Vada Faith

by Barbara A. Whittington

  “You don’t know these people, honey,” Joy Ruth said, examining her nails. She turned back to the mirror and smoothed on some lip gloss. “Who are they anyway? Where’d you find them? I mean, they show up here from only the Lord knows where. They buy some land,” she ran her tongue across her teeth, a reflex from the lip gloss, “build a new house and now, wham-o, you’re going to have a baby for them. A baby, Vada Faith. A real live little baby. Like one of your precious twins. A little human being.”

  “I’ve thought it all through. You don’t seem to understand that a surrogacy baby would never be mine. It would belong to Roy and Dottie Kilgore. Right from its conception.” I came to stand behind her, staring into the same mirror with her. “Didn’t the Virgin Mary give her son, Jesus, to the world? Well, that is exactly what I would be doing. It’s something I want to do more than anything else. Can’t you try to understand, for me?”

  When she frowned, I picked up my tote bag and started loading it with supplies to take home.

  “This is not about the Virgin Mary,” she snapped. “Have you forgotten about your husband. What about John Wasper? What does he say about all this?”

  “I have not forgotten him. I’ll tell him when the time comes.” I closed my tote bag and went over to the Coke machine. I put in some coins and punched a button. The Coke fell with a bang.

  “When the time comes?” She stood up and folded her arms in front of her. “You mean you haven’t even told your husband what you want to do? Well, the time has come, girl. You’re nuts. You said being pregnant was no picnic. You liked giving birth even less. Now help me figure this out.”

  “No matter what I do, you’re against me.” I opened the Coke and took a long drink. Like some of her words, it burned going down. “It makes no difference what I do, even if I think of changing my eye shadow you say it’s a mistake.”

  “This is not eye shadow we’re talking about here, little sister.”

  “Don’t call me little sister. I am your age. Exactly.” I was so mad I could spit nails. I wasn’t stupid. I knew it was time to discuss it with my husband. I just hadn’t figured out how.

  “You,” she said, pointing her finger at me, “were born one minute after me, therefore, you are my little sister.”

  “So for that I have to pay for the rest of my life. You are not my boss. I hate you sometimes, Joy Ruth. Lately I hate you a lot.”

  “The feeling is mutual.”

  I grabbed my “Shop ’til I Drop” tote bag and slammed out of the shop. Miss High and Mighty could finish the inventory and close up by herself. I was mad as a hornet. She was being a pain in the butt. I was mad at myself too. For letting her get to me. For knowing she was right about talking it over with John Wasper sooner. Just when I’d thought things in my life were about to get better.

  I set off down the street, furious at the world for not being perfect.

  I didn’t look back as I hurried away. I knew Joy Ruth was standing in the doorway watching me. It was out of character for me to leave upset. I always wanted to work things out, especially with her. Well, she could just get used to things being different between us.

  It was time to cut the cord which had thickened between us when mama walked off and left us. Sure, she left us with our daddy. However, two little girls needed a mama more than they needed anything else.

  I headed down Main Street at a fast clip, the tote bag slapping at my legs. The sun beat down on the top of my head. I could feel a trickle of perspiration beginning at my hairline. I wished now I’d driven to work. I wasn’t in any mood to amble through City Park the way I usually did, enjoying the flowers and listening to the birds.

  Thoughts of mama leaving us in that run-down trailer with daddy ran through my mind like a bad movie.

  “Yoo hoo, Vada Faith!” I turned at the familiar voice.

  I shaded my eyes and looked across the street. Midgy Brown stood on the corner pushing her frizzy red hair out of her eyes.

  “Hey,” I said. While she was a good friend and steady customer I wasn’t in the mood to talk to her about her latest country heartthrob or about her latest cause. She was always heading up some committee to save something.

  Nope, today, I had my own problems to think about and nobody was going to help me. Nobody but me, myself, and I.

  Chapter Two

  My very first lesson in small town dynamics came the summer I met John Wasper Waddell.

