The conversation she’d had with her father over the Memorial Day parade rang through her thoughts.
“There’s going to be a celebration in town, and I say why not be a party to it?”
“Daddy, everything in life can’t be your own personal celebration.”
“I’d have to ask you again, Sadie-girl, why not?”
“Why not?” Sadie echoed the question that had come back to her time and again since then.
“April, either back up or—”
“Or…” Sadie reached down to the floor to retrieve the hat she’d flung into the car earlier. “Maybe there is a third choice.”
“What have you got on your mind, Sadie?” April asked.
“Forget her mind,” Hannah snapped. “What has she got on her head?”
“Just hear me out,” Sadie said.
The music rose as the high-school band stopped to do an intricate number involving flat twirling and frantic movements for the benefit of the dignitaries observing from the VIP seats.
As she detailed her idea to her sisters, Sadie glanced around them at the small but lively crowd clustered at the corner waving flags and holding balloons. Looking down the larger street in both directions, she could see the older folks sitting in their lawn chairs on the sidewalk. Children perched on the curb, ready should the next float or group throw small wrapped candies to the spectators. Though she could not see them from here, Sadie knew the food vendors she’d given permits to would be lined up at the front edge of the park. And the vendors who hadn’t gotten
the proper paperwork would set up in places like Downtown Drug’s parking lot, along with the booths of civic, church and school groups raising money.
In other words, pretty much everyone in Wileyville or thereabouts was gathered at or near this crossroads today.
And that was just fine with Sadie.
“Well?” she asked her sisters when she had finished her pitch.
April chewed her lip, considering the proposition.
“Don’t you dare,” Hannah warned.
“Oh, go on, April.” Sadie poked the driver-sister in the shoulder. “For once in your life,
dare
.”
April looked at Hannah.
Hannah held her breath.
The band came to an uproarious conclusion. Then after a moment’s silence, began to play a soft, sweet, patriotic tune.
The car began to move. The paper barricade snagged, coming free of the light posts it had been taped to and creating a lovely banner across the Caddie’s grille as it eased forward.
Sadie plunked her hat on as someone rushed up and handed her a red balloon.
And off they went.
That was how it happened that Sadie and her sisters came to fulfill their destiny as Solomon’s daughters by barging in on the annual Wileyville Fourth of July parade in a yellow convertible, a flurry of red, white and blue streamers with the glorious strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” reverberating in the background.
“Okay, you’re so smart.” Hannah sank as low in the seat as possible, snapping, “What do we do now, Sadie?”
Sadie swallowed a lump the size of a cherry bomb in her throat and scanned the sea of familiar faces staring at
her from the sidewalks. Her cheeks burned. Her eyes stung. And her heart…raced with genuine joyful exuberance!
“What to do? Sisters, we will do the only thing three Shelnutts in an open-air car inflicting themselves on a decades-old Wileyville tradition
can
do. We’re going to enjoy it.”
“Are you…?” Hannah couldn’t even finish her question.
“Really?” April met Sadie’s gaze in the rearview mirror, her eyes glittering with the fun of it all.
“Smile pretty girls, and wave!” Sadie did both.
In turn, slowly, so did Hannah, then April.
From her prime spot in front of her family’s home furnishing store, Lollie Muldoon cocked her head one way and then the other, clearly unsure what to make of it.
Her son, Kurt, working “crowd control”—as if anything in Wileyville constituted a serious crowd or would submit itself to control in these circumstances—stopped long enough to tip his hat to the passing ladies and call out, “Nice entry, Miss April.”
“April has a boyfriend,” Sadie teased with a tug at her sister’s braid.
Waynetta Cummins did manage to put a damper on things with a simple shake of her head, but that soon evaporated when Sadie caught a glimpse of Claudette and her sons laughing and cheering them on.
Sadie raised her arm and pantomimed scratching that old itch.
Claudette gave her a thumbs-up.
Sadie laughed, but before she could say anything about it all to her sisters, Deborah Danes had appeared out of nowhere, taking long strides to keep up with the slow crawl of the car.
“Don’t tell me. That nut Moonie put y’all up to this.”
“For your information, that
nut
is not even in town.” Hadn’t she just told her son recently that smart people didn’t stoop to sarcasm? Well how smart could she be, Sadie decided, that she not only got herself into a parade by accident but then decided to take on the likes of Deborah Danes in the middle of said parade? “In fact, we were headed out of town ourselves, took a wrong turn and are just trying to make the best of it.”
“You know the saying?” April kept her eyes on the road and her smile on high beam. “When life gives you lemons…”
“Life does not give me lemons, thank you. It does, at times, in the form of people with the last name of Shelnutt, sometimes give me ulcers, but not lemons.”
