Big Stone Gap

  “Are you in love with Sarah Dunleavy?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Because if you are, I will take up your offer and leave.”

  “And if I’m not?”

  “If you’re not, I think we could work this thing out and you could get very lucky tonight, as your mother is out of town.” Where did that come from? Thank God he’s laughing, or I might have to ask where they keep the gun they use to shoot rabid dogs and just turn it on myself.

  “Had I known it was that easy, I wouldn’t have sold my truck.” He gets up and pours himself a glass of water.

  “Why did you sell your truck?” Now I’m standing. I think the two bites of macaroni helped me get my strength back. I’m ready for him now. So I keep going. “It was fully loaded. It was your dream truck. You loved that truck.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve loved you since the sixth grade.”

  He turns to me. I can’t move. He doesn’t either. He just stands there looking at me. Finally, he points to the floor in front of his feet, indicating that I should walk to him—he is not going to come to me. So I take those twelve steps and fall into his arms. I didn’t think this moment would mean so much to me, but once I am in his arms, leaning against this place on his chest that I have dreamed of, there is nothing that could tear me away from him ever again. He kisses me, just like he has in my dreams every night since Iva Lou’s wedding. I am so mad at myself for having wasted so much time.

  It is early in the evening, and we still have a lot to talk about. We finish dinner (he is hungry, I am not). Then Jack wants to show me the house. He starts with the sunporch, which looks even cozier at night. He shows me his mother’s bedroom from the doorway, a simple pale blue room. The parlor. The sitting room. And then he takes me upstairs to show me the attic, a room the size of the whole house. Mrs. Mac’s quilting supplies are organized on simple wooden shelves, and there is a long farm table in the middle of the room, with chairs around it. Jack Mac explains that this is where Aunt Cecelia and various friends come and quilt. He leads me to the window, which overlooks the magnificent Powell Valley. I can see for miles; though it is dark, the faraway streetlights give the small pockets of the mountains a twinkling glow.

  While we’re in the attic room, he shows me some photographs in the family album. There are pictures of his mother when she was a girl. I think she looked like Loretta Young in Call of the Wild; Jack tells me his father always thought so, too. He tells me his parents had a real love affair, and how sad she was for so long after he died.

  Jack shares a little about his romantic past with me, enough to help me understand but certainly not anything to make me feel uncomfortable or envious. He confides that he was worried I’d marry Theodore and he would miss his chance with me. He has a lot of questions for me, too. He wants to know where I was going when I gave everything to Pearl. I tell him I wasn’t sure. I was planning to take a long trip to Italy and then decide where to settle. He asks me if I still want to live in Big Stone Gap. I’m still not completely sure, but I am starting to see that the place didn’t make me unhappy; I made me unhappy. I started to view everyday things as a burden, so they became a burden. But I tell him that it had a lot to do with my mother’s death.

  Jack asks me about Fred Mulligan, with whom I now feel at peace. Jack remembers him as a decent man but very stern. I agree with him. I guess I was lucky; I learned a lot from the bad stuff, too. Who would have thought meeting Mario da Schilpario would help me let go of Fred Mulligan?

  I ask Jack about his father. He smiles. “The best thing a father can do for his son is love his mother. And he did that.”

  I think of Iva Lou telling me that Jack Mac didn’t throw himself around town with the ladies indiscriminately. Maybe he’s just like his father. He leads me out to the sunporch, taking the patio candle with us. We lie on the couch. He holds me. Then he tells me what’s in his heart. “I’d been trying to get your attention at the Drama for years. I was always offering to stay and help with the stage crew, or I offered to bring you home a lot. Do you remember?” Now I do remember. But I never thought he was interested in me that way. I wasn’t that kind of girl. I was always so busy. “You always seemed perfectly nice, but you never really paid me any mind.” I didn’t. I was friendly to everybody, but I never chose favorites. A little of that was Mazie Dinsmore’s directing style that I imitated, and part of it was my own brand of shyness with men.

