The Empty Nesters

by Brown, Carolyn

  “They’ll be so excited.” Joanie retrieved her phone from the bedroom. “And we can write letters to them on the back of the paper where we print the pictures. I figure we can get several on one page.”

  Diana followed her down the steps, her mind on which pictures would be best to send. “Good morning,” she sing-songed as she headed through the kitchen to help Tootsie set the table. “What is that scrumptious smell? Is it pumpkin?”

  “That’s right.” Luke winked. “We’ve got bacon quiche and then pumpkin tarts for dessert.”

  “He’s showing off,” Tootsie teased. “But ain’t a one of us going to complain, are we, girls?”

  “No, ma’am,” they all answered in unison.

  “I’m not showing off. It’s just that some mornings are better than others, and this is one of them,” Luke declared.

  “Did y’all talk or something?” Tootsie whispered to Diana.

  “We did, and it’s all worked out. We will be dating when we get home, but we’re taking it very slow,” Diana answered.

  “Good,” Tootsie said. “I was damn tired of the tension around here. I can take you girls bickering, because that’s just joking around with each other, and sisters oftentimes argue. But I didn’t like that you and Luke were uncomfortable with each other.”

  “Me, either,” Diana said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Everything settled into a new routine by Friday. Late at night, Diana would sneak out of the house and spend a few hours with Luke, then make it back to her room before daybreak. She’d forgotten it was even her birthday until she came out of her morning shower to the smell of cinnamon floating up the stairs.

  “Would you hurry up?” Tootsie yelled from the bottom of the stairs. “Luke is putting the icing on the cinnamon rolls, and they’re best when they’re right out of the oven.”

  Diana couldn’t have wiped the smile off her face if she’d sucked all the juice from a lemon. She’d mentioned to Luke that she loved cinnamon rolls night before last. “I smell them, and I’m on my way.”

  “Happy birthday!” All four of the women pointed to the table where Luke was busy lighting a candle that he’d placed right in the middle of a pan of iced cinnamon rolls.

  “Blow it out and make a wish,” Tootsie said.

  Diana whipped her hair to one side, leaned down and closed her eyes, and blew out the candle. “I thought I would be blowing out candles on my cake later on today.”

  “You will.” Luke cut sections, put one on each plate, and passed them out to everyone. “This is just the first of two or three birthday wishes you get to make today.”

  Carmen forked a bite into her mouth. “Delicious. Now, Diana, we want to know what you wished for.”

  “Not until she takes a bite, or it won’t come true,” Tootsie said as she dipped her first bite in her coffee.

  Diana cut off a bite, dipped it in coffee, and quickly got it into her mouth before it fell off the fork. “You should forget techie stuff and invest in a café, Luke.”

  “Your wish?” Joanie asked.

  “I wished that someday we could bring our daughters here for a vacation,” Diana answered.

  Tootsie wiped her mouth with a paper napkin with HAPPY BIRTHDAY printed on it. “That can be arranged anytime they all got leave. One or all three can come here with y’all or with all of us. It’s open to whoever wants to use it at any time.”

  “Thank you,” Diana said. “Tell us about your honeymoon here. Weren’t your folks still living then?”

  “Sure they were. Granny and Grandpa had moved into Clarksville to be near her sister, and they gave the place to my folks. I was born right here in this house. Then when me and Smokey got married, Mama and Daddy went on down to Granny’s house for a week so we could have our honeymoon alone.” Tootsie got a faraway look in her eyes as she talked about it.

  “What happened at the end of the week?” Carmen asked.

  “They came home in time to see us off to Smokey’s first duty station in Georgia. Mama cried when I left. I cried all the way across Louisiana. Smokey didn’t know what to do with me. Then we stopped for gas, and I went to the bathroom. The ladies’ room had an old cracked mirror above the sink, and I stared at my reflection a long time.” Tootsie took the time to eat a few more bites before she continued. “I decided that I loved Smokey more than my folks, my friends, and anything else in the world. So I dried my tears and bought a Coca-Cola in a bottle. That’s the only way they came in those days, and I got myself a candy bar to go with it. I promised myself that when I got done with those two things, I was going to make the best of my new life in Georgia. And that if Smokey had to go to Siberia, I’d go with him with a smile on my face.”

