“A year and six months,” Hannah whispered, her gaze lowered to her entwined fingers.
“What?”
In one brief but deep breath, Hannah regained her composure, glanced at the steaming mugs of tea then headed for the refrigerator. “Technically, I suppose you could say that for the first year it was less a case of thinking in clinical terms about cycles and conception and more a case of leaving it in God’s hands.”
“Not a bad place to be.” April took a sip of tea. “In God’s hands.”
“Yeah, I know.” She withdrew a cut-glass pitcher of iced tea and a delicate plate of cut fruit, took a side step to gather a tall fluted tumbler then set them all on the kitchen counter. “And in the end, for all our calculations and calendar counting, that’s where it all will always rest—with the Lord. But still…”
“You have your concerns,” April said.
“Yes, I do. We waited for so long now, trying to get Payt through med school and his internship, holding out for just the right time to start our family. Now every time I see that negative on the pregnancy test strip, I can’t help wondering if we waited too long.”
“Thirty-five’s not that old,” said the woman who felt ancient at thirty-nine. “Not these days.”
“I hope not. Payt wants so badly to have children. And he
should
become a father, he’d make such a terrific one.”
Payton Bartlett was what well-brought-up people around here kindly called “a late bloomer.” Drummed out of military school, washed out of the Coast Guard…and after he ran his uncle’s printing business into red ink, Payton’s father called him a bad seed. Probably worse if there were no ladies present.
Then, while “taking a break to find himself” young Payton had landed on a mission trip to Nicaragua, trying to impress a girl whose name he conveniently couldn’t summon to mind anymore. The romance didn’t last, but as is often the way things go, his lifelong love found him. Working with children in dire need awakened in Payton a drive and ability that no one had suspected he possessed. He came back from that trip with the desire to become a doctor, a pediatrician.
Old man Bartlett had amassed a fortune, but lacked foresight and forgiveness where his greatest earthly treasure, his family, was concerned. He cut Payton off, refusing to fund another impossible dream that would surely fail.
About that time Hannah entered the picture. She was working toward her degree in journalism at the time. They dated and married and later went off to his eighth-choice medical school, a small, obscure place in a western state—but that did not mean it came cheap.
So Hannah left college a few credits shy of attaining her degree and went to work anyplace she could. Payton studied. And when the time came for him to do his residency, Hannah suggested they return to Wileyville, where the Bartlett name had some cachet. With that to build on, she had hoped he’d get an offer to join a prestigious medical practice someplace in Kentucky where they’d have a lovely home and she’d have a houseful of babies.
“Yes, Payt will make a good dad.” April poured tea. “And you’ll be a great mom.”
Hannah picked up a lemon slice and stared at it for a few poignant seconds before raising it above her glass and squeezing the juice into her drink. “I suppose.”
Neither April nor Sadie seemed to have anything to say to bolster her opinion of her abilities. What could they say, after all, to reassure a sister who had lived her whole life reminded that as soon as she was born her own mother had run away?
And so, like so many times in their lives, since they could not quarrel about the situation, they remained silent. Leaving things unsaid, Sadie had decided a long time ago, helped maintain the delicate balance among them. It kept things safe. Talking meant revealing one’s self, and that meant none of them could keep up the pretext that they accepted their mother’s leaving as just one of those things that happens in life.
“You’ll keep trying.” April issued the statement like a decree from the eldest.
“Either that or—” Hannah plunked the lemon into her glass, then wiped her fingers on the cotton towel by the sink. “I haven’t said anything to you two because it’s not a sure thing by a long shot, but there is another way we might start a family.”
“You’re going to adopt!” April gave voice to what was also Sadie’s best guess for her sister’s plans. “Hannah, that’s wonderful.”
“No, not adoption, not exactly.” She tucked her rich auburn hair behind her ears, not once but three times, in slow, meticulous strokes. Then she wet her lips and fixed her attention on her glass of iced tea. “Payt has a second cousin he hasn’t seen since high school. The two of them spent summers together up until then, so they have a history, a bond.”
The legs of Sadie’s stool wobbled as she shifted her weight forward and asked, “And?”
“His wife died in an automobile accident six years ago. He was driving and suffered severe injuries, as well. He’s never fully recovered, physically or emotionally.”
April hugged her mug to her chest, her head bent. “That’s just awful.”
“It gets worse. This is where Payt and I come in. This second cousin has a child, passed around from one family member to the next and…and now it’s our turn.”
Sadie leaned in farther still. “A child?”
Hannah nodded. “A seven-year-old boy.”
“Seven?” April didn’t cluck her tongue, but she might as well have.
Hannah cast her green-eyed gaze heavenward. “And a
boy
.”
