I remembered how Mama and I had watched Wheel of Fortune on her nights off. How we’d crack up because we could never figure out the words on the board. A contestant would call out something like “The Bridge on the River Kwai!” and we’d crack up some more because who could pull “The Bridge on the River Kwai” out of a few random consonants? Then Vanna White would turn the rest of the letters and, sure enough, we’d see it for ourselves, clear as day.
Mama had always been like a Wheel of Fortune board with only half the letters turned. Now that Grandma turned the rest of them for me, I saw everything. Why Mama didn’t talk about her past. Why she always had that little crease between her eyes, even when she laughed. Why she didn’t settle anywhere. Like there was some purpose in being uncomfortable.
“Why were they running away?”
But I knew, of course. I’d always known, even if I never wanted to think about it. It was because of me. Mama was pregnant with me and she was only seventeen.
“We felt she needed time away from Scott. That she had some considering to do . . . about her future.”
“You wanted Mama to give me up.”
When I said it, I didn’t know if it was true or not, but the fact that Grandma couldn’t meet my eyes gave me all the answer I needed.
In a flash, a whole other life washed over me. The life I could have had if Grandma had been the type of mother who loved her daughter through a hard time. If she’d accepted the fact that I was coming, that Mama and Daddy loved each other even though they were young. Then I would have been born here, in this town, with a mother and father, a grandma and grandpa. I wouldn’t be coming twelve years late, trying to carve out a place for myself one more time.
A fury came over me thinking I’d almost trusted her. “If you would have just loved her, loved me, they never would have tried to run away. No one would be dead.”
I didn’t wait for her to answer. I ran out of the meadow and down the trail, sending birds into the sky as I went.
18
Too Precious
to Throw Away
Mama wouldn’t start a new project until she had every piece. Sometimes it took months of gathering. We’d go to yard sales and junk shops and she’d let her hands run along rows of knobs and buttons and screws that had held other people’s lives together in one form or fashion for more years than I’d been alive. She let herself imagine those lives, what kind of bird she might piece together. One time I asked her how she knew what to pick and what to leave behind. She said the right pieces hummed under her hand, like the daisies. I remembered sitting in the tub night after night, for a long time, humming, so she knew not to leave me behind. Then she went ahead and did it anyway.
The trick was figuring out what to take and what to leave behind. Moving so many times, we should have had it down to a science, but Mama wasn’t one for science or anything else that might require making lists and putting things in proper order. She’d throw this or that into the boxes we kept with us always, the ones that fit perfectly in Daisy’s hatchback, and that was that. From one move to the next, there were additions and subtractions based on Mama’s art, what she might need for her birds. Once she’d left behind our bedding because she needed the space for a bunch of old watering cans and a box of hand-painted tiles she’d collected. Bedding was easy to replace.
But I always felt a sadness for those things that were left, like they had proper feelings or something. Being left behind was like a shadow that never went away.
Unlike Mama’s boxes, my canvas duffel always had the same stuff. Clothes. The photo album. A needlepoint pillow that I’d made with our landlord in Hanford, Mrs. Smithson, when I was six. There was a pack of strawberry seeds from kindergarten, a small bag of beach sand, a few more odds and ends. At the very bottom was the packet of unsent letters I’d written to Grandma when I was eight years old.
She banged on the shed door. “Grace, let me in. We need to talk about this.”
“Go away!”
“I will not go away. I will stand here in the rain until you open this door.”
Leave it to Grandma to ruin my plan. I opened the door a crack. “I’m sorry for yelling at you. I’m tired. I just want to take a nap. Can we please talk about this later?”
Grandma narrowed her eyes, skeptical, and tried to look around me and into the shed. “Are you sure?” she finally said.
I nodded and then closed the door, leaning against it until I heard her boots squishing through the mud back up the trail.
Once she was good and gone, I took her letters out of my duffel and threw them across the shed. I made sure all my cranes and things were in the Kerr jar, along with Mama’s bird poem. A solitary bird, hollow it flew. It was as though she’d written it for me.
Whatever didn’t fit in the duffel, I packed into Mama’s toolbox. Daddy’s book of Robert Frost poems, all the extra flyers, and Archer’s Ladle Boy picture.
I curled up in my sleeping bag and pulled Mama’s quilt around my shoulders. When Jo knocked at the door some time later that afternoon to try and find the meadow, I ignored her. She knocked a few more times, calling my name, but I just shoved the pillow over my head and waited for it to get dark.
I pushed Mummy Max and Jo out of my mind. I tried not to think of Beauty and what her baby might look like. Then I pushed away the meadow, and the fact that Mama’s next clue was probably the spoons that made up the crane’s wings. It was just the sort of clever thing she’d expect me to pick up. Since I was sure she was eventually leading me to Mrs. Greene’s anyway, I supposed it didn’t really matter.
• • •
I didn’t worry as I climbed in the car because Mama had taught me how to drive when I was nine, declaring that if there were ever an emergency and she keeled over in the middle of nowhere, she wasn’t about to have me starving to death because I hadn’t learned such a simple thing as driving. Just before I turned the ignition, I said a little prayer that starting Daisy wouldn’t wake this half of the mountainside.
