by Carr, Suzie
“None of us have a shot.” I stole the ball from him. “I know you’re more creative than a baseball. Make a pretty mug for me.” I handed it back to him.
He kneaded the clay. “So, if you’re married, why are you always without her?”
Nadia looked at me again.
“Go on. Tell him.”
“She’s in jail, sir.” She twisted her clay, pulling on it, ripping it apart. “She killed someone in a drunk driving accident.”
The four of us pressed, rolled, and ripped at our clay.
“Have you forgiven her?” Grampa asked.
Nadia sighed. “It’s kind of hard when she hasn’t even forgiven herself, sir.”
He fixated on the stretch of table in front of Nadia. “You have to forgive her if you ever want to get on with your life.”
“You speak like you’re coming from experience,” Nadia said.
He nodded. “We’ve got some ugly baggage in our family too.”
Nadia cupped her clay ridden hand on his wrist. “Ruby told me about your daughter and her accident on the stairs. That must have been difficult.”
He licked his thin lips and shook off a bad memory. “We all have our problems in life. We survive them.” He pulled apart his clay. “Are you angry with her still?”
She pinched her clay. “That’s putting it mildly.”
“You’ve got to find a way to get rid of that. You’re far too young and sweet to carry that kind of bitterness around with you for the rest of your life.”
“I agree,” Shawna said. “You have to let it go.”
“You say that like it’s something I can just toss aside and forget about.” Nadia stretched out her clay, pressing it to the table with the palm of her hand.
“We’ll help you figure out a way,” Shawna said. “That’s what friends are for.”
* *
Later that day, Nadia and I took my grampa back to his apartment after we dropped off Shawna at the hotel. He fell asleep watching a hockey game. I closely followed. I peeked over at Nadia and she, too, had closed her eyes. I watched her sleep. Her silhouette breezed up and down in gentle whispers. I could’ve watched her breathe, listened to her gently snore, and fantasized about her curvy lips and velvety tongue forever.
She woke up and caught me staring at her. She rolled over, all lazy and beautiful, and touched my lips with her finger. “Your grampa told me something interesting today when you were talking with the owner of the pottery café.”
“Did he tell you how much I nag him for not taking his meds?”
She circled her finger around my mouth and then down my jawline, to my throat and then dropped it to my arm. “He told me how proud he was of you with how you handled your mother’s death.”
I gulped. Nadia circled her fingers back to my throat. Their pressure mounted with each tough swallow. She stared at me with such sweetness, such concern, such love that I welled up. My chin quivered, and she started wiping my tears away with the back of her hand in gentle, sweeping motions. No one had ever taken care of me in this way. No one had ever asked me about my feelings.
“The day she died, I was supposed to fill the washing machine with the clothes. Tuesdays were my day to clean the house, do laundry and cook supper. Catherine, my best friend at the time, invited me to her Girl Scouts meeting. I had been begging her forever to let me go. Finally, her mother approved when I volunteered to watch their cat while they vacationed the following month. I was supposed to be home, but instead I sat in a circle with a bunch of girl scouts listening to some boring woman talk about life. Had this happened any other Tuesday, I could’ve helped my mother. She wouldn’t have died.”
Nadia pulled me into her arms and rocked me.
“Just goes to show you,” I said. “You can’t be everything to everyone.”
She didn’t respond with words. Instead, she cradled me until I fell asleep.
* *
We woke at six o’clock that night.
“I’m starved,” Nadia said. “How about I go to the store and get us something to cook for dinner?”
“I could go for meatloaf,” Grampa said.
“Meatloaf it is, then.” Nadia climbed to her feet and stretched, exposing her taut belly. “I’ll see what I can do about finding us a dessert, too.”
When Nadia left, I looked at my grampa’s messy hair. “You need a haircut.”
“No better time than the present.” He climbed to his feet and walked to the bathroom. “I’ll grab the haircutting bag and meet you in the kitchen.”
A minute later, he sat on a chair, and I began cutting.
“She’s got big problems. She’s going to need some help getting over that.”
I combed his hair and chopped into it. “I have my doubts that this woman is even good for her.”
“Well, love will prompt you to do funny things.”
I shook my head, stuck between lying and surviving his statement. “Love is a funny word.”
“Complicated word,” he corrected.
“Yeah. People sacrifice themselves over it.”
He pinched a smile on his face. “When you love someone, it’s not a sacrifice.”
I walked around to his back and chopped away at his long hair. Gray strands fell to his shoulders, taking up company on them while I tried to even out the mess in the back of his head.
“Do you think she’ll stay married?”
I shrugged. “She’ll stick it out. She has hope that things will go back to the way they were before. She’s not like me. I would’ve walked away the minute I got the phone call about the accident.”
“I doubt that.” He bowed his head.
I chopped through his wiry hair, attacking it. “I’m not my mother.”
“Where’s this anger coming from?” he asked.
I chopped more of his hair. He loved his daughter, and I bit my tongue every time he spoke about her as though she reigned the world with angel wings to mother me. “I’m not angry. I just don’t want to spend my life in a loveless marriage, that’s all.”
