Love, Carry My Bags

by Everett, C. R.

  “He built you a great place,” Reese said with admiration. “I’m glad he took care of you.”

  “Glenn never did anything just a little bit. I never really wanted for anything material, no,” I said, my unmet needs for the non-material things apparent in my expression. Reese held me tightly in response. Mt. Baker glistened across the sound.

  * * *

  “I don’t know how I’m going to bake all those Christmas cookies for the YMCA bake sale tomorrow and get Nicole to the airport,” I said, fretting out loud, plans already made.

  Reese sorted through the cookie cutters, picking out the Christmas ones and said, “I’ll take her.” He then laid a Halloween-cat cookie cutter in the Christmas pile.

  “You will?” I asked, surprised by the offer. After a split-second’s consideration, I said, “Oh, thank you. Plus it’ll give you a chance to get to know each other better.”

  “Just do me a favor and make some Christmas cats.”

  “Christmas cats?” Sydney said, one eyebrow raised.

  “You remember, that year we made Christmas Jack-o-Lantern cookies and bat cookies, frosted them in red and green,” I said. “It was cool. Nothing wrong with Christmas cats.”

  Reese smiled, unfazed by my non-traditional sugar cookies.

  “You two are weird,” she said, leaving the room as though she might catch a disease.

  * * *

  “Grandma, why do you wear that purple suit?” Sydney asked. “You look like Barney.”

  “Who’s Barney?”

  “You know, the purple dinosaur,” Sydney explained. “We’ll just start calling you Barney.”

  Sydney and Elizabeth hugged her.

  “Grandma might not like you calling her Barney,” I said, giving Sydney a respect-your-elders look even though I thought she was teasing.

  Reese started singing, “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy . . .” I gave him a playful shove.

  “I don’t mind. Call me Barney! I am a dinosaur,” Nicole said proudly, “and I hope you become a dinosaur too.” She turned to Reese, “Shall we? My flight’s at four.” Reese picked up Nicole’s luggage, hauling it to the car through the pouring rain.

  “Well, I’m not wearing purple suits, Barney,” Sydney declared.

  “Bye Grandma,” Elizabeth said as Reese lifted Nicole, carrying her through the pooling rain and mud, saving her from getting cold and wet feet, “have a good time. Bye Reese.”

  “That was nice of Reese to carry her out to the car,” Elizabeth said after they had gone.

  “Yes it was.” It reminded me of when he had carried his own grandmother, nearly on her deathbed, up and down the stairs.

  “I hope Aunt Jillian will be glad to see her,” Elizabeth said, Grandma safely out of ear shot. We looked at each other uncertainly, shrugging our shoulders. It was the first time she’d gone back for a visit since she’d moved in with us, Jillian never inviting her, not even this time. She just up and went, spur of the moment. All decked out in her royal purple pantsuit and flaming red hat, she had said, regarding her sudden vacation, “No time like the present.”

  The girls kept me company while we baked sugar-cookie cats, pumpkins and bats, trees, candles and stars. Elizabeth baked a batch of banana bread which filled the room with a fresh-from-the-oven aroma as we frosted red Santa hats onto the cats and outlined green garland onto the bats. Sydney surgically placed chocolate sprinkles, one at a time, forming eyes on the red-and-green striped jack-o-lantern.

  “Aren’t you going a little overboard there, Sydney?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I’ve been infected,” she said, intent on her work.

  Five hours later, Reese returned. “I have a surprise for you,” I said, concealing a Santa Claws cat cookie, decked out in four frosted black boots and a red suit, blue dots for eyes.

  “I have a surprise for you too,” he said, clumsily hiding something behind his back.

  It mewed.

  A soft baby mew, which made me miss David, which then spurred a twinge of sadness inside for Glenn. A vision of David’s little furry paws attacking my feet from underneath the bathroom door came to mind, and the time he got carried away, scratching my toe and causing it to bleed.

  “You got me a kitten?” I said, delighted.

  “Someone to cuddle you when I’m gone,” Reese said, revealing a Siamese puff ball with brilliant blue eyes. “He’ll be a good mouser.”

