Song of the Brokenhearted

by Sheila Walsh

  Behind her Emma made sucking noises in her sleep, reminding Ava that this wasn’t her journey alone. This was little Emma’s heritage and her own children’s as well. Just as she’d done with her babies, Ava suddenly wanted this child far away from the pain of such a history.

  Emma.

  Suddenly Ava pulled off the road at a turnout. An open hay field stretched out, half plowed with rich earth churned up and the other half covered in rebel grasses that pocked the field between the harvest and planting time.

  Emma remained asleep, but she shifted restlessly now that they were stopped. Ava didn’t have long before she woke unless they kept driving. But Ava didn’t want to go forward suddenly. Forward meant taking this child back to the world she had escaped. Turning around . . . what did that mean exactly? She and Dane would have a new child? Dane didn’t want another child, and she didn’t either. That stage was behind them. They would soon have an empty house, adult children, and later grandchildren.

  Ava needed Dane. He’d have something witty to say, as well as a direction to go—either forward or back. He’d know exactly what to do.

  She couldn’t keep going down this road.

  Emma rested peacefully, oblivious to everything going on around her. Before Ava could put the van in gear again, an old Chevy pickup approached and slowed to a stop beside her.

  “No,” she muttered as the passenger cranked down the window. Ava reluctantly rolled her window down as well.

  “Take a wrong turn, ma’am?” the driver asked, leaning this way and that to see around the passenger who studied her suspiciously.

  “No.” She waited for one of her cousins to recognize her.

  “Well, so as you know, this here is private property. Probably should turn back around.”

  Ava wondered if she could turn around and escape before they realized who she was, but Frankie’s frown was already turning into a look of recognition.

  “Hey, Franks and Beans,” she said, smiling. Benny’s mouth dropped and Franks started laughing as he slapped the steering wheel.

  “Well, I’ll be thunderstruck,” Franks said. “It’s the Aviator herself.”

  “That’s right,” she said, nearly falling fully into her old thick accent that most everyone in the family used with vigor.

  “What the heck are you doing out here?” Benny asked, folding his arms onto the window frame and leaning out.

  “I was just in the neighborhood,” she said, glancing in the mirror to check on Emma.

  “I didn’t recognize you in your fanciness, though that car be about ole as this Bessy.” He slapped the outside of the door.

  “Lean back, I can’t see through your head, numbskull!” Frankie grabbed Benny and pulled him away from the window.

  “You’re a numbskull,” Benny said, punching Frankie’s arm.

  Ava half expected a brawl to break out between them. Some things didn’t change. Her cousins’ hair had turned from brown to nearly gray, deep lines baked into their faces, and still they acted like they were ten years old.

  “So do you have that baby in there with you?” Frankie said, leaning on the steering wheel.

  “What baby?” Benny asked, looking to Frankie and back to Ava. His one eye drifted left as it always did, then he blinked and it returned to normal. “Did you go and have another baby? Ain’t you too old to have a baby?”

  “That’s not polite, Beans. And women have babies into their sixties now.”

  “They do? That’s sick,” Benny said with a horrified expression.

  Ava laughed, waking Emma. She broke into an immediate cry.

  Benny’s face lit up in surprise. “You do have a baby. I’m sorry if I off-ended you.”

  “No, it’s okay. She’s not . . . mine, not really.” Ava hopped out and around the van to open the back door and reached for Emma, pulling off her thick baby blanket and unbuckling her straps.

  The back of Emma’s head was wet with sweat, but she stopped crying and arched her neck as Ava walked back around toward the two men gawking at her from the truck.

  “I’m sorry, little sweetie,” Ava said, worried that the cool afternoon would give her the chills. She wrapped the blanket around her.

  “You sure looking good, cousin. Hardly aged at all compared to ole gruffy there and me,” Benny said with some embarrassment. He opened the truck door and brushed at his pants as if the stains might actually come off.

  “Thank you,” Ava said with a smile as she hugged him. She caught a whiff of tobacco and straw. “I guess we’re certainly aging, though.”

  “So you adopt a kid? I’m a little corn-fused, if you know what I mean.”

