The Lost Husband (17 page)

“That’s fine,” my mother said, taking a new tack. “I drove all the way out here, but that’s fine.”

“I didn’t ask you to drive out here.”

“No!” she agreed. “Because you aren’t speaking to me!”

“Hey!” I said, stupidly trying to set the record straight. “
You
are not speaking to
me
.”

“I go on my vacation,” she went on, a tone of amazement in her voice, “and when I come back, the house is cleaned out. No note. No phone call.”

She’d been doing this my whole life: taking perfectly true facts and reshuffling them until they weren’t true anymore. “You
told
me to go! You
told
me to be out before you came back!”

“It’s like I don’t even have a daughter.”

I was shouting now. “You
told
me you didn’t have a daughter!”

Now she had me where she wanted me. “That’s fine. You needed me, and I was there. You were widowed and alone, and I was there. Who opened her home to you when you had nowhere else to go?”

Then, right there in the kitchen, my fingers still covered in barbecue sauce, looking at the face of the woman I’d fought with so many times, I realized I didn’t have to fight. I didn’t have to answer her questions, justify my behavior, or follow her rules. And then I knew, out of nowhere, how to shut her down. So I summoned up my parent voice—one that sounded remarkably like Jean’s—and I used it on my mom.

“I have to put the kids to bed now,” I said, “and it’s time for you to go. You’re welcome to say good night to them. You’re also welcome to visit us whenever you can do so in a pleasant way. We’re happy to see you whenever you can behave appropriately.”

And then I walked out the screen door and let it slap shut behind me.

Jean and the kids were at the tire swings by now. “Bedtime!” I called out.

My mother followed me to the yard. “I don’t know what you—” she started, but I held up my hands.

“Stop!” I said. Then, to the kids, I said, “Say good night to Grandma.”

The kids made their way toward us, Abby stopping to let Tank climb up onto her back for a precarious-looking piggyback ride. “Good night, Grandma,” they said in unison.

My mother sighed. “Good night, children,” she said. “I hope your mother will let me see you again someday.”

“And we’re done!” I practically shouted, pushing the children up toward the house and leaving my mother and Jean facing each other in the yard.

“Why does Grandma
hope
that she’ll see us again?” Abby asked, old enough now to pick up on subtleties.

“She’s kidding,” I said as we stepped inside, trying for the millionth time in my life to make it seem like she wasn’t so bad.

Once the kids were down, I returned to the kitchen to start on the dishes, planning to recount the conversation to Jean. But when I got there, the room was empty. I looked around. Barbecue sauce was everywhere—every wall, surface, pot, and plate. We had similarly devastated a pot roast of Jean’s a few nights before, and as we’d joined forces to start cleaning, she’d looked around with a satisfied nod and said, “We really know how to live.”

That night, though, I found myself looking at the kitchen with
my mother’s eyes—thinking about all the work it was going to take to scrub those pots and how I really hadn’t managed to teach my kids any manners. Same kitchen, different view. I kept trying to shift my perspective back to Jean’s, but it wouldn’t budge.

As I stood at the sink, running hot water for the dishes, I heard my mother’s voice through the window screen, and then I heard Jean’s. I scanned the dark lawn for their shadows, and when I found them, I couldn’t help but listen in.

They’d been at it for a while, judging from the strain in their voices.

“I don’t care,” my mother was saying. “And you wouldn’t care about me if the situation were reversed.”

“I don’t know how I would feel if the situation were reversed,” Jean said. “But it’s not reversed, Marsha. It is how it is.”

“Maybe I’ll just tell Libby,” my mother said. “Maybe she deserves to know.”

“There are a lot of things Libby deserves to know that I haven’t told her,” Jean said. “And if you tell her my secrets, I’ll be more than happy to tell her yours.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t told her already,” my mother said.

“You’re the one who should have told her,” Jean said. “Years ago.”

“You just want her to hate me.”

“I don’t care what Libby thinks of you,” Jean said. “I only care about what she thinks of me.”

Then a pause. I could see their silhouettes out on the lawn, staring each other down.

“When you tell her,” my mother said, “she’ll leave. She’ll be gone so fast she’ll leave tire skids on the road.”

“Maybe,” Jean said.

“And she’ll come back home to me, and you’ll be forgotten.”

“Just like old times,” Jean said. The bitterness in her voice cut the air.

A few minutes later I heard my mother’s car start up and, just after, Jean creaking open the screen door. She paused at the sight of me.

“Hello,” I said, all innocent.

“Hello.”

“What did my mom have to say?” I asked, scrubbing the skillet with steel wool.

“Oh,” Jean said, “same old same old.” She rubbed her eyes and then asked, “Could you hear us talking?”

“Some,” I said with a shrug.

Jean started clearing plates off the table and bringing them to the sink. “How much?”

“Well, you both have secrets you don’t want me to know,” I said. “But I didn’t catch what they were.”

“Oh,” Jean said, her brow still in a tense frown.

I could have taken this moment to ask her what they were talking about, and I’m sure she would have told me. For some reason, though, I just didn’t.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that I could have made such a decision. I think, more than anything, I wanted to keep things the way they were. I didn’t want anything about our life on the farm to change. Especially not just because my mother had decided to pay a surprise visit. It was a kind of protecting what was mine. My new life. My new job. My new beloved aunt Jean.

We stood side by side at the sink for a bit after that, me washing and her drying. Bob Dylan barked now and again and got the
little dogs yipping, and I felt like Jean and I were making a mutual silent decision to drop it.

A little later, though, as Jean went to wipe down the table, she said, “I need to tell you something.”

I felt a sting of anxiety. I wanted to beg her not to tell me. Whatever it was.

