Dr. Walker was about forty. He made Gincy feel old. It always made her feel old when she encountered younger authority figures. Police officers, doctors, lawyers, all barely out of diapers! Well, that was an exaggeration. Still. She didn’t like it.
“So how is my mother, Doctor?” Gincy asked when the exam was over and she had been called into the examination room.
“Fit as a fiddle, though a bit too thin and possibly anemic, but the blood tests will tell us for sure. All fairly easy to fix,” he said with a smile.
“You see, Mom?” Gincy said. “It was a good thing we came.”
Ellen nodded. “Yes, Virginia.”
Dr. Walker put his hand on his patient’s shoulder. “Mrs. Gannon, I would strongly advise you to listen to your daughter. She only wants what’s best for you.”
That was true, Gincy thought, looking at her mother sitting now in the visitor’s chair, her old pocketbook, the “good” one, held firmly in her lap, her best shoes shined just that morning. She did want what was best for her mother. But she didn’t deserve praise for it. What halfway decent daughter didn’t want what was best for her mother?
“You know, Dr. Walker,” Ellen said, “my daughter has made quite a success of her life. She made a good match, her husband is a very nice man, and she’s a real bigwig in Boston. Between you and me, that important newspaper she works for is probably going bankrupt without her there in the office to see that things happen properly.”
Gincy cringed at her mother’s gross exaggeration of the extent of her professional power. And yet she was touched. No child was ever too old to appreciate a parent’s approval. She remembered what her mother had supposedly told Adele Brown, that she didn’t want to disturb her daughter because of her big important job in the city....
Over her mother’s head, Dr. Walker gave Gincy a conspiratorial smile. “All the more reason, Mrs. Gannon, that you should take your daughter’s advice.”
They thanked the doctor and made their way back to the waiting area. “Have a seat for a minute, Mom,” Gincy said. “I’m going to use the ladies’ room.”
But Gincy had no need of the ladies’ room. Instead, she asked to speak for a moment to the nurse practitioner, a woman much closer to Gincy’s age than Dr. Walker. Briefly, she told the woman about her mother’s depression. “I do think she’s coming out of it,” she said, “but I worry she’ll have a relapse, possibly once I’ve gone back home to Boston.”
“Any chance she could go to stay with you for a bit?” the nurse practitioner asked.
“Doubtful. I mean, my husband and I would be fine with it, but my mother is fairly terrified of the city.”
“Well, at least you can continue to keep a close eye on her while you’re here,” the nurse advised. “If you see any deterioration, bring her in. Depression is certainly not uncommon after the loss of a spouse, especially at the holidays. We can try a mild antidepressant.”
Gincy thanked the nurse and headed back to the reception area. She highly doubted her mother would take an antidepressant willingly, but it was good to know there were options besides seeing a therapist, something she knew for sure her mother would never, ever do. Cities and therapists were firmly on Ellen Gannon’s list of things to be avoided at all costs.
“What took you so long?” Ellen demanded when Gincy rejoined her. “I’m getting hungry. You heard what the doctor said. He says I have to eat more.”
Gincy smiled. “How about a hamburger for lunch, Mom? The doctor said you need more protein in your diet.”
“If you say so, Virginia.”
“I do, Mom,” Gincy said. “I say so.”
CHAPTER 35
After lunch, Ellen went to her room for a nap. Tamsin, after helping her mother clean up the kitchen, announced that she was going to walk downtown.
“I noticed this new store on Main Street while we were driving around yesterday,” she said. “They’ve got those nautical-style rope bracelets I like. I want to see how much they cost.”
“They’re probably cheaper here than in Boston,” Gincy noted. “Most everything is.”
When Tamsin had gone off, Gincy called Tommy’s cell, but again the call went to voice mail. “Call me, Tommy,” she told him. Where the heck was he, she thought. Why couldn’t he at least return a call? It wasn’t lost on her that only weeks ago Tommy’s silence would have annoyed her. Now what she felt was concern. Was he sick? In trouble?
