The Myth of Perpetual Summer Page 15

  Now all I have to do is convince her it’s too dangerous to be here, that we all need her too much for her to take the chance. I’ll promise to help register voters. Yes. That’ll be a good positive argument. I’m not asking her to give up the fight, just to do it on safer ground. And she should be happy that I’m joining the cause, too.

  I’ll get her to come home. I know I can.

  12

  When Ross pulls under the carport outside the office of the Moonglow Motor Court, I see a bunch of people inside the chain-link fence surrounding the swimming pool in the center of the U-shaped motel. It looks like a bunch of college kids on vacation: loud music, beer bottles, and lots of splashing.

  “I’ll go ask which room,” Ross says.

  “No,” I say, pulling my eyes away from a show-off doing a jackknife off the diving board. “I’ll go.”

  “Not alone.”

  “Stay here!” My words are sharper than is polite. And all Ross is doing is being polite. “I’m going to be less than ten feet away . . . on the other side of a glass window. I’ll be fine.”

  He raises his hands in surrender.

  A little bell on the door jingles when I open it. It takes a few seconds, but a man who looks like he belongs in a boxing ring comes out of a back room. “Help you, missy?” He has a stubby cigar clenched between his teeth and smells like fried onions.

  “I was told Margo James is staying here. I’d like her room number, please.”

  He squints one eye. “And you’re lookin’ for her because . . . ?” He drags out the last word.

  “I’m her daughter.”

  I’m not sure if the bark that comes from his throat is laughter or just surprise. “So she’s got a kid, huh?”

  “Four. Four kids.” I start to squirm under his gaze; I feel like a puzzle he’s trying to take apart and put back together with his eyes.

  That’s when I notice there’s a hole worn in one of the square gray tiles under my feet and the windows are hazed with grime. Wishing I still had my gloves on, I take my hands off the counter and resist wiping them on my yellow dress. “Will you please give me her room number?”

  “You don’t need her room. She’s right out there.” He nods toward the pool. “Surprised you didn’t see her. A doll like that stands out.”

  I glance over my shoulder. Not only is she out there in a bathing suit that borders on indecent, she’s leaning with her elbows on the top of the fence pushing her chest in Ross’s face and laughing like a teenager. I thought I’d already experienced all the ways Margo could embarrass me, but I was wrong.

  My ears and cheeks burn as I head toward them.

  “I was just coming to get you,” Ross says. “I wasn’t sure it was your mom at first.”

  I can see why.

  “What are you doing here?” She’s no longer laughing.

  I’m breathing so fast, I’m light-headed. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Here I stand,” she says with a flip of her hand and a laugh. She’s obviously been drinking.

  “In private.”

  “Margo! Your poker hand is getting cold,” a man in swim trunks and a matching shirt calls from a little table under a faded metal umbrella in the far corner.

  Over her shoulder she says, “Be right there.”

  “I thought you were doing a protest at the bus station,” I say, my voice shaking. I can’t even look at Ross. “You’re supposed to be working.”

  “The next Riders aren’t due for a few days,” she says, as if that explains everything.

  The man comes over from the umbrella table and puts his arm around her, and she leans into him a little. “This is Robert. Our fearless leader.”

  I want to knock his hand off her shoulder. I want to scream and rant and stomp my feet. “A few days? And you couldn’t come home in the meantime?” I think of poor Walden and Dad and the blackberries, and I want to pull out all her hair.

  “Don’t use that tone with me, young lady! You don’t know a thing about what’s going on here.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me! Tell me why you’re drinking and playing poker while Walden is crying himself to sleep at night! Tell me why you don’t care enough about your family to drive home for those few days! Tell me about the important work you’re doing right now!”

  Griff was right. I feel dizzy and sick.

  “You don’t fight the fight every second of every day,” Margo says. “We have to strategize, plan. We have to be ready—”

  “Stop! Just stop!” I spin around and run back to Ross’s car, hoping he has the decency to follow and get me out of here.

  He’s in the driver’s seat before I get my door closed. Margo isn’t a crusader but a . . . a . . . floozy.

