What Makes a Family

by Colleen Faulkner

  “Don’t agree to it, Drum. Not if you don’t want to. Stop being such a nice guy and bailing other people out.” I’m quiet for a moment, waiting for him to respond. He doesn’t. “Call me later?” I ask.

  “Sure. You going to take a pic of your granny’s tat? Text it to me?”

  I laugh because it sounds so funny the way he says it. And so bizarre. And it’s both, I guess. “I don’t know,” I say, going to the bedroom door. “Isn’t that a little creepy? Taking a picture of my comatose grandmother’s thigh and texting it to you?”

  “Not as creepy as my looking at a text of your grandmother’s thigh,” he says.

  “Good point. Love you.” I make a kissing sound.

  “Love you, babe.”

  I smile as I disconnect. There was a time when I hated it when he called me babe. It seems so . . . misogynistic. But he never meant it that way, and now after twenty years of marriage, I like the fact that he still calls me anything that’s in the least bit affectionate. We’re getting to that age where friends and coworkers are divorcing. Hell, some of them are divorcing now for the second time. I’m a lucky woman to have a man like Drum, and I know it.

  Drum’s older than I am. Fifteen years. I met him at a pub crawl in Baltimore my senior year of college, which is funny because that wasn’t my thing. Pub crawls. It wasn’t his either. We were both there because friends had trapped us into the evening of drinking and carousing, which wasn’t all that fun because we were sober. I was just coming out of a two-year relationship, not looking for a date, certainly not looking for a husband. Drum was single, too. He’d had several long-term relationships, but never been married. Which is amazing, considering what a catch he was. He’s always said he was waiting for me; he just didn’t know it.

  It was funny because when we bumped into each other, ordering a drink at the bar, I don’t think I even noticed how much older he was than me. I was too taken with his smile. He said he noticed right away that I was quite a bit younger than he was because he couldn’t understand why anyone as young and beautiful as me would be interested in an old hippie like him. It was love at first sight for sure. For both of us. My breakup with my old boyfriend hadn’t been traumatic; we’d just drifted apart as we matured, so I think I was ready to fall in love. Drum and I talked until closing, abandoning our friends. We exchanged phone numbers, dated a few weeks, and after graduation I moved in with him, to the horror of my parents. We married six months later. Never a day, or a moment of regret. For either of us. And now here we are, still together, still in love, still trying to figure out how to do this life thing.

  Downstairs, I check on Mom Brodie and resist the urge to lift the sheet and blanket and peek at her tattoo. My grandmother, my proper Methodist Circle grandmother, has a racy tattoo.... I just can’t get the idea out of my head. Where did a girl who met her husband at a Methodist tent meeting, at eighteen years of age, get a tattoo on her thigh?

  I wander down the hall and find Birdie in the kitchen. She’s wearing a pink and green, full, flowered apron and leaning over the counter dicing hardboiled eggs. She must have a dozen.

  “How was your morning?” I ask. “Get your errands run?”

  “Took chicken salad and coffee cake to Mrs. Barton. Laid up with the gout again. That worthless son of hers, lives next door and can barely carry her a can of Campbell’s.”

  I perch on a stepstool we keep in the corner of the kitchen. The cabinets run all the way to the eight-foot ceiling, and so they’re tall. And Birdie’s short. She drags the stool around the kitchen to get what she needs.

  “Sarah’s in the living room looking at picture albums. Wanted pictures of Mrs. Brodie. She wants to make one of those slide things for the funeral. You know, where they put pictures up on the screen. I don’t know that Mrs. Brodie would like that. Pictures of her on a movie screen.”

  I prop my feet on the lowest step and hug my knees. “Oh, I think she would. You know how Mom Brodie was. She always loved to have her picture taken.”

  “Vain,” my mother says, her back still to me as she chop, chop, chops the eggs. “ ‘So I’m allotted months of vanity, and nights of trouble are appointed me.’”

  “What’s that from?” I wrinkle my nose. I used to know my Bible quotes cold, but over the years I’ve drifted from my Methodist roots. I still feel as if I’m a spiritual person, but certainly not religious. Organized religion makes Drum itch. But he meditates every morning before he goes through his yoga routine.

  “Job.”

