Just One Thing (4 page)

“Gracie McCain, if you don’t get up you’re going to be late for school,” Lexie shouted up the stairs. Her youngest was the
busiest of the children. Gracie was always trying to cram just one more thing into her days. Which meant that when she finally fell asleep, she slept like a rock.

And getting this particular rock to roll in the morning was hard. Getting her to move in time to get to school could be almost impossible.

“Mom,” Connie whined, “Conner’s so gross. He—”

This was Lexie’s life and most days she was honest enough to confess, at least to herself, that she loved every minute of it. The twins were ten—a complete two-handed age that Gracie, and her not-quite-there nine, sometimes resented.

They aggravated and delighted Lexie in turn. She told friends that her kids kept life interesting. That was a curse. May you live in interesting times. She thought maybe it was a Chinese curse. Or maybe Japanese?

She was pondering where that curse originated when Lee came into the kitchen and kissed her forehead. It was an absentminded sign of affection. “Hey, honey. I’ve got that meeting tonight and—”

The phone interrupted Lee. Interruptions were part of their lives, but not phone calls at seven thirty in the morning. Lexie felt a rush of trepidation as she picked up the receiver. “Hello.”

“Lexie, it’s me.” The me in question was her mother.

Marion Jones Morrow was a prominent Erie attorney who was disappointed that her daughter hadn’t lived up to her true potential and become an equally high-powered something or other. Lexie had felt that disappointment keenly for as long as she could remember, but they both pretended it wasn’t standing there between them. Always between them.

“Hi, Mom. What’s up?”

Lee blew her a kiss and started for the door as Gracie finally came downstairs wearing what appeared to be the same outfit she’d had on the day before.

“It’s your father. A stroke, they think. We’re at the hospital.”

It felt like the moment hung there for minutes, hours even. Lexie finally managed to call her husband. “Lee.” Her voice stopped him in his tracks. “I’ll be right there, Mom.”

Her father? He couldn’t be sick. “My dad. A stroke,” she explained as she hung up the phone, snagged her keys, and started toward the door.

“Do you need me to drive you?”

She shook her head. “No, you just take care of the kids.”

“Lex, I love you.”

The words were the balm she needed. “Love you, too.”

Erie was small enough that the drive from their Glenwood Hills home to the hospital on the Bayfront wasn’t a long one. Even with the morning traffic it only took ten minutes, but it felt like an eternity to Lexie as she parked her van and hurried into the ER. “I’m looking for John. John Morrow,” she told the girl at the desk behind the glass window.

A tech showed her back. And there he was—the once bigger than life, always in motion John Morrow—with her mother at his side. Lexie didn’t need a fancy medical degree to see that he was gone. He was small and motionless, two words that never described her father while he was living.

Her mother looked up as Lexie came into the cubby. “They said he was gone before he got here. There wasn’t a chance . . .”

Her father had always been her champion. He’d been her companion and comforter.

She remembered when she was in seventh grade—just half a step from her teens. In retrospect she realized she was already riding the wave of new hormones.

She’d come home from school, upset about . . . She couldn’t remember. She simply remembered being sure that her life was over. She remembered crying to her father, in that overly dramatic way that went with the age.

He hadn’t tried to tell her that everything would be fine. He’d held her and let her cry. He’d whispered, “No matter what, you’ll always have me.”

She looked at his body and knew that had been a lie. She wasn’t ready to let him go. She still needed him. When things got bad and she wasn’t sure what to do, she could always count on him to hold her and remind her that she’d always have him.

Lexie loved him, heart and soul. She loved her mother, too, but her mom pushed and prodded. She had always wanted Lexie to prove that her generation’s fight for women’s rights was worth it. Her father just wanted Lexie to be happy.

He’d lied. She wouldn’t always have him.

He’d left her. And missing him would be an ever-present feeling.

Lexie never cried, at least not in front of anyone. Not even Lee. He’d marveled at how stoic she was when she’d given birth. How she faced everything head-on.

But as Lexie held her mother and let her cry, she didn’t feel stoic; she felt shattered.

She talked to the nurse, called a funeral home and . . . It was a long, long list of things that needed to be done. Lexie did them all without shedding a tear.

She didn’t even bother to wonder why.

“My father died, and I didn’t have a chance to say good-bye. To tell him how much he meant to me.

“When the family got up and got ready for church that Sunday, I didn’t go.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I know I should be able to come up with something better to say than that, but . . .” He paused as if searching for that something better, then gave a small shake of his head. “There simply aren’t any words other than I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said. I’d often wished I could come up with something better than just a “thanks” or “thank you” as an expression of appreciation, but like Sam, I’d never been able to.

“You haven’t gone back to church since then?”

“No. I might have. I was actually planning to, but . . .” I took the last sip of my beer. “I’d better be going.”

Sam nodded. “I understand.”

I was walking toward the door when Sam called my name. “Lexie?”

I turned.

“Thank you.”