  Frankie walked up next, slamming his truck door shut after shutting off the engine. A plume of gray exhaust drifted lazily into the afternoon.

  “That’s Bethany’s kid, Stupid Beans.” He hugged Ava and pinched her cheek as he always had when she was a kid.

  “It is?” Benny asked, completely unfazed by the insult. “How’d you get Bethany’s kid?”

  “You didn’t hear about her going off and leaving her baby with Ava and her husband?”

  “Nobody tells me nothin’, that’s what I always say because it be true.”

  “So you’re bringing her back?” Frankie took a pinch of tobacco from a box and stuffed it behind his bottom lip.

  The question hung in the air.

  “I’m not sure. I’m trying to find out what’s going on, and why Bethany left her.”

  “It don’t take a rocket scientist to understand what’s going on. Bethany got a new beau who don’t want some screaming brat around—sorry, little baby—I know you aren’t a brat.” He leaned toward her and wiggled his finger at Emma. She stared at him with large eyes.

  Ava sighed. “I didn’t know that was it.”

  “I thought Bethany was going to become the next Taylor Swift,” Beans interjected.

  “As if it’s that easy.” Frankie shook his head at his younger brother.

  “Anyway, you come on up to the house. You’ve got to meet Beetle.”

  “Beetle?” Ava glanced at Frankie for an explanation.

  “You’ll see,” Frankie said with a grin.

  Ava was searching for some excuse to turn back around when another truck came down the road. It pulled up beside them. The window came down and an older woman with a scowl shouted toward Franks and Beans.

  “Quit flirting with that woman and get home like I told you both to. The hay ain’t gonna bale itself.” Ava was stunned to see how much her aunt had aged.

  “That ain’t no woman, Ma! That’s Ava Lynn!” Benny laughed like he’d just told the funniest joke ever.

  “Who? Say what? Ava Lynn?” Aunt Lorena stared at her with narrowed ice-blue eyes. Ava gave a small wave as she bounced the baby.

  “Oh, of course. That’ll bring you out here. Well, get yourselves all up to the house then.”

  Ava glanced longingly down the road she’d come up, but Frankie backed up, waiting for her to follow where Aunt Lorena sped toward the old farm. If she’d had her Mercedes,

  Ava could’ve whipped around and easily put distance between Franks and Beans and herself.

  What am I doing? What if they take Emma away from me now?

  A panic came over her—what a terrible idea this had been. She’d jumped into the car, driving without any plan, without anyone with her. No one was coming to help if this situation became tense. It was Ava against a family who didn’t answer to typical reasoning. Ava had walked straight into their territory without an ally on her side.

  God, help me, she whispered.

  “God is taking care of you and that baby,” Jackie had said earlier that morning.

  She gripped the steering wheel and pulled onto the road toward the old family farm.

  Believe. Hadn’t that been the word she’d been given?

  I guess this is what it means to put action to faith, she thought, wishing such words were as easy as they sounded inside the walls of the church or at the
table of her Bible study group.

  Belief had a lot more to do with courage than she’d ever known before.

  Twenty-Eight

  THE HOUSE STOOD STRAIGHT AND OMINOUS ON A RISE OF HILL-side. The roof with its different colors and one section covered in a blue tarp reminded her of the old overalls she’d worn as a kid with patches covering the knees. The blue-painted clapboard siding had faded and peeled beneath the hot Texas summers. A chimney puffed out wood smoke into the already-gray sky.

  Aunt Lorena’s truck chugged up the last rise ahead of her, and she felt the push of Frankie’s truck behind her. This was where Ava and Clancy had lived with their grandmother when their father went out evangelizing across the country every summer. Not having parents of his own, he figured his former mother-in-law owed it to him to help out. The summers at Grannie’s were her worst childhood memories.

  Ava’s grandmother had raised five daughters on the farm after her husband was killed in a machine “accident” on the land. The girls had been given L names: Aunt Lara, Aunt Lorena, Aunt Lynne, Aunt Liza, and Ava’s mother, Leanne.