Gincy sighed. So much in one’s life could change in a matter of days, even moments. Even long-held estimations of a person could be thoroughly wiped away in the proverbial heartbeat and you could suddenly start to see him as he really was. What was the old expression, probably from the Bible or Shakespeare? Most great expressions were. The scales were falling from her eyes.
Gincy sighed. Suddenly, the idea of a nap, or at least of a rest, seemed a good one. She went up to her old room and lay down on the ancient mattress. And not surprisingly she found herself thinking back to that pivotal summer of her life, the summer she met Rick and Clare and Danielle. In fact, she dated the start of her adult life to that summer. Clare and Danielle had become her first genuine friends, though initially she was absolutely sure they would never be close. And she hadn’t been at all interested in getting seriously involved with a man, let alone a widower with a small child!
So much had changed for her that summer. She had learned so much. She had finally, at the age of twenty-nine, grown up.
She remembered now the call she had gotten from her father one hot and humid night. She had immediately assumed that he had bad news to tell her. Her father was never the one to call. “Who’s dead?” she had demanded.
But Ed Gannon had contacted his daughter for quite a different reason. After an unexpected visit to his sister, Tommy had gone home to Appleville to report that Gincy was seeing a creepy old guy. Ed Gannon was concerned. What exactly had her father said to her? Yes, that she had always had good sense but that as her father he felt he should offer a warning about men. She had assured him that Rick was neither creepy nor old and had thanked him for his concern. He had told her to call him if she needed anything.
It had been a turning point for Gincy, that simple conversation with her father. She had realized that until that moment she hadn’t given him much credit for anything other than being a hard and conscientious worker. She certainly had never given him credit for caring enough to reach out to her when he thought she might be in trouble.
She had made a separate peace with her father after that. Then why not with her mother? What had been holding her back besides stubbornness? And it wasn’t her mother’s responsibility to make the effort to connect. It was Gincy’s duty to reach out. She believed that. For one, she had seen a lot more of the world than her mother had. She was more emotionally equipped to take a risk.
As if to prove this to herself, she set her mind to recall times when her mother had indeed been a good and loving parent. Surprisingly, as they had done the other day when she had thought about the picnics and the bake sales, the memories of those early days came easily. For one, there was the year her mother had made her a fantastic Halloween costume in a matter of hours.
Gincy had been invited to a party given by a girl at school, but for some reason she couldn’t now recall (something silly, no doubt; even as a kid she had been quick to take offense) she had gotten mad at the girl and announced that she wouldn’t be coming to her “stupid boring party.” Then, for another reason she couldn’t now recall (probably something equally as silly), she had changed her mind.
“I need a costume for Margaret’s party tomorrow afternoon,” she had told her mother.
“Use the money you’ve been saving from babysitting and buy a costume at the variety store,” her mother had replied, not raising her eyes from the local newspaper she was reading.
“But I don’t have enough money for a good costume! I’ll look totally stupid!”
And then she had stamped her foot. This had gotten her mothe
r’s full attention, and after some scolding about breaking promises and paying the consequences, Mrs. Gannon had gone off to her sewing machine. By the morning she had produced an accurate replica of Wonder Woman’s costume, albeit with a more demure neckline. Gincy doubted that she would have been so accommodating to a whiny, obnoxious eleven-year-old, and certainly not to one who had gone so far as to stamp her foot.
Then there was the time in her sophomore year of high school—and this was embarrassing to recall, even all these years later—when she had fallen under the spell of a girl named Kathy O’Connell. The kid was bad news all around, but Gincy, chafing under the constraints of life in Appleville, had found in this criminal in the making a hero, rather, an antihero who was living out some pathetic rebel fantasy, smoking filterless cigarettes, scowling a lot, and generally causing mayhem. She still remembered with incredible clarity the day Kathy told her she was planning to break into the Kmart out on the highway and wanted her help, and the feeling of almost sexual thrill that had overcome her. This was what life was about. This was excitement!
