Blossom Promise (9 page)

If only I had not made the raft
…
Why did I do that? Why didn’t I
—

Michael touched Vern’s arm. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About whether I should go get my mom.”

For the first time in his life, Vern wanted Michael’s mom’s firmness. He ducked his head.

“Does that mean get her or not?”

“Get her.”

“If my dad’s home, I’ll get him too.”

Vern lifted his shoulders again and let them fall. He and Michael walked without speaking the half mile to the Houstons’ bridge. There Michael spoke again. “My mom’ll know what to do.”

Vern stepped onto the bridge. He hesitated because he was crossing more than water.

Then Michael said in a lower voice, “Vern, I know he’s not dead.”

Vern bobbed his head to show he’d heard, and then he started across. Through the cracks between the boards, he could see the water had already begun to recede.

If only I had seen this bridge, Vern thought, maybe I could have grabbed it. Why didn’t I just …

Holding himself tighter, he jumped off the bridge and broke into a run for home.

Maggie picked up the phone and said “Hello.”

“Maggie, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

Maggie sank down onto a chair, directly in the blast from the window air conditioner.

“Who is this, Vern or Junior?” Maggie had never been able to tell their voices apart over the telephone.

“It’s Vern.”

“Vern, I am so glad you called. I am all by myself in this motel room and I am going crazy. I—”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Give me a chance and I’ll tell you. Mom has gone out with some bull rider named Cody Gray.”

“When will she be back?”

“How would I know? Late! She does this every night, Vern. I don’t even know where they go in that big silver convertible. I can’t figure out why Mom wanted me to come if all she was going to do was run off and leave me. Vern—”

Vern interrupted. “Pap had a heart attack.”

Maggie stopped in mid-sentence. “What?”

“He may die.”

The blast from the air conditioner was icy cold. Maggie’s knees began to tremble beneath her jeans. “Pap?”

“Yes.”

“How did it happen? When?”

“This afternoon. He was throwing a rope to me and Michael—we were out on the creek in a raft—and after he threw the rope, he just staggered up the bank and fell over. You and Mom better come home.”

“We will. But, listen, Vern, don’t hang up yet.” She sensed Vern was lowering the receiver. “Who’s staying with you and Junior?”

“Mary.”

“Mad Mary?”

“Yes.”

“Let me speak to Junior.”

“He’s asleep. He was real upset because he was with Pap when it—Oh, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. You’ll hear all about it when you get home.”

“Vern, don’t hang up,” she said again. Vern was known for his short phone conversations. Most of the time he never even said good-bye. “I’ve got to hear more about this. Did you talk to the doctor—”

She heard a dial tone. After a long minute, she put the phone back in its cradle.

She got up slowly and looked around the room as if she’d forgotten what she was doing there. Then, in a robotlike way, she began to get her clothes and put them in her suitcase. She packed her mom’s clothes in the same slow way.

She glanced around the room to make sure she wasn’t leaving anything. Then she went out and sat on the edge of a rusty lounge chair by the blue swimming pool.

People swam in the pool, got out, dried off, drank beer at the tables. Cars moved in and out of the parking lot. Late arrivals checked into the Bar None and found their rooms. Maggie noticed none of this.

She sat tensely, her arms wrapped around her knees, bathed in the red glow of the motel sign and the amber glow of the Bar-B-Q Barn. Her eyes watched the vacancy sign because that was where cars turned in from the highway.

At two thirty in the morning Cody’s silver Cadillac convertible pulled into the motel drive.

Maggie got to her feet instantly. She crossed the parking lot. Cody’s convertible stopped in front of room 104, taking up two slots. The motor was idling.

Neither her mother nor Cody noticed her. Her mother was kissing Cody good night when Maggie opened the car door.

The moon was high and full. The stars were out. A night breeze blew from the west.

Mad Mary was sitting on the porch, in the swing. It was after midnight, but Mary couldn’t sleep under a roof. Anyway, she loved the night sky. On nights like this she felt she could, with her naked eye, see stars scientists hadn’t even thought about.

She heard a knock on the front door. She knew it had to be Junior. No one else would knock to come out of a house.

