“With all respect, Mr…. Jasper…”
“I know, I know. My sudden interest in your mother has to do with finding her putting up Christmas decorations in April, Charlene. And realizing how much I miss having someone to take care of. Someone who really depends on me.”
“Ah. I didn’t think it was a decoration-trading scheme.”
He grinned. “Good alibi, wasn’t it?”
“Fair.” She shrugged.
“Well, I recognized the confusion. In fact, I recognized need, and it was familiar to me. So I decided that, even though it was overdue, it wasn’t a bad time to become a good neighbor.”
“You’ve been looking out for her.” It wasn’t a question.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You don’t have to, you know. You could have simply called me and—”
“Please, don’t insist that I stop, as though this is some burden thrust on me. It turns out I’m comfortable in this role. I’ve had tons of practice. I haven’t felt useful in years, and for pity’s sake, Lois likes me and the rest of you are busy.”
She sighed deeply. “But she’s my mother, Jasper. I can’t step aside and give you the responsibility. You can’t imagine how much I owe her.”
“Oh, but I can. I’ve been your neighbor, remember. I might not have been outgoing, but I wasn’t blind. I saw her go off to work every day till she was sixty-five, and then she worked part-time and volunteered. She did all the work that house required and helped take care of her granddaughter in the bargain. She’s a helluva woman, that Lois. I’m glad to hear you say it, that you owe her. Damn fine gesture for a daughter, if you ask me.” He leaned close and whispered, “A busy daughter who could probably use a little help now and then.”
She felt deeply grateful. “You’re very sweet.”
“All the women say so,” he said with a laugh. He rarely ever talked to women.
“Go home and get some rest, Jasper. You must be exhausted.”
“Actually, I feel pretty good. Probably that hospital coffee your Stephanie forced on me. But, I’m going to go home now and let you see to your family.” He took one of her hands in both of his. “Promise you’ll call on me?”
She nodded and tears came to her eyes. How strange life was. All through high school she’d thought of him as the grouch next door. Mr. Crabapple. Even though he was only twelve years older than she, it had seemed like a huge age span then. She and her friends would come roaring up to the house in their noisy cars, squealing and honking, and this grumpy old coot would come outside in his flannels and yell at them to shut up! Self-absorbed teenagers that they were, they never worried about his poor sick wife, about his perhaps desperate need for rest. He must have celebrated the day Charlene left for college, and mourned the day she came back, child in tow.
Now he was offering to help her.
She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you. I think you saved her life.”
“Heavens. And she may save mine if she lets me be of service again.”
Life was strange indeed, Charlene thought as Jasper’s words burned into her memory, taking her back to her youth. I saw her go off to work every day till she was sixty-five…. There were things she hadn’t allowed herself to think about for years and years.
She sent Stephanie and Jake away and plopped herself down at her mother’s bedside. She took Peaches’s hand in hers and settled in for a long and reckless bout of remembering.
Lois moved them into that little house in Fair Oaks when Charlene was ten. She could vaguely remember Mr. Conklin moving in at about the same time. Charlene’s father was not with them during the move, but not too long after, he made one of his appearances.
That was what Nate Pomeroy did—appeared. And disappeared. Then he’d appear and disappear again. He was a piano player, a lounge singer, a band manager, a music man, a fly-by-night. Because Charlene and Lois didn’t talk about him too much, Charlene wasn’t clear on how her parents had gotten together in the first place. There was a picture Lois kept in the bottom of her underwear drawer—Nate and Lois, dressed up, she holding flowers and wearing a hat with a veil. It had been a very small, very intimate little wedding in Charlene’s grandparents’ living room. By the time they moved into the little house in Fair Oaks, Charlene didn’t have grandparents anymore.
When she was little, she knew her father as the handsome, funny, playful, happy man who just kept showing up and darting into her life like a beautiful exotic bird, filled with stories, laughter and small gifts.
Lois was a librarian with firm hours, a steady paycheck and a quiet lifestyle—except for Nate. Before buying the house, they had lived in a tiny two-room apartment. If Nate was around, Charlene slept on the sofa, and if he was not, she slept with Lois. From the time Charlene was five, whether or not Nate was in residence, she would go to school in the neighborhood of her mother’s public library building, walk to the library after school, and they would take the bus home together. Charlene learned to sit quietly and do homework or read for several hours at a time when she was very young. She was extremely disciplined.
When Lois managed to purchase the little house in Fair Oaks, Charlene still went to the school near the library, until she was in junior high and old enough to be left on her own until dinnertime, when Lois was off work.
And every so often—Charlene couldn’t remember exactly how often—Nate Pomeroy would saunter up the walk to the front door with flowers, candy, some kind of toy, trinkets, cheap costume jewelry or silk scarves—anything colorful, feminine and irresistible. Charlene would scream in delight and throw herself on him, overtaken with sheer joy, but Lois would cross her arms over her chest and glower at him. It would sometimes take him days to win her over, but only seconds for Charlene to fall under his spell.