  It was hot that afternoon, the day he and his big brother Bruiser, and his younger brother Bobby Joe, rode up in front of our trailer on brand new bikes. Bruiser put down his shiny kick stand and yelled from the middle of the yard, “Hey, you twins. You wanna build a fort?”

  John Wasper and Bobby Joe had hopped off their bikes and stood beside him staring across the yard at us.

  It was almost too good to be true. There were no kids on our road and most days Joy Ruth and I were left to amuse ourselves.

  “Yes,” Joy Ruth and I screamed in unison, “we wanna build a fort.”

  We jumped from the front porch steps where we’d been fighting over the comics and raced to meet them, tripping over our flip flops as we went. We showed the boys the creek that ran along the back of the property. They promptly jumped in and splashed us until our shorts and shirts clung to our skinny bodies like Saran Wrap and our blond hair hung in strings. We didn’t care.

  When their backs were turned we pushed them into the creek and fell in behind them, laughing and splashing.

  That was the beginning of our friendship. The boys came nearly every day after that and we spent hours hammering tree houses and forts and building dams in the creek to keep the turtles and frogs from escaping.

  If only we’d kept to that simple routine.

  However, we got bored and started making the long trek into town to the A & P for a candy bar. I was the only one who bought a different kind of candy bar each time.

  The day I bought my first Baby Ruth was when it happened.

  I had the candy bar in my hand and was pulling change from the pocket of my red seersucker shorts, anticipating the taste of chocolate and peanuts on my tongue. I got into the check-out line, leaving Joy Ruth and the boys to make their decisions. I was eager to peel off the red and white wrapper and take my first bite of the fat chocolate bar.

  “I might just start calling Joy Ruth Baby Ruth,” I thought as I waited. I looked back at her, acting cool, flipping her hair in John Wasper’s cute boy face. She would hate being called baby anything. She thought being born one minute before me made her the oldest sister. The more superior.

  Daddy said it didn’t. He said I might have been born first except Joy Ruth was wrapped so tightly around me she caused me to be blue and they had to pull her out first. He said she squealed for an hour after they untangled us. Then when they put us together in the same crib he said we snuggled up like two peas in a pod.

  “Hello, Vada Faith,” Miss Wright had said that summer day at the A & P, looking down at me as she rang up my candy bar. I learned from her name badge that her whole name was Miss Emily Wright. I only knew her as Miss Wright. She taught Bible school every summer at the Tabernacle Holiness Church on Park Street which wasn’t close enough for us to walk to but we did anyway.

  “Hello, Miss Wright,” I said. She peered down at me with her big milky eyes, magnified by thick glasses framed in tortoise shell.

  She turned to Miss Dunkel who ran the register beside her and jerked her permed head toward me. “Bea,” she said, nodding, “this is Vada Faith. One of the Dunn twins.”

  I knew Miss Bea Dunkel too. She served cupcakes at Bible school from the kitchen in the church basement and she got mad if you got crumbs on the floor.

  “I know Vada Faith,” Miss Dunkel said to Miss Wright, her eyes never leaving her register. She stared over half glasses that hung by a rhinestone chain around her skinny neck.

  When Miss Wright held out my change, I could have been a mechanical doll wrapping my fingers around the cold coins for all the
heed she paid me. I turned to go.

  “Helena and Delbert’s girl,” Miss Wright said, snapping her words off like breaking crackers. “Hel-e-na Car-ter.” She started talking loudly as if Miss Dunkel had ear wax build up.

  “Oh, Helena, yes,” Miss Dunkel said. She sounded as if she and my mother were best friends and that she had the inside scoop. Well, my mama was a mystery. Even I knew that.

  “Helena always fancied herself higher up the totem pole than us.” Miss Dunkel’s voice sounded again. “Then doesn’t she marry that handsome Delbert Dunn. He didn’t have the best reputation. Just the best body.”

  “You mean Doolittle Dunn?” Miss Wright’s fingers hit the register keys with a clang as she checked items for the man who’d stood behind me. She had put special emphasis on Daddy’s nickname. Doo-little.

  “Well, Helena ran off and left them,” Bea’s voice rose to a high pitch. “So poor Delbert can’t hold a regular job raising those wild girls. I feel so sorry for him.”

