Baggage Check Read online

  Intellectually, Rebecca understood this. She would be lying if she said she had never wanted a break from reality herself. Emotionally, she wondered when, if ever, her mother planned to return from this little vacation. She could see the appeal: The grounds of Mountainside were lovely and well-kept, the views spectacular. The staff were kind and approachable, and the food seemed better than average. Better, at any rate, than what Rebecca ate when she worked on meal flights.

  “Why don’t you come in for a family therapy session?” the social worker asked.

  “What? No, I don’t—I don’t think I need…”

  “It’s your choice,” the social worker said kindly, “but it would probably help her recovery. What’s your work schedule like? Maybe we can schedule it at a time that’s convenient for you.”

  Rebecca thought briefly about lying, but decided against it. “No, that’s fine. I’m on family leave. I should come in.”

  The truth was, she missed work. At least, she missed her paid job—being on the move and the tidy routines of the airline. As for labor itself, she had never done so much of it. By ten thirty each morning, she had kissed her mother gently on the forehead, smoothing the gray that had begun to gather around Lorena’s tired face, and was on her way back to the house. She arrived each day to find the blue tarp neatly folded on the lawn, so the grass could breathe in the mornings before she began.

  She had worked out an agreement with a couple of local guys who worked at the Goodwill in Birmingham—they stopped by first thing two mornings a week on their way to work and cleared away the items she had left on the blue tarp, while a red tarp nearby served as a resting spot for things that might be salvaged or sold. At least twice a day, Rebecca caught herself shifting items from the red tarp to the blue one and back again, or the other way around. She found it was easier not to buy things in the first place, as Rebecca had done for so long, than to have to decide which possessions were worth keeping.

  There were moments when she understood something of what her mother must have been thinking. This is such a cool thing, or I bet this has a neat story to it, or it seems a shame to throw away something so new.… Those were the moments when things got shifted to the red tarp—an unopened hand mixer (even though no one in the family baked), a neat lamp shaped like an elephant that reminded her of her grandmother, a box of collector’s bottles of Coke. Then she would spend another few hours in the house and feel ready to burn the damn place down. Back to the blue tarp, all of it.

  The relief she would feel leaving the driveway, sometime after dark, would fade into sadness and even regret as the clutter on the blue tarp disappeared into the darkness of the rearview mirror. What would her mother be without all these things? If her family’s history and the junk that her mother loved meant nothing, then what meant something?

  She had left all these things behind her long ago, when she left Alabama as a teenager. It was easier to leave things behind when someone else was curating them. But Rebecca had sensed, even then, that there was something unhealthy in the way her mother clung to each piece of matter around her. It was as though by holding on to the everyday items that came and went across her fingertips, somehow she could hold on to Cory, too.

  In her mother’s eyes, everything in that house had infinite possibilities, potential so great it might never be tossed aside. How could Rebecca compete with that?

  She couldn’t, and even at seventeen she had recognized her defeat. So, she had cast off the world of reused sandwich bags and aluminum foil balls and a closed-off room at the end of the hall. She had replaced it with a senior year trying to fit in with the kids from a rich Atlanta suburb, trying to live up to other people’s potential. Then the sorority at UGA, for which she was still the regional alumna vice president at large, where she hoarded social connections the way her mother hoarded garage sale furniture.

  Rebecca loved her clean, orderly life. She loved being the kind of person who could be a blank slate, a smile that reflected back what people wanted to see in themselves. She had no pets to provoke allergies, no glaring artwork for someone else to see as tasteless, no low-cut blouses or profanity to offend a potential suitor’s mother. She had built her life on being girl-next-door clean, an asset to any man of wealth and reputation. And yet, she slept alone. The men of wealth and reputation wanted blue-blooded women like Suzanne, who could wear high heels and silk scarves, and still manage to make “motherfucker” sound feminine. Rebecca had never been able to pull off either scarves or cursing. Both hung on her with the same ill-fitting awkwardness.