“That woman really isn’t welcome here,” she went on. “You don’t have to take on—” She paused. “My
sorrows
just because you’re here. I understand if you want to see your mother or visit with her. That’s your right, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing.” She took a breath. “But just not here. I don’t ever want to see her in my house again.”

“Of course,” I said, relieved. “I understand.”

After Jean had gone upstairs, I stepped out the back door and sat on the porch swing. Yes, my mother was a narcissistic pain in the ass. Yes, she never let anyone else be right, even for a minute. Yes, she was exhausting, and crazy, and infuriating. But I had to admit she had some good qualities, too. She was wickedly funny sometimes. She had great taste in jewelry. And she was a great cook when she was in the mood. We were fighting now, and she was always at her craziest during a fight—but I couldn’t help thinking that some other time, when we weren’t so mad, she might have enjoyed a visit here. From a distance—sometimes a great distance—she wasn’t so bad.

The thought made me miss her just the tiniest bit, and the feeling took me by surprise. But there was nothing to be done. Instead I just sat there, circling around all that had just happened, guessing at the secrets, and trying to fathom what on earth could have happened between two sisters to leave them so intractably full of hate for so long.

Chapter 14
 

With O’Connor gone, possibly never to return, Jean wound up hiring Sunshine to help out in the mornings. Jean wouldn’t say that O’Connor had quit, exactly, only that he had “other priorities” at the moment.

I was ecstatic to see Sunshine arrive—on April Fool’s Day, in fact, which was perfect because she was absolutely terrible at everything I asked her to do. She was the Amelia Bedelia of farm help, but by then I had been doing everything by myself long enough that even that was better than nothing.

She was pleasant to talk to, if a little odd-looking in her black combat boots and black lipstick. It was a wonder she didn’t frighten the goats. The only thing that wasn’t black on Sunshine, actually, was the roots of her hair. The ends were still dark as obsidian, but the longer she went without dyeing it again, the clearer it was that the roots were a perky, cheerful blond.

“Are you growing out your hair?” I asked one day in the barn.

“Nah,” she said. “I’m just going two-tone.”

“But those blond roots,” I said. “Is that your real color?”

Sunshine raised an eyebrow. “No blonde jokes,” she said.

I wanted to ask her why on earth she would cover up that golden hair with dye, but I never did. She had her reasons. I wanted very much to ask her about her former famous life, but I just couldn’t. If she wanted to avoid the life itself, she probably wanted to avoid the topic, too. Instead we just talked about little local happenings, as if neither of our lives had ever been any different. The weather. The vintage Ford Fairlane that Russ was rebuilding out in their garage. The progress Jean and the kids were making on the tree house—which now had a rope net for climbing, a roof made out of flattened tin cans, and, down low, a pirate’s plank.

Also, of course, we talked about the goats. Whose lives turned out to be almost as compelling as our own—to Sunshine, at least. Laura Ingalls Wilder, for example, had eaten Jean’s favorite rose bush, and Mother Teresa was pregnant again. Helen Keller had gotten stuck in the mud down at the pond and had to be rescued, a process that took an hour. And Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Merman, and Oprah Winfrey had formed a little clique of late and would not give the other goats the time of day.

Sunshine couldn’t get over the way those three isolated themselves under the bois d’arc tree. “What do you think they’re talking about?” she kept asking as she glanced over.

“They’re not talking, Sunshine,” I said. “They’re goats.”

“They’ve got some kind of secret,” Sunshine insisted. “Look at how they’re huddled.”

“You do know they can’t talk, right?”

“I know they can’t talk in a way you and I can understand,” Sunshine said, taking all my condescension and lobbing it right back.

I ceded the point.

But I did like it when she was there. The rest of the day, it was mostly just me doing chores alone. Jean worked in the garden some, and she cooked all the meals, but she was also gone quite a bit while the kids were at school. She was always visiting the sick, or helping people with projects, or sewing things for auctions. She shelved books at the library and sang with the church choir, even though she didn’t actually go to church. She belonged to a quilting club, a book club, and also the Ladies’ BBC Period Love ’n’ Romance Club, which TiVoed
Masterpiece Theater
and watched the episodes together while eating chocolate and drinking champagne.

My mom had always portrayed Jean as a lonely hillbilly out in an isolated cabin—kind of a lady Unabomber with only goats for friends. But she was the opposite of alone. She had a gravitational force that pulled people toward her. Wherever she happened to be always turned into the center of it all.

I was not the center of anything, out in the barn by myself. And so even though Sunshine and I were not exactly soul mates, we became better friends—faster—out in the barn together than we might have otherwise. At the end of our second week, when she showed up at work with her face all puffy from crying, I asked her right away what was wrong—and I felt genuinely anxious to know.

“You know about me, right?” she asked. “Jean told you who I am?”

I didn’t want to get Jean in trouble. “She just told me your real name. Then I knew the rest.”

Sunshine pursed her lips and blew out a big sigh. Then she grabbed a milking stool and got to work.

“What’s going on?”

She sat up a little straighter, and rubbed her eyes with her sleeve. “I broke up with my boyfriend,” she said.

“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” I said.

“I usually don’t,” she said. “I decided a while back that romance upset my equilibrium.”

I walked Jane Goodall up onto the milking platform and got to work next to Sunshine. If she wanted to keep busy, we’d keep busy.

“Dating is tricky for me,” Sunshine went on, “because I have a history with every boy in this town. Even ones I’ve never met.”

“Because of that
Playboy
you did?”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “He had it under his bed for two years. Until his grandmother found it and threw it away.”

“That’s a long time,” I said.

She nodded. “Two long, formative, hormone-driven years.”

“This is why you broke up with him?”