“Come on out, Junior,” she said, “and join me.”

Junior came out on the porch in his mother’s pajamas. These were the pajamas he had packed so happily that morning for the spend-the-night.

His feet padded across the uneven plank flooring, and Junior took his place in the swing. He sat as close as he could to Mary, and she put her arm around his shoulder. She began to pat him in rhythm with the swing. “I thought you were asleep,” she said.

“I kept having bad dreams.”

“Well, sit out here and keep me company.”

“All right, if you want me to.”

“Look at the stars, Junior. That’ll make you feel better. It does me.”

“All right.” He would watch the stars if she wanted him to, but the only thing that made him feel better was being close to her.

Junior took a deep breath, inhaling her comforting woodsy smell. They watched the sky without speaking for a few minutes. Then Junior broke the silence.

“Did your grandfather ever almost die?” he asked.

“He did die,” Mary said. “I was just about your age when it happened too.”

“Did you see it happen?”

“Yes, I did. As a matter of fact, I was holding his hand.”

“You were?” Junior pulled back to look at her.

“In those days, Junior, it seemed important to be with somebody when they died. The whole family was there, standing around my grandfather’s bed. Folks don’t do that much anymore.” She glanced down at Junior’s moonlit face and changed the subject. “Your grandfather and I were in a school show one time. Did he ever tell you about that? He did rope tricks and I sang ‘Ave Maria.’”

Junior blinked his eyes. “He told me you sang, but not which song. Do you still know it?”

She shook her head. “My singing days are over, Junior.”

“Could you hum a little bit?”

She hummed a tune Junior had never heard before. Even when she was humming, she couldn’t make the high notes. When she stopped, Junior said, “That was nice.”

There was another of those long, comforting pauses. Junior cleared his throat. “Getting back to the subject of grandfathers … when your grandfather died, did it scare you?” he asked.

“No, Junior, it didn’t, but I was expecting him to die. My mother had a long talk with me before we went—about how Poppa Dear—that’s what we called him—Poppa Dear was dying and what I was supposed to do and how I was to behave.”

“I wish my mother had told me what to do,” Junior said. Mary hugged him.

“If you don’t want to talk about it,” Junior said, “that’s all right, but I’d like to hear some more.”

“Let’s see. We went in the bedroom, and, Junior, my grandfather’s bedroom was bigger than a lot of churches, and when we got over to the bed, it just happened that I was standing right by his hand. I don’t know why, but I reached out and took it. His eyes weren’t open, but for a while he held my hand back. Then all of a sudden, he just let go. That was how I knew he was gone.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” she went on in a different, firmer tone of voice, “don’t you let folks dying do to you what it did to me.”

“What?”

“Drive you away from people, make you go off and live by yourself in a cave.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Junior said. “I couldn’t. I’d miss people too much.”

Mary hugged him again. “You’ve had about as bad a day as a boy your age can have, haven’t you?”

Junior rested his head on Mary’s shoulder. “I sure hope so,” he said.

“Well,
I
never thought Pap would do something like this to me,” Vicki Blossom said. She and Maggie were in the car, on their way home to Alderson. They had passed through a dust storm, and the windshield wipers were still wiping away the dust.

“Mom, he didn’t
do
anything to you. He had a heart attack!”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean. You act like he did it on purpose to stop you from having fun with Cody Gray!”

Vicki Blossom began driving faster, weaving in and out of interstate traffic. On either side of the highway were stretches of flat ground. Behind them the dust storm reached to the sky.

By evening the oil towers they were passing would have changed to trees. The brown fields would be green hills. By early morning they would be home.

Maggie blinked her eyes. She had been trying to cry ever since she had opened the convertible door and said, “Pap’s had a heart attack.”

“How bad?”

“I don’t know.”

Everything happened in a rush then. Her mother was out of the convertible, hugging her, crying, “Oh, no, not Pap. Oh—Junior and Vern. We got to pack.”

“I already did.”

Cody’s hand was on Vicki’s shoulder. “What you want me to do, hon? How can I help?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can’t think.”

“I’ll check you out of the motel. I’ll look after Sandy Boy. You just throw your bags in the car and go.”

