The Lost Husband (4 page)

“Bought?” Jean turned to me. “I made those quilts!”

“You made them?”

Jean nodded.

They’d been full-sized and patchwork. It had never occurred to me that Jean might have made them. Who makes something like that?

“All hand-stitched, too,” Jean added. “No machine.”

“How long did they take you?” I asked.

“Maybe about a year,” she said. “Each.”

“A year!” I couldn’t imagine why this almost-total stranger would spend a year of her life making quilts for children she’d likely never even see.

She sensed what I was thinking. “It was time well spent,” she said. “Y’all are my only family. Except for your mother. And she hardly counts.”

“I’m thinking back, trying to remember if I sent you a thank-you note,” I said, now cringing a little. “I hope I did.”

“I have no idea,” Jean said. Across the yard the dogs started howling, and she hushed them. “Do you use the quilts?”

Here I had to lie. My mother had insisted we put them away. She had wanted to
throw
them away, but I’d convinced her we might someday sell them on eBay. Even she had to admit they were adorable.

“We did use them,” I lied. “All the time.”

Jean looked happy. “Then that’s thanks enough for me.”

At the garden, some of the dogs followed us in. Abby closed the gate after everyone, but when she turned around, she was face-to-face with the biggest dog either of us had ever seen—like a golden retriever crossed with a polar bear. She skittered over to hide behind me.

“He’s friendly,” Jean said.

“He’s taller than Abby,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed, “but he thinks he’s a Chihuahua. He defers to anything beagle-sized or larger.”

Sure enough, his legs were surrounded by little dogs: a shih tzu, a rat terrier, and a dachshund.

“We’ve got two packs here,” Jean explained. “The big guys”—she pointed to a group of knee-height mutts by the barn—“and the little guys.” Her eyes fell on the enormous dog and his tiny friends. “But,” she added, “they’ll all play together in a pinch.”

“Kind of like people,” Abby volunteered from behind my leg.

Jean tilted her head as though she were seeing Abby for the first time. “Yes!” she said. “Kind of exactly like people.”

Jean kneeled down beside her and said, “Let’s go make a proper introduction.” She took Abby’s hand and led her over to the big dog. He stood very still, and when Abby got close enough, he licked the tips of her fingers. Before long she was letting him slather his enormous tongue all over her face.

“What’s his name?” I asked as Jean walked back toward me.

“Bob Dylan,” she said.

“Can he play the harmonica?”

She shook her head. “He refuses to practice.”

We hadn’t been in the garden long before Jean put the kids to work. She showed them where she kept a rain barrel “to collect the runoff from barn gutters,” demonstrated how to turn the spigot, and then asked them to fill her watering cans for the plants. As they got to work she said to me, “Let me show you the house.”

“Are they safe there?” I asked, hesitating. It was not very often—like, never—that I left them unsupervised.

“Who?” Jean asked.

“The children.” I knew I sounded nuts. It was a garden, for Pete’s sake, not a snake pit.

“Of course! Yes! They’ll call us if they need us.”

I glanced back at the kids again. “Are there ever snakes in the garden?” I asked, trying to seem casual.

“Oh, no,” Jean said as she opened the door. “You just stomp around nice and loud when you first get there in the morning, and that scares ’em off.”

It’s uncommon to move into a place sight unseen. Usually, even if you’re going to a hotel on vacation, you’ve at least seen the website. As we walked over, it hit me that I had probably never been less prepared for what I was about to see. Though after all these years of living with my mother’s fierce jealousy and bitterness over the house, I couldn’t help but expect something big. Big enough to sustain a thirty-year feud.

Of course, nothing in life is ever what you’re expecting.

It was not a mansion, as my mother had claimed. I stopped in my tracks and gaped. It looked like a plump little English
cottage—like something from a magical forest. It had exposed crossbeams, rounded dormer windows, planter boxes with flowers, and plants all around it in full bloom. The whole thing was lopsided, almost like a life-sized gingerbread house.

“Whoa,” I said. “Is that roof made of license plates?”

“Yep,” Jean said. “Frank collected them.”

“Who’s Frank?”

Jean turned to study my face and frowned a little, as if she thought I should have known. Then she turned back to the house again. “I guess Frank was like my husband. Except we were never married.”

I nodded. Frank was the hippie boyfriend.

“He’s been dead ten years now.”

Something about the emotion in her voice made my eyes fill with tears.

Without looking up, she seemed to know it. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “It gets easier, sweetheart. It really does.”

I glanced back to check on the kids, who did not appear to be in grave danger, and then turned my attention back to the house.

“Frank was a recycler,” Jean explained. “Almost everything here came from the junkyard.” He had pressed decorations into the wet cob—broken glass, smooth stones, animal bones—as he built each wall. The front door was rounded at the top, and the front porch, which ran the width of the house, had posts of cedar and an awning made out of enormous antique metal gas station signs welded together side by side:
HUMBLE OIL, MOBIL, SINCLAIR
, and
TEXACO
.

It was pure whimsy. It was folk art you could live in. And each thing you noticed seemed like the best—until you noticed the next thing.

“Frank was amazing!” I said, and Jean nodded.

We went inside.

We stood face-to-face with an enormous river-rock fireplace.

“Is that part of a car?” I asked, staring at the red mantel.

“A tailgate,” Jean answered. “From the junkyard.”

Furniture-wise, the house was spare, with a mixture of handmade pieces Frank had created in his workshop and heirloom family pieces. A red-painted drop-leaf table in the kitchen, some iron beds in the bedrooms, and a rocker in the den had all belonged to Jean’s great-aunt Cortie.

“Which makes her your great-great-aunt Cortie,” Jean said.

“And the kids’ great-great-great-aunt Cortie.”

