"It does seem strange," said Frances. Her husband, George, shook his head.
"It only gets worse from here on out, kiddo," he told her.
"At least she wasn't sick for months or years," Rosemary said. "She'd have hated that." Around the table, heads nodded.
"That was a nice tribute you gave her," Jean said to Charles. "I think she'd have liked it."
"She'd have liked it," said Frances.
"Thank you," said Charles. He turned to Rowena. "Did you know her?" he asked.
"Me?" asked Rowena, surprised. "No."
"It must have been pretty tedious for you, then."
"No," said Rowena. She looked down at the table. "Not really."
"Not really?"
She raised her eyes. He was looking at her kindly. And next to him was Shirley, who must have noticed Rowena's tears, even though she had politely not mentioned them. And Sammy's hand now lightly on her arm. Rowena took a breath.
"There were some things that people said that reminded me of my great-aunt, who's . . . not all that well. And . . . I guess I'm not really terribly prepared."
"One never is," Charles said. "I don't think it's really possible." He was still watching her, seriously but with sympathy. She looked back down at her food, trying to stay calm this time and waiting for someone to change the subject.
"I would think," said Shirley hesitantly, "that if the person is sick or something, it would be less of a shock than losing somebody who seemed healthy."
"If you expect somebody to visit," Charles said, "aren't you still startled when the doorbell rings?"
"It's a little different, Shirley," said Frances, "at first. But after that your grief has more to do with what that person meant to you than with how long you thought she'd live."
Jean poked her fork thoughtfully into her macaroni and cheese. "I don't think you can really prepare for anything in life," she said.
"No," said Charles. "All we can do is enjoy each other while we can." And he included Rowena in his glance.
"I told you everyone would like you," Sammy said, in the car.
"I wasn't really afraid they wouldn't like me," Rowena told him.
"Do you agree now that you belong with the rest of us?"
She smiled at him. "I guess I have to."
"I'm sorry the service upset you, though, dear," said Rosemary. "If I'd known--"
"I didn't know," Rowena said. "I just--I started thinking about my Aunt Glad--she's the same age May was and . . ." Rosemary knew about Aunt Glad.
"I'm sorry," Rosemary said.
"It's more my fault than yours, Mom," Sammy said.
"Stop apologizing," Rowena said, and she suddenly felt she was going to cry again--and to laugh at the same time. "If you can turn into May," she told Rosemary, "maybe I could turn into Aunt Glad. She could never stand having people apologize for this kind of thing, either."
"I think you're a lot like her already," Sammy said; and Rowena felt she was going to cry.
"I suppose," Rosemary said, behind her, "that's one way to keep somebody alive."
"I suppose," Rowena said. She picked her purse off the floor.
She would have Sammy take her to Aunt Glad; she would bring her aunt red gladiolus this time, vivid and extravagantly alive. She watched the buildings go by.
Sammy pulled into Rosemary's driveway, and Rosemary invited them in. "I won't keep you long," she said, looking at Rowena. "I expect you have somewhere to go."
"Am I that transparent?" Rowena asked. Rosemary laughed and patted her arm.
"Wait right here," she said. And when she returned she gave Rowena a paper bag.
"Does your aunt like banana bread?" she asked. "I found myself with too many bananas last night, and . . . well, you and your aunt are welcome to them."
"Oh, Rosemary." Rowena stepped forward and hugged her.
"I put a plastic knife in and some little paper plates so you can share it, if you like," Rosemary said. "And some napkins . . ."
"Thank you," Rowena said.
"You're welcome." Rosemary looked at her. "Thank you for joining us today."
Rowena waved until Rosemary was out of sight. "So," she asked Sammy, "when do I get to see everybody again?"
Sammy turned off his mother's street. "As I said, we don't get together very often," he told her.
Rowena looked out the window. Sammy said casually, "Aunt Frances has invited us over for dinner weekend after next. Jean'll be there."
"Oh, Sammy!"
He pulled up to a stoplight, took her hand and kissed it. "What did I tell you?" he asked.
Rowena leaned up against him. "Do you think Aunt May and Aunt Glad would have liked each other?" she asked, a bit wistfully.
"I think so." Sammy eased the car forward, and Rowena straightened up again.
"I think so, too," Rowena said. She looked through the windshield, as far as she could see, to where everything converged. "I think they would have," she said again.
