by Annie Jones
Sadie clenched her teeth but could not contain her own laughter. She’d tried to hold back but how could she? The image of Hannah—prissy, “conniption fit waiting to happen” Hannah, she of the “manicured nails and trips to Atlanta to buy only the best of the best for her wardrobe” Hannah—sitting in her cavernous bathroom with her two fretting sisters outside, backs to the door in fervent prayer while she tried to do what she must to take an at-home pregnancy test cracked her up.
“You two cackling like a couple of hens is not helping, either!” The bathroom tile amplified Hannah’s complaint.
And it only made them laugh harder.
“Y’all…please,” Hannah nagged.
“Okay, okay.” April stood and held her hand out to help Sadie up. “We’ll take it into the kitchen.”
“I’d very much appreciate it if you would.” Abruptness barbed Hannah’s courteous words.
So much so that Sadie couldn’t help getting in a jab of her own as they headed out into the hallway. “Call us when you’ve…had a breakthrough.”
More girlish giggling bubbled up from the two women old enough to be above that kind of silliness.
“Just go and wait in the kitchen for a while,” Hannah said from behind the door.
“Mind if I brew some herbal tea?” April asked, her soft brown braid bouncing against her back as she hurried ahead of Sadie.
“Tea, coffee, get that roasting hen out of the fridge and stuff or glaze or presoak or whatever you’re supposed to do to one of those things, if you have the inclination. Just leave me be for a while.” The hinges on the door between the master bedroom and bath whined and Hannah’s next order came out loud and clear. “No matter what the results are, I want a minute alone and then a minute to call Payt and tell him the news. I want him to be the first to know.”
“Yes, ma’am,” April and Sadie called out together as they headed down the stairs.
April’s sandals hit the hardwood floor of the foyer first. She paused there only long enough to grab her backpack and half turn to ask Sadie, “Was Ed the first to know about your babies?”
“Was he?” Sadie held on to the faux antique finial at the bottom of the handrail and cocked her head. “I don’t remember. I do know it didn’t come as much of a surprise when I told him.”
“Of course not.” April chuckled and headed off for the gleaming black-and-white kitchen.
“Of course not? Why do you say that?” Sadie hurried to catch up.
“Well, you have to admit, Sadie, as far as your life has been concerned, things have pretty much run along the tried-and-true steady course.” She clunked the hunter-green backpack onto the glossy imitation-marble countertop and began opening drawers and taking out spoons and napkins.
“Tried-and-true?” Sadie sat on one of the mismatched kitchen stools Hannah had gotten from the church thrift shop and so proudly painted, following instructions from a magazine. “What do you mean by that?”
“You know, college, marriage, babies.” She filled the teakettle with water. “I’ll never forget how you told me after the Christmas Eve candlelight service that you and Ed had decided to start a family. Olivia arrived in time for Advent the next year.”
“You make me sound so predictable.”
“No.” She shut the water off and set the kettle on the stove, flipping on the heat then stepping back to make sure that everything met her standards. “I wouldn’t call it predictable. More that when you set your mind to something, Sadie, it happens.”
Sadie rested her cheek in her hand. “I think you’re describing yourself. You’re the planner. The planter. The one who has seen her goals and aspirations take shape. I’m the one who rushes headlong here and there and lets other people make my mind up for me, remember?”
“I remember a lot of things, Sadie. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I remember too much, or if…” She drummed her fingertips over the protected handle of the teapot then straightened her shoulders and turned to face Sadie. “Well, the point is, you’re the one who has so much to show for her life. I have a business and, of course, our family, but you’re the one who’s got it all together.”
The praise rang hollow in Sadie’s ears. And on top of the longing in her sister’s tone, it almost broke Sadie’s heart. If she were made of sterner stuff and if her sister weren’t the stoic type, she might have gone to April then, put her arm around her and…she had no idea what.
