Pulling Home (7 page)

Everything changed after Corrine’s death. Grandma Lenore shuffled more,

clasped her rosary tighter and murmured to herself, in prayer or desperation, Audra couldn’t tell which, wondered sometimes if they were the same. The aches in the old woman’s joints settled in her knees, making walking any distance painful. Audra became the messenger and the delivery person—to the grocery store for milk and bread, the neighbor’s to borrow an egg or spool of thread, the drugstore for liniment. Mrs. Mertigan drove them to Mass every Sunday morning in her navy Caprice Classic. While other girls Audra’s age were sharing secrets at sleepovers or learning new dance steps, she tended the garden, canned the tomatoes, picked and snapped the pole beans, and baked the breads. She gathered the laundry, ironed the aprons and housedresses, dusted the maple table and chairs, and mended her own skirts. She rubbed liniment on her grandmother’s swollen knees, washed the old woman’s long gray hair twice a week and braided it into a bun on top of her head. Gradually, Audra took over the cooking too, soups and stews at first, and then roasts with homemade gravy and chicken with buttermilk dumplings.

Grandma Lenore curled up after Corrine’s death, shriveling inside herself, one

breath at a time until one morning, two days after Audra’s high school graduation, she died. It was a Thursday, bright and clear. Audra had just fixed Grandma Lenore oatmeal with wheat toast, settled her in her rocking chair and tucked the gold and brown afghan around the old woman’s swollen legs. Then she’d gone to the basement to pull out chicken for dinner but changed her mind and decided on beef soup instead. It took a few extra minutes to find the beef cubes and rearrange the packages, and when she returned to the kitchen, Grandma Lenore was leaning back in the rocker, mouth slack, eyes wide open.

Grandma?
But Audra knew, before she placed a hand over the old woman’s

heart,
she knew
. It was then, as she clutched her grandmother’s limp hand between her fingers that the knowledge burst inside her like a cancer cell gone wild, spreading first to her gut, then her chest and finally, her brain, until every cell in her body was contaminated with it. Her family was gone and all she had left was Christian.

“I promised myself if I ever got out, I’d set things straight with Corrine’s
daughter.”—Doris O’Brien

The birds woke Audra the next morning, chirping from the gnarled oak outside

the window. She threw back the covers and stretched. If she hurried she could sneak in a run before anyone woke up. She wasn’t avoiding them but Joe Wheyton could stare down a blind man and Alice was too overwrought to concern herself with her husband’s behavior. The man would just as soon kick Audra out if he thought he could keep Kara and get away with it. Christian always said his father was all bluster, that deep down he was a real softy. Doubtful.

Audra slipped on sweats and a T-shirt and made her way down the steps and out

the back door. Holly Springs hadn’t changed much in nine years, especially the middle class area where the Wheytons lived. Her old house of course was on the other side of town. The wrong side. She stretched and began jogging along the familiar streets, past alleys and paths leading to schools and churches, the post office, Kroger’s, True Value.

This part of the country had a natural greenness about it that didn’t exist on the West Coast unless someone spread it from an aerator or pellet. In Holly Springs, grass sprouted in lush, rolling clumps along hillsides and banks, surrounding sidewalks and pathways.

The foliage too had a healthy sheen to it—green, glossy, and natural. San Diego as seen from the road offered cactus and brown brush, spiky protrusions hugging the ground, so unlike this area. There was true beauty here, in the land, in the surroundings, but unfortunately, not in the people.

There were those who said West Coasters were hollow and fake, gathering their

mantras from the newest gurus to hit the New York Times Bestseller list, honing fashion sense from the pages of
GQ
and
Mademoiselle
, choosing mates based on BMI’s instead of compatibility. It was true to some degree. But for all the illusion and emptiness, there were still those who held true values, who believed in right and common sense, who would not compromise integrity. Christian had been such a person. Peter was one, too.

Fifteen minutes later, Audra ended up on her old street. Hadn’t she somehow

known she would have to see the house of her childhood, if for nothing else than to compare memory with reality? A red and white For Sale sign protruded from an

overgrown lawn. The house she remembered as powder-blue shingled was now

gunsmoke, peeling around rusty gutters and beneath windows covered with plastic. It was a tiny box of a house with a narrow entrance and even narrower windows. Grandma

Lenore had taught Audra to clean those windows twice a year with ammonia and

newspapers because newspapers didn’t make lint like paper towels did, and of course, there was the cost to consider.

