“Blog.”
“What hon? Oh, here. I’ll get you a drink.”
She smacked her lips. “Blog. You should start a blog. (Hic) ‘Gil’s ’Net: When You’re Fishing for Answers.’ ”
He pursed his lips and wiggled his backward hands near his cheeks in a reasonable facsimile of a fish.
“Of course, you’d need to sell ad space (hic) to make that profita—(hic)—ble.”
The warmth in his embrace did more to stop the hiccupping than her mouthful of peanut butter.
“You, my creamy protein-ness, are the one with all the answers.”
“Gil, we both ran out of answers a long time ago.”
He held her a long moment. “Then we are perfectly positioned for the spectacular, aren’t we?”
The morning brought a phone call from the realtor—the offer was withdrawn—and with the flip of a switch, expect-the-spectacular Gil became as sullen as a teenager with PMS and a baby. And . . . the circle was complete.
If it weren’t for their shrinking reserves and the distress it would have caused her husband, Becky would have admitted that the news made her ecstatic. There was still time for a real answer to show up.
Still time, too, for Lauren to show up. She hadn’t come home the night before.
Becky took her anger out on the pan of oatmeal she made for Gil. Mr. Cranky couldn’t afford irregularity. While he sat watching her from his self-imposed Time Out stool at the breakfast bar, she stirred the bubbling cauldron with a vigor usually reserved for hand-whipping meringue.
In her frenzy, she almost missed it. But moms hear things like the faint click of a key in a lock.
Lauren thought she could sneak in the front door? At nine thirty on a Saturday morning?
Impeccably cued, Jackson alerted the world that he was awake.
Roused from his catatonic state by the concurrent crises, Gil pointed down the hall to signify he had dibs on the boy. She could have the girl.
“Lauren?”
“Mom, don’t start. I’m not in the mood.”
“Excuse me? Young lady—”
“I’m really tired. I’m going to bed.”
“No, you’re not. Sit. Sit!” Becky’s blood pressure fluctuated wildly when she saw the look on Lauren’s face. “Honey, sit down. What’s going on? Where were you?”
“The wedding is off.”
The gasp heard ’round the world.
“You broke up?”
“Noah is such a jerk!”
To talk or not to talk—that is the question.
Lauren flinched when her son let out a man-sized holler.
“Your dad’s taking care of it, Lauren. Now, talk. What happened? Maybe it’s cold feet. A lot of grooms get—”
“Oh, Mom. Give it up. There’s no hope. We’re done.”
“Is it worth it to get some premarital counseling, Lauren? Jackson needs his daddy.”
“What?” Lauren’s forehead creased like a sideways pleated skirt. “Noah’s not Jackson’s father!”
“He isn’t?”
She scrunched her nose. “What’s burning?”
Oatmeal!
Becky ran to clamp a lid on the saucepan and slide it off the stove. The stench still billowed into the room, so she took the pan outside and stuck it in a snowdrift. When she returned to the house and the bizarre conversation, the other half of the conversation had disappeared.
To her bedroom, no doubt.
What was Becky going to do with that daughter of hers?
She knew the answer to that one. Keep loving her . . . and step up her prayer labor.
“You can’t give back a tattooed engagement ring.”
The Lauren Trundle Book of Modern Proverbs. There was a job for her—writing how-not-to books.
“No, dear. That’s true. But maybe”—was she really going to say this?—“maybe you could go back to the shop and have something tattooed on top of it. A flower or something.”
Lauren rolled onto her back on her perpetually unmade bed. “What did you say?”
“Trying to help.”
“Mom, you’re amazing. How can you keep loving me?”
Becky swept the too-long bangs off Lauren’s forehead. “It’s in the contract.”
“Your daughter gets pregnant on a dare—”
“What?”
“Yeah. We’ll talk about that later. But, I mean, how many ways can I mess up my life?”
I’m keeping a ledger. I’ll go get it.