  Christmas that year swelled as it had not since my then-married parents welcomed fledglings back to the nest at Christmastime in the years before I took my first flight. It seemed like half a lifetime ago; it nearly was half a lifetime ago. I took Reese to experience some of the many Pacific Northwest pleasures, hoping my love of the land would incline him too. We sat on the stones underneath Deception Pass Bridge at the North end of Whidbey Island. The same set of stones from which Glenn had taken several particularly smooth and striking specimens home for our own personal rock garden years before. The whine of an F-35 landing at NAS Whidbey occasionally interrupted the sound of low-breaking waves. Music to both sets of ears. We picnicked under a moss-laden shelter flanked by tranquil pine and cool, lush fern.

  “I feel like I’ve been here before,” Reese said between bites of ham sandwich.

  “Maybe because you’re so comfortable,” I suggested. Reese looked carefree, happy, peaceful.

  “I don’t know. It’s a déjà vu kind of thing, ya know?”

  I glossed over his rhetorical question, distracted by a conglomeration of slugs in the grass beside us. “Look.”

  “It’s a slug fest!” We both laughed at Reese’s corny pun. I settled deeper into my comfort zone. I felt secure enough to broach a subject that had been eating at me.

  “Tell me,” I said, while tracing a knot in the picnic table with my finger, “why did you stop writing to me after you said that you never wanted to not talk to me again?” The question worried Reese. He knew he’d been guilty of the same crime before. “You didn’t even friend me on Facebook,” I said, thinking of how I had chosen not to either.

  “I’m so sorry.” He put down the book he had been reading, giving me his full attention. “I wanted to write to you. For a while there, I wrote to you every single day, then instead of hitting send, I hit delete. It hurt too much, pretending you were just a friend, when you were so much more. I couldn’t say what my heart wanted to say—with you being Mrs. Conroy—and I knew keeping in contact was hurting you and your family too. Causing you any more pain was the last thing I wanted. Not writing seemed like the least bad option. Sometimes I wished I had never looked you up, yet other times it felt like the most worthwhile thing I had ever done.” I knew the reason and had known for years. I needed to hear him say it.

  “Why didn’t you just explain it to me then? Why didn’t you just do me the favor of writing one last time, saying it wasn’t fair to anyone and that it hurt too much to maintain a just friendship instead of leaving me hang . . . again? Hanging hurts too, you know,” I said with contained anger and disgust.

  “Maybe cold turkey wasn’t best,” he said to himself. Then he looked at me with an intentional directness. “I thought cold turkey was best. The sooner I ended what I had started, the better.”

  “Matters of the heart, of relationships—and we had a relationship as odd as it may have been—are not unilateral decisions made in a vacuum.” Pride welled up inside me. I would never have voiced such a decisive declaration in my early adulthood, not even to Reese, who had always been safe.

  “I made a poor choice. I’m sorry.” Reese was genuine. “You are not unavailable Mrs. Conroy anymore, so that is not an issue. I can now say what is and has been in my heart, no holding back.” He touched my face with his fingertips. “I love you. I love you. I love you. You mean the world to me.” Reese held my hands across the table. “It only took me ten years to figure out that I should not have blocked you out of my problems at the first. I haven’t forgotten that either. I won’t ever leave you hanging again.�
� My nagging concern melted away with his words. Demonstrated wisdom on Reese’s part would melt the hint of my concern that remained frozen.

  * * *

  “You two look like you’ve had a good time,” Sydney said to me while Reese was away, filling the car with gas.

  “Yeah, is it love?” Elizabeth asked, raising her eyebrows up and down.

  “I want to be in love,” said Sydney with a naïve romantic twinkle in her eye, longing in her voice.

  “Love isn’t always going to be foo-foo drinks garnished with mini umbrellas and skewered fruit,” I said, hoping to remove any rose tinting from their vision. “Sometimes it’s hot cocoa when you come in from the snow, nothing fancy, but makes you warm inside. That’s how it should be.”

  “Were you and dad that way?” Elizabeth asked.

