Tina runs her foot lightly across the pool’s surface, her capris rolled up to her knees, an old photo album open across her lap. She designed and landscaped this area, and it’s still her favorite spot on the property. She begins most mornings with a vigorous dip, no matter the weather. She’s reminded us more than once Katharine Hepburn swam in twenty-degree temps for decades and did just fine. My father would always say the actress’s tremors probably stemmed from said frigid dips.
We’ve been here since dusk, an hour ago now, perched on the concrete next to the diving board. Up until this point, my mother has not volunteered any impressions of the pictures she charily thumbs her way through. “Did you see your friend fixed the pool light?”
“What? Who?”
“Joe. This afternoon.”
I stare at the milky glow from the bulb underneath the board, expecting to see some remnant of his surprise appearance.
“It went out years ago. I kept begging your father to replace it, but he kept putting it off, and one day I decided I liked it.” She clears her throat. “Well, I thought I like it.” Tina swishes her foot more quickly across the water and brings it down with a hard, defiant splash.
“He’s quite the specimen,” she says, holding my gaze with a curious expression.
“Who?”
“Well, Joe, silly. So, what’s going on there?”
“What do you mean?”
“With the two of you.”
Wow. This is my chance. To finally have a talk about this unexpected journey with Joe.
“Bo Skeet?” She still hasn’t looked away.
And then I realize I can’t. I can’t tell her there’s a chance she’ll never have that wedding or that grandchild even if she continues to thrive.
“He’s a good friend.” The Stalworths don’t love like other people. She said it. Yet this is all I have to say to her. What am I so terrified of? That’s an easy one. I couldn’t live with myself if she found the news upsetting and it got in the way of her healing.
“Oh,” she says quickly. “That’s nice.” The moment is over. And I realize what a moment it was. My face threatens to overheat with the anger and disappointment I’ve pushed down.
“Whatcha got there?” I ask.
“Old photos,” she says, running her finger across one of the pages. “All these folks’ strengths and insecurities put together in one pose. Flicker of clarity, frozen in time. And of course, you’re never aware when someone’s taking your picture that fifty years later, that singular pose may forever define how someone thinks of you. Just like that. Frozen.”
I glance over the edge of the album at a sepia-tinged shot of a very young Tina, her downturned mouth smeared with berries.
“I never knew how to smile when someone was taking a picture,” she says. “I was always trying to figure out what to do with my mouth.”
This was no news to me. Whenever we were on family trips and my father would grab the Instamatic, she’d always stop the proceedings by waving a hand. “Wait! Hang on a second. Oh, phooey!” she’d say, moving her lips this way and that. Something that came so easy for everyone else always seemed like work to Tina.
“You know, I was thinking.” I haven’t quite yet decided how to proceed, but I press ahead. “My whole life I’ve never seen you get really passionate about anything. I mean, I’ve seen you enjoying your painting, but I’ve never seen you get crazy happy about anything. There was always something tentative about your happiness. Does this make any sense to you?”
I realize as I’m saying it that I could easily be talking about myself. Tina looks directly in my eyes like she’s suffered some form of betrayal. I continue carefully. “I’ve noticed there’s this thing you do. Whenever you’re angry or afraid to speak up for yourself, you clear your throat. Now, I’m not talking about the cancer, I’m talking about something you’ve always done. You clear your throat. Did you ever notice this?”
She doesn’t say a word for a moment. Breaking eye contact, I gaze at the other end of the pool.
“Do you know that I was born at home?” She speaks calmly, quietly. “And the umbilical cord was wrapped so tightly around my neck that I almost died?” Tina stares straight ahead, playing with the collar of her T-shirt. “I still can’t stand to feel anything tight around my neck.”
I’m not sure what I expected, certainly nothing this precise.
“You know,” she says, leaning an arm on the diving board, “when I was five, my little sister died of appendicitis. My mother and father never spoke of it again. But I needed to. I had dropped her when we were playing, a few days earlier. She was fine, but I couldn’t help thinking that’s what had brought on the appendicitis. I carried that thought with me every day. I think Mother knew it. That’s how she kept me under her thumb all those years,” she says, a tiny smile crossing her face. “I always had a hunch that I was beautiful, talented, and smart. But Mother always told everyone, ‘Don’t compliment her, she’ll get the big head.’” Tina freezes. “When Mother was dying, I was holding her hand in the hospital room. She looked up and said, ‘So beautiful.’ At first I thought she was talking about me. But then I realized she was looking just past me. Heaven. She saw heaven!” she says, the look of genuine awe on her face swiftly chased away by a fake, upbeat smile. “How could I compete with that?”
