Chapter Two
I Was a Secret From the Past
Would I ever find my sister?
When Mom was seventeen, she and her own mother had gotten into a meaningless spat about one thing or another. Mom left the house angry, huffing all the way to her job.
Hours later, she returned home to an ambulance in their driveway, her mother on the stretcher.
Dead of a heart attack at fifty-six.
Mom carried her mother’s death with great heaviness for all the years that followed, feeling responsible for bringing it on.
The heaviness was only made worse by the fact that she never had the chance to say she was sorry, to tell her mother how much she meant.
Now, Mom’s family of seven was one short, the glue cementing them forever gone. My mother’s father was lost in his own grief, unable to fulfill his parental role.
After his wife’s death, he used the family cabin as a temporary hideaway. Isolated, he hid from the world, drowning himself in alcohol and despair.
Eventually, he rented his own apartment back in the Twin Cities, leaving all the siblings– Mom and Nancy at seventeen, were the youngest– in the family home.
He said it was too hard to be in the house without their mother, too many memories– he couldn’t move on.
Their oldest sister was already married with three little ones, and they lived on their own.
Mom’s two older brothers both held full-time jobs and still lived in the house. The oldest brother purchased the family home from their father, allowing the siblings to remain somewhat intact.
They clung to one another through the forced changes that followed their mother’s death.
Not long after Mom lost her mother, she met Tom at the 100 Twin Drive-In. Mom worked in the concession stand, and Tom was an usher.
Tom’s mother had also recently died– in her case, from walking pneumonia at age 38.
The romance between Mom and Tom grew, a cherished, kindred bond that continued throughout Tom’s enlistment in the Marines.
A few years later, upon his return, Tom had an insatiable and unexplainable desire to be married. Undecided and only nineteen, Mom felt it was too soon, too rushed.
Tom didn’t take Mom’s resistance well and broke off their relationship. Before Mom had a fighting chance, Tom proposed to another, intent on marriage.
And married he became.
Mom’s heart, however, never faltered.
For reasons known only to them, Tom and Mom never stopped seeing one another, rendezvousing at every chance.
Mom never viewed herself as the other woman. No, Tom was the love of her life, regardless of his acquired marital status.
When Mom and Nancy arrived at the small white lake cabin, they sat in the car, slow to get out. They hadn’t driven down that pebbled road lined with pines since losing their mother.
The tulips their mother planted every year were missing, the flower bed by the front door barren. The tall birch trees still held the blue birdhouse they’d once painted.
Across the road, they saw the brown cabin belonging to Chuck and Helen, their mom and dad’s best friends. The two families had both bought their land across the street from one another so they could retire next to each other one day.
Mom and Nancy unlocked the cabin’s front door and entered with hesitation, the musty smells inside overpowering them. They set their overnight bags down on the round wooden table.
Mom went into the bedroom and touched the multi-colored quilt her mother had made; the corners swaddled and snug under the bed.
The familiar hum from the empty pale-yellow refrigerator was somehow soothing, as though reassuring the twins that all was well. But it wasn’t.
Dust was everywhere; a thick layer covered the kitchen windowsill. A daddy longlegs crawled to its corner. The cabin brought forth memories that Mom and Nancy thought they had tucked away.
Their mother’s presence was scattered throughout the rooms, a bittersweet reminder of how special and gone she was.
The twins spent the weekend remembering, re-experiencing their grief. They attempted to put a plan in front of them– to come to a decision regarding Mom’s pregnancy.
The one resolution they agreed on was Tom’s need and right to know. For now, that was all they could manage.
Drained from an emotional holiday weekend, they made the long drive back on Sunday.
Soon after Mom and Nancy arrived back home from the cabin, there came a knock on their front door.
Mom looked out the picture window and saw Glen, Tom’s best friend, standing on the steps. He wore white coveralls, his work uniform. Glen also worked as an usher at the drive-in; he was a member of their inseparable gang.
But on this day, Mom was taken aback by Glen’s unusual demeanor: face splotchy, shoulders slumped, hands deep in his pockets. She opened the front door.
Despite Mom’s sense that something was wrong, she feigned normalcy, as though it might make the likelihood of wrongness less true.
“Hi Glen, what’s going on?”
Glen sighed long and drawn out. “Linda, I have something to tell you.”
The hairs on Mom’s arms raised. Glen wouldn’t look at her.
“Glen, why are you acting so strange? What’s wrong?”
