Raising Hope (13 page)
H
ow was your day?” Ruth asks, serving me a breast of chicken, rice, and spinach.
“It was awesome.” I slide into my chair and pick up my knife and fork. “Oops,” I say, remembering to put my napkin in my lap. “It was the best. I had my tennis lesson today, and I loved it. I did really good.”
“Well,” corrects Sara Lynn. “You did very well.”
“Sara Lynn was always quite accomplished at tennis,” Mamie says, patting her mouth gently with her napkin. “She reminded me so of that cute Chris Evert.”
Sara Lynn rolls her eyes and says, “I’m okay at tennis, Mama. Hardly Chris Evert material.”
Mamie acts like she hasn’t heard Sara Lynn. “Oh, she was such a sweet thing, with her hair pulled back in a long braid. So graceful on the court.” She turns to Sara Lynn then and says, “You really were graceful, dear. You could have been a prima ballerina.”
“My goodness,” says Sara Lynn, her voice sounding brittle. She’s cutting her chicken into tiny pieces, moving her knife over the chicken like it’ll get up and run away from her if she doesn’t show it who’s boss. “Chris Evert! A prima ballerina! Is there anything I couldn’t have been?”
Mamie sets her mouth hard and gives her head a quick, impatient shake. “Now, what did I say that possibly could have upset you?” she asks, a forkful of rice poised in the air. “I was only complimenting you on how talented you were.” She turns to Ruth and me. “Talented at anything she set her mind to.”
Sara Lynn doesn’t say anything, just keeps spearing her food and bringing it to her mouth. Her eyes look a little bright, and that line she gets between her eyebrows when she’s upset appears.
I glance at Ruth, and she gives me a look that says, “Here we go again—the old invisible wall.” Actually, the “invisible wall” is my name for it, for this barrier between Sara Lynn and Mamie. It’s like there’s a wall of ice that separates them, a wall where they can look through and see each other, but there’s no way they can touch. Sometimes we all forget the wall is there until one of them says or does something to set the other one off. Then there it is, this wall between them that they hide behind, one on each side.
“You want to play Scrabble or something after dinner?” I ask Mamie. I’ve found it’s best to take everyone’s mind off the wall when it appears. Just change the subject and get them on to something else.
“Fine,” Mamie says, in a stiff voice like she’s still hurt. But then she turns to me and tries to smile. “That would be lovely.”
So here I am. A promise is a promise, after all, and I did say I’d play Scrabble with Mamie, even though it’s as boring as all get- out because I never, ever win. It’s my turn, and I’m fooling around with my letter tiles, trying to figure out how to make a Scrabble word with seven consonants. I don’t think it’s possible. Mamie is sitting across from me, drumming her fingers on the card table I’ve set up between the two wing chairs in her bedroom.
“Just give me a second,” I say, squinting hard at the letters, trying to will a vowel to appear. Mamie’s on this hot streak tonight, getting triple word scores practically every turn, when it’s all I can do to put “cat” or “dog” on the board.
“Dang,” I finally say. I put back my L and my M and pull up two letters. I don’t want to put back the X and the J I have. Big points if I can use them. Okay, I have a U now, at least. Hmmm.
Mamie puts down “zephyr,” and I groan. “Double word score, too,” she points out modestly. I write her score and look at my letters, wondering if “pux” is a word. Maybe it’s kind of like “pox.” I glance at Mamie, wondering if she’ll challenge me.
“P-u-x,” I say, adding the U and the X to the P Mamie just put down on the board. “Pux.”
“Pux?” Mamie raises an eyebrow. She looks just like Sara Lynn when she does that. “Did you really think I wouldn’t challenge, Hope?”
“Oh, fine,” I grumble, taking the letters off. Technically, I should lose a turn, but Mamie usually lets me try again if I try to pull a fast one on her.
I sigh as I look at my loser letters. “You know what? I can’t make a word. And I’m so far behind that it’s not fun anymore. Let’s just call it and say you won.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to keep going?” she asks. “The game’s not over until it’s over.”
“Oh, it’s over all right,” I say.
“All right, then,” says Mamie. “Would you like to play some rummy?”
I drum my fingers on the card table and think a minute. “No. You know what I really want to do?”
