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After Jim got locked up, I spent the next two years writing letters and making telephone calls, doing everything I could think of to secure his freedom, to release him from suffering the worst thing he could have imagined. It was a long drive to Angola, but I visited Jim as often as I could. I brought cookies and brownies and bright, color photographs of Emmy—walking, talking, laughing, growing up without a father.
Jim had been sent to prison so quickly that part of me thought there had to be some rapid way to reverse the process. I was convinced, at least in the beginning, that I had only to find the right angle, and then Jim could be free again.
As it turned out, all the phone calls and letters in the world from someone like me weren’t going to make some judge or prosecutor change their minds about someone like Jim. Living in Gulfy, having friends like I did, running my business, living what I considered a normal life, I had forgotten or had allowed myself to forget that we were invisible to people like that. The way the outside world, the marks, viewed us was one part of the story I couldn’t change.
As I struggled to adjust to my new circumstances, my mind turned to the many tasks I had left unattended in my single-minded obsession to get Jim out of prison. I thought of the letters I had let go unanswered and began to crave the one piece of my life that it was in my power to have. I wanted my mother.
Mrs. Schendel’s voice when she answered the telephone was exactly as I remembered it. I was twenty-five years old and hadn’t written to her in two years or spoken to her in almost eight, so there was a great deal for me to apologize for, but I was determined not to let the time lapse compound, like Gigi had with her father.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. I’m really, really sorry,” I blubbered. She forgave me, of course, cutting short my apologies to ask me questions about what was really happening in my life. I confessed that the whole story of living in New York City had been a lie, an invention to distract people from my actual whereabouts with the carnival, working in the sideshow, just as Missy had suspected. I told her that people knew me as Lola Stanton now, part stage and part married name. I described Jim as my husband and our marriage as an informal sort of arrangement. We even talked about my document business, the profitability of it and the independence of having money with no boss looking over your shoulder.
My worst regret, of course, the hardest one to mention, was that Emmy had been alive for nearly three years before Mrs. Schendel even knew of her existence.
“You have a daughter?” Mrs. Schendel asked. The surprise and delight in her voice mixed with a crisp edge of anger that I would keep such information from her.
I promised to bring stacks of pictures, hundreds of them, of every moment of Emmy’s life from the moment she was born. I babbled on, desperate to wipe away her disapproval, to have my new enthusiasm erase my former reticence.
“Okay, okay,” Mrs. Schendel relented. “I can’t wait to see them all. Oh, and I’ll have to get her a little present. What do you think her favorite color is?”
“Purple.”
***
The air-conditioned interior of the Breeze Palm Restaurant felt shady and cool after trudging across the shimmering parking lot, holding Emmy’s hand. Indigo spots, remnants of St. Pete’s everlasting sunshine, flashed behind my eyes when I blinked. I suppose I was easy enough to identify—certainly no amount of clothes or makeup or hair changes could obscure a five-hundred-pound body, which was a lucky thing, too, because I would never have recognized Mrs. Schendel if she hadn’t spotted me first.
She had been sitting out on the restaurant’s back patio with a hunched, white-haired man. She waved her hand high above her head when she saw us step inside the restaurant and walked toward us, gaining speed as she got closer until she was almost jogging. The man, who must have been Saul, stood up after her, taking the time to push her chair back under the table.
The dark, stringy hair Mrs. Schendel had always worn woven into a lank bun at the nape of her neck had been replaced with a short, springy haircut and frosty highlights. She had on blue eye shadow and coral lipstick, too, and wore orange Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless cotton blouse with tiny oranges and green leaves on an ivory background. Many of the other patrons eating their lunches were around the same age as Mrs. Schendel, but most of them seemed old and dumpy compared to her. She had retained her slim figure and good posture. Her movements were freer, her body somehow more elastic and graceful, and finally, she was the best-looking woman in the room.
“Sarah, my God, is that you?” Mrs. Schendel squeezed me with such strength that I couldn’t keep myself from crying. While her appearance might have changed, her scent remained the same. Shalimar and cigarette smoke lined with something plainer, more basic and less easy to detect, a wholesome goodness reminiscent of baked bread. Even in the land of red-and-orange dappled sunshine, she smelled like a warm kitchen on a cold day. Her embrace was the same relief and rush of heat you felt stepping inside from bitter winter weather, your cheeks staining with blood at the suddenness of the sensation.
I pulled back from her. “You look wonderful,” I said.
Mrs. Schendel gripped the tops of my arms to study my face. “I look old,” she said. “You’re beautiful, though.” Hearing those words when I had many memories of Mrs. Schendel nagging me to lose weight and think of the future or of her praising the inner me she divorced from my big body was like a cool, healing balm on a wound I didn’t know I still possessed.
