But everything had started to change when Gincy had gone to high school. Why? Why had her mother become so critical and dismissive of her? And why had she, Gincy, allowed herself to become the same toward her mother?
“Gincy? Are you there?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about the past. And about the notion of my mother needing me. It’s just so hard to believe.”
“Look, you’re back there now, aren’t you? You chose to go back, and she hasn’t asked you to leave. She’s even relying on you, isn’t she, to make the meals. She’s letting you clean her house. She made a fuss I’m sure, but she did actually let you see her finances. I’m no psychiatrist, but isn’t it at least possible that she’s happy you’re there with her? Since when do human beings make sense?”
“Since never,” Gincy admitted. And at dinner Ellen had said that she was glad Gincy and Tamsin were visiting, although that might have been a lie for Tamsin’s sake.
But Gincy had never known her mother to be a liar, in spite of the few recent incidents, and obviously her mother had felt she had good reasons for keeping certain bits of information from her daughter. If anything, the Ellen Gannon Gincy knew could be brutal in telling the truth as she saw it.
Rick yawned. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s not the company.”
“You’re tired. I’ll let you go.”
“You should get to bed, too,” he said. “You’re working very hard there, I know.”
Gincy smiled. “You know me, Ms. Get-’er-done. Good night, Pinky.”
“Good night, Brain.”
Gincy continued to sit at the kitchen table for a few moments after ending the call with Rick. She needed to think more about the notion of her mother actually needing her; she needed to think more about the notion of her mother actually being glad that her daughter, the prickly, discontented Gincy Gannon, who had rejected a perfectly good life in Appleville for the temptations of the Big City, was there to take care of her, at least for the moment.
And she realized as she sat there that she felt kind of good about it, not of course about her mother being in a state of distress, but about her mother wanting her there at Number Nineteen. If indeed Rick was right. After all, everyone needed to be needed, even by a mother who had never shown her daughter much affection or understanding, certainly not once she was past the age of twelve and no longer entirely dependent on her mother for her every thought and opinion. Maybe, Gincy thought now, just maybe Ellen’s becoming generally dismissive of her daughter had been the only way she could handle Gincy’s growing independence, her obvious desire to leave Appleville, her determination to live a life vastly different from the one her mother had chosen.
It was possible, wasn’t it? It was possible that Ellen Gannon had felt rejected by her daughter and had protected herself from hurt in the only way she knew how—by withdrawing, by criticizing. But would Gincy ever really know for sure?
With a sigh, Gincy got up from the table, turned off the kitchen lights, and made her way upstairs to her old bedroom. She had a powerful urge to give her own daughter a great big hug. Tamsin always welcomed hugs.
CHAPTER 26
Ellen and Tamsin were watching a movie in the living room, something starring Ryan Gosling, one of Tamsin’s crushes of the moment. The sound was up way too loud, as it had been every time her mother watched a show on television that week, but Gincy refrained from asking them to turn the volume down. For all she knew her mother was experiencing difficulties with her hearing. It was something else she would have to ask about. Carefully, without wounding her mother’s pride.
Suddenly, Tommy was standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“You’re like a ninja,” Gincy said, her hand to her heart. “You just appear out of thin air.”
Tommy grinned. “I came in the front door. You just couldn’t hear me because of the TV.”
“Is Mom having trouble with her hearing?” she asked.
“She didn’t say anything to me.” Tommy went over to the fridge, opened it, and began to rummage around. Her father, too, had been one for rummaging. It had driven his wife nuts, Gincy remembered.
Ellen: “Decide what you want before you open the door! You’re wasting electricity!”
Ed: “How can I know what’s in there if the door is closed?”
