When the Morning Glory Blooms (24 page)

“I can’t turn my back on these girls. The world will swallow them up like a wolf hungry for the taste of fawn. It is my prayer that you will not be able to turn your backs, either.”

Did the table groan that night with the weight of gold bullion and silver coins my guests pulled from their pockets? No. But over the course of the next few weeks they all gave what they could. I was humbled by their trust.

And this is the wonder of wonders. Those first dinner guests became advocates for the cause. Other community members began to share their resources at the persuasion of those Lydia handpicked to attend. Never, in all the history of that home, did we have an excess. But we turned no one away for lack of provisions.

I misspoke. We knew a brief period of abundance. As did the Old Testament Jacob’s discerning son Joseph, we stored it away in anticipation of lean years ahead. What would we have done without it when the locusts came?

18

Ivy—1951

An echoing, rhythmic shuffle in the stairwell let Ivy know her father was home early from the bowl-a-drome. Was he ill? That rarely happened.

She closed the cover of the notebook that held Anna’s story, and from her place at the table watched the apartment door open and her father enter, more stoop-shouldered than normal.

He looked around the kitchen, as if exceptionally reluctant to make eye contact with her. Ivy followed his gaze. Sink empty of dishes. Counters clean—as clean as possible, given their age and wear. No extra lights left on. No overflowing wastebasket. What?

She stood and turned down the radio dial. Dinah Shore—“My Heart Cries for You.” Ivy’s musical choices were a good twenty years younger than his and somehow irritating to his ears. Still, no word from him. She turned the radio off. A deeper silence.

He set his black and pearlized vinyl bowling-ball bag just inside the door and moved through the kitchen to his chair in the living room. Was she expected to follow? Ask about him? Leave him alone?

Something in the curve of his shoulders said his current burden outweighed hers.

She sat on the corner of the couch, only the lamp table separating them. He hadn’t turned on the television, though his eyes were trained in that direction.

“Dad, are you okay?”

He looked at her then, his face a puzzle. “I got a promotion today.”

That was his bad news? They’d sat through supper, across the table from each other, and he’d not said a word. He’d left for bowling league with that information unexpressed.

“Dad, that’s wonderful! I’m  . . .  I’m proud of you. You deserve it. I don’t know anyone who’s worked harder for that company.” Ivy stopped herself. So many words. Too many words.

“The deal is,” he looked toward the blank-faced television screen again, “the first thing I wanted to do when the boss let me know was tell you.”

Did he hear the gasp caught in her throat?

“But I didn’t know how.”

Ivy pulled her blouse away from her belly. “Is that why you came home early from bowling?”

He leaned forward, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped together. “No. I quit the league.”

“What?”

“The reason’s not important.”

She waited. His claiming it wasn’t important hinted at the opposite. The sagging drapes at the window moved. She’d left the window open. Not that it helped any. The air was stifling, despite the promise of rain. Or storm.

This time, unlike the others, so many others, the silence forced an answer from him.

“The guys said  . . .  said something  . . .  about you and your  . . .  condition. And I  . . .  might have thrown out a few colorful words. Stupid gossip.”

Where had the guys at the bowling alley heard about her? Was Jill making it her ambition to ruin her life? Wait. Her father stood up for her? Her evicting father. Her emotionless father.

“So I quit.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Nothing to say about that.”

Ivy let the moment swirl around her, knocking her equilibrium off but in other ways anchoring her to a thread of hope she didn’t know was there.

“We’re leaving this apartment.”

The reality of her situation flooded in like blood swelling a hammered thumb. “I know, Dad. I’m looking for a place. I haven’t found anything yet that I can afford. And I lost my—” She rehearsed his statement. “We?”

“I’ve always hated this place. Don’t understand what you found so appealing about it.” A rare smile broke the monument of his roughly sculptured face, bumpy, as if the sculptor had been interrupted before having time to smooth the clay.

“We?”

“There’s a place out toward the fairgrounds that’s been for sale longer than most. It’s got some problems, but it’s also got three bedrooms.”

She held her breath until her eardrums started to bulge.

“I talked to a friend of mine. He thinks I can get it, with this raise and what I’ve been putting away every week, and still have enough to get a used car on credit, if it isn’t too fancy.”

His words died out then, the rush of them exhausted like a sudden air pocket in a bathroom faucet. Spurt and done.

He pushed himself out of his chair and angled for his bedroom.

