Promises to Keep Read online

  I screamed. The gun exploded. Tillie stiffened, stumbled, put a hand to her chest. The tip of the bat hit the floor, and Tillie leaned on it like a cane. The light came on in the bedroom behind Daddy, and the room grew loud with panic: Valerie’s piercing screams, Mom calling Daddy’s name. “Alan, no! Alan!”

  Daddy aimed the gun again, pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  Again.

  Nothing.

  And again.

  Nothing. Nothing but three dead clicks.

  Tillie moved forward.

  Daddy slapped the gun against his palm and swore aloud. He jiggled something on the barrel and pulled the trigger. The gun came to life, exploding once again and sending a bullet through the floor. Daddy reeled, righted himself, lifted the gun once more, but it was too late.

  Tillie reached him now, the bat still clenched in her hands. She swung, hitting Daddy squarely on the side of the head. The impact hurled him into the bedroom even as it thrust Tillie up against the wall, where ever so briefly, she stood as though stunned, until slowly she slid down to the floor. One wide streak of blood marked her path on the wallpaper. A second widening circle of blood stained the front of her gown.

  Mom bypassed Daddy, sprawled on the bedroom rug, and rushed to Tillie’s side. “Hold on, Tillie. Hold on,” she pleaded, her voice shaking. “I’m calling for an ambulance.”

  Mom grabbed the extension in the hall and dialed zero as I finally found my legs and ran to Tillie. I was trembling, every inch of me shivering with fear. Even the house itself seemed to vibrate with panic; the air felt thick with it.

  Mom said something into the phone that I could scarcely hear over Valerie’s shrieks. When she finished, she didn’t hang up but left the receiver dangling by the cord, turning ever so slightly in the air like someone hanged. She ran to her room, and I called after her, “What are you doing?”

  “Stay with Tillie,” she hollered back. I waited a moment, but she didn’t say more.

  “Tillie,” I whispered. “Tillie.”

  Her eyes were open. She settled them on my face.

  I was crying now and breathing hard, gasping for air. Don’t die, Tillie. Don’t die.

  She stretched a hand toward me, the hand that had gone to her chest when she was shot. I didn’t want to touch it, didn’t want to touch the blood. But when her warm moist fingers curled around my palm, I held on tight. “I love you, Tillie,” I said.

  She tried to smile. She gazed at me with eyes that seemed to be drifting, losing focus. “I love you too, Roz,” she whispered. She looked away from me, beyond my shoulder, gave a small gasp. Her eyes widened, took on light.

  She said my name again, but this time it didn’t quite sound like Roz. It sounded like Ross.

  I looked over my shoulder then back at Tillie. Her eyes were closed now, and her chin drooped toward her chest. A siren wailed in the distance. Valerie went on screaming. I saw Mom lean over Daddy, feel his neck for a pulse, lift the gun from the floor. She held the weapon in the palm of one hand as her other hand went to her mouth. She was weeping quietly, her tears capturing the overhead light and glistening on her cheeks. After a moment she stood and, aiming with both hands, pointed the gun at Daddy’s head.

  As I waited for her to pull the trigger, I felt Tillie’s hand lose its grip on mine.

  chapter

  47

  Long minutes passed, one melting slowly into the next, as I stood motionless in the sterile room. Any noise around me – the clanking of medicine trays in the hall, the occasional voice over the hospital PA system, even the click and the hiss of the equipment around the bed – became little more than white noise to me, I was so lost in thought. I was trying to make sense of all that had happened since our move to Mills River, and as insights came to me piecemeal I worked to fit them into a meaningful whole.

  “You lied to me,” I whispered to the figure in the bed. “I can’t believe you lied to me.”

  And yet, why was it so unbelievable? They had all warned me. Wally, Mom, Tillie, even Mara. They had told me Daddy couldn’t be trusted, and I hadn’t listened.

