Return to Little Hills

by Janice Macdonald

  Annie laughed. “What’s happening? You’ve met someone and he’s talking marriage and babies?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. God, no. Please, spare me. My sister went that route and it’s definitely not for me…”

  “Got you,” Annie said. “Okay, so you want to know have I ever been sorry I married a guy who wasn’t home when any of our three kids were born? Who’s bored to death after two days when he is here? Who’s missed more Thanksgivings than I can count?” A pause. “No, because I love the jerk. But I tell you, it’s no walk in the park.”

  “Have you ever tried to get him to do something that involves less traveling? A stateside job?”

  “Ha. We banned that question the first year we were married. Couldn’t discuss it without me ending up in tears and Fred slamming out the door. What I know now is that even if I’d got my way and he’d stayed at home, he wouldn’t be happy. And if he’s not happy, he makes my life a misery, so it’s better that he does something he loves.”

  “I guess,” Edie said, not entirely convinced.

  “It’s true,” Annie said. “Most people aren’t lucky enough to be in love with what they do. Fred is. You are. You can’t have that kind of love without cheating on someone else. I come second to Fred’s work, and so do the kids. We all know it. We’ve just accepted it.”

  “YOU’VE GOT A HANGOVER, haven’t you?” Maude asked the next morning. “You and Peter drank all my port. You shouldn’t drink like that, it’s not good for you. Turn your nose into a strawberry if you’re not careful.”

  “I’ll remember that, Mom. And I had one glass of port last night.” Did Maude lecture Viv on drinking? “I feel great,” she lied. She felt miserable and confused and lost, somehow. She stood at Maude’s pantry door, alphabetizing little red and white tins of spices. She hadn’t meant to. She’d gone to the pantry to look for cinnamon and then started thinking about Peter. Before she realized what she was doing, she’d organized cumin, cinnamon and cloves on one shelf and had started looking for A’s.

  Maude appeared at the pantry door, shook the can of allspice and stuck it back on the shelf, right in the middle of the newly organized C’s.

  Edie stuck it back in the A’s next to a bottle of almond essence and shot Maude a defiant look. “You should really toss it, Mom.”

  “Empty?” Maude grabbed the container again and shook it, spattering the front of her pink housecoat with allspice. “It’s not empty. There’s plenty left.”

  “Okay, but take a sniff.” Edie snatched the spice away and shoved it under her mother’s nose. “See? No smell. You’ve had it so long, the stuff is useless.”

  “Smells fine to me.” Maude grabbed the tin and replaced it on the shelf. “Don’t go changing my kitchen to suit yourself. It’s been this way for more years than you’ve been around and I like it just fine the way it is. I just wish I knew what happened to all the eggs.”

  “For God’s sake, Mom, we’ve gone over this twice this morning already. I’ll go to the store and buy you some damn eggs.”

  “Don’t swear. And don’t raise your voice at me. I’m still your mother. If you can’t talk to me without shouting and swearing, you can leave.”

  Edie drew a long breath. Maybe that was what she should do. It was only at home that she ever felt weird and confused. Maude was still in the pantry, breathing over Edie’s shoulder and rearranging the spices to her liking.

  Claustrophobic, Edie went into the kitchen and made coffee. She’d just poured a mugful, when Viv called.

  “What’s wrong?” Viv asked.

  “Nothing.” She was supposed to be asking Viv what was wrong.

  “Edith,” Maude called from the pantry. “What did you do with the box of oatmeal? I can’t find it. Where’s the oatmeal? Edith.”

  “Hold on,” Edie said into the phone. “I didn’t touch the oatmeal, Mom. It’s right where you left it. She thinks I’ve moved the oatmeal,” she told Viv.

  “Edith,” Maude called again.

  “Grrrrh.” Edie slapped her forehead. “Viv, can I call you back?”

  “Found it,” Maude crowed. “Different shelf. You must have moved it.”

  Edie groaned into the phone. “Take me away from this, please.”

  “See! Now you know what I go through. You’ll leave, I won’t.”

  “It’s just…I swear, I try to be patient, but she goes over the same thing a dozen times. She can’t hear anything I say, so I have to raise my voice, and then she gets upset because she thinks I’m shouting at her.”

