What I Remember Most (47 page)

When it grew colder that night, Rose said, “Why, it’s colder than a cow’s tit in December.”

And when Rose’s nephew Charlie Jr. didn’t get up quick enough to get her another helping of potato salad, she hollered at him, “You got a moose up your butt? Get it out and get moving, Charlie!”

Kade won at poker. Rose’s brother Tinker was miffed at that and told Kade, “Don’t ya ever get too big for your britches or someone’s gonna bust your britches wide open and then they’ll find out you got a butt like everybody else. Nothing special about it.” But he came back later and apologized for what he said.

Kade made Rose and Hugh an oversized rocking chair. He carved
To The Hutchinsons, Love, Grenadine
on the headrest. Those two gun-totin’, pot-growin’, bad-mouth-swearin’, government-hating, loving and kind people cried their eyes out and so did the rest of the loud and feisty Hutchinsons. Then they took turns rocking in it by themselves, with another person, with two other people, and with me.

People talk about “white trash.” I was called “white trash,” and “white trash foster kid,” more times than I can count. I had heard others call the Hutchinsons white trash.

I hate that term. Always have. Being poor and white does not make you white trash. Trash comes from the heart. Covey was trash. Bucky was trash. Many of our rich “friends” were trash.

The Hutchinsons are not white trash. They were, and are, pure, shiny gold, the kind that never dims. I love them. When I arrived at their double-wide trailer, beaten down and defeated, they put me up right again and, as Rose said, “Loved you silly.” They saved me.

Beatrice and her husband, Larry, came to visit, too, after the Hutchinsons. She rolled up in her new Mercedes, her diamond bracelets shining. She did not let go of me for five minutes.

Beatrice had wanted me to live with her forever. I moved out when I was twenty-one, when she married Larry. I bought my little green house for $120,000, $100,000 of which was Mr. Lee’s money. I had been waitressing full time, working at the same restaurant I had in high school, but also selling my art at Saturday Market, at art shows, and to more and more private clients.

Beatrice’s husband, Larry Schneider, was also an artist, but he understood the business side of selling art, too. He was gentle and sweet, like Beatrice, and he helped launch my career.

I kept waitressing until I was twenty-five because I was tremendously insecure about money, and saving money, and never being poor again, but I finally quit when Beatrice and Larry pointed out I was working about seventy hours a week and made far more money on my art than waitressing. My health at that point was unraveling, too. It was time to become a full-time artist.

While Larry went fishing with Kade one day, Beatrice and I painted a picture of Mr. Lee in my apartment. We used fabric to make his bow tie, added a line of rocks around the frame because he loved nature, and put a gold hoop earring in his left ear. “I miss him every day,” Beatrice said.

“Me too.”

Kade made Beatrice and Larry an oversized rocking chair, too. He carved
Beatrice, Mr. Lee, Larry, Grenadine
across the top. When Beatrice cries hard she snorts and snuffles, poor woman. Larry hugged me tight and whimpered, “Our girl, our girl!”

I know that the reason I didn’t come out of foster care addicted to drugs, pregnant, prostituted, or incarcerated was because of love. The love of my parents for my first six formative years and the love of the Hutchinsons and the Lees. The care and steadiness of my case worker, Daneesha Houston, and how she came out of retirement to help me when I had sunk into foster care hell may well have saved my life. The interest and kindness of teachers and principals made all the difference.

I will always miss my parents. But what I’ve learned is that nostalgia, the “if onlys” can be dangerous. It can bring on heavy sadness and sharp despair and it does not change the past.

So I am here, in the present.

Rozlyn DiMarco died in the fall when the leaves were on fire. Bright golds, scarlet reds, pumpkin orange, the mountains blue and purple at dusk, the sunrises full of streaks of pink. Nature was a layered, colorful collage, a last gift, it seemed, to Rozlyn.

Before she died, she told Eudora and me she would “Live like crazy,” and so she did. She and Cleo went to Disney World for a week. They went to the beach and splashed in the waves. They made a Thanksgiving dinner in August together and invited everyone. They baked an eight-layer chocolate cake and a pizza in the shape of a smile.

They sewed a special, queen-sized quilt. They cut up their favorite old clothes into squares and made a double border around the edge. In the center, they cut out a huge red heart.

They rode Liddy and took long walks. They took photos of everything they did together. Rozlyn gave me the photos, and Eudora and I put them into photograph books. Who knew that ex-spy Eudora would know how to cut out papers and stickers and make those fancy album pages?

