“Smart thinking,” I said, and my mind picked up its walking cane and chased after hers. “We need a computer.”
“That’s what I said.” She lifted her hands, then let them slap to her thighs.
But she hadn’t gotten my point. “No, I mean to say, we
need
a computer. Wal-Mart is only a few blocks. They sell those at Wal-Mart, correct? And the cellular apparatus for the Internet connection. Do they sell those?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. They got a whole cell phone store right there in Wal-Mart. You can buy anything. Shoot, when we go shopping, we can pick me up a cell phone while we’re there.” She delivered the last sentence in a sarcastic tone, but with a hopeful gleam in her eye. “You know a computer’s expensive, right? And the cell phone Internet thing probably is, too.”
“Cost is not an issue. We have work to do.” Tucking the letter carefully back into the envelope, I scooted to the front of my chair, the joints in my legs popping and protesting. “You can use it for your schoolwork, as well. When you have a need.”
“Cool!” Backing away from my chair, Epiphany cast a quizzical look in my direction and then toward the clock. “You mean we’re going right now? To Wal-Mart to buy a computer?”
A check of my wristwatch told me it was almost time for Epiphany to go to the city bus stop. “Perhaps you should let your mother know you’ll be working late. I can take you home in the car after we’re finished.”
She looked askance heavenward in the way of a mother exasperated by a child’s repetitive questions. “Nobody’s there, J. Norm. Mama’s gone to her night shift by now, and Russ said he’d be away until late. He doesn’t want me calling him while he’s out doing his thing, believe me.” The answer held a nonchalance that made me wonder if anyone was looking after this child. She seemed to operate in her mother’s house as if she were a miniature adult, living with roommates she didn’t particularly like. I found the concept difficult to imagine. When I was her age, my mother could barely summon the courage to allow me to pick up a date and drive to the spring cotillion. When the time came for me to actually fly the nest, Mother wept for weeks, trailed me with letters, phone calls, care packages, and too-frequent visits.
And, in truth, I wasn’t even hers by blood. Yet she was my mother in every meaningful sense of the word.
Oddly, I found myself both missing my mother and admiring Epiphany as we proceeded to the car and drove to Wal-Mart. Based on Frances’s letter and my dreams, I suspected that my mother had saved me from a situation like Epiphany’s, or worse. Given a set of circumstances like Epiphany’s, would I have been as resilient, as determined to make a life for myself as she was?
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Epiphany asked when we pulled into a handicapped space in the parking lot. Being old does have its advantages, occasionally—handicapped tags, for one.
“Quite. We’ll purchase a computer and anything else that will be helpful in our search.”
Less than forty minutes later, Wal-Mart being the multipurpose mecca that it is, we were walking out the door with food from the deli, a new backpack for Epiphany, and a computer, complete with all the necessary accessories, some of which the charming pimple-faced boy at the counter had given us for free with our purchase. The total cost, including the Internet cell phone connection, and a pair of barbecue dinners from the deli, was less than nine hundred dollars. A pittance, really, considering that I well remembered the day when computers occupied entire warehouses and carried price tags in the millions. Comparatively, our new laptop device was a bargain. Nonetheless, Epiphany was stunned on the way home.
“Must be nice to have all that money,” she muttered as we pulled into the garage again.
I considered the quest that had consumed a great deal of my life—not so much a lust for money as for success, for accomplishment. Money had been a natural result of it, however. “Money follows hard work,” I said, perhaps by way of defending myself.
Getting out of the car, Epiphany scoffed. “It helps if you got money to start with, J. Norm.”
Her answer frustrated me, because of the implicit helplessness of it. “It helps if you’re tall, and athletic, and dashingly handsome, too, but I was not. I suppose I would have preferred it if I’d been placed in the body of one of those charmed young men for whom the world seems to roll out like a red carpet, but what good would it have done me to complain about it? I came to this earth with an acute mind and an unwavering curiosity, and I made use of those assets. One of the secrets to life, Epiphany, is to find your gifts and focus on those. Leave your liabilities in the dust of the road not taken. The world is an imperfect place. Everyone struggles. Successful people see trials as growth experiences, rather than stumbling blocks. You have everything you need for success. You’re a beautiful young woman, and you’re strong, and you have a clever mind. If you let anyone convince you otherwise, you steal from yourself.”
“Now you sound like my history teacher,” she complained as we took the computer upstairs and set up a card table in Roy’s room, a clandestine location where our equipment wouldn’t be found, should Deborah ever decide to come back.
While we ate our deli meals and configured the computer, I told Epiphany about the early Block I Apollo Guidance Computers and the giant Sperry UNIVAC 1100 and IBM mainframes, which took up the space of whole rooms, operated via punch cards, and used reel-to-reel tape to store information. “Hard to believe how things have changed,” I admitted, pointing to the computer. “Those are kilobytes and gigabytes of information, flashing through the air all around us, encrypted and encoded. We could have used that technology, back in the day. The Russian trawlers wouldn’t have given us so much trouble with our rockets.”
“The Russian what?” She paused with a fork halfway to her mouth.
“The trawlers—fishing boats off the coast,” I explained, thinking back to those cloak-and-dagger days when the Russians attempted to thwart us at every turn. “In preparation for sending the real
Surveyor
into space, we moved our operations from California to Cape Canaveral to test a dynamic model, placed in an Atlas/Centaur rocket. But time after time, we experienced communications failure. Before we figured out that the Russians were using fishing boats off the coast to jam our radio signals, we’d changed out two complete radio transmitter systems, thinking they weren’t working correctly. It took a couple of days each time, which was expensive—not to mention the costs of the hardware. After we discerned that the Russians were waiting for our launches each time, we began announcing fake launch times, then performing the real launch tests in secret. Our tests stopped failing after that.”
