J. Gonzalez - They

“I think I do,” Vince said. He struggled to keep his voice even, to keep from breaking into tears himself. He could feel his chest grow heavy, his throat constricting. “She all but damned me to Hell. She did not want to hear about what I thought was something every mother would want to hear from her son, that I was engaged. Instead she told me I was doomed, and that she did not want to hear from me ever again. And then she hung up on me.” His breathing was growing heavy. He struggled to hold back the flood of tears that threatened to pour forth. “I expected this, but… I thought she would have been happy for me. You know?” And then he did start to cry, just a little bit, because it wasn’t just the memory of his mother’s rejection of him that he was crying over. It was the memory of Laura taking him into his arms that day after his mother hung up on him and he’d turned to her, teary eyed just as he was now and said, “Sh-sh-sh-she..h-h-hates me!” He’d broken down then, and Laura had been there to comfort him.

Lillian tried to offer comfort as best she could. Her warmth brought a sense of security to him, one that he’d never felt with his mother. But then he’d always felt pretty secure with Lillian. Growing up, Lillian had been the only member of the church group to tell him jokes, or to trade gossip in the latest chapters of the soap operas they both watched (Vince had been a fanatical follower of General Hospital in the Luke and Laura days). In short, she’d been more of a mother to him than his birth mother. And she was filling the role now as well.

He wiped the beginning of tears away. He turned away from her, slightly embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that…”

“You don’t have to explain,” Lillian said. Surprisingly, she remained strong for him when he was at his most vulnerable. Her features were composed, strong and confident. “It’s all right to cry every now and then.”

Vince managed a smile. “I wasn’t expecting to cry like a baby in your home.”

Lillian playfully slapped his arm. “I’ve seen you cry more than once, young man! My Lord, I’ve seen you at almost every point in your life except for when you were really little. I’ve seen you cry over everything from scraped knees to broken hearts.”

This broke the ice and they laughed. For Vince, the laughter helped ease the tension. He’d always liked Lillian, but deep down never really knew whether Lillian thought of him as a sinner the way his mother had. Part of that tension was his fear that Lillian, who he saw as his only hope in regaining some sort of foothold in Lititz, would have succumbed to his mother’s view of him.

He felt better now. He looked outside at the warm blue sky, his rental car parked in Lillian’s driveway. He turned back to her, gratitude welling forth. “Thank you, Lillian,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, rubbing his arm and smiling at him. “That’s what families are for, right?”

“Are you my family, Lillian?”

“I’ve always felt I was.”

“Good. I always felt you were too.” And he did. And now he suddenly felt a void that he never thought he would; a sense of loss in that he never fully knew how much Lillian Withers meant to him as a friend, as family , until twenty years later.

“Lillian,” he began, not knowing how to approach this question. He decided to take the plunge and ask, even if she became shifty about it the way she had when she inadvertently referred to his mother’s killers as ‘they.’ “There’s something that’s been bothering me for awhile now. It’s recently started bugging me since… well, since yesterday when I was on the plane flying out here.”

“Yes, Vincent?”

“Did… did my mother ever mention her family to you? Do you know what ever happened to them?”

Lillian sighed, and much to Vince’s relief she didn’t appear shifty. “Your mother never spoke much about her family and I never asked. All I know is what she told me when I met her, when you moved to Carlisle Street in Toronto. That the two of you had lived outside of Buffalo, New York for a year and that you were originally from California. Your mother was divorced and she had custody of you. That was it.”

“Divorced,” Vince muttered. He’d tried dredging up memories of his life before New York, but it all came in images. He remembered living somewhere other than New York, he remembered a man that he presumed to be his father. The man had been nice, had seemed like a father to him, although he was gone a lot. Vince just assumed he’d been out working. He remembered other people that had been in their lives, but he had no recollection of who they were, or what their relation to him and his mother had been. One of them, a distinguished looking older man, could have been an uncle. A younger couple close to his mother’s age could have been aunts and uncles, friends of the family. Others floated to the surface of his memory only to dissipate. He shook his head. “I don’t remember him hardly at all. I don’t remember his name, where we lived—”

“You were no more than eight or nine when you moved to Carlisle Street,” Lillian said. When he and his mother moved to Carlisle Street in Toronto, they’d settled into a two bedroom apartment in a lower-middle class neighborhood. Lillian had lived in the apartment downstairs and was the building manager. Once Maggie found out Lillian was an evangelical Christian, the two women had become fast friends. “If you were eight when you and your mother left California, you probably wouldn’t have remembered that much.”

“I thought she would have mentioned more to you about our past life,” he said. He looked at Lillian wearily, realizing it was only noon and he had the rest of the day to make funeral arrangements. He felt worn out. “But she didn’t say anything, not even in passing?”

“No.” Lillian shook her head. She tried to muster a smile, perhaps in an attempt to put him at ease. “I tried asking a few times, but she never revealed more than what I just told you. And that her parents were dead.”

“Her parents were dead,” Vince echoed.

“Yes.” Lillian looked at Vince with concern. “Are you okay, Vincent?”

Vince turned to her. He was gazing out the screen door again. “What? Oh, I’m fine.”

“Will you need any help making funeral arrangements?”

“I suppose I will.” He hadn’t really given it much thought until now, but then who knew his mother better than Lillian Withers? “I’m supposed to claim her body this afternoon at the Lancaster County Morgue.”

“Why don’t I call Reverend Powell and see if we can arrange something? Do you have any particular plans in mind?”

“No.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon making funeral arrangements for Maggie Walters.

LONG AFTER VINCE Walters left her house, Lillian Withers still couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that she almost lost her composure when Vince asked if Maggie had told her anything about her past besides what Vince already knew.

She’d never been a very good liar. How Vince swallowed that one, she would never know.

She sat in the easy chair, her Bible opened to Revelations. It was ten-thirty p.m., and the night was warm. It had climbed to ninety degrees today and it was close to seventy now. A very comfortable evening. They’d spent the day making Maggie’s funeral arrangements, then had gone out to dinner at a steakhouse called Hoss’s and Vince filled her in on what he’d been up to. Graduating top of his class at the University of California in Irvine with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in Economics and a double Masters Degree in Economics and Business. He was the Director of the Western Division at Corporate Financial and was doing quite well. With the exception of losing his young wife, Laura, almost a year ago to that horrible car accident, life had been pretty good to Vince Walters. The Lord had blessed him.