Things Remembered

by Georgia Bockoven

  How was it Grace could put on a performance like that and not get a job acting? “Check your email for the ticket in a couple of days,” she said with finality.

  What about money for a rental car,” Grace added hastily. “If I have to come up, I might as well visit some of my friends while I’m there.”

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport, and if any of your friends are still around and available, you can use my car to see them.”

  “You’re treating me like a little kid.”

  Finally, something Karla could laugh about. Grace had demanded her way, thrown a tantrum when she didn’t get it, whined that she wasn’t being treated fairly, and insisted Karla foot the bill.

  “What’s so funny?” Grace demanded.

  “It’s not worth talking about. I have to go. If you haven’t gotten the ticket in a couple of days, call me. Otherwise I’ll see you in two weeks.” She hung up before Grace had a chance to answer.

  “Did you find the money?” Anna asked, patting her freshly coiffed hair for the third time since leaving the shop. “I saw that you’d put the canceled check box back in the closet.”

  She’d heard what Anna said, but it took a second to connect. The traffic on Douglas Boulevard was even heavier on Saturday than it was in the middle of the week, and she was having a hard time with landmarks. “Oh, yeah—I’ve been meaning to tell you about it.”

  “I’m sure the bank will be happy when—”

  “It isn’t the bank’s money, Anna, it’s yours. Or I guess you could say it’s mine, depending on how you want to look at it. I never cashed the checks you sent to me that year for Christmas and my birthday. I didn’t even look at them, so I had no idea the one was for as much as it was.” Normally, when Anna couldn’t get out or couldn’t think of something to send for a present, she sent a check—for twenty or twenty-five dollars. While the birthday check that year had been the standard twenty-five dollars, she’d sent two that Christmas: one to repay the six hundred dollars Karla had given Grace for books for school, the other for $1,201.59.

  “Where did you get that kind of money?” Karla had told herself she wouldn’t ask because it was none of her business, and there it was, almost the first thing out of her mouth.

  “I sold the house. It was to one of those companies that doesn’t take possession until you die or until you have to move into a nursing home. I took some of it in cash to pay for Grace’s last two years in school and the rest in monthly payments for as long as I live. School didn’t turn out be as much as I thought it was going to be, so I divided what was left between you three girls for Christmas that year.”

  “You mean you took a reverse mortgage?”

  “That’s it.”

  No wonder she hadn’t found the deed. It hadn’t even occurred to her that the house could have been sold. She knew what it meant to Anna, what it had always meant. “You love your house. How could you have sold it?”

  “It seemed like the most reasonable thing to do at the time. I could have taken a loan against the house, of course, but there was no way I could make the payments. I figured one way or another, I was going to lose the place—this way, at least, I got to stay.”

  As frugally as they’d lived at Anna’s, there should have been more than enough money from their parents’ estate to see all three of them through college. Month to month they’d lived on Social Security, both Anna’s and their parents’.

  “You need to get in the other lane,” Anna announced. “The restaurant is coming up.”

  At Anna’s request, they were going back to the Italian restaurant where they’d eaten with Susan. Mark and Cindy met them at the door. Karla tried to blame the warm flush of pleasure she felt at seeing Mark again on the unseasonably hot day, but then he looked into her eyes and smiled, and it was useless to try to pretend what she was feeling was anything but what it was.

  “I’m glad we’re finally getting a chance to visit,” Mark said to Anna when they were seated at the table. “It seems like all we ever do is exchange a few words in passing. You may not know this, but you’re one of Cindy’s favorite people. She’s talked about you since she started going to Susan’s.”

  Anna smiled at Cindy. “I talk about you, too.”

  “What do you say?”

  “That you can climb a tree faster than any little girl I’ve ever known and that you make beautiful pictures.”

  “Do you tell people I can read?”

  Anna’s eyes widened in surprise. “You can? I didn’t know. When did this wonderful thing happen?”

