The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “I’ll need to see each of you purchase a ticket to the county of your release,” said the guard, checking their paperwork. “After that I am absolved of any and all responsibility for you.”

  Faced with the wide open of the terminal, Serna hesitated before picking one of the two ticket lines. Deborah knew how she felt. She watched her traveling companion buy a ticket for Los Angeles and then fidget in front of the vending machines—folding and refolding her remaining dollars. Just as Deborah was about to purchase her ticket to Redding—the nearest station to Kidron—she heard someone calling her name.

  “Deb! Wait! I’m here.”

  Deborah hesitated before turning around. She’d immediately recognized the rich musical tone of Erin’s voice.

  Her daughter stood in the doorway of the bus station, holding half a dozen Mylar balloons with welcome slogans scrawled across them in various neon shades.

  “It’s about time,” Deborah said, taking her money back from the grinning clerk. In the rush to embrace and the awkwardness of maneuvering around Erin’s large belly, the balloons slipped from her daughter’s grasp and floated to the ceiling.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Choices

  In the car Erin explained her tardiness with an airy wave of her hand. “I got a late start.”

  “Any later and I would have been on that bus,” Deborah said.

  “But you’re here. I’m here. We’re finally headed home together.” Erin’s voice cracked as she tried to continue the sentiment.

  Deborah should have put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and told her it was fine. Instead she asked when they were going to stop for lunch. “Nothing cafeteria-like, I want real food.”

  “I know a sandwich place near Modesto,” Erin mumbled. She wiped at her tears with a loose cotton scarf she had draped around her neck. After a while, she gestured outside. “Does it look different to you? Bigger? Older?”

  “I don’t remember enough to know.” Deborah studied her daughter’s profile. She must be seven months pregnant now—far enough along that she looked uncomfortable, but not so far along to look swollen. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, something her daughter had done in childhood in moments of unease.

  Deborah rolled down her window and let her hand ride the currents of wind outside the car. In the median, the normally upright oleander bushes drooped with the weight of their blossoms. They were quiet until the first exit for Modesto.

  “You know where you’re going?” Deborah asked.

  Erin turned off the radio, which had been softly playing some opera Deborah couldn’t understand and didn’t particularly enjoy. “Next turnoff. Grandma Bets and I liked to stop here after—” She didn’t finish her thought. “I guess she met the owner’s son once.”

  The restaurant was in a yellow building across the street from a bank Deborah had never heard of. The place had a slightly worn look, but the parking lot was so crammed, they’d had to park on the curb. A dull hum came from the shop as they stepped inside, and immediately Deborah wanted to leave. The restaurant had the feel of a place that needed an owner’s manual. She’d wanted a hostess, a plastic menu, and time to sip her soda before deciding what to order.

  Erin motioned for Deborah to follow her into the disorderly line in front of the counter. “The specials are there,” she said, pointing to the wood paneling above the cashier, where someone with terrible handwriting had scrawled a variety of sandwiches and salads in colored chalk.

  Before she could process the list, Erin leaned into the counter and ordered a Noah’s boy on whiskey with a white cow. The cheerful teenager taking her order repeated it back into a microphone and then asked her how she wanted her Murphys. Erin asked for them cold and then turned to Deborah.

  “I’ll have whatever’s good,” she said to the smiling boy. “And an iced tea, if you have that.”

  “Everything’s great,” the boy replied. “Sweet or unsweetened?”

  Under the boy’s expectant gaze, Deborah felt itchy. “What?”

  “Your tea. With sugar or without sugar?”

  For more than two decades, Deborah had never had a choice about whether she wanted sugar in her tea. At Chowchilla it came sweetened. “However you serve it is fine,” she said, scratching at her neck.

  “We serve it both ways.”

  Deborah looked again at the chalk scrawled list above the boy and then at Erin. From behind them, she thought she heard grumbling about the wait. She had no idea of what she wanted.

  “Just get it unsweetened,” Erin said. “We can pour sugar in it until you like it.”

