by Cathy Lamb
I was distracted. Back to the fight.
I’m getting my breath back with Michael and Raji on me, and I’m pissed off because I really don’t appreciate getting jumped, and I free Billy and Bob (my fists) and shove Michael’s and Raji’s heads together as hard as I can. I see this whole group of men in suits running toward us, and I know they’re running to help, which is nice, but not necessary as now all three of them are spread on the ground like amoebas that have been stepped on.
These men run over, and they’re sweating when they get there and one says, “You okay, Tate?” This is a small town and a whole bunch of people know me, my mom and my Nana Bird and my great-grandparents. I’ll tell you another time why everyone knows my Nana Bird. You know her, too, probably.
And I said, “Sure.” And I was. I stood up. I was bloody and I knew I’d have bruises on Bert and I could tell that Road Runner was getting all swollen up, and there were cuts on Billy and Bob but General Noggin wasn’t too bashed up.
I was still kind of sad. Not whiny sad, just sad.
Why would I feel sad? (Warning: here comes some emotions. Watch out!)
I am not all hitched up about getting attacked for how I look and I’m angry about one thing right now (basketball, Boss Mom, basketball!) so part of me has to admit that getting in a fight made me feel better. Some anger flew out.
But I feel sad for Raji, Michael, and Caleb. I don’t want to sound sanctimonious. Sanct-EEEE-Moan-Eee-Us. Get it?
But there they were, on the ground, bleeding and groaning. Three against one and they are beat to shit. I don’t feel bad for them because of the blood, though, I feel bad for them because of what they don’t have going in their lives. If they were happy they wouldn’t be beating General Noggin and me up.
I’m not going to sound all high and mighty, but those three must have crappy lives because they go after me. What kind of person does that? What kind of person has to beat somebody else up in order to feel better? What caused all that anger in these three guys to begin with?
They gotta hate themselves. Normal dudes with normal confidence aren’t going to do that.
I helped all three of them up. Raji’s crying, Michael’s wiping blood off and he’s shaking, and Caleb can hardly stand but he leans on me to get up.
Why do people do this crap?
I don’t know.
Do you?
“Hey, Boss Mom, look at this!” Tate pointed to a counter on his blog, a golden red harvest moon hanging right outside his window. “Says I had twenty-five people read my blog. Twenty-five, twenty-five! And a bunch of them answered the question about why some people are crappy. Look!”
I could tell he was tickled to death that people were actually writing to him. I read the answers. Some were touching, some thoughtful, others a rant on mean people. “This is excellent. You’ll be famous in no time.”
“It’s starting, it’s all starting.” He sighed heavily, grinning at me. “I don’t know how I’m going to handle all these lusty women coming after me when fame hits, I don’t know how I’m going to manage my experiments and continue my study of the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes with women fighting for my delectable body and my hand in marriage. . . .”
“I’m sure you’ll manage.”
“It’s going to take all I have to keep my purity.” He clutched his chest, head back, the drama king. “My virginity, my innocence.”
“Use restraint, my dear, control those hormones.”
“I’ll try, Boss Mom, but these women with their libidos, once they read my blog they’ll barely be able to control their passions and seductive natures. It’ll be a battle of epic proportions.”
“Battle politely with the women, then. Good night, Tate.” I ruffled those curls.
“Love you, Boss Mom.” He turned back to the blog, then said, “I hope I’m here in the morning. There’s probably women lurking outside my bedroom window right now propping a ladder against the house to sneak me away, plotting a way to get me alone and naked. . . .”
Tate has always been incredibly funny.
It has definitely helped him through the not-so-funny stuff.
“He said you intentionally killed his father.”
It felt like a dead rhino had been dropped on my heart. “You’re kidding.”
“No.” Sydney Grants peered at me over the rim of her red-framed glasses, her elbows on the table in her office.
Sydney’s parents moved here from Ghana when she was three. She wears super-bright colors and prints, she’s as tough as a redwood, and her kindness and graciousness is unending. As the manager of our hospice unit, and a hospice nurse for fifteen years before that, she knows it all.
“Why is Dirk Hassells saying I intentionally killed his father?”
“He says that not enough was done to save his father’s life, he thinks we didn’t try all available treatments, his father was railroaded into hospice, he had more time to live, and, my favorite ludicrous comment—you overdosed him with morphine in the weeks before he died on purpose and that’s what killed him.”
I felt outrage wrap tight around my body. I’d been up for much of the night with another patient, had her settled and cared for, rushed home, and sent Tate off to school. And now this. On no sleep.
“Dirk’s threatening legal action.” Sydney swirled a pen in her hand. “Says he’s going to hire an attorney.”
“Sydney, you know that Mr. Hassells, Senior, had liver cancer. It had spread over his whole body. It was as if he had a piranha inside his gut. The doctors, specifically Dr. Baharri, said there was nothing that could be done.” I drummed my nails on her desk and tapped my leather boot. Today I was wearing a burgundy-colored loose blouse and jeans. “Dirk is saying I overdosed Mr. Hassells on morphine? That’s ripe.”
