The Lavender Hour Read online

  “You're really not going to make it this year?”

  “Not if you paid me in emeralds.” Lily said this with the exaggerated weariness of a woman who had a whole string of Easter brunches under her belt and didn't plan on one more. “In fact, I'm not stepping one foot in the kitchen. I'd rather herd cats.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Jan and I are sailing up to Baltimore for a few days. As a matter of fact, you were lucky to catch me. We're leaving in a couple of hours.”

  Jan and I. I didn't like the sound of that. Exclusive of others. “You're not going to be home for Easter?”

  “Not this year.”

  “What's Ashley going to do?”

  “I'm not sure. I think she said something about how she and Daniel and the boys are going to his parents'.”

  Lily wasn't sure what Ashley was doing? This didn't sound at all like our mama. Our entire lives, she had been hands-on, involved with the daily details of our lives. Perhaps too much so. Our rift had begun when I had started to rebel against the constraints of her involvement. Now suddenly she'd gone AWOL, turned into an absentee parent, no longer interested in keeping traditions. No longer worried about me. No longer checking in daily to circle around her concerns. Was I tired? Any headaches?

  “So what have you planned for tomorrow?” Lily asked.

  “I'm going over to Nona's in the morning.”

  “Nona?” she said.

  I tried to conceal my impatience. “Nona Ryder. Her son is the hospice patient.”

  Silence echoed on Lily's end of the phone.

  I pushed on. “And later in the afternoon, I'm having dinner with Faye.”

  “Well, that sounds lovely,” Lily said.

  “I guess,” I said, lost. Here was what was bothering me. Throughout my life, even if I wasn't as close to my mama as Ashley—thick as thieves, the two of them—Lily had been the compass I could count on. Ashley could get knocked up, get married, have kids, I could move, date and break up with dozens of men, develop a tumor—our daddy could die—and Lily would always be there. Steady. Okay, annoying, too. But dependable. Until now.

  “So did you get my card?” Lily asked.

  I pulled myself back to the conversation. “Yes,” I managed. “Thanks.”

  “And?”

  “What?”

  “What did you think?” Lily prompted, her voice again girlish.

  I knew exactly what Lily was asking. Tucked inside the card was a photo of a couple in shorts, backpacks, and hiking boots. Scrawled on the back: Jan and me on the first leg of the Appalachian Trail.

  “You look different,” I said. True enough. Although Ashley had been harping on the fact for months, I wasn't prepared for our mama's transformation into a stranger with gray hair. “I didn't even recognize you.”

  Lily waved this comment aside. “What about Jan?” she said. “What did you think of him?”

  “It's hard to tell from a snapshot,” I hedged. In truth, I'd dug out a magnifying glass from the desk, the one my daddy used to pore over his stamp collection, and had studied the new man in my mama's life. Sandy blond hair and—if the color reproduction was true—bluish green eyes. Muscular legs. He looked more like a carpenter than a dentist. The photo alone was enough to make me want to fly home and straighten Lily out.

  “I really want you to meet him,” Lily was saying. “I know you'll be crazy about him.”

  This I very much doubted. Who knew who this Jan was or what he wanted with my mama. Daddy had been good with money and left Lily fairly well off. It was entirely possible this dentist wanted a meal ticket. You heard about that kind of thing all the time, and Lily could be really naïve. Who was watching out for her interests? I made a mental note to bring this up with Ashley. Okay, maybe I was the one meddling this time, but I was honestly concerned. Lily, alone and aging, was vulnerable.

  “He's looking forward to meeting you, too,” Lily said.

  “You look so different with your hair gray,” I said—a deliberate subject shift. I remembered what Ashley had said during one of our earlier conversations: Why would a person deliberately choose to look older? Especially if she was dating someone ten years younger.

  “For God's sake, don't start,” Lily said. “I get enough of that from your sister.”

