Mothers and Daughters: An Anthology

by Deborah Bedford

  He asked the question aloud in the darkness, his forehead still pressed up against the cold windowpane. “You want me to open all that up again, Lord? Sure don’t see what good it’ll do anybody.”

  Silence.

  No reassuring voice in the darkness.

  Only the dull aching of his heart, the memory of the day when he’d swept through room after room, fighting to purge every painful recollection, every broken promise, from his household and his life with his little girl.

  Theia decided the hair ribbons had to be in the buffet.

  Digging for hair ribbons seemed as good a therapy as any after her sleepless angry night.

  She wasn’t due at St. John’s for her chemo treatment for several hours. She had the entire morning to herself. She got down on her hands and knees and, piece by piece, began to bring out the tiers of plates that made up her wedding china. First came the Gorham Rondelle saucers, then the dessert plates, then the bread and butters. Even though she was a preacher’s wife, she was a preacher’s wife in Wyoming. She hadn’t set a table with these fancy dishes in ages.

  Just to make sure, she checked the stacks of linen napkins and the basket she used when she served dinner rolls. She checked inside the plastic sack where she kept Christmas candles, wrapped in tissue.

  She sat back on her heels.

  There wasn’t anything here.

  “You know what I wish for?” she said aloud to nobody there. “Maybe some pictures. Something to put around the house that would remind me of…me.”

  Even as she said her wish aloud, she realized how she could make it happen.

  Beneath the maple lamp stand in the front room sat a row of thick photo albums, dating back to the days when the girls had worn diapers.

  Theia piled the Gorham back into the buffet and then sat cross-legged on the floor beside the lamp stand. She unshelved each album and thumbed through it, occasionally slipping a picture out from behind the plastic, reading the back, checking its date. Some she put back where they belonged. Others she kept on the floor beside her.

  An hour passed, and she’d only gotten halfway through the albums. An array of photos lay strewn in a circle from her right ankle to her left knee.

  A snapshot of Joe holding a large Mackinaw trout.

  A backside view of Kate as she stood, topless and toddling, trying to reach a watermelon bigger than she was in the refrigerator.

  A black-and-white picture of Theia’s best friend, Bobbie Galden, riding a horse.

  The girls with their Easter baskets, squinting into the sun.

  Then, her favorite, one she’d kept forever and hadn’t looked at for years: the litter of kittens she hadn’t wanted to part with when she’d been ten. In this photo, she wore her two blue hair ribbons, tied at jaunty angles, one on each pigtail.

  She would just have to be satisfied with a picture.

  She couldn’t come up with those hair ribbons any other way.

  If Theia hurried, she had just enough time to take these to Big Horn Photo on the way to St. John’s. She would buy pretty frames at Global Exchange and arrange them according to size on the table behind the sofa. She would display a few on the mantel. She would scatter some beside lamps and along windowsills.

  Forget the expensive decorate prints and the watercolor she and Joe had bought each other for their tenth wedding anniversary and the pencil etching of a moose by the pond that they’d won top bid in a church auction.

  Unnecessary adornments would come down from her walls. She would fill this house with life. Her life.

  Joe fanned out the pages of his sermon across his desk and tried to make sense of them. He scrubbed his eyes with his palms, picked up his pen and made a note. Then he stared at what he’d written for a full fifteen seconds before he shook his head, drew a line through the entire thing, and pitched the pen across his desk.

  The backbone of his Sunday message. Gibberish. He’d worked on this for hours, and now it made no sense at all.

  I’m a failure at being a husband for her, Lord. I don’t know what to say to give her strength. I don’t know what to say to let her know how much I love her. Even when I do think I know what to say, I open my mouth and the wrong words come out.

  Stupid words. Hurtful words.

  WHAT GOOD ARE YOU, HUSBAND, IF YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN TO RELY ON THE ONE WHO SEEKS YOU FOR HIS BRIDE?

  Joe picked up the pages of his sermon one by one, scanned them, crumpled them into wads, and flung them against the wall.

  Who am I to think I can teach anybody about You? Who am I, that I’ve taken responsibility for shepherding Your flock?

