Exactly one hour past the end of the church service, she stood at the doorway of her own family dining room, holding a pitcher of sweet tea in her hands. There were a dozen guests today plus three of her own family members, Becca, son-in-law Aaron and granddaughter Abby. Multiple threads of conversation could be heard from where Martha stood. She loved the fellowship of these Sunday afternoons, the always-voiced appreciation of a good meal, the comfort to be found in repeated ritual and familiar faces.
She looked down the long harvest table to see who needed a refill, then stepped forward and added more tea to Esau Austin’s glass. Aaron had just finished sharing the story of one of their dairy cows who refused to go into her milking lane until Aaron put her favorite alfalfa hay at the front.
Esau thanked Martha for the tea, and then to Aaron, chuckled and said, “Easy enough to see who’s running that show.”
Warm laughter drifted up, and from her seat across the table, Becca glanced at her husband with affection. “They like to let him think he’s in charge.”
Once she’d completed a round with the tea, Martha took her own seat next to Abby who had finished her soup and was dipping out another serving from the big white stoneware bowl at the center of the table with the appetite of youth. “This is really good, Grandma,” she said.
“Thank you,” Martha said, patting Abby’s hand. “I’m glad you like it.”
Esau put down his glass of tea and ran a hand through his white beard. “I guess you all heard about Millie Griffith’s passing,” he said, his aging voice suddenly serious.
With the words, something in Martha’s heart caught, a spasm of sorts that startled her with its intensity. One hand automatically went to her chest. She lifted her gaze and let herself look at Becca only to find confirmation that Esau’s news had hit her with equal effect. Becca’s face had lost its color, her eyes brimming with instant tears.
Martha felt the curious gazes of those sitting nearby and forced normalcy into her voice when she said, “I’m so sorry to hear that. She was a kind lady.”
Esau nodded. “She was.”
“The funeral,” Becca said, the words uttered with what Martha heard as deliberate neutrality. “Do you know when it is?”
“Tomorrow morning,” Esau said. “At eleven o’clock.”
Becca stood and slid back her chair, the legs making a sudden scrape against the wood floor. She grasped the table edge, her fingers white against the grain, steadied herself and then said, “Excuse me, please,” before walking quickly from the room.
Martha heard the screen door off the kitchen at the back of the house wheeze open, then shut with a loud clap that made her flinch.
She glanced at her son-in-law and saw that he, too, had made a connection of worry in this news. It was there in the wrinkle of his brow, the firm set to his mouth. Martha could only hope that they were both wrong, and that there was no need for concern. Becca was a mature woman who had long ago put her own desires beneath the needs of her family. It was hardly fair to doubt her now.
But Martha also knew that Mrs. Griffith’s passing would bring the woman’s grandson back to the county. She knew, too, that there would be no talking Becca out of attending tomorrow’s funeral.
A wave of tiredness gripped her, so intense she could barely sit straight beneath its onslaught. Maybe, somewhere along the way, she had become complacent, allowed herself to believe that what was done was done. Even though she had once questioned the path they’d taken, she had deferred to her husband’s judgment, certain that their actions had been for the greater good.
Sitting here at this table, a table around which she had raised her three children, Becca, Jacob and Emmy, she could admit she no longer knew. And she could not help but wonder if, in the end, a single choice that had seemed so right at the time, an act of obedience on her part, would be the final definition of so many lives.
2
Departures and Arrivals
“Life can only be understood backwards;
but it must be lived forwards.”
- Soren Kierkegaard
Now
The day of Millicent Griffith’s funeral dawned as a sparkling April morning, a day when the entire town of Ballard appeared dewy and again renewed under spring’s generous return. The back parking lot of the Ballard Methodist Church overflowed with cars and trucks alike, late arrivers for the morning funeral squeezing in along the grass edging. Others left their vehicles in the downtown library’s lot and walked north uphill to the church in a somber procession of dark silhouettes.
At two minutes before eleven o’clock, Becca Brubaker lingered at the entrance of the church sanctuary, her hands trembling against the strap of her black purse. With a look of forced determination, she walked down the center aisle and took a seat in one of the back pews. She kept her gaze focused straight ahead, never once letting herself meet eyes with those around her, a representative mix of Ballard County citizens in modern clothing as well as some members of her own Brethren community wearing black shawls and black bonnets with their conservative print dresses.
The organist played a Charles Wesley hymn, the old Methodist song rising up to fill the place with a combined sorrow and celebration. Becca sat with her hands folded in her lap, the words playing through her head, each stanza soothing her with a stoic peace. She’d told herself over and over while she was getting dressed this morning that she had every right to be here, every right to pay her respects to a woman who had meant a great deal to her, her motives void of anything more calculated than a wrenching sense of loss.
