Song of the Brokenhearted

by Sheila Walsh

  She couldn’t sleep, and Emma seemed to sense Ava’s unrest as she squirmed, frowned, and then stirred again.

  Today was Monday and she hadn’t talked to her husband since Friday. It felt like a month. They kept missing each other’s call or their service was bad. Ava hadn’t talked to Kayanne, Sienna, or anyone from church, but her in-box was filling up.

  Ava typed a text to Dane: I know you won’t get this till you’re on your way home or on top of some mountain somewhere. But I’m thinking of you tonight. Of us, our family, and our life together.

  As unstable as their life was at the moment, more than it had ever been, their marriage was home and she was filled with a longing she hadn’t felt since their early years together. I’m homesick for the things that matter, Ava thought with bittersweet joy.

  Tomorrow she was going to see her father. Her mind drifted to the prison, to that awful confined existence. She remembered the initial shock of seeing her father there many years earlier. He came into the visitation room wearing an orange jumpsuit and sat at a table across from her. Her father, Reverend Daniel Henderson, had gotten himself a tattoo. Ava could see the bottom of it sticking out from his orange sleeve, and though she wished to know what it was or said, she resisted showing interest and kept her eyes averted with quick glances at his face and then around the room.

  She’d never asked him or Clancy about it. Ava expected her father to have a great story. “Prison does things to a man” would’ve been his likely words. After everything, Daddy was still the best excuse-artist she’d ever seen. It was a gift Ava hadn’t inherited. Even when her excuse was valid, she couldn’t say it right and she sounded false doing so. But to weave sympathy out of any kind of sin was a talent, like that princess who could weave gold from straw.

  “I’m so happy my firefly finally came to see me,” Daddy had said as he reached across the table with two hands because they were bound together in handcuffs. Ava had pulled her hands away into her lap, leaned back, and blew a bubble with her chewing gum. She’d dyed her hair platinum blond for the occasion. When he’d seen her last during the trial, it was raven black.

  “How are you?” he said with less confidence than usual.

  “I’m doing drugs,” she’d said, trying to express boldness with her words. “And having sex. Lots of both.” She’d never said the word sex in front of him before in her life, and she was proud of herself for doing it.

  Daddy stared at her with those deep brown eyes, and there it was, the look of sadness that made her feel guilty for hurting him! Ridiculous.

  “Firefly, oh, my little firefly.” He rubbed his ears as if to rid them of what she’d said. So he’d believed her? Ava had said it to hurt him. He deserved it after the way he destroyed their lives with his lies and deceits. But not long after his prison sentence, Ava had decided that what she did with her life was her choice. She wouldn’t rebel because she was angry at him. She would live her life on her terms, not in retaliation, because then he’d have a hold on her again.

  You don’t own me now, Daddy. You don’t mean anything to me.

  She’d practiced saying it but the words caught in her throat. Instead she chewed on her nails and pretended she was sitting through the most boring of Baptist preachers.

  “I’ve been ministering to the men here. For this next season of my life, this is my calling. My lawyer hopes I’ll get a new trial or early release. Then I’ll be home, and we’ll make amends.” He spoke in a low tone as if more to himself than to her.

  “This is your calling? No, Daddy, you stole money, you got drunk, and you killed somebody. All the while you were a preacher and that should’ve made you get punished all the more.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, “but God can use everything for good.”

  Ava looked away from her father then, and she saw a tiny girl coloring a picture beside a huge dark-skinned man. Every inch of the man’s skin was covered with tattoos, including his face and smooth, bald head. The little girl glanced up at him with that admiration and love only very young girls have for their daddies. She probably had no clue she was visiting her father in prison. If only Ava could switch places with that little girl and look at her father with the utter devotion she’d once had. She wondered how many years it would be until that little girl arrived for a visit with dyed hair and black nail polish. Two years earlier, Ava had looked like the perfect ultraconservative Christian with no makeup, wearing dresses instead of jeans, and able to recite scripture in a single bound.