  Poor Daddy. What am I going to do? If I tell him it’ll break his heart. Margo’s already driving him really and truly insane. What if this pushes him into a shadow time he can’t come out of?

  But what if this really is the way protesting works and I’m jumping to the wrong conclusion about Margo and that . . . that Robert. Hard to believe, considering . . . but, still.

  Maybe I should tell Griff and see what he says.

  You know what he’ll say.

  As Ross drives silently back toward Lamoyne, I keep my unfocused eyes on the roadside and just want to die. About halfway home, he turns off the highway onto a deserted dirt road and slows to a stop.

  “Why are we stopping?” I can’t look at him.

  He shuts off the engine. “Because I have something to say and I want to do it before we get back to Lamoyne.”

  I sniff. “Please, just take me home.”

  “No.”

  “Ross—”

  “Look at me, Lulie.”

  The name only Griff uses surprises me enough that I turn.

  “Maybe you jumped to a hasty conclusion back there.”

  “You don’t really think that, do you?”

  He shrugs.

  “Griff’s right. She’s not full of convictions and principles. She doesn’t love us. She doesn’t want to be a mother at all.” I’ve been hiding from the truth, burying it under excuses. And now, finally saying it out loud, it slides under my skin like a hunter’s knife.

  “Maybe not,” he says softly.

  I’d expected at least a little resistance, reassurance that something so awful as a mother not wanting her own kids couldn’t be true.

  “But this is on her, Lulie. Not you. Not Griff or the twins. Her,” he says, taking my hand. “She’s the one with the holes inside, not you.”

  With his words, something twists and rolls in my chest. The tears I’ve been choking on evaporate. I don’t have to want her to love me. I don’t have to care! Suddenly I understand how free Griff must feel since he gave up on her.

  “I’m sorry about what happened back there, but it has nothing to do with you.” Ross surprises me by wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pulling me close. “Nothing at all.” His lips press against the top of my head and I am free.

  * * *

  My sense of lightness and freedom lasts all of eight hours, when I awaken at midnight to shouting.

  “I don’t know what Tallulah told you—”

  “She didn’t tell me anything. But you just did!”

  She came home because she was afraid I told?

  “You don’t trust me?” she shouts. “You! With your coeds and—” She breaks off in a growl followed by breaking glass. Margo is a thrower.

  Walden scurries into my room with his raggedy stuffed dog. I lift the covers, and he jumps into bed with me. I hold him close, and his face burrows into the curve of my neck. It’s a drill that no longer requires words.

  I wish he’d closed the door. The hurricane of their voices is so much louder, sharper . . . clearer without the wood filter. I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to understand.

  Walden’s panicky breath brushes my neck. He’s trembling. I feel terrible because my going to Jackson set this in motion, this fight, t
hose hateful words.

  I’m glad we live far away from anyone who could hear the storm raging through our screens. All I want to do is go and curl up beside Griff. I doubt he’s sleeping—he just doesn’t need me to get through these nights.

  Lately he only needs Ross.

  After today, I’m afraid I do, too. How can I resent one boy so much, and long for him, too?

  * * *

  At dawn, I peel myself away from a sweaty, sleeping Walden and get ready for berry picking. My head throbs from lack of sleep, and my insides feel raw. The house didn’t fall quiet until sometime after three. I’m half afraid to come out of my room and face the wreckage. After nights like this I like to have it cleaned up when Dad and Margo wake up, so there’s no reminder that they’re mad at each other.

  At first, when I come into the dim living room, I stop short, fiery shock shooting through my veins. They’ve finally killed each other.

  Then one of the legs in the naked tangle on the floor moves. I realize Dad is snoring softly. Thank the Lord a gray-and-yellow crocheted afghan from the davenport is draped across them, covering from bare shoulders to midthighs.

  Other than the disturbing sight of naked parents, there’s an overturned bottle of bourbon on the coffee table, two broken glasses on the hardwood, a few books knocked from the shelves, and a ceramic ashtray lying at the baseboard beside the fireplace in three chunks. Toss pillows have landed like grenades all over the room and the lampshade is knocked askew.

