by Amy Sorrells
“Santa Fe? So far? You don’t know a soul out there. And when will you come back? It’s not like you can just come home whenever you feel like it for a weekend.”
“Mom.” Nel grasped her mother’s hands. “I can’t heal here” was all she’d said, unable to put into words her shame of losing the baby, the shame of ever getting pregnant in the first place, and especially the shame of losing her chance to ever have children of her own again because of it. She pushed her chair away from the table, pausing to look out at the lake, gray clouds hovering low above the water, choppy and dotted with whitecaps. “I have to go finish packing.”
“If I can’t stop you, let me help you, at least,” Catherine had offered.
“Okay.” Nel wrapped her arms around her mother, the one to whom she’d confessed most of her secrets—her first kiss, her first breakup—although she’d spared Mama the news of her first sexual encounter with the neighbor boy, Walter Prescott, a triple-varsity-lettered, hairy kid who lived down the street. And other than her best friend, Lori, she’d told her mom before anyone else about the unexpected pregnancy with Tom. Nel knew she and Catherine shared a unique mother-daughter relationship and that many would call her crazy to leave—maybe she was. But she was determined to find a place where she could start new.
They wiped their tears, and Catherine had called her tennis partner to cancel their match. Upstairs, Nel explained to Catherine more about the artist colonies and what she hoped to do in Santa Fe, which was to apprentice with someone and then start selling her own jewelry designs. She told her mother about her love for the flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe; the landscapes of Peter Hurd; the oils of Oscar Berninghaus; and the cowboys, Indians, and cavalry of Frederic Remington. How surely breathing the same air and walking the same paths of such great artists would inspire her art to new levels unattainable—lost, even—if she stayed in the tiny tourist town of South Haven.
“Those aren’t jewelry artists,” Catherine had pointed out, tugging a large, sparkling amethyst back and forth along the silver chain around her neck. Jakob had faceted and set the brilliant pale-purple stone for her most recent birthday.
Nel had grinned a little, trying to lighten the mood. “I know, but there are so many kinds of artists out there—all kinds. Art feeds art. I’ll find my way.” She folded a corduroy blazer and added it to the contents of the suitcase, which was almost full. “Maybe God’s in the desert. He was there with Moses. Maybe He’ll be there. In the sunrise and the sunset.”
“He’s here, too, you know.”
She looked at her mother apologetically, Catherine’s pointed response reminding Nel to avoid the topic of faith, about the only topic in their relationship that caused any major disagreements between them. It wasn’t that Nel didn’t believe—she did. It wasn’t that she hadn’t accepted Christ as her Savior—she had, the first time as a small girl in white tights and a pale-peach, lace Easter dress. Kneeling on a dusty tile floor before Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ in a Sunday school room at the Presbyterian church her parents attended, she’d asked the gentle-eyed man in the frame to come into her heart. His skin, pale and smooth like velvet, and His golden hair, edged with supernatural light, were forever etched into her memory.
The second time, she’d thought of the serene man in the painting and asked Him to please come into her heart again. She was sure Jesus had left her after she got caught making out with Brad Stanislawski under the bleachers at the high school football stadium. The dean of students, Mrs. Edwards, spent an entire hour lecturing her about the dangers and abomination of teenage sex, then called Jakob and Catherine into the office and lectured her some more.
The third time Nel had asked Jesus into her heart was while sitting around a bonfire at Young Life Frontier Ranch camp in the summer of 1969. At the time, Jesus looked more like one of the camp counselors she had a crush on than Warner Sallman’s portrait. Over and over and over again, she’d asked Jesus into her heart, though she supposed she knew she only had to accept Him once. But mistakes and regrets and certainty followed by the fumbling darkness of uncertainty had caused her to come to God again, begging for pardon, for acceptance, for some kind of sign or indication that what she was asking of Him—or surrendering to Him—was real.
