Bless Her Heart

by Sally Kilpatrick

  He laughed, a hoarse humorless sound. “A good way to make sure I don’t have a drink is to make sure we don’t have fights.”

  “But you make no sense. You would marry me because that would make everyone in town happy even though we don’t know for sure if getting married would make us happy, but you won’t continue our relationship to see how or if we fit together? That’s insane, you can see that, can’t you?”

  “Insane or not, that’s how it has to be. I’m confident that you and I can work together to be good parents even if we don’t marry. I’ll start looking for a job that pays better, maybe go to a two-year school and get a degree in something.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said, barely getting the words over the lump in my throat. I imagined John working a nine to five job with stiff clothes, short hair, and dull eyes. I mourned the loss of his long hair, and he hadn’t even cut it yet.

  “I’ve been hiding from responsibility most of my life. I’ve even used recovery as an excuse to keep fiddling with pianos and church bands, neither of which pays enough to help you raise a child. It’s time for me to grow up.”

  Tears pricked my eyes. I should’ve never made that quip about how he could help pay for our baby. It was crass and unnecessary. “My mother raised me alone, and I can raise this child. I mean, I’d like your help, and I want you to be a part of our child’s life. But I don’t need your money. I don’t need to be rescued.”

  “I have a bad habit of trying to rescue people,” he said.

  “Maybe I was the good lay for you,” I murmured.

  He faced me, cupping my face so he could thumb away each of my hot tears. “No. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anyone or anything as much as I wanted you.”

  Wanted. Past tense.

  Buck up, Buttercup. You aren’t going to get hung up on another man.

  “So this is it for us as a couple,” I said, willing my tears to be the silent, calm kind—at least until I could make it to the car.

  “I don’t know. Probably. I can’t be a good father if I’m not sober. Maybe we’re too broken to be together.”

  “But everyone is broken in one way or another.”

  “Not as broken as you or me.”

  I nodded. He was right, and I hated him for it. I hadn’t known how much hope I’d held out for our eventual reconciliation until it’d been taken away. Maybe that could be my memoir title: Figuring Out What I Want Only After It’s Been Wrested Away: The Posey Love Story.

  No, the Posey Adams story.

  “I have to go now,” I said. Too many emotions, too many scars, too many changes. Who cared that it was broad daylight? I was going home to take a nap.

  For a second he looked as though he might ask me to stay, but instead he stood and walked me to the door. Rowdy came to say goodbye, and I gave him an extra pet because something told me it would be quite some time before we met again.

  * * *

  On the way home, I stopped for those SpaghettiOs. The dictatorial kidney bean within demanded meatballs. I had to question his—or her—judgment. Even so, the baby was the boss at the moment so SpaghettiOs with processed meatballs it was. I grabbed a two-liter of ginger ale and tried my best not to be conspicuous. Unfortunately, Miss Georgette almost ran into me as I rounded the corner with my eyes drawn to the Hostess Cakes.

  “Why, Posey! I’ve heard such good things from Ms. Varner. She says you have settled in so well.”

  “I’ve been enjoying those kids, too. Thank you for nudging me in that direction, Miss Georgette.”

  She drew me into a fleshy, Giorgio-drenched hug. “I know it’s been a tough few weeks, but I am so proud of you for getting your life together and walking around with such a glow.”

  My smile wavered. She wouldn’t be as proud once she figured out the source of my glow.

  “Thank you,” I murmured.

  “Well, I hate to cut this chat short, but I have to get some sherbet and 7UP to make the punch for the Ladies’ Ministry meeting. We’re getting the church all spiffied up for tomorrow.”

  I froze. “At Love Ministries?”

  “Oh, honey, no. I went back over to First Baptist. Hope I’ll see you there tomorrow.”

  Agape, I watched her shuffle toward the ice cream aisle. She’d waltzed right into First Baptist and was already a part of the Ladies’ Ministry again? Could it possibly be that easy for me?

