Bless Her Heart

by Sally Kilpatrick

  I thought of the pregnancy tests and my missing period. Yes, I would drink a glass of water and go to bed.

  * * *

  I woke up at three, four, and five before convincing myself to just get up and get it over with.

  Groggily, I trudged to the bathroom. The wrapper around the pregnancy test didn’t want to tear, but I persevered. A few minutes later, I paced up and down the hall where I couldn’t see the test while I waited for the three minutes to pass.

  Oddly, I remembered the day my mother, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, told me she was pregnant with Rain. As a freshman in high school, I thought my mother truly hated me. I blamed her for getting pregnant. Why couldn’t she be like other mothers and marry a nice man and stay home and bake cookies? Or, heck, she could work as a teacher or a secretary or maybe a dental hygienist. I didn’t care if she became a pilot like Amelia Earhart, whose biography we’d once read together. All I knew was that I didn’t want her to be pregnant again when my classmates had just calmed down about her.

  Henny was finally getting to the point I could stand him now that all-day school tired him out. I did not want another baby in the house. No more free babysitting. No weird stares from people. No whispers about how my mom was such a slut.

  No matter what I wanted, Mom was pregnant. She sat Henny and me down and told us in a faux-cheerful voice that we were going to have a little sister. Henny thought it was the greatest thing ever, not realizing that by the time his little sister was old enough to play Legos with him, he’d be through with them. I stared through my mom. That day I made myself a promise: no more flights of fancy with Amelia Earhart. I would concentrate on getting a good education and finding a good man who would never leave me.

  About that.

  Maybe Granny was right. Maybe the Adams Girls truly were cursed in matters of the heart.

  My watch indicated the proper amount of time had passed, and I walked to the bathroom. This was my moment of truth.

  Negative.

  Considering the events of the past twenty-four hours, I should’ve felt relief. Instead agony ripped through me. Not again. At the first signs of hyperventilating, I willed my breath to come in even inhales and exhales. Time for the other pep talk.

  Posey, you are only thirty-two. There’s still time for you to be a mother.

  I decided to add a new piece of inspiration to otherwise well-worn thoughts:

  Now you can even look into adoption since it doesn’t matter what Chad believes about only wanting to raise his own flesh and blood.

  My breath even, I stood up straight and disposed of the test, washing my hands in scalding hot water. In the mirror, I saw an older version of myself, a makeupless scarecrow with a grim expression. I didn’t look a thing like my petite and blond mother. Was this what my father looked like? Did he have those same fine lines around his eyes? Maybe his genetics were the ones to blame for my inability to get pregnant.

  Of course, that hadn’t stopped him from impregnating my mother, not that I knew anything about how my conception came about other than the fact it took place on some kind of commune south of Nashville.

  Intentional community, the voice of my mother inwardly corrected.

  “Oh.” Something moved between my legs. I grabbed at my last pair of clean underwear in such a hurry that I scratched my thigh. Sure enough, there was that telltale brown spot, proof that I wasn’t pregnant after all. The room spun around me, my vision misted with tears.

  I sat down on the toilet. My fist traveled to my mouth to keep from sobbing aloud, a habit from all those years of not wanting Chad to hear me cry.

  No reason to worry about that anymore.

  So I cried out loud, a keening wail. I let my sobs shake the walls of the empty house, ten years’ worth of them, until I lay on the floor, gasping for breath.

  Not even this one thing, God?

  My answer came in the form of cramps, and I went searching the hampers for a pair of underwear to wear to Jefferson long enough to get supplies and new panties that actually covered my backside.

  New underwear and then I would have to take charge of several things: apologizing to Liza, seeing Ben about a divorce, and asking my mother if I could move in with her. The whole plan felt as though my life were skidding backward, as if another pawn had bumped me back to Start in a game of Sorry!

  No, it wasn’t a game of Sorry!

  It was the Game of Life, and my peg had fallen out of the car. No, it was a biblical version of the Game of Life, and I was the prodigal daughter.

