Chapter 1: The Prodigal Daughter Returns

chapter excerpt from novel Sisters In Arms

Chapter One: The Prodigal Daughter Returns

         Thirteen years. Thirteen years since I’d driven these streets and I was ashamed. I turned down Temple Street and it was like being a kid again. The road was still narrow and buckled up in the middle, cracks in the asphalt running down toward the ditches. The ditches were still there; empty, now that sewers had been installed.

         Jesus, thank god for that. I can remember the brown-silt bottom of those ditches. Clear water running over piles of dirty muck. It only looked clear. Nobody drank it. Nobody even walked in it. Except my brothers when they practiced fishing and that was with heavy rubber boots on their feet. I used to try taking a running jump over the skinny parts of those ditches. I fell in more than once. The neighborhood kids use to tease me on how the ditch slime made my skin look dirty. Hah! They never had the guts (or the stupidity) to try flying across those ditches.

         More than a decade later, Cheyanne, my home town, was still asleep. There were no strip malls and only one mini-mart had popped up near the valley freeway. Cheyanne; population 2,326 and it wasn't going to get any bigger. It was a slightly redneck, little pocket tucked at the foot of the Cascade Mountains and hemmed in by two larger suburbs. It was a perfect place, growing up.

         There was something broken in me that held on to my home town even though I hadn’t been able to bring myself back for so long. The rushing water in the ditches, when the spring rains pelted. The wind sighing through the maples and willows, the fields of buttercups. I knew these things. They made up a part of my biological network. My being, my bones.

         Cheyanne is where my grandparents, Jacob and Elizabeth Donovich settled. My mother Hannah and her sister Anna, the two eldest daughters, had married young and remained rooted in the town, but the younger ones -- Ruth and Dorothy had wandered. The house the girls were raised in was long gone, but the foothills, the lonely pines and firs were still there, unchanging.

         I never had much to do with the Donovich family because well, my mom didn't encourage it. I don’t think it was in her, though I found out later why. There was this huge gap of knowledge about who we were as we were growing up, and because of that, something remained empty in me for all those years growing up in Cheyanne. I filled those empty places with schoolbooks, playing softball, and friends. As a young adult though, Cheyanne was no place to roam. The loneliness came on strong when I was at home, so I stayed away from home as much as possible.

         Things like that hang onto you though, like a latent genetic disorder. The empty spots come to claim you; they come to make their silence heard. They demand names and explanations.

         I slowed my speed to take it all in. It was like reading a favorite book for the hundredth time. All the surprises are gone, but every page is cherished. The apple tree in Larson’s field was still there. I climbed that tree almost daily in summers, eating as many green apples as I pleased (and got the shits every time!) Gnarled and twisty branches now. Covered with leathery lichen scabs. If I climbed into this tree’s arms today, they would break, but she still stood, welcoming me.

         My home town was not a place that asked for change. And something in me was so grateful for that, I felt tears threatening.
         And I felt ashamed.

         I had not seen my mother in thirteen years. We’d talked over the phone and exchanged cards, but not much else. I hadn’t even come home for Christmas. Roger and Dave had made it back occasionally, and sometimes they had her over during the holidays, but as she got older, Mama refused to travel anywhere and as both my brothers moved away and had families of their own, it just wasn’t all that practical to have to come back to Cheyanne. My older sister Shelley and I, didn’t have that excuse, but no one was as lame as I when it came to keeping in touch with their mother.

         I pulled into a graveled, grass-tufted driveway. The house looked smaller. Of course it would. I got out of my car and headed across the lush green lawn. She had always kept a neat yard; the grass evenly trimmed with flower borders. My mom spent more time on her gardens than her children; one of the reasons I didn’t come back to visit much. Oh! She still had pansies. I bent down to touch a soft petal, remembering the velvety wonder of their skin.

         I walked up the cracked cement sidewalk with the footprint still in it, and mounted the big steps. Tallulah was barking. I was about to rap on the door when my mom opened it, startling me. She had on her rain coat and one of those goofy plastic scarves with flowers all over it.

         “Well, I thought that was you!” she said, a huge grin spreading across her face. “I saw someone pulling in the driveway, but I didn’t know who would be driving such a heap.”

         “Hi, Mama.”

         "Tallulah, that’s enough!” she snapped at the dog and Tallulah sat back on her haunches, eyeing me. “You be nice to Julie.” She turned to me and her blue eyes narrowed. “You look different.”

         “Well,” I laughed, “it’s been an awfully long time.”

         “I’ll say it has!”

         Her hair was cut in a page-boy and it looked nice on her. She had put an ash brown rinse in it, covering the silver. I would never have my mother’s natural blonde hair, but someday, I would have her silver strands, and I would hide them, too. She didn’t look thirteen years older, not different at all. But to me, my mom had always looked old. There’s no other way to say it.

         “So, you all ready to go?” I asked. That was stupid. Of course she was ready with her coat on and her purse in her hand.

