Secondhand Sister

by Rhett DeVane

  “Back when I worked at the hospital, I wore the thinnest scrubs money could buy. The public spaces were okay, but the patients’ rooms steamed like private saunas.” The old woman chuckled. “Now here I am, complaining of the cold.” She stopped, looked at Mary-Esther. “Why’d you say you were here?”

  “My mother was married at one time, to a man named William Harvey Day. Does the name sound at all familiar?”

  LaJune’s white eyebrows knit together. “Day. Day. Lemmee see . . . used to be a family of Days lived out the Havana highway. Don’t believe they’re still around, though.”

  Mary-Esther took a deep breath and released it. How could she get answers when she didn’t know what questions to ask? For the next few minutes, she related the story of her mother’s final days. The details of the moment that doctor told her she couldn’t save her mother spewed out: the sickly green shine of the fluorescent lights on wear-slickened carpet, the stained orange plastic chairs. No money. No insurance. No hope.

  “I know all about that organ donation thing,” LaJune said. “I may be old, but I still read my nursing journals.” She drummed one finger on her leg. “Just because you’re family, doesn’t mean you’re suitable.”

  “I started to doubt we were even related,” Mary-Esther said. “Our blood types didn’t match either.”

  “Still doesn’t mean squat.” LaJune leaned closer. “What made you suspect you weren’t her daughter?”

  “Don’t know, exactly. Guess I always felt like Loretta and I were from different planets.”

  LaJune nodded. “Somewhat typical with a mother and daughter.”

  “I had a DNA test. Swabbed my cheek. Took hair from Loretta’s brush.”

  LaJune let out a low whistle. “Bet that cost you a pretty penny.”

  “Two hundred dollars I didn’t have. Begged and borrowed to scrape it together.” Why was she confiding in this old woman? Had to talk to someone.

  Mary-Esther stood and paced. “Loretta Boudreau Day left this earth believing she had passed on her genes. Or did she?” She stopped. The burst of energy spent itself. She sank back into the chair. “Wouldn’t be the first time she lied to me.”

  Why bring all of this to the surface? The cardboard boxes in the van corralled all that remained of that life. Her treasured rock collection. And Loretta’s ashes.

  “Here’s the thing, Mrs. Eldridge. I don’t have a clue where to look . . .” Mary-Esther threaded her fingers through her hair. “I came to Quincy because, at least as far as my birth certificate states, I was born here on April 1, 1946. Seemed a logical place to start, at the time.” Her shoulders curved forward. “I’m grasping at straws.”

  “April Fool’s Day. What a delightful day to be born. Opens you up to all kinds of things, I’d think.” The old woman leaned over and gave Mary-Esther’s hand a pat. “Honey, I don’t get many visitors. Most of my people have died off. My husband and I were never graced with children. Sheila drops by from time to time. She’s a good girl. But for the most part, my days are long. Glad you landed here.”

  Small wonder LaJune had ended up in the nursing field. Her compassion felt genuine.

  “And,” LaJune continued, “call me by my first name. Mrs. Eldridge was my mother-in-law.”

  “You got it, LaJune.” Seemed strange. Nana taught her respect for her elders. That included proper titles.

  “I haven’t ever been much on names, even when I was young like you. I confuse sounds, a defect I’ve lived with all my life.” The old woman’s lips curled up. “I’ve been to Boston, but never to Baltimore. Or is it the other way around?” Her brow crimped. “Both of them start with a B and they’re both up north. Like now, I couldn’t attest if you are Mary Evelyn or Maybelle. I know it starts with an M.”

  “Bet that’s a problem for you.”

  “Only when I worked in Labor and Delivery. God knows, once you got past the boy/girl parts or skin color, those babies all looked alike.” LaJune held up one finger. “Now, it was easier with adults. I could pick out something that stuck in my mind and after a few tries, I could get their names straight. But newborns? Hush!”

  Mary-Esther dismissed a bizarre idea as swiftly as it formed. Nah, too much like the plot line of a daytime drama. “I appreciate your time, LaJune. I really do. Maybe if I stick around, I can swing back by and visit.”

  The old woman’s eyes sparkled. “If you like The Bingo, you could come on a Tuesday or Thursday. Fellow who calls numbers is real good. We play for cheap dollar prizes, but we do have a high time.”

