When Sparrows Fall (37 page)

“I sure feel prettier in pretty clothes.” Rebekah scooped up more clothes and ran for the bathroom again.

“You’re beautiful too,” Yvonne said, taking Miranda’s chin and tilting it upward. “Inside and out. Hold your head high. There. That’s it. I’d love to get a look at that preacher’s face when he sees the new Miranda.”

Miranda swallowed. Her new streak of independence might make Mason think twice about tangling with her, or it might only infuriate him. “Don’t take too much off. Be careful.”

Yvonne let go of Miranda’s chin and began undoing her braid. “You’ve spent half your life being too careful. It’s time to go for broke. Now, I’ve done hair for years. You let me have free rein, and I’ll do you up right. I’m thinking something flippy and wild and a little on the messy side. You know what I mean? Good messy, not bad messy.”

“Just leave it … long enough to play with.”

Yvonne moved behind Miranda, freeing the last of her hair from the braid. “Jack will play with it, all right. He can’t take his eyes off of you.”

Miranda’s face warmed. “You’re crazy.” Her scalp tingled, a strange combination of relief and pain.

“No,
he’s
crazy.” Yvonne lowered her voice when Martha came back. “He’s crazy to be interested in the mother of six kids. But wait till we’re done with you.”

Miranda cleared her throat. “Martha, the bags of hand-me-downs Miss Yvonne brought us earlier are in my room. You and Rebekah may go ahead and see what you can find.”

“Can I have the pink party dress?” Martha asked with longing written all over her face.

“Yes, sweetheart. You may have it.”

Martha’s mouth dropped open. She let out a squeak and ran for the bedroom. A normal, all-American girl in jeans.

Again, Miranda wanted to cry but couldn’t understand why. “They’ll never want to wear denim jumpers again.”

“No great loss. Let’s get started. My, my, this’ll be fun. Jack won’t know what hit him.” Yvonne fluffed Miranda’s hair and clucked like a cheerful hen. “I brought makeup. I brought nail polish. I brought perfume. Poor Jack. He’s a goner.”

Afraid a reply would lead to more teasing, Miranda didn’t answer. She pulled a chair into the middle of the kitchen and sat, her pulse speeding. She hadn’t had a real haircut since she was eighteen.

Yvonne reached into her tote and pulled out scissors, a comb, a squirt bottle, and a thin cape of shiny black fabric that rustled as she draped it over Miranda’s shoulders.

“This is the only kind of cape I intend to wear for the rest of my life,” Miranda said.

Yvonne laughed. “Amen. Face forward, baby. Chin up.”

Miranda obeyed. She focused on a crooked line of hearts of all colors, taped to the refrigerator door, then on Martha’s crayon drawing of a spiky yellow sun over a strip of green grass and gigantic pink flowers.

Directly below, under a daisy-shaped magnet, was the business card of R. Jackson Hanford, PhD, also known as Unkul Jack. A man who loved to dig for the truth.

Below Jack’s card was Thomas Dean’s, with a phone number scrawled in the white space between the simple silver-foil star of the sheriff’s department and the intricate design of the county seal. She remembered him as a kind man, but he was part of the justice system. He had sworn an oath to uphold the law of the land. Like Jack, Dean was committed to digging up the truth. It was a lawman’s job to bring lawbreakers to justice.

No doubt about it. She should have disobeyed Carl more often.

As Jack sat on a log a few feet from his latest fire, a sense of foreboding hung over him. Over the next few weeks, he had to make a gradual return to his normal life, and that meant leaving Miranda and the kids to their own devices, for the most part. He couldn’t be in both places at once.

Besides, it was a Friday. The night that meant loss and grief and regrets.

Ava left him on a Friday. He’d found his mom on a Friday. His dad died on a rainy Friday afternoon. Even Jesus died on a Friday. Sometimes, it took until Sunday to remember that Sunday always came.

