The Goodbye Summer (33 page)

Goose Creek Guest Cottages, formerly Hunter’s Haven Cabins, were spread out on one side of the flat, two-lane highway, and the building with the owner’s office, the registration desk, and this coffee shop sat on the other side, behind a gas station consisting of an island with one pump.
Texaco. Luckily it was a sleepy highway, so all the traipsing back and forth you had to do to stay here wasn’t dangerous. There used to be six cabins, all duplexes (so really, twelve), but the new owners had knocked down the center walls to make the rooms bigger. They’d been tiny before; now they were just small. And turquoise, with orange trim. Magill said they looked like Howard Johnson’s babies.

They’d rented two side-by-side cottages for the night ($49.99 each, including continental breakfast in the coffee shop), to the delight of the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Willis, Peg and Ethel—Peg was the husband. They might not be so delighted if they knew Finney was taking a nap right now in the farthest cottage, the one you couldn’t see from here because a billboard was in the way. Then again, maybe they allowed dogs, who knew? But during a hasty conference before registering, Caddie, Magill, and Cornel had agreed that in this case it was better to be secretive than sorry.

Cornel had his map out again. By now every time Caddie so much as glanced at it, the word “Clover” leaped out at her like flickering neon. The men were arguing about Maryland and Delaware, which state was better for taxes or something—Caddie silenced them by standing up. “I have to make a phone call.”

They looked at her as if she’d announced she was hitchhiking to Dover. “Who to?” Cornel wanted to know.

She’d tell them if it worked out. Although what
working out
meant in this situation, she didn’t know. “I, um, have a friend in the area. Maybe; have to check. Be right back.”

Peg manned the motel office and the gas station while his wife handled the coffee shop. “Is there a pay phone in here?” Caddie asked Ethel, a hefty woman in her forties with a net over her wavy brown hair. She reminded Caddie a little bit of Brenda.

“Around the corner, right next to the men’s room.”

“Does it have a phone book?”

“Sure does.”

Why were restroom corridors always paneled in the same dark, depressing wood? They always had the same carpet, too, thin dark blue speckled with stains and ground-in chewing gum. The telephone book swiveled out
from under a metal platform under the phone. It covered four counties in two states, but it was only about an inch thick. For Kent County, there was one Haywood listed in Clover. Mrs. C. R. Haywood. A woman?

As soon as she got her money out, her hands began to perspire. The quarters stuck to her palm. She had to put her weight on one leg because her other knee was trembling. She dialed wrong twice in a row, and on the third try somebody answered so fast, she wasn’t sure what they said, or even if it was a man or a woman, or a child. “Hello?” she said. “Hello?”

“Hello?” It was a woman. Old; quavery-voiced.

“Hello—my name is Caddie Winger and I’m trying to locate a Mr. Bobby Haywood.”

“Bobby? Who is this?”

“Caddie Winger. I’m—”

“Caddie? Who is this? Where’s Bobby?”

“No, I’m…” She heard a scrabbling sound, a woman’s voice saying, “Mother, I’ll take it,” and then—

“Hello? Who’s calling?” in a strong Eastern Shore accent.

“Um, hi.” She started over. “My name is Caddie Winger, I’m in a phone booth in the neighborhood and I was looking—at the book, and wondering if by any chance this is the residence of Bobby Haywood.”

“Bobby?” Not rude, but sharper. “I’m sorry, who’d you say this is?”

She repeated her name. “I think he knew my mother, if I have the right number. Years ago.” Thirty-three years ago. If she had the right number. “Who’s this?” she asked politely.

“Well, my name’s Dinah Krauss, but…” She hesitated. “My brother was Bobby Haywood. Robert Charles Haywood.”

Caddie’s skin prickled; she felt as if she were getting a mild electrical shock. “Is he—” She had to clear her throat. “Is he there?”

“Oh, honey.” The voice softened. “Bobby died a long, long time ago.”

