“Are you sure?”
“Were you ready?” I said.
That stopped her. She smoothed her hands over her stomach; it looked like she’d swallowed a small melon, or a pumpkin. “I don’t know. Probably not. I loved him, and one night things just went farther than they had before. Afterwards I realized it was a mistake, in more ways than one.”
“Because it came off,” I said.
“Yeah. And for other reasons, too. But I can’t preach to you, because I was sure I was doing the right thing. I didn’t know he’d be gone the next day. Like, literally gone. But you have to consider that.”
“That he might die?”
“Not die,” she said softly, and there was that ripple again, the one that still came over her face whenever she spoke of him, and I suddenly realized how long it had really been. “I mean, I loved Michael so much, but—I didn’t know him that well. Just for a summer, you know. A lot could have happened this fall. I’ll never know.”
“I can tell he wants to. Like soon. He’s getting more pushy about it.”
“If you sleep with him, it will change things,” she said. “It has to. And if he goes, you’ll have lost more than just him. So be sure, Halley. Be real sure.”
Chapter Twelve
Grandma Halley was staying in a place called Evergreen Rest Care Facility. Some of the people were bedridden, but others could get around; women in motorized wheelchairs zoomed past us down the corridors, their purses clamped against their laps. Everything smelled fruity and sharp, like too much cheap air freshener. It seemed like every open piece of wall had a Thanksgiving decoration taped to it, turkeys and Pilgrims and corn husks, and you got the sense that holidays there were imperative, important, because there wasn’t much else to look forward to.
I’d slept for most of the trip up, since my father wanted to leave at four A.M. to get the jump on all the other travelers. My father was always concerned with “getting the jump” when we traveled, obsessed with outsmarting other motorists; once in the car, he flipped the radio dial constantly, checking out his competition, something that drove me crazy since I never got to hear any music.
Before we left I lay awake most of the night, listening for cars outside. I was sure Macon would come by, even just to beep, to say good-bye again. He knew I was upset about my grandmother, but it made him uncomfortable; family stuff was not really his department. I didn’t want to leave things the way we had, unresolved, and I pictured him in the few places I knew he went, with the few friends of his I’d met, and tried to tell myself he cared about me enough not to look elsewhere for what I wasn’t giving him.
The first thing I thought when I walked into Grandma Halley’s room was how small she looked. She was in bed, her eyes closed, and a square of sunlight was falling across her face from the window. She looked like a doll, her face porcelain and unreal, like the Madame Alexander Scarlett O’Hara she’d given me.
“Hi there.” My mother stood up from a chair by the window. I hadn’t even seen her. “How was the trip?”
“Fine,” I said as she came over and kissed me.
“Fine,” my father said, putting his arm around her waist. “We made great time. Really got the jump on everyone.”
“Come outside,” she said softly. “She’s had a hard night and she really needs her rest.”
Out in the corridor a pack of women in wheelchairs was passing, laughing and talking, and next to Grandma Halley’s room, behind a half-closed door, I could see someone hooked up to a machine, a tube in his nose. The room was dark, the shades drawn.
“So how’s everything?” my mother said to me, pulling me close. “I’ve missed you guys so much.”
“How are you?” my father said, noticing as I did how tired she looked, her face older and more drawn, as if just time in this place could age you.
“I’m okay,” she said to him, her arm still around me. I was uncomfortable, my arm clamped in an odd position against my side, but this was important to her, so I didn’t move. “She’s doing much better today. Every day she just improves by leaps and bounds.” Every few words she squeezed my shoulder again for emphasis.
When we went back inside I only spoke with Grandma Halley for a few minutes. At first, when she opened her eyes and saw me there was no flicker of recognition, no instant understanding that I was who I was, and that scared me. As if I had already changed into another girl, another Halley, features and voice and manners all shifting to make me unrecognizable.
