Before I Say Goodbye

by Rachel Ann Nunes

  Dante picked up his dishes and started for the kitchen.

  “Oh, I might not be here when you get home,” Becca called to him. “I think I’ll go over to Rikki’s and see if I can help her.” She looked at me. “If you don’t mind.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” I said. “We’re really fine.”

  “Mom, let her help.” Kyle’s mouth was stuffed with roll. “The place is a mess. It’ll take hours and hours to clean.”

  Dante paused. “That reminds me, Rikki. I talked to someone who has a brother who works for the city. They’ll come out to see about the water. Might have already stopped by. You’ll have to officially talk to the city on Monday, of course, but that’ll get you through tonight.”

  Dante to the rescue. “Thank you,” I said.

  With a kiss blown to Lauren, he was gone. We heard the dishwasher open and a minute later the back door shut.

  Becca sighed. “Okay, kids. Everyone help with the table.”

  They did, including Kyle, which surprised me. Even the boys reappeared to put away things like the butter and the milk. Becca smiled at each one, and I knew they did it because they loved her.

  “They do it because they don’t want to be grounded,” she told me when they’d all disappeared again. “The girls would probably help anyway, but if I tell Dante the boys didn’t help, they won’t have access to electronics for the week.”

  I laughed. “So that’s the secret.” Becca was still busy working, setting things right. Did she ever take a break? I doubted it.

  “Your house is so clean,” Kyle said, rubbing her hand along the granite countertop. Her nostrils flared, and I knew she was taking in the clean scent as well. A twinge of jealousy surprised me. I wanted a house like this for Kyle. I wanted the steadiness of this life for her.

  I didn’t know the hurt I’d feel going down this road. It would all be harder than I’d thought, and what I’d thought had been difficult enough.

  “We’d better get going,” I said.

  Becca threw down her dish towel. “I’ll need a few cleaning supplies. I was thinking we’d do enough to get you settled for the night, and then tomorrow we could get a few other women and finish up.”

  “Oh, no. I can do it. Kyle will help. She doesn’t start school until Wednesday, and I don’t work until then, either.”

  Becca’s face flushed. “I’m afraid I already told Charlotte Gillman, and she said she’d get together a bunch of ladies you knew when you lived here. I volunteered to bring a snack.”

  Kyle laughed at the horror on my face. She knew how I hated to be a project. I didn’t mind free food, hand-me-down clothing, or other tangible gifts, but my space, my freedom to live the way I wanted, was untouchable. I’d rather live in the dust for weeks.

  “I can call and tell them no,” Becca said. “But they really want to help. I think you should let them.”

  “We were going out to get some clothes tomorrow,” I said. “Kyle needs a new church skirt.”

  Becca’s eyes flashed to Allia, who was seated at the smaller kitchen table next to where Kyle was standing. A clear message, though I didn’t know what it meant.

  A wave of tiredness came over me. “Oh, let them come.” I edged toward the door and my escape. One day I could endure, and it was only dust after all. They wouldn’t be frowning over my friends because I didn’t have any here, or about the way I dressed my children because they themselves should be in scroungy clothes for cleaning.

  “We’ll be over in a minute, then.” Becca said. “I know where the house is. Would it be okay if Lauren came with me?”

  “Sure. She and James can play together.”

  “They could stay here with Travis, if you want.”

  I should let James stay, but I wouldn’t because he was mine for a bit longer. “No, he should help with his stuff.”

  “Okay, then.” Becca walked me to the door.

  “See ya in a bit,” Allia said to Kyle.

  Kyle lifted a hand. I saw her scan the hallway, as though searching for something, and I knew she was looking for Travis.

  Out in the truck, I rested my head against the steering wheel for a few seconds as the children buckled their seat belts. “Are you okay, Mom?” James asked, nudging me.

  “She drove practically all night,” Kyle said in an old voice. “She’s tired, and now that lady is going to come over and make us clean.”

  “I like that lady. She smells nice.”

  She did smell nice. I swallowed hard and started the engine. “Kyle, what was it with you and the goo-goo eyes?”

  “What?”

  “I saw you looking at Travis. Little old for you, I think. He’s what, sixteen?”

  “Who cares? He’s hot.”

  I laughed. “Looks like his father did at that age.”

  “Were you in love with his father?” Kyle sounded dreamy.

  “He was my best friend, and I needed him. We were too young for love.” The truth. I had loved him, but I didn’t know it was love until I’d given birth to Kyle. I hadn’t slowed down enough to examine my emotions, and by then it was far too late. What I felt for Kyle wasn’t exactly the same as what the girl I’d been once felt for Dante, but it had been every bit as strong. Maybe that was the way you felt about someone who’d saved your life.

  “Well, Travis is off limits,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because, that’s all.”

  Kyle folded her arms in a pout.

  “Please,” I said more softly. “I have a good reason.”

  Kyle glared at me. “Whatever.”

  On that fine note I drove to my parents’ house and parked in the driveway. She’d hate me more before this was over, but I hoped someday she’d forgive me.