Her father had had a point, Gincy thought. She opened one of the drawers under the counter to the left of the sink and began to empty the contents onto the counter. Today one of her chores was drawer tidying; it was amazing what rubbish she had found already, including handfuls of twist ties that had lost most of their plastic covering; three cherry pit-ters, all broken; and one metal skewer with the word PIG etched into the round end. She had never known either parent to have the need for a metal skewer, ever, not even when the old grill was wheeled out each summer. Ellen and Ed Gannon had cooked hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill, nothing as exotic as kebabs.
And cherries? She had never seen a cherry pass the door of Number Nineteen. Fruit for the Gannons had meant apples, bananas, orange juice, and the occasional grapefruit. Small grapefruit, not medium or large, and always yellow, never pink.
“What’s this?” she said, pulling out a bundle of brochures. The brochures, some yellowed with age, were bound in a rubber band, which promptly fell apart as she tried to remove it.
Tommy, still at the fridge, looked over his shoulder. “Those are Mom’s,” he said. “She’s always wanted to go on a cruise to someplace with palm trees and drinks with umbrellas and pieces of fruit stuck in them. She never went. Well, you know that. I guess Dad couldn’t afford it.”
Gincy stared down at the brochures in disbelief. She had never had any idea her mother wanted to go anywhere, let alone on a cruise! As far as she knew, her parents had never gone on vacation other than to a lake on which a distant cousin had a pathetic little cabin with a pathetic little rowboat, and that had been ages ago, before the cousin accidentally set fire to the cabin with his cigarette and it had burned down. For all she knew the rowboat burned, too.
What else about Mom do I not know, Gincy wondered. Is she a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, a certified pilot, maybe an award-winning chess player?
Briefly, looking down at the bundle of brochures advertising exotic getaways, the idea of sending her mother on a cruise occurred to her. Why not? She and Rick could probably afford a modest package that included airfare. But was Ellen healthy enough to travel alone? Would she want to? The idea faded away as quickly as it had come.
Tommy closed the fridge without having taken anything out of it and leaned against the counter a few feet from where Gincy was working.
“Mom took good care of Dad,” he said.
“What brought that on?” Gincy asked her brother.
“Just thinking. I wish I was as lucky as Dad was. Maybe if I had someone like Mom for a wife I wouldn’t . . .”
“You wouldn’t what, Tommy?” Gincy asked gently.
“Nothing. Anyway, they were good together. Everybody said so.”
Gincy wanted to ask about this “everybody,” but it occurred to her that Tommy might think she was challenging him and she didn’t want that, not now, not when they were finally really communicating for the first time since they were kids.
“You know,” Tommy said then, after glancing toward the door as if to be certain they were alone, “back like seven or eight years ago I signed up for a class at the community college in Brickton.”
Gincy was stunned. Tommy barely got out of high school! He had always hated school, right from the beginning, and each year the teachers were glad to see him go.
“You did?” she said. “I never knew that. What sort of a class?”
“Computers.”
“Good for you,” she said. “Did you enjoy it?”
Tommy picked up a stray jar lid Gincy had found in one of the drawers and began to turn it around and around in his hand. “Not really,” he said. “I couldn’t keep up. I mean, they
had a computer lab where you could practice between classes but . . .”
“Did Mom and Dad know?” Gincy asked.
Tommy glanced again toward the kitchen door. The sound of the television seemed to assure him that his mother was still in the living room. “Nah,” he said. “I figured I’d only tell them if I got a good grade or something. I didn’t want them to be disappointed.”
“Tommy,” Gincy said. “Did you finish the class?”
Tommy laughed, and the laugh was bitter. “What do you think?”
“I’m sorry.” Gincy, rarely if ever at a loss for words, simply didn’t know what else to say.
Tommy shook his head and put the stray lid back on the counter. “Doesn’t matter. Do you think Tamsin will be around this afternoon?”
“I suppose. Why don’t you ask her?”
Tommy nodded and left the kitchen for the living room.
Gincy felt shaken up by what Tommy had told her—and more so by the fact that he had shared his failure with her in the first place. Her brother had never confided in her about his personal life before this visit home, ever, but maybe that had been her fault. Maybe he had never felt he could trust her not to laugh at him or dismiss his concerns.