  I was nearing the door, fighting back tears. The Wheaties I’d had earlier that morning were threatening to slide back up my throat. How could they say such awful things?

  My enthusiasm for the candy bar was gone.

  “It’s a cryin’ shame,” Miss Wright said, “a real cryin’ shame.”

  I made it outside before the tears came. I swallowed hard and threw the Baby Ruth into the trash barrel on the sidewalk. Through the big plate glass window of the A & P, I could see Miss Wright and Miss Dunkel ringing up other customers.

  I ran across the parking lot as fast as I could go, covering my ears to try to stop Miss Wright’s voice going around in my head.

  I wanted to shut out the truth in her words. Our mama had left us and our daddy didn’t have a job. I knew all that.

  I refused to let anyone see me cry. Not Joy Ruth who thought our life was fine and certainly not John Wasper whose boy face I had already begun to love.

  Behind me, John Wasper started calling out, “Hey, Vada Faith. Wait up, you hear. Wait up. Vada Faith?”

  Years later, I would wait many times over for Mr. James John “Wasper” Waddell but not that day. I kept on running, my red canvas tennis shoes hitting the hot pavement, driving the heat right up into my feet and through the rest of my body until it came to rest on the top of my head like hot coals.

  I ran as if all the demons in Hell were after me.

  I looked over my shoulder only once to see John Wasper and Joy Ruth in earnest conversation, their heads bent together, munching on the candy bars they’d bought. Bruiser and Bobby Joe lagged behind licking chocolate from their fingers.

  Even though Joy Ruth and John Wasper stared at the candy bars longer than any of us, the two of them always picked a Hershey with Almonds. They said you always knew what you were getting when you got a Hershey with Almonds.

  To this day, those two will not try anything new or different and certainly not anything controversial.

  On the other hand, I, Vada Faith, was always up for something new. Back then and now. Something different. Even if I ended up hating it, I was always willing to give it a try.

  I slammed into the trailer that summer day, past daddy stretched out on the sofa reading the newspaper, and buried myself in the sweet smell of the patchwork quilt covering the small bed I shared with my sister.

  We didn’t have much, but daddy kept everything we had clean, especially the bedding. He was home most days and he was always running the old washer out on the built-in porch, hanging clothes on the clothesline strung between two posts out behind the trailer.

  I can see him to this day with several clothespins stuck in his mouth hanging a row of our worn pink panties on the line to dry in the sun.

  “Hey,” Daddy said, coming to stand in the doorway as I lay sobbing on the bed. “You all right, Vada Faith?”

  It was his standard question.

  “I’m all right,” I said, sniffling, giving my standard answer.

  “Okay.” He stood there a minute more, looking uncomfortable, then he trudged back to his newspaper.

  Problem solved.

  Well, not entirely.

  A seed of longing was forming deep inside me. A longing to be something more than I was. To be someone special. Someone everybody looked up to.

  That day I just wiped away my tears and joined the others in the backyard.

  At the edge of the woods there was a big competition going on. The prize was the extra Hershey bar John Wasper had bought. The person who could climb to the top of the old Maple tree won the candy bar.

  I knew I could win hands down. I was the best climber in the bunch and the most daring.

  Besides I was motivated. My Baby Ruth rested at the bottom of the trash can at the A & P. And I was hungry for chocolate.

  Chapter Three

  When I rounded the corner of our street on my way from work that day, I could see the old Victorian home Grandma Belle had left us. The paint was worn on the big wraparound porch where Eleanor Roosevelt reportedly had sat. I could picture the President’s wife daintily perched on the edge of one of the old wicker chairs sipping tea from one of grandma’s bone china cups with the pink roses.

  John Wasper had filled the spacious lawn with beautiful flowers and shrubs. The neat bungalows that had sprung up all around the old house made it a decent neighborhood in which to live. However, the old house was an antique that had lost its luster.

