“I hope not, sweetheart.” In a few shuffling steps he put his back to her, then whispered, “But what about your sisters?”
“I can’t speak for them. In fact, the way we left things, I can’t even speak
to
them. Or they to me.”
“Did you three quarrel?”
Quarrel? No, not out and out. But then they never did. Silence was their system and that’s how they had left things after Hannah had pointed out that Daddy had ended up with his favored daughter.
She patted his back and moved ahead of him, down along a row of newer markers. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But I do worry. You girls…I went through so much to keep you together….”
“It’s nothing you can do anything about, Daddy.” She dismissed the subject with a wave of her hand, her focus on the ground stretching to the far side of the site.
“More than once I’ve wondered…did I do the right thing? Should I have—” His voice broke. He coughed. “Sadie-girl, I’m afraid.”
“Daddy?” She whipped around.
He held his hand up to stop her coming to help him. “I’m afraid I’ve done something very wrong for all the right reasons. And now I have to ask myself if I should do something more, something I swore I’d never do, to make sure you girls always stay…to…to…”
He stared straight ahead. He reached out his hand to nothing, staggered, then stumbled. His knees crumpled and he went down.
“Daddy!” She rushed to his side just in time to catch him by the arm. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine. Fine.” He put his cane between them.
“You’re
not
fine. Let me help you.” She tried to push aside the sturdy walking stick, but he resisted with astounding strength. Maybe Sadie was more like her father than she ever knew.
“I am fine, I tell you.” He blinked rapidly, then lowered his head. When he raised it again, anger flashed in his eyes. “Fine as I can be given you’ve hauled me into a graveyard, child. You know how I hate them.”
Right now Sadie didn’t know anything except that she wanted her daddy to act like his normal, ornery, insufferable self. So she set the example by making the kind of impatient, offhanded remark she would have made if she had just not witnessed what felt to her like the very end of her world. “Daddy, we already had this conversation.”
He looked around them as if he’d just now arrived on the scene, and said with a trembling, quiet voice, “I haven’t been in a cemetery since…well, a good long while.”
“Not in my lifetime.” She tried to sound light despite the suffocating apprehension rising from the pit of her stomach.
“Thirty-five years,” he said softly.
“Thirty-nine,” she corrected him. “Hannah is thirty-five, Daddy.”
“Hannah?” He blinked.
“It’s Sadie, Daddy. I’m Sadie.”
He gripped her hand. He nodded his head in a way that showed he understood, but his eyes remained unfocused and distant.
Sadie couldn’t think.
She couldn’t distinguish anything but Moonie’s gray face.
Her ears filled with his labored breathing.
Still, she must have had a well of great reserve within, as she found the power to lift her father to his feet and
say in a calm, comforting tone, “I think maybe we’d better get to the hospital.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I do. Can you walk?”
“I can walk.” He leaned on her and let his cane fall to the ground. “If
you
want me to walk, I can.”
“Okay, nice and slow then. Steady, steady.” They eked along, one uncertain step after another. “Just keep walking.”
“I can do anything for you,” he muttered again.
Anything?
“Step, Daddy, keep moving.”
How about never, ever growing old? Never getting sick or feeble?
“Lean on me,” she said. “Just a little ways more.”
Never thinking I’m too old to need my daddy and never scaring me like this ever again?
She scanned their surroundings furiously, hoping to spot someone she could call to for assistance. But no one else ever hung around the graveyard on a bright summer day. She got them both to her car and opened the door. “I’m going to have to drive you, Daddy. It’s just a quick trip to the emergency room. Can you sit up in the car?”
“Anything.” He dropped into the passenger seat, and when Sadie bent down to tuck his feet inside the car, he touched her cheek. “I’d fly if you asked me to.”
“Well, I plan to drive fast, but we’ll try not to let it go that far.”
“I only wish I could have made you trust in that more.”
Before she could formulate some answer to the odd comment, her father spoke again, his eyes teary.
“I only wonder what might have been if you had understood how much I loved you, dear.”
“I do understand that. But right now I need for you to sit still and hang on.”
“For you, I’d do anything.” He smiled, settled down into the seat, laid his head back and shut his eyes. “Anything for you…Teresa.”
