I arched an eyebrow and smiled. “Mike is there, isn’t he?”
“Whatever makes you say such a thing, Dellie?” Charlie asked, all mock innocence.
“Because I know you. And it’s six o’clock there, so you must be angling to guilt him into running out to bring home some dinner. Straight to hell, Charlie, straight to hell,” I tsked.
“Never. Besides, I have a loving husband who would deny me nothing if I asked,” she said, the volume of her voice increasing with each word.
“Why do I feel like I’m being used?”
“Why are you so suspicious?”
“Does Mike know how truly insane you are? Surely, after all this time, he must.”
“It’s part of what made him fall in love with me.”
I sniggered. “Riiiiight,” I drawled. “Poor Mike.”
“You didn’t call me to discuss my husband’s virtues, and you know it, Dellie. So what’s going on? Are you okay?” she asked, growing a bit more serious.
“I don’t know,” I sighed, leaning back into the pillows stacked against the headboard in the guest room I had claimed. I looked around, surveying the room, which had looked the same since the early days of my teenage years. Not much had changed in most of the house in the past ten years—the last time any of the decor had really been updated—and that had always been a comfort to me. It was the one constant in the midst of so much uncertainty.
And now, there was so much more uncertainty that even this very familiar space felt a little bit foreign.
I missed my mom. I missed my sister. And I missed the one person who could fully answer all of the questions I had swirling around in my head about the past.
“I wish you were here,” I murmured.
“Me, too, Dellie,” she said back, heaving a sigh of her own. “We could play Nancy Drew together.” It was obvious that she was trying to make me feel a little bit better with the joke, but it had the odd effect of making me miss her more.
I sniffed at the runny nose I could feel coming with the onset of teary eyes.
“Oh, Dellie, did I upset you?”
“No, you didn’t upset me. It’s all just so odd. And being here now, without Grammie, is even weirder,” I sniffed. “And I want to know what happened. Even if it was years ago, I still want to know. Everyone else knows—even Vivi knows, from what Annabelle’s said. But I didn’t know. We didn’t know,’ I stressed. “We didn’t know, and it feels important.” I sniffed again and cast a quick glance at the dresser a few feet away to see if there was a box of tissues on top. “I miss you, and I feel like Grandpa thinks I must be crazy for wanting to know about any of this. Maybe I am. If you were here, you could keep me sane.”
“You’re sane, Dellie! It’s just confusing. I think really all families are a big confused mess of weird people with weird histories.” Charlie paused. “We just happen to be finding out some of ours very late in the game.”
“You’re not kidding,” I said. “I still can’t believe none of us knew about this—even Mama.” I frowned, tracing one of the cabbage roses on the bedspread with my finger. The blinds were closed against the evening sun. I wondered if there would be fireflies out tonight.
That was one other thing I’d always loved so much about this place as a child—catching fireflies in mason jars with my cousin every summer. Hampton was the only place I could ever recall being that there was such an abundant population of fireflies, or “lightning bugs,” as we often called them. Always, always, we would take one of the bugs and squish its luminescent rear end at the base of a finger, like the glowing gemstone on a ring. No doubt the bugs didn’t much appreciate sacrificing their behinds to our strange childhood proclivities, but still.
It was our thing.
“Have you talked to anyone else?”
“Anyone else as in the uncles? Or our cousins?”
“Yes. And when you say it like that, it makes them all sound like some kind of mafia organization.” Charlie laughed.
“You never know,” I muttered.
“Somehow, I doubt it, Dellie,” she replied. “I was just wondering if maybe they already know, is all.”
I felt my eyebrows furrow. “But why would they know, if Mama doesn’t?” I asked, fully aware of the fact that she would have no answers to either one of my questions.
“I don’t know. Guess I’m just casting about for answers.” I could picture her shaking her own head now, lying on the couch in her living room a thousand miles away, waiting for her husband to bring home dinner.
“Tell me about it,” I agreed. “No, I haven’t had a chance to talk to any of them, yet, but even if I do, I’m not sure I’ll get much of an answer. They’re guys, so they probably give it just about as much space in their brain as Grandpa does.”
“Well, I have to admit, part of me agrees with him; maybe it shouldn’t matter so much. It’s an old story about a love triangle, plain and simple.”
“But what if it isn’t?”
Charlie laughed. “You’re doing it again, Dellie. You’re making it a soap opera story or something.”
“Can you blame me? I lived in one myself for eight months when I was married…” I trailed off, not really wanting to delve into this line of conversation right then, even though I’d accidentally been the one to bring it up. I hoped she would let it drop.
“I think we need to put this one to bed for the night, babe,” Charlie suggested, mercifully not taking the detour she could have taken. “Mike will be back with dinner soon so I need to go.” She paused for a beat. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, hoping I sounded convincing enough. “What are we having?”
“You sure you want to know?” she teased.
“Ye-es.”
“Cookie’s.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?” I moaned.
“Because you know me so well, and you know that I’ve been craving Asian food, like, every five minutes for this one?”
I rolled my eyes.
