Her parents’ house smelled like turkey and buzzed with activity and people. After hugging her mom, she headed to the kitchen where Karen peeled potatoes at the sink.
“It’s about time you showed up,” she said, giving Bebe an affectionate hug without touching her with her wet hands. “The work’s almost done.”
“We had trouble getting the boys up.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “We almost left without Brandon and Eric.”
Her mother bustled in and adjusted the temperature on the oven. To Bebe, she said, “Help me get the turkey out of the oven.”
Bebe grabbed a pot holder and together they lifted the huge turkey onto hot pads placed on the countertop. It looked perfectly browned and relaxed, with its legs and wings slack like it had been given an epidural. Overcooked, as usual. Steam curled from the dressing-filled cavity.
“We’ll let it sit for a while, and then you can make the gravy. Put in that pan of rolls behind you.”
Bebe slid the rolls into the oven and set the timer for twenty-five minutes, and then followed her mother into the dining room to help her set the table. She was setting out her best set of china with the fading platinum ring around the edge and her grandmother’s crystal goblets, which usually only went to the adults. Bebe wondered what she would do now that all of the cousins were grown and there weren’t enough to go around. Bebe followed her around the table, setting out the silver and the napkins on either side of the plates. After setting out the last plate, her mother came along behind her, straightening each utensil and napkin that Bebe laid out. Bebe felt a bit irritated, until she realized that this was her mother’s tangible way of showing love to her family. She was never happier than when she was in charge of the kitchen cooking her best dishes or making an occasion special for them all.
“Get out those candlesticks, the ones on the top shelf,” she directed Bebe. “The candles are in the top drawer.”
The crystal candlesticks had also been handed down from her grandmother, and the German crystal was probably worth more than her mother realized. Her mother set them in the center, positioned the candles in firmly, and stepped back to admire them.
“Those serving dishes on the second shelf are for the potato salad and the beans,” she told her. Bebe took them from the hutch and followed her back into the kitchen. “I need you girls to chop onions and cook up some bacon for the potato salad.”
Bebe was grateful to be among family and to keep her mind off of her problems, but every time the door opened, she glanced up to see if it was Bobby. At last, she heard the front door open and someone greeted him and his guest. Bebe felt her pulse skip. She hoped that his friend would keep him occupied for the day.
She heard them making their way through the house and her chest tightened. She tried to be nonchalant, but knew that her smile looked forced when he introduced Angie to them. Angie seemed like a nice woman and greeted everyone with a smile, but Bebe wondered how much she knew.
The dinner was finally on the table and eaten too quickly to do justice to the amount of time and preparation that had gone into preparing it. The food in Bebe’s stomach turned leaden from the anxiety she felt, with Scotty beside her talking to Bobby directly across from her. They sat around talking for only a few moments before her mother started gathering dirty plates. Karen looked resignedly at Bebe, and they got up to help. Bebe heard the conversation veer toward Scott’s recent graduation, and she was glad to be busy in the kitchen again.
The day turned out to be beautifully sunny and a warm 65 degrees, and the family drifted outside after dinner. Bebe washed dishes while Karen dried, and half-listened to her talk about their recent cruise to Ensenada. She had so much on her mind, but the most pressing problem was her relationship with Bobby and Scott.
Watching Bobby head back through the vineyard with Angie, she realized that Jude had been right about one thing. She had looked up to Bobby as her protector during her childhood. After all, it was what her father expected of him in his position as the oldest son in the family, and he’d taken it seriously. There was nothing so wrong with that. The world was a dangerous place, and the vineyard was expansive and alluring to a young child. A memory tickled in the back of her mind, an uncomfortable one that pricked, and she pushed it aside without considering.
“Some of the vines still have their leaves,” she said, pulling aside the curtain.
“We haven’t had a hard frost yet, like we usually do,” her mother answered from the dining room where she replaced her china in the hutch. “It’s been this way for the last few years.”
The back door opened and Angie came into the kitchen, offering to help. Bebe’s mom tried to get her to sit and visit while they worked, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She grabbed a dish towel and helped Karen with the turkey roaster. Karen turned to Bebe and gave her a secret thumbs-up.
Angie seemed to be a likeable, ordinary person, but Bebe kept her remarks vague when the conversation drifted to her boys. Her mom asked about Jude and Rain, and she said very little about their situations. Bebe didn’t like to seem evasive, but it was necessary.
When the last pot was washed and the counters wiped down, Bebe went outside to greet Max and Bandit. They followed her as she walked out into the vineyard, and then raced ahead to investigate some movement in the grass. Clover grew mingled with the ankle-high grass between the rows of spent vines, and the younger vines still grasped yellowed leaves. The pruning would begin after the holidays, when the workers returned from Mexico. Then the clover would be disked under to replenish the soil with nutrients, and the growth cycle would begin again. The vines would unfold into a chaos of leaves and tendrils and grapes, creating a place in which Bebe had always loved to spend time, even though her father had cautioned her about the dangers.
She heard voices and laughter coming from the house and looked back. Scott had overthrown a football and Dylan jogged toward it. His cousins were giving him a hard time about losing his touch while he was away.