“Above all, be kind,” Gincy whispered into the empty room.
They certainly were words to live by.
CHAPTER 27
Gincy and Ellen spent a good deal of the afternoon running errands. Persuading her mother to accompany her had been oddly easy, and Gincy took that as another sign that her mother was on the road to recovery.
First they dropped off a pair of curtains at the dry cleaners, but only after some verbal tussling. Ellen had insisted that the curtains could be washed by hand in the tiny bathroom tub, and Gincy had strongly vetoed the idea. “Do you know how heavy these will be soaking wet? You’ll never be able to handle them, and I’m certainly not going to throw my back out!”
After the dry cleaners they stopped at Harriman’s, where Ellen was greeted no fewer than four times, and by name at that, on their way up and down the aisles.
“You’re popular, Mom,” Gincy said, when one man had gone off after tipping his tweed cap and wishing Ellen the season’s greetings. She felt some surprise at this popularity, given her mother’s lack of close friends.
“I’ve lived here a long time,” her mother replied. “That’s all.”
After leaving the grocery store they stopped at a stand along the road leading out of town. Two teenage boys bundled to the teeth in fleece and wearing goofy knit caps were selling Christmas wreaths. “Our mom makes them,” the taller one said when Gincy asked where the wreaths had come from. “She’s, like, obsessed,” the other boy added. “Our dad said she had to sell some ’cause there’s no more room in the house.”
“You pick one, Mom,” Gincy suggested. “After all, it’s for your front door.”
“But the cost . . .”
“My gift. Just pick the one you like best.”
Ellen chose a wreath of pine boughs heavily decorated with red berries, blue ribbons, and little green bells. There were heavy doses of silver and purple glitter sprinkled over the ribbons.
“It’s very—festive,” Gincy noted.
Ellen nodded. “It’s the nicest wreath by far.”
When they got back to the house on Crescent Road, Ellen went to her room for a much needed nap and Gincy went to the basement to fold laundry. The outing had actually been pleasant, she thought, as she stacked clean bath towels and sheets and put aside her mother’s blouses for ironing. They had talked about nothing much, certainly nothing to cause either of them distress. Her mother had filled her in on the Appleville gossip, although given her mother’s relative social isolation, Gincy couldn’t be sure how much of the gossip was up to date. Micky Sullivan might have gotten another job by now, after having been sacked for petty theft at his old job at the hardware store Ed Gannon had once managed. Clarice Huston might have ended her not-so-secret affair with the married pastor at the Baptist Church. And Dr. Hayes might by now have been able to afford to start construction on the new luxury house his wife had been clamoring for.
“That woman,” Ellen Gannon had pronounced, “is downright spoiled rotten.” Small-town gossip. It was one of the many reasons Gincy was glad to be living in Boston, where a certain degree of anonymity was still possible.
And though she was dying to know more about her mother’s secret passion for palm trees and pristine beaches, Gincy had refrained from mentioning the cruise brochures. If her mother had wanted her to know about her interest in ocean travel, wouldn’t she have told her before now? She had already pried into her mother’s personal life by opening the Bible and, at least in her mother’s opinion, by looking through her financial papers.
It was just the three women at dinner that evening. Tommy, after having taken Tamsin to a trolley museum that afternoon, had gone to meet a buddy. Gincy hoped they weren’t meeting at a bar, but there was a good chance that they were. Bars were fine in and of themselves; Gincy had spent her fair share of time on a barstool, drinking a beer, munching on French fries or mixed nuts, and pretending to be interested in whatever ball game was on the television over the bartender’s head. It was just that Tommy wasn’t known for his ability to “drink responsibly.” Well, Gincy thought now, maybe that’s changed. Tommy had told her that he now liked to work, when for years he had regarded a job as something akin to torture. Maybe these days he had the sense to stop after two or three beers.