Jack checked his phone for the time, the silvery light nearly blinding in the darkness. He and the boys had come back from the pizza place an hour before, but they were still banned from the house. He didn’t mind; it forced Timothy to participate in the outdoor festivities. The girls had joined them too. Everyone but Miranda and Yvonne had gathered around the fire.

Once in a while, Martha and Rebekah shared mysterious smiles with each other, then giggled and clammed up. They thought their secret was safe.

As if Jack hadn’t noticed they wore jeans.

A great encouragement, those jeans. Now that Miranda’s posse knew what freedom tasted like, they would wage war if she ever tried to drag them back to Mason’s legalism.

As the fire’s orange tongues licked the night sky, Jack entertained the bitter notion of burning Mason in effigy. Not a Christian thought, but it would have been a satisfying way to celebrate. Lord willing, the man’s tyranny over Miranda and her family was over.

Jack had grand plans. He would come back on weekends. He’d take them to church—a mainstream church. He’d take them to Chattanooga sometime, to the aquarium. To the school, where Martha’s eyes would light up at the sight of all those books in the library. There was the zoo. The Cooledge Park carousel. The river, the caverns, Lookout Mountain. They could spend the night at his house. His bachelor digs would come alive with noise and laughter.

He closed his eyes, imagining Miranda in his bed.

He pictured himself sleeping on the couch. The perfect gentleman. That couldn’t last forever.

A minor commotion startled his eyes open. Over Jonah’s grumpy protests, Timothy hauled him away from the fire.

“Not so close.” Timothy situated his baby brother on one of the logs and returned to the outskirts of the circle to stand guard.

Jack tried to relax and absorb the peace of the mountains. Crickets chirped, the wind rustled the pines, and the children chattered around the fire.

Back at the house, an engine turned over. Headlights and red taillights wavered against tree trunks and vanished into the darkness. Yvonne had left.

Jack waited, not knowing if Miranda would stay inside or join them.

Time crawled. He couldn’t stand it.

“Timothy, would you mind being in charge for a few minutes?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Thanks.” Jack started toward the house. Nearly there, he looked behind him. Timothy, silhouetted against the fire, hadn’t budged from his post.

Then Jack turned the corner, going around the house, shutting out the dim orange glow. Alone in the soft darkness, he found his way to the front. The porch light was off.

Then it was blazing in his eyes and he was blinking at a gorgeous blonde in jeans and a pale green sweater. Her hair swung freely, falling just to her shoulders in a sassy cut that simply couldn’t have sprung from the scissors of a great-grandma.

Miranda shut the door behind her and stopped there, exactly where they’d first met. He’d been coming up the steps to knock when she’d ventured onto the porch. Upbeat, excited about meeting his brother, he’d talked about wanting family connections. Miranda had smiled, served lemonade, juggled two toddlers, and said how nice it was to meet a surprise brother-in-law. She hadn’t said a word about having just lost her son.

Now her eyes asked … something. Jack stood motionless, trying to hear her unspoken question. What did she want from him? Or what did she want to give?

An invitation into the invisible box she’d built around herself. That was it. His doubts gathered wings and darted away like bats, back to the darkness where they belonged.

“Wow,” he heard himself say from an echoing distance. “Jeans.”

“I had to try on half a dozen to find some that fit.”

As he urged his clumsy feet up the steps, he inhaled a light, flowery scent that challenged the smell of smoke on his clothes. Placing his hands on her shoulders, he thought he could feel the merging of their invisible boxes into a heady little universe of their own.

He leaned toward her but hesitated, giving her a chance to escape. Instead, she stretched up for a quick, awkward kiss that was all the sweeter because she’d initiated it.

“I’m out of practice.” She let out a low, breathy laugh. “But practice makes perfect.” Her hand found his shoulder and slid up toward his neck, and she tugged him into their second kiss.

It was much better than the first. Solidly on target. Warm and willing, on both sides.

He pulled away to study her. To savor her. Her face framed with a wild abundance of silky hair. Her lashes longer than ever, her big eyes shimmering with tears.

