James Reese sat on the edge of his bed, a hinged double picture frame in his hand. One side held his wedding picture, the other a photo of him and his wife at their 60th wedding anniversary last year. The images blurred as tears filled his eyes. Nearly a year past her death and he still did not know how to go on without her. What was a year compared to a lifetime spent side by side?
He set the frame down on the bedside table and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief he kept in his back pocket. He had precious little time left to spend in their home. He needed to collect the things he wasn’t willing to part with before his children came and took charge of the packing.
He planted his hands on the bedside table and pushed himself up with effort, retrieved a box from the corner, and placed it on the bed. He opened the top drawer of the bedside table and started sorting its contents. Her pills, mints and hair ties went into the trash. Jewelry was set aside for his daughter to go through, none of it worth much. There was a small wooden box her father had given to her as a child. He couldn’t remember the significance of it but she kept it close always. It served no purpose and it was sentimental to her, not him, but it felt wrong to dispose of it. He laid it in the box to take with him.
One of her blue hair ribbons was sticking out of the back wall of the drawer. He wondered how it could have gotten stuck there. He tugged at it, the back wall fell forward. It revealed a hidden compartment that held a pile of envelopes wrapped in the blue ribbon. The paper was increasingly yellowed with age as it got closer to the bottom, the ribbon dirty and creased. Red and blue stripes around the edges identified them as Airmail envelopes, from overseas. James didn’t recognize the envelopes or the handwriting on them. He couldn’t think of anyone they knew overseas who would write so regularly. His heart sank at the thought of what they might contain.
He reached in to remove them as though they might strike out like a snake and bite him. They all had the same return address in France and each was postmarked in April in consecutive years going back to the sixties and ended several years ago, forty-four envelopes, forty-four years.
He heard the front door open and put the envelopes in the box, placing the wooden box on top. He moved on to the next drawer.
“Dad?” his daughter called.
“In here,” he replied. He busied himself with the magazines and paperbacks in the second drawer trying to compose himself before she came in the room.
“Good news?” she asked.
“Not for me.”
Susanne saw a letter on the bed, picked it up and scanned it.
“Dad, this is great news. You’re in. Oh, I’m so relieved,” she said plopping down on the bed. “You’ve been accepted into the new facility at the Whitworth estate. Can you believe it?”
“No, I hardly can, and I’m not sure how I feel about it, Susanne.”
“Well, you should feel happy about it. It’s supposed to be a much nicer facility than Meadow Villas and it’s free.”
“How does that work, I wonder?”
“I’m not sure. They work something out with the government or something. Who cares? You’re going to be living in Sebastian Whitworth’s mansion. You are and he isn’t. It’s incredible.”
“I prefer my own home, thank you very much, our family home, if you recall.”
“Let’s not do this ok.? You know that’s not an option. What do you think happened to him?”
“Who?”
“Sebastian Whitworth! ‘Jack’s son,’ no one’s seen him in over a year,” Susanne said.
Susanne, like too many people in James’ opinion, was fascinated by the Whitworth family history. Jack Whitworth was supposedly a real life American dream. Born in poverty, they say he started working when he was eleven. He worked his way through school and up the corporate ladder in a hurry becoming the richest and most famous man anyone in Barrettville has seen up close. He and his wife had one son, Sebastian Jackson Whitworth, “Jack’s son” as he was known. James bristled at the mention of him. He could not comprehend why everyone was so damn obsessed with what became of that man.
Jack was a brilliant businessman. His son was a louse. James had once read that Jack had funded a local women’s center, a black women’s center in the nineteen seventies no less. These things just did not happen at that time, and out of his own pocket. That’s the difference that working for what you have does. His no good son was handed everything on a silver platter. If Jack had a major fault it was in giving his son too much. Every father wants to do the best he can for his family but children need to learn the value of things, the value of life.
James and his wife, Margaret, bickered over whether to use Sebastian as a financial advisor. A financial advisor, a man like that, James thought. He was against it, but Margaret had other plans. She wanted that big payoff that would give them the money to get not just comfortably by, but allow them to travel, dine out more, “put a little spark in our golden years” she’d said. She went to Sebastian and invested everything, their pension, savings, 401K. She signed James’ name on the dotted line as she had been doing for decades in handling the household affairs. That Jack’s son would allow that tells you right there what kind of man he was.
“She had to go to him. She couldn’t trust me. I trusted her completely.”
“Dad, you’re confusing trust with obedience again.”
“Don’t start that feminism with me, Susanne. This isn’t about men and women. It’s about sense and recklessness.”
When Margaret learned that she had lost everything she was terrified, of James’ reaction, of what would happen to them, of what their children would say. She took the remaining cash in her wallet down to a nearby pub for a drink or two to calm her nerves before facing James. Four martinis later she couldn’t put it off any longer. She paid her tab, got in her car and made it three-quarters of a mile before running a red light smashing into a motorcycle then spinning into a tree. She and the cyclist were rushed to the hospital where she was pronounced dead and the cyclist learned he would never walk again.
“Who cares where goddamned Sebastian Whitworth is? Rotting in hell, I hope,” James yelled tossing a pile of magazines into the trash and yanking open the bottom drawer.
“Everybody cares. It’s like he disappeared into thin air.” She laid down across the bed on her belly and pulled one of the magazines out of the trash.
“Along with all of my money.”
“Along with a lot of people’s money but, according to the judge, the money was lost in the investments. He didn’t steal it. He just made poor business decisions and left all of us high and dry.” She paged through the magazine as they talked.
“More recklessness and what do you mean, ‘us’?”
She stopped turning pages and looked up at him. James looked down at her and grunted.
“It’s already a chore to clear out this house. If I’m too sentimental about half of it and you pull the other half out of the trash, it’s going to take an awfully long time to get done,” he said.
She closed the magazine and tossed it back in the can.
“Do you want my help or not?” she said getting up from the bed.
“No, I’m not ready. There’s things I need to go through first.” He put a protective arm across the top of the box.
“Well, you’re right about one thing, dad. We’re short on time. I’ll leave you to it but by next weekend we’re going to have to start making serious headway on packing and clearing the house.”
“Yes, yes, so you’ve mentioned. I am aware. I was already working on it when you came in and interrupted me.”
“Fine, I’ll leave you to it. For the record though, I think he’s going to turn up and no one’s going to believe where he’s been.”
“Who?” he asked getting angry.
“Sebastian Whitworth! Haven’t you been listening? They’re going to find him where you’d least expect. That’s my prediction.” She hugged him tight and handed him the letter of acceptance from the Golden Years Manor. “This is such great news. I’m really happy for you,” she said kissing his forehead. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
James picked up the brochure for the Golden Years Manor that came with the welcome letter. The blue ribbon holding all those envelopes caught his eye. Probably just some notes from her cousin, he told himself. Wasn’t his birthday in April? She had some family there, not that he’d ever known they were in touch. He glanced over the glossy page of the brochure then tossed it into the trash before moving on to the other bedside table.
Beth Fisher 