“It’s Halley, Mother,” my own mother said softly from the other side of the bed, looking across at me encouragingly, since she couldn’t squeeze my shoulder and pass this off as better than it was.
And then I saw it, flooding across my grandmother’s antique, careful features: she found me in the strange face looking down at her. “Halley,” she said, almost scolding, as if I was an old friend playing a trick on her. “How are you, sweetheart?”
“I’m good. I’ve missed you,” I said, and I took her hand, so small in mine, and wrapped my fingers around it. I could feel the bones in it working, moving to grab hold, as I carefully squeezed it, emphasizing, reassuring, that everything would be all right.
Later, we watched Grandma Halley eat turkey and cranberry Jell-O off an orange plastic, cornucopia-decorated tray. The halls at Evergreen were packed with other relatives now, making pilgrimages; at one point when I passed the room next door, the man with the tubes and machines had a crowd around his bed, all talking softly and huddled together. Outside, in the hallway, a little girl in a pinafore and Mary Janes was playing hopscotch across the linoleum tiles. The halls had a different smell now, of air freshener mingled with hundreds of types of perfumes and hair spray, the outside world suddenly mixed in.
That evening we went to a hotel downtown and paid a flat twenty bucks each for a Thanksgiving buffet, rows and rows of steam tables full of mashed potatoes and gravy and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Everyone was dressed up and eating at little tables, like a huge family broken up into pieces. My father ate three plates’ worth and my mother, her face tired and lined from lack of sleep, talked the entire time, nonstop, as if enough words could make it less strange, less different from every other Thanksgiving we’d ever had. She asked me tons of questions, just to keep the conversation going, about Scarlett and school and Milton’s. My father told a long story about some listener who’d stripped naked and run down Main Street for concert tickets, the station’s latest coup. I picked at my mashed potatoes, smooth as silk, and wondered what Macon was doing, if he even had a turkey dinner or just a Big Mac in his empty room and another party without me. I missed him, just like I missed the lumpy potatoes my mother made every Thanksgiving.
We settled into Grandma Halley’s house, me in my old room from all those summers, my parents down the hall in the guest room with the blue flowered wallpaper. Nothing much had changed. The cat was still fat, the pipes still wheezed all night, and each time I passed the bell in the staircase window I touched it automatically, without thinking, announcing myself to the empty stairwell.
In the evenings I reread the few magazines I’d brought or called Scarlett. She’d cooked an entire traditional dinner for Cameron (whose family ate early) and Marion and Steve/Vlad, who showed up, she told me, in dress pants, with his clanking boots and medallion necklace and what she said could only be described politely as a tunic.
“A what?” I said.
“A tunic,” she said simply. “Like a big shirt, with a drawstring collar, that hung down past his waist.”
“He tucked it in, right?”
“No,” she said. “He just wore it. And I swear Marion hardly even noticed.”
This fascinated me. “What did you say?”
“What could I say? I told him to sit down and gave him a bowl of nuts. I don’t know, Marion’s crazy for him. She wouldn’t care if he showed up butt naked.”
I laughed. “Stop.”
“I’m serious.” She sighed. “Well, at least dinner went well. Cameron kept
the conversation going, and I was highly complimented on my potatoes. Not that I could eat them. My back has been killing me and I’ve been feeling nauseous since last week. Something is rotting in the kitchen. Did I tell you that?”
“Yeah, you did,” I said. “Did they have lumps?”
“What?”
“The potatoes. Did they have lumps?”
“Of course they did,” she said. “They’re only good if they have lumps.”
“I know it,” I said. “Save me a bowl, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, her voice crackling across the line, reassuring as always. “I will.”
I got to know my Grandma Halley a little better that weekend, and it wasn’t through the few short visits I spent by her bedside, holding her hand. She was still in pain from her surgery and a little confused; she called me Julie more than once, and told me stories that trailed off midway, fading out in the quiet. And all the while my mother was there behind me, or beside me, finishing the sentences my grandmother couldn’t, and trying to make everything right again.
