When the Morning Glory Blooms (25 page)

From the moment I welcomed Marie into my home, I could sense her undercurrent of fear. A violent act had spawned the baby in her womb. She fought a constant, courageous battle to accept the child as it grew within her, without linking it to the attack and her attacker.

Marie was out visiting Lydia, taking piano lessons more for the diversion than for the music, the afternoon he showed up at my door. I recognized him from the pictures Marie had painted of him with her words. The snarling mouth of a hill badger. The evil eyes of one from whom all goodness had been extracted.

He did not actually show up at my door. He burst through it as if the place were a tavern party waiting for his arrival, rather than a home. My home.

“Where is she?” he demanded when I reached the front hall in which he stood, or rather staggered.

“Who?”

“Marie!”

How my heart pounded! “Not that it is any of your business, but she is not here.”

“Not my business?”

“Sir, I’m going to ask you to kindly leave the premises.” I straightened my posture but still failed to gain any height or power.

“I ain’t going nowhere until she comes with me.”

“You will have a great deal of difficulty convincing her of the wisdom of your plan.”

“Don’t have to convince nobody. She’s mine. And that kid she’s fixing to whelp. I’ll kill anyone that tries to say different.”

I gripped the sides of my skirt with my clenched fists to keep my hands from striking out at the beast that was fouling the air and curdling my blood. “She’s not here. And she’s not yours,” I added, growling the last words.

The look he hurled at me was so venomous that I felt flush with the poison. “Take your argument elsewhere, sir. You’re not welcome here.”

What made me think the encounter was over? He exited, no less agitated than when he’d arrived, and I retreated to my office parlor, closing the tall double doors behind me, shutting out the stench of his presence. I collapsed into the chair at my desk, quivering with rage and concern. How would Marie’s life ever be free of this man? Who would protect her and the child from his appearing at their door someday in the not-too-distant future, hissing and staggering and threatening?

It was many minutes before I stopped shaking. Puff and Marie were due back from town, and Josiah was expected to join us for our evening meal. Kitchen duties called to me. The chicken stew would not cook itself.

Would not cook itself
. Those four words lodged themselves in my brain, stuck to the walls of it as though it had been branded
with a hot iron. They were the last words I entertained before the rock shattered the window, before the flames danced up the drapes and raced across the floor toward me, before I discovered the doors to the office had been barricaded from the outside, before the smoke wrapped its vicelike hands around my throat and squeezed for all it was worth, before the darkness won  . . .  would not cook itself  . . .  would not cook itself.

God had a plan all along to protect Marie from her—and my—attacker. Prison bars. A hefty sentence  . . .  not for what he did to her, but for what he did to me and to my home. Even in my most desperate hours fighting off the spear-wielding demons of pain, Marie’s freedom from fear soothed me.

Consciousness was not my friend in the days after the fire. I begged for it to leave. To be alert meant to feel, and I dared not feel. My throat and lungs were raw and soot-clogged. My palms were blistered as if I’d grabbed a roaster from the hot oven with my bare hands. Dr. Noel speculated that as the smoke overcame me, I slapped at the flames on my legs.

It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before Puff and Marie arrived. Only my legs were badly burned. My memories of that time are pieced together from snatches of nightmares, bits of conversation, reports I’ve been told, and mangled thoughts that blur the boundaries between truth and hallucination. Josiah said that by the time he arrived, Puff had the fire out. How he kept it from spreading to other rooms of the house is as much a mystery as the rest of him. As Josiah related it, Marie hovered over me as if she were already a mother—mine.

After Puff pulled me from the room and carried me to an oasis of shade, Marie tenderly picked charred fabric off the burned flesh on my legs. It was all she knew to do. Dr. Noel said that if she hadn’t acted so quickly  . . .  or if they hadn’t come home when they did  . . .  well, the scars are reminders
that I am still here. Reminders, too, that the Lord was not inattentive, not unaware of the flames or of me in the midst of them.

Ivy—1951

“So now you know about the scars, Ivy.”

Ivy choked out, “Do they still bother you?”

“Oh, yes. I had my heart set on becoming a Rockette dancer.”

“Other than Drew, you’re the first person who’s made me laugh in a long time, Anna.”

“Speaking of your Drew  . . . ”

She checked her wristwatch.

“Ivy  . . .  ?”

“I started a letter to him last night during a break from staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t think.”

Anna’s chest rose and fell in an exaggerated sigh.

“I intend to tell him. It’s hard to know what to say.”

“Lies are complicated, Ivy. The truth is easy. It flows like maple sap on a warm spring day.”

“Not this truth.”

“Even this one.”

It was Ivy’s turn to sigh.

“Child, listen to me.”

“I have been, Anna. And I don’t want to stop. Please consider sharing the house my father hopes to get.”

“Your father ‘
hopes
to get.’ And then you hope to convince him to share it with me when he’s only just agreed to share it with you! Ivy  . . .”

“Oh!”

“What?”

“This baby of mine must want to be a Rockette, too.”

Anna’s eyes teared up.

“What is it, Anna? Are you okay?”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you call the child ‘baby of mine’ and the first time you’ve talked about the little one with a smile on your face. How beautiful.”

Ivy felt her cheeks flush, and something like warm syrup spread through her. So this is what it felt like to be a mother.