“I have a feeling that most people would hardly go so far as to consider Cookie’s authentically Asian, but still,” I replied, picturing the menu at Cookie’s Fortune, a little hole-in-the wall restaurant at home that was run by a punky, tatted-up Japanese-American guy named Tadashi Cookman who liked to push the envelope and make strange dishes with strange names like Miso Fried and Wanton Wontons. It was basically the culinary equivalent of what might happen if a redneck and an Asian had a love child—which was precisely what Tadashi was, if you were to get right down to it. Everyone was addicted to the Muffoons, which were his crab and cream-cheese filled cornbread muffins—inspired, of course, by cream cheese crab rangoons—so much so that there were times he was completely sold out. Charlie’s favorite was Teri-fried Chicken, a chicken breast marinated in teriyaki sauce, then dipped in buttermilk and dredged in flour before being pan fried in Crisco, served on a buttermilk biscuit that came with a kicky, sweet orange ginger and red pepper jam. The joint was strange and delightful, and it had been insanely popular since the day it opened.
“I’d tell you I hate you right now, but I guess we’re just about even, since I get to go to Wilkes while I’m here,” I replied, sinking farther back into the pillows at my back and trying to feel more confident in the words than I felt. Cookie’s was one of the places that still remained on my “safe list,” since he was more than willing to accommodate my need to strip my order down to its most natural elements, steaming veggies and piling them high on a plate for me while everyone else dove in with delight to his culinary curiosities.
Wilkes, on the other hand, had always been a place I had loved eating as a child, but now that I was so locked into the safe confines of my well-controlled list of foods, it was far outside of my comfort zone. And therefore, I had decided to make eating there part of the fulfillment of one of the items on my bucket list. Eat Somewhere Unsafe. And this time, I meant to order something that felt unsafe, as well.
A str
ange noise came from her end of the line.
“Did you just growl at me?” I laughed.
“So what if I did?”
“You did!” I crowed, the grin widening on my face.
“Well, I think it’s perfectly understandable,” Charlie defended.
“Don’t worry,” I said, still smiling. “I promise I’ll bring you some, okay? I’ll have Grandpa show me how to pack it up good so that I can box it and check it with my bags. Deal?”
“Bless you,” she said.
“You only love me for my meat,” I said in mock accusal.
“So not true,” she protested.
“It’s okay, I’m used to it,” I whimpered.
“Good night, Dellie,” Charlie chortled. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Grandpa, can I ask you something?”
We were sitting in the den, each of us having set up camp in a recliner—Grandpa in his, me in Grammie’s blue one. The television was tuned to one of his favorite prime-time cop dramas, but I was too distracted to follow the story at the moment.
No answer from his side.
“Grandpa?”
“Hmmm?” he said, my voice having finally won the battle with the television for his attention.
Or not, seeing as how his eyes had yet to stray from the screen.
“Why won’t you tell me anything about Grammie and George?”
“I did. I told you that they were engaged, but he ran off with Annabelle instead,” he said simply. “There’s not much else to tell.” His eyes were still fixed on the television. “Did you get that bike from Marge so that you can ride to the bookstore when you need to work?” he asked, clearly having moved on.
I nodded, unsure whether I should redirect the conversation back to my initial inquiry or just let it drop.
“I did,” I said, watching his face in hopes that it would help me gauge his mood. “She said to keep it as long as I needed.”
I’d decided that having one on hand would be good, even if I never got to use it. The jury was still out on that one, since I didn’t really know my way around that well, and I hadn’t ridden a bike on the road in more years than I could remember.
I took a deep breath and decided to take the plunge. “Remember how I had coffee with Annabelle this morning? I was hoping she would tell me more about George. And Grammie,” I murmured.
“Did she?”
I shook my head. “Not really. I mean,” I said, running my words quickly together before I lost my nerve, “she told me some of it, but not enough to really clarify anything. Mostly, I think it just left me with more questions,” I admitted.
“The woman meddles too much, Dellie,” Grandpa grumbled, waving his meaty paw through the air in dismissal. “And she doesn’t have anything to tell you that needs telling. It’s old, old history. It doesn’t matter now.”
How could I make him understand that it did matter? And not just to me, either, but to my mother and my sister, as well. We’d all lost Grammie, and now there was this part of her life that we hadn’t known about. Knowing what had happened, all those years ago, would bring her a little closer again, as strange as that sounded.
I shook my head, feeling frustrated. “It does, Grandpa. Maybe it doesn’t to you, but it does to me,” I protested. “And to Mama and Charlie.”
His eyes narrowed further as his scowl deepened. “Why?”
I shrugged. “It just does. This is part of all of us, part of our story.”
That got an eyebrow raise. Obviously, he was not convinced.
“Dellie, it’s not something you need to be worried about. It was hard for your grammie when it happened, and it took people a long time to stop talking about it,” he said, shaking his head as he turned back to the television. Obviously, he was ready to let it drop, but I felt almost overcome by heartbreak for the young woman who had been so undeservedly left by the man she thought had loved her.
“What did Grannie Rose and Papa Joe do?”
“Your Papa Joe told her she shouldn’t have been surprised that he left her the minute a prettier girl paid him any attention.”