At the doorway, he paused and turned to face her. “It weren’t right that I meant to kick you out. House with three bedrooms? What would I do with all that space  . . .  without you?”

The tears she’d squeezed back rolled freely now—a hot, wide river on her cheeks.

He nodded toward the billowing curtain. “Don’t forget to shut that window.”

Anna spit toothpaste into the curved enamelware basin Ivy offered her. “He said, ‘Don’t forget to shut that window’?”

Ivy used the damp washcloth in her hand to wipe a remnant of toothpaste from the corner of Anna’s mouth.

“I can do that myself, dear.”

“Yes, of course, Miss Anna. And yes, that’s what he said.”

“To what do you attribute his change of demeanor?”

Ivy handed Anna her mother-of-pearl hand mirror. “I don’t know. I stared at the ceiling all night asking myself a similar question  . . .  and praying I hadn’t just dreamed his kindness.”

“Praying, Ivy?” Anna stroked her hairbrush through her silver strands, dividing her attention between the mirror reflection and Ivy’s reaction.

“Yes, praying. You’ve had a stronger influence on me than you know.”

Thin silver eyebrows arched coyly. “Did you two talk at breakfast this morning?”

“Some. Fewer words. It’s been a long time since things have been right between us.”
Did Anna mean God or my dad? Either way, the answer stands
.

Anna drew a long, slow breath. “Sometimes you have to travel a long distance to get to where the real adventure begins. And sometimes the adventure is what happens along the way. Healing takes time. Wish I were going to be around to witness the fullness of yours.”

Ivy gripped the steel footboard of Anna’s bed. “You’ll  . . .  you’ll be around  . . .  for a long time.”

“Neither of us has many more days here. Have they hired your replacement?”

Ivy’s grip relaxed. “No. But Friday’s my last day no matter.” Just in time to save her from having to purchase maternity uniforms.

“I will miss you, dear Ivy.”

“We’re not done writing down your stories, Anna.”

Was the mist in those dove-gray eyes for the loss of Ivy or for the incomplete stories? Ivy thought of all the after-hours moments they’d shared, filling the lined pages of the steno pad, Anna’s aged voice blessedly slow enough for Ivy to keep up with the pace of her storytelling. The hope tucked between the lines. The light Anna’s words shed on Ivy’s shadowed existence.

“I talked to Dad about you this morning.”

“Me?”

“About you moving in with us.”

“Oh, glory, child!”

A noise at the door drew both women’s attention. “Mrs.—I mean,
Miss
—Carrington, other patients are waiting for their sponge baths.”

“Yes, Mrs. Philemon.”

“What you do on your own time is your business. But while you’re on duty—”

“Yes, ma’am. On my way.”

Anna—1890s

Puff kept a remembrance key in his pocket. An orphan key. The lock into which it once fit was long gone, he said. One might think it worthless then. No. It spoke to him. When he dug his thick-fingered hands into his pants pocket and brushed against the cool metal of that key, he heard its singsong, “Puff, you’re a free man. A free man. A free man.”

When my mother’s nerves troubled her, she fingered the tatted edge of a silk handkerchief given by her own mama  . . .  when they were still speaking to each other. Before I was born. I imagined those jittery fingertips engaged in a silent language perhaps even she didn’t understand: “Oh, Mama, I need you! I need you!”

Aunt Phoebe’s remembrance went to the grave with her. She asked to be buried with her silver locket around her neck  . . .  and the hinge open so the tiny tintype inside showed. The tintype captured Uncle Raif and Aunt Phoebe when love was young, their skin taut, their eyes bright, their future an unknown adventure. I believe she expected to be that precise age in heaven, and wore the locket as a means of introducing herself.

On Josiah’s desk, at home among the files and papers and brass inkwell and marble paperweight, lay a feather—his reminder. Not an iridescent, showy, peacock feather. A simple drab-brown feather discarded by a common sparrow with one to spare. His cleaning woman dusted around it, except for the first time when she tried to treat it as garbage.

When Josiah leaned toward worry about his workload or his clients or his children, the feather would pipe up, “Consider the birds of the air! Not one sparrow falls to earth without the
Lord knowing about it. And are you not more important to Him than a sparrow?”

My reminders stay with me, a permanent part of me, to prevent me from misplacing them, I suppose. I run my hands over their pink, numb, erratic trails each morning when I pull my stockings over the scars.

They remind me that love always carries risk and not infrequently pain.

Ivy’s pencil paused midair. She was about to hear the story of Anna’s scars—the ones that showed.