No, the conflicts between Nel, her mom, and religion arose because Nel hadn’t been as outwardly devout or involved with faith as Catherine had hoped. Nel knew it was difficult enough for her mom that Jakob didn’t say or do much of anything where church was concerned. If Nel attended, it had been because of Catherine getting her there. Sometimes Jakob joined them, sometimes he didn’t. And if pressed, he’d often say, “My faith is personal. I do it in my own way.”
As she stuffed the rest of her favorite possessions into a suitcase alongside her mother, she supposed she was more like Jakob than Catherine in regard to her faith. Words from verses swam through her mind out of order, no longer strung together on plastic bracelets from Vacation Bible School or underlined with fluorescent highlighter in The Way, the old Bible her Young Life leader had given her. Like she’d told Catherine, maybe she’d find more of God and find more meaning to her faith in the desert, surrounded by mountains and open sky.
Nel set her last suitcase on the floor of the foyer. The old, flower-power design had seen her through many junior high and high school slumber parties. She and her mother embraced, and in the end it was Nel’s arms that slackened first, Nel’s legs that stepped toward the threshold.
Catherine had reached out and straightened Nel’s glasses, then patted her cheeks.
“Tell Dad I’ll be back.”
“He’ll be upset you didn’t say good-bye in person.”
“I won’t be able to leave if I do.”
Catherine held the end of one of her tennis-sweater sleeves to her trembling mouth and leaned against the front door as if trying to steady herself as she watched Nel stuff the suitcase in the car.
And so, without saying good-bye to Jakob, Nel drove south along the lake that chilly spring day, with the top of her red VW Beetle down and the heat on full blast. She drove past blueberry fields, some of them smoking and blackened from controlled burns that would help them produce bigger yields. Miles of road later, as she approached the Indiana border, she began to sing along with the radio to “I Will Follow Him” by Little Peggy March. Then she pushed an eight-track tape into the console and sang every Peter, Paul, and Mary song ever made. Gusts of wind beat her long black hair against her face. Part of her wished she could go back to days when the lake house had seemed like a mansion, when warm summer winds had caressed her arms like a cashmere sweater, and homemade sundresses Mama made out of seersucker had hung just above her knees, when she hadn’t minded the tickle of grass in her ears as she lay flat, limbs spread wide in the thick of the yard, and stared at clouds floating past. Happiness had lingered in those days before shame had swallowed her up.
CHAPTER 6
Billy Esposito tried, still, to make small talk as they rattled their way through first a storm door and then the sticky side door of Jakob’s house, his voice too loud against the hushed hollowness inside.
The kid must hate silence, Jakob thought as a pang of uneasiness filled him.
Catherine would know what to say to Nel.
He almost turned his head to look for a reassuring phantom of his wife, the pain of her absence jolting him again. This must be what an amputee feels. Jakob recalled stories he’d heard from veteran friends, then later, friends who’d lost limbs due to diabetes, who described how they could still feel a foot or a leg, a hand or an arm even after it had been severed. That the nonexistent appendage itched and burned and ached as if it were still there. Worse, sometimes, than if it were still there. After all, an itch on something that didn’t exist couldn’t be scratched.
He’d been beyond lucky to marry Catherine, and his thoughts drifted to her and their earlier years together. Had there not been a
war going on, and most of the respectable men her age fighting in the Pacific or on some godforsaken front in Europe, Jakob knew he and Catherine would never have had a chance. In fact, Catherine had been engaged before, but her fiancé, the son of a Chicago hotel tycoon, had died a hero on a navy destroyer lost in the Battle of Guadalcanal.
“November 13, 1942. Days before he would’ve been on leave … for the holidays,” Catherine had explained about her fiancé’s demise. A tear had rolled down her face and landed on her wrist, next to her triple-stranded pearl bracelet. She and Jakob sat on a scrolled, mahogany-trimmed, velvet settee in the lobby of the Palmer House hotel in Chicago. It was the weekend before Christmas Eve 1943, and the two of them were at a party, complete with Santa, who had arrived and begun giving presents to all the children in attendance. She was there because her father, chairman of the board of a steel company, was hosting the event. Jakob was there because Mr. Grünfelder, the jeweler he and his brother Peter had worked for, had invited him knowing he was alone, as he had been since Mrs. Stewart died from influenza in 1935, and Mr. Stewart died in 1941 from what appeared to have been a heart attack. Jakob had agreed to come to the party out of respect more than loneliness.
