The Way Back to Happiness (13 page)

Her own head was still filled with the book. “Have you read
Great Expectations
?” she asked.

“How could I? We just got it today.”

“I started it in study hall. It’s really good—it’s about an orphan, and a crazy rich old lady starts taking an interest in him. She becomes his secret benefactress. That’s what I need.”

“What about your grandmother? You told me that you hoped you would end up living with her.”

“Yeah, I know. . . .”

But the last few visits to Dallas had made her wonder if that would ever happen. For one thing, she kept hearing murmurs about money. While Gladdie seemed rich next to how Alabama and her mother had been, she couldn’t spend a lot because she was on something called a fixed income. She’d overheard Gladdie and Bev talking about medical expenses, and the horror of dipping into the principle—whatever that meant. It all sounded dire.

And then there was Wink, and how Gladdie seemed around him. Happy. After one visit, Alabama tried to remember if she’d ever heard her grandmother laugh before. She certainly hadn’t while Alabama had been staying with her.

Gladdie deserved to have laughter. She deserved to be with Wink if she wanted to be, without having a teenager around to worry about.

“I think I’m going to need a benefactor who’s not distracted,” Alabama said.

Stuart sank down onto the floor next to the bed. Sometimes it was so easy to read his face, he could have been walking through life with a cartoon think balloon over his head. Right now his forehead scrunched as he put all his brainpower behind solving this conundrum. “It’s like trying to win a scholarship for your life, but who gives those out?”

She slipped down next to him, hugging her arms around her knees. “Crazy old ladies in books.”

“What about your other grandparents? Are they still alive?”

“I guess so. But I’ve never met them.”

“Oh.” He blew out a breath. “That makes it harder.”

But not impossible.
My other grandparents.
Once the thought took up residence in her head, it refused to be dislodged. Before, whenever she’d imagined her father, he’d been a soulful-eyed soldier in uniform she’d stumbled across in a picture buried in her mother’s bureau drawer. Her mind had tried to construct, without much success, the brief whirlwind romance between her parents—a girl with long hippie hair and corduroy bell-bottoms, and a soldier with a buzz cut. She’d always felt vital details were missing—details her mother was always too shaky to provide when the subject came up.

As a result, her father had never seemed quite real, and she hadn’t considered much beyond him. But now it dawned on her that there was a whole family out there that had helped produce him. Parents. Maybe siblings. Alabama knew her mom had revealed her existence to this other family, the Jacksons, and that they hadn’t been thrilled. Diana had always referred to them as the Jackasses, but she had been prone to make snap judgments of people—clerks she thought too snooty, cranky neighbors. She’d even hated Alabama’s third-grade teacher because she’d sent a note home complaining that Alabama was sleeping in class.
“Of course you’re sleeping”
her mother had fumed.
“Kids need sleep! The woman’s just a slave driver.”

But Miss Hodges had always seemed really nice to Alabama. She’d even slipped Alabama milk money when Alabama “forgot” it. If Diana had been wrong about Miss Hodges, maybe her mother hadn’t been right about her father’s family, either.

Did the Jacksons ever wonder about her? Did they ever spare a thought for the grandchild they’d never laid eyes on?

She had nothing to lose by finding out.

That night after Bev was asleep, Alabama dragged the phone as far from her aunt’s room as the cord would reach, and dialed information.

“I need a number in Houston,” she told the operator.

“I’m sorry, miss. You’ll have to speak up.”

Trying not to wake Bev, she raised her voice as far above a whisper as she dared. “I need a number in Houston.”

“Name?”

“Jackson.”

“First name?”

“I’m not sure.”

“There are many Jacksons in the directory.”

Alabama frowned. “Could you read a few out?”

“You don’t have a name?”

“I do—but he’s dead.”

A pause ensued before the operator said, “Miss, you do realize it’s against the law to make prank calls?”

“This isn’t a prank. I’m looking for the family of a man named Tom Jackson.”

“When did Mr. Jackson die?”

Alabama did some rapid calculating. “Nineteen seventy?”

The woman’s huff of exasperation reached her ear as a roar of static. “I’m sorry. You’ll need to find more information.”

“Well, duh. That’s why I called you.”

The operator disconnected.

Alabama laid the receiver on the cradle and stretched out on the hard floor. Overhead, there was a rectangle cut out of the hallway’s ceiling. A crawl space, or an attic. Bev probably had more junk crammed up there. The whole place was a warehouse of crafty crap.

