her excavations. “The bank has a lawyer who’s going to look at the will for us, if I can ever find the stupid—”
Her fingertips tapped against something. She lifted all the papers, and under them sat a flat metal box.
“Bingo,” Kate said.
“Maybe.” Jamie pulled the box out of the drawer and sat it in her lap. It was a heavy little thing, fireproof. The lid would not lift open for her.
“Locked.”
“Where’s the key? On his key ring?”
They tiptoed up to his bedroom together to retrieve the key ring from his dresser top. No luck—there was no little key that fit. Nor was it in the bottom of any of the desk drawers, or in one of the pigeonholes, or hanging on a wall anywhere.
“I am going down to the basement to find a hacksaw,” grumbled Jamie, whose small supply of patience seemed to be all taken up by her grandmother. “Or a blowtorch.”
“You’ll fry the will or saw it in half,” Kate protested. “There are people called locksmiths, you know.”
“As if we have money to—”
“Oh, chill out.” Kate was poking around in the desk. Her hand bumped against a section of ornamental woodwork between pigeonholes, and it moved. “Hey!” She pulled at it. A secret compartment slid open, and there lay a little key.
Jamie snatched it and tried it in the keyhole of the metal box. It fit. She turned it and opened the box.
“You’re welcome,” Kate told her sweetly.
“Uh, thanks.” There were only a few documents in the box, each in some sort of envelope. Jamie flipped through them: Grandpa’s contract with his employer, Grandma and Grandpa’s marriage record, a squarish brown envelope marked Birth Certificates.
Jamie froze with it in her hand. Suddenly she was not just looking for her grandfather’s will any longer. Suddenly she was looking for herself.
“Open it,” Kate urged softly.
“Please,” Jamie whispered to the envelope as she pulled out the papers inside. Then she groaned. There was her birth certificate all right, along with Grandma’s and Grandpa’s. But it told her nothing. She saw only some numbers and her name, birthdate, and place of birth.
“Chicago?” Kate exclaimed, looking over her shoulder. “Is that where you lived before?”
“No. It wasn’t a city.” Jamie felt sure it had been a little town, almost country. Hadn’t there been chickens in the backyard? She thought she remembered chickens—but the memories seemed as faded as old photos, and she felt suddenly very tired. “Damn. I thought they put your parents’ names on birth certificates.”
“Looks like they don’t.”
“Looks like.” Jamie returned the papers to their envelope and reached for the next one.
It was the will.
Kind of lightweight, as wills go. Simple, only two pages long. Jamie pulled it out of its envelope and glanced at the first few paragraphs, having no idea how important this document would turn out to be to her. Much as she expected, it left everything to Grandma, and the lawyer would figure out the technicalities in the morning. Good, one less thing for Grandma to worry about. God, I could sleep now. Dog tired. Dopey tired. She slipped the will back into its envelope—
And jumped as if she had been cattle-prodded. “You idiot!” she cried at herself.
“Huh?” At Jamie’s sudden yell Kate jumped too.
“I almost missed it! Look!” Jamie jabbed her finger at the will. Not the will, really, but the envelope it was in.
It was the original envelope that had brought it in the mail. Imprinted in the upper left-hand corner was the return address: “S. J. Lampeterson, Attorney at Law, 160 Market Street, Silver Valley, Pennsylvania.” Typed below was the mailing address: “Mr. Cletus Uru Bridger, 35 Sweet Gum Lane, Silver Valley, PA.”
“That’s where I’m from,” said Jamie, her voice shaking. “It’s where I come from. Silver Valley. That’s where my parents might be.”
Chapter
4
“Grandma, please eat something,” Jamie begged. Days after the funeral there was still food left over from when Grandpa had died. Jamie had warmed up somebody’s homemade chicken pot pie, and her grandmother was sitting at the table with her, watching her eat it. Grandma had stopped crying all the time and seemed calm these days—quite calm—but was not eating.
“I can’t, dear. Once that’s gone, we don’t have anything.”
