We all sat or stood in the library waiting for Lucy and Chuck to show up. There were the long silences of people who don’t know each other that well and have run out of small talk. Mom struggled valiantly to keep conversation going until Dad announced we should go ahead and sit down for dinner. The group moved to the next room.
I was the last out of the library and, glancing through the window, saw Lucy and Chuck standing outside. Chuck’s back was to me but I could see Lucy stroking his face. His head was down and his shoulders were shaking. Then he grabbed Lucy and hugged her close. I stood there for a long moment watching that hug, then, not wanting to be caught at the door again, I turned and entered the dining room. My place card had been moved. Looking around I saw I was seated next to Anna.
Lucy and Chuck had come in and now stood in the doorway like deer in the headlights. What little conversation was going on stopped cold. For a split second, no one moved or said anything. For Evan, it might have been because he hadn’t laid eyes on Lucy for six months. For me, I’m ashamed to say, it was because I was staring at Chuck the way you might stare at a traffic accident. Chuck was wearing a mouth guard like a football player’s. But bigger. Metal headgear was strapped around the back of his head holding it in place. His eyes were fastened on the floor.
Anna abruptly swept from her place of honor at the head table, nearly upsetting me in my chair, and moved toward the doorway. I thought she would brush by them and collapse in the ladies’ room, sobbing, on the chaise lounge I had earlier vacated. Instead, she kissed Chuck on both cheeks, ignoring the headgear. Then she took Lucy by the shoulders and smiled at her. “Welcome home. Evan and I are so pleased that we can share this wedding weekend.”
Lucy melted into her arms and Anna swayed her back and forth. I glanced over at my mother, whose face was visibly losing its wrinkles. Mom called her wrinkles her “badges of honor,” but I think she could have lived without the badges from the past few days.
Anna pulled Lucy and Chuck into the room and seated them next to her and Evan. I moved over to Mom and Dad’s table to accommodate them. After that, there was only the clinking of glasses and laughter.
Chapter Nine
Saturday, June 28, 1986, 7:32 a.m.
The hammering woke me, and I rose blearily from the couch to yell at somebody. It was Tom, the handyman, pounding new boards into the dock stairs. When I reached the kitchen, Dad was already at the table reading the paper. He passed me a cream horn and a cup of coffee. I had a particular weakness for cream horns from Meijer Thrifty Acres. Dad always remembered to pick them up for me when he went out there for hardware or fertilizer or new white T-shirts when we girls had taken all of his. We sat together and read The Muskegon Chronicle. As usual, I turned to the crimes section to see what kids had been busted trying to get someone to buy them a six-pack of Stroh’s. Then I read the anniversaries, weddings, and engagement section. In our town, people having their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary always looked seventy years old in their pictures, although most of them were probably only about forty-five.
At eight o’clock, Dad got up and let Buddy out to go do his business. Then he switched on the small TV on the kitchen counter. He turned it to the local station broadcast out of Muskegon Community College. The signature music for The Michigan Bass and Buck Show came on. The opening titles cut to Evan, who stood in a kitchen set drinking black tea. He looked like he needed it, too.
“Jeez, Evan usually at least shaves before the show,” Dad said.
Evan had on his red flannel shirt, jeans, and beat-up Docksiders. He put on an apron while he talked. “It looks like the Caddis Hatch has started right on time and it may be a blue-ribbon year for fly fisherman. For the uninitiated, the Caddis Hatch is more commonly called the Mayfly Hatch. It’s named for the big-bodied insect with the”—Evan searched for the word—“the gossamer wings. It’s like catnip for trout.” Evan took a trout out of a Styrofoam cooler. It flopped in his hands as he gutted it from rectum to gill and pulled out the inside mess. He grabbed a little fleshy organ and cut it open. “See, the stomach of this little fifteen-incher is completely full of Mayflies. So you may want to consider tying a larger-bodied fly with a hint of blue showing.”
