Leaves of Hope Read online

  “How about this summer?”

  “Oh, no, I’m still settling in here in Lake Palestine. I have a lot to do.”

  “I’ll help you unpack. I’m here for three days. I bet we can take care of it all before I leave.”

  “No.” Her voice growing serious, Jan rose from her chair. “Don’t touch anything, Beth. Leave those boxes in the guest room exactly as they are. I’m the only one who knows where things should go. Seriously. Hands off.”

  Beth studied her mom, who looked shorter and tinier now than ever. Despite her auburn hair and pert blue eyes, Jan showed her years. Did she want to shrivel up and fade away as her husband had done? Disease had robbed him of all movement, and then his breath and finally his life.

  Before the tears could start, Beth stood. “Good night, Mom,” she whispered as she folded her mother in her arms. “I love you.”

  In the guest room, Beth rooted through her suitcase. She had grown so accustomed to living out of it that she hardly had to search for things. Underwear on the left. Toiletries on the right. Casual clothes at the bottom. Business attire near the top. She bought knits that needed no ironing, and lingerie she could wash at night and wear by morning. Her mother had no idea of any of this.

  As she tugged her T-shirt over her head, Beth focused on a plaque Jan had painted long ago. It had always hung in the spare room at their house in Tyler. “Welcome, Friend,” she had painted in delicate, curling script—black ink on a pale purple background. And then beneath it she printed words from a William Cowper poem:

  Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

  Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

  And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

  Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

  That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

  So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

  Beth wondered if this was truly what her mother desired most. Shutters fastened, curtains drawn, cups of hot tea and a quiet life in which nothing ever changed.

  She mused on their evening together. While talking of New York and her job, Beth had felt her mother’s scrutiny. It was as if Jan were trying to read her offspring, define her, decipher this odd creature in her living room. If only she could label her daughter in the same way she tagged other things, the child would make sense at last.

  In fact, now that Beth thought of it, her mother had branded her. Near the window in her cotton-candy pink bedroom, Jan had hung this verse:

  What are little girls made of?

  Sugar and spice, and everything nice,

  That’s what little girls are made of.

  Sugar and spice? Hardly. Now, as she opened the closet door to toss in her travel bag, Beth wondered where the framed sayings and poems had ended up. Were they in one of the boxes stacked around the guest room? Or had her mother thrown them into the trash on moving day?

  Of course, the inscription painted in bright pink letters over the bed in Beth’s room would have been left behind. She recalled gazing at it for hours, wondering if it were true. “Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,” read the words by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

  Queen rose. Beth had pondered the elaborate calligraphy as she lay in her pink bedroom with its reproduction white French Provincial furniture, its flowered spread and curtains and its pale pink carpet. She had imagined the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden, a fourteen-acre park with five hundred varieties of roses among its forty thousand bushes. She had pictured a girl’s face inside each rose…her friends, models in the Sears catalog, actresses on television. In the center of the park grew one large bush with a single deep red blossom…the queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls. And whose face did Beth see when she peered among the petals of that marvelous flower?

  Her mother’s.

  Janice Amelia Calhoun Lowell.

  In her heart, Beth knew she herself was no rose. She inhabited the pink room, but it had never belonged to her. She didn’t match the soft hues, fragile blossoms and sweet poetry. An olive-skinned tomboy, she ran around the neighborhood with scuffed sneakers, scabby knees, tattered shorts and skinny arms. Twigs of hair stuck out in every direction from her long brown braids. She climbed trees and built forts. She was a pirate king, a mermaid ruling an undersea city, a soldier slogging through the jungle, a spy on a secret mission. She hated pink.

  “I don’t know how you became this person,” her mother had mused aloud. But had Beth changed so much?

  As she set out her toiletries and Bible, she tucked a length of hair behind her ear. Scripture taught that change was not only possible but essential. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul had written that a Christian must become a new person in Christ. A different creature.

