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I had just gotten home, weary, my clothes caked with dirt, when Jeremy drove up with the flatbed. He backed partway into the barn and started unloading the half ton of hay while I went inside and washed up. My shower could wait. I’d spent the afternoon attacking the ground, digging holes with fury, and planted a couple dozen large shrubs and trees in record time. I hadn’t let my mind lapse into that state of peace and rhythm the way I usually did when planting. I sought no healing or refreshment from my task; instead, I mulled over and over my recent conversations with my mother and my uncle, thinking of what questions to ask Ed Hutchinson when I saw him tomorrow. My head hurt from all my mental musings, but I kept my heart in check.
I’d had plenty of collisions with my mother over the years. We always worked through them. Perhaps my mother, feeling stressed over her current financial straits, was taking out her anxiety on me. She’d had such a run of success over the years, buying and selling commercial real estate while the economy boomed, that she allowed her spending habits free rein. Trips to Europe, weekly visits to her spa and masseuse, eating out nearly every day, buying clothing from expensive designer boutiques. Having to watch her bottom line was foreign to Ruth Sitteroff.
I didn’t know what shape her portfolio was in, but forcing Neal to sell his house in Novato to get back her investment seemed to indicate more than a minor passing problem. Why hadn’t she just taken out an equity line of credit and let him stay there? Would the payments have been too high? No doubt it had something to do with her taxes and cash flow. I never asked.
I had wanted to make Jeremy a nice dinner, but with the day’s aggravations, I had no energy left. I threw together some burritos, which he always loved, and popped open two Coronas. I heard him on the front porch, pulling off his boots, as I put food on plates. A smile rose on my face, listening to him mess with the dogs, roughing them up and talking silly to them. Buster and Angel were his babies too. What would happen if Jeremy decided to divorce me? Would he fight over custody of our dogs? The thought sent an ache straight to my stomach, so I pushed the whole mound of fear back behind a concrete dam I erected in my heart. I would not go there.
“Do you want to eat on the back deck?” I asked. “The bugs aren’t bad yet.”
Jeremy nodded and took his plate from my hand. He opened the French doors and I followed him out. His manner was unusually tense, a contrast from the day before, when he had seemed pliant.
We ate in silence until I just couldn’t take the strain. “Jer, I want to apologize.”
“For what? What did you do?”
“Well, I’m always stuck in the middle between you and my mother. And I’m always siding with her. You know how I feel about that. But I realize now I haven’t been very compassionate about your side of things. Seen it from your point of view.”
Jeremy made a little sound. His face turned thoughtful. I could almost hear him think the words about time.
When he didn’t respond, I continued. “I’m at a loss right now. The more I try to make things better with my mother and my brothers, the more I seem to feed the fire. Everyone’s so worked up.”
“Yeah, well. With Raff dealing with his issues, it’s affecting everyone.”
“It’s not just that. I . . .” My words lodged like a clod in my throat. It hurt to get them out. “I love you so much, Jer. I hate what’s happening with us. I feel powerless to stop our relationship from disintegrating, but I don’t know what to do—”
Now Jeremy snorted. “I know just what to do. Get your mother off our backs. Draw the line.”
“You’ve already done that, sending her those legal papers. She just brushed them away as of no account. I’ve tried to talk to her—”
“Talking to her doesn’t work. Like talking to a brick wall. You always let her win. She bowls you over every time. We have to do something, be firm.”
I bit my lip. What? How? Frustration shifted into annoyance. “Well, what do you propose we do? You’ve already insisted she sign the devise. She said no. We’ve tried to set up a payment plan to pay her back for the property, but she won’t budge. Refuses to change the title.”
“You’re just now realizing this?”
I cringed at his chastisement. “So, what’s your new plan? How do we draw the line?”
Jeremy tipped his beer back and finished it off. The dogs chased each other over by the pond, and the farm animals watched the antics from the pasture between taking bites of hay from the feeders. A flock of songbirds warbled in the tall fir next to the house. I yearned for the peacefulness of our home to descend and coat our conversation, but it seemed to scream in dissonance at me.
“I’ve been talking to a lawyer friend of mine. He says we can file a lawsuit and take legal action against her—”
“What!”
Jeremy threw his hand up and his tone grew harsh. “Just hear me out, Lis. We have ten years of letters—papers from her trust—stating this property is essentially ours. We have folders of receipts showing the amount of money we’ve invested here. There’s something called promissory estoppel, a way we can press the issue for ownership based on the assurances and promises your mother has given us over the years. We can prove we poured our money and labor into this place based on her promises, and she has to concede to us.”
“Jeremy, there’s no way I’m going to file a lawsuit against my own mother.”
“Then I’ll do it without you.”
Heat flushed my face, and I held back a strong urge to scream. “Why? I don’t understand what you’re doing. We’ve lived here all these years, without my mother making any demands on us—”
“Until now.” He slammed his hand on the patio table and startled me. “Or don’t you know about her latest scheme?”
“You mean, about us making payments on the property?” At that moment I felt about three inches tall, like a mouse about to be squashed under a mighty boot.