  “I’m moving to California,” she’d told him.

  He paled instantly. She was his firefly leaving the cage and flying away. He hated that, she knew. Him stuck inside that prison was less terrifying than being out in the world. The world was where evil resided and the devil waited to snatch us all away.

  The devil was right inside our church, Daddy.

  Then he cried. Ava tried to ignore the tears, telling herself they were his act, his on-cue display of false remorse. She recalled the tears her father could present on demand from behind the pulpit. They were well timed and set to the tempo of his message. But these didn’t seem the tears of a charismatic minister. These were messy tears, and they crushed her heart.

  His head hit the table with a thud, and his bony shoulders shook.

  Her arms refused to reach across the table to comfort him. Her mouth refused to work as it jammed with words of both hate and love. She didn’t apologize. Instead she stood abruptly.

  “Gotta go, I don’t feel well.”

  Ava looked back once as the correctional officer opened the door with a buzz of the locks. Daddy was wiping his eyes, slumped low in his seat, looking small and frail. Her father was a shadow of the man who lifted his fist to the sky in triumph, who would jump in the air rejoicing as a new convert was ushered into the family of God.

  The word that came to mind made Ava finally believe he was sorry. Even if he didn’t say it the way she wanted him to say it. Her father was broken.

  Now, thirty years later, Ava feared learning what that broken man had become.

  She pushed the porch swing with her feet as she cradled a cup of steaming coffee between her hands. The chains creaked back and forth as she moved. Clancy peered through the window at Emma sleeping in her car seat before he sat in a patio chair near her.

  “I can’t believe I’m really here,” Ava said, taking in the landscape.

  “I need to do some remodeling on the old place.”

  She had a thousand memories on that porch. She’d played with Barbie dolls here during the winter months, read her library books here escaping the summer heat, and sketched images she loved into her long sketch pad. Clancy and Ava had taken care of themselves here for over a week when they’d run away from their grandmother’s farm and before Daddy returned from the road. The house had been locked up, so they made the covered porch their house. She’d been hiding supplies under a broken board, so they were fed well enough.

  “I’m surprised you never left here,” Ava said as a rooster crowed from a distant ranch.

  “Where would I have gone?” Clancy said, looking out across the green yard toward the fields.

  Ava shrugged. “Somewhere else in Texas? You could have come to California with Aunt Jenny.”

  “Me in California? Imagine that.” Clancy chuckled as he took a sip of coffee.

  “There are a lot of ranches and farmland out there. It’s not all surfers, palm trees, and tech companies.”

  Clancy snickered. “I could’ve worn my cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans.”

  “Most anything goes in California, but that might be taking it too far,” Ava teased.

  “So why haven’t you come back?” Clancy leaned back, placing his feet on the porch railing. His boots were worn but surprisingly clean.

  Ava shrugged, unable to articulate an answer.

  “I should have,” she said, and realized how true that statement was. Here she’d thought it was about protecting her kids. But Ava hadn’t needed to pul
l back from the entire family, Clancy included, to do so. She’d been protecting herself all these years, turning her back to the past and its pain, trying to blot it all out and forgetting the good parts.

  “I understand. Must be pretty hard once you get outta here,” Clancy said with sadness in his tone.

  Ava pulled her feet onto the swing, sitting cross-legged like how she’d sat as a girl.

  “I really should have,” she whispered. “You are my brother, after all.”

  “That road goes both ways,” he said.

  But Ava knew he’d needed her, and she’d been in the best position to reach out. She spearheaded a ministry for broken people, after all. Yet the years clicked by, and she marveled that so many had disappeared. Sitting here with her brother and their childhood all around her, it seemed impossible they were in their late forties now. Perhaps this was all part of God’s plan to bring her back so they could finally move forward.

  “What’s he like now?” Ava asked. She could see their daddy walking in from the barn, practicing his sermon as he walked. The country life didn’t sit well with him, and the farm fell into disrepair until they leased most of it out. Daddy took an apartment in town where he stayed sometimes for whole weeks.

