Bless Her Heart

by Sally Kilpatrick

  * * *

  Liza pulled up in her minivan, a Cardinals cap pulled low over her strawberry blonde hair. I swallowed a lump of guilt. I hadn’t seen her or Nathaniel in a month. She probably thought I hadn’t been by because Chad didn’t like her—she didn’t like him any more than he liked her—but the truth of the matter was that jealousy had been eating me alive. She’d gotten pregnant by accident, and I had been trying for so very long. My right hand traveled to my stomach. Since I might finally be pregnant, it was easier, even exciting to see how much Liza’s little one had grown.

  “You know, you didn’t have to lock yourself out of the house just to see me.”

  “I know. I’m a horrible friend.”

  “You’re a horrible honorary aunt, you mean. I hope you’re studying up on ways to spoil this child because you know I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

  I climbed into the passenger seat and looked back, but I couldn’t see the baby because the car seat faced backward so I turned around and studied my toes. “I am a terrible aunt. I’m sorry.”

  Liza squeezed my hand and I looked up to her freckled face. She smiled in spite of her awful best friend and the bags under her eyes. “Posey, I’m teasing. Although I would like to see more of you.”

  “I never wanted to wake up the baby or get in the way.”

  Liza arched an eyebrow. “Well, you woke up the baby this morning with your bajillion calls. Fortunately, he fell asleep again on the way over here. That child is going to be the death of me if he doesn’t start sleeping through the night again.”

  “He’s not four months old yet, is he?”

  “No, but he slept through the night all of last week and then quit, so I’d say he’s definitely a tease,” she said as she eased the minivan out into the road.

  “Not a speed demon anymore, huh?”

  Liza snorted. “I won’t so much as risk taking a speed bump too fast if that boy is sleeping.”

  True to her word, Liza eased into the driveway and then opened the van door carefully before contorting herself to get the baby’s bucket seat out without slamming it into the door frame. “Oh, I forgot. Key’s in the side pocket of the diaper bag,” she whispered.

  It took me a minute to find which side pocket contained the house key, but I rummaged around until I did and then closed the side door of the van. The door slammed harder than intended, and Liza shot me a dirty look even though she was already on the front stoop. Sorting through her keys carefully so they wouldn’t jingle, I finally found the one that fit my front door and pushed it open so Liza could enter first. She set the bucket seat down gently, and I knelt to take a look at my pseudo-nephew.

  “Oh, Liza, he’s perfect.” I drank in his peaceful face, so chubby with roly-poly arms and legs to match. His hair seemed thinner than before and maybe darker? He clenched his hands in fists as though determined to wring every last bit of rest from his nap.

  When I finally looked up at Liza, she had a misty look in her eyes. “He’s pretty damn cute, isn’t he?”

  While she looked at her son, I studied my best friend. No makeup, dark circles under her eyes, and a suspicious stain on her yoga pants—this wasn’t the Liza I’d gone to high school with. That Liza had once spent fifteen minutes fixing her hair before we went outside to play badminton using a water hose as the perfect indication of an invisible net. High School Liza would’ve never been caught outside the house in such a state of disarray.

  Of course, High School Posey would’ve never envisioned locking herself out of her house or having her car repossessed, so clearly teenagers had no idea what was to come.

  “Why don’t you let me make you some coffee?”

  Liza looked around warily. “Is Chad coming back soon?”

  “He left a note last night about being gone to a conference for a week. First I’d heard of it.”

  Liza snorted. “That doesn’t sound suspicious at all.”

  “Well, I’m not calling the police again.”

  Her expression sobered. That time Chad had slapped me, she paid him a visit at work. Since it was before Love Ministries, I had no idea what she said, but I did know he never slapped me again. He also told me never to invite Liza over again, but I ignored that edict.

  Come to think of it, the receptionist job came about not long after he came home early and found Liza and me giggling over tea. That’s also about the time he started researching “put your wife in a corner” and the like. Well, I wanted to put him in a corner for getting the car repossessed. We’d see how he liked it.

  “Didn’t you say something about coffee?” Liza asked.

  I nodded and headed for the kitchen. Surely, he hadn’t made me work the receptionist job just so I wouldn’t have any free time away from him. Surely, not.

  You know he would do something like that.

  I ignored my thoughts and concentrated on making coffee. While it slowly dripped, I searched the pantry for something to eat, but I came up short since I was not supposed to have anything sweet. After my second fruitless search through the pantry, it hit me: the drawer in the coffee table. Chad thought he was hiding his cookies from me, but I knew they were there. I also knew he knew exactly how many were in the container. I usually didn’t risk taking one because it wasn’t worth the lecture or possibly being sent to the corner.

  Yeah, well, if you got the car repossessed because you hadn’t been paying the note, the least you could do was share your cookies.

  So, I went to the living room and opened that drawer to find a brand new package of Oreos.

  “Breakfast of champions?” I asked as I slid the cookies on the table.

  “Ooo, feeling rebellious today, are we? I like it.” Liza rocked the bucket seat when Nathaniel fretted.

  “Get my car repossessed, and I will eat your cookies. Make a note,” I said as I got two mugs, creamer, and the sugar bowl.

