The Way Back to Happiness (19 page)

Although she should have known. Even the ring of the phone sounded more pesky than usual before she picked it up.

“Bev? This is Dot Jackson,” the caller greeted her matter-of-factly. “I don’t imagine you’ve forgotten me.”

“Oh no,” Bev said. “I haven’t.”

They exchanged formal, halfhearted how-are-yous before Dot got right down to the crux of the matter. “I don’t need to tell you how disturbed Mother’s been after receiving the girl’s letter.”

Bev pursed her lips. “Mm. I can guess.”
A guilty conscience will do that.

“We’re weighing the situation very carefully. Of course, we have no way of knowing . . .”

“Yes, you do.”

Dot snorted. “Let’s not mince words, Bev. I’m sorry about your sister, but Diana was no saint, and not exactly the most dependable person on the planet. And as you’ll recall, the last time our parents heard from your people, there was talk of another grandbaby . . .”

“You can drop that subject right now,” Bev said. “And if it’s
ever
mentioned to Alabama . . .”

“I have no intention of telling Alabama anything,” Dot said, cutting her off. “I only wanted to call to let you know that we’re taking these allegations
very
seriously.”

“Allegations?” Bev clenched her hand on the receiver. “She’s not an allegation—she’s a teenager.”

“But whose?”

“Tom’s. Your brother’s.”

“There’s a lot at stake with this, Bev,” Dot said. “Maybe Alabama doesn’t understand that, but I’m sure you do. In fact, I’m not convinced that you aren’t the guiding force behind all this.”

Anger made her hand shake so hard that it was all she could do not to slam the phone down. “I knew nothing about that letter. And believe me, I wasn’t particularly happy about it. But Alabama’s just lost her mother, and she’s reaching out for family.”

“And Mother’s just lost her husband last year, and she’s feeling vulnerable. I guess
that
didn’t occur to you.”

“I didn’t know until Alabama told me,” Bev said. “And I was sorry to hear about your father. But, again, the first I heard about the correspondence was when I read your mother’s reply. Which didn’t exactly fill me with warm fuzzies for reconnecting with the Jacksons, by the way.”

“We’re still weighing what to do next,” Dot said. “I only wanted to warn you not to get your hopes up . . . or the girl’s. And please—no more letters.”

“I don’t control
the girl’s
outgoing mail. Alabama’s fourteen. But I don’t think your mother’s reply struck her as being eager to hear from her again. She’s not a fool.”

“So she doesn’t take after Tom or Diana . . .” Dot let the statement dangle, and Bev could have sworn she actually heard the woman smirk. “Maybe she takes after you?”

S
tuart read through Dorothy Mabry Jackson’s letter again. “This is the woman you want to be your long-lost grandmother?”

“She
is
my grandmother, whether I want her to be or not. Why shouldn’t I get to know my dad’s family?”

“She sounds snobby. And she really didn’t like your mother.”

That bothered Alabama, too, but she wasn’t willing to give up yet. “She just didn’t think my mother was telling the truth about me. She says she only met her once. Maybe my mom was having a really bad day.” Her mom had had a lot of those.

He squinted at the words, studying them like a gypsy reading tea leaves. “Well, if you do want to meet her, you should definitely send her a picture. You’ve got to make her see you as a person, not just a Putterman.”

Alabama nodded and spread the photographs she’d picked as possibilities out on the bed. “This is probably my best one.” She pointed to the snapshot that had been taken last year, by Charlie the sax player, after they’d been to a concert in the park. She was standing behind her mom with her arms draped around her, smiling like she could barely remember smiling in her life. A sitcom smile of perfect happiness. Her mom was beaming.

On second thought, she picked up the picture and tucked it back into the envelope it had come from. “It’s my favorite picture of my mom. I can’t send it.”

“We could make a copy.”

“That would take too long.”

He nodded. “Plus your mom’s in it. No offense, but she doesn’t seem to be a good selling point with Granny Jackson.”

“Right. I think I should send her one of this year’s school pictures.” She gestured to the photo of her against a boring slate-gray backdrop. She wasn’t smiling, but it seemed a pretty accurate representation of herself at this moment. Her potential benefactress might as well realize what she’d be taking on—weird hair, unhappiness, and all. Plus, her forlorn expression might make Granny Jackson more inclined to rescue her. She looked like a CARE kid who’d gotten into dye trouble.

“Yeah, that would probably be best.” Stuart leaned back and sighed. “I don’t know why you want to leave beautiful, bustling New Sparta.”

She laughed, but he didn’t.

“I don’t know why you want to leave me,” he said.

“I’m not leaving
you
.” She nudged him. “Besides, you’d abandon me quick enough if Kevin Kerrigan came along and swept you off your feet.”

“Of course. But I’d still be here to wave at you occasionally across the cafeteria.”

She tossed her second-grade picture at him.

“Okay,” he said. “Stick your photo in an envelope so we can get on with important matters. Talent show. Have you been thinking about it?”