  Jack continues, “And then there was that night, when Sweet Sue gave you the champagne and then the cast started teasing us and begging me to propose. That was just about the worst night of my life. Because I wanted to turn to you and say, ‘You’re the one I want.’ Sue knew it too. That’s when I decided to just be direct with you. That’s when I came over and asked you to marry me.”

  “You thought I’d say yes and that would be it?”

  “I thought you’d think about it. I didn’t think you’d say no and get mad at me. But I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t understand you then. I do now. Things have to be your idea or they don’t get done.”

  “But why then? Why did you ask me to marry you then?”

  “Well, I thought I saw something different in your eyes up at the hospital after the explosion in the mine.”

  “I wanted to drive you home!” I offer.

  “Right.”

  “But Sweet Sue and your mama . . .”

  “I couldn’t turn them away. And you looked at me as though you understood.”

  “I did,” I say, meaning it.

  “When I got home, I sat down and had a long, hard night of thinking. I realized that my life was half over. Sounds simple, but it isn’t. Kept me up all night. See, I went in to help Rick, and when I got to him, I realized that at my age I might not have the strength to pull him out of there. I’ve been in the mines since I was eighteen. That’s almost twenty years. I’m not what I was.”

  “But you were strong! You did save him!”

  “Barely,” Jack says.

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  Jack Mac takes a moment. “I didn’t want to grow old without you.”

  I can’t speak. As the town spinster, I had no picture of my old age. Being alone gave me a certain timelessness. I don’t have the deep worry lines on my face that come from motherhood, or the soft body that comes from holding a lover or a child. I have perfect posture because I never stoop or look down. I froze myself in time, hoping it would not catch me. I was so afraid to love someone for fear I would fail.

  “Are you crying?” he asks me.

  “I have a feeling I’m just getting started,” I tell him. He laughs. “Now, tell me how you decided to bring my family over from Italy.”

  “See, Iva Lou kept me informed about your search for your father. When you got in touch with him, I thought I’d take you over there to meet him. So I found Gala in the paper and called to arrange a first-class trip for the two of us. Then I came over to your house and proposed.”

  “Apple Butter Night.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say quietly.

  “You said no, so I was stuck with no pride and a deluxe trip for two to Italy. Iva Lou still insisted you were in love with me. So she suggested we send the tickets over there to bring your father and grandmother over here. But you almost messed that up when you planned your own trip. We told Gala the whole story and persuaded her to invent a phony trip. You wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with the tickets she sent you. They were fake.”

  “I know. Gala told me. But what about Zia Meoli and Zia Antonietta and Uncle Pietro?”

  “Well, you saw how things work with Gala. And Iva Lou, for that matter. They snowball. But if I was going to do this thing, I was going to do it right. I couldn’t bring your father over and ignore all of your mother’s people now, could I? So—”

  “So,” I interrupt. “You sold your truck.”

  “I sold my truck. The mystery is solved,” Jack says simply.

&nbs
p; Sort of.

  “Why would you still go through with it after I . . .” I don’t want to use the word rejected, so I don’t.

  “Look. I thought about giving up. It was too late; the plans were made. And I’m stubborn. I wasn’t ready to give up. Iva Lou kept telling me you were in love with me but you just didn’t know it yet. But faith can only go so far. Sometimes you need a little proof.”

  I never gave Jack a single sign. No wonder he walked away that day when my family came. He probably couldn’t believe my reaction. I was grateful when I should have been loving. No man had ever given me such a gift. A priceless gift, really. He looked deep inside me and then set out to fulfill my heart’s desire. And I acted as though he had dropped off a jar of apple butter. So he looked elsewhere for affection.

  “And then Sarah Dunleavy swooped in.”

  “You don’t know Sarah. She can’t swoop. It’d mess up her hair.”

  “What were all of you doing up here having dinner the night I brought the fabric?”

