by Pamela Morsi
Mom’s jaw dropped open. Her expression was incredulous and then she actually laughed.
“I’m underestimating your sister’s creativity and imagination,” she said. “Or maybe she’s just watching too much TV.”
“So if you’re not pregnant,” I said, “why are you going to the doctor?”
“There are lots of reasons to see a doctor,” Mom answered. “I don’t really have an appointment at this clinic, so I’d better get over there so I can pressure them to try to work me into the schedule.”
She drank down her coffee and got up to leave.
“Mom!” I whined.
She reached over and flicked my nose, playfully. “When I have anything certain to tell you and Sierra, I will.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but she wouldn’t be budged from it.
“At least stay and have breakfast with me.”
“You’re finished already,” she answered. “Tomorrow. We’ll make it a date. Breakfast tomorrow.”
She winked at me again and then she was gone. A few minutes later I heard the loud muffler on the Dodge as the car started up.
I sat there in the big, superclean kitchen alone.
I got up and carried the dishes to the sink. Normally I would have rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher. But I figured if Mrs. Leland liked cleaning so much, then she could do it.
I glanced through the little storage room between the kitchen and the back door. Through the window I could see Mrs. Leland. She set the watering can on the edge of the patio and walked back to the office behind the garage. I took the opportunity to snoop through a few cabinets. I wasn’t really looking for anything, just looking.
It was all basic stuff, detergent and spray cleaners, paper products and canned goods.
In the bottom cabinet near the door, I noticed the dog food and wondered where Rocky had gotten to. I’d never had a dog before and I’d always kind of wanted one. It seemed like such a neat, ordinary thing. A kid and a dog. That was like a regular childhood. I walked through the house, whistling and calling for him, but he didn’t come.
The place was pretty much empty. Mom’s little suite was messy and chaotic already. She’d apparently tried on lots of outfits before deciding on the gray funeral suit.
I peeked into the Lelands’ bedroom. Nobody was there, so I tiptoed in. It was decorated in pale tones of yellow and gold. The bed was made, the dresser uncluttered. Vern’s house shoes were sitting precisely parallel just under the edge of the bedspread fringe. The closet doors were closed. From inside the master bath I could see the dim glow of a night-light. It felt weird being there. I sniffed the air, testing the rumor that old people smell bad. But it was all candle scent, faint with gardenia.
Obviously, the dog was not there, but I took the opportunity to stand a few feet inside the door and survey the area. It was a guilty pleasure, invading their privacy. I lolled in it for several minutes before tiptoeing out.
I expected Vern’s study to be a dark, cavelike, mannish sort of place. But the old scarred, knotty pine was surprisingly cheerful, the worn—almost ragged—leather lounge chair was inviting and there were more books than I’d ever seen outside the public library. I walked along the bookshelf, fingering the titles. If there was an order to it, it wasn’t obvious to me. A history of the Teapot Dome scandal sat next to a Steinbeck novel.
Near to the window there was a little table with a chess board set up. A game was obviously in progress. There was an old-fashioned turntable nearby and a stack of those big black plastic records. I picked one up, expecting Elvis or something equally sixties. There was a picture of some guy who looked like he ought to be on money. The title was Haydn’s Surprise, Symphony No. 94 in G. I’d never heard of Haydn, so I shrugged and put it back.
Vern was not as neat as his wife, that was clear. The desk was piled with folders, papers and notebooks, and yellow sticky notes were tacked up everywhere. Especially on the area around the computer monitor. It was mostly math stuff, equations and formulas. I was pretty good at math, but this was very tough and there were symbols I wasn’t familiar with. All in all, I liked Vern’s room. I thought I could hang there. But not in the morning. It was definitely a doldrums-of-afternoon kind of place.
I kept exploring, checking out the front hallway and the living room. It was in the dining room that I saw the photos. At first my eye passed right over the frames as if they were just more knickknacks in a house loaded with them. Then inexplicably, like a tingle up the spine, I sensed they were more. Set out on the top of the buffet I saw a small framed toddler next to a somber Eagle Scout, a gap-toothed Little Leaguer beside a grinning kid in a wet swimsuit, a serious boy in a white choir robe, a young man in a mortarboard.
“Dad.”
The name slipped from my lips involuntarily.
This was him. This was Sonny Leland. This was the man who’d really loved my mother, who’d given me life, whose existence had brought me to this place. This was Sonny Leland. He was more than a tattoo on my mother’s breast. Here was a whole life in a dozen framed photos.
Hesitantly, I reached up and touched one. He was in his soccer uniform, burgundy and gold with striped socks. He’d been about my age, I guess. He was lanky like me. He didn’t look like me, not exactly. But I could see familiar things about him, about me. This was really my father. I was really part of him.
I heard the front door open.
Inexplicably I grabbed up the soccer picture and stashed it inside my shirt.
There was the scratch of scurrying dog paws on the entryway tile.
“Where are you going?” Vern called out.
Rocky didn’t answer, but a minute later he was at my side.
