But when Iona came on the phone, Diana was so overcome with emotion that she could barely speak. 'When did you have time to make all that stuff, Mom? It's wonderful, but how did you do it?'
For years, Diana kept her mother's answer buried in the furthest reaches of her memory. Now, it came back to her.
'Love always makes time,' Iona had said.
Remembering those words now left Diana awash m a sea of guilt. Love always makes time. Measured against her mother's performance, Diana's relationship with Davy seemed a gigantic failure. She was too busy with her own concerns and ambitions to pay attention to Davy's day-to-day needs. Stung by guilt, she was still so busy justifying her continued survival in the face of both her mother's death and her husband's suicide that she forgot to pay attention to the quality of that survival. Luckily for her and for Davy, Rita was there to take up the slack.
I'll do better, Diana promised herself. If I live long enough, I swear I'll do better.
She peeled the final layer of tape from the box, releasing the lid. In moments, Diana went from remembering her cardboard 'hope chests' to what could only be called hopeless chests, from boxes filled with promise to ones packed with crushed dreams and dashed hopes. That's all Iona Dade Cooper's boxes contained.
All the while the unopened boxes sat stored in the root cellar, Diana had imagined them packed with her mother's few prized possessions, the treasures arranged with the same loving care Iona had used to pack the boxes she sent to Eugene. Except these boxes held no treasures. What was stowed there hardly qualified as personal effects.
Francine Cooper had gone through her new husband's house, Iona's house, packing up only what she didn't want-the inconvenient onion chopper with its broken blade, the battered metal pie tins Iona used only as a last resort when the season's current crop of fruit-pumpkin in the fall, mincemeat in the winter, rhubarb in the spring, and fresh peach in the summer-had swamped her supply of goods Pyrex pie plates. There were ragged hot pads and oven mitts, not the good ones Iona had used for company meals and church dinners, but the old ones she had used only for canning, and that, by rights, should have been thrown out with the trash long before they were stuffed into boxes.
Resolutely now, Diana ripped open the tape on each succeeding box. One rattled ominously as soon as she picked it up. At the bottom of that one, she found the smashed remains of the only really nice thing Iona Dade Cooper had ever owned-a Limoges salt-and-pepper-shaker set she had inherited from her own Grandma Dade- clattered brokenly around in the bottom of the box without even a paper towel as protection against breakage.
Grim-faced, Diana set a few things aside on the table to keep. The rest was swept into a waiting trash can. Only in the bottom box, the heaviest one, did Diana strike gold.
There were books in there-the whole frayed green set called My Book House from which Iona had read her daughter countless fairy tales and poems and fables.
Seeing the books, Diana felt a flash of recognition. From these volumes, she had gained her love of reading, her fascination with the written word. She pulled out each book individually, thumbing through the pages, glancing at the familiar illustrations, remembering her favorite stories, wishing Davy knew them the way she did.
And then, in the very bottom of the box, stuffed in hastily perhaps so Max wouldn't see, was the real treasure, the one item of her mother's that Diana had really wanted and had counted lost-her mother's well-worn Bible. Reverently, she picked it up. One corner- of the cover had been permanently bent back. She opened the book gently, trying to smooth out the wrinkle.
As she did so, a paper fell out. Picking it up, she found it was actually three papers, welded by age into a tightly folded, brittle mass. Carefully, she undid them.
The outside was a letter. Folded into that were two other pieces of paper-a yellowed newspaper article and a small, flower-covered funeral program dated August 16, 1943.
She glanced at that first, wondering whose it was Harold Autry Deeson.
Harold Deeson? Who was he? She had never heard of anybody by that name, although she read right there on the program that Harold's parents were George R. and Ophelia Deeson.
George had a son? Diana wondered. How come she never knew about him?
How come nobody ever mentioned, him by name?
She turned to the newspaper article. The paper was brittle and flaked apart in her hand, but it was from the La Grande Herald on August 11, 1943, and it told how Harold Autry Deeson, only son of George R. and Ophelia Deeson, had died in a one-car crash on the highway halfway between Wallowa and Enterprise. Heading back to base at Fort Lewis, near Seattle, after being home for a weekend, Harold's car had slammed into the highway embankment and then skidded across the road, ending up in the river.
There was no clue as to what caused the accident, although the sheriff theorized that he may have braked to avoid hitting an animal that had wandered onto the road or else he had fallen asleep. Either way, Harold Autry Deeson was dead on impact.
Reading through the account of the accident, the whole picture of Diana's family history suddenly shifted into focus. She started crying long before she ever picked up the letter. It was little more than a note, but Diana knew instinctively what was written there-not exactly, not the details, but the general outline.
'Dearest Iona,' Harold had written in a hastily scrawled, immature hand.
'Thank you for tonight. I don't care what my mother says. You may be Catholic, and my mother's Mormon, but that doesn't matter, not to me, and it's not a good enough reason for us not to be together.
'I can't make it home from Seattle again for at least a month, but when I do, we'll run away together to La Grande or Pendleton, or maybe even all the way to Spokane. If we come back married, no one will be able to do anything about it, not even my mother. Please be ready. Love, Harry.'
Diana let the paper drift from her hands onto the table.
She didn't need to count on her fingers. Max and Iona Cooper were married in September of '43. She was born in May of '44. No wonder George Deeson had brought her Waldo. George Deeson had been her real grandfather, but why hadn't someone told her the truth?
Under normal circumstances, Davy would have fought tooth and nail at any suggestion of a nap, but that day, when Rita lay down on her old-fashioned box spring mattress with its frail metal headboard, Davy climbed up onto
