The Stories We Tell (14 page)

“It's a little more than that,” I say. “But thanks for asking. She's doing better. A little better every day.”

“Well, I looked it all up on the Internet cuz Gwen wouldn't stop talking about it.”

Gwen leans over and lightly pops him on the shoulder with her palm. “Stop. You're making me sound OCD, like it's all I talk about.”

“It sort of is,” he says, and kisses her. Right there at the dinner table in front of her parents, he kisses her on the lips and laughs. “But that's okay. OCD is cute on you.”

They seem in their own world—just Gwen and Dylan—in a world where secret code and inside jokes turn into love.

“Anyway,” Dylan says, turning to me again. “I'm sorry about your sister. It really sucks.”

“Yes,” I say. “It does.”

Cooper is silent, twisting noodles around his fork and staring at Gwen, who is looking only at Dylan. It occurs to me, in the silence of this stare standoff, that Dylan has asked more about Willa, and researched more about head injuries than my husband has.

It's Cooper who stands up and speaks. “I think it's time for you to leave, Dylan. These have been long days for all of us.”

“No way, Dad.” Gwen stands, too. “We're going to see Aunt Willa.”

Together, she and Dylan walk to the side door. Dylan turns. “Thanks for the dinner, Mrs. Morrison. It rocked.” He gives me a thumbs-up and walks out with Gwen.

Cooper stands and takes his empty plate, places it in the sink. “What are we going to do? You can go after her if you'd like.”

Cooper sighs long and loud. “Our daughter seems to be on one long road to a terrible decision. Something life-changing. We have to stop her.”

“I know. I think about it every day. I don't know what to do. I'll get drug-test sticks, and we'll keep setting the house alarm at night. I'll try talking to her tonight when she's calm.” I list all the solutions I have, the ones I've listed in my own mind already.

Cooper shakes his head at every suggestion. “Talking doesn't do a damn thing. We need to take everything away from her—phone, TV, boyfriend, car. All of it.”

“One thing at a time,” I say. “Okay?”

“Well, you asked what I'd do, and that's what I'd do.”

“I didn't ask what you'd do,” I say, turning to face him and wiping my hands on a dish towel. “I told you to go after her if you wanted.”

“Do you always have to be so literal?” he asks.

“No, I guess I don't.” I drop my gaze.

We stand there in silence, neither of us able to build that bridge created by the word “Sorry” or the touch that means the same. Cooper walks out and the TV voices return. ESPN music is the sound track to the distance between us.

I'm more careful than most about leaving conversations unfinished in moments of anger. And not just because I'd memorized the verse from Ephesians about not going to bed angry, winning a youth group Bible trivia contest in seventh grade, but because my last words to my parents had been in anger and the regret weighs on me with heavy shame.

I drop the dish towel and enter the living room. I sit next to Cooper on the couch. “We have to be a team, Cooper. I can't do all of this alone.”

“All of what?”

“Willa, Gwen, the Fine Line, the house, your parents.…”

“What do you mean by my parents? Is there something to be done about them?”

“No … I just meant … I don't know what I meant. I feel like they need something from us, from me, that I'm not giving.”

“They always want more time with me than they have. It's not your fault.”

He places his arm around me and pulls me close. The sportscaster drones on about a record being set. There is always a record being set. Cooper mumbles into my hair. “It's been a long week. I'm exhausted. And darling, you don't need to do it all.”

I relax into his shoulder. This is what I've always wanted: someone at my side, a partner. I rest in this.

Then he speaks again. “Sometimes you just have to pick your priorities. Right now, I think that's at home with Gwen. And me. Then Willa.”

The Fine Line hasn't made the list of priorities. I close my eyes and exhale. Maybe he's right.

“I love you,” he says. “You know that, right?”

“Yes,” I say. “I know.”

“Our family, it's the most important thing of all. It's why I do what I do. It's everything.…”

“I know,” I say, repeating myself.