  I took my time answering, weighing the consequences of an honest answer versus a half-truth. “There were a few foo-foo drinks at the start . . . then years of nothing. I was parched.” In a whisper I said, “Toward the end, the cocoa arrived.” One tear dripped down my cheek.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” Sydney sniffed back bittersweet tears.

  I smiled a contented smile, then reached to hold both of their hands. With knowing, inner peace, I said, “Things happen for a reason.” About the time of my twentieth high school reunion, high school seemed like yesterday, now it seemed like quite a while ago. Wistful thoughts swept through my mind as I gazed through the back door watching snowflakes the size of hummingbirds silently crash down.

  I knew the reasons.

  * * *

  We packed a lot into those three weeks. Reese hadn’t gone anywhere for years, so he had plenty of vacation saved up. Sydney and Elizabeth chaperoned when their social schedules permitted, joining us on Seattle’s Underground Tour, strolling Pike’s Place Market and the nearby piers on the Seattle waterfront, sipping Starbucks against an Olympic Mountain sunset.

  “What do you want for Christmas?” I asked Reese while walking the waterfront.

  “You don’t need to get me anything for Christmas. I just want to be with you,” he answered. The girls gave each other eye-popping looks behind his back, stifling amazed and delighted giggles. Reese cracked some jokes, including ones about the prolific land-whale population, as a family of four carnival goers passed, stuffing their faces with funnel cakes.

  “He should be a late-night talk-show host,” Elizabeth whispered to Sydney.

  We stopped to watch a bull pigeon strut his stuff on the pier. Reese stepped into the latte line while the three of us saved a table.

  “When are you going to marry him, Mom?” Sydney said. “He’s so funny. He nearly had me peeing my pants.”

  “I like him.” Elizabeth chimed in. “You seem so happy together, like two peas in a pod.” Like two peas in a pod. The same phrase my friends had used in high school, before we had squandered our chance for a whole life together. Our years apart vanished, yet remained gratifyingly filled in with the lives of Sydney, Elizabeth, and the wide range of experiences with Glenn—the better and the worse. The girls seemed so excited, like it was a no brainer to tie the knot.

  “For one, he hasn’t asked,” I said.

  “Oh, come on!” Sydney said. “It’s so oozing out of every pore how much he loves you. He looks like a poor kid who really is going to get what he wants for Christmas this year.”

  “Getting married is taking a leap of faith. I’m not ready to take the leap again. It’s freaking scary. When you’re young, you don’t even know how scary it is. You don’t know what you don’t know. No matter how much you think you know a person there are always surprises, like how’s he going to act when kids come along. Will he put their needs first, or his own?”

  “You’re too old for more kids,” Sydney said, horrified.

  “That was just an example. One which you two should pay attention to, closely. How do I know how he’s going to react if, say, I become incapacitated and need to be taken care of?” The words he had written in his last letter, before the most recent fourteen-year hiatus of non-communication, popped into my head . . . if you ever need me for anything, I’ll be there.

  “You’ll know how he’ll react because he doesn’t have a selfish bone in his body,” said Elizabeth.

  She had a good point, but I remained happy with the state of almost married.

  “What if he lost his job? How do I know he’d go get another one? What if he has bad credit? There’s no way you really ever know anyone because you can’t imagine every situation that may occur. Hell, I don’t even know how I’d react in every situation that could possibly happen to me.”

  “You’d deal with it, Mom. Isn’t that what you always told us, ‘Just deal with it’?” I ignored my own advice Sydney gently threw back in my face.

  “How do I know that when the going gets tough, he won’t get going again?” On one level, I felt like this whole discussion with my daughters was premature, yet, on another level, I knew it wasn’t.

  “Because he loves you,” Elizabeth said, as if the answer was so obvious and simple an untrained monkey would get it.

  “He loved me before. Yes, he loves me. He loves me so much that he wants to protect me from everything, and his idea of protecting me from his problems is to leave, not realizing that leaving breaks my heart more than any problem could.”

  “Mom, he’s fifty-two years old. I’m sure he’s learned a thing or two by now. Have faith in him.” Sydney’s last words were slow and succinct bits drilled into my thick skull.

