*After church on Sunday, Bobbie made a light lunch for her mother and herself. Riko picked at her portion of the Cobb salad.
“I hope they figure out what happened to Dean soon. Maybe he was attacked by someone passing through town. I hate to think someone from Tangle Falls could be responsible.”
Lately Riko had reached that stage of old age where she was beginning to shrink. Always a small woman, she looked unbelievably tiny and frail as she clutched the wool scarf tightly to her body.
“Are you cold, Mom?”
“A little.”
It was going to be a hot day and Bobbie didn’t want to start the furnace. Instead, she got her mother some slippers and helped her put them on. “Have you heard from Mac? Is Sunday dinner on tonight?” When ranch life got too crazy—as it often did in the springtime—her brother and sister-in-law would have to cancel.
“It’s on.” Her mom gazed out at the mountains and sighed.
Something was definitely wrong when the prospect of a family dinner didn’t cheer up her mother. Bobbie dropped into a nearby chair. Riko had always had a happy, outgoing personality. Lately she seemed quieter. This morning even sad.
“Are you feeling okay? Did you take your medications this morning?” Her mother had been incredibly healthy most of her life—which she attributed to her green tea habit—and she resented the cocktail of pills she was now required to take. A pill to lower cholesterol, another for her blood pressure and, recently, something to combat hypothyroidism.
“Yes, I took them. But I am feeling a little blue this morning.” She lifted her hands, then let them drop into her lap. “I’ve been thinking about Dean and Odette and your grandfather. All the people we lost too soon.”
“Is there something I can do to help? Would you like to go for a drive to Jewel Lake this afternoon?” She knew it was one of her mother’s favorite places.
“Your father and I used to love to hike around that lake. But it’s not the same now that I can’t walk very far. I’d rather visit the cemetery. Maybe we can stop on the way to Mac’s? Would you mind?”
“Of course, I wouldn’t mind.” But Bobbie was worried about her mother’s state of mind, and she didn’t think a trip to the graveyard was going to help.
*
When Bobbie pulled into the cemetery lot at three that afternoon, there were no other vehicles. The sun was high and the forest-covered mountains, the rolling hills, and adjoining pastures showed the results of a plentiful snowpack and ample rain in April and May. All was fresh and green and perfect. The cemetery grounds were especially beautiful, thanks to George Linderman’s tender care. Thick lush lawns were neatly mowed, and the walking paths had been freshly graveled and raked.
Bobbie pulled a folding lawn chair and three small bouquets—for each of her grandparents and her father—out of the back seat. “Looks like we have the place to ourselves.”
But she’d spoken too soon. In the far back of the cemetery, in the shadow of a massive Douglas fir, George was sitting on the ground, having a solitary picnic. She waved, but he either didn’t see, or he didn’t want to see.
Bobbie had a lot of sympathy for George. She wished she had been able to do more for him when he was a young teenager in her class. She’d seen the way the other boys, usually spearheaded by Rene LaPierre and Dean Kavanaugh, alternately bullied or ignored him. She’d tried both talking to the boys and punishing them when she caught them in the act, but all to little avail.
Teachers and school administrators tried a lot harder to prevent bullying these days. But even with their zero tolerance policies, bullying still happened. And in some cases, was even worse, thanks to social media.
She’d done her best to help George after his family died. She’d put in a word for George with the town council, to get him a job with public works after he left high school, and George had done well with it. The town parks and public spaces had never looked better than under his care, particularly the cemetery. She’d also found him a new home to live in and gathered donations to get it furnished.
All very practical and useful things.
But she’d never sat down with George, taken his hand, and asked if he wanted to talk. She’d never invited him to dinner or out for a walk. And as far as she knew, no one else in town had either. The community which she found supportive and friendly had let him down. Let his family down.
Bobbie gave herself a mental kick in the head. Here she was ruminating about the past again. Retirement was a veritable field of land mines. Why had no one warned her?
As she and her mother headed toward the family plot, Riko also spotted George. “He’s still mourning after all these years. Poor fellow.”
“Yes.”
“Go talk to him, Bobbie, while I pay my respects.”
She would, but first Bobbie set up the chair in some shade for her mother and made sure she was comfortable. Then she turned to her grandparents’ grave marker. The concrete slab was dark and pitted with age, but the names and dates were still legible.