So she sighed and shook her head and bent down the corner of the napkin in front of her. “Me? I don’t have anything together that didn’t already come prepackaged. Having it all, that’s Hannah’s bailiwick. She’s the organizer. Her Imperial Highness delegating, always delegating.”
“Not anymore.” April pulled a dented cardboard box from her bag and took out two tea bags that smelled of chamomile and peppermint. “She isn’t going to delegate someone to have this baby for her. Though—”
Footsteps overhead cut her off.
They both waited and listened.
More footsteps. Then quiet.
Sadie curled her fingers into tight fists. “This is killing me.”
In a heartbeat, April’s hand fitted over Sadie’s. “I wondered about that. Are you…are you okay with all this?”
“Not really.” She leaned back and tilted her head up to look at the ceiling in the approximate spot where the results might even now be being revealed. “You know me. If I had my way, I’d have my ear pressed up against that door listening.”
“No, I mean are you okay with…with the whole baby thing?”
“Oh.” The baby thing. She cleared her throat, tried to make herself revisit any and all of her feelings on the matter but, finding that impossible, simply lifted her shoulders and said, “Yes.”
“Do you want to expound on that?”
“No.” Okay with it or not, Sadie would not risk spoiling Hannah’s moment by letting her own too-long-unresolved grief intrude.
“You want to talk about something else?”
“Please.”
“All-righty-then, tell me about this new job.”
Sadie shut her eyes, pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead and groaned.
“What?”
“What made me even consider running the cemetery?”
“The park and cemetery.” An important distinction to someone like April.
“You mean what’s left of the park. Have you checked it out lately? They’ve let city storage all but take over. Old trees, equipment, piles of mulch, bent-up old street signs, they’re everywhere.”
April reached up into a cupboard and pulled down two oversize ceramic mugs. She set them down decisively and smiled. “Maybe that’s why you’ve been placed in this position, to stop the takeover and restore the park to the way it looked when we played there as kids.”
“April, we never played there as kids.”
“Didn’t we?” She tipped her head to the right, her forehead creased and her eyes moving as though speed-reading the story of their childhood. “Seems I remember a park with red-and-yellow horses on springs?”
Sadie shook her head. “Slide and swings. All we’ve ever had here.”
“No monkey bars? No wooden teeter-totters?”
“Nope.”
April hooked her finger in the neck of her soft, baggy T-shirt and ducked her head. “You’re sure?”
“There are pictures all around the superintendent’s office of the land as it appeared in every decade. No springy horses. Not a single teeter or totter.”
“But I remember those teeter-totters and how happy I was when you were born, because I thought I’d finally have someone to sit on the other side, and Mama said—” She gasped the faintest little gasp possible then covered her mouth, her eyes wide.
“Mama?” The very word took Sadie’s breath away.
Sadie had so few recollections of their mother. A stolen moment sitting in her lap, a summer day in the yard of a house she had only seen in her mind’s eye. In truth, over time s
he had begun to doubt the validity of those images. Were they memories or dreams or something in between?
Daddy refused to talk about it. He didn’t want to dwell on the past, he said. No good could come of it.
And April, who had been seven when their mother left, had never defied him in that. She kept whatever she recalled locked tightly away. But with this little slip, perhaps a door had opened, and if Sadie prodded, gently, maybe she could learn something about the woman she had never known and yet always missed.
“And Mama said…?” she prompted her sister.
April pressed her lips together, her chest rising and falling with every shallow breath. Her cheeks flushed with a ruddy glow in marked contrast to the rest of her fair, freckled complexion.
“April?”
April opened her mouth.
The teakettle cried out with a blast of steam.
Both sisters nearly jumped out of their skin.
Then April spun around to lift it from the heat.
She hunched her shoulders protectively, and Sadie knew there would be no talk of Mama and the past today.
When her sister turned around again, a practiced calm masked her features. “No. It couldn’t have been the park here in Wileyville, then could it?”
