Double Wedding Ring (2 page)

Sweetbranch, Alabama November 1995

S
USAN COULDN'T REMEMBER
a single blessed thing the young woman was telling her she ought to remember.

Not “young woman.” Malorie. Her daughter.

Susan resisted the temptation to look at the young woman in the driver's seat. But earlier that morning, when she had looked at her, then looked immediately in the hospital mirror, Susan had known it must be true. Their hair was the same color, although Susan couldn't remember what to call that color. They both had those funny little spots sprinkled across their noses.

“Those are freckles, Mother,” Malorie had said the day Susan had asked, the same day she'd been frightened of the way the red cubes called Jell-O had jiggled when she touched them with the knife. Spoon.

Then Malorie had looked away, shielded her eyes. It hadn't taken long for Susan to learn to recognize that look. To give it a name, even. Pity. The young woman with hair the color of sunshine reflected through a jar of honey felt sorry for Susan.

That ticked Susan off. If anybody was going to feel sorry for her, she'd do that little job herself. And she hadn't slipped that far yet.

Why, Susan wondered, could she remember a jar of honey sitting on a table—a chipped, green-and-white Formica table with matching vinyl chairs—and not remember the imp-faced young woman everyone told her she had given birth to? Right now, she wasn't even sure what that meant. Giving birth. What was it like? Had it been fun? How did it happen? Could she do it again so she could remember it on this side of her life?

Susan didn't look at Malorie. She looked out the car window at the things Malorie said she should know all about and tried not to wonder where all those memories had disappeared to. She was glad to be out of the hospital. Three months, they told her, although that was another notion that didn't mean much to her right now. All the same, after two months of green walls—Malorie had told her that color, after Susan said she hated it—and long, echoing corridors and red-and-green food that gave her the heebie-jeebies when it moved, Susan discovered she liked the outdoors very much.

Sweetbranch, the sign beside the covered bridge had said. Malorie had pronounced it for her. Most of the alphabet had come back to Susan, although she still found it hard to make the sounds out loud herself. Mostly, they came out slurred, funny-sounding. Like a drunk, Malorie had said, giggling as she went on to explain the concept.

“Tell you what,” Malorie had said to her last night at the hospital, “I'll give you a demonstration. Your first night at home, I'll tie one on for you.”

Susan wondered where you tied it—around the neck? around the waist? around a wrist?—and looked forward to seeing one. She gobbled up each new experience. And most of it, she discovered, stuck. She was relearning things at a remarkable pace, the rehab therapist had said.

It was only her yesterdays that wouldn't return to her, didn't stick even when Malorie explained them to her.

The place called Sweetbranch didn't look much like the place called Atlanta, where the hospital lived. Huge ribbons of concrete didn't twist and wind through Sweetbranch, providing parking places for thousands of cars and trucks and vans. The big trucks made Susan nervous.

Tall trees the colors of fire spread every which way in Sweetbranch. The houses sat far apart, separated by green carpet that was nothing like the sickly hospital green.

“I might take a liking to green, after all,” she said, forgetting that it was easier all the way round when she didn't speak.

“What, Mother? Are you all right?”

Susan heard the alarm in the young woman's voice and sighed. “Green. It's pretty.”

“Oh. Yes.”

But Susan heard the uncertainty in Malorie's voice and wondered if she had made herself understood. Would she ever be able to speak clearly again?

“There's where you went to church when you were a girl, Mother.”

Eagerly, Susan followed the direction of Malorie's gesture. The brick building with the center spire seemed vaguely familiar. “Reckon I should've gone more often?”

Again, that funny look from Malorie. Her therapist had liked it when Susan made little jokes. Malorie took it all way too seriously.

“And there's the high school. You were on the debating team, if you can believe that.”

Susan looked again, this time at a two-story brick building. Home of the Bobcats, read a brick-framed sign between the street and the gravel drive. The squat, square building stirred more vague feelings in her, feelings of anticipation, feelings that something good was about to happen. She smiled.

