Now that Mom mentions it, I realize how often he has stopped by my room and commented on the photo collage on my desk. Dewey. Trish. Bella.
“Wait—which of Rosella’s children was Mr. Esposito descended from? I can’t keep this family tree stuff straight,” Mac says.
“Mr. Esposito is the grandson of Val and Rosella Martin’s son Michael, their only natural born child,” Mom says. “He gave me Solina’s journal and Rosella’s maple leaf vase. The journal really helped me flesh out the story.”
“Why did you keep Mr. Esposito a secret?” I ask.
Mom sighs. “I didn’t know how you’d feel about knowing your boss is your father. It could make things awkward for both of you.”
No kidding. How the devil will I keep a straight face the next time I see him?
“Will you tell him you know?” Mom asks.
I don’t think so. It’s enough to know he’s a good man. I have no desire to embarrass him or his family.
His family! I shoot up to standing, flinging my arms out wide. “I know his kids! I have a half sister and brother.” They have walked the same streets, gone to the same schools as me. Geez. How weird.
Mom rises to her feet, too. “Quite a bit younger than you, but I’m sure you’ve seen them at football and basketball games.”
“I serve on the library board with Nancy.” Not that I go to meetings, but I do send in book recommendations.
We head off to join Dewey, Poppy, Trish, and Bella, who have gotten quite a ways ahead of us.
Mac is very quiet, rather withdrawn. “You have other sisters.” She says this without looking at me.
It’s taken us so long to find our connection again, there’s no way am I going to lose her now.
“No shared history,” I scoff. “You’re the only one who knows where the wild strawberries grow.”
“And you’re the only one who knows what I did with that ring.”
“You’re my forever sister, Mac.”
A smile toasts her face. “Always and forever.”
~~~
In the summer of 2018, Dewey and I plan a family vacation to visit east coast historical towns. Harper’s Ferry. Washington, D.C. Boston. And most important, Philadelphia. It figures in my birth family history.
When Dewey and I settle into our Philadelphia hotel room—the cheapest available—I sit on the side of the bed and slip my cell phone out of my purse. Stare at it silently, trying to muster the courage to do what I came here for.
“You want to be alone?” Dewey asks.
I shake my head and pat the bed beside me. He snuggles up and slides an arm around my waist.
“Go ahead, Ange.”
“What if she doesn’t want to talk to me?”
“Then you will hang up and our lives will go on just fine, the way they always have.”
“What if I hate her? After all—”
“Stop with the ‘what ifs.’ Just do it. Or don’t do it. Either way, you’ll be okay.”
He’s right. It’s not as if I’m contacting an alien species. Heaps of dirt have been dumped on the people I love this year—job loss, reluctant legislators, Mac’s divorce, Poppy’s dementia, Rebecca’s cancer, Bella’s impaired hearing—yet we are still looking out for each other. We do the best we can. In our darkest moments, a fundamental graciousness in the human spirit spurs us on to nurture each other, to heal whatever is broken. I have to believe this woman will be gracious and kind.
Dewey takes a handkerchief from his pocket, drops it in my lap.
“I’m not gonna start crying like some fool,” I scoff. “I would rather eat jellied moose nose.”
I tap the number I’ve saved to my cell. Several seconds pass in silence. Have I punched in the wrong number? I know I haven’t. I checked it a dozen times. Finally, there’s ringing. And ringing. More ringing. She must not be home. Just as I’m ready to give up, a woman answers.
My tongue feels weighted down with sand. Puddles gather in the corners of my eyes. “Mrs. Springer? My name is Angie Fisher. I’m—”
“Oh honey, I know exactly who you are.”
I hear a great intake of breath, and then, in a wobbly voice—“For years I’ve been hoping you would call.”
With all my strength, I struggle against the beastly pressure building in my chest. Suck it up, Angie, suck it up.
Tears spill in runnels down my face.
I can’t suck it up anymore.
EPILOGUE
You can bury seeds and ideas, but you never know for sure if they will germinate. They may stubbornly refuse. Or they may explode into life unexpectedly.