Hannah’s head jerked up.
“Now with all due respect, ladies,” Deborah said tartly, her smile more of a grimace, “get out of my parade.”
“I thought this was the town’s parade.”
Had she actually said that out loud?
“It’s the whole country’s parade.” Twisting around in the seat, Hannah gave Sadie a wink and Deborah a stern look.
Something had changed in her sister. Something had shaken loose and awakened. Without asking, Sadie knew what that something was. Hope. It filled her sister’s face and fueled her words. For once in her life Hannah had real hope that they would finally know the truth about their mother, that she might finally be let off the hook over that whole left-her-as-a-baby complex.
And it showed when she tossed back her hair, waved to the crowd and announced, “Everyone here has gathered to celebrate the roots of our individual freedom. And I
can’t think of a better send-off for a journey to find our own family roots than doing something to make our daddy—or as Mrs. Danes likes to call him,
that nut
—proud. Drive on, April.”
“Buh-bye, Deborah!” Sadie gave the official beauty-queen wave.
April accelerated just enough to pull away from the parade’s irate organizer.
For the first time in what seemed forever, the three of them had acted in unison and for a common goal. Whatever lay ahead for them on this strange and tenuous trip, Sadie told herself to hold this memory in her heart.
They were sisters. They were family. They were on their way to find out the truth, and no matter what, with love and God’s help, they would be all right.
Wouldn’t they?
“I
can’t believe this,” Hannah muttered.
“You were the one who told us to always listen to the navigator. April said turn right here, and so I turned…” Sadie spread her hands wide over the yellow convertible sitting nose first in a grassy drainage ditch “…right here.”
April pushed the loose strands of hair from her eyes, then pulled her braid free from a dry bush that had ensnared it. She began working her way up the three-foot-deep embankment by the side of the old disused two-lane road, saying, “Right, as in to the right. Here, as in at the next intersection.”
“I
know
that.” Sadie extended her hand to help her sister back onto level ground. “I was making a joke.”
“I think this trip is going to give me a whole new appreciation of Deborah Danes and her whole life-doesn’t-give-me-lemons-but-Shelnutts-give-me-ulcers philosophy.” Hannah paused long enough from pawing around in the back seat, where she’d been sitting, to hold her hand over her stomach and sigh.
“Just misjudged the distance.” Sadie peered off into the growing dusk. “That’s all.”
“We wouldn’t even be on this road if you hadn’t taken us twenty miles back toward Kentucky after we left that giant truckers’ plaza place and that nice clerk hadn’t told us about this way to get on track.” Joining Sadie by the side of the road, April turned, her hands on her hips. “Which leaves me with one question.”
Sadie dared to give her sister a little shoulder nudge. “Why am I driving?”
“No.” April tried to maintain her stern exterior.
Sadie nudged her again and laughed, just a little.
April gave in and joined her in a brief tension-easing chuckle. “That
is
a good question, but no. My real question is, if the three of us can’t make this trip without mishaps, what are the odds that Daddy did?”
“They must be pretty good.” Sadie gazed at the horizon thick with trees divided by the road that disappeared over the next hill. “We haven’t seen hide nor hair of him yet.”
“He’s probably there already.” Hannah picked her way around the side of the stranded vehicle, clutching a paper bag from their last stop along the way. “Meanwhile, we’re still ninety minutes away from Alphina and it’s getting dark.”
“The roadside-assistance man said they were running behind because of the holiday.” Sadie pressed a button on her cell phone to check the time. “He should be out here within the hour.”
The bag crinkled in Hannah’s death grip while she used her free hand to shake some leaves from her once-tidy summer dress. “We should have been there by now.”
April folded her arms and shifted her weight. Small rocks and dried twigs crunched beneath her clunky hiking boots. “We’d have made better time if
somebody
didn’t have to stop every few miles.”
“I’m nervous.” Hannah held the bag containing her suddenly indispensable bottle of pink gooey antacid aloft like Scarlett O’Hara swearing she’d never go hungry again, and proclaimed, “When I’m nervous, my stomach gets upset. I’m delicate that way.”
“Delicate?” Sadie snorted.
“Right.” April clicked her tongue. “I have known you since the day you were born, girl, and I have never seen you go ‘delicate’ over anything before.”
“Well, you’ve never seen me just hours away from meeting our mother before, have you?” Their baby sister took a swig from the bottle on the spot, and in a very unHannah-like move, wiped the excess from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. “I tell you, it’s got me all in knots.”
Puh-puh-pop
.