  Clancy sipped his coffee again.

  “Daddy is Daddy. He’ll be crazy-chimp happy that you’re in the house.”

  Ava laughed out loud at that. “Crazy-chimp happy—I forgot that one. I remember you jumping around that Christmas when Aunt Jenny brought us all those gifts.”

  Clancy chuckled. “You just stared in awe.”

  Ava pushed off from the swing to peer in the window at Emma still sleeping soundly.

  “Daddy would’ve been out in another few years. Aunt Lorena is broken up about it. She had her heart set on them finally being together.”

  Ava shivered at the thought, wrapping her coat tighter around her.

  “I wouldn’t have ever guessed it of Daddy.”

  “Between us, he told me that’s why the cancer got him— to save him from Aunt Lorena and her house of inmates.”

  “I can almost believe it,” Ava said, thinking of those sweet children trapped in that life.

  Clancy rose from the bench, his knees popping as he stretched. “We’re going to visit Mama on the way. So we better get moving.”

  “We are?” Ava hadn’t been to her mother’s grave since the visits with her father as a child.

  “We are,” Clancy said, and she knew that this was his tone that meant no negotiating.

  They walked the green manicured lawn dotted with gray headstones that seemed to grow right out of the grass. Ava followed Clancy’s lead as he carried Emma in one arm and held a bouquet of flowers they’d picked up at the supermarket on the way. Emma stared at Clancy, scrunching up her eyebrows as she studied him suspiciously.

  Mama was down a long row of flat headstones. Ava would have never found it without Clancy, but then there it was.

  Leanne Rosalie Henderson.

  Only twenty-five years separated her birth and death dates. She wasn’t much older than Sienna, Ava realized with a sense of sadness and horror. Such a short life.

  “I barely remember her,” Ava said just above a whisper.

  She’d been beautiful, and she loved putting on makeup, though it was a secret from Daddy. Ava remembered watching her apply bright red lipstick to her lips and then she’d kiss the air, saying, “Bonjour, mon cheri.” She’d wipe away all the evidence before Daddy came home from the church. Aunt Jenny later told her that a few months after she left them, Daddy found the tube of lipstick hidden under Ava’s pillow. But Mama was mostly a void in her memories.

  “Ava’s here with me today,” Clancy said to the green space her mother occupied. Ava watched her brother chew on a long straw weed. He chuckled out of the side of his mouth. “No, Ma, this baby isn’t mine.”

  “Do you think she hears you?”

  Clancy winked. “No.”

  “Really, you don’t? Then why talk to her?”

  “It’s nice to talk to someone, even if that someone isn’t actually there. If I did that other places, I’d get looked at oddly. But at the cemetery I can talk all I want, no matter who else is there, and they understand.”

  “Brother, you are starting to worry me.”

  He laughed so loud it echoed across the cemetery grounds. Emma jumped at his laugh, then cooed and smiled at Clancy.

  “I’m just messing with you. Don’t worry, I don’t spend my days hanging out with our mama in the grave and Daddy in the pen. For a while I did. For another while I hung out at the bars, doing that scene. I still can’t get myself back to church, though you forgiving church folk make me think it’s possible.”

  Ava took the flowers from Clancy, unwrapping the plastic and rubber band.

  “It took me awhile, and I think getting away from all this helped. God wasn’t the problem. He’s always here, faithful, loving, unfailing, and true. Unlike His people. Unlike Daddy and Grannie.”

  “Praise Him for that,” Clancy said.

  Ava bent down, cleaning out old leaves and dirt from the metal vase beside the headstone. She arranged the flowers inside, then she brushed her hands together as she stood.

  “How often do you come then?”

  “I stop in to see Mama maybe once a year or so. I like to put some flowers on her grave so as she’s not all the way forgotten. You know, I don’t have one memory of her, being so young as I was. Seems like a good son should do a little something to take care of his mama, so this is what I do.”

