H
alf an hour later at the motel, when Daddy had gotten settled into his seat in the van—shotgun, he called dibs on it the moment they pulled into the parking lot—Sadie held back.
“Y’all go on ahead.” Sadie dropped her overnight bag into the back seat of the yellow convertible. “I want to drive through town once before I go—you know, to sort of clear my thoughts.”
“Sadie, if you need a few more minutes, we can hang around until you’re ready.”
“It’s okay, Hannah. Between the mama-to-be needing to stop every few miles and the daddy-too-bossy wanting to direct every driving moment, I figure I’ll catch up with you in time for all of us to have lunch together.” She pulled her cell phone from her purse and waved it. “We can arrange the details later.”
“Sure thing.” April tried to smile, but it wouldn’t hold.
Hannah tilted her face up just enough to bathe it in midmorning sun. She scrunched her eyes shut and wrinkled her nose. “Going to get hot today. Don’t hold back too long.”
“I won’t.” Sadie tried to tote up the amount of time she’d need, but since she really didn’t have a clear notion of what she had to do, she couldn’t.
“Okay, then. We’ll catch up later.” April looked at the van and then at the motel and finally at the ground, where hiking boots, high-fashion sandals and scuffed sneakers stood toe-to-toe.
Hannah’s feet shifted restlessly at first, then inched forward to wedge her place solidly among her sisters.
April put one hand on the back of Hannah’s neck, then stole a peek over her sister’s shoulder to the van before leaning in to form a closed circle between the three of them. “You’re going back to the cemetery, aren’t you?”
Sadie rested her forehead against April’s so lightly that she doubted it even smashed her hair down. And yet the touch united them sufficiently that when Sadie found the power to speak in a dry, feeble whisper, she knew the others heard her. “I have to go. I just…have to.”
Hannah wrapped both hands around Sadie’s arm. “Sadie, are you sure that’s wise?”
“Of course it’s wise.” Sadie raised her head, all queenly and confident, and she smiled. “Don’t you know? We’re Solomon’s daughters, girl. We’re just brimming over with wisdom born of authentic individuality.”
“You trying to roast me alive in this van?” Moonie leaned over and beeped the car horn three shorts and a long. “Come on, girls, let’s get going!”
“Oh, all right, we’re Solomon’s daughters born of having put up with
that
all our lives.” Sadie jerked her thumb over her shoulder to their father, who was at that very moment tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as though he just might take a mind to slip into the seat and start them off on another adventure. “If that didn’t give us some kind of horse sense, what else could?”
“You got that right.” Hannah swept her hand through her hair and somehow managed to actually improve the already flawless style. “We’re coming, Daddy. But if you honk that horn again, you’ll be riding on the luggage rack.”
“And lovin’ every minute of it,” he hollered back, waving his hat in the air.
April laughed.
Hannah groaned. “You sure you don’t want to take the first shift driving Daddy?”
“I have enough to cope with, if you don’t mind.” Sadie gave her sisters a quick hug. “Now go. I’ll be okay.”
They all stepped apart, but no one really moved to leave their circle.
“Okay, then,” April said again.
“Okay.” Sadie lifted her hand in a halfhearted wave.
Hannah started to walk away, then suddenly turned and gave Sadie a hard, emotion-fueled hug, murmuring, “Tell Mama goodbye for us.”
She broke away as quickly as she’d started the embrace and rushed to get into the driver’s seat of the Royal Academy van.
Sadie took a deep breath, her eyes watering, nodded to April, then hurried to the old convertible and drove away.
Outside the cemetery she pulled into a spot not easily seen from the main road.
Now what?
Why not?
What are you waiting for, Sadie?
The old questions came at her even as she sat in utter silence.
Now what?
Do what she had come to do. To try to make some sense out of all she had learned today and all she had gone through since losing her baby.
Postpartum depression. She had never thought of it happening after a miscarriage. That’s what Claudette was telling her without using the words. She knew that now. It helped to know she had someone to go to who would understand—and someone Sadie thought would be
perfect for taking over the reins as the president of the Council of Christian Women.
