A Change of Heart (6 page)

I
t was the second Tuesday in August, the height of vacation season, and the Harmony town square was nearly deserted, except for Fern Hampton, who was waddling past the
Harmony Herald
building on her way to the grocery store. Bob Miles was perched in his office chair, staring out his front window, seeking fodder for that week’s “Bobservation Post” column. Fern does her trading every Tuesday in the hope Bob will mention her in his column, which he invariably does.
Fern Hampton is on her way to the Kroger, where this week’s special is ground beef at $1.25 a pound.

He watched Sam Gardner come out of Grant’s Hardware and walk by the Legal Grounds Coffee Shop, where he stopped, rattled the doorknob, then pressed his face to the glass and peered in.
The Legal Grounds Coffee Shop remains closed,
Bob typed dutifully.

At that very moment, the owner of the Legal Grounds, Deena Morrison, was eating lunch with her husband of thirty-two days and wondering if she’d made a dreadful mistake.

Their honeymoon had been a joy. Just the two of them in Belize, evening walks on the beach, scuba diving in the morning, and shopping in the afternoon. Fourteen blissful days, only to return home and learn that Dr. Pierce’s mother had left her husband and moved in while they were gone. She’d taken over the master bedroom and was chain-smoking at the kitchen table, badgering Deena about keeping her maiden name.

Dr. Pierce, it turned out, was a wimp where his mother was concerned. Deena wasn’t sure whom she would kill first—her husband or her mother-in-law. Worse yet, their love life had dried up. With his mother just down the hallway, Dr. Pierce’s libido had gone south. Deena had even come to bed one night wearing her honeymoon bikini, to no avail. For all the effect it had, she could have worn chest waders.

“I’m going back to work on Monday,” she said one Saturday night as they lay in bed.

“Who’ll keep my mother company? We can’t leave her alone. She’s depressed.”

“Well, honey, she’s your mother, so if you’re worried about her, why don’t you stay home?”

Dr. Pierce had stared at her for a long moment. “Whatever happened to the nice, thoughtful Deena I married?”

“She’s right here. She just didn’t agree to a package deal. Now are you going to help your mother find an apartment or should I?”

“You would throw my mother out on the street?”

“Did I say that? No, I didn’t. I said we could help her find an apartment. She can stay one more week, but no longer,” Deena warned. “Our marriage won’t stand a chance if it’s a threesome.”

The next morning, after church, she sought Sam’s counsel. He’d read of a similar situation in “Dear Abby.” “I think your husband needs to put his foot down,” he advised. She’d rolled her eyes at that. A bad sign. She’d been married less than a month and was already rolling her eyes.

Then, as Deena sat there in the meetinghouse office, inspiration struck. “How long has it been since you and Barbara went somewhere without the boys?” she asked.

Sam leaned back in his chair and thought. “Well, there was that morning at the Holidome in Cartersburg the week after Easter. Before that, oh, I don’t know, maybe ten years. Why?”

“Why don’t you take her someplace nice for a few days and let the boys come stay with me?”

“Let me get this straight,” Sam said. “You’re willing to watch our children so Barbara and I can go somewhere by ourselves?”

“Absolutely. It’ll be fun.”

Sam reached across to shake her hand before she changed her mind. “It’s a deal.”

The next morning, at eight o’clock, the Gardners deposited their sons at Deena’s front door. At nine o’clock, Kivett’s Five and Dime opened, and by nine fifteen Deena had purchased a set of drums and a trumpet. At precisely eleven o’clock, Dr. Pierce’s mother was backing her Lincoln Town Car out of the driveway and heading toward home.

The following day was a Tuesday. Deena left for the Legal Grounds after breakfast, the Gardner boys in tow. As they rounded the corner in front of the hardware store, Bob Miles spied them and watched as Deena unlocked the door of the Legal Grounds, raised the blinds, and turned the sign from
Closed
to
Open.
Bob began to type.
Good news for all you coffee lovers, Deena Morrison is back to work at the Legal Grounds with two new helpers.

As for Deena, she was inordinately pleased. She’d scarcely been married a month and had already trumped her mother-in-law. Now she just had to whip her husband into shape and she’d be set.