Drawing in a steady breath, she let her gaze sweep the front of the church, spotting him instantly at the end of the pew directly in front of the casket. Matt. The sight of him brought with it a start of electricity, a reigniting of something long ago extinguished.
Even from this distance, Becca could feel the waves of his grief, as if the connection between them had never been severed, and she could still feel what he felt.
Guilt clanged inside her like the ring of the church bells that had called everyone into this sanctuary to honor the life of Millicent Griffith. There had never been any question that he would be here today, and maybe that should have been all the reason she needed not to come. Certainly, this was true in the eyes of her mother and her husband. Even after all these years, still swimming upstream when it would have been so much easier to follow the natural path of things and simply stay away. And yet, she needed to say this good-bye.
Becca longed, suddenly, for Matt to turn his head, to drink in the sight of him, imagining that this full on appraisal would quench the thirst inside her the way a glass of cold water cooled her throat after hours of working in her garden. It was wrong, this need that had consumed her in the hours since she’d learned of Mrs. Griffith’s death. But a single thought had stuck in her mind, and she could not stop herself from worrying it the way a child worries a loose tooth. This was very likely the last time Matt would have a reason to come back to Ballard County, very likely the last time she would ever see him. She told herself that maybe there was relief to be found in this, as if the end were finally in sight, a final closing up of any lingering what-ifs.
People continued to file into the church, a blend of young, old and somewhere in between. Millie Griffith had been a woman known in the community for her devotion to helping those less fortunate. Programs created through her efforts varied from the collection of Christmas gifts for children with a parent in prison to the creation of a food bank where single mothers could come for groceries every Monday morning.
Despite the gap in generations between them, Mrs. Griffith had been Becca’s friend. For more than fifteen years, Becca, along with her mama, and then later on her own, delivered eggs to the Griffith house on Highland Street once a week. By word of mouth alone, Mrs. Griffith single-handedly helped grow the Miller’s egg business to the point where Becca could hardly make all the deliveries in one day. And, to Becca, personally, she gave another kindness.
Becca let her eyes drift to the back of Matt’s head again, struck anew with the reality of seeing him. She’d imagined it too many times to count, until their past began to seem like someone else’s dream.
During that last summer when they’d been together, Matt had been a seventeen-year old boy. Today, she saw the man he had become, his shoulders wider now beneath his dark suit, his jaw line more defined. He was the kind of man women call good-looking, the kind of man who would never be single. She could not help but wonder, then, why there was no one by his side today.
The reality of that ignited a spark of gladness inside her that seemed beneath her. Had she hoped somewhere deep down that if she could not have him, then no one else would, either?
The thought was a selfish one. After all, she had known from the beginning that the bar had been set too high. That in spite of what they felt for each other, people were different, and no matter how much they wanted to believe otherwise, those differences mattered.
In the end, those differences had separated them.
In the end, they mattered more than either of them could ever have imagined.
3
Collapsed Bridges
Millicent Griffith: County Matriarch’s “Influence Will be Missed”
- The Ballard County Times
Now
It was exactly the kind of day Gran would have chosen for her funeral, bright sun and blue skies. “I want smiles at the end, Matt. No tears for me. Where I’m going, there’s nothing to be sad about.”
Matt Griffith pictured his grandmother as she had been when he was growing up, a spitfire of energy and motivation. Baking biscuits at five in the morning. Ironing his clothes before school. Rehearsing at the piano before choir practice on Wednesday nights. Driving the two of them downtown to Simpson’s Grocery in her big black Ford, her hands gripping a steering wheel the size of a tractor trailer tire.
He thought then of the woman she had been during his visits these past ten years, staring at him from the nursing home bed, not a spark of recognition in her blue eyes, a shrunken shell of her former self. Death could be cruel when it consumed a person in stages, each of Gran’s strokes stealing a piece of her identity until, in the end, there was little left of the person she had once been.
Sitting on the hard-backed pew, listening to the Reverend Prillaman remind those who had known his grandmother about the life she’d led, Matt wished for her faith, for her conviction that there was a purpose for everything that happened, a reason behind each of the events in a person’s life. She had tried to teach him this as a boy, but too young, he had decided that life was made up of little more than coincidence and chaos, that people were merely victims of circumstance, of moments of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He squeezed his eyes shut against a sudden deluge of memory, a day over thirty years ago when he’d sat in this same sanctuary as a little boy, two caskets lined up parallel to one another where Gran’s now sat alone. He’d been unable to look at the faces of his mother and father that day, burrowing his head into the curve of his grandmother’s arm, her soothing hands anchoring him to her.
Throughout his childhood, Gran had been the buffer between him and the memories of the accident that had taken the lives of his parents. They filled his head now, a collage of sounds and images disjointed by time and a concerted effort to forget. The unrelenting wail of an ambulance siren, the cold sting of sleet blowing through a broken back window where he’d sat trapped behind his father’s seat. And his own six-year old voice crying out their names, the silence telling him once and for all that they would never again answer.