Dad stretched. He liked the cooking parts of the show but didn’t care much about fishing. “For trout, this is a perfect moment in time,” Evan continued. “They are feeding at the calm edge of life’s riffling waters. For once, they do not need to work because the currents of fate sweep along the river and bring what they wish—the Mayfly. Or the Caddis, if you will, for the purists out there. They are not eating because they are hungry; they are eating because they can have exactly what they want and as much as they want. It’s that golden jewel of a time when everything is as it should be. We should all be so lucky as to have a moment as satisfying and full as that.”
Evan moved to the microwave. He heated up water for his Yogi tea. He’d been into that for a few years now. Dad and I watched Evan watch the timer on the microwave count down, then open the door, remove the cup, and dunk his tea bag in and out. He stroked his face and worked his jaw in that way men do when they are tired and need a shave. “Right after the commercial break, we’ll talk about smoking trout with beer.”
“He sure is comfortable on television. I don’t even think he combed his hair,” I said to Dad. I was envious of my brother’s casualness about it all. The phone rang and I got up to answer it.
“Hi, Jeannie? Are you up?”
“Yeah, hi, Walker. How did it go last night?” I didn’t have to ask what my boyfriend had been doing. Every fly fisherman in Michigan knew that, if the temperature was right, the Caddis Hatch occurred the last week in June. No fisherman would be anywhere but on the river that week.
He launched in. “I was up on the Little Manistee River last night. Roger went with me. We fished until about 4 a.m. Damned if my headlamp didn’t go out just as I had a little fourteen-inch beauty on the line. Lost him. Then Roger threw his line full of air knots and by that time we had to hike out. Roger had to be to work by eight anyway.” I could hear the disapproval in Walker’s voice. Air knots in a fishing line were for amateurs.
Fly-fishing for Walker was not a sport. It was a religion that, for him, only honorable men who were throwbacks to honorable times could correctly practice. He once said that he belonged to the church of the Great Outdoors. That was probably true because he wasn’t much of a Protestant. Every year most fishermen here kept complex log books of date, river temperature, air temperature, water depth, type of fly hatch—the fly to be tied in order to correctly fool the trout—and, most important, how all of this affected the trouts’ appetite. Each fishing hole on the river was given a name or the name was passed down from generation to generation of fishermen. There was the Come Back, named, not particularly cleverly, for the place where most fishermen turned around to come back home. And there was the Beaver Hole. Contrary to what this might sound like, it was famous for a time when Walker’s father was fishing and a beaver tore his trout right off the line. There was also the Wop Hole, named for a sarcastic and funny Italian boy whom Walker had brought home from Princeton and tried to teach to fish. The Italian boy had named the hole himself after he had fallen into it, had water fill his waders, and nearly drowned in three feet of water. He finally made his way to the riverbank and sat there cursing the Wop Hole. I always chided Walker when he referred to the Wop Hole in front of people who did not know the story. I feared he would be taken for a redneck at Princeton.
Fly-fishing in Michigan is a bit like surfing in California. Prize locations are ferociously guarded, locals only. Some fishermen have been fishing after the same fish in the same hole for years. Folklore abounds about these fish—their own personal Moby Dicks. Walker had read and memorized every topographical map for most of Lower Michigan. He could find his way around on a river in complete darkness just from his memory. People will travel from Grosse Pointe or Royal Oak to fish in the prime stretches of the Little Manistee,
the Sable, or the Muskegon rivers. They show up in their brand-new Orvis vests with their shiny fly boxes and their unscratched Ford Explorers. They get stuck in the two-tracks leading to the rivers—a two-track being the tire tracks worn through a field after repeated use. Then they bother local fishermen to drive out to the highway and call them tow trucks. Walker called all of these people “Teds.” For some reason several of them one particular summer had the name Ted, and the derisive term stuck. Now most local fishermen used it and we all knew what they meant.
Walker had begged off the rehearsal dinner. Now he was calling about the wedding.
“You can’t miss Evan’s wedding,” I begged him. “Please don’t miss Evan’s wedding.”