  “And you did, right?” Joanie asked.

  “Never had to go to Siberia, but the two winters we spent in the German mountains, I thought I might freeze plumb to death,” Tootsie giggled. “But enough about me. Tell me about your best birthday and your worst one ever, Diana.”

  “Worst was the year that Rebecca was born. She was six weeks old, and Gerald had to leave again two days before my birthday. Looking back, I probably had postpartum depression. Strangely enough, my best birthday was the same one. Carmen and Joanie had both just moved into base housing, one on either side of me. They each had a baby, too, and their husbands were on the newly formed team with Gerald, and our husbands had left on the same mission. They came over that evening with a casserole and their daughters, and we spent half the night talking about everything,” Diana said.

  Carmen reached for a third cinnamon roll. “We’ve sure been through a lot since that evening. I felt like I was about to drown, and meeting y’all was a lifeboat.”

  Before she’d taken the first bite, her phone rang. She recognized the number as being the lawyer she’d talked to a couple of times about the divorce. “Hello, this is Carmen Walker.”

  “Miz Walker, this is Lester Thomas. I’ve got the revised divorce papers in my hands. Tootsie said it was all right if I called your husband’s lawyer and talked to him. This looks much better than that first one, but you are still entitled to alimony if you’d like to pursue that,” he said.

  “Eli told me about the revision, and I’ve decided to sign it. If you could mail it to me, that would be great,” she said.

  “I’ll drop it in the post office this afternoon. If you are sure about this, just sign it, and mail it back to me. I’ll take care of the rest of it,” he said.

  “We don’t have to go to court or see each other?” she asked.

  “Not if you agree on everything. His lawyer and I will meet with the judge in chambers. I’ll file it and then send you a final copy. Maybe you should think about it for a while. Once it’s signed, you can’t go back and ask for alimony. It appears the house you have is the only shared property, and it still has about seven years left on the mortgage. Are you willing to take that on with no job and no alimony? You could at least ask that he make the payments for the first year so you can get your feet under you,” Mr. Thomas said.

  “I’ve got a job waiting for me when we get back to Sugar Run, and I want as little to do with him as possible. I’m ready to sign and get it over with. I want to thank you for all your help, though. Please send the bill—”

  “Oh, no payment is necessary,” he butted in before she could finish. “Smokey was an old golfing buddy, and Tootsie worked for me for years. Smokey talked about you three ladies a lot—like y’all were kinfolks, so let me do this in his memory.”

  “Then thank you very much.” Carmen made a mental note to take the lawyer a basket of homemade cookies and breads when she got home.

  Everyone around the breakfast table was staring at her when she ended the call. “You probably heard enough to know that was the lawyer,” she explained. “He’s mailing the papers here. I will sign them and send them back. I’m hoping it’s all done by Thanksgiving so when we take turns around the table sayin’ what we’re thankful for, I can simply say ‘closure.’
”

  “And start off the new year with a new life,” Luke encouraged.

  “Amen. And, honey, you don’t need anything Eli has in the way of financial help,” Tootsie declared. “I’ve got more money than I’ll ever spend, so if you get in a bind, you just let me know.”

  “Thank you, but I called my friend last night and told her I’d be there for work on December fifteenth. That’ll give me a few days to get settled at home before I start. She said the first day will just be paperwork, but after that I’ll be working from eight to five every day, and I can have all the overtime I want,” Carmen said. “I’d have mentioned it first thing this morning, but this is not about me today. It’s Diana’s birthday.”

  “And what better present could I have than knowing that you’re actually about to have closure and that you have a job,” Diana said. “That’s just the best birthday present ever.”

  “Do y’all realize that in three weeks, we’ll all be at our daughters’ graduation? And Brett will be home, and the divorce will be done with?” Joanie asked.

