Glory her coat, then shrugged into her own. “Come on,” she said, pushing her feet into transparent plastic boots. “I’ll show you the house Harold and I are going to live in.”
The snow fell faster as the two women walked along the familiar sidewalk. Now and then, Delphine paused to wave at a store clerk or a passing motorist.
They rounded a corner and entered an attractive development. The houses had turrets and gable windows, though they were modern, and the yards were nicely landscaped.
Glory remembered playing in this part of town as a child. There had been no development then, just cracked sidewalks that meandered off into the deep grass. The place had fascinated her, and she’d imagined ghost houses lining the walks, until Dylan had spoiled everything by telling her there had been Quonset huts there during World War II to accommodate workers at the town smelter.
Delphine stopped to gaze fondly at a charming little mock colonial with a snow-dusted rhododendron bush growing in the yard. The house itself was white, the shutters dark blue. There were flower boxes under all the windows.
Glory’s eyes widened with pleasure. This was the kind of house her mother had always dreamed of having. “This is it?” she asked, quite unnecessarily.
Proudly Delphine nodded. “Harold and I signed the papers on Friday. It’s all ours.”
Impulsively, Glory hugged her mother. “You’ve come a long way, baby!” she said, her eyes brimming with happy tears.
Both of them stood still in the falling snow, remembering other days, when even in their wildest dreams neither of them would have dared to fantasize about owning a house such as this one.
“Are you going to keep the diner?” Glory asked, linking her arm with Delphine’s as they walked back toward the center of town.
Delphine’s answer came as no surprise. After all, she’d worked and scrimped and sacrificed to buy the place from her former employers. “Of course I am. I wouldn’t know what to do if I couldn’t go down there and make coffee for my customers.”
With a chuckle, Glory wrapped her arm around her mother’s straight little shoulders. “I imagine they’d all gather in your kitchen at home, they’re so used to telling you their troubles over a steaming cup.”
Back at the apartment, Delphine immediately excused herself, saying she had to “gussy up” for the Stewart-Grant festival at the Rialto.
“Sure you don’t want to come along?” she queried, peering around the bathroom door, her red hair falling around her face in curls. “Harold and I would be glad to have you.”
Glory shook her head, pausing in her unpacking. “I feel as though parts of me have been scattered in every direction, Mama. I need time to gather myself back together. I’ll get something light for supper, then read or watch TV.”
Delphine raised titian eyebrows. “You’re getting boring in your old age, kid,” she said. “Just see that you don’t eat over at Maggie’s. Last week one of the telephone linemen told me he got a piece of cream pie there that had dust on top of it.”
“I wouldn’t think of patronizing your archrival, Mama,” Glory replied, grinning. “Even though I do think serving pie with dust on it requires a certain admirable panache.”
Delphine dismissed her daughter with a wave and disappeared behind the bathroom door.
As it happened, Glory bought spaghetti salad in the deli at the supermarket and ate it while watching the evening news on the little TV with the foil antenna. Downstairs in the diner, the dinner hour was in full swing, and the floor vibrated with the blare of the jukebox.
Glory smiled and settled back on the couch that would be her bed for the next several weeks, content.
She was home.
After the news was over, however, the reruns of defunct sitcoms started. Glory flipped off the TV and got out her mother’s photo albums. As always, they were tucked carefully away in the record compartment of the console stereo, along with recordings by Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley.
Delphine probably hadn’t looked at the family pictures in years, but Glory loved to pore over them.
Still, she had to brace herself to open the first album—she was sitting cross-legged on the couch, the huge, cheaply bound book in her lap—because she knew there would be pictures of Dylan.
He smiled back at her from beside a tall man wearing a slouch hat. Glory knew the man’s name had been Tom, and that he’d been mean when he drank. He’d also been her father, but she didn’t remember him.
The little boy leaning against his leg, with tousled brown hair and gaps in his grin, was another matter. Gently, with just the tip of one finger, Glory touched her brother’s young face.
“When am I going to get over missing you, Bozo?” she asked, in a choked voice, using the nickname that had never failed to bug him.
Glory stared at Dylan for a few more moments, then turned the page. There she made her first photographic appearance—she was two months old, being bathed in a roasting pan on a cheap tabletop, and her grin was downright drunken.
She smiled and sighed. “The body of a future cheerleader. Remarkable.”
Her journey through the past continued until she’d viewed all the Christmases and Halloweens, all the birthdays and first days of school. In a way, it eased the Dylan-shaped ache in her heart.
When she came to the prom pictures of herself and Jesse, taken in this very living room with Delphine’s Kodak Instamatic, she smiled again.
Jesse was handsome in his well-fitting suit, while she stood proudly beside him in the froth of pink chiffon Delphine had sewn for her. The dress had a white sash, and she could still feel the gossamer touch of it against her body. Perched prominently above her right breast was Jesse’s corsage, an orchid in the palest rose.
She touched the flat, trim stomach of the beaming blond girl in the picture. Inside, although Glory hadn’t known it yet, Jesse’s baby was already growing.
Glory closed the album gently and set it aside before she could start wondering who had adopted that beautiful little baby girl, and whether or not she was happy.
The next collection of pictures was older. It showed Delphine growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and there were photographs of a collage of aunts, uncles and cousins, too.
Glory reflected as she turned the pages that it must have been hard for Delphine after she left another abusive husband. Her family had understood the first time, but they couldn’t forgive a second mistake. And after Delphine fled to Oregon with her two children, she was virtually disowned.
Saddened, Glory turned a page. The proud, aristocratic young face of her Irish great-grandmother gazed out of the portrait, chin at an obstinate angle. Of all the photographs Delphine had kept, this image of Bridget McVerdy was her favorite.
In 1892, or thereabouts, Bridget had come to America to look for work and a husband. She’d been employed as a lowly housemaid, but she’d had enough pride in her identity to pose for this picture and pay for it out of nominal wages, and eventually she’d married and had children.
The
