Letting Go

by Pamela Morsi

  “Goodbye, dear,” she said to Ellen. “The coffee was lovely and you really must come some Sunday afternoon for tea. Bring Sis and Willy and they can amuse themselves in the yard.”

  As they made their way out, Mrs. Stanhope questioned Irma. “Do you have any idea what has happened with all my coats?”

  Ellen stared after them and shook her head. Mrs. Stanhope had been just fine. And then she wasn’t.

  “How did that woman find her here?” she asked, mostly to herself.

  Yolanda answered. “Oh, I called her.”

  “What?”

  “I knew you were in way over your head,” she said. “And anytime we see her on the loose, we call for Irma to come pick her up.”

  “Is that necessary? She seemed to be doing fine before that woman showed up.”

  “She’s a real loony,” Yolanda said. “You never know what she’ll be doing next.”

  Ellen was surprised at Yolanda’s lack of empathy for the woman.

  “It’s not her fault, you know,” Ellen told her. “Alzheimer’s or senility or whatever it is, just happens to people.”

  Yolanda lowered her chin to eye Ellen over the top of her glasses.

  “It does, but this lady’s problem isn’t old age,” she replied. “She’s been the local crazy lady since I was a little girl.”

  The car was in desperate need of an oil change. The man who did it so inexpensively for Ellen, was only available after six—when he got home from his real job. Ellen called Amber to ask her to go straight home, to relieve Wilma and see that Jet got supper and a bath.

  Amber groused to her mother about it, but that was only by habit. In truth, she didn’t mind spending an evening at home with Jet. The bar scene might be flashy and loud. But like any routine, a constant diet could get a little boring.

  She was certainly needed. By the time she walked into the house, it looked as if Jet was taking care of Wilma, rather than the reverse. Her grandmother was lying on the living room couch, taking oxygen.

  “Are you all right?” Amber asked her.

  “Just trying to catch my breath,” Wilma assured her and waved her off.

  “Come on, Jet,” Amber said. “Let’s see what we can come up with for supper.”

  Her daughter trailed after her excitedly.

  “Are you going to be here all evening, Mama?” Jet asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Even after we have dinner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then are you going to give me a bath and read to me and put me to bed?”

  “Yes, Jet,” Amber answered, almost annoyed.

  Her daughter was so clearly delighted to have Mama all to herself, it made Amber feel strangely guilty for all the nights she spent away. Which was stupid, Amber assured herself. With Ellen and Wilma showering her with attention every minute, Jet didn’t need anyone else.

  In the kitchen, Amber opened the refrigerator and sighed heavily.

  Checking out Wilma’s fridge was no easy task. As always, it was crammed so full that the light could barely illuminate the contents, dozens of little plastic bags containing crooked neck squash, snow peas, en-dive and broccoli.

  Amber dragged the trash can over to hold the door open and got down on her knees and began to weed out the oldest layer pushed far to the back. Most of it was still edible, though it was less than prime. She came across a bunch of bearded asparagus or some blackened cabbage slowly turning to soup. For a family near destitution, they certainly wasted a lot of good food.

  Practically all of Wilma’s social security check went to buy groceries. But since nobody really cooked, they probably didn’t eat any better than those people who didn’t know bib lettuce from kale. That was always the way it had been at Wilma’s house. But it was getting worse.

  “What are we going to cook, Mama?” Jet asked.

  “We’ve certainly got plenty to choose from,” Amber said. “How would you feel about a big salad?”

  Jet frowned a little. “I kind of had a big salad for lunch,” she said.

  “Okay,” Amber said. “What would you like?”

  “I could eat the corn,” Jet said. “And I like spinach.”

  “Corn and spinach it is then,” Amber said.

  “Remember sometimes, Mama, when you’d fix me macaroni and cheese from a box,” Jet said.

  “Sure, I remember,” Amber answered.

  “Gramma says it’s no good, but I really like it,” Jet said.

  Amber grinned at her as if they were two wily schemers, plotting against a common enemy.

  “If I can find a box, Jet Jameson, you can have it for supper,” Amber told her.

