Briana's Gift

by Lurlene McDaniel

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  I WISH TO THANK DR. LIZABETH KENNEDY,…

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PREVIEW OF LETTING GO OF LISA

  ALSO BY LURLENE MCDANIEL

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Noah Duble, age four, and to his family, who will always love and miss him.

  I wish to thank Dr. Lizabeth Kennedy, neonatologist at T. C. Thompson Children’s Hospital in Chattanooga, for her excellent and invaluable input in helping me bring this story to life.

  But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

  Luke 2:19 (NIV)

  I’m probably the only girl in the world who hates the month of December. I know Christmas comes in December, but so what? Every bad, awful thing that’s ever happened in my family has happened in December. Like when I was five and Daddy died in an accident at the steel mill just two weeks before Christmas and we had to move to Tennessee and live with Grandma. And when I was eight and Mom was told in the first week of December she had rheumatoid arthritis and so she couldn’t work and had to set up her own at-home business. And when I was almost fourteen, my sister, Briana, ran away from home on a cold December Saturday, just after school let out for the holiday break.

  Mom said later, “I should have seen it coming.”

  But neither of us had.

  Our mother always said that Briana marched to the beat of a different drummer, which I totally got because I’m in the marching band at school and staying in step is a must. When she was just sixteen, Bree took off with Jerry Stevens, a nineteen-year-old guy Mom called “worthless, hateful and without a lick of sense,” but that Bree swore she loved more than anything. Bree and Mom had lots of fights about Bree dating Jerry, and then on a Saturday morning when Mom had driven into town to Pruitt’s Food Mart for groceries, Bree comes down the stairs with two suitcases and a duffel bag and drops them at the front door.

  “Where you going?” I ask. I’m sprawled on the sofa watching a cartoon and eating Cheetos. I like the old cartoons; plus, it’s a good way to spend a Saturday until Mom makes me do my chores, which wasn’t going to happen until she came home from the store. My fingers are covered with orange Cheetos dust and I lick them.

  Bree scowls. “That’s disgusting.” She looks out the high glass window of the door. “I’m leaving.”

  “For where?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “Why?”

  “Me and Jerry are going to find jobs.”

  “You don’t know anyone in Los Angeles,” I remind her. We live in farm country, in Duncanville, a small town in middle Tennessee, three hours from Nashville, only forty minutes from Chattanooga, which I guess Bree figures are both too close to home.

  “We’re going clear across country, seeing everything there is to see on the way. When we get to Hollywood, we’ll get a place of our own and be happy forever.” Her green eyes sparkle.

  “Mom’s not going to let you go.” Bree had taken off twice before and Mom had gotten the sheriff to fetch her home.

  “It’s different this time.”

  “How so?”

  “I left a letter in my room. It explains everything.”

  “What about school?”

  “I’m finished with school. I can quit if I want to. You finish school.”

  “But—”

  A horn honks outside and Bree throws open the door and grabs her bags. “I’m out of here.”

  I follow her onto the front porch, stop when I see Jerry’s pickup in our dirt driveway. He jumps out, hugs Bree and tosses her bags into the open bed. “What did you pack, girl? The kitchen sink?” He never looks my way.

  Bree laughs and kisses him. She says to me, “Go inside, Sissy.”

  I’m still wearing my sleep T-shirt and my legs and feet are bare. The cold has sliced right through me and frozen me to the porch.

  Bree shoots Jerry an apologetic look, runs back and puts her arms around me. “It’ll be all right, Sissy. I know what I’m doing.”

  I feel all hollow, scared too. I don’t want my sister to leave.

  “I’ll send you postcards.”

  I stand still, my arms glued to my sides, fighting hard not to cry. I’m careful not to touch her with my disgusting orange fingers. “Why do you want to leave?”

  “I don’t want to be stuck in this place forever. This is my chance to go places with someone I love and who loves me.”

  The truck’s horn beeps and I see Jerry scowling from behind the wheel. Bree breaks away. “I can’t keep Jerry waiting.” She bounds off the porch, runs to the truck, gets inside and rolls down the window. She calls out, “Tell Mom not to worry. I know what I want. I love you.”

  My voice is stuck in my throat and I can’t say anything. I stand on the porch shivering and watch them drive away. And find another reason to hate December.

  When Mom comes home, I tell her what’s happened and we go up to Bree’s room together. The usually messy bedroom is neat and clean. The bed’s made up with the old quilt Grandma sewed before she died and the closet holds only old summer T’s and empty hangers. Mom picks up the letter propped on Bree’s pillow. As I watch her stiffened fingers rip open the envelope, I cry. “Shush,” she says, her eyes darting over the page.

  “Wh-what’s it say?”

  “She and Jerry are getting married.”

  “Call the sheriff, Mom. You can stop them.”

  “Why? Once they’re married, I have no say in her life.”

  “But school—”

  “She’s sixteen, Susanna. You can’t stop a river from flowing downstream, and I can’t stop Bree from going her own way. I should have seen it coming.”

  Shock waves roll over me. Briana is gone. Really and truly gone.