  Daddy lay there between the sheets, wide bandages wound tightly around his broken skull, reaching down even to cradle his chin. His face was drowning in a pool of white. White gauze, white linen. His eyes were shut, unseeing. His ears peeked out of cracks in the binding, but they didn’t hear the words I’d just spoken. They couldn’t hear anything now, hadn’t heard anything for the past two weeks. The doctors weren’t sure he would ever see, hear, taste, or touch anything again. They weren’t sure he would ever wake up, but if he did, his brain had sustained enough damage to keep him bedridden the rest of his life.

  It didn’t seem like much of a life. Maybe Mom should have pulled the trigger when she had the chance. But she didn’t. Had never meant to, she said, unless he woke up. But he didn’t wake up.

  I felt no pity. My feelings were of sadness and betrayal. And relief. And guilt.

  “This is the first time I’m glad the old fool was drunk,” Wally said when Mom called him long distance to tell him what happened. “It kept him from shooting straight. If not for Jim Beam, you might all be dead.”

  Maybe Jim Beam had ended up doing something right this time, but he hadn’t worked alone. Daddy may have killed us all, if not for the element of surprise. He’d come up against what he hadn’t expected, a powerhouse named Tillie Monroe who, with one swift blow, had sent him sailing into this lingering twilight.

  Thank God for Tillie. Thank God she had come back to the house she had lived her life in and that she wanted to die in.

  Still, in the midst of my relief, I was trying to lay my guilt to rest. None of it would have happened if not for me. I lifted my hands to the railing of the hospital bed and squeezed hard. I was the one who had been tricked. If tragedy had come to the entire family, it would have been because of me. While I was trying to figure out whether I could trust Daddy, I should have simply trusted Mom. She wouldn’t have brought us to Mills River if it had been safe to stay with Alan Anthony. Why hadn’t I thought about that? Why did I overlook what was so obvious?

  I could only suppose it was because I wanted what I wanted. I wanted it enough to let myself be fooled, to believe in spite of everything that Daddy was trustworthy and the good life he promised was possible. I was a child, and yet I should have known. If only I had listened. If only I hadn’t let the dream overshadow my common sense.

  Mara was right. Sometimes it’s the dream that holds you down and keeps you from flying, if it’s the wrong dream. You have to let it go if you’re ever going to soar.

  Daddy had come to our house, just as he said he would, but his promises stopped there. He hadn’t brought the ruby ring with him, or a letter, or a dozen red roses. The only thing he had brought to our house was the gun, one the cops said he’d purchased in a pawn shop in Chicago sometime around Christmas. The ring, which belonged to Miss Charlotte, was found in the glove compartment of his car, along with Mr. Wainwright’s watch. A few other items were found at the pawn shop where Daddy had bought the gun, as he’d made several trips back there between Christmas and leap year day. Not only was Daddy a liar, he was a thief.

  It was time to let go of the dream.

  I clenched my jaw. I had something to say to this man, even though he couldn’t hear it. But I had to say it anyway, for my own sake if nothing else. I leaned forward, unlocked my jaw, and sighed heavily. One tear trickled down my cheek. “I can’t help it, Daddy,” I whispered, “I still love you. Just a little. I can’t seem to stop. But if you ever wake up, I’m not going to be able to believe anything you say. So I’ve come to say good-bye.”

  I dug around in my jeans pocket and pulled out several sticky Sugar Daddy wrappers, ones I had kept in my jewelry box at home. I slipped them into Daddy’s unresponsive hand and curled his fingers around them. “Thanks anyway,” I said, “but you can have these back.”

  “Are you ready, Roz?”

  Mom was out i
n the hall now, framed in the doorway of Daddy’s room. Beside her stood Lyle Monroe, clutching the handles of a wheelchair. And in the chair, wearing a brand-new hat and a new winter coat with a faux fur collar, sat the spitfire herself, Tillie Monroe.

  I smiled at all three of them and nodded. “I’m ready, Mom.”

  “I’m ready too,” Tillie said, adjusting her hat. “Merciful heavens, but it’s hard to get a good night’s sleep around here, what with all the prodding and poking and temperature-taking. They should have let me out a week ago. After all, it was just a flesh wound.”

  “Now, Mother,” Lyle countered as he cast an amused glance at Mom, “a bullet that both enters and exits your shoulder is more than a flesh wound – ”

  “Well, son, having been the one who was shot, I should know. . . .”