Rozlyn wrote Cleo a letter and gave it to me. I put it in the back of the last photograph book, the finality sobering.

Rozlyn danced outside one night naked to the song “Greased Lightning” and made Eudora and me dance naked with her. We went skinny-dipping in the river and got drunk off margaritas. We took Cleo roller-skating, rafting, and camping.

She lived like crazy until the disease beat her down and she couldn’t live anymore, her head aching.

Rozlyn died as she wanted. She had a special date with Leonard three nights before and said good-bye to him. She said he “blubbered like a baby, but I told him to quit it because I wanted to ride him like a bucking bronco one more time.” She knew it was over. She hugged me and Eudora, then closed the door to her home on a Saturday morning to spend time with Cleo only.

There are, sometimes in life, gracious moments, as I call them, and Rozlyn had one. Cleo left for school on Monday. I took a day off work to be with Rozlyn, and she came upstairs to visit. We sat out on my porch, the sun shining on her face, the billowy white clouds moving right along, the trees singing a whispery song.

Rozlyn didn’t look well. She was pale, shaky. She’d lost weight. Her time had been less than expected. She was supposed to have two years, but her doctor had told her recently it could happen anytime, the tumor in her head instantly sucking the life out of her. I felt angry about that, cheated, defeated.

She reached out her hand and I held it. “I love you, soul sister,” she told me.

“I love you, too, soul sister.” I choked up.

She closed her eyes, sighed, and her whole body jerked twice, as if it had been shot, then her head fell to the side.

I felt her life drain out in my hand, her grasp loosening. “I love you, Rozlyn,” I cried out, wanting her to hear those words as she left. “I love you.”

I did not call 911. I did not try to save my soul sister. She was not savable. She would not want to be revived only to die again anyhow. She had died as she wished. She had not wanted it to happen in front of Cleo, and she had kept her promise to herself to live like crazy.

I put my cheek to hers and cried for my friend, my tears dripping off both our faces.

I cried and cried for Rozlyn, then I cried for Cleo. Then I cried for all of us.

It is inexplicable how some of the very best people die way too young.

It knocks you flat, that it does, and you wonder how you will ever, ever get up again.

Rozlyn’s funeral was held outside, on her property, the Christmas tree farm and the meadow in the distance, the mountains towering behind. It was attended by two hundred fifty people, including everyone at Hendricks’.

We had a potluck dinner afterward, as Rozlyn wanted. “Cleo needs this to happen in a familiar, loving place. Make sure Liddy is nearby. That horse is her best friend.”

We set up white tents and long tables. Kade brought the wine and beer, as Rozlyn had requested, so that people could have a drink on her, and “rock and roll on.”

Liddy was tied to a nearby tree wearing her flowered hat. Cleo went and hugged her often. In the middle of the potluck, after the service, Cleo untied her and Liddy followed her on a walk through the meadow, one of Rozlyn’s “women-power” quilts around her shoulders.

Cleo had, at first, been quiet when I went to school and picked her up the morning Rozlyn died. The funeral home had been by for Rozlyn already. She had not wanted Cleo to see her dead. “Her last memory of me should be of my wicked awesome smile and my love, not a stiff, scary corpse.”

Cleo and I went on a walk, past the big, red barn, and I held her hand and told her, as gently as I could, that her mom had died. She didn’t say anything for long, painful moments, but I felt her hand quiver.

She had known it would happen, but children, as adults, often don’t understand the finality of death until they’re in its irrefutable black depths.

“She’s not dead! She’s not!” She ripped her hand out of mine. “Do you hear me, Grenady? She’s not dead! I know it! I want my mommy! I want my mom!”

I felt my whole chest constrict. I was Cleo and Cleo was me. I had thought those same words a thousand times as a child . . .
I want my mom! I want my dad!

I dropped to my knees and hugged her, my tears streaming. “I’m sorry, honey, so sorry.”

“No! No! Get her, Grenady, get her!” She cupped my face. “Right now!” She tilted her head back and screamed, the sound utterly shattering.

I heard Liddy in the barn, neighing, turning, trying to break out of her stall, to reach Cleo.

She struggled out of my arms, her face hot.

“Help her!” Cleo shook my shoulders. “Help Mommy!”

“I can’t help her anymore, Cleo,” I sobbed, then bit my lip. “She’s in heaven.” Rozlyn had told her that that was where she would be, watching over Cleo like a “quilt-sewing angel.”

“No, she’s not. You lie.” She hit me on the shoulder with her tiny fist. “Where is she?”

