When Carla returned, she handed Hannah a fluffy towel that smelled of dryer sheets. On top of that was a neatly folded housecoat, a light-pink gingham material with an embroidered pattern around the collar and cuffs on the short sleeves.
“I’ll give you your privacy. Just leave your things by the washer. I can toss them in for you later.” Hannah always insisted on doing her own laundry, which usually led to procrastination and wearing the same pair of jeans longer than was probably socially acceptable. But today she didn’t fight Carla’s offer. She was already shivering, and any item of dry clothing was preferable to her pants’ heavy denim material, which was clinging to her like alligator skin.
Once Carla left, it didn’t take long to change out of her wet clothes, even with all the shivering. Leaving her damp bra and underwear on under the housecoat, she slipped on the warm pair of grippy hospital-style socks, wrapped her hair in the towel, and put her soggy bag on her shoulder.
Hannah tiptoed out of the laundry room and took a wide right turn, avoiding her usual path through the kitchen. Instead, she made her way through the formal dining room, avoiding the square pass-through that connected the two rooms, when she heard a familiar male voice resonating in the kitchen.
Sure enough, Guy Franklin was standing in the kitchen, shoveling spoonfuls of Carla’s chili into his mouth. Hannah wanted to walk into that kitchen with her head held high, pretending she was confident in her calf-length housecoat and grippy socks, but instead she took a giant step back. It must’ve been enough movement to draw attention because Guy’s eyes shot up from his bowl and connected with Hannah’s. He raised one eyebrow, and that annoying smirk developed along the edge of his mouth as he slowly chewed a bite of cornbread.
She tried to think of something to say, but when he didn’t look away and no clever words filled in the blanks in her mind, she broke off from his stare. Stumbling into the safety of the hallway, Hannah threw herself into Papaw’s office.
Still chilled from the rain, she leaned against the closed door and wrapped her arms around her midsection. Under all the attractive young handyman’s “yes, ma’ams” and “no, ma’ams” she knew he must be judging her.
The real person she was mad at in this house was herself. It was like she could only focus on one thing in her life at a time, whether it was mourning her father or longing for Alex or digging into the story of Evelyn or taking care of her grandmother. She had so few responsibilities in this Mississippi purgatory she’d found herself in, but she still couldn’t function. And rather than be reminded of that frustrating fact, it was just easier to be mad at Guy.
There was a tap on the other side of the door. Hannah jumped. She reached for the throw blanket on the back of the office chair and draped it over her shoulders before responding.
“Yes?” she whispered through the crack.
“Hannah, your Mamaw is callin’ for you. She wanted to wait for you to get home to have dinner, so I’ll make up a tray and bring it to you in her room after you’ve changed.”
Oh, thank God—it was Carla.
“Okay, I’ll be out in just a minute,” she said. Her cheerful singsong reply sounded false to Hannah’s ears, but Carla didn’t seem to notice.
So, this is why they do it, she thought as she threw on her sweatpants, a sports bra, and a long-sleeved Bears shirt that used to belong to her dad. There was a sense of relief in being in control of the parts of herself other people were allowed to see.
As had become a habit, Hannah picked up her phone to make a quick social media check. But as she tried to turn on the little rectangle, it didn’t make so much as a beep.
“Damn it!” She tried a hard reset with multiple buttons, but still nothing. It was waterlogged from being in her back pocket during the downpour. “Shit!”
She dropped the temporarily useless device onto the desk, cringing at the loud thump. Yet another annoying result of her overly stubborn ride home. To think she might have to wait till morning to have access to the internet. Hannah ran a brush through her tangled, wet hair.
She’d apologize to Mamaw, smile, and do her best not to swear or mention how Monty’s new shoes made fart noises or say mean things about almost-too-charming Guy Franklin.
“Thank you, darlin’,” Mamaw said sweetly, as Hannah removed the portable tray from across her lap and pulled the quilt up to Mamaw’s shoulders.