Oh, Waynetta would have a fit. “It just isn’t done, stepping down midterm.”
And Deborah Danes would sniff and sneer about duty and commitment. On second thought, after the parade stunt, Deborah might have already started a recall, or even an out-and-out revolution to remove Sadie from any seat of honor, ever.
Lollie, of course, would needle and pry, slopping sugar to cover up her quest to uncover the “who, what, where and why” behind Sadie’s sudden decision.
“Let her ask,” Sadie muttered, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. “And maybe if she asks straight out, why, I’ll look her in the eye and give her the kind of answer I learned at Daddy’s knee—why not?”
Why not?
Why not start something here and now?
She whipped out her cell phone and hit the speed dial for the pharmacy.
“Ed? I just realized that because of the time difference between here and there, you are probably making your Saturday run to the bank.” So this is what it had come to between her and her husband. After almost twenty years, the best way she knew to get through to him was to shout a message through her cell phone for him to hopefully pick up on his voice mail.
Nice.
She took a breath and vowed not to let it undermine her determination. Ed would get the message. One way or another.
“I’m still in Alphina but should be on the way home soon. I know it’s Saturday and you’re busy and we have to get things laid out for church tomorrow, and maybe you have golf plans.” She was rambling. Well, why not? It was sure a lot easier than just blurting out what she really wanted.
But isn’t that why she had called?
To blurt?
To be honest with her husband? To tell him what she wanted and trust that he wanted the same?
“Anyway, I was hoping…” As honest blurting went, that was a pretty pathetic example. She cleared her throat and began again. “No, I am more than hoping, Ed, I am
counting
on seeing you when I get back, and not just for a minute as you rush back to work or off to golf. We need to talk. So set aside this entire evening. I’m through with being last on your list. I believe our marriage deserves better than the leftover scraps of our lives. I just hope you feel the same way.”
She hung up and waited.
The sky did not grow dark and dreary.
Lightning did not strike from out of the blue.
The earth did not crack open at the center and swallow Sadie up, yellow convertible and all.
People kept on walking.
Cars kept right on driving.
Sadie batted her eyes and exhaled long and low, unaware she had been holding her breath at all.
“Well what do you know? I told my husband what I wanted from him, and the world did not cave around me.”
Of course, she thought, always ready with a darker viewpoint, Ed hadn’t actually heard what she had asked of him. Maybe he wouldn’t even check his voice mail before she got back to town. And what if he did and decided he didn’t feel the same way she did?
Her world might just fall in on her yet.
Or not.
Sadie sighed. She started to lay her head on the steering wheel and retreat when her phone chirped out the tune Ryan had programmed especially for her.
“Aw, c’mon, Mom, you gotta admit, the ‘Monster Mash’ is the perfect song for ’Fraidie Sadie the Cemetery Lady,” he’d told her.
She tried to argue the inappropriateness of it, but when she heard it, well, it always made her smile. And how could she deny her son the not-so-small pleasure of making his mother smile? Sadie knew, sitting here, that she’d have given the world for such a privilege.
She punched a button. The song stopped. She put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
“Oh, Sadie.” It was Ed. “I just got your message. Are you…are you okay?”
“I’m at the cemetery in Alphina.”
“You said.”
“We found Mama—she’s here.”
“I guessed. Do you…do you need me to come down there? I can be out the door in—”
“No.” Her heart lifted. “No, Ed. It’s enough that you offered.”
“Sadie…you’re still my sweet Sadelia, you believe that, don’t you?”
He was asking her if she still had faith in him, in their love and their marriage.
“Yes, Ed,” she whispered as she battled to keep the wellspring of emotion from overwhelming her. “I believe.”
“When will you be home?”
“As soon as I…” She looked around at the run-down properties and the little patches of greenery among the graves. This cemetery was larger but much less lovely than hers.
Her cemetery?
Hmm, maybe all those folks who said she was meant for the job were right. It certainly had gotten under her skin. Of course, it wasn’t the job so much as the opportunity to feel useful again. To know that what she did with her days made a difference.
