Leaves Of Hope

Waiting for the public library to open that morning, Beth had eaten a doughnut at her family’s favorite restaurant just off the town square. Every Sunday after church, the whole Lowell crew had traipsed in, settled at their regular table and ordered the same meals they always did. Fried chicken for Dad, roast beef and gravy for Mom, pork steak for Bob, ribs for Bill. Good old Southern dishes.

Beth always ate spaghetti. Italian. She had been ready to taste the world even back then. Like Thomas Wood, who had left Tyler and never come back. Had her parents sensed a difference in her? Had it affected the way they treated her?

Unwilling to hesitate a moment longer, Beth grabbed an armload of yearbooks and carried them to a table. She sat down and flipped through the index at the back for the most likely year. In moments, she had found him. Thomas Wood.

And he was a dork! In his senior photo, he wore a wide tie and a too-small, pin-striped jacket, and his hair hung in strange, choppy lengths almost to his shoulders. He wasn’t smiling.

Beth stared at him, trying to see through the black-and-white photograph into the truth of who Thomas Wood had been. Dark eyes…like hers. Dark hair…like hers. Straight nose…like hers.

But there was a lot of him that looked nothing like his daughter—a pronounced Adam’s apple, a square jaw and those hands! Beth studied the one hand that the photographer had evidently posed so it showed Thomas’s class ring. Huge fingers stretched across the sleeve of his jacket. Big, rough hands roped with veins. Callused knuckles. Round white nails.

She lifted her own hand and studied her slender fingers and manicured nails, turning them one way and then another. No, she hadn’t gotten them from him, that was certain. But so many other things…

Bob and Bill had inherited a mix of their father’s sandy hair and their mother’s auburn curls. They both had freckles and a tendency to go soft in the middle. Their noses tilted up at the ends, like Jan’s. And their ears stuck out a little, like John’s. But big sister Beth had brown eyes and board-straight brown hair and olive skin.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” The reference desk clerk startled Beth as he pulled back a chair and sat down at the table. “Thomas Wood—well, there he is. Guess you struck oil after all. Get a load of that tie!”

Beth tried to smile. “Yeah, I found him. Thanks.”

“It’s possible we would have pictures of him going all the way back to kindergarten. You want me to look?”

Actually, she wanted the librarian to go away. But Beth pushed the yearbooks in his direction. “Sure. See what you can find.”

“Thomas Edward Wood.” The young man flipped to the index in the back of a volume of the Alcalde. “Did you come all the way from New York to look him up? Because, in case you didn’t know, we can do research for you and communicate online. We’re glad to do that. Not all libraries have those kinds of reference services, but we do. And it’s free!”

“Great. I’ll remember that.” While the clerk went to do some more digging, Beth read the inscriptions under her birth father’s senior year photograph. Thomas Wood had not held a class office or worked on the yearbook staff or acted in a play. He hadn’t done much in sports, either. His freshman year, he had played junior varsity football. He had been on the basketball team—first JV and then varsity—all four years. And that was it. His future? The caption said he planned to attend Tyler Junior College and major in agriculture.

An ag major! He was a hick! Her father was a dork and a hick. A goofball with a tight sport coat and big hands and no more aspirations than to be a farmer.

Of course, being a farmer wasn’t exactly an easy life. Beth knew many of them couldn’t make a go of it. To take college classes showed Thomas Wood had some gumption. And he had chosen that beautiful antique tea set. Maybe there was something ambitious and romantic in him after all.

Beth read the quote he had chosen to have placed beneath his photograph. It was from Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book she had never read but had heard was one of the most saccharine pieces of schmaltz of all time.

“There’s a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!”

Yeah, right. We can be free! Good motto, Thomas Wood. Get your girlfriend pregnant and then abandon her. If you had been a creature of excellence, intelligence and skill, you would have stuck around and done your duty. At least you could have paid child support.

The fact was…she hated him. There, she had acknowledged the truth. Beth stared at the picture of the teenager in the tight coat and wide tie. He was a dweeb, a dork, and she hated him. Good riddance, loser.

Shutting the book, she pushed back from the table. The desk clerk glanced up. “I found him for you in these,” he said. He pointed to a stack of yearbooks opened and placed one on top of the other. “Here, I’ll show you.”

Beth could hardly refuse to look after he’d done all that work. She leaned on her elbows as the young man pointed out his discoveries. “Eleventh grade,” he began, his stubby finger jabbing at the photograph of a skinny-faced, even longer-haired version of Thomas Wood. “Tenth grade, ninth. And then we go to grade school. He went to Douglas Elementary.”

“You’re very good.”

“Thanks. It’s my job.” Dimples deepening, he beamed as he handed her the Douglas Wildcats yearbooks one by one. “Right on down the line. He sure is a beanpole, isn’t he? Look at this one—he’s got a Band-Aid on his chin. Short hair in these younger versions. I guess that was the style back then. And here’s the last one—first grade. There you go. I don’t guess there was a yearbook for kindergarten in those days.”

Beth stared down at a toothless little boy who was looking back at her with big brown eyes. “He was my father,” she murmured. “This…person.”

