by Brandon Dean
I nodded. “Sounds fine to me,” I replied, excited by the idea of spending more time with her.
The rest of our time on that couch was spent talking about basic things, things you would typically know before you had a deep conversation like we’d had. Guess the whole world was backward.
Hazel had been born October 14, 1926. Same year I was born. She was still sixteen, though; I had a few months on her. Her favorite color was yellow. I had never met anyone whose favorite color was yellow before, but I also hadn’t met anyone like her before. Her favorite food was scrambled eggs, but with tomato catsup mixed in. She’d once tried to have a boyfriend, but her grandpa had run him off when he’d found out, using a twelve-gauge to intimidate him. Thanks, Art, I thought as I listened. The more I heard, the more I knew she was far from perfect. But luckily for me, I didn’t want perfect. I wanted her.
Time passed, and night fell. According to the broken clock, though, it was only 3:00 p.m. Hazel’s eyelids drooped heavily, and she slipped into sleep on the opposite end of the sofa from me. I grabbed a blanket from the backrest and tucked it around her, then spent another hour or so watching the clock, hearing the sounds of my mother groaning and a rustle coming from upstairs. I hoped all was going well.
And then I heard it.
Crying.
A tiny, fragile, and innocent cry. It was the baby.
I shook Hazel awake.
“Geez, Louise, wise guy! What is it?” Hazel asked in irritation.
I didn’t have to say anything, though, because as soon as she heard the cries, her eyes grew wide in excitement.
Both of us hurried up the steps and opened Mom’s door.
“Boy or girl?” I demanded to know as soon as I barged in.
Mom was propped against the headboard of the bed, obviously exhausted, crying tears of joy, with a little bundle swaddled in her arms. “It’s a girl, Clint,” she whispered. “It’s your baby sister, Violet.”
I walked over to get a better look. She was adorable. “She’s so precious,” I said.
Mom smiled back and gently held the baby out to me. “Why don’t you get to know her?” she said.
I reached out to take the baby. “Shhh, shhh . . . Good girl,” I said to Violet, gently rocking her back and forth in my arms.
Hazel peeked around me, trying to get a good look for herself.
“Would you like to hold her?” I asked.
“Really? You mean it?” Hazel asked.
“Of course I do.” I handed Violet to Hazel, and, in an instant, she stopped crying. “I think she likes you!” I teased.
“Well, who could blame her?” Hazel replied smartly.
Hazel was squinting as she tried to make out the details of Violet’s face. I walked over to Beverly to whisper in her ear.
“In the bathroom cabinet beneath the sink,” she said to me.
I headed down the hall and into the bathroom, opening the doors beneath the sink. There they were, in a pristine black leather case. Hazel’s glasses. I returned to Mom’s room to give them to Hazel. “Put these on. You’ll be able to see her better,” I instructed.
Hazel groaned and traded Violet for the glasses, donning a pair of thick black frames that looked almost too big for her head. She looked down at Violet one more time. “Oh, my goodness!” she squealed. “She’s beautiful! Isn’t she beautiful?” Hazel said, looking me directly in the eyes with a wide, sincere smile.
“You have no idea,” I said back.
Chapter 10
About a month went by. My injuries had almost entirely healed. It was a good feeling, getting my physical health back.
Mom stayed in bed for a few days after Violet was born, recovering. But she was tough, and she seemed to bounce back fast.
Violet’s rosy-red newborn shade faded before long, and I could finally get a good look at her features. She looked just like Dad, and it wasn’t until I saw how much she looked like him that I truly noticed how much I didn’t. Sure, he and I shared a feature here and there, but Violet? She may as well have been Dad with wisps of hair and baby fat.
She had to be fed every two or three hours, waking us with her incessant crying, making my eyes pop wide in the wee hours. Not a single time, though, was I upset to hear her cry. That child was a monument to all of my persistence, Mom’s fortitude, and Dad’s selflessness. That child—along with Mom, Hazel, and Beverly—was a reason to fight another day.
Mom liked to rock back and forth with Violet swaddled like a caterpillar in a cocoon, singing seemingly every song she knew. “You Are My Sunshine”—she loved to sing that one, and Violet loved hearing it, twisting her wobbly little head to look around with an adorably gummy grin. Before then, I’d never known how good a singer Mom was, but I imagined hers was a voice that could command rooms.
She loved Violet fiercely, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, she was happy.
Beverly taught me a few things, and I could’ve sworn that she saw me as her own grandson, at times. For times when food was scarce out in the wild, Beverly had stocked a lot of supplies. It hadn’t been because she’d anticipated the bombs—she was just the type to make sure she didn’t have to go to the grocer more often than she had to. The outdoors and her family were all she needed most days, and I took a lesson from that.
Beverly showed me how to cook properly, and I was thankful for it. We had plenty of food to last us for a while. Between Beverly’s supplies and the garden, we could afford to spare some for cooking lessons, even if they went awry. And in a home surrounded by women, cooking wasn’t such a bad skill to have. I could hardly have lived it down if I’d been the only one in the house who struggled to boil a pot of water while everyone else could make pastries and filling dinners in a snap. I guessed she was showing me how to pull my own weight, but in a different kind of way than I might have expected. And I could tell she had just as much fun teaching as I had learning.
