I jounced the car back onto the tarmac and turned a sharp left, toward town.
“I don’t want to hear another word,” I said, my teeth clenched. “You had no right to do this. Did you?”
Austin’s face fell. “I just thought you needed to know. For closure.”
“You don’t get to decide what I need to know,” I said.
The ride back to town was less than five miles, but it seemed to take hours. Austin turned the radio on again, and turned his back to me.
Traffic around the square was heavier than normal. I pulled up to a parking space at the courthouse, across the street from Fleur. “This is the best I can do,” I said.
“It’s fine,” he said, stony-faced. He opened the car door, started to get out, then thought better of it and got back into the front seat.
“You can stay mad at me if you want,” he said. “But I care about you, Keeley. I know you think you’re over your mama’s leaving you. But you’re not. You can’t be. Nobody could be over something like that. Just think about what I’ve told you. Okay? I searched the vital records data bases for all those states in, like, two hours on the computer. All that stuff is online now. If I had more information I could really get some answers.”
“No,” I said. “Look. It’s not like I’m some motherless waif. I had Daddy and Aunt Gloria, and they did just fine by me, thank you very much.”
“I need the name of the man your mama ran off with,” Austin kept up, pretending he hadn’t heard what I said. “And there are a bunch of other questions I want to ask you too.”
“Goodbye,” I said pointedly.
After he’d gotten out of the car, it took a few minutes before I could back out into traffic. I circled the square three times, looking for a parking spot, but it was hopeless. Without thinking about it, I headed the car toward my daddy’s house.
The driveway was empty. Monday. It was Daddy’s golf day. Before my hissy fit, before I’d gotten him kicked out of Oconee Hills Country Club, Daddy usually played eighteen holes with his cronies on Monday afternoons. He hadn’t said anything about it, but I knew he’d switched over to playing the public course over at the state park. This was something else for me to feel guilty about. The state course has more rocks and red clay than greens or fairways, and there was no posh clubhouse, locker room, or grill to repair to with his buddies after a punishing round in the blazing sun. He probably sat on the trunk of his car to change out of his cleats, and stopped at the Starvin’ Marvin on 441 for a cold Budweiser on the way back home.
Which would be several hours from now.
I let myself into the kitchen. It was neat and tidy, as always. For a bachelor, Daddy was a bit of a biddy. He never left dirty dishes in the sink, never failed to sweep the kitchen floor, which he mopped every Saturday morning.
The kitchen still smelled like Pine-Sol. When had he gotten into these habits, I wondered. Was that something his mama had done, mopped on Saturdays? Or had it been the practice of my own mother? I’d been such a little kid when she left, I had no idea how things got done around the house back then. I knew Daddy worked at the car lot, and Mama stayed home and did lady things, like cooking and cleaning and making sure I got to school and dance lessons and spend-the-night parties at my friends’ houses.
I opened the refrigerator door and reached automatically for the green Depression glass refrigerator jug full of cold water. The refrigerators had changed over the years, but the jug had not. We always had a pitcher of cold water in that green glass jug. Even though Daddy’s refrigerator had an ice and cold water dispenser on the door now, he’d kept that jug refilled, year after year.
In the cupboard over the sink I found a juice glass and poured myself some water. On the bottom shelf of the pantry I found the Porky Pig cookie jar, and helped myself to a package of Nabs. Daddy bought cases of Nabs to keep at the car lot for his customers and salesmen. I think they fed them to me as a baby instead of teething biscuits.
Chewing and sipping, I walked aimlessly around the house. In the living room I toyed with the gold-framed photos Daddy kept displayed on Mama’s piano. I had never actually heard anybody play that piano. Now I plinked some of the keys, surprised to find that it sounded as though it was in tune. There was my high school graduation photo, with me wearing the off-the shoulder drape the studio had supplied all us girls. I’d felt self-conscious about the amount of cleavage that drape revealed, but never said anything about it to anybody. Next to the graduation photo was one of Daddy with his arms around me and Gloria, on his fiftieth birthday, taken a few years ago at the surprise party Gloria had organized at the country club. There was an awful baby picture of me too, in a frilly pink and white dress, with a pink bow Scotch-taped to my nearly bald head.
I plinked the piano some more and wondered about what wasn’t there. No photo of my mama. Had there ever been any? I tried to remember. Once maybe, a wedding picture of the two of them. It seemed to me Mama had been feeding Daddy a piece of wedding cake in that picture. Or had I just made that up?
The bookcases that flanked the fireplace were full of old Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, my red leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica set, and some tired-looking twenty-year-old hardbacks. I pulled each out by the spine and looked them over. Daddy’s reading mostly consisted of the Morgan County Citizen, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Car and Driver, Sports Illustrated, and the occasional paperback spy novel.
So these would be my mama’s books. The titles seemed to run to romances—Forever Amber, The Flame and the Flower, like that.
