When the Morning Glory Blooms (39 page)

“Better. Her counselor is helping us both.”

“Good. Good.” She sipped the fragrant tea.
How many cups of tea or coffee had they shared over the ye
—

“Becky, I can’t afford to have you clean anymore.”

Funny. Becky’s first thought wasn’t the cost to her own budget, but sympathy for whatever financial crisis threatened Monica’s. “Honestly, your house is always immaculate. I’ve felt guilty for taking your money. You know that. If your finances can’t afford it anymore, that’s probably the Lord’s way of—”

“It’s not the money. I can’t afford it emotionally.” Monica stared into her teacup.

Wasn’t Becky the one who should have been embarrassed? Scrubbing toilets for her best friend to make gas money for her husband’s job interviews?

“I can’t afford the  . . .  the friendship.”

“What?” A nerve ending in her brain twitched. Then another. She pressed two fingers against her right temple. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I love you, but every time I see you all I can think about is
that
moment. The day Brianne—You were here for her when I should have been.”

“Monica, you couldn’t have known. None of us suspected the depth of her pain. Neither of us knew she’d skipped school.” Becky drew closer and gave Monica a sideways hug. “Does it matter which of us was here that day? We’re just grateful she—”

Monica shrugged off her embrace. “Don’t. I can’t  . . .  can’t be around you. It’s too hard.”

“You don’t really mean that.” She hadn’t felt this nauseous since her last confrontation with her own daughter.

Stiff as a posture expert, Monica planted her palms on her thighs and resumed staring into the barren backyard.

Words, Lord. I need words!

“Your pay for today is there in the envelope. But I don’t want you to  . . . ”

“I understand. Well, I don’t understand. I think we need each other now more than ever. But I won’t try to tell you how to feel.”
Wish I could, but I won’t
.

“Thank you.”

Becky picked up her teacup and brought it to her lips. She hadn’t noticed earlier how tepid it was.

As Monica drew circles with her fingertip on the spotless granite countertop, Becky angled for the door. “I guess I’ll go home, then.”

“Thank you.”

What? You’re grateful I’m going home? Oh, Monica! I’d better step up my prayers for your counselor. And get the phone number. I may need it, too
.

Gil had rigged a bouncy-swing in the archway between the kitchen and the family room. It looked like something from the 1950s. But Jackson didn’t seem to care about style. He was happy bouncing, no matter the apparatus.

Gil pointed to the cell phone in his hand when Becky walked in. “Yes, sir. Certainly. I understand.” He shook his head side to side for her sake. He had no idea how well she understood that yes-with-my-lips, no-with-my-heart concept. “I’d appreciate that. Thank you.”

“Tenneson?”

“Second interview scored high, he said. But they went with someone else.”

She dropped her coat and kicked off her boots—hadn’t she just done that in another home?—and kissed Jackson’s head on her way past him to where Gil sat in his couch cockpit. “I’m sorry, Gil. What’s still out there?”

“I hear the cleaning business is good, my dusting queen.”

She’d let him think that wasn’t the dumbest thing he’d ever said to her until she got control of the tears that threatened.

“No?” His face showed some of the puzzle pieces slipping into place. “What are you doing home this early?”

She sat beside him and slid her hand into his. “The last time I asked you that question, you’d been let go.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, but best friends don’t fire—”

“Not so much fired as divorced.”

“What?”

“The ultimate pink slip. Not only am I not welcome to clean her mirrors, she also let me go as her friend.”

“Come on. That’s nuts. You saved her daughter’s life.”

“Part of the problem, apparently. Do we have any of those brownies left?”

“Beck, it’s nine-thirty in the morning.”

She patted him on the thigh and stood to go look. “It’s been that kind of day.”

“Hon. They’re gone. I ate the last one for breakfast.”

Sympathetic as she was to his futile job hunt, she might never forgive him for eating the last brownie.

Gil joined her in the kitchen, Jackson still drooling and bouncing as the scene unfolded. “I don’t understand, Becky.”

“Chocolate is comforting. And chocolate in the form of a brownie is—”

“That, I totally get,” he said. “I don’t understand what happened at Monica’s.”

Becky gripped the counter, then snatched a paper towel from the holder, dampened it, and swiped at the sticky spot she’d found while looking for stability. “I’m an anathema to her.”

“You give her asthma?”

“Oh, Gil! Sometimes humor is  . . .  is  . . .  an anathema!”

He wrapped his arms around her. “Sorry. I’m not a hundred percent sure I know what that word means, but if it’s any comfort, sometimes you make it hard for me to breathe, too, but not in a bad way. You know?”

“Gil. Not only is the baby watching, but also if there were ever a time I was not in the mood  . . . ”

He loosened his grip. “Bad timing. I know. I have a Sidam touch.”