In my bedroom at Grandma Halley’s, there was an old cabinet made out of sweet-smelling wood with roses painted across the doors. One night when I was bored I opened it up, and inside were stacks of boxes, photographs, letters, and odds and ends, little things my grandmother, who was an intense pack rat, couldn’t bear to throw away. There were pictures of her as a teenager in fancy dancing dresses posing with gaggles of other girls, all of them smiling. Her hair had been long and dark, and she wore it twisted up over her head, with flowers woven across the crown. There was one box full of dance cards with boys’ names signed in them, each dance numbered off. I found a wedding picture of her and my grandfather bending over a cake, the knife in both their hands. It all fascinated me. I read the letters she wrote to her mother during her first trip abroad, where she spent four pages describing an Indian boy she met in the park, and every word he said, and how blue the sky was. And the later letters about my grandfather, how much she loved him, letters that were returned to her postmarked and neatly tied with string when her own mother died.
I went downstairs and found my mother at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea and sitting in Grandma Halley’s big green chair by the window. She didn’t hear me come in and jumped when I touched her shoulder.
“Hey,” she said. “What are you still doing up?”
“I’ve been reading all this stuff of Grandma Halley’s,” I said, sliding in beside her. “Look at this.” And I showed her the dance card I had tied to my wrist, and the wedding picture of them dancing past the band, and my birth announcement, carefully saved in its own envelope. Hours had passed as I’d sat going through my grandmother’s life, stored in boxes and envelopes, neatly organized as if she’d meant for me to find it there all along.
“Can you believe she was ever so young,” my mother said, holding the wedding picture to the light. “See the necklace she’s wearing? She gave that to me on my wedding day. It was my ‘something borrowed.’”
“She fell in love with an Indian boy the summer she was nineteen,” I told her. “In a park in London. He wrote to her for two years afterwards.”
“No kidding,” she said softly, her fingers idly brushing across my hair. “She never told me.”
“And you know that bell she keeps in the window halfway up the stairs? Grandpa bought her that at a flea market in Spain, when he was in the service.”
“Really?”
“You should read the letters,” I said, looking down at my own name on the birth announcement: Welcome, Halley!
She smiled at me, as if remembering suddenly when moments like this between us were not noticed for the very fact of how rare they were.
“Honey,” she said, gathering up my hair in her hands, “I’m sorry about that night at the restaurant. I know it’s hard to understand why we can’t let you see Macon. But it’s for the best. Someday you’ll understand that.”
“No,” I said. “I won’t.” And then, just as easily as it had closed, the distance opened up between us. I could almost see it.
She sighed, letting my hair drop. She felt it, too. “Well, it’s late. You should get to bed, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.” I got up and walked toward the stairs, past the framed front page of the local paper, announcing the comet’s arrival. HALLEY MAKES ANOTHER VISIT, it said.
“I remember when the comet came through,” I said, and she walked up behind me, reading over my shoulder. “I sat in Grandma’s lap and we watched it together.”
“Oh, honey, you were so little,” she said easily. “And it really wasn’t clear at all. You didn’t see anything. I remember.”
And that was it; it was so easy for her. My own memories did not even belong to me.
But I knew she was wrong. I had seen that comet. I knew it as well as I knew my own face, my own hands. My own heart.
The next morning we locked up the house, fed the cat and left money for the petsitter, then piled into the car for one last visit with Grandma Halley. Evergreen was quiet then, with the visitors already having hit the road, getting the jump on each other. My father said his good-bye quickly and went out to the parking lot to stand by the car, eyes on the freeway ramp, his head ducked against the wind. Inside, behind the sealed-for-your-own-safety windows, we couldn’t even hear it blowing.