  As the three of them bantered about Tillie’s wound, I took one last look at Daddy. I felt as though I should say something else, one last parting statement, but I had no more words.

  I patted my jeans pocket, not the one I’d taken the candy wrappers from but the other one. Tucked deep inside was the necklace Daddy had given me for Christmas. That, I was going to keep. Not for any sentimental reason, but as a reminder. If I was going to survive in this world, I had to understand that not everything I wanted to be true was true, and not everything that looked good was good.

  I moved to the hall and took Tillie’s hand. “Come on, Tillie,” I said, “let’s get out of here.”

  Tillie squeezed my fingers and smiled. “Now you’re talking, Roz,” she said. “Lead the way. I’m right behind you.”

  epilogue

  Tillie lived for another three years in the house on McDowell Street, long enough to see Mom and Lyle get married and long enough to greet her grandson, my brother, Ross Monroe. Tillie said Ross looked just like his namesake, the grandfather he would never know . . . at least not this side of paradise. “But when I see him again,” Tillie promised the baby, “I’ll tell him you’re here. He’ll be proud to know that.”

  Certainly his other grandfather, Grandpa Lehman, was proud of him, calling Ross the gem that rose up out of the ashes, the little man who sailed in after the storm. Gramps had offered to move us out of the house after the shooting, “So you don’t have to live with the memories,” he said. But Mom said no, she wanted to stay. She had a feeling good things were in store for us there, and she was right, the birth of Ross some two years later being one of the happiest events.

  Wally came home from Vietnam shortly before Ross was born. When he came back from his tour over there, he was a different person, and that in a good way. Much of the anger was gone, not because it had been spent on the battlefield, I think, but because the threat of Daddy had disappeared from our lives. Wally said he finally felt safe. No more North Vietnamese Army, no more Vietcong guerillas, and no more Alan Anthony. For the first time in a long time, Wally was at peace.

  And so was Mom. I’ll never forget the evening she called me away from my homework, asking me to join her downstairs in the living room. When I arrived, everyone else was already there: Tillie, Wally, and Valerie. Mom was on the couch with baby Ross in her arms, her husband, Lyle, beside her.

  “What is it, Mom?” I asked.

  “Are we in trouble or something?” Wally added.

  Mom shook her head. “No, you’re not in trouble. I just wanted to look at you. I just wanted to have you all right here in the same room at the same time.”

  “Okay.” Wally shrugged, took another bite out of the apple he was eating. “As long as we’re not in trouble.”

  Mom’s eyes moved over each of us, one at a time. She gazed lovingly at the sleeping baby in her arms, then reached for Lyle’s hand. “God has been good to us,” she said quietly.

  “Indeed,” Lyle said.

  We were quiet for a time and didn’t even feel awkward about it. We shared an almost tangible gratitude that we were all there and all together.

  Finally Tillie said, “This house is happy again. I can feel it in my bones. Can’t you, Lyle?” She looked at Lyle, who smiled and nodded. “It was built for a family,” Tillie went on, “and now it’s satisfied.”

  We really were family now, as Tillie was Mom’s mother-in-law and my brother Ross’s grandmother. And my grandmother too, mother of my stepfather, Lyle, who I didn’t think of as my stepfather at all but as my daddy. Now I knew how Mara felt about Willie Nightingale. He wasn’t her grandfather but her father, her true daddy. Somehow, in a way we never expected, our Daddy Deal had been fulfilled and our prayers answered.

  It was when I put Valerie to bed one night that I understood what Tillie had been trying to tell me on the day I got my tonsils out.

  “Tillie, how do you know if you’re going to end up in heaven?”

  “Well now, that all depends on who your father is.”

  When Valerie folded her small hands together and said – she was saying it correctly now – “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .” I thought, Oh. Of course. That’s what Tillie was talking about.

  One more thing I should have seen earlier. But no one had ever told me God was a father. I had always simply thought he was God.

  I had a suspicion, on the night she was shot, that Tillie had caught a glimpse of heaven. I asked her what it was she saw, and she said she couldn’t tell me.

