“I’d forgotten about all that. It doesn’t seem so important anymore.”
“You might change your mind down the road,” Carmen said. “At any rate, you can’t make an appearance until we change places. You’d still have to account for your whereabouts all this time.”
“But where will I go? And when are we going to change places? I want to be myself again. Aren’t you tired of being me all the time? It must have been awfully stressful.”
“It was hard at first,” she said. “But now I’ve become pretty good at it. We’ll have to meet secretly somewhere and figure this all out at another time, but right this minute, you’ve got to go. Git! Vamoose.”
“But where? I have no place to go and not a whole lot of money left.”
“That’s not my problem.”
I stared, not believing she had uttered those words. Guilt flashed across her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that. Listen, go to Dad’s. Pretend you’re me. Say you wanted to go to school here this year, so Mother let you come back.”
“Without any luggage?” I said, tears of exasperation springing into my eyes.
“Tell them your bag got lost on the flight. I have the key to grandma’s old house on East Third Street. We’ll plan to meet there in a day or so and get some of my clothes and an old suitcase for you. Tell them . . . Oh hell, I don’t know what you can tell them. Make up something, if my story doesn’t suit you.”
“Why can’t we meet at your grandma’s old house in a day or so to get some of your clothes for you and make the change?” I was becoming hysterical.
“We can, we can. But for now, you’ve got to cool it. How did you get here anyway?”
“I literally escaped from the hospital and rode all night on the bus. I caught a cab here.” I pressed on my abdomen to get a deep breath. “The driver’s waiting by the gate.”
“Then go back and make him take you to Dad’s. We’ll figure out how to do the switch as soon as everything quiets down from the shock of Elizabeth dying.”
Much as my mind rebelled against it, I knew that was the only answer.
“What is Farrel doing here, Carmen?”
“I . . . he asked if he could drive us to the church and out here and all.”
“Then you’ve been seeing a lot of him?”
“No, not really. He would like me to, but no. I stayed away from him, for you. You’ve gotta go, Julie.”
“Wait, first you have to tell me, Carmen.”
“Tell you what?”
“How did Mama die?”
“She had an aneurism that burst. The doctor said she’d known about it for years, but it was inoperable and there was nothing that could be done.”
“She never said a word about it to me,” I said, unable to hold back my tears any longer. “I don’t even know what an aneurism is.”
“Neither did I.”
“But why didn’t she tell me?”
“She didn’t want to worry you. The doctor said she knew it could burst at any time, but she also knew it might never happen. He said she didn’t want me, uh, you, to know, ’cause if you did, you’d never have another peaceful day. I really have to go.”
She stuck out her hand and patted mine. Mama’s diamond ring she’d inherited from my grandmother flashed a prism of light. I seized Carmen by the wrist.
“Take that ring off and give it to me, right now!”
“Have you lost your mind? Keep your voice down. People will hear you.”
“Why are you wearing my mother’s ring?” I said in a harsh whisper.
“To keep up the deception. Why else? Aunt Hattie gave it to me. I couldn’t very well say, ‘I can’t wear it. I’m not really Julie.’”
“I want that ring. It belongs to me.”
“You can’t wear it before we make the switch. I’ll give it to you then.”
I let go of her. “You didn’t ask about the baby.”
“Oh, yeah. What was it? A boy or a girl?”
“A little boy. It killed me to have to leave him out there.”
“Well, it’s over now. You can forget about it and move on.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t be hard for you to forget about him. He’s only your nephew. But he’s my son.”
She looked down.
“I guess I don’t quite get the full impact of what you’ve been through.”
“No, I guess you don’t.”
I looked beyond her. I could never forget Nicholas. Nor could I ever move on.
My eyes focused. Farrel had put Aunt Hattie in the car and was approaching us with hurried steps.
“Julie,” he called. “Your aunt says we need to get to the church.”
He drew closer. His eyes connected with mine. His expression changed into confusion as Carmen faced him and we stood side by side. He shook his head, as if to clear it.
“Carmen,” he said, coming over to me and giving me a quick hug. “I’m blown out of my tree to see you here. I thought you were in England. When did you get back?”
“This morning,” I replied, hoping he would somehow see through the charade we were enacting. “I, uh, wanted to go to school here this year.”
He took a moment, seemingly to digest that.
“Are you going to the lunch?”
“No.” I nearly choked on my next words. “I barely knew Elizabeth.”
