Life Without You (19 page)

When I went back home, I wanted things to be different. I wanted
me
to be different. Maybe this time here, with the people I was meeting, would teach me how to
do
. How to
be
. How to stop hiding and let myself live again.

“I miss you, Bette,” I said, sighing as I shifted on my bed in the guest room.

“I miss you, too, Dellie,” she replied quietly. “Now, tell me all about what’s going on up there. I’m dying to know everything.”

Not surprisingly, I was on the phone with Bette for the next two hours, regaling her with the details of my family’s history that I’d learned so far. She was fascinated and horrified at all the appropriate things, adding her own brand of conjectures and comments—some of them colorful enough to fill a crayon box—but it was certainly fun to get her particular point of view.

Thankfully, Vivi and Savannah had gained her approval; and I had suspicions that she would soon be Facebook stalking them—if, indeed, they did have Facebook accounts—to enlist their help in helping
me
find
me
.

It wasn’t until after we had finally gotten off the phone that I realized that, though I may have given her the full rundown on my afternoon playing hooky from work while Vivi, Savannah, and I explored every last nook and cranny of the store to find the perfect bridal shower gift for the bride-to-be, I hadn’t told her how unprepared I was to tell them my whole gory story.

Perhaps it was the excitement of telling her about my own find—a bright yellow thong with a sequin-accented pineapple that I had run across during our brief foray into the lingerie department. It was fun, it was frivolous, and it was everything that
he
would have scoffed at. All the more reason that made buying it mandatory; but I had realized, as I was telling Bette about them, that I had somehow let the panties become more about defiance than about reclamation, not really fulfilling the spirit of the list I’d made. I hadn’t understood that earlier, while I was standing there happily holding those panties. And I hadn’t explained to the girls why I was so pleased with my purchase. To them, I was just the workaholic writer—the granddaughter of a woman so many people had known and loved for so many different reasons.

Maybe one day soon I would be able to look at them and say the words, “Hi, my name is Odelle Pearl, and I’ve been lost for so long I almost don’t remember who I used to be. But my life is
not
over, and I’m here to find myself again.”

I’d been there a week, and my brain was playing the already/only game. It felt like I’d been away from home forever, yet I also felt like so very many things had happened in those few days. I’d thought this trip would help me reconnect with my family and hopefully be able to gain some much-needed fresh perspective on my own life. The fact that I was going to discover things about my grandmother that I’d never known—that even
Mama
had never known—had never crossed my mind. Sure, I knew that there were probably all kinds of stories I’d never heard, but that was normal for any family.

But
this
? Somehow I doubted it.

And even though Mama hadn’t known didn’t necessarily mean that my uncles didn’t know. There had been other instances when they’d withheld things from my mother, using the weak defense of, “We weren’t sure you could handle it.”

When all was said and done, though, no one could argue that Mama was by any means fragile. She had more backbone than anyone I knew.

But that was beside the point. The point right now was to find out what they knew.
If
they knew. Somehow, I had a feeling that they did—and that they had known so long that the whole story had faded into the background, a piece of ancient history that seemed far from relevant by now.

The only way I would know that for sure would be to get in touch with them directly. Fortunately, one of my uncles lived a few streets over…which certainly simplified things for me.

I glanced at the phone in my hand, trying to decide if I should call and see if he’d be up for a visit. Actually, now that I thought about it, it was kind of unusual that I hadn’t already seen or heard from him by now. He was usually the first face I saw besides my grandparents’ when I came to Hampton. But then again, things were much different now…

“Hey, Shortcake, how are you?” my uncle asked when he came on the line. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by to see you—did Dad tell you I’ve been out of town for work? I hope he did; otherwise, I would have been the other day, when you got in.”

I felt a smile creep across my face. I knew there had to have been a good explanation.

“No, he didn’t tell me,” I replied, hoping I sounded light and casual. “That explains a lot, though. And I’m glad you’re back. Will I get to see you anytime soon?” I glanced at the window as someone passed by, casting a shadow that moved across the blinds. The sound of the squeaky storm door followed, groaning on its hinges as it opened, then banging shut behind whoever had come to pay a visit.

