Twisted Creek

Chapter 2

Twenty-four hours later, after driving all day and spending the night in a Motel 6, I was ready to meet the lawyer and inherit my property. I held my disposable coffee cup in one hand as I drove toward the offices of Garrison D. Walker, Attorney-at-Law.

“Maybe you knew Uncle Jefferson, Nana? Maybe he was a friend of your family from way back?” We’d played this game for a hundred miles with no luck.

Nana shook her head. She’d been a tenant farmer’s wife all her married life, and once my grandfather died she’d lived with me. She could count the number of people she’d called friend on her fingers. And as for Nana having a rich, secret lover hidden away somewhere, that was about as likely as magnolias in Alaska.

“I knew a Jeff once, but he went by the name of Red ’cause he had hair as red as an apple,” she mumbled around a donut. “He took me to a dance that summer I spent time in Texas. My mom sent me to stay with my brother Frank’s wife, who was expecting. She’d taken a summer house for one week when Dallas was burning up ’cause being big pregnant is hot on a body even in the winter. She drove up to Oklahoma and picked me up, then we wandered around the most nothing land until we found the place she’d rented.”

Nana smiled as the wind tickled through her short gray hair. “All the boys had been called up after Pearl Harbor. My mom wanted me to stay with Mary until school started. She weren’t but a year older than me.”

I remembered the story and didn’t want to hear the retelling of how Frank was killed in the war and his wife died in childbirth. “Tell me about this Red you met,” I encouraged.

Nana licked donut icing off her fingers. “He was real nice. We talked almost all night, every night that week. He was turning eighteen in the fall and couldn’t wait to join up.”

“Why didn’t you marry him?” I winked at her.

She laughed. “I was already engaged to your grandpa. My folks had promised we could marry as soon as I finished my eleventh year of school. They said your grandpa was solid on account of him being older than me and already a farmer.” She popped another donut and turned to look out her side window. “Some folks didn’t think so, but those men who stayed to farm did their part in the war, too.”

I frowned. If Nana didn’t have anyone in her past, it had to be me. But who?

I’d had my share of boyfriends in college, but most had wanted to borrow money from me, not keep in touch because they planned to name me in a will. Once I moved back home, I hadn’t known a single man in the county I wanted to have a cup of coffee with, much less get involved with romantically. When the few single guys my age did come around, they lost all interest as soon as they discovered Nana was part of the package.

Glancing at Nana, I smiled. She’d been a real help and didn’t even know it. A man who couldn’t love Nana, too, wasn’t worth having.

Nana refolded the map she’d been trying to get back in its original shape since Oklahoma City. She stuck it over the visor where I’d put the lawyer’s letter. Nana had read it aloud so many times during the trip, we could quote almost every line. She hummed as we passed through the streets of Lubbock.

This morning, we’d had our motel showers and hot coffee. It was time to meet with Garrison D. Walker and solve the mystery. I tried not to hope for anything. If the inheritance was nothing, we’d already had an adventure, and I could look for a job here as easy as I could have in Memphis.

I turned off of Avenue Q onto a tree-lined street named Broadway. Finding the lawyer had been no problem, thanks to the directions he’d left on the back of his letter. When I called to tell him we were coming, he sounded excited. Maybe he was glad to be rid of his responsibility with the will.

A very proper secretary welcomed us. She offered us a seat and disappeared through one of the mahogany doors behind her desk.

“Don’t say anything about not knowing Jefferson Platt,” I whispered to Nana, who was busy pulling the tag off the outfit I’d bought her at a Wal-Mart last night. I thought if I was going to inherit something we should look like we didn’t really need whatever it was. We’d found dresses for both of us for under a hundred dollars. Nana’s was navy, made to look like a suit with a white collar. Mine, a shift that buttoned down the front, was the pale blue of a summer day. Like everything I bought, it seemed a few inches too long, but we hadn’t had time to hem it.

“I won’t say a word,” Nana mumbled. “It’s not right to talk about the dead, dear.” She’d managed to pull the tag off, but the plastic string still dangled from her sleeve.

I think the world of my nana, but she is a woman far more comfortable in a housecoat than a suit. “All dressed up” to her meant taking off her apron. She helped me through those first two years of college by cooking at the elementary school a mile down from the farm my grandfather worked. She’d walked the distance every morning and cooked, then returned home to the full day’s work of a farmer’s wife without one word of complaint.

I covered her hand with mine, wishing for the millionth time that I could make things better for her. When you’ve only got one person who loves you, you have to wish extra hard.

“Miss Allison Daniels?” a man of about fifty asked as he neared.

I stood and shook his hand. “My friends call me Allie,” I said. “And this is my grandmother, Edna Daniels.”

“Garrison D. Walker, at your service.”

