by Ashley Clark
Millie closed her eyes, and one of her daughters took hold of her hand. She opened her eyes to see it was Rosie who’d touched her.
“Are you missing him?” Juliet asked.
Millie nodded. “I will miss him with every breath for the rest of my life. Though I suspect I will learn to do a better job of smiling in between breaths.”
Millie rubbed her face with both hands, realizing only afterward that the soil had sunk deep under her fingernails and likely streaked black marks like train tracks along her skin. She didn’t make any move to wipe them.
Instead, she looked to Rosie, once again taking her hand. “Sweetheart . . .” Millie hesitated. “I don’t even know where to begin.” Her gaze trailed to Juliet, then back again. Both girls stared intently at their mother, as if concerned for Millie’s own heart. Little did they know they themselves had composed it since the day they were born. Her future, in two parts.
Millie opened her mouth to speak, hoping the words would follow. “The truth of it is, Rosie—I am your mother.”
Rose’s eyes widened just like Franklin’s until the whites at the corners filled with floods of tears, and the tears turned to streams rushing down.
She came to Millie on the porch swing and clung to her, and the two of them heaved with sobs. Maybe it was a minute or maybe it was a lifetime, but all Millie knew was her daughter knew the truth now and hadn’t run.
“Don’t be mad at Franklin,” she whispered into Rosie’s hair as she held onto her. “He always wanted to tell you. If you must rage, let it be at me. I’m the one who was afraid.” Millie gulped. “I’ve always been the one who was afraid, if we’re being honest. It’s kept me so many times from all that mattered—”
“Millie, stop,” Rosie interrupted.
Millie frowned.
Rosie looked up at her, hesitancy tightening her expression, and yet she continued. “I already knew. Dad told me last year.”
Millie shook her head, even as her hands trembled. “What?”
“You don’t be upset at him, either. I was droning on and on, and I think he could just tell I needed to hear it as much as he needed to say it.”
“But we had agreed. We did it to keep you safe, and your sister too.” Fury and relief and disappointment and joy all flooded Millie’s soul. “Why didn’t he tell me?” she whispered.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Tears slipped down Rosie’s cheeks. “I think he felt guilty for saying it so suddenly, and he didn’t want you to have to keep the secret from Juliet.” Rosie’s gaze trailed to her sister.
“So somebody did actually think of me. Between all the lies, I mean.” Juliet’s words, like daggers, were a comfort to Millie—a strange relief to feel the sharp pain she deserved for a few moments rather than the deep ache of loss. And one thing was certain. Millie did deserve the reaction. Every bit of it.
“Why would you do that?” Juliet’s eyes flashed with fury. “Why would you send her away?”
“I didn’t send her—”
Juliet stood from the rocking chair before Millie could finish, her feet hitting hard against the ground beneath them. “That’s exactly what you did, and we all know it. And then you lied to us, all those years. How could you be so cruel?” Juliet crossed her arms and looked off along the horizon of ancient oaks and the fog that’d rolled in along the water.
“Juliet!” Rosie chided. “Enough.”
But she shook her head, looking toward Rosie. “Easy for you to say. You just got a new mother.” She clenched her jaw as she met Millie’s gaze. “Was anything you told me true?”
The words rushed like a tidal wave into all the weakened crevices of Millie’s heart until the fragile walls she’d pieced together with masking tape began to crumble down, down, down.
Juliet turned on her heels, and Millie knew what she was going to do next. But Millie was not going to let that happen. She would not lose one of her daughters. Not again. She would fight for her with a fight she had reserved for fear in the past. She would be strong for her daughter’s sake, or at least, stronger.
She stood and grabbed Juliet by the arm. Spun her around to face her. “We will sit on this porch until you’ve heard every word. I will tell you about my father’s murder when I was a child and the lynchings in the papers when we moved to Alabama and the reasons I know so well what can happen in these times if a person isn’t careful, if a person isn’t guarded.” She tightened her grip on her daughter’s arm. “But you will not leave this porch, Juliet. I’m the one who taught you to run, you know. But I want us to do better. For your father’s sake as much as anyone’s.”
