Page 69 of Love on the Vine
I’d never been in here before. The door was always shut—like the places inside himself that Jake had closed off to me.
Jake wandered over to the wooden doors at the back of the room and opened them, revealing dozens of cardboard boxes stacked in a precarious heap. “This is what I cleaned out of my father’s house last year.”
“When you were back last Christmas?”
“Yeah, I donated all the furniture but couldn’t bring myself to deal with this. He’d boxed up his entire life—or at least any trace of his family—when my mother finally left a couple years ago.” He kicked at a box withDetroitscrawled across it in black marker.
“Did he know he was sick?”
“Who knows? He was always healthy, or at least he pretended to be. It was a heart attack—totally unexpected, especially since I didn’t know he had a heart.” My stomach clenched. I wanted to comfort him, but before I could take his hand in mine, he moved away.
“My parents were miserable together. I don’t know how my mom stayed with him so long after I left.” He tapped his hand against one of the boxes. “Anyway, I have to go through these. Whenever I pass by this room, I feel like there’s some sort of malevolent ghost in here.”
“Why don’t we do that today? It won’t be so overwhelming if you have some help,” I suggested, sliding my hand across his waist.
He pressed a kiss to my head. “I wouldn’t want to subject you to that.”
“I don’t mind.” I couldn’t, of course, admit that my offer wasn’t only one of goodwill. I was curious about his past and how it continued to affect him. In these boxes were more of those puzzle pieces that I needed to fit together.
When he hesitated, I bumped my hip against his. “Oh, come on, it’s like ripping a Band-Aid off. It’s always easier if someone else does it for you.”
* * *
Hours later we sat cross-legged on the living room floor with various boxes in front of us. Some of them had turned out to be filled with old account books and tax documents. But the rest were a virtual treasure trove of photographs and other personal items.
I’d already set aside a pile of photos to frame or put in albums. Jake had frowned at the idea but had finally agreed when I promised he didn’t have to be involved in the album-making.
“What an elegant woman your mother was,” I said as I studied a photo of her in her twenties, sitting in a Parisian café. She was tall and blonde, very beautiful, always perfectly coiffed.
“Yeah, she dreamed of modeling in Paris, but ended up marrying my dad instead. She had money then and could come on her own terms.” He tossed a photo aside that I quickly snatched back. “She never felt at home in the States. She’d take me back to the Netherlands every summer, and sometimes I wished we’d never go back.”
Aside from wedding photos, there weren’t many pictures of his father, the rubber bumper-heir from Grand Rapids. In the wedding photo, his father was tall with dark hair and a sternface. Jake definitely resembled him, but judging by how he’d tossed the photo aside, he wouldn’t appreciate me pointing that out.
I learned bits and pieces about his family as we went through the rest of the boxes. His Dutch-American grandfather had invented a prototype of a rubber bumper, which had made him millions. His father had been an engineer for General Motors, before taking over the reins of the company. Suddenly, Jake’s passion for refurbishing his old car made more sense. When I suggested it, however, he failed to see the connection and gave me a bewildered look. In his mind, clearly, he’d sprung to life fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s head.
“And you don’t think your love of France came from your mother?” Again, he shook his head and stared at me vacantly. For someone like me who’d spent most of her teen years grappling with generational trauma, it was a major surprise that some people chose to ignore it when the evidence of it was right under their nose.
We saved the box labeledJakobfor last. I even considered leaving him alone with it, but when I suggested leaving, Jake shook his head and went to the kitchen to get us two cold beers. It was early evening now, and a nice breeze was coming through the windows we’d opened.
When he returned from the kitchen, Jake sat down next to me and dragged the dreaded box to him, opening it carefully as if it might contain a tangle of hissing vipers. To my delight, there were already several albums in there.
“Oh look, a baby album with all your baby accomplishments. Wow, you were rolling over at four months! Already so precocious,” I teased as I flipped through it. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen this before?”
“My mother never showed it to me,” he said as he dug more photos from the box. I was transfixed by baby Jake—blond,smiley, and dimpled. My ovaries pinged at the sight, and I tried not to imagine what our babies would look like.
Don’t go there, Liv.
The next photo took me by surprise. He was young—maybe nine or ten—with a big orange cat on his lap and a huge grin on his face. “Oh, who’s this?”
His face darkened. “Dewey, like the decimal system. He was a cool cat. Used to play ball with me.”
“How long did you have him?”
“I don’t know, a couple years. He disappeared one summer when I was in the Netherlands,” he said nonchalantly, riffling through the box. Then suddenly he stilled. “That’s not true. My father got rid of him. To punish me. I overheard him telling my mother that he drove an hour out of town and left him in a dumpster somewhere.”
It felt like someone had just punched me in the gut, and my hand fisted at my side. The absolute cruelty. Tears burned in my eyes. “Jake . . . I’m so sorry.”
I put my hand on his back, and he flinched, drew away from me and went back to picking through the box. We flipped through more photos in silence. I was still burning with sadness and rage, but I wasn’t about to make him share more than he was ready to.
