Chapter Twenty
Dean followed Ruby back down the trail. Though they didn’t talk, the forest was alive with sounds. Birds squawked and chirped in the trees overhead, squirrels chattered, water splashed.
At the park, he tossed the picnic basket—still filled with a lunch unpacked and uneaten—in the trash can. Curling the heavy blanket around his shoulders, he climbed tiredly onto his bike.
When they reached the summer house, he pulled off to the side of the road and got off his bike.
Ruby stopped a few feet ahead, then set her kickstand and turned to him, frowning. “I guess this is where I say good-bye.”
He heard the crack in her voice and it gave him hope. Ruby could push him away from now until forever, and he would still know the truth. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in her tremulous voice. He’d felt it in her kiss. “For now.”
“It was just a kiss,” she said. “Don’t turn it into Gone with the Wind.”
He took a step toward her. “You must have confused me with one of your Hollywood idiot-boys.”
She wanted to move backward; he could tell. “Wh-what do you mean?”
Now he was close enough to touch her, to kiss her, but he stood perfectly still. “I know you, Ruby. You can pretend all you want, but that kiss meant something. Tonight we’ll both lie in bed and think about it.”
Ruby flushed. “You knew a teenager a decade ago. That doesn’t mean you know me.”
He smiled. It was so precisely the sort of thing she would have said at sixteen. “You might have built a wall around your heart, but you haven’t exchanged it. Somewhere, deep inside, you’re still the girl I fell in love with.” At last he touched her cheek, a fleeting caress.
He wanted to do more, to pull her into his arms, hold her close and whisper, I love you, but he knew he couldn’t push her that far. Not yet.
“For years after you were gone, I thought I saw you,” he said quietly.
“Every time I rounded a corner or came up to a stoplight or got off an airplane, I’d think for a split second, There she is.
I’d run up to the person, tap her shoulder, and find myself smiling awkwardly at a stranger.
I still walk on the right side of the sidewalk, because you like the left. ”
Her mouth trembled. “I’m afraid.”
“The girl I knew wasn’t afraid of anything—”
“That girl’s been gone for years.”
“Isn’t there some part of her left?”
She stood there a long time, staring up at him, then finally she turned away.
He knew she wasn’t going to answer. “Okay,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll concede this round.” He climbed onto his bike and started to go.
“Wait.”
He stumbled off his bike so fast he almost fell.
It clattered to the ground as he spun back to face her.
The way she was looking at him reminded him of when she was nine years old and she fell out of the oak tree on Finnegans’ farm .
. . or when she was twelve and broke her arm skateboarding down Front Street.
She took a step closer and looked up at him. He couldn’t be certain, but she looked ready to cry. “You sound so sure.”
He smiled. “You taught me love, Ruby. Every time you held my hand when I was scared, or came to one of my ball games or left a note in my locker, I learned a little more about it. Maybe when we were kids, I took that for granted, but I’m not a kid anymore.
I’ve spent a lot of years alone and every date I went on only proved again how special we were. ”
“My parents were special,” she said slowly. “You and Eric were special.”
“So, your point is, love dies.”
“An ugly, painful death.”
It saddened him, knowing how her heart, once so open and pure, had been trampled by the very people who should have protected it. “Okay. Love hurts. I can’t deny that. But what about loneliness?”
“I’m not lonely.”
“Liar.”
She stepped away from him. Without a backward look or a wave or anything, she jumped on her bike and rode away.
“Go ahead,” he called after her. “Run away. You can only go so far.”
Ruby knew her mother would be waiting for her. She’d probably be sitting at the kitchen table, or in the rocker on the porch, pretending to be occupied by some small task. Maybe knitting; she’d always loved to knit.
Ruby stopped pedaling. The bike slowed down, rattling and bumping over the uneven road. When she reached the minivan, she dumped the bike at the side of the gardening shed and headed down to the house. The gate creaked loudly at her touch.
She stepped into the kitchen and found her mother at the stove, stirring something in an old iron pot. She was wearing her old apron—the one that said A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE . . . AND THE SENATE.
“Ruby,” she said, looking up in surprise. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.” She glanced at the door, now closed behind Ruby. “Where’s Dino?”
Ruby stood there. God help her, she couldn’t talk.
The kitchen smelled of pot roast, slow-cooking all day with baby carrots and oven-browned potatoes.
