Proper Goodbye

by Connie Chappell

  “Well...” he trailed off.

  “I know this really isn’t your problem, but I don’t want to wait. Waiting this long hurt him badly enough. I don’t want to compound it.”

  His nod came with no words.

  Tilting her head, she looked up to find his downcast eyes. “You came searching for the truth. Can’t you imagine how her husband would feel?”

  “I can, but Vincent won’t be back till late.”

  “That’s right,” she said, remembering Vincent’s long drive back from the auction.

  “What if we put it off one more night?”

  She sensed his anxiety. “Okay. Saturday night it is.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  When she drew alongside the young man inside the office doorway, she lay a hand on his shoulder. “Yates, you have just as much right to Terri’s love as anyone. Don’t undervalue that, and don’t undervalue yourself.” She patted his shoulder twice, gave him a firm nod, and moved out into the hall.

  A Season Not To Forget

  Beebe scuffed down the center aisle at McKinley’s Hardware, looking for her father, but having no luck. When she reached the last aisle, Scott Cotter stepped out of the warehouse.

  “He’s back,” Scott said.

  “May I?” Beebe asked, pointing at the double doors.

  “Sure. He’s out by the dock.”

  “Daddy,” Beebe called to catch her father’s attention. She saw him disappear behind a stack of boxes. Half a second later, he reappeared. The smile she offered was not returned. “Daddy, I spoke to Hal.”

  “I know you did.”

  “You went by?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re angry.”

  He glanced behind her. Wondering about Scott’s proximity, she guessed, then walked her out to the dock.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m angry. Why didn’t you let me handle it?”

  “I wasn’t trying to push you out. Hal was right there. I knew the plans. I asked him. He considered your policy about Saturday work.” She maintained an informative tone.

  “Look, managing the cemetery is my business. Mine alone.” He pounded an index finger on his chest. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes. I do. Did you and Hal change any of the plans?”

  Their conversation was cut by a beat of silence before Cliff said, “No.”

  “So, everything’s just as Hal and I left it.” Beebe’s words carried the intended jab.

  “That’s not the point.”

  She studied him. Despite his stiff posture and clenched fists, she thought him ready to cry. “Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked sympathetically.

  Cliff was exhibiting his old trait of swinging wildly, if not symmetrically, from one extreme of the emotional spectrum to the other. He needed to get his arms around the whole story as soon as possible. She reached a decision: Yates must come to dinner tonight. Having more time pass before the full truth was out would only hurt Cliff further. She couldn’t let that happen.

  And quite frankly, she wanted father and daughter to get along better. They were picking up where they left off with petty squabbles. She was glad Yates seemed to understand that, just as he wanted answers to the Terri Miller mystery, Cliff wanted and deserved answers, too.

  “Why would you ask that? Am I okay?” Cliff threw back at her. “We’re talking about digging your mother’s grave.”

  She maintained composure, lowered her voice and slowed her words. “Yes, I know we are. And it’s hard. But you know what?” She ticked up her enthusiasm. “I’m going to invite a young man working over at Crossroads to dinner tonight. He’s new in town. We need some company, and he’s got time to fill. It won’t be just us tonight.”

  “You think I need a distraction?”

  “I think if I get away from Crossroads early, I can have lasagna ready, plus garlic bread and mint-chocolate-chip ice cream. How’s that sound?”

  “Fine,” he said, sounding more exhausted than exasperated now.

  “I will not interfere with your cemetery. I got it.” She poked playfully at his no-paunch stomach. “Listen to me: Save yourself for a lasagna dinner.”

  Rushing back to Crossroads, Beebe swept past the pool players with a wave. Yates gravitated to cleaning out kitchen cupboards.

  When Barleycorn’s tail thumped the floor, Yates looked around.

  “I need a big, big favor,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Come to dinner tonight. I know I agreed to Saturday, but I just talked with Daddy, and I can tell, grief is creeping up on him. This can’t wait. Another full day can’t go by and he not know what the rest of us do. You can understand that.” She added that last sentence to draw him in with a degree of ownership. The measure was absolutely necessary.

  By the look on his face, Yates started to retreat. “Beebe, uh...”

  “You can understand, can’t you? This is important. Very important. It’s got to come from you. You can do this. Please.” The determination in her voice dropped the last word to a whisper.

  “But Vincent’s not here. I’m supposed to close the center.” Nervously, he moved some glasses around on the counter.

  “It’s Friday. There’s nothing scheduled for tonight. Lock up at six, and be at our house by six-thirty. I’m checking out early, too. I’ll square it with Vincent. You know he’ll understand.”

  “But the guys…”

  “I’ll handle them. No problem.”

  She went down the short hall. The same three men stood around the pool table with cues in their hands.

  “Hey, Mr. Fyffe, can you guys clear out by six so Yates can have a nice home-cooked dinner at my house?” She passed her glance among the trio. “Come on, give the kid a break.”

  A tall man stepped up and spoke. “You don’t know me. I’m Mick Nettleman. I worked in maintenance at the hospital. Whatever happened to your mother?”

