When the Morning Glory Blooms (9781426770777)

by Ruchti, Cynthia

  “You’re gonna need some more skills for after—” Ivy’s father nodded toward her child-sized belly. “Merry Christmas, and I’d suggest you practice now, before that clacking noise wakes up my grandson.”

  “Grandson, Dad?”

  “Might be.” The faintest hint of a smile on his weathered face warmed her all the way to her unpracticed fingers.

  “Anna, please, now that Ed Sullivan is finished for another week, can we get back to Puff and Melody’s story?”

  “It’s almost bedtime.”

  “Can we talk while I help you get ready for bed?”

  “Not tonight, Ivy.”

  Ivy laid the back of her hand against Anna’s pale forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “You’re not the only one missing her beloved. All that talk about Puff and Melody, about the girls and their babies who came into my life and left again . . .”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed.”

  “Oh, it’s silly of me. I’ve had my share of wonderful. And now God’s given me another burst of joy watching what He’s doing with you. Can’t wait to hold your little one. Look at that!”

  “What?”

  “I think that was an elbow making its presence known there.”

  “Elbow. Knee. Here.” Ivy took Anna’s hand in hers and laid it on the spot where the baby had last kicked. It wasn’t long before the little one responded with a healthy prize-fighter punch.

  Tears filled the crevices on Anna’s face. “Such a beautiful thing. What that must feel like for the mother!”

  Anna had never known.

  25

  Becky—2013

  Quiet grace speaks louder than noisy blame.” The flip calendar was right again.

  Then Lauren blew into the house and had to be reminded to shut the door behind her, despite the single-digit temps of a late-winter Arctic blast. “Sorry, Mom. But when I tell you what I have to tell you, you’ll forgive me for being a little distracted.”

  Becky tucked her feet underneath her on the couch and wrapped the chenille throw tighter around her shoulders. The surge of cold air would dissipate before it tried to slither under the closed door behind which both Jackson and Gil slept in the master bedroom. Both had been whining entirely too much lately. A nap would do them good. She hoped.

  “Is Dad here?”

  “He’s sleeping off the dregs of driving the fourth-graders on their field trip to the capital.”

  “Ooo. Brutal. Can I wake him up?”

  “Not without waking Jackson, too. They’re napping together. Your dad volunteered to lie down with him for a few minutes. That was an hour ago.”

  Lauren’s mouth formed a series of smooth, cursive w’s. “Hmm. I wanted to show you at the same time.” She bounced on her toes, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her thank-you-Goodwill coat.

  “Show us what?”

  “This!” She pulled her left hand out of her pocket and stuck it under Becky’s nose.

  “A . . . a tattoo?”

  Lauren sighed. “It’s a ring!”

  “A tattoo of a ring.”

  “Right. Brilliant, isn’t it? Can never get lost. Won’t catch on sweaters. Doesn’t need insurance. Don’t have to take it off when I do dishes.”

  “Oh, honey! You’re going to start doing dishes? I’m overwhelmed. This is so unexpected.”

  “Mother, you’re so funny. Look at it. It’s an en-gage-ment ring. Isn’t that the most outrageous thing?”

  What was that disease where a person’s eyes bugged out? Former first lady Barbara Bush struggled with it for a while. Graves’ disease. That was it. Lauren had the power to induce Graves’ disease. Becky pressed her palms against her closed eyelids to push her eyeballs back into their sockets.

  “Mom, I’m engaged!”

  Which, oh which, question to ask first? Are you kidding? Are you insane? You got a tattoo? You’re engaged? To whom?

  “Mom, say something. It’s perfect, isn’t it?”

  “In . . . what . . . way? Could we start at the beginning?”

  Lauren huffed her exasperation and plopped on the floor in front of Becky. Cross-legged and almost audibly screeching the brakes of her emotions, she said, “Okay, so, Noah and I were at the mall, and I thought he was just kidding, but he wasn’t, when he said we should look at rings.”

  Becky shook the loose synapses in her brain. “Wait a minute. Noah and you are that serious?”