A
pril rushed past the windowless blue-on-blue waiting room. Before Sadie could call out to her, her hiking boots scuffed on the old tile floor and did a thundering turnabout. Seconds later, she stood in the doorway, her hair clinging to her damp forehead and her cheeks flushed. “What happened?”
Hannah, seated in the corner, barely looked up from the tattered magazine in her hands. “Sadie broke Daddy.”
The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed.
Sadie gritted her teeth. “I did not
break
Daddy.”
“Oh, really?” The pages flipped closed in Hannah’s lap. She laced her arms over her chest, and when she spoke she looked all of five, fretting and frightened. “He left my house in perfect health, and I can present the testimony of a live-in doctor to prove it. But give Daddy one day in Sadie’s care, and what happens?”
“I don’t know,” April said, trying to catch her breath. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. What happened?”
“We got calls to rush to the hospital, that’s what. The
hospital
—and me working the desk in Payt’s office just
down the street. She could just have easily brought him there for care.”
“No offense to Payt’s skills as a doctor—or yours as a receptionist—” Okay, it was a snotty thing to say but sometimes Hannah just brought out the…the…the
sibling
in her. “But Daddy didn’t need to go to a pediatrician’s office. He needed a hospital. It’s not like it took more than a minute longer to get over here.”
Small though it was, Wileyville, being the county seat, did have a regional health center on the edge of town. In truth it got more business from people in the more rural outlying areas, while the locals tended to drive the seventy miles to the nearest sizable town for medical attention. But today Sadie had whispered praises to the Lord for every second the proximity of the medical center shaved off the trip to the E.R.
“What’s his condition?” April wrung her hands, and a tiny bit of potting soil trickled between her fingers. Obviously she’d run over straight from work without even stopping to clean up. “Grave? Because I swear that Olivia said on the phone he was grave.”
Sadie shut her eyes. For an instant she thought to blame her seventeen-year-old’s cell phone for the miscommunication, but in her heart she recognized that even in a dire circumstance Olivia only half listened to whatever Sadie tried to tell the girl.
“He
fell
in a grave,” Hannah supplied, which at least gave Sadie some hope that Olivia’s lack of attentiveness might well be genetic instead of a personal slight.
“He did not fall in a grave.” Sadie’s heels clicked over the short distance from the bank of chrome-and-vinyl seats to the doorway. She took April’s arm to bring her inside. “He sat on a grave.”
April pushed her hair away from her eyes. “Why would he do that?”
“Because Sadie dragged him to work with her, that’s why.”
Hannah had that same impassioned tone she’d had at thirteen when she’d misheard Sadie and April and thought they were going to put a bag of cats in the oven. Even after they had shown her the
baguettes
of bread for dinner, Hannah had taken a while to calm down and get the incident clear in her thoughts. When Sadie’s noble-spirited, willing-to-take-on-the-world-for-a-just-cause sister got going, neither fine points nor facts got in the way of her having her say.
“Knowing his intense aversion to the place, the woman who had the nerve to lecture
us
on not forcing him to do anything against his will hauled Daddy into the cemetery and made him walk around with her.” Hannah’s lower lip quivered. “No wonder he had a stroke.”
“A stroke!” April sank down to sit on the edge of a sofa cushion.
“A transient ischemic attack,” Sadie said with measured precision, wanting to make sure she got every word right.
April flattened her hand over her heart. “In English?”
“A
stroke
.” Hannah crossed her legs, then her arms, then she shifted on the vinyl seat, literally giving Sadie the cold shoulder.
“A teeny-weeny, itty-bitty, minor, paltry, ministroke.” Sadie held her thumb and forefinger a hairbreadth apart. Looking at the meaningless gesture, she had to admit it did not ease her angst one teeny-weeny, itty-bitty paltry bit.
“A ministroke, which could be a precursor to a big fat massive stroke,” Hannah muttered.
“Have you called the church?” April looked around as if she expected to find a phone nearby. “Did anyone notify the prayer chain?”
“Done and done.” Hannah’s expression softened. “We’ve been doing our share of praying here, too.”
“And?” April prodded.
“And Daddy’s going to be okay.” Sadie raised her chin and leaned back against the doorframe.