  Chapter Six

  Becca

  Rikki’s house had a lot of dust, and by the time I’d vacuumed the entire upstairs, I knew it’d need to be done again once we got the walls, shelves, and closets cleaned. But that could wait until tomorrow. Allia and Kyle were in the kitchen, supposedly washing out cupboards to hold the dishes Rikki had brought in from the truck, but mostly they were laughing and throwing wet rags at each other. James and Lauren had disappeared into a tree house out in the backyard, and in the back of my mind I worried it wasn’t safe, even though Rikki assured me it was.

  “I’ll call Dante and have him and Travis help us bring in your mattresses and a few of your bigger boxes,” I told Rikki as she came inside with another box. We could probably do it ourselves, but she was looking paler by the moment. She hadn’t eaten much dinner. Poor thing needed sleep.

  “Even if he brings in the mattresses, I’m going to have to sleep in the tree house, you know,” Rikki said with a grin that lit up her face. “James has his heart set on it.” She sat down on the living room floor against the wall. I knew her black tank top was probably dusty from the contact. On the bright side, the wall would be marginally less dusty.

  The other reason, maybe the real reason, I wanted Dante to come over was so he could look at the tree house to make sure it was safe. Apparently, there was no man in Rikki’s life at the moment to take care of that kind of thing.

  “We’ll also need to check the cord on that refrigerator. Hopefully it’s not plugged into the outlet and that’s why it’s not working.”

  Rikki jumped up. “We can do that ourselves. I haven’t needed a man for something like that for a long time.” She paused. “In fact, I can just about pay someone to do anything I’d want a man for, and I don’t have to cook his food or do his laundry.” She winked, and I laughed.

  I understood what she was saying. There’d been far too many times when Dante was busy at the church and I’d had to pay a handyman to install or repair something. I told myself I didn’t mind, but lately I did mind all too mu
ch.

  To our daughters’ amusement, we pushed and pulled at the fridge until we exposed the back—and inches of dust. “Wait,” I said, hurrying to the living room. “Let me get the vacuum.”

  “But I’ll never see it,” Rikki protested.

  “Not good to breathe in, especially for kids.” I approached with the wand outstretched. “Out of the way!”

  The girls and Rikki giggled. “You worry too much,” Rikki said. “But go ahead. Knock yourself out.” She slumped down next to the cupboard to wait while I expunged the dust. I doubted it had been cleaned in a decade or more. The refrigerator was at least that old. Might even be the same one Rikki had used as a kid.

  When I was finished, I shoved the plug into the outlet. “Okay. All ready. Help me, girls.”

  “Sorry, they went down to Kyle’s room. With any luck, Allia will clean it, because Kyle never cleans anything.” Rikki stood, and together we pushed the fridge back into place.

  I frowned. “Guess we should have checked to make sure it worked before we pushed it back.”

  “The moment of truth!” Rikki pulled open the door. “Well, the big light isn’t working, but these smaller ones for the temperature are.”

  “The bulb’s probably busted.” Squeezing in next to her, I unscrewed it. Sure enough, the filament inside was broken.

  “Better leave it in there until I’m ready to get a new one,” Rikki said. “Otherwise I’ll lose it.”

  “If you put it in your purse, you’ll have it with you when you remember.”

  “I guess so. But I’ll be honest with you, Becca, I don’t really care about the light. I’ll probably never replace it.” She shrugged. “Lights aren’t a priority with me.” She leaned against the counter.

  I palmed the light and stood next to her. “Lots of things more important, I suppose. Like the children and work—” I was wondering how to bring up James and the fact that he couldn’t read. Did she even know? How could a mother not know?

  “Dancing, seeing the sights, meeting new people. Sleeping under the stars.” The longing in Rikki’s voice made a hollow ache grow in my stomach.

  “Must be hard coming back here after all these years.”

  She sighed. “It’s something I never thought I’d do.”

  “Where else have you lived?”

  “California, Mexico, Oregon, Nevada, Boston, New York, Florida. I even stayed a year in Spain. I went to Morocco while I lived there, and France. Boston was probably my favorite place, though.”

  “What’d you do in all those places?”

  “I danced. I tended bar. Whatever I wanted. I was a secretary once and a waitress at a place where the tips were phenomenal. Sometimes I didn’t work and just lived with . . . friends.”

  “What about the kids?”

  “Well, it was easier before Kyle was born, but she went with me. Mostly.”

  “Mostly?” That worried me. James was too young to be without his mother, and Kyle needed more guidance than apparently even her mother could give her.

  “I had to leave the kids with friends a few times.” Rikki shrugged and pulled herself up to sit on the counter, which the girls had left more or less clean. “Only for a few months. Sometimes you can’t take kids certain places, you know? But they’re usually good to go wherever I need to be.”

  I couldn’t imagine leaving my children with “friends” for a few months or even with Dante for that long alone. But I would have loved to see those places she talked about. And others. My sister and her husband went every year for a short vacation together. I knew because I watched her children for the week. I’d never felt I could leave mine that long, even if Dante’s work, with its odd deadlines, had been more conducive to vacation. His extensive church callings only added to the scheduling problems, and we were lucky to take the kids somewhere for a few days each year.