She didn’t feel anything. Then she did, a wave of disappointment so swift and heavy her legs went weak. She’d have sat down on the floor where she was, but the phone cord wouldn’t reach.

She got over it fast, because it was silly: how could you grieve for someone you’d never known and never even expected to meet?

The lady gave a little cough of concern into the silence.

“Um,” Caddie said. “He was a musician, wasn’t he?”

“Why, he sure was. Who did you say is your mother?”

“Jane Buchanan.”

“Jane…”

“But she used the name Chelsea.”

“Oh, lordy, you’re Chelsea’s girl.”

“Yes. Did you know her?”

“I never met her, but I sure heard all about her from Bobby. How’s she doing?”

“She died, too. In a car accident out in California, a long time ago.”

“Oh, no. Did she? Well, I am real sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you.” There was so much sympathy in the lady’s voice, Caddie got a stupid lump in her throat. “The reason I knew to call—I found a letter from Bobby to my mother, and it seemed like…they knew each other real well.”
Real well.
She was falling into Dinah’s idiom for some reason. She guessed because she wanted her to trust her.

“Well, Bobby was deep in love with her,” Dinah allowed after a funny pause. “That I know. Like I say, I never met her myself.” She said that carefully, as if trying to be fair.

“Dinah?” Might as well jump in. That’s what Thea would do. “The reason I called is because I think, I’m pretty positive from the letter and the dates and everything, that your brother, um”—she almost lost her nerve—“might’ve been my father.”

“Whoa.” A thump, as if Dinah had sat down. “Oh, my goodness gracious. Caddie?”

“Yes?”

“Your name is Caddie?”

“Catherine Ann Winger. My mother was Buchanan, well, actually Buckman, but—oh, that’s a long story, but Winger is my name.”

“Where’re you calling from?”

She told.

“Why, that’s hardly any piece at all!”

“I know. Would you like to meet?”

“Why, heck, yes, wouldn’t you?”

They laughed together.

“Well, you could come here if it’s—”

“No, come over here,” Dinah interrupted, “Earl’s working and I can’t leave Mother. Besides, you’ll want to see the house. Bobby grew up here.”

Caddie hunched her tense shoulders with excitement. “I’m traveling with some friends, two people, I really
was
in the neighborhood—”

“Well, just bring them, too.”

“Really? I’d like to if it’s all right. There’s not much to do here, and I hate to just leave them—”

“Bring ’em with you. I’ll give you directions, but it’s easy as pie. Earl, my husband, he’ll be up after a while, and you can meet Mother, too. Lord, Caddie, just think. She’s probably your grandmother.”

Even downtown, the streets of Clover, Delaware, were only a lane and a half wide, with rutted dirt shoulders for passing.
Downtown
—ha. Two churches, one gas station, the post office, and a place to buy lottery tickets, that was about it. The rest was Victorian and gingerbready houses, old and not restored, with flat, grassy-green yards only half a step down from the front porches. The big shabby-stately houses gave way within a block or so to smaller ones, also old and mostly frame, painted white, blue, and pale yellow. “Sleepy” was too dynamic a word for Clover, but Caddie liked it.
My dad grew up here,
she practiced.
My father. He grew up in this town.

“Thank you again, you guys, for coming with me. I really appreciate it.”

“Don’t mention it. What else did we have to do?”

“Don’t be nervous,” Magill said. “This’ll be a cinch.”

“I don’t know why I am—she sounded perfectly nice. I know they’re not going to
eat
me.”

“Just be yourself, they’ll be crazy about you.”

She smiled gratefully. “I hope.” When she’d first told him and Cornel about the phone call, Magill had said, “Caddie Winger, you are full of surprises,” and he’d looked at her with the nicest mix of admiration and sympathy. Cornel had said, “I can’t take too many more of these goddamn
revelations.
”

“Turn here,” he instructed. Even now he had to navigate, from the slip of paper she’d written Dinah’s directions on.