How it pained her to think Mama had never known that kind of simple satisfaction. At least Sadie thought it had pained her. She still hadn’t quite taken up the notion of her mother as anything but a fantasy creation.
Had they really been so alike? What might each of their lives been if only…
“I’ll start for home as soon as I take one last look at Mama’s grave, Ed.”
“I’ll be waiting for you whenever you get here.”
She didn’t know when she’d ever heard sweeter words from the man she still adored after all these years.
“Thank you,” she murmured, then as an afterthought added, “You might say a prayer for traveling mercies for Daddy and the girls…and me, if you think of it.”
“I have been. In fact, you may not realize it, but you’ve been carried along this whole time on the prayers of all the people who love you.”
She thought of her mother’s fate and of her own and of how things had played out to reunite her family these past two days when it might well have gone the other way. “I do realize it, Ed. I do.”
They said their goodbyes and Sadie climbed out of the car.
This was it. Whatever
it
was.
She shook her hair back and brushed her hand down her clothes, an act that neither dewrinkled her outfit nor smoothed her ruffled emotions.
The screeching of the wrought-iron gate didn’t help put her at ease, either.
Why had she come here, really? What had she hoped to find? The living among the dead?
Had her mother retained her personal faith in the face of crippling depression? Sadie didn’t know. She probably never would.
Her shoes crunched over the broken path. She wound her way to the headstone she had only glanced at earlier in the day. But when she reached it, she didn’t know what to do.
Teresa Owens.
That’s what she had come to see.
It had bothered Sadie more than she could ever let on to Daddy or her sisters that Mama hadn’t kept the name of Shelnutt. The unfamiliar name mocked her and stood in silent testimony that Mama had truly left them—in every possible way.
Sadie’s fears were not ungrounded. She
had
been abandoned. All her life she had wondered if she had been a better child, if she had not been the impatient one as Daddy described, would things have gone another way? Sadie had spent her life waiting for the answers and the understanding to come to her. Standing here looking at the grave of her mother, dead by her own hand even if by accident, Sadie finally had to accept—maybe they never would.
Maybe, just maybe, instead of living her life waiting for the big picture to be revealed, she would just have to take it day by day, hour by hour, from one moment to the next and every one of them with nothing more to stand on than faith.
And that, Sadie finally decided, standing there alone in among the graves, would be enough.
What are you waiting for, Sadie?
“I’m
not
waiting anymore, Mama.” She folded her hands and cocked her head to speak to the marble marker. “I’m going on with my life.”
Sadie looked up. “Do you hear that, Lord? I’m not waiting for life to come to me anymore. I’m not waiting for everything to be perfect before I come to You and lay my burdens at Your feet. I’m flawed. In fact, I’m a great big bundle of unresolved issues and complaints and confusion and bad habits and big hips and a smart mouth and…and…enough faith to remember that You love me anyway.”
She looked again to her mother’s grave, her emotions raw but at peace, and whispered, “Amen.”
At last she knelt to touch the marker, to take away with her some final, visceral memory of having made contact
with her mother. And then she saw it. Words she had not seen before, small and cramped and all but hidden by the grass that grew over the edge and sides of the flat rectangular stone.
Wife and Mother
.
The simplest of epitaphs. Ordinary. Unremarkable.
Except to someone for whom those words meant…everything.
Wife and Mother
.
Mama had not forsaken them. In the end,
that
was how she wanted to be remembered—as Moonie’s wife and Sadie, Hannah and April’s mother.
It was not a perfect, tidy answer to Sadie’s every prayer. But it was an answer. One that she had waited all her life to find.
Her heart swelled.
If she cried, it came unbidden. She did not feel like crying. In that moment she felt…like Sadie.
At last, after so long and even with so much unresolved, she felt the hint of her old self again. And it felt good.
She kissed her fingertips, placed them on the newly uncovered words and whispered for the first time she could ever recall, “I love you, Mama.”