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The wind blew hard and cold off the gray water of the Pacific Ocean, with occasional gusts pushing through like a rude giant hurrying through a moving crowd. Between the gray of the water and the gray of the sky, seagulls wheeled and shrieked, sometimes diving into the sea. The smell of salt water and wet vegetation wafted over the sandy beach whenever the wind lessened for a moment. Waves whispered up the sand, coming to within a yard of Susan Thompson’s bare toes.
Susan sat still, her eyes fixed on the foamy white tops of the waves rushing toward the shore. Was the tide coming in? She didn’t know. She should have asked at the hotel, she guessed. She felt like the tide came in during the evening. She’d read that, or seen it in a movie, maybe. It was late afternoon, but probably not late enough for the tide to be a factor in what she was here for.
To her right, north of where she sat, the water boomed against tall, black rock cliffs. She marveled at the difference between that loud, aggressive surge of water compared to the sibilant wash of water over the brown sand where she sat. It was no wonder her parents had loved this place. No wonder they had chosen it for ...
Her eyes moved away from the retreating wave and lingered on the gold urn to her right. A silver plate attached to the curved metal jar read William J. Thompson, 1945-2021. Her knees were pulled up between the two urns. She skipped over her jeans and looked at the matching urn on her left. Barbara A. Thompson, 1946-2020.
“I knew he wouldn’t last long without you, Mom,” Susan whispered, the words ripped away by the wind and blown behind her, back toward her home in Wyoming.
Cancer had taken her mother two years ago. She had fought it for a while, and after losing her hair to chemotherapy, she seemed to be winning the battle, but then the disease came back with a vengeance, and she refused to fight any longer. She asked only that when the pain became too much she would be given something to dull it. Two months after that, she was gone, a small, bent, cold and wasted skeleton of the vital, loving, warm woman Susan had known all of her life. The woman who had helped her into her wedding dress, had tended to her during two miscarriages, and had comforted and kept her sane when Susan learned her husband was having an affair and had gotten his mistress pregnant. After the divorce, Susan and her mother had become closer than ever, often sitting together and knitting and watching medical and true crime shows during the evenings. It was during this time that her mother had opened up and told Susan stories about the early years of her courtship and marriage to Bill, Susan’s father.
“He was a farm boy back in those days,” Barbara said, her knitting needles dipping and twisting at a speed Susan thought she would never match. “He was as strong as a bull, but as shy as a bunny. I never would have known he liked me at all if his sister, your Aunt Tabitha, hadn’t told me. I remember she invited me to go get a soda with her at the Knox; that was a little cafe that’s been gone for years and years. She’s two years older than your dad, remember. I had never talked to her. She was a senior and I was just a freshman in junior high. I didn’t know what to think when she came up to me as I was walking home and asked me to come to the Knox and have a soda with her, but I went.” Barbara paused and focused on her knitting, her eyes drifting far back in time.
“Aunt Tabby hooked you up?” Susan prompted.
Barbara laughed. “People did not ‘hook up’ back then,” she said. “She bought me a root beer float. Not just a soda. Those were ten cents back then. We sat at a table near the window and she told me her little brother liked me and she wanted to know if I liked him and if I would be good to him.”
“What?” Susan asked, laughing with surprise. She knew her aunt was an outspoken lady who didn’t tolerate unimportant conversation, but this seemed out of character even for her. “What did she really say?”
Barbara smiled, her knitting needles still flashing. “‘My little brother is Bill Thompson. He’s in your history class, and you’re all he talks about at home. I know my brother and I know he hasn’t said a word to you about how he feels, so I’m telling you,’” Barbara quoted verbatim from a happy memory. “Then she said, ‘If you like him, you’ll have to speak to him first. If you don’t like him, leave him alone. I better never find out you flirt with him just to hurt his feelings’.”
“No way! Aunt Tabby really said that?” Susan asked, her own knitting paused, her eyes wide.
“Hand to God, Susan,” Barbara said. “I’ll never forget it.”
“What did you do? Did you like Dad?”
Barbara laughed softly. “I didn’t even know who Bill was. The teacher called him William. He was very quiet. He came into the room alone every day and went to his seat somewhere behind me. From what his sister said, he spent most of every class looking at me. It was almost embarrassing how she said he described my hair and neck and how some days he was in awe because I turned my head and he could see my eye.”
“Creeper,” Susan said, laughing. “I can’t imagine Dad being like that. And he really said all that to his sister?”
