Angel Sister (11 page)

“Then a kiss it will be, my beautiful bride.”

As their lips met, she wanted to crawl inside his skin and go with him. But she could not. He pulled free and touched her cheek one last time before he ran for the train door just as the conductor was pulling up the steps. She ran alongside the train to the end of the platform and then watched the train until it disappeared up the track. The tears flowed unchecked down her cheeks as she walked back to the boardinghouse.

She thought about staying in Louisville. Maudie said she could stay in the attic room, but then three days after Victor left, Nadine got her one and only letter from her father.
Come home. Louisville is a wicked town
. That was all he wrote, but Nadine read more into the words because she wanted to.

She wouldn’t go home. She couldn’t live in the same house with Carla, but she would go back to Rosey Corner. A person needed family even when that family wasn’t always easy to love.

______

As the days passed and her mother didn’t come home, worry hung in dark clouds over Kate. Not just about Grandfather Reece, but about Lorena as well. Every time there was a knock on the front door, Kate’s heart jumped up in her throat and she froze wherever she was until she found out it wasn’t Ella Baxter come to take Lorena away.

Kate simply could not fathom why anybody could think Ella Baxter would make a better mother than Kate’s own mother. Anybody with any sense knew that wasn’t true. Why, if a little kid got close to Mrs. Baxter with sticky hands at a church dinner, she nearly went into hysterics. Then there was that time last summer when Paul Whitton threw a caterpillar at some girl out in the churchyard and hit Mrs. Baxter instead. The woman had screamed like a banshee, grabbed Mr. Arthur’s cane, and started whacking Paul. Almost broke his arm before Grandfather Reece got the cane away from her. Paul wasn’t but ten, but Mrs. Baxter spoke up at the next business meeting and wanted to vote him and his whole family out of the church. All over a worm.

The woman didn’t like dirt. She didn’t like bugs, and she didn’t like kids. Kate couldn’t imagine what had made her decide she wanted Lorena. If they were going to pick a mother simply because a woman hadn’t been blessed with a child of her own, Aunt Gertie would make a better mother than Ella. Ten times over. While Aunt Gertie might be a little set in her ways and prone to headaches, at least she liked kids. But the intention of the people of Rosey Corner had been plain enough at the church on Sunday. Grandfather Reece’s stroke had delayed that, but Kate wasn’t sure it had changed anything.

In fact the stroke made it that much harder to change. Kate had stood up ready to fight for Lorena in the church, and Aunt Hattie had stood up to fight beside her, and look what had happened. Everybody said it was Aunt Hattie’s fault that Grandfather Reece had a stroke, but Kate had been the first to speak up against him. She knew who was really to blame.

Daddy said neither one of them was to blame. That sometimes strokes just happened, but everybody knew they happened faster when people got upset. Else why would people keep telling each other not to have a stroke when something was going wrong? And things had been going wrong.

Sometimes the unworthy thought sneaked into Kate’s head that Grandfather Reece had the stroke because he was going against the Lord’s own plan for Lorena. The Lord had picked Kate to find Lorena on the church steps, not her grandfather. And then Kate would practically melt with shame for even considering the thought that the Lord might look upon her with more favor than he did on Grandfather Reece after all the faithful years her grandfather had served the Lord. If anybody knew what the Lord wanted, it would be Grandfather Reece and not Kate.

By some kind of miracle, her grandfather hadn’t condemned her for causing his stroke. Instead he had taken her hand and smiled at her when she had told him how sorry she was. At least he’d smiled as best he could. He wasn’t happy. Nobody could be happy lying there so helpless with no way to know if he’d ever get better.

The doctor didn’t even know that. He said Grandfather Reece’s condition might improve, but then he pulled Mama aside to warn that a second stroke could be even worse and that they needed to keep Grandfather Reece from getting upset again.

Kate didn’t know how the doctor expected them to ever do that. Grandfather Reece got upset each time he opened his mouth and the words didn’t come out right. He couldn’t get out of the bed and walk. He couldn’t even take a drink without half the water spilling out the wrong side of his mouth onto the bedcovers.

Rosey Corner Baptist Church was praying for him. So was the Christian Church. They held a special joint prayer service the Sunday night after he had the stroke, but Grandfather Reece didn’t sit up and start talking so people could understand. The deacons told Kate’s mother not to lose faith. The miracle would surely come in the Lord’s own time. That’s what Grandfather Reece had always told them when they prayed for something that didn’t come right away, whether it was for rain or healing.

