Leaves Of Hope

Even now, lying in bed, a forty-five-year-old widow with three grown kids and a whole other life, she could see the words Thomas had written to her in blue ballpoint ink. “I bought this tea set for you at an antiques shop in London on my way back to Texas. I knew you would like it. The pattern is Summertime, and I had hoped that would be our time. I will always love you. Thomas.”

Setting the lid on the porch floor, Jan had turned over the teapot. Grimwade, it read. Royal Winton. Summertime.

She had taken out the creamer, a funny little squared-off thing with four feet that matched the teapot. And then she had studied the rectangular sugar bowl and the matched pair of gold lines that rimmed it on the inside. The set looked so pretty…too pretty…on the old, creaky porch.

Crying all over again—it seemed she was either crying or vomiting in those warm days of early summer—Jan had settled the china pieces back into their foam nest and carried the box upstairs to her bedroom. Briefly she had considered putting the tea set on her bedside table. But the thought of Thomas holding that delicate china in his big, wonderful hands…walking into an antiques store just for her…writing her the note…loving her…

“Oh, rats!” she breathed out. Jan threw back her covers and swung her feet out of bed. Plodding to the bathroom, she thought of how slender and long-legged she once had been. And how pudgy and ancient she felt these days. Thanks to her daughter’s snooping, she wasn’t going to get a wink of sleep. Tomorrow she would have swollen eyelids and a fat nose from crying all night. She would be irritable, and Beth would start bugging her about the tea set and Thomas and all the things Jan had worked so very hard to put away.

Well, Beth was not going to get the whole story. And that was that. Thomas was a good man, just as she had written. But he had not hesitated to walk out of the Calhoun backyard that afternoon. He hadn’t called or dropped in to say goodbye before flying off to Sri Lanka again. Only four short letters with strange stamps had appeared in the mailbox in Tyler.

Gone, just like that. Pfft. Out of Jan’s life, as though a match had been snuffed by the wind. Nothing had remained of those two years of passion, two years of insane, crazy, mad love. Nothing but Beth. Little brown-eyed, brown-haired Beth, who looked so much like her father, sometimes it was all Jan could do to keep from showing how deeply the child affected her.

Beth would stare long and intensely at her mother, just the way Thomas had, and Jan wanted to grab the little girl and hold on so tightly that maybe she could feel Thomas’s breath against her cheek again. And other times Beth would give a toss of her hair and go wandering off from the house for hours, never bothering to tell her mother where she was. That was when Jan fought to keep from snatching her by the shoulders and shouting out the speech she had often rehearsed for Thomas.

Stop leaving me! she wanted to yell. Stay with me, where you belong, and stop running away all the time! Don’t leave me alone! Need me…want me…be lost without me, the way I am without you.

But Beth had too much of Thomas Wood in her to read beyond her mother’s placid face and calm words. She didn’t see or understand or even care how much she meant to Jan. Like her father, she would happily jaunt off to Sri Lanka or Botswana or some other foreign place where you could die of cholera or require armed guards and Spanish lace to keep your house secure.

Genetics. All the nurture in the world couldn’t overcome a wanderer’s nature.

After blowing her nose and splashing water on her face, Jan walked back into the room and checked the clock on the bedside table. Nearly three. Great. And there was John, sitting in his oak picture frame, looking at her like he always did. “Get a grip, Jan,” he would say when her nerves unraveled and she began to fall apart. Nothing’s that bad. It’s not a big deal. Relax, honeybunch. Let it go.

She ought to paint some of John’s platitudes on her bedroom wall. They would comfort her the way her husband had with his calm, quiet smile and a pat of his hand. He would lean over and press his lips to her cheek and make that little smack.

“There you go, sweetie pie,” he would say. “Better now?”

And she was. Truly, John always made things better. From the day he had offered to marry her and become the father of her baby, to the day he exhaled his last, labored breath, John had brought peace and security into Jan’s life. He had given her everything she wanted and needed. Always. He hadn’t asked her to change. Or leave. Or go to strange places. He had just patted her hand and planted a kiss on her cheek and called her honeybunch. And that had been more than enough.

