She ought to paint some of John’s platitudes on her bedroom wall. They would comfort her the way her husband had with his calm, quiet smile and a pat of his hand. He would lean over and press his lips to her cheek and make that little smack.
“There you go, sweetie pie,” he would say. “Better now?”
And she was. Truly, John always made things better. From the day he had offered to marry her and become the father of her baby, to the day he exhaled his last, labored breath, John had brought peace and security into Jan’s life. He had given her everything she wanted and needed. Always. He hadn’t asked her to change. Or leave. Or go to strange places. He had just patted her hand and planted a kiss on her cheek and called her honeybunch. And that had been more than enough.
“Oh, John.” Taking up the photograph she had framed not long after his death, Jan gave the glass a wipe with the sleeve of her pink robe. “What am I supposed to do without you? You weren’t supposed to leave me. Thomas did that already. You were supposed to stay.”
Battling a new wave of tears, Jan took off her robe, lay back on her bed once more and shut her eyes, hugging the frame against her chest. Maybe she ought to pray. Beth always chided her mother for not being more religious. What would she say if she knew Jan wasn’t even going to church these days?
Well, what was the point? You prayed, and your husband died anyway. You went to church, and then what? Your kids grew up and left home. Your Sunday school class just got older and older until you couldn’t believe you belonged in the same room with those wrinkled, gray-haired fogies. Your preacher kept yammering on the same Bible verses again and again until you could practically preach his sermon for him. Potlucks and Bible studies and revivals and prayer meetings and on and on.
The thought of it all made Jan tired. Still holding John’s picture, she turned onto her side and pulled the sheet up over her ears. Just as she was sure she would never get to sleep, she realized she had been imagining herself in a shoe store buying a pair of hiking boots, which had nothing to do with anything. And then the hiking boots turned into furry yellow puppies. And that was the end of that.
Jan woke with a gasp. A slanted sunbeam warmed her cheek. It must be after nine! Good grief!
She sat up in bed, rubbed her face with her hands and blinked, trying to see through the residue of last night’s tears. Oh, great. This was not good. She needed to be up fixing breakfast for Beth. She ought to have taken a shower by now. Dried her hair. Put on makeup. Dressed in a pair of slacks and a nice top. She was still determined to take her daughter to the Rose Garden. Or the Azalea Walk. Either would be beautiful this time of year.
As she fumbled her way out of bed, Jan saw that she had slept with John’s framed photograph all night. Poor John…How hard he had battled that awful ALS—three years of fighting, until he had looked nothing like the man in the picture. She set it up on her bedside table again. This was how she would remember him—pudgy and freckled and grinning from ear to ear.
“There,” she said, taking a last look at the picture. She grabbed her robe and slipped it on as she hurried out into the kitchen. Thank goodness there were no signs of life. Beth must be sleeping in, as she always had on school holidays when she was younger.
Jan padded in her thick socks to the coffeemaker. She would get the pot started, and then she could run to the bathroom for a quick shower. This was going to be a better day, she thought as she stood at the sink to fill the glass carafe with water. She and Beth would start off on the right foot, and that way Jan could head off any…
She stared at her empty driveway. The rental car was gone.
Chapter Four
“I’m looking for yearbooks.” Beth leaned against the reference counter. “From John Tyler High School.”
The librarian was a nice-looking young man with dimples. “The Alcalde! Are you an alum?”
No one in New York would have asked such a personal question. In large cities the world over, Beth had discovered, people got down to business. Chitchat took too long, didn’t really matter, and you’d never see the person again, so why bother?
With a fair amount of chagrin, she recalled her first week in the Big Apple. She had walked into a perfume boutique, said hello to a saleswoman and—like a good Southern girl—she began with a comment about the weather and then moved on to discuss her own favorite fragrances, how she enjoyed floral scents because she was from a town in Texas where roses were grown for export, how she had just arrived in New York and was excited to have found a studio apartment she could afford and on and on. Finally, Beth had realized the woman was staring at her as though she had just landed from Jupiter. Not only had Beth breached the “no small talk” rule, but her Texas twang had no doubt branded her as someone who just fell off the turnip truck.
This wasn’t New York or London or Toronto, though, so Beth smiled back at the young librarian. “Yep, I graduated from JT a few years back. Go, Lions!”
He laughed. “I went to Robert E. Lee High. I’m working on my library science degree at UT-Tyler now. It’s a good school, but I’ll be glad when I’ve got my degree and can move away. Tyler.” He rolled his eyes. “My ancestors were some of the town’s first settlers, and we’ve been here ever since.”
Beth nodded. “Time to set forth into the world. I live in New York.”
“Really? Wow. I bet that’s different.”
“You can say that again.” Beth reflected for a moment on the number of old families still living in the area. “Did you ever hear of anyone named Wood around here?”
“Wood? Like Wood’s Nursery and Greenhouse? Wood’s Landscaping? Wood Tractor and Lawn Service? There are several businesses by that name.”
For some reason this shocked Beth. Of course she knew about the Wood family. The name was on any number of small enterprises around the city. She could have been living among her relatives all her life and not realized it.
Had they known about Beth? Was her heritage a Tyler secret? Did people elbow each other as she went by…? There’s Thomas Wood’s daughter, but don’t let on that you know….
“I’m looking for someone,” she told the young man. “His name is Thomas Wood. Or was. I think he might have passed away a while back. I’m pretty sure he would have graduated from John Tyler High in the early eighties.”
“All our copies of the Alcalde are down that row of reference books across from the soda machine. You can’t check the year-books out, but you can use our copier if you need certain pages. Dime a page.”
Beth thanked him and headed across the library. As she crossed the reading area, she glanced at an elderly man browsing the Dallas Morning News. Did he know? If she walked up to him and said, “I’m Thomas Wood’s daughter,” would he reply, “Oh, I know that. He left town, but your mother stayed here and married John Lowell.”
Why not? In a city of around ninety thousand, people ran into each other now and then. They joined things together—churches, PTAs, Lions and Rotary Clubs. They congregated at the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden or the Caldwell Zoo. They celebrated annually at the Azalea and Spring Flower Trail, the Festival on the Square and the Texas Rose Festival.
And they talked. They talked at grocery stores, on the sidewalks, in church, at the coin laundries, even in the library. How many had known about Beth’s lineage and said nothing to her—but plenty to each other?
The thought of people gossiping behind her back made her feel sick. And angry. She stepped between the tall bookcases and spotted the rows of yearbooks. But as she started to reach for one, she hesitated. Maybe she didn’t want to know what Thomas Wood had looked like. Maybe she ought to be like her mother and pretend he really hadn’t existed.
Thomas