2 EVIE
E VIE
“Mom?”
I hear my daughter’s voice calling me from the distance and pull the light throw around my shoulders a tad bit higher. I close my eyes and inhale the crisp air, savoring its combination of sweetness and woodsmoke. There was a time when I didn’t like autumn, when it was my least favorite season.
I was a summer girl in my earlier years.
Loved the feel of loose cotton and sun-kissed cheeks and bare feet.
Warmth was fleeting in eastern Pennsylvania and never seemed to last as long as it should.
When autumn would come, I saw it as the unhappy reminder of the end of summer’s warmth and the beginning of dreary, gray cold, never quite understanding why people liked it so much.
Leaves changing from fresh green to shades of dull orange and dead brown held no interest to me, and I dreaded the uncomfortable itch of wool on my softened summer skin.
But that was a long time ago and a different version of myself.
If, somewhere in the grand universe of life, one could put a divider through the timeline that stretched from birth to death, I thought that mine might be labeled “Part 1—Before I Liked Autumn” and “Part 2—After I Liked Autumn.” Since that time, many years ago, autumn has become my favorite season, and like so many, I love the scents and sights and emotions that the season brings.
“There you are.” Lainey’s footsteps offer a pleasant crunch as she walks toward me and stands a few feet away. “It’s getting chilly out here. The sun’s going down.” She looks to the trees, filling the space between us with comments about the weather.
“The fresh air feels good,” I tell her. I look at my daughter, who stands with her hands on her hips staring out into the woods that border the backyard of our Pennsylvania house.
At the edge of the trees are dots of grass where the green is a different shade, marking the spot where, at one time, a wooden swing set lived, complete with a slide and a little playhouse.
I can see the younger versions of my two now-grown children, swinging with glee, trying to touch the tips of their toes to the leaves on the tree.
I can hear the sounds of their crystal voices giggling as we run around the yard and our dog barks and leaps nearby.
“Want to join me?” I pat the bench beside me.
Lainey looks down, and for a moment, I think she might sit, but she doesn’t.
We used to cuddle under a blanket and watch the stars together on that bench, just as I did once upon a time in a different place with my own mother. Look, there’s Orion. See?
“We’re going to order some Chinese food.
How’s that sound?” she asks. But before I can reply, she quickly adds with the underpinnings of exasperation, “I know there’s still plenty of food in the house, but I’m not sure we can possibly eat any more lasagna.
Rick offered to run out and pick it up. Why is it that people think lasagna and funerals go so well together? ”
I laugh a little and nod agreeably. “Sure. Sounds good.” I see the slightest hint of surprise on my daughter’s face and feel a quiet sense of satisfaction. I can still pleasantly surprise you sometimes, I guess. Even if it is about something as meaningless as take-out food.
“Okay. Good. What would you like?” Lainey doesn’t bother rattling off the menu of what they’d be ordering for themselves.
I’m not a big fan of American Chinese food, and to me, it’s either beef with broccoli or chicken and vegetables, and I know she believes this is the extent of my adventures in exotic foods.
I don’t like that she sees me this way—as a kind of sheltered woman with a small life in a small town.
It isn’t her fault. I’d think the same about me if I were her.
Sometimes I imagine telling her the stories. The ones she deserves to hear. About my life. I wonder, at times, how things might have been different had she been raised with a different impression of me, instead of the version she got.
“Anything’s fine, honey. I’m not that hungry.”
Lainey turns, taking a step. “Are you coming in or ...” She trails off. She’s fussing over me a bit, worried and taking care of me. In truth, it’s her I’m worried about.
“I’ll be in in a few minutes.”
She nods, and I watch her return to the house, her footsteps quieting.
Alone again, I trace my fingers along the bench, feeling the rough, graying wood slats.
At one time, it was shiny and brown, the lacquer as bright and smooth as the side of a boat.
Steve and I purchased the bench from a nursery in town, while out buying impatiens and marigolds a long time ago.
I was nine months pregnant and in nesting mode.
I would spend hours enjoying the peaceful spot, grateful for that bench as I cradled my newborn daughter and sang lullabies.
