Hope Springs - 05 - Wedding Cake (12 page)

L
ouise could not make up her mind about getting married, and she was angry with herself that she couldn’t just tell George no. He had called her every day in the last week from Baltimore, trying not to sound desperate and plead, but certainly working to persuade Louise to give him an answer. His condition was worsening more quickly than originally expected. He was eager to start his new life, this new life that would soon be death. He needed her to marry him, and he needed her to do it soon.

Louise heard the phone ring and she didn’t move from the swing on her back deck. She was sure that it was George since he had promised last week to call again, giving her a few more days to decide. She knew he had waited as long as he could and then dialed her number again. Four times the phone signaled a call, and finally the voice mail picked up. She would check it later even though she was sure she knew who it was.

It was a cool April day and Louise was enjoying being outside.
She closed her eyes and pushed herself back and forth with her feet. She loved her old porch swing. She loved the back deck and the way the sun danced between branches of trees and the way breezes stirred while she rested there. Even when she had been advised to cut some of the trees closest to her house, she had kept all of them in the backyard. She was often nervous during ice storms when the trunks would splinter and the limbs break, but then spring and summer would soon take the place of winter and she would laugh at her worries and enjoy the ample shade, knowing that even on the hottest days it would be cool out there. She loved her backyard.

It had been Roxie’s favorite spot on the property as well. Even when she was agitated, the Alzheimer’s yanking her further and further away from reality, shifting her thoughts from long ago to even longer ago, Louise could bring Roxie outside, ease her into the swing, push her just a little, and the agitation would lessen. Roxie would smile and cluck her tongue against the roof of her mouth, mimicking the sound of the woodpecker they could hear working on one of the hardwood trees at the edge of the backyard. The light breeze would blow through her hair and she would lay her head back and cluck.

Louise smiled, wrapping the light blanket around herself, recalling those last months she spent with Roxie. They were splendid and horrible, both at the same time. It was a constant battle, trying to convince Roxie who she was, trying to convince Roxie that she wasn’t in a stranger’s house, that she wouldn’t be harmed. Every day was a struggle with Roxie’s sense of loss, her unexplainable grief in having everything taken from her, her capability to reason, her family, the ability to recognize people she was told she should know. And yet even in the struggles, the day-to-day battles, the cajoling and the arguing and the convincing, there had been the most amazing moments
of tenderness, of sweet, intimate communion for Louise and Roxie. There had been these quick but satisfying moments when Roxie would look right into Louise’s eyes and tell her thank you or that she loved her, and even though they were as fast as lightning, gone in a blink of an eye, they were there, and those were the moments that made for most of Louise’s memories.

When Roxie died, Louise was glad her friend didn’t have to suffer any longer, but if it had been up to her and she was allowed to be completely selfish about things, she would have kept Roxie alive for as long as she could, just to have one more of those clear and beautiful moments.

“So, what do you think of this arrangement, Miss Roxie Ann?” Louise asked the question out loud, imagining her friend sitting next to her in the swing.

“Your husband asking me to marry him, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? And I am crazy for even considering such a thing, right?” She draped her arm across the back of the swing the way she used to do when Roxie was beside her. Back and forth she pushed the swing, thinking of her best friend and all the days they had together.

Louise drifted back in her memories and thought about Roxie when she was young, how simply she saw the world, how matter-of-fact she could be. Louise let the morning breeze move her back and forward in the swing and suddenly remembered a time when the two women lived together in a boardinghouse while they worked at the mill, a time when Louise asked her friend for advice regarding her relationship with her mother.

Louise had never been close to her family and she was particularly distant from her mother, a harsh woman who openly displayed her disapproval of Louise and her sisters. All her childhood, Louise
had felt as if she had never been quite good enough for her mother, never been able to measure up to her mother’s standards. Her mother had often told her daughter that because she was so stupid and ugly, she would never amount to anything more than a dirt farmer’s wife. Louise’s mother had refused to buy her children new clothes or spend any money on them at all, so Louise and her sisters learned at a very early age how to sew their own dresses and blouses, and they shared what they had with one another and accepted hand-me-downs from cousins and friends. By the time Louise was a teenager, out of school, and had moved out of town to work on her own, she and her mother barely spoke.

One day she received a letter from her mother asking Louise to send home more money. Louise already sent a large portion of what she made to her parents, leaving her with very little to make ends meet. She had left home to get away from her mother and to join her sisters at the mill, and even though she had no tenderness toward her parents, she still felt a responsibility to help support them, to send them money.

Louise knew things on the farm were difficult; her father had suffered a back injury a year before she left and was not able to do the work of planting and harvesting, and her mother had never been one to work outside. She spoke in the same harsh way to her husband as she did to her children, always belittling him, always reminding him how she hated him for being a farmer, and she refused to help him in any way. In the earlier years, Louise and her siblings had been the ones to milk the cow or feed the hogs, hoe the rows of beans and cucumbers, and drive the tractor through the fields. The children had managed all the outdoor chores, including planting and growing the gardens and taking care of the livestock. Louise’s mother would
cook meals and clean the house, but she would never venture outside beyond a small flower garden she kept near the back door to the kitchen.