Rowena Writes A Letter
Fiction by S. D. Youngren
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rowena set the point of her pen carefully onto the paper. "Dear Grandma," she wrote. "I hope this finds you well." She paused; she always felt awkward using such standard phrases, but she didn't know what else to say. "I'm doing fine here." She paused again, glancing over at the four or five photographs stacked neatly beside her letter; in the top one, taken by Sammy, she stood smiling in her living room, holding up Linus for the camera. Linus had had a bath for the occasion, though he'd managed to get dirty again, as always, as soon as she took him for a walk.
She started a new paragraph. "I'm enclosing some pictures I think you might like. I don't think you've met my dog, Linus. He--"
At this point the phone rang. Rowena set her pen down, pushed back her chair, and managed to answer before the machine picked up. "Hello?"
"Your sister--I--terrible!"
"Mom? What's wrong?" It could be anything; anything at all. The only thing Rowena could be reasonably sure of was that it would take a long time to sort out.
"In this family!" her mother said. Rowena relaxed the dealing-with-disaster portion of her mind and shifted into dealing-with-Mother.
"What did she do this time?"
"Your sister! Naked in public! Right there in her apartment!"
"Naked? She told me--"
"You knew about it? And you didn't even stop her?"
"Stop Maralynne? How? Anyway, from what she said it wasn't that bad."
"Not that bad! She had this--lace thing--my daughter!"
Rowena opened her mouth but her mother plunged on. "At least she's supposed to be my daughter. I always suspected the babies had been switched in the hospital. Those doctors--"
"You mean, every time she does something you don't like you want to believe it's not your fault. Mother, in the first place this doesn't sound so bad. In the second place--"
"This is a decent family. Nobody--"
"How'd you find out about this, anyway?"
"Your Aunt Yvette told me. She said Bernie--"
"I should have known. I should have known. Mother, if anybody in the family is depraved, it's Uncle Bernie. I would think you'd know that."
"He was using his computer and these pictures of Maralynne just popped on his screen."
"Mother, they did not pop on his screen. He went looking for them. That's how it works."
"Yvette said she walked into the room and there was Bernie, and this awful picture, and Bernie told her he was just trying to find the population of Brazil and--"
"It amazes me," Rowena said. "It just amazes me that after all these years either one of you would listen to Uncle Bernie."
"You keep Bernie out of this! Listen, talk to your sister."
"Me?" Rowena looked over at her pen, sitting on the table with its cap off. "What makes you think she'd listen to me? Anyway--"
"I should have known," her mother sai
d. "Go on. Think only of yourself. Abandon your sister in her hour of need."
"Mother. It's none of my business. None. Not even a little bit. Anyway, I already have talked to her. It did just as much good as it usually does."
"So you want me to do it?"
"No. I want you to--" But her mother hung up. Rowena looked a moment at the phone, both halves of it, and then put the receiver back where it belonged. She looked at the phone once more, and then got up and went back to her letter.
"I don't think you've met my dog, Linus," she read. "He--" Rowena stared at the paper, and then off into the distance. What had she been planning to say? She picked up her pen and turned it about in her fingers.
"He came from the animal shelter," she ended up writing. "Did I tell you about that? My--"
The phone rang. Rowena, with a feeling of dread, went to answer it.
"Hello?"
"You fink!" This was Maralynne. "You fink! How could you?"
"Maralynne, I--"
"How could you? I thought I could trust you. I thought I could tell you--"
"Maralynne--"
"And you went and finked!"
"Maralynne, I did no such thing. She found out from Uncle Bernie."
"Uncle Bernie? That pervert?"
"That pervert went on your Web site and Aunt Yvette caught him at it and told Mom and Mom called me and I tried to tell her it was none of--"
"Uncle Bernie saw me? Ewwwwwww."
"Well, that's what I thought. But looking back, I don't know that we should be surprised."
"It's not for Uncle Bernie."
"Maralynne, when you make something public . . ."
"What did he see? What picture?"
"Well, the one Aunt Yvette saw involved some kind of `lace thing.'"
"What? A teddy? My bustier?"
"I don't know. I was talking to Mom."
"Great. Just great."
"Well, at least you had something on," Rowena said. "Um, at least that time."
Maralynne was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Stupid Uncle Bernie, that pervert."
"Well," said Rowena, "if Mom calls back, I'll tell her--"
"Don't tell her anything!" said Maralynne, and hung up.
Rowena hung up too. Then she went back to her letter.