And I had a pretty good idea who it might be…

“Dellie, get off the damn phone and come see your favorite uncle!” His voice played over the line even as it rang down the hall, coming from the kitchen. I grinned and punched the End button on my phone before tossing it down onto the bed.

“Just a sec!” I called back, untangling my legs from the blanket I’d been snuggled under. The house was always a meat locker, so having something warm to bundle up in was a necessity, even in the summer. “Coming!” I said again. “Coming, coming!”

The flicker of worry I saw register in his eyes at the sight of me when I came into the kitchen was quickly replaced by his easy smile, so warm and so familiar that I could have cried. He was one more thing to cling to, one more thing that hadn’t changed about this place where so much had stayed the same but still felt so different. I threw myself into his arms for a hug and felt the warm heat of his chest envelop me, like a comforting blanket. He held tightly and then pulled back to look at me again.

“I’m glad you could come, Dellie,” Uncle Luke said, his voice softer than I could ever recall hearing it. His brown eyes bored into mine, searching for something. “We’ve all been worried about you…” He trailed off, letting me fill in the blank spaces. “How much weight have you lost?”

There it was, the one question I had feared most. The question that had an answer that showed so readily on me, the question that had driven me deeper and deeper into hiding behind my computer and kept me away from so many of the people who hadn’t seen me since
before
.
Before
—not only before my marriage, but before my own anxieties had begun stealing so much of me. True, it had been years in the making; but now, the toll of it all was undeniable.

I was sure Vivi and Savannah could see it, even if they hadn’t brought it up.

Annabelle had even called me out on it, in her own way.

If Grandpa had noticed, he hadn’t said anything. But now there it was, hanging in the air between my uncle and me with the heaviness of a fog.

I swallowed as I tried to find an answer, feeling my throat close up with tears.

Uncle Luke seemed to read my eyes, and I watched as the sheen of emotion formed in his own. “We worry, Dellie,” he said, wrapping me in his arms again. “We worry.”

“So I hear you’ve met Annabelle,” he said awhile later, each of us in tacit agreement that we were going to move past the emotional exchange we’d had earlier. He’d said what he needed to say and knew that steeping ourselves in it would hardly do either of us any good. Now was the time to work forward.

He gazed at me silently for a moment, taking a sip of the iced tea he’d poured himself from the pitcher in the fridge. It was one of the familiar sights that gave me comfort, silly as that might have seemed. There had always, always been iced tea in this house; and now that Grammie was no longer there to make it, Grandpa had had to learn the task for himself. The sight of a filled tea pitcher when I’d first arrived had given me one more sign of hope that not everything would be different, not everything would be lost.

I watched my uncle, trying to gauge the lack of real expression on his face. He was giving away absolutely nothing that would clue me in—either about what he personally thought of the famed Annabelle or even how he’d heard about our meeting.

“I have,” I said, wondering how much I should say. “It was definitely interesting.”

“Interesting is one way to put it, I guess.” Uncle Luke laughed. “Knowing Annabelle, that’s an extremely mild term to use.”

I couldn’t help the laughter that escaped my lips in return. “You’re right about that. She’s definitely different than anyone I’ve ever met before,” I murmured. So far, I really hadn’t sensed any type of disapproval or animosity in his voice; but then again, I hadn’t brought up the fact that she and I had spent any amount of time together, either. For all he knew, I might not have had any more than that first odd encounter with her.

Time to do a little more digging.

And hopefully, my digging would be useful this time.

“Grandpa told me about her husband, George,” I said slowly, reaching for the bottle of Tabasco sauce that sat atop the lazy Susan on the kitchen table. Not that I had any need for hot sauce at that precise moment, but I was desperate for something to do with my hands. “He told me that Grammie had been engaged to him, and then he married Annabelle…” I trailed off, shifted a little in my chair.