She tried to think of a plan. She needed to talk to someone who’d known her dad. Gladdie probably knew something about him—although she’d never mentioned him. But how could she start asking questions about this other family without hurting Gladdie’s feelings?
“Do I have grandparents who could take care of me?”
That didn’t sound very nice. Upsetting Gladdie was the last thing she wanted.

Bev might also know something about Tom Jackson, but Alabama wouldn’t stoop to asking her. Not that she’d mind offending Bev, but how reliable would she be? Bev had hated Diana. What were the chances that she’d liked Diana’s choice of a fiancé? Plus, Bev would act all patronizing about her search for more family—as if it were reaching out for love or a cry for help. She might even want to send her to the shrink again.

Alabama didn’t need a shrink. She needed a private detective.

She got up and stowed the phone, then crept back to her room. It was too hot still for the blanket, but she crawled under it anyway, breathing in the lingering smell of cone incense that clung to it. In a few months that scent would be gone, and it would reek of Murphy Oil Soap and vinegar like everything else in Bev’s house.

A crater of longing cracked open inside her. She’d thought it had been shored up, that she was doing better, but she missed her mom so much. Missed even the little things, like the way they felt comfortable watching TV together at night, sharing the afghan on the couch. She missed having a home she felt she belonged in.

What did she know about Tom Jackson? She sat up, reached toward her desk for her algebra spiral, and flipped it to the back.

First, his name. She wrote it out.
Thomas Thelmer Jackson
.

It was hard to imagine her mom married to a guy named Thelmer. That was one thing she had in common with her dad, she realized—a weird name. She wondered if he ever got teased.

He was in the army. A private first class. She wasn’t sure what that meant.

He was twenty-three when he died.

His family lived in Houston, and he went to college at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Her mother hadn’t gone to college at all, so how they met always seemed a little sketchy. Diana had said she was a waitress when she met Tom. Alabama always imagined their gazes locking as he ordered a club sandwich. But would her mom have gone to Denton just to wait tables?

Alabama’s fingers cramped around the pen. Why hadn’t she asked all this stuff when her mom was alive? It was dumb to be trying to piece it together now, when there was no one to speak to except Gladdie, who would get upset when she mentioned Diana. Or Bev, who Alabama didn’t want to talk about private things with.

One thing her mom had said was that Tom’s family had plenty of money, and that she’d never stoop to asking them for any. Apparently, they hadn’t been at all happy about their son marrying a waitress.

Snobby rich people might be bad in-laws, but those traits made them perfect benefactor material. The only trouble was finding them. Obviously, telephone operators weren’t going to help. And the Jacksons might not still live in Houston. Look at the number of times she and her mother had moved.

From now on, she’d have to be her own detective.

 

That weekend, she and Bev paid their usual visit to Gladdie. Before they got there, Alabama turned to her aunt. “Can I go to the library while you guys run errands?”

“The library?” Bev’s brows gathered in suspicion. “What would you do there?”

“Read.”

“But you don’t have a library card for Dallas—you can’t get one because you don’t live here.”

She had to rub that in.

“I don’t want to check anything out. I just want to read.”

“You can read in the car.”

“I want to read something that’s
in
the library.”

Their gazes locked.

I’m not going to tell you,
Alabama telegraphed with a stony stare.

Later, when she found herself with a few minutes alone with Gladdie, she asked, with careful casualness, “Why did my mom live in Denton?”

Gladdie stopped sifting through coupons and eyed her across the top of her bifocals. “She never did.”

The words sounded measured, almost wary.

Alabama twisted her lips, thinking. “But Mom always said my dad went to college in Denton, and she must have met him around that time, just before he went into the army. And his folks lived in Houston. So where else would she have met him?”

Gladdie’s gaze remained riveted on a Rice-A-Roni coupon. “Here, I suppose. In Dallas.”

“But how could a waitress in Dallas meet a boy from Houston who was going to school in Denton?”

“From Denton to here isn’t far.”

“Yeah, but what was he
doing
here?”

The old clock sitting atop her grandmother’s china cabinet ticked loudly.

“My memory is that they had a mutual friend,” Gladdie said.

“Oh.” That made sense.

But it didn’t help her much.

“What did they do?”

“Who?”

“My dad’s family? The Jacksons.”