  This was troublesome for a girl who had given her life to Jesus at a church revival when she was eight years old. How much sin could a child that age have committed? How much change could one expect? Yet, Beth sensed that because of Christ, she was changing all the time—renewing, working out her salvation, striving toward righteousness.

  The more she dug into Scripture, the odder and less normal she became. These days, she felt transparent and single-minded and deep and narrow and open and loving and intolerant and all kinds of contradictory things. In the same way that she had failed to blend into her pink bedroom as a child, she now failed to identify with most of her coworkers and friends. She was metamorphosing into an alien, someone not even her own mother recognized.

  With a sigh, Beth pressed a dab of toothpaste onto her toothbrush, picked up her cleanser and comb, and cast a last look at the Bible on the bed. Tired and a little cranky from trying to communicate with her mom, she considered skipping her daily Scripture reading. But she knew she wouldn’t. The ritual had come to mean too much.

  As she brushed her teeth in the guest bathroom, Beth could hear her mother in the kitchen—putting away dishes, opening and closing the refrigerator, tucking place mats back in their drawer. Touching everything and setting little bits of herself here and there, shaping and molding her small, well-ordered world.

  Did her mother feel she had failed? Skinny, dark-haired Beth, Jan’s only daughter, hadn’t grown up to become the queen rose. She certainly wasn’t sugar and spice and everything nice. Beth had traveled away from her family and had kept on going, until she was someone else entirely.

  As she headed back into the bedroom, Beth recalled her mother’s insistence that she was doing different things now—using pastels to create portraits. As though that were a radical change from her watercolor bouquets.

  Perhaps such an alteration was more fundamental than Beth supposed. Curious about her mother’s art, she peeked behind the coats and sweaters in the closet. What sort of people could Jan Lowell be sketching? Rose-cheeked children? Ladies in pink flowered gowns? The high school students she had taught so many years? All of them looking vaguely like Native Americans…

  Smiling at the thought, Beth knelt and pushed aside a cardboard box in search of an artist’s pad or a hidden portfolio. The new sketches were probably in her mom’s bedroom, stashed away until she deemed them ready for presentation. In the past, Jan always held a little ceremony, complete with chocolate cake and punch at which she debuted her latest rose paintings. Her children chose their favorite, and their mother framed it—hanging the selected piece in a special place beside the front door.

  As Beth began to uncurl from the floor, she spotted a black-marker notation on the cardboard box she had pushed aside in the closet. “For Beth,” it read. The carton wasn’t large, and she wondered what could be inside it. Old school papers or childhood treasures? Perhaps a collection of mementos from Beth’s grandparents or sweet old Nanny, the children’s favorite babysitter?

  Beth ran her hand over the tape that sealed the carton. Odd that this box had been so well packed while the others in the room were simply folded in on themselves. She shouldn’t open it. Her mother had told her not to touch anything in the room. Hands off. But thi
s carton was clearly meant to be Beth’s. “For Beth,” it announced in bold black ink.

  Glancing at the door, she noted that the house had fallen silent. Her mom might be upset with her for opening a box so carefully sealed, but maybe their talking about the items would draw them closer together. It would be interesting to see what bits and pieces had been saved from the big house, the old life in Tyler, where school and friends and family had been all Beth knew of the world.

  As she popped the tape and the carton’s flaps sprang up, Beth saw she had guessed correctly. Relics of the past. Her baby blanket—a soft knit in shades of white and pink—lay on top. A tag fluttering from one corner read, “Crocheted for Beth Lowell by her mother, Jan.” Next she lifted her red velvet Christmas dress with its row of tiny holly leaves across the hem. Her mother had printed on the tag, “Beth’s church dress when she was three years old.” Farther down, she unearthed small white shoes, worn and battered, her first pair. A sealed envelope under the shoes had been printed in her mother’s handwriting, “A curl from Beth’s first haircut.”