“Your father? Thomas Wood?”

“My birth father. I was raised by a different man…my real father. He died two years ago.”

“They’re both dead? I’m sure sorry to hear that.”

Beth nodded as she slid the open yearbooks across one another, looking at the pictures once again. “I just found out. My mother…” She bit her lower lip. “I’m just blabbing. Forgive me.”

“No, it’s okay. Do you want me to make photocopies for you? I’ll do it for no charge.”

“That’s all right. I’m just—” She rubbed her eyes. “Okay, yes. Make copies, if you don’t mind. I’d appreciate that.”

“Sure.” He scooped up the yearbooks and headed for a back room.

Beth dropped her head onto the crook of her arm and fought tears. Why should she be sad? Thomas Wood had never been a part of her life. And now he was dead, so why cry? Maybe she was weeping for her daddy. For John Lowell who had carried the secret to his grave. She couldn’t be angry with him. He had given his whole adult life to her. His love, his time, his attention, his money.

What had possessed him to do that? Had he loved her mother so much that Beth became part of that passion? Or had he actually loved his adopted daughter, too? Had her father ever felt Beth really belonged to him? Or did her dark eyes and hair always remind him that another man had preceded him in Jan’s life?

Beth lifted her head as the eager reference desk clerk returned with a sheaf of photocopied pictures of Thomas Wood from first grade through high school graduation. He handed them to her and waved away her offer of payment. “It was fun,” he said. “Like a quest. If you need any more help, my name’s Brian. Kids used to call me Brain. That bugged me in the old days, but now I don’t mind. It fits.”

Beth stood and slid the sheets of paper into her purse. “Thanks, Brain.”

He laughed. “You’re welcome. Enjoy your visit to good ol’ Tyler.”

Giving him a thumbs-up, Beth left the library carrying information she had needed, and didn’t want, and could no longer live without. Why hadn’t her parents told her years ago? What was the point in keeping such a secret from their only daughter?

As she slid into the seat of her rental car, Beth knew she had to make one more stop before she could leave town.

An oak tree. Beth drove the wide turn around the cemetery as she looked at the trees and wondered which one of the many oaks now dropped its acorns on her father’s grave. She should have come more often. In the two years since John Lowell’s death, his daughter had visited his final resting place only twice. The first time had been at his burial service. And the second time, when Beth was back in Tyler for one of her quick visits, her mother had impulsively driven them to the cemetery after church.

Unable to express how very much she did not want to see her father’s grave, Beth had wordlessly endured the endless minutes. She and her mother had left the car and stood in silence near the headstone that listed the dates of John Lowell’s birth and death but told nothing of who he had been and what he had meant to those whose lives he had touched. Beth had tried not to think of her father’s body lying deep in the earth, decaying and transforming into something fit for a horror movie. Instead, she had studied the sky through the oak leaves and thought about the family she was preparing to move to a nice house in Panama.

John Lowell was not inside that casket, Beth had reminded herself at the time. She still believed that. Parking the rental car near the cemetery’s old iron gate, she walked toward the one grave she did know how to find. Beth’s beloved babysitter had brought her to the memorial park on regular occasions. While Nanny knelt and rearranged the silk flowers at her husband’s grave, Beth and her brothers had chased each other up and down the rows, hiding behind headstones and trees, throwing acorns or sweet gum balls at each other and generally behaving like little pests.

There it was. Beth crossed a path and approached the small plot that she remembered Nanny tending so faithfully. Nanny now would be buried beside her husband, though the child she had babysat for so many years had never once visited her final resting place. Stopping at the spot, Beth gazed down at the bright green grass, neatly mown without a dandelion in sight. Then she looked up at the pair of matching headstones.

Theodore Wood. Nancy Wood.

As if a sudden wash of ice water had slid down her spine, Beth stiffened. Again she read the two names. Theodore Wood. Nancy Wood. But this was where Teddy had been buried…Nanny and Teddy. Two people without last names. Without pasts or futures. Without children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews. Nanny had just existed to babysit Beth and her brothers, hadn’t she? She had been an icon, never changing, never growing older, never acting any different than she always did.

While Jan Lowell had taught English at John Tyler High School for twenty years, Nanny had looked after the three little Lowells. Every weekday morning when they were preschoolers, Beth, Bob and Bill had gotten out of the car at Nanny’s house and spent the day there. Their mom picked them up about four every afternoon. When they were old enough to start school themselves, they went to Nanny’s house in the afternoons for visits or on weekends to splash in Nanny’s big plastic pool and eat Popsicles from her freezer.

Nancy Wood. Nanny.

Could it be? Beth walked around the two stones, looking for some kind of clue. Might Nancy and Theodore Wood have been Thomas’s parents? But that would make Nanny Beth’s grand—

“Hey, there.”

Giving a start at the interruption, Beth swung around and saw her mother approaching down the path. Jan had left her car next to Beth’s near the cemetery gate. Wearing jeans, a knit shell top and bleached white sneakers she looked younger than she had said she felt. Younger even than Beth had thought the day before.