  “Uh, yea-uh!” She wiggled her ring finger in Becky’s direction.

  “Is he Jackson’s father?”

  “That is so not the point, Mom. Will you just listen to the story?”

  Hot flash? Heart attack? Stroke? Aneurysm? Her vision skewed as though she were viewing the scene through waxed paper. Her hearing fogged. Incapable of speech, she nodded.

  “So I thought, of course, he meant the jewelry store, but we headed to the Skin Art Gallery.”

  “Oh, lovely.”

  “Do you know how much money we saved? Once the redness and swelling go down, you’ll see how gorgeous this ring is. I’ll have to go back for the wedding band part after the wedding. It wraps right around the diamond over on one side like a vine. Kind of like your morning glory vines. See how it sparkles? They put a special additive in the pigment to make it glisten like that. Kind of like glitter. Look.” Lauren held her hand out flat under the lamp on the end table and wiggled her hand back and forth so the “diamond” could catch the light.

  Blinded by its brilliance, Becky turned away, blinked, and called out, “Gil? Gil, come on out here.”

  “Noah proposed right there in the store. It was so sweet. I mean, we’d talked about it, but I thought he’d wait until we graduated.”

  “At least.”

  Lauren sank onto the couch beside her mother, causing a tidal wave of cushions and emotions. “But, then, we realized that we both turn eighteen before the end of the school year, so . . . ”

  “So . . . ?”

  “Legal age.”

  “I realize that. I wasn’t making the connection between the number eighteen and the wisdom of getting married the next day.”

  “That would be dumb.”

  Becky allowed herself a tiny, controlled exhale.

  “That’s a Thursday. Who wants to get married on a Thursday?”

  “Gil, honey? This is important.” Blood pressure, somewhere in the two hundreds. “Lauren, let me go get your father. He’ll want to hear all this.”

  “We can talk later. Noah’s picking me up in a few minutes. His aunt has a cupcake shop—SweetCheeks. She runs it out of her house. He thinks he can get her to give us a cupcake tower wedding cake for our present. See how financially responsible we’re being?”

  The speed of Lauren’s recitation—well beyond warp speed—didn’t allow Becky to think in sync, much less form a response.

  “But, Mom, we can’t take Jackson with us to a place like that, so, could you, like, watch him for a few more hours? Thanks a bunch.”

  “No.”

  Now on her feet, rezipping her coat and gingerly pulling on her mittens as she left the room, Lauren turned. “What did you say?”

  “Can’t watch your son tonight.” I have a nervous breakdown scheduled in five, four, three, two . . .

  Gil padded into the family room, staring down at his cell phone then up at his wife. “Did you just text me? My phone started to vibrate and the text said, ‘Come here. I need you.’ That was you, right? Not a Watson/Alexander Graham Bell thing?” He grinned as if considering making a living as a stand-up comic.

  Becky’s eyeballs throbbed in synch with her heartbeat. She opened her mouth, but nothing flew out.

  “Hey, you’ll get a kick out of this. While Jackson was trying to find a good position for his nap, I flipped through my Learn a New Word Every Day paperback. Today’s word is mammothrept: ‘n. a spoiled child raised by its grandmother.’ Great word, huh? Mammothrept. Not that . . . not that it applies here . . . at all . . . because you’re
not . . . spoiling—Becky? What’s wrong?”

  Becky raised a robotic left hand. “What do you see here?”

  “Your wedding ring?”

  “No. This one.”

  “Your engagement ring.”

  “Right. Lauren has one, too.”

  “What?” He sank to the couch beside her. “No.”

  “Oh, yes. Only hers is—” Becky gulped like melodramatic actors did in the 1950s when they were acting scared. “Hers is tattoed.”

  “Have you been sniffing too much ammonia on your cleaning job?”

  She punched him in the arm with the back of her non-ringed hand. “Gil, I’m absolutely serious. She’s in her room calling Noah to tell him they can’t go look at cupcake towers because I refused to watch Jackson for them so they could perpetuate this ridiculous—”

  “Wait. Noah? Is he the father of—?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “What’s a cupcake tower?”