Beverly kept mementos, photographs, trinkets, and everything of the like. I would spend hours late at night sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen with her, sipping on a mug of hot tea and skimming through the pages of old photo albums. I would never have pegged her as having once been a professional model, but she had. Not a fashion model, though—a model for women’s cosmetics. Beverly’s picture had once been plastered in every magazine and newspaper across all forty-eight states. According to her, she’d had to wear a thick white powder with accents of red on her eyes, lips, and cheeks. I got a kick out of imagining that, but she said it had been the style back then. The photographs and newspaper snippets she showed me were all in black and white, so I’d had to imagine it. Even so, I could plainly see she’d been a looker back in the day. I could see where Hazel got it.
Among all the photos of herself and Hazel, Beverly showed me others. There were pictures of Hazel’s father, Beverly’s one and only child. The photos they posed for together as father and daughter indicated there was genuine love there, but it made me wonder how a person could leave his own children behind. Art and Gabe were also among the photos. Art was a larger-framed, husky sort of man, as the massive clothing I had to wear indicated. I got a look at the life he and Beverly had built together, from youngsters madly in love in their twenties to buying their first home—this home—in their early thirties. Hazel’s little brother, Gabe, was obviously your typical little kid. There were plenty of photos of him playing outside or with his die-cast toys, opening gifts on Christmas morning. Blowing out the candles of his birthday cake—a cake Beverly must’ve made herself. I swear, I could’ve tasted it through the picture. A picture is worth a thousand words, and every single one of them spoke loudly of love and happiness.
When it came to Hazel, she was an ever-flowing river of surprises. She was something else. It wasn’t long before I could describe the way she made me feel. Especially when she said my name, or laughed with me, or at me�
��didn’t matter. I’d have walked a million miles to hear it. That feeling was exactly like Dad had said, like a million little firecrackers going off in the pit of my stomach. I was in love. And I prayed that she felt the same way about me. Hell, I’d even have taken a strong liking, truth be told. I’d have taken anything I could get.
Hazel taught me how to fire a gun. Art kept a rifle similar to the one Dad had owned, the one rusting in the woods where I’d left it. Hazel had made some snarky comments before about how she’d saved me from those “puppy dogs,” and I saw firsthand how she knew her way around a stock and barrel as well as most people knew their way around their own house. She was patient with me, though, in teaching me about using the gun. I must’ve wasted twenty bullets before I could hit a stationary target, but—in my defense—they weren’t very easy to hit: old sarsaparilla bottles at the end of a long driveway. We spent an hour or two every day outside, fine-tuning my marksmanship. I knew if it came to it, it would be a significant skill to possess.
Hazel was rough and tough out there in nature, but in the house, she was much more lady-like. There was a little bit of Beverly and a little bit of Art in her, and although I’d never met Art, I could tell which was which based on what she was doing or what she said.
The girl could also draw—well. Really well. Had I not watched as she moved her pencils across blank paper, I would’ve thought the finished product was by da Vinci himself. I suppose it was possible, though, that I was a little biased. She’d told me she wanted to be a cartoonist; that was her dream. She said there was too much bad in the world, that it was too serious and too dark. All she ever wanted to do was brighten up people’s day. She sure brightened mine. She might as well have been the sun itself.
She taught me more about God, put it into a perspective that no preacher or pastor had ever been able to do. We would read near a lit candle in the kitchen every night before bed, getting up to Ecclesiastes. I kept asking myself, if God was real, why had the whole world turned upside down? It seemed I was the only person who even questioned it; Mom, Beverly, Hazel, and even Dad had all kept their faith. But after all those nights talking with Hazel and reading, I also reclaimed mine. I’d come to realize that maybe He really does have a plan. After all, if it weren’t for everything that had happened, would I have met Hazel? Didn’t there have to be some reason for all of it?
We had grown closer and closer with each day. And then came that one special night. The snow had begun to melt as it had started to get warmer, and drips from suspended icicles painted the front porch with chilled water. An old wool blanket was spread across a patch of thinning snow several feet from the porch, and we lay there together on our backs with our eyes on the night sky, another thick blanket draped over us.
Hazel raised her arm and pointed to a pattern of stars. “That one’s Orion,” she said matter-of-factly.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“Beats me!” she said with a giggle. She raised her hand again. “Ooh! That one’s the Little Dipper! See the handle?”
I squinted and desperately looked for anything that even remotely resembled a handle; I couldn’t find it. “Sure! Yeah, I see it now!” I said, not wanting to sound like an idiot.
Hazel pulled her arms back under the blanket to warm them before poking one out again. “And that one . . . that one little star up there! The brightest of the bunch—see it?”
A star, so white it shone light blue, was separated from the all the others. “Yeah, yeah, I see it,” I said.
Hazel propped herself on her side to look me directly in the eyes, the moonlight reflecting off the lenses of her glasses. “That one, that special little star, that’s your daddy looking down on you.”
I smiled at her. “You think so?” I asked.