  “Life sure has taken some strange twists and turns for all of us in the past seven weeks, hasn’t it?” Carmen got up and brought the coffeepot to the table to refill all their cups. “It’s been good to be here in Scrap, so thank you again, Tootsie.”

  “Aww, pshaw!” Tootsie waved away the words with a flick of her hand. “It’s me that’s got the blessing. I was crazy with grief, but coming home has helped me come to terms with Smokey’s leaving me so fast.”

  Luke pointed at the ceiling and frowned. “I think I hear sleet hitting the roof. I hope we don’t lose power again or, worse yet, have an ice storm closer to the time when we need to leave for the graduation.”

  Carmen went to the window and pulled back the curtains. “That’s exactly what you hear, but we’ve got lots of firewood cut, and there’s still two or three bottles of lamp oil in the pantry, so we should be fine. And if there’s ice on the road when we need to leave, we’ll get out some skis.”

  “Or hire us a sled and some mules to pull it,” Tootsie laughed.

  “I’m going to take mail out to the box and see if we’ve got letters before the ground gets slick.” Luke pushed back from the table and headed to the living room for his coat. “Tornadoes and now an ice storm. Never saw such crazy weather in northeast Texas. Have you, Aunt Tootsie?” He didn’t wait for an answer but disappeared out the front door.

  “Answer is yes, I have. The winter before me and Smokey got married, it iced over up here, and we didn’t get mail for a whole week. Smokey and I wrote to each other every day, and I thought I’d plumb die without his letters,” she said. “Weather is like life. It ain’t nothing but a cycle. We’ll have some cold winters, and then we’ll have some that ain’t bad at all.”

  “Know what life really is?” Carmen asked.

  “Breathing, eating, sleeping, loving,” Joanie offered.

  “No,” Carmen giggled. “It’s a four-letter word.”

  “Damn straight.” Tootsie laughed with her. “And them other four-letter words come in right handy when I’m pissed at the world.”

  “You got it, Tootsie.” Carmen’s giggles were so infectious that everyone started in laughing. “And just so y’all know, if Luke brings in some wood that already smells a little scorched, it’s because I unloaded a whole wheelbarrow full of four-letter words on those logs when I was splitting them.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  They had three days of icy weather, but Carmen insisted on going to the mailbox at the end of the lane every day. The sooner the divorce papers arrived, the sooner she could sign them and be done with it. The first day, she did some fancy footwork to keep from falling either flat on her face or on her butt a couple of times before she made it to the mailbox. The second day, she took a tumble five feet from her destination and had to crawl to the mailbox post to get her feet solid under her again. The third day, she kicked the post. There wasn’t even a letter from one of the girls or a damned bill for her efforts.

  She heaved a long sigh of relief when she saw the big yellow envelope on the fourth day. “Thank you, God!” she muttered through the scarf wrapped snugly around her face. She gathered up all the mail and stuffed it inside the coat that had belonged to Smokey. It hung to her knees, and the sleeves were rolled up, but it was warmer than the lightweight jacket she’d brought from Sugar Run. Who would have ever thought that the weather could be so different from one part of Texas to another? Bending her head against the bitter cold, she hurried back to the house.

  For the next three days, everyone in the house went over the divorce decree, one sentence at a time. Tootsie called the lawyer several times so he could explain the legalese. One week after Diana’s birthday and with everyone gathered around her, Carmen signed the papers and dated them November twenty-second. It was just her name on the last page in a seven-sheet stack of paper, but somewhere near the bottom it really should have said THE END.

  “Six weeks and two days since Eli got this whole process started. Shouldn’t I feel something?” She’d thought there would be relief or perhaps a fresh burst of anger, but there was nothing at all.

  “Feelin’ a little numb, are you?” Diana asked.

  Carmen nodded. “Like I’m hanging in space waiting for . . .” She paused. “I don’t know what, but it feels like it’ll shock the shit out of me when it arrives.”

  “It won’t,” Diana told her. “It’s over now, but complete closure takes a while. For me, it was when I realized that I hadn’t thought about Gerald in a whole week.”

