Buried [Completed]

Chapter nineteen

On Saturday morning, Kyle offered to take the kids to the beach so Jamie could finish moving out of the trailer.

"You decide what you want to keep and what you want to throw away," he said as he topped off her coffee after breakfast.

"Then in the afternoon, the kids and I will help you haul the boxes home."

"Thanks, honey."

Much as she would have enjoyed a few hours on the beach with her new family, she appreciated the opportunity to go through her belongings on her own, free to wallow in the memories to her heart's content.

Once they'd left, she drove to the trailer and parked in her usual spot, to the right of their double-wide. A "Sold" sticker had been slapped over the "For Sale," sign. She'd brought her camera with her, thinking she might mark the occasion with a few photos, but now that she was here, her heart felt too heavy. So she left it in the car, and went to open the trunk.

For a moment she paused, looking back at the pretty doublewide and recalling the day her mother left to go to the hospice. She'd kept her chin up, a smile on her face.

"Thanks for the memories,"
she'd said, slapping the door on her way out. If she'd ever been scared— about the cancer, about the pain, about dying— she'd never shown it. In her trunk, Jamie had a pile of cardboard boxes she'd picked up from Sam's Market yesterday. She carried them to the door, then unlocked the trailer. Already her old home had an unused smell about it. Or was that her imagination?

"Just get the job done, girl. Stop moping." She turned on the radio to the country station. Might as well listen while she could, since Kyle preferred classic rock.

She glanced around. The place already looked stripped, though all she'd taken so far were a couple of suitcases worth of clothes and shoes and books. Her mom had believed in traveling light through life and she'd passed that philosophy down to Jamie. Still, there were a few things she wanted to keep. The photo album, of course. She'd start with that. It was impossible to pack the album, though, without taking a peek. She had to smile at the early photos of Dougal. Such a serious baby. Then she'd been born, and pictures of Dougal now included her. It was at this point that there ceased to be any photos of her father. Not that there'd been that many to begin with.

On the radio, the top of the hour news began playing. Wow, time had flown without her realizing. She had to stop looking and do more packing. She put the album into a box, and then packed some of her mother's favorite dishes. The soup tureen she'd inherited from her grandmother. The silver gravy boat they'd never used, but which had been a wedding gift.

Next, Jamie opened the drawer where her mother stored Dougal's mementoes. He'd taken nothing but his clothing with him when he'd moved out, leaving behind school yearbooks and report cards, not to mention his high school football trophies. She boxed all of this and shoved it in a corner. Then she carted the boxes with her things out to her car. Finally she cleaned out the last of her mother's drawers. Most everything had already been given to Goodwill. Stella Ward had helped her sort the clothing about a month after her mom had died.

But there was still one drawer that had been untouched. In it were scarves and accessories and one small box containing what her mother had called the "good" jewelry. Jamie tried on her mother's old wedding ring. So thin and fragile. She put it back in the box with her mother's pearl earrings and gold chain, then carefully zipped the box into a compartment of her purse. The rest of the stuff was junk. She dumped it all into a large garbage bag. That was when she saw the letter. It was still in an envelope, with a return address from the Oregon State Penitentiary. As soon as she saw that, she knew it was from her father. Jamie sank onto her mother's stripped mattress to read it. Two pages, hand-written with a date on the top left corner. It had been written about six months before her mother died.