  Mom gets to her feet and her orthopedic shoes shuffle on the wood floor. “Come on now and help me bring in the groceries.”

  Bring in the groceries? How can she think about groceries when her daughter, my only sister, has just run off to get married to a guy Mom hates? I swipe at my eyes. Mom puts her arm around my shoulder. “She’ll be back, Sissy.”

  “When?”

  “When he leaves her.”

  “But if they’re married…”

  “It’s a lot easier to break promises than to keep them,” Mom says. Her face looks sad. I still can’t believe she isn’t going to do anything to make Bree come back. “Come on now.”

  Mom shuts Bree’s bedroom door behind us and we go downstairs.

  I hardly remember living anyplace but Duncanville. We were in Indianapolis when Daddy fell to his death at the steel mill. Mom moved us to Grandma’s farmhouse in the country in Duncanville where she’d grown up and told us it would be a nice place for us to grow up too. Not that we do any farming. When the doctors told Mom she had this bad kind of arthritis, she started a little bookkeeping business in the old sunroom at the back of the house. Grandma kept some chickens and a garden almost until the day she died, when I was ten. I missed Grandma a lot, and I think Bree did too, but she was too busy arguing and fighting with Mom about coming and going as she pleased to let us know it.

  Bree hated our small school—all the grades are in the same building. I’ve nev
er known any other kind, so I like Robert E. Lee Elementary, Middle and High School all in one, but Bree always said it was dull as dishwater and that kids in real cities were cool and not hicks. She bought teen magazines about cool kids in cool places and read them for hours.

  I have two best friends, Melody Wallace and Stuart Ableman. We’ve been all through school together, same grade, same classroom even. In middle school, there are two eighth-grade classes, so Stuart got split off from us, but we still all do band together. We have a football team—JV and varsity rolled together, and we only play the little schools like us. Sometimes we have to travel on one old school bus—the players, the band, the coaches and the chaperones too.

  Once word gets around that Bree Scanland has run off with Jerry, I’m asked a lot of questions, none of which I can answer. Nobody acts real shocked either. Guess it was well known around Duncanville that Bree marched to the beat of that different drummer.

  She does send me postcards like she promised. At first anyway. They’re postmarked Nashville, Oklahoma, Nevada and finally Los Angeles. They come often at first, then dribble down to a few, then none come at all. At first her postcards tell me about the fun she’s having. Her last one just says, “L.A. is big and crowded.” I stick it on my bulletin board with the others. I have a million questions for her. Does she have a job? Does she miss us? Does she like being married? I want her to call home, but she doesn’t, not even on my birthday.

  “She ever coming back?” Melody often asks. She has three brothers and they give her fits, and she says she wouldn’t miss them if they left home.

  “Maybe she’ll get discovered in Hollywood,” Stu says.

  It’s August, and Bree’s been gone eight whole months. We’re all fourteen—I turned fourteen in March, Melody in May and Stu in July. School’s starting in another ten days, and we’ve just watched a TV movie at my house about girls getting murdered in L.A. “She’s not dead, Stu. No one’s discovered her body.”

  “I meant discovered her in a good way and made her into a movie star. It happens, you know. I read about it. She’d make a good movie star. And because she’s your sister and we’re your friends, we could all go out to Hollywood and see her. Maybe she’ll introduce us around. Take us to her studio while she’s making a picture.”

  He could make me crazy sometimes with his imagination. “Bree won’t become a movie star without telling me and Mom first thing.”

  “If she gets to be a star and wins an Academy Award, will she thank all us little people?” Melody was getting into Stu’s stupid fantasy.

  “Why should she? We didn’t do anything to help her get to Hollywood,” I say.

  “Plus, Jerry might not let her talk to all of us ever again,” Melody adds.

  “Jerry’s got no say. He was just a means to an end—getting her to Hollywood.”

  “You think she’ll divorce him once she’s rich and famous?” Stu asks. “That’s not nice.”

  “Stars don’t have to be nice. They just have to be stars.” I stand up from where I’ve been sitting on the floor in front of the TV. “Look, I’ve got to start supper.” Mom is working on a big project that came in this morning and it’s my job to get supper going.

  “Well, don’t get all crabby,” Melody says.

  I don’t like talking about my sister and making up stories about her. I miss her and only want to see her again. “I’m not crabby. I just need to start cooking.”

  “At four?”

  “Mom likes to eat early.”

  I watch them leave, feeling deceitful, but also wanting to be by myself. At the end of our front yard, Stu turns. “See you in the morning?”

  Like football practice, band practice has also started up. Mr. Mendoza insists that we march in the early morning before the day gets too hot. Stu’s mom drives us to the football field and Melody’s mom picks us up. “I’ll be ready and waiting.”

  We’ve all gotten our driving permits, but we can’t get our licenses until we’re sixteen, so we get from place to place as best we can. Melody and Stu straddle their separate bikes for the half-mile ride into town, where they live. “You’re not mad, are you? About Briana, I mean. We were just speculating and making up stories,” Stu says. “Joking.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  I go inside and rattle around the kitchen. It really is too early to start supper, but I dig out pots and pans anyway. The house is quiet, and so when I hear a motor chugging up our long dirt driveway, I’m thinking it’s UPS or FedEx for Mom. I walk out to the porch and see the cab of an unfamiliar semitruck rumbling in our yard, belching diesel smoke. I’m about to yell for Mom when the door on the passenger side swings open and Briana snakes down from the seat.

