Chapter 16 Double News #2
Gus looks beyond the vintage hooked rugs, tall custom-built bookcases, rocking chairs, and goose-down sofa to Jack’s framed photographs lining the walls.
“I remember this one,” she points to remnants of a cabin smothered in kudzu with vibrant rays of sunshine filling the center.
“I was with him that day. He waited and waited for the right moment to take the picture. I never saw how it came out.”
She touches the protective glass and speaks softly. “Uncle Jack loves it here and he loved you at first sight, Aunt Liddy. Am I on the right or the left?”
“What?” I mumble, disoriented by her spooky declaration that is tied to a logistics question.
“Is my bedroom on the left or right?”
“Oh. You’re on the right, honey. My room’s on the left.”
I am stunned at the girl’s easy reference to Jack’s ghost being happy here and his loving me at first sight.
I feel a stab of abandonment and envy and joy all in one swoop.
Such a sweet memory when we met on a blind date arranged by friends and Jack’s first words when he shook my hand were, I think I love you, Lydia Brown.
He was shocked he had said those words aloud, and it made us laugh.
I love a man who makes me laugh, but did I ever tell Gus that story?
I don’t think so. With the duffle stored in her room, she heads to mine to see the wolpertinger with the white cat on her heels. Rattled, I put on the kettle for tea.
Gus will find the curious creature on top of Oma’s Bavarian armoire that crossed the sea from Germany.
The stuffed creature that sits on top was fabricated a hundred years ago, made on a lark by my great-grandfather.
It has tiny antlers and falcon wings sewn to a rabbit’s body and stands seventeen and a quarter inches tall.
It was made to lure tourists into the Black Forest on the trail of the Brothers Grimm.
In my childhood home in Riverton on story night, whenever fairy tales were told, the wolpertinger held center stage as proof such fantastical things were real.
But the Bavarian armoire it sits on is more than it appears to be.
It holds a secret that no one knows but me.
One day I’ll show Gus the hidden latch that releases a felt-lined compartment.
A catch that is invisible in plain sight, such is the clever craftsmanship.
After Oma died, only Mama knew about the hiding place till she showed me.
A place where I have hidden stolen pieces of my family history: forty-two glass marbles and a paperweight with purple forget-me-nots.
Mama cherished those things that linked her family to good German people, not evil Nazis.
My German people created lasting things of beauty that I now possess because, in my grief on their dying day, I went to Mama’s bottom dresser drawer and took them.
Before my sisters came home for the funeral.
Before their sorrow dissipated. Before they began coveting Mama’s things.
Before they remembered the marbles and the paperweight.
At seventeen, I became a thief. My unique pain gave me that right.
Great-grandfather’s glass marbles should have gone to my brother Grady, who is ten years older than me.
You wouldn’t know looking at the reticent man he’s become, but when he was a boy of sixteen, he was a marble-playing marvel who made us proud.
He never lost a local game. When the German prisoner-of-war camp was built in our hometown, masterful competitors emerged, and the first international marble championship was held inside the fence topped with concertina wire.
I was too young to stand among the Nazi prisoners back then, so Mama banished Cora and me to the care of Aunt Fanniebelle, but good family stories take on a life of their own.
This one grew to epic proportions. We learned every move in the retelling.
Grady was twenty-seven when Daddy died, but he was already becoming a shadow of a man in the presence of Daddy and our older brother Everett.
After, Grady never found his true place, and with Daddy gone, he let Everett make every decision.
There was a time when I thought he was smitten with Bert Tucker, the daring girl who lived her teenage years under our family’s roof.
She was magnetic and irresistible and had her eye on more.
That more never included Grady Brown. Her heart was never his to have. That loss changed him.
Next time I speak to Grady, I’ll ask if he’d like to have the handmade German marbles. I hope he does and that he’ll cherish them and remember what it felt like to be an international champion.
And the coveted paperweight. Maybe it’s time for it to come out of hiding. My siblings have stopped asking if I know where it is, as though it sank into the muck of the Roanoke River with our parents on the day they drowned. It should sit on my window ledge in the light.
I open the front windows to let in washed air coming across the valley and, with my mug of tea in hand, head to the front porch to sit in the swing. Gus joins me carrying the cat. “Does he have a name?”
“No, honey. I told you I’ve never seen it before.”
“I’m gonna call him Uncle for Uncle Jack.” The cat’s underbelly is exposed.
“Well,” I point. “It’s a girl cat.”
“I’m still gonna call her Uncle.”
When she speaks the name, the cat looks up in recognition. “You don’t mind being called Uncle, do you, pretty thing?” Gus kisses the top of her head.
“How are you feeling, honey?”
“Not so good.”
“Let me feel your forehead.” She leans forward. “You’re warm to the touch. Let me take your temperature and get you some aspirin. This damp night air might not be the best thing for you.”
Gus sits on the kitchen stool with the thermometer under her tongue and watches me pull a tray of ice from the freezer, wrap the cubes in a dish towel, and use my hammer to crack them into tiny pieces.
I fill a glass with chipped ice and add ginger ale.
Gus’s fever is nearly 101, and without complaint she takes an aspirin and lets me tuck her into bed with pillows propped at her back and Uncle by her side as if the cat belongs.
I feed her teaspoons of ice nuggets and ginger ale like Mama used to do for me when I had a fever. I spoon-feed Gus till she’s had enough.
“I’ll stay right here, honey,” I say and settle in the easy chair by the window where I can watch over her. She looks vulnerable in the bed wearing dreadful makeup and spikey hair, and she drops off to sleep and so does the cat while I think about her mother, my sister Lucy.
She surprised us when she married a safe, quiet, good man after junior college.
There were no stars in her eyes and nothing brilliant in his.
Ryan Flannery became a life insurance salesman, and I was disappointed for Lucy.
I had pictured her penning a bestselling novel in a charming hut built for writing.
When I was little, she was a thoroughbred living on our working man’s farm.
When I was little, I thought that once she could, she’d break free from the mundane and rise to her potential.
After high school, she went to college in the western part of the state alongside Bert Tucker.
Lucy said that the first time she came to this high country when she was fifteen, it stole her heart away.
That oddly she knew she belonged here and would return.
To stay rooted to family, she named their first two children after our parents, David and Minnie.
The boy and girl were always mannerly and never spoke back or missed a curfew or broke a rule.
They now live safe lives. Then a decade later along came Augustina Rose.
Teeny. Gus. A spitfire of a girl who dreams about the other side and fights her battles like a warrior.