“What, Mother? Are you all right?”
Susan heard the alarm in the young woman’s voice and sighed. “Green. It’s pretty.”
“Oh. Yes.”
But Susan heard the uncertainty in Malorie’s voice and wondered if she had made herself understood. Would she ever be able to speak clearly again?
“There’s where you went to church when you were a girl, Mother.”
Eagerly, Susan followed the direction of Malorie’s gesture. The brick building with the center spire seemed vaguely familiar. “Reckon I should’ve gone more often?”
Again, that funny look from Malorie. Her therapist had liked it when Susan made little jokes. Malorie took it all way too seriously.
“And there’s the high school. You were on the debating team, if you can believe that.”
Susan looked again, this time at a two-story brick building. Home of the Bobcats, read a brick-framed sign between the street and the gravel drive. The squat, square building stirred more vague feelings in her, feelings of anticipation, feelings that something good was about to happen. She smiled.
Malorie must have seen the smile. “Do you remember Sweetbranch High, Mother?”
“Maybe.” Susan could tell, although Malorie went to great pains to hide it, that every missing memory, every forgotten skill, was like a personal loss to her daughter.
“That’s good. Dr. Kerr said being back on familiar territory like this could be very good for your memory retrieval.”
Susan remembered that, and took it as a good sign. “Yeah. Maybe someday I’ll be normal again.” She laughed, despite the frown her daughter shot in her direction. “Shoot, maybe someday I’ll even know what normal means.”
“Mo-ther!”
Susan smiled at the admonition. She didn’t know if she’d always been the type to try to do things against the grain, but she was discovering she liked it now.
“This is Main Street coming up,” Malorie said.
Having heard the expectation in Malorie’s voice, Susan sat forward in her seat. She didn’t want to miss Main Street, and the chance for more memory retrieval.
The two lanes of traffic along Main Street crept between rows of adjoining brick buildings. Susan’s heart leaped at the familiar sights, until she remembered that they had passed by similar Main Streets in other small towns all along the way from Atlanta. As in those other small towns, the brick buildings housed a dress shop and a bookstore and a drugstore and a post office and various other offices. Signs read The Picture Perfect and Holy Spirits Tavern and Sweetbranch Weekly Gazetteer. People here didn’t bustle around the way they did in Atlanta. These folks seemed to have more time as they made their way along the sidewalks, stopping to talk, laughing over something in the bins at the hardware store, calling out to people passing slowly in their pickup trucks.
Susan didn’t recognize any of them. She didn’t recognize anything.
Except for Hutchins’ Lawn & Garden.
The sign made her heart skip again, and when it resumed its regular beat, it had sped up.
Hutchins’ Lawn & Garden was on the northeast end of Main Street. The wooden sign had been hand-painted years ago and needed freshening. The building took up almost half a block with its big plate-glass windows, framed by faded and tattered green-and-white awnings. Right now the windows were bare, but Susan was almost certain that once upon a time, in the spring, those windows had been decked out with hanging baskets of lacy Boston ferns and blood-red geraniums. The wooden bins built out onto the sidewalk in front of the windows now were filled with dusty, ungainly bags of weed and feed. But Susan could see as clearly as the freckles on Malorie’s nose a time when those bins had held tulip and gladiola and iris bulbs, each bin labeled with a colored picture of the bulbs in full, glorious bloom.
“Let’s go there,” she said.
“What, Mother?”
Susan pointed. “There. Go there.”
Malorie smiled and patted her hand in a way that made Susan want to jerk away. She knew what that pat meant. Her daughter thought she was addlebrained.
Well, could be she was.
“Would you like to shop around, Mother? We’ll do that soon. Just as soon as you’re ready to get out. But right now, Grandmother’s waiting. Aren’t you excited about seeing Grandmother?”
“No.”
Malorie looked at her and smiled, but the smile was strained. That was one good thing about being injured. Susan could say whatever the heck was on her mind and get away with it. The thought made her smile; her smile wasn’t strained at all.
“What about Cody, then? Cody can’t wait to see you. He’s missed you something fierce.”
