by Leslie Gould
An hour later at the clinic, Rebekah pulled out Pepper’s insurance card for the receptionist. The woman read from the computer screen. “Payment denied.” She paused. “For the last five appointments.”
“I know.” Rebekah shivered.
“Ask Jamie to help you. We have to appeal this sort of thing every now and then.”
Rebekah sat down across from Pepper and Elise.
“What’s in your bag?” Elise nodded toward Pepper’s small Nike backpack.
“Gum. Trident bubblegum.”
“What else?”
“Blue and brown paint chips. I want to paint my room. And Arthur trading cards.”
“Arthur? The aardvark?”
Pepper nodded. “Mark and Michael probably used to watch it.”
“Yes, they did, and I read plenty of Arthur books to them over the years.”
“I still like the show. And the Web site.” Pepper opened her backpack. “Oh, I also have some polka-dot fabric—blue and brown. I’m going to make a cushion for my chair, the one I painted last week. And I have some horse stickers and some free song stickers for my iPod.”
“You have an iPod?”
“No. Not yet.” Pepper nudged her mom.
Rebekah shook her head.
“Mom, can we go by the scrapbooking store on the way home? The big one?”
“No. We’re going by the Western Store. Besides, we have our own store now.” Rebekah flipped the pages of the magazine.
“But the one close to Lloyd Center has so much cool stuff. Lloyd Center! Can we go there too?”
Rebekah pretended to read the magazine. “We went there just a few days ago.”
“It’s been way over a week—just so you know.”
“Pepper Graham.” The nurse stood at the door to the waiting room. Rebekah and Pepper stood.
“Oh, I also have my urine sample in my bag,” Pepper said, turning toward Elise. “Want some gum?”
The Western Store took up an entire block. Rebekah breathed in deeply. Leather, feed, and fertilizer. She quickly found the halter and bandage she needed for Sky.
“I need new boots, Mom. My feet grew.” Pepper turned down the boot aisle.
“I can’t afford new boots right now.”
“Aren’t these cute?” Pepper held up a short, blue and green, gator-print boot with a square toe. “It’s a Fatboy. They’re really trendy right now.”
“Pepper, I can’t afford trendy.”
“Those are cute.” Elise picked up a brown Fatboy boot. “What size do you wear?”
“Six and a half.”
“I thought your feet grew.” Rebekah concentrated on not rolling her eyes.
“They did, Mom. I used to be a size six. My boots are too tight. I’m not kidding.”
Elise turned the boot over and checked the bottom.
Rebekah wandered off and sat down in a leather chair, the bandages in one hand and the halter in the other, her purse over her shoulder. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
“You asleep?”
“Almost.” Rebekah sat up straight. “Did you find some boots?”
Elise nodded.
“Fatboys?”
“They’re cute.” Elise sat down next to Rebekah.
“What’s Pepper doing?”
“Deciding.”
“I’m not buying her new boots.” Rebekah sat up straight.
“She knows. I am.”
“Elise, I can’t let you do that.”
“Sure you can. I don’t have a daughter to buy things for. Let me buy for Pepper.” Elise’s eyes brightened.
“I’ll trade you boots for scrapbooking stuff.”
“That means I’d have to get serious about scrapbooking.”
“You’ll scrapbook.” Rebekah flinched, thinking about the retreat.
“We’ll see.” Elise hugged the box. “Let me buy the boots. You let me ride your horses.”
Pepper stood in front of the mirror, admiring a pair of red boots. Rebekah shrugged. “Okay. Thanks.”
“What did the doctor say?” Elise slipped out of her jacket.
“The same. Transplant within the next six months if at all possible. Her kidney function is just below fifteen percent. The coordinator is going to call our insurance about the preexisting-condition fiasco.”
“Any word about the list?”
“The doctor doesn’t deal with that. Kids have priority on the list, because of everything the kidney affects—growth, all of that. But still, it’s a long list.”
“What’s the hardest part for you?”