  “But did you see anything at all?”

  She looked past me and smiled, as though she were seeing it all again. “Oh yes.”

  “Why can’t you tell me?”

  Her eyes snapped back to me. “Because I don’t have the words. I wouldn’t be allowed to anyway, even if I did have the words. But I can tell you this much. I don’t have to look back anymore. It’s all ahead of me, all the lost moments of my life . . . they aren’t lost. They’ve been tucked away for safekeeping, along with so much more.”

  That’s all she would say. No matter how much I pestered her, she said I simply had to be patient and wait until the day I would find out for myself.

  “But don’t worry,” she added. “You can trust God for what’s to come. He’s a good Father. Unlike some.”

  Alan Anthony died in the summer of 1968, almost a year to the day we moved into the house on McDowell Street. Mom was already planning her wedding to Lyle when she came and told me Daddy was dead of sepsis. He’d developed a bedsore that got infected, and it was all downhill from there.

  “I’m sorry, Roz,” she said.

  “I’m sorry too, Mom,” I told her.

  I allowed myself one good cry, and then I put it all aside, like closing a book when you reach the end and tucking it back up on the shelf. His memory faded over the years until it became little more than a distant ache.

  Wally went off to college, Valerie started school, I became a teenager, and Ross had begun to walk and talk by the time Tillie stood up from the dinner table one evening and announced, “Janis, dear, you and Lyle can have the house now, free and clear. I don’t need it anymore.”

  Mom looked up wide-eyed and sounded alarmed when she asked, “Why, Tillie? Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “But this is your home.”

  “Not anymore, it’s not.”

  That night Tillie lay down beneath her wedding quilt on her big brass bed and quietly slipped away. She got her final wish. She died in the house that she had built with her own two hands alongside her husband, Ross, the house that was happy when it had a family living inside.

  Since then, the house on McDowell Street has always had a family living inside. I raised my three children there, and now my son, Ross Monroe Hillsdale, and his wife are raising their two children there. My son Ross was the second child in our family to be named for Tillie’s husband. The third was my grandson, Ross Theodore Hillsdale. And so the Monroe and the Anthony families continue to grow and intertwine.

  Mara visited often over the years, first with her children and later her grandchildren. After college she moved to Chicago and went on to become the well-known
playwright Beatrice Nightingale. Her most famous play, The Radio Man, had a thirty-six-week run on Broadway. Not bad for a kid from a small unknown town in flyover country.

  Since Tillie died, I suppose I’ve thought about her every single day. I think of the way she showed up in our lives unannounced, blowing in like a nor’easter and yet doing so in a way that brought our family together instead of ripping us apart. I think of her eccentricities, her iron will, her gentle kindness that caused people to love her, in spite of herself. I think of the way her cries of “Merciful heavens!” echoed throughout the house and bounced from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling. But that was the thing about Tillie; that was the legacy she left me. Without her, I might never have known what I know now: that heaven is indeed merciful, and all the hours and days and dreams we deem as lost are simply waiting for us in a place we’ll someday recognize as home.

  discussion questions *

  1. An age-old saying declares, “You can never go back home again.” The meaning is clear: times have changed; people have changed; places have changed. Tillie returns to the house she and Ross built with their own hands. She considers the house hers, no matter if the title has changed to someone else. Have you ever attempted to return to a place you once considered yours (i.e. your childhood home, the city where you attended college, etc.)? If so, what sensations and emotions occurred? Was the attempt successful? Why or why not? Do you think the place had changed or you had changed? Or both?

  2. Winston Newberry considered himself wronged by Tillie, who showed off his Eiffel Tower–shaped birthmark. Winston waited countless years to enact his revenge. Have you ever believed someone caused you harm, whether intentional or not? Did you hold anger in your heart, waiting for the opportunity to pay the person back for what had occurred? Did you attempt to exact revenge? Did the attempt give you the satisfaction you anticipated? Who do you think suffered more: the alleged perpetrator or you? Would you change how you responded to the act if it were possible? Would your life be different if you had?