She had an odd feeling of déjà vu. She tried again to shake it off, but that niggling memory forced its way to the front, and she could almost feel the heat rising from lush vines and hear insects buzzing around her as they would on a hot August day of her childhood.
Once again, she was eight years old and playing at the edge of the vineyard within earshot of the house in case her mother called her. It was a sultry, slow-moving kind of day that allowed for hours of freedom and make-believe. She had taken a spoon from the wooden box lined with dark purple felt in her mother’s hutch and used it to dig her riverbed deep. Her village grew on either side of the riverbank. When she was finished, she would fill it with a pail of water from the garden hose.
The silence was broken by Bobby shouting her name. She didn’t want her mother to know she had taken the spoon, so she ignored him, but his voice pitched, growing breathy and frantic. She stood up, and as she did, a movement nearby startled her, and she jumped. A man stood not far down the row from her, looking disheveled with a scruffy blond beard and dirty clothes and hands, and a look in his eyes that made her squirm. For a moment, she stood transfixed, unable to move. She heard Bobby shout for her to run. The man took his eyes from her to glance briefly at Bobby. Bobby shouted again, and the man took a step toward her. She spun on her heels and darted, clutching the spoon and scattering the small houses she had built with sticks in the black soil at her feet. She barreled down the straight row without stopping until she ran full bore into Bobby. He grabbed her by the hand and half-dragged her back to the house with their legs pumping and aching, Bobby pulling her up when she stumbled and stealing anxious glances over his shoulder.
They burst into the house and collapsed. Bobby clutched her until her mother came and pried her out of his arms, demanding to know what was wrong. Bebe saw him turn away and wipe his eyes. She’d never seen him cry before. And although she didn’t completely understand the danger at the time, she knew how the man had made her feel, and the fear it had stru
ck in her family. And she felt beyond a doubt the depth of Bobby’s love for her. She realized now that the anger her father displayed when he found out wasn’t directed at her as she’d thought at the time, but was simply his reaction to fear. Somehow, her guilt over taking the spoon had blended into accepting a childish responsibility for the turmoil and the unspoken implications of the man’s intentions.
Bebe gazed back toward the house at the boys tossing the football. Bobby had joined them, and the sun was beginning to dull and fade in the mauve horizon. The temperature dipped and the air grew chilly, just as it had always been out on the periphery of her family where she had lived most of her life.
She felt acutely her need for reconciliation—to prune the regret from her life, and to disk the undergrowth of guilt into the nourishing soil of forgiveness. Did she truly believe that God could heal her broken heart and that He wanted to dress her wounds? She’d held this healing at arm’s length for too long, knowing she was forgiven, but refusing to allow Him access to her pain. It would feel so nice to let it go.
She slipped into the house to grab a jacket and came back out to where they were playing. Bobby noticed her standing on the sidelines, and surprisingly, gave her a small nod. After a few more passes, he excused himself from the game and came over to her. They stood looking directly at each other for the first time in years.
“Can we talk, Bobby?” she asked.
He considered her for a moment, and then nodded toward the vineyard without malice or insolence. They walked down one of the rows with the silence surrounding them as they moved farther from the house. Bebe toyed with the ring on her necklace as they walked, and she saw the recognition in Bobby’s eyes.
“I was remembering that time when I was playing out here and you saved me from the transient.”
He walked with his head down, watching his steps.
“Thank you.” She looked over at him and he looked back, nodding without answering. “I remember you went back and found my ring in the dirt when we were sure he was gone.”
He looked down to the end of the row. “Mom wasn’t too happy about her spoon.”
“When she figured out I was okay, she paddled me good.”
“You couldn’t have taken just any old spoon out of the kitchen drawer.”
Bebe chuckled grimly. “No, I had to use Oma’s silver.”
Bebe felt encouraged that they were actually carrying on a normal conversation for the first time since she was in college. She plunged ahead.
“I owe you several apologies,” she said. “And I just realized the connection between them.”
She cleared her throat. “I think that, over the years, I’ve blamed you for some unfortunate choices that I made. Some situations I found myself in. They weren’t your fault,” she hurried to say, “and I wasn’t even aware at the time that I was doing it, but I guess I have been.”
He continued to walk, and she caught the small edge in his voice. “Like what?”
She took a deep breath. “Like leaving me at college. Realizing that I wasn’t equipped to face the situation I was in, and not stopping me.”
His countenance grew dark, and he stopped. “I tried to make you go home with me, do you remember? What was I supposed to do, pick you up and throw you into the car?”
She raised her hands. “I know, I know. It wasn’t your fault. That’s what I’m saying. It was totally my choice. All of it. You did the right thing by leaving it up to me.” She folded her arms across her chest and continued to walk. He walked beside her.
“The things that happened, the choices that I made . . . they weren’t all bad. Some of them really helped me to grow, although I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone else. I think that for a long time, I saw you as my savior, and when you weren’t there anymore, I lashed out.”
“Just how did you lash out?”
She stopped and plunged her hands into her pockets, screwing up her courage. She spoke to the ground at their feet.
