Heart and Home (20 page)

“Me too,” he said.

As much as I had been
looking forward to experiencing the hayride, my attention was elsewhere after
his proposal. I simply soaked in his presence and enjoyed the warmth of his
arms around me while I listened with a longing I hadn’t ever experienced before
to Becky explaining that the skeletons were just pretend to her little boy. I
watched the moon weave in and out of the clouds, and thought about what it
might feel like to be someone’s mother. When I looked over at Becky, both boys
moved in and put their arms around her, as if clinging to her very being would
make all the wrongs in the world all right.

Hadn’t I felt that way about
my own mother as a little girl?

My first memory of Halloween
was a similar excursion. We’d gone to the local farm to pick pumpkins and the
people working the stand dressed up in costumes. I vaguely remembered being
afraid to walk over to the pumpkin I really wanted out of fear. She knelt down
and took my hand to explain that they were just people dressed up in costumes
because Halloween was the one time of year that a person could dress up to be
anything else in the world that they wanted to be. I could still hear her
laughter when I asked her why people wanted to be skeletons and vampires, but
she hadn’t laughed at me, just my observation.

I glanced around the cart,
little girls with their daddies, boys holding their mothers’ hands, and as Troy
gave me an affectionate squeeze, I wondered what he was thinking about, and
whether or not he had any hopes for a family in the future, or dreams of being
a father one day, despite the rocky relationship he had with his own father.

It was fun to watch their
faces, the fear and realization that it wasn’t real, the moments of surprise
and laughter as they leaned in to whisper some funny thought or secret
observation to the parent beside them. I glanced over at Becky and Marty, both
seemed to be more occupied with their kids’ reactions than the actual show
outside the cart, and while just a couple of months earlier I might have
thought something like that an inconvenience, now I wondered how much more
exciting it life would be through a child’s eyes if that child were your own.

And it wasn’t just Troy, or
the romance building between us. Despite my tangled emotions I knew I wasn’t
ready for anything as serious as that with him, or anyone else for that fact.
Thinking about my mother, about how many times she said as long as I was happy,
she was happy, or bragged about her big, smarty-pants writer daughter working
for the city paper…

Was that what parenthood was
all about? Living and dreaming through your children?

For the first time in my
life, I wondered if that was one of the great secrets of being a mother.

“What are you daydreaming
about?” Troy left a soft kiss on my cheek.

I shook my head, “The
future.”

It was as simple as that.
There were no strings attached to it, no immediacy about it. I just realized
for the first time that there were children in my future. There must be,
because despite all the differences between us, despite my career minded goals
and lack of enthusiasm about scrapbooking and baking homemade apple dumplings,
my mother taught me that to be a mother was the greatest joy in the world. And
while I hadn’t known anything for certain about my life since I that that job in
the city, I suddenly knew in my heart that someday I wanted to be someone’s
mother.

I almost laughed out loud at
myself, and how funny the mind worked. One minute I couldn’t keep my mind off
of Troy half dressed in a doorway, and the next I was daydreaming about
motherhood. Whether there was any connection between the two hardly mattered,
but I still couldn’t help grinning a little stupidly about the whole tangled
mess inside my head.

After we circled back to the
entrance and unloaded, I promised Becky I’d meet them at the car in a minute
while Troy and I sorted out the details of our plans.

“So, do you want me to just
meet you back here?”

“The last run should be over
around ten-thirty, so you can do that,” he drew inward and kissed the top of my
head.

“I’ll see you then,” I
stepped back, squeezing his forearm before letting him go.

As I slid into the car,
Becky turned back to eye me with suspicious glee. “What was that all about?”

“Oh, we’re meeting up when
he finishes the last run.”

“And what color did you want
your bridesmaids to wear? I can give you a list of colors I don’t look good in
if you’d like.”

“Rebecca!” Marty scolded
with a snort of laughter.

“Oh, it’s all right, Marty,”
I latched the lap belt into its buckle. “She’s got our whole future all mapped
out. Kids, the white picket fence, you name it. What were our dogs names again,
Becky?”

“That’s enough.”

“She’s a sucker for everyone
else’s romance,” he sighed.

“She is, isn’t she?”

