Coming Home (6 page)

Chapter Seven

THE ROCK HOUSE Ice Cream Shoppe had been constructed from red cement and small boulders—like giant peanuts in raspberry ice cream. Attached to the back of the shop was a small addition, displaying antiques and knickknacks. According to the signs, customers could feast on two scoops of delicious ice cream in the shop up front, then peruse an assortment of antique plates, bottles, glasses, and silverware in back. They might even purchase a rustic turn-of-the-century ice-cream maker.

Entering the busy shop, Jessie automatically placed her open hand behind her back, catching the screen door. Instead of banging against the frame, it
twapped
against her hand. Old habits never die.

The aroma of vanilla and cinnamon filled her senses. The blackand-white floor tile, yellowed and scuffed with age, felt hard beneath her white sandals. Directly in front of her, beyond the line of parents and children, a glass-enclosed display offered an assortment of ice-cream flavors. Several high school girls were taking customer orders and ringing up their totals. Behind them was the menu board, advertising chili dogs and hamburgers, apple pie and cinnamon buns, and beyond that the food kitchen. Little had changed.

Jessie nervously swept her gaze past the short hallway leading to the antique room—then to the wall on the right. Dominated from top to bottom by a collage of photos, it was a mosaic of faces. There were pictures of happy families, giggling children, and cranky old gentlemen eating ice cream, fishing by the lake, sitting at picnic benches. All posed for the trusty camera of the town historian, Betty Robinette. Photos of flowers, framed and priced, were intermixed with the other photos.

A thin woman who looked to be about eighty emerged from a back room, wiping her hands on a towel. She wore a green apron tied tightly over a white T-shirt, her white hair confined by a thin mesh netting. She had a tiny nose and chin, and her heart-shaped face seemed shrunken with deep wrinkles. Her pinkish lips were stark against her pale white skin, but her eyes were kind and gentle with a hint of no-nonsense scrutiny. She wore glasses around her neck for close viewing, just as Jessie had remembered.

Betty Robinette delivered a plate of chili and hot dogs to a waiting family, then retreated to the back again. When Jessie’s turn at the counter finally came, one of the young girls in matching green aprons took her order. Jessie asked for a single dip of pistachio, then wandered over to the wall of photos, licking her cone.

She recognized many of the faces—neighbors from long ago and classmates who had grown up but apparently never left the sleepy town. After a bit, it occurred to her that she was looking at friendships she might have nurtured, memories she might have made, a past that might have been.

Eventually people began to leave, and just a trickle of customers remained. Jessie was still standing at the wall, lost in the pictures, when she was startled by a familiar voice behind her. “Like my artwork?”

Jessie turned to see Betty Robinette, only a few feet away, her right hand gripping a cane. The woman stood there motionless, looking proud, and then her eyes flickered. She frowned, scrutinizing Jessie’s face.

Jessie opened her mouth to introduce herself but stopped. Betty was already smiling broadly. “Well, I’ll be. Is that you, Jessie?”

Jessie broke into a smile. “I didn’t think—”

“That I’d remember you? Oh, for pete’s sake. Stop talking and give me a hug.”

Jessie melted into her arms. Her old friend smelled the same but felt much smaller. The Mrs. Robinette she remembered was a towering woman.
People seem bigger when you’re a kid,
Jessie realized.

“How’s Mr. Robinette?”

“Oh, he got to go a few years back.”

“I’m sorry,” Jessie whispered.

“Weak heart, you know,” she said. “He didn’t suffer, thank the Lord.”

She held Jessie by the arms, examining her face. “You look wonderful, Jessie. Look at you, all grown up. It’s so good to see you. I’ve been hoping you’d come back.”

Jessie suppressed a smile. In spite of her kind manner, Betty was never one for mincing words.

“I’m just passing through,” Jessie hedged. “I’m on my way out to Oregon for grad school. Just thought I’d stop by.”

“I’ve been so worried about you. I’ve called your grandmother for years, but …” She hesitated.