  I took my purchases to the register. If the teen cashier smacking her gum had any inkling about my secret, she said nothing to indicate it. I had at least a few more weeks before anyone would notice. Right?

  * * *

  After a well-deserved nap, I heated up the SpaghettiOs and ate half of them before my stomach decided no more. I had the oddest craving for Long John Silver’s fish and chicken, but I was not about to drive to Jefferson to scratch that particular itch. I pushed the not quite empty bowl to the center of the table and leaned on my hand.

  So.

  This was pregnancy.

  My mother burst through the back door and pulled a chair over to the refrigerator before I could even say hello. She climbed on the chair and stood on her tiptoes to open a cabinet above the fridge, taking out a stack of placemats and reaching behind a cookie jar to bring out a bottle of something. She didn’t even bother to replace the mats or close the cabinet before jumping down and opening a drawer to take out a souvenir shot glass.

  She downed two shots and pulled the chair to the table to have a seat.

  “Mom?”

  She poured a third shot and tossed it back.

  “Mom.”

  What was with all the drinking?

  When she reached for the bottle a fourth time, I grabbed her wrist. “Mother. What are you doing?”

  “For the second time in my life, I am drinking myself into a stupor.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “No!” She buried her face into her hands and sighed heavily, finally looking up at me. “My talk with Santi did not go well.”

  “What a coincidence! My talk with John didn’t go well, either, so I drowned my sorrow in SpaghettiOs.”

  Mom looked at the bowl at the center of the table and scowled at its many offenses: processing, sodium, meat. “That’s disgusting.”

  “I know. It wasn’t my request.”

  She chuckled. “When I was pregnant with you, I wanted strawberries, always strawberries. I think it’s because your father—”

  She clamped her mouth shut.

  “I’m over thirty now. Don’t you think you can finally tell me who my father is?”

  She reached for the bottle of whiskey again, and I let her because I would willingly let her have a hangover if it meant she would finally tell me where I really came from. At this point, it had to be something awful like my father was Satan himself. I’d worry she’d been one of Manson’s girls, but he’d gone to prison before I could’ve been conceived.

  Conjugal visit?

  I shuddered. “Mom, you have to tell me. Please.”

  She tossed back her fourth shot and closed her eyes. “There. There’s the warmth I was looking for.”

  I glared at her, unwilling to break eye contact until she told me.

  “The truth is . . . I don’t know who your father is.”

  Oh.

  My mother had a reputation for being loose, but I had never expected this from her. She might be unconventional, but she was also quite meticulous. Had she done drugs? Had she been drugged?

  “You can’t say something like that and not tell me more. Please, Mom.”

  “Oh, I can.”

  “I am asking you, no, begging you, to tell me,” I said.

  She shook her head no. “You’re like Mama: too judgy.”

  I threw my hands up. “I don’t think I can afford to be judgy now!”

  “True.” She stared beyond me, thinking of another time or another person, no doubt under the effects of the whisky she’d drunk.

  Finally, she took in a ragged breath. “You know
I went to California and managed to hook up with the only hippies in creation who, of course, wanted to create an intentional community in Tennessee, right?”

  “Let’s say that I do.”

  “I almost left them then and there. To finally make it all the way to California only to be dragged back out to the boondocks, well, that was like a slap in the face. But I was in love. Or, at least I thought I was, so I followed a man back to Tennessee. An older man.”

  Ah. That explained part of her reaction on the night I told her about my engagement.

  I wanted to ask if that man was my father, but I didn’t. I waited for her to continue. At this point the whiskey had taken effect, and she slurred her words enough to give a hint of her original Tennessee accent, something she usually worked to hide.

  “Only problem is, that man I loved didn’t love me enough, or he said he loved me but he also loved another girl. I was young and stupid, and I joined what they called a ‘four marriage.’”

  “A what?”

  “Four marriage. A marriage with four people.”

