Things Worth Remembering (8 page)

He is asleep before either of us has the energy to say anything else.

Luke’s hand is warm in mine.

I’ve been holding that hand a very long time now. We were married twenty-four years ago in June, only a few months after Clay introduced us.

Each year Clay and Rebecca hosted a series of Christmas parties or receptions for the schools in the district. The Friday night of the elementary party, they invited Luke. Luke was twenty-four and, having earned an MBA, just beginning his job with an accounting firm in Indianapolis.

Clay invited his nephew for two primary reasons. One, his boys, fourteen and thirteen, were tired of smiling at hundreds of teachers and administrators but thought they might endure one more party if their hero, Luke, would come and play pool with them. Two, Clay wanted Luke to meet me. He said later that Luke had been too busy too long to nurture a serious relationship, but now that school and job hunting were behind him, he should have time to think of matters of the heart.

I had come to the party with Paula and her fiancé, but somehow they disappeared while I was putting away my coat. I had just stepped into the beautifully decorated living room, about to join the two rowdy male sixth-grade teachers standing in the far corner of the room, laughing about something, when Clay called my name.

“Kennedy,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m glad to be here,” I said, giving him my aren’t-you-glad-you-hired-me smile.

“I’ve sent my daughter to the basement to rescue my nephew. My sons think he is their personal property, but they’re going to have to share him a few minutes, because I intend for him to meet you.”

I could hardly believe Dr. Laswell was taking time away from rooms full of guests to focus on me at all, much less to say such a thing. He wanted
his
nephew to meet
me
?

And then the nephew appeared, as handsome as Clay Las-well, but younger—fourteen years younger, I later learned. It would be an understatement to say the introduction was awkward. I felt like everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing and saying to look at us. But when Luke Laswell shook my hand, it was warm and unaccountably comfortable, and I was happy I had worn the black velvet dress Paula coveted, and I was more than a little disappointed when two boys came up from the basement to drag Luke back to their lair.

Later that evening, after I had been as outgoing and gracious as I could stand, I felt the need to escape the crowd, and I stepped into the study off the main hallway. I was drawn to the quiet of an empty room and the warmth of a four-log fire. I stood watching the flames, glad to be out of the fray momentarily, when I heard, “There you are.”

I turned and saw Luke standing in the doorway.

“You caught me,” I said.

“I’ve interrupted your peace.”

“Are
you
in need of peace? Come in. This room is lovely. I haven’t had the nerve to go down to the basement. I’ve wondered if it’s reserved for family, off limits to guests.”

“As a matter of fact, several of your peers have made their way down there. That’s how I managed to make my getaway. The boys are beating their former sixth-grade teachers at pool.”

“Well, now I
know
I’m not going down there.”

It was clear that neither of us wanted to be anywhere but where we were. We sat on the sofa and began to really introduce ourselves. When people came to the doorway and peeked into the room, they saw us talking quietly but intently, and they invariably chose to go away. We were invariably glad.

Before Luke was discovered by one of the boys and dragged away again and before I found my coat and thanked the Las-wells for a wonderful evening, Luke and I had made plans for the following night. We spent every weekend together after that, and he proposed to me the week of spring break, the middle of March.

After dating six months, we were married in June, and after dating her boyfriend for three years, Paula married in August. “Who would have thought you’d be married before me?” Paula said when I showed her my engagement ring and told her the wedding date we had chosen.

Mother was horrified, naturally. “Good grief, Kennedy!” she said. “You hardly know the man.”

“You know what, Mother, that’s just not true. I know Luke very well. You should be
thrilled
I’m going to marry such a good man. One who can supplement my teaching habit, by the way.”
And almost as ambitious as you,
I could have added—but I didn’t know that yet.

She turned around and walked into the other room that day, and I stood there wondering why I had expected anything different. It occurred to me that after so many years, she still thought “good man” was an oxymoron, at least on a personal level. She always seemed to get along with the male species at work.