  “Yes, well, keep in mind she’s old,” Viv said. “You need to try and be a little more patient with her.”

  “I do try. I’m just frustr—”

  “Ray is so furious at Peter Darling,” Viv broke in, having clearly lost interest in discussing their mother. “And I don’t blame him. I mean, the man is totally unrealistic. Remember that little tramp, Melissa?”

  “Brad’s girlfriend?”

  “No, she is not his girlfriend, she’s a little… Well, anyway, Ray’s caught her in so many things, but every time he tries to discipline her, Peter steps in and overrules him. Now Peter’s got her signed up for some Mickey Mouse course—”

  “It’s a journalism club, Viv. I told you about the program. I’m working with some of the students.”

  “Oh well, if you’re working on it, Edie,” Viv said, “it can’t be Mickey Mouse.”

  Edie felt her teeth clench. She opened her mouth to speak, closed it again. “You know what, Viv?” she finally said. “Why don’t you go straight to hell?”

  She slammed the receiver down so hard the vibration ran up her arm. Her legs shook and her face felt drained of blood. She picked up the coffee mug she’d been using and carried it to the sink. One of the taps was dripping. She counted the drops. One. Two. Three. Behind her, she could hear Maude moving about the kitchen.

  “I’m going to make meat loaf,” Maude said. “Maybe Peter would like to come to dinner. I suppose you used up all the eggs. Don’t know how I’m supposed to make a meat loaf with no eggs. Didn’t you think before you used the last egg? Now you’ll have to take me to the IGA and I bet they don’t have them on sale this week. What’s this in the garbage? Garlic salt? You threw it away? Tsk-tsk-tsk. Waste, I tell you…”

  Edie buried her face in her hands and pressed her fingers hard against her eyes. The phone rang. She didn’t move. It rang three more times and Maude answered it.

  “Viv wants to talk to you.”

  “Tell her I’m dead.”

  “She’s going to bed,” Maude said into the phone. “…I don’t know. Tired, I suppose. Beth’s what? Hit her? Oh, sweater. I’ll ask her when she gets up.”

  Tears seeped through Edie’s fingers. She gulped air and sobbed.

  “Edith.” Maude had come up beside her. “What is it, honey?”

  Edie shook her head, but Maude was pulling at her arm now, forcing her hands down from her face. She allowed Maude to lead her to the table. Maude told her to sit down and she did. Eyes and nose streaming, she looked across the table at her mother.

  “Always did bottle things up.” Maude’s hands were on the table, clutched around a tissue. Shoulders hunched, she shook her head at Edie. “I can see you now, about fourteen you were. Acting like nothing was wrong, then I walk into the kitchen one day. Standing just about where you are right now. I could see your shoulders just shaking and shaking. You remember that?”

  Her head in her hands, elbows propped on the table, Edie nodded. The tears flowed unquenched, running down her face, dripping off her chin and through her fingers, trickling down her arm to wet the cuffs of her shirt. She swiped at her eyes, at her nose, and at her eyes again, and they just kept filling.

  “You mean when I killed Jim Morrison?”

  Maude regarded her from across the table. “That rabbit you had with the long ears? I’d tell you and tell you that he had to have food and water, but you’d go off to school and I’d go check and sure enough, the bowls
were empty, so off I’d go and fill them—either me or Vivian. She loved that rabbit, too. Hate to think what the poor thing would have done if we hadn’t been there…”

  Edie stared at Maude through a blur of tears. “He died, Mom.”

  “’Course he did. He was old. Had to be ten years old when Dixie gave him to us, and then you must have had him…I don’t know, five years or more. Nothing lives forever.”

  “But his water bowl was dry.”

  “You’d left for school that morning. Forgot to give him water, of course. I remember filling his water and food bowls and thinking to myself, that girl needs to be taught a lesson. So later on when I went out there and saw he’d passed away, I just emptied out the bowls.”

  For a moment, Edie couldn’t speak. “All this time…” she finally managed to say. “I thought he died because of me. And you let me think that.”

