The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [130]
I approached my mother’s house and paused. This fine structure would have been Ole’s satisfaction, that and taking care of his family without the world knowing that his wife had defied him. That was all he really wanted. I could forgive him for not taking the money but not for diminishing what we’d done those years ago, denying how we’d accomplished something remarkable, refusing her the comfort of that story. But he was gone now; hanging on to resentment hurt only me. And my mother had lost another child, her sixth. I wanted to grieve with her.
I took a deep breath. I knocked on the door. Ida opened it.
“Oh,” she said, her eyes as big as biscuits.
“Who is it?” I heard my mother speak from another room, her voice a sigh from the past. “Has someone brought another casserole?”
My mother entered from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.
There she stood, white hair, eyes with lines, skin drawn tight against that strong face and chin, glasses slipping on her nose. She pushed them up. She was still a handsome woman, shoulders straight as railroad ties. She no longer looked defeated, just profoundly sad.
She stepped next to Ida, stopped. “Clara?”
I am five years old, aching for her arms to comfort me when I’ve scraped my knee; I am fifteen, angry that she’s told me I must leave the farm and go to work to serve the family but still longing for her words of reassurance; I am eighteen and she has taken me from love to walk across the continent, propelling me to life.
I am a young woman standing at the edge of the Dale Creek trestle. My mother is across the chasm looking back.
I am a forty-seven-year-old child, walking this way and that, aching for my mother to call me home.
My heart was pounding, pounding. She has not put her arms out. Should I reach out to her? Can I withstand the pain if she steps back?
I am her daughter. She is the mother who started me on this walk.
I stepped forward.
PART THREE
Reunion
FORTY-FOUR
Out of Exile
Clara?” Mama repeated. “You’ve come home.”
I put my arms up and she walked into them, the daughter giving comfort to her mother, but she reached her arms around me too. I felt the bones in her back, her spine built of pearls, delicate but strong.
Tears streaked the powder on my face. She isn’t sending me away. “Oh, Clara. You’ve come home, when we needed you.” We held each other, seemingly alone in the room, the longing slipping away, my soul filling up.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Bill said then, coming from the other room. At least I assumed it was my brother Bill. It wasn’t spoken cruelly but was Bill’s way of broaching awkwardness, I decided.
“Better than a mouse, I hope,” I said releasing Mama. “Though I eat more, Billy. Do you even have a cat?” I asked.
“Not much more,” he commented. “You always were thin, as I remember.” Bill patted his own stomach, flat as an iron. “Can’t say the same for myself.” Self-deprecating. That was a Norwegian man for you, I thought.
“Your carpentry work keeps you fit,” I said.
“Meat cutting,” Bill said. “I stopped carpentry a few years back. Lost the lust for it after Papa … Well.” He lifted his palms, dropped them.
Lillian said, “I was seven or eight when I last saw you.” I nodded. A beautiful woman.
“Though one day I walked by as you sat on the steps, writing in your diary with your friend … Marcia. You might have been eleven or twelve.”
Lillian’s brow furrowed. “Yes. Years ago,” she said. A man came up behind her and put his arm around her shoulder. “My husband,” she said.
“You’re old enough to be married,” I said.
“Of course.” She smiled. A warm and direct gaze met mine.
“You were always lovely and still are,” I said. “Ida,” I turned to her. “It’s good to see you.” I didn’t add “again,” not certain if my mother had ever known of our encounters those years before.
“Would you like coffee?” Ida asked, and when I nodded, she left the room.
Maybe that’s what was necessary now as we gathered our bearings. These mundane words, spoken like garden tools making room for bulbs, people