  “My mother knew her mother years ago and invited the girls to dinner. Theodore is on the Faculty Welcoming Committee. We were going to take them to the Coach House, but Mama wanted to cook. You know how she is.”

  “But you kept seeing her?”

  “Not really. She was new in town. She called me to take her places, but I didn’t call her. I liked it when you were jealous, though. It was the first sign of life I saw in you regarding me.”

  “What do you think took me so long?” I ask. “What took me so long to figure out I wanted you too?”

  “I wish I knew.” We laugh.

  It takes a long time to get to Jack Mac’s bedroom. (What a gentleman.) We stop and kiss every other step; sometimes we talk a bit, but mostly we just connect and connect and connect. I have dreamt of these kisses for so long that they still aren’t quite real to me. I thought I had a pretty good imagination, but I am not so sure anymore. The real thing is so much better, so much more full of surprises than the stories I created in my mind’s eye.

  Jack’s room is simple, with an old four-poster bed heaped with lush quilts, a straight-backed chair in one corner, and three windows that look out onto the long rolling field that drops off down the mountain. I won’t let him draw the curtain; the view is so beautiful.

  For some reason, I think of Iva Lou, and I laugh.

  “What is so funny?”

  “Iva Lou would give everything she had twice to know where I am right now.”

  “You don’t want to call her, do you?” Jack Mac jokes.

  “Where’s the phone?” We laugh. I hope that, whatever happens, we will always laugh like this.

  I am standing by his bed; he is near the windows. He comes to me and lifts me up and places me gently on his bed. He covers me in small, tender kisses—can I remember each and every one of these forever? I breathe deeply, feeling the rise and fall of my breath matching his.

  When I was little and playing in the yard, I found a tiny blue egg in the grass. I looked up in the tree; there, out of my reach, was a nest in the branches. I ran for my mother. She carefully placed the egg in my hands and lifted me high off the ground and up into the tree, so that I was eye level with the nest. There were two more tiny blue eggs in the nest. Very gently, I placed the fallen egg at home with the others. This is how I feel in my lover’s bed tonight. I feel that I am safe and I am home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I always thought that if I ever unleashed The Woman in me and gave in to my passionate nature, everybody in Big Stone Gap would know it and come running. So I am not totally surprised when I get up the next morning and no sooner do I fix the coffee than Spec is banging on the door. Iva Lou probably called my house and couldn’t find me, so she called Spec, who lives in Cracker’s Neck, and he’s come up here looking for me. Jack is still asleep. I’m dressed, so I answer the door.

  “Hey, Spec.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Making coffee. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to fetch Jack Mac. They took his mother to the hospital down in Pennington. He needs to get to her right away. It’s real bad, Ave. We need to hurry.”

  “Stay here.”

  I go into Jack’s room, where he is sleeping soundly, like a little boy. I kiss him tenderly to wake him, and he pulls me close.

  “Jack, Spec’s here. Your Aunt Cecelia took your mama to the hospital. We need to go right away.” He jumps out of the bed. I help him dress, handing him a T-shirt, boxers, socks one at a time, a pair of pants. We jump into the ambulance with Spec.

  Spec doesn’t turn on the siren; it’s Saturday morning, about seven, and most folks are on a weekend schedule. He goes about ninety, though. I sit in the back; Jack is up front with Spec. I lean forward on the seat to keep my right hand on Jack’s shoulder to let him know that I am here for him. Every once in a while he reaches up and squeezes my hand. Spec looks at me in the rearview; he raises one eyebrow and lets me know he understands.

  Jack doesn’t say a word the entire ride. I know he has dreaded this ride all of his life. The idea of his mother in pain or sick is too much for him to bear, but he doesn’t collapse. I completely fell apart when it was my mama. Jack MacChesney is not the fall-apart type.

  Spec pulls into the emergency exit at the hospital in Pennington Gap. He knows it well, so he takes us through a long corridor, a back entrance to Intensive Care. Jack goes through the door first, before Spec. He sees his mother in the corner of the unit, Cecelia at her side. He breaks into a run to reach her. When Mrs. Mac sees Jack, she smiles and raises her head slightly off of the pillow.