“Well, dear,” he started, turning just as I chopped. I nicked my finger. Blood squirted. I screamed. He screamed. I ran to kitchen sink and stuck it under the faucet. “Son of a bitch,” I yelled. The sting buckled my knees.
Grampa climbed to his feet and wobbled over to me, dragging his hair all over the kitchen floor. “You have to squeeze it.” He tore off a paper towel and wrapped it around my finger. “Squeeze like this.” My finger throbbed under the pressure.
I turned away from the bloody mess. “I can’t look.”
He wrapped my finger tightly and walked with me over to his kitchen table. I sat, and he dragged a chair to my side and sat down. He held my finger up in the air and squeezed it. I looked at the picture of Mother Mary on the wall next to the cloth wall calendar from nineteen eighty-two. A picture of The Rafters sat just below the year.
“I miss that place,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around something, anything but my ravaged finger.
“Ah, that place glowed with magic. It had a healing quality to it. Guests would say it all the time. They’d come in there with their broken lives, broken marriages, and broken hearts and leave healed, strong and ready to forgive.”
Yet, it couldn’t heal him. The fact that he just up and packed away his life because of someone else never sat right with me. That’s what commitments did to a person. They robbed people of the pleasure of pursuing their dreams. Nothing good ever came out of a relationship.
The room silenced as we both stared at this picture. We never spoke about that day we drove away. We never spoke about how life just turned gray afterwards. He never brought it up, and neither did I. I looked over at him. He looked sad. “I wish you would’ve stayed there.”
“I wanted to move on,” he said. He squeezed my finger, applying more pressure than it needed.
“One of these days we should take a trip there.”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
H
e peeled away the paper towel and examined my injury.
“You said it, though. It’s a place of healing.”
His mouth hung open, and he looked perplexed. I got woozy and turned back to the calendar.
“No one needs any healing here.”
“We could go fishing in our old pond.”
“We’ve got plenty of ponds right here in Rhode Island.”
I looked him squarely in the eye, into the eye of a man who walked away from his dreams. “What are you afraid of?”
He examined my finger. “Me afraid?” He scoffed. “The past should just stay in the past.”
I pulled my finger away. “All of us could use a good dose of that place.”
“All of us?” he asked.
“Me, you, Shawna, and Nadia. We could all use a change of scenery.”
“I need to bandage this finger.” He rose from his chair with a grunt and left me without an answer.
He bandaged my finger in silence. He never quieted for this long. I had put a thought in his head, and I prayed he’d come through on it. I wanted him to face his past so he could mend his broken spirit once and for all. Fear didn’t sit right on his heart. It stole away the very essence of his dynamic character. He needed to mend this. Shawna needed to mend her frightful heart. Nadia needed to mend her restless feelings towards Jessica.
“I’d be so happy if you agree to take this trip.”
He eyed me, kissed my bandaged finger, and walked back to the kitchen.
When Nadia returned, Grampa charged into the living room. “Nadia, would you be interested in taking a trip with us?”
I beamed and shot to my feet. “And Shawna, too.”
“And Shawna, too,” he corrected.
“Where to?” Nadia asked.
“To The Rafters, to the place where Ruby grew up.”
Her face blossomed into a smile. “When do we leave?”
He looked to me, waiting on a response. I imagined driving down the interstate en route to my old home, Grampa smiling away, his teeth shining, and Shawna, Nadia, and I singing Billy Joel at the top of our lungs while we crunched on Doritos.
“Let’s cook that meatloaf dinner and leave first thing in the morning. I’ll call and make reservations,” I said.
“Hell, yeah,” Nadia said.
Grampa hugged her. “God I love a girl who can shout out a good curse word without blinking.”
She kissed his cheek.
“I’ll call Shawna.” I pulled out my cell phone. “This is just what she needs.”
* *
The next morning, I arrived at my grampa’s apartment to find Shawna and Nadia already there scrambling eggs and burning toast.
I sat down with Grampa on the couch and stared at a picture of myself as a little girl. I was sitting on his lap. We were crafting a kite together. We were laughing. His smile stretched far and wide, and I looked like I was caught up in the moment, present, right there living that precious moment of time when nothing else in the world mattered but that kite.
“Do you remember when I got stung by all of those bees the day we flew this kite?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “I felt so bad for you. Your little legs could barely keep up with your fear that day. I thought for sure you’d break something. I’ve never seen anyone sprint down a hill.”
Grampa remembered the finest of details from the past.
“We had so much fun back then.” I leaned against him admiring the memories that sat before us.
He cradled my wrist. “This trip is going to be good for me.”
“It’ll be good for us all.”
I turned the photo album page and landed on a picture of him and my grandma on their wedding day. She wore a simple, cream dress with eyelets across the chest. Her hair swirled in finger waves and her lips straightened into a line. “Was grandma a happy lady?”
“Oh yes.” He nodded. “Very happy, indeed. Well, except for when I forgot to wipe mud from my shoes. She’d lay into me for doing that.”
“Do you think we would’ve gotten along?”