"He came from the animal shelter," she read. "Did I tell you that? My--" Rowena sat and stared at the page. Then she stared into space. Eventually she picked up her pen and wrote, "boyfriend Sammy took me to the shelter and I couldn't resist him." She raised her pen and stared at what she'd written. Couldn't resist whom? Her grandmother, she was sure, would read it the way she'd meant it; that Rowena couldn't resist taking Linus home. On the other hand . . . She went and got a fresh sheet and copied out what she'd written, up to that last sentence. In its place she wrote, "He was so friendly I just couldn't leave him there." And then she sat again, pen raised, for a second or two until the phone rang.
Rowena trudged over to it. "Hello?"
"Rowena, that sister of yours is impossible!"
"Mother, she's--"
"She's blaming everything on your poor Uncle Bernie. `How did Uncle Bernie know about it?' She called him a--well, I can't say it, but it was--it was a `p' word."
"Mother, listen."
"She even said you called him that! I told her you would never use that kind of language, at least not on your relatives, and--"
"Mother. Please." Rowena knew she was about to take a chance, but she couldn't stand this. "If the word you're referring to is `pervert,' it's not a--"
"Rowena!"
"Mother, he could not have known about Maralynne's Web site if he hadn't been looking for things like that. Do you understand me? If Maralynne hadn't mentioned the population of Brazil on her site, which I doubt she did, and by the way I don't for a minute believe that that was what Uncle Bernie was actually looking for, then Uncle Bernie's computer couldn't have found her site on a search for--"
"Are you calling your Uncle Bernie a liar?"
"Mother, have you taken leave of your senses? Didn't you used to tell me he--"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Rowena took a deep breath, and let it out. "Of course you don't. And--"
"What do you know about it, anyway?"
"Well, I've--"
"For that matter," her mother said darkly, "what does Maralynne know about it?"
"What?"
"Who told Maralynne she could do this sort of thing?"
"She's over 21, Mom."
"That's not what I mean. Who's helping her?"
"Well, Chester."
"Chester!" her mother yelled. "What does Chester know about it?"
"He's a professional."
"He's a WHAT!"
Rowena shut her eyes, cringing. "It's a computer thing," she said. "He's a professional computer guy; he knows all about computers. He knows about Web sites. Clean ones," she added.
"So it's his fault!"
"Mother, no." But once again, her mother had hung up. Rowena regarded the phone, sitting there innocently. She considered leaving it off the hook, or at least letting the machine answer for her, but in the end she decided not to prolong the inevitable. She hung up, found Linus, scratched his ears, and then went back to her letter.
"He was so friendly I just couldn't leave him there," she read. She sighed. She picked up her pen, wiggled it a bit in the air, and wrote, "There are also some pictures of me with my boyfriend, Sammy. You remember Sammy? I thought you might like some pictures of us together. They--"
And again the telephone. Rowena resisted the urge to say "What is it, Maralynne?" instead of "Hello."
"Why are you trying to break us up?"
"Maralynne, I--"
"Telling Mom all these horrible things about Chester--that he's a pornographer and--and a bad influence on me and--and I don't know what."
"I didn't say anything of the kind! You know how Mom is. She wanted to know how you knew how to set up a Web site and I told her Chester knew all about computers and--"
"So you're saying I'm stupid and couldn't do it by myself?"
"Could you?"
There was a pause. "No," Maralynne said, "but I'm not stupid."
"I didn't say you were," Rowena said, silently adding, "this time."
"Chester just did the real technical stuff. And gave me the computer stuff. And told me about cam sites. And that having one might help my Career. That's all."
"I believe you," Rowena said.
"So why'd you tell Mom he's a pornographer?"
"I didn't!"
"You're trying to split us up," Maralynne said. "Why?"
"I'm not. I like Chester."
"You do?"
"Yes."
"You're trying to steal him from me?"
"No, I am not! I don't want him and I'm not trying--"
"You just said you like him!"
"I like him for your boyfriend. I think he's better for you than any of your other boyfriends were. I--"
But Maralynne had apparently not heard past the first part of this. "You want him because he's my boyfriend? That is so mean!"
"Maralynne--"
"I'm never going to speak to you again!" This time she slammed the phone down.
Rowena hunted for Linus, found him, and picked him up. She carried him back to the table and set him down in her lap. One thing at a time, she told herself. She felt she couldn't finish the letter unless she had something to distract her from all those phone calls, and she felt that finishing the letter would make it somehow easier to cope. She looked at what she'd written.
"I thought you might like some pictures of us together. They--"
They what? Rowena thought. She ruffled the fur under Linus' chin. And then she remembered. "They were taken by my friend Terese. I don't think you've met Terese"--actually Rowena was sure that she had not--"but she's funny and she makes us--"
S.D. Youngren - Rowena 5 - Rowena Moves Closer.txt Page 10