Lucille Beemer said, “Gene, wake up. Somebody’s here to see you.”
Gene looked up to see a beautiful blond woman standing by his grave. He had no idea who she was, but, wow, she sure didn’t look like an Elmwood Springs lady. She was wearing a brown suede jacket, a black turtleneck, and black slacks, and looked like someone out of the movies. Just then, his aunt Elner walked up to her and started talking.
“I see you found him.”
“Yes.”
They both stood there for a moment. Then Aunt Elner said, “Do you remember coming out here to see him when you were little?”
The blond woman seemed surprised. “No….Was I here before?”
“Oh, yes, two or three times. We’d bring you out here on Memorial Day. You used to talk to your daddy and everything.”
“I did?”
Aunt Elner nodded. “I wish you could have known your daddy. He was such a sweet boy…and smart. Oh, my, I always thought when he grew up, he might have been a writer.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes, even when he was in grammar school, I’d come over to the house, and he would be up in his room, just typewriting away…tap tap tap tippy tat. You used to play with that old typewriter when you were little.”
“Huh, I don’t remember. Who else is buried out here?” she asked, putting her hands in her jacket pockets.
“Everybody. Your great-grandparents, your grandmother and granddaddy, and me someday.” Then Elner looked at her with concern. “Honey, do you have your plot yet?”
“No.”
“Well, I would advise you to get it. I know you’re young yet, but it’s nice to know where you’re going…sort of comforting.”
After they walked away, Gene was left in a little bit of a state of shock. That beautiful woman was his daughter. The last time he had seen her was almost thirty years ago. And now she was a grown woman, older than he had been when he died. He was sure she didn’t know it, but with that blond hair and blue eyes, his daughter looked a lot like the picture he’d seen of his grandmother Katrina.
Dena was going to be in town for only a few days, and so after they left the cemetery, Norma drove them out to the country, so Dena could see the old original Nordstrom farmhouse. As they pulled up, the first thing Dena noticed was the large field of flowers blooming on the side of the house. “Oh, wow. Look at all those sunflowers. I love sunflowers.”
Elner laughed. “Well, you should. You come by it naturally. Your great-grandmother planted those almost eighty years ago…and they just keep blooming year after year.”
“They do?”
“Oh, yes,” said Elner. “I remember Momma saying that Katrina Nordstrom always loved her sunflowers. I wish I’d known her, but she died when I was little. But everybody loved her, I can tell you that. I just wish she could see you and how pretty you are. She sure would be proud.”
—
THEY COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN it, but Katrina had seen her and was talking to Gene about her at that very moment. “Oh, Gene, she’s grown up into such a beautiful young woman.”
Gene said, “Hasn’t she? I think she looks just like you.”
Birdie Swensen, who had been listening, piped up. “Gene’s right, Katrina. She is the spitting image of you when you were that age…only taller.”
“Oh, thank you. But I was never that pretty.”
“Yes, you were!” said Birdie.
“But I wore glasses.”
“Even with your glasses, you were always pretty. You just didn’t know it.”
—
WHEN DENA LEFT TO go back to New York, she was sorry she had not come back to Elmwood Springs sooner. Living in a big city as she had for so many years now, she had almost forgotten where she had come from. She got on the plane with a jar of fig preserves and a four-leaf clover that her great-aunt Elner had found and given her.
1978
Tot Whooten seemed to be getting over her upset about her husband, James, running off with eighteen-year-old Jackie Sue Potts.
This morning, Norma was at her weekly standing appointment with Tot, having her hair done. In between taking drags off her cigarette, Tot was telling Norma about her new philosophy in life. “You know, Norma,” she said. “Everybody’s whining about how this is the new ‘Me’ generation, and how terrible it is, but it suits me just fine. And that’s who I’m gonna think about from now on, me. I’ve had a lifetime of thinking about everybody else, and what has it gotten me? Hell, I spent twenty years taking care of Momma, and she didn’t even know who I was. She called me Jeannette for the last five years of her life.”
“Who is Jeannette?”
“I have no idea. Now, I’m sorry she died, but it has sure freed up a lot of my time to do what I want for a change.”
—
ANOTHER THING THAT HAD cheered Tot up a bit was that the beauty business was good. Thanks to Farrah Fawcett and the television show Charlie’s Angels, big hair was in. Now, if your hair wasn’t stacked, packed, curled, feathered, teased, and sprayed high enough to hide a small child, you just weren’t in style. And today, Tot had teased and sprayed poor Norma’s hair until it looked at least a foot high.
Ever since Tot had seen the movie Saturday Night Fever, a big change had come over her. All of a sudden, she was wearing four-inch platform shoes and polyester pantsuits with bell-bottom pants and going out dancing at Disco City every weekend. She told Verbena, “You know that song ‘I Will Survive’? I think that gal wrote that song just for me. Like Mary Tyler Moore says, ‘I think I just might make it after all.’?”
Tot had thrown herself into the seventies with a vengeance. In 1973, she had put up a Billie Jean King poster in the beauty shop. Now she had a lava lamp in her bedroom, a beanbag chair in the living room, and had even bought a mood ring. As she explained to Norma, “Every morning, when I wake up, I look at my ring, and if it tells me I’m in a bad mood, I just cancel my appointments that day. It saves a lot of wear and tear on me and my customers.”
Tot’s son, James Dwayne Whooten, Jr., had always hung out with the cool kids. His gang had started smoking pot and drinking beer in the seventh grade.
In high school, they didn’t play football or basketball or play in the band, like the jocks and nerds, and they sure didn’t study or make good grades.
They also didn’t date much, but it didn’t matter to them because hot damn, they were “cool to the max, man,” with their long, stringy hair and Grateful Dead T-shirts. And if you weren’t stoned by eight in the morning, you were “an uptight loser, man.” By the eleventh grade, most of his crowd had already dropped out of school or, like Dwayne Jr., been kicked out.