“Oh my gosh, it is the least I could do. I’m still so, so sorry,” Hannah said, reaching for the horsehair brush on Mamaw’s bedside table and running it through Mamaw’s fine hair. After one stroke, Mamaw pushed Hannah’s arm back gently.
“Oh no, dear. I just had my hair done today, so I won’t need it brushed.”
Hannah couldn’t remember anything right today. “Damn it,” she swore under her breath.
Mamaw must’ve heard because her mouth twisted in an odd, entertained way, her lips still a faded pink from the lipstick she’d been wearing on her trip to the salon.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah apologized reflexively. Mamaw didn’t find swearing ladylike.
“It’s okay, darlin’. I’m getting used to it,” Mamaw teased. It was nice, Hannah had to admit, to not have the conversation devolve into a big fight like it would’ve with her mother. Pam Williamson would toss around aggressive terms like irresponsible or untrustworthy or ditzy. It reminded Hannah of her father’s gentle, serene temperament and how safe he always made her feel when he was around. No one calmed her anxieties like he used to.
She recalled when she was nine, and one week out from the fourth-grade bike rodeo she was the only one in her class who didn’t know how to ride a two-wheeler. The rodeo was a rite of passage at Garden Grove Elementary in Oak Park, Illinois, and she’d been dreaming about it ever since Brody had won a red ribbon for Master Maneuvering when he was in Ms. Carter’s class a few years earlier. But it wasn’t just Brody. Everyone knew her father was an avid cyclist, and she’d done a whole research report about his last triathlon, so there was no way she’d show up to that rodeo with training wheels on her bike.
“It’s okay, darlin’. You’re doing a fantastic job,” her dad told her as she sat on the curb after her eighth fall that night.
“Can I stay home from the rodeo? Please?” she begged, starting to feel desperate.
“No. You’ve got this,” Patrick Williamson said, hefting the crashed bike back up on two wheels.
“But I keep falling. You and Brody are so good at it . . .”
Patrick Williamson put down the kickstand, sat next to his daughter on the curb, and examined the scratches on her knee.
“Hannah, you might not know this, but I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was in high school. Your Papaw told me that I couldn’t get my driver’s license until I learned. I fell down a thousand times. Your uncle Samuel . . . he helped me in an abandoned lot so none of my friends could see how bad I was. But after lots of practice, my brain and my body figured it all out, and riding my bike became like walking. You know what I found out?”
“That you should never give up?” Hannah filled in a generic encouraging phrase she’d heard on one or two afterschool TV specials.
“Ha, well, not exactly. I found out that once you’ve learned to do something really well, nobody asks how many times you fell down while you were learning how to do it. You didn’t walk the first time you tried, right? You didn’t talk that way either. Same with reading and math and T-ball and soccer. So you’ll fall down a few times. That’s fine! Just try to fall into the grass, okay? No reason to get hurt every time if you can help it, right?”
Fall into the grass. That soft place to fall—that had always been her relationship with her dad. Her mom was the scratchy asphalt, and since her father’s passing Hannah couldn’t seem to find a safe place to land. But if Patrick Williamson was a neatly manicured lawn, Mamaw was a pile of freshly raked leaves.
Mamaw oozed grace with every genteel greeting and carefully controlled half smile. Her dark eyes were beautiful, but si
nce Samuel had died, they also held a sadness in them that made you want to look a little longer than was polite. And those wells of sadness seemed deeper and darker since she’d stood by her eldest son’s grave a few months earlier. Hannah was growing to understand the hidden sorrows gathered in her grandmother’s eyes now that she was able to recognize the beginnings of her own pools every time she looked in the mirror.
“I’ll keep working on it,” Hannah said as she fluffed Mamaw’s pillows. She liked to sleep a little upright after having her hair done so it didn’t get all “flattened out.” Just who Mamaw was keeping her hair fluffy for, Hannah didn’t know. Maybe her beau, Mr. Davenport.
“No, dear. Times have changed, I know I’m old-fashioned. The ladies at the salon say”—she hesitated, then swallowed like she’d tasted something sour—“many colorful things. I’m startin’ to wonder if maybe instead of you stopping, I should give it a try,” Mamaw joked mischievously, tugging at the collar of her nightgown.
