The Hope Chest, page 18
“And there’s one with a smear of mustard that I got on my blouse when she let us roast hot dogs over an open fire out in the yard. She fussed because it had dried before she got it in the washer and the stain didn’t come out,” Nessa said.
“That last row is the year we were all fifteen. Remember she made us matching shirts? I see part of the material over there,” Nessa said. “But why would she save bits of all those things all these years? We’ve all just turned thirty-one. Some of this stuff has to be as old as we are.”
“I think it’s her way of letting us know that she loved us,” April said.
Flynn couldn’t believe she’d said that, not after learning so much about her relationship with Nanny Lucy the night before. “Why would she treat you like she did if she loved you?”
“All she had was her quilting. There she was, saddled with a miserable lifestyle she didn’t want,” April said. “Kids and grandkids that disappointed her and made her remember her sin. Her husband quit paying attention to her when she got pregnant, so that had to affect her, too. Uncle Isaac wanted to please her, so he went into the ministry, but I wonder if he truly loves what he does. Uncle Matthew is constantly looking for love. My mother probably just wanted someone to show her affection.”
Complete silence filled the shed for a full minute. Flynn couldn’t think of a single word to say, because April was right. His father was constantly looking for love and never finding it, just as Flynn had done.
Finally Nessa nodded. “You probably hit the nail right on the head, April, but I’m wondering what Nanny Lucy might have done with her life if she hadn’t been dealt such a raw deal. Her sewing is so good, I wonder if she might have been a home economics teacher.”
April held up both palms. “There are no buts here, Nessa. I can read, and a lot of what I read in self-help books is beginning to make sense now. We can’t go back and redo or undo the past, but we don’t have to let it define us, like it evidently has Uncle Isaac and Uncle Matthew and even my mother when she was alive, right along with all three of us.”
Flynn went back to stitching. “My mother made the comment once that my father changed when she got pregnant with me. That scares the bejesus out of me. What if I break this gene thing that got passed from our grandfather to my dad and now to me, only to find out that I can have a meaningful relationship, but then I don’t like my wife when she gets pregnant?”
“When does Uncle Matthew get tired of his women?” Nessa asked.
“Well, it’s sure not when one of them gets pregnant. He had a vasectomy as soon as he could. Mama told me that when I asked if she thought Dad would have more children,” Flynn answered.
“Think back,” April said. “What’s the longest he’s ever stayed with a woman?”
“My mother, I guess. He was with her about six years after I was born, but he wasn’t faithful.” Flynn frowned. “The rest of his marriages have lasted about two years; then he’s off on the chase again. You know”—he paused a moment before he went on—“I just bet that’s why she treated my mama like a daughter, and the rest of her family so horrible. She kind of bonded with Mama because of her own past.”
Nessa snapped the fingers on her left hand. “You’re probably right about that, and it’s the chase, like you said before. I bet that’s what Grandpa liked, too. He liked the excitement of the chase, then the first little while of the affair or relationship, then he got bored. Nanny Lucy was just a phase that he went through. I hate to say that.”
“From what I read, he had to marry her to get into bed with her. She’d never been with a man when they married,” April said. “If he liked the chase, then I guess the only way he could win with Nanny Lucy was to marry her.”
“Sixty years ago, that wasn’t uncommon,” Nessa said. “Not even around thirty years ago, because Mama says that she and Daddy were both virgins. Of course she added, ‘just like God declared they should be.’”
Flynn chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” Nessa turned to glare at him.
“I bet you got the talk about how it would be so much better if you abstained until you got married, right? I can just hear Uncle Isaac drilling that into your head. The idea of him trying to talk you into anything hit me as humorous,” Flynn answered.
Nessa raised her eyebrows and nodded in agreement. “It was Mama who gave me the talk. Daddy would never discuss sex with me. He picked out a husband and wanted me to get married the summer after I graduated, but I refused. That came close to causing a war.”
“Nanny Lucy was proud of you for doing that,” April said.
