Thank You for All Things (3 page)

Peter was going to take us to Vermont next spring and we were going to help tap maple trees and make syrup, a yearly tradition for Peter and his family. We were going to meet his dad, a widower who, at the age of sixty-four, can walk on his hands clear across his yard (so he would probably appreciate a woman with Tina Turner legs), and his niece, who is twelve and has read
Little Women
fifteen times. A week ago, though, he showed up and handed Mom a poem he’d written on a coffee filter. A poem, he said, that would explain why he needed to break things off with her. He didn’t pick up my book or ask Milo a question that day, but after he handed Mom the poem, he hugged me goodbye, squeezed Milo’s shoulder, and left our Hershey’s Kisses on the table next to our computers. I still have that Kiss.

Mom’s hands trembled as she read the poem while still standing by the door where he’d left her, and when she was finished, she tossed it into the paper shredder. Then she rested her hands on her scarred desk to steady herself and sat down to resume her work. I ran to the window and looked down to watch Peter waggle through the old people and little kids clogging the stoop. “Don’t let him go!” I screamed. “Mom, please! Call him back! Call him back!” But she didn’t. Instead, she asked me if I’d finished my report on archetypes and warned that, if not, I should get busy.

Later, when Mom disappeared into the kitchen to nuke
our frozen dinners, I dug through the paper shredder and tried to find the strips of coffee filter. It would have been impossible to put them back together, so it probably didn’t matter that Mom caught me and scarfed up the scraps and shoved them into the trash. “That’s okay,” I shouted, crossing my arms across my chest. “I know why he broke up with you, anyway. You have an attachment disorder, that’s why. I don’t need his poem to tell me that.”

“It’s like my intuitive, Sky Dreamer, says,” Oma announces, her voice grabbing my attention and yanking me back to the here and now. “Sometimes we need to go home to find the parts of ourselves we left behind before we can truly become whole.”

“Your intuitive? What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Sky Dreamer, my intuitive. I told you about her, Tess. I met her at that psychic convention I went to in California last November. Remember?” Oma pauses to cough. “She told me that each of us—you, me, Lucy, Milo—we all left parts of ourselves back in that town, in that very house, and in our relationship with Sam. She said that this trip will help us reclaim those parts and cleanse our family.”

“The twins were newborns when they left Timber Falls. What could they have possibly left behind but spit-up? Besides, the only things that sound like they need cleansing to me are your lungs. Did this Sky Walker tell you to quit smoking too?”

“Sky Dreamer. Her name is Sky Dreamer.”

“A rose by any other name is still a charlatan,” Mom says.

Oma looks down at the chair opposite Mom’s desk, and I hurry to remove the stack of books, folders, and notebooks from its seat. Oma pats my back as she sits down and props
her other hand on the baggy white purse now resting on her legs. “Tess, you’ve always had an aversion to the concept of ‘going home.’ When you were three years old, you’d plug your ears every time you heard Bing Crosby’s ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ play on the radio. And do you remember what you did to that Home Sweet Home pillow Marie made me for my birthday?”

Mom picks up the Bible and her pencil and runs the tip of it down one of the parchment pages. “I don’t think we need to go into this, Mother,” she says. Mom calls Oma “Mother” only when she’s upset. The rest of the time it’s simply, “Ma.”

Oma turns to me. “My best friend in Timber Falls, Marie Birch, made me a needlepoint pillow for my birthday one year. It was beautiful. Burgundy and peacock blue, some gold. Your mother hated that thing from the moment she saw it. She swiped the seam ripper out of my sewing box and hid it under the sofa cushion. Then, whenever I left the house in the evening, she’d take it out of hiding and pluck at those tightly woven threads, letter by letter, word by word, until the whole adage was gone.

“I couldn’t for the life of me understand how the threads could have come loose, period, much less over the words only. That is, until I found the seam ripper under the cushion.”

“That’s enough, Mother!” Mom snaps. “Crissakes, like I don’t have enough on my mind now, and you have to bring up old crap that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the problem I’m dealing with today.”

Oma turns her attention back to Mom. “Oh, but it has everything to do with your problems today. Don’t you see that?”

