by Isla Morley
“I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye,” she says, “but I am sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.”
She turns to her companion and explains, “Their daughter is with the Lord now.” And to me she nods in agreement with herself. “He always takes his favorites to be his special angels.” Having uttered her obituary, she steps forward, tree-trunk arms untangling to gather me up. The itching is intolerable now and I snatch the hat from my head and point it at her. “Don’t say that again! Ever! You know nothing about it!” I blast, and push past her and Lily Otai, whose mouth has dropped open like an unlatched purse.
I hurry out to the churchyard just in time to see Mrs. Scribner’s car make a left into the Sunday brunch traffic.
It is three miles from the church to the house the way Greg goes, taking the direct route up Nuuanu Avenue. But today, on foot, I take a detour and weave through the narrow streets around Punchbowl Crater. Halfway up, instead of turning left in the direction of home, I veer right on Puowaina Drive, past the row of flags to the entrance of the caldera. The sign on the lava rock says NATIONAL MEMORIAL CEMETERY OF THE PACIFIC. I put Mrs. Scribner’s hat back on, even though I walk in the shade of the shower trees in full bloom, and find a place among the graves. Something as close to Sunday worship finally begins.
GREG IS DOZING in the lounge chair on the deck, still in his collared shirt and pants, oblivious of the tiny blossoms the pepper tree is depositing in his hair. He wakes as soon as he hears the gate latch. “I was worried about you; I drove up and down every street to try to find you.”
“Did you call home to wish your dad Happy Father’s Day?” I ask.
He nods. “What happened with you and Carolyn?”
“I can’t do it, Greg. The people thing. I am not going back,” I say, stepping out of my shoes before going in.
“People don’t know what to say,” he offers quietly.
“Then why can’t they just shut up?”
The truth is not that I want nothing to do with the people but that I want nothing more to do with Carolyn’s God. The God who plucks up little children from their earthly nests and sets them on heavenly errands; the God who gives life and then snatches it back. The Stingy Bastard God.
Greg’s God is worse—the God who is off somewhere else, darning socks or stringing beads or in his parlor counting all his money, certainly not doing anything useful like saving lives. If there is any God I want, it is Jairus’s God, the God who not only led the poor father through the crowd to the miracle worker but did something neither he nor his wife could do, something entirely useful: made their little girl, pale and without a pulse, rise up from her deathbed quicker than you could say “abracadabra.”
“They mean well,” Greg says, following me into the bedroom, watching silently when I take off Mrs. Scribner’s hat and reveal my prison do.
“Tell me who means well, Greg. Is it people like Carolyn who think I should move on because it was the ‘Lord’s will’? Or is it God who means well?”
“I am not suggesting that it was God’s will that Cleo died, if that’s what you’re asking. And angry as I am with God, I don’t for one minute believe that God’s heart is not broken too.”
“Well, what use to me is a brokenhearted God?” A hand-wringing God who weeps outside the window of the world, massaging his temples, heaping burning coals on his head? Neither the God who mourns at gravesites nor the one who deploys winged toddler-cherubs to find parking spaces for people who recite just the right prayers has any business paying a visit on my grief. “I’m done with Manifest Powers and Transcendent Almighties, Greg,” I announce, during what is to be our last theological conversation.
“Don’t say that. Don’t mistake God for the people who profess to know his will,” he pleads.
“In that case,” I retort, “I am done with them too.”
SOMEHOW it is dark again, and I haven’t noticed the afternoon growing old, just that I can no longer make out the photo clearly without switching on a light. It is 8:33; you have to love digital clocks for never rounding off. The photo I took was outside our front gate, next to the jack-o’-lantern. Greg, dressed as the White Rabbit with a plaid jacket, a waistcoat, and bunny ears, is kneeling next to Cleo-as-Alice. He is looking into the camera, but she has reached into his pocket, retrieved his grandfather’s pocket watch, and is pulling on it with an adamant expression. Her mouth is open, poised in the defining word of a two-year old: “Mine!”