In the end Gincy had backed out of the scheme, stoically enduring Kathy’s nasty verbal abuse. Well, Kathy had gone ahead with the robbery and had gotten caught red-handed, so she had probably endured her own share of verbal abuse, though she probably had not done so stoically.
Now, all these years later, lying on her old narrow bed, something came to Gincy, something she remembered having heard her mother say that had tipped the scales in favor of sanity and maturity, something that had given her the courage to say no to Kathy.
Her parents had been watching the local evening news, and she had been doing her homework at the kitchen table. She had gone into the living room at one point to retrieve a notebook she had left there. She remembered her father shaking his head and saying, “How can a person stand to look at himself in the mirror after committing a crime like that?” There was nothing unusual in his comment, nothing to grab her attention. She was on the way out of the living room, notebook in her hand, when her mother had said, “Forget about looking at himself in the mirror. Everyone lets himself off the hook in the end. Everyone learns to live with himself. The real question is, how can he ever hold his head up in public? It’s what other people think of us that really matters. How can he ever bear to walk down a street knowing that his neighbors know what a stupid, cowardly thing he’s done? How can he bear the shame?”
Gincy remembered lying awake on her bed that night, thinking about what her mother had said. Thinking about shame. Thinking about responsibility. Thinking about how important it was not to be ostracized from the very community that had fostered you. Rebellion was all well and good but only if what you were rebelling against was truly awful and personally destructive. Her hometown might not be ideal, and already, at the age of fifteen, Gincy knew she would be leaving it one day, but she didn’t need to be leaving it in disgrace. And the very next day she had told Kathy to count her out of her stupid criminal scheme.
So it was Mom who kept me out of juvenile detention, Gincy thought, lying on that same old bed in that same old room. Imagine that. And maybe it was her mother—and her father, when he was alive—who had kept Tommy on the straight and narrow for so long now.
Pretty good accomplishments as far as parenting went, Gincy thought, glancing over at her mother’s sewing machine. Really, how much more could you ask for from your mother and father than a good grounding in the difference between right and wrong?
And maybe, on occasion, an awesome Halloween costume and bologna sandwiches in the park.
CHAPTER 36
Once Tamsin had come back to Number Nineteen, wearing her new bracelet—“It only cost fifteen dollars! They’re like fifty dollars in Boston!”—Gincy got in her car and drove to Appleville Park. It was as gray and bleak and sad looking as it had been a few days earlier, but for a reason Gincy couldn’t name, she felt the need to be there. Maybe it was the happy memories of the splashing fountain or the thought of how lovely the park would look covered in a blanket of snow. She took a seat on the same bench where she had called Danielle and pressed the button for Rick’s cell.
“You know what?” she said when Rick answered.
“What?”
“I’m an idiot.”
“Now, Gincy,” Rick said, “not all of the time.”
“Rick! I mean it. I’m an idiot. But I’ve had a revelation. All these years I’ve been so unfair to my mother, punishing her because, I don’t know, because she’s not me. What’s so great about me that my mother should want to be my double?”
“A lot is great about you, Gincy,” Rick said, “but I hear what you’re saying.”
“Why haven’t I been able to accept her for who she is? Well, there are probably a thousand reasons, but it stops now. I swear I’m going to try seriously hard to stop judging and complaining about her and just—accept.”
“It won’t be easy, you know,” Rick said. “The habits of a lifetime are hard to break, and your mother can be difficult.”
“I know,” Gincy admitted. “I’ll probably fail miserably at first, but I’ll keep at it and eventually I’ll get it right.”
“There’s the spirit.”
“Do you know what Mom said to the doctor this morning? She’s fine, by the way, possibly a bit anemic. She told him I had made a real success of my life. I swear I almost had a heart attack. I certainly never knew my mother to brag about me!”