In five minutes Maggie was in the car. Through the window she could see Cody Gray pressing some money into her mom’s hand.

“I can’t take that, Cody.”

“Now, I don’t want to worry about you,” he said. “That car of yours is liable to quit. If it does, you rent another one and keep going.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“You just take care of yourself. I don’t want anything happening to you.” He leaned down to look at Maggie through the car window. “You either, little lady.”

Then he straightened. “I’m real, real sorry.” There was a pause. Maggie looked in the sideview mirror. They were kissing.

“I’ll see you,” Cody said, “in—let’s see—Phoenix.”

“Oh, I hope so.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“Come on, Mom!”

Her mom got in the car, and they pulled out of the motel. Her mom held on to Cody’s hand out the window until they got past the swimming pool. “You taking me with you?” He laughed. Vicki Blossom let go and laughed too.

The whole thing made Maggie try even harder to cry.

The dust was gone now, so Vicki Blossom turned off the window wipers. “It just seems like yesterday when I first saw Pap,” she said as she passed a sixwheeler. “I met Pap before I met your dad, did you know that? It was at the Snake River Stampede in Nampa, Idaho.”

“I knew you met at a rodeo. I didn’t know which one.”

“The Snake River Stampede. Pap introduced me to your dad on a Monday, and I married him two weeks later on a Saturday. I would have married him sooner, but he was slow in asking.” She smiled slightly. “The wedding was at the Pikes-Peak-or-Bust Rodeo in Colorado Springs. The bride wore white—a white satin shirt, and so did the groom.”

“I knew you got married at a rodeo, but I didn’t know which one.”

“I had an old Ford in those days and we sold it for three hundred dollars, hooked my horse trailer up to their pickup, and took off—Pap and your dad and me. That was probably the happiest summer of my life.”

Maggie rubbed her eyes. They were so dry they hurt. She was watching her mother. When she was sure her mother was finished talking about her courtship, she said, “I wish there was no such thing as heart attacks.”

“You know what Pap told me after your dad died? I never will forget this. When your dad died, Pap was the saddest person I have ever seen in my life. Oh, we were all broken up about it, but it was like Pap wouldn’t ever get over it—and the truth is, he never did.”

They drove on in silence for a few miles. Maggie waited. Finally she said, “So, go on. What did Pap say?”

Vicki looked at her blankly.

“You were getting ready to tell me something that Pap said after my daddy died.”

“Oh, I was thinking about something else.”

“Cody Gray?” Maggie asked.

“No, not Cody Gray. Give me a break, Maggie. Pap said that when he was little, life was like a giant seesaw, and everybody he knew was down on one end with him. He said he didn’t even know one single dead person. No one was on the other end. Well, then his little sister died, then an aunt, then another aunt. When he was seventeen, his mom died.

“Pretty soon, Pap said, the seesaw was just about balanced. He knew about as many people on one end as he did on the other. When your dad died, though, Pap said the seesaw tipped, the other end went down so hard, so fast, Pap said it almost pulled him down there too.”

“I’m only twelve and my seesaw’s already balanced,” Maggie said. “A lot of people I love have died. If Pap dies too …” She couldn’t finish.

“What we need to do is pile some more people on our end—get some new friends, have some fun.”

“I don’t want Pap to die.” Maggie felt tears come to her eyes. With relief she wiped them on the hem of her shirt.

“I don’t either.” Vicki Blossom smiled sadly. “Nobody ever wants a Blossom to die. You know how sometimes people will say, ‘Isn’t it a blessing that so and so passed on,’ well, nobody ever says that about a Blossom. And you know something else?” She blew the horn at an eighteen-wheeler. “Nobody ever will.”

Mud was in the shelter of the pine trees. He had been there, sitting uneasily on his haunches for hours. From time to time, his whole body trembled.

Mud didn’t understand what had happened. One moment he had been bounding down the hill, ears flapping, tail flying, barking with excitement. He had just flushed a pair of flickers out of the grass.

At that triumphant moment, he had seen Pap with his rope. There was something about Pap slinging a rope around his head that always sent Mud into a special frenzy.