And All Is Made Whole Once Again: A Remarkable Love Story

By Katherine Alley

Im pregnant. The words hang suspended, and Annette Anderson feels like all the air is suddenly gone. Annette and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Issie, are about to embark on a compelling journey together through a controversial choice that will tear at the fabric of their relationship, expose Annettes childhood secrets and feelings of inadequacy as a mother, and help both realize that love has the capability to heal even the deepest wounds.

Everyone thinks Annette is taking a day off from work to relax and have fun, when in reality she is accompanying Issie to an appointment that will change their lives and their relationship. As both women navigate a challenging path of not just one but many complex decisions, traumatic memories rise to the surface; and Annette realizes she must reconcile her own past experiences in order to help Issie move forward through her own pain.

Life is about choicesand many choices have no clear answers. And All Is Made Whole Once Again is a poignant love story that illuminates the human experience, an emotional test, and the inner-strength of two women who mange to transform an all too common heartbreak into love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450258517

Katherine Alley

Katherine Alley is an artist and professional living in a small town in Western Washington with her beloved John and their two cats.

Book preview

1

MILK. I’VE GOT TO STOP AND GET MILK. If we’re not out, we soon will be. I don’t want to. The trip is long and dark and wet, and another stop will just make it longer and darker and wetter. But if I don’t, I’ll just have to go out again later.

The turn signal makes an intermittent shiny yellow spot on the wet road in front of the car, the clicking too loud in my head. Cars coming from the four-way stop in front of me space themselves as evenly as if some car-making machine is rolling them off an assembly line, and I wait for a hole to slip through into the parking lot of the last mini-mart before the long climb up the hill to home.

Once I’m committed to entering the store, it gets a little easier; the anticipation, as usual, is worse than the act. My black rain coat, car-coat length—anything longer makes me look even shorter—is damp and sticks to itself, and I have to stop under the awning outside the door and adjust it so it doesn’t get all turned around and hide my pockets. I’m going to need one of those pockets in a minute, the one with the five dollars in it, and it would be very uncomfortable not to be able to find it when it becomes my turn to pay. All the other wet, damp commuters behind me with their six packs and gallon jugs would start to press forward—she’s taking too long; she’s lost her pocket—and I can almost feel the pressure, them pressing their worry on my back, their concern that I’ll add time to their trip home. And I don’t want to add to anyone’s long trip home.

The milk is in the back east corner. I don’t have to think about it; I’ve been here before. Grabbing the first jug, I head up to the cashier to pay for it. The line isn’t too long, just three or four people in front of me, and it moves quickly. I pay the checker, not exchanging more than hello and money. I know the girls who work in the morning, and we chat, but not the night staff. I’m too tired to get to know them.

The rain feels wetter on the return to the car, but at least it’s already warmed up. Turning the engine over, I realize that this is the last leg; eight more miles and I’m home on Friday, home for two whole days, and my heart lightens enough to finish this trip. Just a little farther now.

Pulling the front door shut with my foot, my hands occupied with my purse and my laptop and the milk, I feel the warmth provided by the forced-air furnace. It’s a good furnace; it’s good to be warm. Hot water, warm air, conveniences comfort me. Those instant conveniences have reduced our patience and reinforced our expectation of rapid comfort, have softened us, but at this exact moment I am not concerned with the social implications of modern life; I am simply grateful.

Issie doesn’t look up from her book as I enter. I get a sideways glance from Ella; she peeks at me from the corner of her eye.

Hello, I say from the entry room, which is actually part of the main living area and not a room at all. My children go on with their reading and their computing, not really acknowledging my arrival, not honoring that I have returned from a long and weary struggle to make the money to buy the milk so that they can drink the milk and sit in the warm air of the forced-air furnace and pay little attention to my arrival. What I really want is for them to light up when they see me, to show that they are happy to see me, show me that I matter to them. I don’t really need them to make the connection that my life is dedicated to their survival; that would be a bit much to ask, don’t you think? But their indifference really blows my idea of what should happen, what I want to happen, what I expect.

Hello? I say dramatically and a bit too loud.

Hi, Mom, Issie says from the oversized, overstuffed leather chair ten feet in front of me. Ella grunts from the bar that separates the kitchen from the dining room.

Home.

Home is where my children are, where my heart is, and where the forced-air furnace blows.

2

WHERE’S BRAD?

He’s upstairs playing Halo on his computer.