“I didn’t have any money with me, so Tommy paid our entrance fees,” Tamsin told them. “I felt bad. I mean, I didn’t know where we were going. If I had, I would have brought some money. It was eight dollars for each of us, and that’s because it’s off-season. It’s ten dollars usually.”
“I wonder what made him choose the trolley museum. Had he ever been there before?” Gincy asked.
Tamsin nodded. “Oh, yeah. He said it’s his favorite place ever. But he’s not an actual member. Maybe it’s too expensive to be one.”
But ten-dollar entrance fees added up, Gincy thought. Tommy’s understanding of economics had never been strong.
“Your grandfather and I went to the trolley museum once,” Ellen said. “It was a long time ago. We took Tommy. You didn’t want to go with us, Virginia. I don’t remember why.”
Probably, Gincy thought, because I was being full of myself and didn’t want to be seen with my embarrassing family.
“Did you have fun?” Gincy asked her daughter.
“I had a great time,” Tamsin said. “They’ve got hundreds of streetcars and trolleys, some dating back to the 1880s. Isn’t that amazing? And they’ve got all these special programs, like one where a real motorman teaches you how to drive a trolley. Tommy said he wants to do that someday. Not be a professional motorman; he just wants to sign up for the program. And you can have a birthday party there, and in October you can ride one of the trolleys out to a pumpkin patch. I’d love to do that.”
As her daughter spoke enthusiastically about the T-shirt she would have bought Tommy at the museum shop if she had had any money with her, and what she had learned about the difference between urban and suburban trolleys, Gincy thought back to the conversation she had had with her brother that morning. She thought about how all these years after the ill-fated computer class he still felt the sting of failure. She felt her heart break all over again.
And another thought occurred to Gincy then, as they ate their dinner of cheese ravioli and salad. She had always been critical of her mother’s coddling Tommy, of her not pushing him to be better, more productive, to be even a little bit ambitious. She had always thought of her mother, and to a lesser extent of her father, as an enabler. But maybe Ellen had been right all along. Maybe from the start she had known her son’s limitations and had accepted him for who he was. Maybe she had known, in the way only a parent could know, that pushing him would only lead to disaster. Maybe her father had known this, too, and had simply loved his s
on without condition.
The way Gincy loved her own children.
Above all, Gincy thought, her parents had been kind to Tommy.
“How long will you be staying, Virginia?” Ellen asked, when Tamsin had finally finished her report of the afternoon.
“A few more days if that’s okay,” she said, wondering if her mother had forgotten she had already asked that question.
Ellen’s eyes widened. “Of course it’s okay. Do you think I would throw my own daughter and granddaughter out of my home?”
Tamsin tried unsuccessfully to hide a grin.
“In fact,” Ellen went on, “you could stay through Christmas, if you like.”
Gincy hoped that her immediate reaction to this suggestion didn’t show on her face. She didn’t really want to spend Christmas Day at Number Nineteen. She wanted to be home with her husband in their comfortable home, surrounded by the things they had collected together over the years, the paintings, the knickknacks, the books. She wanted to sit under her own real Christmas tree. If that was being childish or selfish, well, that’s the way she felt. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “It might depend on work, but I’ll let you know as soon as possible.”
Ellen nodded. “You decide what’s best. And I meant to tell you, Virginia, I started that new mystery you brought me. When I woke from my nap this afternoon.”
“And?”
“It’s really very good. It’s not too bloody, and there’s no bad language. And there are recipes in the back.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying the book, Mom,” she said, though she dreaded the idea of her mother attempting to make crepes. Regular old pancakes made from a mix were almost beyond her. Ellen never seemed to serve a pancake without a big, fat lump of uncooked dough at its center.
“Do you know if there’s a second book in the series already out?” Ellen asked.
“I’ll find out for you,” Gincy promised. “I’ll check the publisher’s website.”
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