Elissa Ambrose - Journey Of The Heart

She picked up another carton. She was planning to spend the afternoon going through the boxes in the pantry, keeping the good memories, discarding the rest.

Her thoughts returned to the conversation at lunch. Cassie was wrong. Laura had no intention of jeopardizing her relationship with Edward.

Steady Eddy, Cassie called him.

So what if he liked things just so? So what if he was…fastidious? So was Laura. They were completely compatible. There were no ups and downs, no roller coasters in this relationship.

And no surprises, either. She sat down on the faded linoleum floor, imagining what the meticulous doctor would say about the way she was dressed now. She knew exactly what he would say—in a breezy but disapproving tone—about her old gray sweats and bunny rabbit slippers.

She debated calling him. She wanted to talk to him about keeping the house, certain he’d agree it was a good idea. A home in Connecticut would make a wonderful place for entertaining. A wonderful place to schmooze with the bigwigs who worked at the hospital—as long as he didn’t have to mingle with neighbors.

She decided she would call him later.

She sliced open the top of the box with a knife. Inside was a bundle of envelopes bound together with a stretched-out rubber band. With a start she realized that these were the letters Cynthia had given to her for safekeeping. Letters written to Cynthia by a man whose existence Jake had never suspected. Letters given to me so that Jake wouldn’t find them, Laura recalled with hostility. She’d always felt like an accomplice in her friend’s deception, and had resented Cynthia for involving her.

After the accident, there had been no reason for Laura to keep the letters, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to dispose of them. They were a part of Cynthia, and Laura hadn’t been ready to relinquish any part of her friend, as if preserving a memory, even a shameful one, could somehow bring her back.

No, that wasn’t it at all. She had kept them because she was angry. Angry with Cynthia for deceiving Jake. As long as I held on to my anger, Laura rationalized, I could justify loving my best friend’s husband. I kept them to remind me of her guilt, hoping to dispel my own. I would not have married Jake if Cynthia had lived.

Cynthia had also asked her to keep a few mementos as well, but no matter how curious Laura had been, she had never once considered going through her friend’s things or reading her letters. She carried the small carton into the kitchen, without further examining what was inside.

The garbage trucks would be coming by on Monday. Several of her aunt’s cartons were already lined up next to the door, to be taken out to the curb for removal. Why on earth had Aunt Tess kept all this stuff? Why would anyone hang on to torn curtains and linen? Who would keep old shoes and hats? These cartons were Aunt Tess’s links to the past, Laura realized, thinking about her own memory boxes. Laura hadn’t thrown those out, either, when she’d left home.

She picked up another box. Inside was a child’s tea service, complete with cups and saucers, sugar bowl, creamer and teapot. Had the set belonged to her mother? She tried to picture her aunt and mother as children sitting at their kitchen table in Ridgefield, hosting a tea party for themselves and their dolls. But Tess had been six years older than Laura’s mother. Would she have been interested in a child’s tea party? Maybe what Reverend Barnes had said was true. Maybe Aunt Tess had been a warm and doting sister, Caroline’s true caretaker.

Laura remembered another child sitting at a different kitchen table, passing a cup and saucer to a fair-haired woman. The child, wearing a brightly colored party dress, could not have been more than three years old. I was that child, Laura realized. Fingering the delicate bone china, she tried to bring the memory into focus.

The sound of the doorbell broke into her daydream. She wiped her hands on her sweatpants. Back in New York, she never would have answered the door dressed like this, but this was Middlewood. Pretentious was not a word in the town’s dictionary.

The doorbell was ringing insistently, and Laura hurried through the hallway, calling “I’m coming! I’m coming!” She threw open the front door without asking who was there—something else she would never have done in New York. Under the overhang outside the front door stood a tall, thin boy. Laura hadn’t seen him in five years, but she recognized him immediately. Although he wore a frown, and his cheeks were smudged with dirt, his face was still the mirror image of Cynthia’s, and like Cynthia’s eyes in her final year, his were filled with sadness.

“I heard you were back and I was wondering if you wanted to be on my paper route.”

Cory’s shoulders were almost level with hers. He’s so tall, Laura thought. Tall like his father. But it was Cynthia’s face she was looking at, her high exotic cheekbones, her gold-flecked hazel eyes, her smooth olive skin. “I think we should talk about this,” Laura said, trying to imitate the serious tone in Cory’s voice. “Come on in.”

He glanced inside. Shrugging, he stepped into the hallway.

She motioned for him to follow her into the kitchen. “Are you hungry? I have peanut butter cookies and cake. Marble cake with vanilla frosting. Why don’t you wash up at the kitchen sink while I fix you a snack?” she suggested, glancing at his muddy hands. “So, tell me. Are you still in Peewee? No, of course not. You’d be in Little League by now.”

“Nah, baseball’s dumb. All they do is swing a stupid bat and run around a field.” He turned on the faucet. Underneath the sink, a pipe rattled. “How come the water’s brown?”

“Give it a few seconds. It’ll run clear.” She filled a plate with cookies and squares of cake from yesterday’s gathering and placed it on the table. “I won’t be needing the paper during the week, but maybe you have a weekend deal?”

