Crystal’s attempts to get the group back on a more positive, moreproductivetrack fell short of any accomplishment. The session ended on such a somber note that the usual invitations to go to the café across the street, near the park, were not heard for a full five minutes until Pauline approached Thelma and asked if she would like to join “everyone” that week.
Usually, she hung around the building until it was time for class. Today, though, she eagerly agreed and ensured she had some cash Megan had offered, so nobody would have to buy for her. She still couldn’t get used to how much a coffee cost in the modern world.Never mind all of the styles and types there are…
The funniest thing wasn’t the gaggle of disparate people making their way across the wide boulevard to take over a local coffee shop. It was instantly recognizing FBI employees who, in turn, recognizedthem.In a way, wasn’t that comforting? Thelma could be herself around these people: awkward, excited, and exhausted. Nobody questioned why she needed half the menu explained to her or why she sat with people across so many generations and ethnic backgrounds. She could slap hergreen 1950s purse on a table and have nobody comment on it. Likewise, if she accidentally spilled some water in her lap, nobody cared that she leaped up shouting,“Golly gee almighty!” I’m so tired of Megan hooting and hollering at how I talk when I’m surprised.It wasn’t anyone’s fault that Thelma saved the cuss words for when shereallymeant it. Maybe modern people were more attuned to swearing whenever they felt, but Thelma swore she would never get used to hearing a barista mutter “stupid bitch” when dealing with irate customers.
Well, at least she wasn’t shocked by it anymore. She heard all manner of potty language while at the supermarket with her granddaughter.
“Have you tried the oat milk yet?” Pauline asked while they stood in a long line and gazed up at the menu hanging from the ceiling. “You’d never guess it, but it’s quite good! I guess it started as an alternative for people allergic to dairy. Or for the vegans. You met any vegans yet? They’re everywhere in Los Angeles in this era.”
Thelma tilted her head as she looked at how expensive the milk substitutions were. “Not yet. I’ve got that Norwegian stock in me. Never had a problem with dairy.”
“Your family doesn’t carry it now?”
She must have meant the dairy alternative. “No. It’s just milk in the fridge.”Actually, come to think of it…There hadn’t been any at all when Thelma arrived. Not until she started going to the store with her son and granddaughter and put it into the cart without thought.Am I the only one using it?Whenever she went to grab it out of the fridge, it was always pushed into the back, as if the rest of the family had other things to prioritize.
What the heck had they been cooking with?
Lately, Thelma had been favoring “cappuccino,” which not only delighted the part of her brain that glommed onto cute things, but was (to her) the perfect meld of sweet and bitter.Maybe it’s that milk drinker in me.Steamed milk was her new favorite thing. Add in the espresso? Well, it made her quite jittery later, but she liked it!
She sat back down at the table as soon as the others started gossiping about the group session. “…Can you believe he blames his brother like that?” hissed Olive Krasinski, a chrononaut from 1834. She was older than many of the others in group and had been in the “modern” era for the past thirty years already.One of her favorite jokes is that she should be suffering through the Civil War right now.“Like, we blame alotof people for our predicament, but ultimately, we know it’s nobody’s fault. Nobody knows when the fog will come or who will get caught in it. I could be blaming my mother for sending me out to shoo the feral cats away from our house, but she had no idea I would go missing that night!”
“It’s easier for you to say, Olive,” said Ted Minsk, from the ‘90s. “None of your family was alive by the time you came here. You don’t know what it’s like to be put in a home with people who have suddenly aged twenty years and thought you were dead that whole time.”
Olive pretended to zip her mouth shut, but kept talking while her elbow came precariously close to hitting her cup of coffee. “Therealproblem is that we no longer have a sense of community in this country. Even back under Mexico, we always knew where our neighbors were and what we would do for those who wandered back a few years later. Now what? Even in Tennessee, the chrononauts have become a local legend that says they should be basically worshipped as Gods.”
“Nobody can be responsible for what Appalachia does,” Pauline mused. “My parents were actually from West Virginia. Born eight to a shack before getting the heck out of Dodge and making their way here. My bottom was born in the back of a Model-T somewhere in Arizona. Right on the side of the roadwhen it was hotter than Satan’s ass.” She sipped her macchiato with oat milk. “They would have taken me in, no questions asked, if I showed up twenty years later instead of eighty. Frank’s brother just wasn’t right in the head.” She turned her own head toward Thelma, who sat beside her. “I’m sure your son will come around. It’s just been so long. He’ll soon be grateful to see his mama again before he goes. You’ll see.”