Trick-or-treating down the lane, careful to cross the street before we got to Mrs. Chung’s yard, it was Greg who carried the basket and Cleo who held on to the watch, dangling it from its chain like a pet. “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date,” they chanted as they skipped. Finding the old frame tucked behind the stacks of recipe books that are never opened, I replace our wedding photo with this one of Greg and Cleo. When he is asleep in front of the TV, a John Wayne Western, I put it on the table next to the spare room bed, where he will see it later.
NINE
The whirring of the vacuum cleaner wakes me. Thursday! I pull on my robe and swallow against the resentment rising like heat off the blacktop at the thought of the cheeriness that shimmers at the bottom of the stairs.
“Mor-ning,” Petal, the new uninvited, unwanted feature of my empty life, shouts in her singsong voice, and turns off the vacuum. “And a happy birthday to you,” she coos, planting a kiss on each cheek, European style. “Ooh, look, your hair’s growing out.” Petal’s driver’s license, if she had one, would indicate that she was born “Penelope Oliver” a full two decades after it was fashionable to wear ankle-length patchwork skirts, denim vests, and leather thongs. Peering out from beneath bangs that part like a vaudeville curtain, she gushes on, “Reverend Deighton told me what the flowers were for. He’s such a lovely man. Look, there’s a card too. Granddad should really get to know him; life’s too short for spats, don’t you think?” By “Granddad” she means Kelsey Oliver; by “spats” she means his castration of Greg. I tried getting Greg to explain exactly why he was hiring Kelsey’s granddaughter. Was it for political gain? To have the moral upper hand? “It’s passive-aggressive, Greg!” is what I eventually accused him of, an accusation he was vehement in denying. “It has nothing to do with getting at Kelsey,” he protested. “It’s what I believe: someone needs help, you help them, whether it’s your friend or foe or your foe’s granddaughter. You don’t think about how it is going to appear. I couldn’t care less if Kelsey sees it as a sign of weakness.” Problem is that I saw it as a sign of weakness. Just for once I wanted Greg to stop turning cheeks as though they were cards in a deck and start delivering a few blows back. But instead, here I am, listening to Petal talk of life being too short for spats while I am called to march toward a battle by a bugle only I can hear.
Petal whips along in her inimitable lisp, “I wish I had known before I came, because I would have made you a present. A necklace, maybe . . . moss agate is the perfect crystal for a Gemini. I made this one; do you like it?” She points to the necklace around her neck, a heavy rose-colored stone wrapped in a disheveled web of silver wire. “I am getting better at it; one of these days I am going to sell them at a craft fair; don’t you think that would be lovely?”
Kelsey brought this girl-woman to church the Sunday after she arrived from England, jet-lagged, pale from the English winter, and still shell-shocked from her mother’s untimely death. Apparently Kelsey’s oldest son, the Oxford professor, seemed ill equipped to deal both with his own grief and that of his hippie child. So Petal had sold her camper van parked on the downs of the English countryside the week after her mother’s funeral and bought herself a one-way ticket to her grandparents in Hawaii before they could launch their objections. Almost four months had gone by, and rather than showing interest in returning to England, Petal is settling into the aloha lifestyle with a vengeance. Grandfather Kelsey, not one to put up with excuses, has apparently insisted she start earning her keep, and if it
means mopping floors and scrubbing toilets, then so be it. Even if they are the parson’s.
“You sit down and I will bring you a proper English breakfast,” she says, and skips off to the kitchen, humming the refrain of “Yellow Submarine.”
“I’m not hungry,” I say, but she swats at my objection with a dish towel.
“You can’t start your birthday on an empty stomach.” Today she has on a pair of purple linen pants and a tie-dyed halter top. Arranged over one shoulder and around her waist is an Indian silk scarf. She has on an ankle chain of bells that jingle with every step. Greg warned me that she was a cliché in motion—the paisley clothing, crystal jewelry, and canvas tote with pocket-sized star sign guide and diary. He said he could tell the first time she came to church that she would be a vegetarian, consider herself “spiritual but not religious,” practice yoga, burn incense, and roll her own cigarettes. He is wrong about only one thing, as she bites off a piece of crispy bacon and brings me a plate. “Don’t be unkind,” he had warned me. “We’re going to help her out.” And I agreed only because I knew what it was like to lose a mother.