Susan remembered the sturdy-legged little boy. Malorie had brought him to the hospital twice. With his little round chest and his toddler’s swagger, he looked ready to pick a fight with the world. But his smile was as sunny and uncomplicated as Malorie’s. He troubled her, too, although in a different way than Susan’s grandmother troubled her.
“I’m not much of a mother anymore,” she said.
“Now, Mother. That’s no way to talk.”
“You may have to be the mother for a while,” she said. “For me and Cody.”
Malorie was silent and Susan wondered if her words had been too slurred. The trip had worn her out, and when she got tired, her speech got worse.
“Well, I know Cody and Grandmother are both excited about seeing you,” Malorie said at last. “And we’re almost there. Just two more blocks.”
Susan remembered blocks from the rehab hospital, painted all colors with the letters of the alphabet on them. She wasn’t sure what that had to do with finishing the drive to Grandmother’s house, but she was growing too tired to ask. All she knew was what she had admitted to Malorie, that she wasn’t looking forward to seeing the woman Malorie called Grandmother.
Grandmother was Susan’s mother. She knew that much because her therapist had explained it to her after Grandmother’s first visit. Rather, the first visit Susan could remember. Grandmother’s name was Betsy Foster, and Susan still remembered the first words she’d heard her speak at the rehab hospital.
“Oh, Susan, what have you done to yourself now? This would break your father’s heart if he were still alive to see you like this.”
Susan hadn’t known how she looked at that point. After hearing Grandmother’s reaction, it had been a long time before she’d been willing to glance at herself in the mirror. Once she finally had the courage to look, she realized she had nothing to compare with her present image. The thin, pasty-white woman with the shaved head and the limp left arm and leg looked no worse to her than anybody else she saw at the rehab hospital every day. And the woman who had been Susan Foster Hovis before the accident no longer existed in her mind. Still, she felt a little queasy whenever Grandmother showed up, because she sensed the disapproval.
And now, she and Malorie were coming to live with Grandmother. Malorie said they had no choice right now, nowhere else to go. That they should be grateful there was somewhere she could get better, that there was someone to help her.
She kept the sign that said Hutchins’ Lawn & Garden framed in the side-view mirror until the van turned the corner and all she could see was the high fence around the back of the building. She wanted to go down Main Street one more time so she could memorize the sign. But Susan knew that was the kind of thing that made Malorie worry her mother would never again be right, no matter how much memory she retrieved.
As it turned out, the sign stayed in her head all the way to Grandmother’s house, anyway.
Susan liked the street. Mimosa Lane, the sign read. Trees lined the sides, dressed for autumn in reds and golds and oranges, making Susan smile. The houses made her smile, too, houses with gables and front porches and crisp green shutters fanning out from tall, wide windows. The houses looked friendly. Maybe living on Mimosa Lane wouldn’t be such a bad thing, after all.
Malorie stopped the van in front of the friendliest of the hou
ses on Mimosa. White, with a second story and a peaked roof and a wooden wheelchair ramp off the screened side porch. A willow tree weeped in the front yard and stirred in Susan a desire to sweep beneath it, dancing from bough to bough, fluttering the fall of leaves with her outstretched arms. The desire was strong, almost a physical ache.
Before Malorie could get around to the passenger side of the van, the front door of the house opened. Leading the way was Cody, laughing, barreling full speed toward the new van, which Malorie said a trucking company had bought for them. Settlement, Malorie called it. Behind the little boy, a tall, stocky man with sandy hair more than half filled with white came out behind a tall, gaunt woman whose back would never have bent enough to allow her to sweep beneath the boughs of the willow in her own front yard. Susan saw that and understood it, even if lots of other things flickered just beyond her grasp these days.