  I get a towel and mop up the bourbon, the sharp smell stinging my nose. When I start picking up the broken glass, a shard pricks my thumb, drawing a bright bead of blood. As I go get a Band-Aid, I’m wondering how I’m going to keep Gran outside when she gets here. I can get the mess cleaned up, but I can’t scoop Dad and Margo off the floor and deposit them behind the closed door of their bedroom where they belong.

  But it isn’t Gran who shows up before I finish sweeping up the glass. It’s Ross. The sound of his car is unmistakable. I rush out the back door into the hazy morning to intercept him before he knocks. Yesterday was humiliating enough; I can’t let him see this.

  He peers beyond me as I approach. “Griff ready?”

  And you thought he came for you, the little mocking voice comes from the back of my mind, knocking my heart down a peg or two. “Oh. Um, no. I’ll go get him.”

  As I turn to go back inside, he snags my arm. “Wait a minute.”

  I wish I didn’t feel so unbalanced when I look into his eyes.

  “I see your mom’s back.” My stomach jumps before I realize he can’t see through the French doors but is nodding toward the Chevy parked crookedly on the lawn. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” The two words are sharp, cutting the air between us.

  “Lulie, I can tell just by looking at you, you’re not. Did you even sleep?”

  I think of the party at the motel . . . that man, of Walden’s fear, of the words my parents hurled at each other in the night, of the mess in the living room, and I want to throw myself into Ross’s arms and cry until I no longer have the strength to stand.

  But he’s already seen too much of the truth of me, of my family. He says he’s the kind of friend who won’t be scared off by my parents’ craziness, but he has no idea how bad it can get. I force the echoes of last night out of my head and put a smile on my face. “I’m fine. I’ll get Griff.” I turn and hurry into the house before I weaken and say more.

  Once I’m back in the kitchen, I look out the window. He’s leaning against his car with his arms and ankles crossed, calm and quiet, like the orchard in the early morning. I feel such a tug of longing that my throat swells. Tears? Shame? Love? I can’t tell.

  I close my eyes and fight the urge to go back out and beg him to take me today and leave Griff here to fight the blackberry thorns and clean up the wreckage.

  Then I turn away and go to wake Griff.

  I wait until I hear the Corvette start before I head to the sanctuary of the orchard. After a night like last night, Dad and Margo move in a world that is exclusive to the two of them, locking the rest of us out. Which will set Dharma in attention-grabbing mode. The unpredictability of our family is so predictable.

  As I move through my morning, I want Maisie. I want her sly way of looking at things to entertain me through the tedious hours of picking. I want to ask her if she thinks Griff will ever come back to the way he was. I want to talk to her about Ross and the strange way he makes me feel.

  But I am alone.

  When I’m finally done with blackberries, I head to my secret place, toward the river that separates the pecan orchard from the wildness beyond.

  If only I could keep walking west, away from family chaos and this town, to a new me with palm trees and sunshine and endless stretches of sand.

  13

  August 1972

  Lamoyne, Mississippi

  After tucking the dusty jars of mayhaw jelly back in the closet, I got up off Gran’s foyer floor. I couldn’t even look Ross in the eye as I headed for the stairs, saying I was going to pack Gran’s bag. So far, all I’ve done is wander from room to room, visiting the memories made in them. Unlike everything else I’ve encountered since I knocked on Ross’s front door, this place truly is frozen in time.

  I poke around the old nursery where Griff and I played with the same toys Gran and even Great-Granddaddy played with as children. From there I head to the sewing room, where Gran fitted and hemmed my dresses and sewed recital outfits for Dharma and holiday-themed vests for Walden. The only open bedroom other than Gran’s is where Walden must have spent the past nine years. I’m not strong enough to face the detritus of boyhood he left behind, so I turn back around and take a quick peek inside the two closed-off rooms where the furniture is covered with white sheets, just as they have been for as long as I can remember.

