Proper Goodbye

by Connie Chappell

  The women walked back down the row and around the blue spruce to Melinda’s car. Beebe explained the story behind the words along the way. In Beebe’s opinion, Cliff’s outlook improved marginally after the symbolic burial of past lies. When Beebe concluded, Melinda nodded her appreciation of the psychological needs of those who grieve.

  Melinda reached for the door handle, and Beebe said, “Wait. What happened with the rent?”

  Corralling several long blowing curls with her hand in a combing motion, Melinda said, “Oh, it got paid. I think to the true disappointment of my mother.”

  “Daddy must have found a second job,” Beebe reasoned.

  “No. No. I don’t think so. Well, he could have, but that’s not the story I got from Father.”

  When Melinda finished the forty-six-year old tale, Beebe upgraded Kenneth from her unjust ranking of him as the “silent one” in the Thorndyke household. Apparently, Kenneth was a husband willing to spill awkward details despite how they tainted his wife. Those details supplied Beebe with an early piece of her parents’ marital history that, oh so neatly, bridged the gap that stymied her father all these years.

  The women said their goodbyes. Beebe strolled leisurely back toward the house. The air gliding across the cemetery brought a crisp quality despite the bright sun.

  When Beebe passed close enough to the side door to hear the phone ringing inside, she rushed up the steps and through the mudroom to lift the receiver.

  “Yates here,” the caller said. The young nurse sounded giddy. He drew the afternoon shift that day. “Guess what? Willa just came in.”

  Nearly all of Yates’s eight-hour shift ticked by before his second phone call woke the house. Beebe dozed on the couch; Cliff snored in the recliner. Yates proudly announced, “Mother and baby Rebecca doing fine.”

  On that note and, with their spurt of renewed energy dissolving quickly, the Walkers climbed the stairs for bed.

  * * *

  Beebe endured a wakeful night. She made rounds through the house. Back upstairs, she eased open the door to her father’s room and went in for an armchair visit with her mother. Still hours before dawn, the room was clothed in darkness. She made her way to the chair, though, without one false step, and stretched out her hand to the object she knew was draped there. Her fingertips caressed the squares sewn into her mother’s quilt.

  Beebe’s thoughts wandered to the days she counseled the bereft and what she encouraged family members and close friends to do. There would be no new memories of the lost loved one, so it was welcomed and beneficial to share old ones. This gave Beebe an idea.

  Very quietly, she crossed to her father’s bedside clock and reset the alarm. Beebe added chance to hope that her idea would nudge her father into opening up.

  Stepping down from the last stair step to the entry hall, she wondered if her father sensed Abigail’s presence in the house again. That was the quilt’s doing. Beebe felt a warmth embrace her every time she came home. To carry the warm feeling forward until her father’s alarm woke him, she decided on baking something. A pair of too-ripe bananas caught her eye in the kitchen, and when she sniffed, her nose agreed.

  Good, she thought. Banana muffins. They were always a childhood favorite.

  She found the cookbook she wanted behind the door of a nearby cupboard. After laying it on the countertop and lifting the cover, she flipped pages to the recipe. She mashed the bananas into wheat flour, added other ingredients, stirred up a batter, and spooned it into tins. The tins went into the heated oven.

  With the timer set, the cookbook could be returned to the shelf. She hadn’t gotten a firm enough hold on the large book, and it slipped out of her grasp, hitting the counter at an angle. The impact jarred a loose paper stored between the leaves partially into view.

  Just the corner of the page was enough to wrench memories free from a long-ago day when she was twelve or thirteen and her mother’s vitality filled the kitchen. She placed a steadying hand on the Formica to balance the dizzying effect of her peripheral vision graying out around the sliver of yellow construction paper.

  Slowly, she cut the pages to the cookbook-turned-memory book. Within its binding, like a rose pressed between the layers, was a portal back in time to a mother-daughter baking contest at church. The Walkers entered banana muffins. Their entry had not won, but they did go home with a Polaroid photograph taken by one of the judges. In it, Beebe displayed the tray of muffins while Abigail’s arm draped her daughter’s shoulders. Later in the day, good-natured Beebe set about correcting that error in culinary judgment. She fashioned a blue ribbon out of colored paper, glued it to one side of the yellow backing sheet, leaving room for the photo on the other.

  Beebe remembered presenting her homemade award to her mother. Laughing at her funny daughter, Abigail displayed it next to the plate of remaining muffins stored under a clear dome. At some point, Abigail slipped the award-turned-mother’s-keepsake inside the cookbook.

  Beebe could not draw her eyes from the photograph that transported her to another age. A sad smile crossed her lips. So very slowly, Beebe’s trembling hand reached out to touch her mother’s face, captured and preserved exactly as she remembered it. Beebe never watched Abigail Walker grow older, never saw her become frail. In the picture, Beebe was grinning and gangly; her mother proud and shapely. But, their faces— Their faces were a twin of the other.