“Sure, no problem. Lots of people only get the paper on the weekend. You know, for the comics.” The clanking of the pipes suddenly stopped, and clear water began gushing from the tap. “Tommy’s grandmother saw you at the funeral. I’m sorry about your aunt. She said you looked different, skinnier. I mean, Tommy’s grandmother said it, not your aunt. She’s dead. I don’t mean Tommy’s grandmother. She’s alive. Anyway, I’m sorry. I mean, about your aunt.”

“Thank you, Cory,” she said, suppressing a smile. She searched through her memory. Tommy? Tommy Pritchard? Wasn’t he that short, frail-looking kid who’d been in Cory’s kindergarten glass? “And how is Tommy these days?”

“He’s okay.” Cory turned off the faucet and wiped his hands on a dishcloth, leaving a dirty stain in the floral pattern. Eyeing the cookies hungrily, he sat down.

“Go ahead, take one,” Laura said, pouring him a glass of milk. She sat down across from him. “Take two, if you want.”

“Dad says my teeth will rot.”

“You’ll brush when you get home. Go ahead, eat.”

He reached for a cookie and started munching. “Dad said that you were sick and that’s why you went away. Are you better now?”

Seeing him again, sitting across from him, listening to him speak, was almost more than Laura could bear. “What else did your father say?” she asked, suppressing the urge to jump up and hug him.

“He said you were never coming back. Can I have some cake, too?”

“Help yourself. That’s what it’s here for.”

He picked up a square and popped the entire piece into his mouth. Traces of frosting dotted the sides of his face. “He lied. You came back.”

Gingerly, she reached across the table and wiped away the icing. He didn’t pull away. “Your dad didn’t lie,” she said in a thick voice. “He didn’t know I was coming back.”

“But you’re here. So what he said wasn’t true. How come you left, anyway?”

What could she say that he could understand? She thought for a moment, and then spoke slowly. “Sometimes married people, even though they still love each other, can’t live together. I got sick, and we thought the best thing I could do was go to New York. They have good doctors there. I got better, but the problems between your father and me didn’t go away.” It wasn’t the complete truth, but it was all he needed to know.

“This is where you tell me that your going away had nothing to do with me. You still love me and all that crap.”

She ignored the crass word—for now. Apparently, Cory had been given this lecture before.

He took a big swallow of milk. “Tommy’s parents got divorced. His father takes him every second weekend and buys him neat stuff. He bought him a computer. How come you never bought me a computer?”

She knew that Cory wasn’t talking about electronics. “You aren’t my natural child,” she said plainly and honestly. “If you were, I would have taken you with me to New York after I got better. I wanted to come back and see you a million times, but I thought…your father and I thought…it would be better if I didn’t.”

“You made a mistake,” Cory said, his face solemn. “You should have come.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But that’s okay. No one’s perfect. Dad says even grown-ups make mistakes.”

“Your father is right. No one’s perfect.” Especially grown-ups.

He reached for another piece of cake. “Tommy heard his grandmother say that you stole my father from my real mother. Tommy said that’s why you got sick. Because God punished you.”

Laura gasped. “That’s a load of…crap. What did you say? You didn’t believe him, did you?”

“Nah, he’s crazy.” Cory grinned. “Hey, you’re okay, Lulu. Dad always yells at me when I say that word. He says it sounds like hell. Oops, I mean heck.”

“He’s right.” She tried to keep her face stern, but inwardly she was smiling. He had called her Lulu. Lulu had been the first word he had ever spoken, at fourteen months, two months after Cynthia had died, and it had remained his name for her.

“I beat him up.”

“Who?”

“Tommy. I told you, he’s crazy. And he has a lot of uncles. You know, guys who stay over and pretend to like him. They buy him stuff, too. But nothing like a computer. Stupid stuff. Yesterday this short guy with a big head and no neck bought him a yo-yo. How stupid is that? But I told Tommy it was the perfect present, seeing how Tommy is a yo-yo himself. He said I probably have a lot of uncles in New York. He said you probably brought me back a dozen yo-yos. So I hit him.”

“Sorry, no yo-yos.”

“What about uncles?”

“Nope. No uncles.” Would he consider Edward an uncle?

“No uncles,” he repeated. “That’s good. I hate yo-yos.”

She regarded him closely, remembering how he had towered over all his friends at school. “Do you think it’s fair beating up on guys who are smaller than you?”

“Who, Tommy?” Cory’s eyes widened. “I’m a midget next to him! He’s a whole head taller!”

They sure grow up big in Middlewood, she mused. Must be the brown water. She looked at the torn pocket at the front of Cory’s backpack. “I can mend that for you, if you’d like. How did it happen?”

“Last week Tommy called me a geek. So I punched him. He got mad and threw my backpack across the schoolyard.”

“You punched him because he called you a geek?” She shook her head. “What does your father say about all this fighting?”

“He yells a lot. Says I’m a problem child. Maybe he’ll send me to correction school. You know, jail for kids? I hear New York’s full of those schools. And you don’t have to sleep there. You go there in the daytime and you sleep at home, or wherever. I mean, you could stay at somebody’s house, if you knew someone in New York. I used to hope he’d send me to one of them. I mean, when I was little.”