Rebekah paused. Was Elise really interested? “The hardest part is not being able to give Pepper one of my kidneys. I should be able to. I love her more than anyone in the world loves her. Don’t you think I should be able to?” Rebekah slumped in the chair.
“I’m sorry.” Elise squeezed Rebekah’s hand.
Surprised by Elise’s warmth, Rebekah continued, “Wouldn’t you want to be able to do that for your kids?”
“I’ve never even thought about it,” Elise answered. Her face contorted just a little.
“Be thankful that you haven’t had to. It’s horrid.”
Pepper paraded in front of them, wearing a pair of blue boots. “Those are really cute.” Elise stood and headed to the hat aisle. Rebekah followed her.
“How about this?” Elise tried on a green straw cowboy hat.
Rebekah picked up an orange one. “I’ve wanted to take Sky to the coast and ride on the beach. Want to go next Saturday if Sandi will watch the store for me?”
“Maybe, if John will watch my boys.” Elise paused and looked at herself in the mirror. “How would we get the horses to the beach?” She took the hat off her head and then took the orange one from Rebekah.
“The trailer.”
“That old rickety thing behind your barn?” Elise plucked a blue hat off the shelf.
“It works fine.”
“Have you pulled it before?”
“Yes.” Rebekah stood on her tiptoes. Where was Pepper?
“When?”
“Every week to 4-H through the spring and summer.”
“How many times to the beach?” Elise headed toward the boot department.
“None.” Rebekah ran her hand through her hair. “What are you doing with all those hats?”
“Buying them. For you, Pepper, and me.”
“Elise.”
“Hush.”
“Is it safe for Pepper to eat ice cream?” Elise whispered as they stood in line at Baskin-Robbins.
“As long as she doesn’t eat a whole gallon,” Rebekah whispered back.
Pepper sucked on a pink spoon from her sample of Very Berry Strawberry. She tilted her head. “Mom, they’re playing country.”
Rebekah listened. Sure enough, even in Portland.
“I love this song.” Pepper held the spoon in her hand. “But she’s somebody’s hero,” she sang along. “A hero to her baby with a skinned-up knee.”
“I especially like the line at the end of this song about Momma being in a nursing home and being fed with a spoon.” Rebekah winked at Elise.
“The keeper of the Cheerios.” Pepper sang through the whole song. “It’s by Jamie O’Neal. She’s singing about you guys.”
Elise shook her head. “I don’t think I’m anyone’s hero.” They inched forward in the line.
“You are.” Pepper blew a bubble. “I hope I’ll be a mom someday. If I can’t have kids, I’m going to adopt.”
“You’ll make a great mother,” Rebekah said as she approached the counter. Boy, they had a long way to go before thinking about grandbabies.
“Who all went on the retreat?” Elise asked after she ordered her frozen mocha.
Rebekah tried to sound nonchalant. “Sandi, Pepper and Ainsley, and a few other women.” Rebekah paid the cashier.
“How many altogether?” Elise’s voice sounded scratchy again.
“Twenty.” Pepper reached out her hand for
her cookies-and-cream ice-cream cone. “Isn’t that cool?”
Rebekah elbowed Pepper.
“What, Mom?” Pepper grabbed a stack of napkins.
“Wow. What a great turnout.” Elise’s voice fell flat.
Rebekah handed Elise her mocha. Why did life never seem to progress past junior high?
Elise scooted onto the seat and slammed the door of Rebekah’s pickup.
“Look at my little sweetie,” Rebekah said with a smile. Pepper stood next to the barn with her arms crossed and a fierce scowl on her face. “I told her we’re going to check things out—to see if it’s safe for me to take her next time.”
“She’s going to make you pay for this one.”
Rebekah nodded, her two braids bobbing back and forth. “Never underestimate the power of a pout. I can just imagine what she’s going to talk Patrick into today—probably shopping.” Rebekah swung the pickup and horse trailer onto the highway and accelerated. “How are the horses doing?”