“Ha! Well, I think you’d raise a few eyebrows, but I say—go for it. I’d start out small if I were you. But you know how I feel about it—a few little hells and damns never hurt anyone.” Hannah touched the metal on the lamp next to Mamaw’s bed so it turned on and then dimmed with two more taps.
“I’ve been thinking,” Mamaw continued, as though she’d put hours of thought into the topic, “if Reverend Moss can say it over the pulpit, why can’t I say it in the privacy of my own house?”
“Amen!” Hannah added, like one of the church ladies from the Senatobia Presbyterian church, where Mamaw liked to go on Sundays when she was feeling up to an outing.
“And is one little curse word going to keep me from passing through the pearly gates?”
“Never!” Hannah urged emphatically, finding her grandmother’s rebellion at the age of ninety-one beyond endearing. She flicked off the overhead light and retrieved the remote from on top of the sixteen-inch ancient tube TV on the dresser across from Mamaw’s fully adjustable hospital bed.
She tried not to watch as Mamaw wrestled with her conscience, setting her lips in a firm line and mashing them together like a whole string of words she’d been dying to say was cued up right inside. She took a deep breath through her nose and held it. Hannah also held her breath without meaning to. She had given up being like her grandma long ago. It wasn’t possible. It could be her mother’s northern bloodline, or just being raised in a world that was colder in more ways than were reflected on a thermometer. She’d never be like Mamaw—but what if Mamaw became a little more like her?
Mamaw let out her breath but didn’t say a word, losing her battle with her conscience and bred-in-the-bones belief system. More than a little disappointed, Hannah clicked on the humidifier, and the room filled with a relaxing hum as she took a deep lungful of the moistened air.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Mamaw said, mostly to herself, wistfully, touching the bouffant of her hair.
“Maybe,” Hannah added, reasonably sure she’d never hear a questionable phrase escape her grandmother’s lips. Moving on to the next step in the routine, Hannah counted out Mamaw’s nighttime pills. Most of them she didn’t recognize, but there were a few that were familiar. Ambien, which looked like a small version of ibuprofen, had been prescribed to Hannah when she couldn’t sleep after Alex moved out. The emptiness of that apartment was like a bell continually ringing. The doctor had warned the pills could be habit-forming, but she was desperate to sleep through the pain of his loss.
She didn’t realize that the habit she’d form from taking Ambien would be time travel. When she took those pills, she slept so deeply that she would lose all track of time. She’d wake, take another, and another, until days had vanished. She kept thinking that when she’d wake up the pain would be gone—but it was always there waiting for her.
Hannah’s flirtation with those pills and her subsequent firing and hospitalization dragged her through life only a few weeks before her dad took a turn for the worse. He was the sole reason there was only one funeral in the family this year instead of two. A few weeks before his sharp decline, he’d forced his way into Hannah’s apartment because she didn’t answer her phone for twenty-four hours and he had a “bad feeling about it.” He’d called 911 and then had her involuntarily hospitalized after seeing the state of her trashed apartment and finding the empty bottle of pills on the floor beside her bed. Hannah cringed, still ashamed of how low she’d let herself get.
She recapped Mamaw’s pill bottle and picked up the next one.
The Prozac was easy to identify, green-and-white capsules. It’d been the first antidepressant they gave her in the hospital, and the only pill she still took every morning. Apparently, in some ways, she was just like Mamaw.
“Hey, before I forget, I have a town history question for you,” Hannah said, wanting to wash the memory of her father’s rescue out of her mind. The sleeping pills worked in a matter of minutes, so she’d have to ask her questions fast.
“I’m not a historian, but I’ll do my best,” Mamaw said, putting each pill in her mouth one at a time, with a sip of water between. She always acted like she knew little more than how to host a Ladies of the Library luncheon or organize bingo night at the church, but Mamaw taught English at Gulf Park College for Women and years later at Senatobia High. She liked to play it down. She’d been raised in a time when it was unseemly to be a smart woman, but even after nine decades and with her body growing frail, her mind was sharp.
