Mariner's Compass (29 page)

June 2, 1961

Dear Jacob,

I’ve missed you so much. You left so quickly and without much explanation that I was very angry with you for a long time. I understand now and can live with it, though it saddens me that we can never see each other again. There is so much to tell you I don’t even know where to start. When I received the letter from you I almost fainted. I was sure you were dead. I have done as you asked and not told Ben about you. You’re right, it would just complicate things, and heaven knows none of us needs that right now. You would like Ben. He is a good, solid man and he loves me very much. We met in Little Rock when I was living with Ervalean. We lived with his mother for the first three years and have only been here at the ranch for two months. I am learning to be a good ranch wife. His mother is a wonderful woman who has treated me as if I were her own daughter. I miss Mother, though. It’s still hard to believe that she and Daddy have been gone for almost five years now. You never mentioned how you found me, but then I didn’t make a secret of where we were going. You always were such a clever man I suppose you found some means to track me down. It is very beautiful here (I am doing as you say and not mentioning the town and will give this to a friend to mail the next time she goes to Los Angeles). It doesn’t look at all like where we came from. I miss the thick pine trees, though oaks have their own special beauty. Speaking of beauty, did you know I have a little girl? Her name is Albenia Louise. We call her Benni. I wish you could see her. She seems to grow faster than the weeds that I pull from my flower garden every day. She was three in March, and already Ben has her riding a pony all by herself. And she’s not a bit afraid, a trait she certainly doesn’t get from me. Ben tries to get me to ride, but you know how frightened I am of animals. Except for cats. Remember the tabby we fed in the alley? I wonder what happened to her.

I stopped reading for a moment when an overwhelming sadness flickered in my chest. Closing my eyes, I tried to picture the face of the woman who’d written this letter thirty-three years ago. My memories were of photos, though, not of a real, flesh-and-blood person. Her touch was something that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall. I brought the thin blue stationery up to my nose, but any lingering scent had dissipated years ago. I stared at the letter for a moment and realized something—she wrote her
B
’s like I did. That small similarity struck me in the heart like a physical blow.

There’s so much to say I don’t know where to begin. I am happy, don’t worry about that, though I miss you and wish things could have turned out differently. I don’t yet understand why God has arranged things the way He has, but the minister at our church preached a sermon on faith last Sunday and said that if we knew what would happen every step of the way in our lives, then faith would have no meaning. To be honest, I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t want to know what is ahead of me. You always think that if you knew the future you would somehow do things different, but I don’t think many of us would. Well, Benni is waking up from her nap now so I’d better go. I’ll write again and tell you more about my life. I hope you are safe and well and have friends. The thought of you being alone breaks my heart. I wish I was there to give you a hug. I pray for you every night. Did I tell you she has your smile? All my love, your Ally Lou

Each letter was a little longer but ran along the same vein. She told a little more about me in each one, and I felt like I was watching myself grow up through my mother’s eyes. She told this man things that if she ever told my dad, he never passed on to me—like what I brought home in my pockets after playing down at the creek; how I loved fried baloney sandwiches; how the only thing that frightened me was grasshoppers, which she found odd because I’d pick up a spider or a snail without hesitation; and how, when I had just turned five, I’d climbed on the roof of the house with the intention of jumping on my pony’s back like I’d seen on television, but instead fell off, gashing my forehead. She didn’t tell my father about it when she saw I was okay, because he wouldn’t let me watch Westerns with him anymore, and she knew that would kill me.

I touched the scar on the right side of my forehead, the one I’d always had and began covering with bangs when I turned thirteen and became suddenly concerned about my looks. I’d always wondered where it had come from, and no one had ever been able to tell me.

There was something about these letters that bothered me and not just because they were my mother’s voice from the grave. It was the intimacy in them. With each one came a slow and terrifying realization that this man wasn’t just a friend, that he was more. One line repeated itself over and over in my mind.

Did I tell you she has your smile?

