ONE SMALL VICTORY (3 page)

~*~

Dressed in her good tan slacks and a silk
blouse the color of cream, Jenny opened her bedroom door and heard
snatches of conversation punctuated with the clatter of dishes
drifting from the kitchen. People, possibly lots of people, had
arrived. She winced and considered closing the door and never
coming out again. Then some long-forgotten sense of propriety told
her she shouldn’t be rude.

When she stepped into the kitchen, the first
person she saw was her mother. Time warped for one brief flash, and
Jenny was a child rushing to the comfort of her mother’s arms. The
older woman held her and crooned, “There, there. It’ll be
okay.”

Jenny allowed herself to be the child for a
moment, savoring the security of being taken care of. Then she
pulled back and looked at Helen, struck by how much the woman had
aged in the past twelve hours. Anxiety deepened the furrows on her
forehead and her hazel eyes were dull and lifeless.

“You okay, Mom?”

Her mother bit her bottom lip and nodded.

A touch on Jenny’s arm drew her attention and
she turned to see her neighbor, Millie, so impeccably proper in her
hat and gloves. Today’s black hat was topped with a small sprig of
red, silk roses, perhaps chosen to reflect the dignity of the
occasion.

“I’m not going to bother you now,” Millie
said. “Just wanted to bring something by. There’s nothing else we
can do.”

That simple statement spoke volumes and Jenny
was grateful for the kindness. It broke a chink out of the wall of
reserve she’d been trying to erect. The wall was a necessary part
of survival for a time, but she knew the danger of building it too
thick. It would be too easy to block out more than she’d
intended.

Her impulse was to hug Millie, but the older
woman had her own wall of reserve. In the six years Jenny had known
her, Millie had always been friendly but had avoided intimacy at
any level, so Jenny kept her distance as they moved toward the
entryway.

“Don’t be afraid to call if you need
anything,” Millie said.

“Thank you.”

Jenny closed the door and then walked back to
the kitchen. “Where’s Alicia?” she asked Carol who was busy washing
dishes.

“She went to get dressed before the man from
the funeral parlor gets here.”

“I don’t think I want to stay for that,”
Helen said, picking up her black leather purse from the table.
“I’ll come back later and see if Alicia would like to come to my
house for a while. Keep me company.”

For an instant, Jenny wanted to revert to
childhood again. Then she could run away with her mother and
wouldn’t have to do this. Not that she blamed her mother for
leaving. Jenny took a deep breath, remembering that lost look of
pain her mother had worn last year when they’d buried Dad. She
couldn’t ask her to replay that scene again so soon.

She kissed Helen’s cheek, which felt cool to
the touch of her lips. “That’s okay. I’ll call you later.”

~*~

Fred Hobkins was a tall, thin man who carried
an air of consolation along with a cashmere coat and a briefcase.
Jenny found his gentle manner and soft-spoken voice comforting as
he greeted her and wondered briefly if that was something he
learned at mortuary school. Are there classes in soothing and
sincere?

Jenny took his hat and coat and hung them on
the coat tree in the foyer. Then she led him toward the living
room, using the mundane task to chase that crazy question away.
Would she ever get control of her mind again? She motioned for him
to sit on the straight-back occasional chair where he could use the
corner of the coffee table for the folder he pulled out of the
leather case. She sat on the sofa, clutching a blue throw-pillow to
quiet her nervous hands. Alicia, wearing a dress for the first time
in months, sat beside her, and Scott slumped at the other end of
the couch.

Other than running a brush through his hair
that was so pale it was almost white, she couldn’t see that Scott
had done anything special for this moment. He still wore his gray
warm-ups and the black Nike tee shirt he’d put on earlier. Jenny
tried to catch his eye, to offer some gesture that would connect
them, but he kept his gaze averted.

She turned to face Hobkins when he cleared
his throat.

“We can be ready for the family viewing
tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Then it’s up to you.”

“What is?” Jenny asked, her voice coming out
in a croak.

“Whether you want an open casket for public
viewing.” He paused as if choosing his words with care. “It is
possible... considering that there were no injuries above the
neck.”

