10,400 ~ 12,700

Sam snuck back into her mother’s apartment with the key Jean had given her and quietly closed the door behind her. It was a little after midnight and Sam was in no mood to talk. Jackie had Googled the Cross-Lake Ferry while they all chatted. Sam would be able to make the 12:30pm departure which would get her to Muskegon at 4:00pm. She’d be able to see Aunt Jane that evening. The trip from Lindstrom to Milwaukee would take about six hours. This meant that Sam needed to be road to no later than 5:00am. That meant less than four hours sleep.

“This isn’t something you can be late for, Samantha.” It was Malin, but it sounded like something her mother would say.

“Fuck, really? I’m not twelve. I’ve traveled a bit. I know how to make a damn connection,” Sam thought.

Instead she sighed and replied, “Yes, Ma’am.”

It seemed like a total waste of a day to Sam, but she believed her friends when they agreed that this was probably the only way to get her first lead on the current whereabouts of Ruth Ann Goldman. If everything went well, she could be on the first Ferry back across the following morning.

“Fuck. Two wasted days,” Sam thought. “Well, at least it gets me out of here for awhile. No Mom, no Allison, and no Malin.” No Malin. Damn Malin.

Kate ran to her grandmother’s door and was poised to scratch it open with her paw.

“Kate,” Sam whispered getting the dogs attention. “Wheels up at 0500. Don’t get too comfortable in there. And do NOT wake up Grandma.”

Sam laid down on the bed in the guest room and tried unsuccessfully to sleep. She was still processing this whole thing. Who was this Ruth Ann and why was she suddenly so important to Jean? Sam searched through her memory banks to determine if she’d ever heard the name before. She didn’t think so. When Sam was in high school, she remembered looking through her mother’s year books. She saw pictures of Jean Taylor with the girls tennis club and working on the school paper (two things she and her mother had oddly always had in common). Her mom told stories about some of her friends and showed her the picture of the nerdy looking boy she’d gone to prom with. To Sam’s best recollection, Jean had never mentioned Ruth. In fact, Sam remembered there being few stories about her mother’s life in Cincinnati before her family moved to Muskegon, Michigan when she was thirteen. Maybe she was too young to have too many memories of that time, Sam thought. However, as Sam considered it, she realized that remembered a lot about being twelve and thirteen. That was middle school as they called it in California where Sam lived. There was a boy, Tim Dolan, in her after school tennis clinic that she had a ‘crush’ on and a girl on her sister’s soccer team that she was secretly in love with. Kristin Templeton. Her best friend was Shelley McBride. Her father was in the Navy and they moved away during Sam and Shelley’s freshman year of high school.

She hadn’t thought of Shelley in years. It was just middle school and life went on. They were probably totally different people now, more than twenty years later. More than likely, Shelley would be married and living in Boston, Massachusetts or some city in Timbuktu with her husband and three children. She supposed she could look her up on Facebook the next time she got on-line. Still, though, she wasn’t curious enough about Shelley to make finding her an item on her Bucket List, much less send her daughter on a wild goose chase looking for her. Her mother’s friendship with Ruth Ann was apparently different or maybe things changed as people aged. Maybe when she was in her late sixties, Sam would want to find Shelley. “Eh, probably not,” Sam said out loud to no one but herself.

Sam must have fallen asleep because she woke with a start when her alarm when off. She took a quick shower and pulled on her favorite old jeans and a burnt orange University of Texas t-shirt. She looked at her unruly short hair in the mirror and shrugged.

“Fuck it, no one to impress on this trip,” Sam said. Sam wished she’d brought a backpack so she didn’t have to take her carry-all with her. She was only going to be gone one night. She certainly didn’t need all of her things. She shrugged again, grabbed the carry-all, and emerged into her mother’s living room. She was just about to call for Kate when she heard a voice in the darkness.

“Where are you going so early? Sneaking out of your visit with your old Mom?”

Sam was tired and already borderline pissed that she had to spend part of her vacation trying to track down some old lady. It would have been so much easier to visit a couple travel websites and type in her credit card number. Sam knew that she probably should have expected it. Her mother had never been easy. It was complacent of her to think that she would start now. Needless to say, Sam was not in the mood for conversation.

She held onto the ‘I wish’ that coursed through her brain and instead replied, “No, Mom. I’m off in search of Ruth Ann for you. We think that the best place to start is with Aunt Jane. Even though she can’t remember shit on a regular basis, she might recall something about your life in Cincinnati. She might remember what high school she went to, which was probably where Ruth would have gone. It would at least be a start. This search isn’t going to be easy, Mom.”

“We? Who’s ‘we’?” Leave it to her mother to ignore everything besides one small pronoun.

“We. Malin, her girlfriend, and Jeff. We met last night at Al’s. I needed advice about this.”

“Jeff was at Al’s last night?” Jean’s voice grew louder.

“Aw, Hell,” thought Sam. Jeff supposedly had had a late night vet emergency the night before. Sam had blown his cover without even thinking about it. She’d have to text him a warning from the road. This wasn’t something her mother would forget to tell Allison. No, Jeff was going to be in serious trouble with both his wife and his mother-in-law.

Sam went on, omitting an answer to her mother’s question, “You didn’t give me much to go on so I have to reach out to Aunt Jane. I remember Chris saying that she refused to throw away anything when she moved into the nursing home. He’s bound to have an old yearbook or something in the basement. I can go digging around down there if I need to.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t have much information for you. It’s just so long ago and I was so young. I remember a lot about Ruthie, just not anything else.”