That got her attention. Juliet’s expression softened ever so slightly at the mention of Franklin. “Why? Why did you keep me and not Rosie? Why couldn’t you raise both of us? Why did you have to be so afraid?” Juliet held up her free arm for inspection. And in the motion, in that moment, Millie traveled back in time to Charleston when she herself was Juliet’s age and really just a girl, and her mama said she must go to Alabama and never tell anyone she was choosing just one part of herself in the process.
But Mama never told her how she’d grieve the other half.
“Well?” Juliet rap-rap-tapped her shoes against the ground.
Millie blew out the deep breath she’d been holding. Rosie was still sitting on the swing and wringing her hands. “I separated you two because I loved you then, even as I love you now. I was so scared one of you might be hurt if I kept you together.” Her shoulders heaved with the weight of her heart. “And so, in a decision that has wrecked me every day since, we took Rosie to live with your daddy’s mother because we knew the world would be kinder to you both.”
“Well, that’s not fair. To either of us.” Juliet’s forehead wrinkled in anger.
“No, it’s not. But neither were the times. I did what I had to in order to keep the two of you safe. And at least I can say I did that much.” Millie tried to take a deep breath. Her resolve, like her hands, was beginning to shake.
Had she and Franklin made the right choice all those years ago? She still didn’t know, and she probably never would. How does somebody make the right choice when there is no right choice available?
“What good is safety,” Juliet blurted, “if you live as a glass figurine on a shelf?”
Millie understood her point. But Juliet hadn’t known the trauma of racial violence like Millie had. Millie had made sure of it, always softening a would-be threat or distracting Juliet from a racial slur. But Millie was no fool. She knew that kind of violence. Saw firsthand what it did to her mama, to her own family. And the fact Juliet would even ask that question showed just how good a job Millie had done at sheltering her daughter from the pain, from the grief she herself knew all too well. Because a guarded life was better than a dead one.
She thought of that book—what was it? The Glass Menagerie?—and how that part with the shattering was so real in her mind’s eye she could still see every single shard falling like little crystal cymbals to the ground.
“Come with me.” Millie rubbed her hands against her dress as she looked to both daughters. “I need to show you two buttons that may help you understand.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Gatlinburg, Modern Day
“I thought everything was going to be okay. How could I have been so wrong?” Harper rocked back and forth in the large wooden chair, looking off into the Blue Ridge Mountains. She was so tired that the peaks of the mountains seemed to touch the valleys with each swing of her chair. She held the fabric of an antique blouse in her lap and pulled the thread in and out of the tear at the neckline.
She thought of the bench beside that train with Millie, and how Millie spoke of fear and trusting God. But Harper’s own heart was taking on water, and she just didn’t think she could dream the dream any longer.
Her father turned to look at her. His hair had greyed, and his love of Five and Dime ice cream showed more than it used to around his middle. But he still took a long swig from hi
s coffee cup, just as he always had. He caught her gaze and didn’t dare turn away.
“Don’t you remember what I told you back when you were a girl?” Daddy reached toward the wicker coffee table between their chairs and set his cup down. “You may not know the how, or the why, and you probably won’t like the when.”
“Jubilee doesn’t come all the time.” Harper whispered the words, as they returned to her like the tide. “But when it does, get your nets good and ready.”
He picked his cup of coffee back up and held it for a long moment without saying anything. “What makes you think you’ve failed?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I got the dress store I always wanted.” Harper rapped her chipped fingernails against the armrest of her chair. “Still couldn’t make it happen.”
“You remember that story in the book of Ezekiel, Harper? The one about the bones and the dust? The one about the army.”
Harper stilled her chair and leaned closer to him. Her heart quickened for reasons she didn’t quite understand, but she wanted to hear more. “What about it?”