Nate was wonderful for a little girl, a fantasy father. He would take her to movies, to the zoo, to the park, to the river, to San Francisco. Sometimes, as she got a little older, they would conspire that she would skip school so they could do something special, like drive to the coast or up to the mountains. He always knew actors and musicians playing Tahoe clubs or San Francisco theaters. She idolized him.
Lois remained cool and distant for a while, but eventually she warmed up. And just about the time she’d start to relax and enjoy a sort of family routine, Nate would get restless again and be gone. Poof. Sometimes he didn’t even leave a note. Weeks or months would pass before he returned. As Charlene got older, the stretches of his absences grew longer…and her resentment deeper.
Now that she was an adult, she understood the scenario better. Lois had fallen under his spell, married him, had a child with him, and either would not follow him around in his nomad-like existence, or had not been invited. Lois had already been thirty-two when she married Nate; in the fifties she would have been considered an old-maid librarian.
In high school Charlene was less impressed with her father’s irresponsible behavior, and met his visits in much the same stiff manner that Lois did…and again, much like Lois, she warmed up eventually. By then Nate appeared about once a year and stayed for as long as a few weeks. She also noticed that he began each visit by talking about what a fool he’d been to let this precious family life slip away from him. Who needed the boys in the band? He needed his two beautiful girls! His home, his security, his sanity! There must be something he could do that would keep him close to Fair Oaks, even if he had to work in San Francisco or Lake Tahoe and drove home every week for a couple of days. Maybe he could be a lounge singer in Sacramento, or give piano lessons right in Fair Oaks. Charlene would grow excited by the prospect of having a full-time father.
Then he would go and Charlene would be shattered.
Charlene misled her friends and later Jake, making it sound as though her father was a presence in her life and simply traveled for his job. She made it sound as though he wrote, called, came home regularly, supported the family financially with his work. In reality, she doubted Nate ever gave Lois a dime,
and she was a little afraid to ask Lois if she gave Nate money. Afraid Lois had.
Lois was a great mother as mothers go, but she wasn’t exactly a tremendous communicator. Charlene remembered back to an incident in her junior year of high school. Nate had come, won them over in a few days and settled in like a father who’d doted on his wife and daughter for years without interruption. He went to church with them, attended the high-school football games, chaperoned the dance, did card tricks for her friends, helped them decorate the homecoming floats…and then left a note saying a gig had come up in L.A. and he didn’t know how long he’d be gone. Charlene had thrown herself on her bed and wept hard, burning tears. Lois came into her room, sat down beside her, touched her back with gentle affection and said, “Shall we talk about it, Charlene? Your father?”
She had said, “No! I don’t want to talk about him! Not ever!”
And Lois had said, “All right, but tell me if you change your mind. And remember, I’m always here.”
And that was it.
From the time she was a little girl, Charlene had learned to keep her feelings to herself, the way her mother did. She was ambivalent toward her father, adoring him and detesting him. As she got older, it took him longer to melt the ice that encased her heart, but she never asked her mother the burning question, “How did we get mixed up with a guy like this?”
Small wonder, then, that she ended up being helplessly attracted to Jake, a fun-loving boy who might never grow up. Jake, who could make her laugh till she wanted to fall down, and who could bring her such forbidden sexual joy she wanted to never get back up. Jake, who had such passion, for justice, for adventure and for her. From the first time she kissed him, there was something so familiar. Even though there was no physical resemblance at all, the first time Lois met him she said, “Oh boy.”
Charlene got pregnant before she got married, which didn’t give her a lot of time to plan things. And she couldn’t find her father for the wedding. When Stephanie was close to arriving, a telegram found Lois. Nate was dead. Shot by a jealous husband in southern California.
Charlene demanded that her mother go with her to L.A. to retrieve the body and have a look at where he’d been and with whom. She wanted to lay the whole thing to rest once and for all. Jake offered to take her, help her get through it, but she didn’t want Jake right then. She wanted only her mother. Lois went because she was worried about the pregnancy; Charlene was overwrought.
Lois tried to talk to Charlene about Nate, about their disjointed family life, about how she was never sure if letting Nate in and out of their lives did more harm than good, but Charlene wasn’t interested in going over it. She wouldn’t listen. She wanted to be finished with all that. Through her tears she said, “He’ll never let us down again.”
What Charlene didn’t realize, didn’t prepare for, was the legacy he left like a splotch on her future. For years to come she would make decisions and choices based on the disappointments of her youth because she hadn’t ever confronted and untangled them.
She came out of the experience—twenty years of abandonments by a father she craved—a determined young mother. She was done screwing around with confusion and focused her attention on doing everything right. But she went over the edge. Already very disciplined, Charlene became controlling. She became the kind of college student who mourned over an A-, the kind of mother who never let her daughter near a smudge.
There just wasn’t room for a guy like Jake in a deal like that. He didn’t have the constitution for it. Besides, at his young age, he couldn’t concentrate long enough to keep Charlene happy.
Fortunately for everyone, the situation made Jake angry enough that he demanded to be a huge part of Stephanie’s life. And to soothe his weary manhood, he found himself a woman right away, whom he dated, married and divorced in about eighteen months. This, in Charlene’s way of thinking, established him as very much like her philandering father…and therefore hopeless.