Jessie shrugged, knowing that if Betty had kept in touch with her grandmother, she would be aware of the estrangement. It was an awkward moment. Betty glanced away, nodding thoughtfully. She pointed at her wall. “Did you find yourself?”

“You mean I’m still up there?”

Studying the photos near the middle of the wall, Betty placed her glasses on the end of her tiny nose. She crooked her head back, peering downward through the lenses, then tapped a photo of a brown-haired boy and a blond girl straddling bikes. The two held up ice-cream cones like trophies, smiling at the camera.

It really happened,
Jessie thought again, feeling terribly honored.

Twelve years later, I’m still there… .

“Remember how you kids used to come by after school?”

Jessie nodded, lost in the picture. It was like a trigger sparking more long-forgotten memories. Or a line of dominoes, each memory falling into the next.

“You loved bubble-gum ice cream. Can’t give the stuff away now, but you practically lived on it.”

Jessie laughed. “We did get sick of it.”

Betty pointed to the round wooden table by the window. “You two would sit right over there and do your homework together. Your hair was so blond, I called you my little cherub.”

Jessie gave Betty a humorous frown. “I disliked that name intensely.”

Betty chuckled. “As I recall, Andy disliked math. But he was a dimple-cheeked charmer, wasn’t he? Got Bs instead of Ds ’cause of you.”

Jessie shrugged, giving a subtle nod. “I was glad to help.”

“We used to joke about you two. The whole town did, you know.”

“The whole town?”

Betty laughed again, her eyes dancing. “You and Andy were practically joined at the hip. Drove his mother crazy! Bless her heart.”

“She wasn’t very fond of me, was she?”

“Well … she was a real proper sort, you know. In her book, little boys and girls didn’t play together. In the end, it didn’t matter what she thought. We all knew you’d get married someday.” Betty paused, shaking her head. “Can’t even remember what day it is half the time. But some things you just never forget.” She sighed, appraising her again.

“I’m so glad to see you,” Jessie said suddenly.

Betty beamed. “You look good, sweetie.”

“I drove by the house, too,” Jessie said. “It seems well kept, but the girl next door says no one lives there now.”

“No one has
ever
lived there.”

“But why?”

Betty just looked at her as if Jessie should know the answer.

Jessie frowned. “Who owns it?”

“Well … honey …” She pursed her lips as if trying to find the words.

“My grandmother?”

Betty nodded slightly.

Jessie felt a shudder of anger. “Why would she do that?”

“I think maybe you should ask her that yourself,” Betty said with a shrug.

Their eyes met and Jessie forced her features into a pleasant expression, but her anger was boiling. Betty seemed tentative, careful. “I know she’s a tough cookie, Jessie. You don’t have to tell me that, but—” she stopped and her eyes lingered on Jessie’s face—“people change. Sometimes they do anyway.”

Jessie bit her lip and changed the subject. “How long did Andy stay?”

Betty frowned. “I think they moved to Denver the following summer.” She tapped her cane against the tile. “He came back, though. My word, he’s tall now. Gave me a big hug. Nearly crushed my feeble bones.” Betty’s eyes twinkled and she sighed. She opened her mouth and then hesitated. There was more to the story.

Jessie nodded. “It’s okay.”

Betty’s eyes dimmed, her sense of loyalty showing through. “Had a girl with him—a TV preacher’s daughter … something like that. Elizabeth something. Engaged to be married. My word, he graduated with a degree in business. Now that I think of it, I can’t imagine him handling the math without you, but I guess he did.”

Jessie felt a sinking feeling in her stomach, and for the moment it overshadowed the growing rage. Betty appeared apologetic again, unsure of what to say. She paused and then her voice became distant, as if she were conjuring memories from a rarely visited mental storehouse. “He asked about you.”

Andy remembered me?

“I told him you were away at college somewhere. That’s all I knew.”

