Homefires (10 page)

“
No!”
This almost vehemently. Then she said more softly, “No, Sis. It won’t help.”

I silently cursed the genes that conduct and spawn these danged cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof nervous systems that pick up on the tiniest nuances of sentiments as a
threat
, that blast one’s adrenaline level to kingdom come, that take a look or a phrase and blow it up to wide-screen, 3-D horror, that suck away at self-esteem ‘til one’s time is consumed with just surviving each moment, that make victims of good, otherwise
strong
people.

“I’m okay,” she awkwardly arose and commenced to attack the task. “I’m just tired. This old cold seems to be hanging on longer than usual.” She looked pale and beneath her eyes looked as if shaded by a dark crayon.

“Has Anne – ?”

“No.” Trish looked me in the eye. “It’s not anything she’s
done
. Honest. It’s just me.”

“Promise me you’ll come to me if I can help you.”

“Okay, Sis.” She turned from me and began shuffling things around.

Back in the den, things were still hopping. “I know he was preaching right at me,” Kirk divulged to a militantly sympathetic Daddy.

“Yep.” Daddy’s recliner tipped back and his chin rose another notch. “Know whatcha mean. Last time I was at church, he preached on smoking and I know,
by golly
, he was aiming it right smack
between my eyes
.” His nostrils flared regally, a precise measure of Daddy’s indignation.

“Now, Joe,” Anne scolded, “Pastor Hart didn’t ever come out and
say
‘cigarettes.’”

“That’s cause ‘cigarettes’ ain’t in the Bible.” Daddy’s hand slapped the chair arm. “
Dangit all.
Preachers shouldn’t oughta
meddle
.
” Law me
, I thought, he’s gaining steam.

“Trish doesn’t look like she feels well,” I said to Anne, not able to hold my tongue.

“It’s that old cold.” Anne’s face had, like, no expression, like shuttered.

“Kirk, can we go now? Heather’s getting sleepy and I need to put her down for a nap.”

“Bye, darlin’ face,” Anne hugged Heather and kissed her soundly on her plump cheek. I felt so torn. I knew beyond doubt that Anne’s love for me and my family was genuine.

What about Trish?

Our walk home was silent, except for Heather’s
Dada and Mamama jabber,
which usually perked Kirk up. Today, I knew my usual teasing him about dada’s little girl would be pointless, futile. So I left him be. I’d known, since the Christmas Eve incident, that his deep funks had nothing to do with me. My thoughts kept ricocheting back to Trish, my little sis.

Please…help Trish. And Anne. Somehow, Lord, make things better.

Kirk’s walk, I noticed, lacked its usual peppy cadence
.
It actually sloughed.

And while you’re at it, fix Kirk up, too.

Kirk rolled over in bed later that night. “You awake?” he asked softly.

I roused from the doze closing in on me. “Mm hmm.” I turned over to face him, anticipation fluttering like scattered butterflies through me because my husband seldom wasted words, especially at bedtime when he usually – after we made love – promptly fell asleep with me spooned back against him, his arm firmly draped around my midriff. And when he wanted to talk, it heralded something significant.

Suddenly, I was fully awake…and I remembered his present angst.

Was tonight different? I knew a moment’s apprehension.

“Remember when I said I wanted us to go to church and all – that day at the lunch table at Chapowee High?”

I did and had wondered many times if he remembered. “Yes.”

He shifted onto his back and folded one arm under his head. “Well, I want us to.”

“To – what? We go to church every – well,
most
Sundays, anyway.”

“I know. But not to be just
pew-warmers.
”

Bingo.
I suppressed a grin.

“I mean – I want us to be born again.” He turned his head to gaze at me through nighttime’s sooty veil, silvered by outside streetlight filtering through venetian blinds. There was, in his statement – because that was what it was, a statement – a resoluteness that was Kirk’s when his mind was made up.

“Okay.” I gazed back, knowing his decision was right. He did nothing lightly and when he was convinced, so was I. Though I’d found Christ at five, kneeled at the church altar, I sensed Kirk’s awe of this newly unearthed reverence. Too, I’d drifted in recent years. It was time.

And so we slid from bed onto our knees and prayed together and went to sleep wrapped in each other’s arms – and a new peace.

I shall never forget arising the following morning and seeing the sun, already warm and golden in a sky bluer than I’d ever remembered, and thinking how brilliant the world looked with dew-soaked verdant grass. Colors shimmered and danced and twirled as they had when I was a child.