She pressed her hands against his chest and looked up into his scruffy face. “Sidam?”

“It’s the opposite of Midas.
Nothing
I touch turns to gold. Or dollar bills, either. Or electronic deposits.”

Cry or laugh. It could go either way.

“Good news, though,” he said, his normally rock-solid voice more like the loose skree on which they lost their footing while hiking on their honeymoon. “Ron has a tentative offer on our house. He called right after you left. It’s not a great offer, but we should probably take a look at it.”

Cry. Definitely. Cry.

28

Ivy—1951

It had all gone so wrong.

No Christmas Eve service. No deviled ham. And no Christmas baby, either.

The first wave of doubled-over pain hit with blinding fierceness a few minutes after Ivy finished the lunch dishes on the 24th. Intent on lowering herself into the tweed chair for a few minutes, instead Ivy skinned her knees on the hardwood floor in the living room as she fell. She stayed there, on all fours, an hour-long thirty seconds before the pain subsided. So different from the bands of tension she’d felt over the past week, this condensed education about the realities of labor stole her breath and her courage.

Anna called out from her bedroom, “Ivy! Ivy what happened? Dear one, are you okay? Answer me, please!”

“Oof. I’m okay.”

“Is it the baby?” Her voice drew closer. How had she maneuvered out of bed into her wheelchair without assistance?

By the time Anna wheeled into the room, Ivy was seated in the chair, dabbing at her raw knees with a handkerchief.

“Oh honey, you’re bleeding.”

“I didn’t expect my knees would take the worst beating during labor.” Ivy worked up a smile that she hoped would reassure her friend.

“I’ll dampen a kitchen towel for them.”

Ivy placed her hands on the arms of the chair to lift herself out. “I’ll get it.”

Anna’s glare could sear meat. “You sit! I’ll get it. The way this is starting, you will need every ounce of strength you can spare. How soon before your father gets home?”

Ivy leaned back in the chair, closed her eyes, and massaged her abdomen. “He went to the post office. To check. For me.”

“Why are you crying? Have your pains started again?”

She choked back a belly-deep sob. “Anna, I wanted this child to bear Drew’s name. We’ve run out of time.”

Anna bent as well as she could and laid the cold compresses against Ivy’s knees. “Carrington is a fine name.”

“It’s not his.”

“I know. I know, dear.”

“Oh! And my dad will be so upset.”

“That you prefer Lambert to Carrington? He understands more than you think, Ivy.”

“Not that. About the chair. My water broke.”

Bright light. Too bright. Marrow-deep pain. Crushing. Bruising.
Who is that tearing at me, pressing on me, smothering me?

White and noise. Smells. So foreign. Alcohol. She smelled alcohol. And blood. Hers.

Ether. Dark. Too dark. Pain breaking through the darkness.

Whispers.

Silence.

Eight women in the ward. When the curtains were opened, Ivy counted eight women and ten beds—two empty, five on each side of the room—and feet facing a wide aisle for the medical staff. The crushing pain had fled, replaced by a stinging pain and a weariness that forced her to use both hands to grip the bed rail to pull herself onto her side.

The woman in the bed to her left had babies suckling at both breasts. Twins. The woman to her right had given birth to her seventh child in seven years. Tired. She looked as tired as Ivy felt.

A woman Ivy couldn’t see from where she lay complained that her husband—her
husband
—read magazines until midnight while she labored, then went home so he wouldn’t miss his mother’s Christmas morning brunch with his family. Her bitterness soured the ward. If Ivy had had the energy, she’d have shut her up. The mother of twins shushed the woman with a word that held the power of an industrial floor fan.

The twins’ suckling sounds made her have to go to the bathroom and created an odd tightness in her breasts.

“Miss Carrington?”

Miss
. Did she have to say it so loud? Women on the ward might have had to get married, but no one would know. Their names started with Mrs.

She rolled to her back, her arms empty, a soup of darkness, whispers, and pain swirling in her mind. She hadn’t heard a tiny cry before the darkness engulfed her. Now some Nightingale had been sent to tell her.

The nurse’s crisp white hat, banded with a thin black velvet ribbon and held to her Lucille Ball curls with white bobby pins, loomed large in her vision as she stood beside Ivy’s hospital bed. Her face was as kind as Anna’s had ever been.

“Miss Carrington? Are you with us? You had a pretty rough time of it.”

“I’m here.” Her voice scratched across a dust-dry throat.

Someone’s baby mewed. The sound was so close. In the nurse’s arms.

“Ready to meet your daughter?”

It had all gone so wrong. And so right. No Christmas Eve service. No deviled ham. And no Christmas baby, either.

Joy Elizabeth Anna was born a Carrington, not a Lambert, eight minutes into December 26th.

Joy to the world.