Bless Her Heart

by Sally Kilpatrick

  “Where are you?” Henny asked.

  “The kitchen.”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He sighed deeply then told me all of the places he’d been. “Any idea where I should look next?”

  “Henny, I don’t know what the plan is. I’m the one who forgot the dead bolt, and Mom left me here to stew. No one told me anything about—”

  “Just where would you go. I need to do something.”

  I opened my mouth to say I didn’t have a clue but then I remembered the other time Mom had lost Granny. “Try Maple Avenue.”

  “That’s in the opposite direction of where everyone thinks she would’ve gone.”

  “Just do it, please.”

  “On it.”

  Mom had thought Granny had gone down Maple Avenue earlier because she wanted to see her sister, Pamela. I still thought Granny was headed toward the interstate and the daughter she’d once lost to the hippies. I’d been so wrong about so many other things, though, that now I had nothing left to do but pace and pray.

  chapter 25

  Twenty minutes later, my pacing and praying blessedly came to an end.

  Henny found Granny walking down Maple Avenue just as I’d predicted. They’d missed her on their first pass because she had taken a diagonal pattern through backyards then forgotten where she was going. She headed in the opposite direction for a while before recommitting to her task. If I’d hoped Mom would forgive me quickly since I’d helped find Granny, then I was mistaken. To make matters worse, my brother was doubling down on his conviction that Granny was more than Mom could handle.

  “Mom, I’m serious,” he said.

  Face in her hands, she shook her head. “I won’t do it. I can’t afford it, and it’s not right.”

  “Posey, can you help me talk some sense into Mom? It’s time for Granny to go to a memory care place, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t care what she thinks,” Mom snapped. “If she hadn’t been sneaking out in the middle of the night and leaving the door unlocked, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

  I took a step backward, eyes wide. Mom had never spoken to me like that before.

  She, however, now touched her lips as if making sure they were still there. “I can’t believe I said that. I think my mother said something very similar to me once.”

  She didn’t apologize, though. Never one to apologize, my mother.

  “At the risk of sounding like my mother once again, ‘What the hell were you doing running around at two in the morning?’”

  I wanted to go back to what she had once been doing running around at two in the morning, but I knew that conversation wasn’t happening. “Long story.”

  “Pull up a chair,” she said drily.

  “Mom, chill,” Henny said. “Posey’s a grown woman. I’m sure she had a very good reason for what she did.”

  The moment of truth had arrived.

  Over the years, I’d thought about all of the ways I would announce my pregnancy. I’d bake cookies in the shape of bottles. I’d bring a balloon with a stork on it. Maybe I’d give her one of those memory books to fill out or a shirt that said World’s Best Grandmother. In the end I had to settle for, “Mom, I’m pregnant.”

  “Whoa.” Henny took off his cap and scratched his head. “I did not see that coming. Congrats?”

  At the same time my mother said, “I can’t believe you. I thought I raised you better than that.”

  Her fingers traveled back to her lips as though measuring them once again for treason.

  So I turned to my little brother—my sober younger brother, my favorite sibling for the moment—and pointedly ignored her. “Thanks, Henny. Or I guess I should say Uncle Henny.”

  He grinned. “I like it.”

  We might be ignoring our mother, but we could feel her glare.

  “Know what? I need to sleep before I go into work ’cuz I’ve got a mid shift, and I bet there’s woman talk about to happen,” Henny said, waving his pale hand in a circular motion to convey the feminine mystique. “I’ll, uh, leave you two and go take a nap. Pose, can I crash in your room?”

  “Sure.” No way I’d make my defender sleep on the couch.

  The minute we heard the bedroom door click, my mother turned on me. “I thought I told you everything you needed to know about sex so you would never find yourself in this situation. For heaven’s sake, I used to hand you condoms when you were in high school.”

  “Which I didn’t need at the time,” I said. “Look, Mom—”

  “I never wanted you to be subjected to the same mistakes I made. I tried so hard to keep you from this—”

  “Mom.”

  “Seriously, accidentally pregnant after all this time?”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I said through gritted teeth. As I said the words I believed them. Sure I would’ve preferred the horse before the cart and the white picket fence route, but I had asked and a baby had been given unto me.

  “But now?”

  “Death, taxes, and childbirth. There’s never a convenient time for any of them,” I murmured, echoing Gone With the Wind, a book I’d read against my mother’s wishes. She’d said it reinforced inaccurate racial stereotypes (it did), but Granny claimed it was the best Southern novel ever written (arguable). At the time, anything my mother had been against was something I wanted to be for.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Posey, why? I wanted better for you than to follow in my footsteps.”

  So I told her the whole story. How Chad had tricked me, how John had been wonderful right up until the moment he started making pragmatic marriage proposals, and how I’d gone over to his house when he’d called me while in a drunken stupor.

  “Okay. I guess I can see how you might’ve been distracted,” Mom conceded.

  “D’ya think?”