Matt blinked hard now to erase the images, focusing on the remainder of his grandmother’s eulogy even as the words blended with those uttered in memory of his parents so long ago.
Reverend Prillaman closed the service with a prayer, an uplifting deliverance from this life to the next that Gran would have found satisfying. The pastor stepped down from the pulpit, and a woman with freckles and long wavy, red hair took his place. Matt recognized her as an older version of a young girl who had sung in the choir when he was growing up. She faced the crowd and stood for a moment, eyes closed. There was no music, just the rise of her voice a cappella. Amazing grace. How sweet the sound.
For the first time since he’d received the call that Gran was gone, tears filled his eyes, spilling over and falling onto the sleeve of his suit where they made a dark stain against the gray fabric.
He dropped his head and gave in to the power of the song, its poignant swell rousing in him a well of regret for all the ways in which he knew he had disappointed her. For the knowledge that he was not the man she had tried to teach him to be.
When the song ended, a peaceful quiet settled over the sanctuary, a quiet of acceptance, of closure. No one moved, and Matt felt it was a moment worthy of a woman as fine as his grandmother.
He turned his head to meet the sympathetic glances of those who had come to pay her their respects. Most of the faces looked familiar to him; some the children and grandchildren of people he hadn’t seen in almost two decades. He realized then how much he had missed this place, how despite his deliberate efforts to eradicate this town from his life, ties that could not be so easily cut anchored him here.
It was then that he saw her.
The shock of it rolled through him, even as the changes in her appearance registered one by one. She now wore the clothing of the Brethren Church, a traditional black bonnet covering all but the front edges of her blonde hair, a long sleeve light blue dress matched with a cape that buttoned at her neck.
Something painful and raw began to burn low in the pit of his stomach.
Her eyes locked steady on his. I’m sorry. I know you loved her.
Staring at her, the years fell away for him, just like that, and he remembered how she once read his thoughts so well, what it felt like to be young and in love.
It had all been so long ago. Eighteen years to be exact. On that last night he’d seen Becca, she had been his. The certainty of this as identifiable upon her features as the symbolic clothing that now singled her out from the others in this church. But this was no longer true, their lives having unfolded along completely different roads. With this realization-though it was hardly a new one—the bridge he’d built to a new life collapsed within him. And it felt like losing her all over again.
4
Links
God can heal a broken heart, but He has to have all the pieces.
- Author Unknown
Now
My name is Emmy Miller. I am thirty-four years old. I live in Ballard County, Virginia.
I recite these facts to myself at least once every day, a habit based on the fear that I might eventually lose even this most basic awareness of who I am or who I used to be.
The center of my world is this room where I’ve slept since I was a little girl, four solid walls I don’t care to venture beyond.
If I had the choice, I would be most content living out the rest of my life right here. But that’s not something my sister is willing to let me do. Becca is a fighter. She starts each morning as if it’s a new battle, and she has a fresh plan for how to pull me out of this shell, how to get me out into the world again.
She’s a worthy general in this war we’ve all been fighting for more years than I can even remember now. Her determination is like a steel rod in her spine. She will not break. Will not give in. She keeps pulling me along, convinced that one day I’ll wake up, and all will be as it used to be.
Maybe I once believed this myself. But now I see the truth of it. The truth is I am the concrete block tied to my sister’s ankle. And I fear that one day, I will pull her down altogether, so that neither of us is able to go on.
The thought increases the heaviness in my chest,
and I get out of bed and stand by the window of my room. Through a tiny hole in the pull-down shade, I watch Mama hanging laundry on the clothesline. I see the glances she throws this way, the worry she wears full-time the way she used to wear smiles and happiness. All I can think is how lost she looks out there. As if the world she once knew changed in a blink with little of it now recognizable.
I wish I could snap my fingers and make things the way they used to be. Turn this darkness inside me to light, roll back the years to a day when I could direct us all down a different road. If only life gave us that kind of second chance.
When we’re young, we think the chances are limitless. That if we make a wrong choice, we’ll always have another opportunity to fix it. But I know the truth of this now. The truth is that every decision counts. One leads to another and another and another until the chain is formed, the links forged and unbreakable. And maybe all of it would be bearable if the chain had been my burden alone all these years. If I had been the only one to suffer for my choices.
This is the part that doesn’t seem fair. That the people I love should continue to pay for my wrongs. This is the part I would change, if only I could.
5
Butterfly Wings
At night, when the lights are out, when the house is asleep, when I am sure that not a living soul can see in my face that I am thinking of you. That is when I think of you. Remember you. Let myself long for you.
- Entry from Becca’s Journal
Crossing Tinker's Knob Page 2