“All right you two, stop
talking about me like I’m not here.” She turned back in her seat with a joyful
smirk and added, “How am I supposed to help it that I can take one look at a
couple and tell whether or not they’re meant to be together.”

“Next thing you know, she’ll
be on Oprah, hired out as a relationship psychic, or something,” Marty teased.

“I’d pay for her services,”
I chimed in, and the three of us held up the playful banter all the way back to
their house.

Chapter Nineteen

After tucking her boys into
bed, Becky sauntered back into the den and sighed, flopping into the seat at
the computer beside me. She leaned over my shoulder and surveyed the website I
was browsing over, “Any luck?”

“Not really,” I took my hand
off the mouse and leaned back until the chair squeaked. “There was this one
thing I was reading, about spirits emitting these high electromagnetic frequencies
and people who are sensitive to that sort of thing experiencing dizziness and
even fainting.”

“That’s right,” she stopped
herself, brow furrowed. “I forgot about you fainting that day. Do you think she
was there that day? At the cemetery, I mean.”

The thought sent chills down
the backs of my arms, “I don’t know. One minute I was standing there and Dad
went to throw dirt on the casket. After that I don’t know, I just couldn’t deal
with it. My face felt numb and my knees started shaking and next thing I know,
I was on the ground looking up at Troy.”

“That’s right,” Becky
nodded. “Troy to the rescue. Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”

“Weird how?” I shrugged my
shoulder. “Lottie Kepner and my mom were friends. Her chair was right beside
Dad, and Troy was one of the pallbearers.”

“Well, maybe your mom is
trying to tell you that you and Troy are meant to be together.”

I rolled my head along my
shoulders, laughing all the way, “Becky, not everything is about Troy and me.”

She nudged me with her
elbow, “Hey, look at this.”

I lowered my gaze back to
the computer screen and scanned the headline of the page she was on. “When a
Spirit Lingers,” I said out loud.

“It says here that sometimes
the soul lingers if there is unfinished business or they have a message they
weren’t able to deliver while they were still alive,” Becky traced her finger
across the screen as she read over the words. “So you were probably right about
her trying to tell you something.”

“But what is she trying to
tell me?”

Becky shrugged her shoulders
and then leaned in to read the remainder of the passage. “You said she was
mouthing something to you the night you saw her at the top of the stairs, but
you couldn’t make out the words, right?”

“Exactly, and that morning I
woke up and felt like she was there with me, she was talking to me,” I
remembered. “It was this thing she used to do when I was a little girl, come in
and sit beside my bed while I was asleep. A couple of times she caught me still
awake, but I pretended to be asleep anyway.”

“Think hard, Janice,” she
urged me. “Think hard and try to remember what she said to you just before you
woke up.”

I closed my eyes, all the
while shaking my head, “Something about it being painful,” I remembered. “That
even though it was painful, it was my path.”

“Huh.”

“Huh?” I looked toward her
for some kind hint. “Does that mean something to you?”

“No, you?”

“Not a thing.”

Becky’s hopeless breath
matched my own, and for a long moment neither of us knew what more there was to
say. The sound of the television filtered out from the other room as the
furnace kicked on. Marty started to snore and the two of us just looked at each
other before bursting into giggles, covering our mouths with our hands to keep
from disturbing her sleeping husband.

“I swear, sometimes you’d
think I was married to a lumberjack,” she snorted, drawing her hand away.

“How do you sleep at night?”

“It’s not as bad as when he
falls asleep on the couch sitting up,” she said. “Mostly it’s just a low
rumble.”

“Obviously it’s bed time,” I
glanced behind us for a clock. “What time is it anyway?”

She zoomed in on the
computer, “It’s quarter ‘til ten.”
 

“I should probably get
going,” I noted. “Get there a little early…”

“So what could the two of
you possibly have planned for so late on a Friday night?” She wagged her
eyebrows at me.

I could feel my face warming
with the prospective night ahead, “No plans.”

“No plans,” she offered a
smug grin. “Now aren’t you glad I made you come out with me and the girls
Tuesday night?”

“I was glad before he showed
up,” I told her. “And besides, I still owe you for that whole thing. Don’t
think for a minute I’ve forgotten about it.”