“It’s ok, Mom,” Sam replied to a rare apology from her mother. “I’ve done a lot of research for my books so I’m sure I’ll be able to find something to go on. Kate, let’s go. Mom, I need to get going. We’re taking the ferry from Milwaukee this afternoon.”

“That’s not something you can be late for, Samantha.”

“See? Just like Malin”, Samantha thought. Fucking women. Sam could never understand what she saw in them.

“Yes, Ma’am.” It was the same answer she had given Malin the night before. “We’ll be back tomorrow night, probably around dinner time.”

With that, Sam was out the door. No hug, no kiss on the cheek goodbye. They just weren’t that kind of family.

 

 

 

~

 

 

Sam wasn’t happy that Kate had to stay in a kennel on board the ferry, but rules were rules. This one seemed impossible to break. It was a warmish day for late April, but Sam grabbed her fleece jacket out of the Xterra just in case. The ferry cabin seemed a bit claustrophobic so Sam wandered upstairs to the upper deck. She found a comfortable spot looking aft, put on her iPod, and leaned back. She had roughly two and half hours to do absolutely nothing. With the warm sun, cool breeze, and easy rumble of the ferry, Sam almost immediately fell asleep.

When she finally opened her eyes, she looked around. She could see sailboats on the water near the ferry and houses on the shore. They must be on Muskegon Lake nearing the ferry terminal. Sam had slept almost the entire way. As she stood and stretched, the dream came back to her. They were both there, Malin and Shay, and then as dreams tend to go, they morphed into another woman. Sam hadn’t thought of Shay in a very long time. Usually it only happened when she heard a song or when Shay interrupted radio silence by texting her. Nine times out of ten, it was when she was drunk and fighting with her husband, so seeing her in a dream seemed so out of the blue. Seeing her with Malin made it even stranger. Sam had no idea who the third woman was, though. She remembered chasing her in the dream and always being a few too many steps behind her. She woke right as she tapped the woman on the shoulder. She remembered her long brown hair, but never did see her face.

Sam shook it off and stood near the railing watching the ferry approach the terminal. Maybe knowing that she was coming to Muskegon, where she and Shay had met, triggered the dream. That was probably it, even though Sam had visited several times since and those visits seldom made her think about her ex-girlfriend. And damn Malin. Sam had spent the entire six hour drive to Milwaukee alternately thinking of her and willing herself not to think of her. She didn’t need to think of Malin, not at all. Malin had a girlfriend and lived in a place Sam would never live. And above all, Sam didn’t want a girlfriend. Girlfriends got in the way of life and Sam wasn’t about to risk losing the life she loved.

“No, Ma’am,” thought Sam. “No girlfriends.”

As the ferry docked, Sam collected a very unhappy Kate from the kennel. They loaded up in the SUV and waited their turn to disembark. Sam pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes as they emerged from the dark recesses of the car deck. They would through the ferry terminal parking lot and stopped before turning onto Laketon Blvd. In many ways, Sam was home. She’d lived here, and in this neighborhood no less, for six years. Granted it had been a decade ago, but Muskegon, Michigan tended to change slowly if at all. Sam had never been thought about moving ‘home’ as she still sometimes called it, however there were things she missed - the lake shore, Michigan football, the fall color, and The Flamingo. Even though, Sam’s first choice was always Chinese, she immediately decided that she would have dinner at her absolute favorite Mexican restaurant. Austin was full of grungy hole-in-the-wall Mexican places, but none were as good as The Flamingo with it’s sticky Spanish rice and huge chicken tacos. Maybe Chris and Scott would join her.

Aunt Jane’s nursing home was on Roosavelt Road, just a short drive from the ferry terminal. Sam was pretty sure she could remember the way. She steeled herself for what was to come. Even before the signs of Alzheimer’s began to show, Aunt Jane had been a challenge for Sam. A product of her environment and her age, Aunt Jane was bigoted and homophobic. She knew little of Sam’s life, but what she did know she didn’t like. Sam brought Shay to one family Thanksgiving, one. Aunt Jane had been pleasant enough to them during their visit, but the next day she had quizzed Jean mercilessly about Sam’s ‘friend’ asking if she was ‘one of those dykes’. Jean attempted to deny it saying that it was none of their business, but Jane had gone on to ask if Same was also ‘one of those dykes’. Jean remained non-committal but it changed Sam’s relationship with her Aunt Jane forever. She was never invited to another holiday gathering, not that she would have gone anyway.

Sam secretly took great pleasure in the fact that her cousin, Chris, was also gay. With the exception of insisting that two men lived at Chris’s house, Aunt Jane had no idea that her son was gay. Chris had smartly waited until his mother’s mind was so far gone before coming out to anyone, even Sam. She needed to call him and let him know she was in town. She wanted what he and his partner had done to Aunt Jane’s old house when they moved in.

“Shit!”, Sam suddenly exclaimed. She had forgotten to text Jeff about blowing his cover that morning. Luckily Jeff was easy going and wouldn’t be mad. And really maybe it was about time he came clean with his wife about the true nature of his after hours emergencies. Allison was a bitch and deserved to know that her husband hung out at Al’s drank to avoid her bullshit. Thankfully, she wouldn’t suspect that he and Malin were having an affair. Or maybe she would. Her sister could be bat-shit crazy at times. Leave it to Allison to think that her husband was having an affair with the town lesbian. Sam laughed at the thought as she hit send on an apology text to Jeff.