Somehow, whatever she needed materialized.
I reentered the house and headed downstairs. When I reached the bottom of the steps, I heard voices in the dining room.
“It’s just common sense, Mother,” Holly said. “You know you’ve never been able to handle a camera. Remember the pictures you took before the Christmas dance? None of us had feet.”
“I don’t find feet all that interesting,” Aunt Jule replied.
“They are when Jackie and I each spend big bucks on shoes,” Holly countered. “I told you that at the time.” Seeing me at the doorway, she gave a little wave. Aunt Jule glanced up from her quilting.
“Anyway, like it or not,” Holly continued, “Frank’s coming over and taking pictures before the prom. Nick’s parents are going to want photos, too, and—”
“Nick?” I repeated, entering the room.
“Nick Hurley,” she replied, smiling.
“Mr. Frank’s nephew?”
“Yes. We’re dating.”
I looked at her, surprised. Two’s the limit, I almost said, but maybe that was just a line he had given me.
“We’ve been friends forever, of course,” she went on.
“Now Nick has finally seen the light. And if he hasn’t, he will,” she added, laughing.
I laughed with her and squelched my disappointment.
“Wait till you see him,” Holly said. “He’s not that roundfaced kid anymore.”
“I know. I ran into him at the festival on my way here. I dunked him twice at your school booth.”
“You were at the festival?” The smile disappeared from Holly’s face. “At my school’s dunking booth?”
“I was walking through town and happened to pass it,” I replied. I didn’t tell her that Nick had asked me to stop by, for I had just gotten the same chilly feeling I used to get around Holly, as if I were invading her territory.
But then she smiled. “He’s coming around later. It’ll be like old times.”
“I guess you visited Sondra’s grave,” Aunt Jule said to me.
“I didn’t, but I will tomorrow. I need to do things one at a time,” I explained. “It — it’s kind of hard coming back here.
For me Wisteria is not all happy memories.”
“We’re well beyond those unhappy times,” Aunt Jule observed. “Seven years beyond.”
“Still, when I came back today, it seemed like yesterday.”
“That’s why you shouldn’t have waited so long,” she replied.
Her cool tone surprised me. “My mother died here,” I said defensively. “You can’t expect me to think of it as a great vacation spot.”
“It’s where you were born,” Aunt Jule answered firmly. “It’s where you had your happiest times.”
“Yes, but—”
“It’s time you got over Sondra’s death, Lauren. She wasn’t exactly Mother of the Year.”
That stung. “I know, but she was my mother. Excuse me, I’m going for a walk.”
I turned abruptly and exited through the dining room door to the porch. I had thought Aunt Jule would be more understanding, but a trace of that summer’s bitterness had remained with her. It seemed to me that Aunt Jule, herself, hadn’t completely left that time behind.
I took the three steps down to the grass, paused to look at the dock, then walked the long slope down to it. The river’s edge was a spongy mix of mud, sand, and clay, tufted with long bay grass. Aunt Jule’s property was probably the only shoreline in Wisteria unprotected by a sea wall. The dock no longer met the riverbank, the land having eroded from beneath it.
Planting my hands on the dock, I swung my feet up onto it, as if climbing onto a three-foot wall. I stood up slowly, my eyes traveling the length of the T-shaped walkway, then shifting to the far left side, to the piling where my mother had struck her head.
She may have been drinking. It was easy to trip on the uneven planks. The tide was high that night, the water just over her head. It took so little for a person to die. Aunt Jule had told me over and over that it was nobody’s fault.
And yet, I felt responsible. My mother had refused to let me visit Aunt Jule that last summer. But the more clingy she had become, the more desperate I’d been to get away from her. I had thrown fierce tantrums until she gave in-gave in with the condition that she would accompany me. If I hadn’t argued, if we hadn’t come, would she still be alive?
I couldn’t walk to the end of the dock, not yet. I jumped down and climbed the hill to the house.
My mother had become even worse in Wisteria, still clinging, not wanting me to play with Nora and Holly. She would blame them for things. She’d tell me I was too good for them, and say it in front of them. Poor Holly had been caught between snubbing me entirely and acting like my best and dearest friend — just to get my mother riled.
Both Holly and Nora had fought back with words, showing the anger that I myself felt but tried to hide. Then Mommy drowned. What do you do with your anger when the person you’re mad at goes off and dies? Bury it? Bury it inside you?
I circled the house to see the gardens, hoping they could still give me the peace I had felt there as a child. I passed my favorite tree, a huge old oak with a swing. Someone had lassoed the high branch with a new rope. The gardens, too, had been cared for and looked better than they had seven years ago. My heart lightened.
A greenhouse stood not far from the garden, a long rectangular structure with a gambrel roof, built in the 1930s on the brick base of an earlier one. The roof vents were up and the door open.
When I peeked in I found Nora tending plants halfway down the main aisle, on one of the short cross aisles.
Focused on her work, her fingers moving deftly among the shiny leaves, she didn’t notice me. I stepped inside the door and she looked up. Her eyes darted fearfully around the greenhouse. I thought that she had heard me enter, but her gaze passed over me as if I were invisible. I, too, looked around, wondering what she sensed.
She started to tremble and shook her head with quick, jerky motions. It was as if she had something frightening inside it that she was trying to shake out. I remembered as a child how she hated getting water in her ears and would become frantic to get rid of it. I watched silently, afraid to speak and upset her more.
The shaking finally stopped, the fear in her easing into a quiet wariness. She tended her plants, neatly removing yellow leaves. I surveyed the greenhouse again. There was nothing there — nothing that I could see — triggering her emotions; whatever Nora was reacting to was deep inside her.
“Hi, Nora.”
This time when she looked up, she saw me. “I don’t want you here.”
I walked toward her. “Here in the greenhouse or here at your mother’s?”
She didn’t answer.
“Why don’t you want me around?” I asked.
She moved on to another bench of plants and began to snip off their tops.
“Nora, why don’t you like me anymore?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Please try to.”
She pressed her lips together and nervously fingered dark strings of hair. I wished Aunt Jule would make her wash it.
“I’m busy,” she said, “I have to cut off their little heads. It hurts them. They hate it, but they will be better for it.”
“You mean you’re pinching back the plants so they’ll grow bushier?” I asked.
“Do you want to see my vines?” she replied.
I wasn’t sure if she was too mentally scattered to answer my questions or simply unwilling. “Sure.”
She led me outside and showed me several trellises standing against the southern wall.
“It gets too hot in the summer, so I use the climbers to shade the plants inside. These are morning glories,” she said, pointing to the heart-shaped leaves. “And over there is Lauren.”