“And yours? And what are the odds I won’t totally mess up Jackson’s life too? Poor kid.”
“Parents pretty much all feel that way, no matter how old they are.”
“No they don’t.”
“Trust me.”
Lauren’s facial expression shifted. “Not you and Daddy. What have you two ever done wrong in raising us?”
I’m keeping a ledger. Let me get it. “Well, let’s see. Earlier today . . . ”
“Come on. I’m being serious.”
“So am I, Lauren. Do you really believe you’ll never be any smarter about parenting than you are today? No smarter about relationships? That you won’t learn anything useful over the next few years? That mistakes are practice for the next big goof-up rather than life lessons?”
Lauren shook like a toddler coming down from a tantrum. “I . . . I really do love him, you know.”
“Noah?”
“NO! That jerk. I’m talking about Jackson. I really do love him.”
“I know, honey. It shows . . . sometimes.”
“It’s supposed to show all the time, isn’t it?”
“Parenting 101.”
Lauren sat up and hugged her mom sumo-style, and with sumoferocity. “Will you help me?”
What do you think we’ve been trying to do for the last year? “Absolutely.”
“A dare is a superdumb way to make a baby.” Lauren tugged Jackson’s sweatshirt over his belly. He sat in her lap, facing out, as she sat cross-legged on the couch next to her mother. The recliner Gil rescued from Goodwill was his new office and crisis-management center.
Becky glanced at him, then focused her attention on her daughter. “I think we can all agree there.”
“Lots of things start out ugly, Lauren.” The pace of Gil’s words held as much meaning as their multiple definitions.
“That chair, for instance.”
“Hey, it’s comfortable.”
“Mom, you’re okay with it messing up your design scheme?”
Becky leaned in conspiratorially. “It’s temporary. There’s no way it’ll fit in the duplex.”
Lauren giggled, a far too infrequent sound. “Yeah, but if you’re staging a house with hopes of selling it . . . ”
“Gil! She’s right! Quick! Haul it out to the yard. We’ll have a bonfire. We can throw in your ratty hooded sweatshirt too.”
“Ladies,” he began, pounding his feet on the chair’s footrest to bring the monstrosity to its pseudo-upright position, “I’ve worn dress shirts and ties almost every day for twenty-four years. Cut me some slack on the unemployment dress code, all right?”
Lauren stroked the pulsing soft spot on her son’s head. “Slack? It’s called grace, Dad. And thanks for sharing it so generously with me.”
What was that sound? Gratitude? Becky held her breath, afraid the gossamer bubble would burst if she exhaled.
“I’m ready to listen to you guys.”
Can’t exhale yet!
“What do you think I should do?”
Gil and Becky exchanged invisible, inaudible, parental Morse code. You take this one, Gil, she tapped.
“Bullet points or lecture?”
“Bullet points, please.”
Come on, Unemployed Dad of the Year. Do your thing!
“First, focus on getting your diploma. A given.”
“Agreed.”
Becky raised her hand. “May I add some color commentary here? As intriguing an idea as was the Purse Suede business . . . ”
> “Yeah, Mom. You can save your breath. I can’t even sew. Someday maybe. Might make a nice hobby when I’m old.”
Why is she looking at me?
“Okay then.” Gil used one index finger to point to the other. “Second? Look into any financial help offered to single moms for online learning so you can at least get an associate’s degree.”
“More school?” She wrinkled her nose.
“More possibilities,” Gil countered.
“You don’t know,” Becky offered, “if you’ll need to support the two of you on your own for two years, five years, or ten years, so you’ll need marketable skills.”
“Way to be supportive, Mom. ‘You may never find a guy who loves you, Lauren, so . . . ’ ”
“That’s not what I meant.”
The sound Gil’s chair made when he scooted forward would have delighted a gaggle of fourth-grade boys. “Back to our bullet points. One more. Love that son of yours and lean on God.”
“That’s two points.”
“Not exactly. They’re so closely tied together, it’s hard to separate them.”