In loving memory of
Tasaka
Mitsue and Haruto
Bobbie kissed her own hand, then touched the etching of her grandmother’s name. Mitsue had been a protective, loving, dynamic force in her life, unlike her grandfather who had been a quiet shadow in the background.
His deportation and the forced labor on road camps had demeaned him, diminished him, and he never recovered. He’d died relatively young, more than twenty years before his wife, so for that reason as well, Bobbie’s memory of him wasn’t as strong.
Her mother though, had adored her father.
Bobbie placed two of the flower tributes beside the grave markers. It was an interesting custom, this bringing of live flowers to a cemetery, knowing they would soon die. It felt a little too “on the nose” for Bobbie. Yet, it was what people did. And she had so many flowers blooming at home right now, it was good to make use of them.
One thing you could count on—George would remove the blooms once they withered and lost their beauty. He kept a tidy graveyard.
“Thank you,” her mother said. “I’ll sit here awhile, then move on to your father.”
Mac McArthur was buried with the rest of his family, where space had been set aside for her mother too. For Bobbie, this was too morbid to contemplate. She wanted a green funeral for herself. She’d told her brother to take her somewhere on their family ranch and bury her in a compostable bag. He said he wasn’t sure that was legal, and anyway, how was the family going to remember her if she did that?
Her husband hadn’t wanted a burial either. He’d asked to be cremated; his ashes spread out over the forest preserves where he had loved to hunt. That didn’t stop her from remembering Colin, but Bobbie did sometimes regret the absence of a plot and a marker where she could sit and reflect, the way her mother was doing.
She started toward George and the huge Douglas fir in the rear, southwest corner of the grounds. Though he didn’t glance in her direction, she could tell by the way his back stiffened, that he knew she was approaching.
“Hi George. It’s a nice afternoon for a picnic.”
“Hi Mrs. G. Today it is,” he agreed. Spread out at his feet, on a well-worn blanket, was an open thermos, an empty sandwich container, and one of the Deadwood Junction cinnamon buns. George was dressed in his usual summer uniform, a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. It didn’t matter how hot it got as the summer progressed. She’d never seen him in shorts, or a lighter colored shirt.
George’s weekly picnics at his family’s graveside were common knowledge in town. After the first year people expected the frequency to decrease. But George never faltered.
Most took it as a sign that he “wasn’t all there.” Bobbie figured he’d just never gotten over his catastrophic loss.
“May I join you for a bit?”
“Sure.” He still hadn’t looked at her, not directly, but after she’d sat cross-legged on a corner of his blanket, he did turn his gaze toward her briefly.
Bobbie smiled. “You’re a very devoted son and brother.”
“If I don’t remember them, no one will.”
Did he ever think about what would happen when his life was over? Who would remember George? “I understand you want to keep their memory alive. But you can’t live in the past. Making friends has never been easy for you or your family in Tangle Falls.” That was an understatement. “Have you ever considered moving? Making a fresh start. You’re hard working, healthy and strong. You could meet someone. Start a new family.”
“You’ve always been nice to me Mrs. G. And I know you mean well with your advice. But I can’t move.”
“Can’t George…or won’t?” Bobbie prodded gently.
George let out a long, ragged sigh. He turned his face up to the sky and closed his eyes. “I’m not even supposed to be alive. If I hadn’t had that fight with my dad and gone off into the woods, I would have died with them. That’s what was supposed to happen.”
Bobbie felt a shiver, like a ghost exhaling at the base of her neck. If ever there was a place to believe in spirits, it was a cemetery. “What happened was tragic. Horrific. But the part where you didn’t die—that part was good.”
He sat up straighter, rubbed his wrist. “It’s never felt that good to me.”
“Sometimes people who survive a terrible event, like that fire, feel guilty about surviving. Back when it happened, I should have urged you to go for counseling. A lot of time has passed. But it’s not too late. It would be healthy for you to talk through all that happened and how you feel about it.”
“Don’t worry about me, Mrs. G. I’ve got my routines. I’m comfortable with my life the way it is.”
What more could she say?
Bobbie stared at the date on the gravestone in front of them. The date George had lost his family: October 31, 2002. A few months shy of being twenty years ago.
According to the investigators the fire, which had started shortly before midnight, hours after the Linderman family left the town Halloween party, had been accidental. The Linderman’s had set up a Halloween display close to the house—four jack-o’-lanterns displayed on a stack of dry straw bales. The investigators surmised that the candles in the pumpkins had been left burning and had ignited the dry straw sending the entire display up in a blaze.