  Becky swiveled to face him more directly. “That is not the main issue here, Gil. They’re planning to be married.”

  “When?”

  “About ten seconds after they both turn eighteen.”

  Gil leaned into the drooping couch back. “And we feel horrible about that, right? I mean, Noah’s a nice kid . . . ”

  “The operative word is kid.”

  “But if he’s Jackson’s father, wouldn’t the best thing be for them to be married and to raise him together?”

  Becky bent over until her chin touched her knees. “I don’t know. You’d think so. But they’re so immature. That’s no way to start a marriage.”

  “That’s how we did it.” Gil rubbed her turtle-shell back. “We got married pretty young.”

  “That was different.”

  “And immature.”

  “Only one of us.” She nudged his foot with hers.

  “And we survived.”

  “By the grace of God.”

  The phrase laid a blanket of silence over the room, interrupted by a squawk down the hall. The door to Lauren’s room opened, then the door to the master bedroom—different hinge sounds. In less than a minute, Lauren and a Jackson-shaped hip attachment headed for the kitchen and a premade bottle in the fridge.

  Becky stood. “Want me to get that? So you can show . . . your dad your ring?”

  “Stupid ring.”

  “What?”

  “Noah can’t go look at cakes tonight,” she said in what could only be described as her snottiest tone. “He’s grounded. His parents are so strict, it’s sickening!”

  Five, four, three, two . . . “What was the offense?”

  “Get this. He’s grounded because he spaced on picking up his little sister from school. So his dad had to leave work early, and his mom was all freaked out wondering if Noah’s sister had been kidnapped or something, and Noah wasn’t answering his phone because we were, like, in the middle of something.”

  Becky caught the twitch in the skin around Gil’s right eye, even from across the open-concept great room/kitchen.

  Lauren looked from one parent to the other. “Oh, get your minds out of the gutter. We were in the tattoo parlor!”

  Gil stood then. “Lauren, watch your tone.”

  “Why can’t anything ever be simple?”

  Becky handed her the warmed bottle and warmed her voice to match. “Honey, you gave up simple about nine months before Jackson was born.”

  Lauren stumbled into the kitchen the next morning with evidence of a night of crying all over her face. She poured herself a bowl of cereal and told her mother that she couldn’t go to school that day. Would Becky call it in to the school office?

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  Becky thought back to all the reasons not to laugh in the last year or so. “No, I won’t.”

  Lauren sniffed then grabbed a paper towel on which to blow her nose. “Promise?”

  “I promise. What is it?” Becky stuck her coffee mug into the microwave for a reheat, pulling off nonchalance as well as she could under the circumstances.

  “I think my ring’s infected.” Lauren held out her delicate left hand, which had a swollen, beet-red, blistered ring finger.

  For the first time she could recall, Becky broke a promise to her child.

  “It’s not funny!”

  Becky choked. “Oh, I know. I’m s-sorry, honey. Not funny at all. Here, let me get a closer look. This isn’t good. We need to get you to the doctor to check this out.”

  “It really hurts.”

  “Don’t touch it! I’ll call the clinic.” And thank the Lord Gil’s work insurance still has a few more weeks on it. “Your dad has a job interview today, so we’ll have to take Jackson with us.”

  “Yeah, uh, the baby’s awake, but . . . ”

  “But what?” Becky pulled open the cupboard door on which was tacked a list of important phone numbers.

  Lauren brandished her infected hand. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to change a dirty diaper right now.”

  Becky considered suggesting latex gloves but instead tapped the spot of the clinic number on the list and handed Lauren the phone while she headed down the hall to the messy diaper.

  Will there be a time, Lord, when things aren’t this complicated? Now we’re in perpetual survival mode.

  She followed the sound of her sweet grandson waking to the day, burbling and chatting in an indecipherable baby language despite the foul odor he gave off. “Oh, Jackson!”