I did in fact look very different from when she had last seen me. My hair had caramel streaks. I did my makeup every day, not as heavy as when I was onstage with the floodlights washing out my skin, but the overall effect was certainly more dramatic than subtle. I drew dark wings around my eyes and used wine-colored lipstick. In fact, if I compared the image of Mrs. Schendel and me before I left for the carnival against what we looked like on that day at the Breeze Palm, it was as if we had burst free from a drab sepia photograph and were now living in full color.
Saul reached his hand over Mrs. Schendel to tap me on the shoulder. “I’m Saul, and you must be Sarah.” He bent down to look at Emmy, who had remained glued to my leg in all the confusion and noise. “And who do we have here?” he asked, leaning his face close to Emmy’s until she laughed.
I picked up Emmy and kissed the soft skin of her cheek. “This is Emmy.”
“Well,” Mrs. Schendel said, “if you aren’t just the cutest thing, then I don’t know what.” She smoothed Emmy’s silky blond curls.
“Emmy, say ‘hi’ to Grandma.”
My use of the word Grandma caused Mrs. Schendel to burst into sudden tears. Emmy, who normally wouldn’t accept being held by a stranger, went without complaint into her arms.
“Hello there, precious plum,” Mrs. Schendel whispered into Emmy’s hair.
Some of the other diners had stopped eating to watch our reunion. One woman in particular made no pretense of doing anything other than staring outright at my bulk, so I looked straight back at her.
Mrs. Schendel turned her head to see what had caught my attention. “Hey, you,” she said. “Mind your own business, and eat your lunch.”
We sat at a table out on the back patio under the shade of an umbrella. Mrs. Schendel took a pair of big round sunglasses with bright-white plastic frames from her straw purse. “This place has the best boiled shrimp.”
“They get them right out of the Gulf,” Saul said.
He was holding Mrs. Schendel’s hand, their interlaced fingers resting on the glass tabletop—something that she and my father would have never dared do in public, something that she would not have done with her first husband either. Never in any of the many times Mrs. Schendel had convinced me to attend church with her and Mr. Schendel or when I’d seen them together at her house had I ever noticed any gesture of affection between them, certainly nothing as visible and casual as the way she and Saul touched each other. I smiled, happy that she had this love, that she didn’t have to hide herself, to be invisible, any longer.
Mrs. Schendel drew her chair closer to mine so we could look together at the thick stack of photographs I had brought.
“I had two sets made so you could keep one,” I said. As promised, there were dozens of pictures of Emmy, who sat on my lap, holding the new purple teddy bear Mrs. Schendel had given her.
“See that, Ursula? Now, you’ll have something to show the old biddies,” Saul said.
Mrs. Schendel pushed his arm. “You go on, you. It’s true, though. All anybody ever talks about around here is their grandchildren.”
There were photographs of other people too. “This is my best friend, Gigi,” I said. “She used to work as a sword swallower. And here’s one of Gigi’s father, Isaac, and our other friend, Ora Ann. She’s a fortune teller.” I smiled at the image of the two of them. “They met at Gigi’s wedding and then ended up getting married themselves. He used to be a farmer, but now he takes people out on a fishing charter, and Ora Ann runs Miss Oracle’s Parlor out on Highway 41.”
“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like that,” Mrs. Schendel said.
“You can meet all of them when you come visit,” I said. “And this is my house.”
Mrs. Schendel held the photograph of my neat little white house closer to her face. “Is that hibiscus you’ve got growing in the back there?”
I nodded. “And here’s Jim and Emmy.” It was one of the last shots I had of Jim as a free man. He was standing in the living room, holding baby Emmy high up in the air, the two of them laughing. Tears fell from my eyes, dropped onto Emmy’s head. She slapped her scalp, twisting on my lap to see what was the matter. I half expected Mrs. Schendel to tell me not to worry, that Jim would somehow be home in no time. Her silence devoured the childlike hope that I hadn’t even known I had retained that my mother, Mrs. Schendel, could show up and make everything better.
“Emmy,” she said. “This picture belongs to you, honey. Maybe your mommy can get you a pretty frame to hang it in your bedroom.”
Saul cleared his throat. “You know, Sarah, if you don’t like shrimp, they also do a very nice chicken salad here.”
***
The shrimp were delicious, big pink ones cooked to perfection. While we ate, Saul talked about the dry-cleaning business he had owned for many years in Philadelphia before retiring to Florida. One of his adult daughters lived in Seattle and the other in Boston. “It’s hard sometimes because they’re so busy. I just wish they lived closer.”
