The Goodbye Summer

  “Such as they are.”

  “There’s hardly anything to say.”

  “Just something for them to have after we’re gone.”

  “I’d be glad to,” Caddie said. “I’d like to.”

  “Really? Are you sure?” Edgie sat up and clapped her hands. “But you’re so busy. We’d understand if you wouldn’t have time, we surely would.”

  “No, truly, I’d like to. I’m free right now—want to do it now?”

  “Out on the front porch,” Bea said, “it’s cooler,” and they all got up and went outside.

  “Papa had dairy cows and some chickens, but he wasn’t a real farmer, not full-time. He did other jobs to keep the family, machine repair and being the deputy sheriff of the county.”

  “Bea, tell about that time—”

  “One time he kept a prisoner in our barn for two nights on account of a rainstorm that took out the bridge over the creek between our house and the lockup in town. Oh, my, that was something.”

  “We huddled in the bed both nights and didn’t sleep a wink. He was a colored man,” Edgie lowered her voice to say, Caddie wasn’t sure why, maybe because of Mrs. Brill, although she was nowhere in sight. “I don’t believe, looking back, he’d done much more than get drunk, but we were scared to death he was going to bust out and murder us in our beds.”

  “It was in those times when you heard such stories, you know,” Bea said. “Then, too, we were a couple of right silly girls.”

  “Tell her about the time the two—”

  “One day two ladies came to our house, which was a piece out of town, not isolated exactly but plenty rural. They knocked on the front door, and Mama answered.”

  “I expect we were about six and ten years old at the time this happened,” Edgie said, “somewhere in there.”

  “Edgie and I were in the kitchen making poppy seed cakes when one of these women comes in. She was older than us but not as old as our mother—”

  “Maybe twenty,” Edgie estimated.

  “ ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘your mama sent me back to get a drink of water. I’ve been walking.’ Well, that didn’t sound right to me for some reason. Not that Mama wouldn’t have let a complete stranger waltz in and have a glass of water, she certainly would have, and fed them, too—”

  “It wasn’t the Depression yet, but we did have hobos come to the house once in a while asking for a quarter or a job or something to eat.”

  “Our mother was a soft touch,” Bea said, with a sweet, remembering smile.

  “Oh, she surely was.”

  “But something was not right about this woman in the kitchen.”

  “Bea knew it before I did.”

  “She had funny eyes, and she was dressed wrong, not like she was poor and she’d been walking. She had on a red coat, I remember. She looked around with little darty eyes like she’d never seen a kitchen before—”

  “But really she was casing the joint.”

  “And she got her water and went out. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and sailed out the door. Well, I don’t know why, I truly do not, but I told Edgie to stay put, and I followed her. Sure enough, she didn’t go back down the hall to the front door, where I could hear Mama out on the porch talking to somebody else—this is the first I knew there were two of them—sure enough, this first lady ducked into our dining room!”

  Edgie took Bea’s arm and squeezed it with both hands. She pressed her lips together, determined not to interrupt, but she widened her eyes at Caddie, as if to say, Isn’t this exciting?

  “Why, she’s after the silver, I thought to myself, and took off down the hall hollering for Mama. Just when I got there, I saw the other lady—”

  “Who turned out to be her mother, the first one’s—”

  “Edgie, now, don’t spoil it—”

  “Okay, but call them ‘mother’ and ‘daughter,’ Bea, so she’ll know who’s who.”

  Bea took a deep breath. “The mother of the first one—anyway, I saw her give my mama such a shove it bruised her hip, she pushed her right up against the gateleg table in the hall and darted past, into the dining room, where the other one was. I yelled or screamed or something—”

  “Which is when I ran in,” Edgie said, “when I heard all this commotion.”

  “Next thing you know, the daughter is waving a knife at us, yes, a knife—”

  “Huge!”

  “And the mother—who, by the way, looked like our aunt Clarice, I mean the most respectable person you could imagine, she looked like she’d come to sell you the Bible—”

  “Which when you think about it is what they should’ve said to us in the first place. Glass of water,” Edgie said in disgust.