If I were fair, I’d have to admit Luke’s and my courtship was a bit of a whirlwind. But sometimes, and it is wonderful when it happens, things are very clear.

Other times, of course, they are not.

But by God’s grace, and to my mother’s utter amazement, Luke and I are still married.

I squeeze my husband’s hand, and though I know very well he is sound asleep, he squeezes my hand in return.

WEDNESDAY

CHAPTER SEVEN

Kendy

I walk into the kitchen and find Marcus pouring Raisin Bran into a serving bowl—a
serving
bowl! The word
chipper
comes to mind while watching him happily fending for himself. I do believe we’re going to have another morning person in the family.

“Have some cereal, Marcus,” I say with a smile.

He looks up and smiles too. He has a gorgeous smile. “Good morning, Kennedy.”

“It’s time you call me Kendy, Marcus. No one calls me Kennedy except Mother and my dentist.”

“I’d like that.”

“So,” I say, pointing at the cereal box, “is there any left for me?”

He shakes it. “Plenty. And I saw another box in the pantry.”

“Okay, then. I love Raisin Bran. I have since I was a little girl. This made breakfast a snap, which pleased my mother no end.”

Marcus laughs.

What does he know?

Marcus chooses a chair at the round table by the windows instead of a barstool, and I come over and join him.

“Luke says he’s going to mow before the pool party,” he says, nodding toward the outbuilding where Luke keeps the tractor. “I told him I’d come out and do the trimming if he trusts me with his weed eater.”

Marcus looks as if that would be as exciting as exploring Mars. I have a constant urge to hug the boy. I tell him I’m glad he had the time to come here for the week, and he says his boss gave him two weeks off with pay as a wedding gift.

“I should write him a thank-you note,” I say, sort of meaning it. Time to spend with the man who loves my daughter is invaluable to me.

“So,” I ask, “do you like having so many siblings?” It rather fascinates me that he has four brothers, all with names beginning with
M
. I try to keep them straight.

“I do,” he says.

“And you’re the youngest, right?”

“I’m the baby boy, five years behind the others,” he says. “I’ve been called the Caboose, the Afterthought, the Crowning Glory, and Oops. Mom says all the monikers are appropriate.”

“I like Crowning Glory.”

“Mom would appreciate that. Even though I was their little surprise, she and Dad plugged away at my formation until the day I left for college. They say they went into the house when I drove off, put their feet up, and said, ‘Whew! We’re done!’ ”

“What was one of their important lessons?”

“Frugality,” he says with no hesitation.

The mother of the bride is comforted to hear it. “So,” I say, “Benjamin Franklin would have been proud to know your parents?”

“He would have
loved
them. They did their best to teach my brothers and me financial responsibility. An allowance did not come without strings attached: They taught us to tithe ten percent, to consider giving an offering on top of that, and to save at least twenty percent, and then we could decide what we should do with the rest. I was unanimously voted the best saver of us all. The story goes that I still have all the money I put in my piggy bank before I started school.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s the story. But no one can find the bank to prove it. My theory is they made it up at some point and now believe it to be true.”

“An embellishment gone awry,” I say.

“Exactly.”

“Well, I’m sure your brothers will be delightful escorts for Maisey’s friends.” I get up and bring the carton of orange juice back to the table. “A big family sounds like fun,” I say.

“It is.”

“It also sounds boisterous.”

“That’s for sure. And if five boys weren’t enough, we always had a dog or two—house dogs—and a cat that died just a few months ago at the impressive age of twenty-one.”

I have to laugh. “I have absolutely no frame of reference for so much activity. Like Maisey, I was an only child, and to make matters worse, I lived in a condo, my only companion a goldfish incapable of making a ruckus.”

“Did you like being an only child?”

“It was okay.”

He looks at me as though I should have more to say.

“There really isn’t much to tell, but I’ll try to come up with a detail or two for you one of these days.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he says, jumping up, rinsing his bowl, and heading out in search of a weed eater.