“Yes. The baboon obviously doesn’t know how we use morphine. He says he was not informed of his father’s true condition, that he was given hope that he would live, that had he known death was imminent, he would have visited more often, that you were neglectful in your duties not to tell him.”
“Dr. Baharri told him. I told him. The sister, Beatrice, the one who’s a teacher, divorced, five kids, the one caring for her dad all the time, told him, too. He told me he didn’t believe his sister because she was always, and I quote, ‘hormonal, emotional, whiny, the weaker sex has a hard time dealing with this kind of stuff.’ He also told Beatrice, ‘I’m busy, I don’t have the easy career of a teacher and I can’t drop my clients, my important responsibilities, and come now. He’ll be fine.’ ”
Sydney said, “We have the son on the white horse charging in.”
“We sure do.”
The son on the white horse charging in is a now-and-then occurrence in hospice circles. Basically, the wife, or the daughters, or the long-term daughters-in-law, in most cases, do all the work of tending to a dying patient.
The son is “too busy.” The son will not take the time out of his day to help the dying family member. The son will not take a leave from work as his sisters do. The son will not lose sleep, do housework at the parent’s house, manage the medicine, the doctor visits, the treatments, the post-care, arrange for help, handle the bills, stay up all night, and arrange for hospice.
No, the women do all that.
And when the health of the patient starts to deteriorate, out the son will come, flag waving, armor on, charging in. He’ll save the day! Ta-da! Bring in the hero! Bring in the genius! He’ll insist on care that is ridiculous to insist on.
Dirk was, sort of, the son on a white horse charging in. He was a short man with a permanent smirk who had a vengeful, personal agenda behind all of this.
Sydney read my mind. “I think, though, this is mostly about you, Jaden.”
“Yep. It is.”
Why? Because designer suit–clad Dirk, he of the slicked-back hair, hit on me each time he was at his father’s house, and I rejected him. At first, Beatrice told me, he rarely came to visit his father. But one time, a
few months before Mr. Hassells died, he met me.
He was not married, no kids, but he dated women a lot. I know, because he told me. “I have a high sex drive.” He asked me out, asked me to go upstairs alone with him, asked me to his home and tried to have sexually charged conversations with me, as in, “I gotta have sex every day . . . let’s tell each other the best time we ever did it . . . this one time, in San Francisco, I met this woman in a bar and I. . . .”
I put up a hand and said, “I don’t want to hear it, Dirk.”
He smirked. “You don’t?”
“No.”
“Jealous, Jaden? Don’t be. We can make our own memories. It’s a hot story, though. You’re hot.” His eyes wandered down my body, as if this would be a turn-on. “One bright blue eye, one bright green eye. Red hair. You’re two women in one, we could have a three-way.”
“No, we could never do that,” I told him. “That would disgust me.”
And it began. When he knew I was coming, he’d show up.
One time he stood in front of me, blocking my way to his father’s bedroom. “I think you and I would be good together, Jaden. Don’t play hard to get, it’s a waste of time.”
I said, “I’m not playing hard to get, but I see that you are the kind of man who will insist on believing it because you won’t be able to accept that I’m not the slightest bit interested in you. This is the time for you to take with your father.”
“Want to take a ride in my Porsche? You can feel my engine.”
“That’s the stupidest pickup line I’ve ever heard, and no. No, I don’t want to go for a ride in your car that is a reflection of your tiny penis, with fancy wheels that are obviously a reflection of your balls. Now get in there and pay attention to your dad.”
He was furious with me. He was a sick, controlling man who did not take rejection well. In the four weeks before Mr. Hassells died, Dirk visited once.
Sydney sighed as we talked about Dirk. She had been well aware of what I was dealing with. She had offered to replace me, but Mr. Hassells senior, Beatrice, her kids, and I were already bonded and I couldn’t abandon them.
“We have a man who is ticked off you wouldn’t sleep with him so he accuses us of poor medical care and you of killing his father. What a shark.”
I held my head in my hands. I was infuriated, the anger that always bobs close to the surface of my life exploding like a firecracker. I didn’t sleep with Dirk—he accuses me of murder.
“We’ll meet with Dirk as a group here. If he calls in the attorneys, we’ll meet again . . . blah blah blah. You know how it goes.”
“Yes, I know.” I was exhausted thinking about it.
“Jaden, I will stand behind you, a soldier with a loaded gun, only my loaded gun will be my mouth, you know that.” She reached across her desk and patted my hand. “Don’t worry.”
“I’ll worry.”
It’s always a bad day when you’re accused of murder.
4
I live outside Tillamina, Oregon, in a white, two-story house with a wraparound front porch, built in the late 1800s by Faith and her husband, Jack. They built the home as their country home . . . and as a place for Faith and Grace to hide, if need be, from two dangerous men, who they thought might hunt them down later.
Faith named the home and surrounding land London Gardens because she missed her family in London and knew, because of the witch hunt, that she could never return. She and Jack planted the maples that line the driveway up to the house. Faith also planted thyme, sage, rosemary, parsley, oregano, lavender, Canterbury bells, hollyhocks, lilies, irises, sweet peas, cosmos, red poppies, peonies, and rows and rows of roses, as her mother and grandmother had in England.