A dead maple leaf twirls outside the skimmer. I focus on the last of its whirling trajectory and remain as still as I possibly can.
“Anyway, after I had my children, I said I would always make sure you and your sister knew you were beautiful, talented, and smart.” She pushes a lock of hair out of her eyes and holds it in place. “Guess I left myself out of the equation.”
After hearing this confession that answers so many of my questions, I feel I should offer some solution. It’s a clumsy one. “Do you ever think about teaching? Maybe privately?”
“I think about it, sure. Let’s get me out of the woods first. Okay?”
Since Tina’s clearly been much more forthcoming than I have, I decide to keep the dialogue going. “I’ve never asked you about the hospitalizations.”
“No place to put the anger,” she says.
“Anger at Garrett?”
“At everything. And not just your father. Listen,” she says, taking my hand. “Your father and I have been head over heels in love since the day we met. I’d take a bullet for him, as they say, and him for me.”
None of this was a surprise to me. I knew he signed All My Love on the inside of every card he ever gave her. I always thought it so poetic in its simplicity, this declaration from a man who would tell you he hadn’t read a book since high school. All My Love.
“Here’s what I think happened. Your father came up during a certain time when women weren’t given a voice. There were definitely those who did have a voice. Mother was one of them. It was just in her DNA. She never had to fight to find it. Your grandfather knew that’s what he signed up for. Perhaps if I’d expressed my wishes early on, Garrett would have had to surrender. But I didn’t. I made my bed.” She squeezes my hand harder. “Don’t ever make a bed you can’t get out of, Bo Skeet.”
I squeeze my mother’s hand back, a sign I’ll do my best, whatever that is.
* * *
Through the smudged windshield of the Lincoln, I can see Garrett pacing inside a square of red flags near a stand of poplars marking the site of the prospective camp house. Feeling the only thing his father’s acreage lacked was a body of water, Garrett hired a high-priced contractor and built a lake. Not just any lake, mind you, but a tarn as big as three football fields.
He flaunts the head of a gigantic indigo snake in my face as I slam the door of the car. “Get that thing away from me,” I hiss, tumbling backward into the arms of a bay tree.
Garrett laughs and coils the thing around his neck. “Almost stepped on him when I got out of the pickup.”
“Fine. Just put him back.”
Garrett absentmindedly pets the snake’s head and puffs up his chest, looking out over the site with pride. “So, what do you think?”
“Is this my imagination or will this be a poor man’s version of the house we already have?”
“Won’t be a poor man’s anything, Bo Skeet.”
“So, what’s the point?”
Garrett leans against the electricity post and picks his teeth with a pine straw. “The point is, I’ll have my own place far away from anybody else. And I’ll have my own catfish.”
“Your own catfish,” I repeat without comprehension.
“Yeah. I’m tired of having to go out on that dangerous river. As a matter of fact, they’re already here,” he says, looking out at the lake. “I had it stocked a few weeks back.”
“So you’re building a house only a few minutes away from the one you already have. For catfish.”
Garrett points an accusatory finger at me. “There it is.”
“There what is?”
“That look you give me. That judging look you got from your mama.”
I remember how much better I felt on the John Deere when Garrett had to look up at me from what seemed like ten miles below. Spying a rotted pine stump, I jump up on it like an auctioneer. “I’m sorry, but am I living on another planet here? The Planet of It’s All about Me and Not about the Person Who Has Inoperable Lung Cancer?”
Garrett rolls his eyes. “I think it’s time you got on back to California.”
“Shit,” I say, forgetting I’d promised the powers that be I’d be cuss-free forever. “I am way too fucking old for this.”
“There he goes with the f-word,” Garrett says, turning away from me.
Deciding I want my father even lower than he already is, I indicate a spot on the ground between us. “Please, have a seat.”