Sequoiadendron giganteum, the largest living thing on Earth, begins life looking very much like a blade of grass, an inch tall, but what potential lies within! General Sherman in Sequoia National Forest is more than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, about 52,500 cubic feet. It took 2,000 years to reach that size. Ideas may take a long time to mature, too.
In 2012, scientists regenerated seeds that were thirty-two thousand years old. These seeds of Silene stenophylla, a flowering plant native to Siberia, had probably been buried by an Ice Age squirrel. They were entirely encased in ice below the permafrost, surrounded by mammoth, bison, and woolly rhinoceros bones. In this current age of mass extinction, scientists are freezing seeds of thousands of plants in doomsday vaults. Will humans be around to thaw and plant them in a far-off future time? No one knows.
At seventeen, Susan B. Anthony, working closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, started a movement to achieve equality for all people. She not only worked tirelessly to improve the lives of women worldwide, she also fought alongside Frederick Douglass in the abolitionist cause. Miss Anthony didn’t live to see women achieve the right to vote, but she inspired others to carry on. Fourteen years after her death, the seeds she planted and tended so assiduously bloomed. Her revolution continues as Afghan women push for the right to drive automobiles, American women protest for equal pay and equal rights, and African Americans fight against a biased legal system.
In 2018 and again in 2019, teachers in West Virginia walked off their jobs and stormed into the dens of power. Their revolution spread across the nation as teachers walked out in Colorado, Oklahoma, California, Arizona, Kentucky, and North Carolina. None of these educators won everything they wanted from their state legislatures, but no one can foresee how widely the forces of activism might spread and take root.
Poppy died more or less peacefully at home in the winter of 2019. We hired full-time help during the last five months of his life when he lost the ability to walk, to feed himself, to talk. On one of his last semi-cognizant days, he gurgled and reached out insistently for something we couldn’t see. Without words, his longings remained trapped inside his jumbled neural pathways. Mom played Dean Martin’s pizza pie song, and that seemed to quiet his yearning. I hoped in the foggy spaces of his brain he was spinning the Love of his Life around the dance floor one more time.
When spring of 2019 arrived, Kev moved back in with his addicted father and dropped out of school. A short time later he was arrested on charges of breaking and entering. As a juvenile, he got a second chance after time served. His record was expunged. He earned a G.E.D. about the same time he would have graduated anyway and began coursework at Pierpont Community College and Technical School.
In the spring of 2020, Marla Harding graduated as class valedictorian. She won a full scholarship to WVU. Her application essay focused on her plot project in my biology class and expressed her desire to study either environmental science or genetics.
Bella entered preschool in fall of 2020. Her teacher mentioned that Bella talks a lot, maybe too much. What joy that brought to those of us who feared our hearing-impaired child might not learn to talk at all, her thoughts and desires trapped inside, much as Poppy’s were. Speak, Bella, speak! Share your beautiful words for all the world to hear, little girl. Nonetheless, we will have a discussion about the need to listen, too.
One thing eve
ry parent and every teacher learns: the seed you plant in a child today may never grow into what you hoped for. Or the knowledge and values you plant in a child today may bloom into more than you ever dared imagine. Generations from now, one might become a revolutionary whose passion creates a more just world. Or she might become the scientist who thaws and regenerates seeds long buried, long forgotten.
The End
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Acknowledgments
This manuscript languished unfinished for over a decade as I struggled to bring these characters and their stories to life. Any mistakes are my own, but I am grateful to many people for their assistance and support.
Some fine writers took time from their busy lives to help nurture this manuscript. Rhett DeVane, Peggy Kassees, Hannah Mahler, and Susan Womble read and critiqued an early version of Rosella’s story. I am also grateful to Peg Holmes, Ursel Homann, Joan Leggitt, Claire Matturro, Phyllis Wilson Moore, Edwina Pendarvis, Diane Schneider, and Pat Spears who served as early readers and provided helpful insights that strengthened the story. And once again, Paula Kiger and her Big Green Pen came through as my editor.
