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His gaze skirting Glory as though she’d suddenly turned invisible, he greeted the boys by name and took a place at the counter. “Hi, Delphine,” he said, as the woman poured his coffee. “How’s my best girl?”
Glory concentrated fiercely on the second boy’s order, and when she’d gotten it, she marched into the kitchen and started cooking. She had to keep herself busy—and distracted—until Jesse finished his coffee and left the diner.
“What’s he doing here?” she whispered to her mother, when Delphine joined her to lift the basket out of the deep fryer and shake the golden fries free of grease.
Delphine smiled. “He’s drinking coffee.”
Glory glowered at her. “I’m going upstairs!” she hissed.
“That’ll fix him,” Delphine said.
In a huff, Glory took the cheeseburgers off the grill and the shakes off the milk-shake machine. She made two trips to the boys’ table and set everything down with a distinctive clunk. All the while, she studiously ignored Jesse Bainbridge.
He’d just come in to harass her, she was sure of that. He probably bullied everybody in Pearl River, just like his grandfather always had.
The jukebox took a break, then launched into a plaintive love song. Glory’s face was hot as she went back to the kitchen, hoping Jesse didn’t remember how that tune had been playing on the radio the first time they’d made love, up at the lake.
She couldn’t help glancing back over one shoulder to see his face, and she instantly regretted the indulgence. Jesse’s bold brown eyes glowed with the memory, and his lips quirked as he struggled to hold back a smile.
Glory flushed to recall how she’d carried on that long-ago night, the pleasure catching her by surprise and sending her spiraling out of her small world.
“That does it,” she muttered. And she stormed out to her car, collected her suitcase and overnighter, and marched up the outside stairs to her mother’s apartment.
The moment she stepped through the door, Glory was awash in memories.
The living room was small and plain, the furniture cheap, the floor covered in black-and-beige linoleum tiles. A portable TV with foil hooked to the antenna sat on top of the old-fashioned console stereo.
Glory put down her luggage, hearing the echoes of that day long, long before, when Delphine had taken a job managing the diner downstairs. Dylan had been fourteen then, Glory twelve, and they’d all been jubilant at the idea of a home of their own. They’d lived out of Delphine’s old rattletrap of a car all summer, over at the state park next to the river, but the fall days were getting crisp and the nights were downright cold.
Besides, Delphine’s money had long since run out, and they’d been eating all their meals in the church basement, with the old people and the families thrown out of work because of layoffs at the sawmill.
Dylan and Glory had slept in bunk beds provided by the Salvation Army, while Delphine had made her bed on the couch.
Pushing the door shut behind her, Glory wrenched herself back to the present. It was still too painful to think about Dylan twice in one day, even after all the time that had passed.
Glory put her baggage in the tiny bedroom that was Delphine’s now, thinking that she really should have rented a motel room. When she’d suggested it on the telephone, though, her mother had been adamant: Glory would stay at the apartment, and it would be like old times.
She paced, too restless to unpack or take a nap, but too tired to do anything really demanding. After peeking out the front window, past the dime-store wreath with the plastic candle in it, to make sure Jesse’s car was gone, she went back downstairs for her coat.
The cook who took Delphine’s place at two-thirty had arrived, along with a teenage waitress and a crowd of noisy kids from the high school.
Delphine handed Glory her coat, then shrugged into her own. “Come on,” she said, pushing her feet into transparent plastic boots. “I’ll show you the house Harold and I are going to live in.”
The snow fell faster as the two women walked along the familiar sidewalk. Now and then, Delphine paused to wave at a store clerk or a passing motorist.
They rounded a corner and entered an attractive development. The houses had turrets and gable windows, though they were modern, and the yards were nicely landscaped.
Glory remembered playing in this part of town as a child. There had been no development then, just cracked sidewalks that meandered off into the deep grass. The place had fascinated her, and she’d imagined ghost houses lining the walks, until Dylan had spoiled everything by telling her there had been Quonset huts there during World War II to accommodate workers at the town smelter.