  All my life I’d empathized with the older child, the one who stayed put and did everything right but couldn’t seem to merit a party. Now, I saw I was the youngest, the child who’d been in a hurry to run away from home. Maybe I hadn’t squandered an inheritance or been reduced to feeding pigs, but I was about to head home with nothing to show for my thirty-two years on this earth.

  One thing I knew: Mom would never cook the fatted calf—she was a vegetarian—but, if I were lucky, she might meet me on the path with the modern-day equivalent of a ring and robe.

  chapter 8

  No two ways about it, I dillydallied in Jefferson. I didn’t want to admit defeat to my mother. The night before my wedding she’d lectured me about how marrying Chad would be a mistake. I had stalked off after shouting “You never cared before. Why do you suddenly care now?” Our most recent blowout about “daddy issues” hadn’t helped. Holidays and chance meetings in town had been civil, but it was safe to say my mother and I weren’t in a good place.

  At the edge of one row of store fronts in Ellery sat a building she had renovated and claimed as her own.

  I had never been there.

  Today, however, I would darken the door of Au Naturel, a health food store/yoga studio and the cause of many snickers when I was in high school. As I opened the door, I heard mystical pan flute instead of modern chimes. Despite the warmth of the building with its hardwood floors, breezy interior, and soft lighting, I wanted to run. Chad had called this store a den of iniquity, a haven for New Agers who loved crystals and chakras.

  Yeah, well, Chad has shown his true colors, now hasn’t he?

  I took a step forward, but didn’t see anyone.

  “Lark’s upstairs finishing up.”

  In the corner, a cozy nook with two overstuffed chairs, a coffee table, and shelves full of books, sat a woman I didn’t recognize. She had wild dark hair and olive skin. As if she knew I was trying to place her, she looked up from the cards she’d lain out on the table to smile at me. “Can I help you?”

  “No, I’m, um, I’m looking for my mother.”

  The lady in the corner studied me intently then her features brightened. “You must be Posey! Your mother talks about you all the time.”

  “She does?”

  “Oh, yes. She talks about you and Rain and Henny. I’m Julia, by the way. I’ve only been here for a few weeks.” She walked forward with outstretched hand. “Your mother was kind enough to let me do tarot readings here for a while until I can afford a place of my own.”

  I shook her hand. Of course, my “kind” mother, the woman who took in every sort of stray but never seemed to have time for her oldest child. Sounded just like her.

  “Whoa. You have some strong energy,” Julia said with a frown. “Could I do a reading for you? First one’s free.”

  I bit my tongue to keep from saying something about how drug pushers used that line and I wasn’t about to go anywhere near tarot cards or crystals or any of that other nonsense. “No thank you.”

  “Well, I’ll be here if you change your mind.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but my mother came down the stairs before I could. “Posey!”

  Lark Adams was just a little over fifty, but she easily looked forty. Petite and blond with a body trim from years of doing yoga, she didn’t look genetically related to me in the least. I’d often wondered if I were her first stray after all, maybe a baby on the side of the road she’d found. She had on
ce shown me stretch marks on her hip, pointing out an almost faded set that belonged to me, more defined white ropy ones that belonged to Henny, and the last set, still purple, that belonged to Rain. Her battle scars, as she liked to call them, were her proof that I was hers.

  Of course, we both knew Granny had raised me.

  “Mom. There are some things I need to ask you.”

  She drew on a coat, probably more to cover her workout gear than for the weather. “I was just heading out to the Ash Wednesday service. Come with me.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I can’t be late. I promised Mrs. Dale that I would sit with her. You can talk to me on the way there and on the way back.”

  Before I knew it, I was walking outside with my mother. She’d swept me up into her plans as she always seemed to do, one of the reasons I avoided her when I could. I huffed as I tried to keep up with her brisk pace, but now I knew I was out of shape rather than pregnant. Tears pricked once again, but I tamped them down. “Mom, I’m just going to come out and say it: I need a place to stay.”

