Pushed behind the taller books, the way my children used to destroy the neat shelving during library visits, was a small paperback that stopped me. Titled Letters to Karen, the cover pictured a young woman whose face was hidden by falling, golden-lit hair, madonnalike. The book had been a premarital counseling gift from my minister. I fanned the stiff pages bound within an un-cracked spine, wondering if Hal too had failed to read his corresponding volume, Letters to Phillip, and what had become of it. “You hang on to things too long,” Ceel has told me, and true to form, I boxed it with gardening volumes, ones in which I could finally consult the cool-weather chapters.
Ellen came in as I was leafing through a yearbook, and I beckoned to her. “Come over here. I need a you fix,” I said, family shorthand for a hug. She leaned over my shoulder, arms around my neck, enclosing me in her sweet scent of shampoo and skin.
“Who’s that?” she asked, pointing.
I laughed. “Me.”
“You look awful.”
I couldn’t argue. My ninth-grade smile was obliterated by braces, the most obvious feature in a face half-hidden by chin-length hair. “My best friend told me a thousand times that parting my hair in the middle looked terrible, but I didn’t listen to her.”
“What are those stripes on the sides?” Ellen asked.
“I slept in bobby pins so my hair would curl, and all I got was those dents.”
My daughter’s fingers traveled down the page. “But someone scratched out your name and put Angela.”
“My friend did that, too. She was making fun of me.”
“Weren’t you mad at her?”
“Oh no. When we were little girls playing pretend-like, I always wanted to be called Angela instead of Hannah. She could do a perfect English accent, like Mary Poppins. Ahn-je-luh,” I imitated.
Ellen giggled appreciatively. “I like your name.”
I turned to kiss the smooth cheek warm against my own. “Thank God for small favors.”
“Let me see her picture.”
“Who?”
“The friend.” I obediently flipped to the Os. “Her hair looks good,” Ellen said.
“Yes.” I sighed. “It always did.”
“I would’ve hidden if I were you,” Ellen said with nine-year-old confidence and four-year-old tactlessness.
I laughed. “In a way I did. I went to a different school the next year.” Seeing an opportunity, I seized it. “Like you are. Where your daddy will be a teacher.”
“Was she your best friend?” Ellen persisted.
“Yes, she was.”
“Did you cut yourselves and press your fingers together? Were you best friends like that?”
“Oh no. We didn’t have to prove anything. We just . . . knew. Like you and Lila.”
Ellen’s brow creased. “Lila says she’ll write to me, but she said that when she went to camp and never did.”
“Don’t hold that against her. It doesn’t mean you aren’t still friends. Sometimes people mean to do things and don’t.”
“What happened to her?”
I stood up, surprised by Ellen’s interest. I forgot that about children, their intrigue with facts beyond their own timelines. It’s both fascinating and impossible to picture parents in any guise other than their grown-up roles. Hard to imagine that those giants of logic and imperturbability once wept over skinned knees and hurt feelings, schemed or cheated or climbed trees. Children long for access to those people they can’t personally know. “She always liked her name just fine. Isn’t that weird? Very weird,” I said. There, that was a fact.
But not enough fact for Ellen. “What happened to her?”
I scrunched up my eyes and forehead, pulling down the skin to make a gruesome face. “We both grew up and got all old and wrinkled.”
Ellen rolled her eyes. “Mommy. So?”
“So she moved. Like us.” I grabbed her bare foot. “So, so, suck your toe, all the way to Mexico.” She giggled again, and I held up a sleek, also unread version of The Velveteen Rabbit. “Are you ever going to read this? Your godmother gave it to you.”
“Oh, Mom,” she said, breezing from the room, “I’m too old for that.”
I added the Wyndham Hall yearbooks to the TO GO box. Embossed on their covers was the school motto my classmates and I ridiculed in sonorous, melodramatic tones: What we keep we lose, and only what we give remains our own. Surrounded by years of accumulation, of possessions segregated into containers, it seemed that despite its intent, the motto fell short. What about those things we never intended to lose, yet never intended to keep, those things that by our not deciding remain part of us through simple default?