Issie’s boyfriend has lived with us a few months. She’s seventeen (an old seventeen); he’s twenty-one (a young twenty-one). He’s easy to live with—easier than Isabel. He’s quiet, polite, and neat and doesn’t ask to borrow money. He has a job that he goes to every day.

Issie’s always been a one-guy girl, never dated a bunch of guys, and Brad’s been her guy for over a year. They met over the Internet, friends of friends. Brad lived in the eastern part of the state of Washington. Washington is divided into two states, not by man but by nature. A mountain range runs north and south about a third of the way across the state, and east and west don’t even resemble each other. The west is temperate and wet. The west is all about water, and lush vegetation is the natural result. The east, now that part is about dry—desert, long rolling hills devoid of trees. You can see miles in every direction. Hot in the summer, bitter cold in the winter, eastern Washington is a substate of contrasts, where western Washington is a study in green sameness.

Brad and Isabel met in person a few times on prearranged chaperoned trips, her taking the bus to Kennewick, staying with Jim (another part of their group) and his family or with Craig and his. Sometimes Brad would come here with Jim and Craig and stay a few days. I don’t know when they fell in love—Iss didn’t share that part with me—but someplace, either here or there or over a phone line, they did.

Brad doesn’t have much in the way of immediate family; raised by his grandmother and a once-in-a-while mom, he was on his own a couple years, staking out a small corner at friends’ houses, moving frequently. He worked in a test lab for a while making enough to get by, but he had no real reason to stay in the east, and when he and Issie fell in love, he had more than enough reason to come west.

Issie talked to me one night about him coming to live here. They had a plan. Isabel always has a plan; she was born with a plan.

Brad and Craig wanted to come over here, Mom.

Oh?

There are more jobs over here. And, well, eastern Washington is so rural. They want to move here and get jobs and an apartment. But they need a place to land. Craig is going to live with his girlfriend’s family. Mom, could Brad live with us for a bit, just while he finds a job?

I rolled this idea around in my head a moment and found I was pretty open to it. Issie’s pediatrician had given me some sage advice years ago that I’d adopted wholesale: Be the place where they feel safe, let the kids come to your house, let them be who they are there, and then you’ll always know where she is. His advice had struck me as so sensible, so simple, it was easy for me to adopt. Divorced for eight years, I only had me to consult on the decision.

When?

Oh, it’ll be a month or so before they come, Issie told me.

And just Brad here? Craig has a place to stay?

Oh, yeah, he’s staying with Jess. It’s all arranged. Her words were quiet, but her body was tensed and pushed, leaned toward me, and I could tell this was important; this was one that if I said no, I’d lose her. More hung in the balance than showed on the surface. It always does with her, but over the years I’ve learned to tell the deal breakers from the I wants—it isn’t hard to tell the difference if you listen, and I was listening, and I could hear.

He’ll contribute around the house, be part of the family?

Of course he will, Mom.

All right, he can come.

Issie’s face lit up. Thanks, Mom. We’ll do our part, and he really needs us to get started, and it won’t be for long.

Don’t worry about that, Iss. We have a lot, and we can share it. People are important, and we have room.

She went off to call, to send the good news, and I sat on a stool at the counter and the leading edge of the trailing thought wave broke in my mind; slight doubt and a couple stray questions almost formed, nebulous thoughts that sounded like Am I a good parent? What would other parents say? Is this in the parent handbook? Will I regret this?

There is one subject we didn’t need to speak of, one that challenges the imaginary parent handbook (of which I didn’t get a copy). They would sleep together. In my house.

I didn’t know if Issie was a virgin or not. We’d not talked of this, but Brad was not Isabel’s first boyfriend, and this subject is as old as the human race, and I had figured out a long time ago that I was not going to be the person who stopped that freight train, the natural phenomena called sex drive. I’d been preparing for this train for a long time, and now it had left the station and would arrive right on time, in a month.

They would have sex. In my house. And, while sometimes I felt I should, I could not find a way to make this wrong. The train was coming, whether it was this one from the east or another from the south or the north or just a bus coming down the street. And if I said No, this train does not exist, I’d lose her, because the train did exist, and she’d go to meet it, because she had to, because she is a human, and I’d lose her. Better to be the place where they feel safe, where they can be themselves, because then you know where they are. Thank you, Dr. Young.

There was another issue we didn’t need to discuss: birth control. Thank you again, Dr. Young.