“Here?” Away from town? She steered onto a frontage road paralleling the highway, surrounded by stalky, dry, sawed-off cornfields and far-off houses dwarfed in clusters of tall trees. Mrs. Ernest Holly’s car was an SUV. Caddie wasn’t used to her new, superior relationship to the ground, or to the stick shift, which she kept grinding between first and second. Her nerves were jumping. After talking to Dinah she’d gone back to her room to fix herself up, and the sight in the mirror of her plain old self—except for the highlights, which Magill liked, so thank God for them—had been disheartening. She’d never wanted to look attractive, smart, and full of character more than she did right now, and all she looked like was her usual old self.

“Should be the next house. I can’t see numbers that far,” Cornel said.

“Krauss,” Magill read on a black mailbox in the distance. “There it is.”

Things were happening too fast. She couldn’t take in her surroundings; she couldn’t prepare. Here was a gravel driveway leading up to a one-story frame house, yellow with brown trim, and then beyond it to a green aluminum outbuilding and a parked school bus. The house had a weathervane on top and a Pennsylvania Dutch ornament over the door. Somebody had decorated a leafless dogwood tree in the front yard with plastic pumpkins. Where should she park? Down by the school bus? Here? What if she blocked somebody in?

Magill started to say, “This is good, right here,” when the front door opened and a woman came down the two steps to the concrete walk. She waited, smiling, her arms down but her palms out, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Rather than grind the gears in front of her, Caddie left the car in third and turned off the ignition. “Well!” she said brightly, for courage. Magill winked at her. She took a deep breath and got out.

She was only halfway up the walk when the woman, tall and solid-looking, big-boned, with frizzy hair the color of the rusty geraniums in a box by the front door, held out her arms and said, “Oh, Lord, I see Bobby all over you. Come here, darlin’, I’m your aunt Dinah.” She had tears in her hazel eyes. Caddie blinked her own eyes clear and went into her arms, unprepared for the ferocity of her embrace. Dinah pushed her away to look at her—“Aren’t you
sweet
?”—and then grabbed her back, mashing her against her
bosom. She had on a long, scratchy sweater vest with a blouse underneath, green stretch pants, and white sandals.

“I don’t know,” Caddie said in a tremulous voice. Her hands felt small and childlike in Dinah’s strong grip. “I think I might look like you.” Not the eyes or the fleshy features, but something in Dinah’s smile, happy and sad at the same time.

Caddie introduced Magill and Cornel, who were hanging back self-consciously, missing nothing but trying not to stare. “Well, hey,” Dinah said, and she hugged them, too. “Come on in, everybody come in, gracious, you all look so
hungry.
”

Small, formal living room cluttered with pictures and knickknacks and a suite of matching furniture. “The room nobody ever sits in,” Dinah explained, leading them through it to a smaller room, a den, with a wide-screen TV on one paneled wall and a cluster of lounge chairs and ottomans around it. The TV’s sound was off, captions running along at the bottom. Caddie didn’t see the woman stretched out on one of the recliners until Dinah said loudly, “Mother? Mother, look who’s here. Oh, Lord,” she said in a softer voice, “I don’t think I’ll try to explain it all to her now.
Mother
—this is
Caddie
and these are her friends, Mr. Montgomery and Mr.—Magill. They’re visiting.
Visiting.
”

She looked like a wizened doll, tiny in the enormous padded chair with her hands folded, feet together in furry white slippers under a knitted afghan. Caddie bent close and put a soft kiss on her cheek. Her hair was white as cotton. She smelled like baby powder. She blinked rheumy blue eyes and smiled a sweet, trusting smile. “Hello,” Caddie said. “I’m so pleased to meet you.”