  It took a bit of doing and a number of pans, but a lovely meal of corn, spinach and boxed mac and cheese made it to the dining room table. By then Wilma felt well enough to join them.

  Jet was in high spirits clearly enjoying herself. And they lingered long at the table before Jet’s bath.

  “You clean up the dishes, I’ll clean up the baby,” Wilma told her.

  “Are you sure you’re not too tired?”

  Wilma shook her head. “She does most of it herself.”

  Jet nodded.

  It didn’t take long to get the kitchen in order. Amber was just hanging up the dish towel when the sound of happy running feet could be heard coming down the hallway. Jet came charging into the kitchen, bright eyed and full of natural energy and exuberance.

  “I’m all clean and scrubbed,” she announced proudly.

  She was wearing her bunny pajamas and the plush, black on white Holstein-like bedroom slippers she referred to as her “cow-shoes.”

  “Great,” Amber praised.

  “Smell me,” Jet said, offering her wrist.

  Amber dutifully sniffed the fragrance on the child’s arm.

  “Oooo, very nice,” Amber told her.

  “It’s strawberry,” Jet said. “Wil-ma gave it to me, strawberry bubbles.”

  Amber smiled at her. She was such a good kid, so easy to please. And so grateful for any little gift, even the kind that most kids her age would have taken for granted. Maybe that was the upside of growing up on the edge. With all the people around her that were crazy about her, Jet had somehow never gotten spoiled.

  “Where is Wil-ma?” Amber asked her.

  “She went to sit on the porch,” Jet answered. “She’s having a nicker-teen fit.”

  The last, said with great solemnity, was undoubtedly a quote.

  “Come on,” Amber told her. “Let’s get your hair done and get ready for bed.”

  “Okay,” she said, scampering off. “Meet ya in the rocking chair.”

  By the time Amber made it there, Jet was already waiting for her, comb, brush and storybook in hand.

  “What are we reading tonight?” Amber asked.

  “Gus and Button,” the child replied, indicating the brightly colored story about the adventures of a spunky little mushroom in a vegetable world. “It’s my favorite.”

  “I thought Goodnight Moon was your favorite,” Amber said.

  “It’s my going to sleep favorite,” Jet explained. “Gus and Button is my getting braided favorite.”

  “Ahh,” Amber responded, as if that cleared up everything. “So you like vegetables?”

  Jet nodded eagerly.

  Amber grinned at her. “You take after your Grandma Wilma,” she told her.

  “No,” Jet insisted. “Wil-ma takes after me!”

  Amber laughed as she seated herself in the bent-wood rocker that had been a nursery gift. It now held a prominent place in the living room decor. Jet scrambled onto her lap.

  “We’ll take turns,” Amber told her. “You read it first.”

  Jet, of course, could not read. But she knew the story pretty well and in an expressive and dramatic voice mimicked the tale as she turned the pages.

  Amber had her hands full, sectioning Jet’s dark hair and braiding it into a half-dozen little pigtails. Her experience with her own thin, stick-strai
ght tresses had not prepared her for the thick, natural curls of her daughter. But she’d discovered, by trial and error, as well as questions at the beauty supply store, that a little moisturizer and braiding before bed kept it in control. Still it occasionally got napped up and tangled. Jet was brave and stoic, but Amber would do almost anything not to hurt her. Amber knew that she had already caused enough pain for everybody.

  She’d started off in motherhood on the wrong foot. She had known all about birth control. She hadn’t bothered to use it. Not that she deliberately tried to get pregnant. But she didn’t try very hard not to.

  Having a baby had been unplanned. Getting pregnant, however, had been something she used as a weapon.

  Her dad had died and Amber had never felt so alone. Yet, she found her mother’s closeness stifling. Ellen wanted to hold her, comfort her, support her. Amber just wanted to get away, put it all behind her. She wanted to just forget about her parents—the living and the dead.