A cookie sheet sat on the counter. On it, homemade biscuits were rising.
And unless Ruby missed her guess, that was vanilla custard Mom was stirring.
She’d made Ruby’s all-time favorite dinner.
Just then, Ruby didn’t know which hurt more—the effort her mother had made to please her, or the fact that Dean wasn’t here to share it. All she knew was that if she didn’t get out of this room soon, she was going to burst into tears.
“Dean went home,” she said.
A frown darted across her mother’s face. She turned off the burner, carefully placed the wooden spoon across the top of the pot, and grabbed her crutches, then limped toward Ruby. Step-thump-step-thump. The uneven footsteps matched the beat of Ruby’s heart. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I guess we started something we couldn’t finish. Or maybe we finished something we’d started a long time ago.” She shrugged and looked away.
“This won’t be like Max,” her mother said.
“I love Dean,” Ruby admitted. “But that’s not enough. It wouldn’t last, anyway.”
“Love is nothing without faith.”
“I lost that faith a long time ago.”
“Of course you did. And you’re right to blame your dad and me for it, but that doesn’t matter anymore—whose fault it is.
What matters is you. Can you let yourself jump without a net?
Because that’s what love is, what faith is.
You’re looking for a guarantee, and those come with auto parts. Not love.”
“Yeah, right. Love put you in a mental institution.”
Mom laughed. “I think it makes lunatics of us all.”
It felt good to talk to her mother this way. As friends. It was something Ruby had never even imagined.
It was true; love made everybody crazy. All those years Ruby had spent angry with her mother, sending back presents unopened and refusing all contact—it wasn’t because she’d felt betrayed.
Those years, those feelings and actions, had been about . . . longing. Simple longing.
She’d missed her mother so much that the only way she’d been able to go on in the world was to pretend she was alone.
I’m not alone anymore.
That one sentence, once thought, formed a road that led Ruby to herself. She didn’t say it aloud. Instinctively, she knew that if she spoke, her voice would be a child’s, full of awe and bewilderment. And she would cry.
I can’t write the article.
“I’ve got to go upstairs,” she said suddenly, seeing the surprise on her mother’s face. Ruby didn’t care. She ran upstairs and went to the phone, dialing Val’s number.
Maudeen answered on the second ring. “Lightner and Associates, may I help you?”
“Hi, Maudeen,” Ruby said, sitting on the bed, drawing her knees up. “It’s Ruby Bridge. Is the Great Oz in?”
Maudeen laughed. “He and Julian went to a premiere in New York. He’ll be back on Monday, and he’s calling in for messages.”
“Okay. Tell him I won’t be delivering my article.”
“You mean it’s going to be late?”
“I’m not going to turn it in at all.”
“Oh, my. You’d better give me your address and phone number again. He’ll want to talk to you.”
Ruby gave out the information, then hung up. She hadn’t even realized that she was reaching for her writing pad, but there it was, sitting on her lap. It was time now to finish what she’d begun. Slowly, she began to write.
I have just called my agent. When he calls back, I will tell him that I can’t turn in this article. I never thought about what it meant to write an exposé on my own mother.
Can you believe I was so blind? I took the money that was given to me—my thirty pieces of silver—and I spent it like a teenager would, on a fast car and expensive clothes.
But I didn’t think.
I dreamed. I imagined. I saw myself on Letterman and Leno, a witty, charming guest plugging her own skyrocketing career. I never noticed that I’d be standing on my mother’s broken back to reach the microphone.
My dreams, as usual, were all about me.
Now, I see the people around me, and I know what the price of my selfish actions will be.
As I write, I am reminded of that passage from the Bible—the one that is read at every wedding: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.”
Now, I understand as an adult. Maybe for the first time in my life. This article would break my mother’s heart, and perhaps even worse, her spirit. That didn’t matter to me a week ago; in fact, I wanted to hurt her then.
My only excuse: then I was a child.
I can’t do it anymore; not to her and not to me. For the first time, I have drawn back the dark curtain of anger and seen the bright day beyond.
I can be my mother’s daughter again.
Even as I write that sentence, I feel its powerful seduction. I can’t fully express to you—strangers—how it feels to be motherless. The ache . . . the longing.
She is the keeper of my past. She knows the secret moments that have formed me, and even with all that I have done to her, I can feel that still she is able to love me.
Will anyone else ever love me so unconditionally?
I doubt it.