A tear slipped down Annie’s cheek. “Mom wrote to me, but the letters didn’t say anything. Just that she loved me and wanted me to be a good girl and not be afraid. To trust our dad to take care of us. But he hadn’t taken care of Harriet Jane and he hadn’t taken care of Mama. I knew she was gone forever and I’d have to grow up by myself. I used to hide in the attic and cry. Phoebe and Mona had each other, but I felt like I didn’t have anybody.”
“You have me,” Tulip said.
Annie laughed despite her tears. “I do now. But I didn’t then.” She wiped her face. “That’s the crazy part. Nobody knew it, but Mama was pregnant with you. And I guess when you were born, she had to come home.”
Annie’s face was flushed. She hugged Tulip. “It was so good to have her back, to see Dad making over you and Mama, to hold sweet little you.”
Tulip’s heart ached. Thank goodness she’d gotten to skip that time in her family. “And then what happened?”
“We healed. We forgot. Or pretended we did.”
“But what happened to Harriet Jane?”
“I don’t know.” Annie shook her head. “Harriet Jane was a closed subject then, and she’s stayed a closed subject. Though I think she and Mama write to each other. Mama wouldn’t really abandon any of her girls.”
Tulip stood up, her stomach churning. The house without their mama was too terrible to think about. She wished Annie hadn’t told her that.
“Let’s finish up,” she said. She knew she sounded mad.
“Hey,” Annie said. “You asked.”
“I know.” But what she’d heard was worse than anything she could imagine. Their mother had left them. She tried to see it in her mind—their mama not there. It made her feel like she was falling off a skyscraper.
Annie got to her feet. She put her hands on Tulip’s shoulders. “It was a hard time in our family. But we got through it. Actually, you got us through it. You made everything better. Dad adored you. He knew there wouldn’t be any more kids. You were his last hope for a farmer,” she said, smiling.
Tulip tried to smile back. She picked up the few flowers they had left. But her feelings got the best of her. “Why did nobody ever tell me this?” she cried.
“Because we wanted to forget the bad parts,” Annie said, tucking Tulip’s hair behind her ear. “About Harriet Jane running away and Mama leaving Dad.”
Tulip shook her head, sending her hair back into her face. “It makes me feel left out,” she said.
“And because we wanted to protect you. See how it hurts? I shouldn’t have told you even now.”
Tulip took a deep breath and let it out. She didn’t want to talk about it. “Let’s finish,” she said.
As Annie read the names and dates of the last Lovells, Tulip wasn’t listening. She didn’t say hello to the people and feel them stir at her friendliness. She laid flowers down when Annie stopped speaking and moved to the next grave.
She listened to the birds, trying not to cry. This family Annie had told her about seemed as foreign as the postcards in Great-grandma Belle’s wardrobe.
·· five ··
Iris
2001
IRIS was the last kid left on the bus. She walked forward to stand by the driver. “I’m not getting off at my grandma’s today. I’m getting off at home.”
Miss Daley, who Iris saw every morning and afternoon of her life, as regular as sunrise and sunset, met Iris’s eyes in the mirror. “I hope Clara isn’t sick.”
“No. She’s fine. I have a dentist appointment, and my dad is waiting at home to take me.”
“Is he home for the summer?”
Iris nodded. Her dad was a college professor. Usually he was just home weekends, except in the summer, when he was home all the time and he and her mom fought a lot.
“Will Annie be coming to visit anytime soon?” Miss Daley asked. She and Aunt Annie had been friends in high school. Aunt Annie lived in Portland now. She was a doctor.
“Maybe. I don’t really know.”
“Well, you tell her hi for me if you see her, okay?”
Iris nodded.
When the bus stopped at the end of the drive, Iris said, “Bye!”
“See you tomorrow. Same time, same place.” Miss Daley said that every afternoon.
It seemed strange to be dropped off at home. Normally, Grandma Clara was waiting at the dollhouse, acting as if Iris was the high point of her day.
Iris opened the mailbox at the end of the drive, hoping there might be an envelope with her name on it. She had a birthday next week and sometimes cards from the aunts came early, and they had money inside. But there was just boring stuff addressed to Tulip Smith or Lawrence Smith, her parents.
Iris cut across the grass to the front door. She was surprised the house was closed up, since it was such a pretty day.
The front door was locked.
She rang the doorbell and waited. And waited, a lump growing in her throat.
Finally, she tilted the flowerpot where the secret key was kept. It wasn’t there.
She pressed the doorbell again, knowing she was acting pathetic but longing to hear the sound of her dad’s footsteps, wanting him to open the door, wanting him to say if they hurried, they could still get to the appointment on time.
The clock inside bonged four o’clock.
Leaving her book bag in the porch swing, she went to the north end of the house and peered through the garage window. Both her parents’ cars were gone.
They had forgotten her.
Tears burning her eyes, she sat in the porch swing and stared at nothing. Her ears ached, listening for the sound of a car. She looked down the road, hoping to see one of her parents’ cars turn the corner at the cemetery.
