Leaves Of Hope

Well, Beth was not going to get the whole story. And that was that. Thomas was a good man, just as she had written. But he had not hesitated to walk out of the Calhoun backyard that afternoon. He hadn’t called or dropped in to say goodbye before flying off to Sri Lanka again. Only four short letters with strange stamps had appeared in the mailbox in Tyler.

Gone, just like that. Pfft. Out of Jan’s life, as though a match had been snuffed by the wind. Nothing had remained of those two years of passion, two years of insane, crazy, mad love. Nothing but Beth. Little brown-eyed, brown-haired Beth, who looked so much like her father, sometimes it was all Jan could do to keep from showing how deeply the child affected her.

Beth would stare long and intensely at her mother, just the way Thomas had, and Jan wanted to grab the little girl and hold on so tightly that maybe she could feel Thomas’s breath against her cheek again. And other times Beth would give a toss of her hair and go wandering off from the house for hours, never bothering to tell her mother where she was. That was when Jan fought to keep from snatching her by the shoulders and shouting out the speech she had often rehearsed for Thomas.

Stop leaving me! she wanted to yell. Stay with me, where you belong, and stop running away all the time! Don’t leave me alone! Need me…want me…be lost without me, the way I am without you.

But Beth had too much of Thomas Wood in her to read beyond her mother’s placid face and calm words. She didn’t see or understand or even care how much she meant to Jan. Like her father, she would happily jaunt off to Sri Lanka or Botswana or some other foreign place where you could die of cholera or require armed guards and Spanish lace to keep your house secure.

Genetics. All the nurture in the world couldn’t overcome a wanderer’s nature.

After blowing her nose and splashing water on her face, Jan walked back into the room and checked the clock on the bedside table. Nearly three. Great. And there was John, sitting in his oak picture frame, looking at her like he always did. “Get a grip, Jan,” he would say when her nerves unraveled and she began to fall apart. Nothing’s that bad. It’s not a big deal. Relax, honeybunch. Let it go.

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 Wood had been a mistake, Jan seemed to be saying.

The pregnancy had been a mistake.

Did that make Beth a mistake?

A brief time in Jan Calhoun’s distant past had been nothing more than a blip in the comfortable straight line of her life. Just a small error that she and John Lowell had rectified with their careful, structured and secure marriage. Running her fingertips across the spines of the royal-blue-and-white yearbooks, Beth reflected on the man who had raised her from birth. Her daddy.

As much conflict as she now felt about the whole situation, she would never deny that John Lowell had been her true father. The family photo albums proved that. As an infant, she had spat processed carrots right in his face. He had held her tiny fingers when she was taking her first baby steps. He had pushed her on the swing in the backyard and taught her how to bait a fishhook, and he kissed her cheek when she graduated from high school. She had loved her daddy.

So why bother to look for a picture of a stranger whose DNA she happened to share? A guy who had impregnated his girlfriend and then walked away…a loser who had sowed his wild oats, never imagining a baby girl would grow from a night of furtive wrestling in the back seat of some car…a dead man whose brief life had meant nothing to his daughter…

Clenching her fists in the anguish of uncertainty, Beth read the dates stamped in gold letters on the volumes of the Alcalde. What was the point of looking for him? But then again…why shouldn’t she? How could it hurt?

She was reaching for a yearbook when her cell phone went off. Jumping at the unexpected sound in the cavernous library, she jerked the device from her purse and frowned at the caller ID. It was her mother. Beth silenced the phone and let her voice mail answer. No way was Jan Lowell going to butt into this decision.

Beth had been unable to sleep the night before, alternately furious with her mother, sad at the memory of her father’s recent suffering and death, curious about Thomas Wood. She had tried to piece things together, mentally walking back through the years and wondering if one thing or another had held more significance than she thought. It was a nightmare—only she had been awake through it all.

As the sun was coming up over the lake, she had packed her bags, thrown them into the rental car and driven back to Tyler. She cruised around town, looking at the Lowell family’s old house, remembering friends and events. She passed her brother’s home and considered knocking on his door to ask him if he knew she was just his half sister.

But Bill hadn’t been aware of anything, Beth realized. If he had, he would have blabbed years ago. So would Bob. Crazy little brothers. Neither one could resist telling on each other or on Beth. If they had known their sister had a different birth father, they would have told her.