  Beebe set about washing up the few dishes while the cookbook and its discovered treasure remained on the counter. While she constantly snatched looks at the photograph, the day mother and daughter baked muffins for the contest replayed in her mind. Her memories ballooned vivid and full until her chest swelled to a painful proportion. When she could endure it no longer, a hiccupping sob burst through.

  For the first time since she took up residence in the caretaker’s house, she submitted to the ache of misery embedded just beneath the surface, kept buried by all the busying tasks she undertook: the obituary, the corrected death certificate, the reburial, her first board meeting. Now, with Cliff’s agreement to attend counseling cemented by an appointment, she finally succumbed to grief.

  The cloak of strength she projected for weeks fell away. Her knees buckled, and she slid down the counter with a deep, guttural moan that told of the tremendous sense of loss and loneliness she felt since her mother’s death. In a leaden heap on the floor, she hugged herself with sudsy hands and wept.

  Her wallow in sorrow measured but a brief moment. Blinking back tears, she struggled to her feet in response to another call to duty. The oven timer chimed.

  With the tins of golden brown muffins cooling on the stovetop, Beebe gazed down at the photograph and spoke to her mother. “Thank you for saving my artwork. Thank you for coming home.” With that, she closed the homemade ribbon and its accompanying photo inside the book. She returned it to the shelf and smiled. The aroma of banana muffins curled around her like a warm hug. She welcomed it as one last act of love from her mother.

  But a mother’s love has the power to transcend all barriers. With Beebe’s next breath, she sensed Abigail Walker’s encouragement to accept Rev. Razzell’s invitation for counseling. Her “miscue” terminology veered way off the mark. It seemed to her that he knew the scorching pain she just experienced waited to ambush. He knew she would stumble around lost in a world of emptiness if she didn’t attempt to resolve her grief.

  Razzell knew.

  He came through his own haze aided by the careful attention of others, and he knew. She decided a call to the minister for her own appointment was in order. She would not upset Cliff’s and Razzell’s private sessions.

  Her mind drifted ahead to the end of this day. She just might sleep through the night.

  A glance at the kitchen clock r
eminded her of her initial mission for this morning, the reason she reset her father’s alarm.

  In the dark bedroom upstairs, she sat down in the armchair and arranged the quilt over her legs.

  Eyes open, but her sight useless, her random movements along the quilt brought forth a unique and startling realization. Her fingers touched varying textures. She thought how that element of change, from one second to the next, aptly and accurately represented a person’s life, one’s characteristics, moods, even smiles. A person owned several smiles. Each could be interpreted. Often, a smile could be enough by itself. No words spoken. The quilt was like that.

  The alarm clock’s buzzer snapped her out of her reverie. She watched her father smack at the off button.

  He used a half-second to read the numbers, then said, “Ah, geez, Beebe, where are you?”

  From the chair behind him, she lay the quilt aside. His head whipped toward the sound of the chair’s creaky groan when she got to her feet. She went to open the bedroom door. That ushered in a fuzzy cone of low-wattage illumination from the hallway’s overhead light. She wanted enough light to appreciate her father’s expression. She cracked a mystery that puzzled him as far back as the days before she was born.

  There by Melinda Thorndyke’s car, Beebe learned that when Patsy Thorndyke issued her second warning to Abigail Walker all those years ago, Emma Walker appeared out of nowhere on the porch steps behind Patsy. She overheard the threat, understood the monetary shortage involved, and without hesitation, wrote the pinched-faced creditor a check in full for two months’ back rent. Beebe pictured her grandmother’s arm firmly encircling her mother. An eternal bond sealed around mother- and daughter-in-law as they watched Patsy stomp down old wooden steps in heated retreat.

  That day, Grandma Walker foiled all of Patsy Thorndyke’s fun.

  And that day, Emma and Abigail reached a bargain. Poor Daddy, Beebe thought, always on the outside of one secret or another.

  Cliff’s chin came up when Beebe artfully drew on the oratory experience of a former minister and brought the story to its conclusion. He looked off into a dark bedroom corner, then swiveled his head to his daughter. “My mother wrote a check? You’re right. I can see it now.”

  Then it happened.

  His face relaxed. The texture of his smile warmed Beebe’s heart. Full understanding of the relationship binding his wife and his mother was enough to usher her father into breaking the bounds on his silence.

  “We got into trouble with a car repair, baby doctor bills, and things for the nursery. I came home from the store and wanted to call Patsy Thorndyke. I actually wanted to speak with her husband because I thought, man to man, he’d be more sympathetic. I worked out overtime with Old Man McKinley, but Abigail stopped me from making the call to Kenneth.”

  “Because Grandma paid the rent.”

  “No. Well, yes, I guess. But your mother said she arranged it with Patsy. She sold some of her nursing textbooks. She planned to type term papers for students at the college. She was a fair typist. For weeks, her typewriter sat out on the desk. Papers lay there. I saw her typing. And Patsy Thorndyke stopped coming around. It didn’t seem like typing would pay the rent, but your mother knew college life better than I.”

