The Mulberry Tree

“What about Harper?”

Matt hesitated before answering. “He was one of America’s first victims of AIDS.”

“I see,” she said, then bent forward and looked at the photo again. “Sal Mineo. Remember him? That’s who he looks like.” She looked back at the photo. “If those kids at Welborn had known that about him, his life probably wouldn’t have been worth much.”

Matt handed her another photo. This one was of a smiling, laughing young couple. He was wearing a school letter sweater, and she had on a big circle skirt and a tight sweater with a fuzzy little collar. They looked like actors in a stage presentation of Grease.

“Your parents?”

“Yes,” Matt said softly. “That was them in the days before my grandfather went bankrupt, before he drove his car over a cliff and took my grandmother with him.”

The bitterness in Matt’s voice made Bailey shiver. “They look so much in love,” she said, holding the photo. “Look at her eyes! She’s looking at him as though she’d—” She broke off.

“As though she’d follow him anywhere?” Matt asked, his voice sarcastic. “She did follow him. But years later he left town and never came back. He left the woman who loved him more than life with two young children to support, and much too proud to ask her parents for help.”

“How did your family survive?”

Matt leaned back against the sofa, and for a moment he didn’t speak. “I remember a childhood of work,” he said softly. “That’s all there seemed to be. My mother ran the local grocery store for a tightfisted old bastard, and she left us in the care of a slovenly old woman who watched soaps on TV and ignored my brother and me.”

Matt took a breath to calm himself. “I did my best to see that my little brother was fed and kept safe. I was a big kid, so I started mowing lawns for money when I was nine. On the day my father walked out on us, I was transformed from a child into a man. He took his high school medals, wrote a note to his wife, then left.”

When Matt looked at Bailey, his eyes were black with anger. “You know what the note said?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “ ‘Forgive me.’ That’s all he wrote. Just two words.”

“But you didn’t forgive him, did you?”

“No. When a man makes a bargain, he stands by it.”

“As you did with Cassandra?”

“Right. Until her actions let me out, I stayed. I’d made the vows, and I meant them.”

“Your mother never contacted her parents?”

“No. Too much pride.” He smiled. “And don’t look at me like that. I know that I inherited her pride. Patsy’s told me often enough. But my mom wouldn’t take money from her parents, and she never took any money from me. I worked all through school, every minute I could, and I saved every penny of it. My mother said she wanted me to go to college. She said that school was the only way that I wouldn’t end up like her, and saying that was the closest she ever came to complaining.”

“I wish I could have met her,” Bailey said. “But if I had been in the same situation, I would have complained, and I would have gone to my father on my knees and begged him for help.”

Matt looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Oh? Now why don’t I think that’s true? Why do I have the impression that maybe, possibly, you have more pride than my mother and me put together?”

Bailey looked away. He saw too much. “Did your mother see you graduate from college?”

“No. She died the year Rick was a senior in high school, and six months later he married Patsy. Rick said he wasn’t like me, that he didn’t have my drive, and he couldn’t bear to live alone. He said Patsy would give him someone to live for. He was smarter than I was. He knew what was good for him, and he went after it. He’s been very happy with Pat and the kids.”

“But not you. You haven’t been happy.”

“No, not me. I’ve always felt that something was missing from my life, that there was a big empty place inside me.”

“Did you ever find out where your father went, or why?”

“A few years ago, I received a package. A woman who owned a boardinghouse in Baltimore sent it, and she wrote that her boarder said that if he died, she was to mail me the package.”

“Let me guess. It was from your father.”

“Yes. All his high school medals, the ones he’d taken with him, were inside. There was no note, nothing but the medals. At the time I was too involved in my own life to do anything more than mutter, ‘The bastard,’ and toss the whole box into the top of the closet. But later, during the divorce, when everything was being separated, I found the box and dropped it into my suitcase.”

“A suitcase that you’d packed for going home to Calburn.”

“Yes. I think it was in my mind that I needed to figure out where to go from here, and Calburn, home, was where I needed to figure it out.”