7. Lock Haven Yellow
SEVEN
LOCK HAVEN YELLOW
? PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES ?
Frank Beckman died on a Saturday.
And that would be just like him, to choose the day of the week made for relaxation, celebration, and fun.
He'd been working on the Cutlass that afternoon.
Helen had seen him from the kitchen window, his sleeves rolled up and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, leaning under the hood with the focus of a man who never got tired of engines.
Around three o'clock, she watched him straighten up, wipe his hands on a rag, and walk to his lawn chair by the garage door.
He sat down with the ease of being slow and satisfied, like a man who'd put in a good afternoon's work and earned the right to rest.
Helen made him a glass of lemonade and put a few cookies on a plate. She carried them out to the garage, already thinking of what she would say to tease him about, something about the Cutlass always getting more attention than she did.
When she got there, Frank was in the chair, his head tilted slightly to the sky to absorb the warm sun. His hands were on his knees and his face peaceful, the way it looked when he fell asleep on the sofa for his Sunday naps.
Except this time, when Helen said his name, he didn't wake up.
He'd gone quickly and hadn't suffered. He'd sat down in the chair where he'd watched Charlie work for twelve years, and he'd simply gone to rest.
Katie was at a friend's house that Saturday.
She arrived at the Beckmans in the early evening, walking through the kitchen door, expecting to find Helen at the stove and Frank in his chair at the table, the smell of something good filling the house.
Instead, she found Helen in the living room, sitting very still on the sofa.
Her eyes were puffy and red, her hands folded in her lap.
When Katie walked in, Helen looked up at her and the expression on her face told Katie everything she needed to know before Helen even said a word.
Helen told her gently. She held Katie while Katie cried, and when the crying slowed, Helen said, "We need to call Charlie."
It was late, a little past eleven o'clock Indiana time when they were finally able to sit down and make the call, which made it just after eight in California.
Charlie was at her desk in her Pasadena apartment, working through a problem set for her graduate coursework when the phone rang.
She picked it up expecting a friend to invite her out to The Boulevard that night, their usual Saturday night hangout.
But instead, it was Helen. And behind Helen's voice, Charlie could hear Katie crying softly.
Charlie knew before Helen said it. Not because of the words, but because of the sound.
Helen Beckman had never sounded like this.
It was steady, because Helen was always steady, but there was something underneath it that had been taken away, a foundation that had been there so long you didn't notice it until it was gone.
"Charlie, honey. I need to tell you something."
Charlie listened. She didn't interrupt. She didn't cry. She sat very still at her desk with the phone pressed to her ear and her hand flat on the problem set she'd been working on.
"He was working on the Cutlass," Helen said, and her voice cracked for the first time. "He was saying earlier how he was looking forward to showing you something new he had added."
Charlie closed her eyes.
After they hung up, she sat at her desk for a long time. She didn't move, didn't call anyone. She stared at the problem set in front of her, and the numbers looked like a language she'd forgotten how to read.
Her hand found the pin in the drawer of her desk, where she kept it next to Katie's mixtape insert card.
Frank's Aviation Machinist's Mate badge.
She turned it over in her fingers, feeling the tarnished wings and the propeller at the center, and she thought about the night before she'd left for Caltech.
The garage. The way he'd said "Life" and looked at her like he meant it.
She'd seen him a hundred times since that night for holidays and summers, but that was the moment that lived in the pin. The moment Frank told her who she was.
There were things she'd been meaning to tell him.
Things she'd been working up to, turning over in her mind the way she turned the pin over in her hand, waiting for the right moment.
But now the right moment would never arrive.
Its possibility had settled into a lawn chair on a Saturday afternoon and simply gone to rest, and Charlie would never get it back.
She set the pin down, stood up, walked to the kitchen, and started making a list. Flights to book, clothes to pack, things she would need to help Helen with the plans.
She looked at the list, crossed out "flights," and wrote "drive."
It was the only way she knew how to carry something she couldn't repair. The freedom of the car, and music.
? SHELBYVILLE, INDIANA, UNITED STATES ?