  “Ah. Right.” Of course, my mother would quote Job. It’s her favorite book in the Bible. She loves all the suffering.

  I hear my daughter’s footsteps, and she comes into the kitchen, carrying an ancient picture album. “Hey Birdie, these pictures are kind of stuck. You sure it’s okay if I take them out? There’s like glue on these sheets, and the pictures got glued in. I might be able to peel the plastic off and just leave the sticky back. Then I can just scan them on Grandpop’s scanner in his office.”

  “Do what you want with ’em,” Birdie answers. “You want egg salad?”

  Sarah cuts her eyes at me. She’s barefoot in a tank top and wearing short shorts that border on Daisy Dukes, in my eyes. But she doesn’t even know who Daisy Duke is. “I don’t do mayo, Birdie.” She turns to go.

  “Who doesn’t do mayonnaise?” Birdie says, mostly to herself as she goes to the refrigerator and takes a jar with the blue label out.

  Sarah is almost out of the kitchen when she turns back to us. “Birdie, what was Mom Brodie’s maiden name?”

  Birdie shuffles back to the place at the counter where she’s chopped the eggs and tossed them in a Pyrex bowl. I can tell her feet are bothering her. Plantar fasciitis. I keep suggesting better shoes and maybe orthopedic inserts might help, but she won’t go for it.

  “Hm. Can’t say I recall.”

  I get the eye cut again from my daughter. It’s her “what the hell?” look that’s almost identical to her father’s. “Where could I find out?”

  Birdie sighs and takes a wooden spoon and begins dropping big lumps of mayo into the bowl. “I don’t know.”

  “Would Grandpop know?”

  Birdie taps the spoon on the side of the bowl. “Doubt it.”

  Sarah thinks for a minute. “Do you have her marriage certificate?”

  “Might. Have to ask your grandfather. It might be in the safe deposit at the bank.”

  Sarah looks at me. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  I laugh. “Banks used to have a room full of metal boxes. You could rent them and keep important papers in them.”

  Sarah cradles the album to her chest. Her breasts are small like mine, only she doesn’t mind. When I was a teen, it bothered me that I wasn’t large-breasted. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate my little boobs. No sagging.

  “It was mostly to preserve them in case of a house fire,” I explain. “Back in the day where there were a lot of house fires.”

  Sarah nods slowly. I can see she’s taking in the information. Then she looks at me and says, “Denim axe examined,” and makes her exit.

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Birdie declares, watching her granddaughter go.

  I laugh and wonder if Birdie realizes she used the very same words Sarah had used. “It’s a palindrome.”

  “What?” Birdie says, taking on her cranky tone. The one she uses when she thinks someone is getting “uppity” with her. I feel as if I can never win on this subject. If I explain “big words” she gets insulted and accuses me of thinking she’s stupid. If I don’t explain, she thinks I’m being “uppity,” too.

  “It’s a sentence that reads the same forward or backward. She’s been doing it for months. You asked me about it the last time we were here.” And the time before that.

  My mother screws up her mouth. “Why on earth would a teenage girl just blurt something like that?”

  I chuckle and shake my head. “Because she’s a teenage girl and she lik
es palindromes.” Birdie stares at me, perplexed. “Come on. I did the same silly stuff. Remember the summer I was fifteen and memorized a bunch of Shakespeare’s sonnets? You’d ask me if I wanted breakfast and I’d answer ‘Pity the world, or else this glutton be, To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.’ Which is particularly funny because Shakespeare was not talking about appetite.”

  My mother goes back to making her egg salad. I let it go and watch her add even more globs of mayo to the bowl of chopped eggs. “What time is the hospice nurse coming?” I already know the answer; it’s just a way to make conversation with my mother. And a better choice than asking if she knows Mom Brodie has a tattoo.

  “Between two and four.”

  “I’ll be back by two, then.”

  “I would certainly hope so.” Birdie adds relish to the egg salad. “Don’t take that long to carry your Daddy his lunch.”

  “No, but I thought I’d go for a ride. Maybe go find Joseph.”

  She pulls a load of white bread out of the breadbox on the counter. “What for?”

  I shrug, refusing to feel like I’m a kid again, being grilled by my mother. “I don’t know. Because he’s my brother? I’m worried about him. The divorce.”

