by Ashley Clark
He didn’t know what he’d expected. Millie didn’t seem the type to panic or burst into hysterics. He had a feeling she was always strong, even before life made her stronger. But still, this polished picture caught him off guard.
Millie broke off a piece of crust and took a good look at him. He was a mess, and he knew it. He hadn’t shaved, his long-sleeved shirt looked as if it’d been folded in a ball for months—truth be told, it probably had—and he was all but certain the sleepless night had left him with tire tracks under his eyes.
Millie, meanwhile, was dressed to the nines and looked as if she were ready for tea with the governor. She ate the crust of her toast and took a slow sip from her teacup.
“You’re in love with her.” Millie set her cup down on the table and shook her head. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner.”
Peter crossed his arms and leaned against the kitchen counter, several steps from the table. He tried to play it cool, but his foot was rapping against the floor so fast, Millie surely caught the nervous movement before he could think to stop it.
Hope and disappointment whooshed in and out of him with the rise and fall of his breath, and though he’d rather not talk about Harper, he knew there was no hiding his feelings for her any longer.
“Does she know?” Millie squared the red hat on her pinned hairstyle. “What am I saying? Of course she knows.”
Peter turned toward the top cabinet and reached for a glass he could use for water. He filled it from the tap and took a seat beside Millie. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Millie tapped her fingers against her teacup. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.” She was baiting him, and Peter was playing right into it.
Oh, she was good. She could charm the queen’s guard into a grin if she wanted.
Peter leaned closer, his elbows on the salvaged table. “Millie.”
With a wave of her hand, she smiled at him. She lifted the teacup to her lips and took another slow sip from it. An eternity seemed to pass before she set the cup back down on the table, and meanwhile, Peter’s pulse rushed with an optimism he hadn’t felt since Harper drove away.
Millie rolled her eyes. “You young people have the advantage of every type of technology at your fingertips, but you’ve forgotten how to simply talk to one another. She loves you too, Peter. Anyone with half a wit of sense about them can see it.”
Peter hesitated. Could this be true? He rubbed his five o’clock shadow with his hand. “Are you sure, Millie?”
“Have I struck you as the type of person to make up these things?” She took another nibble from her toast, then looked up at him. “I am quite sure, Peter.”
“Wait.” Wait. Surely he misunderstood. “She told you she loves me?”
Millie tilted her head to the right, then to the left, mulling this over. “Not in so many words, but we did discuss it.”
“And you’re sure?”
“Heavens to Betsy. How many times are you going to make me say it?”
Peter grinned, and he could’ve sworn the sunlight from the kitchen window floated up higher and higher through the room. “She loves me?” He could hardly wrap his mind around it.
Millie nodded, and he caught the corners of her grin rising as she lifted the teacup once more to her lips.
“I have to find her.” Peter considered jumping from the kitchen chair and running down the stairs. “I’ll tell her hope isn’t lost for the store, that I’ll do whatever it takes to restore the place for the two of you.”
“Now don’t have a conniption, but—” Millie’s cup rattled against the saucer as Peter stood. “I get the feeling that’s a lesson Harper needs to learn for herself.”
Peter stilled.
“She’ll be back. Mark my words.” Millie reached across the table and covered his hand with her own.
Was this the moment? Was she finally going to tell him about being his grandmother?
But Millie’s mind seemed still fixed on Harper. “When she returns, may I humbly suggest you tell her that you love her too?”
Peter nodded. Millie was right about everything. He knew it.
What he didn’t know was how he would manage the coming days waiting for Harper.
FORTY-FIVE
Fairhope, 1968
The boardinghouse had proven the perfect place for Millie to keep her promise to Mama by hiding her heritage for so many years, always talkin’ with guests, but never quite addressing anything. But in times like these, with Franklin ill, Millie wondered if she had made the right choice by hiding away from the rest of the world.
It was the coughing, the rasp, and then the little bit of blood in his handkerchief that worried her.
Franklin told her not to worry, that he had simply caught a fever and would recover just fine. But she had read something in the paper. Mesothelioma, the headline called it, “The Invisible Death of the Railman.” The article said how it affected railway workers. Cancer caused from breathing all that smoke, even years and years ago.
Like seeing a mosquito in the bedroom and imagining the bite, she couldn’t get it out of her mind. Had she created a mosquito from a shadow, or had the bug vanished among the air of the night?
His wheezing woke her in that dark hour just before dawn.
She turned to him, brushing the wisps of hair from his sweaty forehead, and stroking his back until his chest found that soft rise and fall once more.
Millie didn’t go back to sleep after that. She pinned her hair and made her face and even set the kitchen timer for a sheet of biscuits. She did everything as she would on a normal day, knowing this day wasn’t normal at all.
When dawn finally came and Franklin didn’t rise, her concern grew. Millie sat in the chair beside their bed and watched his chest continue to rise and fall, interrupted here and there by the wheeze of his cough. His body sought the rest he so desperately needed.
It was near afternoon by the time he woke fully. He sat up in the bed, sheet around his middle, and his voice was a rasp though his eyes danced at the sight of her. “You’re beautiful, Red.”