“Nothing wrong with boys.” Sadie sat back again at last and laughed, thinking of her own son, Ryan, at that age. “Well, nothing wrong that a little patience, love and earplugs won’t help.”
“But what would
I
do with one?” Hannah said.
Sadie placed her hand on Hannah’s wrist. “Be his mom.”
“That’s the catch. Even though he can no longer care for the boy, this cousin won’t give up his parental rights. I can’t blame him for that, but it puts us in a tentative position at best. He wants us to become foster parents.”
“Fostering a child in so much need, Hannah, I can’t think of anyone better suited to do that than you and Payt.” Again April spoke in such a way that it seemed just her speaking of it made everything indisputable.
“On the one hand it’s ridiculous. Me?
Mom
to a seven-year-old boy?” She spread her hand over her heart, her delicately painted nails bright against her creamy skin and silk knit top. “Then I stop and think—this is my chance to be the only mother some child has ever known.” Her hushed voice broke. She raised her gaze to first April’s, then Sadie’s. Her hand closed. She sniffled. “That really gets to me, you know?”
They both knew so well, they did not dare try to put it into words.
Hannah’s perfectly plucked eyebrows crimped down. “I really hate it when things get to me.”
“Oh, admit it. You’re just a big softie.” Sadie crinkled her nose up.
Hannah responded silently in kind.
April took another sip of hot tea before asking, “When do you have to decide?”
“We have to take some classes, and we want to be settled in our new house.”
“I like
this
house.” April made a show of looking around them at the sparsely furnished house in the part of town officially called Furst Heritage Hollows but that everyone jokingly referred to as Debt Valley.
“Payt and I want one someplace else. Wileyville is quaint and all, but he’s not the small-town type.”
“What about you?” April crossed her legs at the ankles, the thick soles of her sandals thudding quietly together. “If you’re going to start a family, one way or another, don’t you want to be close to us?”
“Close is one thing. Practically on top of one another in the same town?” Hannah pursed her lips in an implicit
No thank you
.
April sighed. She uncrossed her ankles and crossed them again. Then she plucked her braid from her shoulder and began flipping her fingertips through the soft frayed end.
Finally, without making eye contact with either of her sisters, she raised her chin and said, “No matter which you chose, though, that leaves the Daddy thing up to Sadie and me.”
“And just why is that?” Not a single human being on earth who knew her would think Hannah wanted to be a party to doing anything that might even slightly upset her much-adored daddy. But the women in this room knew that if it came down to it, she’d ruffle every last one of the old rooster’s feathers in a New York minute rather than be excluded from anything she saw as a sisterly decision. “I am just as much a part of this family as you two. I have as much to contribute as either of you.”
“Don’t start that whole runner-up-sister routine again, Hannah. We’re talking about seriously taking care of Daddy here. It’s not a contest.”
Runner-up sister
. Hannah loved to bandy that ridiculous title around whenever she and Sadie competed for anything, most of all when vying for their daddy’s approval. In Hannah’s opinion the fix was in. Sadie always won. And Hannah always felt like the runner-up, the sister named to step in should the Miss America sister be unable
to fulfill her duties. Sadie hated the expression not only because it kept a hurt alive in Hannah that Sadie could not ease, but it also must have been an awful blow to April. If Sadie was always the star sister and Hannah next in line, what did that make their older half sibling? Not even in the running?
“Sadie’s right,” April chimed in, with a sure hand on Hannah’s shoulder. “There’s no contest here.”
“Just a decision worthy of King Solomon himself,” Sadie said. Making their father do something he did not want to do could wreak havoc on all their fragile relationships. “How do we divide up
our
Solomon’s care without tearing the family in two?”
The ice rattled in Hannah’s tea glass as she tipped it slightly back and forth.
April tapped her spoon against the side of her cup.
Sadie jiggled her foot and, in time to it all, asked quietly, “Who…gets…Daddy?”
“I do,” Hannah said.
“But you’re moving,” April reminded her.
“That’s not settled yet,” Hannah retorted. “And in the meantime—”
April clunked the spoon down lightly on the countertop. “In the meantime you can use taking care of Daddy to keep you from having to make a decision about becoming a foster parent?”
Hannah’s green eyes sparked, but she did not meet either of her sisters’ gazes when she proclaimed, “April, that is a low and despicable thing to say.”
“Which doesn’t make it any less true,” Sadie murmured.
“And I suppose you want Daddy, too?” April folded her arms. “Miss ‘anything to avoid taking the job that everybody knows you were born to do’?”
“I refuse to believe I was born to run a cemetery!” Sadie evaded a real answer with enough phony huff-and-puffery to rival anything Hannah could produce. “Why shouldn’t
I
take care of Daddy?”
