“Sure you don’t want to come along?” she queried, peering around the bathroom door, her red hair falling around her face in curls. “Harold and I would be glad to have you.”
Glory shook her head, pausing in her unpacking. “I feel as though parts of me have been scattered in every direction, Mama. I need time to gather myself back together. I’ll get something light for supper, then read or watch TV.”
Delphine raised titian eyebrows. “You’re getting boring in your old age, kid,” she said. “Just see that you don’t eat over at Maggie’s. Last week one of the telephone linemen told me he got a piece of cream pie there that had dust on top of it.”
“I wouldn’t think of patronizing your archrival, Mama,” Glory replied, grinning. “Even though I do think serving pie with dust on it requires a certain admirable panache.”
Delphine dismissed her daughter with a wave and disappeared behind the bathroom door.
As it happened, Glory bought spaghetti salad in the deli at the supermarket and ate it while watching the evening news on the little TV with the foil antenna. Downstairs in the diner, the dinner hour was in full swing, and the floor vibrated with the blare of the jukebox.
Glory smiled and settled back on the couch that would be her bed for the next several weeks, content.
She was home.
After the news was over, however, the reruns of defunct sitcoms started. Glory flipped off the TV and got out her mother’s photo albums. As always, they were tucked carefully away in the record compartment of the console stereo, along with recordings by Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley.
Delphine probably hadn’t looked at the family pictures in years, but Glory loved to pore over them.
Still, she had to brace herself to open the first album—she was sitting cross-legged on the couch, the huge, cheaply bound book in her lap—because she knew there would be pictures of Dylan.
He smiled back at her from beside a tall man wearing a slouch hat. Glory knew the man’s name had been Tom, and that he’d been mean when he drank. He’d also been her father, but she didn’t remember him.
The little boy leaning against his leg, with tousled brown hair and gaps in his grin, was another matter. Gently, with just the tip of one finger, Glory touched her brother’s young face.
“When am I going to get over missing you, Bozo?” she asked, in a choked voice, using the nickname that had never failed to bug him.
Glory stared at Dylan for a few more moments, then turned the page. There she made her first photographic appearance—she was two months old, being bathed in a roasting pan on a cheap tabletop, and her grin was downright drunken.
She smiled and sighed. “The body of a future cheerleader. Remarkable.”
Her journey through the past continued until she’d viewed all the Christmases and Halloweens, all the birthdays and first days of school. In a way, it eased the Dylan-shaped ache in her heart.
When she came to the prom pictures of herself and Jesse, taken in this very living room with Delphine’s Kodak Instamatic, she smiled again.
Jesse was handsome in his well-fitting suit, while she stood proudly beside him in the froth of pink chiffon Delphine had sewn for her. The dress had a white sash, and she could still feel the gossamer touch of it against her body. Perched prominently above her right breast was Jesse’s corsage, an orchid in the palest rose.
She touched the flat, trim stomach of the beaming blond girl in the picture. Inside, although Glory hadn’t known it yet, Jesse’s baby was already growing.
Glory closed the album gently and set it aside before she could start wondering who had adopted that beautiful little baby girl, and whether or not she was happy.
The next collection of pictures was older. It showed Delphine growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and there were photographs of a collage of aunts, uncles and cousins, too.
Glory reflected as she turned the pages that it must have been hard for Delphine after she left another abusive husband. Her family had understood the first time, but they couldn’t forgive a second mistake. And after Delphine fled to Oregon with her two children, she was virtually disowned.
Saddened, Glory turned a page. The proud, aristocratic young face of her Irish great-grandmother gazed out of the portrait, chin at an obstinate angle. Of all the photographs Delphine had kept, this image of Bridget McVerdy was her favorite.
In 1892, or thereabouts, Bridget had come to America to look for work and a husband. She’d been employed as a lowly housemaid, but she’d had enough pride in her identity to pose for this picture and pay for it out of nominal wages, and eventually she’d married and had children.
The adversities Bridget overcame over the years were legion, but Delphine was fond of saying that her grandmother hadn’t stopped living until the day she died, unlike a lot of people.
Glory gazed at the hair, which was probably red, and the eyes, rumored to be green, and the proud way Bridget McVerdy, immigrant housemaid, held her head. And it was as though their two souls reached across the years to touch.
Glory felt stronger in that moment, and her problems weren’t so insurmountable. For the first time in weeks, giving up didn’t seem to be the only choice she had.
Two
The next morning, after a breakfast of grapefruit, toast and coffee, Glory drove along the snow-packed streets of Pearl River, remembering. She went to the old covered bridge, which looked as though it might tumble into the river at any moment, and found the place where Jesse had carved their initials in the weathered wood.
A wistful smile curved Glory’s lips as she used one finger to trace the outline of the heart Jesse had shaped around the letters. Underneath, he’d added the word, Forever.
“Forever’s a long time, Jesse,” she said out loud, her breath making a white plume in the frosty air. The sun was shining brightly that day, though the temperature wasn’t high enough to melt the snow and ice, and the weatherman was predicting that another storm would hit before midnight.
A sheriff’s-department patrol car pulled up just as Glory was about to slip behind the wheel of her own vehicle and go back to town. She was relieved to see that the driver wasn’t Jesse.
The deputy bent over to roll down the window on the passenger side, and Glory thought she remembered him as one of the boys who used to orchestrate food fights in the cafeteria at Pearl River High. “Glory?” His pleasant if distinctly ordinary face beamed. “I heard you were back in town. That’s great about your mom getting married and everything.”
Glory nodded. She couldn’t quite make out the letters on his identification pin. She rubbed her mittened hands together and stomped her feet against the biting cold. “Thanks.”
“You weren’t planning to drive across the bridge or anything, were you?” the deputy asked. “It’s been condemned for a long time. Somebody keeps taking down the sign.”
“I just came to look,” Glory answered, hoping he wouldn’t put two and two together. This had always been the place where young lovers etched their initials for posterity, and she and Jesse had been quite an item back in high school.
The lawman climbed out of his car and began searching around in the deep snow for the “condemned” sign. Glory got into her sports car, started the engine, tooted the horn in a companionable farewell, and drove away.
She stopped in at the library after that, and then the five-and-dime, where she and Dylan used to buy Christmas and birthday presents for Delphine. She smiled to recall how graciously their mother had accepted bottles of cheap cologne and gauzy handkerchiefs with stylized D’s embroidered on them.