  * * *

  BY MARCI THOMPSON STILLWELL

  * * *

  BLOG: THE CARE AND FEEDING OF A SUBURBAN HUSBAND

  { Entry #182: Do You Feel Like a Grown-Up? }

  Monday, July 25, 2016

  True confessions time: When I was younger and I imagined what life would be like in my midthirties, I thought I would feel, well … a little more grown up than I do today. Sometimes I look at my lovely home in the suburbs, my beautiful baby daughter, and our amazing life, and think, “Jeez, they’re trusting me with all this? Are you sure you have the right girl?”

  I have to be honest, I always imagined I’d feel more self-assured and confident at this stage of my life, the way my mom always did when she was this age. Or at least she seemed that way to me. But when I hold Munchkin in my arms, I don’t feel like the mature, nurturing protector I remember Mom being. I feel like the half-crazed, exhausted, confused, and often childish pretender to the throne of adulthood. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m operating on the “fake it til you make it” philosophy of marriage and motherhood. Every day I’m expecting someone to realize that I’m not really cut out for this life, knock on my door and deposit me back where I belong, working as a temp and living in a tiny apartment in Texas next to a crappy punk band.

  For me, this issue is about motherhood in particular, but in talking to my friends, there is a common theme. Like my friend who recently married (squeee!) a much younger man who happens to be a public figure. Under the spotlight and under pressure to be perfect, even the most talented, beautiful, and self-assured woman I know can feel the strain of long-past insecurities pulling on her. She’s amazingly successful and gorgeous, but sometimes it’s as though she were still an awkward kid in middle school. As someone who was even more awkward than she was in middle school, I can sympathize.

  We have another friend who has returned to her hometown after leaving years and years ago. She is doing some work at her childhood home and trying to renegotiate a relationship with her parents, which I can only imagine makes her feel like she’s back in high school again. We always think our parents are going to be these bastions of wisdom as we navigate adulthood. You don’t expect that they are going to hand you the reins and wish you luck.

  So my question is this: When are we going to feel like grown-ups? Is this a generational thing? Maybe those of us in the “me generation” raised on MTV and Nintendo are destined to be dazed and confused forever. We do seem to have the luxury of more time to gaze at our own navels than previous generations. Or maybe people in every age feel this way, and our generation simply whines more.

  All I know is that I wish I’d spent more time enjoying being a kid, and even a teenager and college student. While I wouldn’t trade my current life and family for anything, this growing up stuff is not nearly as clear-cut and freeing as I expected. I don’t know what adulthood means, but I do hope I get there while I’m still young enough to appreciate it.

  * * *

  24

  One Wednesday night in late July, Alex invited her to an out-of-the-way seafood place for dinner. “Just as friends,” he’d said when he dropped by her mom’s house earlier in the day. “I promise, there will be no hand-holding, canoodling, or other tomfoolery. Just fried shrimp and the best hush puppies in the South.”

  “Who could turn that down?” she’d said.

  By the time Rebecca had returned to her dad’s after a day
of inspecting, moving, throwing away, and (once) running screaming from the house after discovering a family of mice had taken up residence in a closet, no shower had ever felt so good. She couldn’t remember being hungrier, either. She put her long brown hair in a wet braid rather than taking the time to blow it dry, and waited on the front steps so that Alex would not even need to come to the door.

  “Maybe I should have made a reservation,” he said, when he saw her. He opened the car door for her, and waited for her to get situated before closing it and walking around to the driver’s side.

  “Do you think it will be crowded?” she asked. Her stomach growled.

  “Shouldn’t be too bad on a Wednesday. But I think there’s half a protein bar in the glove box if you’re starving.”

  “That’s okay.” She wrinkled her nose.

  “You sure? It’s only a few days old. I don’t want to get my arm chewed off if there’s a wait at Abelle’s.”

  “I think you’re safe.”