Kirk’s transformation was instant. It was as though his soul had passed through a spiritual dialysis machine where most of the junk filtered out. Not all – but certainly most. Heather’s unconditional, adoring love had already boosted my self-esteem. Now, as Kirk viewed me through different eyes, my old feeling of unloveableness began to recede.

In the weeks and months to come, that aura of
rightness
grew and burgeoned and when I learned I was pregnant again, Kirk and I considered it a holy seal on our new start.

As it turned out,
both
Anne and I were pregnant. Anne, whose only symptoms were sleepiness and an increase in appetite, didn’t know for weeks that she’d conceived. Her delivery date was four months prior to mine. Anne seemed mellower, somehow. Her eyes, the ice-blue of a clear-day sky, cut through Daddy’s nonsense with scalpel perception but would – amazingly – turn incredibly warm and teary by something touching. Pregnancy seemed to agree with her on all levels. I convinced myself things between her and Trish were improving. At least, I prayed they were.

This time, I weathered the nausea stage a bit more stoically and the months passed swiftly. Kirk now served as deacon and Sunday School teacher and took seriously his duties. But he always had time to cuddle and romp with Heather, who adored her daddy.

Trish spliced her duties between me and Anne, who gave birth to Dale in February.

“He’s not a pretty baby, Neecy,” Anne stated matter-of-factly of the little red-faced bawling brother who added to Daddy’s straining quiver. “But he’s a sweetie-pie.”

“He’s cute as a button,” I insisted, kissing and nuzzling his sweet-smelling neck. I was thrilled that my family kept growing and growing and growing.

It helped offset, to some degree, my loss of Mama’s folks. As time passed, Anne and I bonded more closely and though I’d learned to love her family clan, the
belong
-thing evaded me. Unlike me, young Trish synthesized with the Knight kids. Looking back, I believe they loved me. They could not have been nicer. I simply missed the affectionate spontaneity that came so naturally from MawMaw and Papa. The Knights were great people with a strong sense of
family.
But was I, to them, family? Was Grandma Whitman right?
Was blood
thicker than water?

Maybe,
I decided. Chuck – well, Chuck didn’t even concern himself with blood-ties, much less with step-status. “What is,
is
,” was his cynical commentary before he fled home.

I conceded that perhaps, in this instance, Chuck was right.
What is, is.

Just minutes before midnight, on Heather’s second birthday, Kristabelle – Krissie – came into the world with the serenity of cherubs in religious paintings. Tiny and doll-like, she seldom cried. Rosebud lips yawned and minute limbs stretched and arched like a kitten’s. I never thought I could adore another baby as I did Heather, but from the beginning, I felt love equally as intense for this wee one. Kirk’s devotion to our girls matched my own, swelling him to giant proportions in my eyes and laced even tighter the love bonds connecting us.

Gentle Krissie flowed with everything, from traveling to nursing. She was a wise little grown-up in an infant’s body, whose big soulful blue eyes said she’d simply not feed if it was a bother to me. Months later, I would lay her in her crib during busy times, then get sidetracked with laundry or dishes or whatever and an hour later, remember.

Krissie.
Gripped by guilt, I’d bolt to the nursery and peer in, to find her lying contentedly, cooing at the crib’s bunny rabbit decal or gumming a rattle. The blond curly head would swivel to seek me out and sunshine would burst over her face. How I loved her. As the months passed, my two girls became inseparable playmates. Heather, a natural leader, was always
Mama
in their play-likes and Krissie,
Baby.

Mymymy,
how revealing to hear Heather’s Mama-dialogue. “If you do that again, I’ll
spank
you, young lady,” delivered in just the right touch of steely authority and then the steady, climbing, shrill, “Stop that! Stop that this
instant.
Just you wait until your Daddy gets home!” always stopped me dead in my tracks, eyes wide with disbelief. Yet on some level, I recognized the wording, voice inflection,and note of frenzy as
me.

That piece fell into the incomplete
Who Am I
? puzzle. Neecy, the Role Model.

Like it or not, what I said in haste and impatience
would
come back to haunt me.

Kirk was, I discovered, a mathematical genius. Against my lackluster math background, Kirk shone brilliantly. By the time I scurried for a pencil to write down the numbers, figures raced through his head, calculated and spouted out his mouth like a slot machine.

Eventually, I asked him to do equations for me to save time and quite honestly, face. My ineptness embarrassed me. The upside was that my praise and deference to his skills pleased him, as did my being home with the children and having a delicious table set for his homecoming. “I don’t want my wife working,” he’d say in that “it’s settled” voice.