  “I told him not to marry her.” She lays the egg salad on thick on the bread. “Thinks she’s better than us. Her being a doctor.”

  I hold my tongue. I had my doubts the marriage would work, too, but not because I didn’t like Marly. And certainly not because I thought she thought she was better than us, whatever that means. My concern with their union was based more on the type of people they are. Joseph is a simple man with simple needs. His whole life is this farm. This island. And his family. He’s one of those people who says, “Why would I ever want to go to Paris?” And he sees everything in such black-and-white. There’s no gray with Joseph. Which I suspect will change as he gets older. I know I certainly see more gray with each gray hair that appears in my hair.

  Marly’s a go-getter. She’s driven. She’s ambitious and not in a bad way. I just worried that they would never see eye-to-eye once the wild sexual attraction wore off. And we all know it does. And apparently, as Birdie would say, “those chickens have come home to roost.”

  I glance out the window over the sink. My car’s still gone. I can either take Birdie’s Buick or the old pickup. Daddy gets a new pickup every eight years, or so. His one extravagance. But he always keeps the old one as “backup.” I’ll take the pickup. I kind of like driving it. It reminds me of my teenage years. Birdie would never let us drive her car, and we were never allowed one of our own. It was Daddy’s truck I drove when I snuck around with my girlfriends, drinking underage, calling to boys on the sidewalk in front of the diner, and laid in the bed, staring up at the stars down by the water’s edge, dreaming of the life I would lead.

  I watch Birdie put the sandwich in a Ziploc bag and add an apple and a Little Debbie oatmeal pie to the bag. My daddy has a sweet tooth. He loves his Little Debbies. He’ll eat three oatmeal pies in one sitting if Birdie doesn’t get to the box first. She worries about his cholesterol, which is high, and his weight, which is too heavy. And this is one subject we agree on. I think Daddy should take better care of his health. But I also think we’re all born with free will, and she can’t hide all the Little Debbies on the island from him.

  Birdie holds up the brown paper lunch sack.

  I pop off the stool and cross the kitchen to take it. As I reach for it, I meet my mother’s gaze, and I realize she looks sad, and it’s on the tip of my tongue to ask her if she’s okay. But of course she’s not okay. There’s a woman we’ve all known our whole lives dying down the hall. Even with the conflicted relationship Birdie and Mom Brodie have had, this has to be hard for her. A part of me wants to give Birdie a hug. Just a quick one. But my mother never hugs me. I’m afraid it will make her uncomfortable. It will sure as hell make me uncomfortable.

  So I take the lunch sack, grab the keys off the hook near the back door, and sail out. “Back soon.”

  9

  Birdie

  “Abby’s gone to take Joe his lunch. Egg salad.” I pull up the chair to the side of the bed and sit down. I put the plate on my lap and pick up half of my sandwich. I take a big bite. It’s good: fresh eggs from the henhouse, just the right amount of mayonnaise and store-bought pickle relish, and a pinch of salt. I didn’t know how to make egg salad when I came here. It was Mrs. Brodie who taught me. “Celeste went to buy cigarettes in Abby’s car. Be lucky if she sees that car again.” I take another bite. “Nah, her clothes are upstairs. Big bag of makeup and such in the closet. Using something in a bottle to make her hair grow. It won’t work. She wouldn’t leave without her makeup.”

  I take another bite and chew. “Mrs. Barton’s down with the gout again. Joe says she drinks, but I don’t believe it. Sends her best.”

  I look over at Mrs. Brodie. She hasn’t moved a muscle since one of us moved it for her. I wonder how long this will take. Her passing. A few days I hope. Not that I want her to suffer. But I like having the girls here. When she dies, they’ll all go home and leave me here alone in this house.

  I watch her chest rise and fall. She doesn’t look to be in pain to me. She just looks like she’s sleepin’. Kind of peaceful-like. “Abby thinks Joseph’s going through with the divorce. I know you liked her. Marly. But I told you she thought she was too good for him.” I make a sound between my teeth. “And now they’ve got that sweet little one. Families today, they think they can just divorce if they don’t like the same pudding.” I take another bite of the egg salad and reach for the coffee I’ve set on the nightstand. Wash the bite down with a good swallow. Coffee’s just the way I like it. Strong and cooled down. Some people have to have the coffee hot. Joe’ll put his in the microwave if it’s not hot enough. Mrs. Brodie was the same way. Of course everyone thinks I’m the one who likes it hot, but I don’t. I make it hot for them. I’m used to my coffee sitting while I do one thing and then another.