Delphine stopped to gaze fondly at a charming little mock colonial with a snow-dusted rhododendron bush growing in the yard. The house itself was white, the shutters dark blue. There were flower boxes under all the windows.
Glory’s eyes widened with pleasure. This was the kind of house her mother had always dreamed of having. “This is it?” she asked, quite unnecessarily.
Proudly Delphine nodded. “Harold and I signed the papers on Friday. It’s all ours.”
Impulsively, Glory hugged her mother. “You’ve come a long way, baby!” she said, her eyes brimming with happy tears.
Both of them stood still in the falling snow, remembering other days, when even in their wildest dreams neither of them would have dared to fantasize about owning a house such as this one.
“Are you going to keep the diner?” Glory asked, linking her arm with Delphine’s as they walked back toward the center of town.
Delphine’s answer came as no surprise. After all, she’d worked and scrimped and sacrificed to buy the place from her former employers. “Of course I am. I wouldn’t know what to do if I couldn’t go down there and make coffee for my customers.”
With a chuckle, Glory wrapped her arm around her mother’s straight little shoulders. “I imagine they’d all gather in your kitchen at home, they’re so used to telling you their troubles over a steaming cup.”
Back at the apartment, Delphine immediately excused herself, saying she had to “gussy up” for the Stewart-Grant festival at the Rialto.
“Sure you don’t want to come along?” she queried, peering around the bathroom door, her red hair falling around her face in curls. “Harold and I would be glad to have you.”
Glory shook her head, pausing in her unpacking. “I feel as though parts of me have been scattered in every direction, Mama. I need time to gather myself back together. I’ll get something light for supper, then read or watch TV.”
Delphine raised titian eyebrows. “You’re getting boring in your old age, kid,” she said. “Just see that you don’t eat over at Maggie’s. Last week one of the telephone linemen told me he got a piece of cream pie there that had dust on top of it.”
“I wouldn’t think of patronizing your archrival, Mama,” Glory replied, grinning. “Even though I do think serving pie with dust on it requires a certain admirable panache.”
Delphine dismissed her daughter with a wave and disappeared behind the bathroom door.
As it happened, Glory bought spaghetti salad in the deli at the supermarket and ate it while watching the evening news on the little TV with the foil antenna. Downstairs in the diner, the dinner hour was in full swing, and the floor vibrated with the blare of the jukebox.
Glory smiled and settled back on the couch that would be her bed for the next several weeks, content.
She was home.
After the news was over, however, the reruns of defunct sitcoms started. Glory flipped off the TV and got out her mother’s photo albums. As always, they were tucked carefully away in the record compartment of the console stereo, along with recordings by Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley.
Delphine probably hadn’t looked at the family pictures in years, but Glory loved to pore over them.
Still, she had to brace herself to open the first album—she was sitting cross-legged on the couch, the huge, cheaply bound book in her lap—because she knew there would be pictures of Dylan.
He smiled back at her from beside a tall man wearing a slouch hat. Glory knew the man’s name had been Tom, and that he’d been mean when he drank. He’d also been her father, but she didn’t remember him.
The little boy leaning against his leg, with tousled brown hair and gaps in his grin, was another matter. Gently, with just the tip of one finger, Glory touched her brother’s young face.
“When am I going to get over missing you, Bozo?” she asked, in a choked voice, using the nickname that had never failed to bug him.
Glory stared at Dylan for a few more moments, then turned the page. There she made her first photographic appearance—she was two months old, being bathed in a roasting pan on a cheap tabletop, and her grin was downright drunken.
She smiled and sighed. “The body of a future cheerleader. Remarkable.”
Her journey through the past continued until she’d viewed all the Christmases and Halloweens, all the birthdays and first days of school. In a way, it eased the Dylan-shaped ache in her heart.