“I was really angry at you for leaving and going to Vietnam.” She looked him in the face. “It doesn’t make sense. You didn’t have a choice. You just weren’t there anymore. I was nineteen. I was in over my head with some things and I had no one I could trust to talk to about it. I was angry at the government. I was angry at Mom and Dad for not stopping you—I was angry at everybody. I didn’t care about Vietnam. I only wanted you to be safe again. We heard so many horrible stories, and I was afraid that you wouldn’t come back, and that somehow God would punish you for the things that I did.”
He slowly began to walk again, and she kept pace with him.
“So I decided to protest the war, force them to bring the troops home. Make a difference. Except it was never about politics, it was about frustration. All it did was get my picture in the paper. That picture ruined everything.” She briefly closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she saw it all again. “It was like a switch was thrown. Like gasoline to a flame. It made me feel like I was really accomplishing something, and people rallied around like I was some kind of celebrity.”
“And then you stopped writing to me. At first, I thought you’d been wounded or . . . worse. But Rudy told me that you knew about the picture, and I figured I’d never hear from you again. I didn’t blame you. It looked so bad and it was manipulated in a lot of ways that weren’t true. And the protests in the news got worse and more violent. They turned into bombings, and Mom and Dad just assumed I was a part of all that, and they acted like I was dead to them for a long time. I didn’t even know you were home from Nam until Rudy finally called me.”
Bobby was quiet for so long that Bebe wondered if he had moved beyond her reach. Finally, he spoke.
“We heard things were bad here. Crazy bad. When we got back to Oakland we were told to remove our uniforms and put on civilian clothes, and then told exactly what we could expect to find out there. But I just wasn’t prepared. It couldn’t be fixed. I couldn’t be fixed. None of us deserved it.” He looked up at the sky and cleared his throat. “Neither did Cynthia.”
His brow furrowed and he cleared his throat again like he was struggling for control. They walked in silence.
He kicked a small stone. “And then, Scotty joins up.”
“Yes. Scotty, who knows nothing about any of this until he gets a copy of the clipping. I wrote him a letter, trying to explain it all. How the times were different then. But I still don’t know how he feels about it.”
Bobby stopped and looked at her. She didn’t know what he was going to say, or how he felt, or whether any of it had made sense or just sounded like an excuse. She just knew that she’d had to say it. She needed the closure, one way or another. She needed for the healing to begin.
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Opening it to the billfold, he pulled out the envelope she sent to Scotty with the letter explaining about the clipping.
“Scotty sent this to me and asked me to read it. Took me about a month before I could. Angie convinced me to read it.” His features softened into a gentle smile. “She’s quite a woman. She said that she understood where you were coming from, because her ex was a Marine. You might have even bumped into her at a protest.”
He offered it to her, but she couldn’t speak and just shook her head. He folded it back up and stuck it in his wallet. He stood looking at the purpling horizon and Bebe could see a bit of the younger Bobby that she used to know.
“She sounds like a good friend to have around.”
“She’s helping me deal with some things.” He sniffed. “I sometimes blamed myself for what happened,” he said. “You know, I thought about going back for you that day. I almost turned around at Fairfield. I never told Mom and Dad. Things might have turned out different if I had. I was pretty mad at the both of us.”
“I couldn’t have gone back home, Bobby. I needed to make my own decisions. Times were changing. Like I said, you weren’t my savior. If I had, I wouldn’t have married Neil, or had Scotty and Dylan and a jo
b that I love. And I wouldn’t have Rain.”
They turned around and headed back toward the house. The sun was almost gone and the air carried the scent of wood smoke.
“I always wondered about Rain. I figured she was yours, and you were just keeping it a secret from the family.”
She chuckled. “No. Jude is her real mother, although I loved her like my own.”
He scratched his head. “I gotta tell you, I could never see her as a mother.”
“She wasn’t a very good one, but she didn’t have a very good example, either.”
They got to the end of the row and paused, turning to face each other and considering all that had gone on between them. She hoped he wouldn’t reconsider later. Over thirty-five years of anger doesn’t dissolve in one conversation.
“So, what do you think?” she asked him, feeling vulnerable and thin as tissue. “Can we call it a truce?”
He looked down on her, and a small smile softened his face. “Truce, little sis.”
Rain had gone to Lisa’s house for Christmas Eve, simply because she couldn’t come up with a plausible excuse at the time when Lisa had invited her. It turned out that it was a setup with her cousin who was divorced and had custody of his two kids. When the evening finally ended, after the twin boys knocked over a pedestal by running through the house in a frenzy and almost set fire to her carpet, Lisa apologized to her and said it would never happen again.
Rain spent Christmas Day with her mother and William, but drove home on Christmas night over the protests of William who offered to let her stay in his room. She couldn’t stay in the house any longer, and she needed to go to work the next day. It had been awkward between herself and Jude, and disappointing since they didn’t celebrate the holiday, even though William made a fabulous pork tenderloin and tried to make the dinner special. Her mother had slept most of the day, and suffered from nausea, so Rain and William ate alone. Her medications weren’t quite enough anymore to take the edge off of her pain.
Raising Rain Page 29