Lovey

Bring Her Back Up

My momma named me Lynn because it could be a boy’s name or a girl’s. She wanted me to grow up to do big things with my life, and she thought that having a name that could have been a boy’s would make people take me more seriously.

But, it didn’t much matter because, once Annabelle was born, she changed my name altogether. When she was a child, I used to say to her, “Oh, I love you,” and, with those muddled little toddler syllables running together like they do, she would say back, “Oh, Lovey.” From then on, that’s what practically everyone called me.

I kept thinking of her as that tiny girl, sitting on the floor in the den at Dan’s feet, playing with makeup in my bathroom, riding her bike around the front, circular driveway. The memories of this house were so pronounced for me, such a normal part of my daily routine, that I couldn’t imagine being without them.

That’s why saying you’re going to move to assisted living and actually doing that same thing are very different matters. If I had ever been anything for my daughters, it was steadfast. I was brave and fearless. And if I wasn’t, I never let it show. Maybe it was old age, the instability of it all, the loss of balance, the lack of memory, the persistent pain of the process of breaking down. Or perhaps it was removing the man who had made me feel invincible for all this time and throwing me into the river without so much as a float. But being alone in that house with him all night, every night, was the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had.

Every snore or gasp of breath convinced me that I would peek over the foot of the bed to see the man I had loved more than myself cold, blue and gone from me. Every creak down the hall or rustle of leaves from the trees was someone coming in to rob us, and, slow and decrepit from age, I couldn’t get to the gun to defend myself—though no one could deny that my shot was better than the sheriff’s. Every cell phone beep or TV flicker was the smoke alarm going off, and, though I may have been able to get myself out, my husband was a sitting duck.

“Oh, Momma,” Lauren said gaily, sorting through a drawer of memories in the den, “surely we can get rid of some of these old clippings or letters or crumbling photos.”

“I know!” Louise chimed in. “I can take all these old photos and scan them into one file so you can access them anytime you want.”

“Or, I can have them all printed into one photo book,” Martha said.

I nodded slowly to appease them, but knowing as well as my right from my left that I could never part with these things. Clippings of my girls’ names appearing in dance recitals might not have seemed worth saving. But they were my memories. These drawers, overflowing with old bankbooks, receipts and never-filed photos were all I had left to hold on to.

I heard the front door creak open, and Jean called, “I’m here!”

I shuddered. Jean was the least sentimental, most cutthroat of the bunch. She would have dumped my drawers with all their memories into one black Hefty bag without a second thought and just left them right there on the street like a squirrel that has been run over.

“Momma,” she said, “it’s fine to keep all your stuff, but you can’t move it all into a nine-hundred-square-foot assisted living apartment. It’s not possible.”

“I know,” Sally said. “Why don’t I take all of this home with me, and I’ll organize it into a couple of scrapbooks for you so that it’s all together.”

“Well,” I started. “I just don’t know . . .”

“Come on, Mom,” Jean pressed. “You know you don’t even look at all this old stuff.”

I peered down into the drawer on my lap and looked at the stack of papers and clippings in my hand. My girls looked in these drawers and saw a bunch of old junk. They didn’t realize that this receipt from Penney’s was for the pram that Dan surprised me with when we first found out I was pregnant with Sally. Or that I could just see Louise’s happy little face when she brought me this kindergarten report card filled with “satisfactory” marks. I glimpsed a photo of Dan and the girls standing in front of our old house in Bath and realized that, as it is with all lives, the memories that filled these drawers weren’t universally happy. But they were universally mine. I pulled out a boarding pass and smiled again, thinking how passionate Dan was about travel.

I looked at my girls, sorting through my possessions on the floor. “Fine.” I exhaled. “Sally, put it all in scrapbooks. But don’t you dare throw away one single thing.”

“Oh, I won’t, Momma. I promise.”

Sally was as big of a pack rat as I was. “Jean.” I glared at my youngest girl. “Now don’t you even think about helping.”

She laughed. “The good news for you is that with the election coming up, all my time will be dedicated to signs, speeches and debates.”