“Oh, John.” Taking up the photograph she had framed not long after his death, Jan gave the glass a wipe with the sleeve of her pink robe. “What am I supposed to do without you? You weren’t supposed to leave me. Thomas did that already. You were supposed to stay.”

Battling a new wave of tears, Jan took off her robe, lay back on her bed once more and shut her eyes, hugging the frame against her chest. Maybe she ought to pray. Beth always chided her mother for not being more religious. What would she say if she knew Jan wasn’t even going to church these days?

Well, what was the point? You prayed, and your husband died anyway. You went to church, and then what? Your kids grew up and left home. Your Sunday school class just got older and older until you couldn’t believe you belonged in the same room with those wrinkled, gray-haired fogies. Your preacher kept yammering on the same Bible verses again and again until you could practically preach his sermon for him. Potlucks and Bible studies and revivals and prayer meetings and on and on.

The thought of it all made Jan tired. Still holding John’s picture, she turned onto her side and pulled the sheet up over her ears. Just as she was sure she would never get to sleep, she realized she had been imagining herself in a shoe store buying a pair of hiking boots, which had nothing to do with anything. And then the hiking boots turned into furry yellow puppies. And that was the end of that.

Jan woke with a gasp. A slanted sunbeam warmed her cheek. It must be after nine! Good grief!

She sat up in bed, rubbed her face with her hands and blinked, trying to see through the residue of last night’s tears. Oh, great. This was not good. She needed to be up fixing breakfast for Beth. She ought to have taken a shower by now. Dried her hair. Put on makeup. Dressed in a pair of slacks and a nice top. She was still determined to take her daughter to the Rose Garden. Or the Azalea Walk. Either would be beautiful this time of year.

As she fumbled her way out of bed, Jan saw that she had slept with John’s framed photograph all night. Poor John…How hard he had battled that awful ALS—three years of fighting, until he had looked nothing like the man in the picture. She set it up on her bedside table again. This was how she would remember him—pudgy and freckled and grinning from ear to ear.

“There,” she said, taking a last look at the picture. She grabbed her robe and slipped it on as she hurried out into the kitchen. Thank goodness there were no signs of life. Beth must be sleeping in, as she always had on school holidays when she was younger.

Jan padded in her thick socks to the coffeemaker. She would get the pot started, and then she could run to the bathroom for a quick shower. This was going to be a better day, she thought as she stood at the sink to fill the glass carafe with water. She and Beth would start off on the right foot, and that way Jan could head off any…

She stared at her empty driveway. The rental car was gone.

Chapter Four

“I’m looking for yearbooks.” Beth leaned against the reference counter. “From John Tyler High School.”

The librarian was a nice-looking young man with dimples. “The Alcalde! Are you an alum?”

No one in New York would have asked such a personal question. In large cities the world over, Beth had discovered, people got down to business. Chitchat took too long, didn’t really matter, and you’d never see the person again, so why bother?

With a fair amount of chagrin, she recalled her first week in the Big Apple. She had walked into a perfume boutique, said hello to a saleswoman and—like a good Southern girl—she began with a comment about the weather and then moved on to discuss her own favorite fragrances, how she enjoyed floral scents because she was from a town in Texas where roses were grown for export, how she had just arrived in New York and was excited to have found a studio apartment she could afford and on and on. Finally, Beth had realized the woman was staring at her as though she had just landed from Jupiter. Not only had Beth breached the “no small talk” rule, but her Texas twang had no doubt branded her as someone who just fell off the turnip truck.

This wasn’t New York or London or Toronto, though, so Beth smiled back at the young librarian. “Yep, I graduated from JT a few years back. Go, Lions!”

He laughed. “I went to Robert E. Lee High. I’m working on my library science degree at UT-Tyler now. It’s a good school, but I’ll be glad when I’ve got my degree and can move away. Tyler.” He rolled his eyes. “My ancestors were some of the town’s first settlers, and we’ve been here ever since.”

Beth nodded. “Time to set forth into the world. I live in New York.”

“Really? Wow. I bet that’s different.”