Up to that point, Uncle Luke had been standing, one hip propped against the kitchen counter as he and I talked. The air in the room shifted slightly, and there was a definite change in his energy. He crossed the short expanse of old linoleum flooring and pulled out a chair at the table.

“I was wondering if you were going to bring that up,” he said, looking unperturbed, but still showing signs that this was not exactly a topic he relished discussing. He took another sip of tea before setting the glass on the table in front of him, tracing a bead of moisture on the side with his finger. “No one was trying to keep secrets to be malicious, Dellie, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said.

I felt one of my eyebrows arch just a bit in doubt. “So why didn’t Mama know? And
how
did she not know? She lived here all her life before she married Daddy, and it never came up in anyone’s stories. How is that even
possible
? Everybody here talks about
everything
. It’s hard to keep secrets. At least, I
thought
it was,” I said, a bit surprised at the indignation that had crept into my voice.

“People had just moved on from it by the time all of us came along,” Uncle Luke said simply, staring me square in the face. “It was over and done. Mom and Dad had their life; George and Annabelle had theirs. They didn’t do much associating with one another, and the MacMillans didn’t socialize that much with people who weren’t important to important people.” He shrugged. “I guess it was easy to compartmentalize and put away. And it’s not like that kind of thing hadn’t ever happened before, Dellie. Far from it. People have been falling in and out of love since the beginning of time. People just move on.”

I shook my head, unsatisfied. “But it’s still important, Uncle Luke. It’s part of our past as a family.”

He nodded. “Maybe. But there’s a lot of things that are part of our past as a family that I’m sure none of us know about. And we don’t have to. Your mama didn’t know because no one talked about it anymore,” he said, flattening his hand on the table. “They just moved on and left it alone. I didn’t even know about it myself until a couple of years ago when I ran into Annabelle up in Norfolk one day and she made an offhand comment about how she hoped Mom would be able to make a cake she needed for some ladies’ function.”

I frowned. “What did she say?” I pressed, wondering how the two topics could have aligned.

“Oh, just that she loved Mom’s cakes, always tried to order them from her instead of going anywhere else,” he said slowly, trying to recall the exact wording. “She said something about having a lot to make up for, but she didn’t go into it any further than that.”

“Did you ask her what she meant by that?”

“No, but I did ask
Mom
what she meant. And Mom told me.”

My eyes widened. “She did?”

Uncle Luke nodded, smiling at my shock. “She didn’t really go into any details, though, Dellie. Just told me that before she met Dad, she’d been engaged to George; and that Annabelle had broken the two of them up.”

It sounded so cut and dry, coming from him. So far removed from us. But I knew there was more, knew that it could hardly have been that simple. I knew that Grammie’s factual delivery of the story had been one of self-defense, a pretense that she had taken her lumps and moved on quickly.

Even I could see, looking at the trajectory of her life and knowing what I now knew, that the whole situation had shaken her, had stripped her for while of what little confidence she’d had, haunting her and whispering the lies that someway, somehow, she didn’t quite measure up. That she was flawed, and that that flaw was big enough to make her family ashamed of her. What I needed to know, more than anything, was that she had been able to move on from the emotional blow and find her worth.

Uncle Luke shifted in his chair and reached to take my hand in his. “Your grammie told us a lot of stories, Dellie. And you’ve heard them all,” he said quietly, noting the look of disappointment in my eyes. “But this one wasn’t one she told. It wasn’t something I wanted to push her about, either.”

“Do you wish that you’d asked more, now that she’s gone?” I questioned, truly wanting to know.

Once again, I watched his dark brown eyes almost liquefy with emotion. “In some ways, yes,” he admitted. “But knowing all the details of the story wouldn’t have changed anything. Not really. Mom was Mom. What happened before she and Dad got married was…before,” he concluded. “They had a happy life together, so it didn’t matter. Everyone let it go. All of her brothers and sisters, all of them. Why bother? So it kind of got lost in all the dust after all of those years, and so none us knew.”