The Lord’s own time. Meanwhile they didn’t have any choice but to keep doing the best they could to take care of him. Miss Carla wasn’t any help. She was still having sinking spells and telling anybody who would listen that she wasn’t well enough to stand up under the strain of caring for her husband. Every day Kate’s mother looked as if she was having a harder time standing up under the strain herself.

On Wednesday when Kate went over to see if there was anything her mother needed from home, she grabbed Kate with a look that verged on frantic and jerked her into the sickroom. “You can sit with your grandfather for a little while,” she said.

Kate wanted to pull away and run home. She didn’t like being in the sickroom. It had a funny smell. Not a dirty smell. It was clean. She and her mother had seen to that the first day, but there wasn’t any way to keep out the sick smell. That smell just seemed to ooze out of the pores of somebody as sick as Grandfather Reece.

But Kate couldn’t say no to her mother. Her mother needed help and who else was there to give it? Certainly not Evie, who turned pale at even the thought of having to visit Grandfather Reece, or Tori, who was way too young. No, it had to be Kate, the middle sister, the one who always did whatever had to be done. The responsible one.

So Kate took a deep breath of air that she hoped would be enough to last as she moved a few steps farther into the room. The man on the bed scared her. To be truthful, her grandfather had always scared her. Even when he was patting her on the head as a little girl, she’d kept expecting him to yank her up by the collar and let her have it for something she’d done.

Kate heard her mother go out the front door. Miss Carla was snoring on the couch. No church people were visiting. Nobody there but Kate to take care of her grandfather.

She tiptoed over to the chair by the bed. He was asleep or seemed to be. That was good. She could sit there beside him and be very quiet. Better even than that, she could close her eyes and pray. Sometimes she jumped up in the morning and forgot about praying. She didn’t intend to. She just did. And now wasn’t a good time to be forgetting about praying. Not with so much she needed help with.

Of course it wasn’t right to only pray when she needed something. She was supposed to pray about everything. Good things, bad things, in-between things, ordinary things. The Bible said the Lord wanted to hear from his people. And she was one of his people. She’d been baptized down at the river when she was younger than Tori, and not just because her grandfather and mother told her she should be. She’d felt the Lord telling her in her own heart.

Grandfather Reece had baptized her and Evie, who had run down the aisle that same day after Kate stepped out. He’d called her Sister Katherine Reece Merritt, thanked the Lord for her soul, and dipped her down under the water. It was the closest she had ever felt to Grandfather Reece.

Now as she sat beside her grandfather’s bed, she bowed her head and shut her eyes, but she couldn’t seem to settle her thoughts down enough to pray. Her legs were all jerky and itchy. She wanted to move, to run outside and down the road to check on Lorena.
Lorena. Lorena. Lorena. Dear Lord up in heaven, help me take care of Lorena. Let me keep being her sister. I’ll try to be extra good and do the things I should and not do the things I shouldn’t.

“Amen,” her grandfather said.

She opened her eyes and peeked over at her grandfather to see if he had noticed her praying and was trying to help her out, or if he wanted a drink of water or something. It was hard to tell since “amen” was the only word he said that anybody could understand and he said it for everything.

He was staring at her out of his good eye, and she almost expected him to rise up out of the bed and start preaching at her the way he’d done plenty of times in the past when somebody had told him some wrong she’d done. She’d almost be glad to get preached at that way again, because that would mean he was back to his old self. But instead he just lay there and kept staring at her. Not a stern stare or a reproachful stare. But more as if he wanted her to do something for him.

“Can I get you something?” she said softly after a few minutes.

“Amen,” he said.

“You want me to pray?” she asked. “I’m not too good at praying out loud, but I can do the Lord’s Prayer if you want me to.”

He waved his right hand as if to shoo off that idea and pointed to the nightstand.

“The Bible. You want me to read the Bible to you again? I can do that.” She reached over and picked up her grandfather’s Bible. “I could read it all the way through for you, but that would take too long. You’d be back preaching before I got out of Exodus. How about if I just open it up and start reading wherever?”

Her grandfather said amen again. She didn’t know whether that meant yes or no, but his eyelids drooped down over both his eyes, and he seemed to be listening when she opened up to the Gospel of John and started reading. She remembered him preaching sermons on some of the verses she read, and when she told him that, he opened his eyes and looked at her and said, “Amen.” This time it sounded as if the very word he intended came out of his mouth.