“Yeah. I’ve thought a lot about scratching my name off the list.”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t be a coward. It would be so cool if I won first prize and you won second.”

“What do we win?”

“A ribbon.”

“I’m supposed to humiliate myself for a ribbon?”

“You’re not going to humiliate yourself.”

“Dressing up weird and tap dancing to ‘Rock Lobster’?”

“It’ll be cute.”

“No, it was cute when I did it in elementary school. Now it’s going to seem weird.”

“That’s what’s so great about it. It’s, like, surreal. Like a Thomas Dolby music video.”

“Only I won’t be on MTV, I’ll be in the New Sparta High School auditorium, humiliated.”

“You need to learn to take risks,” he said. “Besides, maybe you can use the Miss Havisham costume to earn extra credit in English.”

Though a long shot, that outcome was a compelling carrot to dangle in front of her. Her grades needed a boost. Concentrating on schoolwork was tough this year. During classes, even ones she liked okay, her attention would veer off. The scratch paper on her algebra test would fill up with doodles, not numbers. The sight of the janitor mowing outside the window would distract her from a biology lecture. Though she craved dreams, when she could be with her mom again for precious flashes of time, she could only sleep fitfully at night. Yet sit her at a desk in the middle of the school day and she was instantly narcoleptic.

Her teachers probably thought she was really stupid.

“Where is the dress?” Stuart asked.

“Back up in the attic, I guess.”

His eyes brightened. “Can we go look at it again? I’m thinking of stuff we could put on it.”

“I’m not sure Bev would like that.”

“Nothing permanent—we’d just pin stuff to it. How could she object to that? In class she’s always telling us to do more with less, by accessorizing what we have and using things for two purposes. That’s part of home economy. Well, we’re finding a dual purpose for a dress.”

Alabama still hesitated. “I think this is what they call peer pressure.”

He smiled. “Is it working?”

Minutes later, they were rummaging through the attic again. Alabama found the dress in its box and pulled it out. Never satisfied, Stuart kept excavating. “Do you think she had some gloves—long ones?”

“I don’t know.”

Alabama held the dress up to herself.
Whose was it?
That’s what still puzzled her. It was her size, too small for Bev. The dress had to have been her mom’s.

Maybe that’s what had upset Bev when she’d seen the dress on the dummy. She was obviously prone to coming unhinged when it came to her sister.

“Oh boy—more pictures.” Stuart unearthed an old photograph album and sat back against a trunk to leaf through it. “Maybe we’ll find a better snap to send to Granny Jackson.”

Alabama frowned and lowered herself down next to him. “There won’t be any of me in there. I’d barely met Bev before this June.”

“Yeah, these are all ancient.” Stuart flipped through the thick board pages. “I love old pictures. People used to look so much better.”

To Alabama, people in old photos usually seemed stiff and overdressed.

“This must be your grandmother,” Stuart said.

“Yeah, that’s Gladdie.” In the black-and-white photo, Gladdie was standing next to a tall man on a porch. She was so young! Alabama felt a buzz of excitement to find a whole new set of photos of the family. Most of the ones she’d seen were the few her mom had had, or the framed ones Gladdie kept in her apartment. “That’s my grandfather. I’ve only seen a couple of pictures of him before.” Now she drank in his features—the straight, thin mouth and sober, light-colored eyes. He and Gladdie gazed seriously at the camera, as if they knew he wasn’t going to live long enough to take many more pictures.

What if they’d had a crystal ball to tell them Gladdie would end up married to Wink Williams? Maybe that would have made them laugh.

“Is
this
your mom?” It was hard to miss the disappointment in Stuart’s voice as he stared at the picture of Diana, leaning against a tree and grinning, with hair that reached almost down to the low hips of her jeans. “She wasn’t a beehive girl. She was a hippie.”

“Wasn’t she pretty?” Alabama couldn’t take her eyes off her, even when they began to cloud with tears. She wanted to crawl into that picture.

Stuart moved on. “And this must be Ms. Putterman.”

On the facing page was Bev, in a black-and-white shot different from the rest of the pictures in the album. The glossy photo looked almost professionally done, even though it was just a candid shot of Bev staring at a grandfather clock.

“She looks so cool,” Stuart said.

“Aunt Bev?
Cool?
” Alabama inspected the picture more closely, but all she saw was Bev. It irked her that Stuart preferred a photo of Bev to the one of her mother. But of course he knew Bev.

“She’s wearing a cool dress—like Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. And who’s this mystery man?” he asked.

The face smiling up at her was one she’d only seen in the faded color snapshot her mother had kept in her drawer. Tom Jackson. Here he was in a wrinkled suit jacket and tie, arms folded, grinning puppyishly.

“That’s my dad.” She reached out to touch the edge of his head, as if he would be flesh and blood. Her chest felt tight.

“He was cute,” Stuart said. “I thought you said he was in the army.”

“Not always, obviously.”

“Yeah, but I expected somebody more serious.”