  “And what's this about hiking?” I asked. “The last thing I knew, you wouldn't go across the street without taking the car.”

  “We've been getting in shape for the voyage.”

  “So you're still thinking about doing that?” I said.

  “Not thinking about it. It's set. We leave early in June.”

  “I think it's crazy.”

  “It is kind of crazy, isn't it?” Lily laughed. “I guess that's part of the appeal.”

  Now I didn't even try to conceal my exasperation. “Why are you doing this, Mama?” I didn't just mean the sailing. I meant all of it: allowing herself to go gray, dating a man nearly a dozen years younger, dropping family traditions. Again I thought about flying down to straighten things out, but even as the idea occurred to me, I knew its futility. Lily had always regarded my input with amused tolerance.

  There was a pause. “I don't know if you'll understand,” Lily said.

  “Try me.”

  “Because I want to feel alive.”

  “Alive?” Alive?

  “Exactly.”

  I felt the sudden flash of guilt I had had when I learned about the tumor. “Is this about me?”

  “What about you?”

  When I'd first been diagnosed, I used to feel guilty around Lily, knowing the worry I was causing. Now I wondered if in some way my having cancer hadn't shaken her life in an unhealthy way and led to all of her recent actions: The dentist. This crazy idea of crossing the Atlantic. “You know,” I said.

  “This isn't about you, Jessie,” Lily said. “It's about me. I want to feel excited about something again.”

  Jesus, I thought, if she starts talking about sex, I'm out of here. “Do you have to sail across the world to feel alive?”

  Lily laughed. “Would you rather I buy a motorcycle?”

  “What, Mama? Those are the choices?” I took a deep breath. “I'm just worried about you. I mean, think about it. You're sixty-five years old.”

  “I'm perfectly aware of my age, thank you.”

  “And you're talking about sailing across the ocean. Can't you see how dangerous that is?”

  “The truth of it is, I'd rather die sailing to Europe than at home in bed.”

  Or hunched over a steering wheel, stopped short in the prime of life by something a lot bigger than a red light. I pushed the thought away, got back to Lily's transformation, which I couldn't explain. “This doesn't even sound like you,” I said.

  “Life doesn't stay the same, honey. People change.”

  “I do. I stay the same.”This, I suddenly realized, was true. In spite of all I'd been through, in spite of wanting a new beginning, I was essentially the same person I'd been before the tumor, before my move to the Cape.

  “Maybe you shouldn't.”

  “What?”

  “Stay the same.”

  I ignored this. “So, what are you saying? You're having some kind of late-onset change-of-life crisis?”

  Another pause, this one longer. “Jessie, honey,” Lily said, her voice calm, “two things: I love you. And I'm not having this conversation.” And then, to my amazement, my mama hung up.

  A HALF hour later, I was still sitting there staring at the pad and the doodle of the nest and eggs, immobilized by my conversation with Lily. The sound of the UPS truck roused me.

  “Hey, Kenny,” I said, as the driver approached with a package. During the last six months, he had made so many deliveries for the jewelry business that we had developed a first-name friendship. He was married with two kids and a wife who worked days at a retirement home in Hyannis.

  “About time we had some sun,” he said.

  “Sure is,” I said, as I sign
ed for the padded envelope. The return address was marked Sonoma, California. I recognized the customer's name from earlier correspondence. Another cancer patient.

  I carried the envelope up to my studio. The morning's work— the piece for the young leukemia patient—was still on the table. I had nearly completed weaving the braid and could soon begin fashioning the bracelet.