“Listen, I'm swamped tomorrow. Could you and Gwen go pick up my car from the body shop? It's ready.”

“That was quick,” I say.

“We've been good customers through the years. They're prompt with me.”

He kisses my forehead and his attention returns to the baseball stats. My attention returns to Gwen and Willa, to the cottage, and then wanders down the dirt road to the studio. But my body remains on the couch, still and quiet.

 

eleven

Again, there's an envelope on the project table with my name in block letters. There's no return address and the stamp is crooked. It takes me a long time to decide whether to open it, but of course I do, because an unopened letter will eventually have its due. This I know.

What I try to do—what I've always tried to do—is bring something good with my work. Now someone is using this goodness to bring fear. I want to open the envelope. I want to burn it. I'm curious. I'm scared.

Finally, after what seems like ages, I lift the cotton envelope. I rip the flap quickly, like a Band-Aid from skin. There it is, another card from the Ten Good Ideas line. This time, the
Search for the True
card—number four in the series. The design shows the world, blue and floating amid the dark night. Stars are set as sparkled dents in the universe.

I brace myself for the anonymous note, but this time—nothing. There's just blank space where words should be. Something is inside, though. A small business card falls out and lands on the painted concrete floor; it stares up at me with block letters, e-mail and a phone number for the Anglers.

I leave it there, this offensive business card on cheap paper. I stand and use my foot to push the card under the table, toward the trash can on the far side, and I turn away.

If there's a truth to be known or told or written, I want to know. Who wouldn't? But to hint like this is perverse. I wish I had a wineglass to throw again. I wish I had something to smash and hurl and splinter, but I don't.

I've come here to print wedding invitations and I'll focus. We have a huge order—four hundred invites using both a polymer plate of two tiny birds facing each other on a tree branch, which Francie had designed for the bride, and also our carved-wood fonts, which are set and tied into a metal chase. Setting this card took Max and I the better half of a day. I lift the large platen top, placing the first sheet of cotton paper.

A meditative calm comes over me, as it often does when I'm alone and printing. Four hundred invitations. My God, who invites four hundred people to witness the exchange of vows? Does this make them more binding? Cooper and I married in front of a small crowd in a downtown chapel. My family couldn't pay for a large wedding and Cooper didn't want one, although his mother begged us to please let her have a cathedral wedding and she'd pay for it.

For this invitation's design, I met with the new bride for hours over a month's time. When I asked about her groom, she flushed. She loved him so much and she told me, she couldn't believe her luck. He'd been her best friend, and then love showed up.

My parents claimed to have a great love—one that lasted through thirty-six years of marriage. So tied together that they died together. It was an accidental carbon monoxide death. Usually when you hear about this kind of dying—the slow, in your sleep death—it's suicide. But not my parents. Suicide would have meant an eternal hell, and no matter what they feared here on earth, they feared damning separation from God more so. What I've learned since is that carbon monoxide poisoning is the number-one reason for accidental death.

There are some things you don't want to learn.

They'd gone to bed that night and closed their Bibles—Mom's with the pink quilted cover and Dad's with the leather so cracked, it looked like dried mud. They'd turned off the lights, let Buster, the mutt, jump onto the bed, and together closed their eyes. They were lost in their own worlds, asleep when the ancient furnace, which they'd sworn to replace, started to leak. Sleep, I think, is the only time we can live entirely in our own world. And this time, for my parents, it was an eternal sleep.

The church secretary found them the next day. She had said that the worst part was the way they looked alive, curled in repose, as if they didn't know they were yet dead. Buster, too.

But the worst part for me, the terrible part, isn't that I wasn't the one who found them; it was the
reason
I didn't find them. Two weeks before my parents passed away, we had a disagreement about why I didn't regularly take Gwen to church, why I myself had stopped meeting them at the front steps. I'd tried to explain, but because I didn't fully understand my motivations, I couldn't rightly explain it to them. My decision then was vague and unformed. Dad yelled at me, telling me that I would destroy my family and my life. I said a terrible and hurtful thing when I told him that church hadn't exactly saved his family, that it wasn't the catchall insurance card he'd wanted for us, was it?