  Deborah nodded her head. The boy looked at the people stacking up behind them. “Do you want food, too?” he asked.

  “What’s that smell,” Deborah asked, looking at her shoes.

  “Stew,” the boy said, his forehead creasing.

  “I’ll have that,” Deborah said.

  “Bossy in a bowl,” he called into his microphone. He looked toward Erin and said, “It comes with B and B. Does she want that?”

  Erin nodded and brought out her wallet.

  “Finally,” said the man behind them.

  Deborah sighted a table in the darkest corner of the room and walked unsteadily toward it. Erin followed with their drinks and a large number 14 that she slipped into a holder on the table. “This wasn’t a good idea,” Deborah said.

  Erin slid the selection of sweeteners toward her. “I thought you’d enjoy it. Plus the food is good—really way better than all that Sysco stuff they feed you at Chowchilla.”

  “There’s no sugar here,” Deborah said. Her fingers furiously flipped through the small colored packets. “Sweet’n Low, NutraSweet, Equal, Sugar in the Raw, Splenda.”

  “What do you want? Plain sugar?” Erin reached across the table and plucked out two of the small packets. “This is what you want. It’s sugar, just in a fancy package.”

  Deborah’s hand was shaking so violently she couldn’t tear open the brown envelope of natural sugar. “I should have stayed at the Greyhound. Taken the bus back.”

  “Definitely wouldn’t have had all these choices to make then,” Erin said, with a half-smile. “Sandwich or soup, tea or coffee, eat in or take away—”

  “Can’t you take me seriously? I’m saying none of this is right—and it can’t be, because we’ve started this whole trip off on the wrong foot.”

  “You’re just being petty now,” Erin said, taking a long sip of her vanilla milk shake.

  “Why weren’t you there?”

  “I told you I got a late start.”

  “But why? This is a big day for us.”

  Erin pushed her chair back from the table and reached for the number placard. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Sit down,” Deborah’s shrill voice pierced the dull hum of conversation in the restaurant.

  From behind, you couldn’t tell her daughter was pregnant. She took several more steps toward the counter. Deborah looked at all of the eyes on her and tried again to get her daughter back. “Erin Elizabeth Ripplinger. Come here.”

  Erin didn’t even turn her head. The rejection felt as if she’d been knocked to the ground. To keep herself from literally falling over, Deborah took small deliberate sips of her iced tea. She watched her daughter wait for their food at the counter and then carry it all outside, pausing against the harsh sunlight as she opened the exit.

  Next to Deborah an elderly man leaned across his table and in a conspiratorial whisper told her that in his experience it was better to give in than get left behind. Deborah nodded in agreement, and after finishing her tea and then the soupy milk shake abandoned by Erin, she left the restaurant.

  The car wasn’t at the curb, where they’d originally parked. Deborah looked wildly around the busy commercial street and then heard two quick taps of a horn coming from behind her, in the parking lot. She turned and saw Erin behind the wheel of the car, eating her ham sandwich. She wondered if her daughter had actually driven away,
or just moved the car to be in the shade.

  The inside of the car smelled like meat. “I thought you were a vegetarian,” Deborah said to Erin.

  “You don’t know all that much about me,” Erin said, handing her the paper sack with the remains of lunch.

  She looked in the bag. “I guess a cold Murphy is potato salad.”

  Erin shrugged. “Coming here always made me think Grandma Bets knew a secret language.”

  “The two of you are close,” Deborah said. “When you were a baby and got colicky, she was the only person who could soothe you, but she’d never admit that, she thinks she’s terrible with infants.”

  Deborah picked at her buttered bread and searched for a plastic spoon to eat her stew with. Erin slid her seat back as far as it would go and then half-turned, so she faced Deborah. The car felt smaller. “She made me come get you. I got cold feet or close to it. Bets told me it was time I learned to want something after I got it.”

  “You weren’t going to come?” The inexorable itching sensation crept back into Deborah’s skin.

  Erin looked down at her pregnant belly.