“Crazy eights?”
“Try on your rings.”
She chuckles, a smile widening across her little wrinkled face. “Sweet girl. You haven’t wanted to do that in some time.” She slides her diamond engagement ring and wedding band off her left hand and places them into my palm. I put them onto my right index finger and hold them up so the big round diamond shines in the lamplight.
“Look at me,” I say in an affected voice. “I’m rich.”
“Don’t go talking about your money like you’re common trash,” Mamie says, grinning. This is an old game of ours. She tugs slowly at the ring on her right hand; it’s what she calls her dinner ring, and it’s my favorite, a wide band with six small square diamonds set into it. I don’t in the least see what all those diamonds have to do with dinner, but Mamie says she cherishes it because it was her mother’s from back home in St. Louis.
She reaches over to give it to me, and I place it on my middle finger, next to her wedding rings. “Now I’m really rich,” I say, waving my hand in the air.
“Tacky,” she snorts, shaking her head. “Wearing them all on the same hand.”
“I like them all together.” I look at my jeweled hand for a while, and then I tip my right hand upside down into my left, and the rings fall off. I hand them back to Mamie.
“My, my,” she says, shaking her head as she slides her rings back on the fingers where they belong. “That brings back memories. When you were little, you were like a monkey, always climbing up on my lap wanting to try on my rings.”
I laugh from the pleasure of recalling cuddling with Mamie and playing with her jewelry, but a little pang of sorrow hits me, too. I’m coming to realize that as you get older, remembering things is half-happy and half-sad. When you’re little it’s all happy, because the things you remember—like Santa coming, for example—will all happen again. But when you get older, you realize that some happy things go away forever and that’s it—they’re gone for good. You’re glad you have the memory of those things, but you’re also sad because that’s all you have—the memory and never again the thing itself.
Mamie’s in a remembering mood tonight. She shakes her head and
tsk
s her tongue, saying, “My Lord, it seems like yesterday you came here as a baby. Sara Lynn just came bursting through the door one day and said, ‘Mama, Bobby Teller has made his sister, Ruth, and me guardians of his baby girl, and I’m going to do it.’”
“How did my father come to choose Sara Lynn?” I ask, even though I can already guess what she’ll say.
Mamie’s mouth puckers, and she says, “Oh, Sara Lynn and Ruth were always friends. Classmates, you know, all through school. Your father likely knew Sara Lynn would help do what needed to be done regarding you.” Mamie’s voice trails off, and she looks over my head as if she’s seeing something.
“Mamie.” I’m sitting on the edge of my chair. “Go on with the story.” I’m forever trying to get them all to tell me how I came to live here. None of them tells it the same, or even the same way twice, and I keep hoping that someday I’ll put all the versions together to find the truth.
“Patience, child,” Mamie says, still looking at something I can’t see. “Patience is a virtue.”
I sigh. Grown-ups are so lame. They take their sweet time telling you the things you want to know, and when they finally do get around to talking, you just know you’re getting the
Reader’s Digest
condensed version.
Mamie yawns delicately, putting her fingers up to her mouth. “My goodness,” she says, coming back from wherever she was in her head. She looks at me surprised, as if she’s half forgotten I’m in the room. “I’m a bit sleepy. This has been a lovely visit, dear, but I think I’d better get a little rest.”
“Love you, Mamie,” I say, standing up and walking over to her chair. I put my arms around her neck and wait for her kiss on my cheek.
“Good night, dear Hope,” she says.
I close her bedroom door behind me and walk down the quiet hallway. Sara Lynn and Ruth are likely downstairs, probably reading or watching TV, but I don’t feel like being with them right now.
When I reach my bedroom and flick on the light, my eyes happen to fall on my desk. Now, I never, and I mean never, use my desk during the summer. My desk gives me the heebie-jeebies, in fact, because it reminds me of homework and school and how the clock is tick-tocking double time in summer. But it’s like I’m under a spell or something—I pull out my desk chair and sit, and then I rummage through my desk drawer for paper and a pen. I think it was talking to Mamie about how I came to live here that put this idea into my head, but I must have been storing up the right words for a long time because I’m not even hesitating a little bit. I just write without stopping, as if I know exactly what to say.