  Then there was Aunt Jenny. Not until Ava was living with her aunt in California did she discover why Jenny didn’t have an L name. She’d been dropped off with Grannie by a woman she didn’t know, unlike Grandpa. Before his suspicious accident, Grandpa was known to have a cheating heart.

  Grannie’s daughters all had various marriages and boyfriends that produced Ava and her generation of cousins. The cousins were now in their thirties and forties with children of their own—Bethany, Sienna, and Jason’s age group. With Emma, the youngest generation was born.

  Ava thought of the dozens of children who had run these grounds, playing hide-and-seek, tag, and king of the mountain.

  Looking in the rearview mirror, Ava saw Emma’s small face in the infant mirror on the backseat. Her eyes were turned downward in concentration and Ava heard the sound of her rattle.

  Grannie had died when Jason was only two, and Aunt Lara had died several years earlier. Clancy had called with the news both times. Ava had considered making the trip out for the funerals, but she found some excuse to stay away. They were good excuses—Jason had the flu and something else she couldn’t remember—but in the end, she hadn’t gone. That’s all her family would remember.

  Aunt Lorena waited on the cracked cement walkway. The yard had been mowed and a flower bed grew wildly up the front porch, but it looked almost cute close up like this, as long as she didn’t look toward the barn where the yard was littered with broken farm equipment, old cars, washing machines, and other appliances wrapped in tall grass and vagrant weeds.

  She stopped behind her aunt’s truck and waited a moment for the dust to settle before hopping out of the VW. The house was spitting out people and animals from the doorway.

  With a whispered prayer, Ava pulled Emma from her car seat and walked toward her family. Children of all sizes, at least eight of them, stared at her curiously, and several dogs barked, racing toward her until one of the children shouted and threatened to hit them with a stick.

  “Yes indeed, yes indeed,” a woman said, emerging from the house. For a moment Ava thought Aunt Lara had returned from the dead. Then she recognized Aunt Lara’s daughter Jessie— Bethany’s mother and Emma’s grandma—who stared at her from the door and walked forward clucking her tongue as if she’d expected Ava’s arrival. Jessie had not aged well. She wore stained bunny slippers, sweats, and an oversized T-shirt.

  “The prodigal cousin returns, and with my own granddaughter to boot.”

  Frankie and Benny came up from behind.

  “Doesn’t Ava Lynn look great?” Benny said, getting a hard punch to the arm from Frankie and a scowl from Aunt Lorena.

  “She oughtta when she can afford to pay for good doctors and expensive clothing and enormous jewelry,” Aunt Lorena said.

  Ava almost laughed at how expected this greeting was. Some things didn’t change, and that was a sad fact when it came to her family. She realized her bitterness was truly gone, replaced with sadness over their lives. There’d be no reconciliation with these people who shared her blood.

  Emma wrenched her body around to take in the view as a young boy raced up and wrapped his arms around Benny’s legs. He tugged at his sleeve until Benny bent down to catch the whisper.

  “This is your cousin. Her name is Ava and she lives in the big city of Dallas.”

  “And who are you?” Ava asked the boy as he stared up at her with large blue eyes. His cheeks were smudged with dirt and his clothes were worn thin.

  “This is my boy, Beau Jackson, but I call him Beetle. Did you know I had a kid?”

  “I didn’t. Clancy usually gives me all the family news, but he didn’t tell me this.”

  “He might not know. I ain’t talked to Clancy in a bit. And I didn’t know I had a boy until his mama brought him last winter. We got shared custody now, and I gotta work to pay some child support. But he’s a good boy, aren’t you, Beetle?”

  The boy hid behind Benny’s leg when Ava smiled at him.

  “How old are you?” Ava asked, but Jessie came forward abruptly, interrupting them.

  “Enough of all that. I suppose I’ll have to take the kid, if Bethany’s gonna desert her on someone’s doorstep.” Jessie reached for Emma.

  “I only came to talk,” Ava said, pulling Emma closer against her chest instead of handing the baby over.

  Jessie frowned and set her hands on her hips.

  “Let’s get out of this cold and do some talking then. Boys, this is women business, you two get about with the evening chores,” Aunt Lorena said, and Ava realized she’d taken over for her grandmother as the matriarch of the house. She wondered just how many people were living here. Ava retrieved the baby bag, then followed them inside with Jessie tailing her every move.