  “Of course! Your room is pretty much as you left it. Your brother has been sleeping in there, but I’m sure he’ll be a gentleman and sleep on the couch. He needs to get out and find a place of his own anyway. This might be just the push he needs.”

  There she went again, deflecting interest from me to someone else.

  Or did her chatter mean she was nervous?

  “Thank you. I suppose you heard about Chad.”

  “Well, I’m a proponent of believing none of what you hear and only half of what you see, but Rain did tell me that, at least according to her friend, he’d left town with another woman.”

  Calling Courtney Rawls a friend of Rain’s was probably a stretch.

  “Is this the point where you say ‘I told you so’?”

  My mother stopped and turned to face me, gripping both of my shoulders. “Honey, I wouldn’t dream of it. I can’t afford to toss stones at those particular glass houses.”

  She squeezed my upper arms and rubbed them awkwardly before turning to face the church.

  Stunned that she’d quoted scripture, I paused a second longer than she did and had to jog a few steps to keep up. “Where are we going again?”

  “First Methodist. Today’s Ash Wednesday.”

  She said all of this as though it made perfect sense. “Since when have you attended First Methodist or participated in Ash Wednesday?”

  “Since about five years ago.”

  I’d really been out of touch if I didn’t know my mother was attending church. Neither Ash Wednesday nor Lent were recognized by First Baptist or Love Ministries. For one thing, neither was mentioned in the Bible and Jesus had that whole passage about not letting people know you were fasting. Then there was the fact that setting aside only forty days to avoid sin meant you had another three hundred and twenty-five or so to contend with, and, of course, that Lent was so Catholic. Baptists didn’t tend to truck with high church rituals.

  In spite of all of that, I stood on the front steps of First Methodist. I wished I could bottle whatever it was that made people—even me, especially me—follow my mother wherever she went. Now I was following her into First Methodist where Imogene Dale could harass me about the fire I’d started the night before.

  “We’re running a little late,” my mother whispered. She grabbed my hand to drag me inside and down the aisle, and I looked down at her hand. Her hands were warm and capable, as always. Would my life have gone differently, if she’d taken my hand more when I was a kid? I thought of how Rain had taken my hand the day before. Both mother and sister supported me in ways that didn’t make any sense. Chad had often pointed out how they’d abandoned me, how he’d been there to pick up the pieces and take care of me.

  But had he really?

  It didn’t matter. If I were going to follow through and get a divorce—and I had no reason not to now that I knew I wasn’t pregnant—then I was going to have to stop thinking about him.

  Yes, Posey, but you were married to the man for ten years. He was your constant companion. These things may take time.

  An intense feeling of not having time, of being in a hurry smothered me. What if I didn’t have time? Here I’d wasted at least ten years of my life. I had nothing to show for it but an angel with broken wings, an obsolete camera, and a whole host of regrets.

  My mother squeezed my hand then let it go as the minister took the pulpit. Sure enough, Miss Imogene sat on her other side and smiled at me. She reached over my mother to pat my hand, and I thanked the organist for preventing her from saying those words. I had to look away from her pitying expression, so I drank in the sanctuary with its elegant chandelier, polished wooden altar and pews, and colorful stained glass. I was so used to a small room and Chad at a lectern that I’d forgotten what it was like to sit in a large, airy sanctuary. I’d never gone to a church with stained glass windows, either. In addition to the rich colors of the windows, First Methodist housed mahogany pews with velvet seats, and plush carpet. A spring sun brightened the stained glass—everything felt so . . . opulent. And wrong.

  Then again, I’d spent my whole life trying to do everything right and look where that had landed me: jilted, jobless, and childless. Maybe I should try something different. Maybe I should try doing everything wrong for once.

  “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you,” boomed the minister, and I jumped out of my skin, properly chastised.

  “And also with you,” everyone but me responded. I put my hands on the pew in front of me, ready to bolt as the responsive reading continued. The whole thing sounded like a cult. Fortunately, we went into a hymn, even if it wasn’t one I knew. Hymns were, at the very least, familiar territory. From there the minister read a Psalm.

