Full Circle

I had been driving since dawn, at least, and now the last bit of daylight was fading behind the hills of Mark Twain National Forest. My phone rang again. I let it go to voicemail. Maybe in a while I’d call my daughter back, just to let them know I was okay. But Hal? I couldn’t even hear his voice yet without melting into a rage. Sure, it wasn’t all his fault. He had known about the letters from the bank, and he had kept them secret, but I should have checked our accounts too. I shouldn’t have left it all to him, assuming he was keeping everything afloat. I knew business was slowing all year. I bore some guilt too. And maybe that’s what I was most angry about. After all, I lost more than he did. He had grown up in a stable home. Me? I was a typical army brat, moving every year or so and having to rip up and regrow tender roots in so many different places I’d lost count by the time I was in fifth grade. As a child, there was just one place I ever felt at home and that’s where I was going.

I rounded another of the corners that snaked their way between endless bluffs of pine, oak, and ancient sediment, reminded of all the times I’d nearly lost my lunch sliding around the back seat as a child. It was the seventies; nobody wore seatbelts. Dad drove with Mom’s head resting on his shoulder, once in a while glancing back at us to yell at my brother, Rawlins, and I to stop punching each other. What he never heard, or pretended not to, was Rawlins annual threat to push me out the door of our Lincoln while we navigated the sharpest curves that always seemed to exist where the pavement plunged into the canopy below, and nothing protected us from the sheer drop but a measly guard rail. The yearly torture was always worth it though, hidden in the hills was Full Circle Camp and RV site. A wonderland of tents, trailers and the wilderness. I slowed my car. Even in the darkness I remembered the way, I couldn’t be more than a few miles out, but this stretch of backwoods highway was intimidating now that it was immersed in the newly fallen night.

The Full Circle in those days was a place of freedom. Covered in chiggers, we’d scamp around without care. There were lightening bugs to catch and the river to swim in and the mysterious world of adulthood to observe; cocktails on the dock, and gossip at the daily women’s Bridge games, and cigars hanging from the men’s lips while they fished on one of the rented canoes. But my favorite place was Cookie’s Clutter. Cookie’s was little more than a barn. Aluminum-sided on the outside and all wood and rafters within. It sat at the entrance of Full Circle and was run by a woman named Thelma Crumb, who seemed to be perpetually forty years old. Cookie’s was a strange mixture of antique market, general store, and bakery. More than once my mother found some little knick-knack she couldn’t live without, and my father would grumble while attaching his suitcase to the roof of our car to make room for Mom’s new treasure. Behind the store was the ramshackle shack where Thelma lived and baked fresh cookies every day. I would rise early some mornings to help her roll dough and sprinkle bits of chocolate into the mix while Rawlins occupied himself with trying to steal cigarettes from the vending machine in the store. For us, Full Circle was more than a campground. Through all the moves and new schools and new friends, it was the one constant of our young lives.

Ahead of my car a worn billboard loomed. Full Circle Camp and RV Site. The paint of the black lettering was peeling, and a chunk of board was missing from the green and white camper drawn below, still my nose tingled with the orange fizz of one of the glass-bottled sodas from Cookie’s. I drove around the last bend that wound up a steep gravel hill to Full Circle. It was dark. In my headlights the tarmac was cracked and broken. The trails and picnic pavilion overgrown. Only the front wall of Cookie’s remained, charred wood and melted siding chained to the ground by vines knotting themselves to the building. I searched the glove compartment for a flashlight and braved my way behind the ruin. There stood the remnants of Thelma’s cabin. If you could call it standing. Discarded and all but devoured by trees and bushes. Despite that, my mind was occupied by the smell of the homemade fudge she put in her cookies instead of store bought chips, and the warmth of the sun streaming through the kitchen window while she dusted the flour from her chocolatey hands to help me with cutouts. In the grand scheme of my life, I hadn’t spent much time with Thelma Crumb, but as I stared at the destroyed house I realized for the first time since storming from my own home without a word, that my stomach was empty and grumbling.

In the neighboring town of Oakridge there’s a Diner, that was known to us summer adventurers, as the last chance for gas anywhere for miles. We used to stop for grilled cheese sandwiches and patty melts on our way home. I was happy to find it hadn’t changed since my childhood, aside from a fresh coat of paint and some new dining benches. Sure, the pink waitress uniforms and paper hat the cook wore were gone, but at least it still smelled of grilled onions and French fries. And I was hungry enough to faint at any moment.

“What happened to the Full Circle Camp?” I asked once I’d eaten my fill and the waitress brought the bill.

She shrugged. “Burned down a few years ago I think.”

“It’s been seven years now.” A man at the counter turned from his plate. Seven years was not so distant but the words drove home how long ago I abandoned those happy memories of my youth.

“Thank you.” I said. “This might sound strange, but do you remember Thelma Crumb?”

His face brightened. “Miss Thelma! Sure, everyone round here knows her.” He looked at my waitress who was twirling a strand of hair on her finger while she settled my tab at the register. “Well, any of us who’ve lived round these parts for long. She’s up at the Hospital in Valley View but visiting hours’ll be ending bout nine or so if you’re plannin on goin to see her.”

In my memory, Valley View was a stereotypical sleepy small town wedged in that space where the Midwest meets the South. It had grown into a tangled network of highways guiding cars to the heart of the city, and outlying bedroom communities, like Oakridge, that had grown to fully fledged suburbs. I shouldn’t have been surprised; it had been over forty years. My daughter had informed me I must be insane when I’d finally returned her calls. She was right, spending at most, fifteen minutes with a woman I hadn’t seen in decades and never knew well in the first place was preposterous. She’d begged me to come home. She didn’t understand, I didn’t understand myself, what was calling me to travel fourteen hours to these Ozark Mountains, but I’d come this far, and I was determined to see it through.