  But a grieving soul couldn’t live without connection. So one night in a dimly lit bar she’d connected up with Chris, a man as heartbroken as she herself. Chris’s wife had been unfaithful. She was sorry, repentant, pleading for another chance. He wasn’t sure if he could forgive her or even if he could live in the same house with her, or the same town with her.

  Down from Dallas, as far in the depths as a man could go, he and Amber had shared their misery. Offered comfort to each other. Gave voice to the unutterable cry of pain with the honesty that one could offer to a stranger. It was a week of commiseration, soul sharing and sex. Then one morning Chris woke up and decided to go home.

  “I still love her,” he told Amber. “I still love her and I guess…I guess now she and I are even.”

  She hadn’t asked for his phone number, not even for his last name. He was going back to his life and she needed to forget him and pick up the pieces of her own.

  With a sharp intake of breath, the adventures of Gus and Button stopped abruptly as the comb caught in a snarl.

  “Ooo, I’m sorry,” Amber told her daughter as she clasped the hair above the tangle to try to ease it through without pulling.

  Jet scrunched up her narrow little shoulders and held herself stiff, braced against the discomfort of hair care.

  “I’m almost done,” she promised.

  “It’s okay,” Jet assured her, in her small, brave voice.

  It took her a moment to smooth the mat out. As soon as she did, the little girl went back to her reading. Amber started plaiting the last pigtail.

  Ellen was actually better at this than Amber. Ellen had taken on the task of raising Jet as if it were a new lease on life. Amber loved her child, but she just sort of stumbled through motherhood, leaving the big decisions to her own mother, and then resenting Ellen for making them. “All done,” she announced and laid the comb on the nearby table.

  “Yea!” Jet cheered.

  She handed the book to Amber. “Now, it’s your turn,” she said.

  Like warm butter, the child melted back onto her chest, finding just the perfect spot to rest her head and still see the pictures. The warmth, the touch, just the sweet smell of this little child made all the troubles of the world seem light. Amber may have screwed up her life, big time, but she had no regrets about having Jet.

  She opened the book. “Waiting at the window for the whirling storm to stop,” she began the story.

  Jet was yawning before Belle, Pip and Cecil led Gus past the celery stalk temple.

  6

  Jet was singing to herself as Wilma cleared the bowl of mostly eaten cereal from the table in front of her.

  “When’s my birthday, Wil-ma?” she asked.

  “In a few weeks,” the older woman answered.

  “Will I have cake and candles and presents?” The child’s eyes were wide with the possibility.

  “Absolutely,” Wilma assured her. “It wouldn’t be a real birthday without them.”

  Jet seemed reassured by that statement.

  “Right now I need you to fend for yourself for a few minutes.”

  The little girl nodded solemnly. “Do you want your ox-a-jim?” Jet asked, worried. “I can roll it here for you.”

  “No honey,” she assured the little girl. “I’m just going to use the phone. You stay kind of quiet and play with your pretties.”

  “Okay,” she answered. “Sheila and me are gonna read the newspaper.”

  The child got down on the floor and propped the doll against the edge of the couch. She spread the Express-News out on the floor and carefully began to turn the large pages as she looked at the photographs and made up stories to tell about them.

  Wilma smiled at her. Jet was such a happy, easy-going little girl. Obviously somebody had done something right. Wilma supposed that Ellen should get the credit.

  Somehow Ellen had taken on Jet as if she were her own daughter, not Amber’s. Stranger still, Amber seemed content to let her do it. Amber, who resented her mother inexplicably, and wouldn’t have happily shared much of anything with her, had given over her only child almost completely. It didn’t make sense to Wilma. But to be absolutely truthful, not very much that either of those two women did made much sense to her.

  Ellen had always worked harder than any reasonable woman should ever aspire to. She’d lived a straitlaced, narrow, boring existence. Paul Jameson had been a nice man, but he couldn’t have scared up any excitement in a Halloween costume. Poor Ellen had struggled through years of physical drudgery and emotional upheaval to take care of him. And now that her burden was finally lifted, was she out celebrating, having a good time? No, she missed the guy. She was pining after him.