“Mother doesn’t talk much anymore,” Dinah said softly, “not for a while now.” She smoothed the old lady’s forehead with her hand. “She’s fine—you all come in the kitchen, won’t you, I just baked four pies, I hope you like pumpkin. Sit, sit. Who wants a cup of coffee? It’s just made. Caddie, I wish you could’ve met Mother a year and a half ago, she was sharp as a tack. She lived here by herself, drove her car, went to church, you name it.”

“How old is she?” Caddie sat down on a stool at a long Formica island opposite the sink in the cheerful yellow kitchen. Magill and Cornel took seats on either side of her. For the rest of her life, she would associate the smells of cinnamon and warm, baking pastry with her aunt Dinah.

Dinah turned a knob, dimming the lights in a chandelier shaped like a wagon wheel over their heads, and leaned back easily against the sink as if that were her spot, her station. “Eighty-four in January, she’ll be eighty-five next year. The doctor said it was little strokes one after another, taking bits of her mind each time. Earl and I moved in a year and three months ago.”

“Oh, this isn’t where you live, usually?”

“Well, it’s the house I grew up in. We’re down in Salisbury, but we came up here when Mother couldn’t do for herself anymore. Long story, but this was easier. She looks little and harmless, but she would
not move
—but you don’t want to hear about all that. Anybody want ice cream on top?”

She was cutting huge wedges of pumpkin pie and pushing plates across the counter. “Anyway, here we are for who knows how long, and I got to thinking after you and I hung up, Caddie, it’s a good thing Earl never got around to changing the phone. He’s got his business phone out back, but so far we’ve just left Mother’s name in the book even though she never talks on it anymore—her answering today was most unusual—and if we hadn’t, if we’d had them put Earl and Dinah Krauss, you’d never’ve found us!”

Mighty good pie, Cornel told Dinah, smacking his lips in appreciation. Even Magill, who usually had to force himself to eat, was making pretty good headway on his piece. Dinah asked how they all knew each other, and Caddie let the men explain it while she and Dinah stole looks at each other, flashing quick, thrilled smiles.

“I wish I’d brought the letter your brother wrote,” Caddie said when there was a pause. “I could send it to you if you like. It was very sweet. And sad. It sounded like he loved her a lot.”

“Oh, he did, I know that for sure. Bobby was four years younger than me, so he told me things. We were real close, although I didn’t see him as much after he got so taken up with his bands. Music meant the world to
him, he was off from the time he was about twenty, off traveling and playing, trying to hit it big. You know, that big break that was coming any second, just around the corner. And once Chelsea joined up as the singer in Red Sky, why, that was it,
nothing
was going to stop them.”

“Did you ever hear them play?”

“Not in person, not after your mother joined. After that they were moving around so much, it seemed like they were always too far to go, and then of course I had just had my first baby, Sherry, she’s a little older than you, Caddie, but not much. She’d be your cousin. She lives in Dover, has two kids of her own already, she will
love
to know you.”

Caddie shivered with excitement.

“Barbara, our other girl, she’s over in Germany with her husband, you’ll have to wait to meet her. But so, no, I never did hear Bobby and Chelsea play in person, but I’ve got a tape you can listen to, a demonstration he had made for them to try and get a record contract. That never panned out, but your mother sings on it, and Bobby, too.”

“Oh, my. A recording of them together?”

Magill squeezed her knee, and when she looked at him, she thought her eyes must be shining the same way his were.

“What finally broke it up as far as I know is that Chelsea—Jane—wanted to go solo and more into rock and roll, with Red Sky just a backup band. Bobby loved their country sound and thought it should stay Red Sky with a girl lead singer. I think your mother wanted to go off and be Janis Joplin or something, and Bobby wanted a band like, oh, the Flying Burrito Brothers. You won’t remember them, but sort of weird country rock, it sounded like to me.