  “How did you get so wise beyond your years?” I asked as Reese returned, brown cardboard beverage carrier filled to capacity.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Reese asked. He had to because we all fell to a quick silence the moment he rejoined us.

  “Nothing. Just girl talk,” I said.

  “We were just noticing that Mom’s left hand was very bare looking and thought you might be able to rectify that situation.” Sydney, at twenty-one, still hadn’t outgrown her childlike bluntness. I blushed a shade cooler than my high school graduation party glow.

  “I intend to.”

  “Told ya so.” Elizabeth playfully sassed me.

  CHAPTER 39

  The Grandfather I Never Knew

  I knew him not, but what I was told

  About his life and times of old.

  He was a good man, yes he was

  He loved his children just because.

  But then the time, the time did come

  For him to see the Blessed One.

  I knew him not, but what I was told,

  I am sure, God rests his soul.

  —Elizabeth Conroy

  I took Reese to Friday Harbor, San Juan Island on December 23rd. Those not in the know think an island called San Juan must be in the Caribbean or near Mexico. They never guess it’s spitting distance from Canada’s west coast. We drove across Deception Pass Bridge, peering down on the beach area below where we had picnicked days before, turbulent water rushing underneath. The ferry from Anacortes on Fildago Island whisked us through the San Juans, a trip I had not made since Glenn passed.

  “The last time I was here, I buried Glenn,” I said while the forest of Lopez Island faded behind us in the fog.

  “You came to terms with everything?” Reese said, gentleness in his voice, searching for clarity. “You got past the hard times?”

  “No.” I laughed. “I mean sort of, but it wasn’t that. Kurt brought Sydney, Elizabeth, Nicole, and me out here on his boat and we sprinkled Glenn’s ashes all through the islands. We left his head in Friday Harbor.”

  The expression on Reese’s face told me I was totally off, but that was okay with him.

  “Just kidding, but we did leave a little more in Friday Harbor since that’s what he wanted. We both felt at home here.”

  “I can see why.” A form briefly broke the water as Reese spoke, starting concentric rings from its splash point, and then the ferry-permeated silence resumed.


  “Now, this is where he rests—in the fish, in the water, in the trees. Kind of a fitting end.” I stared into the water, remembering the trip and how the girls felt peace, sprinkling the ashes like new seeds. “Daddy’s not cooped up anymore,” Elizabeth had said as the last dust fell from the urn. Finally, Glenn could be spread thin and into everything at once and me be okay with it. The thought had put tears in my eyes. Sydney had thought I was crying over the loss, maybe I was.

  “I’m glad you told me that. I wouldn’t mind the same thing.”

  “Same what?”

  “Having my ashes spread through Puget Sound when I die. Leave my head in Deception Pass.” We smiled at each other, chuckling.

  We spent a good share of the day touring the varied terrain of San Juan Island. Llamas grazed on a hobby farm in the flat, marshy, central region. We strolled the marina at Roche Harbor on the west side of the island, then drove a winding forest road, cliffside, which made you feel at the edge of the earth. Ocean waves crashed underneath in a place heard, but not seen. Our day ended milling about American Camp National Historical Park, the site of the last buildup against the British in the dispute over the U.S.-Canadian border. We shared the wonder Captain Pickett must have felt on the driftwood-shrouded beach, peering through the fog-obscured distance, waves lapping at our feet.

  * * *

  “What was your favorite part?” Elizabeth asked Reese upon our return home. She stood near the fireplace she had stoked with the flip of a switch, the days of wood-burning fireplaces long gone—societal air-pollution concerns, rampant.

  “Spending time with your mother.”

  “No, really, what did you like most?”

  “If I have to narrow it down, which is extremely hard to do, I’d have to say seeing a fish rise while ferrying through the islands . . . almost magical, the way it disturbs the serene. You know stuff is down there, but where? It’s a surprise. Why do you ask?”

  “I was testing you. You passed,” she said.

  “I got the right answer?”

  “There were several right answers. One wrong answer.”

  “What was the wrong answer?” I asked.