  The full width of the rear of the second story is a sleeping porch, the old balcony screened sometime around the turn of the century. During the hottest months when I was a girl, Gran used to set up the same portable cots her family used when she was a child. Those were the best nights: Griff, me, and Gran—and sometimes even Daddy—sleeping on our cots, lined side by side, Gran spinning ghost stories handed down from her own grandmother about the lost souls bound to the river behind the house.

  Now there is just a single cot on the porch. It makes my heart ache to think of Gran dragging it from storage herself and spending long dark nights out here alone.

  As darkness falls, I breathe the mud scent of the river, listen to the bugs tap against the screens and the rising voices of the crickets and tree frogs—a familiar, beautiful symphony that lulled me to sleep all the summer nights of my childhood.

  I swipe the quiet tears from my cheeks and head to Gran’s room. Everything is just as it’s always been. The rose-covered wallpaper, the handmade quilt covering the bed, the yellowing tatted doilies scattered on all horizontal surfaces. Everything in the exact same place. There’s something comforting about it. But it’s strange, too. I can’t quite put my finger on what makes it feel off. As I walk slowly around the room, it becomes clear. I have never been in Gran’s room without her. Things look the same, but the warmth and vitality are missing.

  The house is still hot, so I open the windows. There’s no stir of breeze, just more heavy, moist air and pressing darkness. Gran’s absence echoes in every inch of this place. What if I’d been too late and this was all I had to return to?

  To give myself a reprieve, I head to the bathroom to collect her toiletries. Many of them are missing, her toothbrush and toothpaste, her lavender bath talc, her lipsticks, the train case she keeps in the small closet. I wonder if Mr. Stokes was the one to gather her things and take them to the hospital. It seems oddly intimate, and yet I can’t imagine her letting anyone else do it.

  Thinking of him makes me yearn for Maisie in a way I haven’t for years.

  I take the things I’ve gathered to Gran’s bedroom and focus my thoughts on the tas
k at hand, filling the spaces where the memories are trying to roost. Turning on her old AM radio, I rotate the yellowed plastic dial. The only nongospel station that comes in with more music than static is playing Alice Cooper. It feels so horribly wrong in this room, I switch it back off.

  I lay Gran’s blue suit and a soft cream blouse on the bed, along with two other dresses that look like they’ll pack well. All the clothes are a size smaller than I remember. I choose a couple of blouses and a pair of slacks. As I pull them out of the closet, I pause, surprised by the hollowness in my chest.

  I’d thought I was done with this place for good. Apparently, it isn’t done with me.

  I move to the dresser to gather undergarments, stockings, and jewelry. Even when working in the orchard, Gran’s clothing was tastefully accessorized.

  Opening the beautiful inlaid-wood jewelry box Granddad gave her when they were married, I poke through the clip-on earrings, brooches, and bracelets. I don’t see her pearls. She’ll want them for the courtroom. Nothing says solidity like a good strand of pearls, she always said.

  There are three shallow drawers in the top row of the long dresser. The one on the right holds her underthings, the one on the left socks and stockings. I don’t remember her ever getting into the one in the middle. I pull the knob, but the drawer doesn’t budge.

  There’s a brass-rimmed slot for one of those tiny keys, but no key. I look in the small cut-glass dishes on the dresser, lift the lid of the little Spode box, feel around in the bottom of her lingerie drawers searching for the key. No luck. I check her nightstands and every decorative vase and knickknack that could serve as a hiding place.

  Returning to the dresser, I lift out the top tray and check the lower compartment. No key. I lift the mirrored tray holding decorative perfume bottles and check underneath. No key. I look at the jewelry box again. Could there be a third compartment?

  I lift out the top tray again, then try the lower. It’s snug but finally lifts out. Near the back is a small ribbon loop, the same dark burgundy as the velvet lining the box. I pull and the bottom panel swings open. The space below isn’t deep, maybe an inch or so. No pearls. But there is a large gold filigree locket. At the sight, I feel the cold of the dedication day, hear this locket clattering onto the steps of the stage, experience the sting of Gran’s unusually sharp reaction as she snatched it away. I never found the courage to question her about it.