  “Mick, don’t ask that. What’s wrong with you?” Fyffe said, berating the man for his manners. “It’s none of our business.”

  “No, fellas.” Beebe patted the air between Fyffe’s complaint and Mick’s offensive stare. “The truth is, Mother died recently. I’m home now, and Daddy wants to have memorial services.” Cliff Walker would just spit it out, she thought, and so would she.

  “Oh,” Fyffe stammered. “What are the arrangements?” Behind Fyffe, a small-framed quiet man watched and listened.

  “That’s sweet,” Beebe said. “But, you know, it’s just going to be us.”

  “We’ll be thinking about you. And we’ll be out way before six.”

  Thanking him, Beebe turned away just as Fyffe smacked Mick on the arm. She waited out of sight at the near end of the hall to gather herself. The conversation had its effect. While she pulled in a deep breath, she heard Mick’s voice and turned an ear toward the large room. “But I worked with her mother. That was a disgrace, what she did.”

  “Leave it, Mick,” Fyffe said in a low tone. “Didn’t you hear? The woman is dead.”

  “But she was never punished for stealing narcotics from the pharmacy. It’s not right. That Mrs. Gabriel ought to know. Isn’t she a doctor’s wife?”

  “What’s your point?” Fyffe asked.

  “I talked to her once before when she was in. She cares about this center’s reputation. I bet she doesn’t know the whole story with those Walkers.”

  “What makes the difference? It was thirty years ago. And, ‘those Walkers?’ Don’t tell me you’re going to bring up the men’s club festivals again?”

  Eve
ry sentence the two pool players spoke felt like a punch to Beebe’s gut, up to and including the festival she unburied herself that morning.

  “Cliff was shown special consideration, and you know it.”

  “You still harping on that?”

  “I was the one they always hired to get that festival up and running, then Cliff comes around moanin’ and sobbin’.”

  “Stop it, Mick. I’m not going to listen. You should never have taunted him like you did back then. It was petty. So what if he did the job for a few years?”

  “Five years.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I don’t think so. Some crimes don’t have a statute of limitations.”

  “Only crimes against Mick Nettleman don’t have a statute of limitations is what you mean.”

  Beebe experienced a wave of mixed emotions. While her hands formed fists, compassion for her father swelled inside her chest. He hadn’t told her the full story. Of course, the Cliff Walker she knew wouldn’t. But she understood. When she set out to tell Cliff of her feelings about the festival earlier, she began with her embarrassment. But to be taunted publicly, and with regularity, was something a man rightfully kept from his daughter. Was it true that the Walkers were so financially strapped that he went back year after year and tolerated the abuse?

  Out front, Mick wasn’t done. “Well, we’ll see what Mrs. Gabriel thinks.”

  “No. Leave it. Too much time has passed,” Fyffe said. “Rack ’em up, Quincy, so I can beat the tar out of this bum. Then, I can go home.”

  Beebe heard pool balls drop onto the felt-lined table. Apparently, the third man’s name was Quincy.

  Throughout the eavesdropped conversation, her focus remained on the brown-speckled and time-yellowed floor. She decided to take her algebra teacher’s advice and leave things in the past. She would not confront the man named Mick Nettleman. One must pick one’s battles. Mick, however, seemed determined to place her at odds with her boss. If Mona Gabriel was the kind who attracted those who carried a grudge, then Beebe must tread carefully.

  Silently, Beebe thanked Fyffe again for expressing his convictions. The town still remembered. The pool players were probably an accurate cross-section of Larkspur’s population: One voice spoke for the Walkers, one voice against, and one appeared neutral.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw a pair of dingy athletic shoes step into her line of sight. She glanced up. A sorrowful look hung on Yates’s face. She knew he heard the men’s conversation.

  “About tonight, Beebe. I’ll be there.”

  She forced a smile of appreciation. Inside though, she fought to keep from being transported back to those awful high school days when her mother’s absence was an untamable force of nature.

  Staying in the present, though, aligned her with the brutal realities that were her father’s life. Despite everything, he stubbornly chose the course where rituals required that a death notice be published in the local newspaper for all to see. His stubbornness was exceeded only by his strength to endure.

  In tribute to her father, Beebe thought, To thine own self...

  * * *

  Cliff rode in his truck, heading home. He cruised past the city-limits marker a mile back. When he crested the next hill, his gaze rolled out to the cemetery, tracking the house and the block building. Far off, in the gap between them, grew a tree line. In the foreground, his eyes locked on the newly dug grave, Abigail’s grave. Hal Garrett completed his job.

  In reality, it was the cut of carpeting Hal laid over the open grave that Cliff saw from a distance. The carpeting disguised the sheet of plywood beneath it and was designed to imitate grass in texture, but it was too bright for August’s drought conditions. Twenty-five yards away, equal to the reach of the backhoe’s swing arm, lay mounded earth, exhumed, exposed, there for the end of the story.

  He pulled into the first cemetery entrance that came up on his right, not the one nearer the house. His speed slowed. The old pickup crept along of its own accord, giving Cliff the time necessary for his heart to accept what happened in his absence.