  I opened the envelope. Like most of my customers, this one had sent the hair sealed in a plastic bag, bound by elastic. When I withdrew the duplicate order form, I checked for a note and was surprised to find none. People often included personal anecdotes or histories along with the hair, and although many were from women who had cancer, there were other stories, too, like that from the mother whose son had just joined the navy. She sent a strand she had kept ever since his first haircut. Now she wanted it preserved in a locket. (Imagine, I thought when I received the order, keeping those flaxen strands so carefully for all those years. I had held the hair and wondered if I would ever know the terrifying joy of having a child.) A coed at Mississippi State sent her hair braided into a plait as thick as the arm of a child. She wrote that, all through her childhood, her mother had braided her hair every morning, pulling it with a vengeance, so tight that she wept. Now she was setting herself free. A woman from Fond du Lac told me that her hair held all her power. She wanted me to create a “power piece” for her that she could pin on her clothes. A widow from Sante Fe told me the An-deans believed that, after death, hair was braided into a bridge that helped the soul of the dead cross a dangerous ravine to reunite to the body. She had sent strands of her husband's hair, the yellowish off-white of blond gone gray. A natural blond from Washington asked me if I knew that Princess Diana had spent more than six thousand dollars a year having her hair bleached. I hadn't known that but didn't doubt it for a minute.

  But, as I said, the envelope Kenny delivered contained only the order form and the customer's hair caught up in an elastic band. I set it aside and tried to concentrate on my morning's work and replaying my earlier conversation with Lily.

  LATER THAT afternoon, as prearranged, Faye picked me up, and we headed over to Brewster.

  “Okay, what's going on?” Faye said, as she swung out onto Route 28, cutting in front of a pickup and ignoring the driver, who was honking furiously.

  “What do you mean?”

  She turned to look at me. “Not hard to figure out. You haven't said five words since you got into the car.”

  “Watch the road,” I said. There. Three words.

  Faye tailgated the car in front of us, edging left to pass when an opportunity presented itself. Unmindful, the car ahead crept along. LORPs, Faye called them. Little old retired people who flooded the roads, driving along at a pace twenty miles south of the limit, turn signals perpetually switched on, chins held level with the hubs of their steering wheels. Although Faye was saintly in a number of ways, patience while behind the wheel wasn't her long suit. The LORPs drove her nuts. If it were up to her, she'd have them outlawed. Or permitted on the roads one hour per day. Ten to eleven A.M. Max. Her idea was to clear the roads of everyone else and let the LORPs duke it out, which they often did, backing into one another in the post office lot on a regular basis. Last fall, she advised me not to venture anywhere near there until after noon, by which time, the last of them had picked up their mail. According to Faye, most of them drove like they'd undergone vertebrae fusion, unable to turn their heads more than two centimeters left or right. Nights you were safe, she said, since they didn't like to drive in the dark, but days you definitely were throwing the dice.

  “YOU DON'T have to tell me if you don't want,” Faye said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “What it is that's bothering you.”

  “It's nothing, really.”

  “Nothing?”

  I sighed. “Okay, it's Lily. I talked to her this morning, and I've barely been able to work since.”

  “And…”

  “I don't know.” I really didn't want to get into this and most certainly didn't want to tell Faye about my mama hanging up on me. Talking about Lily to Faye made me feel disloyal. “I guess I'm just worried about her.”

  “Isn't that backward? Isn't the mother the one who's supposed to worry about the daughter?”

  I bit at my lip.

  “Okay,” Faye said. “What specifically are you concerned about?”

  “Well, it's this man she's with, for one thing,” I said. “This dentist person. Who is he? What does he want with her?”

  “I think that should be pretty obvious, Jessie.”

  “You think he's after her money?”

  Faye cocked an eyebrow. “I was thinking along the lines of something more carnal.”

  I stared at her. “Sex?”

  “Desire doesn't dry up with the passing of decades, you know.”

  “Jesus, Faye.”

  She laughed. “More power to her, I say. I don't know why she didn't start seeing men years ago.”

  “Not another word, okay. I don't even want to go there.”

  Faye laughed again. “So what's the other thing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said you were worried about the dentist for one thing. What's the other?”

  “Well it's everything, really.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “It's like she's not even the same person.” I told Faye about how Lily wasn't hosting the traditional family Easter brunch.