“April…”
Her sister’s gaze lifted and met Sadie’s for only a moment. Pain, then confusion, then sober resolve took over again.
She tipped the kettle up and the water cascaded and swirled into the mug. “Well, whatever reason this job came to you, I, for one, think it’s…Hmm, how would I describe it?”
“Creepy?” Sadie suggested, dipping the tea bag into the steaming liquid in front of her.
“Inspired.”
“By madness?”
“No.”
“Well the more I think about it, the crazier it sounds to me.”
“What does Ed say? What about the kids?”
“Ed and the kids? They don’t say much of anything, least not to me.”
“Something wrong at home, Sadie?”
Something was wrong at heart. But how did you express that to a sister with whom you had never truly opened up? It was probably too late for that kind of relationship now.
“Everything at home is, you know, the way it always is.”
“Then what’s keeping you from that new job? What are you afraid of, Sadie?”
When did she sprout a sign proclaiming: Please feel free to butt into my life?
“Afraid?”
“You worried about what people will think if you take that job? Or that you might actually excel at something besides the things you decided ages ago should be your life’s work?”
“You mean my marriage and family?” She hit the words a little too hard, realizing too late it smacked of tossing in April’s face the very things she had not cultivated in her own life. She did not apologize, though, because that might make things worse. “My ‘life’s work,’ as you put it, seems to me very much a work still in progress. I’m not sure I’m ready to tackle more, especially now in the midst of the high drama of taking away Daddy’s Caddie.”
“When does it get out of the shop?”
“We have another week’s grace before we have to do the dirty deed.”
“He won’t surrender those keys without a fight.”
“Three of us and one of him,” Sadie reminded her, tapping her spoon against the edge of her cup.
“We may have to call in reinforcements.”
“Or get sneaky. You ever tried your hand at firing tranquilizer blow darts through a bamboo stick? Digging tiger pits? No-holds-barred Ninja fighting?” She curled her fingers and moved her arms in first slow then rapid circles, as if she might strike at any moment.
April withdrew her own spoon from her mug dripping tea on Hannah’s tabletop. “You’re saying we can get those keys if we use our heads.”
Sadie ducked then winked. “And maybe our teeth and feet.”
Quicker than a skinny minute, April grabbed a sponge and wiped up the almost imperceptible mess she had made. “We could sell tickets and raise enough to fund Daddy’s retirement.”
“What about Daddy?” Hannah walked into her own kitchen the way a debutante might walk in to a ballroom, perfectly groomed, totally confident and wavering on the very verge of getting sick and blowing the whole effect.
“Forget about Daddy.” Sadie forced more buoyancy into her tone than she meant to, but somehow couldn’t seem to deflate it as she added, “What about the mommy?”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds that Payt was with a patient and I haven’t spoken to him yet.” Hannah’s smile trembled. Tears brimmed just slightly above her lashes.
She didn’t have to say more.
“Oh, Hannah.” Sadie and April both went to her, folding her into their arms.
Sadie sniffled. She had prepared to hear only good news. She hadn’t even imagined another outcome. But suddenly this turn of events reopened her own pain, the very real pain of wanting a child with all her heart, and her own body unable to provide.
A sob caught in the back of her throat. She could not give in to her traitorous emotions now. Hannah needed her. She had to stay strong.
Hannah stepped away from them.
“You can try again,” April murmured.
Sadie stiffened.
“It’s too soon to worry anyway.” Flicking her long brown braid over her shoulder, the oldest of the sisters rubbed the youngest’s back. “It’ll happen in God’s time. You’ve only been trying for four months.”
“Six months,” Sadie corrected. It had stuck in her mind because when Hannah first talked openly about getting pregnant, elated Sadie had prayed they might have their babies within the same year. Shortly after that she had miscarried. “It’s been six months.”
“A year and six months,” Hannah whispered, her gaze lowered to her entwined fingers.
“What?”
