by Shirley Jump
“Guess I don’t know women very well at all. Especially Alex.”
And Alex’s heart.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“How long do think it’ll be before someone realizes you’re not collecting Social Security?”
Alex sat on her grandmother’s back patio, in one of the two cushioned chairs that faced the grassy grounds of Merry Manor. Twin pots of geraniums decorated the corners of the brick space, with a small terra-cotta–colored chiminea in the center. “It’s only for a few days, Grandma. Until I find my own place.”
Grandma handed Alex a glass of lemonade, then settled in the opposite chair with her own glass. “You already have your own place.”
Alex rolled her eyes. She refused to talk about that subject again. She’d arrived at Grandma’s condo with her boxes of possessions just that morning and already, her grandmother had brought up the topic three times.
Alex pointed to that day’s City Times. “Did you see where they placed my article on Willow Clark? It’s above the fold. That’s a big deal.”
She’d written the story as Willow had wanted, sure Joe would have a heart attack. Just in case, Alex had prepared a backup, plain old objective feature piece. But to her surprise, Joe had loved the personal spin Alex had put on her article about Willow Clark and already assigned her two more similar articles.
Grandma gave the newspaper on the small table between them a glance. She’d read the piece earlier and already proclaimed it worthy of a Pulitzer. “I’m proud of you, honey, don’t get me wrong, and down the road, we’ll celebrate your new job. But right now, I want to know exactly what the hell you’re thinking. Because I happen to think you are completely off your gourd.”
“Grandma!”
“Well, you are. You’ve run away from home. Literally. Run away from Mack. Literally. And now you’re hiding out in a senior citizen’s community. If that’s not crazy, I don’t know what is.”
Alex sipped at her drink. The ice clinked together, like soft music. “I have my reasons.”
Grandma put down her own drink, then steepled her fingers and stared at Alex, waiting.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Alexandra, I am eighty-one years old. I didn’t get to this age by not learning a thing or two about life. Try me.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Uh-huh. So tell me something I didn’t know.”
“And Mack’s in love with me.”
Grandma rubbed at her ear. “Did I just hear you right? Oh, Alex, that’s wonderful! Mack will make such a wonderful—”
“No. I don’t want him to marry me. He offered and I turned him down.” Alex curled her hands around the icy glass, the condensation a cool relief from the warm day.
“Why? Just because the baby is Edward’s? Do you think Mack’s going to care that the baby isn’t his? If that man loves you, which I know he does—he always has, you know—then he’ll treat this child just like his own.” Grandma smiled. “And, believe me, he’ll marry you before you can blink.”
“Exactly. And keep on taking care of me, just like always.”
“Maybe I’m going senile, but I don’t really see the problem with that.”
Alex leaned forward, drawing her knees to her chest. She wished this was easier, that she could suddenly have some lightbulb turn on in her heart and illuminate the right answer, because every time she came to the subject of Mack, she couldn’t figure out which way to go. “There’s a huge problem. All Mack has ever done is take care of me. I don’t want him marrying me—or loving me—because he feels like he has to.” Alex put little air quotes around the last few words.
“Do you truly think that little of Mack?”
“You know how he is. He’s like a German shepherd when it comes to me.” Alex shook her head. “It’s better this way. He won’t marry me out of some misguided sense of what’s right, and get stuck in another dead-end marriage.”
“Better for who? Better for you? Because then”—Grandma reached out and laid a hand on Alex’s, her paper-thin skin marked with a roadmap of her life—“you don’t have to get at what’s really scaring you?”
Alex bit her lip. “Nothing’s really scaring me.”
“Sweetheart, you have more abandonment issues than the ugly duckling.”
Alex laughed, but the sound got caught in her throat with a sob. Oh, Lord, this was exactly why she hadn’t wanted to bring up this subject. “Aw, Grandma, you’re right. And every time I think I’ve dealt with this crap, it keeps coming back, like mooching relatives.”
