by Annie Jones
“Why didn’t you tell us before now?”
“Because you girls seemed reconciled with your mother’s absence—not content, mind you, but that you’d made your peace with it. I just didn’t see how dredging it all up again could do anyone any good.”
April’s lips went thin. “It might have done Sadie some good. She might have had some warning that she had a predisposition toward depression.”
“Sadie? Oh, darling, I didn’t know. I thought if I lived my life with joy and exuberance, you three would learn by my example. I had no idea it was a medical condition. You understand that, don’t you? I didn’t…”
His mouth continued to move as though forming words, but no sound came. His eyes fixed on something in the distance and yet showed no sign of seeing anything at all. He raised his hand toward them, almost clawing the air, but without a sense of desperation, like a man reaching for a handrail or for help getting up out of a chair.
“Daddy?” Hannah tried to grab his hand, but he flailed and pushed her away.
“Daddy, are you all right?” April bent to try to look into his face.
He twisted away from her. He struck his arm out. The hat in his hand fell to the ground.
“It’s happening,” Sadie said. “It’s happening again.”
“Is this…the transient ischemic attack? Is this what you saw last time, Sadie?”
Sadie bent down in front of their father, her heart racing. “Daddy, can you hear me?”
His head turned in her direction. He did not appear to recognize her.
A strangled sob caught high in her throat. She put her hand to her mouth.
Hannah stepped in behind him and braced him with her arm around his shoulders. “Daddy, can you sit down?”
He nodded.
“He’s responding.” Cautious relief washed over April’s expression.
“Can you walk to the car?” Hannah asked.
He coughed into his fist and nodded again. “Why? Are we going someplace?”
“Yes. We’re going to get out of this graveyard. I know how you hate them,” Sadie said, moving ahead to get the gate.
“Why see the living among the dead?” His lips managed a wan smile, but his eyes had that old Moonie Shelnutt spark in them again.
“Come on, Daddy, let’s get to a hospital.” She took his hand and began to guide him to his beloved old car. “You may have left Mama because she insisted, but her daughters are not going to let you go without a fight.”
Chapter Twenty
It didn’t take the doctor long to check out Moonie and reach the same conclusion they had come to in Wileyville. Nothing we can do here and now. Get to your regular doctor as soon as possible and discuss options in treatment, management and indications for future health issues.
That hadn’t satisfied Hannah, who had promptly gotten Payt on the phone and asked him to get all the details and information from the doctor in Alphina. While that transpired, April took the time to duck into a hallway and call the store to make sure Olivia and Mary Tate had opened up without any difficulties. Then they planned to settle the bill so all of them could hit the road home.
That left Sadie and Moonie all alone sitting on unforgiving plastic seats in the sparse, cold waiting room.
“So let me see if I got this right, Daddy. All these years, your acting up and speaking out, going over the top and generally creating chaos around every corner, you intended that to teach us how to stay happy by example?”
He ducked his head a little. “Maybe I didn’t think that through so good.”
“You actually thought that running us ragged, driving us batty and making us constantly fly by the seat of our pants to try to keep up with you would somehow make us better sisters, better mothers, better equipped to handle the harsh reality of the world around us?”
He stared at the hat in his hand.
“Well I just have one thing to say about that.” The way Sadie saw it, this was her opening. The time had come at last to consider all that her father had done and said over the years and finally give Daddy exactly what he deserved.
A second chance.
“Thank you, Daddy.”
He jerked his head up. His eyes searched hers for any sign of her trademark tendency to use sarcasm in a pinch. “But, Sadie, honey, I did so many things wrong.”
“Join the club, Daddy.” She took his hand, smiled, then leaned back in the chair and watched the medical staff at the nurses’ station busy themselves with charts and phone calls. “I can see how it would be hard for you to recognize depression, Daddy. To understand it. You’re just so vital. So full of joy.”
“Joy? Is that what we’re going to call it today?” He harrumphed in gracious good humor and balancing his hat on his knee, stroked his chin to underscore his insight. “Because it isn’t such a very distant time ago that I recall you using some other choice words for my uncompromising quest for authentic individualism.”
He’d nailed her without compromise and it made Sadie laugh lightly. “Aren’t we a pair, Daddy? You always make me smile…”
“And you could always break my heart if I thought for one moment I’d let you down.” He placed her hand in his open palm.
She curled her fingers around his. “You never did.”
“Oh, I think I did, more than a few times, darling.” The lines around his eyes creased more deeply. His smile held a tiny tremor. “But I always hoped you’d forgive me my shortcomings.”
“I always knew you’d overlook mine.”
“You had that much faith in me?”
“Yes.”
“And in your family?”
She looked away, anxious that her eyes would betray her. She thought of Ed and how his inattentiveness had started to panic her.
And Olivia and how she’d let her daughter ride roughshod over the household because deep down Sadie knew the time was fast approaching when her child would leave. Sadie hadn’t trusted her firstborn to love her mother even if she didn’t like the rules that mother set down for her.
And her sisters, how they had chosen silence over sharing secrets.