Unfortunately, the wind that night had been in the wrong direction, and it carried sparks from the fire to the wood siding and cedar shakes of the house. George’s parents, Steve and Jean, and his sister Susie, had all died of smoke inhalation in their sleep. It was some comfort knowing they hadn’t suffered.
If George hadn’t been out walking in the woods—blowing off steam after an argument with his father—he would have died too.
Bobbie remembered there had been some speculation that George’s father might have set the fire deliberately. Her own husband Colin had believed this theory. There were signs that the family had been under stress. Steve had lost his job a few months earlier. Since then, he hadn’t made any of his rent payments for their house or the quarter section of land where he and Jean raised turkeys. With hindsight, others noted that Jean had stopped bringing her kids to church those last few weeks.
The town went through some painful soul searching at this point. Had any of the men invited Steve for a drink, given him a chance to talk? Had any of the ladies from church visited Jean? What about school…did the kids get support from their teachers or other students?
The answer was no.
And so, when investigators concluded that in the absence of any sign of an accelerant or other evidence of arson, the cause of the fire was accidental, the town breathed a collective sigh of relief. No one wanted to admit that they could have done something to prevent the tragedy.
Years later, once the fire had receded into most people’s distant memories, Colin had told Bobbie that there were some people who still thought the fire had been set deliberately. Not by the father, but by George.
After all, he’d admitted to arguing with his father. And he was the sole survivor. Maybe the reason he kept up his weekly visits to the family gravesite was because of guilt, not grief.
It was a theory Bobbie couldn’t even contemplate, let alone believe.
“George I’ve got a lot of regrets for how your family was treated in this town.”
“I’ve got regrets, too, Mrs. G. Doesn’t help anything. But I sure wish I hadn’t argued with my dad that night.”
Bobbie was encouraged. It was healthy for George to talk about this. “What was the argument about?”
“I was mad at him for making us go to that party. We looked like fools. No one wanted us there. Mom and Dad never got it. They didn’t realize no one actually liked us. The adults tolerated us, and the kids bullied us.”
“Oh George.”
“That party was no different. Susie and I stood around awkwardly, while Mom and Dad moved from one group to another, getting nothing but short answers to their questions and polite smiles. Later, when the food was served, I noticed that no one—other than us—ate any of the cookies my mom and sister spent all afternoon baking.”
George clenched his hands into tight fists and the muscles in his throat worked hard to keep him from crying.
Bobbie wanted to cry too.
She wanted to fold George into her arms.
But he was a grown man now, no longer a young student in her seventh-grade science class. Instead, she merely placed a hand lightly on his arm. “I’m very sorry.”
What was she apologizing for? So much. For the people in her town. For herself. She did remember talking to Jean that night, but her conversation had been perfunctory. She’d been going through the motions, not showing any genuine interest. Or caring. She hadn’t even asked Jean why she’d stopped going to church. She hadn’t asked if there was anything she could do to help the family.
“You don’t need to say that.” George rubbed his wrist again. It seemed to be a nervous habit. “You’ve always been nice to me. You got me this job. Helped me buy my house.”
When the cabin at the end of Providence Avenue came on the market fifteen years ago, Bobbie had told George about it and then walked him through a budget that proved he could afford it. That was all.
“I just wish there was some way to make things better for you. Nothing can bring back your family. Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier living somewhere else? Some other town where the memories aren’t as painful.”
“Like I said, I can’t do that. Who would visit their graves if I wasn’t here? Who’d bring flowers and remember them the way they were?”
Bobbie felt on the verge of tears again.
“I hate thinking back to that last argument I had with my dad. Cause now that I’m older I see that he was brave to keep trying. He and my mom, they had good hearts. They were doing their best. And all I did in return was make them feel like I was ashamed of them.”
“Oh George. All teenagers do that to their parents. You’re too hard on yourself.”
“Maybe people should be hard on themselves. Then, when they hurt other people, they might learn something from it.”
Bobbie suspected he wasn’t just talking about himself now, but the kids who had bullied him and his family. From what she’d seen, the worst offender of this had been Rene LaPierre, but Constable Kowalski’s words from earlier came back to her. The only person who really knew the damage caused by pranks and bullying was the victim of those pranks and bullying. Was it possible that, in George’s eyes, the worst offender had been Dean?