Grandma chuckled softly. “Before you drive that man away, maybe you better come to terms with whether you’re running from him or you.”
Alex toyed with her lemonade glass. Slices of lemon danced with the ice. “I don’t want to make a mistake.”
“If you love him, it’s not a mistake.”
“Ah, Grandma, that’s where I think you’re wrong. If I love him and hold on to him for all the wrong reasons, it’s the biggest mistake I could ever make.”
Because she’d break Mack’s heart. Lose him as a friend. Destroy the man she loved most. How could she do that to him? How could she let him tie himself to her for a lifetime, knowing they’d end up unhappy down the road?
She’d done the right thing, turning down his proposal. Except it hurt like hell, and no matter how much time or distance she put between them, the hurt only seemed to multiply. Alex got up and went into the condo, done with the subject of things she couldn’t change.
Grandma followed a few minutes later, and found Alex poring over the box of memorabilia and drawings that she had pulled from the house. She’d spread them out on the kitchen table, as if assembling the jigsaw puzzle of her life. Alex had brought them over because she knew her grandmother would want to see these pictures, and fill in the blanks of her daughter’s last few years.
“Oh, my. What’s this?” Grandma asked.
“They were my mother’s. She saved all these.”
Grandma slipped into a chair beside Alex and picked up a crayoned image of a fish. She smoothed her palm over the picture, as if simply touching it could bring Josie back. “She did?”
Alex nodded, and scooted closer to Grandma. Going through these items this time would be a more joyful experience because she’d have Grandma to share it with. “There was this box, in the back of a closet, and it was filled with stuff. It’s like…a gold mine of my childhood.” Soon, Grandma got out the photo albums and together they laid out the photographs, one after another, a Technicolor brick road of Alex’s first five years. Moments she’d forgotten, or never remembered happening. Alex and her mother at the park, with Alex on a swing. Alex sitting in front of a huge birthday cake and a tiny candle shaped like a number three.
The two of them flipped through the dozens of photographs, and with each one, Grandma had a story to tell, a memory to share. As she talked, sprinkles of images filtered into Alex’s mind and she began to fill in those first five years, with a new set of memories, ones that were sweeter.
The final photo they came to was one from the day Alex was born, her tiny form cradled in her mother’s arms, an exhausted Josie looking down at her daughter with one clear and obvious emotion: love.
Grandma Kenner picked up the picture and held it tight in her hand, her eyes misting, her smile trembling on her lips. “Oh, how she loved you.”
“But if she did,” Alex asked, her throat raw, the questions stuck there for so long, “what went wrong after this day? How did everything change?”
“When it came to you, Josie started out with the best of intentions.” Grandma sighed. “She just…didn’t know how to put them into practice. It’s like wanting to be a gardener and not knowing a thing at all about how to make a plant grow.”
Alex considered that, and this time, her grandmother’s nature analogy made sense. Inside her own body, a seed was growing into a person. And right now, she didn’t know the first thing about how to nurture this child and help it
grow. But she had an ally beside her, one she intended to call on. Probably every day. “I don’t understand why she wouldn’t ask you for help. You were such a great parent to me.”
Grandma sighed. “I think you do better the second time around. I learned my lessons, realized my mistakes. Lord knows I made more than enough of them.” Grief pooled in her eyes, lined her face. “When I lost Josie, it nearly killed me, Alex.” Her voice cracked, and she shook her head, her eyes closed, her mind reaching back two decades. “We’re three generations of hardheaded women, us Kenner girls, and your mother and I, we would just dig our heels in like two bulls. If I’d been easier with her, more flexible, less judgmental, maybe she would have come around sooner. Talked to me more. Instead of feeling like she had to do this all alone.”
