by Gary Parker
© 2006 by Gary E. Parker
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3930-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Section 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Section 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Section 3
Chapter 5
Section 4
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Section 5
Chapter 8
Section 6
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
About the Author
Back Ads
SECTION 1
There’s something greater
That speaks to the heart alone:
’Tis the voice of the great Creator
Dwells in that mighty tone.
Joseph Edwards Carpenter
1
Allie Wilson sat on the floor of her childhood bedroom in a pair of lightweight cotton pajamas. The tiny image of a blond-haired, green-finned mermaid—repeated over and over again—decorated the pajamas. The hems of the legs and the cuffs on the sleeves were frayed, thinned by years of wear and tear. A light May breeze blew through an open window to her left. A ceiling fan whirred gently. An arrangement of freshly cut flowers sat in a crystal vase on a table by her head. A stack of books, picture frames, shoes, old baseball caps, and a cluster of other assorted items surrounded her on the floor. Allie heard footsteps and looked up as her mom, Gladys, entered the room.
“I like your pajamas,” her mom said, pointing to Allie’s frayed nightwear.
“You should. You gave them to me.”
“Christmas—when you were thirteen.”
Allie smiled as she remembered the Christmas tradition; her mom gave her new pajamas on Christmas Eve every year. Still did. “I always liked mermaids,” she said.
Gladys plopped down beside her. “They’re a bit snug in the backside now, I expect,” she teased.
“And a little short in the legs but not too bad.”
“You got most of your height that year,” Gladys said. “Five ten by thirteen.”
“I’m wearing them for old times’ sake.”
“I’m surprised you found them.”
“They were stuck in the back of a dresser drawer. You know me. I never throw anything away.”
“You’re the queen of the pack rats.”
Allie surveyed the clutter around her. “Until now,” she said.
“You’re finally cleaning things out?” Gladys’s voice registered surprise.
Allie picked up a pair of high heels that had once been favorites but that she hadn’t worn in years. “About time, don’t you think?”
Her mom chuckled. “I guess a wedding in three weeks causes a girl to do all kinds of strange things.”
Allie grinned at her mom. Gladys, now fifty-three, was stout but not plump, and age lines traced around her mouth and eyes, but more from laughing than anything else. She was gray haired but with no shame about it. “I earned every gray hair on me raising a daughter mostly by myself,” she said whenever anybody asked her why she didn’t buy a younger hair color from a bottle.
Allie held up the high heels. “You know anybody who can use these? I want to give away what I don’t need anymore.”
Gladys took the size nine and a half heels, her eyes bright. “You can search the neighborhood for a tall Cinderella, I guess,” she said, “but no short girl can wear these skis.”
Allie tossed a cushion at her mom, who caught it with one hand and placed it behind her back.
“I bought those heels, what... twelve years ago?” Allie asked, trying to remember.
“The year you graduated from Furman.”
“I wore them the first game I ever coached; they made me taller than any of my players.”
“I’m glad you were never ashamed of your height.”
“You taught me not to slump.”
“It’s a good thing Trey is six three.”
Allie thought of her fiancé, Trey Thompson—gangly, blue-eyed, and blond. He worked as a guidance counselor at Asheville High School, where she’d once taught and served as the assistant basketball coach. Although she’d since left that school for the head coaching job at Crestview High—a new school in her hometown of Harper Springs, North Carolina, a four red-light mountain town about thirty minutes west of Asheville—they still saw each other just about every day and had done so for the past three years. For over two years now, Trey had asked her to marry him on every special occasion that showed up on the calendar. Her birthday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, his birthday, Mother’s Day. Once he’d even asked on St. Patrick’s Day.
“It will make every guy I know green with envy,” he’d said. “My marrying a woman who looks like a model, long and willowy, raven hair, eyes the color of black olives.”
Until just recently she’d always told him to wait. “I’m not ready yet,” she’d say. “You know why.”
“Let me see,” Trey would say, cupping his chin in an exaggerated counseling pose. “Could it be that your father’s abandonment of you and your mother when you were just four has caused you to become distrustful of the entire male species?”
Allie always laughed but just barely. Although she’d never whined to Trey about the absence of a dad, he knew the story. “Just don’t give up on me,” she constantly pleaded.
“You’ll find that I’m a stubborn man,” he’d assure her. “Until you kick me away with a pointy-toed boot, I won’t give up on you.”
True to his word, Trey had kept asking, and finally, on Valentine’s Day she’d said yes.
Her mom placed the high heels in a box, and Allie’s mind returned to the present.
“You plan to leave anything here?” Gladys asked.