  Ava peered into a house that was messier than she remembered with piles of dirty dishes, napkins, and pizza boxes covering most every surface. The television flickered in the living room and the dogs took up barking from some back room.

  “Let me at least hold her for a minute. She is my grandkid.”

  Ava reluctantly passed Emma over to Jessie. There was a surprising sense of loss in Ava’s arms, and she watched carefully as Jessie carried Emma to the old couch that was piled with laundry—hopefully clean laundry.

  “Have you seen your father?” Aunt Lorena asked, motioning Ava to sit down at the dining room table.

  The question surprised her. “My father?”

  “Yeah, your father, did you forget you had one? He’s the one in prison.”

  The floor was littered with stray socks, crushed leaves, and yellow potato chips.

  “Not yet,” Ava muttered.

  “So you’re gonna see him?” Jessie pressed in a sarcastic tone as she bounced Emma.

  “Maybe. I came out here for another reason.”

  Jessie laughed and looked her over. “I knew you wouldn’t want the kid. Told that stupid daughter of mine when she hatched this plan.”

  The baby lifted her face upward, watching Jessie, and Ava considered scooping her up to leave then and there.

  A boy who looked about ten walked out from down the hallway carrying a bag of chips and crunching on a mouthful.

  “That’s Amber Lee’s second one.”

  The boy stared at her without much expression, continuing to crunch on his chips.

  “Hi, I’m your cousin Ava,” she said, smiling at the boy. He stared back without any change in expression.

  “Tell her your name,” Aunt Lorena said sternly. When he didn’t respond, she slammed her hand on the kitchen table. “Manners!”

  “Jarrod,” the boy muttered with a mouthful.

  “This family is going to hell,” Aunt Lorena muttered. “These kids keep having kids and dropping them off with us ’cause they’re on drugs or in jail or have some far-fetched ideas in their head. What happened to raising your own kids?”

  “If they’d keep their legs t
ogether, we wouldn’t have this problem,” Jessie said, bouncing Emma on her leg. Ava suddenly felt sick to her stomach.

  “So Miz Dallas-High-and-Mighty, we know why you’re here. Why don’t you head back to your fancy life?”

  Ava stood and rushed over to Jessie. “I’ll take her.”

  “You have no rights to her.” Jessie held her away from Ava with a mean smile on her face.

  “Bethany left her with me. I’ll talk to her about what we should do with Emma.”

  “Emma, huh? Is that what she named her? Poor kid didn’t have a name for the first few months. I don’t know what they put on the birth certificate.”

  “I should get over to my brother’s house anyway. I came here looking for Bethany.”

  “She’s not here, as you can see. But I’m her grandmother, so the baby should stay with me.”

  Aunt Lorena watched the scene as if amused. The dogs started barking, and Ava noticed the children gathered on the stairs watching as well.

  “Mama, give Auntie Ava the baby.”

  Bethany stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Sneaking in the back now? I thought you was gone,” Jessie said with a snarl.

  Bethany stood with her long legs in a “just try me” stance that Ava thought was part of every woman’s DNA at one time or another. Ava took the chance to grab the baby from Jessie. Emma smiled her wide grin, showing off her pink gums.

  “Isn’t this convenient timing?” Aunt Lorena said, leaning back in the old dining room chair. “That Benny should mind his own business.”

  “Uncle Beans cares more for me and that baby than you do, Aunt Lorena.”

  A sense of déjà vu swept over Ava as if she’d been in this conversation with her family over and over again.

  “Is that one out there the father?” Aunt Lorena asked, motioning toward the front window. A guy stood smoking a cigarette on the porch, gazing out across the land.

  “No,” Bethany muttered with her arms crossed.

  “She won’t tell us who the father is. She don’t know who the father is.”

  Bethany glared at Jessie. “You just hush it. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I know who it is, but it ain’t none of your business. When my daughter is old enough to ask me who her daddy is, then I’ll tell her. Until then, I don’t want my baby daddy around and neither do any of you. It’s best left as it is.”