“You can say that again.” Beth reflected for a moment on the number of old families still living in the area. “Did you ever hear of anyone named Wood around here?”

“Wood? Like Wood’s Nursery and Greenhouse? Wood’s Landscaping? Wood Tractor and Lawn Service? There are several businesses by that name.”

For some reason this shocked Beth. Of course she knew about the Wood family. The name was on any number of small enterprises around the city. She could have been living among her relatives all her life and not realized it.

Had they known about Beth? Was her heritage a Tyler secret? Did people elbow each other as she went by…? There’s Thomas Wood’s daughter, but don’t let on that you know….

“I’m looking for someone,” she told the young man. “His name is Thomas Wood. Or was. I think he might have passed away a while back. I’m pretty sure he would have graduated from John Tyler High in the early eighties.”

“All our copies of the Alcalde are down that row of reference books across from the soda machine. You can’t check the year-books out, but you can use our copier if you need certain pages. Dime a page.”

Beth thanked him and headed across the library. As she crossed the reading area, she glanced at an elderly man browsing the Dallas Morning News. Did he know? If she walked up to him and said, “I’m Thomas Wood’s daughter,” would he reply, “Oh, I know that. He left town, but your mother stayed here and married John Lowell.”

Why not? In a city of around ninety thousand, people ran into each other now and then. They joined things together—churches, PTAs, Lions and Rotary Clubs. They congregated at the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden or the Caldwell Zoo. They celebrated annually at the Azalea and Spring Flower Trail, the Festival on the Square and the Texas Rose Festival.

And they talked. They talked at grocery stores, on the sidewalks, in church, at the coin laundries, even in the library. How many had known about Beth’s lineage and said nothing to her—but plenty to each other?

The thought of people gossiping behind her back made her feel sick. And angry. She stepped between the tall bookcases and spotted the rows of yearbooks. But as she started to reach for one, she hesitated. Maybe she didn’t want to know what Thomas Wood had looked like. Maybe she ought to be like her mother and pretend he really hadn’t existed.

Thomas Wood had been a mistake, Jan seemed to be saying.

The pregnancy had been a mistake.

Did that make Beth a mistake?

A brief time in Jan Calhoun’s distant past had been nothing more than a blip in the comfortable straight line of her life. Just a small error that she and John Lowell had rectified with their careful, structured and secure marriage. Running her fingertips across the spines of the royal-blue-and-white yearbooks, Beth reflected on the man who had raised her from birth. Her daddy.

As much conflict as she now felt about the whole situation, she would never deny that John Lowell had been her true father. The family photo albums proved that. As an infant, she had spat processed carrots right in his face. He had held her tiny fingers when she was taking her first baby steps. He had pushed her on the swing in the backyard and taught her how to bait a fishhook, and he kissed her cheek when she graduated from high school. She had loved her daddy.

So why bother to look for a picture of a stranger whose DNA she happened to share? A guy who had impregnated his girlfriend and then walked away…a loser who had sowed his wild oats, never imagining a baby girl would grow from a night of furtive wrestling in the back seat of some car…a dead man whose brief life had meant nothing to his daughter…

Clenching her fists in the anguish of uncertainty, Beth read the dates stamped in gold letters on the volumes of the Alcalde. What was the point of looking for him? But then again…why shouldn’t she? How could it hurt?

She was reaching for a yearbook when her cell phone went off. Jumping at the unexpected sound in the cavernous library, she jerked the device from her purse and frowned at the caller ID. It was her mother. Beth silenced the phone and let her voice mail answer. No way was Jan Lowell going to butt into this decision.

Beth had been unable to sleep the night before, alternately furious with her mother, sad at the memory of her father’s recent suffering and death, curious about Thomas Wood. She had tried to piece things together, mentally walking back through the years and wondering if one thing or another had held more significance than she thought. It was a nightmare—only she had been awake through it all.

As the sun was coming up over the lake, she had packed her bags, thrown them into the rental car and driven back to Tyler. She cruised around town, looking at the Lowell family’s old house, remembering friends and events. She passed her brother’s home and considered knocking on his door to ask him if he knew she was just his half sister.