People got in car accidents. They also had heart attacks, choked on food, and drowned. Lots of things could kill people. Bees, snakes, tornadoes.
Crows cawed angrily from behind the house. They made her think of her parents when she lay on the floor by the secret listening post under her bed, where she could hear every word, where she could even hear her dad lift the cap off a bottle of beer. She could hear her mother sigh.
Didn’t they ever wonder where she was and what she was doing when she was up there with her ear pressed to the opening behind the baseboard?
Sometimes they liked each other. Her dad enjoyed cooking for them on the weekends. Sometimes, though, he cooked fancy stuff that they mispronounced and he tried to hide his smile, but her mother always saw it and got mad. Sometimes her dad was funny and made her mother laugh. Sometimes he seemed proud she ran a big farm, and sometimes she seemed proud he wrote books. Her mother had conservation awards on the wall behind her desk in the office they shared. Her dad had two books he’d written on the bookshelf behind his desk. But they said mean things to each other. Her dad said her mother was letting herself go. Where was the beauty queen he’d married? Her mother said her dad better look out for that wandering eye of his. It had gotten him in trouble before.
The clock inside chimed four thirty. She wasn’t going to wait any longer. She stood up, put her book bag over her shoulder, and began to walk.
It felt like a long way to Grandma Clara’s house. She turned east at the corner, going up the first hill. The grazing cows and calves raised their heads and looked at her.
The sky seemed really high and the barn far away, as if the world had gotten bigger or she had gotten smaller. Nobody knew where she was. What if somebody came along and tried to kidnap her? They probably wouldn’t. But they might.
If she heard a car, she’d run to the bridge, scramble down the bank, and hide in the water. But she didn’t hear a car. Or anything.
There was only one house along this road and a big dog lived there. She saw him standing at attention on the front porch. She looked straight ahead and walked as if she were invisible, barely b
reathing. She counted backward from a hundred by threes, telling herself if she just kept counting, the dog wouldn’t be able to move. She didn’t look, not even out of the corner of her eye. Her heart was racing but she didn’t rush.
When she was well past, she relaxed and walked faster.
Eventually she got to the dollhouse. It looked different—lonely—without Grandma Clara standing on the porch waiting for her. She went through the squeaky metal gate.
“Grandma Clara?”
Maybe she wasn’t home either.
“Anybody home?” Iris cried, her voice shaking.
Finally, she heard her grandmother’s voice. “Iris?”
“Yes! I’m here.”
Her grandmother came to the door and opened it. “What are you doing here?” She looked sleepy. She didn’t quite have her welcoming face on. “I was having a nap,” she said.
Iris felt her face breaking up.
“Oh, you poor girl,” Grandma Clara said, folding Iris in her arms. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s nobody home at our house.”
Her grandmother put her arm around Iris’s shoulder and steered her inside. “Something got mixed up, didn’t it?”
Iris swallowed and nodded, embarrassed she’d almost cried like a baby.
“Well, I was missing you. That’s why I took a nap. Wash your hands while I make our snack.”
The familiar smell of the soap in the tiny bathroom made Iris feel a million times better. She looked in the mirror over the sink. She wished she didn’t have freckles, but she felt better about them when her grandmother called them Annie’s freckles. She liked her aunt Annie.
At the round table in front of the window, Grandma Clara laid down pretty cloth napkins, which always made Iris feel like a princess. When the English muffins popped out of the toaster, Iris buttered them and spread them with strawberry jam they’d made last summer. Grandma Clara poured Iris a glass of milk and herself a glass of water, and they sat at the table eating.
Iris felt much better. She could see their house across the field. The sky didn’t look so big now.
“I wish you lived in our house,” she said. “Like you used to when Mom was little. Why don’t you? We have lots of room.”
“A house can use only one mistress at a time,” Grandma Clara said.
Iris didn’t know for sure what that meant.
“And I’m the mistress of this house now and happy as a bedbug. Tulip is the mistress of that house.”
“But she’s not happy as a bedbug.”
Grandma Clara waited to see if Iris had more to say.
But she didn’t. She didn’t want her grandmother to know what life was like at her house. How unimportant Iris was.
Grandma Clara finally said, “Families say and do terrible things to each other, Iris. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. Usually, everything works out okay in the end. And I’m always right here.”
“I know.” Iris couldn’t bear to think about life without the dollhouse and her grandmother inside.
After they finished eating, her grandmother called and left a message for Iris’s parents that apparently there’d been a mix-up and Iris was with her.
Then they went onto the sleeping porch, which Grandma Clara also used as a sewing room. There were chairs for both of them and a worktable and the sewing machine and the hope chest Grandma Clara’s grandfather had made when Grandma Clara was ten.
Every time Grandma Clara opened the hope chest, Iris saw treasure. Not silver and gold and jewels, but a great trove of fabric remnants, buttons, yarn, thread, ricrac, lace, piping, needles, and stuffing, which they used to fashion their dolls.
Grandma Clara was looking at Iris, a smile forming. “You know what?” Grandma Clara asked.
Iris shook her head.
“When I’m gone, you should have my hope chest.”