  Continuing to sift through the box, Beth found more carefully packed mementos. Jan Lowell’s handwritten tags provided each item’s history. How sweet that her mother had saved these things…cherished and gently tended, like the daughter who once had worn them. Misty-eyed, Beth ran her fingers over a lumpy mass of bubble wrap taped around some bulky object. As she lifted the keepsake from the bottom of the box, she saw it had no label.

  Sniffling, Beth began to peel away the plastic wrap. She had the best mother in the world. Chocolate-chip cookies and cold milk after school, freshly ironed dresses for church, a new lunch box every year and paintings of roses beside the front door. Unlike many of her friends, Beth had been held in her daddy’s arms and fed with her mother’s warm love and nourished by all the security, peace and hope her parents had been able to provide. How truly blessed she was.

  As the bubble wrap crackled and fell open, Beth smiled at the sight of still more roses. A small sugar bowl, pale ivory with tiny pink, blue and yellow blossoms scattered across it, lay nestled in the plastic. How beautiful and delicate it was. She set aside the sugar bowl and discovered the plastic wrap held two more items. She lifted a creamer rimmed in gold, and then a teapot, plump with a curved spout that surely would never spill a drop.

  Who had these belonged to? Beth couldn’t recall ever seeing them. Brushing her damp cheek, she turned over the sugar bowl and read the name of the manufacturer. Grimwade, Royal Winton. How fragile and perfect it was. At last, she cradled the teapot in her lap and peeked under its lid. A thrill ran up her spine as she spied a folded piece of paper lying at the bottom. She opened the note and read her mother’s inscription.

  “Beth, this tea set was given to me by your birth father, Thomas Wood. He was a good man.”

  The words sat on the page, unmoving, clearly legible, yet indecipherable. “Your birth father.” What did that mean? Beth read the note again. “Your birth father, Thomas Wood.” That wasn’t right. Her father was John Lowell, history professor at Tyler Junior College, barbecue king, TV football addict, Halloween treat dispenser, Easter egg hider and picture of health until he was stricken at fifty by Lou Gerhig’s disease and died at fifty-three.

  Beth picked up the teapot and studied it. Whose was this thing? Not hers. She didn’t have a birth father. She had a father. This “Beth” on the label must be another girl. A different person entirely.

  Confusion filled her as she glanced at the items scattered on the floor. These had been hers. The Christmas dress. The lock of hair. But not this tea set. Not this birth father. Not this Thomas Wood.

  But the china had been packed and put away in Beth’s box. The note inside began with her name. “Beth…this tea set…your birth father…Thomas Wood…a good man…”

  Impossible. No way.

  Shaking, Beth got to her feet and gathered up the teapot along with the bubble wrap and the note. This would make sense in a minute. Things would fall into place. The world would come back together.

  As Beth stepped out into the living room, the lid clinked against the teapot. “Mom?” she called out. “Mother, where are you?”

  Chapter Two

  Jan pushed her toes down to the very end of the bed and wiggled them inside her socks. No matter what time of year, her feet were always cold. Her husband had gotten used to it after a while. Sometimes in the night John would roll over, gather her in his arms and let her tuck her feet between his. Even now, two years after his death, she could recall the warmth of his feet seeping through her socks and between her toes. Human warmth. Male warmth. A heating pad or an electric blanket could never replicate that. How she missed him.

  Moving to the lake had been a good idea, Jan confirmed to herself once again. She pulled the quilt up to her neck and listened to the utter silence outside her bedroom window. A small neighborhood surrounded her own little cottage, but at this time of night no one stirred. The couple next to her had retired years before. Another widow—in her nineties—lived catty-corner across the street. Few of the homes belonged to permanent residents. Most people came and went on weekends. RVs pulled into driveways. Boats and Jet Skis zipped across the water. Outdoor grills scented the air with barbecue and charcoal. Firecrackers popped, and dogs howled. But by Sunday night, the weekenders had gone away, and the lake resumed its peaceful repose.

