Hope brought me a glass of water and set it down on a felt-backed silver coaster. A wave of nostalgia swept over me. How many times had I sat here with family? Too many to count. It had been my mother’s formal dining table—and my grandmother’s before that. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, dinner parties. My goodness. The table held a lot of memories.
But then, so did the boxes and trunks from the attic. I pointed to a slender black trunk. “Let’s begin with that one.”
Hope lifted it and set it on the table in front of me. She—or maybe it was Eddie; bless his heart, he was the tidiest man I’d ever known—had dusted it off, but it still smelled stale.
Hope fiddled with the latch. “It’s locked.”
“The key is in the top drawer of the cupboard.”
Hope located the big skeleton key and put it in my hand. Myfingers trembled as I fitted the key in the hole. It was funny—I felt like I was looking at my grandmother’s hands on the ends of my arms. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to having these veiny, spotted hands with such big knuckles—just like I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing that old woman’s face staring back at me in the mirror. It’s not how I see myself at all, although Lord knows I should.
I heard a little click, and felt the give on the lock. “I bought this trunk when I was in high school. Saved up all my money from babysitting and working at the drugstore and bought this my junior year. I had a yen to travel.” I’d collected photos of places I wanted to go—Paris, London, Rome, Athens. I hoarded travel magazines under my bed like men hid girlie mags. “Now, turn it up tall.”
Hope picked up the trunk and set it down vertically, then undid the latch. Her eyes widened. “Oh wow! It’s like a little closet.”
“Yep.” On the left side was a clothes rod, with several hanging garments. The right side held four drawers.
Hope ran her hand over it. “This is too cool! Did you take this lots of places?”
I shook my head. “Only to New Orleans.”
“But you took all those photos of France and Greece and Egypt!”
“Oh, I traveled the world—but not until the kids were grown and Charlie had died. I never went further than Alabama until I was fifty-six. Then I made up for lost time.”
The funny thing was, by then I’d realized that the big deals in life weren’t necessarily big at all. A newborn’s finger, a drop of dew on a blade of grass, an ant carrying a grain of sugar... enormously powerful wonders were all around, enough wonders to fill a lifetime, right in your own backyard, maybe under your very feet. It’s not where you are; it’s how you see it.
“By the time I started traveling, this trunk was obsolete. It was too large for air travel.”
Hope ran her hand over it. “It’s in beautiful condition.”
“Unlike the green dress in it. Take it out, would you, honey?” The silk rustled as Hope carefully lifted the padded hanger.Originally the dress had been pale jade, but age had yellowed it to a soft moss green. The fabric-covered belt was slightly stained where the buckle had rusted. “I fell in love in this dress.”
“Oh, I can see why.” Hope held it up against herself, then carefully placed it on the table. “It’s absolutely gorgeous.”
She was missing my meaning. I fingered the hem. “I don’t mean I fell in lovewiththe dress, honey. I mean I was wearing this dresswhenI fell in love.”
Hope’s eyebrows pulled together. “With Granddad? I thought you two were childhood sweethearts.”
“Oh, we knew each other all our lives. We lived just down the street, two houses away, and our parents were best friends. My mother and his mother were tight as sisters. Charlie’s older brother had died when he was two, so Charlie was an only child, and I might as well have been—my brother was twelve years older than me and away at college by the time I started school. But the sweetheart part...”
“That came later?”
I hesitated. Here was where I had to turn off the road paved with illusions and steer onto the bumpy dirt path of truth. “The fact of the matter is, the sweetheart part was always pretty much one-sided.”
Hope’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
“Charlie always liked me a lot more than I liked him. In a romantic way, I mean.”
Funny, the way you remember things. Memories don’t lie down flat like stripes on a road or photos in an album. They pop up and flap around, like those Mexican jumping beans Uncle Ronnie brought me that time he went to Tijuana.
I wanted to tell Hope about meeting Joe, but instead, all of a sudden—poof!I’m viewing a mental film of the night of my first high school dance.
My mother is at the front door, wearing a ruby shirtwaist dress with her grandmother’s pearls, and she’s opening it for Charlie. Charlie is dressed in his father’s best suit, his hair slicked back,and he’s holding a white orchid corsage. I’m excited about the dance for lots of reasons. For one, I’m wearing a new dress—it’s baby blue chiffon, with a full skirt, cap sleeves, and a lace sweetheart neckline that I’d had the dickens of a time sewing just right—and I can’t wait to show it off. Secondly, I’m eager to see everyone’s reaction to the “heavenly night” decorations I’d helped hang in the gym; and thirdly, I’ve never danced to a live band before, and Billy Bob and the Crooners are supposed to play.
But then I see Charlie in the living room, and he’s looking at me in a way I’d never noticed before, and it hits me: he’s thinking about the dance in entirely different terms than I am. He doesn’t think I’m going with him just because he has his daddy’s car and my mother doesn’t like me out at night by myself and he always gives me a lift to group events and we’re lifelong buddies; in his mind, this is a date—a real, honest-to-goodness, boy-and-girl date. My stomach does a cold, funny flip, like a fish trying to get free from a hook. The thought of being romantic with Charlie just, well... it makes me kind of squirm inside my skin. I don’t think of him that way. Maybe I’m not ready for it. Maybe I just don’t want to change the easygoing way we get along.
And then—poof!again.