When her father was injured and most of the children were gone, the farmland became barren, and the yard and the vegetable gardens were unattended to and unproductive. Louise, like her sisters, left the farm and the unhappy surroundings, but they still supported their parents by sending money from their paychecks. All of them hated to leave their father, worried about him, but in the end only one brother, the oldest son, could stand to live close by. He did as much as he could, growing tobacco and cotton, but he too depended on his sisters’ assistance. None of them discussed how much each one of them was sending, and Louise, unaware at the time that she was sending more than any of the others, was seeking advice from her friend after receiving the letter from home demanding more money.

“Did Maxine or Deborah get a letter like that?” Roxie had asked when she heard about the correspondence. She was referring to Louise’s sisters.

“I don’t know,” Louise answered.

“Don’t you think you ought to ask them?”

Louise and Roxie had been sitting on the front porch of the boardinghouse. It was a Saturday, and neither of them had to work. They were planning to take a drive out to a lake. George and a few other boys were going with them.

“Why would it matter whether or not they got the same letter as I did?” Louise responded. “She’s still asking me for money.”

“Louise, how much do you send your mother?” Roxie was leaning against the porch railing. Over the years that they had been working and living together, she had made a few critical comments about
Louise’s constant contributions to her parents, but she had never confronted her friend and she had never asked such a personal question.

“I send her half,” Louise replied.

“Every month?”

Louise nodded.

“Do you save anything?” Roxie asked, surprised to hear the answer.

Louise shook her head. “After rent and groceries and gas, there isn’t really anything left to save.”

“And now she’s asking for more?”

Louise recalled how Roxie had bent close to her at that point, knelt down in front of her, in fact, putting her hands on Louise’s knees. She recalled the words Roxie had said that endeared her friend to her even more.

“Louise, you are a good person. You are the best friend I have ever had and you are a good sister and a good daughter. But understand that you will never hear these words from your mother. She does not see you for who you are and she probably never will. Sending your father a little money every month is a kind and generous thing to do. It is honorable, and I think you should keep doing that. But you cannot buy what you want from your mother, and you do not have to try and repay her for being your parent.” She had stood up at that point and leaned over Louise.

“You and your sisters need to talk and decide upon the amount you are going to send your parents, and then you need to save some money for yourself. And you need to get out from under your mother’s cloud. It is time to be your own woman and to take care of and love yourself.”

And Louise had taken Roxie’s advice. She and her sisters had
talked, and that was when she discovered how much more she was sending home than her siblings. Together, they decided upon a set amount, and they contributed toward that amount and refused to send more. Her mother had written some terrible letters following that decision, but Louise, with the help of Roxie, had stuck to her guns, and she was finally able to save enough money to buy her own car, her own house, and even go to community college and take a few courses.

“So, what would you tell me now, dear one?” Louise asked again after remembering that cherished story about Roxie’s advice.

She envisioned her friend sitting beside her on the swing, her mind clear, her thoughts rational. She imagined Roxie snuggled next to her, the two of them sharing the blanket, Louise with her arm wrapped around Roxie’s shoulder, and she could almost hear her voice.

“You do not owe George anything,” she thought she could hear Roxie say. “He treated you badly when we were friends, and I know it was hard for you when I got married.”

Louise smiled. She closed her eyes, listening to the make-believe conversation she was having.

“You are a good friend, an honorable woman, and you deserve to be happy in whatever way you define that.”

Roxie would have taken her hand then, slid her long fingers in between Louise’s short, stumpy ones. And they would have sat like that for hours without needing to say another word between them. The shadows lengthened as the morning edged into the afternoon.

“Do you still love George?” Louise asked the ghost of her friend who she pretended was beside her, the woman she remembered as being completely honest and straightforward.

“Of course I still love George,” Louise was sure that Roxie would
answer. “But that doesn’t mean you owe me more than you’ve already given me. It doesn’t mean you have to do something that isn’t yours to do.”

“So, maybe I want to know how it feels to be married. Maybe I want to see my name on some legal document that connects me to another human being. Maybe it would make me feel closer to you.”

Louise waited for some reply from her dead friend, waited for some smart but imagined response from Roxie, but there was nothing else she could hear or sense, no counsel or wisdom or instruction. Just a sweet sense of peace and acceptance, the light breeze blowing around her, and the knowledge that she was already and completely loved by the one who had mattered most.

Louise blew out a long breath, opened her eyes, and made up her mind just as the phone started ringing.

J
essie was cleaning out the bedroom closet when the letter fell out from between two suitcases. She didn’t notice it at first. She was standing on a stepladder, pulling down shoe boxes and cartons of wrapping paper and bows. Jessie enjoyed a good day of cleaning, and since the weatherman had called for a cold rain that particular day in April, it just seemed like a good time to sort and clean for a new season.

It wasn’t until later, after she had finished arranging the luggage and the summer shoes and the plastic bags of extra sheets on the long shelf above the rack and had stepped down from the ladder, that she saw the faded envelope caught under the edge of the closet door. She bent down and picked it up.

It was addressed to James, postmarked in 1990-something, from Maryland, sent to his apartment in Washington, D.C., during the time he had left Jessie and was living out of state. The return address, written in the top left corner of the envelope, included just three initials,
RWH, the letters, small and curled, offering no more information than just that. She held the letter in her hand, somehow feeling the weight of it, somehow knowing it was more than just a bill or random statement about investments or monies needed, that it was more than just a note giving information about a family gathering or news from home. Somehow, just the way his name was written, so matched up to the initials in the corner, Jessie could sense it was personal and, at least at the time it had been sent, important.