  “He would have died,” Maude said, “if he’d had to rely on you.” She got up from the table and walked unsteadily around to where Edie sat. Then she bent and wrapped her daughter in an awkward embrace. “You are who you are, honey,” she said, pressing her mouth against the top of Edie’s head. “We all are.”

  Edie stared wordlessly at Maude as her mother returned to her seat across the table.

  “There’s no one that’s perfect,” Maude said. “Not even your sister, who’s so eaten up with envy that she can’t even see straight. Can’t see why though. The way I reckon, Vivian’s got everything any woman in her right mind would want. Good husband, sons, big fancy house. What does she have to envy you about?”

  “PETER WAS RAISED in England,” Maude told Edie as they drove to the high school. Maude’s purse was clasped in her lap and she stared straight ahead, addressing the windshield. “His mother and father were English.”

  “That would kind of figure.” Edie shot Maude a quick smile. Since the concert, Peter had left several messages. More than once, she’d picked up the phone to call and explain…but explain what? “I think I might be in love with you, but…I don’t think I’m what you need.” No, that smacked of martyrdom—and who was she to tell him what he needed? “I’m too selfish and set in my ways and I’d be a terrible mother to your daughters.” Closer to the truth, but she didn’t want to think that about herself, no matter how accurate the assessment. Finally, she’d decided that the whole thing with Peter would be best nipped in the bud. Now she just had to find a way to tell him.

  Weird how bombs and rockets hardly fazed her, but she was practically having a panic attack at the thought of talking to him. God, she missed him. Missed that walking-on-air dreaminess whenever she thought about him. What she felt now was a resigned acceptance. You are who you are, Maude had said. And it was true. She was not the kind of warm fuzzy person who would make a good mother for Peter’s children. Better to accept that than to remake herself into someone fake and insincere who would end up making everyone unhappy.

  The Nova had no air-conditioning and she drove with one hand on the wheel, an arm resting along the frame of the open window. Yesterday, the temperature had hovered pleasantly in the mid sixties; today it had shot up into the nineties. A thunderstorm was forecast for later in the day and the air was so hot and humid that she imagined herself slowly melting into a sticky, lethargic blob. If there was a positive side to it all, she reflected, it was that the heavy suffocating air created a sort of gray, weary indifference to pretty much everything—including the blowup with Viv, Maude’s revelation about the rabbit and the realization that she’d carried guilt all these years for something she hadn’t done.

  Although, as Maude had pointed out, the rabbit would have died if someone else hadn’t stepped in, so maybe the guilt wasn’t entirely unfounded. She poked a finger down the back of her dress, where a trickle of sweat was starting to itch.

  “This heat doesn’t bother you?” She glanced at Maude who looked amazingly chipper in a lemon-yellow pantsuit. “Heat,” she repeated in a loud voice when Maude gave her a vague look.

  “I’m meeting him at three,” Maude said.

  Edie turned the fan to high. After the journalism club, she would go and make peace with Viv. Not an apology; she’d done nothing to warrant that. Just a sisterly talk to sort things out, smooth hurt feelings. And tonight, maybe, she’d call Peter.

  She yawned. Intense emotion was amazingly draining—a good reason for cultivating, in her professional life at least, emotional detachment and noninvolvement. Involvement was full of traps of all kinds.

  In a jeep with four other reporters on a road in central Bosnia, she’d come across a woman hit by sniper fire. They were out in the middle of nowhere. The woman was bleeding badly and her family was begging them to take her to the nearest field hospital. They’d ended up lifting her into the jeep and taking her in for treatment.

  Three days later a similar press vehicle was attacked, and one of the reporters was injured so severely that he later lost his leg. The second incident was retaliation against her own group who, by assisting the woman, had helped the opposing side. “You help the other side, then we treat you as the enemy,” one of the attackers had said.

  The incident had shaken her for days. By helping this woman, she and her colleagues had indirectly caused another reporter to lose his leg. “We don’t operate in a vacuum,” Ben had reminded her. Everything has its consequences. Including, she realized now, kissing Peter.

  “I told him about your father,” Maude was saying now. “Peter’s sweet on you. All we do is talk about you.”

  Edie felt color creep into her face. She didn’t want to know.

