by Cathy Lamb
He was wearing a simple leather necklace, one silver bar in the middle.
“You don’t have to work at all if you don’t want to. Ever. But I also know you and I know you can’t stop working, so I’ll just say that I think you’ll love selling jewelry.”
“Maybe I will.” I could. It was fun. I had always loved making jewelry. And I loved running a business, too.
“You’re a talented jewelry designer.”
I took a deep, shuddering breath. “So one career ends and another begins?”
“I think so, babe.” His voice was low, and it cracked with emotion. “I almost lost you. My life would be worth nothing to me without you. My primary goal is to make sure that you’re happy and safe and healthy. Make the jewelry. Sell it if you want. I will do anything you want me to do to help.”
“I love you, Zack.”
“I love you, too, Natalie. You’re my life.”
“And you are mine.” I leaned over and kissed him again, on his mouth, the scar on his cheek, and his forehead, then rested on his chest, his heartbeat a reassuring thump beneath mine.
Accounting was me, and yet it wasn’t me anymore.
Accounting was the old me, this was the new me.
I knew I’d cry about this loss again in the coming weeks and months. I knew I’d miss it. Well, not everything. Not our obnoxious or pampered clients or the ones who said, in one way or another, that they wanted us to help them cheat the IRS, which we never did.
But I would miss the numbers. And the firm. And working with Justine.
I thought about a necklace I was working on. . . . It was going to be so pretty. I was using clear red beads....
* * *
I asked Justine to go to lunch on Monday. We were both in our proper accounting suits, but I had swirling designs on my black tights and she had turquoise bracelets up her arm. At least we maintained some semblance of non-boringness in our work attire.
She cried when I told her what I wanted to do.
“But this firm,” she said, “it’s Natalie and Justine. It’s Knight and Fox. We named ourselves after a poker game. It’s our dream. It’s what we worked for.”
“I can’t work here anymore, Justine. I can’t do the work.”
She argued, told me I could do something else at the firm. I could solely focus on getting more clients. I could be the human resources manager. I could be a figurehead and come in when I wanted. “Don’t leave me, Natalie.”
“Nice line. I’ll never leave you, but I need to leave the firm.”
She refused to accept my resignation for days.
“Okay, Natalie. I will buy you out, but I hate you for leaving me and I will make you ride first on our naked bike ride.”
“I know.”
We later had a professional, analytical discussion about the value of the firm, the future value, etc., and came up with an amount we were both happy with.
She handed me the check. We announced, together, that I was leaving. I was honest with the staff about my abilities, and how I simply couldn’t perform anymore at the level I needed to. Our employees hugged me, told me how much they would miss me. They asked if I was sure. Maybe take more time off? Work half days only? We can help you, Natalie!
No, that wouldn’t work. Justine cried in front of everyone, that baby.
Zack came by and helped me pack. He hauled out the carved metal fox my dad had made.
Leaving my own firm, Knight and Fox, was a wrenchingly sad day for me.
Until I got home and looked at all my jewelry supplies. My dad had mailed me another box. Oh, wow! Yes! Everything was perfect. I wanted to do a flower line, so he’d made me roses, tulips, and daffodils, but they were all so unique, each had a different flair. . . .
I sat down and hours passed.
* * *
When I was done working I stopped in front of my grandma’s perfume bottles on the bookshelf. I took out the stopper on the crystal bottle and smelled it. Roses. I thought I heard her laugh.
I loved her. I still missed her. You don’t stop missing the people you love, you just deal with it, that’s what I believe.
We used to ride horses together into the woods. She taught me to love nature on those rides. We used to hike along the lake. She taught me to love wild animals on those treks. We used to watch the sun go down from her back deck. She taught me to love the miracle of a sunset.
Why did I keep envisioning her pushing me?
* * *
I was wiped out the next morning and slept in. My speech was almost back to normal, my walk was almost back to normal, and thinking and getting my thoughts/actions out more quickly was almost normal again, but I still tire easily. So I lay in bed in my long, black rock star T-shirt, drank coffee, and thought about the surprising, sad conversation I’d had with my dad about my mother.
“Your mother told you that she came from a wealthy family.”
“Yes. Sounds like she grew up rich, obnoxious, and spoiled.”
My dad’s dark eyes were sad. “Your mom’s parents weren’t wealthy. They were about as poor as you could get. They lived in Idaho.”
“What?” I was totally confused, but I remembered the conversation I’d had with my mom the last time I’d seen her. She had shut down my questions about her being poor as a child as fast as she could. “She said they lived in Portland.”
“No.” He shook his head. “They had nothing. I don’t know what was wrong exactly, why they didn’t work. It sounded like her father may have had bipolar disorder. He could be productive for a while, then he’d sink into a depression so bad he couldn’t move. It trapped him. He drank too much, too. Slugged ’em down. Alcoholic. Her mother was a beast.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was mean. Mean as a snake. They were homeless. Your mom grew up squatting in different abandoned homes outside of small towns in Idaho. They didn’t have electricity, they didn’t have water. Often they’d sleep in the back of their truck. To earn money her parents put her on street corners on a plastic crate and told her to sing.”