The lawyer smiled and waited for her to offer her hand. But Nana wasn’t about to let him see her plastic string, and he was too much a Southern gentlemen to offer his hand first to a lady.

Walker turned back to me. “We’ve had a hell of a time finding you, Miss Daniels.”

“I wasn’t aware I was lost.” I smiled, thinking Garrison Walker had too many teeth. “I didn’t know Uncle Jefferson was dead.” I knew I should be concentrating, but the man made me nervous. His grin looked like it belonged on a mouth one size larger.

“Your mother didn’t tell you Jefferson died?” Walker asked as he stopped grinning-thank goodness. “We sent her a registered letter the day of his graveside service. He’d listed her phone number and address as the only person to be notified.” Walker paused as if expecting me to fill in a blank. When I didn’t, he added, “Quite frankly, I was surprised when Mr. Platt named you his only heir. I told your mother to let you know of his passing since we had no address on you.”

“Maybe my mother had trouble reaching me. She’s out of the country a great deal,” I managed to mumble as I remembered the string of men who always stood beside her in pictures. She’d send us snapshots from all over the world with little notes on the back like, “Walter and I in Rome,” or “Me and Charles-Paris.” I’d decided years ago that in her odd way she thought she was sharing with us by sending photos. No gifts or calls, just pictures of her and strangers.

“How long ago did he die?” I’d made a point that every time we moved I called and left a message on my mother’s machine. She could have found me, but I didn’t feel like going into family problems with Garrison Walker.

“Almost two months.” Walker lowered his head and sighed. “He had a long life though, dying at the age of eighty-three.”

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Walker was pretending to care. But the information was helpful. His age eliminated any possibility of Jefferson being my father, unless he played football in high school during his fifties.

Walker continued, “Your mother said to send all information to her, and she’d forward it to you, but I’ve been in family law long enough to know to deal directly with the source. Since you are not a minor, I had to locate you.”

Nana found her voice. “Did you hire a P.I. to find Allie?” She loved detective shows. She even told me once that she’d leave my grandpa if McGyver ever came by the farm.

Walker smiled as if talking to a child. “No. When I realized weeks had passed, I went online. I had your legal name and county in which you were born. Within fifteen minutes I’d located your current place of employment.”

“Former employment,” I corrected without explanation. The man could probably piece together my whole life from what he’d learned on the Internet. Places of employment, changes in addresses. Going-nowhere jobs.

To my surprise, Walker looked embarrassed. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you standing. If you’ll step into my office, I’ll need you to sign a few papers, and then the keys are yours. I’m afraid the only money he left was to cover our fees and for your traveling expenses.”

He paused as if expecting me to question him.

I shrugged. I hadn’t expected anything, so Walker’s news wasn’t disappointing. The idea that I had the keys to something I owned, other than my van, was a foreign concept to me.

The lawyer glanced around the empty waiting area as if wishing for clients to appear. “Would you like me to drive you out? I could work it into my schedule.”

“No thanks. I’ve got a map.” Something in the way Walker stared at me gave me the creeps. Mixed signals were bouncing off him. I found myself thinking a little less of Uncle Jefferson for picking him to handle the will. If it’s possible to think less of someone you don’t know.

Walking to the van a few minutes later, I tried to forget about the lawyer. I had the keys. I could leave his problems in his office. They weren’t in my bag of worries.

“Did you notice?” Nana whispered. “That lawyer had wobble eyes.”

Laughing, I had to ask, “What are wobble eyes?” Nana thought she could tell anything from a person’s eyes and most of the time she was right. She told me once that she had Gypsy blood on her mother’s side and Gypsies are all born with a gift for something.

“The lawyer’s eyes wobbled between caring and disliking, maybe even hating. I’ve seen it before a few times in salesmen who used to come around. They’d do their talking, swearing they had one hand on the Bible, but the other would be trying to get into your pocket.” She sat back and crossed her arms. “I don’t like him.”

And that was it, I knew. Nana wouldn’t be changing her mind. “Well,” I consoled, “we’ll probably never see him again.” Cross my heart, I almost added out loud. “We got the keys.”

We drove out of Lubbock, Texas, giggling. Keys! I had keys to my very own place. Some man I never knew, in a place where I’d never been, had left me a house I never even knew existed. Maybe he got my name mixed up with someone else. Maybe he met my mother and figured I was overdue for a break. Maybe he picked me out of the phone book.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. If the place was run down and in need of paint, we could fix it up, and what was left of the five thousand would keep us going until I found a job. I had half a degree and a ton of experience doing everything from retail to bookkeeping. I’d find something to keep food on the table. After all, we already had a roof.

We changed into our comfortable clothes at a truck stop on the edge of town. I found a county map plastered to the wall and studied it as I braided my hair. A pinpoint dot marked the forgotten lake community where my place was located. The middle of nowhere, I thought.