In one brief but deep breath, Hannah regained her composure, glanced at the steaming mugs of tea then headed for the refrigerator. “Technically, I suppose you could say that for the first year it was less a case of thinking in clinical terms about cycles and conception and more a case of leaving it in God’s hands.”
“Not a bad place to be.” April took a sip of tea. “In God’s hands.”
“Yeah, I know.” She withdrew a cut-glass pitcher of iced tea and a delicate plate of cut fruit, took a side step to gather a tall fluted tumbler then set them all on the kitchen counter. “And in the end, for all our calculations and calendar counting, that’s where it all will always rest—with the Lord. But still…”
“You have your concerns,” April said.
“Yes, I do. We waited for so long now, trying to get Payt through med school and his internship, holding out for just the right time to start our family. Now every time I see that negative on the pregnancy test strip, I can’t help wondering if we waited too long.”
“Thirty-five’s not that old,” said the woman who felt ancient at thirty-nine. “Not these days.”
“I hope not. Payt wants so badly to have children. And he should become a father, he’d make such a terrific one.”
Payton Bartlett was what well-brought-up people around here kindly called “a late bloomer.” Drummed out of military school, washed out of the Coast Guard…and after he ran his uncle’s printing business into red ink, Payton’s father called him a bad seed. Probably worse if there were no ladies present.
Then, while “taking a break to find himself” young Payton had landed on a mission trip to Nicaragua, trying to impress a girl whose name he conveniently couldn’t summon to mind anymore. The romance didn’t last, but as is often the way things go, his lifelong love found him. Working with children in dire need awakened in Payton a drive and ability that no one had suspected he possessed. He came back from that trip with the desire to become a doctor, a pediatrician.
Old man Bartlett had amassed a fortune, but lacked foresight and forgiveness where his
greatest earthly treasure, his family, was concerned. He cut Payton off, refusing to fund another impossible dream that would surely fail.
About that time Hannah entered the picture. She was working toward her degree in journalism at the time. They dated and married and later went off to his eighth-choice medical school, a small, obscure place in a western state—but that did not mean it came cheap.
So Hannah left college a few credits shy of attaining her degree and went to work anyplace she could. Payton studied. And when the time came for him to do his residency, Hannah suggested they return to Wileyville, where the Bartlett name had some cachet. With that to build on, she had hoped he’d get an offer to join a prestigious medical practice someplace in Kentucky where they’d have a lovely home and she’d have a houseful of babies.
“Yes, Payt will make a good dad.” April poured tea. “And you’ll be a great mom.”
Hannah picked up a lemon slice and stared at it for a few poignant seconds before raising it above her glass and squeezing the juice into her drink. “I suppose.”
Neither April nor Sadie seemed to have anything to say to bolster her opinion of her abilities. What could they say, after all, to reassure a sister who had lived her whole life reminded that as soon as she was born her own mother had run away?
And so, like so many times in their lives, since they could not quarrel about the situation, they remained silent. Leaving things unsaid, Sadie had decided a long time ago, helped maintain the delicate balance among them. It kept things safe. Talking meant revealing one’s self, and that meant none of them could keep up the pretext that they accepted their mother’s leaving as just one of those things that happens in life.
“You’ll keep trying.” April issued the statement like a decree from the eldest.
“Either that or—” Hannah plunked the lemon into her glass, then wiped her fingers on the cotton towel by the sink. “I haven’t said anything to you two because it’s not a sure thing by a long shot, but there is another way we might start a family.”
“You’re going to adopt!” April gave voice to what was also Sadie’s best guess for her sister’s plans. “Hannah, that’s wonderful.”
“No, not adoption, not exactly.” She tucked her rich auburn hair behind her ears, not once but three times, in slow, meticulous strokes. Then she wet her lips and fixed her attention on her glass of iced tea. “Payt has a second cousin he hasn’t seen since high school. The two of them spent summers together up until then, so they have a history, a bond.”