Susan retreated into the shell her injuries allowed her to create. The same way she had retreated to her wheelchair when she left rehab, so no one could see how she walked, staggering and shaking, unsteady on her feet. Susan didn’t want to see disapproval on the face of her mother and she didn’t want to see pity in the eyes of the other person, whom she couldn’t remember right now. She didn’t want to hear the clank and rattle of the wheelchair Malorie was dragging out of the back of the van right now. She wanted this to be over. She wanted, maybe, to be back at the hospital, where at least everyone laughed with her when she called an apple a pencil. She didn’t want to be here. If her brain had to be bruised, she wanted to go back to the hospital, where everybody else was bruised and incomplete, too.
It didn’t work that way. The man with the sandy-white hair opened the car door.
“How’s my little sis? You better not have put on any weight eating all that hospital food.”
Then he lifted her, groaning in an exaggerated way that was supposed to make them all laugh. Susan let them all laugh. She let him place her gently in the wheelchair. She listened to Betsy Grandmother Mom Foster greet her and pretended she didn’t hear. She was being mean. Hateful. She knew it. But right now, she needed her shell. Please, God, just for right now. Just for these few minutes when I don’t want anyone to see or hear how broken I am.
“Mommy! Mommy!”
The little boy stood in front of her, his blue eyes bright with delight. The stripes on his T-shirt matched his eyes. He flung himself into the chair, into her arms, filling her lap.
“Now, Cody, you be careful,” admonished Grandmother. “Susan does not need you crawling all over her like that.”
So Susan put her good arm around the hard little body and pulled him close. Cody put his arms around her neck. “I love you, Mommy. Me ride? Me push?”
“Yes,” she said, hoping that was enough response to his exuberance for the moment.
The man who called her “sis” pushed the chair around the front of the van. That was when Susan saw the house directly across the street, over the sunny fuzz of Cody’s hair. The house was brick, one story, set back in a wilderness of overgrown azaleas and rhododendron. A broad porch stretched clear across the front, but it had no rockers, no swing, no invitations to sit a spell. Chimneys rose on either end of the house.
“Tag,” she whispered, her brain grasping frantically at the memories stirred by the forlorn-looking house.
“What, Mother?” Malorie bent over her, but Susan shook her head. Her daughter straightened and spoke to the others. “You wouldn’t believe how fast she’s learning to read again. Don’t worry, Mother, I’ve got your books and everything else in the back of the van. You’ll be settled in no time.”
Susan had no side-view mirror on her chair to keep the house in sight, so she closed her eyes and tried to carry it with her all the way into Grandmother’s house. Like the big green-and-white sign on Main Street, the house touched some part of her that nothing else had touched since the accident. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what the sign, what the house, might mean. What Tag might mean.
Light shimmered in that part of her memory, but it was too weak yet to fight back the darkness.
* * *
AS DUSK CREPT into Sweetbranch, Tag Hutchins stared out the living room window. It had become his daily penance. His own Southern Baptist, guilt-and-hellfire version of a dozen Hail Marys.
Waking up with a hangover and a stitched-up head two months ago had scared the bejesus out of him. Scared him so bad he’d gone on the run but good. Eight states in six weeks. Racing so hard and fast and dirty he’d won twelve second places, two thirds, a disputed first place and a dislocated shoulder. Of course, the dislocation actually came after the race, during the fight over the dispute, but that did make it race-related.
Then the past caught up with him again, only this time he couldn’t run. Here he was, smack-dab in the one place he considered his own personal hell on earth. Sweetbranch. So about this time of day, he would stand at the window and stare at her house, forcing himself to live out the old memories, looking each old bitterness square in the face. Daring each memory, each resentment, to drive him back to a long-neck beer bottle.
“Have you decided about the store?”
His nephew’s voice drew Tag away from the window. He let the heavy green curtain drop and limped across the room. His bad knee was worse since the fall down his trailer steps. “Yeah. I’ll keep it open.”
Sam raised an eyebrow as he jabbed the dying coals in the fireplace. “You?”
“Yes, me. Why the hell not me?”
Sam Roberts was one of the few people who didn’t flinch when Tag Hutchins growled. Somewhere during his twenty-seven years, Sam had lost both his awe and his fear of the gravelly voiced uncle with the messy reputation.