  “Well, that's the best thing I've heard in a long time.”

  “It is?”

  “It means she's letting go of what no longer fits. She's changing.”

  “That wins the Understatement of the Year Award.”

  Faye looked at me. “Why exactly are you upset about what she's doing?”

  “It's crazy. Especially this sailing thing. You've seen her on the ocean, Faye. She doesn't know a boom from a broom handle.”

  “True,” Faye said, laughing. “Okay. What's the worst that could happen?”

  I stared at Faye. “Hellooooo? She's crossing the Atlantic. Storm at sea. Death.” Death. There. I'd said it.

  “And that's the worst?”

  “Isn't that bad enough?”

  “I don't know.” Faye reached over and clasped my hand. “Is it worse than dying from cancer?”

  I stared at her, again wondered if Lily had broken her promise not to tell Faye about my illness. At the same time, perversely, I wished Faye did know, since I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep from her.

  “We don't get to choose our deaths, Jessie. But we can choose how to live.”

  “Okay, maybe it's totally selfish on my part, but I don't want anything to happen to her. I don't know what I'd do if she died.”

  Faye slipped her hand free from mind and reached up and adjusted the visor. “You'd go on.”

  “I don't know.” I couldn't imagine life without Lily.

  “You would,” Faye insisted. “We all do.”

  I assumed she was talking about her late husband and about all the deaths she had seen in her work with hospice, but Faye surprised me.

  “When I was a little younger than you,” she said, “I had a dog, an Irish setter named Rusty. He was the most important thing in the world to me.”

  I thought about Rocker and wondered if the Lab was the most important thing in the world to Luke.

  Faye fell silent, then took a long breath. “Sorry. Even now, after all these years, it's hard to remember.”

  “What happened?”

  “He got sick, and the vet said he had to be put down. He gave me a form to sign, and I managed to scrawl something. I didn't think I could bear to stay there in that room—I always believed I was weak that way, avoided funerals like the plague, but I didn't want Rusty with strangers. No one should have to die alone, not even a dog.”

  I thought of my daddy, slumped over the steering wheel, dead before the light changed to green, then willed my mind away. “That doesn't
sound like you. The part about not being strong, I mean.”

  “Believe me, it was. Anyway, I knew I had to be there with Rusty. I had to. When I went in, he was too weak to lift his head off the table. He had just vomited, and I can still remember the horrific smell. I held him in my arms and talked to him until it was over.”

  “I couldn't have done that,” I said.

  “Yes, you could have, Jessie. We're stronger than we know. Each of us. We don't know what we're capable of until we are tested. Look at Lily. She believed she had to be the perfect wife, the ideal mother, and now she realizes she doesn't have to be perfect at all.”

  “Do you think that explains why she's let her hair go gray?”

  “Well, in all the years I've known Lily, I've never seen her without makeup. She even wore mascara when she was swimming.”

  I laughed, relieved to be off the subject of death. “It's true,” I said.

  “So she's changing and challenging herself. Can't you see what a good thing it is that she is daring to try something new?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I just wish she'd choose something less ambitious to start with than a transatlantic crossing.”

  “It sure is a bold choice, I'll say that,” Faye said.

  “Again with the understatement.”

  Faye swung the Toyota into a parking spot off the road. “Well, here we are.”

  I stared at the building we faced. You could drive right by the little stone mill and miss it entirely if you weren't paying attention. “This is it?” Faye had been building up my expectations for days. I expected something a bit more substantial.

  “Have a little respect for history,” Faye said. “This mill was built in 1873.”

  “And this is where the famous herring run is?”

  “Technically, they're alewives, not herring. But, yes, this is it. The run starts over there.” Faye pointed to the north side of the road, and before I had even unlatched my door, she was on her way. I caught up by the edge of the stream.

  THE LAVENDER HOUR

  “It's early in the season,” Faye said, “but in a few weeks, the run will be thick with them.”