  My mouth drops open and I just stare, not believing my eyes. Did we somehow conjure her up with our crazy Hollywood story?

  I fly off the porch and throw my arms around her just as the driver drops a battered suitcase at her feet. “Here you go, little lady,” he tells Bree.

  “Thanks for the ride.”

  Questions are bubbling out of my mouth, but Bree ignores them and watches the driver pull away. I take a good look at her. She looks tired and rumpled—bedraggled, Grandma would have said, like something the cat dragged in.

  “You’re home, Bree! We’ve really missed you. Tell me everything! Where’s Jerry?” I say we because I know Mom has missed her even though we didn’t talk about it. Sometimes I’d see her standing on the porch, or at a window staring down our country road, and I could just feel her wondering about Bree, where she was and if she was happy.

  “Not now, Sissy. Is Mom around?”

  Mom is standing on the front porch, staring hard at Bree and me.

  Bree looks up at Mom, her eyes full of tears. I feel her muscles tense. She clears her throat. “Can I come home, Mom? Just for a little while?”

  I figure it cost Bree a lot of pride to ask, but from the way she looks she isn’t high on pride. I remember how she left—all full of smiles and with shining eyes.

  Mom’s mouth is set in a thin line, but I see tears in her eyes too. “Come on inside,” she says. “Sissy, bring her bag.”

  I pick up the old suitcase, curious about my sister’s homecoming and subdued by Mom’s lack of enthusiasm. Still, my heart’s happy. Bree’s home!

  Once on the porch, Mom and Bree regard each other like wary cats instead of blood kin. “When did you last eat?” Mom asks.

  “This morning.”

  “You been traveling long?”

  “Five days. I started from L.A. I had bus fare to Memphis. I hitched the rest of the way.”

  Mom looks dismayed. “Oh, Briana. That’s so dangerous. Why didn’t you call? I would have sent you money for the bus.”

  Bree’s lips tremble and then she breaks down. Mom gathers her in her arms and rocks her while Bree sobs so hard her body shakes, and this makes me cry too.

  “Come inside,” Mom says. “Sissy, stop your crying and set another place for dinner.”

  I sniff hard. “Sure. I can make her bed up too.” To Bree, I say, “Your room’s just the way you left it.”

  Bree gives me a cautionary glance, chews on her bottom lip. “I-I don’t want to put you-all to any trouble.”

  I think about all the arguing and yelling she and Mom went through just the summer before. This is a changed Bree and I hope Mom can see that. “You’re my daughter, Bree. It’s all right to come home,” Mom says.

  Tears have washed my sister’s face clean, but her eyes look sad, troubled. “I have to tell you something.”

  “Later,” Mom says. “Go get a hot bath while we put supper on the table.”

  I’m disappointed. I don’t want to wait. I want to hear everything Bree has to say right this minute.

  Mom gives Bree’s baggy clothes a long look. “You have any clean clothes in that suitcase?”

  Bree shakes her head. I chime in with “She has some clean T-shirts in her closet and I have a pair of her jeans I can give back.”
r />   “That’ll be fine,” Mom says.

  We go inside the house, watch Bree climb the stairs. She looks smaller somehow, with no bounce, like a balloon with its air let out. Mom turns to me and says, “Let’s hurry supper, Sissy…get something ready to eat before the girl faints dead away.”

  Supper’s quiet except for the clicking of our silverware. I want to talk, ask questions, but neither Bree nor Mom seems anxious to do so. Finally tired of hearing nothing but our forks, I ask, “Where’s Jerry? He go home too?”

  Mom shoots me a hush up signal, but I ignore it. I want to get Bree and Mom talking.

  “Jerry and I broke up in L.A.,” Bree says.

  “Did you get a divorce?” Has my sister already gotten married and divorced before turning eighteen?

  Bree puts down her fork, folds her hands in her lap. “We never got married.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  Mom says nothing.

  Bree says, “Can I be excused?”

  Another shock to my system—Bree’s never asked permission for anything. She just does what she wants.

  “You need to eat more. I’ll keep your plate warm,” Mom says. We watch Bree leave the kitchen. Mom says to me, “It’s best to keep questions for your sister to yourself. Don’t put her through the third degree. She’ll talk when she wants to.”

  “Can I even say she’s home? To my friends, I mean.”

  “I expect the whole town will know soon enough.”

  “But my friends—”

  “Sissy, hush. You’re giving me a headache. Just do what I tell you. Please.”

  Mom walks out of the kitchen too, leaving me to put away the food and clean up. I’m glad to keep busy. Something has gone really wrong in Bree’s life. Something that a few days in her old room and some hot meals aren’t going to fix.

  “I heard Bree came home.”

  These are the first words from Melody’s mouth once we get out of Stu’s mother’s car the next morning. We are trudging across the football field to where the marching band is gathering for its morning practice.