The Pages We Forget (25 page)

Although June fully understood the inevitable, she'd never verbalized it to anyone other than Dr. Wylie, and she couldn't now. So she answered, “You know why, Trevor.”

“No, I don't.”

“Yes, you do,” she pushed him to answer the question for himself. “I know how hard this is for you.”

“Just tell me, Ma!”

No mother should have to tell her child what she was about to
say. She needed help because her lips and heart would not allow her to speak those words. Not to him. His eyes begged for the truth, which meant that she had to tell him. So, she closed her eyes and uttered a prayer for the strength to tell Trevor. “I'm dying.”

“Dying?”

Trevor was smart for his age, a man in a boy's body, his daddy often joked. He was strong and centered. Still, he was only a child.

“But, you promised!” he screamed. “Ma, you promised!”

“Don't, baby.” June reached out for him. “Please don't cry. Please.”

Slowly, he found his way into her waiting arms.

The next day, against everyone's pleas, she checked out of the hospital.

Trevor was lying in the backseat with his head in June's lap as the two cars turned onto Highway 98 in Perry.
Another sixteen miles and we'll be in Hampton Springs
, June thought as she stared out the window at the once familiar sights along the highway. Several elderly and middle-aged women were busy setting up for a yard and bake sale at Stewart Memorial A.M.E. Church. On the other side of the street, an elderly black man with a full, washed-out gray beard and a headful of jet-black hair was opening up a neighborhood bar. He waved to the women across the street and yelled something that made all of the women laugh. One laughed so hard, she fell on a table filled with pies. Had it not been for the lady on the other side of the table, the bake sale would have been without pies. June smiled. She wished she could have heard what the man said. She wanted to laugh like the women were laughing. She could barely remember what her own laugh sounded like.

“Do I need to turn on the air conditioner?” Kathryn asked, glancing in the rearview mirror at June.

June shook her head no. She and Kathryn exchanged glances in the rearview mirror and then both turned away. The two had not
spoken directly to each other since June decided to leave the hospital. There was so much June wanted to tell her mother, but she knew Kathryn wasn't going to listen to anything she had to say until she told her why she kept the cancer a secret and why she refused further treatment.

Kathryn, on the other hand, had nothing to say, even if June offered an explanation. She felt betrayed in the worst way. How could her daughter do this to her? How could she simply give up? There was nothing June could tell her to make her understand. Kathryn wasn't going to abandon her daughter, though. June was ill and Kathryn was going to take care of her like she always did. But that would be it. She decided June's betrayal, deception and unwillingness to fight were unforgivable.

“Kathryn,” Lucy Kaye said. “Why don't you let me cook Junie's birthday dinner, so you can spend the day with her instead of in the kitchen?”

“That sounds nice, Lucy,” Kathryn replied, looking in the rearview mirror, ensuring that Trevor was still asleep. “But I'm not sure Junie wants to waste any time with me.”

“Kathryn, don't say that.” Lucy Kaye nudged her. “I think time with her mother is what Junie needs more than anything else. When she said she wanted to go home, she meant here with you. Right, Junie?”

Kathryn looked in the rearview mirror at June, whose tear-filled eyes were staring back at her in the mirror.

“Tell her,” Lucy Kaye urged June. “Tell your mother how much you need her.”

“Stop it, Lucy!” Kathryn demanded and defiantly pushed back the tears that were starting to blur the road ahead of them. “Just leave it alone!”

For the next twenty minutes, everyone sat quietly staring ahead until the car approached a sign that read:
Hampton Springs: Next Left.
Kathryn slowed down and put on her left blinker. June shifted Trevor's head in her lap and looked back to see Alex turning behind them. Kathryn looked in the mirror again at June, and was slightly startled by her daughter's radiant glow. Gone were the tears that smothered the childish sparkle in her eyes. Now, all she could see was June's famous million-watt smile.