“I know so,” Hazel replied. “ I wish I could’ve met him. Think he would’ve liked me?”
“Not a doubt in my mind,” I said.
Hazel placed her thumb on my jawline and began to trace the shape of my face. She leaned in toward me slowly. “Can I tell you something?”
“You can tell me anything, anytime,” I said.
“I think I love you, wise guy,” she said, obviously nervous.
At her words, my heart started beating as if I were walking a tightrope between two skyscrapers. “Can I tell you something back?” I asked with a wide smile.
Hazel nodded.
“I think I love you, too,” I said.
Hazel leaned in closer, and our lips met. That was the first time we’d kissed. Never had I felt so alive, and never was I so sure that I would do anything to keep that feeling.
We spent the rest of that night under those stars, our hands locked together, staring more into each other’s eyes, each other’s souls, than we did the night sky. Hazel looked happy.
I was happy.
Finally.
Chapter 11
You sure you know where you’re going?” Hazel asked impatiently.
“Yeah, I think,” I replied.
“Since when does ‘I think’ mean you’re sure?” said Hazel.
We had decided to take a trip out to the woods to look for the stuff I had left behind. I guessed it was just boredom setting in.
“I’m freezing, wise guy. Let’s call it quits on this, okay?” Hazel said, fed up with our little treasure hunt.
“Give me a minute,” I insisted. “I know it’s close.”
We continued walking for another few minutes; Hazel groaned in annoyance the whole time.
“There it is!” I exclaimed, pointing to a small black pile off in the distance. “That’s where the fire was!”
“Great. Now let’s get your junk and head home.”
“Why’s it gotta be junk?” I asked, making my way toward the old campfire.
“Because it’s a leather jacket and two nearly empty guns that have been sitting out in the snow for a month. That’s why,” she joked.
“Yeah, yeah, well, what else did we have to do today?” I asked.
“Something that doesn’t require getting frostbite up our knees, for one.”
“Oh, hush,” I said, locking eyes with her and grinning.
We arrived at the campsite, and I got on my knees to stuff everything I could find into the cold, weathered duffel. I dug through the little remaining snow surrounding the fire site and grabbed the hunting knife I’d left. The blade had weathered from its rust-spotted shine to a fully rusted brown shank. It had seen better days, but it was still useful enough to keep. The leather jacket was now drenched, and as heavy as it had been before, it felt at least double its original weight. With some persistence, though, I was able to stuff it inside the bag with just enough room to spare for the pistol. I grabbed the familiar hunting rifle and handed it to Hazel. “Can you carry this for me?” I asked.
“Why? Expecting more puppy dogs?” she said with a wink, reaching for the gun.
“Ha ha, very funny.”
“Thought you’d like it,” she said with a smile, throwing the rifle over her back by the strap.
We began our walk back home.
“Think we’ll get back by the time breakfast is ready?” Hazel asked.
“Hope so. Already got cold toes; last thing I want is a cold meal,” I replied.
“Where’d ya get that joke? A Cracker Jack box?” Hazel asked playfully.
“Yeah, it was right at the bottom,” I countered.
We heard a loud rustling noise in the woods behind us.
“What was that?” Hazel asked, stopping sharply.
Keeping my attention on the woods ahead of me, I shrugged and said, “Probably a rabbit or something.”
Hazel cocked her head to the side. “A rabbit? What kind of rabbit is that loud, wise guy?” she said, looking behind us.
“It’s nothing, Hazel. Let’s get back home.”
“You can say it’s nothing all you want, but—”
“Excuse me?” growled a man’s voice.
We turned around to see a man coming from behind a tree, his frame gaunt, the filth of his unkempt, long gray hair matching a beard. He looked like what I’d always imagined a bootlegger would have before the end of Prohibition.
“What do you need?” I asked, trying to be intimidating, straightening to stand as tall as I could.
“I’m the one with the gun, wise guy. You standing up straighter isn’t going to scare him,” Hazel whispered through the side of her mouth before looking down at my locked knees.
“Well, we can’t just shoot him,” I said.
“I’m looking for my sons. Have you seen them?” the man asked.
Hazel glanced over at me, giving me a nervous, suspicious look.
“No. We don’t know your sons, and we don’t wanna know ’em. So why don’t you just go back where you came from! Go on! Scram!” Hazel boomed, gripping the rifle tightly as a show of threat.
“Calm down,” I whispered through my teeth.
“Shh!” Hazel replied.
“Please, I’m so hungry and lost. Can you please help me?” the man pleaded, his arms in the air in surrender.
Hazel opened her mouth to say something back to him, but I intervened. “Fine,” I said to the man.
“What are you doing? Do you not see what I see? This guy looks like he eats cats or something!” Hazel grunted.
“I guess I picked a good day to be human, then,” I said.
“We have a baby and two women who couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag back home. This isn’t something to crack wise about.”
“What if he isn’t some criminal? What if he’s telling the truth? You really want leaving him to die out here on your conscience?” I asked.
“No, I guess you’re right,” Hazel said reluctantly.
“I’m gonna go check him out. Keep that rifle ready in case he tries something.”