This is the 15
th
, and for now at least, last, in a series of chapters about Melissa, a young woman who brings her boyfriend home to meet her family at their remote Eastern Oregon ranch and learns that while she has been away at college her father, Luke, and Mother, Lisa, have adopted a swinging lifestyle. Melissa and her boyfriend, Jamie, have joined right in with her parents liberated style. It will be helpful to have read the prior chapters.
The next morning dawned clear and bright in the Owyhee high country. Melissa found her mother sipping coffee on the big covered porch of the ranch house. No one else was up. She sat beside her and poured herself a cup from the fire blackened coffee pot that rested between the two rocking chairs. The sun was barely up, lighting the top of the low ridge beyond the pasture, but leaving the grassland still in deep shade, as it did every morning at this hour.
"It's beautiful this morning Mom. Is the eagle up hunting rabbits today?" Melissa said.
Lisa chuckled. "I don't know. Haven't seen him. I was just setting here thinking."
"Are you ready to talk to me yet about what it was in those diaries that upset you so?"
"Yeah, I think I am." Lisa paused and shook her head. "I went through it all with Luke last night, and like your Dad always does, he helped me a lot. I'm feeling pretty good about things this morning." She paused in thought again. "I'll tell you what though, let's saddle up a couple of horses and go up to the Headwaters. This is one of those mother-daughter conversations that works best up there." The Headwaters was a spring and pool several miles horseback ride up into the mountains where the little stream originated that made the family's remote ranch in Eastern Oregon's Owyhee mountains viable. Lisa and Melissa were in the habit of riding there to chat when they didn't want to share their conversation with Luke and Jamie. An hour and a half later they were hobbling the horses in the grass just beyond the aspen stand that surrounded the little pool so the horses could graze while the women talked.
"Are we going to undress this morning, Mom?" Melissa asked. It had become a custom over the summer for Mother and Daughter to sunbathe nude while they talked on the edge of the little pond at the Headwaters.
"Not today," Lisa responded. "We just need to talk. I'm not going to read you any of Grandma Louise's racy diary entries today. But I am going to tell you what I read in them yesterday that explained a whole lot about why my childhood was the way it was. Not everything, but a lot. Come sit," she said as she spread an old blanket alongside the little pond.
"First I know you want to know what the diary says about how Louise answered the question about 'the Kid'. I know I left you hanging yesterday when I quit reading aloud, but I was in shock about what I'd read."
"I just couldn't believe the diary entry ended without a response to Carmelita's question about why your mother always referred to you as the Kid rather than using your name, but I figured you'd tell me when you had digested whatever it said," Melissa responded.
"The answer to Carmelita's question was, 'Because she is the kid I didn't want, and besides, my mother Carolyn picked out her name anyhow'." Lisa shook her head.
"Really, Mom? That," Melissa said. "That's what it said? You were the kid your mother didn't want and your mother didn't even name you? That's awful."
"Yes, that is exactly what Louise wrote in the diary. And you are right, it was awful, but
before you start to yell and swear about your Grandmother Louise. There is a lot more, some of which was in the diary entry I was reading you and some of which was in the volume we picked up in Boise that I was reading on the way home. I didn't bring either volume along today so I'll just talk you through them." Lisa shook her head. "I'm not sure I'm ready to read them again."
"Okay, go ahead." Melissa wasn't sure at this point whether she wanted to hear the rest or not.
Lisa sighed. "Where to start. That's always the problem with my family. Our problems always go way back. I guess you first have to understand a bit about my grandmother, Carolyn."
"Carolyn?" Melissa echoed. "She was your mother's mother, right?"
"Yes, and that's where the problems start. Carolyn was the matriarch of my mother's family. Her husband, Louise's father, was, as far as I can tell, missing in action."
"Missing in action?"
"Yes, just never around. He didn't care about his family and was out of the country more than he was around. Mostly in London, even during the war years. He didn't serve in the military, but he wasn't around home either. Who knows. Maybe he was a spy or something. The result was that Carolyn was the one who ran things and raised my Mother Louise. Also you need to know that her family came from old money. Money made by Southern carpetbaggers after the Civil War. There was money in England too, but I know nothing about where it came from except that it is old money. Generations old. Who knows. Maybe I had relatives who were English slave traders before the civil war. There is just no way to know where that money came from.
"But the peculiar part, the part the diaries I've read so far don't explain, everything, all the money, all the sharecropping farms and plantations in the South and the industrial businesses farther north, even the investments in England, they all belonged to Carolyn. Her parents had died young, from the flu epidemic in 1917, and she was raised by a maiden aunt in Richmond. Somehow, she had inherited everything and her husband had no ownership interest. What's more he apparently had no interest in the businesses, in his family, or, as near as I can tell, in Carolyn. And that was apparently just fine with Carolyn."
"Okay, so your mother didn't grow up with a strong father figure?"