Malorie must have seen the smile. “Do you remember Sweetbranch High, Mother?”

“Maybe.” Susan could tell, although Malorie went to great pains to hide it, that every missing memory, every forgotten skill, was like a personal loss to her daughter.

“That's good. Dr. Kerr said being back on familiar territory like this could be very good for your memory retrieval.”

Susan remembered that, and took it as a good sign. “Yeah. Maybe someday I'll be normal again.” She laughed, despite the frown her daughter shot in her direction. “Shoot, maybe someday I'll even know what normal means.”

“Mo-ther!”

Susan smiled at the admonition. She didn't know if she'd always been the type to try to do things against the grain, but she was discovering she liked it now.

“This is Main Street coming up,” Malorie said.

Having heard the expectation in Malorie's voice, Susan sat forward in her seat. She didn't want to miss Main Street, and the chance for more memory retrieval.

The two lanes of traffic along Main Street crept between rows of adjoining brick buildings. Susan's heart leaped at the familiar sights, until she remembered that they had passed by similar Main Streets in other small towns all along the way from Atlanta. As in those other small towns, the brick buildings housed a dress shop and a bookstore and a drugstore and a post office and various other offices. Signs read The Picture Perfect and Holy Spirits Tavern and
Sweetbranch Weekly Gazetteer.
People here didn't bustle around the way they did in Atlanta. These folks seemed to have more time as they made their way along the sidewalks, stopping to talk, laughing over something in the bins at the hardware store, calling out to people passing slowly in their pickup trucks.

Susan didn't recognize any of them. She didn't recognize anything.

Except for Hutchins' Lawn & Garden.

The sign made her heart skip again, and when it resumed its regular beat, it had sped up.

Hutchins' Lawn & Garden was on the northeast end of Main Street. The wooden sign had been hand-painted years ago and needed freshening. The building took up almost half a block with its big plate-glass windows, framed by faded and tattered green-and-white awnings. Right now the windows were bare, but Susan was almost certain that once upon a time, in the spring, those windows had been decked out with hanging baskets of lacy Boston ferns and blood-red geraniums. The wooden bins built out onto the sidewalk in front of the windows now were filled with dusty, ungainly bags of weed and feed. But Susan could see as clearly as the freckles on Malorie's nose a time when those bins had held tulip and gladiola and iris bulbs, each bin labeled with a colored picture of the bulbs in full, glorious bloom.

“Let's go there,” she said.

“What, Mother?”

Susan pointed. “There. Go there.”

Malorie smiled and patted her hand in a way that made Susan want to jerk away. She knew what that pat meant. Her daughter thought she was addlebrained.

Well, could be she was.

“Would you like to shop around, Mother? We'll do that soon. Just as soon as you're ready to get out. But right now, Grandmother's waiting. Aren't you excited about seeing Grandmother?”

“No.”

Malorie looked at her and smiled, but the smile was strained. That was one good thing about being injured. Susan could say whatever the heck was on her mind and get away with it. The thought made her smile;
her
smile wasn't strained at all.

“What about Cody, then? Cody can't wait to see you. He's missed you something fierce.”

Susan remembered the sturdy-legged little boy. Malorie had brought him to the hospital twice. With his little round chest and his toddler's swagger, he looked ready to pick a fight with the world. But his smile was as sunny and uncomplicated as Malorie's. He troubled her, too, although in a different way than Susan's grandmother troubled her.

“I'm not much of a mother anymore,” she said.

“Now, Mother. That's no way to talk.”

“You may have to be the mother for a while,” she said. “For me and Cody.”

Malorie was silent and Susan wondered if her words had been too slurred. The trip had worn her out, and when she got tired, her speech got worse.

“Well, I know Cody and Grandmother are both excited about seeing you,” Malorie said at last. “And we're almost there. Just two more blocks.”

Susan remembered blocks from the rehab hospital, painted all colors with the letters of the alphabet on them. She wasn't sure what that had to do with finishing the drive to Grandmother's house, but she was growing too tired to ask. All she knew was what she had admitted to Malorie, that she wasn't looking forward to seeing the woman Malorie called Grandmother.

