The Memory Closet: A Novel (9 page)

Still, I couldn’t imagine that Bobo wouldn’t notice, oh by the way, that the dresser that had been in her bedroom for half a century was suddenly missing its mirror.

By the time we finished supper, the storm had struck. Rain smacked the windows; wind assaulted the trees.

“You ain’t never in your life had nothing tastes like this!” Bobo said triumphantly as she deposited roughly a third of a lemon meringue pie on my plate.

And she was right; I’d never tasted anything like it in my life.

I didn’t know the ingredients of lemon meringue pie, but it was a safe bet that one of them was some form of sugar. There was none in the piece of make-your-eyes-water sour lemon filling that resided under the puffy halo of meringue on my plate.

“This is …
amazing,”
I gasped, and somehow managed to swallow the bite without spewing it back out onto the tablecloth.

“I knowed it.” She cackled. “I knowed you’d like it!”

How did Mama do it? How did she live for three years in this lunatic asylum?

And how much longer could Bobo live here before she did something dangerous-crazy? Like getting ptomaine poisoning from eating bad food. Mama said Bobo left the milk sitting out on the counter so often it was always in some stage of going bad, from slightly “blinky” to coagulated. And unless it was as solid as Sakrete in the bottom of the jug, Bobo drank it anyway.

At what point did you throw in the towel and say she just couldn’t take care of herself anymore? And what did you do about it when you did?

B
obo and I stood in the backyard surveying the damage caused by the storm the night before. The wind had toppled trees and shut off electricity and phone service all over town. We’d gotten off easy. The two lines that connected our house to the world drooped in a pendulous smile between a pole on the street and our attic, but somehow they’d survived. The cedar tree hedge that encircled our back and side yards, as thick and sturdy as the Great Wall of China, was undamaged. The tall, skinny juniper trees in the front yard had swayed like palm trees through decades of West Texas wind.

“Julia said a twister took the roof off a house over by the railroad track,” Bobo said.

The hump osteoporosis had planted between her shoulders made it difficult for her to look up, but she leaned back and peered at our roof. “And rolled them trailer houses up like they was gum wrappers. Don’t know why folks live in them things. God don’t like trailer houses.”

“Bobo!”

“Well, he don’t, else he’d stop blowing them away 'ever few months.” She shaded her eyes and squinted up into the sun. “Look there by that back window. The one above the trellis.” She pointed with an arthritis-gnarled finger. “Is that shingle up there next to it loose?”

I followed her gaze. “If it is, I don’t see it.”

“Limb from the Peterson’s tree hit the roof and messed up that window years ago. Jericho climbed up the trellis and fixed it, but it won’t open no more from the inside.”

If she can remember a tree limb hitting the roof 30 years ago, why can’t she remember where she put my diary?

Julia stepped out on the back porch and called, “Mees Annie, somebody ees here to see jew.”

Dusty! I never dreamed he’d come before lunch.

Bobo eyed me, up and down. “So that’s why you got that stuff all over your face.”

“That ‘stuff’ is makeup, Bobo. If I don’t wear it, I look like a crash dummy.” I started toward the porch.

“And your hair all neat in a bun. You's wearing that lacey blouse and them tight jeans, too.”

My jeans are not tight!

She stopped the teasing tone and grew serious. “You do know, don’t you, that wearing jeans tight like that makes you look like you ain’t got no butt whatsoever.”

I didn’t dignify the remark with a response.

“Well, you don’t have to be a puddle-glum 'bout it. How you goin’ to know what your backside looks like if don’t nobody ever tell you?”

Dusty stood in the parlor, his black Stetson in his hands, looking at the family pictures that marched up the wall with the staircase. His brown Sheriff’s Department uniform was starched crisp; you could have sliced bread with the crease in his pants. He seemed taller than he did yesterday, and when he turned toward me, I could feel color begin to rise up my neck and into my cheeks.

Danger! Danger! Danger, Will—oh, shut up, you stupid robot.

“Hello there,” I said as I emerged from the dining room. 

"I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.” He flashed a wide enough-to-dry-your-gums-out smile. “I was on my way back to the office from the trailer park on the other side of the tracks. Wind tore it up pretty bad last night.”

“Nobody got hurt, right? That’s what Julia said.” I came into the parlor, but stopped too short, not close enough to him. There’s a distance apart that people stand when they talk, and I was too far away.

How can I mess up something as simple as when to stop walking?

But it was too late to fix it and I felt terribly awkward. My face bloomed full-blown rose, but Dusty didn’t appear to notice a thing.

