Heart and Home (5 page)

“Thanks for the reality
check,” I tugged out of his light grasp on my shirtsleeve and did my best to
fake a grin.

“It does no good to fight
it,” he said.

I drew in a breath through
my nose and held my chest out for a moment. As I released it, the high school
girl inside of me reared her ugly head.

“So, can I expect to find
you behind me now every time I feel like the world’s falling out from under me,
Prince Charming?”

He cocked his head to the
left in response and admitted, “Hey, I just thought you might be feeling a
little lightheaded again. Didn’t want you to crack your head on the concrete if
you passed out.”

“Look, I’m fine,” I crossed
my arms against the rain chill sinking into my bones. Halloween was just two
weeks away, and now that it was raining the pungent smell of rotting leaves and
earth seemed to hang heavy around us. “Really, I’m fine, I mean, I don’t know.
Maybe I’m not fine.”

“I don’t think anyone
expects you to be fine, Janice.”

“No?” I slowly lifted my
eyes to meet his.

He shook his head, his lips
turning slightly upward with reassurance. “No.”

“I just feel like I’m
letting her down,” I managed. “And my dad too. All those people in there, they
just want to talk about her, and I …” I looked away from him again. “I just
can’t. I mean, I knew her. She was my mom, but now I don’t feel like I knew her
half as well as this town did. That’s so sick! She must be so disappointed. Her
own daughter…”

It seemed he started to
shake his head, and his brow wrinkled with sorrow. I was surprised that he said
nothing, but equally grateful.

I sighed and dropped the
back of my head against my shoulders. I tried to squeeze my eyes against the
oncoming tears, but I soon felt their warmth slipping down my cheeks in
contrast to the drops of rain that washed them away.

“Why am I telling you all of
this?”

He shrugged his left
shoulder toward his ear, “Because I’m listening.”

The stubborn part of me
wanted to push him, to ask him why he was listening, why he even cared, but I
didn’t. Instead I lifted my head with a sigh and nodded. “Well, thank you for
that.”

Over his shoulder I noticed
a few curious pairs of eyes peering from between the fire hall doors. I nodded
toward the doors, and Troy glanced behind him. Head shaking, his grin was
peculiar, but appreciative. “Come on,” he started with a playful shrug. “Don’t
tell me it’s not a small bit of comfort knowing some things never change.”

“That’s for sure,” I agreed.
“Some things never do change.”

“So, you think you’re ready
to go back inside yet?”

“Do I have a choice in the
matter?”

“Not if you want to avoid
gossip, which almost always leads to scandal around here.”

“Ooh, scandal,” the light
reaction of my laughter seemed to inspire his grin even further. “My dad is
probably wondering where I took off to.”

We started back toward the
fire hall doors, which closed mysteriously during the last leg of our
conversation. I was sure whoever had been spying on us was sore at having to
give up that last few minutes.

Just before we reached the
concrete patio in front of the doors, I stopped and turned sideways to touch
Troy’s forearm. “Thanks, Troy, you know, for everything.”

“You’re welcome,” he nodded
once, the corner of his mouth catching in a grin. “And welcome home, Janice.”

Chapter Five

A steady stream of visits
saw out the remainder of the wake. It was just going on five-thirty when Dad
and I arrived home, but the rain coupled with the change in season, made it
seem much later. The events of the last few days had been exhausting, but the
day itself felt as if it would never end. All those people, all of their stories
and memories—it was like living through my childhood again.

As we clamored through the
back door weighted down with trays of leftover food, I stifled a yawn and
thought seriously about crawling into bed and calling it a day.

Dad turned on the overhead
light with his elbow, but the bulb blew with the surge of electricity. “Damn
it!”

“Here, let me turn on the
stove light.”

I shuffled past him and laid
the trays down on the kitchen table. I pressed the button and the dull
hood-light illuminated the darkness enough for us to see our way around the
room. I opened the refrigerator and began shuffling around the week’s
contribution of Tupperware containers and baking dishes. Dad shifted through
the mail behind me. He plunked it down on the table with a sigh before he left
the kitchen. Moments later distinctive news reporter voices joined the static
presence of television, and I thought I heard something about suspected arson
in Stroudsburg.

I rearranged half of the
contents of the fridge to fit everything in, and then started toward the living
room to make sure my father didn’t need anything. He hadn’t said much since
we’d left the fire hall, but after an entire day of nothing but talk, I
couldn’t imagine he had much left to say. Dad had never been much for talk, and
he’d certainly said more than his share for the day.

Pausing at the table, I
looked down at the letter on top of the pile. Her subscription to
Better Homes and Gardens
was going to
expire, and fanned out behind was a letter from the Leukemia and Lymphoma
Foundation requesting her continued support. I moved it aside and there was a
postcard invitation to Helen Jackson’s Princess House party on the second of
November.

