Maybe I wasn’t as different from Mags as I’d thought. I’d spent years all but running from her and The Hideaway, but there I was, inviting other old and tattered things into my life by the armful.
I sat up against the bed pillows and gathered my hair into a braid to keep it neat while I slept. On the bedside table was the bottle of Jo Malone hand lotion I rubbed into my fingers and cuticles, the last item to check off my list before turning off the light. But tonight, I paused with my hand on the chain. Instead of pulling it, I opened the drawer of the small table and reached all the way to the back.
The photo was still there, though I hadn’t pulled it out in a while. Mags and my mother smiled up from the yellowed Polaroid, while I, a busy eleven-year-old, laughed at something outside the camera frame and tried to bolt. My mother’s hand on my shoulder was a feeble attempt to keep me in place long enough to snap the shot.
I focused on Mags. The ever-present bird’s-nest hat was missing, and her hair—salt and pepper, heavy on the salt—was loose around her shoulders. It must have been a day with low humidity, because her hair fell in gentle waves instead of frizzy curls. Her face was soft, and her eyes crinkled into a smile at the corners.
I’d never thought much about Mags as a younger woman, but in this photo, it was easy to peel back the years and see how she must have looked at my age, or even younger. I’d held this photo in my hands many times, but I’d never seen past her fifty-four-year-old face into the person she may have been before my time, before my mom’s time even. As far as I knew, she’d always been the same strange, frustratingly dowdy woman I’d always known her to be. But those eyes. And her smile—it was tilted higher on one side, as if a smirk was in there somewhere, trying to sneak out.
I held the photo a moment longer, then put it back in its place at the back of the drawer and turned off the light. I could feel the storm brewing—my throat burned and my eyes stung. I’d held myself together all day, but with the room dark and quiet, the tension in my chest and sadness welling in my heart overflowed. Tears spilled over my cheeks unchecked and made damp spots on my pillow.
While my chest heaved with quiet sobs, I had a fleeting memory of my grief after my parents’ death. It was different back then—not better or worse, just different. A twelve-year-old with a grandmother and four live-in “grandparents” grieves much differently than an adult who knows she’s now alone in the world, regardless of how she’s tried to tell herself she doesn’t really need anyone else.
I rode out the storm until it ended. Exhausted and shaky, I reached over and pulled the photo out again. I propped it up against a book on the table and took a deep breath. The murky yellow glow from a streetlight outside my window illuminated Mags’s face in the photo. I sank farther into the pillows and closed my eyes, content to know that Mags, wherever she was, was sending that half smile my way.
4
MAGS
JANUARY 1960
I was going to leave him, but he beat me to it. My bags were packed, stuffed into the upstairs closet ready to go when the right moment presented itself, but then I found his note. I couldn’t believe he left a note.
Margaret, I have business in Tennessee. I’ll be gone a while.
Robert
As if I didn’t know what his “business” was. Mother kept telling me to ignore everything. Of course she did. She said if I kept busy at home, doing what I was supposed to do, my husband would end up back under our roof where he belonged. I took her advice through gritted teeth for most of the three years Robert and I had been married, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. And I didn’t even get the satisfaction of leaving him, because he was already gone.
Once everyone found out he’d gone out of town on “business” again, they’d surely think I left to escape the embarrassment, eyes rimmed in red, hair a mess, vowing to do better, to be the wife who would keep him home. But I wasn’t worried. No one in that town knew me very well anyway.
After I read the note, I took a pencil from the drawer in the kitchen and poured myself a gin and tonic from the stash Robert never bothered to hide because he never thought I’d want to drink it. I took the drink, pencil, and note into our tidy backyard. I sipped the cocktail, thinking, massaging Robert’s note in my fingers. When the glass was empty, I took the pencil and wrote “Good riddance” underneath his words. Then I grabbed a box of matches from next to the grill and lit one. I held the note over the fire until the flames licked the bottom edge of the paper and engulfed it.
I was just about to pull out of the driveway when Daddy careened down the street in his silver Chrysler, landing like a pinball in front of our house, one tire up on the grass. When he climbed out of the car, he was red-faced and out of breath, as if he’d run the whole two blocks from their house instead of driven.