“High time you woke up.” Millie smiled. “I’m canceling our trip to Charleston. You aren’t well enough.”
Franklin shook his head, but a sudden bout of coughing betrayed him. “My mother is getting weaker. You have to go, for her sake and for Rosie.”
“Let’s concentrate on getting you better, then. Sooner you recover, the sooner we can make the trip.” Millie watched him a long moment.
“You need to go without me, Millie.” His blue-green eyes searched her own. What did they see there? Resilience? Fear? Love? “My mother won’t last long. You’re right. I’m not strong enough for the journey. But you can go for both of us.”
“I won’t leave you.” She leaned closer until her hand could reach his own.
“But oh, sweet Red, it’s what I want.”
Millie’s heart slowed at the familiar endearment. Still, she stood by what she said. She wouldn’t leave him.
“What if I promise to make a full recovery before your return?”
Millie laughed. “Only you, Franklin, would concern yourself more with others than your own well-being in such a state.”
“Oh, but I’m being plenty selfish. I’ll worry myself sick over Rosie if you don’t go to Charleston and bring that girl home. Just imagine what might happen to her after my mother dies.” He started coughing once more.
“I’ll go to her when you’re stronger.” Millie took his hand.
“That’ll be too late. She needs us now.” He pled with his eyes.
Millie’s heart wrung, yanked in both directions without provision enough for either of them. She watched him long and hard and finally broke the silence.
“If I do go, will you promise to fetch a doctor in my absence?”
“If things get bad off, sure.”
They both knew what that meant. A resounding no, I do not promise anything of the sort.
“Besides,” he sai
d. “I’ve got Juliet. She’s plenty old enough to help if I keel over.”
Millie swatted her hand in the air. “Do not make jokes like that at a time like this. My nerves are about to give me a fit as it is.”
Franklin raised Millie’s hand and lifted it to his lips. “Did I ever tell you, Red, I loved you from that first moment on the train? When you saw me through the window.”
Tears began to stream down from Millie’s eyes.
“I love the life we have together. I love you, Millie.”
“I love you too, Franklin. Oh, how I love you too.”
He squeezed her hand. “Now, go check on my mother and take care of our girl.”
With her thumb, Millie wiped the tears from her eyes and memorized everything about him. The faint scent of pine from his soap, the symmetry of his jaw, and the arms that held her through the storm. She memorized it because she knew she would return to it in Charleston tonight, when she missed him terribly and wanted to hurry home.
But Franklin was right, of course. His mother was dying—there was no other way to say it—and Rosie needed guidance now that she was nearly done with school. She and Juliet had become the best of friends through their letters and twice-yearly visits and the occasional long-distance phone call.
Millie would simply be strong for her daughters’ sake and Franklin’s too. When she returned, Franklin would be well once more. Her wild imagination could be put to rest.
She bent to reach for the shoebox under the bed, then opened the lid and began removing the cash she’d been saving.
Franklin shook his head. “Not that, Red. Not your dress store money.” He covered his cough with his hand.
Millie winced at seeing him so weak. “I’ll spend as little of it as possible, but if Rosie and I are to travel alone on the journey back, I will need to plan ahead.”
She pulled several stacks of money from the box and could feel Franklin watching her.
“Not so much you’ll delay buying the store. You’ve nearly got enough again now, after all those repairs from the cyclone derailed us for years. All your work matters, Millie. All your dreaming and all your saving. You matter.”
Millie stopped what she was doing to walk over to the bed. She kissed him and kissed him well. Then she reached for her red cloche, set it atop her head, and began sliding the bills into her carpetbag, trying to hide the tears she couldn’t keep from her burning eyes. “Some things matter more.” She stood to look at him and hurried to press one more kiss to his forehead. “Rest now, and I’ll see you in a few days, Train Jumper.” She hadn’t spoken the nickname in years, but it seemed to humor him.
And the smile that passed between them shook the walls with its echo.
Millie set her carpetbag down on the stoop and looked up at the beautiful house as she rang the doorbell.
Rosie jerked the door open and threw her arms around Millie. “Thank heavens you’re here.”
At precisely 2:05 in the afternoon and for no particular reason, Millie felt as if the air had been sucked away from her chest. She ached with longing, with emptiness, as the cord that binds one to another in love tugged and tugged hard.
And she knew.
She knew then he was gone.
FORTY-SIX
Fairhope, 1968
One Month Later
The bay was especially hazy that morning, the low-hung clouds touching the water. The surface of the little waves reached up toward the heavens and the heavens reached back down, and both blended together so Millie couldn’t quite make out where the horizon ended and eternity began.
As a child, Millie had always wanted to dance and jump and lie among the clouds. Always imagined what it might be like to hop from one to the next in the sky, weightless and free.
Never imagined the pull of gravity that sunk the raindrops deep into the ground.
Millie sat on the pier behind the boardinghouse, legs pulled up and arms around her knees, as she watched the pelicans gracefully swoop into the water.