“You haven’t been drugging her food, slipping happy pills into her afternoon tea?”
Gincy laughed. “Would that it were so simple.”
“And not that you would ever do such a thing.”
“Of course not,” Gincy said. “I don’t think that I would. Anyway, the problem is that I don’t know what to do. Do I tell her I’m sorry for being a jerk? Will she even know what I mean? Will she pretend not to understand, just to punish me? Should I say nothing and just go ahead with my plan of acceptance? Help me out here, Rick.”
“I wish I could, Gincy,” her husband said, “but I’m not sure I know the answer to that. What I do know is that you shouldn’t expect any big change on your mother’s part just because you feel a change of heart or perspective. You’ll just be letting yourself in for disappointment. Remember what I said a few minutes ago. She can be difficult.”
“And so,” Gincy said, “can I.”
“Only sometimes. Hey, speaking of difficult, any word from your brother?”
“No, but Mom insists there’s nothing to worry about.”
“She probably knows best where Tommy’s concerned. Try not to get yourself worked up.”
“Me? Worked up.” Gincy laughed. “Never. Still, I wish he’d come home. I’m trying to change my way of thinking about Tommy, too. Well, I guess you’ve picked up on that.”
“I have,” Rick said. “And I think you’ll have an easier time of things with your brother than with your mother. But hang in there, Gincy. You’ve got backup in me and your children and your friends.”
“Thanks, Rick. I’d better get back to the house. Are you—”
“Yes, Gincy,” Rick said. “I’ve been watering the tree.”
Gincy laughed again. “Good. Because as Dad used to say, you can never be too careful.”
CHAPTER 37
Gincy made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, with a side of broccoli. There was no use in making anything even remotely interesting or gourmet for her mother. (Even at the Red Rose she had ordered the basic dish of chicken potpie, though the key lime pie for dessert had been a surprise.) In truth, that was fine with Gincy, whose culinary tastes had always run to the basic. There were years when she was young and single when she pretty much survived on chips and pizza and beer and soda. Though she wouldn’t tell Rick, who did most of the cooking at home and who made it a rule to vary his menus, sometimes she missed those bad old days when she considered nachos a well-balanced meal.
“How did the visit to the doctor go, Grandma?” Tamsin asked when
they were settled at the table.
“I’m perfectly fine,” Ellen told her. “I told your mother she was worried about nothing.”
“But Clare thought it was a good idea, too,” Tamsin said, “seeing the doctor.”
“Better safe than sorry, as Dad always said.”
Ellen nodded. “Your father was a smart man. I’ve always said that you’re a lot like him, Virginia.”
Tamsin’s eyes widened.
Gincy almost fell out of her chair. She was hardworking and smart. She was reliable. The Globe was going bankrupt without her. She had married well. What was next?
“Has anyone seen or heard from Tommy today?” she asked. She hadn’t mentioned the defunct landline to her mother but wondered now if she should.
Tamsin shook her head. “I called him a few times on his cell but he never answered.”
“Is that typical, Mom?” Gincy asked. “That he doesn’t answer his cell phone?”
“As I told you the other day, Virginia, Tommy is his own man. I’m sure he’s fine. He’s never out of touch for long.”
“Yes, but . . . All right,” Gincy said. “If you say it’s okay.”
How hard it must have been, Gincy thought—how hard it still must be for her mother (and once, her father)—to love Tommy and to accept him just the way he was. How hard it must have been not to feel disappointed in their son, but to let love and kindness win out over criticism and unfair expectations.
Above all, be kind to those you love.
“Well,” Gincy said, “if he comes by later I can heat up our leftovers for him. I made more than enough for four people.”
Ellen smiled at her daughter. “I’m sure he would appreciate that.”
“Mom? Do you remember that Wonder Woman costume you made me one Halloween?”
Ellen frowned. “Vaguely, yes. Why?”
“Do you know if it’s still around? I thought I’d show it to Tamsin.”
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