Waiting for Sunrise (9 page)

Patsy felt her eyes widen. “How’d you—”

“I’m no mind reader, my dear. Mam has been worried.” He cleared his throat, made a big show of that too. “She’s had something . . . something your mother wanted you to have when you married. She just doesn’t know how or when to give it to you. She doesn’t want to make you sad.” He shrugged almost imperceptibly. “And you know Mam. She’s all-knowing, that one is. And she says she thinks you’ve been missing your mother a lot.”

“Does it . . . does it hurt her?”

“Nooooo.” He chuckled. “Mam knows her place, same as I do.”

“But I . . .”

“Would you like to try to contact her, Patsy? Would you like to see if we can find your mother? Your brothers? Ask them to the wedding?”

At first Patsy shook her head, shook it so hard she heard the wind in her ears. But then she stopped. “Could we? I mean . . . should we?”

“We could and we should.” Papa slapped his hands over his knees and left them cupped there. “Tell you what let’s do. How about you and I head over to Casselton tomorrow?”

“But it’s so far . . .”

“Doesn’t matter to me. We’ll get up early—Mam can cook us a good breakfast and make us a picnic of snacks for along the way. We’ll be there by lunchtime, grab something, and I’ll take you out to dinner. We’ll head back home late and sleep in on Sunday.”

“What about church?”

Papa stood, straightened the waist of his pants, and said, “Sometimes, Patsy, doing the Lord’s work means going outside the church building and its meeting time.”

Patsy looked past his bulk. If she said yes, by this time tomorrow she’d be in Casselton. She’d see her mother again. Her brothers. With any luck, Mr. Liddle would not be home yet. And she could see Jane and Mitzy again. If nothing else, that made the trip worth the trouble.

Now Patsy nodded. “I’m game if you are, Papa. What time should I plan to be ready to leave?”

He looked at his Timex. “I’d say three o’clock.” His arm dropped. “I’ll go tell Mam.” He stepped toward the door.

“Papa?” Patsy said.

He stopped, looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, sugar plum?”

“Thank you.”

10

“I’ve been thinking, Papa,” Patsy said from the passenger’s side of the 1949 Chevrolet Styleline DeLuxe 4-Door Woody Papa bought for the business after he declared Patsy “drove the tires right off the other one.”

“About?”

“Well . . . about my mother and brothers and Mr. Liddle. They live way out of Casselton, down a long dirt road. I was thinking that if Mr. Liddle is there, we might run into trouble.”

“You think I can’t handle Ira Liddle?”

Patsy shifted in her seat, tucking her left foot under the bend of her right knee. She wore a green and white square front neckline dress. The belt, which fit snug against her narrow waist, had been pinching for the last half hour, making her more than ready to arrive in Casselton so she could stand and relieve the pressure. She fluffed the full skirt up and over her knees before answering. “I didn’t say that, Papa.”

“Trust me. I can.”

Patsy watched as Papa’s hands flexed on the steering wheel. “What does that mean?”

Papa drove in silence for a moment before answering. “I never told you, never saw a need to, but Ira Liddle came looking for you about two weeks after you came to live with us.”

“What? How did he . . .” She shook her head. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. If he knew where I’d gone to, it’s because Mama told him. And if Mama told him, it was because he’d beat it out of her.”

“I’m not going to play games with you, Patsy. Never have. You’re probably right. I don’t know for sure. I can only tell you that he came to the house one night when you were out with your new friends. I told him that unless I heard directly from your mother, you weren’t going anywhere. I also told him that if he tried to do anything . . . find you . . . hurt you . . . I’d report him to the police. That I had a good idea how he found us. And I knew enough to ask our local sheriff to call the law down there in Casselton for them to look into pressing charges.”

Patsy was intrigued. “What else did you tell him?” A smiled hinted from her lips.

Papa glanced at her before shaking his head. “That’s between Ira Liddle and me. Look here, Patsy. I know men like Liddle. I know how they think, how they behave. I know that your mama was afraid of the man. More for you than for herself. And I know why.”

Patsy felt hot shame splash across her cheeks. For a moment, she remembered standing nearly naked at her mother’s bedroom doorway. As though it had happened yesterday, she felt Mr. Liddle’s eyes wandering down the length of her body, saw the gray turn to steel.

A puff of breath slipped from between her lips. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come.”

“Don’t you be scared now, little one. We’ve come this far, we’ll take care of business and be on our way.” Patsy watched as Papa’s chin jutted forward. “Look. There’s the sign for Casselton, just up the road a piece.”

Five miles later, Patsy’s eyes took in the changes of her old hometown. Few, but significant. Nothing stood still, she thought. Not time. Not buildings. Not people. She hadn’t. Why should they?