  She got up to make tea, turning her back on me. I knew I’d never get an apology from her. I didn’t know why I’d felt the need to be a smart aleck other than the fact I’d had a rough past few hours, very little sleep, and now felt the full effects of the nausea that was the hallmark of early pregnancy. If I were being truthful with myself, a bit of nausea had been with me for a while, but now that I knew, I couldn’t ignore it.

  “So, are you going to marry John?”

  She couldn’t be serious. She couldn’t even pretend to be that nonchalant, could she? “No.”

  “Why?” Her question was more curiosity than indictment.

  “Do you really have to ask that question? I’m not about to go from one bossy man to another. I’m not going to be domineered again. That was miserable.”

  “But John—”

  “But John nothing! He practically demanded that I marry him. You raised all three of us, and we turned out just fine, thank you very much.”

  She laughed bitterly. “My oldest married an abusive asshole, my middle child is a recovering drug addict, and my youngest squanders her potential through chronic absenteeism. Tell me again what a good job I’ve done.”

  Had she just owned a part in our problems? That had to be a first.

  The kettle whistled, and she busied herself with tea bags and pouring water. “If I’d been a better mother, I would’ve found a father figure for you, someone who would be a better example. Unfortunately, your and Henny’s fathers weren’t good candidates.”

  I sucked in a breath. That was the most she’d said about my father in years. We all knew about Henny’s sorry father. The only mystery there was what had possessed Mom to sleep with him in the first place. But my father? Talking about him had always been verboten.

  “What was wrong with my father?” I asked, trying to keep my tone nonchalant.

  She chuckled. “So many things wrong with that situation. Let’s just say intentional communities weren’t as idyllic as I had hoped.”

  “Mom, I might need to know more about who he is and his health history
for the baby.”

  “I had you just fine, now didn’t I?”

  Well, it had been worth a shot. I thought of another father, one who’d been so worried and who obviously still cared for my mother. “What about Santiago?”

  “What about him?”

  Thinking of how they’d bantered over Rain’s fishing garb and then his worried face earlier that morning, I said, “I think he still has feelings for you.”

  “Oh, that ship’s sailed. He asked me to marry him five times, you know.” She put the cups on the table and then took a seat herself. “I always told myself I’d marry him if he asked me a sixth time, but I think five was his limit.”

  Ah, our pact from reading Amelia Earhart. Maybe we should’ve considered how her marriage, much less her last flight, wasn’t successful before we took any kind of advice from her.

  She smiled bitterly at our inside joke. There for a few idyllic months after Henny and before Rain, Mom and I had reconnected. Every night she would read a bedtime story to Henny. I watched the pair with ragged jealousy since she’d been too busy “finding herself” to read bedtime stories to me when I’d been his age. One night, she tucked Henny in and sat down on the couch with a book of her own. I found myself shyly crossing the room and asking, “Could we read a book together?”

  And so, at eleven years old, I snuggled up against my mother and she read to me from her book about Amelia Earhart. The book, which was meant for adults, was a little dry at times but still interesting because I didn’t hear that many stories of adventurous women at school. I learned of how the aviatrix drank no alcohol because her father had been a drunk, how she advocated for women’s rights, and, of course, how she set records as a female pilot. I even applauded how she made George Putnam ask her to marry him six times before she said yes. For at least three years, my life’s ambition was to be like Amelia Earhart.

  Of course, Mom had put the book down before we finished. She was easily distracted and predisposed to quitting the story before we got to the unhappy ending of Earhart’s mysterious disappearance. I was in high school when I checked the same book out of the public library. The once new book was by then dog-eared and stained from frequent use. Not only did I learn more about Earhart’s last flight, but I also discovered that Amelia’s marriage hadn’t been the fairy-tale happy ending I’d always supposed. She’d only agreed to the marriage tentatively, and her marriage to Putnam had been strained by the time she took her last flight. He pushed her into appearances and clothing lines and other things she didn’t want to do. No, I didn’t care for George Putnam much, either.

  But Santiago was a far better man than George Putnam had ever dreamed of being.

  “Go tell him that,” I said.

  She shook her head. “He doesn’t even care about me that way. Not anymore.”

  “You won’t know unless you talk to him. He even referred to you as Alondrita this morning.”

  She nodded as she fished her tea bag from the cup. “You just learn from my mistakes. If you don’t want to marry John right this minute, that doesn’t mean you might not want to marry him later. Most things in life aren’t all or nothing.”

  “Mom.”

  She shrugged. “You’ve always seen the world as black-and-white, but it’s not. My one consolation about your marrying Chad was that you seemed so confident that you were doing exactly as you wanted. If I’d known what kind of jerk he was, I would’ve intervened in an instant.”

  “And I would’ve married him anyway,” I said softly.

  She nodded. “That’s the tightrope a mother walks—especially a mother like me.”

  “Oh, good. No one mentioned a tightrope. That was not in the manual.”

  She laughed. “There is no manual. Read all the books you want, but you won’t find all of the answers.”

  We sat in silence sipping our tea.

  “You gonna put me in a home when I’m your granny’s age?” she asked.

  “Not unless you bite.”

  She laughed, as I’d hoped she would. “I did a good job with you in spite of myself, Posey Adams. Or I guess your granny did.”