Hannah sat in the chair next to her bed and put her hands on her worn gray sweats. “When you were younger, did you ever hear a story about a teenager being shot in her home here in Senatobia? A girl, around fourteen years old?”
Mamaw handed the cup back to Hannah. “The only shootin’ I can recall from when I was a girl was my cousin getting ahold of his daddy’s pistol and killing the little Stanford boy. My momma made my daddy lock away all his guns after that. Now, there’s always some kind of commotion at the trailer park . . .”
Mamaw, lovely as she was, still seemed to believe there was a right side and wrong side of town. Hannah corrected her more brusquely than she’d planned.
“No, it’s not the trailer park, Mamaw. There was a shooting, a long time ago, before you were born. You wouldn’t remember it happening. I’m wondering if you ever heard a story about a fourteen-year-old girl who was shot and paralyzed and then lived in a home for”—Hannah tried to find the right word, refusing to use the term that Evelyn called herself—“disabled individuals. I’m not sure what the institution would be called now. Um, like a nursing home. For younger people.”
Mamaw smacked her tongue and blinked slowly like she always did as the sleeping pills were hitting her bloodstream. Her shoulders slumped and her head lolled to one side. Hannah kissed her dozing grandmother on the forehead, deciding not to push her for any further information; she’d waited too long to bring it up. Hannah carefully slid a hand behind her grandmother’s back to adjust the pillows to support her head. She startled awake.
“Be careful of the hair, darlin’,” she said, her voice as droopy as her body. Even half-awake, Mamaw was aware of the importance of beauty. Which was just another way Hannah was different; she didn’t inherit much of Mamaw’s beauty and had never been willing to put in the effort to assist where nature had left her lacking.
“You still look beautiful,” Hannah said, plumping the pillows and carefully guiding Mamaw’s head back to rest in a semi-reclined position. With the storm that had come through and the sunset hours earlier, the room was shadowy. Mamaw liked to fall asleep with the TV on the Hallmark Channel, so Hannah clicked it on, turned the volume down low, and then slid the controller under one of Mamaw’s hands so she could reach it easily when she woke. Grabbing the dinner tray heavy with their empty chili bowls and scattered with cornbread crumbs, she backed away from the flash of the TV screen and Mamaw’s steady breathing. With a bit of a balancing act, she used her foot to swing open the bedroom door wide enough to pass through with
her loaded arms. Just as she was about to leave the room, Mamaw called out, making Hannah jump and the silverware gathered on the tray jingle.
“There was a home in Memphis for crippled children.”
“In Memphis?” Hannah asked, a brief memory of a black-and-white image filling her mind. When scrolling through a list of historic hospitals, she’d seen a few potential institutions, but one ended up being a sanitorium for women with “female weaknesses” and the other had closed in 1912. Hannah had scrolled right past the children’s hospital, recalling that Evelyn was twenty when she submitted her articles. But having Mamaw mention the children’s hospital made Hannah pause. Evelyn was only fourteen when she was shot, so technically still a child.
“Yes,” Mamaw said, as though she was dreaming. “Little Cory Mayfield went there after he nearly drowned in Coldwater River the summer I turned seven. He was Jerry’s friend. Daddy visited him there a few times, I think.”
“It was for children. Injured or disabled children?” Hannah asked, feeling like she’d finally homed in on a solid lead.
“Mm-hmm,” Mamaw murmured her response, only minimally awake. Her breathing went back to the steady, throaty rhythm from earlier. She was asleep.
It didn’t matter—the spark had lit the kindling Hannah didn’t even know she had stored in her brain during one of her online research binges. She backed out of the room, leaving the door open a crack like Mamaw always liked it.
Hannah rushed to the kitchen to deposit Mamaw’s tray, swearing to herself that she’d get the bowls cleaned before Carla returned the following day. Then she hurried to the study, nearly slipping on the floral carpet runner in the hall. There were two more articles on her phone from Evelyn, which held the potential of a wealth of information. Plus, there was a list of research items she could get started on even without reading the new articles.
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