“It makes me mad.” I pushed off the porch with my foot.
“Yeah, I know.” Ben took a long swig of his beer. The sun threw ribbons of orange and gold over the parameters of the porch.
“You’re mad too?”
“Not really, I want them to be happy. They seem happy. I think this might be their golden ticket.” He rolled up his shirt sleeve and leaned back into the swing.
“Yeah, but—”
“No buts, Mary-Kate. It’s their thing, their life, their decision.”
“Whatever, Ashley. It’s irrational and immature, and you know it. The whole world knows it.”
Ben shrugged and took another sip of his drink.
“And Bernice is going to leave again. How does he not see what’s around the next bend?”
“You don’t know that, and I think you should let it go. Que sera sera and all that.” He tapped me on the nose and polished off his lager.
“You make a better Doris Day than I do, and we both know it.”
“There is one way to solve that; I’ll get us more beers.”
I swung aimlessly in his absence and listened in the stillness for the elusive answers. When Ben returned, I accepted the beer offering without comment.
So many times I started to ask Dad about Bernice, about what happened, but getting those words past the edges of my teeth was like trying to fit an elephant through my mouth whole.
I was surprised then, when he brought it up the next day himself. We were driving to what we hoped was one of his last appointments when he broke the silence first.
“She’s not a bad person.” He drove fast, knew I couldn’t escape.
“If you compare her to Cruella de Vil.” I didn’t want to talk about it; I wasn’t ready.
He didn’t respond, and I jumped out of the truck at a red light. It was worth the two-mile walk back to the house to get away from the unpleasant topic, but his words chased me all the way to our front door.
I sat on the front porch, thinking, staring at nothing. The mailman waved as he stuffed our mailbox with paper rectangles. Distracted, I wandered over to retrieve the mail. And there it was, looking weary from its journey. A letter, stuck between a flier and two bills. I moved to sit in the yard and opened it.
Hello Reese.
How are you?
In your depth, in your bones?
I stray away from asking you this often, because I imagine I know, but I don’t want you to think you are neglected either.
I care how you are—all your thoughts, feelings, and the salmagundi betwixt. (Salmagundi—how do you like that?)
I so wish I was there to look at you, straight into those soulful sorrel eyes and ask you until you give me an authentic answer.
I’ve been dreaming up a little adventure, and I can’t wait to run it by you. This is what we in the writing business deem “foreshadowing.” Beyond that, not much is happening on this side of the globe—no revolutions or coups of which to speak.
More soon.
Know that someone from beyond the sea is remembering you.
My hug is waiting for your hug,
B
I leaned back into the grass, hugged by the earth and the light wind. The sun warmed my skin, and I let myself be. When Ben’s hand slid into mine, I didn’t open my eyes, but I had to smile. We lay there in the front lawn, two hearts undone, in the sun, until the dinner hour came.
PART II
10
July
Bernice
First things first. I’d gotten up early to make a pot of coffee, the nice hazelnut kind, and I’d bought a vanilla creamer especially for the occasion.
“Mom, it’s eight in the morning, why do you have candles lit?” Benjamin wandered into the kitchen with his hair pointing in twenty directions, and I licked my palm to finesse the catastrophe atop his head.
“It’s about the mood, son.” His hair was not cooperating, and I focused my attention on Reese, who stomped into the kitchen after him as if she was leading an elephant parade. Her dark bun was lopsided and for once she wore her glasses. By Benjamin’s side she reminded me so much of her seven-year-old self. They were beautiful, breathtaking. My heart hurt watching them.
“Happy birthday, babies!” I held my arms wide.
When they turned three, we hired some fancy photographer from Regency to document their cuteness. They cried through the whole hour and a half of the shoot, and I was livid. But now I loved the photos of their wailing faces, crimson red.