“Because like I said, it’s no contest,” April spoke up. “I’m taking Daddy.”
“You, April?” Hannah set her glass down hard. “Why do you think it should fall to you?”
“He’s not even your—” Sadie found the sudden good sense not to finish that statement.
The only topic more off-limits between the three sisters than their mother’s abandonment was April’s birth father. Even if they did allow themselves to broach the subject, they wouldn’t have had much to say. They had a name, David Bock, and the information that he and their mother had met in college, and when he’d found out about April’s impending birth, he’d disappeared. Moonie and Mama had married when April was a toddler, and he was the only father she had ever known.
So who was Sadie to throw the past in her sister’s face, when all she wanted was the same chance at being bedeviled by Daddy that she and Hannah claimed.
“I’m taking Daddy and that’s that.” April’s eyes flashed, but when she spoke, emotion did not rule the moment. “Because he took care of me when Mom left. I know he’s not really my father, not biologically, but he’s still my
daddy
.”
It was the kind of argument no human being with even a hint of a heart could have stood up against.
“So it’s settled. Daddy lives with me.” April clapped her hands together, and smiled big as all get out at her sisters. “Which leaves my two favorite siblings free to explore the new avenues stretching out before them and the many new blessings—”
“You mean bugaboos,” Hannah corrected.
Sadie held up one finger. “I prefer brouhahas.”
April folded her arms and finished with a confidence Sadie, for one, certainly did not share, “…the many new
blessings
that await, if they only have the courage and faith to go after them.”
“H
ope y’ all are ready for this.” With both hands in oven mitts, Sadie gripped her best platter, one of the few things she owned known to have belonged to her mother.
She swallowed hard to chase away the lump rising in her throat but that did nothing to abate the gnawing conflict warring within her. Should she or should she not waltz into the dining room belting out “On Top of Spaghetti”?
She drew in a deep breath from the steaming mountain of pasta in homemade marinara sauce that had taken the better part of the day to prepare. The swinging door that divided the professionally updated kitchen from the do-it-yourself disaster of a dining room creaked softly under the weight of her leaning back against it. Who was she kidding? Taking the light road with a cornball song had no place on the menu this evening.
Tuesday evening. Every Tuesday since—well, for so long Sadie had forgotten when it actually began—had been family night. No eating at friends’. No grabbing fast food after a soccer game. No pizza ordered in so everyone could cart a slice off to eat in front of the TV or computer.
No sandwiches gobbled down on the way out the door to a school play or choir practice. No slow-cooking something to dish up whenever whoever showed up, showed up.
For the Pickett family, Tuesday night had Reserved stamped all over it in big red letters. Granted, they’d gotten lax about it lately. The past nine or ten weeks, Sadie thought. Maybe…maybe six months? Okay, they hadn’t had an honest-to-goodness-family-night meal for over a year.
But tonight was different.
She had reminded Ed and the kids no less than three times each that this Tuesday they would be getting back into the old habit and eating as a family again. On this last night before she started her new job, she had some things she needed to get off her chest.
“Better enjoy this. It may be the last really big family meal I fix for y’all for a while.” Using her hips for leverage, she set the door swinging open.
“Because, you know, after tonight, things are going to change around here.” She strode into the dining room and stared at the empty chairs she had known would greet her. “Or not.”
Sadie plunked the platter down at the end of the table and surveyed her very private little kingdom bathed in warm late-afternoon light.
Overhead, the ceiling fan Ed had installed after a fourteen-hour workday, whirred, sputtered, whined, then whirred again.
Layer upon layer of half a century’s worth of bad taste in wallpaper fluttered in its intermittent breeze. Foxhunting scenes in vignettes of red, gray and green peeked out from beneath a textured tan background dotted with aqua boomerangs, pink atomic stars and gold flecks. Three whole panels—one of them obviously hung upside down—
of a sickly-yellow cabbage-rose pattern on a field of violet stripes had refused to budge. Meanwhile, some seriously ugly seventies disco-era metallic stuff had come off in thin, ragged strips that left shiny bits of silver paper everywhere.
Staring at the evidence of such mixed and meaningful personal histories, Sadie couldn’t help but wonder about the people who had lived here before her. Had any of the moms of the many families that had sat down to dinner in this very room ever felt the way that she did now? Did those other women of eras past sometimes long for just a little gratitude?
Recognition?
Company?
And what about now? If she went door-to-door in her own neighborhood, would she find a sisterhood of lonely hearts, or would she find herself alone in her feelings, too?
If other women shared her experiences, she decided, they sure had kept it a pretty good secret.