When she came to the prom pictures of herself and Jesse, taken in this very living room with Delphine’s Kodak Instamatic, she smiled again.
Jesse was handsome in his well-fitting suit, while she stood proudly beside him in the froth of pink chiffon Delphine had sewn for her. The dress had a white sash, and she could still feel the gossamer touch of it against her body. Perched prominently above her right breast was Jesse’s corsage, an orchid in the palest rose.
She touched the flat, trim stomach of the beaming blond girl in the picture. Inside, although Glory hadn’t known it yet, Jesse’s baby was already growing.
Glory closed the album gently and set it aside before she could start wondering who had adopted that beautiful little baby girl, and whether or not she was happy.
The next collection of pictures was older. It showed Delphine growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and there were photographs of a collage of aunts, uncles and cousins, too.
Glory reflected as she turned the pages that it must have been hard for Delphine after she left another abusive husband. Her family had understood the first time, but they couldn’t forgive a second mistake. And after Delphine fled to Oregon with her two children, she was virtually disowned.
Saddened, Glory turned a page. The proud, aristocratic young face of her Irish great-grandmother gazed out of the portrait, chin at an obstinate angle. Of all the photographs Delphine had kept, this image of Bridget McVerdy was her favorite.
In 1892, or thereabouts, Bridget had come to America to look for work and a husband. She’d been employed as a lowly housemaid, but she’d had enough pride in her identity to pose for this picture and pay for it out of nominal wages, and eventually she’d married and had children.
The adversities Bridget overcame over the years were legion, but Delphine was fond of saying that her grandmother hadn’t stopped living until the day she died, unlike a lot of people.
Glory gazed at the hair, which was probably red, and the eyes, rumored to be green, and the proud way Bridget McVerdy, immigrant housemaid, held her head. And it was as though their two souls reached across the years to touch.
Glory felt stronger in that moment, and her problems weren’t so insurmountable. For the first time in weeks, giving up didn’t seem to be the only choice she had.
Two
The next morning, after a breakfast of grapefruit, toast and coffee, Glory drove along the snow-packed streets of Pearl River, remembering. She went to the old covered bridge, which looked as though it might tumble into the river at any moment, and found the place where Jesse had carved their initials in the weathered wood.
A wistful smile curved Glory’s lips as she used one finger to trace the outline of the heart Jesse had shaped around the letters. Underneath, he’d added the word, Forever.
“Forever’s a long time, Jesse,” she said out loud, her breath making a white plume in the frosty air. The sun was shining brightly that day, though the temperature wasn’t high enough to melt the snow and ice, and the weatherman was predicting that another storm would hit before midnight.
A sheriff’s-department patrol car pulled up just as Glory was about to slip behind the wheel of her own vehicle and go back to town. She was relieved to see that the driver wasn’t Jesse.
The deputy bent over to roll down the window on the passenger side, and Glory thought she remembered him as one of the boys who used to orchestrate food fights in the cafeteria at Pearl River High. “Glory?” His pleasant if distinctly ordinary face beamed. “I heard you were back in town. That’s great about your mom getting married and everything.”
Glory nodded. She couldn’t quite make out the letters on his identification pin. She rubbed her mittened hands together and stomped her feet against the biting cold. “Thanks.”
“You weren’t planning to drive across the bridge or anything, were you?” the deputy asked. “It’s been condemned for a long time. Somebody keeps taking down the sign.”
“I just came to look,” Glory answered, hoping he wouldn’t put two and two together. This had always been the place where young lovers etched their initials for posterity, and she and Jesse had been quite an item back in high school.
The lawman climbed out of his car and began searching around in the deep snow for the “condemned” sign. Glory got into her sports car, started the engine, tooted the horn in a companionable farewell, and drove away.
She stopped in at the library after that, and then the five-and-dime, where she and Dylan used to buy Christmas and birthday presents for Delphine. She smiled to recall how graciously their mother had accepted bottles of cheap cologne and gauzy handkerchiefs with stylized D’s embroidered on them.
