Bodark Creek - 59. Chapter 59

When I was in Hattiesburg, I began thinking about my grandchildren a lot, and first, Neal’s son Danny. It was probably because I was surrounded by my family, and he seemed so cut off from it. We didn’t even know if he liked being called “Danny.” We called him that because we always called Del’s son “Daniel” and Charley’s son “Dan.” But when I asked Neal what his son wanted to be called, he laughed and said, “I have a private name for him, but I wouldn’t say it in front of you, Mama.”

I phoned Valerie, Danny’s mama. We usually talked, once a year, mostly near her birthday or mine. And since I’d just gotten a card from her, I had an excuse.

She was fine. Her husband was fine. Their two younger children were doing well. And so was Danny.

“What’s he been doing?” I asked. He was already twenty-three.

“He’s taking a year off after college.”

I knew that he’d finished, but I didn’t know what he’d been studying.

“He’s looking at graduate programs,” Valerie went on.

“In what?”

“Geology. With all the oil off-shore, he figures he has a chance of finding some.”

We laughed at that, and then I asked where Danny was.

“That’s a good question, just now,” Valerie said. “Last we heard, he and a friend were off riding to Panama.”

“On motorcycles?” I said. It didn’t sound good.

“No, on their bikes. Through Mexico and half of Central America. And Danny doesn’t really speak Spanish. And the other boy’s from South Korea.”

We laughed at that, too, but I was already concerned. “Are they going to be all right?” I asked.

“Well, they’ve been gone since Thanksgiving, and they don’t seem to be in any hurry. We get post cards from them every once in a while, though they’re always two or three weeks old. And he called on Christmas Day.”

“Was he all right?”

“Fortunately.”

“I never would have let him go.”

“I didn’t have a lot of say about it,” Valerie confessed. “He pretty well put himself through Trinity, doing part-time jobs and on scholarships. And he only takes money from us when he really needs it, and never more than to buy text books or a new pair of boots. And he’s nearly always done what he wants, but he’s never been in trouble. So I can’t complain.”

“At least it’s a bicycle,” I said. “It’s motorcycles that cause problems.”

Valerie remembered Eddie and Rodney.

“Does Danny have a girlfriend?” I went on. “That should help bring him home.”

“There’ve been a couple of them that we’ve heard of. But only one since high school who we’ve met. He pretty much kept his college friends separate.”

I had no experience with that, so I didn’t know what to say. I practically always knew all of my children’s friends.

“Well, say ‘hello’ to him the next time he calls,” I said. “And tell him he’s always welcome to bicycle to this part of the state.”

“I’ll tell him,” Valerie promised. And she said she’d give my love to the rest of her family.

“What do you think?” I asked Joann, when she came home from work.

“It sounds like he’s doing fine,” she said. “A geologist. That’s pretty good.”

“He isn’t there yet,” I pointed out. “Right now, he’s bicycling to Panama. And that worries me.”

“You can’t let it, Mama,” Joann advised. “In any case, there’s nothing you can do.”

She was right about that. In the same way, there was nothing she could do about Lilah.

Joann didn’t want her daughter to get married, but she did. And she didn’t want Lilah to have a baby so soon, but Lilah did that, too. She had a daughter named Emily.

“She’s beautiful,” I told my granddaughter in the hospital.

“How could she be anything but?” Lilah said, laughing. “She’s got the best-looking daddy in Texas.”

Geoffrey was sitting on the other side of the room, and he just smiled. But you could tell he was pleased. And Joann was happy, though she kept insisting that she didn’t want to be a grandmother before she was fifty.

“It’s too late, Mama,” Paul teased. “But I’ll tell you what. Cara and I won’t give you any grandchildren till you’re sixty.”

“You don’t have to go to the other extreme,” Joann protested. Paul shrugged, but Cara added they were having too much fun to change.

“That’s what I worry about,” Joann told me afterwards. “They’ll both be thirty before they know it. They can’t wait another ten years.”

“Lucky I don’t have to think about that,” Del commented.

Neither of his children was married yet, though his daughter Lisa was finished with college. After graduating, she’d just come home.

“I never really left,” she’d told me. “And I don’t plan to. I loved growing up here, and this is where I want to raise my kids. Four years of Houston only made me more sure.”

“Lisa hated Houston,” her brother Daniel teased. “She just stayed there ‘cause once she starts something, she never quits.”

“Well, I’m gonna start torturing you soon,” Lisa threatened.

“You’ve been doing that since I was born,” Daniel joked. “Mama always said that the first time you picked me up, you dropped me right on the floor.”

“I never should have let her try,” Susan had to explain, every time that story was told.

“And it was a hard floor,” Lisa said, grinning. “It probably knocked the only sense into you that you’re ever going to get.”

Daniel and Lisa kidded that way all the time, but they got along really well when they worked together. Lisa started helping out in Del and Neal’s insurance office when she wasn’t even fifteen, and that’s what she’d been doing full-time since she got back from college. Daniel helped out when he was home from Galveston, and I always felt the two of them would take over that part of the family business.

“We’ll have to see how Bry and Bran feel about that,” Neal said about his younger sons. But the almost-twins were only twelve and thirteen, so they weren’t making any big decisions yet.

And if I worried about Neal’s oldest son Danny and his bicycle, I also thought about Charley. This was especially true when I went out to the cemetery.

“Are you sure you don’t want to put up a memorial stone here?” Del asked me far more than once. “It might make you feel better.”

“I don’t feel bad about Charley,” I told him. “He’s with our family now, the same way everyone else is. And I don’t need a place to put flowers to remind me.”

“But you mention it every time you’re there,” Del said.

“Do I really?” I didn’t realize that, and I promised myself not to do it again. Though I caught myself starting to say something three or four times before the promise took.

And it wasn’t only not seeing where Charley was buried that bothered me. I probably wouldn’t see where William was either, at least not again. That was in Montana, with his family, and that’s how it should have been. Just as when Walter’s second wife Myra died, no one was surprised that she wasn’t going to be buried in town. She’d been with her second husband almost longer than she was with Walter.

When we heard about Myra, it made me think about Walter’s first wife, Stefanie. I hadn’t thought of her in years, and it took me an afternoon to remember her family’s name. But the following Sunday, when I was in church, I asked if anyone still knew where they were.

The family had moved some time during the Depression, and there weren’t a lot of people in church whose memories went that far back. The old mill houses were now mostly full of younger couples who didn’t need a lot of rooms. Though someone who knew Stefanie’s family had stayed in touch with somebody else, and maybe five months later, near the end of August, I got a letter from a man who was her middle grandson.

The letter came from Massachusetts, and at first I couldn’t imagine who was writing me from there. The man said he owned a restaurant, and he had a wife, and two daughters, and a son. He sent me pictures of Stefanie, too, though I wouldn’t have known who I was looking at if I hadn’t been told. Stefanie must have been around my age in the pictures, and the letter said the photos were taken a year or two before she died. She looked good, and she looked happy, and she was surrounded by people who could have been celebrating her birthday.

Unfortunately, we never got to celebrate another birthday with Ruth, and it would have been her eighty-eighth. One morning, like William, she just didn’t wake up. That was probably the way most of us would choose to go, but Ruth and I had never discussed it.

“She was just talking to me last night,” Leona said. “About some thread she was going to buy. Of course, she wasn’t going to buy it herself. She was sending me out to find it. That’s why she described it so clearly.”

In their last years, Leona did most of the errands.

“It’s good that she still had plans,” was mainly what I told Leona. And Leona agreed. And we both promised that neither of us would stop making plans.