Born Under a Lucky Moon (17 page)

“In the downstairs fridge,” she said.

After Fudgie got his beer, we went out back and sat in the glider and looked at Bear Lake. Fudgie waved at Terri Worthington, who was out in her family's Chris-Craft. It was a wooden classic from the twenties that I had always loved. She squinted up at us with one hand over her eyes, then waved back and continued on, leaving a slow wake after her.

“How the hell did you come to be at Lucy's wedding? Her first one, I mean?” I cut to the chase.

Fudgie rocked the glider with one foot. “I was getting kind of burned out at U of M so I decided to hitchhike across the country. It was actually pretty easy getting rides. You wouldn't think that in this day and age. My mom flipped. She said I'd wind up murdered and in a ditch and would have to be identified by my dental records.” He took a sip of beer. “Anyhow, so I'm pretty tired and really dirty and I had just gotten dropped off in San Francisco. I had stayed with people I knew across the country or their parents or their friends or whoever I could bum a night with. But I didn't know a soul in San Fran. Then I remembered Lucy was in Monterey. I hopped a bus and rode for an hour, then walked to the base. Helluva walk, I gotta tell you. Long way. I got there and asked for Lucy. She comes down with this guy who turns out to be Chuck. We do the usual ‘Omigod, I can't believe you're here' and whatnot; then she tells me that they are on their way to the justice of the peace. Since I don't have anywhere to go she tells me to come along and I can be a witness. They needed one anyway. They were just going to pick somebody up at City Hall but Lucy said if I was there I might as well be it.”

“Didn't you ask why? I mean, why she was getting married?”

“Oh sure. They were both laughing and hooting it up in the car. They told me that it was going to be a quickie wedding so that Chuck wouldn't be shipped out to Germany. Then they'd get it annulled when Chuck's girl showed up to do the real honors. The whole thing was pretty damn funny. That's why I was kind of shocked to see the whole deal happening back here. I guess they really fell in love, huh?”

“Um, yeah.” I wasn't on solid ground here.

“Whatever happened to the chick Chuck was supposed to marry?”

“Lucy said she never showed up.”

“That's weird. Do you suppose she really exists?”

I thought about Chuck's phone conversation in my parents' bedroom. “Yeah, I think she exists.”

“We had a blast that night. Got them married and then we had a reception.”

This startled me. They had a reception? Before I had a chance to imagine a small, intimate setting complete with a string quartet, Fudgie went on.

“We went to Chi-Chi's—you know, that Mexican chain. A bunch of their friends from the base showed up. We did tequila shots and danced around to the mariachi band.”

I revised my initial thoughts. This reception sounded like fun, not like the usual WASPy thing we had around Muskegon—although the receptions that were held at the local Polish Falcon Hall were a lot of fun, complete with polka bands and dollar dances with the bride.

“Then this guy shows up dressed as Cupid. One of their friends had hired him. Cupid comes out and sings a song and then we got him drunk, too. It was a fun night.”

I thought about how different this bride seemed from the sullen Lucy I had grown up with. The Lucy I knew was one who had steadily waged war with every one of her high school teachers. The same teachers I would inherit two years later. When I arrived in their classes, they would look down at the attendance list and say, “Jeannie,” long pause, “Thompson?” The long pause always tipped me off. They were already thinking how much they hated me. The French teacher, on the very first day of class, had seated me in the last row while the rest of the class occupied the first two rows. Since there were six rows in total, I spent a year staring at empty desks and the backs of everyone else's heads. In a school that was only composed of about ninety students per grade, it was hard to escape a teacher who hadn't had Lucy in class. It didn't make for a great four years. But I tried my best to be a model student and not bring any attention to myself.

The mosquitoes were starting up in earnest now. Fudgie and I slapped at them and I lit the citronella candle on the porch. It never helped, but we always used them.

“I wanted to ask you what you gave Lucy the night of Evan's wedding.”

“A picture. One I took the night of the reception. I figured that that was what you wanted to know so I brought a copy with me.” He pulled it out of his shirt pocket. I looked at it in the waning light. It was a photo of Lucy and Chuck holding up their marriage certificate and yukking it up pretty good. Lucy had on a blue ruffled shirt and her best Jordache jeans. Chuck was in a white T-shirt and a sombrero. Behind them was a man painted blue, sporting a skimpy Cupid outfit and pointing a stuffed satin bow and arrow at the smiling couple.

“She's wearing my shirt,” I said. “I've been looking all over for it.”

“How are they doing?” Fudgie asked. “Now that they're living together and all.”

“They aren't. When they got back to base, the army didn't have anything available in married housing. So she's still in her barracks and he's still in his. But they're both getting discharged soon.”

“Then what are they going to do?”

“Good question.” I'd have to ask Mom whether she knew. Fudgie drained his beer and stood up. “I have to go back for my mom's birthday festivities. Tell Lucy I said hi when you talk to her.” He strolled across the backyard to walk the three blocks to his parents' house.

“Bye. And thanks,” I called after him.

He waved his hand in reply as he walked. I went back into the house to escape the mosquitoes. Dad was on the phone and rubbing his forehead. Mom was sitting at the table and watching him intently.

“Can't they find another place for her?” I heard Dad ask the person on the other end of the line.

“What's going on?” I asked Mom. “Is it Lucy?”

“Shush, I'm listening.”

“But she's just not right in the head . . .” Dad continued

“Is it Elizabeth?” I asked Mom.

“No, now shush.”

Dad talked for another few minutes, then hung up the phone. He and Mom regarded each other grimly.

“They say it will only be for two months,” Dad said.

“Two months of what?” I demanded.