“Thank you, Jesus,” April whispered, the heel of her hand pressed to her forehead. “Thank you.”
“God heard our prayers.” Hannah reached out at last and grasped their eldest sister on the knee. “He always does, you know. He hears. Even if some of us don’t seem to think we have anything to say to Him.”
Sadie twisted her upper body so she could look down the long, silent hallway.
A moment passed and then another.
Finally April cleared her throat and scraped her boots lightly along the floor beneath the seat. “So a transient, uh, what?”
“Transient ischemic attack.” Sadie still could not turn to face her sisters.
“TIA. See, it’s so common it has its own nice, tidy abbreviation.” Hannah dropped the antagonism and shifted into hyper-perky reassurance mode.
Sadie wasn’t sure she’d call it an improvement.
“Payt says some people have them and don’t even know it.”
“What caused it?” April asked.
Hannah put her hand on Sadie’s arm. “Sadie?”
“I
did not
.” She whipped around to confront her accuser. “And let it be known here and now that I refuse to allow anyone to reduce this to a lot of senseless finger-pointing!”
Hannah harrumphed.
April pursed her lips. The faintest light of humor shone deep, deep in her worried gaze.
Sadie followed the dip in her sisters’ line of vision to the finger she had been jabbing repeatedly into the air as she preached against finger-pointing. She closed her fist, then tucked her hand behind her back.
Hannah curled her legs up under her in the seat and smoothed back her hair. “As I was going to say…Sadie, since we’re all here now, why don’t you tell us what happened in the cemetery.”
“Well, it all happened so fast. One minute we were discussing Melvin Green—”
“Whoa.” April held up a hand, her expression intense as a crime-scene investigator combing for even the most seemingly insignificant of clues. “Melvin Green? That some friend of Daddy’s?”
“Far as I can tell he wasn’t a friend of anybody’s,” Sadie said. “The only reason I brought him up was because the thought of that man dying unloved and forgotten really seemed to agitate Daddy.”
“So that’s when you first noticed the onset of the attack?” April scooched closer.
“Yes. Well before that he said some things about…” What had he said? The panic of the moment had blanked much of it from her mind. “He said he hoped we never thought he’d put his own motivations above ours and that he wished you two could understand he wasn’t running from you but
to
something.”
Hannah’s head snapped up. “To what?”
“I don’t know but…I think…no, I’m almost certain that it involved Mama.”
“Mama?” April whispered.
“Why?” Hannah closed in, leaning in Sadie’s direction as far as possible without actually tumbling forward out of her seat. “Why do you think that? Did he say something specific?”
“No, he rambled on about whether he made the right choices and sounded like he had some regrets…but it was all so vague.”
April swept her hand back over her forehead to push the stray hairs from her face. The brown strands that clung to her trembling fingers looked darker than usual, but Sadie didn’t know if that was because of sweat or potting soil. “Then why do you think it’s about Mama?”
“Because.” Sadie hated to say it aloud.
Saying it seemed, somehow, both a betrayal and a confirmation of her father’s weakness. If he were here and had any cognizance of his words, would he have told his daughters what he’d said? Would he want them to know? Silence was the hallmark of this small sisterhood, after all, and they had learned that from none other than the man they now wanted Sadie to expose.
And yet that same man had admonished her to start something.
Someone has to start, Sadie. Whatever you’re doing isn’t working—surely you can see that? If you won’t do it for yourself, someone has to start—start talking the truth, start looking at things in a new light, start reaching out
.
Someone had to start to change things between the three of them, and it might as well be her and it might as well be now. “Because as Daddy was fading in and out of coherence, he talked about doing anything for me.”
“No surprise there,” Hannah muttered.
“No, you don’t understand. Then he said, ‘I’d do anything for you…Teresa.’”
At the mention of their mother’s name, April and Hannah exchanged wary glances.
“Did he…” Hannah finally ventured. “Did he say any more?”
Sadie shook her head. “But clearly he spoke like a man filled with regrets. He loved her, y’all. After all these years, I think he still does. It must have nearly killed him when she ran away.”
Sadie braced herself for an outburst from Hannah about what their mother’s leaving had done to them, but it did not come. Only silence and sorrow filled the space between them.
