by Pamela Morsi
“We might,” Sonny agreed. “But we might not and it’s a chance we have to take.”
“We can’t afford to take a chance like that.”
Sonny disagreed. “We can’t afford to try to be out there now,” he said. “We’ve got another job going on out there. We can’t start up that close.”
“We’re within legal distance from the other crew,” the venture’s proponent said. “And they’re using rigging, we’ll be mechanized. It’s not that dangerous.”
“Yes, it is,” Sonny said. “I’ve been out there in those logging crews. I know what it’s like to have to work too close. I lost a friend in a stupid accident on a site just like this one. We can’t do this.”
The argument continued. At first there were a few people on Sonny’s side, but as the acrimony increased and lines were drawn they quietly, one by one, withdrew their support. Finally it was just Sonny, standing alone, sure of his conviction and unwilling to back down.
“I think we’ll just have to turn that decision over to top management,” his supervisor said.
Sonny was hopeful that he would get to make his case. He did not. When he was called into the office of the VP for Operations, the discussion was already over.
“I know that you have personal experience with this,” the man said.
“Yes, I worked in a situation very much like this one,” he said. “I lost a close friend in an accident that never should have happened.”
The man set his elbows on the desk and wove his fingers together thoughtfully. “Sometimes,” he said, “when we have a strong emotional reaction to a particular aspect of the business, it clouds our ability to make good, viable, profit-making decisions.”
Two hours later, Sonny stepped across the threshold of his house in Old North Knoxville.
“What are you doing home so early?” Dawn asked him.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I can’t remember if I was fired or I quit.”
REAL LIFE
27
Vern and I went to the movies with Sierra and Seth. Of course, we didn’t go to the same movie. As soon as we parked at the cineplex, the crush couple exited, making it look and feel like they were out alone. They went into some spooky love movie. Vern and I opted for a gross comedy where we laughed our heads off. We got out before they did and made ourselves comfortable on a bench just outside the doors.
“I saw that you were on the computer for a long time today,” he said. “Were you doing some more fractals?”
I shook my head. “No, I’ve been looking through old census records on the Internet for some of my lost ancestors.”
“Really?” Vern looked at me, genuinely surprised. “Well, it sounds as if you and Phrona are getting along better these days.”
I shrugged. “I don’t want her peeved at us,” I explained. “I think it makes things harder for Mom if she worries about how we’re getting along.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Your mother has more than enough to deal with now without worrying that you girls are fighting with your grandmother.”
It still felt weird to hear Mrs. Leland described as my grandmother. I still wasn’t quite comfortable with it and I sure didn’t want to give Vern any wrong ideas about where my loyalties might lie.
“Mrs. Leland is okay,” I told him. “And she’s entitled to her opinion about Mom. She just better keep it to herself while I’m around.”
Vern grinned at me and then threw an arm around my neck and gave me a quick hug.
“If it makes you feel any better to know it,” he said, “I think Dawn has turned out to be very brave and very wise. It wasn’t easy to come back here.”
“Because she and Mrs. Leland had words,” I said.
He nodded. “Angry, threatening words,” he said. “And your mother won. She won and she walked away.”
“And now she’s back,” I said. “I guess that’s why Mrs. Leland hates us. She thought she’d never have to mess with us again. And now we’re back here.”
Vern frowned. “Phrona doesn’t hate you. She loves you. She wants you here with us. That’s the brave part of Dawn’s behavior. She realized that you girls might need us, so she had to take the risk of bringing you here.”
“What risk?”
“The risk of losing,” he said. “The risk of Phrona getting her way at last.”
“I don’t get it,” I admitted.
Vern hesitated. “When your father died, your grandmother began legal proceedings to have her declared unfit and to get custody of you and your sister.”
“What?”
My voice was very loud and people nearby turned to look at us. I lowered my tone. “Mrs. Leland tried to take us away from Mom?”
He nodded.
“I thought they’d just cussed each other out,” I told him. “I never… Why would she do that?”
“She was trying to do what she thought best,” he said.
“Best? To take us from Mom?”
“It’s hard to explain to you what it was like,” Vern said. “Here was your mother, just a kid herself, she was numb with grief, she had no money, no job, and she had two little babies to care for. We tried to help her. We tried to give her money. We offered her a place to stay in our house. She turned her nose up at everything we wanted to do for her. When she went into the hospital to have you, she left Sierra with some woman she hardly knew. I wouldn’t have trusted that woman to take care of the dog. Which, by the way, she didn’t. Rocky was just running wild in the yard. If she hadn’t mentioned him to us we would have thought he was a stray and left him there. Dawn wouldn’t let us help her. She wouldn’t let us do anything for you girls.”
“I don’t get it,” I admitted. “Was Mrs. Leland trying to get custody of us just to get back at Mom?”