I shivered with an internal chill from the implication in that sentence. The thought of my mother having a lover was shocking. The thought that he might be my biological father was beyond my ability to comprehend. Desperately I tried to reason it away. Surely Daddy would have known if she’d been cheating on him? When in the world could she have seen this man, living out on the farm with Daddy and Dove and the whole Ramsey clan?

Unless she knew him before she met Daddy. I went inside and dialed Dove’s number at the museum. She answered on the second ring.

“Dove, it’s Benni.”

“Honeybun, are you all right? I heard about the fire.”

“I’m fine, really. Don’t forget, I’ve got Scout to protect me.” I hesitated, then said, “I have a quick question for you. What year did Daddy and Mama get married?”

A long silence answered me.

“Dove?”

“Have you talked to your daddy about this?”

“I’m asking you.”

Another silence, then she said, “People made mistakes back in our time too, but they did right by you. Don’t you forget that.”

“Dove, please.”

“It was 1957, but—”

“Thank you,” I interrupted, not wanting to go into this until I let it sink in. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll bring the other things you all requested, that was a large pepperoni pizza, right?”

“Make it two. We’re getting tired of canned food in here. And be careful how you talk to your daddy about this. It’s a sore spot.”

“I love you, Gramma,” I said softly and hung up.

August 2, 1957. My birthday was March 23, 1958. According to my birth certificate I weighed 8 lbs. 2 oz. at birth. By no means a premature baby. That meant my mother was probably two months’ pregnant when she and my father were married.

I went back outside and sat staring at the ocean, watching the lights sparkle like bits of broken glass on the smooth surface, wrapping myself tighter in my husband’s jacket, craving his arms around me. The fact that my mother was pregnant when she and my father were married changed everything. It occurred to me that if Daddy wasn’t my biological father, then Dove and all my aunts, uncles, and cousins were no more related to me than the man on the street corner. That I truly had no family left in this world.

I wanted to cry. There was a lot to cry for—my mother and the years I never had her; for this strange man who meant so much to her, a man who could possibly be my father; for Scout, who was lost and maybe hurt somewhere. But tears wouldn’t come. Something was stuck, like a sideways log in a river of floating mill wood, keeping everything trapped in slow moving water.

Sometime during the night, I fell asleep, my dreams troubled with vague, unsettling scenes. In one dream, I was a little girl again, lost in a huge department store, surrounded by stuffed animals that towered over me with grotesque, toothy grins. A wetness on my hand startled me awake. A soft whine broke through my grogginess.

“Scout!” I cried, and he jumped up on the lounge chair, wet and muddy and panting hard, licking my face with his rough tongue. I hugged his thick, warm body, sent a quick thanks up to God, and took him inside.

13

AFTER WASHING AND drying an exhausted Scout, I eventually went to bed at four-thirty. It was past ten o’clock the next morning when we both woke up. I immediately called Rich and told him the good news.

“They must have just dropped him off somewhere,” Rich said. “Are you all right?”

“Just a bit groggy. I’m going into town today, so maybe I’ll catch you later.”

“Be careful, Benni. If you see those Briggstones, run the other way.”

“If I see them, they’d better be the ones running.”

Taking Scout with me, I walked down to the Embarcadero and ate a quick breakfast at the doughnut shop. Since it was Mother’s Day, all the restaurants would be filled with people taking their mothers out for breakfast, and that was something I couldn’t bear to experience right now. Two grizzled old fishermen shared the warm, yeasty-smelling room with me. As they argued about the demise of the once prolific fishing industry on the Central Coast, I sat by the window, watching the sky turn dark and cloudy, and reread my mother’s letters. I was in a quandary as to where to turn next. If Jacob Chandler was indeed my biological father, that explained why he had left me his estate. What I couldn’t understand is why he’d never made an attempt to talk to me all those years he was watching me. Was it out of kindness or fear? Another question that hovered around me like the clouds gathering over the bay was, did Daddy know? Or had he always assumed I was his? Could my mother have been that deceitful? Everything in me cried no, my mother would never do that. But in reality I knew nothing about the woman who bore me or about her life before she married my father.

My heart froze when I silently said those words. My father. Just who was my father?