Somewhere, Bob knew, there was a story. Though not one he’d ever hear. The town’s more interesting stories seldom find their way into the
Herald.
At one time, Bob had dreams of stumbling upon a big story and splashing it across the front page. But now his knees hurt, so he prefers to sit at his desk and let the news come to him.

Recently, however, he’d summoned the energy to snoop around. The month before, he’d seen Ralph and Sandy Hodge walk past the
Herald
building on their way to Owen Stout’s office. Bob had graduated with Ralph, but he wouldn’t have recognized him if it hadn’t been for the Hodge duckfoot. Bob had first noticed it in the third grade, when he and Ralph had lined up alphabetically to walk to the lunchroom. It was a small class; there were no I’s, J’s, K’s, or L’s. You watch a kid duckfoot his way down two flights of stairs and a hallway every weekday for nine months and it’s lodged in your mind forever.

The Hodges had stayed in Owen Stout’s office forty-five minutes. He’d timed them. After that, he saw them around town from time to time, back at Owen’s office, at the Dairy Queen one evening, turning into the tourist cabins, and once at the Kroger.

He’d tried to weasel information out of Owen Stout at their next Odd Fellows meeting, but Owen wasn’t talking. Then he’d phoned Ellis to see what was going on, but had been told, in no uncertain terms, to mind his own business, which he had no intention of doing.

On the hunch that pastors knew a lot of secrets, Bob had dropped by the meetinghouse to visit Sam, but he was gone, out of town with his wife, Frank the secretary informed him. “And what a shame that is. Just when you wanted to get right with the Lord for all the lies you’ve printed, the pastor’s gone. I hope you don’t die before he gets back. I’d hate to see a man have to stand before St. Pete with your load of sin.”

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Bob said. “Say, maybe you could help me. Have Ralph and Sandy Hodge been coming to church?”

“Yes, but not this one. The secretary at the Harmony Worship Center told me they’ve been going there.”

Frank was plugged into the town’s church secretary network and consequently had the dirt on everyone.

Curiouser and curiouser, Bob thought. The Harmony Worship Center. Then it dawned on him. Maybe they were religious fanatics who kidnapped children. He’d heard about this happening in California, where they had all the cults. Who would have thought it? Little duckfooted Ralphie Hodge had gone off the deep end. Now that he thought about it, Ralph had lived in California. Ellis had told him so himself when Amanda had come to live with him and Miriam.

Now they were back, hanging out at the Harmony Worship Center and up to no good.

He phoned Ellis as soon as he’d figured it out. “You better watch out for that brother of yours. He’s come back to kidnap Amanda. He was a member of a cult back there in California. They steal kids and brainwash them.”

Ellis wasn’t the least bit surprised.

He and Miriam had put off inviting Ralph and Sandy over for dinner, even though they’d promised Amanda they would. Unbeknownst to them, she’d been meeting with them on Saturday mornings. It had started innocently enough. She and Miriam had come to town for their weekly grocery shopping. While Miriam was at the Kroger, Amanda had walked over to the Dairy Queen and there they were, her mother and father, sitting on the bench eating ice cream cones. It had been awkward at first, but they’d agreed to meet the next Saturday morning, and it had gotten easier each week.

They’d apologized for leaving her, for their drinking, for the years of neglect. Then came the tears. Ralph and Sandy hugging Amanda, crying over the wasted years. It embarrassed Oscar Purdy to watch them, so he let them meet in the little shack behind the Dairy Queen, where the Dilly Bar freezers were.

Amanda had much to tell them: winning the National Spelling Bee, traveling to Atlanta for the Future Problem Solvers of America’s annual convention, making the A honor roll every semester, getting her driver’s license, and planting flowers with Miriam for Deena’s wedding.

They told her how they’d gone to church, gotten saved, and stopped drinking. How Ralph was working at the glove factory in Cartersburg and Sandy was working at the Wal-Mart in Amo, and how they hoped to move out of the tourist cabins and into a real house with an extra bedroom so Amanda could come and maybe stay the night.

They couldn’t visit long. It took Miriam forty-five minutes to buy groceries, so they had only a half hour. But they made the most of it. Amanda told them about her week, and they hugged her close and told her how proud they were of her, that she’d be the first woman president.