“Really?” Nessa leaned forward to look past Flynn at her cousin on the other end of the quilting frame.
“Truth.” April laid a hand over her heart. “I was jealous that she bragged on you for standing up for what you wanted. But then I was angry with her at the same time for not being proud of me when I stood up for what I wanted.”
“We really are a screwed-up bunch, aren’t we?” Maybe the happy-ever-after kind of love was just a myth perpetrated by romance books and TV shows. Even in his head that sounded like psychobabble, so he put it out of his mind.
But it didn’t stay gone very long. As soon as they finished their morning quilting and went their separate ways to do other things before lunchtime, Flynn headed down the path to the waterfall. When he was sure neither of his cousins had followed him, he sat down on the grass with his back against a scrub oak tree and called his father.
“Hey,” Matthew answered on the second ring, “did you change your mind about being my best man and about running from who you are?”
“No, and I’m not running from something, Dad, but running toward a better life. I do have a couple of questions about Nanny Lucy,” Flynn told him.
“Fire away, but you’ve got to remember that I moved away from Blossom as soon as I graduated from high school. One of my older friends got me a job in the oil field business down around Austin, and I only went back to visit Mama for holidays,” he said, “and then only if I knew Isaac wouldn’t be there. I got sick and tired of his preaching at me when I was a teenager. I sure didn’t want to listen to him list my sins when I was an adult.”
“Did you know that your father was a womanizer?” Flynn asked.
“Oh, hell, yeah!” Matthew laughed out loud. “Everyone knew that he chased skirts, even Mama. They had some hellacious arguments about that when me and Isaac were kids. Seems like we were about twelve and thirteen when he started spending most of his nights on the sofa. I guess they tried to make it work one more time, though, because Rachel came along.”
Flynn could feel the hard bark of the tree pressing into his back, but he didn’t shift positions. “Did you ever feel like Nanny Lucy loved Isaac more than you?”
“That was a given, too. She always said that he was a good boy like Uncle Ernest, and I was the bad child like my father. I guess I proved her right, didn’t I?” Matthew’s chuckle crackled like an icicle in a child’s hand. “I didn’t want to end up like Daddy. I wanted Mama to love me like she did Isaac, but I got told that so much that I figured, ‘What the hell. I’ve got the name; I’ll just prove her right.’”
Sweat rolled down Flynn’s face and dripped off his jaw. Was he fooling himself into believing that he could change the course of nature?
“How did that make you feel?” Flynn asked.
“After a while I didn’t really give a damn,” Matthew answered. “What brought all these questions out anyway? You never asked me anything like this before.”
“We’ve just been talking a lot about her. Moving into the house has brought back memories. I wondered how you felt about the way things were done when you were here,” Flynn said.
“It was life. I didn’t whine or pout because I wasn’t the favorite. I’m like Dad. Isaac is like Mama. Nothing could change that. It’s just the way things are, and she reminded me every day of it,” Matthew said. “You need to get out of there, Son. That place isn’t healthy.”
“I like it here, and I’ve got a part-time job that takes me away from the house in the afternoons. I’m hoping it turns into a full-time job later,” Flynn told him. “I’m helping Jackson Devereaux build furniture.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Matthew’s voice shot up and got a lot shriller. “You’re trained to manage oil rigs, not piddle around with junk like that.”
Flynn hadn’t expected much support, not when his father had always been affiliated with the oil business in one way or another. “I have found that working with my hands is relaxing. For the first time in ages, I whistled on the way home yesterday evening.”
“And just how many women are you going to meet working out there in the sticks? You’re thirty-one years old. It’s time for you to settle down. Remember that you are the last living young O’Riley in our family. Having a son to carry on the family name is on your shoulders,” Matthew fussed at him. “Marry a good woman, have a child or two or three until you get a boy, and then . . .”
Flynn butted in before his dad could finish: “And then leave her like you did.”
“I’m sorry that you don’t like the genes you got, Son. And if you want to change, then I wish you nothing but the best,” Matthew said, “but you do need to remember that you really are the last O’Riley male in the family. I promise I’ll quit giving you hell about turning your life around if you’ll just keep that in mind.”