“Well, you were always troubled as a kid that the bones didn’t just poof! and come alive. You’d ask me over and over why Ezekiel had to prophesy twice, like I was some kind of pastor and knew the answer.”
Steam pulled up from Daddy’s coffee and dissipated into the mountain air.
“Because God obviously could’ve done it the first time,” she added.
“He didn’t, though, Harper. The bones came together from the dust, just like your dress shop. But the life . . .” Daddy shook his head. “Life didn’t come until Ezekiel spoke to the breath.”
“What does that mean?” Harper hesitated. She had the strangest sensation of breathlessness, like after a long hike into high altitude just before cresting a mountain.
“Well, it’s resurrection. From the ashes. From the dust. From the dead things. Your problem is, you’re looking at the bones instead of breathing.” Daddy sighed. “Maybe your dream was never about a shop at all. Maybe there’s a second command, Harper Girl. Another place where you’re supposed to breathe life.”
Harper looked down to the blouse in her lap. To the thread and the needle.
She thought of Millie’s buttons.
And then hope—glorious and beautiful hope—filled the landscape of her heart as the sunrise scatters new light over the mountaintops.
Of course! Why hadn’t she seen it before? All this time, she had been focused on the store. But her gifting, her dream, was so much more than that.
Her gifting was repairing the broken places. Mending forgotten tears and weak seams. Breathing life back into the fabrics that told stories, into the buttons that bind them.
Taking up the discarded pieces of life as if they were the living ones.
Harper leapt up from her chair. She needed to make a phone call.
“You okay?” Her father’s eyes widened.
“Daddy, you are a genius.” Harper kissed him on the forehead before she hurried inside for her laptop.
“Do you want to talk with him?” Millie asked from the other end of the phone line.
Harper leaned back against the headboard in Daddy’s guest room and picked up the damaged blouse in her lap, fiddling with the seam. “Not yet. I don’t know what I’ll say exactly.”
“But you are returning?”
“Soon.” Harper stuck her finger through the open seam under the arm of the shirt to better inspect the work she still needed to do. “Very soon.”
“I knew you’d come around eventually.”
Harper laughed. “Good-bye, Millie.”
She ended the call and set her phone down so she’d have both hands free to pick up her thread and needle.
To think, through every failure and every detour to her plans, this had been the big picture all along. If the store had been successful from the get-go, or if she’d gained acclaim from SCAD . . . Harper shook her head. She might never have found this perfectly tailored dream.
Repairing beautiful, broken things.
Still, Harper sensed there was something more to discover, a peace she hadn’t yet found. She gently tugged the fabric to check for other weak seams, of which she found several.
Then she closed her eyes, her hand still on the fabric, and took a slow inhale. That’s when it hit her.
The breath of it flowed well beyond the air. Well beyond her lungs, into her heart in a way that was entirely unexpected, so free and so strikingly clear.
For a moment, it was as if her very breath came from an altogether separate place. A sanctuary. The words resonated so deep within her, she knew they could only come from one place.
From the beginning, I have been working between the seams. Where you have ripped, I have mended. When you have torn, I have sewn you. Stitching death to resurrection, failure to dreams, hurt to healing. I never throw out a fabric because it needs repairing.
You’ve spent your life on the other side of the seams, thinking all the if-only’s. But there will always be another section to piece. Another hole that needs mending. So long as you live, you will have loose stitches—don’t avoid them. Come and exchange them for strong seams.
Keep the fabric of your dreams.
FORTY-EIGHT
South of Broad, Charleston, 1992
Millie grazed the palm of her hand along the rail separating the shore from the Charleston Battery and looked out toward the harbor, the meeting point of two rivers. The low tide brought gentle waves to shore as the sun dipped closer to the horizon.
Millie turned toward the park and the line of mansions along the Battery, feeling thankful even though the path to this point had broken them all a little, and sometimes a lot.