  “So you liked to dance,” I said, pulling myself up to sit on the counter near her. The counters were in good condition, so they must have been replaced in the last decade. I wondered if Rikki was as bothered as I was about the peeling wallpaper in the living room and the old paint on the other walls, especially here in the kitchen where it looked like something had caught fire.

  Dante didn’t notice little things like peeling paper, faded curtains, or chipped wood, not even in our old house, but I had grown up in a house where things were replaced or repaired on a regular basis. My parents hadn’t been exactly wealthy, but they had enough funds to make sure where we were living was inviting. I’d learned it had more to do with attention and time than actual dollars.

  Rikki smiled. “Once dancing was my life. I did shows and clubs and plays. It was all a lot of fun. But I also wanted to sky dive and travel. I wanted to climb tall mountains. I wanted to swim in blue oceans. So I did.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Kyle’s like I was.” Rikki’s freckles looked dark against her pale skin. “She’s always dancing. I’ll have to find a place for her to take lessons after we get settled.”

  “There are a few places in town. My girls used to take classes, but they didn’t want to continue.”

  “What about you? What did you always want to do?” Rikki asked, crossing her legs. “Or what do you want to do now? Dante can be a little time-consuming, if I remember anything about him, and the kids are, too, I’m sure, but what do you do in your free time?”

  “What free time?” I didn’t think the occasional walk with my friends every morning after the kids went to school qualified. Every day I meant to do something different, but the house and yard needed work, there were errands to run, and the children were demanding. Even after school started, my time wouldn’t be my own. Cory had experienced some difficulties last year in the fifth grade, and I’d decided to homeschool him for a time to see if we could turn things around. I’d done it with Travis in the seventh grade, and it had made a world of difference.

  Rikki frowned. “Well, what would you do if you had free time?”

  “I’d finish college.”

  “Ohhhhh,” Rikki groaned. “Something fun, I mean.”

  “I loved college.” I thought a moment. “Okay, how about this? I guess I’ve thought that someday when the children are older, I’d like to design landscapes. Flower beds, that sort of thing. I’d like to visit famous gardens and see what landscapers do and how it feels.” I felt stupid telling her this. It almost seemed disloyal because I was happy with my life.

  “Did you design your flower beds?”

  I nodded. “Dante thinks they’re rather much, but I love them.”

  Rikki’s grin widened. “Why, Becca, I think we have something in common, because I love your flower beds, too. They’re wild and voluptuous.” She laughed. “They must be the real you.”

  I giggled and shook my head. “Thanks. I think.” Why it should mean so much to me that this stranger should care about my flower beds, I didn’t know or care. Come to think about it, I still didn’t know who Rikki was to my husband.

  “So,” I prompted, “you and Dante grew up together.”

  Her smile faded. “We were sort of the odd kids out, you know. Everyone else had two parents, mostly members of your church.”

  “Your parents weren’t members?” I knew Dante’s mother had been an active Mormon, but she’d died before he started kindergarten. Dante’s father had been an inactive member. The story went that he’d converted so Dante’s mother would marry him and that his heart and faith and will to live had died when she did.

  “My mother might have been once, but she didn’t go after marrying my dad. He was . . .” Rikki paused, her face completely without expression. “He was the worst . . . Let’s just say, I wasn’t unhappy when I learned he’d died.”

  In that instant, my feelings toward Rikki shifted. Under my mask of politeness, I’d been jealous, wor
ried, and a bit resentful, but in that moment, I glimpsed the lost little girl in her, the child who had still not come to terms with her own past or her choices. For the first time I felt pity and compassion. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Rikki grinned. “It doesn’t matter. I stopped caring about my father a long time ago. I only hope there is actually an afterlife so he gets what he deserves.”

  I thought of my own father, newly retired and serving a mission with my mother in Africa in the same country where he’d once been mission president. As some children of mission presidents were permitted to do, I’d served my own mission at eighteen during his time before I returned to the States to attend BYU, where I met Dante, also a freshly returned missionary. My dad was everything I could ever want in a father. I wondered what Rikki might be like if she’d been raised in a house like mine.

  “Well, there is an afterlife,” I told her. “Of that I’m sure.”

  Rikki’s brow rose. “Oh? Do tell.”

  “Later, maybe.” I rubbed my hands. “I feel like I’ve been bathing in dust.”

  “You have.” She laughed. “You know what? That reminds me of the time I went to some mud hot springs in Florida. Lovely place. I’d never seen so many practically naked, wrinkled old people in my life. Made me vow never to wear a swimsuit in public after turning sixty-five.”

  “Thank goodness. I have a way to go then.”

  We laughed.

  We laughed, but there was something odd between us, something I couldn’t pinpoint. Not so much in what we said, but in the way Rikki studied me when she thought I wasn’t looking.

  Chapter Seven

  Dante

  The sound of children’s voices drew me around to the back of Rikki’s house. I let myself follow them instead of going inside where I knew from her text that Becca was cleaning. Old habits die hard.

  So odd to feel the old reluctance at even the idea of going to the front door. How many times had I first checked to make sure Rikki’s father wasn’t around? He hadn’t liked me. He hadn’t liked any of Rikki’s friends. As far as I knew, I was the only one who hadn’t let that stop me.