  Deborah repeated herself, getting louder each time.

  “Let me explain,” Erin said. “Just hold on a minute and let me try to fix this.”

  The tender skin on her neck, which she’d been scratching at since the restaurant, started to bleed. Erin unwound the cotton scarf from her own neck and dabbed at the blood. “You have to stop this,” she said. “You have to listen.”

  She tried, but Deborah realized that she didn’t know her daughter well enough to make sense of all that was said. Instead, she thought about the last time she’d been a mother to her daughter. A couple of days before Carl had come home for the last time, she’d taken Erin down to the park on the bank of the Sacramento River just outside of Kidron. A cushion of sawdust surrounded the small playground there. It had recently rained, and Deborah remembered that the normally sweet piney odor of the wood chips had been tinged with the smell of decomposition. She pushed Erin on the swings until her arms were exhausted and then the two of them tried to skip rocks across the water.

  The spring snowmelt made the river wild and full of whorls and eddies. It was nearly impossible to make a rock skim its surface, but long after Deborah had given up and resorted to seeing how far she could launch a rock, Erin kept trying. She inched closer and closer to the river’s edge in search of flat stones. Before every throw, Erin turned her gray eyes toward Deborah and with great seriousness requested that she watch. Each time, Deborah offered her daughter some advice, or positioned her hand and wrist just so. Just as Deborah was going to insist that they leave, the water in front of them stilled and Erin let a half-dollar-size rock fly from her hand. It skipped half a dozen times across the river before it sank out of view. They both jumped up and down, hugging in excitement and success.

  That was how Deborah had expected them to greet each other in the parking lot at Chowchilla. She finished the last of her stew and nodded solemnly at Erin, who was still talking about how the pregnancy had magnified the hollowness Erin had felt her whole life about not truly having a mother of her own. No matter how deeply the grandmothers loved Erin, none of them successfully had taken Deborah’s place. That brought up emotions that Erin had never dealt with previously—mostly how she felt about not truly having a mother.

  Deborah reached out and patted her daughter’s knee. “You have to remember that I really am your mother. No matter what else has happened or will happen. I am your mother.”

  “Do you get it then?” Erin asked.

  Deborah nodded, because she couldn’t think of any other option.

  “Oomph,” Erin said. “Baby’s kicking my ribs.”

  “Let me see,” Deborah said. Erin’s T-shirt was tight across her belly, and each time the baby kicked, she could see the fabric of the shirt move. Erin rolled up the shirt and they waited. Her daughter’s stomach veins stood out like lines on a map. The line that ran from her pubic bone to her belly button had darkened to the color of India ink. It bisected her stomach into two perfect hemispheres. As quick as the flash of a lightning bug, part of Erin’s stomach bulged and Deborah saw the outline of a foot.

  “Oh!” Tears sprang to her eyes. Deborah blinked quickly and acted as if she were about to sneeze. The air in the car stilled as Deborah focused on her daughter’s heartbeat, the baby’s heartbeat. She wished that the umbilical cord between them had never been cut.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A Model Citizen

  According to her parole officer, Deborah needed a job and a place to live. Ms. Holt kept her dark hair in a small, neat bun at the nape of her neck. She had full lips and spoke with a slight southern accent—more of a lilt that a drawl—that immediately put Deborah at ease. “I’ve been doing this thirty years,” said Ms. Holt during their initial meeting. “Got the lowest recidivism numbers in the state. Of course, some of the other officers will tell you that’s because I’m a woman or that Tehama County doesn’t have its fair share of drug offenders, but I’ll tell you what. You get a job, you get a place to live. You’re going to be just fine.”

  The place to live had been easy. Deborah settled into a room at Hill House that had belonged at one time to Anna’s brother, Wealthy. She thought the room, with its south- and east-facing windows, had the best light in the house, but because of its narrow shape it had been rarely occupied over the years. The furnishings were spare: an iron bed frame with its own built-in springs and a squat olive wood armoire, which served as dresser and closet. Bets offered to sew some new curtains, but Deborah liked the cowboys and Indians print on the faded ones already in the sill. To make it a place she could retreat to, she’d moved in one of the rocking chairs from the back porch and appropriated a rose-colored bath mat for a rug.