Oma sets her purse on the floor, then parks her arms
on Mom’s desk and leans in. “Scoff if you want, Tess, but I believe that you’ve always had these aversions because, deep down, you’ve always known that one day you’d have to go back home and deal with the pain you never dealt with. Did you think you could rid yourself of it simply by leaving Timber Falls? Honey, it just doesn’t work that way. Think of the toxic waste they dumped in the ocean back in the sixties. Was it gone because we couldn’t see it? No. It washed up on other banks, just as toxic as ever. Tess, you know what I’m talking about. On a soul level, you know.”

I look at Mom. I don’t know what Oma is talking about, but Mom certainly does, because her navy-blue eyes pool with water. My throat tightens then, because when I see her pain, the emotion swelling under my breastbone makes me want to cry. I glance over at Milo to see if he’s empathizing with Mom too, but he’s not even looking at her. I know Mom would have to start wailing before he’d notice that she was in distress. And considering that Mom’s lids are already blinking like windshield wipers, I know Milo isn’t going to notice.

Oma leans over and presses her hand—the one sporting a sapphire half-moon ring surrounded by diamond chips—over Mom’s hand that’s holding the Bible. “Honey,” she says, her voice soft and pleading, “I need you to drive me to Timber Falls. Would you do that for me?”

Mom leans back in her chair and slams the Bible down. “Take the bus. I’m not doing it.”

Oma sits erect and gasps, “Oh, Tess. I can’t do that! You’ve seen the people who take the buses. God bless their pitiful souls, but I’m afraid of them.”

“Then drive yourself. You have a car.” Mom is referring to the 1965 wine-red Mustang coupe that Oma’s last boyfriend, Roger, gave her. The one he had a new CD player
and Bose speakers installed in, so that after his heart bypass surgery he could take Oma to see New York, Frank Sinatra crooning the whole way. He had a heart attack the day before his surgery and died, leaving Oma his car. It’s sitting in a parking garage somewhere in the city, the storage paid for two more years.

“You know I can’t drive a standard, Tess.”

“Then sell the damn thing and buy an automatic!”

Oma takes a deep breath, then drops her hands to her legs and positions them in shuni mudra—the tips of her middle fingers touching the tips of her thumbs—to give her patience. She takes a cleansing breath as Mom mutters, “Oh, Jesus,” and rolls her eyes before she looks back down at the Bible.

When Oma is done breathing, she looks at Mom with tofu-soft eyes, but she doesn’t say anything. She just stares until Mom looks up.

Mom studies Oma carefully under a hem of bangs. “Okay … now that you’re all ‘centered,’ maybe you’d like to come clean and tell me the
real
reason you’re so determined to get me back there. Or to go yourself, for that matter.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Oma says in a voice higher pitched than normal.

“Of course you do. Cut the crap, Mother.”

Oma takes another cleansing breath. “Okay,” she says.

“Maybe there is another reason, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sincere about honoring my promise, because I am.”

“And what would that other reason be?”

“Your father’s leaving you the house, Tess.”

“What?” For a moment, the only sound in the living room is the sound of Milo’s pencil scratching paper.

“Well,” Oma finally admits, “it wasn’t exactly his decision. It was your aunt Jeana’s. Sam made her executor of his
will a couple of years back, and Jeana’s decided that you should get the house.”

“What’s the catch?”

“You get the house only if you spend this time with him. Now, before he dies.”

Mom bolts out of her chair, pacing behind it, one hand on her hip, the other rubbing her forehead. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” Mom says, smashing Oma’s calm to bits with that f-word. Before Oma can respond, Mom puts her hand up. “Okay. I’m sorry. It just slipped out, but, Ma, you’ve … I … God, I don’t even know how to respond to something this absurd.”

“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. That this is typical Jeana behavior, manipulative and controlling. But I believe that her intentions are good.”

Oma gets up, circles the desk, and puts her hand on Mom’s arm. “Honey, please. You have to stop and think this over. What are you going to do until you get your royalty check? Run your credit cards up even higher? I know you’re almost broke, and I’m not in a position to help you. And now with you having to move out of here for a while … Well, it can’t just be a coincidence that Jeana called when she did. It just can’t be.”