She gave Papa the directions to the house and sat with her hands clasped on her lap as she waited for it to come into view. At least the packed dirt lanes slicing across the country hadn’t changed. Blackberry vines still grew wild and thick on rickety fences running alongside dusty ditches. She leaned her face out the opened window and smelled of their sweet perfume, imagining herself with Mitzy and Jane, picking enough for their mamas to make jam and popping anything extra until the juice trickled from the corners of their mouths and onto their clothing. Her hair whipped around her face. The noonday sun skipping between the pecan trees cast both shadow and light into her eyes.

She pulled her head back into the car. “It’s not far, Papa,” she said, pointing to the narrow dirt driveway of her childhood. “Just right up here.”

Papa slowed to a near crawl as he twisted the wheel to the left. The car bounded over the ruts of the entryway, causing Patsy to hold on to the armrest with both hands, lest she fall off the seat.

The car stopped close to the house. It had been repainted since Patsy had last seen it. Still white, but fresh. A white picket fence ran across the front and about fifty feet down the sides of the backyard. Miniature red roses grew on new trellises on both sides of the porch. An old hound sprawled just above the steps eased himself up and woofed, announcing their arrival. Patsy watched as a young woman, no more than thirty years of age, pushed open the front screened door. She was tall and slender. Her hair cupped just under her earlobes. She wore a housedress and an apron, and her feet were bare. From the car, Patsy could see that her toenails had been painted bright red. She looked at Papa, then back at the woman who cocked her hip before planting a fist on it. “Can I help ya?”

“That’s not Mama,” Patsy whispered as she opened the car door.

“Want me to go talk to her, child?”

Patsy shook her head without taking her eyes off the barefoot woman and her old dog. “No, sir. I can talk to her.” She stepped out of the car. “Will your dog bite?” she called.

The woman crossed her arms over her middle. “This old thing? He ain’t hardly got teeth. Can I help you with something? Are you lost? ’Cause Lord knows it’s easy to get lost around here.”

Patsy took a few steps toward the porch. “You’ve got pretty roses,” she said, pointing toward the right trellis.

“I like to garden. Flowers, vegetables.” She smiled at Patsy as though they’d known each other their whole lives. “My husband likes to build, so when we bought this old place, he added the fence and the trellises.”

Patsy cleared her throat. “Do you know . . .” She cleared it again. “Do you know what happened to the family who lived here before you?”

The woman walked down the steps toward her. “The Liddles?”

“Yes.”

“You know them?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then you ought to know they left here back in . . . gosh, when was it? Late ’46, right before Christmas, I reckon.”

Patsy moistened her lips with her tongue. “Do you know where they moved to?”

“Goodness, no. My husband bought this place from Mr. Liddle and then brought me over from Columbus.”

“Do you think your husband would know?”

“He might. But he’s off in Korea right now, so I’m afraid I can’t ask him.”

“Oh.” Patsy blinked. “Well, then . . . thank you anyway.” She started to turn away but looked back. “I hope . . . I hope your husband comes home safe. And soon.”

“Thank you much.”

Patsy returned to the car to report what she’d learned. “Papa, can you drive me to my friend Mitzy’s house? Maybe she knows something.”

Minutes later, Patsy exited the car again, this time in front of a more familiar home. Before she got to the front porch steps, a grown-up Mitzy ran out the door, screaming, “Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness! . . . I don’t believe my eyes!” She embraced Patsy, squeezing and rocking from side to side. Then she jumped back. “Oh! We have to call Jane. Oh, my goodness . . . Jane won’t believe this.”

Patsy laughed. “Mitzy, you haven’t changed.”

Mitzy threw her hands up. They landed with a soft slap at her sides. “
What
happened to you?
Where
have you been?”

Patsy turned toward the car and Papa. She waved for him to get out. “I want you to meet Papa. His name is Wesley Buchwald.” Patsy watched with pride as Papa ambled from the car to where she and Mitzy stood, now shoulder to shoulder. She made the proper introductions before asking, “Mitzy, do you know where my mother is?”

Mitzy’s smile faded. “Come on inside.”

After Mitzy introduced Papa to her mother—who embraced Patsy as though she were her own long-lost child—and Mitzy’s mother had poured coffee into thick café-style mugs for everyone to enjoy around the kitchen table, Mitzy said, “I don’t know what happened to your mother, Patsy. One day you were here and then you were gone. The next thing I knew, they were here and then they were gone.”

Elaine Powell wrapped her hands around her coffee mug. “Even Corinne Dabbs had no idea where they’d gone.” Her fingers flexed. “There was talk . . . in town,” she almost whispered. “Even at the church . . .”

“Talk? Like about what?” Patsy asked.