  “I’d like that.”

  LaJune touched her temple with a fingernail the shade of a ripe tangerine. “You know, I had an idea.” She chuckled and winked. “That doesn’t happen much anymore.” She leaned toward Mary-Esther. “You must go to the county courthouse, dear. It’s only a hop, skip, and a jump from here. Right smack dab in the middle of town. Big brick building. Can’t miss it. Check the records. Maybe you went home with the wrong family. Hospitals don’t like to admit to it, but it happens.”

  “I don’t know, LaJune. It makes more sense I was adopted.” Or stolen.

  “It won’t hurt you to go and see, Mary Evelyn.”

  Mary-Esther smiled. “Suppose not.”

  “The one to talk to up there is Ruthie Longhorn, or is it Rhonda.” The old woman pouched out her bottom lip. “Same difference, I suppose. Anyway, she’s been back in the records department for years. Tell her I sent you and to give you anything you need. I nursed her grandbaby back, practically from the dead, years ago. She’s beholding to me. Don’t let her give you any of that new privacy crap, either. You might luck up on some kind of lead.” LaJune pointed to her. “Report back to me. I do love a good mystery.”

  Mary-Esther stood, rested a hand on the old woman’s stooped shoulder. “If I find out anything worth mentioning, you’ll be the first person I tell.” She offered a support hand, but LaJune waved it aside.

  After three tries, LaJune stood. She unsnapped the lock levers from the walker’s wheels. “Bring me some tomatoes next time, will you? Ones here taste like mush. They buy them from the store instead of a fruit stand or growing them in a garden. When they pick them green, they don’t ripen correctly. Pretty on the outside. Not worth a toot on the inside.” She pushed the walker toward the door, turning at the hall threshold to offer Mary-Esther a conspiratorial wink. “Kind of like some people. Present company excepted, naturally.”

  Chapter Five

  Hattie stood in front of the master bathroom sink, studying the crowded shelves of the medicine cabinet. Just another in a string of mornings. At least it wasn’t Monday. Tuesdays were tolerable. Since she made her own schedule, how could she really complain? But she still did—nursing a timeworn habit.

  Growing up, she had claimed the bathroom in the back wing of the farmhouse. Inside its over-the-sink cabinet: toothpaste and brush, orthodontic retainer, aspirin, deodorant, Band-Aids, and a bottle of mercurochrome.

  Now, with her and Holston well into their forties, the master bath cupboard looked like a well-stocked pharmacy: muscle rubs, headache tablets, eye drops, nose spray, cortisone cream, poison ivy wash, and a few prescription bottles.

  “Why are you standing in here gazing into the Davis-Lewis drug repository?” Holston asked. His thick hair stuck out at strange, pillow-creased angles.

  Hattie moaned. “Trying to find something, anything, to make my shoulder quit hurting.”

  “Isn’t it about time you had it checked? You hug that ice pack more than me.”

  “I hate to admit defeat.” She stretched her neck to one side and rubbed the crest of her shoulder. “You’d think, with me being a massage therapist, I could overcome nearly anything.”

  Holston gathered Hattie into his arms. “Your symptoms sound like mine when I had the rotator cuff issue a few years back.”

  She kneaded her left shoulder again, a gesture as automatic as blinking. “I’ll call the doctor’s office. It’s such a hassle. I have to get a referral,
and then go for x-rays, maybe an MRI. Could be weeks before I can get in to see an orthopedist.”

  “Better get the process started.” Holston stripped from the plaid Florida State lounge pants and cranked on the water. Hattie admired his backside. Keep the washboard abs, bulging biceps, and broad shoulders. Give her a pair of tight buns any day.

  Holston caught her ogling. He gave a hip twitch before he stepped into the shower stall. Took her mind off her shoulder for a beat.

  When she turned to shut the cabinet, Hattie spotted her mother’s economy-sized blue jar of Vick’s Vaporub—the ointment she and her brother had secretly referred to as “Tillie’s Tub of Goo.” The dang stuff lasted forever. She picked it up, unscrewed the metal lid. The pungent camphor scent reminded her of childhood, when a warmed mammy-cloth applied over her Vaporub slickened chest eased congestion.