  “You both did,” I said.

  We sipped our tea, and I considered getting some cookies from the pantry, but the pantry was bare and my newly temperamental stomach wasn’t completely on board with the idea. I really wanted SpaghettiOs, and I hadn’t craved those since I was five.

  Mom was right about one thing: I needed to let John know that I did care about him, that I hadn’t used him for sex, that I wanted him to be a father to our child rather than just provide financial support. He deserved that. I also had a hole in my heart where our friendship had been. I missed him. I’d grown enough to know that I could live without him—in fact, I should take the time to learn to live without him—but that didn’t mean I wanted to.

  “I’m going to check on John now.” I stood and leaned over my chair. “I’m so sorry about forgetting the dead bolt and causing all of the trouble, though.”

  “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I should’ve known you would never be intentionally careless. If I’d installed the alarm system when they first diagnosed dementia, none of this would’ve happened.”

  I stared at my mother. Had she just apologized to me? She never apologized.

  “So you’re not mad at me anymore? For anything?”

  “I told you once before. I can’t afford to toss rocks at your glass house, now can I? We’ll raise this baby right.”

  “Oh, we will, now will we, Granny?”

  She shuddered. “I am not a Granny.”

  I grinned, revenge now in my sights. “Now you’re going to be a Granny for sure.”

  She smiled. “Yeah. I guess I am. It’ll be nice to have a little one again, especially one I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to feed.”

  I made a note to make sure she attended at least one midnight feeding.

  As I left the kitchen, I paused to kiss her cheek. Sunlight from the kitchen window picked up every fine wrinkle, reminding me my mother couldn’t cheat her mortality forever. Before I could let my mind wander to what we would do someday when I was her age and she was possibly senile enough to ask for Tom Brokaw for Christmas, I grabbed my keys from the hook beside the door and drove off to see if I could patch things up with John.

  chapter 26

  When John opened the door, I didn’t have the heart to yell at him as I’d promised. We stood there surveying each other for a few minutes before he finally asked me in. Rowdy trotted into the living room and waited for his obligatory behind the ears scratch before curling up in the corner of the room.

  “So.”

  “So.”

  “Thank you for looking out for me last night. And for not calling the police,” he said as we both took a seat on the couch.

  “I couldn’t leave you like that. You really scared me.”

  He leaned forward on his knees, burying his head in his hands. “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had.”

  “Hey.” I shoved his shoulder. “I didn’t mean what I said yesterday. It was a really emotional day.”

  He looked up but I couldn’t read the emotion in his eyes. Resolve? “So you will marry me.”

  “No. That I meant.”

  “Nice to know I’m nothing but a good lay to you.”

  That cut me to the quick. “I swear I don’t know if I want to smack you or kiss you.”

  “Can’t beat me up any more than I’ve been beating up myself.”

  “Look, I’m not saying never.” Unless you keep up this morose hangdog stuff. “But I can’t say yes right now. I’ve gotta figure out who I am before I marry anyone else, if I can ever marry anyone else.”

  “Why?”

  So I told him about Chad, about the vasectomy, about his idea of wifely behavior, about how I wasn’t sure I even knew who I was.

  “I thought I had it together,” he said. “Then I messed up.”

  “John,” I said. “I feel terrible. I should�
�ve come back to apologize right then.”

  He held out his hand. “I shouldn’t have assumed you needed me to solve all of your problems—our problems—especially not while you were having a panic attack. I was trying to make things right.”

  I scooted closer to him. Clean from the shower, he smelled delectable. I wanted him, and it wasn’t like I had to worry about pregnancy. After that talk with Mom, I even thought there might be hope for us someday. Just not today. “So we’re good.”

  “We’re good,” he said, but he didn’t make a move to meet me halfway for a kiss. Instead he stared straight ahead to the door.

  Something about being the one to make the first move petrified me. But he said we were good. What could it hurt?

  He turned to look at me, and I leaned in for the kiss. At the last minute, he turned, leaving me with nothing but cheek. I backed into my corner of the couch, stung by the rejection. My face burned. Maybe he didn’t want me anymore because I was pregnant.

  “Posey,” he said even though he looked like he was addressing the front door across the room. “I will happily marry you if you want because it’s the right thing to do, but I can’t do whatever we’ve been doing, always wondering if we’re going to make it or not.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “I called my sponsor last night.”

  “And?”

  “He reminded me I have to make sobriety my priority.”

  “And?”

  “And being with you puts me at risk.”

  I stood and began to pace once more. “Oh, but marrying me is okay?”

  “Well, yeah. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you get a girl pregnant.”

  “Sure. If it’s nineteen-fifty.” My hands clenched into fists. I muttered, “And Mom thinks I’m the one who deals in black-and-white.”

  “What did you say?” Now he stood.

  “A wise woman told me earlier today that I shouldn’t deal in absolutes, yet here I am dealing with yours. Marriage or nothing? That’s crazy, John.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t risk having a drink every time we get into a fight.”

  “Then don’t have a drink every time we have a fight!”