Around the Bend (6 page)

“You should marry him,” Ma said. Had she overheard Nick’s side? Or read my mind? I didn’t doubt she could do either.

I put my hands back on the steering wheel, its leather hard and firm under my grip, a direction to somewhere other than a discussion I didn’t want to have. “We’re almost at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. What exhibit do you want to see first?”

“I like Nick, I always have. He’s a little…unconventional, but he’s nice. And he wants you. Lord knows your ovaries aren’t getting any younger.”

I shuddered. I swore she and Nick shared a telepathic link. “Can we not have this conversation?”

“Why? When’s a good time, Hilary? Do you want to pencil me in for next June? Third Tuesday? Because I may not be—”

My mother turned away, watching the pavement pass in a blur. She bit the edge of her index finger, the rest of her fist curled in a tight, white ball.

What the hell was going on with her? One minute, my mother was the same pain in my butt I knew, the next, she was an emotional mess, and then the moment after that, she was acting crazy, dragging along this cardboard cutout of my father and taking pictures of her and him with a cow in a field. And now…

Now
she wanted to build a relationship with me after three decades of almost nothing?

“Because you may not be what, Ma?” I said to her silent frame. “Able to wait that long?” My exasperation boiled over, that teakettle once again unable to hold in its stopper, the water too close to the surface, too jostled by the hours together, the years of frustrations, of unspoken words. “You’ve waited thirty-six years, what’s one more? I know I’m not exactly the child you dreamed of, Ma, but you should have doubled your odds. Had another one. Then maybe you could have had a daughter who actually lived up to your expectations.”

Well.

It hadn’t taken me long to lay it all out there. Leave it to me and my big fat mouth, and one long stretch of boring highway.

This
was why I hated Ohio.

“I did,” she said quietly.

“Did what?”

She turned and faced me. “Have another.”

The Mustang’s tires slapped against the pavement. Slap, slap, slap, slap. Like mini clocks ticking away the silence between us. I froze in my seat, those words repeating in time to the rhythm of the tires.

“Another?” I echoed.

“You were two. You wouldn’t remember.”

That was true. The first memory I had came from my third birthday, when my father had brought a pony into the backyard. My mother had screamed at him, aghast at the four-hooved animal tearing up the perfect, manicured lawn. But Dad had been determined to make my birthday a success, to give his daughter a party she’d never forget.

He’d definitely accomplished that.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“There were just some things we decided you didn’t need to know.”

“A
sibling
was a need-to-know kind of thing?” I stared at her, dumbfounded, until the car drifted into the other lane and I had to jerk it back.

“You were two years old, Hilary. You didn’t know how to use a toilet or count to ten. I wasn’t going to get into the facts of life.”

But a sister, or a brother? She couldn’t have trusted me with that? With what had happened? Hurt stung at my eyes, my throat. I swallowed it back, determined not to let her see me cry. “What happened?”

“I…” She took in a breath. “I lost it.”

Not lost like a penny or the second sock that the washer always ate, but lost forever, to some cruel twist of fate. “But how…why? What went wrong?”

She sighed. “Why do you want to know?”

“Ma, I’m grown up now. I can handle whatever you hid from me at two.”

“That’s not it, Hilary. Some things are…personal.”

I thought of all the need-to-know items in my own history. The edited version of my life that I’d fed to my mother over the years. Of course, I hadn’t kept any secret babies from her, but I did have a couple of whoppers in my own background.

She, however, had opened this Pandora’s Box and I wasn’t ready to shut it, not yet. “But…why didn’t you try again?”

My mother looked out the window for a long time, so long I didn’t think she would ever answer. Behind us, Reginald snored, completely unaware. “Because your father was never the same after we lost the baby. It changed him. He tried…but
he began to slip away and I was afraid…” Her voice trailed off, the sentence unraveling into a whispered sob.

“Afraid of what?” Maybe, I thought, if I could understand more of who I was, where I’d come from—why my parents were the way they were—I could figure out why I wanted to run every time Nick got too close.