I smiled at her, proud of my boldest girl’s spirit and tenacity. She had lost three times before she was elected mayor. And, as it is in all purposeful lives, the falls taught her just as much as reaching the top. I turned over and looked at my husband, napping in his chair. And it made me think that we ought to shake things up. I knew right well that it made me crazy. But I finally said out loud what I’d been planning the past few weeks all the same. “Girls, I’ve decided I’m taking Daddy to Martha’s Vineyard next week.”

“Momma!” Sally said. “That’s insanity. Why on earth would you do that?”

I shrugged. “He loves to travel and, who knows, a trip might perk him up a bit.”

“Well, I can’t go with you, Momma,” Lauren said. “I absolutely have to work.”

I caught Jean rolling her eyes at Martha. They were always accusing Lauren of acting like a martyr.

“I could probably go, Momma,” Louise chimed in. “I could get one of the other teachers to take my classes next week.”

Louise’s yoga studio was her husband and her child all rolled into one. She had started it before yoga was the trend, and, between the vinyasa classes, chanting meditations and nutrition counseling, her business was bigger and busier than I think even she could have imagined.

Chartering a plane briefly crossed my mind. But then I thought of single Louise and divorced Lauren, and I worried, as I always do, that they wouldn’t have enough one day. And so, as Dan and I had always planned, I mentally penciled it in the savings account register for my family’s future.

“No, no, girls. I’ll take a nurse.”

“A nurse isn’t enough, Momma,” Sally said. “You need one of us to go with you. I’ll see if I can get off of work.”

Martha smiled. “I wish I could go, Momma, but my kindergarteners are just learning to read, and you know that’s my favorite part of the year.” It briefly broke my heart that Martha and John had never been able to have children of their own. But teaching gave her that connection with the children that she loved so much.

I know you aren’t supposed to have favorites, but, when you get a little older, maybe it’s that you quit thinking clearly and maybe it’s that you quit caring so much about everyone’s feelings. But I smiled, knowing that one of my girls didn’t have a thing to do next week. “I think I might ask Annabelle to go.”

“She’s in the middle of moving, Momma,” Jean said, shaking her head.

“What?” Martha asked.

Lauren rolled her eyes. “We all know what, Martha. Come on.”

Louise interrupted. “Y’all don’t know. This might work out perfectly, they might be married for seventy-five years, and you are all going to eat crow.”

Sally smirked but didn’t say anything.

Jean put her head in her hands. “Just pray, all of you, every night, that she doesn’t have a baby with him. If she doesn’t have a baby, then we’re okay.” She pointed her finger at Louise. “And you pray to your Buddha or whatever just in case.”

I rolled my eyes heavenward, thinking that I could have been even more concerned about my daughter’s choice of religion than Jean was about Annabelle’s marriage.

“Momma, what do you think?” Sally asked.

I shook my head. “Nope. I’m not going to talk about the poor girl when she isn’t here to defend herself.”

“But she won’t talk about it when she is here,” Lauren said. “So it’s not like any of us can put in our two cents.”

“It’s because she doesn’t want any of your two cents,” Louise interjected. “They’re madly in love with each other. I don’t know why y’all can’t see that. The way they look at each other . . .”

Martha elbowed Jean and, in a loud whisper so we could all hear, said, “Hence the reason she isn’t married.”

Louise smirked. “Ha. Ha. Ha. Y’all are all so hilarious.”

“There’s just something about him,” Sally said. “I know they’re crazy about each other, but I just don’t trust him.”

They all looked at me again, and it took everything I had not to join in the Ben roast. I wanted not to think it, but I couldn’t stop the question from rising to my mind: Wonder how long it’ll last? I inhaled sharply, lecturing myself. It might not have been the future I had imagined for my girl, but she had done it. She had married Ben.

“Girls, all I know is that her ship is sailing straight without a cloud in the sky. And while it’s that way, we’ll all sail together.” I sighed and smiled, thinking about the way my Dan always used to give me these words of encouragement when we were having a hard time with one of our girls. That’s the most difficult thing about parenting: watching your children go down a path you’re unsure of, letting them make those mistakes. But, oh my goodness, those mistakes are one of the most important parts of growing up. “And when it goes down . . .”

Five heads, all in unison, clearly thinking of their daddy too, nodded as I finished my sentence. “We’ll swim to the bottom and bring her back up.”