  “Anyway—the daughter has got this big shiny knife pointing at us and the mother is pulling out the drawers in the oak breakfront and stuffing her pockets with silverware!”

  Caddie made exclamations of amazement.

  “Well. I don’t know what came over Mama,” Bea said. “She—”

  “The sweetest, gentlest soul. When we were bad she couldn’t even spank us, or the boys either. Just didn’t have it in her.”

  “Papa’s coat was hanging on a hook in the hall alongside everybody else’s. I told you he was the deputy sheriff. Well, that day he was out in the field—”

  “She means the fields, he was out doing farmwork.”

  “Yes, and so there was his gun in the holster under his coat.”

  “Can you imagine a man leaving a loaded pistol by the front door in this day and age? With six children?”

  “But these were different times—”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Back then we didn’t think a thing of it.”

  “Edgie, I am almost done telling this story. When I’m through, you can start over and add all your interesting comments.”

  Edgie sat back and made a key-turning motion over her lips.

  “Any way. Our sweet, soft-hearted mama pulled the gun out of that holster like she was Deadeye Dick. ‘You put down that knife!’ she yells to the two in the dining room, with her voice shaking, and you can believe that’s what they did. You never saw two such scared women in your life—unless it was me and Edgie! Mama made them to lie down on the floor, and she told me to go in the parlor and call up the sheriff. Which I did, and then we waited.”

  “And waited.”

  “Lordy, it felt like two days before he came driving up the lane in his black car, but I expect it was only about twenty minutes.”

  “The longest twenty minutes of my life,” Edgie declared.

  “And mine. I will never, ever forget it. What my mama looked like with that silver pistol in her hand.”

  “Papa said he was going to retire and let her be the deputy.”

  They leaned against each other, chuckling, shaking their heads. Sitting next to Bea on the squeaky glider, Edgie’s feet didn’t quite touch the ground, so her sister was the one who got them going every now and then with one of her long, jointless legs. “Hush,” Bea said suddenly. “Caddie, don’t move. Is that a hummingbird? Over the rhododendron. There, right there.”

  “No, honey, it’s a bee,” Edgie told her.

  This was going to take longer than Caddie had thought. She looked down at the notes she had so far for the Copes sisters’ biography. They wanted only one for both of them, not two separate histories. “Born 1917, 1921, Point of Rocks, Maryland.” So far, that was it. She didn’t mind, but each time she asked a question, no matter how factual she made it—What did your father do? What kind of a house did you grow up in?—the answer turned into a story.

  So next she asked, “How old were you when your mother died?” That was a subject that always interested Caddie, when people’s mothers died. Hers had when she was nine. When she was younger, she’d liked to borrow pieces of other people’s stories for a while, using their details to fill in the gaps of her story, which was thin and paltry and not satisfying. You could use the experiences of other people like thickener, she’d found
out, tablespoons of flour to stiffen a watery soup.

  “Edgie was nine, I was thirteen.” Bea sat back and gave the glider another push with her foot.

  “Was it sudden?”

  “No.”

  “It was to me,” Edgie said in a soft voice. “Her name was Labelle—isn’t that pretty? Labelle Ida Rostraver. She had all six of us before she was thirty-five.”

  “She had cancer of the ovary. She was sick the whole winter, and in April she died. She was only forty-four.”

  “April the third, the day after Bea’s birthday.”

  They looked down with gentle, forlorn faces, gazing at the same spot on the peeling porch floor.

  “You must’ve missed her a lot,” Caddie said.

  “We still do,” Edgie said. “People think you get over things just because you get old.”

  “Papa lived to ninety-six,” Bea said. “We were with him when he passed, holding his hand, talking to him. Of course I’ll never forget that, but what I remember like yesterday is the morning he came into our room and told us our mother was gone.” She stuck one finger under the lens of her glasses to wipe her eye. “Broke my heart. Before or since, that was the saddest time of my life, and I’m eighty-six years old.”