My mother didn’t answer. And I guess I hadn’t really needed to ask what she’d been afraid of. I knew what my father had become. Had seen the hole he’d fallen into and never climbed out of.

“Maybe if your father had talked to me,” my mother said softly, “everything would have been different. But we’ll never know, will we?”

I bit my lip. “No, Ma, we won’t.”

She nodded, quiet and severe, tucking her emotions away. I don’t know where she kept them, somewhere knotted in her colon, I supposed, because barely a flicker showed on her face. And yet, I knew, with the connection of DNA, of being a woman, too, that losing a child, whether it had been three years or thirty years ago, still hurt her.

A rectangular blue sign announced food at the next exit. Saved by the bell, a welcome interruption to a topic too heavy for either of us to handle. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to push it, to know more, or to just leave it alone. After all, this had happened more than three decades in the past. How much could it possibly matter now?

And yet, I knew it did.

I wanted to call Nick and tell him,
see, this is why I don’t want to journey down these roads. I don’t want to feel this way in a year or two years or five. Why set myself up when I’ve already seen the end of the movie?

Maybe there was a way to find a happy medium with Nick. To maintain the relationship we had and not take it to the next level. Or maybe it had come time to cut Nick loose, as much as that would hurt, because I was so clearly not the kind of woman who should get married.

We passed the sign, and I glanced back at it, not wanting to let that oasis go. “I think it’s time for coffee, don’t you?”

My mother gave me a smile. “Yeah, Hilary. That sounds good. Really good.”

A few minutes later, we got out of the car, stretched our legs, ordered twin brews, then headed back to the Mustang, all without ever bringing up the topic of confusing relationships, lost babies and need-to-know subjects.

Again, she moved slow, deliberate, not like the Rosemary Delaney I remembered. Worry pushed at me, telling me there were more things my mother had edited out of her conversations. “Ma, you are
not
okay.”

“It’s that car. Seats are too low.” Her hand gripped the doorframe, and she eyed the leather bucket with obvious trepidation.

“If I’d known, I would have rented a bus or something. An RV. You should have said—” I cut myself off. My mother was no spring chicken. Not to mention, I was thirty-six. Old enough to have more than two brain cells and at least some common sense. I should have thought about her age, the impracticality of the car before I brought the Mustang. Damn. How selfish could I be? Guilt ran through me like bad seafood. “No. I should have thought about you first. I’m sorry, Ma.”

“That’s okay.” She laid a hand on my shoulder, instant absolution in that touch. “We’ll stop a lot. I’ll be fine.”

As much as the thought drove me crazy, because that meant extending the trip, and already it seemed like it was taking an eternity, I didn’t see another option. I’d brought this on myself by insisting on driving the Mustang instead of having a little foresight and renting something practical. For once, couldn’t I have taken my mother’s advice instead of being so stubborn?

I laid my hand atop of hers, the guilt not entirely gone, wishing I could rewind and undo this particular mistake. “We’ll stop as often as you want.”

I held the door and helped her down to the seat, ignoring her as she tried to brush off my arm, my help. Reginald watched us, his buttocks flush against my backseat, content and happy to be laying on his Reginald-emblazoned fleece blanket.

My father sat beside him, perpetually happy, not cramped at all. Some people didn’t mind the car one bit.

As I came around to my side, I paused before getting in and leaned against the door. I’d meant what I’d said to my mother on the road. I was the family screw-up, and this incident with the car had proved that in spades.

I glanced down the highway, which seemed to stretch to infinity. Miles and miles yet to go. And just maybe…

An opportunity to prove to my mother I could be the kind of daughter she wanted. And in the process, prove it to myself.

Nick hid his disappointment well. “You never even made it past the Everly Brothers and Dion?”

I sat in my car in the parking lot of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and sighed. Poor Nick. “I don’t think my mother realizes anyone made music after 1965.”

“Not so much as a
picture
of Hendrix? A bit of dust from his Stratocaster?”

“I think I glimpsed it from one of the halls, if that helps.” A heavy thud sounded on the other end of the phone. “What was that?”

“Me. Shooting myself.”

“You and I can always go sometime. Cleveland’s not
that
far from Boston.”