The thought of Grandma Clara being gone stabbed Rose.
“But that won’t be for a long time,” Grandma Clara said, hugging Iris and getting out their project.
The doll they’d been working on for several days was almost done. They had a process for all their dolls. First, Iris wrote down five things about the doll they were going to make. The one she was working on now was eleven years old, longed for a twin sister, had a horse she rode everywhere—even to the mailbox and the garden—was good at keeping secrets, and wanted to grow up and be a wedding planner.
Then Grandma Clara cut the doll’s shape, front and back, out of skin-colored, stretchy fabric. They stitched the front to the back, leaving an opening for the stuffing, and turned it inside out so the seams didn’t show. And then they stuffed it and closed the opening. They nipped and tucked with hand stitches to make cheeks and chin and personality. They put on the faces with paint and markers. Sometimes for the eyes, they glued bits of paper. If the doll was a boy, they usually painted the hair. Otherwise they made yarn hair. Iris loved making the clothing and accessories.
Now and then, the dolls didn’t really look like what Iris had in mind when she wrote five things about them. If the girl they were working on now didn’t end up looking cheerful enough to be a wedding planner, Grandma Clara would say—as she always did—that real people sometimes didn’t turn out like you expected them to either.
Iris took some of the dolls home with her. Some she left with her grandmother, who kept them lined up on a shelf like trophies.
Iris was making sunglasses out of heavy paper and plastic wrap and glue. Anyone who rode a horse a lot and wanted to be a wedding planner someday would have sunglasses. Grandma Clara was telling family stories, as she often did on their after-school afternoons. Iris liked it when her grandmother did that, even though Iris wasn’t always totally listening. But she still liked her grandmother’s calm voice talking about people who were old or dead now but had once been kids. About times when electricity or bathrooms or televisions or computers hadn’t been invented.
“…in those days, I was a young mother still having babies and I expected so much out of Harriet Jane. We all did. She was a tall girl, like you. Maybe that’s why. I expected much less of Phoebe and Mona. And Annie, our baby, I spoiled silly.”
“But my mom was the baby,” Iris reminded her gently. Sometimes Grandma Clara got mixed up.
“Ummm,” Grandma Clara said, licking the tip of thread so it would go through a needle more easily, “she was Harriet Jane’s baby.”
Iris stared at her grandmother. Grandma Clara looked as if she might like to take her words back. But then she lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Everybody in the family knows, but we don’t talk about it. It’s a secret.”
“I’m good at keeping secrets.”
“I know you are, sweetheart,” Grandma Clara said.
Clara felt warm inside that Grandma Clara was trusting her. But she also felt dizzy from this astonishing information.
“But why did you pretend she was your daughter?” Iris asked.
“In those days, Harriet Jane was a wild thing off in San Francisco. And my husband, Ralph, couldn’t deal with the way she was living. Ralph didn’t bend in the wind, which is probably what killed him. And when she changed her name from Harriet Jane Hoffmann, his good family name, to Lotus Lovell—what she called her flower child name—that was the absolute end.”
Grandma Clara went on. “She was going to have a baby but didn’t have a husband. People don’t care much about that now, but they did then. Ralph especially didn’t want anybody to know. We both loved children and hadn’t had one for ten years and thought all that was behind us. And it just seemed the best for everybody because Harriet Jane was beginning her life and maybe not really meant to be a mother. So I went to live with her in California for five months and came home with a baby and let everybody think she was our late-life child. Those things do happen. It was an awfully hard time for the family. Phoebe and
Mona knew what was going on, though we kept it from little Annie. She was too young to understand.”
Iris was struggling to take this in. It was the most grown-up thing anybody had ever talked to her about. She thought of Harriet Jane as a superstar who had become famous for her prints of people holding bouquets and for saving the Lovell land during the farm crisis.
Plus, all this meant Grandma Clara wasn’t who Iris had always thought she was. “You’re really my great-grandmother,” she said.
“Well, I guess I am,” Grandma Clara said, as if she hadn’t thought of that before and it didn’t make a stitch of difference. “But what I’m trying to explain is that for most of us, life is long. We like to think we know how someone is going to turn out. But we don’t. So we shouldn’t give up on people. We shouldn’t give up on ourselves either.”
Grandma Clara began to sew little buttons on the jacket of the doll who was going to be a wedding planner someday. Iris put the finishing touches on the sunglasses.
Before long, she heard the sound of her dad’s Jeep coming up the road.
·· six ··
Rose
AT the end of the day, Ama was late picking her up at school. Both buses had already pulled out, and the last car in the pickup line was gone. The flag ruffled in the breeze. The long dress and love beads were hot, and Rose was thirsty. But Ama would be here. Ama would never forget her.
When the dusty farm truck finally crunched gravel in the school parking lot, Rose jumped up and ran to get in. Myrtle gave her a quick kiss as she climbed into the seat.
“Sorry,” Ama said. “The car died on the way here and I had to walk home for the truck.” Ama looked dirty and sweaty from the hayfield. She also looked rushed. “How did the report go?”
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