Actually, so had she. Of course, her mother had said that her dad was a bookworm, but she hadn’t mentioned that he had a goofy, sweet smile that tugged at your heart.

These photographs confused her. Who had taken the picture of her dad? It seemed to come from the same batch as the picture of Bev and the grandfather clock. Maybe her mom? Alabama squinted, searching for clues. The background didn’t resemble Gladdie’s old house.

“Are there any more pictures of your mom?” Stuart asked.

There weren’t. She found a few more of Tom, though. Some were cheap yellowed color snapshots that looked as if they’d been taken at college. The last pages of the album remained empty, leaving her with the uneasy feeling of something that had been interrupted. “This is weird. I wonder if this was my mom’s photo album. She might’ve abandoned it when she left home.”

“Why would your aunt have it, then?”

Good question. Alabama supposed Bev could have purposefully salvaged it from Gladdie’s house when Gladdie moved to the apartment. Maybe that’s how her aunt ended up with a lot of this old stuff, including the wedding dress.

“Or maybe your aunt had a crush on your dad.”

Alabama recoiled. “Yuck! Why would you say that?”

He nodded toward the album. “Because she kept his pictures.”

She was tempted to swipe several of the pictures, if not the whole album, but she remembered her aunt blowing her stack about her snooping in the attic the last time. The pictures going missing would be a dead giveaway. But if this was Bev’s photo album and she cared about it so much, why was it stowed away in the attic, out of sight?

 

Alabama had thought her aunt was really mad about her getting in touch with Granny Jackson, but over the next week, Bev acted as though it had never happened. Instead, she’d decided that as a big treat, they should invest in a videocassette recorder. “That way we can have movie nights here. Derek loves movies, and you can invite Stuart over, too.”

Bev put more thought into buying the VCR than most people gave to choosing a new car. She read everything she could find about the topic, and then they spent an entire weekend shopping. “Derek is coming back next week,” she explained to Alabama during the trip to Tyler to make the final purchase. “This will give us plenty of time to get the machine all set up for Saturday night.”

On Saturday, the shiny black VCR was out of its box, the instruction manual had been read by Bev cover to cover, and their first rental tapes waited on the coffee table, but Bev nearly ended up having a nervous breakdown trying to set it up. “I can’t make heads or tails of this.” An increasingly angry series of phooeys and gosh-darnits emanated from behind the television, and when Bev came up for air, her face was as red and sweaty as if she’d been running a marathon.

She puffed out a breath. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s broken. I’ll have to take it back.”

Moments later, Stuart arrived, pinpointed the problem, and connected the machine in about two seconds.

“It’s perfect,” he said, admiring the machine effusively enough to smooth Bev’s ruffled feathers. He was also excited about the movies they’d rented. He picked up one with Bette Davis. “I’ve always wanted to see
The Old Maid
.”

Alabama knew that, which is why she lobbied for it extra-hard at the video rental place—which, in New Sparta, was also a bait shop. Bev had thought
The Old Maid
sounded depressing, so she’d insisted on renting two films.

“Tonight we’re going to watch
Any Which Way You Can,
” Bev told Stuart. “Derek loves Clint Eastwood movies.”

Stuart’s enthusiasm was effectively doused. “Really? Even the monkey ones?”

“I loved Clyde!” Bev said.

Derek hadn’t been around for nearly a month, and now it was as if royalty was coming. Ten minutes before his estimated time of arrival, a can of his favorite beer was put in the freezer so it would be at optimal chill when it reached his hand. The oven was already preheated so a frozen pizza could be popped in if Derek showed the slightest impatience to eat. Bev’s air popper and a jar of Orville Redenbacher stood at the ready.

But Derek didn’t show up. Six o’clock—magic hour—passed, then seven. The telephone, the focus of all Bev’s interest, crouched silent on the end table. Finally, at seven thirty, they decided to go ahead and make popcorn and at least start the Bette Davis movie. No harm in that, Bev said.

No harm, except that Alabama had never sat down and watched an entire movie with Bev in the living room. They both had regular series they followed, with tastes that intersected at
Moonlighting
and
Newhart,
but usually Alabama tried to avoid getting stuck in the living room for anything longer than an hourlong series. True, they’d been to movies. But in the New Sparta movie theater, a single-screen operation where the owner patrolled the aisle looking for propped feet and smuggled-in snacks, Bev was always courteously silent.

Now, at home, she provided a running commentary, as if she were standing at the back of a classroom during an educational film. “This is set during the Civil War. I love those kinds of stories, don’t you?” When no one answered, she remained silent until the observations could be held back no more. “Bette Davis was so beautiful back then, wasn’t she? She had such distinctive eyes.”

“You could write a song about them,” Stuart said.

Bev laughed. “Oh, I know—unoriginal, right? But just look at her. And she seems so old and cuckoo now when she’s on
Johnny Carson.
” After a minute of film flickered by, she said, “Her sister’s fiancé is so handsome. What’s that actor’s name?”