Vern’s expression was incredulous. “No, no, of course not,” Vern insisted. “Phrona was worried about you. You girls are part of Sonny, the only part we had left. And, at the time, taking care of you seemed like a reasonable thing to do,” he said. “It wasn’t my idea, but I went along with it. She didn’t want you kids to be neglected or farmed out to the state. And she honestly worried that might happen.”
“Mom loves us,” I said. “She would never do that!”
“You’re absolutely right,” Vern said. “If she’s accomplished nothing else over the last thirteen years, she’s proved that she will take care of you girls. But she was very young and she didn’t know anything about raising children and she was so broken up, we weren’t even sure that she was capable of taking care of herself.”
“But she did.”
Vern nodded. “She did,” he agreed. “And she’s done a great job with you and your sister. Even Phrona admits that.”
“What did Mom say?” I asked. “How did she react when you tried to take us?”
“She was furious,” he said. “She wished us everything but well. But the truth is, I think it kind of snapped her out of her stupor. With Phrona to hate and fear, she was energized. And we found out that all those years she’d been a ward of the state hadn’t been for nothing. She knew exactly who to talk to and what she needed to document. She used the system that had served her so poorly to protect her rights to her children. It was amazing. Our lawyer told us that he was impressed about how much she understood and how well she handled herself among the bureaucracy and professionals that aligned against her.”
“So she won,” I said.
He nodded. “We dropped our claim. The lawyer said that we’d have a better chance going after visitation with you. And…and it was very important to us to be allowed to be a part of your lives.”
“But that didn’t work, either,” I said.
“Actually, the judge granted us one weekend a month,” Vern said.
My jaw fell open. “We never came to visit you.”
“Once,” he said. “You came once. It was a Saturday. Dawn dropped you off and we spent the whole day with you. We fed you and played with you. Well, I guess we mo
stly played with Sierra. But I remember changing your diapers and trying to teach you peekaboo. We were exhausted, but we had a wonderful time.”
He was smiling and he reminisced about the day. Then his expression got somber.
“When your mother came to pick you up, she’d been out. That’s what young people do, I suppose. They go out. Even young people who have husbands that are only weeks in the grave. She’d had a beer, maybe two. Phrona didn’t approve and she said so. The two of them got into a shouting match. Dawn was so angry when she stormed out of the house, she forgot to take the dog.”
Vern sighed heavily, gazed out the window for a moment and then turned his attention back to me. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
“That was the last time I saw you girls before you showed up at our door,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that. But I just couldn’t have you think that Phrona and I didn’t want you. Everybody wanted you.”
I felt tears well up in my eyes and I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t know how I felt. It was too much information to take in. And it tilted my view of the world.
“How did Mom keep from bringing us back to see you?” I asked.
“Once she got that money from the logging company, she was gone,” he said. “For a while we tried to track her down. But she moved so much, we just gave up.”
I wanted to ask how long they looked and where but I saw Sierra and Seth coming across the room toward us. They were still trying to look as if they were alone. But when Vern suggested we stop for ice cream on the way home, they were all for it.
The little place was crowded and we had to stand in line to get our cones. But while Vern was paying, Sierra managed to snag a round, pink table next to the front window.
Seth and Sierra had decided that this was a great opportunity to talk with an adult about the art academy. Maybe he wasn’t going to be in on the decision, but if they could get Vern on their side, then so much the better.
“It sounds like a good school,” he admitted.
“Mom thinks I don’t have a lot of art experience,” Sierra correctly pointed out. “But fashion is kind of like art. And I love fashion.”
Surprisingly Vern agreed. “I think a lot of people in that industry have art as a background,” he said.
Sierra sharply drew in a breath, like he’d said something really amazing and exciting.
Neither Vern nor I could stifle our chuckle. After a second even Seth joined us. She was so easily pleased and so obviously delighted.
“You have to tell that to Mom,” Sierra told Vern. “If she hears it from me, she’ll think it’s just made up. But she knows you’d never lie to her.”
“I thought you’d decided that you wanted to be a nurse,” I told her. “What happened to that?”
“They don’t have a high school for being a nurse,” she pointed out. “And besides, maybe I could combine the careers. I could, like, come up with designer nurse uniforms. Those ugly scrub things are just not that flattering to most body types.”
“Yeah,” Seth agreed enthusiastically.
I rolled my eyes. “Come on,” I said. “That would never work.”
Vern gave me a look and made a tut-tut sound. “Never try to talk anyone out of her dream,” he said. “If it won’t work, the person always figures it out soon enough. And we need all those extravagant dreamers to try those things the rest of us would never take a chance on.”
There was nothing scolding about his tone. I liked that about Vern. He could tell you that you were wrong without making you feel bad about it. Maybe that was part of being a teacher or something.
His words absolutely inspired Sierra. She was off and running with a thousand ideas for uniforms and fancy bed linens to replace utilitarian white.
My sister was in one of her best moods. She was funny and upbeat and her enthusiasm seem to spill out on the rest of us. It wasn’t all that strange when Vern commented on it.
“You remind me so much of your father,” he told her. “He was always so full of ideas and he had the gift of making people believe in them.”