“People wondering what happened to you, of course.” She frowned before taking a sip of coffee and swallowing loudly. “People can be vile, Patsy, when they don’t know the truth of the matter.”

“Did
you
know the truth of the matter?” Papa’s voice resonated between the knotty-pine walls of the spacious kitchen.

Mrs. Powell’s left hand came up to the buttons of her blouse. Her fingertips fidgeted with them long seconds before she spoke. “I had my suspicions as to why Bernice . . .” Her tongue darted to her lower lip to moisten it. “I assumed that . . .” She looked at Patsy, took a deep breath, and said, “If you were my daughter, Patsy, and Ira Liddle were my husband, I’d have sent you to live with family in another state myself.”

“Did my mother tell you that’s what she’d done? Sent me to live with family?”

“Not in so many words, no. But your mother and I were as good of friends as Ira Liddle would allow her to have.” She looked at Papa. “We didn’t speak in words, Mr. Buchwald. We communicated with our hearts. Mothers’ hearts can do that, you know.”

Patsy looked at Papa, who winked at her. “Believe me, I know,” he said.

“Mrs. Powell,” Patsy said, “did Mama say
anything
at all that indicated they were moving?”

“No, honey. I’m afraid not. Just like with you . . . they were here, they were gone. In fact, they could have been gone for a week or more before anyone even knew.” She looked at Papa. “That’s the problem with living so far out and staying out of touch with most folks. Bernice did laundry—I’m sure Patsy told you—for a good number of the well-to-do ladies of Casselton. None of them even knew that the family was leaving. I heard they found the laundry, washed, dried, and neatly stacked in baskets in the living room, once someone finally went out to check on things.”

“That sounds like Mama,” Patsy said. She pressed her lips downward. “Papa, it sounds like we came all this way for nothing.”

He patted her small hand with his large one. “I wouldn’t say that, sugar foot.”

———

Jane came for a visit. The three young women sat in the front parlor and talked nonstop about the events in their lives over the last four years while Papa waited patiently. Patsy promised to send them invitations to her wedding, gave them her new address (“And after I marry, I’ll make sure to send you the address of my new place”), and promised to write.

“And I’m sorry, truly sorry, for not writing before. It’s just that . . . I needed to leave all this behind completely. If Mr. Liddle found me . . .”

“We understand,” Jane said. “Truly we do.”

Patsy didn’t cry when they said good-bye nor on the way home. But once she was safe under the covers of her bed, she wept long and hard. For her mother. Her brothers. And even a little for herself.

But when morning came, another brick supported the wall around her heart.

———

Patsy ran the aerosol can of hair spray around her head one last time and stepped back to see herself from head to toe. Usually, a little rouge and lipstick were all that adorned her face. But for a bride-to-be, she thought she passed muster. She looked . . . close to pretty with her every hair in place and wearing the deepest shade of red lipstick that could be bought at the local F. W. Woolworth. She pressed her hands against the satin slip caressing her flat stomach and inhaled deeply, pushing her chest forward, exhaled.

And giggled.

Oh, heavens, how much longer before they left for the church? For the honeymoon?

A knock at the door brought her thoughts back to the bathroom. “Mam says you’d best get into the dress now,” Lloyd said from the other side.

“Where is she?” Patsy called back.

“In her bedroom, getting all gussied up.”

Patsy looked to the mirror, smiled at her reflection.

“Where’s Papa?”

“In the living room, pacing.”

This time she smiled at the door.

“Go away, then. I’m in my slip and my dress is in the bedroom.”

She listened for the sound of footsteps descending the staircase before opening the bathroom door and tiptoeing across the hall and into her room.

A package sat atop her bed, wrapped in silver and white paper and tied off with a white ribbon and bow. Patsy looked behind her as if to find the giver there, but she was alone. She closed the door, crossed the room, and picked up the gift. She shook it. It was heavy. Solid. She tore away the ribbon and the paper, exposing a small white box.

Patsy opened it and gasped.

It was the gold filigree lipstick holder, the one she’d admired so long ago on her mother’s dresser, along with the used tubes of lipstick. “How did—”

Her bedroom door opened; Patsy swung around to see Mam dressed in a lacy mother-of-the-bride powder blue dress. “Your mother sent it with your things that night. That’s why she wanted me to take the suitcase before you unpacked it.” She extended her arm. Patsy followed the length of it until her eyes came to rest on a small envelope. “She left this for you too.” Mam waited for Patsy to take the envelope before adding, “I have struggled with whether or not to give this to you . . . considering everything that happened a couple of weeks ago. But it is not my place to make this decision for Bernice. She entrusted me with two of her most precious gifts and she trusted me with this present and letter for you.”