I wasn’t sure what he was thanking me for, but I didn’t ask. That memory had taken too much out of me to care. I just wanted to walk home and nudge Angus over so I could crawl in bed.

As I reached the end of the bar, a hand snagged my wrist. “I couldn’t help overhearing,” the regular at the end of the bar, who I’d recently learned was named Jerry, said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry for your loss.”

Jerry was a man on the north side of fifty. Maybe even sixty. His face was lined, as if years in the sun had left a road map on it.

“It was years ago,” I said.

“Time doesn’t matter when you’re talking about the pain of losing someone.”

Maybe it didn’t, I reflected as I walked down the road toward the cottage.

I walked in the ever-darkening evening, very much aware that God was there . . . and wishing I could figure out how to reach him and wondering if I found a way to do it, would it help?

I dreamed that night. It was a snow day in Erie, which meant the city schools were canceled. The twins were maybe seven, which would have made Gracie six. We built a tent in the middle of the living room out of blankets and quilts. We played there all day as the city got buried by a horrible lake-effect snowstorm. In our tent, we didn’t even see the snow.

Gracie crawled on my lap and whispered, “This is a magic tent, Mommy.”

And it was magic. In that tent, for that day, the rest of the world ceased to exist.

When I woke up, I could still smell Gracie’s shampoo. I could hear the kids laughing. We’d all felt safe in that magic tent.

I tried to hold on to the memory . . . to the dream. But Angus nudged me, telling me it was time to wake up and feed him.

I did, but the dream left me with a lingering feeling that I needed to see the kids.

Since I moved to the cottage, I’d made it a point to call them at least once a week, but it had been months since I’d seen them in person.

Talking about losing my father had loosened something in me. Even after I lost him, I held on to the knowledge that he had loved me.

I needed to be sure the kids knew I loved them.

I called them and invited them to dinner at the cottage. I thought about saying, “Meet me at the city house next weekend,” but I wasn’t quite ready for that, so I settled for inviting them to the cottage on Saturday night.

Cleveland is a couple hours away, so I told Connie that she was welcome to spend the night. She’s the only one to move away from Erie. Morrows have lived in Erie for generations. It was as if that initial migration from Ireland here was all the travel the family could manage. Morrows never moved.

Except Connie. Sometimes it made me sad, but since I’d come to accept that I now lived outside Erie myself, I understood. Even before everything happened, I understood. Conner had always been my easy one. Gracie my peacemaker. Connie my restless spirit.

Maybe it was wrong to label your kids, but I don’t think I chose their labels. I don’t think I forced them into some niche I’d created. They invented themselves. I just understood them, or at least tried to.

I spent the Saturday making a nice dinner. I rarely cooked anymore. It didn’t seem worth it when it was just me and Angus. Sometimes I made an occasional omelet, but rarely much more than that.

At dinner, the kids caught me up on their lives and their adventures. Conner had a new girl he was seeing, but not seriously. He offered to come mow what yard I had here at the cottage, but I assured him I could manage.

After an apple crisp dessert, he headed back to Erie, which left only Connie and me. I was used to the silence when I was out here with only Angus, but it seemed too quiet with Connie here. After years when they were kids and chaos ruled, the silence was unnerving. “Would you like to go for a quick walk with Angus and me?”

Somehow being quiet outside didn’t seem as bad.

“Sure, Mom.”

We walked for a while. Angus flushed a turkey from some underbrush. It scared Angus more than it startled us. We both laughed at the sight of the giant dog, quivering because a turkey had flown at him.

“He does keep things interesting,” I said. “This spring, he met up with a skunk. I’m not sure I told you.” Connie shook her head, indicating that I hadn’t. “I bathed him in tomato juice, then finally in peroxide and baking soda.”

“That’s a lot of dog to bathe,” Connie commented.

He was. I’d bought Angus long after she’d left the house, so they were friendly, but they weren’t overly attached. She’d made comments suggesting I might have been better off with a smaller dog, but there were a lot of empty spaces in my life and I figured it took a very large dog to start to fill all those voids.

“Mom,” Connie said a while later.

“Yes, honey?”

“When’s the last time you left the house? I mean, other than running to the grocery store or bank.”

I knew that she was asking about more than if I’d become a total recluse. “I’m busy here. I’ve been working on a new project and it’s going really well.”

“Can I see it?”

No, I couldn’t share the piece yet. I wasn’t sure why. It had as much to do with her as it did me. But right now, I needed to be selfish, to hold on to it myself.

“When it’s done,” I promised. “But just to set your mind at ease, I go out every Monday night.”

“Where?”

“I meet friends in town.”

Now, maybe a month ago, that would have been stretching the truth to the point of being a lie, but things had changed. Mondays were no longer me forcing myself to leave the house. Somewhere along the line, I’d started looking forward to going out. And it wasn’t the Killian’s, though it was a very good lager. It was Sam. He’d become a friend. Telling him just one thing a week . . . it helped.

I thought of Jerry, offering me condolences. Maybe he was a friend, too.