For their eighth birthday, we invited all the neighborhood kids and had a weekend-long sleepover in our backyard. Carl and I didn’t sleep for seventy-two hours straight. We didn’t know it at the time, but the twins and Charlie spent that year telling everyone they were triplets and all the other children showed up thinking it was Charlie’s birthday too. The little scoundrel made out with a mound of presents of his own. All the photos showed their satisfied smiles smashed in a tight row.
I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand, but they remained tenaciously damp. I had reached a disastrous plain of sentimentality.
“Why are you staring at us?” Reese didn’t wait for my answer before heading to the coffee pot.
Carl was already seated with the paper and his coffee. He gave me a wink. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I knew what he was thinking—we did one thing right.
“I’ll be right back, y’all.” I ran upstairs and deposited my gifts on the kids’ beds. When I re-entered, I gathered them around the table so I could regale them with the glorious tale of the day I became a mother. “We found out there were two of you at our first appointment. And did you know, your father passed out cold right there in the doctor’s office when they told us?” Carl winked at me again, and I squeezed his arm.
Benjamin and Reese studied their coffees.
“He sure did, and the way those cute nurses fussed over him you’d have thought he was the one carrying two babies. I tried to help him up, but he sank into the care of that passel of nurses. I told him it was time to go, and still he avoided eye contact with my pretty blues. He let himself be fawned over for a good twenty minutes, as if he actually needed comfort. That man.
“Anyway, knowing there were two of you was enough surprise for one day and so we didn’t find out if you were boys or girls. Besides, I knew you were boys. I knew it in my gut. I’m not sure what happened. We called y’all Twin A and Twin B. Twin B was always my favorite because he was calmer. Twin A was a wild-child like Aunt Naomi, and I knew we’d have our hands full with that one.
“Fast-forward to twenty-six years ago today. I was walking to the post office around ten in the morning because I hoped someone had mailed me a package, some thoughtful baby gift. There I was, looking like a whale in the pouring rain, when my water broke. At eight months pregnant, I’d given up all hope you were ever coming out. I’d embraced the idea of the three of us, with you in womb, growing old and dying together. A mother’s sacrifices start so early on in the journey of life.”
Reese glared at me and took a long swig of her coffee. I brushed away the forming tears with the back of my hand.
“As I was saying, my water broke on the corner of 60th and Grant when I was still six blocks from the post office. My raincoat only buttoned at the very top, and from the belly down, I was soaked right through. In every inch of my being I felt the pressure of your bodies fighting inside me, so I turned around and wobbled home.
“Now, these were the days before cell phones or pagers or anything, really. So we’d put Carl’s office on high alert. Once I called, they were to hunt him down, no matter what meeting with what important person he was in. But I had to get home before I could call and figure it out.
“When I got to the house, there was a light on upstairs, so I grabbed the shovel from the entryway and I crept up to the baby room to see what crazy intruder thought he could steal all my babies’ clothes. I was pretty scared, but I was also brave, so I shut my eyes and walked through th
e doorway, a’swinging that shovel like I was born to be a princess warrior. I was, you know.”
“A real Xena.” Ben smiled as he grabbed the coffee pot to pass between us all.
“A princess warrior, son. Anyhoo, your crazy father sat on the floor fiddling with something and don’t you know, I knocked him out cold, with my eyes closed shut and everything. I guess he’d gone out and bought me this rocking chair I’d been hankering after to surprise me, and there he was dusting it when I thought he was at work.
“So I had to wake him up and then it was my job to drive us all the way to the hospital. In the pouring rain. When my contractions were only six minutes apart. But I was afraid I’d given your father a concussion—Carl, you know you were acting wacky when you woke up—and I wasn’t going to risk him killing all four of us by letting him drive. I’m a better driver than him most days of the week anyway.
“Turns out he did have a concussion, but I didn’t find that out until the next day because I spent the next five hours laboring like a farm hand. And after that, all hell broke loose. Twin B’s foot got stuck under Twin A’s head, making it impossible to deliver you two naturally. They rushed us in for an emergency C-section and the doctor grabbed the first foot he saw, and Twin A exited me first. After all those months of wondering, we had two tiny red screaming babies. A mini scarlet girl and a beautiful, perfect boy.