I am so proud of West Virginia’s teachers who walked out in 2018 and again in 2019 to try to improve the state’s schools. A number of West Virginia teachers provided insights into the 2018 strike. I appreciate the time Erin Bashaw, Stacey Strawderman, and Cindy L. Yazvac took to answer my questions. I am also thankful to Phyllis Wilson Moore, Wendy Oliverio, and Diane Schneider for their assistance in connecting me with these teachers. In addition, the essays in the anthology 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike, edited by Elizabeth Catte, Emily Hilliard, and Jessica Salfia, broadened my understanding of teachers’ frustration with the legislature.
An outstanding science teacher, Jo Farrell, provided me with a wealth of materials on state science standards and how they would impact Angie Fisher in the classroom. I am so grateful for her help in shaping Angie’s classroom activities. I also owe a debt to Dr. Weems, my biology instructor at Fairmont State. I have never forgotten his assignment to study the webs of life on a small plot of land.
I attended a lecture on women’s health issues at the Knott House in Tallahassee. One speaker was Dr. Jennifer Koslow, an expert on nineteenth century women’s health issues. It was through her that I learned mercurial douches were used to cure women of syphilis, oft en without their knowledge that they were infected. Doctors sometimes withheld information to preserve the marriage and also because the Comstock laws prohibited communication of information of a sexual nature. Both the mercury and later, the arsenic, used as curatives, were toxic. At the same event, Kimberly Berfield, Deputy Secretary of Health for Florida, discussed changes in causes of mortality. In the 1900s tuberculosis, syphilis, and pneumonia were top killers of women. These diseases became a major thread in my novel.
Many books increased my understanding of life during the early 1900s and during the San Francisco earthquake. They include Three Fearful Days: San Francisco Memoirs of the 1906 earthquake & fire, compiled and introduced by Malcolm E. Barker; San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire by Dennis Smith; Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life 1876-1915, by Thomas J. Schlereth; The Good Old Days—They Were Terrible by Otto L. Bettmann; and Denial of Disaster: The Untold Story and Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 by Gladys Hansen and Emmet Condon. Ken Joy’s film, The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 was also useful.
Fired by Ideals: Arequipa Pottery and the Arts and Crafts Movement by Suzanne Baizerman, Lynn Downey, John Toki, and the Oakland Museum of California was invaluable as a resource.
Also I would like to acknowledge Barbara Kingsolver, whose use of transitions between present day and historical times in Unsheltered I tried to emulate in this novel.
Use of Historical Figures and Places
By the time I visited New York State in the summer of 2019, Susan B. Anthony already had a small mention in this story, but after touring her house and museum in Rochester, New York, I enlarged her fictional role. In real life, her role in women’s lives, both then and now, could hardly be larger. All of us owe an enormous debt for all she sacrificed for the cause that governed every moment of her adult life: equality for all. The staff at the Susan B. Anthony Museum and House is doing a wonderful job of educating the public about this remarkable woman.
Dr. Philip Brown and Frederick Hurten Rhead were key figures at Arequipa. I used them as fictional creations, but have tried to portray their roles there accurately.
Susan Dew Hoff was also an historical figure, the first West Virginia woman licensed to be a physician.
Hilltop High is an invented school. I feared featuring a real school would lead readers to think my characters represented actual teachers, rather than fictional ones.
About the Author
Donna Meredith is the associate editor of Southern Literary Review. Her award-winning novels include The Glass Madonna, The Color of Lies, Wet Work, Fraccidental Death, and. The nonfiction title, Magic in the Mountains: Kelsey Murphy, Robert Bomkamp and the West Virginia Cameo Glass Revolution, tells the amazing story of a talented couple who revived the ancient art of cameo glass in the twentieth century in West Virginia.
Donna holds degrees from Fairmont State College, West Virginia University, and Nova Southeastern University, and studied creative writing at Florida State University. She taught English, journalism, and TV production in public high schools in West Virginia and Georgia. She lives in Tallahassee, FL, and travels throughout the U.S. in an RV with her husband John and dog Lucca. When home, she likes to garden.
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