But Bill hadn’t been aware of anything, Beth realized. If he had, he would have blabbed years ago. So would Bob. Crazy little brothers. Neither one could resist telling on each other or on Beth. If they had known their sister had a different birth father, they would have told her.

Waiting for the public library to open that morning, Beth had eaten a doughnut at her family’s favorite restaurant just off the town square. Every Sunday after church, the whole Lowell crew had traipsed in, settled at their regular table and ordered the same meals they always did. Fried chicken for Dad, roast beef and gravy for Mom, pork steak for Bob, ribs for Bill. Good old Southern dishes.

Beth always ate spaghetti. Italian. She had been ready to taste the world even back then. Like Thomas Wood, who had left Tyler and never come back. Had her parents sensed a difference in her? Had it affected the way they treated her?

Unwilling to hesitate a moment longer, Beth grabbed an armload of yearbooks and carried them to a table. She sat down and flipped through the index at the back for the most likely year. In moments, she had found him. Thomas Wood.

And he was a dork! In his senior photo, he wore a wide tie and a too-small, pin-striped jacket, and his hair hung in strange, choppy lengths almost to his shoulders. He wasn’t smiling.

Beth stared at him, trying to see through the black-and-white photograph into the truth of who Thomas Wood had been. Dark eyes…like hers. Dark hair…like hers. Straight nose…like hers.

But there was a lot of him that looked nothing like his daughter—a pronounced Adam’s apple, a square jaw and those hands! Beth studied the one hand that the photographer had evidently posed so it showed Thomas’s class ring. Huge fingers stretched across the sleeve of his jacket. Big, rough hands roped with veins. Callused knuckles. Round white nails.

She lifted her own hand and studied her slender fingers and manicured nails, turning them one way and then another. No, she hadn’t gotten them from him, that was certain. But so many other things…

Bob and Bill had inherited a mix of their father’s sandy hair and their mother’s auburn curls. They both had freckles and a tendency to go soft in the middle. Their noses tilted up at the ends, like Jan’s. And their ears stuck out a little, like John’s. But big sister Beth had brown eyes and board-straight brown hair and olive skin.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” The reference desk clerk startled Beth as he pulled back a chair and sat down at the table. “Thomas Wood—well, there he is. Guess you struck oil after all. Get a load of that tie!”

Beth tried to smile. “Yeah, I found him. Thanks.”

“It’s possible we would have pictures of him going all the way back to kindergarten. You want me to look?”

Actually, she wanted the librarian to go away. But Beth pushed the yearbooks in his direction. “Sure. See what you can find.”

“Thomas Edward Wood.” The young man flipped to the index in the back of a volume of the Alcalde. “Did you come all the way from New York to look him up? Because, in case you didn’t know, we can do research for you and communicate online. We’re glad to do that. Not all libraries have those kinds of reference services, but we do. And it’s free!”

“Great. I’ll remember that.” While the clerk went to do some more digging, Beth read the inscriptions under her birth father’s senior year photograph. Thomas Wood had not held a class office or worked on the yearbook staff or acted in a play. He hadn’t done much in sports, either. His freshman year, he had played junior varsity football. He had been on the basketball team—first JV and then varsity—all four years. And that was it. His future? The caption said he planned to attend Tyler Junior College and major in agriculture.

An ag major! He was a hick! Her father was a dork and a hick. A goofball with a tight sport coat and big hands and no more aspirations than to be a farmer.

Of course, being a farmer wasn’t exactly an easy life. Beth knew many of them couldn’t make a go of it. To take college classes showed Thomas Wood had some gumption. And he had chosen that beautiful antique tea set. Maybe there was something ambitious and romantic in him after all.

Beth read the quote he had chosen to have placed beneath his photograph. It was from Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book she had never read but had heard was one of the most saccharine pieces of schmaltz of all time.

“There’s a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!”

Yeah, right. We can be free! Good motto, Thomas Wood. Get your girlfriend pregnant and then abandon her. If you had been a creature of excellence, intelligence and skill, you would have stuck around and done your duty. At least you could have paid child support.