In fact, she couldn’t think of a single woman she actually knew ever having admitted to feeling so lost in her own home. Not the older women at church. Not the other moms in the neighborhood. Not even her aunt Phiz, the designated make-do mother figure of the family.
And since there had never been a subject the twice-widowed, multilingual, single-mindedly self-sufficient archaeologist Phiz didn’t dare broach, Sadie couldn’t help thinking that maybe everybody else had homemaking experiences straight from the mold used on old black-and-white TV shows.
Hi, honey, I’m home
. Corny as it sounded, Sadie would have loved to hear those words shouted from the entryway. And children pitching in to help.
No, Mom, that’s too heavy for you, let me get it
.
And the phone
not
ringing with someone trying to sell them something just as they sat down to eat.
The silver rim on the good china winked at Sadie in the soft candlelight. She exhaled slowly and picked up a plate from the stack to her right.
If her family were here, she would certainly have something to say to each of them.
“For Olivia.” She ladled up a dainty portion. “Regardless of your complaining that the next year’s senior-class commitments commence as soon as the graduating class does—um, commence, that is—you cannot completely ignore your role as part of this family. Got that?”
The dish clunked against the tablecloth, and some noodles dangled over the rim. Sadie reached to tidy it up, then stopped. Why bother? Who would notice anyway?
“And Ryan. Dear, sweet, ‘I promised the music minister I’d learn a new piece on my guitar’ Ryan. Earnest, reliable, ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you that I’m learning the piece to back up Amy Furst, and the only time she can get together to work on it is Tuesday and please, please don’t make me ask her to come to our house because have you seen
her
house? And her
parents?
You and Dad are great and all, but I don’t think you’re ready to, like, interact with Amy, okay?’ Let’s just hope you don’t get any big ideas of your own about interacting with Amy, because if you think Dad and I are the king and queen of uncool now…” A heaping scoop went sloshing onto another plate, and when she plunked it down, sauce slopped over onto the knife and part of the napkin.
Clean that up? She thought not.
“And Ed.” She lifted the ladle as if in a toast to the man who had told her not half an hour ago that he was literally out the door on his way home. On his twenty-minutes-tops-if-you-walk-it-on-your-hands way home, she corrected.
Pasta and sauce hit gleaming white china with all the elegance of an overripe tomato tossed off a two-story balcony.
Splat
.
She stood waiting for the sense of satisfaction she thought this futile act of sarcasm would bring. It didn’t come.
For one brief shining moment, it flashed through her mind to just cut loose and send the plate and its slapped-down contents flying. She supposed when somebody asked her about it, she could just tell them, “Well, they say that you should throw pasta against the wall to see if it’s done. Turns out it was—and so was I.”
She was. Done, that is.
She settled Ed’s plate in front of his accustomed chair, then helped herself to two full mounds of the delicious-smelling concoction.
The silverware by her own chair clanked as she rolled it up in the cloth napkin. She bent to blow out the candles, then turned to take her dinner upstairs to her room.
Ed would show up before too long. Probably. Or Ryan. Or Olivia. Let one of them clear the table and wrap up the leftovers.
And if they came tapping at her door, seeking her out to ask why she hadn’t waited for them, she knew just what she’d say. “You are healthy, able and intelligent human beings. You know how to operate a telephone, a wristwatch and a microwave oven. Why didn’t I wait on you? Maybe the question you should be asking is why don’t you ever wait on yourselves?”
“You actually
said
that?”
“Oh, of course not, Mary Tate. The Lord would never grant me the gift of being both that bold and that clever in the same breath.” Sadie clutched a box of cookies from the
Not By Bread Alone Bakery and turned toward the park. “But I sure do wish I
had
said it.”
“Someday you will. You have the fire in you, Sadie. I saw it the very first day we met.”
“That must be why I love you so much, Mary Tate. You see fire in me where everyone else sees a nice comfy footstool.”
“Well, maybe that’s because you only show them your footstool side, honey.”
“I can’t help it.” Sadie glanced over her shoulder at her own backside. “It’s bigger than both of us.”
“Oh, stop it. You still look good, girl.” Mary Tate bumped Sadie’s shoulder with her own. “But that’s a fine example. Making a joke about yourself, that’s the footstool Sadie talking.”
“Maybe people see that because that’s all there is—did you ever think of that?” Sadie asked.
“Thought of it and rejected it out of hand, thank you very much.” The wheels on the little red wagon Mary Tate had volunteered to bring to carry the cooler of soft drinks rattled and squawked. “Maybe it’s as simple as people not seeing what I do because they don’t bother to look—really look. That’s what friends are for, you know. To look beyond the flesh and the failings and see the you that God means for you to be.”