“No one will even notice. Your family is so damn chaotic they’ll think I’m there. Come on, Jeannie. You know the Hatch only lasts a couple of days. This is important.”
“But Evan will be hurt.”
“No, he won’t. I was just watching his show. He gets it.”
“He gets the metaphoric part of it. He hates to fish. He doesn’t like the smell of wet waders.”
I put down the phone and thought, This is important, too. This is something that doesn’t even happen a couple of days a year. It only happens once, at least with any luck. Walker had been making noises about our getting married. I made a mental note that it would have to be in the dead of winter. Of course, that was grouse-hunting season, but it wasn’t as dependent on the weather. As usual, I let Walker off the hook, so to speak.
My family made him nervous. Being a highly disciplined sort, he did not view my family as a vibrant force but as a disorganized mess that needed cleaning up.
Dad looked up. I slumped back into my chair and he stroked my head and smiled. “Come on, pumpkin. Today is one day you should be smiling.”
When I continued to pout, he sang my favorite song. He’d done that since I was little. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine . . .” I begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t until I laughed with him. “You make me happy when skies are gray . . .”
Lucy wandered in and headed to the fridge for a Tab. She was the only person I knew who still drank Tab. She probably kept several people at a Tab factory employed.
“You guys have any aspirin? Chuck didn’t sleep so well last night and I couldn’t find any in the medicine cabinet. Mom finally gave him some whiskey to cut the throbbing.”
Dad got up and went over to the cupboard where he kept paint and wire and hammers and stuff and reached way into the back and fished out a bottle. “My own private stash,” he explained. Lucy shook some tablets out and wandered back out of the kitchen rubbing her eyes.
“Didn’t Dr. Jones give him a prescription for something stronger?” I asked.
“And when would I have gone to the pharmacy between last night and this morning?” she groused.
“Don’t forget, you and I have to go get your headpiece today,” I shouted after her. She mumbled something from the hallway and disappeared.
“Close your eyes,” Dad said.
“Ah, come on, Dad. I’m not going to steal your aspirin.”
“Close ’em.”
Dutifully, I shut my eyes as Dad found a new hiding place for his aspirin. In our big family, we all jealously guarded what we had. If we really wanted to keep something for ourselves, we hid it. When Mom came home from grocery shopping, the Cokes disappeared, immediately hidden. The Little Debbie snack cakes followed. Years later, we found forgotten Cokes hidden in the backyard and down the laundry chute.
Tom knocked on the sliders and then came in. Behind him were three other handymen I did not know. And even if I did know them, I certainly wasn’t going to stand there in my usual sleepwear in front of them. They ignored me, though, reached for coffee cups, filled up, and sat down with Dad as though they all lived there. I started for the door when one of them took my section of newspaper.
“Evan’s show on yet?” one of them inquired.
“Started a few minutes ago,” Dad replied. I went upstairs and tiptoed into Sammie’s room, where my clothes were. I put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt as quietly as possible, but Sammie bitched at me to keep it down.
“What time is it?” she asked as I was leaving.
“About noon,” I lied. Let her figure it out after she was up. Mom was in the shower, but I went in anyway to brush my teeth. Lucy came in, peed, then flipped the lid down and sat on it. She rubbed her face in her hands.
“Is that Lucy?” Mom asked from behind the shower curtain.
“Yes,” Lucy said.
“Is Chuck better?”
“How did you know, Mom?” I asked.
“Oh, about 1 a.m. I heard Lucy get up, so I got up to see if I could help.”
Moms are truly amazing, I thought. Here I had slept through several people traipsing through the living room—currently my bedroom—to get to the kitchen, and Mom had woken up from the other side of the house. Moms must have built-in radar for problems in the middle of the night. Or maybe she honed that radar when Sammie used to sneak back out of the house after she had come in for her curfew. She never had that problem with Lucy. Lucy was the only one of us who would come home early. Her friends would drop her off at the front door and honk as they sped away. Lucy just got sleepy around ten and that was that. Mom often said that if all of us had been like Lucy, she would have had years more sleep under her belt.