  About the time we started the second cup, we seemed to find ourselves.

  “Posey, what in heaven’s name happened in college that you would marry a man who doesn’t share his cookies?”

  I shrugged and studied my new cup of coffee, the one I was needlessly stirring. “He’s the head of the household.”

  Liza waited. Her eyes bored through me until I had no choice but to look up and meet her gaze. “If he can’t pay the bills on time, then maybe you need to be the head of the household.”

  It sounded good in theory, but I didn’t even know how to do such things anymore. Chad had been paying all of the bills—supposedly by computer—and I didn’t even know what all we paid. Water, electricity, and the house and car payments obviously, but we didn’t have cable since Chad had given away our television several years ago because he claimed it was distracting me from doing the laundry. He gave me cash to buy groceries, and I had to find a way to stretch what he gave me to the end of the month.

  “I’m still waiting for you to move in next door,” she said.

  I grinned. When we were little girls, we’d talked about buying houses that were side by side so we could live next to each other. We would be able to talk every day, and our kids would play together. That future had been so rosy and so devoid of the realities of life.

  Liza sighed, “Chickadee, you know I don’t want to get into your business, but you do have some money set aside, right? You know, just in case?”

  “The Oatmeal Reserve is alive and well.” I looked to the pantry where I knew the two Quaker Oats canisters sat, one with money and the other with oats. Only once had I listened to my mother, and it galled to think she might be right. She’d told me to keep a rainy day fund of cash for myself, and to put it somewhere my husband would never think to look. The measly fund had mainly grown as a dollar or two here and there, but over the years I’d started putting any Christmas and birthday money in there because money couldn’t buy the one thing I wanted.

  “And Chad still has no idea?” Liza asked.

  I shook my head and twisted open another Oreo. One morning
as the honeymoon dimmed, Chad blessed me out for making oatmeal and made his opinions on the stuff clear. In retrospect, I’d started the Oatmeal Reserve by shoving that first five dollars into the canister as a sort of rebellion against his rant. He only tolerated having oats in the kitchen now because, as a health food, they were supposed to make me skinnier.

  “I have money,” I finally said. I didn’t know how much, but I did have money. “But I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for all of this.”

  Liza gave me a heart-blessing look of pity. I wanted to smack her.

  “Posey, are you happy?”

  “Of course, I’m happy.” My answer came too quickly, and we both knew it. “I mean, what adult is really happy? You mean to tell me everything is peachy keen with Owen right now?”

  “No,” she said, “but this child will someday sleep through the night. We will emerge from the fog and look at each other and say, ‘Oh, there you are.’ I know this because sometimes I look at him and feel the love even if I fall asleep because I’m too tired to do anything about it.”

  When was the last time I’d looked at my husband and felt love?

  Did it matter if I felt love? We were married now. Till death did us part.

  “I worry about you, Posey. None of this feels like . . . you.”

  She didn’t even know about how extreme Chad had been with his more intense insistence on wifely submission. My fists closed underneath the table, and I opened my mouth to protest. She held out a hand.

  “Let me finish. We used to be inseparable, and now I only see you when you lock yourself out of your house. I know I had the baby, but you could still come over for a movie or some gin rummy. You hate the color blue, and yet that’s the color of almost every single wall in your house. And what’s up with the freaky angel collection? I got you that first one almost as a joke. You’re not a teacher like you wanted to be. I haven’t seen you take pictures since . . . college.”

  True. Once I’d taken great joy in photography. Chad didn’t share my aesthetic.

  “Maybe, well, maybe Chad’s not the best man for you. I have a hard time believing he left in the middle of the night—the same night when your car got repossessed—to go to a conference you didn’t know anything about.”

  “Liza,” I said, in warning. My blood pressure didn’t like her ideas at all. When Chad and I had married, I’d had the two conditions: no hitting and no adultery. If he ever hit me again or left me for another woman, then I would end our marriage.

  “You are my best friend. I want to see you happy. That’s all.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I snapped. “We can’t all get what we want.”

  Liza sat back. “Well. Okay. I’ve been missing my friend Posey for a really long time, but I’m not sure she lives here anymore.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t.”

  Liza stood slowly with that regal dignity she’d always been able to muster. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  Even as I watched her go, I knew I should go after her. I knew I should apologize, but what she’d said had punched me in the gut. To suggest Chad had left me for dubious reasons was irresponsible. And what did happy have to do with anything? What adult was actually happy? She wasn’t even happy—complaining about not being able to sleep through the night when she at least had a baby. Where did she get off lecturing me as if I had somehow let her down? I’d gotten married. That was all.

  The front door clicked softly behind her, and that made me even madder. The girl couldn’t even slam the door anymore because she was so worried about waking up the baby. The baby this and the baby that. Couldn’t she see that I couldn’t do any of those things with her because I hadn’t been able to have a child?

  But maybe . . .

  I banged my head on the table harder than I meant to.

  Posey, you are an awful human being. Your best friend got out of bed at the butt crack of dawn to let you into your house. She expressed her concern over your happiness and demonstrated that she missed you and wanted to spend more time with you, and you were a jerk.