Her friend’s words touched Sadie, but she covered up quickly to avoid getting blubbery. “Girl, you are cornier than forty acres of Iowa farmland, you know that?”
“That doesn’t make what I said any less true.”
They walked on toward the town park where Sadie had scheduled the first meeting of her presidential term for the Council of Christian Women. She had hoped for one of the members to volunteer a home, a workplace conference room, a church basement—at one point she’d have settled
for a centrally located tree house. When one by one the excuses rolled in, Sadie had to make a decision.
Her house?
She was a footstool, not a doormat.
So she chose to hold an outdoor meeting on what Mary Tate dubbed “her turf.” And with the early-summer evening cooperating, she did not regret it one bit.
Yet.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you.” Mary Tate snatched at the sleeve of Sadie’s simple print dress. “I have gotten a ton of positive feedback about your daddy’s appearance with us in the Memorial Day parade.”
“Me, too. How could anyone filled to the eyeballs with orneriness look so innocent and adorable wearing an army camouflage shirt, red pants, blue suspenders with silver stars and a foam Statue of Liberty hat?”
“Got to admit it, sugar, the man has style. Just reeks of it.”
“Yeah, well at least for now he’s reeking over at April’s, where I don’t have to get wind of it.”
“How’s that going?”
“Who knows?” Sadie shrugged and the cookies shifted forward. Gently she tilted the box to set them right again, sighing. “Neither April nor Daddy has said a word.”
“Then they must not have any complaints.”
“Well, if April did have a complaint, I don’t think for one minute she’d tell me. You remember when we were growing up how Daddy picked out admonitions from the Bible for each of us girls?”
“Wait on the Lord, Sadie-girl. Wait on the Lord.” Having heard that booming through the household over the years, Mary Tate could do a better-than-passing fair imitation of Moonie’s simplified counsel.
“For April it was ‘gird your loins.’ The single most closed-off, cautious human being I have ever known, and Daddy spent her childhood reminding her to always stay on guard.”
After half a block, Sadie’s friend made an obvious show of looking dead ahead toward good old Pickett’s on the Point and asking, “So did you forgive Ed yet for the great facial fiasco?”
“Forgave and forgot, what else could I do?”
“Pout and punish?” She flexed her wrist and wriggled her fingers to set her jewelry sparkling. “Always worked for me.”
“Put your hand down. You forget who went with you when you bought most of that stuff?” She pointed to herself.
Her friend tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear, her eyes sparkling to rival the diamonds she’d just flashed. “You know I talk big. Just my way of, you know, keeping my spirits up. No harm intended.”
“But…?” There was more. With Mary Tate there was
always
more.
“I still say you can’t let Ed get off scot-free. You did catch him alone with a very attractive younger woman. If nothing else, he is guilty of using very bad judgment.”
“If wives started punishing husbands every time they used bad judgment, or caused hurt feelings through carelessness, or took their wives for granted while spending too much time on other things, well, then…”
“Well, then maybe men would start acting better, ever think of that?”
“Hmm, seems like I recall someone around here just confessing they were nothing but a big talker. I don’t see you trying to ride roughshod over Royal the way you suggest I do Ed.”
She wrinkled her nose sheepishly. “I was hoping you’d go first, so I could see how it worked out.”
“No, Mary Tate. Wives bullying husbands is not biblical. It’s not wise. And it’s not going to happen, okay?”
“Oh, all right.”
“Besides, I’m too old now to start trying new tricks on poor Ed just because he acted like some clueless kid.”
“Clueless? You sure? Carmen is awful pretty, and you know her nickname at her corporate office?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Go-Go Gomez.”
Sadie frowned. She could have lived a lifetime without having that wedged into the tangled knots of her thoughts and emotions.
“On account of she’s such a go-getter,” Mary Tate went on.
“Ed says she’s a live wire. And no, I am not worried one bit about that.” All right, she was a little worried. The statistics regarding fidelity, even among people of faith, were scary. But not half as scary as having your best friend plant ideas in your mind that had no business being there. “And I won’t have you read anything into it, either.”
“You’re right. Right. Not my place to speculate. I’m sorry. You know me, not satisfied to accept the boring truth when something much more interesting might fit, right?”
“Right.”
“Of course,” Mary Tate singsonged softly as they turned the corner. “It could have been much worse.”
“Oh, it’s worse all right. Much, much worse.” She played up her friend’s insinuation with a shake of her head, then broke into a wry smile. “The man now struts around the house puffed up as a peacock because he thinks
I think
I caught him on the verge of committing an indiscretion when it hadn’t even crossed his mind.”