“Oh, right. Well, we gotta get going, Julie,” he said, taking Carmen’s arm and tossing a look at me. “See you around, Carmen.”
I watched as, without a backward glance, Carmen let him escort her to his car. He put her in the passenger side and started around the front of the car.
A noise drew my attention away from him. The gravediggers were about to lower my mother into the ground.
“Stop! I want to see her,” I said to the men. “I got here too late for the funeral.”
They shrugged. “It can’t be done.”
“But she’s my mother.”
“Sorry, miss. We’ve done sealed the vault. It can’t be done.”
Maybe it doesn’t matter, I thought. Mama had always said she wanted to be remembered the way she looked in life, not in death. Stooping, I took a handful of earth from the mound they’d dug out. It was cold, making me wonder what they had dressed her in for the long sleep. Holding the dirt above the gaping hole, I allowed it to sift over the white rose lying on the vault. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the pastor had said. And so it was. I felt like I had lost everything—my mother, my sister, my aunt, the father of my child, even myself.
A motion from the direction of Farrel’s car caught my peripheral vision. He had paused on his way to get in, and he stood, staring at me. His face still wore an expression of confusion. He took long strides toward me.
“Do you need a ride somewhere?” he called across the grassy spaces between headstones.
I shook my head.
He started back to the car but hesitated after only a couple of steps and, turning, came toward me again. As he stepped close, his eyes took in my hair, tangled from traveling all night on the bus, and my wrinkled dress with a coke stain on the front of the skirt.
Thank God my breasts weren’t leaking.
“How have you been?” he asked.
“Okay.”
It took all my strength to commit to the deception. I had to turn my face away. The sweating gravediggers labored at shoveling the dirt onto the vault, burying my mother facing the east, as was the custom, so that her first sight upon rising from the dead would be of Christ with his angels, coming in glory.
Farrel shifted his weight, drawing my attention back to him. He squinted in the harsh sunlight.
“She’s taking it better than I expected.”
“Who?”
“Julie, of course,” he said, a quizzical note in his voice.
“Oh, right.”
Awkward space hung between us.
“Where will you be staying?” he asked.
“At my father’s house.”
“Could I come over and see you sometime?” His voice had a hollow ring.
My throat ached. I did not want to deceive him.
“I guess you and he could talk about your work in the oilfields,” I finally said.
“It’s you I want to talk to.”
When I said nothing, he pressed. “So can I . . . see you sometime?”
“Maybe—sometime.”
I looked at this man, the father of my child—our child. My eyes embraced him, for my arms could not. I watched him go back to the car and drive away with Carmen as the false Julie sitting beside him.
I took a step to go myself but turned back for one last look at Mama’s grave. For the first time that day, I noticed the crepe myrtle tree she had planted near our burial plot. Its blooms were shriveling, now that it was September, but a few stragglers still held their summer splendor.
The gravediggers had mounded the earth until it resembled a nest for giant ants. A breeze sent a flurry of the watermelon-red blossoms fluttering down onto the grave. Mama would like that.
I started back along the cemetery road toward the waiting taxi that would take me to the home of my father, the next destination on the journey in search of myself.
— The End —
But wait . . . there's more!
Don't miss
In Those First Bright Days of Elvis
~ Book I in the Days of Elvis series ~
One trivial decision can change your whole life.
On an October night in 1955, fifteen-year-old Julie Morgan decides to attend a free talent show and concert at the football stadium of her Arkansas hometown. At the concert, Julie encounters three strangers: a lookalike, who could pass for her twin; a college boy, who will be the love of her life; and Elvis Presley, who befriends her and whose casual comment about a light bulb becomes a driving force in her pursuit of love and self-worth.
But in that pursuit, Julie goes down the wrong path, seeking popularity and an older boy's affection as substitutes for her missing father's guidance and support, unaware that her longing to feel loved and valued stems from her need to have her father in her life.
Growing up is never easy. The birth of rock 'n' roll, a growing standard of living, and the culture of automobiles brought a feeling of freedom and ease. But the phrase "Duck and Cover!" meant the possibility of nuclear war and death was now a fact of everyday life.
Josephine Rascoe Keenan masterfully weaves a story of human anguish and betrayal, love and loss, recrimination and regret, and shows how choices, once made, can change one's life forever. She meticulously recreates the "golden days" of drive-in movies, screen-wire petticoats, and flashy American cars, when the world seemed brighter and more innocent than today.