They all flinched at the sound of fireworks in the distance.
“Can you believe it?” Hannah leaned her hip against the back end of the car and looked skyward. “In a few hours we could be meeting our mother.”
April stepped forward. “Hannah, I…”
Sp-pt-pt-fe-e-ee-euw
. A bottle rocket screamed high, high up over their heads, then burst into a blinding flash of light.
Sadie put her hand on April’s arm to keep her from saying anything more.
“You two do believe that, don’t you?” In the dimming last rays of daylight, Hannah’s auburn hair looked quite dark in contrast to her pale skin. It made her eyes appear as large and luminous as a fretful child’s when she looked to her sisters for reassurance.
Two more bottle rockets pierced the darkening sky.
“Sadie? April?”
The pleading in Hannah’s voice cut straight to Sadie’s heart. She blinked, and in doing so, freed a warm wash of
tears, which softened the image of her younger sister standing there waiting for an answer.
April exhaled loudly and turned her upper body toward the road they had just come down.
“I just can’t help thinking, Hannah, that if she really wanted to find us—”
“No!” Hannah’s hand went up to demand Sadie say no more.
Sadie pressed her lips together, and for the first time in such a very long time, sought help from a higher source.
Help me to get through this, Lord
. “If Mom was…
interested
in finding us.”
Interested
. What a strange code word for what they all suspected in their hearts—that their own mother did not want them, did not care what had become of them, did not love them.
A tear fell on Sadie’s cheek. She sniffled, looked away from her sister’s stricken expression and concluded, “She surely would have found us by now.”
“No! Don’t say that.” Hannah’s voice cracked. “Daddy kept her from us. Now if he could keep us from finding out about her, what’s to say that he couldn’t keep her from finding us?”
“If that was Daddy’s goal, he would have changed our names,” April said softly.
Sadie raised her head to keep another tear from falling. “Daddy is not the villain in our story, Hannah.”
“And Mama is?” Hannah’s hand went to her throat. “Is that what you’re saying? That our mother is the bad one in all this?”
“No!” Sadie clenched her jaw. “I did not say that.”
Why did every exchange between them have to deteriorate so quickly into conflict? Sadie anguished. Even now,
when they should all be supporting each other, every word they spoke to one another remained suspect. Like too many things involving the people that she loved, it tore at Sadie’s heart. But somehow, standing here with no one but her sisters and the Lord as witnesses, it did not defeat her. Had her short, unimpressive prayer been answered?
Sadie could come to no other conclusion when she marveled at the peace she found when she confronted her younger sister’s pain with kind and loving reason. “There are no villains in this situation, Hannah. Don’t you see that? There are only people. Flawed, misguided, hurting people.”
If you think of everyone you meet as an uncertain, hurting individual, most of the time you’ll be right
.
Funny, Sadie had never thought to apply Claudette’s insight to her own family. Yet standing here with her sisters and knowing their deepest inner yearnings for some kind of closure regarding their mother, she realized she’d been treating each of them as if
she
were the only one in pain and wondering why they did not minister to her. She had shortchanged her sisters in that way.
And Daddy.
“He would have done anything for her,” Sadie whispered.
“What?”
“That’s what Daddy said when he had his episode in the cemetery. He wished Mama had trusted him more, and wondered if she ever knew how much he loved her.”
Boom
. Somewhere, not too far away, another holiday celebration had gotten off to a raucous start. A spark of light soared into the sky and seconds later red-and-white sparks formed a breathtaking blossom.
As the aftermath, a shower of sizzling embers fell to earth again. Sadie shut her eyes and hung her head.
“Well I don’t believe it. I think she’s alive and some plausible reason exists for why she hasn’t come to us. Daddy wouldn’t have taken off on this supersecret mission to go to her unless he thought he could make a bridge.” Hannah scooted up onto the trunk, lying back to watch the show. “That’s what I choose to believe.”
Hurting or not, Hannah had spoken. And when that woman made up her mind, there was no arguing.
April joined her on the back of the car. “I guess we’ll know soon enough.”
Pow. Pop. Bang
.
Both sisters held out their hands to Sadie and she climbed up beside them. They watched the show overhead for a few minutes, the silence broken only by gasping now and again at the beauty of the display.
Finally, during a lull where they could hear but not see the small celebratory explosions going off in every direction, April spoke, softly and plaintively. “Been a lot of years since the three of us talked about Mama.”
“Remember?” Sadie drew in the night air, slightly tinged with smoke and dust. “Those summer nights when Daddy and Aunt Phiz let us sleep outside in the tent and we knew they couldn’t hear us?”