“Now, I wanted to name you Josephine Rose and Jasper Ray, but I fainted sometime shortly after your birth. And while I was passed out cold, your concussed father named you Reese Mae and Benjamin Maddox. He claimed he heard me say those names were pretty; it must have been while I was passed out.
“I’m sorry, Reese and Benjamin, he did and by the time I woke I was so tired, all I could do was feed you both and it wasn’t until a week later that I fully realized what had happened. I thought it was all part of a dream, you see. But by then it was too late. Josephine and Jasper, you made me a mother, and it has been a wild ride, that’s for sure.
“And here we are. The pancakes will be ready in about fifteen minutes. Drink some more coffee while you wait. Drink some water too, for that matter. It will help you all lose a few extra pounds and keep you hydrated. Oh, and babies, I left you each a gift on your bed. You have time to go open them before breakfast.”
I was thrilled with the kids’ gifts this year. I gave my Benjamin a small fortune, which I knew he’d love, but I was more pleased with Reese’s gift. I wanted to watch her open it, but for the first time in my life, I was shy. I’d worked on her little project for weeks, it could have been years, and I was proud of it. It was the best I had in me, and I couldn’t even bear to see the joy on her face when she saw it.
“Reese rhymes with Bernice. I thought it was cute,” Carl muttered into his coffee cup.
I gave birth twenty-six years ago today, and today was going to be just fine. I shoved a napkin toward my face to hide the threatening tears.
Reese
I raced to my room after breakfast and crammed the large package from my mother into my closet. It looked homemade, and I’d deal with it later, when I had the emotional capacity, which was two miles past never. I sat on my bed to process the morning’s events.
My mother had this thing about telling our birth story every year on our birthday. Even after she left, she attempted to reach out so we could remember her sacrifices. One year I had fifteen voice messages recounting her memory, which I promptly deleted without listening.
I was annoyed she force-fed us the story this year, but it had been more than a decade since I’d heard about our entrance into the world, and now it was so comforting I almost hugged Bernice. I shot a rubber band at Ben instead.
The last time I’d heard it was on our twelfth birthday. Mom woke me up with a mug of hot chocolate and my first tube of lipstick. I didn’t think she’d noticed me watching her apply her makeup all those years, but maybe she had. I had been angry at her the night before, frustrated by something, but it was absolved between those cuddles and the solo retelling of our birth story. She kept me back from school and we painted our nails a bright purple that lasted three weeks before it cracked and peeled off in mangled strips in one afternoon.
“Did you get a card?” Ben lounged in my bedroom doorway, holding an envelope.
After she left, Mom didn’t call much, but she sent us cards every birthday and holiday. She even recognized holidays like Labor Day, which no one else cared about except for the fact they got a day off work. She was like that when we were growing up too—having a themed Memorial Day dinner or decking us out in red, white, and blue the entire month of July. She was all or nothing.
Ben and I refused to open the cards she mailed in her absence. We each took the box from our new Reeboks and made a big deal about indignantly adding card after card to the collection.
“No, I got some awkward-looking present. I put it in my closet.”
“Reese.”
“Ben, she can’t waltz in here and act like nothing happened.”
“Listen, I get it. Mom left us when we were young. It was a subpar thing to do and not one of her shining moments. She screwed up. But we all screw up.”
“I think that’s a kind way to put leaving your husband and two kids.”
“Reese, come on. While her attempts at being a mother now border on the comical, she’s trying. Think about how many cookies she’s baked—she made you that R cookie.”
“You and Bernice and those cookies.”
“Reese, Dad wasn’t here either. It’s all screwed up, but it is what it is.”
“Whatever.”
He sat on my floor with an odd look. “I have to tell you something. The year we turned seventeen, I opened my birthday card from her, late at night when I was sure you were sound asleep.” He picked at the rug. “I needed your REM cycle to block your twinly intuition, and I guess it worked.” He shrugged.