  Joe stood in the middle of the office where he’d counseled close to hundreds, waiting, his breath coming in short laborious wheezes, his own heart an empty cavern.

  He raised his fist to the ceiling and shook it. “Show me, Father. Show me who I am!”

  The room felt as empty, as cavernous, as the portions of his own self that he’d finally opened up and laid out upon the winds of the heavens. Joe knew this to be true: Nothing about him was worthy or good enough or strong enough for the task that had been laid before him.

  Joe lowered his arm.

  He closed his eyes.

  When he did, the picture came. Not so much a picture, maybe, but a living depiction. Moving figures. Wailing women gathering frightened children and herding them away. A trail of dirty, jeering Roman soldiers as they followed a bent man heaving a cross along through the dust up the hill of Golgotha.

  Behind the cross stumbled this Jesus, this man they called the Christ, and Joe, standing alone in his office, saw the human man as he’d never been able to see Him before.

  Their voices shrieked at Him as He staggered onward up the hill.

  “Hail, king of the Jews!”

  Again and again they struck Him on the head with a staff. One of them ran ahead, fell on his knees, paid mocking homage to Jesus as He passed.

  “Hail, king of the Jews! Oh, mighty savior of the world. If You could only save Yourself now!”

  Spittle coursed down His face from where they spat on Him.

  Joe watched, horrified, as the soldiers lifted the cross from the shoulders of another man and began to erect it. This, then, was as far as he needed to see. But even though Joe’s eyes were closed, the scene remained.

  He knew what would come next.

  They would put thorns on Jesus’ head that would dig into His scalp and rip out His hair.

  They would pluck the beard from His chin until there was scarcely anything left of His face.

  With a cat-o’-nine-tails, they would scourge Him until his innards hung out of His body and His skin was shredded into tatters.

  They would pierce what was left of Him with a spear, and His blood would begin to pour out onto the ground.

  His followers would desert Him. His friends would betray Him. Even His own Father God would have to turn away from Him.

  “No,” Joe whispered. “No.”

  They kicked Jesus and put a bag over His head and shouted taunts. And when the bag was ripped off, this human man turned and fixed His eyes on Joe with an expression that took Joe’s breath away.

  THIS IS WHO YOU ARE, JOE MCKINNIS.

  This then, he saw, was love. Love with no ulterior motive, unadulterated and true. The very definition of love, not in a dictionary, but on the cross.

  “Lord!” Joe cried out as this man Jesus climbed past him, onward, to His crucifixion. “Lord!”

  COME UNTO ME.

  This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

  At that moment, the room filled with a quiet gentle presence, a peace that vibrated to the very core of the pastor’s soul.

  “Lord?”

  It had been so long.

  So long.

  COME THAT I MIGHT BEAR ALL YOUR BURDENS. COME THAT I MIGHT
SHEPHERD YOUR FLOCK, EVEN AS YOU AGREED TO SHEPHERD MINE.

  Joe fell to his knees, his kneecaps making a huge, hollow thud on the floor. He didn’t care. His entire body shook. The trembling wouldn’t stop, and he didn’t want it to. He bowed before his Holy God, his tears pouring forth from the very headwaters of his soul. “I’m s-s-sorry. Oh, Lord, I’m so sorry. Oh, I’m sorry.” He cried out like an orphaned child. “I’ve tried so hard to do the r-right things. And I’ve b-b-been so wrong.”

  He cried out the same way that the apostle Paul had cried out after he’d served thirty years in the ministry. “I want to know You, Lord. I’ve been looking at myself, not at You. Help me to stop imitating You, Lord.” He lifted his eyes to the heavens. “I’m so t-tired of trying to live that way. All I want is to seek You, Father. You working through me, not me trying to do the right things anymore.”

  Help me with Theia, Father. I don’t even know where to start. She’s shutting me out.

  And then, he knew.

  Oh, Lord. I’m sorry for being afraid. I’m sorry for being selfish. I’m sorry for counting the cost for myself when I ought to have been thinking of her instead. Oh, Father.

  A knock came at his door.