Gladdie studied a coupon for canned peaches very intently. “I think they ran a lumber business.”

Lumber. There—that sounded like something that would stay in the same place, and make loads of money. Rich people were different from poor people. They owned big houses, and businesses. Alabama felt confident that the Jacksons were still in Houston.

When Bev dropped her off at the library, Alabama headed straight for the reference section and asked the librarian if there was a Houston phone book. The woman escorted her to a remote stack and pulled out a chunky, floppy White Pages. Alabama lugged it to a table and thumbed as fast as she could to the page where the Jacksons started. As the operator had warned, the Jacksons went on and on. There were Thomases, Toms, Ts, and just plain Jacksons. Scanning the names even for half a minute made her eyes ache. And then she saw it:
Jackson, Thomas Thelmer.

That was them! It had to be. How many Thelmer Jacksons could there be in the world?

She shivered as she scrawled the number and the street number written next to it. She had found her other grandparents. They really existed.

That night, she waited till Bev was in bed again and dialed the number. A woman answered. “Hello?”

Tongue-tied, Alabama failed to produce a response. What was she supposed to say?
“Is that you, Grandma?”
The lady would probably hang up on her.

“Hello?” the voice repeated impatiently.

“I-I’m searching for Thomas Thelmer Jackson,” Alabama said.

A pause ensued, followed by the voice again. “Who is this?”

Alabama countered with, “Do I have the right number?”

“Thomas Jackson was my husband. He passed away last year.”

Alabama felt a strange stab in her chest. Died. Last year. She was one year too late to have a grandfather. “I’m sorry. I really am. So . . . I guess you knew Thomas Thelmer Jackson Jr.?”

“He was my son. He is also deceased,” the woman said with no emotion other than rising irritation in her voice. “Will you please state your business?”

“I . . . I just wanted information.”

“Then I suggest you contact my late husband’s company.”

“What’s its name?”

“If you don’t know that, young lady, then I wonder what business you could have calling here in the first place, especially after ten at night. Now, I’m going to hang up. You shouldn’t be calling at this hour, pestering people. It’s bad manners.”

“But—”

The line went dead.

Alabama kept the receiver in her hand until the recorded voice reminded her that the call had been terminated and the dial tone returned.

She
had been terminated.

Her grandfather was dead, and apparently the only person left on that side of the family was a cranky old lady who already didn’t like her.

Then again, no one ever said finding a benefactress would be easy.

“I
don’t think you need to go to all this trouble,” Stuart said. “My family will adopt you.”

“If only.”

“They would. They really like you.”

She suspected this was true, which surprised her. Alabama couldn’t imagine being in a family as normal as the Looneys. Her whole life had been so the opposite. Not that she would have traded the life she’d had with her mom for his white-picket-fence existence.

She tried to focus on the letter she was composing. It needed to be perfect.

“Do you think I should call her something besides Mrs. Jackson?” she asked Stuart.

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what else could you call her?”

Alabama considered. “Grandmother?” That sounded so formal, though. “Granny? Grandma?”

“I’d stick with Mrs. Jackson. Getting a letter from somebody calling me grandma would freak me out. Besides, you can’t go wrong being too formal and polite.”

Right. This was why it was a good idea to run the letter past Stuart. He knew all about things like manners. Without his help, she probably would have written
Dear Granny Jackson
and blown the whole relationship before she could actually put any plan in motion.

“What do you think about the rest of it?”

He draped himself over the back of the sofa and read over her shoulder. He was so lean, he was almost feline—a curly-haired cat with grape Hubba Bubba breath.

“It’s a pretty good letter,” Stuart said. “But you probably don’t need to remind her that you woke her up the other night.”

He was right. Why begin on a negative? The woman might never put two and two together. Alabama crossed out those lines.

Over her shoulder, he added, “Your handwriting isn’t very tidy. You need to copy it over on nice stationery.”

“I don’t have any.”

“My mom does. I’ll ask to borrow some of hers and bring it to school tomorrow.” He sighed as he looked around. “I don’t know why you’d want to leave your aunt, though. She’s got such cool stuff.”