“What? Why?”
“Dunno, I was tired of pushing her away, I guess.”
I stared at him, mute.
“I stopped screening Mom’s calls after that. If I was the only one home when she called, I’d talk to her for a few minutes. It hasn’t been much through the years, but she’s met Maya a handful of times and the three of us shared one Christmas two years back when your car broke down and you said you were too poor to buy a plane ticket. You know, the year Dad went golfing for the week in Florida.”
“I was too poor.” It sounded defensive.
“Some might think I don’t take what she did seriously enough, but I think some people hold on to anger longer than it’s needed. In all her outlandish extravagance, she cares. I know she does. Communicating it well just isn’t her thing.”
“Maybe she could learn.” I crossed my arms, to show how upset I was at his betrayal, or maybe to hold my heart inside.
“We all have to start somewhere, Reese. Honestly, when Mom left, I was only half surprised.” He lifted and dropped his shoulders.
Me too. I’d observed the tension growing between Mom and Dad for months, an inescapable tsunami. Ben went between them to repair the gaping holes each day brought forth, begged for clemency—a new, better understanding—but nothing worked. He was the fixer, the optimist; I was the realist and knew no intervention in the universe would make us better.
When Ben wandered off, I sat unmoving, wondering.
“Josephine, special delivery for you!” Bernice yelled up the stairs. Oh right, once she re-lived the splendor of our birth adventure, she insisted on calling us Josephine and Jasper for the entire day. Sometimes Dad joined in. Those two, they thought they were the funniest.
But no need to dissect the psychological wreck that was my mother, she said I had a special delivery. Charlie had done it again. He was particularly horrible at the bitsy details in a relationship, but he was so utterly fantastic at the grandiose, I absolved him for his next twelve shortcomings.
“One minute,” I called around my grin.
“What is it?” Ben appeare
d in the doorway of my room, phone in hand. “Maya wants to know too.” He waved his screen at me.
“Hi Maya. No clue, Jasper. But move aside Sauron, my birthday, my precious awaits.”
My secret birthday dream was that Charlie himself would show up on my doorstep. The two months apart had been the longest separation in our lives, and he knew I loved surprises.
I took a final look in the mirror and scrunched my nose. I dabbed on mascara and a light layer of lip balm before I raced down the stairs, nearly tripping on the second to last step. Years later, and that death trap still wasn’t fixed. I made a mental note to repair it within the week and looked around for my gift.
A familiar face rounded the corner, holding a red balloon. “Someone said special delivery?”
11
Reese
Blake looked endearingly rumpled and his dark hair crept out from under his baseball cap. The stubble was definitely working on him. Bernice danced circles around him, making a show of presenting him, as if he were my gift from both her and heaven, before fading into the kitchen behind me. Rocky, growling warily, trotted after her.
“What are you doing here?” My words came out guarded, stiff. We were both blushing by the time Blake reached for a hug.
“Happy birthday, Reese,” Blake whispered into my ear. He smelled like cedar, spices, and morning. We held onto each other for a long moment and when we pulled away, ever so slightly, he offered the balloon.
“This is a rather extravagant birthday present.”
“Yeah, I was fairly certain you were in need of a balloon. I could read between the lines.” Blake winked.
“Yes. The balloon, definitely the balloon.” I fiddled with its string.
I’d thought I wanted to see Charlie, and seeing Blake unleashed a multitudinous slew of emotions.
“So this is Omaha. Wait, I can’t believe you’re in Omaha! Are you on your way to New York or Dallas? Dallas, now that’s a nice city. It’s crazy hot most of the year, but they have Mexican food that would make you cry. How many days are you in Omaha? Just today? Tomorrow too? We can paint the town red. I’m up for anything. We can talk; we can walk. Hehe, that rhymed. I really don’t know what I’m saying. I think Bernice must have spiked the morning coffee.” I forced myself to stop and drew a ragged breath.
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