“You look at those trailers and it’s hard to believe anybody got out alive.” He casually took a couple of steps toward me. “Wind blew one of them fifty yards off its base, and—”

Bobo burst into the room, the Mentholatum stench a step behind her, and rushed past me to grab Dusty’s hand.

“You ain’t goin’ to take her away, are you?”

“Take who—?”

“You come to get her. I know you come to get her, but I don’t know what we’d do 'thout her.” There was desperation in her voice, but it was calculated, a bid for sympathy.

Now she’s going to play the poor-little-old-lady card.

“I’m just a poor old woman, and it’s real hard for me to get around, what with the arthritis and my bad joints and all. She looks after me. I need her.”

I knew what was going on; Dusty was completely clueless.

“She thinks you’re the Border Patrol and you’ve come to take Julia back to Mexico.”

“She ain’t done nothing wrong here. She ain’t broke no law 'cept being a wetback.”

I cringed at the racial slur.

Dusty, I’d like you to meet my grandmother. She’s a bigot, she stinks, and she’s named after a clown.

“Ma’am, I’m the sheriff and I didn’t come here to take anybody back to Mexico,” Dusty said. “I came here to see Anne.”

Bobo looked at me questioningly.

“Don’t you remember me?” he continued. “I lived across the street, at the end of the block. I used to play here when I was a little boy, used to sit in the porch swing.” He leaned close and stage whispered into her ear, “Even sneaked into your chicken house once, but don’t let on you know or I’ll get in trouble.”

Bobo cocked her head to one side, studying him.

“Was you one of them little boys always hanging around here, had a crush on Annie?”

It was Dusty’s turn to blush. Now we had a matched set of red faces.

We should be shouting, “Clang, clang, clang!” at a railroad crossing.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” he eyed me over her head and grinned, “I did have a crush on Anne. But so did every other little boy in the neighborhood. The line was real long, and I was the scrawny little guy at the tail end of it. I’m Dusty, Bobo. Now, do you remember me?”

“I ain’t never seen you before in my life, son.”

She fixed her gaze on his badge. “You come here to investigate the theft?”

Bobo had made another mental leap, bounding from one idea to the next, a cognitive kangaroo on steroids.

“Theft?”

“Yeah, theft. Somebody come in here in broad daylight yesterday and stole the mirror right off the wall in my bedroom.”

I tried to stifle the laugh, but it got away from me and came out my nose in a decidedly unfeminine honk. It sounded enough like a sneeze that I rolled with it, coughed into my hand a couple of times and tried to rearrange my face before I spoke.

“Actually, Bobo, Dusty came by to pick up the artwork, the pictures I found on the walls up in the attic.”

“Well, that’s right thoughty of him, but is that all?” She looked at Dusty dubiously. “You ain’t going to do nothing 'bout a illegal alien and a stolen mirror?”

He shook his head.

“Some sheriff you are.”

Dusty suffered a sudden coughing fit, too.

Something must be going around.

“Wish I could help you.” He shrugged his shoulders in mock helplessness. “Sorry.”

Bobo turned and hobbled toward the kitchen. “I got to go baste a duck!”

As soon as she was out of earshot, we both burst out laughing.

He looked toward the doorway where she’d disappeared into the kitchen and shook his head. “Your grandmother’s a piece of work!” There was the same admiration in his voice I heard in Julia’s.

Suddenly, I understood what Mama meant when she told me once that the neighbors glamorized Bobo’s craziness, talked about how “entertaining” it must be to live with her.

They didn’t have to clean up the pile of rotted food behind her dresser.

Dusty turned back to me. “If she’s your only source of information about your past, good luck! Isn’t there anybody else who was here, some other relative who could help you fill in the blanks?”

“Nobody I can find.”

That wasn’t entirely true. I didn’t know where he was, but I could have found him if I’d really wanted to. I could have located him with just one phone call—to my brother, Joel.

When the two of us had been in Louisville together settling Mama’s affairs, Joel had suggested I get in touch with Jericho, his father, my stepfather.

Dear, sweet Joel was always trying to be helpful. He may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he knew intuitively how to care for people, how to love them in ways I couldn’t have learned from a mountain of books with a lifetime to read them.

We’d been sitting on the deck of Mama’s townhouse, watching the wide, glassy Ohio River flow past in no hurry to get from Cincinnati to Memphis. He was drinking hot tea just because I was. I don’t think he liked it at all.

“Daddy doesn’t come around much, but I talk to him on the phone sometimes,” he says, sipping the hot liquid and struggling not to make a yuk face.