There was always the cost to consider in those days.
Everything costs money
, she’d said. What she hadn’t said was why they never had any. She didn’t need to though because Audra knew the difference between what hung in her mother’s closet and Mrs.

Mertigan’s hand-me-downs. And then there were the perfumes, and the shoes, and the liquor. Audra figured it out all on her own. And people thought she was like her mother?

They had no idea. She inched toward a side window and tried to peer through the thick plastic.

“Audra Valentine?”

Audra swung around. The woman who had cornered her outside the funeral home

and declared she’d been Corrine’s best friend stood three feet away in a lime housedress belted at the waist with a cord that looked an awful lot like a clothesline rope. Doris O’Brien. She wore pink slippers, pink pearls, and pink lipstick. “Where did you come from?” Why hadn’t she heard the woman’s rattled breathing which now clogged the distance between them?

Doris threw her a wide smile, revealing uneven, dingy teeth and announced, “I’ve been waiting for you. It’s about time you came.”

“I was only out for a morning run. I had no intention of coming here.”

The woman grabbed her arm and said, “Of course, you didn’t, dear. No one ever

does.” She tightened her grip. “Hurry, follow me. If they see me, they’ll make me go back and I won’t be able to talk to you.”

Audra followed the older woman toward the rear of the house, noting the bony

shoulders, the unsteady gate, the stain on the back of the dress. She couldn’t have been more than forty-three or so, yet she looked much older. Doris stopped by the old crab tree Grandma Lenore loved and released Audra’s arm. She pulled out a pack of Salems, coughed and lit up.

“I promised myself if I ever got out, I’d set things straight with Corrine’s

daughter.” She puffed on her cigarette so hard her cheeks hollowed like a skeleton. “After all, it was the least I could do, seeing as I was responsible for her demise.”

Got out? From where?
“No one ever talked my mother into doing anything she didn’t want to do.” Years of empty promises and an array of men by Corrine’s side had taught Audra that much.

“That’s where you’re wrong, child. She wasn’t always like that. Not before.”

Pause. Puff. Doris O’Brien’s pale gray eyes scanned the street, flitted over Audra and settled on her face. “You have your mother’s eyes. Warm as a shot of whiskey on a cold night.”

Audra didn’t want her mother’s eyes. She wanted nothing of her mother. And yet,

since she’d arrived in Holly Springs, the comparisons hadn’t stopped.

“Did you know she wanted to be a nun?” Doris laughed. “Didn’t see that one

coming, did you? She loved the taste of the wafer, and the way her spirit felt like flying after confession. Said she wanted to marry God and commit her life to Him. Pure.

Chaste.” Puff. Puff. “What? You don’t believe me?”

“Nothing I remember about my mother was pure or chaste.” Who was this

woman? Had she escaped from an institution?

“You only remember the after. Corrine wanted to become a nun. That was the

plan. We were both going to join Benedictines. Then she met Malcolm Ruittenberg. She started having feelings for him, sexual and the like. It wasn’t like she was doing anything, she was just thinking about it like any other normal teen. She went to confess to Father Benedict and the next thing I knew she told me to hell with Father, to hell with the Catholic Church.” Doris took a long drag on her cigarette and blew out a ring of smoke.

“It was a bad time. Your grandmother talked to Pastor Richot and he agreed to meet with your mother. Things settled down after that, thank God. Then one day she turned up pregnant and word had it four or five boys could have been the father. One was even a college student.”

“And?” Other than the nun part, nothing was a surprise.

“I knew her. She’d never even kissed a boy, let alone allow five to touch her that way.”

“Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”

“I knew her. I’m saying something happened.”

“Like what?”

“Like somebody took something she wasn’t offering. Or she loved the one she

offered it to and he didn’t return the love.”

The woman spoke in circles. “Why can you only surmise? Where were you this

whole time?”

A sad smile crept over Doris O’Brien’s weathered face. “I was making my own

sins.”