“So they split up, and Bobby came back home to regroup. He took a job in construction to make some money while he tried to get another group going. He wrote a lot of songs during that winter, real sad love songs—but he’d always put some humor in, they weren’t corny, you know, they’d make fun of the person who was crying in their beer or whatever. Too bad he didn’t write any of ’em down, I’d give them to you, but he couldn’t read music, he played everything by ear. He could play more instruments than anybody I ever knew, all the different kinds of guitar,
and banjo, the mandolin, fiddle, you name it. Harmonica. He was a one-man band. Oh, honey, what did I say?”

“Nothing.” She’d let a tear fall out of her eye. “I’m a music teacher, that’s all. That’s what I do.”

“You are?” They shook their heads at each other in sad-happy wonder. “Come on, I’ll show you some of Bobby’s things. You-all want more coffee, would you please just help yourselves. To anything, you know where the refrigerator is. Or watch TV if you want, Mother won’t care what channel.”

In a narrow hallway, she opened a closet door, stood on tiptoes, and pulled down a white cardboard box. “Let’s go in my room.” Caddie followed her into a bedroom. “Pardon the mess, Earl’s got a project going.” No mess, really, but birdhouses everywhere, on every surface, made of wood or twigs, and some were the kind that was edible—the whole thing was seeds and nuts, and the birds ate the entire house.

“He’ll be up soon,” Dinah said, moving four birdhouses from the bed to the floor. “Sit.” They sat on the bed. “Mother’s got more stuff in the attic, but this’ll start you off. And of course there’s pictures of Bobby all over the place.” She opened the cardboard box.

It looked like a jumble at first, papers and letters, loose photos, a baseball, newspaper clippings, ribbons and medals, a birth certificate. Caddie’s hand fell on one of the snapshots, and she gave an involuntary cry. “Is that him?”

“High school graduation.”

Long blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, straight-across eyebrows, broad shoulders under a royal blue academic gown. Her father had his mortarboard pushed to the side of his head and the tassel in his teeth, grinning hugely, probably laughing.

“He was always cutting up, you won’t find a serious picture in here. Look—he’s about two in this.”

“Is that you?”

“Yes.”

They were in a sandbox together, Bobby sitting in the V of his sister’s legs, holding a plastic shovel in one hand and a rubber snake in the other. “He’s so
blond.
”

“White. And it never turned brown, it was still light-colored when he died. Much lighter than yours, but it waved the same way. You look like him, I swear you do.”

She still couldn’t see it. She looked at pictures of Bobby on a baseball team, his yearbook pictures, snapshots of him with his friends, his family—“Oh, look at your mother,” Caddie exclaimed, “she was so pretty.”

“She was.”

“Are there any of your father?”

“Not here, but I can find you some. He died before Bobby was born. I barely remember him myself.” She was rummaging through the box. “Here it is, here’s the one you want to see.”

“Oh, Dinah.”

“Red Sky. The whole band.”

“Oh, God. They’re all hippies.”

“I know.”

“My mother. Oh, my God.”

“You can have it.”

She’d been hanging on to her composure, but that snapped it. Dinah put her arms around her, and she wept on the scratchy wool flowers of her sweater vest until the tide passed. When she pulled away, it was a relief to see Dinah wasn’t exactly dry-eyed, either.

“How did he die?” Caddie asked, blowing her nose on a tissue Dinah yanked out of a box on the night table.

“An aneurysm. We thought it was a stroke at first, but they said he probably had it for years and it could’ve happened anytime. It was very fast, that was the blessing.”

“Do you think he knew about me?”

“No, I do not. If he did, he’d have told me, for one thing. He never kept a secret, Bobby was open as the sun.”

“I want to think he didn’t know.” She picked up a small, browning piece of newsprint. His death notice. He had died on January 8, 1973. So they’d been alive together for four months.

“He’d’ve wanted his own child, ambition or no. Your mother didn’t tell him, I’m sure of it, although I cannot imagine why. Especially if she
meant to keep you, because Bobby was steady—maybe too steady for her. He’d tell me some things. Not that she was bad in any way, not at all, but just so young. And not careful. Thoughtless and full of big dreams about herself.”