The Goodbye Summer

  “Oh, I think that’s best, too,” Caddie broke in, “just get it over with.” The end was coming up fast, and she was not going to be dumped by Byron. This was a two-way breakup. “It’s really been nice talking to you, though. Good luck and everything. I hope you find—”

  “Yes, indeed. Bye.”

  She put her head in her lap and moaned quietly for a while. It could’ve been worse, he could’ve been a stalker. He still could be, in theory, and this was how he threw his victims off, by rejecting them. But something told her she was safe from Byron for the rest of her life.

  She went to bed early, but she couldn’t sleep. Nana didn’t snore or mutter or get up and down in the night, so the house shouldn’t have sounded so weirdly, unnaturally quiet. Every random creak made her start. Finney, too. He lay with his head on her shin, blinking at her in the moonlight. “You miss Nana, don’t you? Want to go see her? One of these days?” He scooted up and pushed his head under her arm. “But they have cats. Cats,” she repeated, to test him, and sure enough, his ears cocked. “I’ll have to call Brenda first to clear the way. They have rules. Rules.” Nothing.

  Oh God, oh God, she was going to turn into an old lady who talked to her dog. “Go sleep in Nana’s room,” she ordered, edging Finney off the bed with her hip. “Go on. You’re not allowed up here anyway.” He hit the floor with an offended thump, his nails making a skittery sound when he trotted out of the room. A few minutes later he tiptoed back in and hopped up on the foot of the bed so gently she had to open her eyes to make sure he was there.

  She lay still, taking deep, slow breaths, pretending she was asleep. So he wouldn’t think she was a pushover.

  Some first night. She’d done all right on her own, she guessed, indulged herself, altered her personal space, made a few good resolutions for the future. Where she’d fallen down was in the reaching-out-to-others department, the part she couldn’t control. She watched moon shadows creep up the wall, heard the snap of her digital clock when P.M. turned into A.M.“Don’t miss me,” Nana had commanded her. Truthfully, she wasn’t doing too hot in that department, either.

  4

  “They’re starting this big memory book,” her grandmother called to say one day after she’d been at Wake House for about two weeks. “Everybody has to write out their life story, tell how it was back in the good old days. ‘We Remember’ or some such thing. They’re going to keep it on the table in the front hall.”

  “I know,” Caddie said, “I was there when Brenda suggested it, don’t you remember?” Cornel, the grumpy old guy, had wanted to call it “We Can’t Remember.”

  “Well, of course I do, I was there, too, wasn’t I? So I want you to type one up for me when you get time. Make me sound important.”

  “Type one up?”

  “It doesn’t have to be long. But not short, either. I’m seventy-nine years old, I’ve got a history.”

  “So just…”

  “When I was born, where I went to school, my accomplishments. Like an obituary, except I’m not dead.”

  “Um, okay, I guess I can do that.”

  “How come you’re not over here by now?”

  “No, remember, I’m coming tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, that’s right. Well, too late now anyway, never mind.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “Today this preacher comes over, not a real one, a ‘lay preacher,’ calls himself—now I’m thinking why didn’t I do that, become a ‘lay preacher’ when I was young, that’s something I’d’ve been good at, a natural, I probably missed my calling.”

  “So the lay preacher came—”

  “Preacher came, and he gathers everybody around for Bible study, fine with me, but. Guess what, I open my book, and turns out I’ve got my Koran instead of my Bible.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Caddie Ann, you’d’ve thought I let loose a basket of snakes. Especially Mrs. Brill, that one with the walker, she almost had a coronary. Christians have very little sense of humor, I’m sorry to say.”

  “So you want me to bring your Bible?”

  “No great rush, just if you remember.”

  “How are you? How’s your leg today?”

  “Leg’s fine, everything’s fine. I’ve got to go, Susan wants to use the phone.”

  “See, if you had your own phone—”

  “What do I need a phone for? Bye—don’t forget my history.”

  “Morning,” Caddie paused in the front hall to say to Magill, who was lifting hand weights in the Blue Room. “Have you seen my grandmother?” At least she assumed it was Magill. He wasn’t wearing knee pads today, but he had on a huge, bright orange football helmet with his baggy pants and oversize T-shirt. To protect his head in case he fell, she assumed.