Her faith in those she loved the most had been small indeed.
“And God?” Moonie pressed on.
“I still believe,” she said. “With all my heart, but…”
“That’s the kind of sentence that shouldn’t have a qualifier, sugar.”
“I know. I know that, Daddy. But…” Her father had told her the truth today and in doing so had risked shattering her faith in him. She owed him the same kind of stark honesty.
No, strike that. She owed it to herself. And to everyone of late who she had not fully showed faith in. And to her relationship with God.
“Daddy, here is what I feel.” Tears stung her eyes. Her chest constricted until she could hardly speak. She had never said this aloud to anyone, and the last person on earth she could have imagined herself confessing to was her father. But he was the one who had told her she had to start somewhere, so she took a deep breath and jumped on in. “It’s not scriptural or divined by study or the result of any kind of serious soul-searching, you understand. It’s just…it’s just what’s in my heart.”
“And it’s safe with me, Sadie-girl.”
She nodded. She sniffled. She laid her head back against the wall and spoke, finally. “After a lifetime of waiting for things to turn out my way and never seeming to have that happen in full, I’m afraid.”
He shifted his weight, and she knew he wanted to pull her into a hug.
But she just wasn’t ready for that yet.
She held up her hand to keep his kindness in check and shut her eyes. “I’m truly terrified that if I ask for what I really want for myself, God will take a long hard look at me and find me…unworthy.”
“So like your mama,” she thought she heard him whisper.
She swallowed hard but did not let herself stop until she had said all she had to say. “And if I push it or ask for more or bare my pain before God, H
e will see me as a grubby little ingrate who doesn’t understand how undeserving I truly am and He…He will abandon me. Just like my own mother did.”
“Oh, Sadie.” This time he ignored her attempts to block him out. He wrapped his arms around her as if she were a child again, and kissed her cheek and even rocked her slightly while saying her name again and again, “Sadie, Sadie, Sadie.”
The tears came at last. Not racking sobs but the quiet, long-overdue tears of finally having let go of her greatest and most dreaded secret. “Oh, Daddy. It hurts so much to live like this.”
He pulled away and placed his knuckle under her chin. “Then you get help, Sadie. Learn from what happened to your mama. You get help.”
“I will, Daddy.”
“You promise?”
She nodded.
He pulled a hankie from his pocket and wiped away her tears. “You have that all turned around, you know, Sadie-girl. God already took that long hard look. He looked at all of us and, just like you suspicioned, He found us all wanting and plenty unworthy. Beggars in filthy rags, to be specific. That’s why He sent His Son to take our place. Because unworthy sinners though we are, God does not intend to ever abandon us.”
“I know all that, Daddy.” She let out a shuddering breath. “But why is it the things I hope for with all my heart never come to me? When I pray and believe and nothing comes, how can I not feel rejected?”
“God is not like some mail-order catalog there to fulfill your latest whims, honey.”
“But they are more than just whims, Daddy. I thought you of all people would understand that. Didn’t you ever pray that Mama would get well? Didn’t you ever pray that she would come back to us?”
“Of course I did. Now blow your nose.”
Sadie obeyed. In fact, she did such a good job of it that it made her hair fall over her eyes. She looked around, more than a bit chagrined.
Moonie let out a belly laugh and pushed her hair from her eyes. “Oh, Sadie, yours are the kinds of questions of faith that people have asked of all times. Why did God let this happen? Why does one person prosper and another fail? Why am I sick or sad or alone, when others have health and wealth and more people than they can count to love and admire them?”
Sadie laid her head on his shoulder. “What’s the answer, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, honey. But that doesn’t mean I stopped believing. God is always good. And there is always good to be found in our lives if we look for it.”
“That’s why I feel so guilty. I recognize that I have so much, but all my mind dwells on is what I lack.”
“Let me tell you, as a lifelong practitioner of dwelling on things I can’t do a thing about—guilt don’t get the billy goat fed.”
Sadie managed to smile at that.
“There’s my girl. I knew she was under all those tears.” He stroked her cheek. Then raised his head to glance around them at their sterile setting. “Sadie, if I had known there was some kind of medical connection between the way your mama was and what you’ve endured of late, I’d never have kept it from you.”
She folded the handkerchief in half. “I know that, Daddy.”
“And do you know why you know that?”
Sadie had no idea what he was driving at but felt she should. She shook her head no, but with reluctance.
“Because I’m your father and I love you and you don’t doubt my love for one single moment.” He slapped her knee and grinned. “You know I want everything wonderful for you, don’t you, girl?”
“Of course.”
“Just like you want for your children.”
“Yes.”
“But not everything your children want for themselves is going to make them happy or help them grow into strong, loving, or dare I say wise, individuals.”
“Wise? That may be asking a bit much.” She sniffled again and wiped the last of the tears from under her lashes. “And I know what you’re driving at, Daddy. God sees the bigger picture. And if my prayers are not answered as fast or as fully as I want, that doesn’t mean God isn’t listening.”
“He’s listening…if you are willing to talk to Him.”