“Whoa, that’s seriously James Bond,” Epiphany commented, and then turned her attention back to the computer. The software had finished installing, and she restarted the computer to allow it to take effect. It was only when the screen came on again that I noticed the time. I shouldn’t have been so surprised, as it was dark outside.
“We should be getting you home,” I told her. “It’s after eight thirty.”
Her response was the usual incredulous, “J. Norm, nobody cares. Besides, it’s not like
you
know how to do a search on the browser. Anyway, you aren’t driving me home.”
“I most certainly am. It’s not as though you can be walking to and from the bus stop in the dark. I won’t allow it.”
With an indignant cough, she opened the browser window. “I can handle myself.”
“Well, then, humor me,” I replied. Epiphany would have a career in the Senate someday. Winning an argument with her was almost impossible. “Allow me to feel useful.”
She ignored me and typed something into the computer. “What year were you born?”
“Nineteen thirty-five. I am driving you home.”
“So if you were five or six when the fire happened, that was 1940 or 1941, right?” Epiphany typed the information into the computer, adding bits and pieces of my life story. Clues. “Not without taking out a few street signs and a fire hydrant or two, I bet. You barely got us home from the school, remember? There were five kids in your dream, right?”
“Five, including myself. I was the eldest.”
She added the words
five children
, and then pushed the ENTER key, sending the kilobytes of my history floating off into the ether. As the computer whirred, she swung my way like the pendulum striking on a clock. “Look, Deborah told my mom that a couple months ago, you ran your other car into a tree and almost killed yourself. You’re not driving me home.”
“Deborah exaggerates.” I could hardly admit that, at the time of the accident, I’d been driving Annalee’s car. I’d brought it out with the intention only of circling the block a few times to run the engine. As the sunlight streamed into the interior, warming the seats, the scent of Annalee’s perfume became so clear, so convincing, that I’d been certain she must be there in the car. Her voice echoed in my ear, and I’d turned toward the passenger seat, seen her or imagined her there, her head tipping back in laughter, her hair curling over her shoulders. I’d reached for her, and then the next thing . . . impact.
Epiphany touched my hand now, but instead I felt Annalee. They were Annalee’s eyes that I saw, large, beseeching, brimming along the bottom. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, okay?” she whispered.
A tenderness swelled inside me—vulnerability of the sort I hadn’t felt since . . . since Roy was alive? Was that when I threw myself so completely into my work, walling myself off from Deborah and Annalee, allowing them to process their grief together, without me? “We’re at an impasse, then, aren’t we?” I observed. “Either way, someone is at risk.”
Risk.
I’d been unwilling to take the risk of showing my pain to Deborah and Annalee, of letting them see the depth of my grief and guilt, of even experiencing it myself. I’d helped Roy choose that car, the Mustang, never stopping to consider what sort of trouble a fast car could lead a boy into.
I shook off the past, shedding it like water from an impermeable barrier. What was the point in revisiting old wounds? “I’ll call next door and speak with Hanna Beth. She has two nurses who live in her upstairs apartment. One of them leaves for the night shift a bit before ten. I can pay her a little something to drive you home.”
“I can take the . . .”
I whipped a hand upward to stop the argument. “It’s settled. I can’t let you go walking off in the dark, and by the by, no gentleman would. You’ll do well to remember that, in terms of dating in the future. Any boy who expects to pick you up and drop you off at the curb is not worth your time. A young lady must respect herself if she’s to demand respect from a boy.”
Epiphany didn’t answer. She’d turned her attention back to the screen, her rounded shoulders indicating that she was weary of my lectures. I only hoped they were penetrating her armor. “J. Norm, look,” she whispered, pointing to the screen. “It came up with something. There’s a listing about books.”
I leaned close to make out the text. An East Texas Timber Town History,
by M. L. White
,
Pinewood Publishing Company
, it read in blue type, and below in black, a listing for a book with two hundred and fifty pages, published in 1991, and following that, a quote: . . .
tramps along the railroad. I remember in January of 1940 a big house along the track burned down, with five children, their mother, and a colored maid inside. My daddy was the sheriff at the time, and there was a suspicion that hobos off the train had caused the fire, but . . .
“My word,” I breathed.
Epiphany nodded, then moved the arrow to the listing and pushed the button. She seemed to be holding her breath, as was I.
The hourglass spun and spun.
We waited.
Epiphany tapped her fingernail impatiently against the button.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s not coming up, or . . .” The screen changed finally, turning white at first, and then a notification appearing:
Address not found
.
Muttering, Epiphany tried again, and then searched for the author, M. L. White, with the same results. I went to the phone and called next door to arrange a ride for Epiphany, while she searched for further information about the book or the publishing company. She came up with an address in Groveland, Texas, and a phone number. After completing my call next door, I dialed the publishing company’s number, thinking to receive an automated message regarding business hours, but the number now belonged to a dollar store in Groveland, Texas. The teenager who answered the phone had never heard of the book or the publisher. A call to directory assistance confirmed that there was no current listing for the Pinewood Publishing Company.
“Tomorrow I’ll try the library in Groveland,” I told Epiphany, as we went to Deborah’s room and selected a few model rockets for Epiphany’s history project. “With any luck, the Groveland library will have the book in their collection, or they can direct me to a place that might—a museum or historical society. I’m sure that with enough digging, we can track down something.”
“I hope so,” Epiphany said, and then we proceeded downstairs to wait for Hanna Beth’s nurse to swing by. Epiphany was still thinking about the Internet listing. “Where’s Groveland, Texas?”