“Hey, puppy,” I said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Eagerly, happily, he stretched up, resting his front feet on my knee so that I could pet him. He had a great smile. The white hair around his snout gave him the appearance of a little old man with a gray beard. His little pink tongue hung out of one side of his mouth. His enthusiasm belied his age.
“You’ve been looking at the photographs?” Vern said from the doorway.
I was defensive.
“I was only looking.”
“Sure, look at them all you want,” he said. “I’m sure there’s some you haven’t seen.”
“I haven’t seen any of them,” I said. “I’ve never seen a picture of my dad.”
That statement made him pause. His brow furrowed.
“There’s more,” he said. “Lots and lots more.”
He gestured for me to follow him. In the hallway he turned on the overhead light and opened a glass-fronted bookshelf. Inside were rows of photo albums.
“We took a lot of pictures of that boy,” Vern told me. “He was our only child. We took snapshots all the time. We had a Brownie when we got married. Then we wore out a couple of Instamatics and a Disc before we graduated to 35mm.”
I didn’t say anything, but I guess I must have looked as clueless as I felt.
“Those are cameras,” he explained. “We always had a camera. And we took pictures of Sonny all the time.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
He nodded and sighed a little sadly, I thought.
“Your grandmother is very orderly,” he said. “She could never stand having loose photos lying around. She spent untold hours getting them into albums.”
He handed me one. I held it tightly in my arms, not so much to savor it as to ensure that the framed photo tucked inside my shirt didn’t spill out.
“You can look at these anytime,” Vern said. “I’m sure that’s what Sonny would have wanted.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, still uneasy.
Sierra came out of her room. Unlike me, she didn’t wash up or dress before breakfast. She was in her Radiohead T-shirt, bare feet and wild hair.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I was just showing your sister where we keep the photo albums of Sonny.”
; “There are photo albums? Cool.”
Vern handed her one of the thick, heavy books and she began a conversation with him as she carried it into the kitchen with her.
Grateful for the distraction, I hurried to the room and shut the door behind me. For added security, I jerked the drapes shut. Then I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed. It still contained all my extra clothes and special possessions, those I wasn’t willing to put on display.
I pulled the soccer photo out of my shirt, wrapped it in an old sweater and hid it deep in the bottom of the scarred piece of luggage.
These people had hundreds of photos of my dad. I didn’t even have one. When we left this place, I had no intention of leaving it behind.
SONNY DAYS
8
It had taken Sonny almost a week to find her. It was a miracle at that. He was amazed at how little he actually knew about her. She had no friends he could consult. No history that she’d related. He remembered her mentioning Central High. But he couldn’t find any record of her graduating from there or any other local school. He was beginning to wonder is she’d given him a fake name.
Reluctantly, because he felt he had no other choice, he went to talk to his mother. Not to have her share gossip about the woman he loved, but to find out if there was anything she knew that could help him.
He found Phrona in her new little makeshift office that had been added onto the back of garage. For most of his life, his mother’s vocation had been mothering him. A former Knoxville debutante and a Fulbright scholar, she’d put her pursuit of history on the back burner to pursue the world of drool and dirty diapers. Being Sonny’s mom had become her entire world for eighteen years. And she had been excellent at it. Endlessly patient with him. Determined to make even the most routine task a learning experience. She devoted herself to his happiness and development. It was a wonderful childhood. Sonny’s home was always clean. His meals were nutritious and tasty. His friends were always welcome. And he knew every moment of every day that he was loved.
When he’d chosen to move into the dorm at college, his mother didn’t even voice a complaint. Though he knew it must have been hard. Empty nesting was what the pop psychologists were calling it. Watching your life’s purpose walk out the front door and wave goodbye required quite an adjustment. With her husband only ten years from retirement, it felt silly to start a career. Then, at a summer picnic with visiting relatives, she’d discovered genealogy. It was the perfect blending of two things she loved, family and history. And she’d taken it up with a passion.
Her office was lined with books. On one wall she’d taped up nine generations of her direct line back to her Puritan roots in the south of England.
Sonny seated himself in the comfortable armchair wedged between the corner of two bookshelves. His mother had swiveled hers around to face him.
“This girl is not for you, Sonny,” she said. “I understand that you have strong feelings for her, but she’s not right for you.”
Sonny tightened his jaw. He wasn’t angry, but he intended to be firm. “Tell me what you know, Mama,” he said. “When it comes to Dawn, I’m not interested in what you think, only what you know.”
“I know that she’s been lying to you.”
“Not revealing personal stuff is not the same as lying,” he defended, though in honesty he did feel she had lied.
“I’m not splitting hairs with you,” his mother said. “I was prepared to like the girl. But I certainly wasn’t prepared to be publicly insulted by her.”
“I’m sure she regrets that,” Sonny said, hoping it was true. “But surely you can see her side of it. She thought you were prying into her life.”
“She only thought I was prying because she had something to hide,” Phrona pointed out.
“Everybody has a right to their privacy,” Sonny said.
“But nobody has a right to talk to me as if I were some loathsome worm. And nobody has the right to lie to my son.”
“Mother, I don’t need your protection.”
“Maybe you think that you don’t,” Phrona answered. “But this girl has obviously hurt you. She’ll continue to do that. People become what they are meant to be. Whether it’s their genetics or their upbringing, this girl will never be capable of love or family.”