  “I dunno.” She looked at Mark. “When did it happen, Dad?”

  “She’s been reading for about a year now,” Mark said. “I’m not sure when she started, it just seemed to happen. Susan’s been working with her the last few months, and she’s really started to take off.”

  “My mom’s home,” Cindy announced, ready to move on to something else. “She’s staying at my school, so I get to see her every day. Sometimes she even sleeps with us.”

  Mark let out a mental groan. To explain would give the living arrangements too much importance, but letting it go would give Karla the wrong impression. “Linda’s in town while her band is working out some problems. Since she didn’t know how long it would take, Susan offered to let her stay upstairs at the school.”

  “We met,” Karla said. “In passing, that is. She was on her way out the door when I dropped by yesterday afternoon.”

  “She didn’t say anything.” Unusual for Linda; she didn’t miss much. But then how could she have known that Karla was the one he’d taken out? Cindy didn’t know, and Susan was the last person to tell Linda something like that.

  Karla smiled. “I must not have made much of an impression.”

  “Impossible.” He’d meant the flattery to be exaggerated but the inflection was all wrong. Instead it came out sounding sincere, spoken the way he felt, rather than the teasing way he’d intended.

  “We didn’t spend much time together, but Linda seems very nice,” Karla said.

  There was an implied question in the statement—why would two nice people who obviously still liked each other, who were the parents of a wonderful child, choose not to raise that child together? “She’s an incredible woman.” He turned to Cindy, caught her chin in his hand, looked her directly in the eye, and said, “Who just happens to be the mother of an incredible little girl.”

  Cindy had been drawing on the paper tablecloth with the assortment of crayons left by the waiter and was impatient at being disturbed. “You say that all the time.”

  “Only because it’s true,” Anna told her.

  The waiter came for their order. When he returned an hour later to ask if anyone wanted dessert, Anna’s lack of interest in her food was obvious by her barely disturbed lunch. Mark surreptitiously noted the effort she made to hide how tired she was and came up with an excuse to leave long before he would have liked.

  He and Cindy waited with Anna while Karla got the car.

  “Thank you for lunch,” she said. “I hope we can do it again before Karla has to leave. She’s staying longer than she first planned, you know. Until after Thanksgiving.”

  It was everything Mark could do to keep a straight face. The old gal might be on her way down for the count, but she wasn’t past a little matchmaking. “No, I didn’t know. I’m glad you told me.”

  Karla pulled up in front of them. Mark helped Anna into the car, bent down to say good-bye to Karla, and took Cindy’s hand before crossing the parking lot to his Jeep. “Well, what do you think?” he asked Cindy when he had her belted into the car.

  “We should get some ice cream.”

  He grabbed her leg and gave it a shake as if checking to see if it were hollow. “About Karla.”

  “She’s funny.”

  “Funny how?”

  “The way she looks at you—like she likes you a lot.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  “Daaaad,” she said in a singsong, impatient vo
ice. “Can we please get our ice cream now?”

  Mark got in the car and took Sierra College Boulevard to the Dairy Queen. Two dates and he was still interested—a first since his divorce. No, it was more than interest he felt for Karla. He was intrigued. Her words, her actions, her silences were like a trail of bread crumbs in the forest, impossible not to follow. The farther he went, the more he wanted to go.

  Chapter

  13

  I’m fine,” Heather said to Bill as she rolled to her side. Not being able to sleep any way she wanted was the one thing that truly annoyed her about being pregnant. The rest—the morning sickness, the heartburn, the backaches—were reminders of the life growing inside her. Her precious little girl. The baby she’d been told not to have.

  “I talked to Dr. Agostini yesterday,” she added. “He said that as long as I don’t overdo it, there isn’t any reason I can’t go to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving.” Not the exact words, but close enough. She’d finagled his permission by promising she wouldn’t be gone more than a day and that she would rest and let everyone else prepare the meal. What she hadn’t told him was how long a day that would make, which was why she’d decided that as long as she scheduled plenty of down time, it actually would be better if she stayed a couple of days instead of just one.