“She was just like your mother. Sweet, accommodating, always trying to please. You would’ve had a blast together.”
I turned the page and landed on their wedding dance. “You loved her, huh?”
“Of course.” He rubbed his finger on the worn photo album page. “She was my world until she died.”
“Did you know right away?”
“Naturally.”
His sureness with this word threw me off. “You weren’t afraid to love her? Afraid she might not love you back? Or worse, love you and leave you later?”
“It’s worth it.”
I turned to another page and landed on The Rafters. I was about eight years old and skipping down the field where dandelions grew tall and abundantly. How many times had I tossed myself down that hill for a giggling tumble?
Grampa turned the next page, and we stared at a picture of me swinging over the creek with a rope that he had tied for me. Without looking up, he asked softly, “You love Nadia, don’t you?”
“Shh.” I turned towards the kitchen, and Nadia stood at the stove, humming and flipping eggs. “I’m never going to fall in love. It’s not my style.”
We both continued to gaze at the picture of free-spirited me. “I messed you up, didn’t I?” he asked.
I snapped away from the picture. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“Look at you.” He tossed his hand out in front of him, to the picture of me so happy. “You’re afraid to love anyone.” He exhaled and leaned back, turning from the photo album now and looking down at his frail hands. He wrestled his two fingers together, twitching his mouth side to side.
“You didn’t do that to me, Grampa. My mother did.”
“Don’t say that, dear.”
“She was weak. I don’t know how you didn’t see that.” I stood up and walked away from my Grampa. “I need some air.” I walked out of his apartment and to the waterfront across the street.
Moments later, Nadia found me pounding the sand with a stick. “He thinks she was such a perfect mother. I want to tell him the truth. I want to tell him how I had to endure listening to her fights, witness her bruises, and whisper whenever I spoke so my stepfather wouldn’t get angry and take it out on my mother for having such a noisy daughter. Who am I to ruin his perception of her?”
Nadia wrapped her arm around me. I pulled away and stared at the waterfront. I watched a riverboat pass. A little girl on the boat waved at us. I dropped my sadness and waved back, honoring her youth and innocence. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the cool breeze wash over my face. I breathed in and held it there for a few long seconds before disengaging. “I never want to disappoint that man. It’s just so hard to listen to him always say such great things about her. But, what good would it do now if I told him how ugly things turned?”
“No good at all.”
I looked up at Nadia and found comfort in her smile. “We should get back before he gets worried.”
I turned, and she followed.
* *
My grampa huddled over the photo album.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I said all that.”
A wave of relief crossed across his pale, grayish face. A fresh golden tone surfaced and brought him back to life. “Let’s eat and get this road trip started already. What do you say?”
“Let’s do it.” I helped him up from the couch.
“You girls are going to love it there,” he said. “You’re going to just love it.”
“I can’t wait to stand on top of that hill again and sit by the creek with fishing rods,” I said.
His smile brightened the space around us all. “Sounds like a slice of heaven is awaiting us.”
Chapter Thirteen
Ruby
We knocked on the front door, and a familiar woman in her late seventies answered with a smile. “Welcome.”
“Do you remember this handsome guy?” I t
ilted my head in Grampa’s direction. He stood close by my side, beaming.
Recognition splayed on her face. “Mr. Clark!” She stretched out her arms to him. He folded into them like he’d been waiting to do this since the day he signed over the papers to her family.
“You still look beautiful as ever,” he said to her.
She pulled away and blushed. “You’re still a flirt.”
“Always,” he said, not even turning red.
She turned to me. “And you’re the young lady?”
“Yes, ma’am. That would be me.” I relaxed into a giggle.
She turned to Nadia and Shawna. “And who might these two lovelies be?”
Shawna blushed red.
“Great friends,” I answered. “They needed to see this place for themselves to understand how magical it is.”
“Well, come on in.” She waved us into the foyer. Nostalgia danced in my heart and swirled in my head. “I’ve got your rooms ready to go upstairs.”
I balanced a hand on the post of the staircase that led up to my old bedroom and the other eight guestrooms. Its slippery and smooth texture hadn’t changed in over a decade. The same carpet runner blanketed the steps, and I spotted the stain I had created back on Christmas day when I dropped a Dixie cup of pink oil paint. The foyer even smelled like home, like freshly baked bread and coffee.
“Wow, this is weird.” I peeked around the planked floor and recognized the four divots I used to use as jumping points when I played hopscotch. “I feel like I just walked out the front door to get my grampa’s Providence Journal and walked back in again.”
The lady crossed her arms over her chest and nodded. “Yeah, I adored everything about this place. I’ve changed very little. Last summer I had to put a new heating system in, and the year before that we updated the carpeting in the bedrooms upstairs. For the most part, everything is still as charming as you all left it.”
The air flowed, as fresh as ever.
Suddenly I heard a door close from up above, and a moment later a man and woman walked down the stairs holding hands and wearing easy smiles. The man tipped his head in my direction. “Hi there.”
I smiled back. I morphed back into a young girl again with no troubles, no fears, just happiness floating around her greeting guests.