“Jeff’s asked me to move in with him; isn’t that lovely?”
“On the boat?”
“Yes, there’s enough space for the two of us, and that way we can save up for a proper place when the baby is born.” Greg forgot to mention our new housekeeper was pregnant.
“Has he found a job yet?”
“He’s found the perfect job, actually. He’s a bartender at Tiki’s on the weekends, which gives him time to work on his invention during the week. He’s going to start applying for the patent soon. Oh, Abbe, you would really love him. He’s scrumptious. I think he’s my soul mate. I think it was meant to be.”
She sets down the vase of yellow roses in front of my plate of food and hands me the card. “Didn’t you feel that when you met Reverend Deighton?”
“Meant to be,” so that notion was still around. There are still daisy petals making girls silly with their love-me/love-me-nots, letting them believe love and fate are folded into a corolla. If I ever thought Greg was meant to be, it was only after Cleo was born, when she was clearly meant for us. But when I met him, on one of my first assignments for the San Luis Obispo Bee, there was nothing of fate in the encounter. His church had just been vandalized, a crime uncommon in the happy-golucky town. The vandals had broken the stained glass windows of the sanctuary and had tagged the side of the building with the words “Fuck the church!” When I went to interview the pastor, I was expecting something of my father’s retaliatory fire. Instead, Greg was calm and forgiving. He said he intended to leave the slur up on the wall for a while, to give his parishioners a chance to see someone else’s point of view. Nobody in their right mind thinks tagging is a point of view. “You think it’s okay to say that kind of stuff?” I had asked him. “I wouldn’t have put it that way myself,” he had replied, “but there are definitely times when the institution has cared more about the preservation of its white walls than about the people those walls often keep out.”
I quoted him first, then kissed him later. In between, I was drawn to a man whose nature was so unlike my father’s, whose feathers remained so unruffled that my father would have thought him a chicken, plucked and ready for the pot. Yet in the foggy winter, when the hills greened and the vineyards promised new wine, our romance simmered like a pot on low heat. There are many ways to cook a romance, I told myself. It doesn’t always have to be boiled.
“I a-dore roses,” Petal says. Whatever Petal says is accompanied by gestures so distracting it requires great effort to stay focused on her face—a meringue with scalloped lips and a shiny peak of a nose. “They remind me of my mum. She used to fertilize them with the manure from the stables next door. Made a right pong, it did, but she always had the sweetest-smelling roses. There’s a—what do you call it?—a moral to that, isn’t there?”
“My mother grew roses,” I say, remembering the rows of bushes my mother tenderly planted alongside the driveway of our house, having spent weeks digging out the rocks. The idea of a rose garden and the money to finance it was her birthday gift from my grandmother, a firm believer in the therapy of hobbies. They were just bare, thorny sticks when they came in the mail. Nothing at all like the pictures of blossom-laden bushes circled in her catalog. But over months, with pruning and care, they grew chest-high and heavy with blossoms. It was enough to make you give hope just one more chance. If the smell of burnt dinners and cheap soap still assailed our home, at least it was mingled with the scent of roses with names like Mary Marshall and Lilian Austin. My mother was literally growing her friends.
“Really?” exclaims Petal. “What star sign was she?”
“I don’t know—she was born in September.”
“Virgo—unhappy people, usually, aren’t they? Mum was a Capricorn, a real homebody. Earth signs are usually the ones who like to garden.”
At first gardening was something my mother did to get out of my father’s way, especially on the weekends, especially when he would come back from the pub queasy and bad-tempered. But then it became something else, something that seemed to take her far, far away. I would watch her from my bedroom window tending the calla lilies, trimming back the African daisies and the king protea. She would leave the roses for last, where she would spend most of her time. By the time she lay down her pruning shears, there would be spent blossoms in plump piles beside her. Sometimes she would come back in only after the sun went down, scratched up and sunburned, with a look that almost matched whatever it was she felt the fateful day she sat laughing on the phone.