  She closed the jar. It would probably still be here after she was gone too.

  When she first moved back to The Hill after her mother’s death, Hattie resisted altering a thing. Each time she moved a knick-knack, she erased her parents’ mark upon the home they had built, lived in, and loved. But gradually the house changed.

  The master bathroom housed the final sentimental holdout. Her mother’s intensely personal belongings mingled with Hattie’s in the nooks and crannies.

  Surveying the blend of her parents’ possessions mixed with theirs, a feeling of comfort and peace enveloped her. The Davis family history provided the underlying tone, and new notes sang the melody.

  A place for everything and everything in its place, her mother used to say.

  “I’m going to walk down to Bobby and Leigh’s and see if our child is ready to come home,” Hattie called out to Holston’s steam-shrouded outline.

  Her daughter and Josh “Tank” Davis, her brother’s chubby toddler, were inseparable. Many times, Leigh settled Sarah into the baby bed alongside her cousin.

  “I’m heading up to my office at the Triple C as soon as I clean up,” Holston called back over the sound of falling water. “Need to get busy on the final edit.”

  The front screened door banged shut behind her. Spackle lifted his head, barked, and joined Hattie for the short stroll. The dog offered a drive-by hand lick before loping ahead, his nose skimming the ground, tail erect. Somewhere in his mishmash gene pool survived the heart of a hunter.

  Tipping her head back to feel the sun on her face, Hattie caught sight of a breeding pair of red-tailed hawks carving lazy arcs in the cerulean late October sky.

  Hattie had once dreamed of relocating to North Carolina, had gone so far as to make several trips to consider mountainside property near Asheville. Since the move back to the Davis acreage, the desire had faded. How had she been so blind to the beauty of the North Florida woods? As hard as her father had tried to instill in his children his passionate love of the land, it took adulthood to set the hook.

  Hattie smiled, remembering her father’s favorite boast: “I know the name of every tree on this property.”

  The then-child Hattie had asked, “Who’s that one right there?”

  “That one?” He grinned. “Why, that’s Earl.”

  “Whoa Nellie.” Hattie’s young eyes gazed across the treetops. “That’s a gazillion names!” Her father was the smartest man Hattie knew.

  Years later when she became a busy adult and her father’s poor balance and endurance prevented long walks in his beloved magical forest, they had to use a secondhand golf cart to reach the one-acre fishpond. Even then, they still called out hello to the trees.

  Hattie still loved the familiar jest.

  In a few years, Sarah Chuntian would be old enough to play the tree game. As Hattie walked, she practiced, puffs of dust trailing her steps. “That one—Johnny Boy. The pine with the wide trunk next to the hollow log is Barney.”

  One of the hawks dove in front of Hattie and dropped behind a clump of broom sedge. Fascinated, she froze and watched the raptor’s wings flap as it secured a kill. Spackle inched toward the brush. Hattie motioned him back. In seconds, the hawk took flight. A rattlesnake dangled in the bird’s clasped talons. Reflexive spasms curled its serpentine body, its head suspended on a thread of skin.

  Hattie shuddered. Snakes served a purpose, but she held a deep-rooted, primal fear of the reptiles. Stephanie, friend and massage therapist for the Triple C, strongly believed in the appearance of certain totem animals: sentient helpmates and predictors of one’s life path. What had Steph said about red-tailed hawks? Something about opening to new experiences and impending messages of grave importance. Hope that snake didn’t add any kind of omen.

  The downy hair at the base of Hattie’s neck prickled.

  “Lord help me,” she whispered.

  In the past, the unsettling sensation signaled major changes, not necessarily good ones. Hattie vibrated her head to dispel the growing dread.

  “Get a grip! What do you think you are, psychic? More like psychotic.”

  Spackle snuffled the enticing scents of hawk and snake at the base of the broom sedge. He lifted his head in her direction and woofed once.

  “I don’t need anyone, not even you, agreeing with that last statement.”

  Mary-Esther’s temples pulsed with the bloom of a tension headache. She gripped a stack of papers: the results of two days’ worth of sifting through birth records. With Ruthie Longhorn’s aid, the list of names narrowed to three babies besides her born the same week at Gadsden County Hospital. Two were Caucasian. Of the two, one was female. More encouraging, the similarity of the last names—Day and Davis.