  “Nope. Susan?” he raised his voice to say.

  Caddie hadn’t seen Susan in her wheelchair by the window, listening through headphones to a tape player. She and Magill were the two “young ones,” although Susan looked at least forty. She was a librarian, according to Nana; she was recovering from a stroke; she had a boyfriend named Stan. She waved to Caddie and slipped the headphones off.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi, Caddie.”

  “I’m looking for my grandmother. Have you seen her?”

  Susan nodded, then said something in her thick, lispy voice Caddie couldn’t quite catch.

  Susan gave a crooked smile and went back to her tape.

  “Oh, okay. Thanks!”

  “She, um…” Caddie drifted closer to Magill, embarrassed because she’d pretended to understand when she hadn’t, not wanting to hurt Susan’s feelings.

  “She went to Hershey,” Magill said.

  “Hershey?” That’s what she’d thought Susan had said. “Hershey, Pennsylvania? How come?”

  “Field trip, Cornel and Bernie, Bea and Edgie, Frances. They’re touring the chocolate factory.”

  “Wow.” How…all-American. “Well, how about that, I’ve been stood up. After I went and wrote Nana’s biography for her.” She held up the manila folder she’d put it in.

  “Thoughtless,” Magill agreed.

  She leaned against the piano, out of his way. “Are you going to write one? For the memory book?”

  He shot her a glance, as if he thought she was kidding. “Uh, no.”

  “Why not? You’re a resident—why don’t you write one?”

  He hoisted his rusty silver weights behind his head, up and down, knotty muscles coming and going in his stringy arms. He smiled and didn’t answer.

  “I could write it for you,” she said on an impulse. “My grandmother’s turned out pretty well. If I say so myself.” She tapped the folder invitingly. The truth was, she was curious about him. “Want me to?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “Really?” He didn’t look serious. “Okay, what do you do?”

  “Nothing. No, wait. Today I got my shoes on by myself. Look, perfect bows, no Velcro for me.” He stuck out a running shoe—but then he had to grab the edge of the windowsill to keep his balance.

  “I mean before you came here.” Before his accident. It happened about fifteen months ago, and it was some kind of skydiving mishap, of all things, but the details were off-limits. Nobody talked about it, and that by itself was strange; after the state of their health, the main topic of conversation among Wake House residents was each other.

  He went back to doing curls, flexing the ropy tendons in his forearms. “Engineer.”

  “What kind?”

  “Biomechanical.”

  A skydiving biomechanical engineer. “How old are you?”

  He sent her some kind of look, but it was hard to tell what kind because of the football helmet. It wasn’t like her to be so intrusive. The pretense that this was for “We Remember” made a good cover for pure nosiness. “Thirty, thirty-five,” he said. “Around in there.”

  She laughed. “Around in there?” His body was so thin and wobbly, it made him look younger. “Do you work for
a company?”

  “I had my own company. Have. Had.”

  “What do you make? Did you make?”

  “Feet.”

  “Feet? Feet?”

  “Feet, legs, hips, pelvises. Mostly feet.”

  “Oh, you mean artificial limbs?”

  “Orthotics.” He put the weights down to take a drink from his soda. No, not soda, one of those nutritional drinks they advertised on TV for old people, supposed to give you energy or a new lease on life or something. He must drink it for the calories. According to Nana, food didn’t mean anything to him since the accident. He’d completely lost his sense of taste.

  “Um, are you from Maryland? A native Michaelstowner?”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes, I was born right here. I grew up on the west side—do you know Early Street?”

  He shook his head.

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “Here.”

  “Just till you get well. Where’s your home? I just thought maybe we went to the same school or something. We could have friends in common.”

  “No home anymore. This is it.” He pushed off from the wall and walked away.

  She was afraid she’d upset him—she was relieved when he just went over to help Susan change the tape in her tape player. Susan spent most mornings doing speech and physical therapy to learn how to talk and walk again. The sessions left her so tired, she kept quiet and still the rest of the day.