It had grown colder and drizzly by noon when I finally made myself drive into San Celina. I dreaded seeing Dove, fearing she’d pry out of me this information that I wasn’t willing to share with anyone yet. I dropped by the pizza parlor and picked up my order. Around the Historical Museum activity had heated up—there seemed to be twice as many newspeople around, probably because this would make one of those amusing, Mother’s-Day-gone-wrong news bites that television newscasters liked to end their shows with. Miguel, a police officer and one of Elvia’s brothers, was guarding the front door of the museum when I walked up, juggling my two steaming pizza boxes and the bag containing their other requests.

“Hi, Miguel,” I said.

“Hi, when’d you get a dog?” Miguel asked, bending over to run a large brown hand over Scout’s head.

“He came with the house I inherited. You haven’t heard?”

His young beardless face sobered. “Yeah, I heard about it. Down at the station we’ve been bearing the brunt of you being gone. You’d better get home quick, Benni. I swear you’re the only thing that keeps him in a decent mood.”

“Not always,” I said grimly. “There’s a week left on my sentence, but I won’t guarantee me going back home will soften Gabe’s mood.”

“Believe me, we can tell the difference when you’re not there.”

“So, how’s the San Celina Seven holding up?”

He shrugged. “I heard some shouting in there a few hours ago, but when I knocked on the door and asked if everything was all right, Dove told me it was nothing.”

“Guess I’d better check it out.”

Elmo Ritter let me in, and judging by the strained look on his face as well as the frantic stroking of the struggling cat in his arms, I could tell the pressure was getting to him.

“Are you okay, Elmo?” I asked in a low voice, handing him his avocados.

“You gotta break me out of here, Benni. Those women are driving me crazy. They’ve got me moving furniture so much I’ll have to sign all my Social Security checks over to my chiropractor for the next two years. And the fights?” He rolled his watery eyes. “Lord, have mercy, they commence to arguing about situations that happened almost forty years ago. Who really gives a flying fig what color blue the draperies of Mott’s Mortuary was in 1959?”

I tried not to crack a smile. “Everyone’s getting a little stir-crazy?”

“They’ve gone nuts,” he said, circling his finger around his temple.

“I heard that, Elmo Ritter,” June Rae called across the room. “You’re not so sane yourself.”

After greeting everyone and giving them the pizzas, which they fell to like a pack of starving hyenas, I pulled Dove aside. “Okay, what’s going on?”

She gave the group a disgusted look. “I tell you, if these people had been in charge of the American Revolution, we’d all be eatin’ fish-and-chips and singing ‘God Save the Queen.’ ”

“What’s caused dissention in the ranks?”

“June Rae and Goldie had a big argument last night about whether Rubylee Smythe should have won the blue ribbon for her fudge at the Mid-State fair last August.”

“I like Rubylee’s fudge. It always wins.”

“Well, so do I and so does half the United States. Everyone and his old maid aunt knows the recipe she uses is on back of the marshmallow creme jar.”

I groaned. “That’s awful. What if the judges found out?”

“The judges
know
. They give her the ribbon every year anyway because she’s got those two terrible boys who are in and out of prison so much, and her daughter’s married to a podiatrist who was arrested for playing with his patients’ feet, and her granddaughter’s got diabetes. That blue ribbon is the only thing that keeps her sane, and Goldie Kleinfelder knows that. Goldie’s just mad because Oscar took Rubylee to the prom instead of Goldie, and Goldie’s never forgotten it.”

“Goldie’s husband had a fling with Rubylee Smythe?”

“I don’t know if they flinged any, but they sure danced close all night, according to Goldie. For heaven’s sakes, that was over sixty years ago. These old people need to get a life.” Dove glared at them, then looked back at me. “I don’t know how much more I can take.”

“Well, it looks like things are heating up outside. You’re bound to get great coverage, it being Mother’s Day and all. Is the mayor or city council weakening at all?”

“Last we heard, the city council was still deadlocked, and only the mayor can break the tie. We’re asking for a twenty-year unbreakable lease. Your lawyer friend Amanda is helping us with that. No charge.”