Charlie left Pasadena before sunrise on Monday.
She drove the Plymouth east on I-40, then north through the heartland, the road unspooling in front of her for four days.
She stopped at motels when she couldn't see straight and ate at diners where nobody knew her name.
She alternated between Katie's mixtapes and her own worn copy of Rumours, the cassette that had lived in the Plymouth's stereo for years.
Somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma, "Songbird" came on and Charlie pulled over to the shoulder.
She sat there with the engine running and her hands on the wheel until the song was over, grieving the only way she could process.
Through music.
She arrived in Shelbyville on Thursday afternoon. Katie met her at Helen's front door and held on to her for a long time without saying anything. They didn't need words just as they'd never needed words for the things that truly mattered.
The funeral was scheduled for Saturday. Helen had told them Frank was insistent that his funeral be full of color, not black.
He'd said it years ago, in that offhand way of his, as though planning for your own funeral was just another whimsical project.
"When I go," he'd said, "I don't want a room full of dark, cold, listless grays.
I want color! I want people to look like they just came from the party of the year. "
On the morning of the funeral, Charlie and Katie sat at Helen's yellow kitchen table waiting to take her to the church together.
Charlie wore dark slacks and a pressed white shirt.
Katie wore a dress in a deep cornflower blue that caught the color of her eyes, the same shade of blue-green that shifted in the light the way lake water does on a clear day.
It was the first time the chapter of Charlie's life had paused long enough for her to see her sister as a young woman, not just her little sister.
Katie was beautiful, and Charlie realized with a small ache that she had no idea when that had happened.
Helen came around the corner from the hallway, moving slowly, snapping her handbag shut. She was dressed in a yellow polka-dot dress with a matching yellow hat and a lace covering over her eyes.
She looked like sunshine, Charlie thought.
When she saw them in their seats at the table, she smiled gently. "There are my girls."
Both Katie and Charlie got up and went to her, hugging her gently. She wrapped her arms around them both and kissed each one on the cheek before pulling away and smoothing her dress.
"Shall we head to the church?" The girls nodded and started for the kitchen door.
"Charlie Wickett."
Charlie stopped and turned on her heel. When Helen used her full name, you paid attention.
"You'll freeze without a jacket!"
Charlie looked down at her outfit. She shrugged. "I didn't pack anything that goes with this."
Helen huffed, walked over, and grabbed Charlie's hand. "Follow me."
She led Charlie through the house and into the bedroom she'd shared with Frank, a room Charlie had only been in a handful of times. The room smelled like pipe tobacco and Helen's hand cream, and the bed was made with military precision, the way Frank had always made it.
Helen opened the closet doors and scanned Frank's clothes, still there on the hangers. Charlie watched as Helen's fingers ran against the fabric of each piece, touching them slowly, taking her own moment with a piece of Frank. Finally, she settled on something near the end of the line.
"Here we go," Helen said, pulling the garment free.
It was a sport coat in a deep, rich aquamarine, the same color of the shallow Pacific Ocean on the shores of the places Frank had told stories about. Hawaii, Samoa, the islands where the Enterprise had anchored between battles.
Charlie's throat tightened. She could smell him in the fabric.
That same pipe tobacco and the faint mineral trace of motor oil that never quite washed out of anything Frank owned.
The conversation she'd never get to have pressed against her chest again, the way it had been pressing since Saturday night.
"Stand up, honey," Helen said.
Charlie stood. Helen helped her fit the coat on, smoothing out the material on her back, then walking around to adjust the collar and press the lapels flat. Helen didn't look up at Charlie while she worked. But Charlie noticed the gleam in her eyes as she kept smoothing the fabric.
Helen stepped back and looked over Charlie from head to toe, then raised her gaze to look her in the eye.
"You look absolutely stunning, sweetheart."
Charlie's eyebrows pulled together, fighting back the burning behind her eyes.
She turned around and looked in the mirror on the dresser.
The coat fit her like it had been waiting for her.
The color was extraordinary against her white shirt and tanned, freckled skin, and the wool was heavy and warm and lined with Bemberg silk that felt like being held.