“Yeah,” Nick said, but he didn’t sound convinced. He paused a long moment, and I could hear him walk around the apartment. I pictured him, phone in hand, barefoot, padding across the wide pine floors, scuffed by years of past tenants doing God only knew what, their furniture, their lives, leaving
imprints. “That implies a future, Hil. Sticking together down the road. Beyond tomorrow. You up for that?”

My gut tightened with tension, laid out like wires stretched too long, too far. I glanced out the window, but my mother had yet to emerge from the gift shop to save me from this conversation. “Well, you know, I meant going together to Cleveland in the vague kind of, whenever sense.”

A sigh weighed down by disappointment and missed expectations traveled across the phone lines. I closed my eyes, wishing I hadn’t heard it, that Nick would take it back, laugh, anything. The thread I’d always counted on between Nick and I, however tenuous it sometimes became, was unraveling one word at a time, and I couldn’t twist it together again.

Not without giving him the one thing I was incapable of handing over.

I thought of the conversation I’d had with my mother, about her and my father, and all the things she wished she’d talked to him about. There were words I wished I could say to Nick, too, but I was afraid—afraid that if I told him how I really felt, I’d lose him. Or worse, if I never said them, and we ended up in the same unhappy cage I’d seen my parents inhabit.

I didn’t want that for either Nick or me. But I didn’t want to lose him, either. Instead, I said simply, “I miss you, Nick.”

“Yeah, me, too,” was all he said back.

My mother headed across the parking lot, waving a stack of postcards from the gift shop, all bearing the faces of fifties icons. “I have to go. My mother’s coming and you know her, she’ll want to hit the road immediately and she’ll freak if I’m on the phone while I drive. I’ll call you when we get through Indiana.”

“I won’t be here.” A pause, a heartbeat. “I’m going out tonight.”

“Again? You never go out two nights in a row.” Or at least, he didn’t without me.

“Yeah, well, things are changing around here.” Then he hung up the phone and left me hanging in cell hell.

The implied message—either I change, or he was going to do it without me. Or even worse, find someone willing to change with him. And here I was, a thousand miles away from being able to do anything about it.

I stared at my phone, mad at him, mad at the entire situation.

Reginald perked up when Ma got in the car, moving around on the seat, settling down only when she tickled him behind his ears and cooed at him. Once we were back on the road, she went on for ten minutes straight about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but the only one listening was her pig.

I drove, nodded my head at appropriate times and places, but all the while, my gut and my mind churned over Nick’s words, looking for an out, a way to make everyone happy.

And came up empty.

I was literally standing in the middle of a Robert Frost poem. Two roads in the woods, and either I took the one with Nick, or went on alone. Every time before, Alone Avenue had been the more attractive route. This time, though, I wavered, thinking of Nick on the beach in Mexico, scooping me up and striding into the water so that I wouldn’t have to step on the conch shells lining the island, a natural barrier to the pristine ocean beauty. He’d cut his foot, bled like a Red Cross donor, which set off some lady on the beach. She’d run screaming to the lifeguard, sure there were sharks in the water.

The lifeguard, a kid fresh out of swim school, had panicked, and waved everyone out of the water. Nick and I tried
to tell him there weren’t any sharks, but our Spanish was bad and his English was worse. Finally, we’d given up, and collapsed on the sand in a heap of laughter. Nick had showered me with kisses and a dusting of pure white sand, then, without a word, carried me back to the room, stripped me down, showered off every tiny grain, then made love to me until I forgot what country we were in.

That was Nick’s specialty. Taking care. But every time, when we were done, I’d wake up in his arms, and panic would grip me as surely as Nick had an hour earlier. I’d bolt from the room, wander the beach alone, and make plans to fly out on the next plane.

Before I relied on that care. Started to count on him being there tomorrow. And the day after that. Did exactly what he wanted me to do—make plans.

Because I knew how easily people you depended on could take it all away, could wash that foundation out from under you, like the tide sucking the sand back into the ocean, greedily eating the very thing you’d been counting on building your life upon.