  Edgie said after a moment, “I have a different memory. That time she called us into her room.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I knew she wasn’t well, but not that it was so bad. We had to be quiet in the house, but she never fussed at us if we weren’t. When I’d sneak in her room, she always acted glad to see me. I remember her smile. She always put her hair up, but after she got sick she wore it down, and it was so lovely to me. Yellow hair. She’d let me brush it for her. I swear I don’t know why, but I just never knew how sick she was.”

  “You were too little,” Bea said.

  “Yes, but I should’ve known better than I did. That day—Bea, you recall that day when she told us what might happen.”

  “Yes.”

  “She asked us to get up in the bed with her. That was a treat—I half expected us to start playing a game. She told us sweet things I don’t want to say out loud, don’t want to start crying. But about how much she loved us, you know, how happy we’d made her. How glad she was…well, cripes.” She gave a laugh while she dug a tissue out of her skirt pocket. “I’m ashamed to say I hated God when she said He might want her up there with Him in heaven soon. Selfish old man, I thought. Take somebody else, don’t take my mama.” She sniffed deeply and blotted her cheeks. “Isn’t this something, now, this many years later. Don’t think I’m a silly old woman, Caddie—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, you are a silly old woman,” Bea said.

  In the quiet that settled over them, Caddie heard a high, tinny sound, almost like a voice.

  “That’s my watch,” Bea said, chuckling at her expression. “It talks. Tells me when it’s time for my pills.”

  “I’ll go get you some water,” Edgie said.

  “Let me get it,” Caddie said.

  “No, you sit still.” Edgie hauled herself out of the glider with both hands, making an exaggerated grunting noise to disguise her difficulty. “Bea, tell her about the time we won the trip to New York. Two rubes in the city. We saw Vaughn Monroe!” she called from inside the house.

  Bea smiled at Caddie. “We’ve had good lives, in spite of acting like a couple of water spigots today. Don’t forget to put that down in the history, Caddie. That we’ve been happy.”

  “I won’t.”

  “But lately, I feel like I’m spoiling the last little bit of it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I worry. I just worry and fret all the time about what’s going to happen next. That’s no way to live, but I can’t help it. Every time I go to the doctor, it’s something else that’s broken down. How much longer can I stay here? You know Brenda’s already filed for a waiver to keep me—she’s not licensed for the kind of care I’m getting, what with all the medicines and restrictions and the special diet for my diabetes and this and that.” She softened her voice. “I just don’t know what Edgie’s going to do if something happens to me. I don’t know how she’ll get along without me.”

  “Oh,” Caddie said, “nothing’s going to happen to you.” The silliest, most cowardly thing she could have said.

  Bea treated it the way it deserved and ignored it. “Life’s been good to us for so long. If I have to go in a real nursing home—”

  The screen door slammed. “If you have to go in a real nursing home, I’m going with you.” Edgie handed her sister a full glass of water and sat back down beside her. “That’s all there is to that.”

  “Do you regret anything?” Caddie asked after Bea had swallowed down four or five pills from a white plastic box with so many compartments and different-colored pills, it looked like a honeycomb. “Do you look back and wish you’d done anything different?”

  “No! I’m not sorry about anything. Are you, Bea?”

  “I wouldn’t do a thing different. So many people have passed on, loved ones have left us behind—that’s the hardest thing to bear at our age, but that’s what life brings you, sure as God made little apples, if you last long enough.”

  “Now, Caddie, don’t think all we can talk about is people who’ve died and gone. Bea, quit talking about death. Tell about Buddy’s second wedding to that preacher girl. Our favorite nephew married a lady minister out in a wildflower meadow, and it didn’t last six months!”

  8

  Early on Friday, two students called within ten minutes of each other, both claiming they had a cold and couldn’t make their morning lesson. Something must be going around, but it was hard to imagine what on such a warm June day, flowers bursting out everywhere, hazy sun burning off the dew before Caddie could finish her coffee. She looked out across the greening sculptures from Nana’s rocker on the front porch and realized she had the whole morning free.