Rows of mature oak trees framed the gazebo central to the park, as the last light of day came through the branches. Millie nearly didn’t recognize them without the iconic Spanish moss. Rosie had written that Hurricane Hugo washed all the moss from the limbs and botanists couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t growing again. But my, what a strange sight to see.
Spanish moss was funny that way, how with the right conditions it grew like a weed and dripped down to the grass below—a perfect nesting material for hummingbirds. But in one fell swoop, the storm took it away. And sometimes, conditions could not be replicated for its return. Sometimes it was simply gone.
Spanish moss didn’t grow on just any old tree, after all.
Millie took a deep breath and gripped the railing as she took the stairs down from the pedestrian wall along the Battery. She continued walking and crossed the street, turning toward Rosie’s new mansion.
The estate was something. That’s for sure. And Rosie’s new husband didn’t seem at all deterred by her tragic loss last year. He had helped her grieve, even accepting the baby as his own, and seemed comfortable when she used terms like heroic in reference to the boy’s father or the Gulf War.
Millie opened the wrought-iron gate and stepped between two stone pillars, then walked through the garden. Night-blooming jasmine transported her senses to another time and softened the sinking feeling in her stomach that Rosie’s husband did seem deterred by something else.
Her.
The man opened the front door before she could reach it. “Millie, you’re back.” He cleared his throat. “Would you like to have a seat?” He motioned toward two chairs set up along the porch that wrapped around the side of the mansion.
“Sure.” Millie raised her chin. She refused to be intimidated, no matter the way this man reminded her of Harry in her childhood—and all the other Harrys ever since.
She chose one of the wicker chairs and sat with her ankles crossed like Mama taught her as a girl. He took the chair opposite her.
Millie looked at him—my, he was such a young boy, wasn’t he?—and smiled to soften whatever conversation may be coming. “Something on your mind, Weston?”
He shifted in his seat and folded his hands as though getting ready to lean onto the table where he drew up his lega
l documents. “I don’t know how to say this, exactly. I appreciate you being here for Rose and helping with the baby.”
Millie nodded. “But you want to know how much longer I plan to stay.”
He scratched the back of his neck. Was he uncomfortable with how direct she was being? Well, if he was going to have the boldness to suggest she leave, she was going to make him come out with it. None of this hemming and hawing around. “Rose is your daughter. Obviously. And the truth is, I think highly of you, Millicent. But we come from very different worlds. My father and grandfather have made sacrifices to maintain a certain position in Charleston society, and with that role comes . . . certain expectations.”
Millie blinked. “Wait. You mean you’re saying this because you think I’m poor?”
Weston shook his head and blew out a deep breath. “No, I don’t think you’re understanding me. I have no problem with you or how you make your livelihood. You seem to have lived a rich life in your own way. But you are very forthright with your thoughts, and I fear I’ll have to do the same in this case. So here’s the truth. I’m completely comfortable with you maintaining regular contact with Rose, but I want to raise Peter in the same social circles my own family raised me. I want him to take over the business someday, maybe even this house, because I think he could be somebody in Charleston’s elite. What I do not want is for Peter to know you are his grandmother.”
At the mention of the word grandmother, the world seemed to simply stop turning around Millie, save for the song of a mockingbird and a large magnolia blossom that fell from a tree toward her feet.
She tried to find her next breath, her next thought, her next heartbeat. She tried to follow the logic, but all she could do was look back at Weston, blinking.
“You want me to pretend I’m of no relation to him?”
All over again?
Weston leaned backward, crossing his arms. “It may not be pretty, but the reality is, my family’s reputation and status could be ruined by the smear of illegal marriages and a baby given away. We can’t have scandal following the family name. I don’t care about your race or anyone else’s, but I do care about scandal. I can provide a good life for Peter, but as he grows up, I don’t want him asking questions. Whether we like it or not, people will talk if the past doesn’t stay gone. And the last thing I want is for Peter to live a life preoccupied with dredging up old history.”