Allie stood, stepped to the window, and looked out at the yard of the white two-story house her mom’s folks had given her when they passed on. A rope dangled from a tall oak directly ahead of her. A tire had once swayed on the end of the rope, and she’d spent hours on hot summer days swinging on the tire. When not on the tire, she’d spent another big chunk of her time shooting basketball on a goal attached to a pole just off the side of the house where her mom parked the car. A small porch ran down the side where the goal hung, and that porch and the town of Harper Springs, which lay three miles past it, gave her the third and fourth major reference points of her youth. On a lot of afternoons, she and her mom had sat on the porch to shuck corn or snap peas or cut the okra they grew in their garden out behind the house.
Allie’s throat filled as she faced her mom again. Although she kept a small apartment a couple of blocks from the school, mostly to remind herself that she was a grown woman and shouldn’t live with her mom anymore, most of her belongings remained right here in this room where she’d grown up. The notion of ridding herself of most of the junk of her youth, of cleaning out her belongings and walking away from this house forever, scared her more than any
woman her age ought to admit. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to get married. Quite the contrary. Although Trey wasn’t perfect, she’d stopped believing that any man was and so looked forward to settling down with him, perhaps even beginning a family. But actually clearing out everything she owned, everything she’d collected in her lifetime, seemed too sharp a cleavage with the past, like stepping off a cliff in the dark. Allie’s eyes moistened slightly, but she brushed them clear, moved to the closet, and started hauling out a stack of boxes from the far corner.
Gladys took the boxes and stacked them on the floor. After removing all the boxes from the closet, Allie found a place on the floor by Gladys again. Her mom flipped the lid off the top box. A pair of white shoes sat inside.
“Give them to the Community Clothes Closet,” Allie said.
Her mom dropped the box to the side and opened another. A bunch of pictures lay inside. Allie flipped quickly through the photos, most of them showing her in various states of shooting a basketball.
“I was a skinny thing,” she said as she finished examining the box and shoved it to the side.
“Like a young filly,” Gladys said. “Still are, though you’re not such a young filly anymore.”
“Hey, I’m just thirty-three!”
“Close to over-the-hill; in my day if a woman didn’t marry by the time she turned thirty, she officially entered the ranks of the old maids.”
“Heaven forbid that should happen.” Allie flipped the top off another box. An old corsage, its flower long since dried, rested inside. Allie held it to her nose, took a breath, and imagined she could still smell the scent of the bloom.
“Tenth grade,” she said, remembering the homecoming dance when she received the corsage.
“What was that boy’s name?”
“Bill Stone. He moved away a couple of years later. Wonder what happened to him.” She dropped the corsage back in the box.
“A keeper or a goner?” her mom asked, pointing to the corsage.
Allie hesitated but then waved it away. “Bill Stone is a goner,” she said.
Her mom smiled. “You really are cleaning out, aren’t you?”
Allie lifted another box and found more pictures in it, black and white ones this time. Her brow furrowed as she fingered the top photo—a picture of her grandmom and granddad standing in front of the house where she now sat.
“What are these?” she asked, handing the first picture to Gladys and reaching for the second.
Gladys’s eyes widened as she examined the image. “I thought I’d lost these,” she said.
Allie lifted out several more. They showed her in scenes she couldn’t remember, younger than she recollected. “Have I ever seen these?” she asked, feeding them to Gladys.
Gladys took the pictures one by one. “I don’t know,” she said.
Allie thumbed through more pictures. Then her fingers froze as she stared at one in the middle of the stack. Two young couples, the men in military uniforms, the women in calf-length white dresses and gloves, laughed out at her from the print. A black Cadillac served as a prop for the happy couples. The women sat demurely on the hood, their legs hanging over the front. The men stood on either side of the women, their feet propped rakishly on the silver bumper of the Cadillac.
Allie immediately recognized her mom as one of the women and knew, without recognizing him, the identity of the man directly to her mom’s left. Jack Wilson, long as a fence rail and equally thin, a dimple in his chin, black hair falling onto his forehead.
“It’s Dad,” she said softly.
Gladys leaned over, saw the picture, and grabbed for it and the box at the same time, but Allie held them away from her.
“Let me have those!” Gladys said.
Allie shook her head.
“They’re just old pictures,” her mom said, still reaching for the box. “No reason to drag them out now.”
Allie pulled all the pictures from the box, dropped it to the floor, and stood. Her mom stood with her.
“Give me the pictures,” Gladys insisted, her teeth clenched. “They’re mine!”
“Why don’t you want me to see them?” Allie asked, holding the pictures over her head like a grown-up holding something from a child.
Gladys shrugged. “It’s just... there’s no reason to drag out old memories, that’s all.”
Allie lowered the pictures and handed them to her mom. “I’d like to see them,” she said, “but I’ll do what you want.”