Grandma rose, using the arms of the chair to help her up, as if the conversation had weakened her. She trailed her fingers along the photographs, taking a tangible memory walk, her gaze misty, her voice soft with regret. “I drove her away. I was so tough on her, so quick to criticize, and that just made her go in the opposite direction. And when she needed me most—”
Grandma shook her head and looked away. She went to the window, her frail hands grasping the sill, pale skin looking so much lighter against the white painted wood. She hung her head, face pressed to the clear pane of glass.
Alex went to Grandma, wrapping her arms around her grandmother’s waist and pressing her chin to the soft comfort of the light cardigan. “Oh, Grandma, don’t blame yourself. You did your best.”
“I didn’t.” Grandma heaved a sigh that became a sob, and she pressed a trembling fist to her lips. “I didn’t.”
“How can you say that? You kept trying. What more could you do?”
“I never told you this, but…” Grandma stilled, and drew in a breath, her entire face filled with sorrow. “She came to see me earlier that night. The night that Brittany died. And I wouldn’t talk to her. I was mad at her for something. Something stupid. I couldn’t tell you what it was five minutes after Josie left, but at the time, it was enough to keep me from answering the door. So she got mad and she went to a party, instead of staying home. I know it probably wouldn’t have made a difference, but still, I wish…Oh, God, how I wish I had opened that door. She died, not knowing how much I loved her. How proud I was of her.” Grandma shook her head, and the shake continued down her body, a tremble of repentance and grief. “I would have given anything to turn back the clock and do it all over again. To open that door. To open my heart, my stubborn heart, to my little girl.”
She broke down, her face dropping into her hands, and sobbed. Alex wrapped her arms tight around her grandmother’s body, two generations of Kenner women, holding each other up like bookends, a link for the one they both missed.
“She knew, Grandma,” Alex whispered. “She knew.”
She released her grandmother and crossed to the box. Alex dug deep inside, pushing aside drawing after drawing, until she found what she was looking for, something she had found that day at the very bottom. A single photo. She fished it out, then slid the image into Grandma’s hands. “Look, Grandma.”
Grandma Kenner ran a finger over the partly faded Polaroid image, a soft smile spreading across her face. It was just mother and daughter, outside the little house in Dorchester, on a sunny day, both of them smiling and holding sodas. Their foreheads hadn’t quite made it into the frame, which meant a young Alex had probably been the one behind the lens. None of them could have ever imagined that a month later Josie’s car would veer off the side of the road and she’d leave her daughter without a mother, her own mother without a daughter. A family fractured.
“She was so beautiful,” Grandma whispered. “Oh, God. I miss her so much.”
“Look on the back.” Alex nudged at the edge of the photo. “She wrote on the back of all the drawings, and on this picture. It was kind of like a diary.”
Grandma flipped to the back, and read aloud the words written in her daughter’s familiar script. “Mom, my hero. I love you.”
Grandma bit her lip, then looked at Alex, tears welling in her eyes. “She really wrote this?”
Alex nodded. Just a few words, but they seemed to turn a tide, offer a bandage of healing to Carolyn Kenner, and bridge more than two decades of guilt. Grandma pressed the picture to her chest and held it there for one long moment, tears welling in her eyes, but this time, they weren’t filled with grief, only joy.
Alex sank into a chair. She tugged out the drawing of her perfect house, the one she’d colored twenty-two years ago and realized she may not have the dog, or the flowers, but she had so much she hadn’t expected inside the walls of the house she already had. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For forcing me into working on that house.” Alex grinned. “I never would have done it if I didn’t think you needed a place to live.”
“Oh.” Crimson filled Grandma’s cheeks. “About that…”
“You have no intentions of moving, do you? Doom-and-gloomers, or not.” Alex laughed. “That’s okay. I figured that out a long time ago. I figured out why you did it. Like you said, us Kenner girls are stubborn.”
“Are you saying all that work was worth it?” Grandma asked.