“Supermom,” Hannah murmured.
“She was going to show up one day out of the blue and rescue us from all the rules and expectations that we hated.” Sadie thought of Olivia and how she had gotten that wish—a mom who let her do exactly as she pleased, if only for a little while. Her heart sank to think that she had placed that kind of burden on her own child.
“And she would be bright and beautiful and radiant, and…and perfect in every way.” Hannah crossed her legs at the ankle and managed not to get so much as a smudge
of road dirt on her sleek sandals. “We sure made her larger than life in those talks, didn’t we?”
“We made her who we needed her to be.” April laced her arms tightly around herself.
“No, not you, April. You never went in for grandiose fantasies about how our mom could do or say or be anything we dreamed up.”
“I just don’t remember her that way,” April whispered.
“At least you
can
remember her.”
“Not much.”
“But some. You have something. We don’t have anything…” Hannah gestured to include Sadie in her complaint. “Not even a crust of a memory from you, since you refuse to tell us about her.”
“I’ve explained that to you. It was all so long ago, I can’t in good conscience promise the authenticity of my recollections.”
Sadie touched her older sister’s arm. “We’re not asking for promises or guarantees, April, we just want—”
“Anything,”
Hannah begged. “How she smelled. Did she sing? Did she kneel beside the bed at night with you and listen to your prayers?”
“I remember…”
“What?” Sadie and Hannah asked at the same time.
“I
think
I remember when Moonie and Mama got married.”
“No!”
“Really?
“You never told us that,” Sadie murmured in awe.
“It’s such a fleeting image—the church, the flowers, eating cake while sitting on Moonie’s lap, and Mama worried that I’d make a mess and him saying, ‘That’s all
right, Teresa. Kids are supposed to make messes. It’s part of life—the best part.’”
Sadie leaned her chin in her hand. “You remember that?”
“Well see, that’s why I never mention it. It does seem like a lot for a four year old to recall. But I
do
. I think it got fixed in my mind because I remember thinking at the time what a lucky little girl I was to have a new daddy who thought the messes were the best part of life.”
“He still thinks that.” Hannah curled the bag of stomach medicine close to her chest.
“Bet you don’t think you’re so lucky now, huh?” Sadie laughed a little.
“Actually…yes, I do.”
Hannah rolled just her head to the side and asked, “Really?”
“Y’all, I…I don’t know if I should say any more.”
“Yes, you should.” Sadie’s pulse picked up at the promise of knowing something—anything—more about the mother she had never really known.
“Do. Please, do,” Hannah pleaded.
“Most of my memories of Mom are not…happy.”
“Happy?” The paper bag in Hannah’s grasp crinkled. “You mean, like birthdays and Christmas happy?”
“I mean…” Even in the darkness April’s eyes betrayed her inner conflict. For a moment it seemed she might close up again and not say any more. Then, slowly, she sat up and looked at her own hands and went on. “The few memories I have of Mom always make me feel so very, very sad—
even
the birthday and Christmas ones.”
“Because she’s gone?” Hannah’s tone begged for that to be the reason.
“Because she was never there.”
They all sat silent for a moment, trying to absorb the whole significance of April’s simple reply.
Somehow, Sadie knew instinctively what she meant, and it chilled her to the bone.
“Oh, physically, her body was present.” April kept her gaze cast down. She fidgeted with the end of her braid. “You’ve seen the photos, you both know that. But inside she just wasn’t available to the people who loved her.”
Sadie shivered. She knew that feeling all too well. Finally she found the courage to ask, “Wasn’t she ever happy? Didn’t she ever…get better?”
“Not that I recall.”
Sadie’s breath stopped short in her chest. This was their mother they were talking about, not her. April was telling them about the past, not giving a warning about Sadie’s certain future.
“My very last memories of her…and, again, I may be mixing all this up with the last stages of pregnancy and her being tired or what have you. But my last memories of her were of her never getting out of bed. Never wanting to see us.” April sniffled, which was for her like a great outpouring sob from someone else. She paused, gathered herself, and then in a voice so raw it hurt just to hear it, whispered, “If she’d have just let us in. I’d have…”
“Done anything. If only she had trusted how much people loved her,” Sadie paraphrased what Moonie had said that day in the cemetery. “If only she hadn’t withdrawn. If only she hadn’t let it eat away at her. If only she had asked for help…”
“Sadie?” April sat up, closer now. “Did Daddy say all that about Mama?”
“Hmm?” Sadie blinked and suddenly realized she’d been all but making a confession about her own actions.
She shook her head. “No. I was just…I wonder if Mama ever saw a doctor for her condition?”