The fact was…she hated him. There, she had acknowledged the truth. Beth stared at the picture of the teenager in the tight coat and wide tie. He was a dweeb, a dork, and she hated him. Good riddance, loser.

Shutting the book, she pushed back from the table. The desk clerk glanced up. “I found him for you in these,” he said. He pointed to a stack of yearbooks opened and placed one on top of the other. “Here, I’ll show you.”

Beth could hardly refuse to look after he’d done all that work. She leaned on her elbows as the young man pointed out his discoveries. “Eleventh grade,” he began, his stubby finger jabbing at the photograph of a skinny-faced, even longer-haired version of Thomas Wood. “Tenth grade, ninth. And then we go to grade school. He went to Douglas Elementary.”

“You’re very good.”

“Thanks. It’s my job.” Dimples deepening, he beamed as he handed her the Douglas Wildcats yearbooks one by one. “Right on down the line. He sure is a beanpole, isn’t he? Look at this one—he’s got a Band-Aid on his chin. Short hair in these younger versions. I guess that was the style back then. And here’s the last one—first grade. There you go. I don’t guess there was a yearbook for kindergarten in those days.”

Beth stared down at a toothless little boy who was looking back at her with big brown eyes. “He was my father,” she murmured. “This…person.”

“Your father? Thomas Wood?”

“My birth father. I was raised by a different man…my real father. He died two years ago.”

“They’re both dead? I’m sure sorry to hear that.”

Beth nodded as she slid the open yearbooks across one another, looking at the pictures once again. “I just found out. My mother…” She bit her lower lip. “I’m just blabbing. Forgive me.”

“No, it’s okay. Do you want me to make photocopies for you? I’ll do it for no charge.”

“That’s all right. I’m just—” She rubbed her eyes. “Okay, yes. Make copies, if you don’t mind. I’d appreciate that.”

“Sure.” He scooped up the yearbooks and headed for a back room.

Beth dropped her head onto the crook of her arm and fought tears. Why should she be sad? Thomas Wood had never been a part of her life. And now he was dead, so why cry? Maybe she was weeping for her daddy. For John Lowell who had carried the secret to his grave. She couldn’t be angry with him. He had given his whole adult life to her. His love, his time, his attention, his money.

What had possessed him to do that? Had he loved her mother so much that Beth became part of that passion? Or had he actually loved his adopted daughter, too? Had her father ever felt Beth really belonged to him? Or did her dark eyes and hair always remind him that another man had preceded him in Jan’s life?

Beth lifted her head as the eager reference desk clerk returned with a sheaf of photocopied pictures of Thomas Wood from first grade through high school graduation. He handed them to her and waved away her offer of payment. “It was fun,” he said. “Like a quest. If you need any more help, my name’s Brian. Kids used to call me Brain. That bugged me in the old days, but now I don’t mind. It fits.”

Beth stood and slid the sheets of paper into her purse. “Thanks, Brain.”

He laughed. “You’re welcome. Enjoy your visit to good ol’ Tyler.”

Giving him a thumbs-up, Beth left the library carrying information she had needed, and didn’t want, and could no longer live without. Why hadn’t her parents told her years ago? What was the point in keeping such a secret from their only daughter?

As she slid into the seat of her rental car, Beth knew she had to make one more stop before she could leave town.

An oak tree. Beth drove the wide turn around the cemetery as she looked at the trees and wondered which one of the many oaks now dropped its acorns on her father’s grave. She should have come more often. In the two years since John Lowell’s death, his daughter had visited his final resting place only twice. The first time had been at his burial service. And the second time, when Beth was back in Tyler for one of her quick visits, her mother had impulsively driven them to the cemetery after church.

Unable to express how very much she did not want to see her father’s grave, Beth had wordlessly endured the endless minutes. She and her mother had left the car and stood in silence near the headstone that listed the dates of John Lowell’s birth and death but told nothing of who he had been and what he had meant to those whose lives he had touched. Beth had tried not to think of her father’s body lying deep in the earth, decaying and transforming into something fit for a horror movie. Instead, she had studied the sky through the oak leaves and thought about the family she was preparing to move to a nice house in Panama.