At the mention of the kids, I realized I’d done something completely inconceivable: I’d forgotten about them.

And then, as if in response to that fact, I heard Abby scream.

I was out the door in less than a second, and Jean was right behind me. I crossed the yard full tilt, knowing for certain it would be a snakebite. Knowing for certain Abby would die in my arms from venom as we sped toward the nearest hospital.

When I made it to the garden, Abby was standing with fists on hips, looking less mortally wounded than mad.

“What? What happened?” I asked, out of breath.

“Tank!” Abby shouted. “He bit me!”

A bite. I was half-right.

Tank copied Abby’s stance, affecting his own outrage. “She took my watering can!”

“Oh, God,” I said, and leaned over to put my hands on my face. “You scared me to death! Please do not scream unless you really have something to scream about.”

“Like what?” she asked.

I could have answered:
A killer bee! A brown recluse! A wasp! A wolf!
A bear! A rattlesnake! A fire! An earthquake! A serial killer!
Instead I just said, “A real emergency, Abby. Use your good judgment.”

“But he
bit
me,” she insisted, pulling up the sleeve on her T-shirt to show a red mark on her arm.

Aunt Jean had caught up and was now kneeling next to Tank, talking in a voice that sounded familiar. It took me a second to realize it was my own parenting voice when I was at my best—a perfect balance of firm and friendly at the same time. “People aren’t allowed to bite other people out here in the country,” she was saying. “There are too many other things that really do bite.”

She stated it like it was just a rule. Nothing personal. And I could see in Tank’s eyes that he was making a note of it.

Next Aunt Jean dusted off the knees of her overalls and said, all business, “Who wants to see the house?”

Jean looked so much like my mother—the unpainted version—that it was mind-boggling to watch her step in with the kids and handle them that way. I tried to think what my mother would have done if she’d been here. But there was nothing to compare it to, because she would’ve been at the nail salon.

The kids jumped up and down when they saw the house. Jean showed them the weather vane, the porch bell they could ring at dinnertime, and the spot under the steps with a litter of orange kittens still lapping up a fresh bowl of goat’s milk.

We walked around back to the screened porch, which was almost the size of the house itself.

“I like the way everything’s at an angle,” I said.

Jean smiled. “Frank was a big fan of imperfection.”

“I haven’t been here before, have I?” I asked then. “This place feels familiar.”

There was a pause. “No,” Jean said, “you haven’t.”

I knew why, of course. Because my mother hated Jean. Which suddenly made me wonder if Jean hated my mother, too. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t know Jean well enough to know how to phrase it.

Standing there, it hit me that in all those years of Jean sending me birthday cards and money, I had never once written to her. Or thanked her. Or invited her to my wedding. It was almost like she hadn’t even been a real person. She was some fictional lady living a crazy hippie life far away. I would no more have written to her to ask how she was than I would have checked in on Santa. How strange to just now figure out she was real.

“My mom said you lived in a mansion,” I said. “Was this the—”

“The family home?”

I nodded.

“No,” she said. “I don’t live there. And I wouldn’t call it a mansion, either.”

“You might want to mention that to Marsha sometime,” I told her. “She imagines you living in obscene luxury.”

“She grew up in that house,” Jean said. “She knows exactly what it is. But she never did let reality get in the way of resentment.”

The kids had climbed onto the porch swing. Jean studied them, then said, “Is she pretty mad at you for coming here?”

I nodded. “You have no idea.”

“Oh,” Jean said, wrinkling her nose, “I think I do.”

I couldn’t help making air quotes with my fingers as I said, “She’s ‘never speaking to me again.’ ”

Jean arched an eyebrow. “That’ll last.”

“My money’s on two months.”

“My money’s on two weeks.”

I let out a breath that was part laugh. It was so strange to not know each other at all, yet have this one burden in common—the burden of dealing with my mother. Before I could think better of it, I heard myself say, “But it lasted with you. For almost thirty years.”

Jean dropped her smile. “I suppose that’s true,” she said. “Except I’m actually the one who’s not speaking to her.”

Chapter 3
 

There was no question that Jean was eccentric. In the next few weeks I’d discover that she never used paper towels, composted the leftovers of every fruit or vegetable that came through the house, and saved all her old shower, rain, and cooking water to pour onto her garden. She had solar panels on her roof. She went to “the church of nature,” only ate meat that came in trade from friends, and did yoga at sunrise every morning to greet the day.

She was about as different from my mother as you could get. My mom had certainly been right about that. But she hadn’t been right about what Jean’s life actually looked like. The grizzled old survivalist’s hovel I’d always pictured did not exist.

I looked around that first day and saw charm and more charm: the candles everywhere, the cabinet full of board games, the laundry line out back with white sheets blowing in the wind. I was so charmed, in fact, that I did not notice the things that were
missing. Things like a clothes dryer. A dishwasher. A cordless phone. A microwave. Things I was so used to—that were such a
given
—that long after I knew for certain they weren’t there, I’d still continue to look for them.

It was hard not to feel giddy about this place as our new home, though the sleeping arrangements made me a little nervous. Jean’s room was upstairs, and so was the guest room, where the kids would sleep.

“They’re going to sleep together in the same bed?” I asked. “Won’t they keep each other awake?”

“Nah,” Jean said. “They’ll sleep better that way.”

“But where will I be?”

“You’re downstairs,” Jean said, leading the way back down a hallway to a small room with its own bath and a door that led out to a patio facing the woods.

“This used to be Frank’s office,” Jean said, and pointed out that her own office was next to it. “I figured that after two years of living with my sister, you could probably use a room of your own.”

“The thing is,” I said as politely as possible, “it’s kind of far away from the kids.”