“Hilary, you should have seen the Little Richard—” She stopped talking midsentence, and I turned to look at her. My mother shaded her eyes against the sun, even though she had her visor down. “Is that what I think it is?”

I followed her gaze and squinted. No way. “On a highway? In broad daylight? On a
Wednesday?
”

“We should stop.”

“Or get someone else to. There are psychos on the highway. Don’t you ever watch horror movies?” I glanced in the rearview mirror. Not another car anywhere. Yet a second reason to hate the state of Ohio.

“Hilary, we have to stop. We’re the only ones around for miles.”

She was right, and truth be told, this was about as far from psycho as you could get. I traveled across the two empty lanes of highway and braked behind a Dodge minivan with its hatch up—

And holding a fully geared up, ready-to-go bride sitting on the back, her dress hiked to her knees, baby’s breath sticking out of her blonde hair like trees gone wild, and her veil clutched in one wadded up ball.

“Whatever happened to her, it’s not a happy ending,” I said.

“You think?”

We shared a laugh, the same one we’d shared over coffee. And for just a second, I felt that bridge between myself and my mother again.

I got out of the Mustang, my mother doing the same, and together we approached the weepy bride. “Do you need some help?”

She looked up, mascara running down her face in squiggly black rivers. Her blue eyes were red rimmed, looking like an ocean at sunset. “What I need is a lawyer. A divorce lawyer.”

“But didn’t you just—” I gestured toward the dress. The veil. The obvious signs of a wedding.

“I can’t be married to him. I just can’t.” She dabbed at her face with the veil, but being made out of tulle, it didn’t do much more than leave a tiny basket-weave imprint of mascara on her face. “He said, and did, such awful things.”

Ma settled on the carpeted edge of the van beside the bride. She laid her hand on the girl’s. “What could he have done that was so terrible?”

“I can’t even talk about it. If I do, I’ll…I’ll…” She inhaled, a jerk of a sob, “cry again.”

And she did exactly that, blotching and crying, her whole body shaking with the effort, the shoulder ruffles on her dress doing a backup pity concert.

I looked at my mother, giving her the “let’s go and get away from the crazy lady” glare, but Ma ignored me. She just went on patting the girl’s hand and there-thereing her.

It took a few minutes, and nearly the entire mini package of Kleenex from my mother’s purse, but the bride-not-to-be finally stopped crying. “Why don’t you start with your name?” Ma said. “It’s always easier when everyone’s introduced, don’t you think?” She pivoted on the edge of the van and thrust out her hand. “I’m Rosemary Delaney, from Dorchester, Massachusetts. And this is my daughter, Hilary.” Ma gestured toward me, apparently not realizing that now this insane woman on the side of the road knew our names.

She could track us down, sell us Mary Kay or something. I did not need that. “Ma, we should go. We have a lot—”

“I’m Sally Wilson, well, Carmichael now, I guess.” One corner of her mouth turned up in a watered down smile. “From Sandusky.”

“Well, Sally Wilson Carmichael from Sandusky, why don’t you come have some lunch with us and tell us all about what went wrong?”

And just like that, we ended up at a Cracker Barrel with a bride, listening to her sob story over a couple of plates of mashed potatoes and meatloaf.

Sally Wilson Carmichael had married Michael Carmichael that morning in a quickie courthouse ceremony in one of those small Ohio towns with a name that ended in Ville and
didn’t stay on my mental map. She’d known him since seventh grade when his family had moved to town and his father started working at the steel factory. They’d become sweethearts in freshman year, gone to both the junior and senior proms together, and except for one two-week period the summer after graduation when he’d gone to visit his uncle in Oregon, been inseparable.

He’d proposed the day of her twentieth birthday, and though they had planned on waiting for a year to have a “proper” bells-and-whistles wedding, Sally and Michael had rushed off the minute she had a dress, he had a ring and they could get a blood test.

“We were in love,” she said and blushed—actually blushed.

For a split second, I envied Sally that certainty about how she felt. She had that Hollywood love, the kind they wrote about in romance novels. When I’d been five and playing with Barbie dolls, I’d imagined that kind of love for myself, but then I’d grown up and gotten real.