“Because you always hated the place,” Sam snapped back.
Tag picked a medium-sized log from the haphazard pile he’d brought in earlier in the week and tossed it onto the ash-covered grate. Sparks crackled and flew.
“It makes money,” Tag countered.
“Barely.”
“Mama had no business managing the damn thing all by herself. I’ll get it back in the black.”
The accusations in Tag’s head seemed to spill out into the silence. His mother had had no choice but to manage the place herself after his father died. Even if they’d known at which dirt track in which two-bit town in Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia to find him, Tag would have had ten good reasons why he needed to run this race or that one before pointing his rolling tin can toward Sweetbranch. Eula Hutchins had been on her own after the liquor finally did in Eugene Senior.
“I know,” he finally said, facing the fireplace so he didn’t have to face Sam. “Her son didn’t do her a damn bit of good while she was alive. What makes me think my help is wanted now?”
Sam didn’t rise to the bait; his voice stayed level, calm, rational. That ability to stay cool might be the only thing Tag didn’t like about his only living relative. “It’s yours now. You can do what you want with it. Sell it if you want to.”
Tag had thought of that. He’d sat on the bench at the park and stared across the green at the old brick building where he’d spent way too much of his growing up years to suit him. He’d tried to picture the sign coming down. Being replaced with something cutesy and creative made up by some former debutante yuppie Junior Leaguer from Birmingham with romantic notions of small-town living. Bootsie’s Garden Boutique. There would be no more fifty-pound bags of manure against the back wall. No more posthole diggers. No more contracts for bush-hogging family garden plots come spring.
And no more Hutchinses in Sweetbranch, Alabama.
Everything his old man and his mama had worked for all those years would be erased, dead and gone. Even Sam, his brother’s only son, had another man’s last name now.
If Tag let the old store go, he would have his wish. He really wouldn’t belong anywhere at all.
“What is it, Sam? Afraid an old vagrant like me can’t keep the place going?”
�
��You’re not a vagrant. Old, maybe. But not a vagrant.”
Tag shot Sam a cynical look. His nephew had been sitting there when Tag awoke two months ago, his head pounding so hard he was certain his skull would explode. Sam had taken him home from the hospital, back to a trailer reeking of stale beer. Sam had propped him up on the side of the couch where the springs weren’t broken and stared at him long and hard.
“Tag, what do you plan to do with your life now?”
“Have a beer,” Tag had rasped, although for the life of him he couldn’t quite imagine being able to move his head enough to swallow.
“That’s not funny.”
“Maybe I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“Have you been drinking long, Tag?”
“Hell, no. Last night. That’s all.”
“What started you off?”
“I don’t know.” But he did know, now. Now, in the cold light of day, he could remember. Too clearly. A birthday not his own. A birthday he wanted to curse and couldn’t quite. And it was easy, once again, to appreciate the lure of oblivion that alcohol promised.
He wondered, fleetingly, what his old man had sought oblivion from. Chastised himself for never caring enough to find out while his father was alive.
“You know the risk,” Sam had continued. “You’re that much like Grandpa. One is too many and a hundred isn’t enough.”
“You’re a smart-ass.”
“I know. It’s the family plague,” Sam had countered, unperturbed. “Tag, if you’re going to start drinking, you might as well go out there and get on that bike of yours and sail over a cliff somewhere. Do it fast. It’ll be a lot less painful for all of us.”
All of us being Sam and Tag’s mother, for nobody else who gave a rat’s ass had been left. Still, Tag saw the wisdom in Sam’s words. And without the murkiness that came with a six-pack, crashing and burning on his motorcycle had little appeal. Neither did going the way his old man had.
Tag hadn’t had another drop since. He’d even called his mama regularly, which was how he’d known when she had the stroke. Sometimes, especially since he’d had to drag himself back to Sweetbranch to watch his mama die, he could taste a cold one going down, could feel the damp tickle of a head of foam on his mustache. Sometimes he felt like a forty-six-year-old grizzly with a thorn in his paw. Acted like it, too.
Double Wedding Ring Page 2