Did You Ever Have A Family

Cissy

I said I’d marry them and I did. I’d done it twice before: once for my nephew and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, and the other time for a couple my sister Pam sold a house to in Ocean Shores. Rebecca and Kelly had been together a long time, but now that it was legal in the eyes of the governor, they wanted the piece of paper. Fine with me.

Compared to some weddings I’ve seen, Rebecca and Kelly’s was small. Just the two of them; Will’s family: Dale, Mimi, Pru, and Mike; Kelly’s brothers and nephews and a few cousins. June was there, too. She came with Lydia, who showed up a month before. She landed in Seattle and took a bus to Aberdeen and hired a taxi to take her from there. When I saw Kelly walking a busty, dark-haired woman rolling a carry-on suitcase behind her toward Room 6, I knew right away who she was. June didn’t tell me much about Luke’s mother, just that she’d had a rough road with men, including her son. She described her once as a small-town Elizabeth Taylor, which is exactly what the woman heading toward Room 6 looked like. I stayed away from June’s room for a couple days. Eventually, I came around to clean and bring a thermos of split pea, which is the only thing she eats besides those bags of peanuts she gets down at the gas station.

When Ben died, I went to my sister’s kitchen and stayed there for months. I roasted everything I could find at Swanson’s Grocery — hams, chickens, turkeys, pork roasts, potatoes — you name it. I baked dinner rolls and popovers and ate my way through cakes and pies and cookies I’d bake in the morning and eat at night after dinner. When my clothes started to pinch and I couldn’t button my jeans anymore, I asked Ellie Hillworth for a job at the Moonstone. She and Bud were well into their seventies by then and had been trying to sell the place, so another hand on deck was welcome. Cleaning rooms and running trash to the Dumpster got me out of the kitchen, at least between the hours of nine and three, and after a while I settled into making pots of soup on the weekends and now and again a batch of orange drop cookies. That’s how it’s been for years.

Not long after June showed up at the Moonstone, half-dead and ready to go all the way, I brought her a thermos of squash soup. Never asked if I could. Just left it on the dresser in her room with a spoon and a folded paper towel for a napkin. She didn’t touch it. She didn’t touch the split pea I left a few days later either. But I kept on leaving the thermos, and after a while I could tell a little bit was missing when I’d pick it up the next morning. It never came back empty, but I took what was gone as a sign; that even if she didn’t know it herself, she was choosing to live.

Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it’s to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won’t see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to let him help clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don’t think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.

Some of the old-timers around here got worked up when Kelly and Rebecca came in and cleaned up the Moonstone. Even my sister Pam, who sold the place to them, wrinkled her nose. But like most things, what seemed important and wrong on one day could barely be remembered the next. Probably, there will always be wrinkled noses, folks who make jokes about the Moonstone dykes or the little boy on the rez who likes to wear his mom’s earrings, or me, the half-breed, bastard bitch who lives with her sisters. It stops when we die and goes on for those we leave behind. All we can do is play our parts and keep each other company.

June and Lydia will stay here for as long as they need to. I will bring them soup and watch them come back to life, and at night I will lie in the room I grew up in and listen to my sisters open and close doors, flush toilets, and climb the stairs. In the morning I will hear their voices in the kitchen and smell the brewing coffee before I open my eyes.

Rebecca and Kelly will wear the rings I watched them put on their fingers when they said their vows. And together they will get old. The Landises will come back every year. I will make up their rooms and bring them cookies for as long as I can, and when I can’t anymore, they will still come, with children and grandchildren, girlfriends and boyfriends and spouses. They will knock on our door and I will be there, crooked and old, and one day they will knock and I will be gone. And every time they come, they will tell those who don’t know the story of the young man who was a boy here, who went away and came home and went away, who cleaned rooms and carved a canoe and on its prow painted the faces of a family. And the stories will change and the canoe will become a headboard and the family will be mermaids and the rooms will be mansions. And no one will remember us, who we were or what happened here. Sand will blow across Pacific Avenue and against the windows of the Moonstone, and new people will arrive and walk down the beach to the great ocean. They will be in love, or they will be lost, and they will have no words. And the waves will sound to them as they did to us the first time we heard them.