Elise turned her head. The trailer window was filthy, but she could make out Sky jerking his head up and down. “Sky doesn’t look too happy. I can’t see the mare.”
Rebekah wore her orange hat. “How are things with Ted?”
“Pretty routine. Lots of surgeries. He’s found a church. It’s cold and wet in Germany too. He said the 4Runner’s spare shouldn’t have gone flat; he checked it when we left Colorado. And he doesn’t know why his army checks haven’t been coming through.”
“You’re kidding. The army doesn’t pay?”
“Eventually they pay.”
“Yikes. What have you been living on?”
“Savings.”
“Must be nice,” Rebekah muttered as she slowed for a curve.
Elise leaned back against the headrest.
“Do you remember our conversation about small towns way back when? What business did everyone know of yours in Cascade Pass?” Rebekah pulled to the right to allow a car to pass as the pickup strained up a hill.
“The usual stuff.”
“Like who had dinner at whose house?”
Elise laughed. “We didn’t really have dinner at anyone’s house.”
“How come?” Rebekah tipped her hat back.
“We kept to ourselves.”
“And did what?”
“Everyday stuff. Homework. Housework.” She paused. “We spent one week every summer in Seattle at my grandmother’s house. We would all go to the market and wharf. Dad would take me to the art museum and the library. Twice we went to the Space Needle. Every year my mother would cry the whole way home.”
“Were you close to your father?”
Elise nodded.
“You were in high school when he died?”
“Senior year.” Elise yawned and then sat up straight. “Look, a deer.” She pointed to the right of the road. “I hope there isn’t a cougar behind it.”
Rebekah laughed. “If there was, Pepper would be even more bummed that she didn’t get to come along.”
Elise turned the subject to the kids and school. She had decided to ride to make Rebekah feel better about not inviting her to the retreat. No, that wasn’t true. She decided to ride because she wanted to ride. It was that simple. She wanted to ride, not talk about the past.
A gust of wind whipped Elise’s green cowboy hat from her head as Rebekah led Sky backward down the rickety ramp from the trailer and onto the asphalt. Sky reared. Rebekah pulled firmly on the reins as Elise chased her hat across the parking lot. Elise clamped it back on her head and pulled the tie to the front.
Rebekah laughed. “Here, hold on to Sky.”
Sky turned his head and pawed the ground. Elise clasped the reins tightly. What if he got away from her? The mare backed out of the trailer in one swift motion. Rebekah and Elise saddled the horses and then led them down the trail toward the beach.
Elise’s hat blew off again. She dismounted and chased it into the surf, snatching it from the foamy waves. Rebekah rode toward the mare, grabbed her reins, and handed them back to Elise. “Push the dealy all the way up to your chin,” Rebekah said, “like mine.”
Elise did and then unzipped her parka and breathed in the salty air. It was windy but warm.
“We must be getting a balmy breeze from Hawaii.” Rebekah handed Elise her reins and wiggled out of her fleece. Sky held his ears back.
What did the horses think of the beach, the crashing waves, and the smell of the ocean? They trotted along the edge of the water. Elise rolled her shoulders. Breathe and balance.
“How did you and Ted meet?” Rebekah rode closest to the waves.
“I worked in a bookstore in Seattle, and Ted came in looking for a specific poem.”
“Was he taking a poetry class?”
“A community class at the church on his block. He was expanding his horizons.” Elise squinted under the brim of her hat as she talked. She hadn’t thought to bring her sunglasses.
“So then what?”
“I finally found the poem. He didn’t know the author. Just the title: ‘When You Are Old.’ ”
“Sounds cheery.”
“It’s really beautiful but sad. It’s by William Butler Yeats, about growing old and love fleeing and pacing upon the mountains overhead.”
“Sounds depressing.”
“Exactly.” The horses splashed through a creek that cut through the sand, and Sky bounded ahead.