I put our bowls into the dishwasher, get the ground beef out of the refrigerator, and begin to make hamburger patties for the cookout, thinking about how differently Marcus and Maisey grew up.

She, like I, grew up as an only child, though Jackie practically lived here during middle school and high school. Like Marcus, Jackie was one of five children, and her mother never seemed to mind loaning her out, at least to us. I did not want Maisey to be an only child. Oh, how I had wanted another! But my doctor was amazed I ever became pregnant at all, and even then, getting Maisey to term required spending most of the last three months of that pregnancy in bed. I’m blessed to have even one child, and I know it.

Mother, on the other hand, didn’t want
me
, much less another child. I’m sure of it, although when I finally exploded one day in high school and accused her of that, she slapped me. She slapped me hard—I couldn’t have been more shocked. She had never spanked me or hit me in any other way until then, and for that isolated incident, she did not apologize. Looking back on it, I suppose what I said was unfair. She could have ended her pregnancy, illegal at the time but still an option; she could have put me up for adoption; she could have sent me off to boarding school. And she was merely grateful for Margaret and Hugh’s presence in our lives; she did not hire them to be my surrogate parents. She does not know I have called them that.

Truthfully, and I imagine it was because of Margaret and Hugh and Paula, there were times I didn’t mind living in a home populated by only two quiet souls and one very nearly comatose fish, even when Mother was gone so much of the time. They say there are two kinds of people in this world: those energized by people and those energized by solitude. I’m sure I’m the latter. I need alone time. It keeps me relatively sane. But there’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. I know this, for I have been both alone and lonely.

Lonely, I hated.

And listening to Marcus, I realize I have no stories I want to tell, no tales from the condominium.

I do have one especially lovely memory I cling to with a tenacity that puzzles me. I was in the ninth grade when a blizzard trapped Mother and me in our condo. Everything was shut down for three whole days, including the company Mother worked for. That was the one year Margaret and Hugh tried the snowbird thing, spending the three months of winter in Florida, where some of their oldest friends had retired. So Mother and I hung out together while the snow swirled in the lights of the city, massive mounds of it building up on the sidewalks and streets, making them utterly impassable.

We scrounged up stuff to eat, pulling cookbooks from a top shelf to see what we could make with the ingredients we had on hand, and we watched a lot of old movies, chatting almost like girl friends during commercial breaks. I asked her questions about work, and during several commercials she regaled me with stories about some of the people she worked with.

Those were enchanted days as far as I was concerned. We stayed up late, never consulting the clock, and two of the three mornings we were snowed in, we didn’t even get dressed.

We stayed in our flannel pajamas and robes and cooked and watched television and played Scrabble and gin rummy. Mother said I was good company.

I remember wishing it would snow forever.

Maisey

Considering how late it was when I finally got to sleep, I’d say I’m up pretty early. I pull on a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and tennis shoes, and tap on Marcus’s door. I can’t believe he’s gone already. When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I hear Marcus and Mother talking in the kitchen. She is saying something about Benjamin Franklin, and he is saying something about financial responsibility.

Is that crazy or what?

That’s a conversation I don’t want to interrupt—or join. I hear the familiar and somehow comforting hum of Dad’s mower and look out the front door to see him beginning the first long swipe down the front yard.

I remember all the times he mowed with me sitting on his lap. I remember him teaching me how to mow with that rider when I was older, turning expertly around the trees like he does. I remember meeting each other in the garage when we were through with the yard, giving each other high fives, toasting each other with bottles of water from the fridge we keep out there.

He’s reached the end of the first row, hugging the long driveway, and is coming back toward the house now. I slip out the front door and run toward him. He must see me waving my arms, because he has stopped and is idling the motor, waiting for me.

“You want to do this?” he asks.

“I will,” I say, “but I really want you to take a break and play a game of Horse with me.”