  Oh, Lauren! What had she done? She wasn’t just crying all night. She must have also been cleaning by flashlight while Jackson slept. Cleaning while crying was a trick Becky might have passed on to Lauren without knowing.

  “Come on, baby boy. Let’s get you ready for the day.” He reached for her and smiled as if he’d reserved a batch of joy just for her. It was a scene Becky wouldn’t experience if Lauren were twenty-five, married, and living in Wichita.

  As she worked to make Jackson smell good again and tugged him into an outfit he’d soon outgrow, she focused on enjoying the opportunity while she had it.

  Sprawled across Lauren’s unmade—some things never change—bed was the latest issue of Brides magazine.

  26

  Anna—1890s

  I feel the press of time, the relentless ticking of the clock, the exhausted beating of my heart, surely using up its allotment of pulses like a sieve with too-large holes.

  So, yes. I’ll tell you more about my Josiah.

  It wasn’t Josiah’s words as much as the timbre of his voice that I found soothing, as comforting as a fire-warmed brick at the foot of my bed midwinter. His voice was silken, yet wakened within me a sweet quickening of life, as I imagined the first flutters of a babe’s womb movements must feel within a grateful mother-to-be.

  The subject of his conversation didn’t matter. The rhythm of it, the rise and fall, the gentleness and gentility stirred within me an emotion I hadn’t known. Truthfully, I’d never experienced the gently lapping waves of soul peace that washed over me when Josiah spoke.

  And when he breathed my name! The pace of my heartbeat responded like a horse to the tap of a whip.

  I read respect in his eyes and voice. And affection. Who could want more?

  It was by firelight that he first broached the subject of my past, a past that carved my future as surely as rivers carve canyons. I was confident enough of his friendship by then to risk telling him the truth about my beginnings. He listened attentively, as he always did, but uncharacteristically dropped his gaze mid-story. I don’t know why, but I was led to push past his discomfort and tell it all. I gambled that Josiah would flinch but not crumble, that he would accept what he was hearing without finding it necessary to distance himself from me, the unsophisticated, uneducated, too often ungrateful.

  My few residents at the time were in their rooms upstairs trying to recapture some of the sleep they’d lost the night before in false labor or caring for a newborn.
The sound of Josiah’s carriage wasn’t uncommon. And not unwelcome.

  He stood in my doorway that evening with a sheaf of papers. “This,” he said, waving the stack, “is a pretence, I must admit. There’s no hurry to get them signed. I confess I made the trip purely for the pleasure of your company, Anna.”

  He waited then, as if there were any real chance I would turn him away. My wide-swung door and wider smile invited him in.

  Providentially, the evening was cool enough for a fire. Fire no longer frightened me as it had for long months after the attack. I saw it once more as a source of heat, light, fuel. No longer a weapon. That, too, was redeemed for me.

  Josiah built and stoked the fire in the front parlor while I cut thick slices of apple pie for us and heated water for tea. The fireplace flames were well established by the time I returned to the parlor with our tray.

  Yes. The flames were well established.

  His hand brushed mine when he took the cup I offered. So brief a contact, but it rearranged all my internal organs—my heart into my feet, my stomach into my throat. When I extended a plate of pie, his hand intentionally engulfed mine. “Thank you, Anna.” The moment lasted a split-second lifetime.

  The firelight was all we wanted or needed for illumination. Josiah’s sideburns showed flecks of silver in the fire’s amber glow. We both acknowledged the fair difference in our ages. But he never treated me like a child. Now that I think about it, I don’t believe I ever was one. I graduated much too quickly from babe-in-arms to adult, skipping the innocence and unconcerned days of childhood altogether. I’m sure it registered in my countenance. The lines on my face brought our ages closer together.

  It occurred to me that Josiah Grissom could teach a thing or two to many of the young men who were the absent fathers of Morning Glory’s children. Professor of responsibility, with doctorates in kindness, gentility, godliness, and strength of character. I could gather the irresponsible, and the unkind, the uncouth, the harsh, and the weak-willed in a room, set Professor Grissom before them, and tell the reluctant students, “Watch this man! He will show you how to live.”