“It wasn’t going to be large,” Aunt Nettie said. “Just the immediate families and a few friends. None of us had any money. Your grandmother hadn’t worked in the thirty years since she got married, but with your grandfather gone, she was trying to find a job. She was also trying to sell your grandfather’s service station. Phil and I were barely scraping by. Sally had been working as a waitress that summer, but she didn’t have much money saved. I think Sally was disappointed at not having a big wedding, but she could see that it was smarter to save what money she and Bill had to set up their apartment in Chicago. The church did give her a shower, but her wedding wasn’t getting too much attention.”
Aunt Nettie sounded apologetic. But I could understand the way she and Uncle Phil must have felt. They had had their hands full with a new business and his recently widowed mother. Turning the responsibility for a rebellious younger sister over to a young man who seemed pleasant and reliable and whose family was “hardworking”—it could have been the answer to a prayer. They hadn’t worried a lot about whether or not my mom was making the right decision.
Then, at four a.m. on what would have been the day of the wedding, my grandmother had called Uncle Phil and Aunt Nettie to say Sally hadn’t come home.
“Phil and I weren’t too worried,” Aunt Nettie said. “After all, it was Sally and Billy’s wedding day, and we thought they’d simply—well, spent the night somewhere. But your grandmother was more puritanical. She was also hysterical. Phil tried to calm her down, but we finally had to get up, get dressed, and go out to the house—this house—to talk to her. That’s when we discovered Sally had taken a lot of her clothes with her.”
The clothes had been packed up, ready to be moved to Chicago, Aunt Nettie said. Getting several boxes and a suitcase out of the house without disturbing a nervous mother would not have been easy, but my mom had managed it—Aunt Nettie said my grandmother might have taken a sleeping pill. The wedding dress—street-length, with an Empire waistline and lace sleeves that puffed at the top and were tight down the rest of the arm—had been left hanging in the closet.
It was Phil who found her note. My mom had left it in the kitchen cupboard, propped against the coffeepot. “Bill and I have called the wedding off for now,” it read. “I’m going on to Chicago. I’ll write when I find a place to stay.”
There was no apology, no explanation.
I had never known my grandmother—she died before I was born—but I could imagine the hysterical scene Uncle Phil and Aunt Nettie had on their hands.
Aunt Nettie tried to comfort my grandmother, and Uncle Phil called Bill Dykstra’s house. Surely Bill would be there and would tell them what had happened, would provide some explanation, they thought.
When Bill’s parents heard the news, his dad rushed to Bill’s room, eager for information. But Bill’s room was empty. Bill had also disappeared—without leaving a note, even one as cryptic as my mother’s had been.
Now there were two sets of frantic parents. Friends and relatives were called in. The roads of western Michigan were thick with people looking for Sally and Bill—either alone or together.
“It was late in the morning when someone thought to check the bus station in South Haven,” Aunt Nettie said. “Then we found out that a girl matching your mother’s description had gotten on the seven a.m. bus headed south.”
“I guess that was a sort of relief,” I said. “Did you have someone meet the bus in Chicago?”
“The bus had already arrived in Chicago by that time. We didn’t know where Sally was for six months.”
“My grandmother must have been nearly crazy! But what about Bill? Had he gone with her?”
Aunt Nettie didn’t answer.
“Did he turn up?” I asked.
“His father found him late that morning.”
“Did Bill have any explanation for the whole thing?”
Aunt Nettie shook her head.
“No explanation? No excuse? What
did
he have to say?”
Aunt Nettie looked at me with eyes that were full of grief. “Bill couldn’t say anything,” she said. “His father found his car parked on a back road. A garden hose had been stretched from his exhaust into the driver’s window. The engine had run until the gas tank was empty.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes. Bill had committed suicide.”
Chapter 3
I
could feel tears welling in my eyes. “How horrible,” I said. “Those poor parents.”
“Yes, it was awful for Bill’s parents. They had two boys—Bill and his older brother, Ed. Ed—well, Ed had protested the Vietnam War, the draft. He was a real rebel. He wasn’t around then because he had gone to Canada. He’d been a terrible worry to them for years. Bill had been the ’good’ boy.”