“I’m sorry to be so—”

“Don’t you dare be sorry,” Betty interrupted. “We all worried for you, sweetie … and …” Her voice trailed off and she glanced at the wall, seemingly overcome with emotion.

Jessie felt guilty, remembering that Betty had always carried more than her share of others’ burdens.

“Everything’s okay now,” Jessie whispered, more to sound reassuring than truthful. She put her hand on her dear friend’s arm. Why had she waited so long to make contact? Even a simple phone call would have sufficed. “I missed you,” Jessie whispered, about to say she was sorry again, but catching herself.

Betty nodded confident reassurance, her eyes closing as she did so, and she crept closer to Jessie, embracing her in another hug.

They sat and talked for another hour, trading history and current life. Jessie kept staring at the dear woman, now old and feeble, who had practically rescued her family during her mother’s illness. She had delivered groceries and covered dishes. She had mended their clothes. And she never let Jessie pay for her own ice cream.

Jessie smiled and reminded her dear friend of the memory. Betty put her hand on her chest and clucked.

“You took
Andy’s
money!” Jessie kidded. “It used to make me so mad!” She reached over and covered Betty’s hand. “But thank you … twelve years too late.”

Betty merely waved it off. But their eyes met and the old rapport passed between them. “So where are you headed next?”

Good question,
Jessie thought, taking a deep breath. Her blood boiled as she thought of her grandmother again, and in the space of a moment, her plans had changed. Time to do what she should have done years ago.

Chapter Eight

DORIS CRENSHAW …

Jessie should have known. Who else could afford to buy the house and then display it like a trophy—or the spoils of a victory? Who else wanted to own everything that had once belonged to her father? And her mother? And to her? None other than the woman who’d kidnapped her mother. And caused her father’s death. The woman Jessie swore she would never see again.

People don’t change,
Jessie thought, remembering Betty’s comment. Betty was still her old sweet self—Pollyanna, to be sure, but that was forgivable, and frankly refreshing. But no less naïve.

No,
Jessie thought again.
People don’t change. They only become exaggerated versions of their younger selves. They finish the journey they began. If they were insensitive and tactless in youth, they become mean and twisted in old age
.

She could only imagine what had become of her grandmother. Even now, at twenty-four, her childhood imagination flew away with her, landing squarely on the image of none other than the wicked witch. Jessie squeezed the steering wheel. It wasn’t her grandmother’s house. It was
their
house. Her father had restored it, and her mother had painstakingly made it a home. Jessie had seen the before-and-after pictures. Sure, it wasn’t a castle. And it wasn’t the Broadmoor, obviously. But it was theirs. Well, theirs
and
the bank’s. Jessie’s parents had had little money and owed the bank a great deal for both the house and the gas station. Jessie had always assumed that after her parents’ deaths, the house had surely been sold and any profits used to pay off debts. But she had never imagined her grandmother as the buyer. Doris Crenshaw didn’t even
like
the house. Jessie couldn’t remember but a handful of visits by her grandmother. How dare she take the house! Wasn’t taking her mother away enough?

Jessie’s rage only deepened. As much as she despised her grandmother, she had questions and she wanted answers.

Barge right in there, eh? Begin a machine-gun fire of insinuations and accusations? Hi, Grandma, haven’t seen you in years. Thought I would drop by and yell a bit. Ratta-tat-tat!

No. She would start slowly. Give her grandmother a chance to answer. Then she’d start firing away.

Jessie settled into the drive south, having nearly convinced herself of her reasons, ignoring the underlying feeling that her motives were more complicated.

Before she’d left the ice-cream shop, she had made a promise for dinner the following night, which pushed her trip west back another day or two. As they were saying good-bye, Betty had pointed to a yellowed photo a couple of photos above the one of Jessie and Andy. Jessie had been aware of crossing her arms, as if defending herself.

A smiling blond woman leaned against the Russian olive near Jessie’s bedroom window. Mom was wearing a light blue sweater and a navy blue skirt. Her skin was milky smooth, her eyes soft, compassionate and playful. Seeing the picture only fueled Jessie’s sense of loss … and her anger toward the person responsible for it.

