“Yeah, she's here,” was the next thing Bryce heard, and she was stunned when her mother turned to face her with her hand now cupping the bottom of the receiver.
“No!” she yelled in a whisper, as Michelle held the phone out to her.
“Your Uncle Wilder wants to talk to you,” Michelle whispered back fiercely.
“About what?!” Bryce had never had a direct conversation with her mother's only sibling, a younger brother who lived somewhere in one of the Dakota states. Or maybe Iowa. Now that she thought about it, she believed there was a grandfather, too, but he had never made contact. Without replying, Michelle thrust the phone into her daughter's hand and disappeared around the corner as Bryce brought the green receiver to her ear. From the direction of her mother's bedroom came the sound of drawers being roughly opened.
“Hello?” she asked nervously.
“Elizabeth, is that you?”
She was struck immediately by the warmth of his voice and the fact that she'd been called Elizabeth twice in 10 minutes, when she hadn't heard that name on anyone's lips since grade school.
“Yeahâ¦yes, it is, but I go by Bryce,” she said. Like it mattered that he knew it, anyway.
“Bryce, I'm afraid I have some bad news,” the voice said. “Your grandfather died early this morning.”
Bryce bit her bottom lip, shifted the phone to the opposite ear. Did he expect her to feel bad, start crying? Because she felt nothing. “I'm sorry,” she offered finally, and then ventured, “Was he sick?”
“He had a heart attack,” her uncle told her, and she could detect his sadness, even over the phone. “He hadn't been ill or anything, just tired⦔ He paused abruptly and she heard him draw a deep breath.
“Hey, listen, should I put Mom back on?” she asked, discomfort writhing in her belly.
“No, that's all right,” he murmured, after what sounded like him blowing his nose. “I actually wanted to talk to you. Do you remember me at all?”
She did, vaguely, but said, “No, not really.”
“You were so little the last time I saw you, only three or four. You and Shelly drove up for Mom's funeral.”
A sudden, watery memory gripped her, a vision of people huddled under umbrellas, crying, but she said again, “I don't really remember, I'm sorry.” She gave up and sank onto her chair at the table.
“You were so little,” he said again, and sighed deeply. “Erica, that's your aunt, played
Brown Eyed Girl
by Van Morrison for you on the record player that weekend. You thought that was great.” He sounded in danger of rambling, and to her amazement Bryce felt another flicker of memory: a big creaky house with big drafty rooms, a woman with gorgeous, long red hairâmermaid hair she'd wanted to comb with her fingers.
“I still love that song,” she heard herself admit.
“That's how I picture you still, with two long braids and those huge brown eyes,” he said. “I'm sure you're a little bigger now.”
“Yeah,” she responded automatically, and a small spurt of anger flared in her belly, burning away the momentary connection. Suddenly he gave a shit after more than a decade and a half had passed? Where had he been when she was desperately wrapping towels around her mother's arms?
“Bryce, I'm calling to see if you can talk Shelly into coming up here for the funeral,” he was saying. “It's been so long since we've seen her, and you, and if you could make it that would mean so much to all of us. I would pay for plane tickets.”
“Ahâ¦when?” she asked, feeling out of depth and fighting the urge to simply hang up the phone.
“Dad's funeral is this Wednesday. You'd be welcome to stay longer than that, too.”
Hell, no
. But she said, “I'll see what I can do.”
“Thanks, honey,” he told her like he meant to end the conversation, but he paused. Bryce imagined a hundred questions she could ask right then, but all she managed was, “Why?” Her voice sounded small, a little girl's, though she hadn't intended that.
Over a thousand miles away, Wilder Sternhagen gripped the back of his neck and rocked on his heels. The heat from the fireplace in his living room, burning in a vain attempt to counter the grayness of his day, was nearly unbearable against the front of his jeans, but he didn't move back. Instead he stared into the leaping, vivid orange flames, his favorite part of the fire, the wild and dangerous part of it.
Jesus Christ
, he thought, while his niece waited quietly. How could he possibly begin to answer that? How could he find a way to atone, to even explain?