  “Is it okay?” Magill asked her. “Loud enough? Sure?”

  “It’s perfect,” Susan answered, smiling at him.

  “You’re never going to let me write your biography, are you?” Caddie asked him when he came back. “Because I don’t even know your first name. Some biography.”

  She was glad when he took off his football helmet, even though it had flattened one-half of his hair and made the other half stick up like a rooster’s crest. At least now she could see his face. “Yeah, well,” he said. “One’s enough for me.” When he bent down to pick up his weights, he missed; he had to try again with one eye closed. Besides everything else, he had bad depth perception. He could play cards with Cornel, but not checkers or chess. Once, Caddie saw him walk into a door.

  “One’s enough? Like Cher?” It was fun to tease him. He tried not to show that he liked it, but he did. She wished she knew the secret about him, the mystery.

  Thump, step, step. Mrs. Brill paused in the hallway on her way out.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Brill,” Caddie and Magill called to her in unison. Magill put his weights on the windowsill and stood up straight: Mrs. Brill brought out everybody’s best behavior. She lived across the hall from Nana. A white card on her door said in neat black ink, SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHER, RETIRED, and that was all Caddie knew about her. She had on white gloves today, and black-and-white spectator pumps with a matching purse that swung wide from her wrist each time she pushed her metal walker. She pulled back the left sleeve of her polka-dot blouse. “Good afternoon,” she corrected, tapping the watch face.

  “Good afternoon,” they echoed, and she started off again with a push of her walker. They heard her on the porch, thump, step, step. Thump, step, step.

  “Where does she go?”

  “Just walking,” Magill said. “I think.”

  “She’s very dignified.”

  “She scares the hell out of me.”

  Caddie looked at her own watch. “Wow, I didn’t know it was so late. I have to go, I’ve got a twelve-thirty lesson.”

  “Uh…”

  She paused in gathering up her things.

  He dug something out of the back pocket of his voluminous trousers, which hung dangerously low on his hips; she could plainly see the elastic top of his shorts. “Just something,” he muttered, handing over a plastic box.

  A CD case. “For me?” She opened it. It was blank, no writing on the shiny disc inside. “What is it?”

  “You said you didn’t know anything about electronic music. You wished you could hear more, so you could find out if you liked it.”

  That’s right, she had said that. They’d been talking about music, she and Magill and Miss Edgie Copes, and Caddie had mentioned she liked every kind of music except techno, but only because they never played it on any of the local stations and she never got to hear it. “Did you make it?”

  “Yeah, it’s nothing, stuff off the computer. I burned it.”

  “I didn’t know you liked this kind of music.”

  “I don’t, it sounds like noise to me. You listen and tell me what I’m missing.”

  “Well, thank you very much. I will.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Was it a lot of trouble? I hope it didn’t take a long time to make.”

  “I only had to cancel one important business trip.” He smiled with one side of his mouth.

  “Thanks again, that was really nice. I’ll listen to it tonight. Well, bye. I’ll probably see you tomorrow.”

  He didn’t reply. Maybe he didn’t hear; he’d put his football helmet back on.

  Caddie started to leave, then paused, uncertain, in the foyer. She still had her grandmother’s biography for “We Remember.” She ran upstairs and put the manila folder on Nana’s bed, where she’d be sure to see it.

  Frances Marguerite Winger was born right here in Michaelstown on September 29, 1924. Her father was a conductor for the C&O Railroad, and her mother was a professional seam-stress who also sang and played the organ in the choir at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church on Reister Street. Frances had one older brother, Frank, but he died in 1930 of rheumatic fever.

  Frances was a good student, and after graduating from Michaelstown High School, she went on to Peterson State College and earned a B.A. in art (1944). That same year she married Charles Eliot Buchanan, an army first lieutenant, who died tragically but bravely in Guam without ever seeing their child, born six months after his death.

  For the next thirty-five years Frances taught art in almost every grade in the county school system. She was active in the Landmark Society, the Triangle Women’s Club, and the Michaelstown Garden Club, of which she was president for two terms.