I closed my eyes and tried
not to echo my father’s sigh. I understood it in a way no one else possibly
could. It was like our whole world stopped, but the rest of it all out there,
the magazine subscriptions and the charities she supported, the parties,
committees and scrapbooking groups—it all went on without her, like she’d
never been a part of it.

The town spent the day
remembering Chandra McCarty, but come morning they would all go on without her,
and they’d expect us too as well. I spoke to my boss only twice throughout the
week, who still expected me to return to work on Monday morning, fresh and
ready to put my nose back to the grindstone. The few acquaintances I called
friends in the city would be waiting to hear from me, but somehow all of that
seemed so mundane.

“Bring me in a beer, Jannie,
would you?”

“Sure, Dad.”

I dug a beer out from behind
the stack of foil trays and walked it out to him. I sat down on the arm of his
chair and followed his gaze to the television set. It was all color and
movement, but nothing worth focusing on. As if he understood the swirling
vacancy that took over my life, he lifted a hand and patted my back, but there
were no words.

Around six-thirty, I
sauntered upstairs to take a bath and try to put the day behind me. After I
gathered my pajamas and robe I paused at my laptop computer and considered
logging in to check my email. I hadn’t touched it since I’d arrived, but the
prospect of facing five days of email seemed daunting. I ignored the vague
calling and headed into the bathroom instead.

The strong fragrance of
lavender rushed out to meet me before I even turned on the light, and I
breathed it in. Immediately I felt the tension begin to release from my neck
and shoulders as I dropped my night clothes into a pile beside the door. My
mother loved lavender, and not the cheap imitation stuff either, only the real
deal. She ordered a special blend of bath salts from a local business woman for
a couple of years, and when the woman went of business she sold what was left
of her stock to Mom. She stacked it neatly into the bathroom closet and
cherished each sacred jar with her own special ritual involving a candle and a
book.

Ever after, the smell of
lavender came to signify my mother and home to me. There was a jar of the salts
on the back of the tub, which I reached for and lifted for a quick sniff. The
pungent, but fresh aroma filled me with comfort and longing. I turned on the
water and poured the Himalayan crystals into the water jetting from the faucet
so that with the rising steam the aroma of lavender would quickly pervade the
air around me.

I turned toward the mirror
while the tub filled and began to untwist the knot of my hair so that within a
matter of seconds a cascade of copper waves fell in around my face. I ran my
fingers through it, tugged it back again and turned my face from side to side
in search of the resemblance I heard about all week.

Of course I looked like her;
she was my mother. I garnered my red hair from her, but where genetics somehow
provided her with enough melatonin to actually tan, I inherited my father’s
fair skin and a host of freckles. With age the freckles faded just enough that
up close they were visible, but not a dominating feature, though along my
shoulders and chest it was often another matter. I wrinkled my nose and leaned
inward to inspect my eyes. Bloodshot and tired, the green overpowered the
brown, making my hazel eyes seem lighter than they normally were.

Her eyes had been a warm
shade of amber, and in the right light they shone like molten honey. Mine were
just hazel. A shade of hazel I was sure the military would love to integrate
into the patterns of their next line in innovative camouflage gear. I already
tested their elusive color on the dating battlefield and could report that
about eighty-five percent of all men seemed to look everywhere but my eyes
while talking to me, suggesting their effectiveness.

I let the hair fall into my
face again and turned away from the mirror. I hadn’t realized what a mess my
head was until I sunk down into the deliciously hot water and listened to the
sound of it rushing into the tub. The heat drew awareness to every knot and
ache in my body, including the few bruises I obviously acquired when I fainted.
My bones were cold, and not just my bones, but beyond, deeper into the marrow,
like my actual soul shivered. Each time I breathed in that lavender bouquet the
tensioned lessened and warmth increased. It was only a matter of moments before
I lowered my head back against the bath pillow and closed my eyes. I reached
out with my foot and turned off the water, and allowed my thoughts to just
flow.

I wasn’t surprised at how
scattered they all felt. My first bout with madness was scrapbooking. I
couldn’t believe that of all the things my mother never told me; she’d never
mentioned scrapbooking with Becky Raynard. And what was I thinking telling
Becky I’d come to her next party if I was still in town? There was no way I’d
still be in town. I was leaving town the very next afternoon and never looking
back again if I could help it. On the other hand a part of me had been sincere
in the promise. I’d never disliked Becky, though we hadn’t really hung out a
whole lot once we made it into high school. She’d been awkward at school, and a
lot of kids, Amber Williams especially, picked on her because it made them feel
superior.

And Amber… Well I didn’t
even want to think about her. She’d never quite forgiven me for getting that
internship at the
Sonesville Standard
the summer before we were seniors. Of course she’d been sugary sweet to my
face, but I knew it burned her up inside to think her father’s check book and
influence weren’t enough to compete with my drive to acquire the job I had been
preparing for my entire adolescence.