The picture that Jenny had successfully kept
at bay for the past few hours flashed vividly into her
consciousness; Michael laying cold and dead on the gurney. Her
first thought had been that they were wrong. He couldn’t be dead.
His face looked so complete. So whole. Surely he was just asleep.
But then her eyes were drawn to the horror that had been his
chest.

Without warning, the dark abyss yawned before
her, and she fought to stay out of its control.

“This is a breakdown of our various costs,”
Hobkins said, his voice like a lifeline. He slid a paper across the
coffee table while she took a deep, ragged breath, her mind again
going down a crazy path. Did he learn this in school, too?
Deflecting The Outburst 101.

“These are some of our more popular caskets,”
he continued, pulling a brochure out of the folder. “You don’t have
to decide now. Let your family look them over, and we can settle it
after we talk about a few other things.”

Jenny picked up the booklet and offered it to
Scott. “You want to look at this?”

He turned away so quickly she only caught a
glimpse of a pained expression.

“I will,” Alicia said.

Jenny looked at her daughter. “You sure?”

“Uh, huh.”

“Now.” Hobkins settled back in the chair.
“Have you given any thought to the service? What you’d like? What
you think he would have wanted?”

Jenny shrugged and looked from Scott to
Alicia, then back to Hobkins. “It’s not, uh-”

“Flowers,” Scott interrupted, his voice gruff
with emotion. “He definitely wouldn’t want flowers.”

When Jenny glanced at him, Scott softened his
tone. “At Grandpa’s funeral. He said they were a waste. And the
smell made him want to puke.”

Hobkins cleared his throat. “Flowers are
optional, of course. Although people might send them. That’s
something we can’t control.”

Jenny nodded, wondering why Michael had never
told her he hated flowers. Then she had to smile. Of course he
wouldn’t have said that. The selling of flowers had put the meals
on the table for the past six years.

If Hobkins noticed the smile, he didn’t let
on. He continued in his soft, soothing voice. “What about the
service itself? Do you belong to a church?”

“Not formally,” she said. “Sometimes we went
to that little Catholic church, but...”

“Michael liked that other church on Main
Street,” Alicia offered. “The one that has the sign out front with
the messages. He thought that was cool.”

Jenny bit hard on her lower lip. How could I
not know this about my own son?

“That would be Calvary Baptist,” Hobkins
said, and the interruption to her self-damning thoughts again came
like a life-saver. “We’ve worked with Pastor Poole before. I’m sure
he’d be willing to let you have the service there. Or we could have
it at our facility with him presiding.”

Jenny focused on a small acne scar on the
man’s cheek, trying to still the whirl in her head. So many
decisions. So many emotions. There was no way she trusted herself
to decide anything.

“We’ll have to think about that, too,” she
said.

“That will be fine.” Hobkins shuffled a paper
to the bottom of the stack. “Do you have family coming from out of
town?”

She nodded. “Uh, my brother. He’s in Ohio,
and, uh, Michael’s father from California.”

“Have they been notified?”

Jenny paused to consider how to answer and
Scott nudged her. Looking at him she knew the question he was
silently asking. “Yes, I tried again,” she whispered, hoping
Hobkins didn’t pick up on the tension.

What could she say if he did? She didn’t want
to explain the whole sordid mess of her life for the past six
years. That wouldn’t serve any useful purpose. But to simply say
she hadn’t talked to her ex-husband yet left the subject open for
too many interpretations. None of which made her look good.

Hobkins leaned forward again. “Three days is
pretty common,” he said. “But we can wait longer.”

“Three days will be sufficient,” Jenny said.
“Everyone who wants to be here will make it by then.”

CHAPTER THREE

“What’s so damn important you had to get me
out of a meeting?”

Jenny faltered at the force of Ralph’s
antagonism coming across a thin wire of communication like some
insidious emotional cancer. She gripped the telephone receiver
until her fingers burned. “Your son.”

“If there’s some kind of trouble we can
discuss it-”

“Ralph, will you please just listen.” Jenny
hesitated, some inner core of compassion trying to keep her voice
gentle.