I could tell that the Cleo I knew was gone, disappearing into her hysteria. Liddy kept neighing, banging on the stall door with her hoof.

“Where is my mommy? You tell me!” She screamed again, long and raw. It reached up into that bright blue sky and the puffy white clouds. “You tell me right now!”

That did it for Liddy. She broke out of her stall, the door crashing open, and galloped over to Cleo. I put my arms around Cleo to protect her, but I had nothing to worry about. Liddy stopped before us, her nose to Cleo’s wet cheeks.

“I want Mommy!” She hit my shoulder again, not hard. “She’s here, she’s here, she’s here!” Cleo took a deep breath, then let all her grief and anger and desperate sadness out again. I swear her scream raced through the meadow, then bounced off those mountains, pummeling both of us. “Mommy! Where are you?”

She collapsed in my arms, and I sank to the grass and rocked her until she had screamed herself out, limp and lost, Liddy neighing softly beside us, agitated and nervous. I could hardly sit up, my body a wall of searing pain.

“Mommy! Where are you?
Where are you?
”

Watching a child grieve takes your breath away.

Cleo and I moved into Kade’s house about two months later. It was not a hard decision. I tried living with Cleo in her home, and she couldn’t stand it. She looked for her mother everywhere. I think, for some, living in the home of someone who is gone is a comfort. Cleo is a child. It was not a comfort. She was haunted.

Kade said, after he made us pancakes one morning at his house, and Cleo was outside, walking Liddy, “I want you two to come and live with me.”

“Live with you?”

“Yes. That doesn’t sound romantic. Will you live with me? But when I’ve talked about marriage, you freeze up. You look worried and nervous. I can see you withdrawing from me, so that’s obviously not in the cards.”

“You got that right.”

“I want marriage, in the future. I want brothers and sisters for Cleo. I want the dog. But I’ll wait until you’re ready.”

I ignored all the happy tingling in my stomach.

“I want to be with you, Grenady. All the time. I want to sleep with you, wake up with you, take care of you, laugh with you, the whole thing, baby, until we’re old and out on that deck in our rocking chairs.”

“You’d get sick of me.”

“Never, Artist Lady.” He leaned over and kissed me. “I will never get sick of you.”

It was tempting. He was tempting.

“Please, Grenady, think about it. I want you and I and Cleo to be a family together. I am begging you. I don’t like living apart at all. I’m lonely without you. I don’t like sleeping here alone. I don’t like driving up to the house and not having you both here.”

“I’ll think about it.” I kissed him, and he picked me up and put me on his lap in his leather chair.

“Okay, I thought about it.”

He laughed. “And?”

“Yes.”

The day we moved in I noticed something new in Kade’s yard. It was a white picket fence in a rectangle. He was building a gazebo in the center of it. In the fall he would plant bulbs. Lilies, for my mother, and in the summer, daisies for daisy crowns and roses for Mr. Lee.

It’s hard not to be madly in love with that man.

He bought me a ring. It’s gold, with a row of sparkly diamonds. I love it. “So it’s a promise, Grenady, that when you’re ready, you’ll marry me.”

“That’s a yes.”

My pink, ceramic rose box for my lily bracelet is right at home on the nightstand next to his bed with the married bald eagles.

Rozlyn made me the spy girl quilt. I found it wrapped in Christmas paper, in her room, with my name on a card, after she died. She made one for Eudora, too.

Three women, butts way in the air, slinking through the grass wearing night goggles, miniskirts, and bikini tops over well-endowed bosoms. I hung it in my new studio to honor her and our friendship. I still cry about her. One wonders how much pain a body can take before it breaks, but I am determined not to break.

Kade, Cleo, and I decorated Cleo’s bedroom together. We hung up Rozlyn’s heart quilt on one wall and the quilt with the woman climbing a mountain in a purple leotard and pink tennis shoes on another. She used two others for her bedspreads.

Kade built Cleo an exquisite desk. In the front he carved a replica of the heart quilt, which I painted.

Cleo and Kade were friends immediately. She clung to his hand, wanting him to read her stories or play space alien dress up or do science experiments. He held her, or I did, or we both did, when she cried. Cleo was a different girl after her mother died, as expected. She was more serious, introspective. She cried often. She would miss her mother her whole life, no question.

But with time, her light, her joy, Rozlyn’s fierce, crazy love of life came shining through again.

I will keep my word to her mother: I will love Cleo as my own daughter, and I will love Cleo’s children, Rozlyn’s grandchildren, with everything that I have, everything that I am.

That’s a promise.