  I tried to keep from staring at her, but I couldn’t seem to keep horror out of my expression. “That’s a thing?”

  “In our community it was rare, but some people insisted these marriages would work.” She reached for the bottle, but I took it and put it on the other side of the table out of her reach.

  “So my father is one of two men?” As I said the words I realized there were even more possibilities. “Or three?”

  “One of two. Either Jamie or Roger.”

  “Mom!”

  She pointed her finger at me, “See? That judgment in your voice? That is why I never told you.”

  She was right, and I was sitting at the table with my own baby out of wedlock. Well, I was wed, but the baby hadn’t been conceived in lock. At least my mother had been married in some shape or form when she’d managed to get knocked up with me. “You’re right. I have no room to judge, and I’m sorry. Where are Jamie and Roger? These days we can do a DNA test and figure this out.”

  Mom shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You have heard of this magical place called Facebook, right?”

  She grimaced and waved away the idea. Lark Adams didn’t care much for technology.

  She was also clamming up again, and I couldn’t let that happen. “Can you at least tell me what happened?”

  She sighed. “Okay. Fine. I had the hots for Jamie. Jamie had the hots for Allison. She held a torch for Roger, and Roger? Well, he wasn’t all that particular. At first everything was going well. Jamie and I, who are still legally married in the eyes of the state of California, lived together and grew fruits and vegetables that we’d sell at the local farmer’s market. I was learning how to grow strawberries from another lady in the community and thinking about leaving long enough to take the courses to become a midwife. Then one day Jamie came home and told me he wanted to expand our marital bond to include Allison and Roger.”

  I nodded because I didn’t trust myself to say anything that wasn’t judgy.

  “I didn’t want to, of course. I wanted to keep Jamie all to myself, but he wore me down on the idea and eventually we entered the foursome.”

  My mother was kinda like a sister wife. I can’t believe my mother was a sister wife.

  “The first week, things went great. Jamie was super attentive to me. Allison and I shared chores and cooking supper. Then we’d play cards and sing songs, often laughing late into the night. I kept trying to prepare myself for the day when we would switch partners. One night, as we headed to bed, Jamie took my hand and put it in Roger’s. Then he escorted Allison down the hall to our bedroom.”

  I had that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. My mother couldn’t have been more than eighteen and far from home. The man she loved, a guy she was still legally married to, was handing her off to another man.

  “It wasn’t that Roger was bad looking,” she finally said. “I just, well, I still didn’t know him.”

  Tensing up, I leaned across the table not wanting the story to go in the direction I was afraid that it was going.

  She smiled. “But he was sweet and kind and, frankly, better in bed than Jamie.”

  She paused in the moment, even blushing a bit. I felt like a voyeur to my mother’s memories, understanding perfectly why she hadn’t wanted to tell me this story. Had she told me any time before, my prudish side would’ve condemned her. Now, I had no room to talk.

  She looked at the shot glass, twirling it between her fingers and finally sighed deeply. “We lasted another week. Jamie ran off with Allison, and Roger ran off to find them. Turns out everyone loved Allison. Even people around town gave me dirty looks because I was ‘that little beanpole who ran off Allison.’ ”

  No wonder Mom’d never been keen on remarrying. The one time she tried marriage she’d been abandoned by not just one person, but three. I harbored an irrational dislike of this Allison person on my mother’s behalf.

  “I waited, thinking surely someone would come back for me, but two months went by with no word. By then I was pregnant. I had morning sickness so bad that I had trouble pulling my weight with community chores. So I packed up and came home with my tail between my legs.”

  A little over a month ago, I’d come home with my tail between my legs, too. Now I knew why she’d welcomed me: My mother wasn’t one to admit her mistakes, but she had enough compassion that she didn’t want anyone else to suffer as she had. No doubt Granny had really let her have it when she first came home.

  “So Jamie or Roger, huh?”