I leafed absentmindedly through the pages. A yellowed slip of paper fell out of the pages of The Flame and the Flower. Despite all the years that had passed, I recognized her printing, instantly. She always printed my name on the brown bag lunch I toted to school. Keeley Murdock. As though there were another Keeley in my class. We’d had two Jennifers, two Stephanies, a Kirsten and a Kelly. But I was the only Keeley.
The paper was a grocery list, written in pencil on a scrap of lined notebook paper. Nothing exciting, nothing that gave a hint of what my mother’s daily life was like back then, or why she’d up and left.
Coffee. Sugar. Haf-’n-Haf (she was a terrible speller), Clorox, baloney, tin foil, eggs, shaving cream, aspirin, strawberry Jello, pineapple tidbits, cream cheese.
The baloney would have been for my lunch. I had a baloney sandwich on Sunbeam bread, with French’s mustard, every day. Mama cut my sandwich in half on the diagonal, and I always threw the crusts away, because Daddy said eating crust gave you curly hair—and mine was already way curlier than I wanted. The pineapple and cream cheese and Jell-O would have been for one of the congealed salads she liked to make. I never could figure out how something with Jell-O and pineapple qualified as a salad, but in Madison, Georgia, it did.
I smoothed the grocery list with my fingertips. She would have borrowed the paper out of my Blue Horse school notebook, I thought. Driven her red Chevy Malibu over to the Piggly Wiggly, probably while I was at school. After I got too big to ride in the shopping cart, she didn’t like to take me with her to the grocery store, because I drove her crazy begging for sugary cereals, candy, ice cream, and potato chips. Maybe she’d stopped off at Madison Drugs after the grocery store, for a Coke over crushed ice, and to hear the latest gossip at the soda fountain.
And then home to unpack the groceries and do whatever else she did all day. What did she do with her time? I wondered. I didn’t know if she watched soap operas, like my grandmother. I’d never known her to play bridge, like some of my friends’ mothers. She talked on the phone, saw her friends, went to Myrtle Beach for a week with them every summer—no kids, no husbands.
I ran my fingers over the spines of the other books on the shelves, and feeling slightly guilty, shook each one out. What was I hoping to find? An airline ticket? Love letter? I thought about all those birthdays that had passed. Each year, for the week up to and after the big day, I’d raced home from school, hoping to find a card from her. I never got one. After I came home from college, before I moved into the apartment, I’d surreptitiously gone all through the boxes and trunks up in the attic, hoping to find some stash of cards and letters from her that Daddy had hidden. I never found anything.
On the top shelf of the bookcase I pulled out four different volumes of Echoes, my parents’ yearbooks from Morgan County High. I took the latest one, 1970, picked up my package of Nabs and my juice glass, and climbed the stairs to my old bedroom.
I put the glass down on my nightstand and opened the top drawer of my bureau. The bottle of Joy was hidden under some half slips. I uncapped it, closed my eyes, and inhaled.
The pages of the Echoes stuck together slightly, so I used my fingertips to pry them apart. How many times had I gone through this yearbook with her? As a child I’d been fascinated with the idea that she’d been a teenager once. At bedtime I’d beg her to show me the yearbook, point out her friends, her enemies, her favorite teachers. I’d looked in vain for Daddy’s picture, until she’d pointed out that he was four years older, and had graduated before she ever set foot inside Morgan County High.
Here was the page of faculty pictures. I smiled at the one of her geometry teacher, Mr. Osier. Somebody (not me! Mama had protested in mock horror) had drawn a mustache and pointy horns on his head. She’d never been any good at math either.
I’d loved the club pictures. Mama had been so popular. Spanish Club, Drama Club, Pen & Palette, Student Council secretary. She’d worn a different outfit in each picture, cute little miniskirts or bell-bottom hip-huggers. In my favorite one, she’d worn an Indian headband and fringed leather skirt.
“Were you in a play?” I’d asked.
“That was just the latest style, that year,” she’d said. “I saw Cher wearing an outfit like that on television, and saved up my allowance and bought one just like it at Rich’s at Lenox Square Plaza in Atlanta. I was the first girl in school to go native!” And she’d laughed and laughed about that.
I flipped through the pages of senior portraits until I got to hers. Jeanine Marie Murry. Her chin was tilted up in the picture, and her eyes, with their dramatic sweep of black eyeliner, frosted eyeshadow, and goopy mascara, seemed focused on something far away. Beneath the picture was listed a list of her activities and accomplishments, and then, as with every senior, her favorite quote. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by.” Robert Frost.
Sure did, I thought, slapping the book closed.
I started to put the perfume bottle back in the dresser drawer, but thought better of it. Instead I took it, and the yearbook. Downstairs, I washed out the juice glass, dried it and put it back in the cupboard. Everything was as it was when I’d come in. And Wednesday night, salmon loaf night, I would come back here, sit across the table from Daddy, and talk about the things we always talked about. How, I wondered, could I get to the place where I could talk to him about the thing we never, ever, talked about? Jeanine Murry Murdock and the road less traveled.