  Bill snuggled against her back spoon fashion, his hand splayed on her belly. After several seconds, he adjusted his hand to better feel the baby’s movement. “She’s up already.”

  “She’s been up since four.” After almost two weeks of little movement, Anna Marie had finally decided to make her presence felt again—big time. She woke Heather out of a sound sleep two or three times a night now, a clear preview of things to come.

  “I’ll be glad when she’s here. It seems like you’ve been pregnant forever with this one.”

  Heather put her hand over his and curled her fingers into his palm. He’d fought having this baby, terrified he would lose them both after the warnings the doctor had given them about having other children when Jason was born. He rarely talked to her about it, but she could see the fear in his eyes in unguarded moments when he didn’t know she was watching. He’d stopped trying to hide how he felt at obvious times—when she was slow getting up or slept a little later than usual or put her hand to her back to ease an ache. “Three more months . . . fourteen weeks . . .” She turned and gave him a kiss. “Ninety-eight days . . .”

  “But then who’s counting?” He smiled tenderly as he brushed the hair from her forehead. “I love you, Heather.”

  “I know you do. And I expect you to worry, but not all the time. I swear I’m all right.” She loved the way he looked in the morning, his hair disheveled from sleep, the shadow of a beard, his eyes soft and lazy. This was her time; no one else saw him this way. To the rest of the world he was the crisp, efficient lawyer—from his hair to the shine on his shoes. And handsome, the kind of man women turned to look at again. He had liquid blue eyes, an anomaly with black hair, startling in their intensity, made more so by the unconscious way he used them. He could grill a witness with a look or, with a conspiratorial wink, persuade a clerk to work after hours to find an obscure bit of information.

  She touched his lower lip with the tip of her finger. “And I promise you nothing is going to happen to me or the baby.” After giving him a long kiss, she added, “Once she’s here and tearing through the house, you’re going to shake your head in wonder that you ever thought she wouldn’t make it.”

  “Right now I don’t care if she turns my office into her own personal toy box. I’ll even let her play in the closet if she wants.”

  She widened her eyes in disbelief. “Not the closet. What if she discovers the hidden body?”

  He laughed. “Okay, you made your point.” He looked past her at the clock on the night stand. “I gotta get out of here. I’m due in court in an hour.”

  “I thought the trial didn’t start until Wednesday.”

  “We have a meeting with the judge. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two, but something tells me we’re going to be there all day.”

  “Do me a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “Oh, you should be more careful with your answers, Mr. Johnson.” She smiled seductively. “I just might take you up on one like that someday.” Not any day soon, regretfully. Sex was a dangerous activity with this pregnancy, a forbidden, and therefore desperately desired, need.

  “You’ve got a three-month window to take advantage of me. After that I go back to being the hard-nosed bastard you fell in love with.”

  When she’d married Bill, she’d thought love was the excitement she felt in just being with him and the sense of loss that came when he was gone. Now she knew it was so much more. Love was getting up in the middle of the night with a sick child, a flower picked on the way into the house, a Sunday drive to Monterey to see the sea lions when a Forty-niner game was on television, and driving a Volvo station wagon instead of a sports car. Love was a series of small moments that made up her days. She was convinced that it was her guardian angel who’d put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake pedal that summer day nine years ago and let her car plow into the back of Bill’s. They’d lived such different lives back then, she was convinced it was the only way they could have met. She never failed to say a little prayer of thanks to her winged protector when she went to bed at night.

  “Well? What’s the favor?”

  “If you have a break . . . and can’t find anything else to fill the time . . . would you mind looking to see if you can find some stollen?”

  He groaned. “I should have known. Which bakery this time?”