I was sick for days after this fight and I'd spent hours forming an apology. But Mom and Dad died before the gap was healed. A simple ending, a terrible ending, and one I couldn't undo.

My dad was an old-fashioned “father knows best” kind of dad. But there was more to it than that. At least for Willa and me. There was this dad, this charming and gregarious man who made people laugh and cry, who enriched their lives. Then there was the man who would only appear at home—the moody, angry man frustrated at the daily goings-on of any life. The rages came from unexplainable sources: a barking dog across the yard; a pair of shoes left in the middle of the kitchen; crumbs in the beanbag chair in the den. And there he'd be, his forehead scrunched up like a wrinkled sheet, his eyebrows drawn together, screaming.

God, the screaming.

The weird part (the part Willa and I would discuss under the bed) was how the screaming usually wasn't prompted by our disobedience or back talk. It would usually be something random and unpredictable that would set him off. That's what made it all so terrifying. There was the night I came home crying because I'd been excluded from a club my friends had created. The Cool Clique, they'd called it, an uninspired and dull name for a club that didn't invite me, and I told them so. “Stupidest name for a club ever.” It hadn't gone well, and for days, until it became boring to them, the girls shunned me, closed gaps at the lunch table, refused my phone calls, and turned away when I approached. I wept at the dinner table, wanting solace or comfort or anything parents should offer when a child is hurting. But instead, I was rewarded with a lecture about “not being of this world” and how I cared about the wrong, wrong, wrong things. When Willa piped up and told Dad to have a heart, he exploded with a lecture and rant so severe, it rang in my ears for a week. So, no matter what it was, the irritating circumstance reminded him, again, that his daughters were disobedient and willful. Mostly, we were. Although we tried very hard not to be.

And yet my favorite phrase had been “That's my girl.” I always wanted to please my dad, even in my rebellion. If he gave me a compliment, I would repeat in my head over and over like a poem or love song. “You look lovely today, Eve.” “Great report card; that's the Wetherburn way. You got the brains in the family, for sure.” Then the big smile and “That's my girl.”

But that was only part of it. I hated him too. I hated the smell of his aftershave as he came down the stairs; his black hair combed sideways across his head; his loafers left in the exact spot at the front door; his change of voice when he believed other people were listening. I hated it all. Yet I needed him to approve of me.

Oh, and the drinking. I hated the havoc alcohol wreaked upon my family. It wasn't the drink's fault: it was the excess. When Willa started drinking in high school, she didn't drink a beer or two like the rest of us at the bonfire; she drank a six-pack and then a twelve-pack. She didn't get drunk; she got hammered.

By the time Willa met the boy from Colorado on Tybee Island one summer afternoon, she was that other person all the time: alternating from hilarious and witty to sarcastic and sad. She left on a Sunday afternoon after church. We'd come home and she'd walked upstairs to take a nap, she'd said. Later that afternoon, we realized she was gone. A note said that she couldn't live with the hypocrisy and ridiculous faking; she was gone to live a “real life.” Sadly, I knew “real” for her mostly rested in a bottle.

I wanted out of the family house as badly as she did, but I'd been biding my time. When she left, she was eighteen years old, had graduated from high school only three weeks earlier. I was working at Soapbox then. Willa's absence throbbed with pain in that small house, like a missing limb taken in a brutal accident.

She “got sober” a few times through the next years, but ten years ago, after a DUI in Boulder, she quit, or so she said. Her abstinence lasted for weeks and then months and now coming up on ten years. Sobriety wasn't so good for a love affair that was based on dependence. When drinking ended, so did his love. That's how she came to live with us.

Dad didn't often drink, but when he did, he drank until he passed out, wherever he happened to be: the shower twice, the garage, the living room couch, the kitchen table. He never took a sip of alcohol outside the house. He kept his vice private, for our enjoyment.