The doorbell rang.
“First the phone and now the doorbell. You’d think it was mid-afternoon. Doesn’t anybody have any manners around here?” Lucy stuck in her contacts while she griped.
I waited to see if Dad would get the door. When the bell rang again, I went downstairs and stopped dead when I saw the cop’s hat through the window. I opened the door a crack. Officer Carson had Buddy by his collar. Buddy didn’t even bother to fight. He sat complacently on the stairs.
“Hi, Officer Carson. Buddy was out again, huh?”
“Jeannie, this is the third time we’ve found your dog wandering around off the leash.”
“So if I tied a leash to his collar he could roam around by himself?”
Officer Carson latched his thumbs in his belt. He did not see the humor in my words and didn’t appreciate the insult to his authority. “This dog could be a danger to others!” Buddy lazily raised a leg and began licking his genitals vigorously. “I could haul you and your family into court right now. I have photos.” He drew several Polaroids from his shirt pocket. There, in glorious color, was Buddy sitting in a leaf pile, peeing on a tree, and sniffing another dog’s butt.
“But these were taken right there.” I pointed to our sidewalk and the curb beyond.
“Your property line ends at the sidewalk.”
Sensing things were getting out of hand, I decided to appease him. “Okay, Officer. I totally understand the situation. We’re real sorry and I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Officer Carson settled down. He let go of Buddy’s collar and I dragged the dog inside. “Thanks, Jeannie. I knew I could rely on you.” He tipped his hat and left.
Sammie came rushing down the stairs, brushing her hair. I followed her into the kitchen and joined the crowd at the table while Sammie made toast, the extent of her culinary skills.
“Who was at the door?” Dad asked.
“Marv Carson. He said we’re all going to dog jail.”
“Oh, for cripes sake. Was Buddy out again?”
“Dad! You let him out yourself—I saw you!”
Dad raised the paper but I could see him smiling behind it.
“Now it’s my damn responsibility to make sure Buddy doesn’t roam around.”
“Don’t swear,” Dad answered me, already having lost interest in the conversation.
“Goddamn it, Jeannie! It’s 8:15 in the friggin’ a.m.!” Sammie had just caught sight of the stove clock. “What kind of a jerk lies and says it’s noon when it’s really 8:15? That is just immature.”
“If I have to be up dealing
with dogs and workmen and aspirin and fishing schedules, then why shouldn’t you be? I didn’t get the choice of having a room to myself. Everyone just assumes that since I’m the youngest I won’t mind the couch. Maybe I mind!”
We glowered at each other. Sammie flung toast at my head. The workmen got to their feet and ambled back outside.
“Well, I never.” Mom entered the kitchen. “You girls should be ashamed of yourselves talking to each other that way. Just when everyone is home and it’s been so pleasant. Now kiss and make up.”
Oh God. Not that. Ever since we were little kids Mom would make us kiss and make up. We had abandoned the actual kissing part when we were about six years old and it was pretty much a figure of speech now. But we still had to apologize and hug each other. We’d been through the drill so often that Sammie and I just eyed each other, then awkwardly hugged.
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, sorry, too.”
Sammie smacked me on the butt and went to make more toast.
Evan’s wedding started at 6 p.m. Elizabeth had given us strict instructions to get the headpiece and then be home by 3 p.m. When Lucy and I finally got to the June Wedding to buy the bridal headpiece it was almost one o’clock. June descended on us immediately, moving her girth through the narrow aisle. We had known June for years, and I had particularly admired her polka dancing at various weddings held at the Polish Falcon Hall.
June beamed at us. “Lucy dear! This is so exciting for you. Mrs. Petty called me to tell me all about it. I’m so glad that you didn’t marry her awful son, Jeff, but don’t tell her I said that.” She barely stopped to breathe. “Are you pregnant, dear? Would you like to sit down?”
“No, no, I don’t need to sit down. And no, I’m not pregnant.”
June looked disappointed. “Oh dear, well, I’m sure you have plenty of time. Tell me about your wedding dress first.”
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