         “Well, I should hope so. Can you give me a hand with this?” She pointed to a potted lily on the floor behind her. I picked it up. It smelled heavenly.

         "This smells so good.” I sucked in the perfume deeply.

         “I grew that,” she said.

         "You grew this?” I asked, incredulous. “How’d you grow one of these?”

         “Well, dear girl, you put it in the ground and wait for it to come up!”

         “But, it’s too early in the season.”

         “I grow mine in my little hothouse. Orchids, too. Geraniums. Your Grandma’s favorite flower was the lily.”

         And there it was. She fought the tears heroically, but her eyes got shiny and she pulled a hanky out of her pocket. My mother’s mother was gone and I was taking her to the memorial service.

         “What is this trap you’re driving?” Mama asked as she climbed into my farty old jeep. “What do you think you’re up to? Going on a safari?” She was trying to lighten an atmosphere of all that had gone wrong, I could tell.

         April rain pummeled the windshield as we drove through town.

         “These seats are very uncomfortable,” she complained.

         “I know. They hurt my back, too,” I said.

         "No lady would drive a car like this! Honestly, Julie!”

         "I’m no lady,” I muttered.

         “Your back? What’s wrong with your back?”

         “Ever since that trampoline accident in high school, it’s never been—“

         “Well, these fancy seats aren’t any good for backs.” She didn’t wait for an answer. She never waited for an answer. “Watch that fella over there!”

         I could feel the anger welling up in me again. Oh man, it’d been a long time since I felt this. I told myself to stuff it.

         “Are you putting on weight?” Again, she didn’t wait. “Whatever you’re doing, it sure agrees with you.”

         “Thank you. Just getting older.”


         Hannah Donovich was never one to listen to anybody, unless there was real trouble and it always took a certain amount of discernment on her part (and effort on yours) to get her to that point. It was easier not to talk about your life. So I never told her much. And she didn’t ask. And because of that we had never had much of a relationship.

         There was the old two pump gas station on Main Street. Same as always. The Randalsons still owned it along with the one grocery store. I drove slowly, not because of the rain, but because I wanted to see the streets again. In some other place, not far from my heart, I could see a little girl, walking to school, books folded in her arms, eyes cast down at worn out shoes.

         “I walked this way to school every day, I remember,” I said. My mom didn’t respond right away because she was thinking about things herself.

         As we passed my old grade school, she spoke, “You never were able to watch where you were going.” I smiled because I knew she was also remembering me walk these roads.

         “One time, I found ten bucks that way, Mama. I never would have seen it if I was looking up.”

         There was the empty lot where the old Pentecostal Mission used to be. The place was long gone, but I couldn’t recall just when it was flattened. I remembered the yellow-painted siding and the way the roof slanted. And Sunday mornings spent there.

         “Whatever happened to Old Lady Blackthorne?” I said. “She still preaching?”

         “She passed away years ago,” Mama said.

         “She was so weird.”

         “There was some talk of her dying of a rat bite,” my mom continued.

         “A fitting end,” I said.

         "Now, she wasn’t so bad.”

         “She was freaky and she didn’t like kids,” I complained. “She scared the living bejeezus out of me.”

         “I wish you wouldn’t swear.”

         “Did I just swear?”

“Elvira Blackthorne was a good friend to your grandmother,” Mama said.

“Really?” This was the first I’d heard this story. I wanted more. “No kidding? Rat recipes?”

         “Do you have to be so rude? For Pete’s sake, you’re just like your brother.” She yanked an embroidered hanky out of her jacket pocket and honked her nose.

         “You have a point,” I said, trying to smooth things over. It took a couple of minutes to realize she wasn’t interrupting me anymore. I wondered if I had truly offended her or if thirteen years had done us some good.

         “I’m sorry, Mama. I’ve always had this strange sense of humor. Sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t.”

         ”That and your foul language,” she added.

         “I’ve tried very hard not to use it around you,” I said.

"True.” She folded her arms abruptly as if it were beneath her to agree. “You and Roger. Two peas in a pod.” She was talking about my oldest brother Roger, her firstborn. “You both have so much of your grandfather in you. When he swore, he painted the walls blue.”

         I threw back my head and laughed. Odd to be laughing out loud while the rain swept rivers across my windshield and on my way to Grandmother’s funeral. But even Mama’s face softened.

         “You know, you’re grandmother used to cover her mouth so we wouldn’t see her laughing when your grandfather swore. But we all knew.”

         No, I didn’t know that. There was so much I didn’t know. I dreaded this day. Trying to catch up with my mom painlessly was one thing. Handling an afternoon with her family was another. I hadn’t seen these people in ages and I didn’t want to. My mom’s sisters were all aging, my cousins were grown. And I’d never been close to any of them. I’d have rather stayed home and memorized the telephone book.

         But, there comes a time when you have to go back home and clean up. Clean up and accept the responsibility for your relationships, if you’re going to have them. And I had chosen to have one with my mother, somehow. I had things I needed to tell her.
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