  And Amber, in her own way, was just as foolish. A bright, pretty girl with plenty of chances to go off to college, have fun and do all the wild, regrettable things that the young are famous for, had chosen instead to saddle herself with a child whose father she didn’t seem to have any interest in. She had condemned herself to a dead-end job and a seemingly endless list of loser boyfriends. If she hadn’t wanted college, Wilma could have understood. But she had wanted it very much. For most of her girlhood it had been all she’d talked about. And if she didn’t believe in abortion, fine. Wilma would never have pushed her into having one. But what about all those loving, deserving, childless couples who would have been thrilled with such a pretty, sweet child as Jet. Amber had insisted on keeping the child. Yet, she treated her daughter more like a sister, and left all the real meat of motherhood to Ellen.

  No, these women didn’t make any sense to Wilma, even if they were her own flesh and blood.

  By the time she got to the telephone, Wilma decided to take up Jet’s suggestion and dragged her oxygen tank over beside her. She hated to admit it, but she was clearly getting worse.

  It wasn’t exactly a surprise. The best hope the doctor had offered was that if she quit smoking and took care of herself, she might halt the progression of the disease. Since she hadn’t made much effort to give up the cigarettes, she could hardly expect anything else. She had always been accustomed to ignoring the advice of others.

  Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead wasn’t just a familiar line from an old war movie, it had long ago become a kind of life motto for Wilma. When life and circumstance got in her way, she just pushed on through in her own indomitable style. When life gave her lemons, she didn’t just make lemonade, she’d distilled it into lemon saki and drank to intoxication.

  With that idea held firmly in mind she fitted the clear plastic tubes against her nose and turned on the valve on the tank before dialing the number of the accounting office. If Ellen answered, she’d pretend some errand or such. No need for any elaborate plan. Ellen never seemed to have a clue about deception.

  She’d talked with Yolanda a couple of times. She knew the woman’s modus operandi. Wilma was not above giving her a healthy dose of her own medicine. For a good cause, of course.

  The phone rang only twice.

  “Roper Accounting, we’re the
Cowboys of Taxes.”

  “Is this Yolanda? Yolanda Ruiz?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Hi, Yolanda, I’m so glad I caught you. It’s been such a day and I’ve had so much to do and I didn’t know if I would get a chance to call but Mildred said I should and so I did, but I won’t keep you if you’re busy or going out or on another line or anything like that, because I know you’re working and I’ve got a million things to do myself. Can you talk?”

  “I…ah…yes…of course, I…”

  “Oh, good, well Mildred didn’t know much, but she assured me that you had the scoop, the whole scoop, and nothing but the scoop. And I just have to know. Not for myself, of course, but for my friend. You know her, but well, I’m not at liberty to say. And you know me, I’m not one for gossip. Can’t tolerate it one bit. It’s a plague on the earth, but when friends are involved, well you have to find out. You wouldn’t be a friend if you didn’t. And, well, you simply have to do what you have to do. It’s what I have to do and I have to count on someone. Can I count on you for that, Yolanda?”

  “Uh…uh…”

  “Can you fill me in? Don’t tell me anything that I shouldn’t know. And believe me everything said to me is held in confidence, the strictest confidence, my lips are sealed, I’ll never breathe a word. But you’re his secretary and if he’s, well, if he’s not at all what he claims to be, then you owe it to her, who is your friend after all, not to keep her in the dark. Isn’t that right?”

  “Ah…yes, of course.”

  Wilma smiled. Every secret was about to be revealed.

  With only minimal prodding and twenty minutes of her time, Wilma got the goods on Max Roper.

  So, on the plus side he’d been divorced for a couple of decades with no young children or ex-wives to support. His business was healthy and his modest Alta Vista home was free and clear. He kept working by choice and by habit. He even owned an acreage near Uvalde where he ran a few goats and cattle.

  But there were problems, real problems. In his younger days he’d had quite a reputation as a rounder. Apparently, he had never had any preference for a decent, hardworking woman when there had been brassy, fast living gals available. He was also sixty-seven—a quarter of a century older than Ellen.