Jackson arched his back and squirmed as if he were old enough to slide from Lauren’s lap and run outside to play. Too soon, that would be true.
Becky’s muscles tensed. Her instinct was to reach for him, settle him, and relieve her daughter of the awkwardness of an unhappy child. Instead, she smiled at the scene taking place inside her brain. Her breaths came in hee-hee-hee-whoo patterns as she mentally took her hands off the moment and let a mother be fully born.
Excellent grandmother was enough of a goal. Jackson already had a mother.
“Oh, sick!” Lauren held her son at arm’s length. “He peed on me!”
She left the room to change both of them.
Gil called after her, “Love that son of yours and lean on God.” Becky raised her hand for an across-the-room fist bump.
30
Ivy—1952
You going to be okay if I’m gone for the day?”
Her dad’s words landed somewhere just beyond his bowl of corn flakes, but she knew they were meant for her. “We’ll be fine. I’m feeling stronger every day. Anna’s holding her own. You know Joy. She’s always fine.”
One corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Sleeps a lot.”
“That won’t last forever. We should enjoy it while we have it. But are you sure you want to go out in this? Snow piled up overnight.” She nabbed her dad’s second piece of toast—not his norm—from the toaster and glanced out the window while she buttered it. “Doesn’t look like it’s letting up, either.”
He slurped his coffee, then adjusted the bow tie at his throat. “I’ve driven in snow before.”
“Where are you going?” She set the toast plate in front of him and sat to peel her hard-boiled egg. A breakfast without protein was unacceptable for a nursing mother, Anna would say.
“I have an errand to run.” His words were tight and sober. Anything but casual.
An errand? Dress shirt and tie? “Can’t it wait until the—?” She stopped herself before his look did. Dad was still Dad.
“Be back before dark. You call Gert and Roy if you need anything.”
Ivy couldn’t imagine how neighbors older than Anna would be much help if any of the women in the household—a newborn, a new mom, and a near invalid—faced something they couldn’t handle, but nodded. “We will. But—”
He ran his tongue over his top teeth, as he often did when thinking too hard. “We’ll talk about it later. Please, Ivy. Just stay put and lay low today. Okay?”
“Dad?”
“I don’t want to worry about you while I’m . . . out running errands.”
“I thought it was just one errand.”
“Don’t get mouthy.”
Ivy never pressed, never poked at the hornet’s nest of conversation with her father. He’d been quiet for the last day or two, reminiscent of the days before, when he struggled to look her in the eye. She didn’t want to go back to that season in their relationship. “It’s your business. We’ll ‘lay low’ and have chicken and dumplings waiting for you when you get home. From that Betty Crocker cookbook you got me for my birthday.”
He lifted his head. The line of his jaw was still lumpy and cementlike, but a tear caught in his lashes. What was going on?
“That’d be nice, Ivy. I like your chicken and dumplings.” Flat, even words.
“Then pray your granddaughter behaves herself today.”
He left the crust of his toast—another first—and stood. “I already did.”
Stormy days crawl forward. The wind turned the new snow into a blizzard. Never too late in the season for a blizzard in the upper Midwest. Watching the frozen white swirl around the house and down the street fascinated all but the youngest of them, but the hours slogged along anyway for Ivy and Anna.
The cold always made life harder for Anna. Her joints. Her breathing. Ivy warmed a blanket on the radiator and tucked it around her, shoulders to toes. Anna rested uneasily, seemingly as worried about Ornell as any mother would be.
An ideal day for storytelling. But Anna and Ivy had formed a silent covenant to wait until the baby didn’t need so much of Ivy’s time.
The typewriter sat silent on the desk in the bedroom. Someday, someday like this molasses-slow one in the future, she’d commit Anna’s stories to typewritten form. Preserving them might turn out to be Ivy’s life’s work. Someday.