  “I told him how your father went out one night to buy cow’s milk because you wouldn’t drink my milk. Vivian had no trouble with my milk, I told him, but not Edie. She squalled and puked—”

  “Jeez, Mom, I’m sure he was fascinated.”

  “Couldn’t keep it down, running out of both ends. I told him how your father finally had to walk down to the IGA and buy some cow’s milk, and the way that car came out of nowhere and just mowed him down. Didn’t kill him that time, I said, but then, wouldn’t you know, it happened again. Then I told him how you nearly killed your sister…”

  Edie slapped her forehead. “Goddamn it, Mom. Why d’you tell him stuff like that?”

  “There you go, slapping your head again,” Maude said. “You’re going to give yourself a brain tumor. That’s what I told Peter. Edith has no patience with me, I said, always slapping her head and swearing. He’s a good listener. It wasn’t easy raising two girls without a father, I told him, and Vivian with her asthma attacks, but it’s like I always said, if Edie hadn’t wanted that bike so bad, I wouldn’t be a widow today…and then she hides Vivian’s inhaler…”

  I am going crazy, Edie thought. By the time I leave this house, I will be gibbering like a monkey, and men in white coats will put me in a straitjacket. As they carry me off, the last words I’ll hear will be my mother saying, “She kept slapping her head. Slapped herself silly. I tried to warn her, but that’s Edith for you, she never listens.”

  As she pulled into the Luther High parking lot, she decided that if she saw Peter, which she most likely would, she would be cool, calm, professional…and detached to the max.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “TWO TEACHERS have family emergencies. One has the flu and one has laryngitis,” Betty Jean cheerily told Peter. “No substitutes yet, but I’ll keep trying. You have a parent meeting at two. It wasn’t scheduled, but the mother says she has to talk to you today. I penciled in a meeting with that probation officer who rescheduled last week. It’s tomorrow at eleven, which might be cutting it kind of close, but I’ll buzz you. The fire marshal is also coming by tomorrow at three and the photocopier is on the blink again…”

  Peter nodded. “I suppose I haven’t had a call from a Ms. Robinson?”

  “Ms. Robinson? No. Hold on…” She picked up a ringing phone. “Your sister,” she said with a smile at Peter.

  “Tell her I’m in a meeting.�
��

  “I’m sorry, Sophia, but…just a minute.” She held her hand over the mouthpiece. “Your sister says she knows very well you’re not in a meeting.”

  Peter massaged the back of his neck and sighed. “I’ll take it in my office.”

  “Abbie has a stomachache,” Sophia said. “Kate might be coming down with something. Possibly they both have whatever’s going around. Natalie would like to go to England next summer and Delphina is wondering about her butterfly wings.”

  Peter, at his desk now, propped his head in his hands. “Sophia,” he said. “I am a high-school principal. I have an endless number of matters major and minor all clamoring for my attention. I leave for work every morning confident that the girls are in your capable hands. This allows me the freedom to concentrate on all these major and minor matters…” He drew a breath. “Why are you ringing me at work with the sort of things you routinely handle every day?”

  “Yes, I see your point,” Sophia said. “Of course, if the girls had a mother at home…”

  “I’m not discussing this with you right now,” Peter said. “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

  “No, we won’t. You’ll be busy with the girls and then you’ll tell me you’re too tired. Look, Peter, I want you to take this a little more seriously. I’m worried at the thought of my nieces being cared for by a stranger. You have to be very careful about the nanny you select.” Her voice broke. “The girls need a mother, a fact you seem determined to ignore. This foreign correspondent…she’s still in the picture, I suppose?”

  WITH AN HOUR TO KILL before the journalism club, Edie decided to stop in at the teen mother center, hoping she might find Jessie, whom she hadn’t heard from since their lunch the week before. She found her in Beth’s little glassed-in cubicle, head drooping, dabbing at her eyes. Beth sat across from the girl, their knees almost touching. Beth glanced up, saw Edie and motioned her inside.

  Jessie smiled tearfully at Edie and stood to embrace her in a long hug that brought Edie to the edge of tears herself. “Hi…” She pulled back to look at Jessie. “I’ve been wondering about you. Things aren’t going so well?”