***

blind slats, jetting across the bed, illuminating bits and pieces of the room. A baseball glove. A globe. A stack of Russian history books. A Yankee pennant. She didn’t need full light to know the details of her son’s room. A mother always remembered. The bed creaked as she sank onto it. They’d bought it from Sears with a bold guarantee the bed would last longer than its user. An uncomfortably true statement.

Christian was gone, the blond boy with the quick smile and kind words who

studied nuclear disarmament treaties. The past was one gigantic puzzle he once told her, and what a privilege to put the pieces together. He’d traveled to Russia and Nepal, China, and Italy.
I’ll take you to Italy before your sixty-fifth birthday
, he’d promised. Alice was sixty-four. Her son was gone and her heart was breaking. She had to figure out a way to keep her granddaughter with them a little while longer. Certainly Audra Valentine owed them that much.

Joe’s voice boomed over the television downstairs as he explained the actors of

On Eden Street
to Kara. He could lose himself in that silly soap for a scrap of the day. At least Audra Valentine couldn’t touch him there. But what about Alice? How was she going to keep from going crazy? Or so depressed she couldn’t move, or think, or feel?

Kara was the only one who could save her. She would be her reason to breathe. Alice spread her hands on Christian’s bed, sunk her fingers into the navy down as she inhaled a steadying breath. One way or another, Kara was staying.

Joe yelled at her from the living room. “Alice? Can you bring me a glass of iced tea? Four cubes. And bring our girl a root beer.”

Alice brushed her hands over her apron and stood. Oh, how the man loved to

bellow. Did he ever speak in a normal voice? With one final glance around her son’s room, she quietly closed the door and hurried to the kitchen where she gathered drinks on a tray and carried them into the living room. Joe sat in his gray barcolounger with Kara tucked in his lap. “Educating our girl, are you, Joe?”

“I’m telling her about Sebastian and Rebecca.”

“She got another man’s baby in her tummy,” Kara said, nodding at her

grandfather. “And there’ll be hell to pay now, right, Grandpa?”

Joe cleared his throat and cast a sheepish look at his wife. “The girl’s very

perceptive. “

Alice handed them their drinks and sighed. “It’s only a story, Kara. All make

believe, no matter how much Grandpa thinks it’s real.”

“Uncle Peter’s not make believe,” Kara said, her golden brows pulling together.

“He’s a doctor on television and in real life.”

“Is he now?” Joe flashed a look at Alice that said,
Let me get to the bottom of this
Peter character, once and for all.

Kara nodded her head with great importance as one about to reveal a deep secret.

“He’s Dr. Perfection. He fixes people’s bodies.”

“Good God, you mean he’s the butt and boob doctor?”

“Joe! Careful what you say!”

Joe snatched the remote and flipped through the channels to On Demand. He’d

become quite good at working all the gadgets of the HD flat screen Jack bought them for Christmas. Supposedly for both of them, but Joe claimed squatter’s rights early on, said now he could watch his darn soap and Norm Abrams in HD.

“There he is!” Kara pointed to a handsome man in green scrubs. “That’s him.”

Joe leaned closer and squinted. “Hmmmm.”

“
That’s
Uncle Peter?” Alice thought he was much too good looking to be such a close friend of the family. Men with looks like that, and a charm he so obviously possessed, usually weren’t just friends with anybody.

“Isn’t he the most handsomest man you ever saw?” Kara’s blue eyes clouded.

“Next to Daddy, I mean.”

He was handsome, she’d give him that. An inch or two shorter than Christian’s

six foot three frame, with a close-cropped beard and streaks of silver in a healthy head of chestnut hair. Tanned, trim, toned. Warren Beatty with wireless glasses. Warren Beatty.

Dear Lord, in his younger days, there hadn’t been a woman alive who could resist his charms. A tingle of suspicion clung to her brain.

“He’s a pretty boy,” Joe said with a grunt and a huff. “Look at those eyes. Bluer than Clorox’s Toilet Bowl Cleaner. I’ll bet he’s got all the girls just pouring themselves over him.”

“He’s got lots of girlfriends,” Kara said, “but he likes Mommy best.”