  “You think?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ll keep you posted.”

  He grinned at her and turned onto the two-lane highway that ran in front of her father’s rental. “Lucky for me we’re already on the south side of town. That will save us a few minutes.”

  “Where is this place, exactly?”

  “It’s down 231 and a little ways east. About twenty-five minutes. Basically the middle of nowhere. I can’t believe you’ve never been there.”

  “We didn’t usually drive far to dinner, I guess. Dad was kind of a creature of habit, by the time Mom stopped cooking.”

  They were quiet for a minute.

  “Want to ask me anything?” he said. “You’ve got three questions for tonight if you want them.”

  “Okay.… Um, where do you live?” she asked. She was surprised she had never wondered until now.

  “The old Pickney Place downtown,” he said.

  Rebecca searched her memory for why this name sounded so familiar. “The haunted house? Seriously?”

  He laughed. “Everyone says that. It’s not really haunted, though. I just use a projector and an old tape recorder to keep Scooby-Doo and his friends from discovering where I’ve hidden the money from the bank robbery.”

  “I thought that place was ready to collapse.”

  “It pretty much was,” he said. “I bought it four years ago at an auction on the courthouse steps. Old Ruth Pickney had been in a nursing home for years, and when she died, there was no one to leave it to. It was pretty run-down, but I’ve been fixing it up. Hoping to sell it, maybe buy another one and do the same thing.”

  Rebecca remembered walking past the Pickney Place as a kid when she visited her dad at the post office. Even then, she’d thought the creepy old house was ready to fall down, and that had been more than twenty years ago. Ruth Pickney must have spent at least two decades in the nursing home, because the house had never been lived in that she remembered. There were whispers that it was haunted, of course, fueled by the fact that all the other Pickneys had died suddenly during a smallpox outbreak in the 1930s, leaving only little Ruth behind to be raised by an unscrupulous aunt and uncle, who squandered her family’s fortune and ran away to New York as soon as Ruth was sixteen.

  “People say Ruth was an odd bird,” she said.

  “I never knew her,” Alex said. “But she certainly could have sold the house years ago and been better off. Lucky for me she didn’t, though. It’s been kind of a labor of love to fix it up. I only use salvaged materials, pretty much.”

  “Salvaged materials?”

  “Yeah, you know. When they tear something down, I’ll go talk to the demolition crew and try to find things that can be used again. It’s recycling, basically. Green building. But in my case it’s mostly because I’m broke.”

  She made a face. “Wouldn’t it be … I don’t know, safer or whatever, to use new materials? How do you know you’re not bringing in some kind of nasty bug or something?”

  “What? Like termites? I check for those.”

  “Yeah, or mold, or bacteria or whatever.”

  He laughed. “Bacteria?”

  Rebecca hated when people laughed at her, and Alex seemed to do it more than anyone, except maybe Jake. “Never mind,” she said, sulking.

  “You still have two more questions.”

  “I’ll use them later.”

  “Can I use mine?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you see yourself staying in Atlanta? I mean, long-term?”

  Rebecca wished she had asked him more questions instead. She twisted her ring and looked out the window. “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t really thought much about the long term.”

  Alex did not respond, but kept his eyes on the road. He put the car into fifth and they hummed along quietly for a while. Hungry and cranky as she was, Rebecca was grateful for the quiet.

  She tried to ignore her hunger pangs as they drove down seemingly endless country roads, with their innumerable dirt road tributaries and bridges over dribbles of muddy creeks. She hoped she would not have to find her way back to Oreville from here—they were in the middle of nowhere, and they had crossed two county lines that she’d noticed.

  Finally, just before the millionth four-way stop, Alex turned in to a short gravel driveway surrounded by a grassy field full of cars and trucks. There were more vehicles parked here than they had seen during the entire half-hour drive. The restaurant itself was little more than a clapboard shack with faded paint on the windows advertising seafood specials and blue plate dinners. There was a bug-light zapping mosquitoes and flickering ominously near the door. An old man sat on a rickety bench out front, staring at the road.

