“Pearl, there will be none of that with me. I am here for the summer to help your father at the mill. He needs the help, and I need to earn money for medical school. I decided a long time ago that I can’t let romance interfere with my goal of becoming a doctor, so I have set any notion of that aside until I complete my education.”
She pouted and tapped his arm. “Oh, John Lawrence, you’re no fun at all. I didn’t propose marriage, just a kiss.”
“You need to leave before someone discovers you’ve been out here. You’ll get both of us in trouble.”
Pearl smiled. “I can keep a secret. No one will know.”
She walked away, and he slid the curtain back over the clothesline so he was out of view. In the distance, she whispered loudly, “Good night, John. I’ll be dreaming of you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1983
It took three days for Joe to inventory the house. During that time, just as Pearl had promised, the dumpster arrived along with the rental truck. The truck came with a slide-out ramp, furniture dolly, and straps, as if someone had assumed he had the skills of a professional mover. He’d figure it out.
Pearl came by every day too, bringing him groceries and looking over the inventory sheets. She seemed pleased with his progress.
Each day, she made him stop working so they could sit at the kitchen table and talk. Sometimes he caught her intently staring at his face, and he wondered if she was noticing the resemblance between him and his father. Or maybe his grandfather? He had so many questions.
He took her visits as opportunities to ask her about the family history. For the most part, she was open to his questions. Joe kept them general at first, feeling his way forward. “We got electricity first,” she said, answering his question about the house, “and then sometime later, indoor plumbing. By the late 1940s, most houses around here had both.” She shook her head. “If you only knew how many hours we spent pumping and carrying water before then. Having it piped in was like a miracle. Of course, by then I was married, so I wasn’t living in this house anymore.”
“So how did you wind up owning it?”
“Dumb luck,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. “I was the last one left in the area. Everyone else has died or moved. My father lived here right until the end.” She smiled, thinking fondly. “People did that back then. No one sent people away just because they were old. You just stayed in your own home and died where you’d been planted. So he passed away, and his daughters inherited the house. I sold my place and bought out the others. I’ve been here ever since. My old house, the one I lived in as a married woman, had lost its charm for me by then. I’d been widowed, and your father had left. Lots of bad memories.”
She told him about her sisters. “There were seven of us altogether, with me being the second oldest. Daisy was the baby, fourteen years younger than me. She was the only one besides me who had blonde curls like our mother.” She tossed her head as if her hair were still blonde instead of white.
Joe and Pearl discovered they had something in common. They’d each lost their mother when they were young. “It was hard,” she said, and he had to agree. “You lose a mother, there’s an empty place that can’t be filled.”
“Did your father remarry?”
“No. He never did. Stayed right in this house all alone and had Sunday dinner with the family members who still lived in the area. We had dinner around that dining room table, and afterward we visited and caught up on the news. Once we had electricity and a radio, we’d gather around and listen. We thought that was the greatest. We had no idea television would be coming along. My father was a quiet man, but he enjoyed having us here. He’d listen to us talk while he bounced the grandchildren on his knee. He had a special fondness for my Bill.”
It was odd for Joe to imagine his father as a little boy, perched on his grandfather’s knee. “So my father came here for Sunday dinner when he was a kid?”
She nodded. “Nearly every week for years. My sister Mae lived down the road at the time, and so did her twin, Maude. They married local boys. Brothers. We saw the others on some holidays when they could make the trek in. Traveling used to be much harder. Cars weren’t very reliable. It was a different world.”
“Are any of your sisters alive?”
“Daisy lives in Hawaii, if you can imagine that. They never have winter there, and she says she doesn’t miss the snow. Helen and her husband, Burt, live in Nebraska, and Mae and her husband retired to Florida. Everyone else is gone.” By gone, she meant dead, Joe realized.
“I just feel kind of bad going through all this stuff, knowing it’s going to be sold or tossed out, thinking maybe a relative might want it,” Joe said.
“Like what kinds of things?”
“Family photos, for the most part.”
“Don’t feel bad. They all had their chance when our father passed away. The whole bunch of them came and went through every room. Copies of photos were made. Keepsakes were snatched up and put in their cars before I could even see what they took.” She illustrated, pretending to grab something on the table. “It was like a swarm of locusts in here. No one is going to be mad at you, believe me.”
“There are a few pictures that I’d like. If I show them to you, can you identify the people so I can write down their names?”
“Of course.”
Joe pushed back his chair. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be right back.” He went to the hallway, where he’d lined the framed photos on the floor along the wall, all the easier to organize and inventory. Most of them he planned to take out of the frame and keep, either for himself or Linda, but they wouldn’t be worth much if he didn’t know who was in the pictures. His father might know, but he couldn’t count on his cooperation. And knowing that his grandmother had terminal cancer made the timing critical. Joe picked up three of the photos and returned to his seat in the kitchen.
“These are the three I’m most interested in,” he said, setting the first one in front of her. It was the family portrait he’d spotted when he’d first arrived. “I’m assuming that’s you and my dad and his father, your husband?”
“That’s right. The Arneson family, in better days.” She pointed to each one. “Me, William, Francis.”
“What year was that?”
Her lips pressed together. “Your father would have been three and a half. You do the math. My noggin’s not as sharp as it used to be.”
The next photo was of a bride and groom. He sensed it was way before his father’s time, and he was right. The couple turned out to be his great-grandparents. “Mary and George Bennett. Wasn’t my mama pretty?” Pearl said, turning the image back to him.
“Very pretty.”
“She died before she could get old, so in my memory, she’s always young, although I didn’t think so at the time. Bless her heart, she missed out on so much.”
Joe wrote down the names. The year, luckily, was written on the back. When he was done, he pulled out the last one, a framed sepia-toned photograph of seven girls standing in a row like stairsteps, going from the tallest on down to a tiny little girl with curly light-colored hair. “This is you and your sisters, right?” He slid it across the table. “I recognized you, but if you’d let me know who is who, I can . . .”