“A buckwheat cake was in her mouth,”
Jack sang, so softly that his voice cracked and wavered.
“A tear was in her eye. Says I, I’m comin’ from the south. Miranda, don’t you cry.”

“You didn’t come from the south. You came from the north. But you came. You came when I needed you.” She clamped her lips together, parted them long enough to say, “Thank you, Jack,” and clamped them shut again like a dam against a flood.

He couldn’t answer. He wanted to give back everything that had been stolen from her. But that wasn’t something a man could say out loud. It was just something he would try to do.

For now, there was nothing to do but tease those pretty lips into a smile and kiss them again.

And again. And again. Forever and ever, amen.

twenty-seven

S
aturday sped by, a blur of long conversations and stolen kisses. Miranda and Jack sat up late, talking, and when she’d finally gone to bed, she hadn’t slept well. Plagued by nightmares of being trapped in a closet under a pile of stolen sweaters, she woke on Sunday with a stabbing headache.

Two reddish brown ibuprofen tablets lay on her palm. Jack had fished them out of his shaving kit for her. If she took them, they would be the first bit of
pharmakeia
she’d taken voluntarily since she was eighteen.

Of course she would take them. They might help her survive the Sunday service at a mainstream church Jack had picked from the phone book. He kept using that word, “mainstream,” as if it were a guarantee against heresy.

He stood before the hall mirror, fussing with the tie he’d borrowed from Timothy. They were funny, those two. They were learning to get along, almost as if they’d always wanted to like each other and had now decided they could, except Timothy still retreated into sullen moods sometimes.

Miranda popped the tablets into her mouth with a swallow of water, then looked down at her dress of periwinkle blue. A matronly style from the
hand-me-down bags, it was years out of date but better than the sacks she’d thrown out.

“I love, I love my twirly dress,” Martha sang. Spinning in circles, preening and pirouetting like a little pink bird, she was oblivious to the fashion faux pas of wearing clunky brown shoes with a lacy dress.

Rebekah wore a simple jacket and skirt in a soft blue. Her shoes were wrong for her new outfit, and it was even worse in her case. Partly because she had big feet, partly because most girls her age would have known the shoes were wrong, but she didn’t have a clue.

Miranda was afraid she’d ruined her children. They would be misfits forever. Other children would laugh at them.

She turned quickly to hide her tears from the girls and nearly crashed into Jack. She spun away before he could inspect her, but paid for it with a flash of vertigo.

“Lookin’ good, y’all,” he said. “Except for some cat hair here and there, everybody looks reasonably respectable.”

She looked down at her own frumpy shoes, evidence she was living half in her new world, half in her old world. Her heart and her head were still making the transition into unknown and terrifying territory.

Jack picked a cat hair from her shoulder. “It’s chilly out. Do you and the girls have coats?”

“Just capes. The girls would rather go without. They don’t want to hide their pretty new clothes.”

“And what about you, Mrs. H.?”

She made a face. “I guess I’ll wear my cape. One last time.”

He lifted the cape off its peg and draped it over her shoulders. Its weight was familiar. Comforting.

Stifling.

About to fasten it at her throat, she balked. “I’d rather freeze.”

“I won’t let you freeze.” Jack whipped the cape off of her and dropped it on the floor. He took his rumpled raincoat off its peg and held it up by the
shoulders. “May I interest you in the latest style? The menswear look.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Capes are so last year,
dahling.
”

She smiled and let him help her into the coat. He cuffed up the sleeves, fastened a few of the buttons, and motioned with one finger for her to spin around. She complied, laughing. Feeling like a little girl in a spinny dress.

Jack kissed her forehead and nudged her toward the door. “Let’s go, troops,” he called.

As Jack pulled the van onto the road, Miranda looked both ways for familiar vehicles. She let out a sigh of relief when the road was empty.

“Afraid someone’s going to see you sneaking off to a different church?”