It was near dusk before I finished. Hal found me outside, trowel in hand and knees buried in ivy.
“So it’s come to this,” he said, and pressed a cold beer against my temple. “Burying a time capsule.”
I smiled at his reference to a family joke. I’d been married and a mother before I finally relinquished a timeline I’d made for a seventh-grade history project, and only then because Mother herself was moving, six months after Daddy died.
“That was very important to me,” I said huffily, and tugged his pants leg. I’d liked the precision and detail required in creating the assignment, liked the pungent chemical scent of Magic Marker, the bold black hash marks of history angling off the line of decades and centuries. Certain, definite, unalterable events both in history and immediate deed since a trembling stroke, an accidental omission of a single event on the unscrolling paper, and the entire project would be ruined. “You ought to assign a timeline to your seventh-graders.” I wedged all ten fingers into the earth and carefully pulled out a crumbling chunk.
“What are you doing?” Hal said. “Taking dirt to Rural Ridge?”
I picked root threads from the moist handful. “This is a valuable plant.”
“Oh, I see. Because it’s invisible.”
“It’s arum. Just because it’s vanished doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Arum dies back every year this time.” I eased the invisible plant into a plastic sandwich bag for transporting to Rural Ridge. “You can’t buy arum. Someone has to give it to you. This came from our house in Cullen.”
The sky was deep violet. I sat on the top step, patted Hal to sit beside me, and took a long swallow of beer. Dark tufts of grass poked through cracks in the entrance sidewalk at my feet. “How nice,” Mother had said when she first saw our house, “a brick sidewalk when so many homes just have concrete slabs.” Bricked entrances were an amenity I hadn’t known to appreciate. Hollow-core doors I knew. Our Cullen house had hollow-core doors, and Mother had often commented enviously on the solid wood doors at the O’Connors’ older house across the street. I sat forward and wrenched free a clump of the wayward grass.
“All done?” Hal said.
“Just about.”
“Good,” he said. “Wouldn’t want you to go to bed without closure.”
Hal teased me about my need for closure, a term that, like the brick sidewalk, I’d never known existed before it was pointed out to me. It was true, though; I couldn’t help it. I liked things tidied and completed. Open-ended decisions and circumstances left me floundering.
“Just think,” I said softly. “This time tomorrow we’ll be watching the sun set over the mountains.”
From beyond the treetops, beyond our neighborhood, floated the familiar summer sounds of organ chords and muffled loudspeaker voice from the baseball stadium downtown. In two weeks the sound would change tempo and direction as a high school band began its nightly marching and practicing on the athletic fields in preparation for football season.
“You never hear children playing after-supper games anymore,” I said.
“After-supper games?”
“Red Light, Giant Steps, Mother May I.” A game called merely School, in which a small pebble was passed, or pretended to be, from one pair of prayer-clasped hands to another. Evening noises in Cullen weren’t insect zappers and baseball a
nnouncers, but the calls of children and bobwhites. As he challenged me to make my bed tight enough to bounce a dime, my father would sit on the stoop and challenge me to count the bobwhite calls. “Listen,” he’d whisper with cocked head, “they say their name,” then whistle his own identical three-note plaint: bob bob white.
“Sad?” Hal asked, clasping my knee. “Melancholy baby?”
The chill stripe of his wedding band warmed against my skin. “You know, this spring was the first spring in five years that cardinals didn’t build a nest in the smilax.”
He gasped. “My God. Shunned by the birds. Good thing we’re leaving.”
“It’s not that simple, Hal.” But I smiled with him; after seventeen years of dailiness you know what can’t be explained, know that the insufficiencies of love can’t be punished. I leaned my head to his shoulder. If I was sad, it wasn’t about leaving. “Moving gets a bad rap in movies and stories. Packing is always associated with some kind of sadness. Change, flight, departure, death. This is different. This is hopeful. I feel as though I’m returning, not leaving. Going back to something I’ve always known.”
“How philosophical of you.”
I looked to see whether Hal was mocking me and decided it didn’t matter. “Maybe a little sad,” I admitted. “Sad to leave the driveway where I spent so many hours watching Mark and Ellen drive their Big Wheels.”