“Grandma, we have plenty. The insurance check came.” Jamie spoke words worn down from having been said many times. Grandpa had provided for Grandma with life insurance after all. Jamie had found the policy in the metal box right under the will. So there was insurance money for Grandma to live on, and besides that there was plenty of money in the bank, what with all of Grandpa’s years of penny-pinching. Once the will was probated, that money would all be Grandma’s too. But she did not seem to understand any of this. To Grandma, unless Grandpa brought home a paycheck and took her to the Super Thrift to convert it into groceries, food did not exist in the universe as she knew it.
Jamie tried again. “Have some soup at least.”
“No, thank you, honey. You go ahead and eat.”
There was a tap at the door, and Kate came in with a fistful of papers. She had been coming over every day after school to bring Jamie’s assignments and explain what had been done in civics, German, algebra. The two of them were hoping to get Jamie through what little was left of the school year that way. Jamie had tried going to school one day, and had come home to find Grandma sitting on the floor under the kitchen table. Just sitting there.
Kate set the papers on the table and hugged Grandma around the shoulders. “Hello, sweetie,” Grandma told her.
“Have some pot pie?” Jamie offered it to Kate.
“Sure.” The Bridgers ate early, or at least the one Bridger who was eating did. The Garibays ate late, and Kate was skinny as a rake; she could handle two suppers. “Everybody says hi,” she told Jamie as she got herself a plate. “Doosie is on crutches again. Fell down the stairs.”
Jamie grinned. For no particular reason Doosie had been falling down stairs about once every three months since Jamie had known her.
“Bert the Pervert chewed a whole package of cinnamon gum at once without taking the wrappers off. He says the paper tastes better than the gum.”
“Some people would burn their hair to get attention,” Jamie said.
“That’s Bert.” Kate sat down and cheerfully went on with her report. “Bethany got mad at her father and she’s missed the bus every day this week. She hides out in the bathroom until after her bus is announced, just to make him come pick her up.”
“Jeez.” Jamie was impressed. “I can’t imagine ever doing that.”
“You’re such a good girl,” Kate said wickedly.
Unable to retort as she would have liked because Grandma was there, Jamie gave her a look.
Kate smiled. “Well, anyway, everybody says to tell you they m
iss you.”
“Tell them I miss them too.” This was all too true. Jamie’s friends phoned now and then, but she had not seen them since she had been staying home from school, because she did not feel as if she could invite them over to her house, the way Grandma was. What would Grandma do if people came in? Cry? Stare? Smile? Bake cookies? Crawl under the table again?
Kate helped herself to pot pie. “Aren’t you eating, Mamaw?” she asked Mrs. Bridger, though she already knew the answer.
“I’m not feeling very hungry right now, honey. You eat.”
Kate eyed Grandma thoughtfully as she did so. She and Jamie had talked about Grandma, trying to think of ways to get her started eating again.
“Mamaw, I saw Mrs. Leweski down the street today,” Kate told Grandma earnestly. “She says to let you know she’ll drive you to the store or anywhere you have to go, to run errands or whatever. She says she’ll be glad to.” Kate’s theory was, if Grandma felt better about life, maybe she would eat.
Grandma nodded politely but barely seemed to hear. “I think I’ll go upstairs now,” she murmured. “You two enjoy your meal.” She wavered up from her chair and shuffled out of the room.
Jamie and Kate set down their forks and just looked at each other, listening to Grandma tread slowly up the stairs.
“Did she eat anything today at all?” Kate whispered when Grandma was far enough away.
“Tea with sugar.”
“Nothing else? Not even noodle soup?”
Jamie shook her head. She knew too that Grandma could not go on like this. Already the big bones were showing white in her wrists. What if she got weak and fell? What if she fainted from starving herself?
“Are you thinking of getting her to a doctor?” Kate asked, reading Jamie’s mind, as usual.
Jamie said slowly, “She’s already on pills. A doctor would probably put her in a hospital, and can you see her? She’s hardly been out of this house since I can remember. A hospital would freak her out so bad she would just lie there and die.”
“She wouldn’t really. They would feed her with tubes.”
“Then she would just lie there and exist.”
Looking for Jamie Bridger Page 3