The smile slipped away from Barbara’s lips and her voice softened. “Your grandparents weren’t always the people you knew. Bill had a hard life growing up. He was the only boy born to a farm couple, so he was a hired hand from the time he could walk. His dad worked him hard and was a drinker, so sometimes he was cruel. His mom was physically strong because she had to be to do her share of the work, but she was morally weak and let her husband rule with an iron hand. Tabitha was the only person your father had to talk to, so they were very close.”
Susan remembered trying to reconcile the old couple living in a nursing home to the people her mother had described to her on that long-ago day. She didn’t want to believe it, but her father had later corroborated the story of his childhood.
“So, what happened next?” she asked. “You asked Dad out?”
“Oh, heavens, no!” Barbara said, the sparkle coming back to her eyes as her needles clicked again. “Girls didn’t ask boys out back then. I took a couple of days to, you know, study the situation. He got to see my eye more, I can tell you, as I kept turning to sneak glances at this mysterious boy who described me in such loving detail to his scary sister.”
“You were scared of Aunt Tabby?”
“You better believe it,” Barbara said.
Susan giggled. “I guess you liked what you saw?”
“He was cute, in a unique kind of way,” Barbara admitted. “And I did catch him looking at me more than a few times. I smiled at him once and he turned the cutest shade of red and looked down at his desk so fast you would have thought he’d looked into the girls’ restroom.”
There was another pause and Susan couldn’t stand the suspense. “What did you do, Mom?”
“I bumped into him as we were leaving class the Friday after Tabitha had her talk with me,” she said. “I made sure all my books fell out of my hands and scattered across the floor. If he didn’t pick them up, I’d know he wasn’t a gentleman and I wasn’t interested.”
“He picked them up?”
“He dropped to his knees like a sinner in church and grabbed every book and paper I’d dropped, stacking them all on top of his,” she said, grinning. “Then he stood up to face me and I said I couldn’t tell which books were mine and that since he’d bumped me like that he could buy me a milkshake while we sorted out which books belonged to whom.”
Susan had laughed so hard her eyes watered. “So, you did ask him out,” she accused.
“I demanded satisfaction for his crime,” Barbara said in a mock-haughty tone, smiling all the while.
“But you bumped into him,” Susan said.
“I was a lady. The fault was all his for not letting me through the door first,” Barbara retorted. “Never mind that I almost had to sprint from my desk to get there as he was going through it.”
The urn was cold under Susan’s caressing fingers. She traced the script of her mother’s name and dates, remembering that conversation and so many others. She turned her attention to her father’s urn and ran her fingers over the cool metal. Her father’s devotion to his wife had never been in question. He had been lost when Barbara was confined to the hospital. That’s when Susan realized he didn’t know how to use the stove, the clothes washer or dryer, and had never mopped a floor. All their married lives, he had worked while his wife kept up the house and paid the bills. He was lost and nearly helpless.
Bill Thompson had been perfectly healthy the day his wife died, but within a couple of weeks he was noticeably thinner. He began having heart problems, but no doctor could find the cause. He complained constantly about feeling alone. Then he developed breathing problems. Again, no discernible cause.
“It isn’t unusual for men to follow their wives to the grave,” his doctor had told Susan once after a battery of inconclusive tests. “Especially men who were married for decades to the same woman and who were as dependent on their wives as your father was on his.”
“He’s dying of a broken heart?” Susan had asked.
The doctor had sighed and looked away. “That’s not an official diagnosis, but yes.”
And then William Thompson died.
Susan had been surprised when her mother died and instead of a burial Barbara had been cremated. “We decided this a long time ago,” her father explained in a listless, dull voice. “It’s what we both want.”
When her father passed and his will was read, it stipulated that she had to bring both urns to the beach near Lincoln City, Oregon, and scatter her parents’ ashes into the wind coming off the ocean so that they would blow across the country, giving them the chance to travel, something they had never had in life.
“I don’t want to,” Susan said. The wind caught her words, blew them into her brunette hair streaming behind her, and carried them away. “I like having you with me.”
But she knew she had to do it. It was their final wish. The last thing they had asked her to do for them.
She pushed herself to her feet and bent to remove the lids from both urns. She put the gold lids with the flip-flops she’d dropped beside her when it proved easier to traverse the sand barefoot, then lifted the urns. Somehow, it seemed appropriate to step into the water, so she walked forward a few paces until the icy autumn water washed over her feet, then tried to suck away the sand she was standing on. The wind blasted against her face.
Susan turned her back on the ocean. Her hair whipped into her face, blinding her, but her hands were full and there was nothing she could do about her vision. She rotated her wrists to turn the urns upside down and felt the dust-to-dust contents running out as the containers became lighter.
“What the hell? What is that? It’s all over me,” a man’s angry voice shouted.