  She shrugged. “Since you were premature, it was really hard to say. You look a little more like Roger, I think, but who knows. At this point I’ve forgotten their features. Both of them are faceless memories from a time I’d rather forget.”

  “Jamie, Roger, Allison, and Lark,” I mused. “Those don’t sound like hippie names.”

  Mom laughed. “By accident, I already had the perfect hippie name, but they all changed theirs—or tried to. Jamie preferred to be called Moonwalker and Roger went by Hawk.” She giggled, the liquor well in effect, well enough that she swayed in her seat and I wondered if she’d even eaten supper.

  “What about Allison?”

  She snorted. “You mean Divine Rainbow?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Yeah.”

  I squeezed my mother’s hand. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “You’re only the second person I’ve told.”

  “Well, I promise I won’t name this child Moonwalker, Hawk, or Divine Rainbow,” I said.

  “You better not!”

  “And for what it’s worth, I think they all left the best part of their marriage behind.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  “You going to tell me what happened with Santiago?”

  “Remember how you’re the second person I’ve told?”

  I found it hard to believe that Santiago would be that mad at Mom for something that had happened so long ago, but what did I know?

  “You don’t need any more whiskey. Drink some water instead.”

  “Ah, the daughter becomes the mother,” she said.

  “Yes. I have it on good authority that you need water, aspirin, and to go to sleep.”

  “Santi always takes Alka-Seltzer when he imbibes too much,” she murmured.

  “Do what you have to do, but go to bed, and I’ll make you ginger tea in the morning.”

  She stood, swaying a little as she went for the medicine cabinet to get Alka-Seltzer. She filled a cup with water and dropped two tablets in then turned and pointed in my general direction. “You’re supposed to go to church tomorrow. End of Lent.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  She drank her Alka-Setlzer and staggered off to bed, but I heard her checking the locks on her way.

  chapter 27

  I tried to sleep, really I did.

  Instead, I found myself wrapped in an afghan and sitting on the porch swing when
the sun came up.

  Going to church was a completely different proposition than when I’d started Lent. Sooner or later, everyone would notice that I was pregnant. They might assume the father was Chad. Professional gossips like Miss Georgette might consult calendars and oracles and come up with a different conclusion. I didn’t really care other than the fact it might keep me from getting a job at Ellery Elementary, a job I desperately needed for the insurance just as much as the livelihood.

  Has going to church ever made me a better person?

  At some point when I was younger I think it had. As a teenager, I’d gone on mission trips and worked in soup kitchens. I discovered my vocation at the after-school tutoring program where I volunteered. In college, the church had led me to Chad—there was a strike against it. I’d also gone on mission trips to other countries and made friends there, a plus.

  I smiled at the memory of Guatemalan children who’d sung me a song after I’d taught them Sunday School in my broken Spanish. I’d always come away with far more than I’d given when I went on a mission trip, whether local or abroad.

  Come to think of it, Chad had put a stop to those when we married, too.

  Only, I couldn’t think of anything Biblical without hearing Chad’s voice. After five years of his preaching, he’d spoken on just about everything.

  Except Song of Solomon.

  I couldn’t help but smile at John’s version of getting to know me biblically. My navel as a goblet? Please.

  That thing was probably going to stick out at some point. At least, Mom’s belly button had been an outie while she was pregnant with Rain.

  Maybe if I could get back to basics?

  Love God with all I had and love my neighbor as myself?

  Eh, as long as Chad moved far, far away I could possibly handle that.

  Did I want my child to be raised in the church or not?

  Well, this was an easier question: My gut said yes despite any misgivings for myself. I couldn’t imagine a life that didn’t involve putting my little girl or boy in Sunday School and preschool and Vacation Bible School.

  Well, maybe not the last day of Vacation Bible School.

  So, I’m going.

  My shoulder angel beamed, glad with the decision I’d made. Unfortunately, my shoulder devil wasn’t quite ready to give up the fight.