“Precious Memories.” June read the mini-billboard that hung over the antique shop at the edge of downtown. The sign, a painted montage of four children and their father tiptoeing through a pasture of pink and yellow tulips, had become a town marker. The painting also graced the back covers of the local telephone book and the Chamber of Commerce's annual “Welcome to Hampton Springs” pamphlet. The historic hotel graced the front covers of both. June worked at the store one summer when she was fourteen. It was the summer after Mrs. Rosa Lee's stroke. Mrs. Rosa Lee was a widow and mother of four children. Two of her children, a boy and a girl, died when they were children. Her son drowned while trying to catch tadpoles in a rain pond behind their house during dog days when he was five, and her daughter died of meningitis at the age of seven. Her firstborn son was declared missing in action while serving a tour of duty in Vietnam. Mrs. Rosa Lee once said she was convinced he was dead because she felt him die after being shot twice in the chest and neck. The baby boy was the only one living but he might as well be dead. He was serving a life sentence for killing a store clerk during a botched robbery in Perry. Mr. Bishop, her deceased husband, was the one who collected antiques. Mrs. Rosa Lee opened the store on July 4, 1976, the day after Mr. Bishop died. She said that the paintings, the clocks,
the tin washtub and scrub board, and all the other items he treasured, made her miss him more. The store was open every day of every year until April 1986 when she had the stroke. It was closed for two months while Mrs. Rosa Lee recovered. When she opened again, she asked June to work there part-time until she got back on her feet. The store started out on her front porch but had expanded until it was hard to tell where the store ended and where the three-bedroom living quarters began. Nearly everything in the house was for sale.

One day, Mrs. Rosa Lee was in the kitchen frying chicken in a black cast iron pan while June helped a customer who had driven from Perry to shop at the curio shops along Willow Street.

The lady rushed over to the stove when she saw the cast iron pan. “I haven't seen one of those since I was a child.”

“What?” June asked.

“This skillet,” she answered. “My grandmother used to fry the best chicken in one just like this when I was a girl.”

“Hi, I'm Rosa Lee.”

“I'm Neddie Daniels. Please tell me, where did you find this skillet?”

“My cousin bought it in Madison four or five years ago,” Mrs. Rosa Lee answered.

“And I've been looking for one like it for just about that long.”

“This one's for sale.”

“Really?” June gasped along with the lady.

“If you can wait until I finish frying this chicken.”

As soon as she was done, Mrs. Rosa Lee washed and dried the skillet, placed a twelve-dollar tag on it and handed it to Neddie, along with the set of silverware, which was twenty-five dollars. She even invited Neddie to have lunch with them.

The job lasted two months. The school year started and Kathryn
wouldn't allow June to work, thinking it might affect her grades. June continued to drop by and help out when she could, and she never forgot the advice Mrs. Rosa Lee gave her a few days after Keith ran away.

“You're going to have a wonderful life, Junie,” Mrs. Rosa Lee told her. “Don't think of this as the end of your life. Look at it as a new beginning. You've got a whole new life ahead of you. This time, remember not to get too attached to anything you can't carry in your pocket. If it's too big to fit in your pocket, it's gonna either walk off, get toted off, be so heavy that it holds you down, or die on you. That goes for your children, too, if you ever have any. Love them. Love them with all your heart. But don't forget, sometimes there's a penalty for loving too much. That's why you're hurting now. You're paying the penalty. But remember, the pain will pass. You will smile again, and you will love again.”

Inez strolled leisurely on the sidewalk toward the beauty salon she owned. Kathryn switched the car's headlights on and off to get her attention. When Inez saw Kathryn's car, she immediately turned and stared at the back seat. Her eyes met June's.

“I love you, Junie,” Inez signed and then blew a kiss to her.

June signed back, “I love you, too.”

She and Inez were best friends growing up, and they were still very close. Whenever June came to town, she had to spend an afternoon in Inez's chair. Inez always closed the shop for June's visit so they could spend the day like they used to in June's bedroom or on her back porch. While Inez practiced and perfected all kinds of styles on June, June would sing. And although Inez was born deaf and couldn't hear a word of what June was singing, she could feel the emotions in June's voice.

“There's the bakery,” June mumbled to herself. “And Jeannette's.”