  I swayed from foot to foot, my night of fitful sleep catching up to me. The last place I wanted to be was church. Why was I here with the woman who wouldn’t take me to church back when I begged? One summer, just after the second grade, I begged to be taken to Vacation Bible School. Sure, my intentions weren’t entirely noble—I wanted to join my classmates and to hopefully prove to them that I wasn’t a weirdo—but I was open to the idea of church.

  My mother, who still looked like a teenager, peered down at me as she was preparing to go out on a date, “But why do you really want to go, Posey? Are you wanting to go to church or are you wanting to see your friends?”

  I wasn’t a dumb child, but I also couldn’t lie, so I said, “Both.”

  She’d said, “I think it’s just for your friends, and I’m not sure I want you subjected to hellfire and brimstone at such a young age. When you’re older, you can go to church if you want to. Then you can decide what you believe.”

  I believed that I wanted to go to Vacation Bible School because I’d heard it was going to be fun.

  So I’d gone to Granny. She’d been delighted at my showing an interest in church and had walked me the three blocks herself on the days Mom took the car. Stubborn as I was, I decided I was grown up enough to make my decision about the church right then and there. Vacation Bible School started off innocently enough. We learned about Jonah in the whale and Noah’s Ark. We played on the playground and drank red Kool-Aid and ate Nutter Butters. All of us learned to sing “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” and the music leader taught us to slow down for the third verse that started “In the beauty of the lilies” but to then ramp it up and sing dramatically the last verse about how Christ was “coming like the glory of the morning on the wave.”

  That music burned through my tiny body straight to my heart. When the preacher spoke of eternal damnation if I didn’t recognize Jesus Christ as my personal savior, then I and several of my classmates walked to the front of the sanctuary with the confidence of the children we were. Later, my mother and my grandmother argued late into the night about whether or not I would go back to the church and be baptized. They spoke in low, harsh whispers, but I could still hear them.

 
“She is a child! They used scare tactics,” my mother said.

  “And if she really did have a religious experience?” my grandmother asked. “Are you one hundred percent sure that our Posey didn’t mean what she did? Are you willing to stake your life on it?”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing when I was her age and had almost the exact same experience.”

  “And disavowing that experience and running off to San Francisco? How did that work out for you?”

  “Well, we got Posey out of the deal,” my mother had finally grumbled.

  “Yes, but at what price?”

  “Mother. If both you and the church hadn’t clamped down so hard on me, maybe I wouldn’t have run away.”

  “Here we go again. Let’s blame me for all of your problems. Yes, it was all my fault.”

  They remained silent for so long I’d almost fallen asleep. At last my mother said softly, “Fine. Let her go.”

  In another couple of Sundays I’d worn a white robe over a shorts set, and Brother Lewis submerged me in a glass tank behind the altar. I hadn’t even known the tank was back there since it usually sat hidden behind curtains. I hadn’t known that I would be completely submerged, and I certainly hadn’t known the entire congregation would be watching. Standing in a see-through tub with the once scary but now mellow preacher holding my hand, I feared drowning even as I answered his questions in a small voice. When it was time to submerge me in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, I flailed, making a splash and striking his thigh.

  Just as suddenly I stood again, water streaming into my eyes. Would I go to hell for striking a minister? I looked up into kind, smiling eyes. “Welcome to the church, Little Sister,” he said.

  I’d been going to church ever since.

  My mother’s presence in the institution she once despised puzzled me, but I’d long since learned to let Lark be Lark.

  By this point in the Ash Wednesday service the minister had moved on to Matthew. He droned on about “not looking somber as the hypocrites do” while we fasted. Finally, we got to sit down, and the sermon began. Dour-faced Reverend Ford spoke about the traditions of Lent, the excesses of Fat Tuesday as exemplified by Mardi Gras—that actually sounded fun. He admonished his flock to make sacrifices that would bring them closer to God but pointed out that sometimes it was better to add something to your routine rather than to just give something up. He talked about his preteen daughter giving up soft drinks and how his wife vowed to get up fifteen minutes earlier each day for a devotion.