My own kids were little too, and the farmâ¦I didn't make timeâ¦it's not my faultâ¦
For a moment he was furious at his father for dying before resolving things with Michelle. More than anything he wished Matthew was home, but he'd been unable to even make contact with his youngest brother today. Finally he said, “Bryce, I wish I could answer that, but I can't right now. Just please come.” And then, his throat closing swiftly, he said, “Good-bye.”
She hung up, stomped 12 feet, and slammed open her mother's bedroom door.
Michelle didn't look at her, but immediately said, “No.”
She was digging through the top drawer of her dresser. A large pile of bras and panties covered the floor. Bryce stared between this and her mother, who angled one shoulder slightly away from her. Michelle was tiny, and so slim she wore children's sizes. Her frailness was somehow exaggerated by her snow-pale skin. Bent over, with strands of hair clinging to her damp cheeks, Michelle looked so ashen and vulnerable that Bryce swallowed the angry words in her throat and instead sank to the threadbare satin blanket on the double bed.
“No, what?” she asked quietly. Michelle paused in her rummaging, then reached into her denim purse and extracted a smoke and her lighter. She sat down beside her daughter and lit up, then wrapped one arm about her updrawn knees and drew deeply on her long 100. It was clearly a defensive posture, and Bryce waited a moment before repeating the question.
Instead of answering, Michelle suddenly stretched her right leg and poked at the mound of undergarments on the floor, then leaned and plucked something from the lacy depths.
“There it is,” she said around the filter, and studied a small black and white snapshot for a second before handing it over to Bryce.
“It's you andâ¦your mom?” Bryce hazarded a guess, bringing the snapshot closer to her eyes. Summertime somewhere, long ago, because Michelle couldn't have been more than two or three. The kind of late-afternoon sunlight that made Bryce's throat ache shimmered over the older woman's pale hair. Tiny Michelle was reaching for that halo of light; neither of them were looking directly at the camera, but instead at one another, and the mother's face bore such an expression of tender devotion that anguish further seared the back of Bryce's throat, catching her off guard. But she swallowed the pain instantly.
Michelle took the photo back into her own hand and blew smoke, but carefully, not letting any touch the old paper.
“Yeah,” she sighed, and closed her eyes. “She was really beautiful, wasn't she?”
Bryce, always suspiscious of what seemed to be a heart-to-heart tone in her mother's voice, only nodded.
“I'm not going,” Michelle said after a protracted silence had passed.
Bryce, who had been studying the wood paneling opposite her and wondering when was the last time she'd been in Michelle's room for anything, bit down hard on her bottom lip.
“Why?” It hadn't worked with her uncle, but it was all she could manage just now. She didn't take her eyes from the wall.
Michelle's knees drew up again. “I'm not ready. I tried going back once, when you were three. It was a fucking disaster.”
They hadn't exchanged this many words in months. Bryce dared a peep at her mother. “Your brother mentioned thatâ¦he said it was your mom's funeral.”
Michelle laughed suddenly and harshly, emitting a cloud of smoke. With a vicious twist, she ground out the cigarette in the blue ceramic ashtray on her nightstand, which couldn't have been emptied in at least a half carton.
“That bitch wasn't my mother,” was all she said.
Dangerous ground Bryce
, she told herself, but asked, “Not the woman in the picture?”
“No, not her.”
“Then who⦔
“Lydia was my father's second wife. We went to her funeral because I wanted to see her dead.”
“Jesus Christ, Mom!”
Michelle turned to meet Bryce's eyes. “I'm completely serious. The truth hurts sometimes.”
Don't I know
, Bryce didn't say, looking back into Michelle's eyes, resisting the urge to turn her own away. Her mother must have been pretty once. Her irises were an utterly clear ice blue, inhabited by no flecks of other color, no slim spoke lines radiating out from her pupils. And her lashes, the only feature Bryce was certain she had inheirited from her mother, were long and thick and dark. Neglect and hard living had chiseled a path through the rest of her features; though only 39, she appeared far older. “But you're going. I already told Wilder I would send you.”
Bryce used both hands to heave herself up. Without replying to the statement she walked back to the kitchen and popped open a beer.
“I'll leave,” she said into the empty room, loud enough for Michelle to hear. “I will run away before I go to some funeral a millon miles away. I will move in with Wade and his mom and stepdad.”
