Janice Carter - The Second Family

“Perhaps you’ve inherited something and that’s why this lawyer wants you to contact him.”

Tess snorted. “What could my father possibly have left me? He never gave me a thing after he left Mom and me. He probably died a penniless drifter.”

“Don’t be speaking ill of the dead,” Mavis clucked.

Tess rolled her eyes. “Then I’ll have to shut up for I can’t think of anything good to say about him.”

“Have we gone back in time? Is this the eighties all over? Are you a teenager once more?”

A trace of a smile belied the reprimand in Mavis’s voice, but Tess flushed anyway. No one else on earth could pull in the reins on Tess Wheaton quite like Mavis McNaught. The woman had been her foster parent since she was ten years old and knew her better than any person alive. She had been the only family Tess had known after her father’s disappearance and her mother’s death a few years later.

“If you’ve made no plans—at least, not for the immediate future—I’ll pop a casserole out of the freezer for dinner.” Mavis set her palms on the kitchen table to raise herself from the chair.

Tess saw her wince as she took a first step. “Did you take your pills today?”

“Of course, love. Twice a day every day. It’s the damp.”

But Tess noticed her smile was more strained now. “Go back to the doctor and tell him they’re not working. If you like, I can get my own doctor to refer you to another specialist.”

Mavis hobbled to the refrigerator and opened the freezer door. “The doctor’s fine. There’s just little else they can do. Osteoarthritis and old age go together.” She pulled a foil-wrapped casserole dish out and set it on the counter next to the stove. “And losing forty pounds or so would help, if I can bring myself to stay away from the goodies.”

Tess ducked her head so Mavis couldn’t see her smile. They both knew her love of sweets wasn’t going to change after all these years. “Why don’t you come with me sometime to my club? For a swim?”

Mavis wagged an index finger at her. “Now don’t you be teasing an old woman. Come and preheat the oven for me. My glasses are in the TV room and I can’t make out the numbers.”

Tess pushed her chair back and walked over to where Mavis was standing. “Why don’t you use the microwave I gave you?”

“I do use it, love, but it doesn’t get the topping all crusty brown, the way you and I like it.”

Tess laughed. “True enough.” She set the oven temperature, then turned to Mavis. “Still, you ought to be using it as something more than a bread box.”

“It makes a dandy bread box. And once in a while, when I’m following my diet, I use it for microwave popcorn.”

“I bet that’s once or twice a year,” cracked Tess. She caught Mavis’s eye and laughed with her. Impulsively, she bent down and flung her arms around the older woman. Coming here had been the perfect move, Tess thought. Mavis McNaught’s kitchen. Her refuge.

When they drew apart, Mavis said, “Why don’t you go upstairs and have a wee lie down? If you like, you can stay the night. I know there’s at least one of your nighties still in the drawer in your room.”

And because Mavis had been watching out for her since she was ten years old and always knew best, Tess headed upstairs to her old bedroom. It was just the way she’d left it after graduating from university and its familiarity was as comforting as Mavis’s embrace. On this day of all days she craved the mindless solace of routine, so Tess kicked off her heels and lay down on the worn patchwork quilt covering the narrow bed. She shifted, adjusting from habit to the mattress lumps, and closed her eyes. But sleep didn’t come.

What came instead was a flood of memory. Her first night in this room. She was ten and her mother, Hannah, had been taken to a hospital psychiatric ward after being picked up wandering Chicago streets in her nightgown. The incident had been the first breakdown, but not the last. When child care workers and police asked Tess if there was anyone she could stay with, the person who’d come immediately to mind had been Mavis McNaught.

Mavis’s parents had been neighbors of Tess’s family and Mavis had befriended Hannah and Tess over the course of her weekly visits. After Richard Wheaton left home, Mavis had kept in touch, in spite of living in another part of the city. She was the only person, other than her mother, whom Tess had really known as family after her father walked out. The middle-aged spinster hadn’t blinked an eye at the officer’s request. She marched out to the police cruiser, wrapped her arms around Tess and led her into the home where she stayed for the next eleven years.

Hannah came to live in Mavis’s house in the beginning, too. But her erratic use of medication and frequent breakdowns took their toll on the makeshift family. In the end, Tess figured, her mother didn’t so much die from pneumonia as from depression. Tess was fourteen when Mavis became her legal guardian, providing the first stable home she’d known in years.

Replaying the past, Tess came to the conclusion she always reached. Her mother’s downward spiral began little more than a year after Richard Wheaton left. That day was still etched in her memory.

They’d been arguing again. Nothing unusual about that, but this time felt different to eight-year-old Tess. She crouched behind her father’s favorite chair and watched her mother pace back and forth, puffing on one cigarette after another. Tess hated to see her mother smoke and so did her father. That was one of the things they often quarreled about. The other was money.

Today Tess didn’t have to cover her ears. There wasn’t any shouting. Instead, their occasionally raised voices fell into low mumbles. They even sat, her mother perched on the couch. Her father, hunched forward in his chair, as if about to spring from it. Tess could have reached out to touch him if she’d dared.

After a silence Tess thought would never end, she heard her mother say the words that would haunt her in the years ahead, “Then leave.”

And when Richard rose from the chair, his answer booming around the small living room, “I will,” Tess had run out from behind his chair. Flinging her arms around his legs, she’d cried, “Don’t go, Daddy. Don’t leave.”

Hands—she didn’t know whose—pulled her away. She threw herself on the carpet, sobbing. Her mother slipped upstairs. It seemed like hours later when Tess heard footsteps in the hall. She sat up and saw her father standing hesitantly at the front door. As if he didn’t know what to do next, she thought.

A canvas duffel bag hung from his shoulder. He was holding his wooden box of paints in one hand and a large paper-wrapped frame in the other. One of his paintings.

“Daddy—?”

He stared at her a long time before saying in a husky voice, “Don’t forget me, Tess. I won’t forget you.” He opened the door and walked out.

Tess jumped up and ran to the open door. Her father was climbing into a taxi.

“Daddy!” she called again.

He turned around and paused, a look of indecision in his face.

Tess’s heart raced. He was changing his mind. He was coming back.

But then he stiffened, waved a last goodbye and got into the taxi. Behind Tess, Hannah Wheaton snarled, “Let him go, Tess. He doesn’t want us anymore…and we don’t want him.”

She closed the door as the taxi pulled away from the curb.

Over the next few years Tess often wondered what might have happened if her mother hadn’t suddenly appeared behind her that day. Would her father have come back inside and tried to patch things up, as he’d done so many times before? Or would he have swept Tess up into his arms and taken her with him?