I knew my mouth had dropped open as I tried to grasp the enormity of what he was telling me. “That’s why she’s always refused to sing, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Singing triggered her back to her days of homeless poverty, like a slingshot. She started when she was four. Her parents would leave her on that crate and come back later for the money. One time they came back and instead of singing she was leaning against a wall. She was starving and couldn’t sing another note, poor thing. And they smacked her and had her get right back up on her crate.”
“I thought she had money. An expensive home in Portland. She always talked about her clothing and all her pretty dresses when she was younger. Fancy cars, fancy vacations. She said her father was in construction, that he built businesses and apartment buildings.”
“Her father was in construction now and then, when he got his hide up to work. He would construct sheds.”
“Sheds?”
“That’s what he knew how to do when he wasn’t drunk. She told me that sometimes he’d build them a shed out of scrap lumber, and that’s where they’d live until some farmer came and kicked them off his land. Or the police would come and they’d move on in the truck.”
“She had nothing then.” I felt as if I’d been kicked in the gut by my mother’s misery.
“Nothing. She remembers being scared. Hungry. Frozen. She raised chickens one year to eat. She picked berries for money. She would wear the same coat for years. It would be too short, too tight, but she had to wear it because she had nothing else. Her shoes, same thing. Sometimes her shoes were too big, sometimes too small. She was dirty. The kids at school, when her parents settled down long enough for her to be in school, would make fun of her. They called her Dirty Girl, and Mud Face, and Lice Hair.
“She got lice one time and was sent home with lice shampoo from the nurse. She said she followed the instructions and rinsed the shampoo out in a river, but that did it
for her at that school. The kids wouldn’t sit by her at lunch, and if they accidentally touched her they would race to the bathroom sink and yell, ‘I have lice from Jocelyn!’ They called her ugly and stupid. She felt stupid. The worst was when she was called white trash. She hated being called white trash. Hated it.”
“That’s why she always told me, ‘We’re not white trash,’ with such vehemence.” I hurt for her, I did.
“Yes. Your mom won the lead role in a musical one time when she was fifteen. She had been in that school for eighteen months, the longest they had ever stayed anywhere. Her parents found an abandoned trailer in the woods. She said she finally started to make friends because she could sing and that gave her a small step up at school. Her parents yanked her out of school a week before the performance and drove her up north because her father thought there might be a job for him up there. The night of the musical they had her out on a street corner singing to make money. It was drizzly and cold, and she cried while she sang all the songs she was supposed to sing for the musical.”
“That’s pathetically sad.” I pictured my mother standing in the rain on a crate crying and singing at the same time.
“It was, Hummingbird. For once in her life she had friends, had acceptance, and had a starring role, but she couldn’t stay long enough to be on that stage. She went to another town, her father built a shed for them to live in, and she went to another school where the kids called her poor and stupid and white trash.”
“Poor Mom.” And I meant it. Poor Mom . . .
“She remembers being alone all the time as a kid and being scared. Her parents would sometimes leave for days or weeks or drop her off at a distant relative’s house or at the home of someone they just met in a bar. She often thought they would never come back.”
“They dropped her off with people they met in a bar? That’s criminal.”
“She told me once that sometimes bad things happened to her when that happened. In fact there was one time she said that she had to leave a house where she was dropped off because, and these are her words, ‘I had to defend myself.’”
“What did she do? Where did she live?”
“She hid out around the house in the woods. It was summer, she was used to helping her dad make shelters, and she made a crude one for herself and sang on street corners. When her parents came back about a week later, she ran to their truck and told her parents what happened. This may be the only protective thing they did in their lives, but her father got out his shotgun and started shooting at the man. He ran off, didn’t get hit, but she told me her dad was livid. For a while they didn’t drop her off with strangers. Then they started doing it again, but she told me they only dropped her off with women.”
“So she was repeatedly abandoned.”
“Yes.”
“Then why did she abandon me?” It still hurt. Still. “She knew how it felt.”
He shook his head. “Because she’s damaged inside, Hummingbird. Your mom had a breakdown, of sorts, after she had you. She cried a lot. She spent days in bed. Sometimes I’d catch her staring at you, sadder than all get out, and she’d whisper something like, ‘I can’t believe they did that to me. I was a child. A child. Like Natalie.’ I don’t even think she knew I heard her.
“I know they have a fancy name for it now, but I’d call it the severe blues. She had had a traumatic childhood, and I think after she had you her childhood was harder to forget. She would look at you as you grew up and remember what she’d been through when she was at your exact age. It kept hauling her back to her past. She grieved, and was furious at her parents, for their neglect and abuse. That stuff doesn’t leave you. It’s stuck in your head like a bullet. She never felt good enough. She never felt like she was equal to anyone else. She always felt like white trash.”