“Where do you want to go to college?” Ralph asked one Saturday. “A smart girl like you ought to go to Harvard or Yale. If that’s what you want, you just say the word. I’ll work three jobs if I have to.”

“No, I think I want to go to Purdue and maybe become a teacher,” Amanda said.

“You’d be the best teacher this world has ever seen,” Sandy said. “You’re so smart. You were reading by the age of three. Did you know that?”

No, she didn’t. In fact, she knew hardly anything of her childhood. So they told her. Her first word, her first steps, her favorite teddy bear, which they brought to her one Saturday. She hid it in her closet, behind a cardboard box that held her winter clothes, which is where Miriam found it in early September when the thermometer dipped into the low forties and Amanda needed a long-sleeved shirt.

She’d asked Amanda about it after supper, when Ellis was out herding the livestock into the barn for the night and they were about to do the dishes.

“I’d rather not talk about it,” Amanda said.

“Well, that’s your prerogative, I suppose.” She smoothed Amanda’s hair. She hesitated. “So how are your mother and father?”

“How would I know?”

“You’ve been meeting them at the Dairy Queen on Saturday mornings.” She pulled Amanda to her. “It’s a small town, honey. And some people like nothing more than to tell everything they know.”

“Now I suppose you won’t let me see them,” Amanda said.

“Not at all. They’re your parents, and you’re almost an adult.” Besides, you’ve never given us any reason not to trust you.”

“What about Ellis? Does he know?”

“Not yet.”

“When were you going to tell him?”

“I think he should hear it from you,” Miriam said. “That is part of what it means to grow up. You talk openly and honestly with people.”

“What if he doesn’t let me see them?”

“I don’t think he’d do that,” Miriam said. “If he does, I’ll have a talk with him.”

“What if I want to go live with them?”

“Let’s take one step at a time. Besides, you’ll be going off to college before you know it, and it’ll be a moot point. Now, why don’t I wash and you dry and put away?”

“It’s a deal,” Amanda said, reaching in for a hug.

Had it ended there, it would have been fine. Amanda could have seen her parents, Ellis would have eventually come around, and the family would have healed. Except it had been a slow summer for news, sales of the
Herald
were lagging, and Bob Miles couldn’t resist the temptation to write a story about children being kidnapped by religious kooks, some of whom lived right under our noses, maybe even at the tourist cabins. So when Amanda worked up the nerve to tell Ellis she’d been visiting her parents, he went ballistic and tried to ground her to her bedroom until she married or turned sixty, whichever came first.

“I’ll work on him,” Miriam told Amanda. “Don’t fret. A man might think he’s the head of the house, but the woman is the neck that turns the head.”

But Ellis wouldn’t budge. He was on Amanda like robes on the pope, shuttling Amanda back and forth to school, not letting her out of his sight except to use the bathroom. Miriam tolerated it for three days before cuffing Ellis upside the head, in a gentle, Quakerly sort of way, and ordering him to settle down before they lost Amanda for good.

Bob Miles watches from his window and writes what everyone already knows, that Fern Hampton shops on Tuesday mornings and Deena is back to pouring coffee at the Legal Grounds. But sometimes it’s the stories never told in the
Herald
that matter most. A mother and father longing for a second chance, talking with their daughter on a Saturday morning at the Dairy Queen. From a certain angle, the child favors the woman. They sit side by side, holding hands, thumbing through an album, the girl pointing out a snapshot on one page and a blue ribbon on the next. The woman wipes away a solitary tear and draws the girl to her. The father looks on, his hand resting on the child’s shoulder.

People drive past and try to place them. Amanda, of course, they know. The National Spelling Bee Champion. The smartest kid to ever hit town. It’s the man and woman they’re not sure of. They’ll mention it on Sunday morning at church.

“Who was that I saw you with yesterday morning?” they’ll ask Amanda.

“Those are my parents,” she’ll say. It is a knife to Ellis’s heart. He stiffens and turns away.

That’s the big story in town this late summer, whispered from house to house, confided over cups of coffee at the Legal Grounds. These are mostly good people; they feel slightly ashamed of their curiosity, but they can’t help it. To not spread the story would be like passing a car wreck without slowing down to stare. So around and around the story goes and where it stops, no one knows.