The lights of the Christmas party, the strolling strings, the ballroom pounding with the newest sounds of Big Band and jazz, the corks popping and the ice tinkling against the sides of long-stemmed glasses had overwhelmed him. Preferring to keep to himself, he’d been warming one side of the settee for some time when Catherine, breathless from dancing and dressed in a silver, floor-length, single-sleeved sheath, plopped down next to him, at first barely seeming to notice he was there. Her dark-brown hair, pulled up with a glinting, jeweled hairpin into a smooth chignon, gleamed. He had tried not to let his eyes linger on her bare left shoulder, which reminded him of marble; it was, he thought, so exquisitely statuesque.
She spoke, and he listened, as her dance-floor giddiness fell away to slower, more serious conversation. Perhaps the rum caused Catherine to lean toward him, to find comfort in the gray edges of his sideburns and his middle-aged shoulders, broad from lifting presses and running machines at the Brake-All factory every day. Or perhaps it was a subliminal aura of neediness he gave off unintentionally, his singleness exposed in a crowd of couples, that evoked within her a sympathy, initially, before striking an eventual mutual flame of physical attraction that had them both reeling, drunk from their infatuation with each other by Valentine’s Day, and married by June.
She had terrified him at first. Catherine, her lithe frame, the way her hips swayed when she walked, teasing him like a puppy to follow her down Michigan Avenue as they’d gone Christmas shopping together the next day, the bottom edge of her wool gabardine dress flipping to and fro, skimming along the rounded edges of her perfect—so perfect—calves. Until Catherine, he’d never noticed the thinness of a woman’s fingers, the delicate way they lifted a champagne glass, or a cup of coffee, for that matter, and then the way their soft, cool ends pressed against the nape of his neck as he, trembling, had pressed his lips against hers for the first time. Loving Catherine had shaped him. Broken him, yes, but in ways that helped him live again. She had become, in fact, the religion he had lost long ago.
“Eleanor?”
Jakob’s attention returned to Billy, who’d been calling and checking all the rooms for Nel. Jakob saw her first, chin in her hands, elbows resting on the edge of the deck railing. He nodded toward the deck. “There she is.”
Billy followed Jakob’s gaze to where Nel stood.
“I’ll take it from here, son. Thank you for your help today.” Jakob reached out to shake Billy’s hand, and Billy grabbed him by the elbow as Jakob lurched toward him on his increasingly bad hip.
“Okay, Mr. Stewart. See you tomorrow.”
Jakob patted him on the shoulder as he moved past in a heavy hobble. He tugged on the back door that stuck a little before opening to the deck, then the yard, then the sharp drop-off to the lake, dappled at that hour with diamonds of afternoon sunlight. He hadn’t intended to startle his daughter, but the sudden release of the decrepit door made her jump as she turned to him. She had aged beautifully like her mother. The resemblance caught his breath.
“Hi, Dad.”
He watched the wind blow her hair around her face, how she brushed it away from her small nose—Catherine’s nose—and her brown eyes.
“Eleanor.” He coughed slightly, then swallowed against the dryness of his throat. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks.” She leaned back against the railing and pushed her glasses up on her nose.
Jakob noticed her face was wet with tears.
“So,” she said with a sniff. “What are we gonna do now?”
CHAPTER 7
Nel and Jakob embraced. As Nel put her arms around her father, the broad shoulders and most of his height remained as she remembered, but the weightiness, the sturdiness of what were once robust muscles felt doughy and lank, even though it’d been only two Christmases ago that she’d seen him. She backed away, keeping a hand on his upper arm.
“How are you, Dad?”
The diminishment of his frame caught her off guard. His eyes, hazel, rheumy, and droopy, like a surprised basset hound, softened before he looked away from her toward the lake.
“I’m okay.” He sighed and shook his head, his gaze settling on his loafers. “I didn’t think … I thought she’d always be here.”