“I appreciate that, Dad, and I never thought about being the only male heir,” Flynn said. Talk about a burden! Not only was he trying to turn his life around, but now he had to think about perpetuating the family name.
Maybe it would be best if the O’Riley name died with me, he thought.
“Well, think about it, and the best of luck to you in finding a good woman and staying with her for fifty years. Your Mama was a good woman and deserved better than she got. Maybe when you figure things out, you’ll be more like her than me,” Matthew said. “I’ve got to go now. Delores needs me to look at a wedding venue. It would be nice if you’d come to the wedding, even if you are too stubborn to be my best man again.”
“We’ll see how things go.” Flynn felt like he was becoming more like his mother, and he liked the difference it was making in his life. Just a little more work, and maybe, just maybe, he would be ready to really fall in love for good.
“Bye, then,” Matthew said, and he ended the call.
Flynn put the phone back in his shirt pocket. “Well, how about that? I can’t believe that my father admitted that Mama deserved better.”
April was fifteen minutes early to work, but she sat in the car for a while, trying to still her mind. It had done nothing but run in circles since the night before. Finally she pushed open the door and inhaled the hot air as she crossed the gravel parking lot.
Now I understand why Nanny Lucy was the way she was, but why couldn’t someone love me unconditionally in my life? she asked herself as she opened the door into the clinic.
“I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve got a chamber of commerce meeting.” Maudie already had her purse thrown over her shoulder and was heading for the door. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Yes, ma’am,” April said, and then she headed back to the shelter area. “Good morning, my pretties.” She took a fluffy yellow kitten out of the first cage. The little thing cuddled down in her arms like a baby and began to purr.
“I love you,” she whispered.
The kitten purred even louder.
“And you love me no matter how bad I messed up in the past.” She almost smiled.
She sat down in the rocking chair with the kitten, and in minutes all the stress left her body. She began to hum a lullaby, and the kitten closed her eyes. This was truly the life—knowing that a little homeless kitten loved her so much it could trust her.
“Someday you’ll have a wonderful home, and the people there will pet you and play with you, but until then, we need to get your cage cleaned,” she whispered as she stood up and laid the sleeping kitten on the chair.
Someday you will have the same, the voice in her head said.
I’d be happy if I could just have a family of my very own. April sighed and then got busy taking care of the animals. But she hummed one tune after another the rest of the afternoon. The troubles she had brought to work with her disappeared one by one until, by the end of the day, she was happier than she’d ever been.
Chapter Fifteen
For a few days, Nessa put the idea that her grandmother was not perfect out of her mind and dived into finishing one quilt top and starting another. She listened to the older country-music playlist on her phone as she worked so that she wouldn’t think about what she had read in the diary. Every evening she took a walk to the waterfall and spent a couple of hours trying to make up her mind whether to go back to Turkey and teach another year or stay in Blossom. If she went back, maybe April would finally come to grips with her demons and go back to her own bedroom. Sleeping in the living room didn’t give the poor girl a bit of privacy.
She must have been trying to make up her mind once and for all the night she dreamed about that messy closet for the second time. Nanny Lucy was in her dream, telling her that answers were in the closet; then she faded away in a gray fog. The next day, when Flynn and April left for their jobs, Nessa gathered up half a dozen boxes from the garage, popped them into shape, and taped the bottoms.
“Okay, Nanny Lucy, let’s go find all the answers so you can rest in peace. If you’ve got any more secrets or anything else to keep chipping away at the pedestal that I had you on, let’s get it over with.” She sighed when she opened the door. Where to begin was the big question. Nanny Lucy had always said that everything had a place, so what had happened here? Nessa stared at the messy closet and shook her head slowly.
“Might as well drag it all out and then sift through it,” she muttered as she got started.