Stuart was crazy about Bev’s place, which is why lately they’d been ending up at her house after school, even though the best snacks and the large-screen TV with VCR and MTV were over at his house. The Looneys’ living room was like a little movie theater, but Stuart took all that for granted.
He
wanted to sift through Bev’s crafty crap, and he was obsessed with the dummy, Rhoda Morgenstern. He was always sticking scarves and hats on it, or the wig they’d found while they were “exploring,” which he’d wanted to leave on for Bev to see, as a joke, until Alabama had pointed out that the wig would be a dead giveaway that they’d been snooping in Bev’s closet.

He lay down on the carpet and frowned. “I don’t know why you want to live in Houston anyway.” He lifted his legs toward the ceiling. He was always doing some stretchy thing or vocal exercise that he swore was essential to being a great actor. In the middle of a conversation, she’d be startled by him making clicking sounds with his tongue, or practicing arching his eyebrows one at a time. “Although they have the Alley Theatre. I wouldn’t mind going there.”

“Even if my grandmother does like me, she might not want me to live with her. A lot of benefactors just send their wards off to boarding school.”
In books,
she added silently to herself. What were the chances that she would get so lucky in real life?

She stared at her paragraphs again, impatience coursing through her. Did she really need to wait for nice paper? She wanted the letter to be on its way, now. “I think I’ll just write it over again on notebook paper. It’s the feeling behind the words that counts, right?”

Stuart grunted his doubts, then crossed his arms behind his head. “What if living with your grandmother is worse than being here with your aunt? Have you ever thought of that?”

Worse than Bev? “How could it be worse?”

“You said she didn’t sound very nice on the phone. When you think about it, it’s like
Let’s Make a Deal.
Right now, you’ve got the Broyhill sofa and the year’s supply of bacon—which is okay, but not spectacular—and you’re about to chuck it all for what’s behind Door Number Three. And what’s there might be a Zonk car, or a donkey.”

“Or the jackpot.”

He frowned at the ceiling. “Speaking of doors . . . what’s
that
?”

A rectangular section of wood was in the hallway’s ceiling, attached by a hinge at one end. Eggshell-white paint, the same color as the Sheetrock around it, served as camouflage.

“Maybe the entry to the crawl space up there?” she guessed.

“Or an attic.” Stuart was already on his feet, scanning the room for a chair to stand on. He dragged one over from the dining table.

Alabama shuddered at the thought of what might actually be up there. If the house she’d once lived in with her mom was anything to go by, they could expect wasp nests and rodent droppings. “I’m not sticking my head through that hole.”

At the prospect of hidden treasure, Stuart was fearless. He stretched his hand up to the corner of the ceiling opening and got a handle on it. When he pulled down, the squealing hinge of the trapdoor caused Alabama to wince. While she hung back, expecting critters to fly out, he unfolded the ladder attached to the back of the closure and scrambled up it.

“Oh my God!”

She hovered at the bottom of the ladder, eye level with his skinny, hairy calves. “If something’s dead, I don’t want to see it.”

“This is amazing! It’s like a whole room.”

“Really?” Curiosity getting the better of her, she slanted a glance upward. “What’s in it?”

“Come see.” His sneakered feet disappeared through the hole.

Tentatively, she crawled up to join him. By the time she hoisted herself onto the dusty cedar plank floor, Stuart had already located the bare bulb at the center of the ceiling and pulled the chain to turn it on. The bright light made her squint. There was really only enough headroom to stand at the very center, where the peak of the roof was at its highest. The rectangle of finished floorboards was rimmed all around by pink insulation, giving her the feeling of being on a cedar plank island.

Stuart inspected the boxes stacked in piles along one side of the space, and lifted one lid. “Christmas decorations. She has them very well organized.”

She grunted, unsurprised. “Don’t expect me to open anything. There’ll probably be some of those Texas-sized cockroaches crawling around.” She shuddered at the memory of seeing one scuttling across her floor toward her bed one night. She was an old hand at dealing with buggy places, but this creature had been like something out of a science fiction movie. Killing it had taken all of her courage and skill.

“How big are non-Texan cockroaches?” Stuart asked.

“You know . . . insect-sized. Bigger than a flea, but smaller than a squirrel.”

He laughed. “Well, I don’t think there will be many up here. Look how tidy it is.”

Alabama detected no cobwebs on the rafter beams, and not much dust anywhere, even on the floor. Bev obviously took good care of this space, but she’d never said anything about it, even when they’d been trying to figure out what to do with all the craft stuff. She’d had the shop teacher from school build storage shelves in the garage.

Strange.