Sierra stopped in midgiggle and stared at Vern for a moment.
“So I’m like my dad?” she asked.
He nodded. “You are,” he said. “You both are. Seeing you here, living with you. I remember so many things.”
Vern’s expression was faraway, but there was a smile on his face.
Sierra’s brow had furrowed. “My mom always says that Sonny was very smart and very kind,” she said. “So I just figured I was more like Dawn.”
Vern laughed out loud at that.
“Sonny was smart and kind,” Vern said. “But he was like you in his excitement about the world around him. He was also able to see the potential in things. That’s what he saw in your mother. Not the person she was or even who she pretended to be, but the person she might have been if she’d had plenty of love.”
“I don’t think she got that much love,” I admitted. “None of her boyfriends were… Well, I don’t think they really loved her.”
“Some of them were nice,” Sierra defended.
I agreed. “I liked a lot of them. And they liked Mom, but I don’t think anyone really loved her.”
“But you girls loved her,” Vern said. “I would say that’s been all that she’s needed, the love of you two wonderful girls.”
“That’s not the same,” Sierra said. She shot a glance at Seth and gave him a blushing smile. “I love you and Phrona and Dakota and Mom. But I think it’s different when you, like, are in love with a guy.”
Seth was blushing now, too.
“Of course it’s different,” Vern said. “It would have been nice if your mother could have found a life partner after Sonny died. But not everybody does. It was very lucky that she had you two. You’ve been the tail on her kite.”
Sierra grinned ear to ear. “I think I’ll tell her that next time she gets all rare about something.”
We all laughed.
“Well, it’s true,” Vern said. “And you may quote me if you like.”
“Still, it would be nice if Mom could like fall in love or meet somebody,” Sierra said.
Vern nodded.
“What about Del?” she asked, glancing in my direction. “I think he’s really sweet on her.”
I shook my head. “She says Del’s all wrong for her,” I said. “And even if he wasn’t, she thinks this is like absolutely the wrong time to be getting interested in some guy. She’s got to get through the rest of this chemo stuff and get well.”
“There might never be a better time,” Vern said. “Life is short at best. Sometimes people should just go after what they want and not wait for the right time.”
“Yeah,” Sierra agreed.
“Are you sure?” I asked Vern. “I mean, hasty choices can be wrong choices.”
He nodded. “Or they can be the only choices,” he said. “Think about your father.”
“What do you mean?”
“That his apparently hasty choice was truly his only choice,” he said. “If your father had waited until he was finished with school and working in a job, the way we wanted him to, then he would never have married Dawn and you girls would never have been born.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But he would have married someone else. He would have had other kids. Remember the chaos theory.”
“Sure I remember,” Vern said. “A little change in the equation has a dramatic change in the outcome. But maybe his time here was not part of the equation. If he hadn’t married her and had you, he might not have had time to make a family at all. Then there would be nothing of him left but Phrona and me.”
“That would have been sad,” Sierra said.
Vern nodded. “It would have been very sad for me,” he said. “It already was very sad before you girls came back to Knoxville.”
“So you think Mom should date Del?”
Vern shrugged. “If she wants to, she should,” he said. “I don’t know what she wants, or if
being with Del could make her happy. But she can’t allow something as ugly as cancer keep her from living a life that she might want to live, a life that might not be as long as we hope.”
“Do you think my mom is going to die?” I asked.
Vern put an arm around my shoulder and gave me a comforting squeeze.
“We’re all going to die, honey,” he said. “You, me, your mother, all of us. But we try to put it off as long as we can and make the most of the life that we have.”
I relaxed and let go of the breath I was holding.
Sierra was smiling brightly, like she’d just come up with some brilliant idea.
“So life is like moving into a new place to live,” she said. “You put stuff up on the walls like you plan to be there forever. But you keep your suitcase under the bed, just in case.”
REAL LIFE
28
I never knew if Mom called that Marcy person from the CAVA. Somehow I got the impression that she didn’t. The woman showed up at the Lelands’ front door anyway. She was a tiny, thin lady about Mrs. Leland’s age, I suppose, but a lot more wrinkly.
“Her hair is like really in style,” Sierra pointed out.
I decided she must have worn it that way for the past thirty years and now it was back in at last.
“It’s the only thing fashionable about her,” my sister said.
I don’t know fashion but, even if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to argue. Her suit, while very neat and clean, obviously dated from another era. It had huge shoulder pads which accentuated the woman’s very narrow frame and shapeless body. I had more curves than she did, an incidence that didn’t come up that frequently.
Mom was not having a particularly good day. She wasn’t throwing up or anything like that, but she was just really pale and exhausted. She glared at Marcy through slitted eyes.
“I’m really not interested,” she said simply.
Marcy nodded. “I used to feel that way, too,” she said. “But I’ve been so lucky. I’ve seen these children. I’ve seen their lives get changed for the better. That can really hold my interest.”