  For years she’d been meaning to take up some healthy physical pursuit, and watching Thea do her yoga exercises the other day had given her new resolve. Wake House was a fifteen-minute drive, so probably…about a three-mile walk, give or take. Nothing to it. She finished her piece of toast, put on shorts and tennis shoes, told Finney to behave himself, and set off to visit Nana.

  How pathetic, she used to think—had thought as recently as a few weeks ago—that she was thirty-two years old and her favorite pastime was visiting old folks in a home. She’d reminded herself of one of those women in thoughtful, depressing novels about English spinsters, repressed women who trudged gallantly from one grim day to the next until the last page, when, usually, they died. She read these books because they made her life seem like Mardi Gras in comparison.

  Now everything was different—she didn’t see herself as pitiful anymore. She could interpret her daily visits to Wake House as normal, kindly meant, simply another facet in a well-rounded person’s social repertoire, because her life had proportion again. She was a regular person. She was Caddie Winger, and she had a boyfriend.

  Christopher Fox. Christopher Dalton Fox. She set her feet down on the concrete sidewalk in rhythm with each stately syllable. She wasn’t compulsively writing his name in a notebook, but in other ways she was feeling, possibly behaving, like an infatuated ninth-grader. She’d seen him two times since their dinner at the German restaurant, and they were both definitely dates, no guesswork required. On Sunday, a spectacular day, the most beautiful day of the year, they’d romped in the park with King, the perfect dog. Half collie, half German shepherd, King didn’t even need a leash, and he didn’t respond to commands from Christopher so much as read his mind. Compared to King, Finney was a foaming lunatic in a strait-jacket in an asylum for the criminally insane.

  Who was handsomer, King or his master? They had the same tawny, soft, floppy hair that blew in the breeze like a woman’s hair in a slow-motion shampoo commercial. Christopher had long, beautiful hands, and Caddie loved to watch them disappear into Ki
ng’s golden fur when he ruffled the whitish patch under his collar or pulled gently on his velvety ears. Christopher’s hands. Last night he’d taken her to the movies, and she’d sat in the dark beside him feeling as if she couldn’t fully exhale, as if she had a pleasant excess of air inside and it was causing her to levitate.

  She’d never been courted by anybody like him before. She couldn’t think of anything about him she would change. Tonight he was taking her to a softball game. A softball game. Already she loved the mundaneness of their dates, the bland, unimaginative wholesomeness of sitting on a hard bleacher seat and ordering a hot dog and a plastic cup of beer. It was frightening to contemplate how closely Christopher resembled the kind of man she’d always wanted, so she was trying not to think about it. She was tricking herself by feigning casualness, like Finney when she had a toy he wanted. He’d look the other way and pretend he couldn’t care less, then pounce on it when she lost interest. She hoped her act was more convincing than his.

  She had sore feet by the time she got to Wake House. And a sunburned nose. She went straight to the kitchen and gulped down a glass of water without stopping. Three miles was a lot harder than she’d expected, especially on a day as humid as this. She took off her shoes and socks and went in search of Nana.

  She wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t on the side porch, not in either of the parlors, and she wasn’t in the backyard. She might be in Magill’s room; she was fond of him, and Caddie had found her there more than once. But Caddie felt a little reluctant to look there today, considering what had happened the last time she’d knocked on Magill’s door.

  Actually, she hadn’t knocked; the door had been ajar, so she’d just pushed it open and taken a single step in. Magill, sitting at his desk, working at his computer—she thought—had jumped out of his chair like a man with a hotfoot, whirling around so fast he lost his balance and started flapping his arms, falling, falling, finally collapsing on top of his bed. What in the world—she’d started to go to him, then she’d processed the image on his computer screen: naked ladies, cheerleaders, having their way with a hairy, muscular, happy-looking young man in a locker room. She could tell they were cheerleaders because of the imaginative ways in which they were using their pom-poms. Magill’s horrified face made her giggle, but the action on his computer monitor made her blush. She mumbled something: “Oh, sorry, should’ve knocked,” and Magill, spread-eagle on the bed, picked up the pillow and dropped it on top of his head. She left.