Grandmother was Susan's mother. She knew that much because her therapist had explained it to her after Grandmother's first visit. Rather, the first visit Susan could remember. Grandmother's name was Betsy Foster, and Susan still remembered the first words she'd heard her speak at the rehab hospital.

“Oh, Susan, what have you done to yourself now? This would break your father's heart if he were still alive to see you like this.”

Susan hadn't known how she looked at that point. After hearing Grandmother's reaction, it had been a long time before she'd been willing to glance at herself in the mirror. Once she finally had the courage to look, she realized she had nothing to compare with her present image. The thin, pasty-white woman with the shaved head and the limp left arm and leg looked no worse to her than anybody else she saw at the rehab hospital every day. And the woman who had been Susan Foster Hovis before the accident no longer existed in her mind. Still, she felt a little queasy whenever Grandmother showed up, because she sensed the disapproval.

And now, she and Malorie were coming to live with Grandmother. Malorie said they had no choice right now, nowhere else to go. That they should be grateful there was somewhere she could get better, that there was someone to help her.

She kept the sign that said Hutchins' Lawn & Garden framed in the side-view mirror until the van turned the corner and all she could see was the high fence around the back of the building. She wanted to go down Main Street one more time so she could memorize the sign. But Susan knew that was the kind of thing that made Malorie worry her mother would never again be right, no matter how much memory she retrieved.

As it turned out, the sign stayed in her head all the way to Grandmother's house, anyway.

Susan liked the street. Mimosa Lane, the sign read. Trees lined the sides, dressed for autumn in reds and golds and oranges, making Susan smile. The houses made her smile, too, houses with gables and front porches and crisp green shutters fanning out from tall, wide windows. The houses looked friendly. Maybe living on Mimosa Lane wouldn't be such a bad thing, after all.

Malorie stopped the van in front of the friendliest of the houses on Mimosa. White, with a second story and a peaked roof and a wooden wheelchair ramp off the screened side porch. A willow tree weeped in the front yard and stirred in Susan a desire to sweep beneath it, dancing from bough to bough, fluttering the fall of leaves with her outstretched arms. The desire was strong, almost a physical ache.

Before Malorie could get around to the passenger side of the van, the front door of the house opened. Leading the way was Cody, laughing, barreling full speed toward the new van, which Malorie said a trucking company had bought for them. Settlement, Malorie called it. Behind the little boy, a tall, stocky man with sandy hair more than half filled with white came out behind a tall, gaunt woman whose back would never have bent enough to allow her to sweep beneath the boughs of the willow in her own front yard. Susan saw that and understood it, even if lots of other things flickered just beyond her grasp these days.

Susan retreated into the shell her injuries allowed her to create. The same way she had retreated to her wheelchair when she left rehab, so no one could see how she walked, staggering and shaking, unsteady on her feet. Susan didn't want to see disapproval on the face of her mother and she didn't want to see pity in the eyes of the other person, whom she couldn't remember right now. She didn't want to hear the clank and rattle of the wheelchair Malorie was dragging out of the back of the van right now. She wanted this to be over. She wanted, maybe, to be back at the hospital, where at least everyone laughed
with
her when she called an apple a pencil. She didn't want to be here. If her brain had to be bruised, she wanted to go back to the hospital, where everybody else was bruised and incomplete, too.

It didn't work that way. The man with the sandy-white hair opened the car door.

“How's my little sis? You better not have put on any weight eating all that hospital food.”

Then he lifted her, groaning in an exaggerated way that was supposed to make them all laugh. Susan let them all laugh. She let him place her gently in the wheelchair. She listened to Betsy Grandmother Mom Foster greet her and pretended she didn't hear. She was being mean. Hateful. She knew it. But right now, she needed her shell.
Please, God, just for right now. Just for these few minutes when I don't want anyone to see or hear how broken I am.