  I opened the mailbox at the curb and pulled out a handful of envelopes, a bunch of junk mail, and a Land’s End Catalog. I wondered where John Wasper was. His pickup was absent from the driveway at the side of the house. I knew he’d taken the girls to a movie. He was always stopping somewhere else. My husband loved people and people loved him. His habit of being gone was grating on my nerves lately.

  Whatever had happened to the days when it was just the two of us? When we’d rushed home to be together? We’d make love and tell each other how wonderful we were together.

  I wandered through the quiet house and wished my husband was home. I loved him but he was almost never home. He’d run out in the middle of the night if someone needed a flat tire fixed. He’d take time off work to take a neighbor to the doctor. He never once asked how I felt about his outings. He just took off. He said he tried to live up to his Grandma Belle’s creed. “Bloom where you are planted.”

  Well, John Wasper was blooming all right. Shady-Creek-style.

  I did the breakfast dishes and assembled a dinner casserole of chicken breasts and packaged corn bread stuffing, topping it off with a can of cream of chicken soup. Usually I called Joy Ruth and we conferred on our dinner menus. Not today. She could cook whatever she wanted in her quiet, orderly apartment and eat it alone for all I cared.

  In the bedroom, I opened my jewelry box. There underneath the red satin lining lay my secret. If my sister knew what I had done she’d have a stroke. She’d never know because I’d never tell her. She could go to her grave thinking Roy and Dottie Kilgore had come looking for me, when really, I’d gone looking for them.

  I didn’t have to pull back the red satin lining and take the newspaper clipping from its hiding place to read what it said. I had it memorized. The words were seared on my brain forever. They were the words that were going to change my life. They already had.

  Even today, when John Wasper called and said he was taking the girls to the movie, I didn’t say, “Why aren’t you working?” Instead I said, “Okay,” and kept right on pushing the broom across the tile floor of the shop. Because I knew if everything worked out my dream was going to come true. I would be somebody.

  Somebody besides the high school beauty queen whose mother ran off and left her and her sister. Somebody besides the mother of twins. Somebody besides the wife of a former football hero. I would be someone in my own right. I’d be the first woman to be a surrogate mother in the town of Shady Creek, West Virginia.

  One month earlier I had found my answer in the personal ads. Right after Men Seeking Women. I w
as getting ready to read Deals on Wheels because I wanted to replace my old car. That was when I saw the ad inside the heart. “Wanted: Special woman with big heart to help couple complete their family circle. Surrogate mother must be caring, loving, willing to make sacrifice. Be our missing link. Money reward. Growing experience. Can’t wait to hear from you. We love you already. Roy and Dottie.”

  Just below the ad were the horoscopes. I did a double take. Under mine it said, “A new source of income presents itself. Go for it.”

  I didn’t need a chair over the head to know this horoscope and the ad from Roy and Dottie Kilgore had my name written all over it. Fate had already tied me to the Kilgores.

  I was further convinced when I finished reading my horoscope. “Family members,” it read, “will stand behind you in the end.” So, Joy Ruth would eventually come around if I became a surrogate. Besides she always did. We’d never been separate on any big issue. That horoscope was all the confirmation I needed.

  The phone number was busy all that Saturday, so I had plenty of time to think about the issues of surrogacy and whether I could go through with carrying a child and giving it away. By Sunday when I finally talked to Roy Kilgore, I was convinced I could.

  I felt as though I’d known Roy Kilgore for years. It was apparent to me then that I was the surrogate for whom they’d been searching. We arranged to meet the following week at the Holiday Inn in Charleston. My fate was already sealed.

  “You’re everything I’d hoped for and more,” Roy Kilgore had said, smiling, coming toward me across the parking lot of the hotel. I had dressed in my good white sheath dress to show off my tan. He first took both my hands in his and sort of shook them and then he pulled me into his arms for a bear hug. Dottie was more reserved. She wore a designer suit and carried a matching cream handbag.

  Over lunch at a nearby restaurant Roy wanted to know every detail of my life and all about the birth of my twins.

  “They’re beautiful babies,” Dottie Kilgore said, warming up some as she looked at dozens of photos of my cute blonde baby girls in the album I’d brought along.