But was it?
Click here to read the first chapter
~~~
Coming in 2018! Book III “In Those Glory Days of Elvis”
Sign up here to be notified when it is released
Thanks to:
Tracey Buswell Simmons, for providing information on Continental Trailways Bus Company.
Lorraine Kay Lorne and Randy Thompson of the Young Law Library, University of Arkansas, for their help with legal research.
My colleagues at the writers group, whose sharp perceptions and unfailing support helped to guide the journey in creating this book.
My husband, Frank, whose insight and probing questions helped guide me to the finished product and who listened with rapt attention to each chapter as it sprang to life.
And to those fans of In Those First Bright Days of Elvis who accosted me with the singular demand: “Hurry up and write Book II.”
Bibliography
Some of the sources consulted in this book:
Butler, Brenda Arlene, Are You Hungry Tonight? Avenel, N.J.: Gramercy Books, 1992.
Clayton, Marie. Elvis Presley Unseen Archives. Bath, UK: Paragon Publishing, 2002.
Fessler, Ann. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v. Wade. New York, NY: The Penguin Group, 2006.
Lowell, James Russell, (author), H. Garrett (illustrator). The Vision of Sir Launfal. Boston and New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1890.
Presley, Priscilla Beaulieu, and Sandra Harmon. Elvis and Me. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985.
Yancey, Becky and Cliff Linedecker. My Life With Elvis. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1977.
For a complete bibliography, visit www.KeenanNovels.com/blog.
Discussion Questions for
In Those Dazzling Days of Elvis
1. What are the social attitudes today regarding unwanted pregnancy? How have these attitudes changed since the 1950s?
2. What do you think this change in attitude says about our society?
3. Do you think Julie should have told Farrel about her pregnancy?
4. For many years adoption records were sealed and birth mothers could not find out who had adopted their children; neither could adopted children get information about their birth mothers. Today, in some states, adoption records are available for adopted persons when they reach age 18. In your opinion, should adoption records be available to both birth parents and the adopted children?
5. What do you think Julie should do about her child?
6. Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept evidence that confirms our beliefs and expectations and to reject evidence that contradicts them. How does this phenomenon work with regard to Carmen and Julie changing places? What does their scheme of switching places reveal about the observations and perceptions of people around them?
7. Research shows that many people resemble each other, whether or not they are related. What do you think of the girls’ changing places? In Carmen and Julie’s world, it works; would it work in the world today?
8. When Julie agrees to change places with Carmen, does she open herself up to any dangers? What are the risks?
9. If there had been such a thing as social media back in the 50s, do you think it would have made it easier or more difficult for Julie and Carmen to change places?
About the Author
Josephine Rascoe Keenan grew up in the little town in Arkansas where all three books in “The Days of Elvis” series are set: El Dorado, city of “black gold.” After reading Gone with the Wind when she was eleven, she decided to become a writer someday. That day came after she had worked many years in the entertainment industry as a director and an actress with many talented people, such as Johnny Cash in the made-for-TV-movie The Pride of Jesse Hallam.
Josephine wanted to tell a story of what life was like in the ’50s when Elvis was first coming on the scene. Elvis had done a few concerts in El Dorado before he hit the top, and she thought it would be great to create a story about a girl who met him before he became the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. The result was a three-book series entitled “The Days of Elvis.”
Josephine is a versatile writer. Cricket magazine has published two of her short stories: The Petticoat Skipper (March 2016), about Mary Greene, one of the first female riverboat captains, and Ohoyo Osh Chisba: the Unknown Woman (November 2007), about the coming of corn to the Choctaw people. Her poem, “A Ride on Grandpa’s Foot,” appeared in Modern Maturity Magazine in August 2005, and Reader’s Digest published her submission for Humor in Uniform. Three of her plays have been produced in regional theatres: Friends and Life’s a Butter Dream, both of which toured with Artreach Touring Theatre, and The Center of the Universe, a three-act play chosen as a winner of Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati’s New Play Contest.
Josephine enjoys oil painting, and her work will be featured as the cover art for all three books in “The Days of Elvis” series. She and her husband love traveling, square dancing, and gardening.
Connect with Josephine at:
http://www.KeenanNovels.com
Facebook Josephine.Keenan1
Twitter @FJKeenan1
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