19

Becky—2012

Downsizing?” The word sounded like a disease that struck other families, not theirs. They’d never upsized, that she could recall.

Gil—once annoyingly absent, now annoyingly present for discussions like this—stated his case. “Do you see any other solution? I’m grateful for the work driving the school bus, but in a town this small, even if I volunteer for every out-of-town game and music competition, it still won’t be enough. Wouldn’t we rather downsize than face foreclosure?”

“I could get a job, too. Not back at Ellison, I’m sure, but something. There might be opportunities in Minneapolis or Mankato.”

“Even if something opened up, Beck, who would Lauren get to babysit, to spend as many hours as you do caring for that little guy? And we certainly can’t fork over money for child care. It would eat up your whole paycheck. Or mine.”

She slit open another paper grocery bag, pressed it flat on the kitchen island, and stenciled red bells and green Christmas trees on what was once the interior surface. Presents were modest this year. She refused to spend more on wrapping paper
than on the gift inside. Good thing the rustic look worked with their decor. “So, by downsizing, you mean  . . . ”

Gil poured himself a cup of coffee. Becky noticed he was drinking it black. Giving up cream and sweetener for the cause? Had it come to that?

“By that I mean, do you think we could get by with a townhouse or condo?”

“You love this yard! This neighborhood!”

His look sobered further. “I love a lot of things that aren’t possible right now.”

“Already, Gil? Really? We’re that bad off just a few weeks into it?”

He frowned into his coffee cup. “Trying to plan ahead. Do you know how hard it might be to sell this place? How long it might take us?”

“Where would we find a condo we could afford that has three bedrooms?”

“Three?”

Jackson wailed in the background, resistant to a diaper change or lost toy or some other little-boy crisis.

“Beck, under the circumstances, isn’t Lauren going to have to work out her own solutions? We have to think of us.”

Bell, bell, bell. Tree, tree, tree. Slam, slam, slam.

“I
am
thinking of us, all of us, the
whole
family.”

“So, we’re going to bear all the financial responsibility for Lauren’s choices? Forever? Is that what you expect?”

Bell. Slam. Tree. Slam.

“You know I hate it when you go to the extreme, Gil. Forever?”

He sidled to the fridge and grabbed the half-and-half. Still unresponsive, he snatched two blue packets from the small bowl on the counter. The contents were well into dissolving in
his coffee when he finally spoke. “Lauren has to pull her own weight in this. Especially now.”

“We can’t just abandon her.”

“Asking her to take responsibility for her actions isn’t the same thing as abandoning. She’s going to have to act like a parent, a real parent, sooner or later.”

“You’re not thinking this would happen before the end of the school year, are you? I mean, come on.”

A tiny sneeze brought the conversation to a halt. Lauren leaned against the archway between the family room and the kitchen. Jackson sat on her thrust hip, clinging with balled fists to her sweatshirt.

“Lauren, honey, we were just discussing—”

“I know. How much we’re in the way. How much easier it would be for you if we weren’t around. How tough we’ve made it on everyone.”

Gil abandoned his coffee and rushed to put his arm around both of them. Lauren shrugged him off.

“No, Dad. I get it. We’re a problem. As if that wasn’t obvious.”

“Lauren, we love you. And we love Jackson. It’s just that—”

Gil! Say something brilliant! Say something day-saving, heroic, manly, correct
.

“What, Dad? It’s just that we’re
inconvenient
? Tell me about it!” Lauren turned, the movement clunking Jackson’s head against the doorjamb. Not hard. Enough to make him cry. She rubbed the spot and said, “Sorry, baby. Mama’s sorry,” as she stormed down the hall to her room.

Becky stamped a Christmas tree that bled clear through to the countertop.

Gil’s laptop held his attention, all of it, for the next two days. Becky had to admire his devotion to job hunting, even if it did keep them from ironing out the wrinkles in their perspectives. She would have offered to help update his resúmé, but in the back of her mind lingered a bullet-point list she must have read somewhere:
How to Love Your Man through a Job Loss
. Writing his resúmé for him was not on the list.

On day three, Gil called her to the end of the couch where he’d planted himself. “Becky, take a look at this.”

Bullet-point two:
Wait until he asks for help
.

She stared at the photo. “What is it?”

“A semidetached on Lexington. Looks promising. Priced to sell.”

Becky gritted her teeth, then thought better of it. They couldn’t afford a dentist bill for a cracked tooth. “A
duplex
? How many bedrooms?”

“Two.”

“Bathrooms?”

“Just the one. It would be something we’d have to get used to.”

“How many of us, Gil? How many of us would have to get used to it?”

“So we’re supposed to go on as we always have, spending without even thinking, meeting everyone else’s needs but our own?”

The cost of an ER visit for stitches in her tongue stopped her shy of biting down any harder on it. “They
are
our own, Gil. Lauren and Jackson are our own.”

He closed the lid of the laptop. “I guess I expected that from you.”

“You say it as if I disgust you because I care about what happens to our daughter and our grandson.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“How would I know that?” She left the room in search of something—anything—to do with her hands. Fold laundry. Dust the top of the refrigerator. Alphabetize spices. Anything other than face the lump that sat on their couch assuming the answer to all their problems lay in miniaturizing the space in which they dwelled.