Mrs. Schendel nodded. “Edna visits every winter. Harold doesn’t like making the trip, so she comes by herself. We go out to restaurants and sit on the beach. I bet it’s the most fun we’ve ever had with each other.” She reached over to examine the line of stitches along the sleeve of my blouse. “Did you make this?”
“I did.”
“Not too bad,” Mrs. Schendel said. “The stuff you find on a store rack is all junk anyway. Maybe I should get you to come work for me.”
We all laughed while Emmy slid from her chair down under the table. “Sit up here, Emmy.” I waved one of the coloring books I had brought and felt around the tabletop to gather up her crayons.
“Ah, we’re too boring for her,” Saul said. “Emmy, why don’t we go look for shells and leave your mommy and grandma here to talk?”
“You’re sure you don’t mind?” I asked Saul, who was already reaching down to grab Emmy’s hand.
Emmy looked up at me from under the table and then at Saul as if to assess his suitability as a playmate. She smiled as if to say she found him acceptable.
The back patio of the restaurant was directly on the beach, so I took off Emmy’s shoes. She accepted Saul’s hand and ran with him to the sand. As I watched them go, I wondered if Mrs. Schendel would take advantage of their absence to ask me at last any questions she might have kept preserved in the cellar of her mind about Jared and how he’d died. She turned in her chair to watch Saul and Emmy, saying nothing, though.
The day was hot. Saul shucked his pale-blue polo shirt, showing off the astounding tufts of white hair on his upper body. Emmy picked up something from the ground and gave it to him. He nodded solemnly at the object in his hand while Emmy laughed.
Mrs. Schendel smiled. “He’s a good man. The best I’ve ever known. I mean... not that your father...”
“No, don’t worry. I can see how this is different. I’m happy for you. I really am.”
Mrs. Schendel patted my hand. “Remember how we used to sit around the kitchen table at your old house after your father died? You would drink tea, and I would have coffee. We’d have to keep our eye on the clock to keep track of when Jared would get home. I don’t even remember what exactly we talked about. I was probably telling you to scrub the floors and stop eating cookies and whatever else I always nagged you about.”
Mrs. Schendel’s incidental mention of Jared felt like a sudden opening, the only opportunity I might have to tell her about the night he died. The moment, brief and unstable, was a doorway that might vanish in an instant.
I began talking, building speed with each word. “Yeah. About Jared. That night, you know? It all happened so fast, and the thing is...”
Mrs. Schendel squeezed my hand rather hard. “Listen to me, honey. Jared is dead. And that is really very sad. It’s tragic, actually, because he was a young man who could have lived for a long time yet. And he could have had many experiences that might have changed him, maybe for better, maybe for worse. We’ll never know. His opportunities are gone. Don’t you waste any of yours, though, on regret. You know, I used to be afraid for you, scared that you’d never get to experience anything in your life. I even told your father at the time that he was wrong to pull you out of school, but I wasn’t your mother, so I couldn’t stop him. And here you are, so confident and independent. You’ve got a nice house, friends, a husband, a good business so you can support your family, and that beautiful, beautiful little girl.”
Mrs. Schendel’s advice sounded remarkably similar to Jim telling me that sleepless nights worrying about the past would keep me from enjoying the life I had built. Jared’s death was tragic. She was right about that, and I could mourn him as my brother and as the friend he might have become.
Mrs. Schendel kissed my forehead. “I’m so proud of you.”
Mrs. Schendel’s praise and her conviction that I had a right to move forward no matter what had happened in the past were like the diaphanous blue of the sky, instilling a sense of perfect symmetry in me. As if after so many years apart, the two of us had completed a cycle, and now we could spend the next part of our lives together.
We were both quiet for a moment as we watched Saul and Emmy playing on the beach and, beyond them, the tide washing onto the shore. Emmy stood in front of Saul, swished her hips, and turned in a circle.
“She’s quite the little dancer.” Mrs. Schendel laughed when Saul tried to imitate Emmy’s dance steps.
“I used to do a similar sort of move when I was on the stage,” I said. “Toward the end of my act, I’d do a half spin and then a shuffle hop.”
“Is that right?” Mrs. Schendel took off her sunglasses. She leaned her head back for the light to shine fully on her face. “It’s so nice and sunny here.”
“It sure is,” I said, thinking of the graceful moves Emmy had learned from me and remembering the hot glow of the footlights.
I twirl. I step. I raise my arms over my head, reaching as high as I can, and then bend forward to the crowd as I take my bow.