“Do you miss your mum?” she asks.
“Every day,” I reply.
“I wish my mum were here to see my baby when it’s born,” she says, and, like a cloud crossing the sun, the cheeriness is sopped from her face.
“C’mon, then, you haven’t opened your card,” she says suddenly, blinking back the darkness.
To the moon and back, is penned in Greg’s careful cursive.
“What does it say?” she asks, and I hand her the card. She frowns, “What does it mean?”
“It’s something he promised me a long time ago,” I reply, remembering the night thirteen years ago when I was packing up, ready to leave San Luis Obispo and its finger-pickin’ folksiness for a real job on a real newspaper. How deliberate our lovemaking was, as though we could slow down the night, keep the dawn from creeping up over the frosted windowsill. “Don’t go,” he had said. And when I argued about the merits of following my lucky break, he proposed. “Marry me,” he said. “Then I’ll follow you wherever you want to go, even if it’s to the moon and back.”
Petal stands the card on the table next to the roses. “He’s a Taurean, isn’t he? I dated a Taurean once. People always think of them as being bullheaded, but they aren’t. They are very loyal, and they always keep their promises.” She tucks her henna-dyed bangs behind her ears and I see that with her topaz eyes this tall girl-woman is on the fence of beautiful. “The bullheaded ones are the Aries, like my grandfather. Mum said that’s the reason why Daddy never left England to come back here—he needed to put a continent between him and Granddad.”
“What does your grandfather have to say about your moving in with Jeff?”
“He’s not happy about it; he doesn’t think Jeff is mature enough to be a father, but he just needs to get to know Jeff better, that’s all. Jeff is going to be a brilliant dad.”
“Mmm,” is my only comment, and I take a bite out of my toast.
“It’s my birthday next month and I’m going to have a big party and invite all my new friends.”
“That’s nice,” I respond, suddenly feeling much older than my thirty-seven years.
“You must come, Abbe. Jeff and his friends are going to bring their guitars and we’re going to build a big bonfire on the beach and have a cookout.” She goes to the fridge, retrieves from it her lunch box, and sets it down across from me. Sitting down, she unwraps
a roll and dips it into a cup of vanilla-flavored yogurt. “I’m always hungry. Got to keep my little Blossom happy,” she says, patting her belly. She is already starting to show and celebrates each week with a new craving. A fortnight ago it was canned tomatoes (halved, not diced, she was quick to point out; “Isn’t that so weird?”) with brown sugar. Who can guess what it will be next time she comes?
I sit watching her mouth form words, occasionally hearing what sounds to be a lecture on the evils of modern-day cleaning agents. I am just about to excuse myself when she abruptly changes course. “Soon I will have to quit my job,” she says with regret. “Jeff says I won’t have to work when his invention is patented because we will have plenty of money.” Jeff’s invention is top secret, she’s told me on a number of occasions, but it is going to make him a millionaire because every bar owner is going to want one.
“What about your family, Petal? And all your friends back home? Don’t you think you should get back to England before the baby is born, so they can help you and support you?”
“But I have Jeff now,” she says.
“Right,” I say, pushing back from the table.
“Don’t you think your husband should come first?”
“Yes, but Jeff isn’t your husband,” I say, and she looks like I’ve just slapped her.
“What about you, Abbe, are you going back to work?”
“They’ve offered to throw some freelance work my way until I decide, but I don’t know yet. Depends on whether your grandfather gets his way and we’re kicked off the island.”
“I feel awful he’s been so rotten to Reverend Deighton, I really do. But maybe a move someplace new will be good. As they say, ‘A change is as good as a jest.’ ”
“A rest,” I correct.
“What?”
“It’s ‘A change is as a good as a rest,’ ” I repeat. “And I’ve been having my share of that, although it hasn’t done a damn bit of good.”