  Great. My hormones had to be out of whack.

  I would make all of this up to Liza just as soon as I got the car back and talked to Chad and knew that everything would be okay.

  First, I had to see what was in the Oatmeal Reserve.

  chapter 5

  Five hundred twelve dollars and eighty-three cents.

  I looked at the money strewn all over the kitchen table, ten years’ worth of saving for this day even if I didn’t know it at the time. If I were lucky—something I hadn’t been all day—I would have enough in the Oatmeal Reserve to rescue my Camry. Hastily I shoved the money back into the Oats container and placed it beside its twin. Even with the change, the cash canister felt lighter just as an almost empty one would. Twin Quakers looked at me with sly smiles as if assuring me they would protect my secret stash.

  Somewhere in the other room my phone buzzed.

  It might be Chad! I jumped up from the table and ran for the living room, this time stubbing my toe on the coffee table. I didn’t cuss it because it had yielded Oreos in my time of need.

  When I couldn’t immediately put fingers on my phone, I dumped the contents of my purse into the overstuffed chair where I used to sit to watch television. I flipped it open then had to figure out how to scroll through the messages because my little sister, Rain, could text more in two minutes than my little screen would hold.

  Posey you have to come get me now it’s urgent

  And then:

  Look I know you’re there and I know Mom told you not to pick me up from school ever again even though you are my emergency contact but it’s really impt

  As I was attempting to text a reply—a slow endeavor since I had to hit each number a certain amount of times to get the exact letter I needed—she texted again:

  Come get me now!!!!!!!!!! It’s about Chad!!!!!!!!!!

  I sighed and backspaced on my original message about how I wasn’t about to get involved in her hooky problem. Instead I texted:

  Against my better judgment I am coming to get you, but I have no car so you have at least twenty minutes to fake an illness.

  Halfway down the hall, I thought to check my voicemail, but I had no new messages. Quickly, I changed into my favorite dress, a black one with no collar and a minimal amount of flowers. I’d have to go by the bank as soon as I picked up Rain. Goodness knew, I needed to try to figure out what was going on with the car. In addition to Oreo consumption, Chad was going to have to forgive me for breaking into his rolltop desk where he kept all of the financial information.

  Eating the Oreos alone was enough to warrant “discipline,” but, to my way of thinking, he owed me several good explanations as to his sudden departure and why our car had been towed in the middle of the night. If he wasn’t paying the bills, then Liza was right. That was a job I needed to take over.

  My phone buzzed again, and I dug around in my purse in expectation.

  It wasn’t him; it was Rain.

  Hurry up!!!

  It took me a minute so I knew what I was talking about when I responded:

  Patience is a virtue

  * * *

  Yessum County High School was almost the same as when Liza and I had roamed its halls.

  The ancient floors had been waxed to a shine, but the whole place smelled of institutional nostalgia. I checked in at the front office only to be directed to the attendance office. Well, that was new. Back in my day, we’d only needed one office for all of our shenanigans, thank you very much.

  When I reached the attendance office/clinic, a small room that had once held textbooks, Rain lay on a cot with a washcloth over her forehead, her face contorted in pain. If there were awards given to students for faking illness, then Rain would’ve been the shoo-in every year. Her crazy high IQ meant school bored her. To make matters worse, she didn’t play well with others, and so didn’t want to attend for social reasons.

  “Migraine?” I whispered.<
br />
  Nurse Radford, who had been at Yessum County long before my high school years, snorted. “Maybe. She says she gets them with her cycle, but who knows? She was in here almost a month ago to the day, though. Where’s Miss Lark?”

  “She, ah, couldn’t come.” I hated to lie, but this statement was, in fact, true. My mother couldn’t come to get Rain because she didn’t know Rain was fake-sick. I was having a banner day when it came to breaking rules.

  The nurse narrowed her eyes. “Miss Lark told me not to let that child leave unless she was missing an appendage.”

  “I know, I know,” I said softly. “She’s a bit of a handful.”

  “You, on the other hand. I think I saw you once in the four years you attended high school.”

  I smiled, remembering that day well. I’d been walking from lunch to the band room. Instead of watching where I was going, my eyes were glued to John O’Brien playing Frisbee in the courtyard. My toe hit an uneven patch of sidewalk and down I went. My knee was a bloody mess, but the whole thing had been worth it to look up into John’s concerned eyes and to have him help me to the nurse’s office.

  “I guess I can trust you,” Nurse Radford said as she looked up from the information card. “You are listed as an emergency contact.”

  Another teen girl appeared in the door with a hangdog expression, and the nurse sighed. “You go over there to the checkout station, and I’ll be with you in a moment.” Nurse Radford moved from checkout area to nursing area, and I watched her examine her latest patient, the pale girl who was either a really good actress or who needed the cot more than Rain.

  The nurse shuffled back to the desk that served as the attendance office portion of the room.

  “Are you having to pull double duty?”

  She sighed. “Budget cuts. They figured that I could handle attendance and nursing since so many of the people checking out are sick. Of course, I have to deal with all of the orthodontist and doctor appointments, too. I think I’ve lost five pounds from the trotting back and forth.”

  “I’m sorry.”