Dear Dad,
It’s your daughter Hope. I’m twelve now, and I’ve been wondering a lot about you. Ruth has some pictures of you when you were little, and I think I look like you. I’ve been wondering about my mother, too. Maybe I look somewhat like her, too, but I wouldn’t know because I don’t have a picture of her. Do you have a picture of her? If you do, I would like to see it. Ruth says she was nice.
It’s not that I’m not happy with Ruth and Sara Lynn. I really am, and I love them a lot, even though they do drive me crazy sometimes, especially Sara Lynn.
I wonder what you’re like. It’s hit me lately that maybe you’re married to someone else and have other kids. That would be okay. I just want to know how you are and maybe a little bit about the time that you left. I know my mother had just died and all, but I wonder a lot about that time in your life. In my life, too, I guess, although I don’t remember any of it.
I am growing up to be a person I think you would like. I’m getting prettier, and I’m smart in school, and I think I have a good personality. At least, Ruth and Sara Lynn say I do. I’m not sure what I want to be when I grow up, but Mamie says isn’t it wonderful how girls can be anything they want these days. What are you? I mean, what job do you do?
What did you feel like when you met my mother? I just wonder how you knew you were in love, how you knew she was the right person for you. Did you know right away? Did she?
Do you think about me sometimes? I think about you.
These are some of the questions I have for you. I would really, really like it if you would write back and answer some of them. It’s hard not knowing these things. You could call me if you’re not much of a letter writer. This is my address and my telephone number:
Hope Teller
24 Morning Glory Lane
Ridley Falls, New Hampshire 03577
(603) 665-9987
Love,
Hope
I fold the piece of paper and slide it into my desk drawer. Then I get up from my desk, turn out the light, and feel my way over to my bed. I pull off the covers and lie flat on my back, looking up at the dark ceiling. The air in my bedroom stills suddenly, and then my mother is there with me, outside my body and in it at the same time. I’ve felt her spirit a couple of times before, always when I’m alone and don’t expect her. I lie perfectly still, and I can taste salt from the tears running into my mouth.
I miss you,
I tell her without words.
I know you do,
she says back.
I know.
A
h! The most delightful part of the day for me—putting my head on the pillow and sailing into sleep. Well, I don’t sail so much these days. It takes a bit when a body is as old as mine.
I chuckle remembering Hope trying on my rings this evening. Such a dear, dear girl with that mop of curls and those dark eyes. Doesn’t look a bit like Sara Lynn, but then why would she? She’s not ours by blood, only by heart. Oh, I wish my sister Julia Rae were alive to know her. She’d like Hope. Indeed she would.
I miss Julia Rae. I miss all the old folks—Baby Caroline, Brother, Mama, and Daddy. I’m the last one of my family. Whoever would have thought it? It seems to me the older I get, the closer I feel to being that young girl again, whispering secrets with Julia Rae and rocking with my mama on our porch swing, smelling the night jasmine. It’s Mama I miss most of all. I miss her more than I miss my own husband, I’m ashamed to say. Now, I loved Eliot. Love him still, even with him gone these thirteen years. Couldn’t have asked for a better, kinder husband. But there’s a hole in my heart no one but my mother ever could fill.
A girl needs her mother. That’s just the way it is. But not my daughter. No. She and I don’t sit side by side on a porch swing, talking without words. Instead, we holler at each other across a canyon deep and wide just to be heard. This distance between us would break my heart if I let it. It surely would.
Sara Lynn didn’t give me a lick of trouble until she quit her lawyering job and came on home to live. Now, it would have been fine if she had quit because she got married and decided to start a family. But no, she left with absolutely no prospects of doing anything else, and after all that education, too. It bored her to tears, she said, all those men storming around so convinced they were right. She just didn’t care to take part in that anymore, so she up and left on a whim one day. That is when I began to think I may have spoiled her, her being an only child I had all but given up hope of having.
“What about Daddy?” I asked her. Her own father was a lawyer, so if she was saying that lawyers were too lowly for her to associate with, what was she saying about her father? “Are you telling me Daddy’s not the most honorable, kindest man you’ve ever known in your whole life?”