When I got back to the van, Nana was staring out at the dry, flat land with an acre of topsoil blowing across our hood. She whispered, “You sure there’s a lake in this country?”

“The man inside said it was about thirty miles from here in a little canyon. He said he thinks it’s an old private community made up of mostly rich folks who want to get out of the city.”

Nana stared at the skyline of Lubbock. “I can see why,” she said. “I was through here a few times when I was young. Nice people, as I remember, but you’d have to have roots growing out of your toes to want to live in this wind.”

Before I could leave the city limits, Nana saw a dollar store and yelled, “Stop.”

I pulled into the parking lot without argument. I had long ago given up trying to understand her fascination with stores where everything cost a buck, but twenty-seven dollars lighter we were back in the car with enough snacks to last a week. Nana still had pioneer blood in her. She believed that wherever we traveled, there might not be food and she needed to be prepared.

Almost an hour later, after two wrong turns, we pulled past the broken-down main entrance to Twisted Creek Community. The gate had been propped up by the side of the road so long ago that morning glory vines almost covered it. From the entrance, the road wound down into a canyon, twisting between brown sagebrush and foot-high spikes of faded buffalo grass.

“Walker said the road makes a circle, so it really doesn’t matter much which way we turn at the gate.” I looked for any sign of life. The place reminded me of a forgotten movie set left to decay in the sun and wind. Everything in the canyon seemed to have turned brown with the fall. The monochromatic landscape might have seemed dull to most people, but I found it a grand study in hues. The wonder of a world painted in browns reminded me of the Civil War photographs by George S. Cook. Dark, haunting, beautiful.

Nana watched as views of the water flashed between the weeds. “Look. I see the creek.”

I slowed, noticing a winding, muddy stream of water with reddish-brown banks on either side. At the base of the canyon, the creek pooled into a lake.

“I remember living near a creek when I was a kid.” Nana rolled down her window. “We used to carry our laundry down beside it every Monday morning. My momma would have my two brothers build a fire while my sister and I filled the wash pot with water and lye soap so strong I could smell it in my nose until Wednesday. Then, while we all played in the stream, she’d wash the clothes and hang them on branches to dry.”

I looked for a mailbox with 6112 on it as I asked the same question I’d asked every time I heard this story. “Why didn’t your mother make all you kids help?”

Nana smiled and repeated what she always said. “Your grandmother liked to do laundry.”

I didn’t correct her that the story was about my great-grandmother. I just nodded, knowing she’d confirmed that craziness runs in the women of my family. The men, it appears, just run, for not one of Nana’s stories ever mentioned her father.

My grandfather, Nana’s Henry, had stayed around. If you can call staying around working from dawn till dusk. Every night he’d stomp in and fall asleep as soon as he ate supper. Same routine every day, seven days a week, until a heart attack took him in the middle of a half-plowed field. He would have hated that.

It seemed strange, but the only memory I have of Henry is him in his recliner with his eyes closed. Maybe that’s why he looked so natural at the funeral. Nana always said he was a good man, but I remembered no good or bad about the man. Except maybe how he liked order in his world. He wanted the same seven meals served at the same time and on the same night of the week. Growing up I always knew what day it was by the smell of supper. I never saw him hit Nana, or kiss her. Their life was vanilla.

“I’m glad we had those days by the creek,” Nana said, interrupting my thoughts. Her short gray hair blew in the wind. “With Frank and Charlie dying in the war, they didn’t have much time for fun in this life. We used to laugh so hard when we swam that Momma would make us get out and rest. There’s no better sleeping than lying in damp clothes on a hot day by the creek. I’d feel so relaxed and lazy I wouldn’t even bother to swat at flies buzzing by.”

Nana stretched as if feeling her memory before continuing, “We were always careful though with Poor Flo. I thought she’d grow out of being frail, but she didn’t even live long enough to marry.” Nana leaned back in her seat. “She had the flu back when she was little, and it left scars on her heart.”

I felt sorry for Poor Flo even though I never met her. She’d been dead more than sixty years, and Nana still mourned her. Nana told me once that some memories stick to your soul. I think Flo was like that with my grandmother.

As we moved around the circle of homes and barns huddled close to the water, I noticed how every house looked overgrown with weeds, and all were in need of paint. This may have been where the rich folks lived fifty years ago, but now the neighborhood had fallen on hard times. I saw a few gardens, a few fishing boats, a few signs of life.

We passed a junkyard of broken-down boats and old rusty butane tanks with worthless cars parked in between. The mess made me think of those wild salads at fancy restaurants where it looked like they mowed the alley and washed it up to serve.

Nana patted my knee three times as she always did. Three pats for three words she used to say.

She didn’t say the words now, she didn’t have to.

“I know,” I said as the van rattled across a bridge. “I love you, too.”