“It would have been awful for my grandmother, too.”
“She really never recovered. Losing her husband in May, then her daughter in August . . . True, she and Sally communicated after that, but their relationship hadn’t been very strong anyway, and they never became close.”
“And I’m sure a lot of people around here blamed Mom for Bill’s suicide.”
Aunt Nettie frowned. “It’s always a ’chicken or egg’ question. Did Bill commit suicide because Sally left, and he was upset? Or did Sally leave because she sensed some basic instability in Bill and decided she’d better not marry him? I leaned toward that explanation.”
“Has Mom ever told you her side of the story?”
“No! As I said, Sally didn’t contact anyone for six months. Then she called Phil. She told him she had enrolled in airline school in Dallas, but she refused to give him her address. And she refused to talk to her mom for six months after that.”
“Do you think she blamed her mother in some way?”
“I think she was ashamed to talk to her.”
“When Mom called, had she even heard about what had happened to Bill?”
“Yes, she had. But she never told anybody how she found out.”
“It wasn’t in the newspaper?”
“Just an obituary in the
Warner Pier Gazette
. The Chicago or even the Grand Rapids papers wouldn’t be interested in the suicide of an obscure young electronics repairman on a back road in rural Michigan.”
“What happened to Bill’s family?”
“His dad died about five years after this happened. I have no idea what became of the brother.”
“How about the mother?”
“Vita Dykstra? Oh, she still lives here.” Aunt Nettie got up and began to collect the cups that had held our coffee.
“But you say I don’t know her.”
“You’ve probably seen her on the street or at the Superette, but I can’t think of any reason you would have met her.” Aunt Nettie yawned rather ostentatiously. “And now I’m going to bed. But first, Lee, I had one more idea about what to do to the living room windows for the wedding.”
“Aunt Nettie! We don’t have time for you to order draperies! And it’s not necessary.”
“Oh, this would be simple. We could do it ourselves.”
“When? In between the Easter rush and the Mother’s Day rush?”
“It would only take an afternoon. We buy fabric, and we hem the edges so it’s long panels. Then we get wooden drapery rods—I’m sure Joe wouldn’t mind putting them up—and we simply drape the panels over the rods, letting them hang down on one end.” Aunt Nettie smiled confidently. “Wouldn’t that look pretty?”
“Maybe. But it wouldn’t look like home. And I want to get married at home. If you want new window treatments, please wait until I move out.”
Aunt Nettie laughed, and I realized she hadn’t been making a serious suggestion. She had been dodging questions about Bill’s mother.
So I quit asking questions and started turning out the lights, ready to go to bed myself. But I had one final comment. “Unless Mom decides to tell her side of the story,” I said, “I guess it will remain a mystery.”
“Mystery!” Aunt Nettie suddenly looked scared. “Don’t call it a mystery!”
“Why not? It is one.”
“But we know what happened.”
“But we don’t know why.”
Aunt Nettie crossed the room and gripped my hand. “Lee, please restrain that curiosity of yours. Please don’t try to find out what happened.”
“I wouldn’t do any more than ask Mom.”
“Don’t! This whole affair was a terrible mess, a tragedy. It was heartbreaking. Please don’t open it up again.”
I gave her a hug. “Don’t worry,” I said.
I lay awake a long time that night. Aunt Nettie had called the situation a tragedy and that was exactly the word for it. Bill Dykstra—by her account a nice young man—had died. My mother had left home and had apparently felt too ashamed to come back again. As far as I knew she’d only returned to Warner Pier once in the thirty-plus years since she’d left. Her mother had been buried in Grand Rapids, and Mom had shown up, I knew, but that was still sixty miles from here. She
had
come to Warner Pier for Uncle Phil’s funeral, but stayed only a few days. I’d been along on that trip. I remembered that Mom refused to leave the house, even to go to the grocery store.
The effect on my grandmother and on Bill’s parents had also been dramatic. My grandmother had “never recovered,” Aunt Nettie had said.
Apparently Warner Pier hadn’t gotten over it, either. At least a dozen people who were longtime residents had asked about my mother. I hadn’t thought a lot about that until now. I guess I had felt that their curiosity was based on friendly memories. Now I wondered if that was true.