I sat for a long time next to Grandma Halley’s bed, her hand in mine, with my mother on the other side. She was coherent, but barely; she was tired, the drugs made her woozy, and she kept closing her eyes. Her cheek was dry when I kissed it, and as I pulled back she put her hand against my face, her fingers smooth and cool, smiling at me but saying nothing. I remembered the girl in the pictures, with the roses and the long dancing dresses, and I smiled back.
I waited in the hallway while my mother said good-bye. I stood against the wall, under the clock, and listened to it ticking. Inside, my mother’s voice was low and even, and I couldn’t make out any words. Next door, the man with the tubes was alone again, the equipment by his bed beeping in the dark. The TV over his bed was showing only static.
Finally, after about twenty minutes, I walked back to the half-open door. My mother had her back to me, one hand on Grandma Halley’s, and as I looked closely I could see Grandma Halley had fallen asleep, her eyes closed, breath even and soft. And my mother, who had spent the entire holiday weekend almost manic with reassurance, squeezing my shoulder and smiling, forcing conversation, was crying. She had her head down, resting against the rail of the bed, and her shoulders shook as she wept, with Grandma Halley sleeping on, oblivious. It scared me, the same way I’d been scared the night I came home from Sisterhood Camp and found Scarlett in tears on her porch, waiting for me. There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you’ve carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand.
Chapter Thirteen
Now that it was Month Five, there was no hiding anymore that Scarlett was pregnant. With her stomach protruding and her face always flushed, even the drab green Milton’s Market apron couldn’t keep her secret. The first week of December, she got called in to talk to Mr. Averby. I went along for moral support.
“Now, Scarlett.” Mr. Averby looked over his desk and smiled at us. He was about my dad’s age, with a bald spot he tried to cover with creative combing. “I couldn’t help but notice that you have some, uh, news.”
“News?” Scarlett said. She had this little game she played with people; she liked to make them say it.
“Yes, well, what I mean is that it’s come to my attention—I mean, I’ve noticed—that you seem to be expecting.”
“Expecting,” Scarlett said, nodding. “I’m pregnant.”
“Right,” he said quickly. He looked like he might start sweating. “So, I just wondered, if there was anything we should discuss concerning this.”
“I don’t think so,” Scarlett said, shifting her weight in the chair. She could nev
er get comfortable anymore. “Do you?”
“Well, no, but I do think that it should be acknowledged, because there might be problems, with the position, that someone in your condition might have.” He was having a hard time getting it out, clearly, that he was worried about what the customers might think of a pregnant sixteen-year-old checkout girl at Milton’s, Your Family Supermarket. That it was a bad example. Or bad business. Or something.
“I don’t think so,” Scarlett said cheerfully. “The doctor says it’s fine for me to be on my feet, as long as it’s not full time. And my work won’t be affected, Mr. Averby.”
“She’s a very good worker,” I said, jumping in. “Employee of the Month in August.”
“That’s right.” Scarlett grinned at me. She’d already told me she wouldn’t quit for anything, not even to save Milton’s embarrassment. And they couldn’t fire her. It was against the law; she knew that from her Teen Mothers Support Group.
“You are a very good worker,” Mr. Averby said, and now he was shifting around in his seat like he couldn’t get comfortable either. “I just didn’t know how you felt about keeping up your hours now. If you wanted to cut back or discuss other options or—”
“Nope. Not at all. I’m perfectly happy,” Scarlett said, cutting him off. “But I really appreciate your consideration.”
Now Mr. Averby just looked tired, beaten. Resigned. “Okay,” he said. “Then I guess that’s that. Thanks for coming in, Scarlett, and please let me know if you have any problems.”
“Thanks,” she said, and we stood up together and walked out of the office, shutting the door behind us. We made it through Bulk Foods and Cereal before she started giggling and had to stop and rest.
“Poor guy,” I said as she bent over, still cackling. “He never knew what hit him.”
“Nope. He thought I’d be glad to leave.” She leaned against the rows of imported coffees, catching her breath. “I’m not ashamed, Halley. I know I’m doing the right thing and they can’t make me think any different.”