  She didn’t expect him to understand; it was enough that he went along with her crazy craving. She was trying to duplicate the special holiday bread she’d first had with Anna in San Francisco. They’d gone by bus that year to see the Christmas decorations, and in her mind everything about that day had been magical. Stollen was only available a few months every year, and she’d already tried the bakeries she knew in Carmel and Monterey. Most of them simply stuffed a few raisins and nuts and citron into a loaf of sweet bread, put some frosting or powdered sugar on the top, and passed it off as stollen. “I don’t know. Pick one at random. You can’t do any worse than I’ve been doing.”

  He got out of bed, dropped his shorts, kicked them up to his hand, and tossed them in the hamper. “By the way,” he called from the bathroom, “I’ll probably be late tonight, so go ahead and have dinner without me.”

  “Do you want leftovers or are you going to pick up something?”

  “I’ll pick up something.”

  “Maybe I’ll take Jason and Jamie out for pizza. I promised them we could go to the park today and we could go from there.” She’d started detailing her days for him when he’d tried calling her several months ago and had panicked when he couldn’t reach her. She’d accidentally left her cell in the car when she went shopping. Thankfully she’d been found by an understanding policeman whose wife was also pregnant.

  “There’s supposed to be a storm moving in tomorrow, so it may be a while before we can go again,” she said.

  “Don’t—”

  “—overdo it,” she finished for him. The phrase had become a mantra between them.

  Heather sat on a hard metal bench and watched Jason climb to the top of the tube slide. Her heart in her throat, she waited until he was seated and came out the other end. It was everything she could do not to hover. Only knowing her fears would become theirs kept her from shouting warnings to be careful every time one of them climbed to the top of anything.

  When the baby was born and Anna came to live with them, Heather planned to take them to the park whenever possible. She believed in sunshine and vitamin D and singing birds—all the good things that came with being outside. She knew Anna couldn’t live forever, but she also knew that under the right care she would live longer than she would if she stayed by herself, maybe even long enough to see her namesa
ke take her first step and speak her first words. Heather refused to think it was unreasonable to believe Anna might even be there for Anna Marie’s first day of school.

  Even though she knew it was something that had to be done, she was angry with Karla for insisting that Anna put her estate in order. She didn’t want Anna to spend time thinking about dying; she wanted her to concentrate on living.

  She shifted position on the bench, making a mental note to put the pillow she normally brought with her to the park back in the car. She wasn’t a “sitting” kind of person, so even with the baby as a constant reminder, it was hard to remember she was under doctor’s orders to do so as much as possible. The sitting was a compromise. The doctor would prefer she was in bed.

  Heather didn’t know what she would do without Anna in her life. Who would she call to share the intimate joys that came from a day no different from any other but made special because Jamie had scored his first soccer goal, or Jason had said something funny, or Bill had sent her a bouquet of flowers for no reason except he’d seen them and thought of her? Anna cared in a way no one else did, not even Karla. When Anna died, she would take a part of Heather with her, a part so special Heather was afraid she would never be whole again.

  The ten-year-old girl she’d been when she first came to Anna had been in desperate need of love and attention. Karla had drawn fire from their father’s family for her stubbornness, Grace had charmed them all with her smile, no one had bothered with Heather at all. She’d been lost in the middle, left behind by her mother and father, left alone by everyone else.

  Somehow, Anna saw this in her and found a way to make her feel special. In time she actually grew to believe she was.

  Bill thought she was paranoid the first time they made plans to go somewhere without the boys and she refused to fly in the same plane with him. He quoted statistics proving it was safer to fly than to drive to the local grocery store, but she was adamant and told him they either went separately or not at all. She lived with the fear that something would happen to her and Bill and that Jamie and Jason would be left without anyone to raise them. There were no other Annas in their lives. Bill’s parents would never let themselves be tied down with children again, his brother had sent his own children off to boarding school, Karla was too busy figuring out who she was to be much good to two little boys who needed help finding out who they were, and Grace couldn’t take care of herself, let alone anyone else.