“cottagers” who lived in the Cove, many of the cottages darn near mansions for some of the older wealth of the South.
That had been Mary’s family, Old South and wealth. Me-ma Jennie, Mary’s mother and Jennifer’s namesake, still hung on doggedly to their home up in the Cove, refusing to consider moving, even though “Papa” Tyler was now in a nearby nursing home, in the final stages of cancer.
John continued to drive east, the traffic on Interstate 40, coming up through the Swannanoa Gap, roaring by on his left. The old-timers in the town still expressed their hatred of that “darn road.” Before it came in, Black Mountain was a sleepy southern mountain hamlet. With the road had come development, traffic, and the floods of tourists on weekends that the chamber of commerce loved and everyone else tried to tolerate.
Staying on the old highway that paralleled the interstate, John drove for less than a mile out of town, then turned right onto a dirt road that twisted up the side of a hill overlooking the town. The old mountain joke used to be “you know you’re getting directions to a mountain home when they say, ‘Turn onto the dirt road.’”
For a kid from New Jersey, John still got a bit of a kick out of the fact that he did indeed live in the South, on the side of a mountain, halfway up a dirt road, with a view worth a million bucks.
The home he and Mary had purchased was in one of the first new developments in the area. In a county where there was no zoning, the lower part of the hill had several trailers, an old shack where Connie Yarborough, a wonderful down-the-hill neighbor, still did not have electricity or town water, and next to her was an eccentric Volkswagen repair shop… the owner, Jim Bartlett, a true sixties throwback, his lot littered with dozens of rusting Beetles, vans, and even a few precious VW Buses and Karmann Ghias.
The house (Mary and John actually named Rivendell, because of their mutual love of Tolkien) offered a broad sweeping view of the valley below; the skyline of Asheville was in the distance, framed by the Great Smoky Mountains beyond, facing due west so Mary could have her sunsets.
When trying to describe the view he’d just tell friends, “Check out
It was a fairly contemporary-looking type of home, high ceiling, the west wall, from bedroom across the living room to the dining area, all glass. The bed was still positioned to face the glass wall, as Mary wanted it so she could watch the outside world as her life drifted away.
He pulled up the drive. The two “idiots” Ginger and Zach, both golden retrievers, both beautiful-looking dogs—and both thicker than bricks when it came to brains—had been out sunning on the bedroom deck. They stood up and barked madly, as if he were an invader. Though if he were a real invader they’d have cowered in terror and stained the carpet as they fled into Jennifer’s room to hide.
The two idiots charged through the bedroom, then out through the entry way screen door… the lower half of the door a charade, as the screen was gone. Put a new one in, it’d last a few days and the idiots would charge right through it again. John had given up on that fight years ago.
As for actually closing the door… it never even crossed his mind anymore. This was Black Mountain. Strange as it seemed, folks rarely locked up, keys would be left in cars, kids did indeed play in the streets in the evening, there were parades for the Fourth of July, Christmas, and the ridiculous Pinecone Festival, complete to the crowning of a Miss Pine-cone. Papa Tyler had absolutely humiliated his daughter, Mary, in front of John early on in their courtship when he proudly pulled out a photo of her, Miss Pinecone 1977. In Black Mountain there was still an ice- cream truck that made the rounds on summer nights…. It was all one helluva difference from his boyhood just outside of Newark, New Jersey.
There was a car parked at the top of the driveway. Mary’s mother, Me-ma Jennie.
Me-ma Jennie was behind the wheel of her wonderful and highly eccentric 1959 Ford Edsel. Ford… that’s where the family money had come from, ownership of a string of car dealerships across the Carolinas dating back to Henry Ford himself. There was even a photo framed in the house up in the Cove of Mary’s great-granddad and Henry Ford at the opening of a dealership in Charlotte back before World War I.
Though it wasn’t polite to be overtly “business” in their strata and Jennie preferred the role of genteel southern lady, in her day, John knew, she was one shrewd business person, as was her husband.
John pulled up alongside the Edsel. Jennie put down the book she was reading and got out.
“Hi, Jen.”
She absolutely hated “Ma,” “Mother,” “Mom,” or, mortal sin of all mortal sins, “Me-ma” or “Grandma” from her Yankee son-in-law, who was definitely not her first choice for her only daughter. But that had softened with time, especially towards the end, especially when he had brought the girls back home to Jen.
The two got out of their cars and she held up a cheek to be kissed, her height, at little more than five foot two, overshadowed by his six-foot-four bulk, and there was a light touch of her hand on his arm and an affectionate squeeze.
“Thought you’d never get here in time. She’ll be home any minute.”
Jen had yet to slip into the higher pitch or gravelly tone of an “old lady’s” voice. He wondered if she practiced every night reciting before a mirror to keep that wonderful young woman—sounding southern lilt. It was an accent that still haunted him. The same as Mary’s when they had first met at Duke, twenty-eight years ago. At times, if Jen was in the next room and called to the girls, it would still bring tears to his eyes.
“We got time. Why didn’t you go inside to wait?”
“With those two mongrels? The way they jump, they’d ruin my nylons.”
Ginger and Zach were all over John, jumping, barking, leaping about… and studiously avoiding Jen. Though dumb, goldens knew when someone didn’t like them no matter how charming they might be.
John reached in, pulled out the bag of Beanies, and, walking over to the stone wall that bordered the path to the house, began to line them up, one at a time, setting them side by side.
“Now John, really, isn’t she getting a bit old for that?”
“Not yet, not my little girl.”
Jen laughed softly.
“You can’t keep time back forever.”
“I can try, can’t I?” he said with a grin.
She smiled sadly.
“How do you think Tyler and I felt about you, the day you came through our door?”
He reached out and gave her an affectionate touch on the cheek. “You guys loved me.”
“You a Yankee? Like hell. Tyler actually thought about driving you off with a shotgun. And that first night you stayed over…”
Even after all these years he found he still blushed a bit at that. Jen had caught Mary and him in a less than “proper” situation on the family room sofa at two in the morning. Though not fully improper, it was embarrassing nevertheless, and Jen had never let him live it down.
He set the Beanies out, stepped back, eyeballed them, like a sergeant examining a row of new recruits. The red, white, and blue “patriot” bear on the right should be in the middle of the ranks where a flag bearer might be.
He could hear the growl of the school bus as it shifted gears, turning off of old Route 70, coming up the hill.
“Here she comes,” Jen announced excitedly.
Going back to the Edsel, she leaned in the open window and brought out a flat, elegantly wrapped box, tied off with a neat bow. “Jewelry?” John asked.
“Of course; she’s twelve now. A proper young lady should have a gold necklace at twelve. Her mother did.”
“Yeah, I remember that necklace,” he said with a grin. “She was wearing it that night you just mentioned. And she was twenty then.”
“You cad,” Jen said softly, and slapped him lightly on the shoulder, and he pretended that it was a painful blow.
Ginger and Zach had stopped jumping around John, both of them cocking their heads, taking in the sound of the approaching school bus, the squeal of the brakes as it stopped at the bottom of the driveway, its yellow barely visible now through the spring-blooming trees.
They were both off like lightning bolts, running full tilt down the driveway, barking up a storm, and seconds later he could hear the laughter of Jennifer; of Patricia, a year older and their neighbor; and of Seth, Pat’s