But I didn’t need the prayer. She was quiet, as though she might understand my need for it, and I drove off that mountain and down through the darkened windows of town, thinking I should have done this sooner. After I was good and far away, I pulled over and took Mama’s map of California out of my duffel, the pinholes reminding me of where I’d been. Mama had always put up the map before we’d leave a place, pacing back and forth in front of it for a good week or so. She’d go to the library and research towns with lakes or hills or what have you, or she’d pick a random city newspaper online and read the For Rent listings. When she was satisfied with her newly discovered town, she’d thumbtack it on the map, and off we’d go.
Once we’d gotten to Mrs. Greene’s, even Mama had said it was where we were supposed to be. We’d found her house because we’d been driving around, going to garage and yard sales, and drove right by Mrs. Greene’s big old farmhouse with this giant plastic pink flamingo mailbox in the front yard, which Mama took as a signpost.
They didn’t even have a For Rent sign in front of the house, but Mama knocked on the door and said this crazy thing anyway. “I think we’re supposed to be here.”
Instead of shying away like we were a couple of loons, Mrs. Greene got this ginormous smile and invited us in for tea and cookies.
It turned out Mrs. Greene was just finishing up this little one-bedroom cottage in the back of her property that she’d always used for storage and was about to list it for rent. Mama wrote her a deposit check that day, asked her to wait to cash it until the next Friday, when she got paid, and we were off and moving again, but this time I didn’t mind. Even that first day, meeting Lacey and Mrs. Greene, I felt things would be different. Mrs. Greene didn’t mind her own business, always putting her two cents in, even going as far as to chastise Mama for dragging me around to kingdom come, and for not living up to her God-given potential. I worried that might dr
ive Mama away, but it seemed to draw her closer. She ate up what Mrs. Greene said like Snickerdoodles. So did I. “Grace, you sign up for school politics. You hear? You can think something through like nobody’s business, and always come up on the logical side of things.” It felt like she was giving me the wide-open world in a way Mama hadn’t. I was convinced that Mrs. Greene and Lacey were the missing pieces of our family and it didn’t matter one lick that we weren’t related by blood. After all that moving, we’d finally found them, and I wasn’t about to give them up.
I turned on the overhead light in the car as it started to rain, and found where I was on the map, tracing a line to the nearest pinhole. It was a straight shot down Highway 80 to the 193, past Sacramento, and on to Hood and Mrs. Greene. I knew how to get to Mrs. Greene’s from there.
As I put the car in drive and wiped at my eyes, headlights came up behind me. They were coming fast, so I waited to let them pass. Instead, they slowed. Blue and red lights flashed, a bleep of siren coming next.
I rested my head against the steering wheel. Eventually, a gloved knuckle knocked on the window. Sheriff Bergum. When I didn’t move to open the door, he did it for me.
“What in the world?” he demanded. He was wearing regular clothes, boots, and a plastic cover over his cowboy hat. When I didn’t answer, he took hold of my elbow and helped me out. The rain came down hard. I was soaked through in seconds.
Without another word, Sheriff Bergum loaded me into the back of his squad car and we were off in a swirl of lights.
• • •
Sheriff Bergum drove through town, with me in the back like a criminal. Maybe I was. It couldn’t be legal to drive a car at twelve. Even in an emergency. I wondered if he was arresting me. If they’d send me away on a bus to someone I didn’t know, like Grandma did to Mama. I wondered if I cared. That last pinball thought bounced around my head and couldn’t find an answer. Not even a measly one worth five points. I was smack out of energy and my shoes were wet.
Sheriff Bergum led me into the station, turning on lights as he went, and walked me into the back cell, past the little origami crane perched behind the family photo, and sat me down. Then he actually took out a giant set of old-fashioned keys and locked me in.
“Are you kidding?” I said, unbelieving.
Even though it had been covered with a hat, his bald head was a little drippy and he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped it down, like a table. Then he put his hat back on.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done to your grandma? And me! I was just sitting down to watch the news and have my hot cocoa when your grandma called, frantic.” He went to the phone and dialed. After murmuring for a while, he hung up with a bang.
“Can’t you just take me back to her house?”
“No. She’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“How did she even know where I went?”
“She went out to check on you again and found you and the car gone. She called me in a panic.”
With that, he hung up his plaid jacket and sat at his multidrawered desk with his back to me. Every few minutes he’d take off his cowboy hat and run a giant hand over his bald head, then put his hat back on with a humph. He turned to his Scrabble game.
“Can I ask you something?”
He grunted.
“Did you make that crane?” If they were going to send me away, I at least had to know where it came from.
He turned and looked at me as though I had asked the dumbest question in the history of dumb questions. “You’ve got bigger things to worry about,” he said.
“I have to know.”
Maybe it was the desperation in my voice that made him answer. Maybe it was the fact that I was shivering and my wet hair and clothes had dripped into a puddle at my feet.
He took a deep, lumbering breath, reached into the drawer behind his desk, and took out a large wool blanket. It was exactly the same as the one they’d wrapped me in the morning Mama died. He held it through the bars. I shook my head.