June immediately thought about the baby-blue prom gown her
mother bought her from Jeannette's a month before that April night all those years ago. They were about to drive over to Tallahassee to look for a gown, when Kathryn suggested they at least look at the selection Jeannette had ordered. When June saw the spaghetti-strapped gown, she knew it was the one.

June basted in the turn-of-the-century ambiance of downtown. The buildings still looked the same as they did when the first trading post was erected in 1891. Two years later, the hotel began to lure visitors from around the country to the area. The former trading post now housed the only real Dime Store in North Florida. Mildred's Bed and Breakfast Inn, Citizen's Bank, The Philmore Mansion, another bed and breakfast, Pearl's Soda Fountain, Kathryn's Bakery, Inez's, the Historical Society, Towne Hall, six antique and curio shops, a Christian bookstore, and Doc Weathers' medical office made up the rest of the three blocks of downtown. Moss-covered oaks and dogwoods lined the two-lane street. The lanes were separated by a greenway of shaded park benches, birdbaths and drinking fountains. But the sight she longed for most was a little further up Willow Street. June let the back window down and stared out at the historical marker ahead until she was close enough to read it. A picture of the old Hampton Springs Hotel and the words “Sight of the Historic Hampton Springs Hotel” were engraved in the varnished cypress.

“Trevor's not too hot back there, is he?” Kathryn asked.

“He's fine,” June answered and leaned closer to the window. She took in a breath of the lightly sulfur-tinged air.

Kathryn made the right turn onto Bacon Street, and waved at Deputy Anderson, who was sitting in his patrol car. He smiled and waved at June. When Kathryn told Sheriff Walker that June was coming home, he closed the street off to everyone except residents. A wooden fence bordered both sides of the narrow road,
which was wide enough for two cars to pass. Mt. Nebo Missionary Baptist Church and the church cemetery sat off the dirt road to the left. The railroad tracks that once brought guests from all over the country to the old hotel was on the right.

A little further ahead, after the tracks crossed the road and disappeared into the forest behind the church, the towering oaks constructed a half-mile-long corridor along Bacon Street. This was where John Bacon, the hotel's founder, built majestic Victorian-style houses for his family, business associates, and living quarters for his more prestigious Northern guests. The houses were now occupied by the descendants of the hotel's African-American servants, who resided in rundown and cramped quarters behind the hotel. They called the servant housing area, Brown Quarters. When Mr. Bacon died in 1956, a few years after the hotel burned down, he left the houses and 125 acres to each of the seven Black families who were still living in Brown Quarters. Those families, which included June's Uncle Ben and Keith's grandfather, used the 125 acres of land to build their dreams. It wasn't long before they became part of the town's elite. Although they were very much a part of Hampton Springs' financial, social and political landscape, they saw themselves as a separate community.

Mrs. Croft, June's fifth grade teacher, was trimming the azaleas that surrounded her neatly manicured yard. When the cars passed, Mrs. Croft stopped what she was doing and hurried toward the road waving. She had read the newspaper articles and saw stories on TV about June's failing health. One network premiered an hour-long special, “Her Final Song,” which really upset Mrs. Croft. She'd spoken with Kathryn on the phone several times while June was hospitalized, so she realized that most of the reports were true, but it still angered her to read and see news stories that talked about June like she was already dead.

Mr. and Mrs. Whitehurst stood at the gate to their yard, anxiously waiting for Kathryn's car. They met Mrs. Croft in the road and they walked together behind the two cars. They were joined by Miss Blue Hen and her fourteen-year-old grandson, and by Coach Rickards. By the time Kathryn and Alex pulled into the driveway, nearly every member of the seven families who lived on the street was walking in the yard behind them.

Alex parked behind Kathryn. He was about to open the door when he glanced over at Keith, who seemed oblivious to everything that was going on.

“Are you okay?” he asked Keith.

Keith didn't answer.

“Hey, man, I know this has to be hard for you, but you can handle it.” Alex opened the door and got out of the car. “Junie needs you. We all need you,” he said before closing the door. He walked over to Kathryn's car and opened the door for June.

“Hold on a second,” Alex told June. “Let me get the wheelchair out of the trunk.”