Pulling the stuff on the closet floor out into the hallway, she realized that there was an order to the chaos. She found one pink rubber flip-flop, a ziplock bag full of small items like ponytail holders and barrettes, and one Cinderella sock—all items that she’d left behind when she was a little girl. She wrote Flynn’s name on one box, April’s on another, and her own on a third, and then sorted the coloring books, puzzles, and all their old memories into the right places.
The stuff on the first and second shelves seemed to belong to Nanny Lucy’s children, and Nessa had to guess at a few things, but most of the items didn’t leave much doubt. She wrote Matthew’s name on the last empty box. Matthew’s toy guns with his initials on the belt went into the one labeled for him. Rachel’s Barbie dolls went into hers. Isaac’s first little New Testament went into his box.
When Nessa reached the top shelf, where the suitcase was stored, she had to bring a chair from the kitchen to stand on. There was very little on the shelf—an old railroad hat and a tiny box that held two gold wedding rings. What had Nanny Lucy thought when she put those rings away? Had she been relieved that she didn’t have to keep up the farce of being married to a cheater, or had it made her sad? Nessa carefully opened the suitcase and added those two items to it and then carried everything, box by box, out to the garage and stacked the boxes up in one corner.
“The quilt tops were on top of the suitcase,” she said as she went back into the house. “The hat was Grandpa. The quilts were you.” She had picked up the chair to bring it back to the kitchen when she noticed the corner of something yellow sticking out from the bottom of the top shelf. She set the chair down, held on to the back of it, and stood on it again. Sure enough, there was an envelope stuck in the crack between the shelf and the wall. She yanked it free, got down off the chair, and then sat down.
She turned it over and over in her hands. There was no name on the front of the envelope, but it was sealed. How a corner had gotten stuck was a mystery because the thing was downright hefty. Hoping that it was a long letter from Nanny Lucy explaining more about her decisions, she ripped into the paper, and hundred-dollar bills tumbled down onto the floor.
“Why did you hide this money?” Nessa frowned. “And in that closet, of all places. Were you saving up so you could divorce Grandpa?”
Nessa counted the bills as she picked them up—twenty-four in all. Then she noticed that the date on them was the previous year. She drew her brows down in a deep frown and carried the money to the kitchen. “Are you testing me or whoever cleans out the closet? I’ll share this with Flynn and April, but why did you put it up there unless . . .” Nessa clamped a hand over her mouth. “You knew you were sick, didn’t you? You put this money there for us grandkids to find. This was probably the last of your quilting-business money.”
She stared down the hallway at the empty closet and then looked toward the living room. “On the outside, you were prim and proper and God-fearing. But on the inside, you were like this closet—messy and locked up—and you knew your family was all in a jumble, too.”
She put the chair back where it belonged, laid the money on the dining room table, and was about to leave the house when Waylon came wandering down the hallway. “I wish you could talk to me,” she told him, “and tell me what was going on here those last months before she died. I guess I’ll never know what she was thinking when she put that money up there on the shelf. Do you think she was really losing her mind, like my dad says?”
The cat meowed loudly, jumped up on the sofa, and curled up to take another nap.
“A lot of help you are,” Nessa said. “I’m going to the falls to try to figure out why she put money away on that shelf. Did she really leave it for us cousins, or was she up there hiding things and just tucked the envelope away?”
When she was halfway there, the noise of tires crunching gravel told her that April was home. That meant Flynn would be there in a few minutes, but Nessa didn’t care. There was a slow cooker of stew on the counter, and they were both adults. They could make their own supper, and she would eat when she got back.
When she reached the water, she kicked off her flip-flops and waded out into the cool water until it came up to the edge of her cut-off denim shorts. She was deep in thought about her grandmother when a big splash startled her so badly that she whipped around to see what was going on. Tex was swimming toward her, and Jackson was taking off his shoes at the edge of the creek. She took a couple of steps, and then her foot landed on a slippery rock and she lost her balance. On instinct, she sucked in a lungful of air just before the water covered her face, and then she came up sputtering. Jackson was right beside her, a big grin on his face and laughter in his blue eyes.