April sniffled, raised the back of her hand to brush the tip of her nose, then froze midgesture. She opened her hand to show the streaks of dirt on her knuckles. “Look at me, I’m a mess.”
“No more than the rest of us,” Hannah joked as she pulled a tissue from her purse and handed it to her sister. “Sadie and I just wear our mess in different ways.”
“When did you get so wise?” Sadie asked, venturing a tiny smile.
“Well I should be wise.” Hannah held her head high. “As should you. It’s our birthright, isn’t it?”
“What birthright?” April blew her nose.
“As Solomon’s daughters!” Hannah laughed, a warm though not hearty laugh. “That experience alone should make us wise beyond our years.”
“You’d think, but so far all it’s made me is
old
beyond my years,” Sadie muttered. Then she managed a half smile and added, “Can you imagine how young we’d all look if we’d had a regulation, standard-issue, no-nonsense father?”
Hannah scoffed. “We might have looked younger, but it would have bored us to death.”
“I tell you, Hannah, this wisdom thing you’ve got going all of a sudden, it’s starting to scare me.” Sadie laughed.
“Maybe I’ll put it and my three years as a journalism major to good use and start an advice column in the paper.” Hannah struck a regal pose that might do for a publicity photo, her hand sweeping out as if she were reading a headline. “Dear Hannah.”
“You should.” Sadie nudged her sister’s knee. “You should do more with your writing.”
Hannah shook her head. “With work and now trying to start a family one way or another…I wouldn’t have the time.”
“You never know,” Sadie said, softly but with all the authority of a person who understood that sometimes opportunities to do a life’s work found you, not the other way around.
They fell into silence for a time.
Finally April looked around and asked, “Where are my brothers-in-law?”
“Payt had to stay at work. He’ll be here as soon as he can.”
“Same with Ed?” April asked.
“No. Actually, Ed…Ed was taking a golf lesson.”
“You’re kidding? Why?”
Should she tell them the long, convoluted story about Carmen Gomez coming back from her trip full of ideas that she’d gotten from other sales reps from around the country? About how the girl they called “Go-Go” had gone and mentioned Downtown Drug to someone in acquisitions for a national chain of pharmacies and they wanted to fly Ed out to a resort to talk? Did her sisters really need to know that when Sadie had needed her husband, he was out on the eleventh hole of the golf course taking lessons so he wouldn’t look like a country bumpkin
when he met with the big boys who might just offer to buy his business?
Sadie looked up at the white acoustical tiles in the ceiling, folded her arms and said, “Ed had a…meeting. He won’t be long.”
Her sisters nodded.
No one said anything more for a few minutes until April tossed the tissue she’d used to tidy up with into the trash can and said, “Well one good thing will come of all this.”
“What’s that?” Sadie asked a bit too brightly.
“The doctors will probably take away Dad’s driver’s license for us.”
Hannah shook her head. “Give me one reason how that would stop him if he really wanted to get behind the wheel.”
“No license, no insurance,” April said.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.” Sadie clapped a couple of times, then dropped her hands to her sides. “It doesn’t feel much like winning, does it?”
“It feels like a dirty rotten trick for age to have pulled on someone who’s still so young at heart,” Hannah muttered.
This time Sadie and April nodded their agreement, and again the room went still.
After a few minutes, Hannah picked up a magazine, flipped through a few pages, then slapped it back onto the table. “It’s the quiet that gets on my nerves.”
Sadie couldn’t have agreed more with Hannah on that. The not knowing gnawed at her already frayed nerves, but the
quiet
…
The quiet crept into Sadie’s consciousness around every guard and gate into the center of her soul, and with it brought reminders. One floor up in this very building she had waited first for the doctor to bring her test
results, then for Ed to come and get her. It had been quiet then, and with the heartbreaking news that she had lost her last chance to have another child, Sadie had carried a bit of that quiet away with her.
From that point on the quiet had permeated her existence, often drowning out the sounds that had once meant so much to her. The daily yakking about nothing in particular with Olivia. Joking around with her son. Breezy phone chats with one sister or another. Long, meaningful conversations with Ed. And prayer.