They both turned to me wearily. “It's Grandma Thompson. Her nursing home has been temporarily shut down for renovations to bring it up to code.”

Grandma Thompson lived in Michigan City, Indiana, about three hundred miles south of us. She had refused many times to come up to Muskegon and live with us or in a local nursing home. She preferred to stay in the city she had grown up in and close to her other son, Robert, Dad's brother.

“Were you talking to Uncle Robert?”

Dad nodded. I asked, “Why doesn't she stay with him? She doesn't like us anyway.”

“Jeannie, don't say such things.” Mom sighed.

“But it's true!”

Grandma Thompson had always had a bug up her butt about our family. When Mom was pregnant with Lucy, she had given her a handbook on birth control. When Mom got pregnant with me, Grandma Thompson didn't speak to our family for five years. People often asked my mom if we were Catholic. She would just laugh and reply, “Not Catholic, just careless.” Uncle Robert's family was correctly composed of one boy and one girl.

“Robert can't take her. He doesn't have an extra room.” We all got coffee and sat down at the table. Dad started tracing the rooster in the corner.

“What about his kids' rooms?” I asked.

“He's turned one of them into a model train room and the other one into a sewing room.”

“Hazel has never sewn a stitch in her life,” Mom muttered.

“It's only for two months. Then she can return to the nursing home.” Dad rotated his coffee cup on the table between his palms. Mom stood up and rubbed his back.

“Of course, Harold. She's your mother and we love her and we'll do everything to make her welcome here. When does she arrive?”

Dad looked at her miserably. “Tomorrow.”

I left them to plan bedpans and wheelchairs and complicated prescription medicines. Later that night, I lay in bed and stared at the wall. As the others had gradually moved out of the house, Lucy and I had finally gotten our own bedrooms. Hers was better. For one, it had heat. I'd wake up on winter mornings and see ice on the inside of my windows. Dad swore up and down that he had rearranged the ducts but nothing ever worked. Since Lucy had left, I slept in her room. Now I stared at her wallpaper. She had chosen white wallpaper with funny drawings of desserts all over it. Under each éclair or chocolate cake was written things like “No! No! No!”

Mom cracked open the door. “Are you asleep?”

“No.” I sat up. She came and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Jeannie, having Grandma here will be fun.”

“Uh-huh.” I couldn't tell where this was going.

“She can tell you all kinds of family stories.”

Like the one about Dad bringing Mom home for the first time to meet his parents? And Grandma taking Mom to see Dad's ex-girlfriend's house? She had told Mom that that was who Dad should have married. It didn't give her a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings toward Grandma. Mom should have gotten mad about that but she had just been sad and felt she could never live up to expectations. I decided not to bring up that particular family story right then.

“Sure, Mom. I'll listen to her.”

“The thing is, you might be with her a lot.”

I sat up straighter in bed. “What does that mean?”

“We can't leave her alone, honey. And I'm working now.”

“But I work, too!”

“Only part-time. I'll talk to Tommy Loyse tomorrow about your hours so that you can be home during the day.”

I wasn't sure which was more insulting, the fact that I was now de facto babysitter to my senile grandmother, or that my mother thought she had to call my boss for me like I was a ten-year-old. I decided not to argue right then and switched the subject. “What's Lucy going to do when she gets out of the army?”

Mom stroked my hair. “She's not sure. She's talking about finishing up her degree.”

“That would be good. She only had a year left at Western.”

“Oh, not Western. She wants to go to Michigan State. They have an advanced Russian language program.”

That was news to me, but I wasn't exactly on an inside educational track at MSU. “What's Chuck going to do?”

“He said he's willing to come along. Said he doesn't have anything better to do.”

“Wow. Well, I guess it's good that he supports Lucy.”

Mom smiled and tapped my nose. “Get a good night's sleep; tomorrow is G-day. Grandma is coming.”

She looked out the window at the trees and the street beyond. “Did you move the lawn furniture into the garage?”

“Yeah,” I said wearily. It was a nightly ritual. A few years back we had discovered a lawn chair directly underneath Lucy's bedroom window. It had been dragged over there from its proper place about twenty feet away. Mom called the head of our neighborhood watch, Mr. Moorepark. We called him Mr. Moorebutt because of his large posterior. She informed him that we had a Peeping Tom and could he please keep a careful watch on the house. But the chair kept reappearing under the window, generally on the nights when one of us inadvertently forgot to close the blinds. Finally, my mom and I had hidden in the bushes one night, determined to catch the peeper. A figure had eventually appeared in the darkness. Mom clapped a hand over my mouth to keep me from yelling out a snide comment too early. The bushes were scratching my face and my knees were about to give out from crouching so long when the silhouette grabbed the chair and lugged it over to the window. Mom flicked on her flashlight and caught the culprit full in the face.

“Mr. Moorebutt!” she gasped. He blinked for a moment, either from trying to absorb the situation or at the crude reference to his behind.

“Mrs. Thompson, this isn't what it looks like. I was just testing out a theory about how difficult it is to move this chair. For instance, how strong a man would have to be.”

Since the chair was made of lightweight aluminum and a four-year-old could have moved it, I didn't think this was much of an argument. Mom was torn. On the one hand, this was such a lame excuse that she had him dead to rights. On the other hand, he was a neighbor she'd have to see every day of her life. She decided to let it go. “If you're finished, then you should move along. Everything is okay here.” We waited while he hustled back to the street and disappeared into the shadows. Now, every single night of the summer, Mom made me drag the chairs into the garage and back out again in the morning. Mr. Moorebutt continued as the head of the neighborhood watch, although Mom made it clear his services weren't needed at our house.