  I set the mug back on the nightstand and look over at Mrs. Brodie again. I wonder if she’s wonderin’ where her son is. Doesn’t seem right, her being his mother and me being the one sitting here. “Joe’s down at the cannery. He’s thinkin’ about letting the fire department burn it down. Training. You know. They have to teach the new boys how to put out a fire. Won’t cost him a thing. Place got cleaned out years ago, but he said he just wanted to have a good look around. Make sure nuthin’ was left behind he could use around the farm or sell at the junkyard.”

  When he told me he was heading to the cannery this morning, just to have a last look before she’s ashes, I think it was on his mind that he met her there. Esha. I know it was on mine. She picked tomatoes for us first, then worked on the line in the cannery. Once she caught his eye. Probably had his way with her there in his office, too.

  I never asked.

  Can’t say I’ll be sad to see the place go up in flames, down to ashes. Good riddance, I say.

  I taste the bitterness of his fornicating in my mouth, and I take another gulp of coffee to wash it down. You’d think after more than thirty years I’d be over it. I used to pray on it all the time. Ask God to take away my resentment. He never did. I used to pray He would let me love Joseph the way I love my girls. The fruit of my husband’s sin. That didn’t happen either. Not that I don’t love Joseph, because I do. In my own way. Any woman loves a baby she walked the boards with at night when he had a fever, the boy who brings her home a Christmas ornament made of a paper cup with his picture glued on it. The boy who calls her “Mama.”

  I wonder if Big Joe ever laid with another woman. There was talk in his younger years. But if there was ever any truth to it, I never saw it. And Mrs. Brodie never spoke of it. Not even when our Little Joe come walking into the kitchen carrying that little black baby wrapped up in that blanket with the teddy bears all over it. I burned that blanket. Threw it right in the old wood stove we used to have in the kitchen.

  He was such a
sweet thing. Joseph. Scrawny and small. Not like my girls who came out all plump and pink. And he never cried. Not like Abby and Celeste. I swear, I think they both screamed for the first year of their life. I remember looking at Abby one night thinking I understood how a mother could smother her baby with a pillow. Just to make them stop that racket. Not that I was ever tempted. But I understood it.

  I smile thinking about the feel of Joseph in my arms. I hated that little baby so much. Hated Little Joe for bringing him home when the mother died. But Joseph found some way of wiggling into my heart until one day I realized I didn’t care what color he was or who the mama had been who birthed him. Far as I was concerned, he was mine. Funny, he’s the only one of them who calls me Mom.

  I finish my sandwich and my coffee and get up to straighten Mrs. Brodie’s blanket. I let down the shades so the bright light doesn’t hit her in the face. Then I stand over her and look down. “Brought you something.” I point at the teacup and saucer I set in the middle of the pill bottles on the nightstand. “That old teacup you like. Thought you might . . .”

  I don’t finish my thought, because it seems silly, now. I brought it down because she always loved that old teacup. Never drank tea or coffee out of it. Just kept it on her dresser. Put earrings and such in it sometimes. I thought about bringing in one of her books, too. Mrs. Brodie was always a reader. We’ve got books floor to ceiling in the living room. Had to have bookshelves built in. And books in her bedroom and on the front and back stair landings. And under beds and in closets. But I thought she’d rather have the teacup. In case she opens her eyes. She’ll see it. Because I don’t reckon she’ll be reading anymore. Not on this earth, she won’t.

  I turn the handle on the teacup. It’s got a stamp on the bottom. MADE IN ENGLAND. I don’t know where she got it; she’s had it as long as I’ve been here. “Nurse’s coming later,” I tell her. “Just to listen to your heartbeat and such.” I hesitate. “She says your breathing might get funny. That you might get restless. If you do, I’ve got medicine for you. It’ll calm your nerves. Comes in a dropper like we use to give the cats their wormer. So you don’t have to worry about swallowing a pill or anything.” I’m quiet for a second. The whole house is quiet.