  Joe stumbled to his feet. He didn’t take the time to straighten his shirt, fix his hair, or attend to his face. He turned the knob and yanked the door open.

  There stood Sarah Hodges, his secretary, with a cup of coffee strong enough to jump-start a Studebaker in her hands. She offered it to him. “I was just cleaning out the pot.”

  He’d thought she’d stare at him, only she didn’t. Sarah was too busy taking stock of the wadded-up pages of sermon that had landed in various corners of the room. She finally met his eyes. Her brows furrowed. “You working on your Sunday message?”

  “I am, oh, I am.” He said it with such vigor, he splashed coffee dregs onto the carpet. It seemed years since he’d had this much joy, this much hope. He grinned and booted a wadded page of sermon out of his way. “Do we have any Coffee-mate for this, Sarah? It’s going to make my hair stand on end.”

  Chapter Seven

  Number nineteen, the regular Teton County middle-school bus, crept past the McKinnis’s house at the exact same time every afternoon. Today, as the bus took the corner and made its way up Ten Sleep Drive, Kate had a minute to lean across Jaycee and scrub everyone’s foggy breath off one window.

  “See, you guys—” she pointed to the Fairlane where it sat waiting in the side yard “—I told you Grandpa was giving me his car. There it is.”

  “Whoopeee.” Paul Jacobs pulled his Game Boy out of his backpack and started punching buttons. “That drools. What a piece of junk.”

  “It isn’t junk. My grandpa’s been driving it for twenty-seven years. He put a new battery in it and everything.”

  Paul won some sort of victory on the Game Boy, and it exploded into a mass crescendo of electronic sound. He rolled his eyes. “Like I said…”

  “It rocks, Kate.” Jaycee snuck her a red Twizzler, being especially careful because they weren’t supposed to share anything to eat on the bus. “Paul is just jealous.”

  “It’s a Ford.”

  “F-O-R-D stands for Found on Road Dead.”

  “When I get my permit, he said he’ll take me out to the elk refuge so I can practice.”

  “I’ll bet that car hasn’t gone anywhere in ten years. It’s buried in snow up past its hubcaps.”

  “That’s because it just snowed this weekend, stupid. He drove it to the hospital last week.”

  The school bus hissed to a halt, the red stop sign folded out like an oar, and the huge yellow door accordioned open. “Stupid,” Paul mimicked as Kate zipped up her Columbia jacket.

  Jaycee waved. “See you later.”

  “Come over if you aren’t doing anything.”

  “I will.”

  Kate hadn’t thought to actually dig the car out of the snow until she saw the snow shovel propped beside the shed. Hm-mmm. If she cleared off the hood, her friends could see it better. Then annoying people on the bus couldn’t make any more comments about the Fairlane not going anywhere for ten years. “Mom! I’m home.” She left her backpack on the floor where she wasn’t supposed to leave it, and went to the pantry to find a snack.

  Her mother had left a note on the kitchen counter. “Gone to doctor’s. There all afternoon. Heidi @ dancing after that. Love, Mom.”

  Oh yeah. It was Tuesday. The day of her mother’s first chemo session. Kate jammed her mouth full of Doritos, found the broom, and hurried outside to begin laboring.

  First, Kate used the broom to sweep snow from the Fairlane’s windows. Next she pushed snow off the car’s roof. After that she brushed snow from each fender.

  She stepped back to survey her work.

  She’d left huge piles behind the wheels and in front of the headlights. This was going to be a lot harder than it looked.

  Kate yanked the shovel out of the snow and started digging. She hadn’t scooped more than a dozen shovelsful before her back began to ache and her thumbs began to throb. She kept shoveling anyway, slicing into the ice with the shovel blade, pitching the load off to one side until she had the beginnings of a path.

  Just let Paul Jacobs try to say this car won’t go anywhere!

  Slice. Pitch. Slice. Pitch.

  I could get in and turn it on and drive all the way to Colorado if I wanted to!

  That thought kept her going a long time. She had no idea how long she’d been digging when Jaycee came walking up the street toward her house. “Oh my gosh. Kate! You’re really digging out the car. Is your grandfather going to let you drive it somewhere?”