Oma lets go of Mom—probably because Mom has just deflated and is suddenly too emotionally drained to stomp away—and Mom leans her back against the wall, rumpling her chapter-by-chapter outline on oversize paper tacked behind her. She grabs the sides of her face, stretching her eyes and mouth into a replica of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream.

“Tess, you know I wouldn’t ask you to go back there with the children if … well … if he was the same man he used to be. But he’s not. He’s old and frail, and he’s dying. You need this for your spirit, and you need this for your
bank account. I talked with Marie last night, and she said that property prices are going up astronomically now that so many folks from here and Milwaukee are buying land up there so they can vacation and retire in the pristine north woods. Your father’s house sits on forty acres of hardwood. As soon as he passes on, you can sell the place and rest assured that if these romance books you’re writing don’t do more than this one run—which they probably won’t, only because your intentions aren’t genuine, I might add—you’ll be able to support these kids for a good long time.”

Mom sits back down on her chair. Hard. She sighs and runs her fingertips in tiny circles over her temples.

Oma turns to look at me and then at Milo, who is wheezing over his books. “It would do the children good to get some fresh country air and sit a little closer to the earth. They’d have acres of trees to climb and grass to run on.”

I get a lump in my throat when Oma says this, because besides dreaming of being a figure skater and a shaman, I dream of running barefoot on grass. There’s grass and a few trees in the park we pass on the way to the university where we borrow our books. Whenever we pass that park, I press my face against the grubby bus window and ask Mom if we can
please
stop. And every time, she says that we will when we aren’t in such a hurry. But I know that a lack of time is not the real reason. The real reason we can’t stop is that the park is filled with homeless people stretched out on park benches, their small bundles wadded into pillows, and with crack whores who do obscene things with men for money so they can buy more crack. And then there are the bangers from the People Nation, or the Folk Nation, who congregate there at night sometimes to exchange money for drugs, or shoot each other, or whatever else it is those scary gangsters—the same boys who will stab or shoot Milo if he goes to
school—do. After the bus passes the park and I sink back against the seat, Mom always promises that one day soon, when we have more time, we’ll take a different route and stop at a nicer, safer park, but we never do.

Oma gets up, clasps her hands together softly, and asks who would like tea. I’m the only one who says yes, so Oma invites me to help her make it.

We go into the kitchen and I get out the basket we keep our tea bags in while Oma fills the teakettle. There’s tea to pick you up, calm you down, put you to sleep, wake you up, clear your mind, help you focus; any mood you could possibly want is in those little pouches of tea. Unfortunately, I don’t think the tea itself can alter moods enough, because after Mom’s literary novel bombed, she drank gallons of tea laced with Saint-John’s-wort, but in the end she still needed to go to a doctor to get an antidepressant so she could get out of bed. The Paxil didn’t make her happy, but she did get out of bed and start writing her Christian romance book.

“I don’t remember my grandpa Sam,” I say, as I rummage through the bags.

“Of course you don’t, Lucy. Not consciously, anyway. You and Milo were newborns when you saw him last.”

“Well, at least we saw him once, even if we were too small to remember. We never saw our dad, though, did we? Not even when we were newborns.”

“No, dear,” she says, giving my flimsy blond hair a stroke. She looks as sad as I feel, so I choose guarana chai tea for the two of us, to boost our spirits, and calming chamomile tea for Mom, if she decides she wants some after all. “Your mother, I’m afraid, chooses the kind of men I once chose. Men like her father. Selfish men who only respond to their own wants and needs.”

“Not Peter,” I say. “Peter paid our rent the month before
Mom’s advance check came, when our charge cards were maxed. And when Mom and Milo had the flu last winter, he brought them Tylenol and juice, even though he was sick with the flu himself.”

“True, dear. But then your mother didn’t choose to stay with him, now, did she?”

As Oma digs through the cupboard for the honey, I put her tea bag and mine into the two cups that are sitting side by side. I take the tea-bag strings and twist them slightly at the ends so they are entwined. Just as Oma and I are intertwined in some way I can’t quite put my finger on but that she explains by saying our souls knew each other before we came into this world.

Oma’s got a point. Mom didn’t choose to stay with Peter. Just like she—obviously—didn’t choose to stay with my father.