I shouldn’t have been
surprised to see her still treating Becky so badly, but then Amber Williams was
the type of person who made me hate living in Sonesville in the first place.

On the other hand, people
like Amber prepared me for the dog-eat-dog world that was journalism, teaching
me that I would never get ahead if I let the Ambers of the world walk all over
me. Small towns didn’t deserve people like Amber though. They needed more
people like Becky Raynard and Troy Kepner.

Thoughts of Troy made me
sink a little deeper into the water to try and cool the embarrassment of my
fainting. Funny how fainting suddenly become synonymous with Troy and eyes like
acid-washed denim. Of course I knew those things really had no business in the
same sentence, much less in comparison to each other, but just closing my eyes
brought back the memory of opening them to find his face, his concerned,
electric stare staring down at me.

A droplet plunked into the
tub and distracted me from the memory. The emptiness of the house carried the
sound of the television up through the floor.
Wheel-of-Fortune.
Ever since I was little,
Wheel-of-Fortune
had been a nightly routine for Dad. If mom wasn’t
off to some meeting or plotting around the garden, she would sit beside him on
the couch and they’d battle each other to see who could solve the puzzles
first.
Jeopardy
was an even bigger
riot, the two of them shouting out their answers in the form of a question as
if their lives depended on it.

I couldn’t even begin to
imagine how losing her was going to affect him. So far he had been quieter than
usual, but that seemed to be the only indication of the major change he was
going through. I tried to talk to him twice, mostly to ease my own troubled
mind, but he just listened and offered the appropriate pat on the shoulder when
necessary.

He and Mom weren’t exactly
old, and I wondered if that ate away at him. Fifty-six was nothing. Dad was
only fifty-eight. Sure, it was twice my lifetime, but a lot of people’s parents
were much older. I always expected Mom to outlive him considering how hard he’d
worked all his life, and maybe that was why he was so quiet. Maybe a part of
him felt like it should have been him.

I blinked away my tears and
shifted my thoughts toward Aaron Kepner, of all people. I never really knew the
man, and could barely even remember him. He’d been as tall as Troy, well over
six feet, and what my mom always called proud. I wondered how old he’d been
when he’d died, leaving Troy to care for his mother and a farm that had been in
their family for generations. I couldn’t even really begin to guess how old
Lottie Kepner was, as her illness always made her seem fragile. Troy was an
only child, like me, and I remembered Dad’s lament about all he’d sacrificed
when his father died.

My mind was obviously
preoccupied with Troy, and with good reason. Out of all the people in the
entire town, other than my own father, he’d been the only one who hadn’t gone
out of his way to make me feel like some kind of freak. He hadn’t embarrassed
me with old stories about my mother, or tried to compare all of my facial
features to hers. He’d just been there at all the right times, and though it
felt ungainly and weird at the time, I realized he knew exactly what to say.

His soft laugh and clever
grin played over and over in my mind every time I closed my eyes. It felt
frustrating spilling so much honesty out in front of him, but when he said he
was listening it brought the first inklings of comfort I’d felt in the days
since her death. It was like he knew somehow I needed someone to catch me,
someone to help make sense of the tangle of emotion and heartache that was my
world.

Gorgeous, sensitive and
intuitive. He had to be taken.

It would just be unnatural
for a guy like that to be single, and besides it didn’t really matter anyway. I
would be going back to Pittsburgh in less than twenty-four hours, and I would
do everything I could to begin the process of convincing Dad to move with me.

While I could hardly imagine
taking care of him the rest of his life the way my mother did, I certainly
couldn’t leave him alone in Sonesville to fend for himself in that great big
house. It would only be a matter of time before its emptiness swallowed him
whole. There were plenty of jobs in the city he’d be suitable for, or better
yet he could retire and take up golf or something.

Yes, I would start to drop
subtle hints in the morning, maybe I’d take him to breakfast before I left.

Like a baseball exploded
through one of the upstairs windows, the force of shattered glass ripped me
from the comfort of my meditation. I shot up from the tub like a wave,
splashing water all over the floor as I groped for and tried to untangle the
wadded fabric of my bathrobe.

“Jan?” Footsteps clamored
hurriedly up the stairs, pausing halfway.

“Are you all right, Dad?”

“What the hell happened up
here?”

“I don’t know,” my shoulders
dropped down into the terrycloth and I began to fool with the belt around my
waist. “Did you break something?”

“No, I thought you broke
something.”

“I’m in the tub,” I reminded
him. “It almost sounded like something broke through a window.”

I listened to his steps comb
the remainder of the stairs, and then clomp down the hallway. I heard him check
my bedroom first, and then he doubled back toward the room he and my mother
shared for more than a quarter of a century.
 
His footsteps moved backward and the door closed again, then
I heard him open the door to my mother’s sewing room.