  “She wanted a special memory, Daddy, just her and Grandma. Maybe she did do those things. The books and the typing. For the extra money. A cushion. You guys were young. Just starting out.” When Cliff’s expression turned from thoughtful to bleak, her anxiety rose. “You’re not thinking that Grandma influenced her lies at sunset?” She used his phrasing. She worried that her morning-talk routine may backfire. They could not go through the whole swing business again.

  “Of all the memories I have of Abigail,” Cliff said, slow to speak, “the memories of her when she was pregnant are my favorite. Always.”

  His words moved her because he used the present tense, not the past. Even more moving, his tone carried greater love than Beebe ever heard him express.

  Without a word, he pushed himself off the mattress and went around to the other side of the bed. He bent to the bedside table next to the chair, opened the top drawer, and returned with a hinged picture frame. He handed it to Beebe.

  She opened the frame and tipped a set of photographs, this pair black and white, away from the hallway’s light and toward what seemed the enchanted glow of sunrise meant to reach them around the drawn curtains. Again, Beebe’s fingers reached out. Tears loomed. She touched the glass and melted at the sight of her mother, twenty years old and framed in gold.

  The photographs set the scene as her father’s stories, all firmly rooted to the small cottage, tumbled out. Abigail, well into her pregnancy, posed for the camera on the porch steps of their Arbor Street home. In the second photo, she sniffed a lilac bloom in the yard. Beebe absorbed all the tiny details the lens captured as she knew her father had over and over for the last thirty years.

  What Beebe began to appreciate, during her father’s retelling, was that he included her. She was not overlooked. His Arbor Street stories drew on the theme of family. For all the while, their daughter was present, like the tense. She grew in Abigail’s womb.

  The library described in Proper Goodbye is patterned after Warder Public Library, a landmark in my hometown, Springfield, Ohio. The structure is an example of the Richardsonian-Romanesque style of architecture. Warder Public Library was completed in 1890 and presented to the city of Springfield as a gift from wealthy industrialist and philanthropist, Benjamin H. Warder.

  Warder dedicated the building to the memory of his parents. A memorial plaque on the building reads:

  This library has been erected in memory of Jeremiah and Ann A. Warder by their son Benjamin Head Warder. It is given to the people of Springfield for their free enjoyment and is left in their charge forever. Dedicated June 12th, 1890.

  Warder Public Library served as the Clark County library system’s main branch from 1890 until 1989, when the new library opened.

  Since one of the themes running through Proper Goodbye touches on childhood memories, my earliest memories take me back to visiting this building and recognizing its wonders, both inside and out. I remember walking to the downtown library on endless occasions with my mother. She dared to let me walk atop the short wall out front, my arms extended for balance. I have to admit the wall seemed much higher when I was five and six than it looks in the postcard displayed.

  Today, Springfield elders still hold possession of this fabulous building and are entrusted to preserve it as a location dedicated to reading. Springfield’s citizens have free use of it, just as Benjamin Warder intended.

  Also by Connie Chappell

  Wild Raspberries

  When Callie MacCallum sews her first quilt after the death of her lover Jack Sebring, she doesn’t realize she’ll be drawn into a Sebring family battle between wife and daughter-in-law. She simply wants to fulfill her promise to Jack to visit their cabin in the West Virginia mountains, where their long love affair was safely hidden.

  Instead, her emotionally reminiscent trip becomes crowded with the two Sebring women, a grief counselor, and the massive role Callie assumes. She must speak for Jack in order to protect his four-year old grandson Chad from his stubbornly manipulative and blame-passing grandmother and his recently widowed and power-usurping mother. Callie understands both women grieve the loss of Chad’s father. He died when a raging storm split the tree that crushed him.

  Grief isn’t the only common thread running between the four women. One by one, their secrets are revealed on the West Virginia mountaintop.

  Deadly Homecoming at Rosemont

  Historian Wrenn Grayson arrives at the Rosemont mansion expecting to receive payment for her services from the mansion’s new own
er, Clay Addison. That expectation dies when she and Clay find Trey Rosemont murdered on the foyer floor. Across town, police officers race to Eastwood University. Priceless Egyptian artifacts were stolen from the history department safe. Wrenn’s longtime love, Eastwood professor Gideon Douglas, heads the department. Only recovery of the artifacts will save his career.

  Life in Havens, Ohio, doesn’t stop for this crime spree. Wrenn works for Mayor K.C. Tallmadge. He wishes Wrenn would stop searching down clues ahead of the police and pacify temperamental playwright Barton Reed. Barton’s play is just days away from opening in the town’s historic Baxter Theater.

  Amid murder, theft, or curtain calls, Wrenn’s instincts prove sharp. But it’s her stubborn one-woman approach that places her directly in the killer’s path.

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