  The job proved more difficult. Her mother had agreed to hire her to work at the Pit Stop, but their relationship remained strained. Most days they didn’t exchange more than polite greetings. At their second meeting, Ms. Holt silenced Deborah’s objections about working for Callie with a sweeping hand motion that stopped Deborah midsentence. “Do you want to know why I’m so good at my job? I’m good at the therapy part of this—only unlike those namby-pamby shrinks in their offices with couches I don’t sugarcoat my advice.” Ms. Holt leaned across the table and narrowed her eyes. “That’s what you’re looking for here, right? You’ve got to own up to the fact that shooting Carl wasn’t an accident. It’s easy to rehabilitate an accidental criminal. I don’t have to mess with childhood traumas or abandonment issues. But, like I said, you aren’t here because of a slipup, which means to keep you out of jail, we’re going to need to fix what’s going on in that family of yours.” Deborah wanted to dispute Ms. Holt’s assessment, but prison had taught her the value of keeping her mouth shut and her disagreements to herself.

  Her mother and father opened the Pit Stop sometime during the late 1960s just as Interstate 5 neared completion. In the beginning it had been a restaurant—trading on its slogan of “we’ll put olives on anything.” There were stories from Deborah’s childhood of teenagers ordering olive malts or peanut butter and olive sandwiches. She remembered her mother complaining about the waste (none of it was ever eaten), and her father laughing it off, saying that life should allow people to try stuff they may not like. But after Deborah’s father died in 1978, her mother brought in kitschy gift items—olive platters, olive spoons made of olive wood, OLIVE YOU posters, LIFE’S THE PITS bumper stickers—until every inch of the three-thousand-square-foot store was stuffed with olives and olive-related products. The billboard, which rose from the parking lot of the store and could be seen for five miles on both sides of I-5, explained it best: “Olive the Pit Stop!” Free Tasting Bar • Locally Grown • Unique Gifts.

  She’d asked to work in the stockroom, but her mother put her at the tasting bar, which was where Deborah had worked during high school. Back then it had been a plum assignment. The tasting bar stood in the center o
f the store on an elevated platform underneath a sign her father had purchased when they first opened the Pit Stop. In large green script, the words EAT HERE NOW sat above a downward-pointing arrow made up of flashing lightbulbs. When she was younger, she’d liked that every person who came through the doors looked at her, but after so many years of being watched by guards and other prisoners, having eyes on her no longer brought any pleasure.

  “Stop scratching,” her mother said, coming up behind Deborah.

  “I’m not.”

  “No one’s going to taste the olives if they see you up here raking flakes of dead skin all over the place.”

  Deborah rubbed her knuckles against her forearm. “We’re out of bleu-cheese-stuffed olives.”

  “See right there. That was a scratch.”

  “There aren’t even any customers right now,” Deborah said, gesturing to the nearly empty store. Nancy, who’d worked checkout since about the time Deborah went to jail, looked up and peered at them through her glasses.

  Her mother leaned against the counter, taking the weight off her bad leg. “The casino bus will be here any minute.”

  “Then I should finish restocking. Can I just grab a couple of jars off the shelf?”

  “No. We’ve got inventory control systems now. Nothing’s like it used to be.”

  Deborah nodded her head in agreement, watching as her mother shook two pills into her hand from the bottle she always carried in her pocket. Without being asked, she handed over a cup of water in a disposable triangular cup.

  “They’re here,” Nancy called. “Moving as slow as ever, but they’ve left the bus.”

  Deborah was about to repeat her question about replenishing her supply of olives at the tasting bar, when her mother reached out for her hand. “I’m sorry I jumped all over you. This is going to take some getting used to. Seeing you behind the counter after all these years is just—”