  The thought seemed funny and ludicrous at the same time. Acceptance? His absence? One afternoon. What about his wife’s absence? And the last thirty years.

  The next blow fell when the cemetery road took him past the blue spruce and the grave that would remain intact until Tuesday’s disinterment. What Cliff thought of as “Abigail’s other life” had not been disturbed, and the life she should have had existed as a gaping hole. Both graves gouged his heart.

  As if that damage wasn’t sufficient, in the grassy area where the sycamore stood beyond the curve of pavement, the glider swung a living memory, pushed into motion by a swirling August breeze that would not bring rain. It took all his control not to ram the swing with the battered truck. He might have gunned the engine and done it, but his heart skillfully conjured an image of Abigail and sat her there, one leg folded under her on the seat, the toe of the other foot barely skimming the ground. The glider gently rocked.

  In the next heartbeat, she was gone. The leafed-out branches of the old tree fluttered, and a breath of wind took the mirage with it. He made the turn. Two seconds later, that same breeze lifted his hair and raised goosebumps on his flesh. It filled the cab, stayed but a moment before slipping out the passenger window without even the whisper of a goodbye.

  He shut down the engine, stepped out to the asphalt, and closed the door with care. The grave so close to the caretaker’s house seemed to beckon him. He walked the path this first of many times to stare down at the carpeting. As protocol demanded, Hal placed four decent-sized rocks at the corners. He found them through his excavation work. He drilled a central hole and filled it with a wire flag. Yellow squares spoke of caution. These four sentinels would guard the open grave for the interminable four days between now and the funeral.

  How would he get through? Longing for his wife swelled in his throat. Grief bore down, pressing a shuddering feeling through him. It felt like his spirit wanted to drain away, flatten itself out on the ground, and slip beneath the barrier. A measure of fear, that might better be called survival, made him break off his stare and back away. Turning toward the house, he took the first few steps with his eyes closed to the world.

  Cliff made an effort to strip off the melancholy when he changed out of his McKinley uniform. He washed up and dressed in clean clothes for supper. Back downstairs, he looked up from his newspaper when an old Jeep rattled into the driveway and stopped behind Beebe’s car. Beebe must have been on lookout in the kitchen because she streaked through the living room and out to the front yard. Cliff pushed himself off the couch and walked over to the screen door. Beebe stood on the far side of the Jeep, her head together with a young man.

  They apparently became close in just the three short days since Beebe’s return, Cliff thought. He studied the man, but didn’t know him.

  Beebe and her new friend moved single-file between the bumpers. Even from this distance, Cliff could see the man owned a pleasant smile and apparently, to Cliff’s surprise, a long-haired dog. The mongrel trotted out from between the vehicles on the man’s heels.

  Cliff pushed the screen door open. Beebe took it. Cliff stepped back. The dog tramped through in front of his daughter.

  The man found Cliff’s eyes and extended his hand. “Hello, Mr. Walker. My name’s Yates Strand, and this is Barleycorn. Thanks for having us to dinner.”

  When Cliff released Yates’s hand, Beebe motioned him to a chair. Beebe slid into another one.

  Cliff settled himself back on the couch. “Beebe says you’re new in town and working over at Crossroads.” There, Cliff thought. That was the sum total of his knowledge, and he politely expressed it. Truthfully, Cliff wa
sn’t that interested. If Crossroads was involved, their dinner guest was probably just passing through Larkspur. He suspected Yates’s plight, whatever it was, became one of Beebe’s care-package projects. Which was how Cliff described all the down-and-out folks Beebe took on in her determination to rescue others from the plight of their own lives.

  “Yes, sir—”

  “Please, it’s Cliff.”

  Yates nodded. “Vincent’s making me earn my keep, just until I get work.”

  Work, huh, Cliff thought. Maybe he intended on pulling his weight in society. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a nurse. A rookie nurse, but a nurse.” The grin he used drew Cliff in. He had misjudged the young man. Yates went on. “I have an interview lined up at Lakeview General.”

  “Nursing is a good profession,” Cliff said. He was thinking that maybe Yates wasn’t quite the care package he thought when something in Yates’s personae showed a miniscule crack. The freshness of his youth darkened. He sat up straighter. Cliff shot a glance at Beebe. It bounced back when Cliff heard the timidness in Yates’s tone.

  “I chose nursing,” he said, “because Terri Miller was a nurse. And this isn’t the first time I’ve been through Larkspur.”

  Barleycorn got up and came over to Cliff. The dog fitted himself between the coffee table and sofa while words rolled off the shock in Cliff’s voice. “Terri. Abigail. My wife.”

  Yates nodded.

  “You knew my wife, and you were aware—” Accusation lived in the incomplete sentence. He dragged his eyes away, his anger percolating.

  “Daddy, I met Yates my first day back.” Beebe spoke softly. “I learned then of the connection. It just seemed too much to pile on you so I waited. That was my decision. Just listen now. Yates has a lot to tell.”

  Cliff’s ears rang. He was speechless, and the dog just stared at him.

  “I don’t quite know where to start,” Yates said.