“Let’s get out of this wind,” Nel suggested, reaching for the door. She held it open and frowned as she watched him totter in. He favored his left hip, and Nel recalled how her mother had said something recently about how he needed to have the right one replaced, but that no surgeon would operate on him because of his advanced age. He’d had the left hip done when he was eighty-six, and she’d stayed with them for a nearly a month then. He’d had both knees done when he was younger, shortly after she’d left for Santa Fe. He looked every bit of ninety-four as Nel watched him lean into the aluminum cane he must’ve found at a fishing show, if she’d had to guess. Where else could someone find a cane with digital pictures of walleye swimming up and down the shaft?
“Three o’clock already.” Jakob raised his eyebrows, long untended and bushy, to glance at the cuckoo clock squawking on top of the mantle. He let his body fall heavily into one of the paired wingback chairs closest to him.
“How did things go at the funeral home? What can I do—”
“It’s taken care of,” he interrupted. “All planned. She wrote it all out, had it taped to the inside front cover of her Bible.”
He’d told Nel this before on the phone, but she didn’t want to make him feel bad by reminding him. She wondered if forgetfulness like this was what Mattie had been referring to. She decided to dismiss it, considering much worse stories she’d heard about people with dementia.
“Are there friends I can call? Neighbors? People who might not read the paper?”
“No, no one.”
“Mattie said she’ll bring us dinner around five.”
“I’ll never starve if she has anything to do with it.”
Nel was glad to see him chuckle at that. “Mattie hasn’t changed much.”
“No, she hasn’t. Same good girl she’s always been.”
Now that Jakob was home, she could at least try to relax and settle in. “You know, I probably ought to call Sam,” she said reluctantly.
“Sam? Have you married that poor guy yet?”
Nel laughed and kissed Jakob on the top of his head. “Not yet, Dad.”
She used the phone upstairs in her old bedroom, and when Sam didn’t answer, she left a message to tell him she’d arrived safely. Then she sat on top of her old bedspread and noticed a faint smell of fabric softener on the faded-yellow Raggedy Ann pillowcase. She was sure Catherine had washed them regularly, even though they were never used, except for when she was in town. The way her mo
m took great care to remake the bed exactly as she had when Nel was growing up made her smile. She pulled a red-and-blue afghan over her shoulders and watched the tree limbs outside her window move against the wind, and she drifted off to the distant sound of a woodpecker pelting the side of a tree and the chatter of chickadees and nuthatches.
The doorbell startled her awake, and after reorienting herself to where she was, she ran downstairs to answer the door. “Don’t worry, Dad. Don’t get up. I’ll get it.”
“I made you beef brisket.” Mattie gleamed as she walked through the front door and headed toward the kitchen. “Been cooking in the Crock-Pot all day, so it’ll fall apart just like you like.”
After setting the load on the counter, Mattie pulled a Tupperware container of mashed potatoes and two french baguettes out of a basket, followed by a blueberry pie and a carton of whipped cream. She turned to Nel. “Did you get a chance to rest?”
“A little. Thanks so much for this—for everything. Will you eat with us?”
Mattie said yes, of course she’d love to join them for dinner, and together they sat in the dimming evening light and reminisced about Catherine. Nel soaked in memories—many new to her—of church gatherings, July Fourth celebrations with the South Haven Senior Women’s Club, road trips to little towns where Mattie and Catherine perused antique stores while Jakob attended gem-and-mineral club meetings. Mattie filled Nel in on who had passed since she’d been home last—Clara Lieberman (cancer), Harriet and Mortie Czylek (six weeks apart; she from a heart attack, and he from a stroke), Gertrude Downing (in her sleep). They discussed the chronic sad state of Ed and Mary Jane Grabowski, who hadn’t been well since their only son, James, a high school classmate of Nel’s, drowned in a rip current near the lighthouse right after graduation. Sally Medendorp (also from Nel’s class) had twins recently—that spring—her first babies at age forty-three. And the new senior pastor at South Haven Presbyterian Church had arrived that summer.