Eyes focused now on the road, she felt her throat close again. She blinked furiously.

… “She was so pretty,” Betty had said as she and Jessie examined that particular photo on the wall. “She and your dad used to take walks around the lake. They’d stop by the shop, holding hands, Frank’s face just beaming! Olivia would be holding you in her arms, back when you were a tiny thing. Frank absolutely adored your mother.”

Pain emanated from Betty’s eyes. She seemed to study Jessie and then smiled proudly. “You look
just
like her, you know.”

“Thank you,” Jessie replied, struggling to maintain her composure.

Unexpectedly, Betty said the strangest thing, “Looking so much like her, it must feel as if she’s always with you somehow… .”

Now Jessie pondered the comment again as she drove. What a weird thing to say. Couldn’t anyone say that about one’s parents? But as far as resembling her mother, her appearance was where it ended. Her mother was a saint and everyone knew it. Jessie, however, had her father’s temperament.
“Thank heavens she looks like her mother,”
she’d once heard a cousin remark during a family gathering when he didn’t think Jessie was within earshot. He finished with,
“Because she sulks just like her father,”
and then laughed at his little joke. She was ten or so at the time but old enough to get it. She’d stormed off, effectively proving his point.

Jessie passed the Air Force Academy to the west of I-25, noting the expansive growth of neighborhoods on the opposite side. She glanced at her cell phone on the passenger seat, haunted by the once-recurring habit of Brandon’s daily call, reminding herself again that they weren’t going to Oregon together.

“It’ll take a while to sink in,”
Darlene had told her.

I’m a pro at this stuff,
Jessie thought.

She wished she could phone her mother. No matter the triumph or tragedy throughout her life, that was always the first thought. After dinner with Brandon she would have cried on her mom’s shoulder and Mom would have understood, just as she always did.

Every turning point in life was another reminder that her mom was gone.

As a teenager she’d had persistent dreams of Mom tucking her in … walking along the beach … swinging at the park. While they were the happiest dreams, they were also the most painful upon awakening. For years it seemed as if Mom had never died. Jessie often awakened breathless, panicked, her grief renewed again.

To think she’d run away from her grandmother’s house five times, each time fighting “extradition” back to her grandmother’s care. She was finally made a ward of the state for her own wellbeing. She spent the remainder of her adolescent years in one foster home after another, all with predictable results.

Sometimes her foster parents were only interested in the monthly paycheck, which suited Jessie fine because they were the types who would leave her alone. Other times, her guardians seemed interested in getting to know her, and it didn’t take Jessie long to disabuse them of that foolish notion. And the idea of getting too attached to her foster parents’ “real” children was out of the question. She would go to school, then come home and hide in her room, doing her homework or reading a novel.

When not in school or in her room, she spent time at some therapist’s office, court-ordered to “assist her in emotional healing.” They’d all insisted on dredging up her childhood, as if by remembering the details she might finally forget.
What a strange idea,
she’d thought at the time. Rarely did she care to divulge personal details of her life with her mother, which would have been a betrayal. What they had together was so sacred, so wonderful, that she refused to submit her memories to their impersonal dissection.

On paper she must have appeared to be a conundrum. Even the therapists contradicted one another, some declaring her of sound mind, albeit a little rattled, others pronouncing her scarred and damaged for life. By the time Jessie was sixteen and pursuing legal emancipation, her grandmother was still calling the shots from afar. Eventually she summoned the big guns as a last-ditch effort.

… Michael Roeske, a Harvard-educated Freudian, was a large man with a full gray-flecked beard, slicked-back brown hair, and the obligatory gold-rimmed spectacles. He had reminded her of Orson Welles as she’d once seen him on a movie poster advertising the old classic
Citizen Kane,
and she’d told him so. He seemed delighted with the comparison.