“What happened to ‘Wait on the Lord?’”
“Wait on the…?” He chuckled softly, lifted his hat from his knee and plunked it on his head. “Oh, honey, when I chose those verses, I was a single man with three small daughters. You were my impatient one, always wanting what you wanted when you wanted it.”
She folded her arms and looked down the hallway for her sisters to finally return. “Well, that much hasn’t changed.”
“But it has changed, Sadie. You’ve changed. You’re entering a new phase of your life. Seeing your children grow up and no longer needing you can make you feel that you’re losing something, but take it from someone who has had the privilege to watch his girls grow into wonderful and, yes, wise women—there is still so much to gain.”
“Really?” Maybe it was the cry. Or maybe it was the confession. Or maybe it was the comfort her father had heaped on her in every form from cliché to handclasp, but Sadie suddenly believed him. And her heart felt lighter.
“Did having an empty nest slow this old buzzard down one bit?”
She laughed.
“Try looking at it a new way—think of all the new adventures awaiting you and Ed soon.”
“Well, me, anyway. Ed seems determined to have his own adventures.”
“I won’t speak to that, honey. I don’t think it’s any of my business, but I will tell you, I never once thought the verse I picked out for you as a child defined you. If you need a verse to do that, find your own, Sadie-girl. And let God help you do it.”
“I bet if you had a verse, it would be that proverb, ‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.’”
“I don’t suppose the modern translation of that would be, ‘A man with a merry heart can be a real pill?’”
“No, but that does sound more suitable, doesn’t it?” She adjusted his hat just as Hannah strode up to them with April only a few steps behind.
“The doctor says Daddy can go, but that he needs to get to his own physician as soon as he gets home.”
“I say let’s get going, then. If there’s nothing holding us here.” Their father stood and looked down at her. “Sadie?”
She stood reluctantly. Was there nothing for them here? It felt as though she still had something left undone.
“Okay, here’s the plan then.” No surprise that Hannah had a plan. Hannah always had a plan. “Two of us drive back with Daddy in the van.”
Moonie opened his mouth, but before he could launch any protest, Hannah cut him off, her hand to his chest.
“Don’t even start with me, Daddy. The van is the most practical way for you to travel. And we need two people with you because…” Obviously it was because they were all terrified of him having another attack and none of the three of them wanted to have to go through that alone while driving a classic convertible down the highway. “Because you are more than any one God-fearing, Christian woman can handle.”
She’d found the one thing their father couldn’t argue with.
He shut his mouth and tipped his head to show everyone he acknowledged that she’d bested him—this time.
“Now let’s get going.” Hannah clapped her hands together. “I’m anxious to get home.”
Sadie could just imagine. She could practically see the wheels turning in her younger sister’s head. It wouldn’t be a week before Hannah had dug up everything she could, gotten together records and files and done as much research as possible to piece together the missing years of their mother’s life. All while battling morning sickness, the complications of combining impending parenthood with the possibilities of taking on a seasoned foster child and always managing to look calm and cool and expertly coiffed.
“‘Peace, be strong,’ eh, Hannah?” April bent at the knees to put her arm under her father’s, letting him lean on her.
Moonie chuckled, “Did
I ever tell you why I picked out that verse for you, Hannah? Or yours for you, April?”
“Tell me walking, Daddy,” April ushered him toward the door with Hannah on his other side.
Sadie watched a moment, her emotions still tender and twisted from all that had transpired.
Something was yet undone here, and she couldn’t go until she’d seen it through.
Chapter Twenty-One
Half an hour later at the motel, when Daddy had gotten settled into his seat in the van—shotgun, he called dibs on it the moment they pulled into the parking lot—Sadie held back.
“Y’all go on ahead.” Sadie dropped her overnight bag into the back seat of the yellow convertible. “I want to drive through town once before I go—you know, to sort of clear my thoughts.”
“Sadie, if you need a few more minutes, we can hang around until you’re ready.”
“It’s okay, Hannah. Between the mama-to-be needing to stop every few miles and the daddy-too-bossy wanting to direct every driving moment, I figure I’ll catch up with you in time for all of us to have lunch together.” She pulled her cell phone from her purse and waved it. “We can arrange the details later.”
“Sure thing.” April tried to smile, but it wouldn’t hold.
Hannah tilted her face up just enough to bathe it in midmorning sun. She scrunched her eyes shut and wrinkled her nose. “Going to get hot today. Don’t hold back too long.”
“I won’t.” Sadie tried to tote up the amount of time she’d need, but since she really didn’t have a clear notion of what she had to do, she couldn’t.
“Okay, then. We’ll catch up later.” April looked at the van and then at the motel and finally at the ground, where hiking boots, high-fashion sandals and scuffed sneakers stood toe-to-toe.
Hannah’s feet shifted restlessly at first, then inched forward to wedge her place solidly among her sisters.
April put one hand on the back of Hannah’s neck, then stole a peek over her sister’s shoulder to the van before leaning in to form a closed circle between the three of them. “You’re going back to the cemetery, aren’t you?”