That was how I felt for years: Not good enough. Not equal. My own mother hadn’t even loved me enough to stay in my life.
He tilted his head. “Jocelyn wanted more than I could give her, too. More money. More status. An expensive home and cars. Most of all, expensive clothes. She never forgot being called Mud Face and Lice Hair and ugly and poor. It’s why she always dresses up. She is still running from her days of poverty, dressed in rags with shoes that didn’t fit.
“I think, too, that she had a problem with being close to anyone. Her parents, whom she should have been close to, never filled the role. She didn’t learn to trust. She didn’t learn what healthy love looked like. She didn’t know how to be in a happy marriage. Her parents fought all the time, threw things, got drunk, screamed at each other, hit each other, hit her now and then, and both were arrested for it. That does something here.” He tapped his head. “And it’s permanent.”
“So she made up being wealthy . . .”
“Because she didn’t want anyone to know she came from nothing.”
“How did you know?”
“One day we were in Grande City and an older gentleman came up to her and hugged her. He was her mother’s great uncle. He asked about her parents. You were about four then. She stuttered, she got all red, she tried to pretend she didn’t know him, then she took off with you in the stroller like the devil himself was on her heels. I stayed behind. The man was very sorry he caused her to get upset. He was upset that he upset her. I asked him to explain himself and he did, and later on I talked with Jocelyn and found out the truth.”
“Did you believe that she came from money, that she had grown up wealthy?”
He hesitated. Sighed. “Not really. There were holes the size of a tractor in her story. She talked about having money, but she didn’t have a formal education. She told me where she graduated from high school, but she’d made up the name of the high school. She never graduated. Your mom couldn’t do math at all. She hadn’t read many books. She was confused about history, couldn’t write well. I don’t say this in an unkind manner, just as a fact. Her education was not what you would see in someone who was wealthy, or even someone who had graduated from high school. And if she came from wealth and her parents died, she would have had money. She would have inherited. She said she had no siblings, but she had no money at all when I met her at the state fair. She made up some story about how her parents had been sick at the end and the illnesses used up all the money, but it didn’t ring in this old head as truth.”
“Are her parents alive?”
“I don’t know. They could be. They would be in their seventies, eighties. She left them and that was it.”
“When did she leave them?”
“Your mom was on her own, by her own choice, at sixteen.”
“Sixteen?” How scary. How lonely. How dangerous.
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
He rubbed his face. “Your mother made me promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone, especially you. She didn’t want you, her own daughter, to think of her as white trash. As she told me, ‘Uneducated, low class, and poverty stricken. I am the ugly and stupid daughter of two child-abusing drunks.’ She wanted to hide it.”
I swallowed hard. “And why are you telling me now?”
“Because, my poppy, I think that your mom needs you.”
“Needs me?”
“Yes. She loves you and needs you.”
“I think she loves and needs you.”
My dad knew it was the truth. “I wish Jocelyn the best, but inviting that woman back into my life would be like inviting a tornado in.”
Finally, we laughed.
Then he said, “I think you need her, too, on a limited basis. You need to know she loves you and, my sweets, she does. Your mother is a complicated, difficult, critical woman with a past she has tried to outrun and keep secret her whole life. She has failed as a wife and a mother. But she does love you, and maybe knowing her past will give you some peace and help you to deal with her. I don’t like that I broke my promise of secrecy. My word means something to me. Without your word, you’re nothing. But this one time, Natalie, you n
eeded me to break a promise more than I needed to keep it.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
I thought about my mom’s depressing story. Her wretched childhood. It all made sense now. Now I understood why Grandma Dixie pitied her. I wish my dad had told me sooner. I wish my mother had told me. But I understood why neither of them did. My dad because of a promise he made, my mother because in her heart she still felt like white trash.
“I love you, Dad.” I reached for his hand.
“I love you, too, my hummingbird.”
* * *
Detective Zadora called me, but this interview felt different. She had questions about Zack.
Where did you and he meet?
Fishing on the Deschutes.
Where did he grow up?
South Carolina.
Where were his parents?
Deceased.
How did they die?
Car accident.
When did they die?
When Zack was seventeen.
What did they do for a living?
Home builder and nurse.
Siblings?
Only child.
How long was he in Alaska for?
Five years.
What did he do before that?
Construction.
Where did he graduate from high school?
I don’t remember. It was in South Carolina.
“I don’t understand why you’re asking these questions, Detective.”
“We’re running a complete investigation, and we like to know everything.”
“But what does his childhood and his parents and their jobs have to do with anything?”
“We’ll get back to you, Mrs. Shelton, when we have more information.”
* * *
I told Zack that night what Detective Zadora asked me.
I swear the blood drained from his face.
“What’s wrong? What is it?”
“It’s nothing, Natalie,” he rasped out. “I’m upset about what’s happened. The hit-and-run. The Barbie, the bird . . . and when she calls and talks to you it reminds me yet again of what we’re dealing with.”