Elise ached for Ted. The first week he was gone was tolerable; one less person to interact with meant a little bit more time to herself. She would stay up and read or watch a movie she wouldn’t watch otherwise. But after the first week, loneliness would seep into her bones, into her heart. As the weeks marched on, the loneliness turned into an ache. It wasn’t that love had fled. It wasn’t pacing the mountains overhead. It was suspended by a turning satellite, an unpredictable army, and miles of uncertainty.
“Be careful who you make sacrifices for in this life,” her mother had once told her. “You can’t help who you fall in love with,” her father had said not long before he died. Those were the only two pieces of advice her parents had given her.
Sky’s dark form lunged up the bank of a wider creek that flowed into the ocean. The muscles of his thighs rippled as he moved. The mare stumbled. Elise held on tightly.
“What happened after you found the poem? Did he ask you out?” Rebekah tipped her orange hat back on her head.
Elise nodded, her cheeks flushed from the sun and wind. “We sat on the wood floor of the bookstore and read the poem, and we both felt, I don’t know, a little haunted. He said, ‘That’s awful. I hope that never happens.’ For a moment I thought he was married.” What she didn’t say was that she had already checked out his ring finger and had determined there wasn’t even a tan line. “But he wasn’t. He asked me if I wanted to have tea the next day.”
“Tea?”
“We took the ferry to Victoria and had high tea at the Empress Hotel.”
“You’re kidding!”
Elise shook her head and smiled.
“Boy, Ted doesn’t waste time, does he?” Rebekah adjusted her cowboy hat. “Did he tell you right away that he was a medical resident?”
“No. He didn’t tell me for a month. That’s when I figured out that he was eight years older than me. He kept that a secret too. He didn’t tell me at first that he owed the army six years, either.”
“But you married him anyway.”
“The army wasn’t that big of a deal in the mideighties. Absolutely nothing was going on. The cold war was ending. The Berlin wall came down soon after that. He would serve his six years, and we would move back to Seattle, where he would go into private practice. No big deal. Then that tyrant I’d never heard of invaded that little country I’d never heard of, and my whole life changed.”
“Saddam Hussein? Kuwait?”
Elise nodded as the mare picked her way over a rocky spot on the beach.
“Why did Ted stay in after his six years were up?”
“He loved the first Gulf War. Crazy, huh? I was home barely surviving while he was deciding that he had never done anything so meaningful in his life as taking care of wounded soldiers.” Elise was ready to change the subject. She concentrated on holding the reins and then kicked at the stirrup strap with her foot to straighten it. “How did you and Patrick meet?”
“Portland State University. I was the bigmouth in our biology class. He was the cute geeky kid who blushed at everything I said. I couldn’t get enough of him.”
On the way back, as they headed north, the wind grew stronger. Elise pulled her hat tighter against her head. They rode along the water’s edge, hoping for some protection from the stinging sand.
Rebekah tightened the string against her neck. “I was wondering about your mom. Did the townspeople help her after your father died?
Were they good to her?”
Elise shook her head. “My mom was never really accepted. My dad was well liked, but my mom was aloof, never really made friends.” She was saying too much; still she continued. “When I was in junior high, she had an affair with a man in town. Everyone knew except me. Finally two girls at school cornered me during PE and questioned me about my mom and this man. I denied it. ‘No, it’s true,’ they said. ‘Everybody knows.’ They were right. Everyone did know.”
“Yikes. I’m sorry.” Rebekah leaned toward Elise.
“It was really awful.”
“And then what happened?”
“The man and his family moved to Everett. He had a son my age that all of my classmates really liked. And that was it, sort of. But then people really had a reason not to like my mom.”
“What about your dad?”
Elise paused and then shook her head. “I don’t know. It wasn’t really anything I could talk to him about. I do remember him crying in church one Sunday around that time. But that was all. It made me feel awful, but I was too afraid to ask him about it.”
“He stuck with your mom?”
Elise nodded. “They didn’t talk much. She was disappointed in him, that he didn’t make more money, that he hadn’t become a manager. He was a small man who did really hard labor. A high-school dropout who went straight to the mill. He loved to read, but he had no education.”