Her father’s promise to get home before dark sneaked under the wire like a teen getting home thirty seconds before curfew. The streetlights glowed, creating an eerie backdrop for the still-blowing snow, when the Oldsmobile crept down the street and stopped near the curb. Ivy watched from the front window as her father drudged up the driveway, then headed back to the curb with his snow shovel. An hour later, he’d cleared enough of a path to drive the car into the driveway.
“Wicked cold out there,” he said, stomping his boots on the mat inside the kitchen and shaking drifts from the shoulders of his gray wool coat and hat.
Anna called from the living room, “About time you got home.”
Ivy’s dad looked at his feet. His socks made damp marks on the linoleum. He stripped them off and laid them near his boots, then picked up a small brown bundle wrapped in string, the size of a pound of hamburger from the butcher.
“Supper’s almost ready,” Ivy offered.
“I need to get into some dry clothes first. Then, you and I need to talk. Can supper wait?”
“Sure.”
When he returned from his room, slippered and sweatered and still rosy-cheeked, Ivy was still standing in the same spot.
“Where’s Joy?” he asked as he dragged his chair away from the table and motioned for her to sit.
“Sleeping in her crib. Anna’s sleeping in her chair. I think maybe we need to have Dr. Simons take a look at her one of these days.”
He raised his chin as if acknowledging what she said but not interested in pursuing that subject. “Ivy, I got some news. About your Drew.” He set the brown bundle on the table and nudged it toward her.
Her pulse no longer a soft thud barely noticeable, it now banged like hardheaded mallets on a bass drum in an erratic marching band. “What’s this?” She reached toward the packet, then drew her hand back. “What is this?”
Her father laid his hand over hers. “Your unopened letters to Drew. His half-written, undelivered letters to you. Some of them.”
“W-where did you get them?”
“His folks had them.”
“How did they—? Why would they have—?” Worms of bile crawled up her throat.
“Ivy, since the middle of October, Drew’s been missing in action.”
“Put a cold compress on the back of her neck!”
Anna’s orders broke through the fog. The room hadn’t gone black, but it had faded to gray flannel. The color crept back into Ivy’s vision, hesitant as a Minnesota spring. Their kitchen. Supper on the stove. The table set.
Anna leaning on the arms of her wheelchair. Her dad folding a damp washcloth this way and that. And a tightly swaddled brown paper bundle on the table.
“Why wouldn’t they have told me? Why would his family keep that from me?”
Ivy traced back through the months since mid-October. All that had happened. Always with a sense of foreboding. She thought his love had disappeared. But he had.
“Was he captured?”
“He’s not on the P.O.W. list. The army doesn’t know what happened. We may never know. Missing in action. Whereabouts unknown.”
Ivy twisted the hem of her blouse. “That’s not what the government said, is it? ‘Missing in action. Presumed dead.’ ” Anna pressed her hands to her lips. Ivy’s father scooted his chair closer and laid his arm across Ivy’s shoulders.
“Not you, nor me, nor the military, nor the president knows the answer to that. And we can’t speculate.”
“How did you find out?”
Ornell tugged at a thread in his shirt cuff. “I called around. Talked to some people in Westbrook who knew Drew’s folks.”
“They’ve known all this . . . all this time?”
The thread gave way and his cuff button spurted onto the floor. He kicked at it with his foot. “Didn’t know right away. But knew too long.”
She still hadn’t touched the bundle. “How’d you get the letters?”
“I planted myself in their front room and told them I intended to camp there until they let loose of any information that rightfully belonged to my daughter.” He cleared his throat. “I aimed for persuasive, but it might have come across as intimidating.”
Oh, Daddy!
“I told them how sorry we all were for their loss, but that you and his little girl deserved to have them letters back—and any he meant to send you if he could have . . . before . . . ”
“I can’t read them right now.”
“There’s time.”
Anna cupped her hand around her ear. “Do I hear the little one squirming? She’ll work herself up into a fit if someone doesn’t go get her as soon as she’s awake. Ornell?”
When the Morning Glory Blooms (9781426770777) Page 27