She later gave London Gardens to their oldest daughter. It’s been handed down to the oldest daughter ever since, which is how Grandma Violet came to own it.
Tillamina is in the middle of Oregon wine country with a view of the purplish coastal mountain range in the distance. We have ten acres with the same flowers and herbs Faith planted, a huge field filled with red poppies, an old apple orchard, pine and fir trees.
My mother was raised in this country house until she hopped on a Greyhound bus for Hollywood at eighteen to become an actress, her sights on bright lights, her dreams on the stage.
I was born in Los Angeles, but we visited Grandma Violet and Grandpa Pete each summer. We moved to London Gardens permanently when Brooke, Caden, and I were teenagers after many terrible nights, and one horrendously terrible night, but before the terrible night to end all terrible nights.
My mother’s father, my grandpa Pete, was a police officer and a farmer who had moved to Oregon from Arkansas, wanting to get out of the heat and humidity and the poverty his family was stuck in.
He met his wife, Violet, my grandma, when she was dancing topless in a forest near here, her auburn curls flying in the wind. Unfortunately a bunch of kids saw my half-naked grandma and the kids’ mothers called the police. She was dancing topless because that’s what her witchly spell required for romance.
Grandpa Pete was the arresting officer called out to investigate the topless lady.
“He was a handsome fellow. I was happy to have my shirt off, Jaden. I wanted him to see the full package. And him standing there in his uniform with his gun.” Grandma Violet chuckled, her blue eyes sparkling. “I thought it was magical. My spell for a man worked! I used a bit of lavender, the thimble and needle, a pinch of thyme and rosemary, and the love chant the women of our family have always used, back down to our royal lineage. It was prophetic, spiritual, the wind blowing right by, ruffling his hair. He blushed, that man with the handcuffs blushed, and he was polite about my heavenly nudity. . . .” She sighed. “I knew I would marry him.”
There was a bit of a scandal with their relationship, because of the nudity part, and some hushed rumors about the witch stuff, but it was Oregon, liberal even then, and no one paid too much mind, especially because Grandma Violet had several brothers, loggers, who threatened to “log some heads together if you peoples don’t shut up.” Plus, Grandma Violet, even as a young woman, was “the healer,” whom people went to for help with their aches, pains, and “diseases and demons of the emotional mind.”
London Gardens was medium-sized when it was built, grand for the time, but my mother added a second family room, with a woodstove, and almost wall-to-wall windows and French doors about twenty years ago. We also gutted the kitchen ten years ago, since it had been twenty years, and pushed it out fifteen feet to create a nook for eating.
My country-style kitchen is white, blue, and yellow. White cabinets line the walls, as does open shelving. A huge butcher-block island stretches down the middle of the kitchen with two red lights in the shape of roses centered above it. The counters are granite and the tiles on the backsplash have been painted with pictures of oregano, thyme, rosemary, parsley, chives, and red poppies by an artist friend of mine.
Our home has high ceilings, wood floors, three fireplaces, and wide white trim. The walls are painted light blue, light green, and light yellow, the colors flowing into each other. We have a creaky staircase, an attic with a pitched ceiling, and a secret room.
Upstairs, there are four large bedrooms, three of which have four poster beds, two of which have grand fireplaces. The fourth bedroom is called Tate’s Experiment Room.
I love that my family has lived here for well over a hundred years.
I have kept my ancestors’ antiques, including armoires, a roll-top desk, and a hutch in the kitchen to display four generations of pretty, flowered plates and teacups. I also have a hundred-year-old rocking chair in my living room that I was sitting on when he said, “It’s time,” and not long after that she killed him.
On the walls I have hung a collection of quilts made by the women of the family. A painting of our barn by Grandpa Pete hangs in a hallway, near framed photographs by Grandma Violet of red poppies and Canterbury bells. I have repainted an old white picket fence and hung it acros
s one wall of the dining room. I’ve used old doors for tables, and a weather vane with a horse that fell off the roof is now hanging in a corner.
I like thinking of Faith’s or Grace’s hand on the same stair rail as me, or their faces, their auburn hair, like mine I’m told, reflected in a window I look out of today. Faith had blue eyes, and Grace had green. In an odd coincidence, I have one of each.
I like wondering what my ancestors were daydreaming about as they lay on the steel daybed. I like thinking about what treasures they stored in the nine-drawer dressers. I like reading through the collection of old books we have and wondering which were their favorites. I like that I have used the old sink in the kitchen to plant daffodil bulbs and that the old brick chimney that fell down was used to create a brick walkway to the house. I like looking at the same scenes of our property out my windows, hung with white, wispy lace curtains, that they did.
But what caught your eye in all that description? It was the secret room part, right?
There’s an area between Tate’s Experiment Room and the stairwell. It’s walled-off space. It’s odd, a quirk in the house. I asked my grandparents about it about a year before Grandpa Pete died and they laughed, their eyes crinkling, their weathered hands flying up in merriment.
“It’s where we keep our ancestors.” Grandpa Pete laughed, always loving a good joke. “Maybe I’ll end up in there, too!”
“The family secrets are all written down in there!” Grandma Violet whispered. “It’s where we keep the magic wands and the skeletons!”