But every so often she would find herself helplessly drawn to Jake. It was a damnable thing! She knew he wasn’t good for her, knew he’d only disappoint her again and again, but she found herself needing him. Though they never actually reconciled, they would fall into an amicable pattern that usually included sleeping together, but never living together. And sure enough, just like with her father, this perfectly wonderful spell with Jake would end because he would let her down. Take her for granted. She would back off, put distance between them until, once more, some force brought them together again. Then he would do something to screw it up. Again and again.
In her total desperation not to get mixed up with a man like her father, she became like her father. She moved in and out of Jake’s life, hurting him and causing him pain for twenty-five years, while he was helpless to reject her because he loved her so. But she didn’t see that.
Charlene didn’t find Dennis for twenty years, twenty long, confusing, difficult, often lonely years, which culminated with perfect Dennis, a man tidy and dependable and classy and reliable. Maybe they didn’t have some of the things Charlene had with Jake, but they did have trust, mutual respect, companionship. He was a man who would stay and stay the same. No one knew better than Charlene how vitally important that could be.
Stephanie insisted on a final cup of coffee with her dad, even though he was clearly tired to the bone. Good sport that he was, he gave her another half hour, because he knew she wasn’t ready to go home and face the rest of the night wondering what was going to become of Peaches. They sat in the deserted hospital coffee shop, sipping on vending-machine coffee that had a distinctly cardboard taste.
“It’s just that she’s had such a tough life,” Stephanie said. “I hate to see her wrap it up like this—confused and disoriented and constantly getting lost or hurting herself. I wished for her a rockin’ old age.”
“Yeah, well, it’s pretty much rocked up to now, wouldn’t you say?” Jake wanted to know.
Stephanie shrugged. “I think there have been some perks these past few years, now that Mom’s doing better financially and I’m out of school. There were a couple of trips, a couple of retreats. But up until then it was work, work, work.”
“The way of the world, my princess,” Jake said. He had that look on his face; it was so like Charlene’s look. That When do you suppose she’s going to get it? look.
“Come on, you know what I mean—the whole single-mother thing. She not only raised Mom by herself, she then mostly raised me. If she wasn’t actually doing the baby-sitting, she was helping to pay for the baby-sitter. And all this on a librarian’s wage.”
Jake looked a little perplexed. “I understand your grandfather traveled a lot while your mom was growing up—”
“That’s what Mom likes people to think. That’s what she even told me—‘Your grandpa was in a traveling band and we learned to get along without a man around all the time.’ But if you ask Peaches, my grandpa was a real flimflam man. He probably only spent a year in total with Mom and Peaches her whole life.”
Jake gave Stephanie his full attention, and he looked more than a little bit surprised.
“Peaches took the bus to work until I was in junior high. Mom had a car before Peaches did.”
He sat up a little straighter. “Your mom’s father wasn’t around at all when she was growing up?”
“Hardly at all. Peaches said Mom adored him. She used to sit on the front step and wait for him, used to haunt the mailbox for letters that never came. It broke Peaches’s heart, but there wasn’t much she could do. She didn’t think it would be better to refuse to let Charlene see her father at all.”
“No, I don’t suppose. It’s so funny I never knew any of this.”
“Well, since you and Mom didn’t stay married for even a year…”
“I remember when your granddaddy died. You were about to be born. I wanted to go with your mom to where he was buried, but she didn’t want me with her. I was worried about her, what with her being so pregnant with you. Bu
t Peaches said she’d be all right, that I should let her have her way. I think you were born about a month later, if that.”
“I know, Dad. He died in Los Angeles, where he’d been living for a few years. Turns out he was actually shot by a jealous husband. Peaches said shooting was too good for him.”
His mouth hung open. He was sure Lois and Charlene had said it was a heart attack. “Wow!”
“She didn’t tell you anything about him, did she?”
He laughed in embarrassment. “Okay, we haven’t always been real honest with each other, but at the time he died we were married!”
“It’s definitely not your fault, Daddy. She didn’t tell me, either. Peaches said she refused to talk about her father. He must’ve hurt her too much when she was growing up by being so absent all the time. That’s what Peaches said.”
“But Peaches told you,” he said.
“Well, I asked a lot of questions about my grandpa. And remember, when I was little and curious and full of questions, Mom was in college and law school. That left me and Peaches together all the time. She showed me some old pictures, told me he had been a musician. He was pretty unreliable and didn’t live with them much when Mom was growing up, but when he did come around he was great fun. But then he’d up and leave with no warning. It would make Peaches furious, but in those days you didn’t get divorced unless there was some horrendous reason.” She laughed ruefully. “I guess it wasn’t horrendous enough that he was a no-good, cheating bum who never made a single rent payment in his life.”
Jake whistled low and checked out the coffee-shop ceiling for insight. “You ever ask your mom about this stuff?” he asked.
“I asked her a few times. She wasn’t very forthcoming, just answered my questions yes and no. ‘Yes, he died before you were born. No, he wasn’t around much when I was growing up. Yes, I suppose I missed him, but you can’t really miss what you don’t have. No, I wasn’t that sad when he died because he hadn’t been a big part of my life.’ We might as well have been talking about the postman.”