“I’m still hoping you
remember me when you’re planning your wedding,” she stuck out her tongue and
ducked away as I raised my hand to playfully slap her. “I’m sorry we didn’t
find anything else about this stuff with your mom. Maybe it really would be a
good idea to go see a psychic or a medium or something. I can talk to Lydia.”

“Yeah, okay,” I nodded. “But
like I said the before, don’t mention the situation. I feel crazy enough as it
is just talking to you about it, especially after my dad gave me the nuthouse
treatment. The last thing I want is for some perfectly nice woman I barely know
to think I’m a loony.”

“You’re not a loony,
Janice,” Becky pushed her chair away from the computer. “Things like this
happen all the time. Look, the subject alone produced over a million results on
Google. Apparently, a lot of people go through this.”

“I guess,” I shrugged. “I
just wish someone else would see or hear something. I mean, I don’t want my dad
all freaked out, but it’d be nice to know I’m not alone.”

“Maybe you are alone in it
because you’re the reason she’s still here.”

“Maybe.”

It gave me a lot to think
about, and with a little more than half an hour to kill before I was supposed
to meet Troy, I decided to take a drive to think things over and maybe clear my
head. The streets of Sonesville, which had once been as mundane and familiar as
dragging a tin cup along my own prison bars, seemed different somehow. The
houses themselves were more personal, almost refreshing compared to the sterile
high-rise and cramped city housing I had grown accustomed to in Pittsburgh. There
were no gates closed over the shops at five o’clock, and the huddled shadows
walking down the sidewalk on Main Street weren’t some violent gang set out to
highjack or rob, but a group of teenagers walking home from the Friday night
dance at the high school.

I wasn’t naive. Danger in
places like Sonesville was often far more devastating than city tragedies.
People in small towns were more relaxed, so when disasters hit, they hit hard
and the whole community took the blow. Like when that little girl was snatched
right out of her bed the summer I worked at the
Sonesville Standard
, the entire town spent days searching the
surrounding fields and woods for her body. In Pittsburgh it seemed like those
sort of things happened every day and people were just accustomed to it.

At eighteen, city life after
spending my whole life as a country mouse was like living on the edge. Every
walk to the bus stop, every sound in the night was a thrill, but over time the
thrill faded and paranoia started to set in. I reached the terrifying stage
that required a can of pepper spray and a stun gun for me to feel safe leaving
my apartment.

And driving, well that was a
luxury I hardly got to enjoy. Despite the fact that I had a perfectly good car,
I had very little time to drive into Butler County or any of the other
neighboring towns with a homier atmosphere. All that time. All those refusals
to ever set foot in Sonesville again. Had it just been pride holding me back?
Now that I’d returned I couldn’t even remember the sole force driving me out
all those years ago.

Sure, everyone was in your
business. It got under my skin to hear that Troy and I going to the movies was
the water cooler topic at my father’s place of employment. And Troy’s story
about his father’s backward notion that a farmer’s son didn’t need an education
just so long as both of his hands worked burned me up inside. Church on Sundays
and pot luck socials were a nightmare growing up, but on the other hand the
very same community that liked to gather were there one hundred percent to
celebrate my mother’s life after she’d passed.

If I died in the city, would
anyone even care?

I could almost hear my dad’s
voice stirring in the back of my mind, “You think too much, Jannie.”

Maybe he was right, but if I
didn’t think about any of it, would I just keep going through the motions over
and over again? Then I had to ask myself whether or not Troy was right, and my
whole change of heart about Sonesville was a false spark of confused emotion
surrounding my mother’s death? What if I did decide to move back and it turned
out that it was no better than living in the city?

I crawled through Sonesville
street by street, passing the Five and Dime, Walters Auto Supplies, the feed
store, the abandoned
Standard
building, feeling nostalgic and even a little homesick until I finally came out
onto the country stretch of interstate that led to the Kepner farm. There was a
surge of traffic that passed me by that must have come from the hayride, and
when I was two miles out the road I slammed on the breaks to avoid a troupe of
deer taking their time crossing. While my heart drummed wildly with the
adrenaline of near accident, I weighed the odds of nearly trampling a herd of
deer in the city and chalked one mark into Pittsburgh’s corner.