Today, one month after laying Franklin and his mother to rest, was the first day she felt brave enough to read the letter he’d left her. Juliet said he’d insisted Millie mustn’t read it until she was good and ready.
Took her a full month’s time to realize she would never be good and ready again.
Her stomach knotted as she replayed their final conversation over and over in her mind. She never should have left him alone with Juliet. And yet, he was right. Who would have been there to look after Rosie? His mother had died the day after Franklin, of heartbreak as much as anything else.
And Millie’s heart, as Millie’s heart had long been, was split. A chasm, a gap, too big for her to know what to do.
She used to think of it as split in halves, as if the two parts of her were portions of her identity. But maybe that was wrong.
Maybe, rather, she was split in two wholes—two full hearts she was forever trying to merge together but couldn’t seem to blend. Two separate fabrics, layered one upon the other so that one must always be the underlay and one, the top layer.
And in this case, she had chosen Rosie because to do so was to pick both the child and Franklin, and wasn’t that what it meant to be a parent?
Yet the other whole heart she carried would never be the same. And she would never forgive herself, though were she to do it over again, she would choose no differently.
She loved Franklin as the color of wildflowers on a summer’s day. She may be Red, but he was all the others and she would see him every time she saw the blending blur of brightly colored petals waving in the breeze.
Millie slid her finger along the corners of the envelope until the seal released.
My Millie:
I have a confession to make.
I knew I wasn’t long for this world when I told you to leave. A man can feel these things in the way his sleep grows deeper, harder to climb out from. But I needed you to be there for Rosie.
Don’t be mad, Red. Don’t be mad at me for dying, or for what I’ve done.
You know I long believed we should tell both girls the whole story. Now that I’m gone, consider it my last wish that you talk to them. Well, that and one more thing. I can be greedy and take two last wishes, can’t I? Promise me you will do whatever it takes to own that dress shop.
You need to know how you changed my life. Took me from a boy on a train to a business owner at the boardinghouse. But more than that, you took me from a lonely soul to a man who could say he found love, richly, in all its forms.
Don’t cry for me, Red. Don’t cry for what’s gone. Lift your chin, look out the window, and just imagine what’s yet to come. You’ll get that dress shop someday. I just know you will.
Until next time, love.
Franklin
Millie pressed the letter to her chest and hoped the thin parchment would warm her. Her lungs had frozen, and her skin had gone cold even as the swallows fluttered in the yard.
But her heart. Oh my, her poor heart had never been more alive. Beating, throbbing with all of her emotion. At once fullness of joy over Franklin’s gentle words, as well as fullness of grief with their finality.
So long as she’d kept the letter sealed, she’d felt as if a small part of Franklin were still with her. Who knew what possibilities the yet-to-be-read words held? But now. Now it was truly over.
As she reread the lines again and again, one in particular stood out.
Don’t be mad at me for dying, or for what I’ve done.
And she felt as though her feet had been swept up into a rip tide, turning her in circles again and again and again, with nowhere to go each time.
What did Franklin mean by that? What exactly had he done, and why in the same breath did he urge her to talk with Rosie and Juliet?
There was only one way to find out.
Millie knelt in the garden, her fingers sore and splintered from pulling up the ground and thorns and what didn’t belong—all to make room for something new.
As gently as she could, she scooped the dirt out of little holes so that everything underground took a deep gulp of air before the new roots went down.
One at a time, she held the pots upside down and wiggled the plants out of their temporary place of residence so they could be planted.
And one at a time, she set the flowers inside. Brushed the soil in little mounds to cover all the cracks and then gave them each several gentle pats to cover any crevices still left over.
Soon it would be spring, and the butterflies would arrive at these abundant little blue flowers.
Forget-me-nots.
Millie brushed the leftover soil from the hem of her day dress and then stood to admire the garden.
Franklin’s garden.
Oh, but that he were here to see it himself. And to help her with what she had to do next.
“Lord, give me strength,” Millie said. Not as a trite or casual expression, as a child asking for treats, but as an earnest prayer. Because Millie saw stars every time she thought about the conversation she needed to have with her daughters, and she didn’t know how she was going to manage it.
The screen door flapped open, then screeched shut. Franklin would’ve fixed that screen with WD-40 by now.
Millie didn’t know where he kept the can.
Rosie and Juliet stepped out, one after the other, into the shadows and sunbeams. “You wanted to talk with us, Mama?” Juliet asked.
Millie swallowed so hard her throat hurt. Slowly, she nodded and pointed to the porch swing, suspended below the haint blue slats of the ceiling that almost looked like the sky.
Lowcountry tradition said haint blue keeps the ghosts out. Millie never did believe in ghosts, but she did know a thing or two about haunting and a past that follows no matter where you go. Maybe ghosts were just a fictional version of that real, honest-to-goodness ache you feel whenever your heart wants something that’s gone, or at least might as well be.
Millie climbed the porch steps, then snuggled up into the swing. Rosie and Juliet took the wicker rocking chairs, one on each side of her.
And as they gently swung up and down, weight suspended among the arc of their chairs, Millie’s resolve did the same until she knew she must all but spit out the words if she was ever going to have this conversation.