Physically, Joel is as much his father’s child as I am our mother’s. Bobo’s hair, Mama’s and mine—all platinum blonde. There are Scandinavian limbs back there somewhere on the family tree. Joel’s hair is red, a light auburn shade; Jericho’s had been the color of a four-alarm fire. Joel has red freckles, too, like Jericho’s, the same faded-denium blue eyes, even looks like him—with a firm, square jaw and a lock of hair that always hangs down over his forehead. Jericho Johnson had been a dashingly handsome man.

“When was the last time you saw your dad?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

Translate that: The man hasn’t spent time with his son in years.

“But I’ve got his phone number; I wrote it down and kept it safe. He gave it to me and said I could call him on it. It’s a cell phone. I used the number to tell him about Mama.”

Tears spring to his eyes, and I reach over and pat his arm.

“I called him 'cause I knew he’d want to know she …” His voice breaks, he puts his head in his hands and his broad shoulders shake as he cries. I get out of the chair and kneel on one knee in front of him.

“Joel. Listen to me. It’s OK.” I rest my cheek on his arm. “Mama knew you were on your way, Joel.” He looks up, tears streaming down his freckled cheeks. “Honey, she knew you loved her and that’s all that matters.”

Joel will probably never forgive himself that Mama died before he made it to the hospital to tell her goodbye. Her fault, not his. If she hadn’t hidden her illness for months, we’d all have been more prepared to deal with it.

He wipes the tears off his cheeks with the back of his hand like a little kid. “You think so? You think she knew?”

“I’m sure she knew.” I get up, walk to the railing of the balcony and look out over the river. Joel picks up his train of thought where he left it.

“I could call Daddy for you, tell him you’re trying to remember. Or you could call him. I bet he’d help if you asked.” His face is earnest, kind and innocent. He has never suspected that I loathe his father. In fact, he probably doesn’t even know why Mama and Jericho broke up. He was a toddler at the time, and I’m sure Mama never told him she’d caught Jericho in bed with another woman, that she found out he’d slept with everything in a skirt for fifty miles in every direction.

“Thanks, Joel, but I don’t want you to call him.” He looks puzzled. “I’m sure he’d help, I just don’t want to bother him. Bobo can tell me everything I need to know.”

“I didn’t know you forgot everything. You never said.”

“Well, I remember you: Joel the Mole, lives in a hole, slides down a pole.” I pick up a pillow off the empty chair and bop him over the head with it. “I remember what a pest you were when you were two.”

But Joel still looks serious, disturbed that something isn’t right in my world.

“I didn’t talk about my amnesia because what was there to say? The fact is, I can’t remember anything that happened to me when I was growing up. And I’m just not willing to live without a childhood anymore. I want to remember it—to remember changing your diapers!” That coaxes a smile out of him. “I’m going back to Goshen to live in the house with Bobo, and I’m going to stay there until I get my memory back.”

Joel lifts his head and stares into my eyes and in that moment, by some trick of the evening light on the planes of his face, he looks just like Jericho looked the last time I saw him 25 years ago. I have to stifle a shudder.

Nope, I have absolutely no desire to see Jericho again, wouldn’t look him up if he could download all my memories into my brain like a file off the Internet.

“My stepfather, Jericho, might be able to help me remember,” I told Dusty, hoping he couldn’t hear the coldness in my tone. “But I don’t know where he is anymore.”

“Well, I remember Bobo, even if she doesn’t remember me. She’d stand out on the front porch and watch us playing under the willow tree. Sometimes, she’d invite us into the kitchen and give us cookies. Unless your mama was … not feeling well. You know how your mama was.”

A chill ran through me.

“Actually, I don’t. What are you saying about my mother?” I didn’t mean for it to come out defensive, but it did, and I watched him back up.

“Oh, she was a sweet lady, just didn’t like a bunch of kids underfoot,” he said. “I remember her as large and in charge, if you know what I mean.” 
He grinned at me. “And with a handful like you to raise, I’m sure she needed to be. Now, about those pictures. I kind of need to get on the road.”

I was instantly embarrassed for keeping him too long.

“They’re upstairs in the studio. I’ll go up and get them.”

“You have a studio? You’re an artist? Well, duh, you wallpapered an attic with your pictures as a kid. It figures.” He looked up the stairs. “Can I see it?”

“Well, sure, but it’s not really a studio yet; there’s nothing to see. My easels get here with the rest of my stuff tomorrow.”

I turned and started up the stairs ahead of him, acutely aware that I was offering the sheriff a behind-home-plate view of the buttless wonder in tight jeans.

“My order from Ikea—a big, all-purpose storage unit, some bookshelves, and a couple of loveseats won’t be here until Monday or Tuesday of next week.” I opened the studio door and made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole room. “All this clutter will one day be in order so I can work.”