  Though she hated to admit it, Jan knew she would feel relief when her daughter loaded the rental car and sped away, too. After a sudden change of plans gave her a free weekend, Beth had arrived at the lake house unannounced. Her shoulder-length dark hair slightly mussed from leaning back against an airplane seat, she wore a tight black top, a black skirt that clung to her nonexistent hips and a black jacket. To Jan, none of the fabrics matched, but Beth never noticed details like that. Leather, denim and silk—well, they’re all black, Beth would argue. Despite her annoyance at her mother’s predictability, Beth hadn’t changed much, either. She had always been difficult…so odd and indecipherable.

  Her younger brothers were teddy bears—freckled and floppy replicas of their pudgy, amiable father. They laughed, wrestled, accidentally knocked things over, told jokes and rolled along with good-natured ease. Bobby had clowned his way through school and almost succeeded in goofing off his entire college career. Now he held a job with a computer company in Houston, but Jan had little doubt that he was still making everyone around him laugh. Billy had been so easygoing, happy to just hang around his big brother and play with his friends and do his chores. He had just graduated from Texas A&M and was back in Tyler working for one of the rose nurseries.

  But as a child, Beth had been a dark-eyed, wiry loner—climbing rock piles or hiding in treetops, building forts out of cardboard boxes, staring at bugs and reading until dawn. She rarely giggled, hated cuddling and deplored the girly aura her mother had tried so hard to create around her. A pink bedroom. A pretty velvet Christmas dress. Dolls. Ribbons. Beth preferred blue jeans, sneakers and a compass or a pair of binoculars.

  Off to see the world! That was Beth’s motto—then and now. Jan sighed and rolled over. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her daughter. Nor was she disappointed in the way Beth had turned out. Just the opposite. But why wouldn’t Beth let her come closer? Why was she always pushing away from the slightest touch or snapping out some witty retort? If only they could be friends now that Beth was grown.

  “Come to New York,” her daughter had begged. The very thought of it made Jan queasy. A huge city, sidewalks jammed with people, taxi drivers yelling and honking. And terrorists. You could never forget about that possibility.

  No, Jan would much prefer to stay here by the lake and work on the portraits she had started. She liked puttering. She enjoyed strolling. Solitude pleased her.

  Let Beth and the boys come here. They could watch their mother slide gently into old age, getting creakier and maybe even crankier with time. She would bake her famous cobbler for the neighbors. Paint roses on her w
alls. Plant petunias, marigolds and roses in her front yard. Maybe she would even stop coloring her hair that familiar auburn shade. What an unexpected thought. Gray at last.

  Beth had described her mother as a pill bug. But that wasn’t right. Jan didn’t intend to roll up and hide her head from the world. She simply didn’t need people as much now. She didn’t have to mingle with professors’ spouses or attend PTA meetings or be in the Lady Lions or even go to church. None of that was required.

  In fact, Jan hadn’t been to church once in the weeks since she’d moved to the lake. And so what? Who would notice if she never showed up at a worship service? She didn’t need sermons to know what she believed, and she certainly had no desire to walk into a Sunday school room full of strangers. If some church wanted her to be a member, well, let them come find her. God knew where she was, and that was all she cared about.

  Turning over again, Jan debated what to do with her daughter for two more days. It wasn’t like Lake Palestine was a dream destination for a single, twenty-five-year-old female. Formed by damming the Neches River, the lake covered 25,000 acres and dropped to fifty-eight feet deep in places. It was a fisherman’s paradise. Largemouth bass, white and striped bass, channel and blue catfish, crappie and sunfish drew people all year long. The white bass had just completed their spring run up the Neches River and Kickapoo Creek. But Jan didn’t own a boat, and she wasn’t fond of fishing. She and John had often taken their children to the smaller lakes around Tyler. Jan had preferred to sit on the dock and read a book or prepare the picnic lunch while her family fished and swam.

  That was what Beth just didn’t understand about her. Jan liked being sedentary. She didn’t want to see the world. Or even New York. The thought of flying to Botswana made her shudder. And as for that poor wife whose husband had dragged her and their children to Colombia to live inside a fortress with armed guards outside—