“Fine.” He looked at the crane. “I don’t know who made it. I found it beside my front left tire after a particularly bad day at work. Some things are too precious to throw away. But you wouldn’t know about that.”
Sheriff Bergum knocked back a container of Tums and pointed a thick finger at me. “No more talking. You sit there and think.”
Fifteen minutes later, Grandma showed up with my duffel, wearing her usual prune face and lumberjack costume. I was glad when she did. I was tired of watching Sheriff Bergum huff and puff and mumble to himself about my ingratitude and general twelve-year-old nincompoopery as though I wasn’t right there listening.
“Let her on out,” Grandma said.
“You should leave her. She might see things different in the morning,” Sheriff Bergum said.
“I have a better idea.” Grandma eyeballed me up and down. Past experience with authority figures had told me that eyeballing never amounted to anything good.
“So I’m not arrested?” I said as Sheriff Bergum let me out.
He narrowed his eyes. “You’re lucky your grandma has some influence over me.”
Fine. I just wanted to get out of my wet shoes and into bed anyway, where maybe I could sleep for a change.
Grandma had other plans.
19
Flat
Sure
“Where are we going?” I said, panicked, as we passed Daisy on the side of the road. “You aren’t going to leave her there, are you?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
We drove deeper into the darkness and silence. Maybe this was it. She really was driving me to the bus station in Colfax since Lafollette’s was closed.
It wasn’t until Grandma turned onto Highway 80 and headed west that I knew where she was going. I expected relief. For some strange reason, there wasn’t any.
After an hour, we came to Exit 116, California 193. Grandma made all the right turns like she knew them by heart. It was still raining, the windshield wipers a squeaking blur. She parked in front of Mrs. Greene’s house and the porch light clicked on. Mrs. Greene pushed through the screen to stand there in her powder-blue robe.
“Your mother and I didn’t get along, Grace. Just as she told you. Especially after the accident. I did ship her off, to my cousin in Texas, but she never made it there. I could tell you I sent her away because I felt that would be easiest on her, instead of having to live in such a small town, pregnant, after such a tragedy. But really, it was easiest for me.”
I didn’t know what to say. She cleared her throat.
“There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t blame myself for what happened. I was hard, and that set things off. I missed out on your life. On her life. For that, I have regret. I’d do things different now. I’m not sure how much that is worth to you. But it’s all I have.”
“You’re not doing much different,” I said, looking at Mrs. Greene standing in her doorway. “Considering where we are.”
Grandma’s face glowed a soft green from the dash lights. A tear rolled down her cheek and she brushed it away. “Sometimes you need to see where you’ve been so you can decide where you’re going. I’ll be back to pick you up in two days—Monday afternoon.”
I was surprised to see the tear, but there wasn’t anything else to say, so I climbed out and grabbed my duffel. I ran through the rain, and Mrs. Greene took me into her open arms, not caring one lick about my dripping hair or coat. Something I was flat sure Grandma would never do.
20
A Trick
of the Light
If you stare at something long enough and then close your eyes, you can see the outline of it there on the backs of your eyelids. That was how it was for me in Mrs. Greene’s house. Mama was everywhere. But only that outline impression of her. A trick of the light I couldn’t turn into anything else.
> I saw her standing beside Mrs. Greene, drying the dishes and bumping hips. I saw Mrs. Greene put an arm around her shoulder and kiss her right on the temple, telling her she didn’t know how she got along before we came. We filled the house with laughter and tears and all manner of chaos, but it was the happiest chaos she’d known. Mrs. Greene was older than Mama so she was a mother to all of us.
As I watched her put together her special-occasion French toast with apples and cinnamon—Mama’s shadow beside her—I got to thinking about her love of cooking and how that had to be one of the reasons Mama and I had stayed those nine months. After keeping grocery money in a coffee can my whole life and just buying staples—mac and cheese, hot dogs, hamburger, Wonder Bread—Mrs. Greene’s fried chicken, black-eyed peas, and corn bread or her teriyaki flank steak and roasted potatoes were just what we needed. It got to the point that Mama and I stopped cooking for ourselves altogether. We shopped, Mrs. Greene cooked, and then we did dessert. It was a good system and I never knew how soothing it could be to gather around a table at the same time every day and eat good food. And laugh. With Mrs. Greene and Lacey, we laughed a lot.
Mrs. Greene swooped in with two plates heaped with French toast and set them down in front of me and Lacey. Then she brought over a plate of bacon while Lacey talked about Denny Thompson, whom we’d both had a crush on what felt like a lifetime ago, and now he was in love with Marsha Trett. Mrs. Greene rotated between tsking, oohing and ahhing, and saying, “Lordy!” or, “What nerve!” depending on what was needed in the moment.
“He likes her because of her bra size.” Lacey whispered the last two words as though saying them any louder might singe her eyebrows. “And is she decent enough to be insulted? Nope. She goes around smoothing her shirt and posing this way and that like she has something to be proud of. Plus she eats meat.”
“I eat meat. So do you,” I said around a mouthful of bacon.
“Yes, but we haven’t eaten beef tongue.”
The Secret Hum of a Daisy Page 12