Gladys held the photos for several seconds, then sighed and handed them back to Allie, who took the one of her dad and inspected it more closely.
“It’s Jack just before he left for Vietnam,” Gladys said.
“I’ve never seen this picture.”
“You weren’t born yet. I didn’t even know I was pregnant at the time.”
“You’re pregnant in this?”
“Just barely. I was nineteen years old, your dad too.”
Allie studied the image a few more seconds, then flipped to the next one. “So he’s the same age as you.”
“Yes.”
“Hard to believe.”
“You’ve never seen any of those,” her mom said, nodding toward the rest of the prints in Allie’s hands.
Allie thumbed through six more images, all of her mom and dad in various places and poses. In the third one, a little girl stood between her mom and dad, a little girl in a light-colored dress, a pair of black shoes with a buckle on them, and a bonnet on her head. Her eyes—bigger than seemed right for her small frame—bugged out, brightly shining toward the person taking the picture.
“It’s me,” Allie said.
Gladys stepped to her side and studied the picture. “Yes,” she finally said.
“How old was I?”
“Three.”
“The year before dad left us?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have other pictures of me with dad?”
“Not many, perhaps a few.”
“Can I see them?”
“Of course you can.”
“Why haven’t you shown them to me?”
Her mom shrugged. “Didn’t want you to remember bad things, to conjure up the fact that Jack left us. You want to see them now?”
Allie thought a moment, then shook her head. “Another time maybe.”
“Whenever you want.”
Allie nodded, not doubting that her mom had done what she thought best for her. Although Gladys hadn’t shut out all talk about her dad, she never brought it up either. In Allie’s younger years, her mom had answered all the questions Allie had asked as best she could.
“Why did Dad leave us?” she’d asked often during the first couple of years after he left.
“He had some troubles,” her mom always explained. “Brought them back from the war.”
“What kind of troubles?”
“He never really told me.”
“Where did he go when he left us?”
“I don’t know. He writes every now and again. Would you like me to read the letters to you?”
Allie always said yes, and her mom hauled out all the letters and they sat down, usually with hot chocolate in the winter and sweet iced tea in the summer, and Gladys read the letters to her over and over until they were both exhausted.
After a few years, the letters stopped coming and her dad disappeared for good, and Allie stopped asking about him. The young are curious but not overly persistent, she realized now. They adjust to life as it is and feel that the reality of the moment is normal. That’s what she’d done.
Allie focused again on the face of her father in the picture. His eyes stared at her as if looking past the years, through them, penetrating the time and space that separated father from child. A sharp sense of nostalgia rolled over her, not for what had been—for she’d never known her dad—but for what might have been, what she might have experienced.
“I wish he could be here for my wedding,” Allie said softly.
&
nbsp; Gladys eased closer and put a hand on her back, both of them intent on the image of Jack Wilson. “I wish he could have been here for a lot of things for you,” Gladys said.
Allie turned to Gladys as her eyes filled. All the grief from all the years caused by not having a dad suddenly threatened to overwhelm her. Feelings she didn’t know she possessed welled up and spilled over. “What happened to him, Mom?” she asked.
“I wish I knew more, but I don’t. He came back from Vietnam a broken man. Suffered nightmares, sweats, the shakes, took to drinking, maybe some drugs too. I never knew all of it.”
“Did he ever say what happened to him over there?”
“Not much. Just that it was rough.” Her voice trailed off, and she fell silent.
Allie knew to ask no more. “Do you think he really loved us?” she asked.
Her mom hesitated for only an instant. “I know it’s hard to believe since he left us, but I know he did. He used to tell me over and over again that we were the only things that kept him alive. He sent money to us for years after he left, even after he stopped writing. He loved us. I believe that even though I don’t have a lot of ways to prove it.”
Allie wiped her eyes and tried to figure it all out. If he loved them, then why leave, no matter how tormented? She examined the question from every angle she could imagine, and something odd occurred to her. She voiced it before understanding it. “Maybe he left us because he loved us,” she suggested.
“How do you figure that?”
Allie weighed her words carefully but then said them, and they sounded true, truer than much of what most people ever said. “Maybe he didn’t want to put us through what we’d have to endure if he stayed around. A man on alcohol and drugs can cause a lot of trouble for loved ones. Maybe Dad figured leaving might hurt us less than staying. At least with him gone we could get on with our lives.”
“That’s one way to look at it. “
Allie held the pictures closer. Jack Wilson looked so alive in them, his cockeyed smile, his dimples, his black eyes. She stared into the eyes; they seemed focused straight on her, bored into her psyche. An odd prickly feeling ran up and down her spine, and she almost shuddered.
“Were his eyes as black as they look?” she asked.