Garrett turns around, threatening. “Excuse me?”
Somehow I manage not to look away even though I desperately want to. “Have a seat. Please,” I say, indicating the snake. “The both of you.”
Garrett looks about and sits on the ground. He lets the snake go, and I attempt to camouflage a flinch as the serpent slithers past my stump and into the thicket behind me. Garrett shows the palms of his hands. “Well?”
“Look. I know how much these woods mean to you,” I say, turning around on the stump, taking in the scenery for his sake. “They’re good woods. And I know how much Tina means to you, and I wanna give you something to think about. You’re not gonna like it,” I say, pausing for effect. “But if you build this cabin now, it will kill Tina.”
Garrett offers up a half laugh, squinting at me like I’m crazy before looking down at the ground between his boots and digging one of the heels into the straw.
“And I mean literally do her in.”
“Those are some strong words, son.”
“But it’s the truth.” I realize this next part’s going to be a stretch, like taking a kid from simple addition to trig in one fell swoop, but I figure I’ve got nothing left to lose. I take another strong bead on Garrett. “Tina hasn’t found a way to speak up for herself.”
Garrett blows out a chestful of hot air and jumps up.
“Sit back down!”
“What?”
I’ve no idea I’ve tilted my head back like Clint Eastwood about to have his day made. “Now.”
Garrett glares at me with cold black eyes. I glare back. Several interminable seconds pass before he finally sits back down.
Nothing can stop me now. “Your building this place up here is the least supportive thing you can do. All your energy will be going into it and not into helping Tina get well,” I say, placing my hands on my hips. “Are you with me here or not?”
Garrett seethes, his eyes darting from me to the ground. I hear something jump in the lake below us, probably one of his catfish. He kicks the ground around him in frustration and gets up anyway. “Can I get up now, or do I have to get some kind of court order?”
Without a word, I hop off the stump and head back to the car, where I find the indigo snake coiled by the rear tire. Garrett always said if you weren’t man enough to kill a snake, then you were gonna have to be man enough to meet him again. Jumping back with a gasp too dramatic to cover, I close my eyes and take a deep breath before opening them again. Eyeballing the serpent and gritting my teeth like Kirk Douglas on crank, I pick up the thing with my bare hands. It makes no move to coil around me but holds its head straight out in front, like a divining rod leading me to my target. I kneel down and let it go, watching it closely as it arches its back and disappears.
Leaving the scene, I hold the brake pedal close to the floor, revving the motor at the same time like some Hazzard County redneck. I let off the brake in one lightning-fast move, baptizing the site in a shower of dirt and gravel as the Lincoln bumps and snorts across the pig trail that takes me back to the highway.
* * *
Tina, Sis, and I are seated around the breakfast table, silent, shoulders back in apprehension as Garrett bangs around the counter space behind us. Returning from an early morning marketing trip to Healthy Way an hour earlier, I’d walked into either the Stalworth kitchen or a set from an Irwin Allen disaster movie.
“Son of a bitch,” he spits, slamming a kitchen drawer.
I proceed with caution, wanting to help. “You know, Garrett—”
“Don’t say a word.” He slams another drawer. I can smell basmati rice simmering along with something else I can’t make out.
Garrett approaches wearing one of those full-body aprons with frilly piping. He places a tureen in the center of the table and turns to Tina, serious, nervous. “Madam, may I present your breakfast.” He hurriedly picks up a cookbook from behind him on the bar and reads aloud. “Miso soup contains living enzymes that aid digestion and strengthen the blood.” He slams the book shut and holds it behind him. “So.”
Tina is floored. She peers into the tureen. “You made me miso soup?”
“I did. Would you like me to serve you?”
Tina looks to me and Sis, then back to Garrett, tongue-tied. “I’m not—yes, of course.”
Garrett had attempted to make grits on one occasion soon after he and Tina were married. The effort was such a disaster, the house had to be aired out for a whole weekend. As far as we could tell, this meal was going off without a hitch. Tina, Sis, and I were positively dumbstruck.
Tina holds her bowl out in front of her like Oliver Twist.
My first instinct is to jump up and give Garrett the biggest hug he’s ever gotten. But I’m not about to mess with perfection.