Michelle made no reply in the half-hour Bryce waited, drinking. She eventually slipped again onto her chair at the table to dent her beer cans and consider how pathetic this whole situation was: her mother would not manage to rouse even a tiny flicker of sympathy for her dead father, would not make an appearance at the funeral, but would instead choose to send her daughter into a group of complete strangers to do the honors for her. It was totally silent in her mother's room, and Bryce at last walked back and peered in; for a second her heart pounded very hard against her ribs and bile rose up her throatâ¦but Michelle was only sleeping, lying flat on her back with the ashtray balanced on her belly, snoring lightly.
Bryce stepped in and silently removed the disgusting adornment from her mother's sleeping form. Conversation closed. She was fairly certain Michelle wouldn't remember the details of this exchange anyhow, and Bryce vowed there on the stained blue carpet she would never mention it again.
4:30 p.m.
Two hours
later, errands complete, Trish pulled up beside the Fremont Motel. She and Bryce looked up at the second-floor room numbered 212, with its battered door thrown wide to the bright afternoon air. Garth Brooks sang from the radio, cranked to full blast, and they could see Amy jumping on the bed. She caught sight of them and yelled, “Come on, you guys, let's hit the pool!”
Trish giggled, moving to open the trunk. Together she and Bryce unloaded two cases of beer they'd brought as party favors and Bryce followed her best friend up the rickety cast-iron steps, her fingers curled around the heavy cardboard box. Halfway to the top Trish stopped abrubtly and someone on the landing said, “Hey, let me help you.”
Just like that, out of nowhere, his voice. It made something shift in the inner space between her belly and breasts, a feeling that caught Bryce so suddenly she struggled to draw a normal breath.
Trish whispered, “Oh my God,” in a tone Bryce understood, and so when a man came down the steps toward them, she already knew what he would look like.
Dark eyes, dark hair. Amazing lips. Scruff on his jaw. Black shirt, faded jeans. He towered over them, reaching one arm to take the beer from Trish as though it weighed no more than a baby.
“Thanks!” she said and smiled brightly, then slipped around him and up the rest of the steps, leaving Bryce silent in her wake.
“You, too,” he said, nodding at her armload, but she hesitated for a second, a moment that seemed to stretch out much further than just this hot June afternoon, a moment that wasn't entirely unfamiliar to her; on a subterreanean level, somewhere deep in her belly, she felt a distinctive shift. For a long, slow moment their gazes met and held, and the smile on his lips faltered at the same second his eyes crinkled a little, as though he too felt the air between them tighten.
“Honey, come on!” Amy yelled at Bryce, bouncing off the bed to stick her head out the doorway. “Hey buddy, you want a beer? It's my birthday,” she declared with drunken magnanimity, grinning at the stranger.
“Thanks, maybe later,” he said, glancing back at Amy, and Bryce blinked once and pulled herself together. She surrendered the beer into his grasp, coming close enough to breathe him in. The skin along her inner arms and thighs prickled.
“Thanks,” she tried to say, but it came out in a whisper, and he grinned, seeming at ease again.
“No problem,” he told her. The second his back was turned her hands were in her hair, smoothing, pulling the sunglasses from from her forehead, shaking out its length. He carried the beer cases under each arm. His muscles were the kind built from hard work, she would bet her life. Long, hard, hot hours of manual labor.
Jesus Christ, Bryce
, she hissed to herself, tearing her eyes from the incredibly appealing view of the back of his shoulders, the slope of them, the chiseled shape of his torso. He deposited the beer on the plastic table parked midway between Amy's room and the door to 214, which was open about a foot.
“Guess we're neighbors,” he observed, and Bryce made a show of hanging her sunglasses on the edge of her tight white tank top, recovering enough to offer him a smile.
“Guess so,” she said, turning away before she melted into a puddle on the concrete, escaping into the music-pulsing depths of 212.
“Okay, holy crap, that guy.” This from Trish as the girls crowded as surreptitiously as possible behind the sheer white curtains in the front window minutes later and watched him make his way across the parking lot to a waiting taxi. Amy, who'd been drinking steadily for the past three hours, waved gaily as he glanced up at their room before climbing into the backseat. Bryce, Trish and Stacy jumped away from the glass as though a gun had been fired.