At fifteen, Issie’s periods were causing her hell. Irregular. Difficult. Her all broken out with acne, aching with cramps, and just plain mean, off we went to consult the good doctor, and he recommended we put her on the pill. I entertained a little doubt—What does all this chemistry do to us in the long run? Should I get a second opinion? What would a good mother do?—but it only lasted a second. The thought of her out of pain and confusion was too attractive to resist.

I also sensed the built-in bonus, advantageous to me. When the time came, the time that at that time seemed so far away, when she heard the whistle of her train, we wouldn’t have to talk about birth control, and I wouldn’t have to trust her to go get it herself. It would be done. It would be easy.

When I had sensed my train coming, when my tracks had begun to hum, it had been easy to get birth control. I’d actually done it after the train had pulled into the station, but it had worked out; I didn’t get pregnant the first time I had sex.

Funny, though, how my easiness was so different than this easiness; mine consisted of not getting caught.

I was seventeen. I had a car and a part-time job, so it was easy to go to Planned Parenthood and pay for birth-control pills. The hard part was being sure they were well hidden, that my mother didn’t find them.

My mother and I had not had the talk; no birds or bees had flown into our life, and by the time I was seventeen, it didn’t look like they were going to, so telling her I needed birth control seemed a bit out of sequence. But then my mother and I were never in sequence, and we would have had to go all the way back to the beginning to get there. Mother didn’t seem to want to go back to the beginning and start talking; she didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong with our not-talking relationship. I did. I wanted to go back and start talking, but I didn’t know how.

And a small part of me goes back in time to remember when my mother let me know she’d seen my train a-coming, a-coming down the track. Though I’m cleaning up the dinner dishes, I’m not really in the kitchen in my home. My hands are in this kitchen—mechanically moving plates from the counter to the dishwasher—but the rest of me is a million miles and many years away. I’m back in my parent’s house, doing dishes that have long since been broken or given to the Salvation Army.

The hot water is good and warm on my hands, soapy and nice. For once, I’m not resisting the chore, just doing it. Humming and washing in my own world. My sister Ruth brings in the last of the glasses from the table and sets them on the counter and leaves. The kitchen is one of those hallway kitchens, a passage in which appliances and counters line opposing walls. The kitchen is located in an apartment way up off the ground, the fifth floor of a large building, part of a two-building complex on the shore of a small lake on the city line of north Seattle. My parents didn’t want to do yard work anymore, my mother not well enough and my dad gone too much. This was their answer—an apartment. Way up high off the ground, weeds and grass can’t get us up here.

I’ve got a Led Zeppelin song stuck in my head—not all of it, just a snatch of lyric playing over and over. It’s been a long time, been a long time, been a long time. Mother comes up behind me, and I finish the song line out loud—quietly, but out loud: Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.

Her voice, like ice, shatters my trance. You don’t know what it’s like to be lonely. And there’s something behind her words, peeking around the sides of her mouth, something scary and familiar, but I don’t recognize it tonight. I was too far away when I heard it; I can’t see its face. And taken by surprise, I cannot resist the bait. Sometimes I can, but not tonight, and I take it before I know it.

Yes, I do, I reply, and there’s a hint of you don’t know what you are talking about in my voice.

Her face contorts into a grotesque mask, mouth askew and eyes raised up high, and still I don’t know it for what it is, but I will soon.

Yes, you and your little friends know so much. With all your seventeen years of experience. You know it all. You are so smart.

I don’t know it all; I just said I know what loneliness feels like.

No you don’t.

Yes. I do.

You think you are so smart. You only care about yourself. The old hatred sits in her words. The words themselves don’t have any real meaning; they are broad and general and don’t ever tell me anything of the real problem she has with me. They are just a vehicle for the anger. They provide a vessel for the hate to come up her throat and out of her mouth, head-on into my face.

I do not just care about myself.

Oh, yes you do. If you cared about anyone else, you wouldn’t act the way you do. When I was your age I was working on the dairy farm, on the delivery truck at five every morning, and helping take care of five brothers and sisters, and still going to school.

We don’t have a dairy, and I only have one younger sister here. The others have moved out, I say dryly from behind the wall of logic that has instantly assembled to shield me. My mind is trying quickly to connect the concept of loneliness with working hard, trying to see if I can figure out where this is going next, but it’s a dead end. I can see no connection.

She misses this point completely. Logic never works with Mother; she can’t hear it because all she can hear is the roar in her ears of old words and old feelings that are rushing