“I don’t think it’s the driveway or the Big Wheels you’re missing,” Hal said, touching his bottle to mine. After a moment he added, “It isn’t permanent, Hannah.”
I didn’t answer him. There is something attractive and irresistible in a limited arrangement, a plan with predetermined closure. Perfect job, perfect house, perfect small town. A perfectly clear path toward rediscovering lost simplicity, or whatever it was I’d lost. The move to Rural Ridge seemed ordained, fated. It had been a Sunday when Ceel called, and the eve of our leaving was a Sunday again. A godsend all around.
And thus does He arrange to give us what we want.
From Hannah’s quote book:
. . . the past came back to her in one of those rushing waves of emotion by which people of sensibility are visited at odd hours.
—Henry James
Chapter 2
Hope the good stuff isn’t gone,” Ceel said as we climbed from her car. “I have six vases to fill and need a dozen tomatoes.” She and Ben were hostessing a casual get-together for Hal and me that night.
“A foot-long sub is Mark’s idea of perfect party food.”
“It ain’t only for you, honey,” Ceel drawled. “Don’t be offended by the double billing, but I’m entertaining our new interim minister and his wife, too. Wait till you see St. Martin’s–in-the-Mountains tomorrow,” she said. “Even the name is wonderful, isn’t it? Looks just like a storybook church.”
“Careful,” I said. “You’re turning into Mother. ’Mark my words.‘”
“Mark my words,” Mother had predicted during every family road trip, “the sweetest-looking church in any town always turns out to be the Episcopal church.” And though I’d sat picking at the backseat upholstery, perversely hoping the church would be something awful and prove my mother finally wrong—contemporary hacienda or a low-slung, pink-bricked monstrosity—it was invariably charming, nestled beneath swaying pines or sweetly white and ivy covered behind wrought-iron gates.
Inside the cavernous shed of the farmer’s market, giant fans spun lazily from a ceiling still draped with crimped Independence Day bunting. Makeshift wooden counters were heaped with shucked corn, yellow squash, and tomatoes in varying stages of ripening. Fingers of carrots, dusty beets, and string beans competed for space with shelled peas—dun crowders, speckled pintos, pale limas—bagged in clear plastic. I touched leafy vegetables meant for day-long simmering with the fatty scraps of country ham one vendor hawked. Aproned women in a far corner sold crocheted toilet paper hats and calico lid toppers.
Ceel headed for the flower aisle while I browsed, buying new potatoes no bigger than grapes, Big Boys and German Johnsons, baby cukes for sandwiches and salads.
Ceel appeared beside me, her face half-hidden by sunflowers and zinnias, loosestrife and bachelor buttons. “What army are you feeding?” she asked at the sight of my bulging bags.
My sister had no conception of feeding a family. “I got carried away with the atmosphere,” I said; Ceel’s childlessness resurrected itself when I least suspected it. “Look.” I displayed my prize find: two quarts of wild blackberries, dark nubbed jewels mounded in paper cartons, a roadside treasure not available in any Durham grocery store. “Still warm from the sun. What a treat. Another plus to add to my list of reasons for moving. There’s enough here for two cobblers. Remember picking blackberries?”
“Huh,” Ceel said. “I remember the chiggers.”
“Maybe I should get some more,” I debated. “To make jam.”
Ceel rolled her eyes, sneezed into the weedy musk of a Queen Anne’s lace. “Let’s go. Five more minutes and you’ll be buying a sunbonnet and butter churn.”
An architect’s sleight of hand, Ceel and Ben’s house seemed nothing but roof and windows, a lit lantern in the dusk. Their home was as sleek as ours was rustic, and I admired its minimal spareness, consisting of only three rooms: kitchen, living area, and bedroom. Distinctively contemporary, the house boasted a two-storied ceiling checkerboarded with skylights. Honey-stained wood floors were enclosed by sliding glass doors giving on to a wraparound porch.
“Hello, boss,” Hal said, shaking his brother-in-law’s hand.