  “Then I may never have it, because every day something reminds me of him.” Carmen slipped the stack of paper into the envelope and sealed it. “Makes me wonder what he thought when he signed his name.”

  “Probably that as soon as he got the final decree, he could rush off to the courthouse and marry that girl.” Joanie covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m sorry. That was harsh, wasn’t it?”

  “Life is harsh,” Tootsie said. “But he’s fixin’ to find out the same thing. Being a full-time husband and father isn’t easy. I remember when Smokey got out of the service. It took some serious adjustments for us to get used to living together. I used to wish to God he’d get a part-time job and get out of my hair for a little while each day, but we finally settled into a lifestyle that we came to love. Delores said that she had the same problems when her Jimmy retired. Eli is going to have even more adjustments than you will.”

  “Think I’ll ever get used to this new way of life?” Carmen asked.

  Diana laid a hand on her shoulder. “Yes, you will. Want me to take that out to the mailbox? It was right nice of the lawyer to send a stamped self-addressed envelope along with the papers.”

  “I think it’ll help if I do it myself,” Carmen answered. “Thank goodness Smokey left behind a heavy coat for us to share for the outdoor chores. I’m hoping to have the final papers back by Thanksgiving.”

  “If they don’t make it by then, I’ll wrap up a piece of paper for your Christmas present that will have the word closure written in glitter on it,” Tootsie said.

  “That may be the only way I get it.” Carmen smiled as she took the heavy coat from the hook inside the kitchen door. She picked up the envelope and almost tripped over her kitten, Sugar, romping around the floor with her two siblings. She laid the envelope and the coat to the side and sat down on the floor to let all three kittens crawl up into her lap.

  “Y’all need to name your kittens.” She looked up at Luke and Diana, who were sitting on the sofa. “Poor babies should’ve been named before they opened their eyes, but now that they can see, they’re feeling unloved.”

  “Simba, from The Lion King. That’s my boy’s name,” Luke said.

  “Nala,” Diana said. “That’s Simba’s friend in the movie.”

  “Sugar, darlin’, I want you to meet Nala and Simba, your siblings. We’ll plan playdates for you, so don’t be sad when we separate you. Now be nice while I’
m gone,” she said as she stood and put on the coat.

  “I’ll go out this afternoon and bring in the mail,” Luke offered. “Here’s hoping we all get letters today and that they aren’t bills.”

  “I won’t argue. It’s colder’n a mother-in-law’s kiss out there.” Carmen started for the door. “And I can testify to that.”

  But not anymore, Smokey reminded her. No more trying to please a woman who was never going to think you were good enough for her son, and never again having to sit through a tense meal with her or spend any time with her at all.

  “Well, that’s certainly one good thing that’s coming out of this,” Carmen muttered to herself as she stepped off the porch. Then it hit her that Luke had been going to get the mail pretty often the past couple of weeks. She and Diana and Joanie had been taking turns taking their outgoing letters out in the morning, but Luke was often the one who brought in the mail later in the day. Maybe, she thought, he just likes yelling “Mail call.”

  Or maybe there’s something more going on, Smokey whispered so softly that she jumped to see if he was behind her.

  “I think today I’ll beat him out here and see who’s writing to him. I’ll shoot him myself if he’s flirting with Diana and getting letters from some other hussy.” She put the flag up on the mailbox, slid her envelope inside, and trudged back to the house. The mail person was slow that day, or else they had no letters, because there was nothing for her to take back to the house, but at least the divorce papers were there for him to pick up when he did get there. That brought a good-size measure of closure to her.

  Since it was her day for kitchen duty, she forgot about the mail until Luke came inside that afternoon and yelled out the familiar words: “Mail call.”

  He had letters for everyone, including himself. Carmen watched as he shoved his letter into his hip pocket, and she vowed that she’d not only find out who was writing to him but that he’d pay if he hurt Diana. Her friend had fought a long battle before she would even say that she’d go out with him, so if this wasn’t going to be an exclusive relationship, then Diana deserved to know up front.