“It was. But not just the physical part.” She paused, thinking over the past few weeks, not just what it had cost her, but also how much more she had gained. “As I was peeling back the walls, I guess I started to peel back layers of myself, too. I saw so much more of what was underneath.” She pressed a hand to her abdomen, to the life living inside her. “I understand me better now, and my mother. I’m still afraid I’ll screw up as a parent, but I already love this baby, as crazy as that sounds.”
Grandma brushed a tendril of hair off Alex’s forehead. “That doesn’t sound crazy at all.”
“I can see, now, how terrifying it had to be for my mother. And I…” She picked up a picture of her mother, this one a head shot of Josie alone, a soft smile on her face, as if the camera had caught her unawares. Alex traced the outline of her mother’s face, the wide green eyes, the long brown hair, the delicate line of her jaw. Holding the image caused a sense of peace to settle over Alex. There were no answers left to seek. She’d found them all. “I forgive her. It’s like finishing the house finished all of this for me, too.” She sighed. “I wonder what she was like.”
Grandma smiled. “Just like you.”
Suddenly, that comparison didn’t seem so bad. For the first time in her life, Alex was proud to be associated with her mother. A woman who may not have done the best job, but who had, nevertheless, loved her children, and left a legacy in this box that had given Alex a peek into her past, the keys she had been looking for, for so long. “I’ve been thinking, Grandma,” Alex said, as she returned the scattered photographs and drawings to the box. “Maybe I won’t sell the house. Not just yet.”
Grandma beamed. “That’s a good plan. You’ll need a place to start your family.”
“Yeah. A house will come in—” Alex halted, as her hands lighted on the one photograph she’d thought was gone forever. How had it gotten in the box?
She picked up the Kodak image and cradled it in her palm. The Christmas tree. The purple pajamas. The little teddy bear. And her mother, leaning forward, smiling. The picture now smoothed, the wrinkles nearly gone from when she’d crumpled it and tossed it away. And attached to the bottom, a Post-it note with Mack’s distinctive handwriting. Mack. Of course.
Building a home is a lot more work than building a house, but not if you start with the right tools.
Come home, Alex.
Love,
Mack
Home.
All this time, she’d been building a house, instead of looking for a home. How could she have missed the point entirely? “Grandma, I have to go.”
“Go where?”
Alex smiled, then grabbed her keys off the kitchen table. “Home.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
&nbs
p; Emma Douglas stood on the lawn outside the house her husband had built in 1978, tears streaming down her face, and wondered whether they all hated her.
They’d be justified if they did.
She clutched her handbag like a lifeline, the thin vinyl straps pressing deep into her palms, surely leaving a faux alligator imprint. “This was a mistake,” she whispered. She turned around, to go back to her car. Then she saw him, standing by the picture window in the living room.
Roy.
Her heart trilled, and she wondered why she had ever left him. But then the memories filtered their way back in, insidious snakes, reminding her that the beginning didn’t become the middle, didn’t frame the end, and that things had changed between her and Roy. Changed a lot. Maybe changed in unforgivable ways.
She stood on the lawn, twenty feet away from the man whose heart she had broken. The same man who had broken hers a long time ago, and wondered whether the foundation of that house was as strong now as it had been back in 1978. Because if it was, maybe there was hope.
And where there was hope, there just might be forgiveness.
Or maybe…there might just be the same old fights as there had been before.
Roy had thought about what he would say to his wife for over a year. He’d had three different speeches prepared in his head. The outraged indignation. The angry recriminations. The sobbing gratitude for her return.
All three flew out of his head the minute he looked out his front window and saw Emma standing there. He held his breath, sure she was a figment of his imagination, then she’d started moving, back toward her car.
He opened his front door, and she turned back, moved toward the door, then stopped a few feet short of the front step. Twelve months had passed—
But to his heart, his wife looked like she had twelve minutes ago.
He swallowed, and had to hold tight to the doorknob. “Emma.”
“I…” She took three steps closer, bit her lip, then looked away. “I don’t know what to say, Roy. I thought I did, but now that I’m here…I don’t.”