The nurse that greeted me at the hospital perked up when I asked for her room number. “We’ve been waiting for you! Miss Thelma insisted all day she had a visitor coming, but with her dementia you never know.” She led me to the room and pulled me aside. Her voice lowered. “She won’t be with us long now.” I nodded and cautiously stepped into the room. The nurse’s voice brightened again. “Miss Thelma, someone’s come to see you!”

“Licey?” She struggled to lift her head from the pillow and squinted at me through eyes clouded by cataracts. The nurse smiled and walked down the hall.

I walked closer, suddenly uncertain about my choice to visit. “Miss Thelma, I don’t know if you’ll remember me…”

She slid on a pair of glasses at the bedside table and pushed them up with a twig like finger and smiled. “Yellow romper, bright red pigtails, and a stuffed elephant named…”

“Phoebus. I’m Sookie. Sookie Bailey back then.”

“Yes, I remember you.” She cleared a stack of magazines from the chair parked beside the bed and patted the seat for me to sit next to her. “You used to come up my place an help me bake cookies, tryin a hide from that brother of yours. What was his name?”

“Rawlins.”

“Yeah!” A toothless grin spread across her face. “Don’t tell me he still runnin round tryin a pick the tails off lightn’ bugs, is he?”

I laughed. It wasn’t my imagination; even Thelma remembered, he was a hellion when we were kids. “No, believe it or not he’s a schoolteacher.”

“And what you doin with your life now?”

What was I doing? I had a life and a home yesterday, but today? Today I was lost. Floundering after arriving home before Hal last night to discover the foreclosure notice in our mailbox. After the ensuing fight, he confessed to pissing our retirement fund down the drain trying to get our restaurant out of the red. A complete lost cause after we closed down last week. He didn’t even talk to me; he didn’t even give me a choice in the matter. I took a deep breath. “My husband and I own a restaurant.”

She wrapped a grateful leathery hand around mine and squeezed. “Your family stopped comin to the camp.”

“My Dad couldn’t bring himself to take another vacation when we lost Mom.” The fingers loosened.

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that, Child.” Her hands covered mine again with a motherly warmness.

“It was a boating accident when I was twelve. After that the only place we went was to our grandparents when he was on active duty.” There it was. I’d come up with a million reasons over the years for never going back to Full Circle, for never bringing Hal or our daughter. But they were lies. The truth was I didn’t want to mar the camp with Mom’s absence. Thelma rested her head on the pillow again; coarse silver hairs peeked from beneath her sleeping cap like a wiry halo in the hospital light.

The nurse ducked into the room. “Just letting y’all know visiting hours are over, except for family.”

“She family.” Thelma said, sitting up with such a sudden burst of authority that the nurse nodded and left.

“Who is Licey?” I asked.

“My sister Doreen’s granddaughter. She’s not a bad girl. Just young. Too young to have to take care of a sick ole lady like me.”

“Don’t you have any other family?”

She shook her head. “Nah, Doreen was the one always had all the boys chasin her.” Her eyes grew distant. “Suppose I thought I’d settle down a time or two, but we can’t help the cards we’re dealt. Sides, who needs a husband an’ kids anyway when I had all you to take care of three months a year. I don’t think I’da kept up with a family all the time if they were like you rowdy bunch.”

“So, it was just you keeping Cookie’s going all those years?”

“I don’t see why not. It was named after me. My Daddy called me Cookie on account of I was so sweet. He built that cabin I was born in. Lived there all my life. Built the pavilion and docks too. The whole campground. Last thing he ever built was that barn I turned into the shop. Probably still be up there too if I hadn’t accidentally set fire to the whole thing.”

I’d never realized the Camp was her entire life. Kids don’t think about things like that. “I’m so sorry you lost your home.” I said.

She coughed. “That’s nothin but sticks and stones. That’s a building, Child, not a home.”

I stayed until Thelma talked herself out. She scooched me in for a hug. The kind that was thankful and desperate. Like she knew what I knew; there was more than coincidence behind our meeting. We were drawn together again by design. It was something we both needed.

A few hours and one stop for gas and snacks later I found myself back on the crumbling blacktop of Full Circle. If my daughter thought I was crazy for going to see Thelma, she should see me now in the closeness of the wild, surrounded by the sounds of nighttime creatures going about their lives in the dark woods. I hung the grocery sack of snacks on my wrist and followed the rays of my flashlight while it bobbed from my stumbling across what little gravel remained of the trail. It had probably been the entire seven years since it was properly cleared, but a hodgepodge path of knocked down saplings and trodden grass led in the direction of the river; likely left by those who still ventured to the dock for fishing.

The moon was already waning by the time I reached the eroding dock. The rest of Full Circle was too covered in trees to see stars, but here the whole galaxy was visible on a clear night. I came too late to see the show; only the brightest stars remained above the water. I took a careful seat on the dock, certain I’d manage a splinter or two when I stood up, and cracked open the orange soda I’d bought, and thought about what Thelma said. I pulled out my phone to read the last message Hal had sent.

I know why you’re angry and you should be. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you. I thought I could fix it before you noticed, and I wouldn’t have to see you hurt.

Typical Hal. I didn’t know if I could forgive him, and he knew it, but he was waiting for me. Patiently allowing me the space he knew I needed. I settled in to watch the sun rise and sipped my soda. My nose tingled with the familiar orange fizz. It wasn’t the same, warm and coming from an aluminum can, but it was pretty damn close.