  “Evening, Elmer,” Alex said as he opened the door.

  The man grunted in response.

  “Good chat,” Alex said.

  Inside was the quintessential hole-in-the-wall country restaurant: Formica tables and old padded brown chairs—half of which were losing their stuffing—linoleum floors, flickering fluorescent lights, and—she couldn’t help but notice—a layer of dust thicker than a magazine on the air vents next to their table. In her other life in Atlanta, she would have taken one look at this place and walked right back out again. But she was thirty minutes from nowhere, and so hungry she could eat her own foot. And Rebecca had to admit that the hush puppies frying smelled amazing.

  “Do you have a drink menu?” she asked the middle-aged waitress who came to take their orders.

  “Coke, tea, water.”

  “It’s a dry county,” Alex said. “No booze.”

  “Oh,” Rebecca said, and the waitress rolled her eyes. “Unsweet tea, please.”

  “We’re out of unsweet. Be about ten minutes.”

  “Sweet is fine, thank you.” When the waitress shuffled away, Rebecca said. “Jeez, I forgot dry counties even existed.”

  “You’re in a whole ’nother world now,” Alex said, amplifying his already-thick Southern accent. “But at least they have a seafood sampler.”

  They were halfway through dinner, and Rebecca was greedily licking the grease from her fingers while debating a third cheddar biscuit from the basket between them, when the little teenybop song rang out from Alex’s pocket. “Excuse me,” he said. He got up from the table and took the call outside.

  The waitress came back to the table with a pitcher of unsweetened tea to refill Rebecca’s mason jar glass and to take away the now-empty bread basket. “Everything good?”

  “Oh my God,” Rebecca said to her. “This is amazing.”

  “It’ll put meat on your bones,” the waitress said. “Not that Alex will mind. He’s a good man. Doesn’t focus on appearances like so many do.”

  Before she could protest that she and Alex were only friends, the waitress was gone again. He knows everyone in a ten-county radius, she thought. If I broke his heart, I wouldn’t even be able to fly in and out of the state.

  Alex returned a few minutes later and put his phone on the table,
smiling.

  “I’d love to meet her,” Rebecca said, surveying her corn on the cob for any remaining kernels. “You guys seem to have such a great relationship.”

  “We do,” he said. “She’s a good kid. But you can’t meet her.”

  Even though her suggestion had been offhand, Rebecca was taken aback by his refusal. “Why not?”

  “Nothing personal, but I don’t bring women around my daughter.” He used the last of his biscuit to guide a bite of coleslaw onto his fork. “Her life has been chaotic enough without a parade of potential stepmothers in and out of it.”

  “A parade?”

  Alex grinned. “Well, not a parade, I guess. More like a small tea party, but still.”

  “But we’re just friends,” she countered. “Don’t you think she would understand that?”

  “Well, there’s a fine line between friends and ‘friends.’” He made air quotes with his fingers. “I think when teenage girls hear their dad introduce a beautiful woman as a ‘friend,’ they are going to jump to the same conclusion anybody else with a bit of sense would.”

  Rebecca wanted to dispute this characterization of their relationship, but she thought about her own father. He had referred to Sonia as a “friend” for several months, too. And she hadn’t bought it either. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Besides,” Alex said, wiping his hands on a napkin before dropping it on his plate in defeat, “I haven’t given up on the idea that you might promote me from friend to ‘friend’ yet. So I want to make sure the timing is right when you meet Honey.”

  Rebecca wished she had not said anything about it. She became engrossed in straightening the red checkered tablecloth so that it lined up with the edge of the table. The waitress returned with the check. “Here you go, darlin’.”

  Alex threw down two twenties and pushed back his chair. “Ready to go? I’m assuming you don’t want peanut butter pie. It’s supposed to be good but I’m always too damn full to try it.”