“I have half a mind to-”

“Ralph, it’s Michael-”

“What fool thing did you let him do now?”

Again, a deep stab of pain, but Jenny fought
the urge to attack him with angry words. She could never be that
cruel. “Please Ralph. Just let me... He’s...” She paused again,
finding the word so incredibly hard to say. “...dead.”

There was a moment of silence until she heard
a quick intake of breath from the other end of the line. She sat on
the edge of her bed to give him time.

“Oh, my God,” Ralph said, his anguish
becoming a part of hers over the miles that separated them. “When
did it happen?”

“Last night. It was-”

“Last night? And you just now got around to
calling me?”

“Don’t yell. I tried to call before. You
weren’t home all night.” She stopped before adding the familiar old
refrain, ‘where were you, Ralph?’ But he picked up the melody line
anyway.

“What I do is my business.”

Jenny took a deep breath and let it out in a
slow hiss. “Could we please not fight? Not now.”

In the long silence that followed, she got up
and paced the small confines of her room. Then she heard him exhale
in a long sigh.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

Again silence. Into the void she offered a
gesture of peace. “If you come we can just be two parents who’ve
shared and lost a son. We can put everything else on hold.”

Still no words from him, and she felt another
flicker of compassion. Some part of him had to care, had to be
hurting. “Just call me, okay. Let me know when you’re coming.”

She pushed the disconnect button and leaned
her forehead against the wall. I can’t do this. How am I supposed
to make all these decisions? Handle all these details? I just want
to go someplace and die.

Her inclination was to slide down the wall
and huddle in the corner, but she pulled away from the temptation.
Go outside, some inner voice told her. Nothing is ever so terrible
outside.

Stepping off the back porch, Jenny was struck
by a brilliance of light that made everything sharp and crystal
clear. The huge expanse of sky was a rich, deep blue with only an
occasional wisp of white, backlit by the sun. The air was crisp,
fresh, incredibly alive.

The voice had been right. Despair could not
live long in such a setting.

Jenny walked down the sidewalk toward a
weathered lawn chair under the sprawling elm tree that had started
dropping leaves in random piles of yellow and brown. She had to
step with care over the gaping cracks in the pavement. She’d wanted
to get the walkway fixed for as long as she’d owned the house, but
somehow life’s essentials always bumped it to the bottom of her
list.

A sense of rightness settled on her as she
sat down, the warmth of the sun touching her cheek like a caress.
Then a flutter of movement caught her eye, and she turned to see a
Monarch butterfly sailing in lazy circles on the wind. The
brilliance of orange and brown against the fading grass was
striking, and Jenny was caught up in the butterfly’s dance. It lit
briefly on the edge of her watering can, opening its wings in an
innocent display of beauty, then lifted again to find another
morsel of nectar in the bed of wildflowers along the fence.

As the butterfly soared, Jenny could almost
feel some part of her spirit lifting with it. Butterflies always
made her feel that way. As if, like Peter Pan, all she had to do
was believe and she could fly with them.

When she was twelve, she’d told her friend
Angie that. The other girl had laughed. Told Jenny that was the
dumbest thing she’d ever heard.

Jenny smiled at the memory. Their friendship
had almost ended when she wouldn’t help catch butterflies for a
collection. The idea of drowning the poor creatures in alcohol had
been more than she could stand. Angie argued back that butterflies
didn’t live long anyway, but that didn’t sway Jenny. No matter how
short the life span was, the creatures deserved every minute of
it.

So did Michael.

The thought caught her off guard and cast a
shadow on the moment as effectively as the cloud that brushed
across the sun. She didn’t want to think about the injustice of it
all. That only made her furious, and she wasn’t sure if the fury
was harder to bear than the pain.

The back door opened with a loud bang, and
she glanced over to see Scott step out.

“Phone for you,” he said.

Jenny reached for the handset, but he held
back. “Did you talk to Dad?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Is he coming?”

Jenny went out on a limb. “Yes.”

To avoid any more questions, she took the
phone and hurried past him into the house.