Jeremy’s glare bored a hole through me. “Well, at least she had the decency to tell you. I got this in the mail, delivered to my store.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his back jeans pocket and threw it at me. He started pacing the deck behind my back as I read. It was a letter from my mother’s attorney, stating that, in order for us to remain on the property, we were required to begin making monthly payments of twelve hundred dollars beginning on July 1. My breath hitched when I read the next paragraph.
“What? She’s expecting us to pay back rent?” That was unbelievable. She wanted what her lawyer called “a reasonable compromise,” considering the work we’d put into the place—four payments of twenty-five thousand dollars each, over the next four years. At that point a negotiation could be ensured to transfer the property into our names.
“And not one legal guarantee that, after all those payments, we’d even get clear title of the land. Not one.”
I didn’t want to look in Jeremy’s face. I just listened to him pound the Trex decking with his boots while I calmed my breathing. My voice came out papery thin. “Where in the world could we get that kind of cash? We can’t afford to take out another loan.”
“And I sure as hell am not going to borrow against the store. No way.”
“I’ll talk to her, Jer,” I said, trying to let him know I meant business.
“Yeah. What good will that do?”
I pictured what would happen if we brought in lawyers. The costs would destroy us; we barely got by each month. But not only that, the dynamics with my mother would shift irreversibly. There would be no turning back once we started down that path.
“At least let me try.” I sighed in resignation. “And if doesn’t work, then maybe we should meet with your lawyer friend and let him outline all our options.” I took a chance and looked at Jeremy. Anger seared his features. He stopped pacing and glared at me.
“One chance, Lis. And I don’t want hollow assurances. I want something in writing from her lawyer by next week. Something that says if we start paying her for the property, then she signs over the title now.”
“Okay.”
I knew I would have to do the only thing I hadn’t yet done. I would beg. Beg my mother—for the sake of my marriage, and for the sake of our entire family. Shower her with gratitude, expose my utter need, my dependency on her, my desperation. And I wouldn’t have to exaggerate, for my desperation at that moment was very real. If I failed, the consequences were unthinkable. I would either lose Jeremy, or I would lose my family. No two ways about it.
Jeremy picked up his plate and the empty bottle of beer. He tipped his head and studied me. “I’ve been very patient, Lis. All these years. I’m not one to complain and you know it. I’ve put up with more crap than most men would tolerate. A lot of guys I know would do some damage to a mother like yours. I’ve never said an unkind word, threatened her, treated her unfairly. I’ve put a clamp on my mouth time and time again. Well, she’s pushed me far enough. And I’m not budging, not anymore.” He narrowed his eyes. “If it means I have to walk out and never look back, then . . . that’s what I’ll do.”
Lines from my father’s letter ran through my mind. He had hung on so long to a bad marriage, ran off to do shameful things that ate him up with guilt. What had my mother done to make my father so miserable, to make him want to leave—to want to die? How could a woman wield such power over a man?
I looked into Jeremy’s angry, pained eyes and realization struck me. Without a doubt, I knew. It had nothing to do with manic depression, with feelings of unworthiness or bad blood or horrible childhoods. It stemmed from something more essential, more basic. The very character and core of a man could only take so much. When men acquiesced and compromised over and over, they were like logs tumbling in turbulent water. The bark eventually wore thin and stripped away, their confidence and personality smoothed into compliance, leaving a drab piece of driftwood. Every day, they lost a little more of what defined them. That’s how Jeremy looked to me, at that moment.
I thought then of another famous poem, by Shelley, one Raff had especially liked to recite, due to its strong emotional content—and because he couldn’t resist enacting the ocean vomiting up the scores of pirate ships that the deep kept trapped in its holds.
“Unfathomable sea! whose waves are years. Ocean of time, whose waters of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore. Treacherous in calm and terrible in storm, who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?”
I pictured some future day, Jeremy and me as survivors, scavenging through the wreckage of our lives vomited up by the sea onto the shore, searching for broken scraps to reclaim from the throes of my mother’s insouciant tossing. In the end, stripped of memory, years, strength, health, we would both become bare bones, bleached by salt and sun, our objections erased by the unforgiving, relentless elements. I saw us picking at the tidbits of memory, the color and flavor leeched away, bland and unnourishing. They would be all we would have to fare on. Not enough pieces left to build a shelter, to harbor a hope, to stave off fear. Only splinters small enough to lodge under the skin, but still able to cause festering and infection. I would only be able to gather what memories I could hold in my hands, finding the pieces light, weightless, without substance. How easy it would be, then, to throw them into the wind and let the brisk ocean breeze catch and carry them back into the sea, leaving my hands bereft of any memory worth clutching.
At that moment, I imagined I could cry an ocean of salty tears. Yes, my mother was both treacherous in calm and terrible in storm. And undeniably, an unfathomable sea. Her demands never ceased, her hunger never abated. Jeremy was right. We had to draw a line and stand firm on it, a borderline, as Joni Mitchell called it. Some mark of in between. Regardless of the outcome. We would just have to salvage whatever we could and hope it would be enough.
I felt as if I had momentarily blinked and my world disintegrated in that instant I wasn’t looking.
“I lay down golden in time, and woke up vanishing.”