  “Took you long enough,” she says.

  “I came as fast as I could, Mama.” Jack is close to her face, holding both of her hands.

  “I done took a fall,” she says as she closes her eyes.

  “She passed out,” Aunt Cecelia says, crying. “I couldn’t get her up. It was just the two of us there, and I had to call the hospital. I got so scared.” Jack is holding his mother tightly. I can’t bear the sight of Cecelia’s tears, so I put my arms around her gently. She looks at me, and though she doesn’t know who I am, she accepts my embrace.

  “She’s the girl I done told you about,” Mrs. Mac says to Cecelia.

  “They’re gonna fix you right up, Mrs. Mac,” I promise.

  “Do you think so?” she says with a twinkle.

  I can tell that Jack wants to be alone with her, so Cecelia and I give them their privacy. Cecelia is a beauty, too, probably older than Mrs. Mac. She is taller and heavier.

  “We was having such a grand time. We talked and laughed and ate. She was feeling funny last night, but we didn’t think nothing of it; I thought she was just tired. But she had a bad night, she told me, like indigestion, and then this morning I went in to wake her and she was on the floor, just blacked out.”

  “You did everything you could. I’m sure they can help her.” I try to reassure Cecelia, but Mrs. Mac doesn’t look too good. Jack Mac calls for me, and a nurse takes over with Cecelia.

  “Mama wants to tell you something,” Jack tells me, his voice breaking. I have never heard this tone in his voice before. My heart is breaking for him. He is so sad. He knows. He knows she is going, and he is powerless to do anything about it. I know that feeling, and it is devastating.

  I lean over the side of the bed.

  Mrs. Mac takes a good breath. “Did you ever wonder why your mama did my mending when I was a good seamstress myself?” I shake my head; I never thought about it. “My son wanted an excuse to go to your house.” She smiles. “Take care of him. Because he took good care of me.”

  I try to say I will, but I can’t speak; I just nod and promise. I kiss her good-bye. I straighten up next to her bed; for a moment I am dizzy. This cannot be happening.

  Jack leans over her bed and takes his mother in his arms. She looks like a beautiful porcelain doll, her skin a silky white, like her hair. Jack holds his mother and cries. I hear him say, “Do
n’t go, Mama. Don’t go.” The nurse crosses over to help, but my expression tells her that Mrs. MacChesney has died. She died in her son’s arms. And that is what she wanted.

  The passing of Nan Bluebell Gilliam MacChesney took everyone in the Gap by surprise. Except Jack. He knew she would never have endured a long illness; she wanted to go quickly. And she did. My mama knew I wasn’t ready to let her go, so she stayed until her passing would be a blessing, her suffering over. The terrible things that happen to us in this life never make any sense when we’re in the middle of them, floundering, no end in sight. There is no rope to hang on to, it seems. Mothers can soothe children during those times, through their reassurance. No one worries about you like your mother, and when she is gone, the world seems unsafe, things that happen unwieldy. You cannot turn to her anymore, and it changes your life forever. There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you’d had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting; and who encouraged you to grow a good heart. When that layer goes, whatever is left of your childhood goes with her. Memories are very different and cannot soothe you the same way her touch did. If any sense can be made of my mother’s death, it would be that I was of some help to Jack when he lost his mother. I hope I have been.

  Jack was so strong through the wake and the funeral. He cried a bit at the service. But I was so proud of him; he took a moment with every person who came, to let each one know how much they had meant to his mother. I fell more deeply in love with him as I watched.

  I load up the Jeep to return all the covered cake pans (again!). Then I’m taking Theodore out to lunch to thank him for being such a help through Mrs. Mac’s funeral.

  Bessie’s Diner is standing room only, as usual. I hear Theodore call my name; over the crowd I see him wave to me from a booth way in the back. I work through the crowd to get to him.