By the time her mother came back in the room to let Kate go home, Kate had read through five chapters of John. Before she left, Kate leaned over to kiss her grandfather goodbye, something she hadn’t done since she was a little girl like Lorena and her mother told Kate to kiss him goodbye. She hadn’t wanted to then, but now it just seemed right. She owed him that much, and some of the worry seemed to evaporate with her lips touching his forehead.

But it came back when her mother asked how things were at home. Kate sort of skipped over the truth. She couldn’t tell her how she and Evie kept fighting over who had to do what or that Tori kept saying she wasn’t hungry and not eating like she should or that Daddy hadn’t come home for supper two nights in a row. So she mumbled something about needing to pick the beans before she kissed her mother goodbye and hurried out the door. It was easy to see her mother was already worried enough without Kate adding to it.

The only person not covered up with worry was Lorena. She was trusting Kate to take care of her. Every morning she got out of bed and stretched up as tall as she could there in the middle of their bedroom and said, “My name is Lorena Birdsong.” Every night she did the same thing before she went to bed. Some days she spoke her name in little more than a whisper. Other times she practically shouted it out. The whisper made Kate want to cry and the shouts made her laugh.

Some mornings, Kate would pick Lorena up and dance her through the house to the kitchen, singing her name. “Lorena. Lorena. Lorena Birdsong. My sweet Lorena Birdsong.”

That made Lorena giggle, and for a minute Kate could forget all the things she had to worry about. Grandfather Reece might be getting better, and Daddy did finally come home even if it was late. It wasn’t that much of a problem to keep the household going while Mama was gone. Getting the fire to burn right in the cookstove wasn’t easy—sometimes it just wanted to smoke up the kitchen—but she kept waving the smoke out the back door with a dishtowel and poking at the fire until the stove finally got hot enough to perk coffee and fry eggs for Tori and Lorena.

And Evie was trying to do her part even if she was sort of bossy about it. The first morning she got up and tried to make biscuits just like their mother’s, but while Mama’s biscuits were light and fluffy, Evie’s were hard as rocks. She cried when their father tried to bite into one before he said some things just weren’t possible and that he always did like light bread with his honey.

On Thursday Tori and Lorena helped Kate pick the green beans. When they ended up with over a bushel of beans, Kate didn’t know what to do. She knew about as much about canning beans as Evie did about making biscuits. She knew about breaking them up and washing them and packing them in quart jars. She’d helped with that plenty of times. Then Mama put them down in big pots of water and cooked and cooked them, but Evie said if they didn’t do it right, they’d end up with ptomaine poisoning when they tried to eat the beans come winter.

“But we can’t just let them sit here and ruin,” Kate said.

Evie eyed the beans a minute before she said, “When’s Mama coming home?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you go ask her? You ought to go see Grandfather Reece anyway.”

“I can’t, Kate. I don’t do sickrooms very well. I get all trembly and feel like I’m going to faint.” Evie grabbed hold of one of the posts on the back porch as if she thought the faint was coming on already.

“You wouldn’t faint,” Kate said.

“You can’t know that. Lots of people faint for all kinds of reasons. Just because you think you can bite nails in two doesn’t mean that everybody can.” Evie gave her a mean look.

“Who’s bitin’ nails in two out here?” Aunt Hattie said as she came around the house and found them on the back porch staring at the beans.

“Oh, Aunt Hattie,” Kate said with a big smile. “You must be an answer to prayer.”

“Why’s that, child?”

“All these beans.” Kate waved her hand at the green beans.

“You’s been prayin’ over beans?” Aunt Hattie raised her gray eyebrows at Kate.

“Well, no, but I should have been. Mama’s still over with Grandfather Reece and Evie says if we don’t do them right we could get ptomaine poisoning, but we can’t just let them go to ruin. You can help us can them, can’t you? Please, please, please.” Kate grabbed Aunt Hattie’s hand and pulled her up on the porch.

“I was a-thinkin’ you might need some help about nows.” Aunt Hattie laughed and looked around. Her smile faded into a frown. “Where’s the young one?”

“She’s inside looking at books with Victoria,” Evie said.

A look of relief flashed across Aunt Hattie’s face as she shut her eyes for a second almost like she was praying. When she opened her eyes, she said, “Gets them on out here. The storybooks ain’t going nowhere. Them young’uns can break beans same as we can.” She grabbed the old straight chair they kept on the porch and sat down before she filled her apron with beans and began breaking off the ends. “And bring on out some pans for the beans. We ain’t got all day. Canning beans ain’t no short job.”