  In 1980, Frances’s only child, Jane Winger, a singer and musician who used the professional name Chelsea, died in an automobile accident. She was thirty-one years old. She left one child, Caddie, whom Frances raised with as much love and care as if she were her own daughter.

  In the early 1980s, when other women her age might’ve been thinking about retiring, Frances’s life took a new, exciting turn. She gave up teaching and began a career as an independent artist. Perhaps taking a page from her mother’s book, her earliest medium was needle and thread, with which she constructed large needlepoint samplers with interesting and unusual messages. One of the largest of these, Women Take Back the World, was displayed at the Michaelstown Arts Festival of 1984, where it won second place in the sewing and crafts category.

  Later in the 1980s, Frances was instrumental in the founding of EBFA, Essential Body Fluids for Art, at first a local movement but eventually national, with members from as far away as Ohio and Virginia. Adherents of EBFA had a rich, complicated aesthetic, but to oversimplify, they basically believed that true art should include as many of the essential body fluids as possible, preferably all seven.

  Frances’s restless artistic spirit took her next to mixed media and collage, followed by an energetic period of photo-realism. But in 1995 she found her true and most satisfying artistic niche. “It was an accident,” she says with characteristic modesty. Accident—maybe. One day in the early spring while checking on the status of her side yard compost heap (since her youth, Frances has been an avid and creative gardener), she noticed her clipping and leaf pile had taken on an odd formation. “It was definitely two faces in profile, one talking, one listening. They were human, but they were also part of the ground. Earth people communicating.”

  Thus was born Earth People Communicating, Frances Winger’s new and completely un
ique grassroots artistic medium, a form of expression she would explore tirelessly, along with other projects, until an unfortunate accident put her active art career on hold. Today, striking evidence of her work in the form of living sculptures can be seen on the lawn of her home at 823 Early Street in the heart of Michaelstown.

  It hasn’t always been an easy road Frances has followed. Her work has been misunderstood, even denounced. But she always meets her critics with tolerance and good humor. When neighbors dismissed her earthy creations as “dirt” or eyesores, she always took it in stride, smiled, and shrugged, and never once considered filing a countersuit. Live and let live is Frances’s motto. “Life is short,” she likes to say. “You only get one, and if you waste it worrying about what other people think, you’re an idiot.”

  5

  Caddie had entertained a private fantasy of Finney becoming Wake House’s therapy dog, but it died the first day she brought him. In hindsight she could see it was a bad idea from the start, but Nana had kept pestering her to bring him, Brenda had said it would be all right as long as they shut the cats up in the office first, and Caddie had a picture in her head of a docile, grinning, blood pressure–lowering Finney being pulled onto lap after lap of delighted Wake House residents sitting around in the Red Room. She’d forgotten that, except with Nana, Finney was docile only when he was sleeping.

  He had a new leash, the kind that extended for fifteen feet or so when fully unfurled; you held it by a plastic handle and pressed a button to make it shorten, zip, like a vacuum cleaner cord. Caddie hadn’t quite mastered the mechanism herself yet, and Nana couldn’t figure it out at all. The first thing Finney did was wind the leash around ancient Mr. Lorton’s legs four or five times as he was making his turtle-paced, hunched-over way back to the parlor from the bathroom. Luckily, he stayed on his feet, but Caddie couldn’t help thinking what if it had been Magill.

  After they got Mr. Lorton untangled, Finney grabbed hold of Cornel’s foot in its leather bedroom slipper and wouldn’t let go. People thought it was funny at first, and even Cornel had eked out a smile with his turtle lips and made a joke about what a ferocious dog that was, a pint-size pit bull, better watch out, and so on. Finney looked harmless—that’s what threw people off. He weighed seventeen pounds. He was all white except for one brown eye and two black spots on his back. He looked like a child’s toy. One of his tricks was lunging at you when you were walking fast—say, trying to get to the phone before it stopped ringing—and latching onto your shoe like a lobster. You ended up having to drag him across the room with you because he would not let go, he was like a pit bull—and Cornel wasn’t a bit amused after he figured that out because the joke had gone on too long.