As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about Mrs. Dykstra. Vita, Aunt Nettie had called her. She still lived in Warner Pier. I wondered what her life was like. How had she coped? Had the scapegrace son, Ed, ever returned from Canada? Apparently he didn’t live in Warner Pier.
Aunt Nettie obviously didn’t want to talk about Mrs. Dykstra. But maybe Joe or his mother—both Warner Pier natives—would be willing to tell me.
Aunt Nettie had urged me not to look into the whole affair. I could see why she didn’t want me to. But I hadn’t promised that I wouldn’t.
Next morning I called Joe at his boat shop and invited him to lunch. “I’ll meet you at the Sidewalk Café,” I said. “My treat.”
“Oh, I can buy lunch,” Joe said. “I made some headway on the credit cards this month. And in less than three months I’m going to have a professional accountant take over my personal finances.”
“Ha! Today I’m not feeling financially savvy. We can go dutch. I’ll see you at the Sidewalk at one.”
I do have a degree in accounting. When Joe and I met, nearly two years earlier, he’d been in terrible financial shape—saddled with debts incurred in starting up the boat shop and unable to access money he’d invested jointly with his ex-wife. He’d been living in a back room at the boat shop, with his mortgage weighing on him like an anchor and his credit card debt as high as the clouds over Lake Michigan.
Then his ex-wife was killed, and Joe discovered that she’d never changed the will she made while they were married. He inherited what appeared to be a substantial fortune. This turned out to be more of a bane than a blessing, since her debts were also substantial, and Joe was determined not to benefit financially from his legacy. Her affairs were such a mess that it had taken him a year to get things on the road to some sort of order.
Just the previous fall he’d presented his ex-wife’s Warner Pier estate to the city for use as a conference center. In typical Joe fashion, he’d forbidden any official recognition of his gift. He still had to live frugally; he relied on his small salary as part-time city attorney to pay the rent on an apartment over an antique shop on Warner Pier’s main street.
But I was making a good salary, now that TenHuis Chocolade’s financial situation was improving. Joe and I believed that we could do all right if we pooled our financial resources.
I had been watching the clock, but a half hour before I was to meet Joe I got a call from the buyer for a Detroit gift shop. She wanted information before she could place her Easter order. TenHuis makes a lot of money selling fancy bunnies to her, so I talked to Aunt Nettie about ordering special packaging, and the two of us went back to my office to do a little arithmetic on pricing. I’d almost forgotten my lunch date when I heard a loud clatter from outside our front window—my office is glass-enclosed and overlooks the workshop, our retail area, and beyond that, Peach Street, Warner Pier’s main drag.
The noise got my attention, and I looked out and saw a ramshackle truck loaded with garbage bags. An old woman in a dirty white stocking cap with an enormous red pom-pom had just dropped a similar bag, and dozens of aluminum cans were rolling around on the sidewalk.
“Oh, gosh!” I said aloud. “Lovie’s scattered a million cans all over the sidewalk.”
Lovie—I didn’t know her last name—was a well-known figure around Warner Pier. She collected aluminum cans for recycling, following a regular route. Her presence and way of life in our little resort town had always amazed me. Warner Pier won’t even allow McDonald’s in the town on the grounds that it would be an eyesore in our pristine Victorian community. But nobody ever complained about Lovie, her sacks of cans, her rattletrap truck, and her falling-down junk shop out on the highway.
My report on the scattered cans made Aunt Nettie look stricken. “Don’t say anything to her!”
“I won’t, since you don’t want me to, though I don’t understand why Warner Pier merchants put up with her and her junk. But I’m late to lunch. I’ll call about the Detroit bunnies after you figure the packaging cost.”
Aunt Nettie nodded, and I got my ski jacket and left. I would have hurried down the block to the Sidewalk Café if I could have gotten through the cans outside the shop without kicking them out of the way. But I couldn’t. The old woman in the cap with the red pom-pom was picking them up slowly. I simply couldn’t walk by her and ignore them.
“Here, Lovie, let me help you,” I said.
“No need, pretty girl! I’m not so old that I can’t pick up a few cans.”