Still, a part of me still held on to that fairy-tale notion, dusting it off every once in a while, before my better senses returned to remind me marriage wasn’t some happy Disney-palooza where everyone sang and danced through their days, but rather a box that sucked your spirit dry.

I’d tried to explain this to Nick, but he’d just hugged me and told me I worried too much.

“I think true love is wonderful.” Ma gave Sally a smile, then ordered a round of fudge cobbler for all of us.

The waitress deposited three dishes of brownies topped with vanilla ice cream before us. If she found it strange to be serving a woman in a wedding gown flanked by another in
a dark and dour business suit and one in scruffy jeans and flip-flops, she didn’t show it. The other diners, however, did stare and whisper, and one little girl kept asking her parents if she could go talk to the fairy princess at the next table.

I pushed the dish aside, my appetite for it gone a long time ago.

“Don’t you want dessert, Hilary?” Ma asked.

“I’ve had enough sugar already.”

“There’s no sugar in meatloaf, dear.”

I sent a glance in Sally’s direction. Thus far, all I’d heard was a nicely rehashed romance story. I half expected the directors of
General Hospital
to yell “Cut”, run in and redo Sally’s makeup for the reunion scene, just before Michael rushed in with a secret baby or a case of amnesia. “We need to get back on the road, Ma.”

“No. We need to help Sally get her life on track, fix things with Michael.”

“I’m sure she’ll work it out with him. Whatever there is to work out.” Thus far, I hadn’t heard a single complaint about the groom.

Sally shook her head at the same time she shoveled in a forkful of brownie, which resulted in a brown smear on her pink lips. “I can’t go back to him.”

“Why?” I threw up my hands. “All I’ve heard is thirty minutes of perfection. He’s the football captain. Love of your life, yada, yada, yada. What could he have done that was so awful that you had to run away from your own wedding in a minivan?”

Sally pointed the fork at me, its tines accusatory and almost lethal. “That was exactly it. The
minivan
.”

I waited for her to explain, but she sat there, wide-eyed, expectant. Like I should get it instantly. “You left your new husband over a Dodge Caravan?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t have a husband.”

“Hilary is a spinster,” my mother said, spitting out the word like a watermelon seed.

“
Ma
.”

“What else do you call an unmarried woman at your age? You passed young lady a long time ago. And I can’t exactly call Nick a boyfriend. He’s forty, for God’s sake.”

“Can we not have this conversation now? Or ever?”

“At least Sally
got
married,” my mother said, then dug into her cobbler. She went on eating her dessert, one tiny bite at a time, smiling at Sally, who had clearly done her life all right, even if she had done it a little too early and a little too impetuously.

Then she struck up a conversation with Sally about keeping house, sharing tips as if she were Martha Stewart, the two of them chatting happily about everything from cooking a pot roast to ironing curtains. Before the ice cream was gone, they had bonded like conjoined twins.

That left me, the unmarried spinster failure daughter, sitting on the outside, and for the first time, wishing I was part of that inner circle.

“Why is the minivan such an issue?” I asked. “I mean, it’s just a van.”

“Just a van? Don’t you get it?” Sally cried, so loud, even the little girl next to us turned around in alarm, her mouth in a wide little O. Her mother drew her close and pointed at her fries, trying to redirect the toddler’s attention. Probably a wise move. “A minivan screams stay-at-home mom, take care of the kids. Have no life of your own. I’m not even old enough to drink yet.”

Probably shouldn’t have gotten married, I thought, but kept that to myself. I wondered about a country that set age limits on driving, voting and drinking, yet allowed marriage at eighteen. Wasn’t a gold ring a bigger deal than popping the top on a can of Bud?

“He gave me the minivan this morning, after we got married. Had it waiting outside the courthouse with a big red bow on it. He thought I’d like it.” Sally started sniffling again. I looked around the restaurant. We were already a traveling circus. I didn’t want to make it worse by adding in a dramatic performance. I shoved a napkin at her, but she ignored it. “I wanted a sports car. An SUV. A motorcycle. Anything but a-a-a
Mommy bus!
”