  “Sure.” Kate hesitated. “Sure he will. He might even let me take it on the highway if I’m careful.”

  “No way!”

  She didn’t know why it seemed important to one-up Jaycee, but just now, it did. “He said he would,” she lied. “That’s why I’m doing all this.” Kate jabbed the shovel hard into the snow so it stood unaided in the middle of the path.

  “You’re so lucky.”

  Kate dusted the snow off her mittens, satisfied.

  Jaycee pulled her stocking cap down further over her ears in frustration. “It’s so boring riding bikes when everybody else is getting cars.”

  “It’s your turn to spend the night here Friday night. You want to?”

  A long moment passed. Jaycee didn’t answer right away. She slumped against the fender of the Fairlane and stared off into oblivion, looking guilty about something. At last she said, “I don’t think I can.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know.” She shrugged easily, but Kate could tell something wasn’t right. “There’s always a whole lot going on.”

  “There’s nothing going on. I’ll ask Mom. She’ll say it’s fine. You’ll see.”

  “I can’t come over, Kate. Don’t bother her about it.”

  Kate grew silent as she stored the shovel back in the shed, and the two girls walked together back toward the house. Suspicion niggled at her heart. Jaycee had never turned down a sleepover before. She asked with great caution, “You want to come inside?”

  “That sounds good.”

  It was the right time of day to play music; her father was still working in his office at church. Kate grabbed the Doritos bag and the bean dip from the fridge.

  “Paul Jacobs was being a total jerk today on the bus.” Jaycee followed Kate upstairs. She paused, and then spoke the next few words with entirely too much emphasis. “There are a lot of people being jerks right now.”

  “Including you.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  Kate shrugged, trying to push the pain away, but she couldn’t do it. “Did you take notes on Miss Rainey’s class today? On ‘To Build a Fire’?” They’d been reading a Jack London story in English. “Tiffany kept passing me notes, and I never wrote anything down.”

  “I wrote down some stuff.”

  “If you came over Friday night, we cou
ld study for the test.”

  “Kate, I’ve already said I can’t come.”

  “Whatever.” Kate’s lips contracted into a tight line of hurt. “Sorry I asked.”

  Jaycee turned away and fiddled with the row of first place blue ribbons that Kate had mounted on her bulletin board with pushpins. She’d won them all at the Teton County Fair, entering art projects. Jaycee sniffed and her shoulders heaved. It took Kate about five seconds to figure out that her best friend was trying not to cry.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Jaycee shook her head, still toying with the ribbons. “I promised that I wouldn’t. It stinks.”

  Kate thought of her grandfather’s car again, the Fairlane, out sitting in the snow, ready to cruise. Whenever things got bad, she thought of the car, and it made her feel better. But even that didn’t help much now. “Fine then. I wouldn’t want you to break any promises.”

  “I told you that everybody was being a jerk. Well, that means more than Paul Jacobs.”

  “Who does it mean?”

  Jaycee turned around, drew a line with a finger beneath each eye to clear away tears without smudging mascara. “Tiffany Haas. She’s having her birthday party Friday night, and she isn’t inviting you.”

  Kate looked stunned. “She isn’t? We’re good friends. I had her to my birthday this year.”

  “I know.”

  “She kept passing me all those notes in Miss Rainey’s class today.”

  “She’s invited six people, and she’s made us all promise that you don’t find out.”

  It devastated Kate, everyone knowing the secret but her, being left out and alone. Her fair skin turned an angry red. “How come she doesn’t want me?”

  Jaycee didn’t answer the question. “We’re driving to Riverton. Her mother’s gotten us a room at the Holiday Inn, and we’re going to spend the night and swim. We’re going shopping at the mall the next day.”

  Kate asked the same question again. “How come she doesn’t want me?”

  “If you ask her to her face, she’ll have an excuse.”

  “Which is—?”

  “That there isn’t room in her mom’s Suburban for anybody else.”

  Kate tried her best not to get upset. In her head, she listed the names of Tiffany’s other friends, girls Kate liked and would have wanted to shop with. It would have been so much fun to be a part of the crowd. “Maybe that’s a good-enough excuse.”