“I locked up the Academy to make sure Hal made it tonight,” Ben said to me. “Classes haven’t begun, but the professor here is already working overtime. Come on in. Ceel’s making sure the lemon slices are precisely a quarter inch thick.”
We followed Ben through the open room to a planked table Ceel had covered with bright bandannas to serve as a bar. Frosted green and amber longneck beer bottles poked from an ice-filled wheelbarrow.
“Martini on the rocks, please,” I said to the young man behind the table.
“That’s a tall order for a moonlighting teacher’s aide,” he said with a rueful expression. “I’ll need some instructions.”
“Watch this highly technical process,” I said, and dribbled vermouth over an ice-packed glass, then quickly upended it over my palm. The clear liquid dripped through my fingers to a dish towel. “Now, gin and three olives, minimum. Perfect every time.” He bowed with mock respect and laughed as I added, “Call if you need my sophisticated skills.”
I stood at a window and watched Ceel light citronella torches on the deck. Ceel and Ben had chosen a snug forested hollow over a prized mountaintop lot, and sunset’s colors had nearly faded here. The dying day remained only in the smeary pink undersides of high cloud wisps rippled like tidal sand.
“You’re Hannah Marsh, aren’t you? Welcome to town,” a cheery voice said. “You’ll just love it here in Rural Ridge, love it. Bill and I only wish we’d come to our senses and left Atlanta earlier.” I turned to a petite woman wearing gold jewelry at wrists and neck and earlobes. “Doesy Howard,” she said, “your neighbor behind the overgrown hemlocks.”
“Doesy?”
“Short for Doris. Our daughter Wendy is just ahead of your son in school. Mark, right? Wendy can tell him everything there is to know about the Blue Ridge Rangers!”
“I’m sure he’d appreciate it,” I said, smiling at Doesy’s effusion and wondering if Wendy Howard was equally enthusiastic. “He’s unhappily baby-sitting for our daughter, Ellen, tonight.”
“You should have called Wendy! Most weekends you wouldn’t ever catch her home, but she’s grounded for two weeks for cutting her piano lessons. Wendy resists all my efforts to make her well rounded—don’t you agree piano is a good life skill? Told Mrs. Biddix she had an orthodontist appointment. Unfortunately Wendy forgot that she’s no longer wearing braces.” Doesy shook her head happily. “The little liar! A social creature if ever there was o
ne. Always has something going on. Of course, it’s all my fault. I couldn’t wait for her to be a teenager so I could live it all over again. Frances!” she trilled to a woman wearing drawstring pants and a needleworked tank. “Come meet Ceel’s big sister, Hannah.”
Frances Mason greeted me and regarded Doesy skeptically. “You’re resplendently overdressed. What kind of soiree did you think you were attending?”
Doesy was unfazed. “I’m trying to impress our new rector. The parish offices are dire, haven’t been touched since the fifties.” In a stage whisper to me she added, “Frances is our village agitator.”
Frances tipped her bottle of beer and took several long swallows. “Loosely related to the community curmudgeon.”
I laughed. “Who do you agitate and curmudgeon?”
“Anyone who’ll let me.”
“Oh, hush,” Doesy said, wagging a finger. “Frances gives me a terrible time. And I’m Picky-Picky’s best customer. Anything new in stock?” she demanded. “You know I get first choice.” Doesy gave me an earnest look. “I’m an interior designer. Give me a holler if you need help with your house. I know a place where you can get darling kudzu-vine furniture.” I thought of the decorating books I’d consigned to the Dumpster.
“Jesus, Doesy,” Frances said. “You’re the kind of female who gives the South a bad name.”
Doesy stuck out her tongue. “Look after Hannah,” she directed Frances. “I’m going to mingle.”
“Mingle, mingle,” Frances called after her.
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” I said.
She was clearly surprised. “Showing your age. And your good memory.”
“I’m afraid so. Doesn’t she mind the way you tease her?”
Frances gave an economic shake of her head. “Nah. We know each other so well that we don’t have to fake anything.”
“What’s ‘Picky-Picky’?”
“My store. I run a sucker joint.”
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