Chapter Thirteen
“That sounds like something he’d say,” Mama said when I called her a bit later that night. I knew it was a long shot, calling her so late, but I had needed to hear her voice. Apparently, I’d lucked out.
“But that’s so cruel!” I protested.
“Papa Joe wasn’t exactly the nicest man, Dellie. Especially when it came to your grammie.”
“Why?”
Mom took a minute to consider. “That’s something I never really figured out. Mama didn’t ever seem to question it, either. It was just the way things were…and Grannie Rose never did anything about it. I think that had a lot to do with their generation. The wives were a lot more submissive to their husbands, even when they were wrong. And no one really encouraged women to stand up for themselves, you know?”
“What would you have said if something like that happened to me or Charlie?” I asked, already knowing the answer but still needing the reassurance of hearing her say it anyway.
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t tell you that it was your own fault because you weren’t pretty enough or smart enough, because neither of those is even remotely true,” Mama said. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m your mother,” she added quickly.
“Uh-huh,” I said dubiously.
“I think, though, Dellie, what I would say to you was that I was here for you, and that you could come to me with anything. I’d want to know if you were okay, and I’d want you to know that you were special and loved and not alone.”
I blinked through the tears that were pooling in my eyes. Those were the words she had offered me just last year, when my own very short-lived marriage had ended. Words she had offered me when, after months of my whole family digging through a tangled, twisted jumble of lies and secrets only to come up with more lies and secrets that seemed never-ending, my husband of eight months had been arrested and extradited on criminal charges of embezzlement. He’d forged immigration papers, his passport, his even his birth certificate, giving himself a legal claim to US citizenship as the son of an American military man who’d married a German woman and raised a family there. Every part of his identity was a lie, which meant that our marriage was, as well. It wasn’t even a legal marriage.
It was a reality that now seemed like someone else’s story, a strange and distant nightmare that I tried to forget, much like I tried to forget the man who had essentially lied his way into my life.
Not that I hadn’t been naive, in my way. I had been far too trusting of someone who I’d met online through a dating website and known only a few months when he had asked me to marry him, far too easily swept up in the fairytale romance of it all to recognize warning signs that were warring with my emotions; and I’d walked almost blindly into a situation that was dangerous in more ways than I could have ever imagined.
The romantic beginning had given me a false perception of my own feelings for him—he had made grand gestures that were every little girl’s dream, sending me gargantuan bouquets of roses, taking me to cozy restaurants—supposedly uprooting himself from the life he had in California to pursue a life with me. He whispered words of love in his thick accent, holding my hand tenderly and offering me his heart and a chance to have what no one else had ever offered—a home with him and a marriage that was supposed to last forever.
He promised me a security that I craved, encouraging me to continue writing without worry that my meager earnings would be enough. He did, after all, earn enough to support us—and so the paycheck that I did bring in with my freelance writing—an amount that, when I was single, made me keep an anxious watch over the bills—suddenly became much less concerning. I used it to pay for the things that were mine alone: the car payment on a car that I’d had for three years, some outstanding medical bills that I was slowly chipping away at, the few times I allowed myself to buy a shirt i
f it caught my eye and the price tag didn’t exceed ten dollars… Even so, I never asked for anything, always afraid that I was a financial burden.
Only weeks into the marriage, the romance began to be stripped away to reveal an ugly nightmare; and what love I did feel was shredded beyond repair to become fear and loathing for a man who showed himself to be incapable of truth or integrity. Lie after lie, manipulation after manipulation were threaded through every moment, worsening each day until the emotional strain was too much to bear and the blow of a punch would have seemed almost a relief from the verbal abuse that was so constantly heaped on me. Sharing a bed with him felt equal to a gamble as I wondered each night if I would make it to the next morning or if he would suddenly decide to take my life while I slept.
I’d had only my faith and my family to get me through, to offer me support and love as they tried to convince me to leave, despite my own insistence that things would eventually get better, that maybe I was only imagining things. It was not a reality they wanted for me, but a reality they knew was endangering me; and they could only wait and pray that I would leave and end things.
Why hadn’t I ended it by leaving? It was a question I’d been asked so many times I’d lost count. Sometimes not even I understood why I had stayed, so trapped by the feeling that I was somehow failing if I left, that eight months was not long enough to know for sure that the marriage was doomed. I had stayed there, letting myself be blind to the true danger I was placing myself in by staying. I dipped my red flags in bleach, hoping that by doing so, everything would turn out okay. That my fairytale would come back.
The end had come in a way I’d never expected—a way that none of us ever had—when the lies became too much for him to escape, when the power plays he had been making blew up in his face and he could no longer outrun them, with too much evidence piled up against him for someone not to take notice. In the end, his country had come to claim him, and they saved me from a fate that could have destroyed me.
The marriage was a mistake that had both cost me many things and taught me many things—I had lost my confidence in my own ability to recognize warning signs, my own sense of security in the way I thought men perceived me, my faith in my ability to find real and true love. I had believed, once upon a time, that good men existed, and that one day, I would have a marriage as strong as my parents had. Now, I had begun to wonder if I even deserved it. But one thing I knew for sure after all of it was my family’s true strength and their dedication to one another.
Life Without You Page 10