Stuart continued his inventory in growing disappointment. “More holiday stuff . . . old aquarium . . . curtains—” His voice cut out abruptly.

The silence made her turn.

“Wow,” he said.

He’d pulled out an oversized clothes box, like a coat might have come in. But what he lifted out of the box—almost reverently—was an ivory-white dress with long chiffon sleeves and an elaborate embroidered panel in the front, sprinkled with seed pearls. The oddest thing about it was the length—it was short, like dresses people had worn in the sixties. The neckline of the dress didn’t dip very low, but that length made it look a little risqué.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know . . . Bev’s old prom dress?”

Stuart unearthed a box within a box, and from folds of tissue pulled out a short wedding veil attached to a satiny headband.

“This is so cool!” he exclaimed. “It’s like a wedding dress Julie Christie might have worn.”

She frowned. She wasn’t sure who Julie Christie was, and for some reason she resisted the idea that this was a dress meant for a bride. “Are you sure it’s a wedding dress?”

He settled the veil on her head and fluffed it in admiration. “What else? Have you ever heard of anyone wearing a veil to a prom?”

She frowned at him through the tulle scrim. “Maybe the veil was from . . . I don’t know . . . Gladdie? And it just happened to get packed with the prom dress. . . .”

“Which just happens to be a modest bridal white, decorated with pearls, and looks like it’s only been worn once, tops?”

He was right. But who had been the bride?

Not Bev. Bev had never been married. Neither had her mom. “The last wedding in my family would have been my grandmom, but that was back forever ago. During World War Two. Did war brides wear dresses like that?”

“I don’t think so. This is mod. I wonder if your aunt wore go-go boots with it!”

She yanked the veil off her head. It wasn’t her aunt’s dress. “My aunt’s never been married. I’m sure of it. Her name’s still Putterman.”

Bev would have changed her name like a shot. And if she’d married young and had been widowed, you could bet she’d have the guy’s picture all over the place and still be wearing her wedding ring.

“You should try the dress on,” Stuart said. “Looks like it’s your size.”

She recoiled at the idea. Something about that dress made her uncomfortable. “No thanks.”

“Then let’s model it on Rhoda Morgenstern. It’s so cool.”

“I’m not sure . . .” Alabama wasn’t joining him in the rush toward the ladder. “It’s like the wig thing all over again. Aunt Bev’ll know we were going through her stuff.”

“But this isn’t her bedroom—it’s an attic. People are supposed to go through stuff in an attic. If you want to hide something, you put it under your bed or in a locked closet.”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t want to be a killjoy, but... “I’m not sure I should drag stuff that doesn’t belong to me out of here.”

“The entrance to the attic wasn’t locked,” he pointed out. “And did she tell you not to look around up here?”

No, she hadn’t. Alabama let out a breath. “Well, okay.”

Stopping Stuart might have been impossible anyway. He was excited about the dress, even more so because of the mystery behind it. Back downstairs, he carefully dusted off the dummy in preparation for dressing her.

Alabama watched him but her thoughts scrambled to make sense of the dress, which seemed even smaller and more stylish when Stuart slipped it over the figure. And then the answer came to her.

Stuart had said it looked like her size . . . so it couldn’t be Bev’s. Bev was at least three sizes bigger.

“I bet it was Mom’s.”

“You said your mom never got married, either,” he reminded her.

“But she was engaged to my dad. Or practically engaged, I think. Maybe she got Bev to make her a dress for when my dad got leave, but then he was killed.”

Stuart placed the veil on the wooden knob that stood in for Rhoda’s head. There was no way to keep the veil from going slightly askew, and something about that crookedness and the way the silhouette of the dress stood out in the fading afternoon light seemed sad.

Had it ever been worn, ever been the centerpiece of a happy day? So much care had gone into the design. Its sparseness had an elegance to it. Compared to the Princess Diana fairy-tale concoctions brides swathed themselves in nowadays, this dress seemed spare, stylish.

And hopelessly out of date.

Trying to shake off the glum feeling, she got up and put on her new Talking Heads album that she’d just received in her big shipment from Columbia House Record Club.
Little Creatures.
Which was maybe their best album ever. She left her door open so that “And She Was” could blare through the house. The thumpy backbeat lifted her mood. In fact, an idea occurred to her that made her feel better about everything.

“Maybe the dress wasn’t for anybody in the family. Aunt Bev could have made it for a friend, somebody who ended up not using it.”