  Could it be possible? Apprehension and excitement churned in her stomach, adding to the drumbeat in her temples.

  She noticed the white and green Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office car parked behind the van as soon as she rounded the corner of the courthouse. “Crap. What now?” She looked up. No booming answer resounded from the heavens. Was there a saint for this? Nana Boudreau would’ve known.

  Since the cruiser blocked her escape, Mary-Esther reluctantly approached the driver’s side, ready to drag out her best manners. The tinted window lowered. Sergeant J. Blount’s now familiar face appeared.

  “Am I parked illegally or something?” She glanced toward the van. Like she could afford a ticket. Money disappeared, no matter how many bologna sandwiches she choked down. Plus the clunker of a van wasn’t exactly fuel-efficient. Not by a coon-ass stretch.

  “I was writing a note to stick underneath your wiper blade.” He handed over a piece of paper.

  “Your right rear tire is low,” Mary-Esther read aloud.

  When she looked up, Sergeant Blount grinned behind the mirrored sunglasses. Twin dimples punctuated his cheeks. Without the stern cop face, he was cute in a good-old-boy type of way. In spite of her headache, she found herself returning the smile like a rapt, nerdy schoolgirl.

  “Looks like you might’ve picked up a nail,” he said.

  Great. That ought to suck half of her remaining cash. His smile snuffed some of the worry.

  It wasn’t only his regulation, brass-studded outfit, but the illusion of strength and authority that got to her. If her three failed marriages stood as proof, the combination often proved misleading.

  Self-flagellation had become Mary-Esther’s new favorite sport. It required no special equipment and was free of charge, one of the few indulgences she could afford.

  She slipped the note into her jeans pocket. “Do you provide the same fine service for all of your citizens?”

  “Only the ones I take a liking to.” The officer’s smile remained. “No offense, ma’am. I noticed your van and was stopping to see if you’d had any luck locating your people, when I saw the slack tire.”

  “Um . . . thanks.”

  “Have you?” he asked.

  “Have I . . .”

  “Found your people?”

  Mary-Esther’s neck prickled with heat. Star-struck and stupid. Might as well wear a Take Me, Take Me Now! sign. She waved the fold
ed papers. “I have a possible lead in Chattahoochee.”

  “Still in my jurisdiction.” Sergeant Blount fished in one of his front shirt pockets and handed her a business card. “Call me if you need help.”

  “Thanks.” She glanced at the card and stuck it into her pocket alongside the note. “Since you know this town, who can fix my tire, cheap? The spare’s balder than the other four.”

  “Brandon’s Tire and Brake. About a quarter-mile west on Highway 90, on your way toward Chattahoochee. Left side of the highway. Milton’s one of my distant cousins. Honest guy. Won’t jerk you around.”

  She tucked a stray strand of hair back over one ear. “Well, umm . . . thanks again.” Mary-Esther turned toward the van, paused, then spun back around. “Is there a place to camp around here?”

  “Suppose you’d prefer it to be closer to Chattahoochee?”

  “That would be a plus.”

  He tipped his head toward the west. “There’s a federal campground a couple of miles north of Chattahoochee on Lake Seminole. Pretty spot. Take a right at the second stoplight once you get into town. You’ll see the sign pointing to East Bank Campground not far after you cross the Florida/Georgia border. It’s got clean bathrooms and showers, and full electric and water hook-ups.”

  Good. A federal campground. They cost half of the private ones. Mary-Esther inhaled and blew it out. The nagging thought of running out of money was not helping her head. “Now all I need is a job. Don’t have one of them in mind too, do you?”

  “Actually—” He pulled the writing pad and pen from his shirt pocket and scribbled a few lines. “Homeplace Restaurant. Southeast corner of the same intersection where I told you to turn. Mr. Bill’s the owner.” He tore off the top page and clicked the pen shut then slid both into their slots. “I was in there yesterday for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. Noticed a Help Wanted sign in the window.”

  Mary-Esther accepted the offered paper. Another scrap for her growing Officer Blount collection. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

  “Math.”

  “Math?”