His office was lavishly furnished with dark wood, and the carpet reminded her of a giant argyle sock. The walls were covered with something resembling crushed straw, as if made flat by extensive ironing. The windows were semiopaque with a lacy winter frost, and the trees just outside, where people walked freely in the parking lot, were glazed with melting ice, the sun reflecting off a sparkling world of post-Christmas white.

In spite of his austere appearance, he was a kind man. Friendly and engaging. She actually enjoyed the visits, which seemed more like conspiratorial meetings against her grandmother than counseling sessions. In later years, she realized the brilliance of his technique.

“I’m impressed with your unique sense of self-equilibrium,” he’d once told her. “Your relationship with your mother was simply marvelous; I wish I could have met her.”

True to his Freudian roots, he was particularly interested in her dreams.

“They’re not
bad
dreams,” Jessie told him.

“But your mother comes to you. No?”

“She tucks me in at night, takes me to the park, that sort of thing.”

“Very natural,” he stated. “They’ll fade in time.”

I hope not,
she thought.

“Do you hate your grandmother?”

“Have you
met
my grandmother?”

“Yes,” he replied. “And she does seem … a difficult woman.”

Jessie was surprised he would admit this.

“She wants to have a relationship with you,” he said somewhat tentatively.

“I can’t.”

“Perhaps one day?”

Jessie only shrugged.

“She may not have had bad motives for what she did,” Dr. Roeske said, referring to the lawsuit that had led to the unexpected court order consigning her mother to a mental institution, instead of a care center, as her grandmother had insisted. Essentially, Olivia became a ward of the state.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned she stole my mother.”

Roeske set down his ever-present dark blue and gold-scripted coffee cup. “But hating your grandmother won’t bring your mother back.”

“I don’t hate her,” she said. “I just can’t stand to be around her.”

“Your memories are like a festering wound,” he told her. “Inflamed and infected. You can’t just put on a Band-Aid and expect it to heal. Now that you’re older, you can deal with all this… .”

She wasn’t interested. Fortunately, a few months after her seventeenth birthday, her emancipation was complete and she was free to conduct her life as she wished. In spite of mixed feelings, she canceled her therapy sessions, got a part-time job, made arrangements to rent a room in a school friend’s house, and finished high school. Things settled down after that and her grandmother finally let go.

It was during her junior year in college that Jessie read of Roeske’s death. He’d died of a heart attack on a Sunday morning in the middle of winter while retrieving his Sunday paper. Jessie had wept for him. Until that moment she hadn’t realized her affection for this dear grandfatherly man. Unlike her foster parents, Roeske had broken through, becoming almost a surrogate parent. In fact, her counseling sessions with him had made such a profound impression she nearly changed her career decision.

To fulfill a class requirement, her roommate, Darlene, had signed up to answer calls for a suicide hotline. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening Darlene was on call, her phone linked to the local suicide prevention agency. It was a Tuesday in January when Darlene begged Jessie to take her place. She had mistakenly agreed to a midweek date, forgetting the previous obligation.

“Are you kidding?” Jessie exclaimed. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“It’s easy,” Darlene said, explaining the basic procedure for talking someone out of suicide. Then she left Jessie alone sweating in her dorm room, hoping no one would find this Tuesday a particularly depressing day.

Sure enough, when Jessie received a call from a despairing woman named Brenda, she surprised herself and rose to the occasion. Years of her own therapy had given her the right phrases to articulate. By the time she hung up, she had managed to pull Brenda out of her deep turmoil.

Several weeks later, Jessie scheduled an appointment with her adviser.

… “How do I get a master’s in counseling?” Jessie had asked. The college counselor had smiled curiously as if to say,
That’s a good one, Jess
.

“I’m serious.”

Another hesitation. “We don’t offer it. But somewhere else? Maybe another year of undergraduate studies. Two years of postgraduate. Give or take. Come to think of it, since you’re interested in Oregon, I’m sure the University of Portland offers something comparable—perhaps psychology?”