At lunch time, she returned to the apartment, where she ate a simple green salad and half a tuna sandwich. The phone rang while she was watching a game show.
Eager to talk to anyone besides Alan or Jesse, Glory snatched up the receiver. “Hello?”
The answering voice, much to her relief, was female. “Glory? Hi, it’s Jill Wilson—your former confidante and cheerleading buddy.”
Jill hadn’t actually been Glory’s best friend—that place had belonged to Jesse—but the two had been close in school, and Glory was delighted at the prospect of a reunion. “Jill! It’s wonderful to hear your voice. How are you?”
In the years since Dylan’s funeral, Glory and Jill had exchanged Christmas cards and occasional phone calls, and once they’d gotten together in Portland for lunch. Time and distance seemed to drop away as they talked. “I’m fine—still teaching at Pearl River Elementary. Listen, is there any chance we could get together at my place for dinner tonight? I’ve got a rehearsal at the church at six, and I was hoping you could meet me there afterward. Say seven?”
“Sounds great,” Glory agreed, looking forward to the evening. “What shall I bring?”
“Just yourself,” Jill answered promptly. “I’ll see you at First Lutheran tonight, then?”
“Definitely,” Glory promised.
She took a nap that afternoon, since she and Jill would probably be up late talking, then indulged in a long, leisurely bubble bath. She was wearing tailored wool slacks in winter white, along with a matching sweater, when Delphine looked her up and down from the bedroom doorway and whistled in exclamation.
“So Jesse finally broke down and asked for a date, huh?”
Glory, who had been putting the finishing touches on her makeup in front of the mirror over Delphine’s dresser, grimaced. “No. And even if he did, I’d refuse.”
Delphine, clad in jeans and a flannel shirt for a visit to a Christmas-tree farm with Harold, folded her arms and assembled her features into an indulgent expression. “Save it,” she said. “When Jesse came into the diner yesterday, there was so much electricity I thought the wiring was going to short out.”
Glory fiddled with a gold earring and frowned. “Really? I didn’t notice,” she said, but she was hearing that song playing on the jukebox, and remembering the way her skin had heated as she relived every touch of Jesse’s hands and lips.
“Of course you didn’t,” agreed Delphine, sounding sly. She’d raised one eyebrow now.
“Mother,” Glory sighed, “I know you’ve been watching Christmas movies from the forties and you’re in the mood for a good, old-fashioned miracle, but it isn’t going to happen with Jesse and me. The most we can hope for, from him, is that he won’t have me arrested on some trumped-up charge and run out of town.”
Delphine shook her head. “Pitiful,” she said.
Glory grinned at her. “This from the woman who kept a man dangling for five years before she agreed to a wedding.”
Delphine sighed and studied her flawlessly manicured fingernails. “With my romantic history,” she said, “I can’t be too careful.”
The two women exchanged a brief hug. “You’ve found the right guy this time, Mama,” Glory said softly. “It’s your turn to be happy.”
“When does your turn come, honey?” Delphine asked, her brow puckered with a frown. “How long is it going to be before I look into your eyes and see something besides grief for your brother and that baby you had to give up?”
Glory’s throat felt tight, and she turned her head. “I don’t know, Mama,” she answered, thinking of the word Jesse had carved in the wall of the covered bridge. Forever. “I just don’t know.”
Five minutes later, Glory left the apartment, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her long cloth coat. Since the First Lutheran Church was only four blocks away, she decided to walk the distance.
Even taking the long way, through the park, and lingering a while next to the big gazebo where the firemen’s band gave concerts on summer nights, Glory was early. She stood on the sidewalk outside the church as a light snow began to waft toward earth, the sound of children’s voices greeting her as warmly as the golden light in the windows.
Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright…
Glory drew a breath cold enough to make her lungs ache and climbed the church steps. Inside, the music was louder, sweeter.
Holy Infant, so tender and mild…