Sonny felt both anger and confusion. “What a terrible thing to say!”
“What a terrible truth to live with,” his mother countered. “The girl’s family is so worthless they wouldn’t even bother with her. And she’s been unable to bond with any foster family in Knox County.”
“What?”
“That’s the word I got from Jane Wickham’s daughter-in-law’s sister, you know, the one who works for child welfare.”
Sonny didn’t remember any of the women mentioned, but he nodded nonetheless.
“This girl’s branch of the Dixon family are unmitigated trash and busy hooking up with the same,” Phrona said. “They are worthless drunks, petty thieves and career criminals. Her father’s been in and out of prison a dozen times. Her mother left town when Dawn was just a baby and dumped her with an old aunt, who neglected the child. She was passed around until nobody would take her and the state intervened. Her own flesh and blood gave her over and said good riddance.”
Sonny swallowed hard. It was difficult to connect this history with the happy, carefree young woman that he knew.
“She was a runaway from a half-dozen foster homes before the system declared her incorrigible and locked her into juvenile detention,” Phrona said. “That’s a juvenile prison, Sonny. She spent her formative years with girls who were thieves and prostitutes and murderers.”
“But she was just a runaway,” Sonny pointed out.
His mother sighed and shook her head.
“I know you believe that you love her, Sonny. But a woman like this will never be able to love you in return. She’ll never be able to share a stable home and family.”
Sonny shook his head. He didn’t doubt that his mother was telling him the facts, but he refused to believe the conclusion that they led her to.
“I love Dawn,” he said. “I love her and I need her. If she’s never been loved, then being loved by me will be good for her. And letting her go would be a tragedy for both of us.”
He left his parents’ home more determined than ever to find the woman he’d lost. He sought out her former caseworkers and the court services people who’d helped her become an emancipated minor. He talked to former employers and even a couple of members of the Dixon family who cheerfully declared that they wouldn’t know her if they saw her on the street.
It was Sheila who flagged him down one afternoon as he once again searched every hangout on Cumberland.
“I saw Dawn’s paycheck in the outgoing mail,” she told him as she handed him a scribbled lunch ticket. “This is where she had it sent.”
The address led Sonny to an area of older homes very near the UT campus. For want of a better name the run-down neighborhood was known as the Student Slum. The huge white house was neglected and faded. On the porch a half-dozen black mailboxes hinted at the chopped-up nature of the residences behind its front door.
Sonny hesitated on the sidewalk. The afternoon was hot and the smell of a freshly mown lawn was in the air. A very skinny old man sat on the front porch steps. He was holding an empty green bean can into which he was spitting tobacco.
“Hi,” Sonny called out as approached.
The man looked up at him without speaking.
Sonny stopped at the steps and glanced down the line of mailboxes. Some had names haphazardly taped to them, most did not.
“I’m looking for Dawn Dixon. Does she live here?”
The old man’s eyes narrowed and he perused Sonny up and down.
“Are you one of them social workers?”
Sonny was momentarily puzzled at the question. “No, I’m her boyfriend.”
The man’s expression immediately changed. He actually smiled, revealing a mouthfu
l of very brown-stained teeth.
“Hers is the garage apartment, around the back,” he said. “She just got home a few minutes ago. Her roommate ain’t come from work yet. She’ll probably be here in another half hour or so. You’d better take your chance to be alone.”
The old guy winked at Sonny.
He thanked him and walked around the house and down the driveway. The garage doors were open and displayed not cars, but a dozen dented and smelly garbage cans, junk appliances and rolls of old carpeting. The stairs to the apartment were on the far side. There was a small landing halfway up where a mismatched selection of women’s underwear hung on an improvised clothesline. He stepped past it feeling as if he were intruding someplace where he was not welcome.
He stood in front of the threshold and knocked on the door.
“It’s open!” a voice called back.
Sonny hesitated.
Uncertain, he turned the doorknob and peeked inside. From somewhere inside he could hear the water running.
“Hello!” he called out.
“Come on in!” He recognized the voice as Dawn’s. “I’m in the shower. I’ll be right out.”
Sonny let himself in. The apartment was really just two rooms. Sparse with furniture but overrun with clothes that seemed to be draped everywhere on everything. He thought about seating himself, but the couch and all the chairs were covered. So he just walked around. Though it was more like pacing than wandering the apartment.
The kitchen consisted of one wall that had a sink, refrigerator, stove and a couple of cabinets. There was no giant mess or pile of dishes. It was surprisingly neat and tidy, especially when compared to the draping clothes disaster in the rest of the house. The table, however, was piled with mail and tiny shampoo bottles, cartons of cigarettes and magazines. He was just walking away, when he saw his name.
The corner of a lined-paper tablet was visible beneath a handful of little soaps from the Holiday Inn. He saw Vernon Henry Leland. He pulled it out of the stack. It actually read in fancy girlish script, Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Henry Leland. His parents? That was even more curious. Then as he looked at the rest of the page he saw Mrs. Dawn Leland and Dawn and Sonny Leland in various writing styles.