Yet their reassurances that Frank’s case was isolated didn’t make Thelma feel any better.I know what I see in his eyes.The way he avoided her as much as possible, even going as far as to pick up extra volunteer shifts at the local library branch. How he wouldn’t evenlookat her when they were at the same dinner table, after Thelma had gone out of her way to make his favorite Salisbury steak with macaroni and cheese. Something that wasnoteasy to create in that modern kitchen without Megan’s help!
“I should give him space,” she said as dead air hit the table. Outside of the loud pop music playing on the speakers and the hum of FBI agent conversations around them, it was unbearably quiet. “The poor thing must blame himself. He was the reason I went out that night and drove into the fog.”
A few heads silently turned toward her. She knew what those looks meant.
“Robbie was sick, you see, and I felt really bad that I didn’t let him stay home from school. The boy was always pulling our legs, trying to get out of school.” She explained that directly to Pauline, for some reason, as if Thelma needed to defend herself to her closest friend in the group. “So, when I noticed we were out of milk and that it was shopping night… I went out. He wanted milk.” Her voice trailed off as it hit her how Robbie must have thought of the whole thing as he grew older and wiser toward the world. “Oh, my God. He spent his whole life thinking it was his fault I disappeared, didn’t he?”
Pauline put a hand on her shoulder while the others reassured her that there was rarely any rhyme or reason for these things. Robbie had taken her in, yes? He didn’t fight the FBI about it, like some people’s families. He didn’t treat her too badly. She had that lovely granddaughter—most of them had met Megan in some fashion by now. See? Even she had to raise her voice at that man, and it hadnothingto do with Thelma, including her disappearance or how she raised him. What kind of man was Bill? Did she think he would do a well enough job raising a boy on his own, let alone through the ‘60s?
Based on what Thelma now knew about the ‘60s… she had no idea.
Bill was a good man. A good father.She told herself that as the group slowly broke up as some went home, others to work, and others to run errands before class that evening. Pauline and Jo remained behind, Jo’s husband taking the car to go to work while she was at class, and Pauline promising to drive them both home later.
“Do you have any pictures of him?” Jo asked. “Of your son when he was a boy.”
“Actually…” As it so happened, Thelma carried in her wallet a picture of her family that she had stolen out of a family album she discovered in Robbie’s attic. While Thelma didn’t recognize the album cover itself, it was hailed to have been Debbie’s and salvaged by Megan when they cleaned out her house two years ago. Thelma certainly recognized some of the pictures that Debbie had painstakingly added to an album sometime back in the ‘80s.
“Oh, wow.” Pauline lifted her sunglasses to take the square black and white photo into her hands. It was a picture taken the summer before Thelma disappeared, the four of them standing in front of the house in their “block party” best. She recognized the toys from other neighborhood kids in their yard, as well asthe big brown dog that lived two houses down.I look so happy…Thelma stood with her hands around Robbie’s shoulders, her young boy in a collared shirt and shorts, and a model airplane in his hands. He grinned at the camera while his sister sat in the grass beside him, her lopsided smile matching the shaggy hair around her shoulders and the big bow on top of her head. Bill was behind her and beside Thelma, his hands in his front pockets and his face turned toward his wife the moment the camera went off.
“Wow,” Jo echoed. “What a handsome family. You four look fantastic. Like a storybook of old Americana.”
Thelma had heard that phrase before about the 1950s.Americana.The WASP-y, suburban family built on the back of the GI Bill and new employment opportunities never seen before—let alone so soon after the Depression. Thelma’s hair was askew because of the breeze, but she glowed in black and white, and the loving hold she had on Robbie insinuated that she would have died for him.
I would have. He was my boy.Robbie was a rather butch kid and had plenty in common with his father, but it was Thelma who got through to his softer, gentler side.I was the one who washed him up and put him to bed every night until he said that was for babies.By then, she had her hands full with Debbie, who showed no signs of wanting her mama to stop fussing over her.
And Bill…
He looked at Thelma as if the world began and ended with her. She was the lynchpin that held the Van der Graafs together. She was the light that had been snuffed out of their home.
“Oh, honey…” Pauline rubbed Thelma’s back as she began to cry. “It’s okay. It’s okay to grieve that life. I’m sure your husband missed you terribly.”