A few years later, when Lucas was born, I would do the same again.
One of my favorite photos is a picture that Steve took of me in a peach-colored sleeveless dress, with both kids curled into my side on a spring day.
One child on each side, their faces are turned upward to gaze at mine with the adoration and love that only a child can offer a mother.
There’s so much contentment in that photo, which sits on the piano now.
As if recalling it all along with me, the bench makes a loud creak where it slopes in the center, splintered and tired from the years it’s been sitting in this very spot.
Funerals are like this, I figure, the impetus to countless voyages down memory lane and all the regrets and joys that come with them. Even when expected, they jolt us out of our daily routine, causing us to question anything and everything.
I should probably get rid of the bench before it breaks one day. But despite its cracks, it had represented the initiation of stability into my life for the first time, many years ago, and I can’t seem to part with it.
“I heard you were out here. Are you hiding?”
I turn and see my best friend, Kate, as she walks toward me, clearly having just left the gym—or at least dressing the part. “They’ve sent the troops out, eh? I didn’t hear you pull up,” I reply.
“I think they’re worried about you. It’s a good thing. At least they give a damn. My kids would probably leave me out here to rot.” She drops down onto the seat next to me.
“They would not.” Kate’s grown children practically live at her house.
We sit in comfortable silence, breathing in the cool air. “How are you holding up, kiddo?” she asks after a moment.
“I’m fine. Really. I don’t know why they’re hovering. We’re not that old yet, are we?”
“We’re not old at all.”
“They’ve started treating me like I’m ancient.”
“You do kind of act like it,” she says, giving me a playful nudge. I can’t entirely disagree.
“I passed Lainey on my way out,” Kate continues. “I hear they’re leaving the day after tomorrow.” She looks over at me with a knowing, sympathetic smile.
“I miss her,” I say quietly. “Even when she’s sitting right next to me, I miss her.
” I think of the way we were when she was a baby.
A toddler. I would sit for hours and hours just playing and coloring and watching her discover the world around her.
I was completely enamored, and she was never farther than a few inches from me, it seemed.
“But she has her own life now. I know that. And Lucas, he’s close by. So that’s nice.”
“But?”
“We used to be so close. Now we just talk about take-out food,” I say with a shrug. “I guess this is just the way it is with grown-up kids, I suppose.”
“Hmm, sometimes maybe, sure. But in this case? You could make it better, I think.”
I turn. “What do you mean?”
Kate pats my hand. “You know exactly what I mean.” She pauses. “Secrets. They’re a subtle invisible line, like a wall you’ve built all around you, sweetie, for years now, keeping everyone just a little bit apart.”
I nod, looking away.
“Maybe it’s finally time they don’t anymore,” she adds.
I knew how she felt about this. We discussed it over the years.
Kate, my childhood best friend who knows where all the proverbial dead bodies in my life are buried.
She has never approved of my decision to keep a part of my life secret from my children but has supported me anyway, as best friends do.
“I haven’t been able to get it off my mind. The thought of telling them,” I find myself saying.
“I figured as much.”
“But I promised,” I say, shaking my head. “And I ... I just can’t. And I don’t know how I’d even start.” My emotions have been close to the surface over the past few days, and my eyes well.
“But Steve’s gone now,” she says gently. “And he did say ‘someday.’”
“It’s not the right time.”
“It might be exactly the right time.”
I ponder this for a while. “It’ll just make things worse.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t know that. What if it makes things better ?” She squeezes my hand. “For all of you.”
With the sun now beneath the horizon, the air turns from crisp to cold and starts to bite. The first star appears on the horizon, and I look up at it, as if for answers.
“Come on. Let’s go in. We’re getting takeout. I’ll even give you my fortune cookie,” I say eventually.
She gives me a look and is about to continue but quiets. The conversation is over.
I raise the cardigan higher on my neck, my hair tucked inside as I walk up the gentle slope toward the house to the deck, where a barbecue grill sits with a cover. As I place my hand on the door, I turn to look back at the yard once more and smile. My husband had loved this yard.