  Ava threaded her arm through her brother’s, bending her head against his shoulder. “You are a wonderful man, Clancy Henderson.”

  Thirty

  ANY WORDS THEY MIGHT HAVE SPOKEN SETTLED DOWN INTO thoughtful silence as they drove between the cemetery and the prison.

  They rode in Clancy’s old Chevelle as the heater rumbled, fighting the outside chill that rode in on the autumn breeze. Emma fussed in the back, and Ava climbed over the seat and gave her a pacifier, leaning close as she talked to the baby. Emma looked up at Ava with those chocolate brown eyes and smiled through the pacifier.

  They came into a town and suddenly Clancy turned right onto a street and she saw boxy buildings surrounded by fencing topped with razor wire. A guard tower came into view, cutting into the cold blue sky.

  A Ava wondered if they’d allow a baby inside. She stared at Emma as the baby squeezed her finger within her tiny hand, and she suddenly regretted this idea. She shouldn’t bring a baby into such an environment. Prison was a place that housed evil and sorrow—how could that not affect them all?

  It was one of many reasons she’d never brought her children to see her father. Her father’s choices sent him to prison, while her children were innocent and needed protection. This was her reasoning. And so she’d stayed away.

  Dane had come a few times. First to ask her father’s permission to marry Ava, and then again within the first year after both Sienna and Jason were born. He brought pictures and shared the details, giving excuses as to why Ava couldn’t come herself.

  And so quickly the years had passed. Ava hadn’t planned to stay away. She sent him a box of goodies every Christmas and on his birthdays. For several years she’d helped his prison get new books in their library. Yet now more than thirty years stretched out since she’d seen her father face-to-face.

  Clancy pulled into the parking lot, and Ava stared at the same towering building that hadn’t changed in the years between. Her mouth went dry, and she couldn’t quite process the reality that her father had been right here all this time while she’d been out in the world, going to college, meeting Dane and getting married, having her children, watching them grow up, traveling on vacations, celebrating holidays and birthdays. He’d been in this prison since she was seventeen years old.

  “I’ll keep the little one here,” Clancy said as he turned off the engine.

  “You’re not coming with me?” Ava said, her heart rate rising.


  “Can, but seems best not to take the baby.”

  Ava nodded, relieved and panicked at the same time.

  “Tell him I’ll see him Saturday. It’d be better for you to talk to Daddy that way.”

  Ava nodded, staring up at the ominous razor wire that surrounded the prison. “I won’t be long.”

  “Take your time. I can manage. You’ve got the thermos to make formula in there, and I’m good with kids apparently.”

  Ava forced a smile. “Okay. Here I go.”

  She went through the security checks, filling out papers, checking in her purse, walking through the X-ray machine. She joined a few other women and an elderly man separated from the other visitors who were going to the main visitation area. They were going to the prison hospital area. Ten minutes later, a buzzer sounded and they were escorted into the visitation room.

  I can do this, she told herself again and again. She tasted blood from biting her lip. Then she prayed, God, help me to do this right. I want to run out of here, but you brought me to this doorway. Guide me through it.

  Ava didn’t recognize him, and she was already assuming he’d be considerably changed. It was something in his walk that returned her attention to the small silver-headed man who gazed around the room searching for someone other than her.

  The Reverend Daniel Henderson was an old man.

  His age wasn’t just in his hair and wrinkles as he squinted, searching the room for his visitor. It was in his movements and the defeat in his shoulders.

  He met her eyes and recognition lit his face. Ava walked toward him. They were nearly the same size now.

  “I can’t believe my eyes. I would not have guessed this,” he said, pressing down his stick gray hair. He didn’t try to hug her, and Ava wondered if that was because of prison rules or choice or respect for her.

  He stood with several feet between them. “You look so . . .”

  “Old?” she said with a laugh.

  He took her in, as if trying to memorize every detail. “Beautiful.”