As Sure as the Dawn (71 page)

Sierra Clanton Madrid couldn’t stop shaking. Her stomach was quivering. Her head had begun throbbing with a tension headache the moment Alex had told her the news.

They had been married ten years. Ten wonderful years. She had thought he was as happy as she was. She had never suspected what was going on beneath the surface. Why hadn’t he told her straight-out that he was dissatisfied?

Sierra pulled her Honda into the driveway of the Mathiesen Street Victorian and prayed her mother was home. Maybe her mother could help her figure out how to reason Alex out of his plans for their future.

Unlocking the front door, Sierra entered the polished wood foyer. “Mom?” she called, closing the door behind her and walking back along the corridor toward the kitchen. She almost called for her dad before she caught herself. He was gone.

With a sharp pang, she remembered the call she and Alex had received at two in the morning three years ago. She had never heard her mother’s voice sound that way before or since.

“Your father’s had a stroke, honey. The ambulance is here.”

They met her at the Healdsburg General Hospital, but it was already too late.

“He complained of a headache this morning,” her mother had said, distracted, in shock.

Now, Sierra paused at his office door and looked in, half expecting to see him sitting at his desk reading the real estate section of the newspaper. She still missed him.

“Mom?” Sierra called again, not finding her in the kitchen. She looked out the window into the backyard garden, where her mother often worked. She wasn’t there either.

Sierra went back along the corridor and up the stairs. “Mom?” Maybe she was taking a nap. She peered into the master bedroom. A bright granny-square afghan was folded neatly on the end of the bed.
“Mom?”

“I’m in the attic, honey. Come on up.”

Surprised, Sierra went down the hallway and climbed the narrow stairway. “What’re you doing up here?” she said, entering the cluttered attic. The small dormer windows were open, allowing a faint sun-warmed breeze into the dusty, dimly lit room. Dust particles danced on the beam of sunlight. The place smelled musty with age and disuse.

The attic had always held a fascination for Sierra, and she momentarily put aside her worries as she looked around. Lawn chairs were stacked at the back. Just inside the door was a big milk can filled with old umbrellas, two canes, and a crooked walking stick. Wicker baskets in a dozen shapes and sizes were set on a high shelf. Boxes were stacked in odd piles with no particular purpose, their contents a mystery.

How many times had she and her brother gone through their rooms, sorting and boxing and shoving discards into the attic? When Grandma and Grandpa Clanton had died, boxes from their estate had taken up residence in the quiet dimness. Old books, trunks, boxes of dishes and silverware. A hat tree stood in a back corner on an old braided rag rug made by her great-grandmother. The box of old dress-up clothes she had donned as a child was still there, as was the large oval mirror where she had admired herself with each change.

Nearby, stacked in her brother’s red Radio Flyer wagon, were a dozen or more framed pictures leaning one upon another against the wall. Some were original oils done by her uncle during his retirement years. Others were family pictures from several generations back. One bookshelf was filled with tennis shoe boxes, each labeled with her father’s neat printing and used as storage for tax returns and business records.

A tattered, paint-chipped rocking horse stood in lonely exile in the far back corner.

Her mother had moved some of the old furniture around so that Grandpa Edgeworth’s old couch with the lion-claw legs was sitting in the center of the attic. Opposite it was Daddy’s old worn recliner. Two ratty needlepoint footstools served as stands for the things her mother had removed from an old trunk that stood open before her.

Marianna Clanton had a tea towel wrapped around her hair. “I thought I should go through some of these things and make some decisions.”

“Decisions about what?” Sierra said.

“What to throw away, what to keep.”

“Why now?”

“I should’ve started years ago,” her mother said with a rueful smile. “I just kept putting it off.” She looked around at the cluttered room. “It’s a little overwhelming. Bits and pieces from so many lives.”

Sierra ran her hand over an old stool that had been in the kitchenette before it was remodeled. She remembered coming home from kindergarten and climbing up on it at the breakfast bar so she could watch her mother make Toll House cookies. “Alex called me a little while ago and told me he’s accepted a job in Los Angeles.”

Her mother glanced up at her, a pained expression flickering across her face. She quickly hid her surprised dismay. “It was to be expected, I suppose.”

“Expected? How?”

“Alex has always been ambitious.”

“He has a good job. He got that big promotion last year, and he’s making good money now. We have a wonderful new house. We like our neighbors. Clanton and Carolyn are happy in school. We’re close to family. I didn’t even know Alex had put out word he was looking for another position until he called me today.” Her voice broke. “I don’t want to go to Los Angeles, Mom. Everything I love is here.”

“You love Alex, honey.”

“I’d like to
shoot
Alex! How could he make a decision like this without even discussing it with me?”

“Would you have listened if he had?”

She couldn’t believe her mother would ask such a thing. “Of course, I’d listen!” She wiped angry tears from her cheeks. “You know what he said to me, Mom? He told me he’d already called a realtor, and the woman’s coming by tonight to list the house. Can you believe it? I just planted daffodils all along the back fence. If he has his way, I won’t even be here to see them bloom!”

Her mother said nothing for a long moment. She folded her hands in her lap, while Sierra rummaged through her shoulder bag for a Kleenex.

“I’m sure Alex didn’t make the decision arbitrarily. He’s always looked at everything from all sides.”

“Not from
my
side.”

Restless and upset, she walked across the room and picked up an old stuffed bear her brother had cuddled when he was a boy. She hugged it tightly. “Everyone we love is here, Mom. Family, friends.”

“You’re not moving to Maine, honey. It’s only a day’s drive between Healdsburg and Los Angeles. And this
is
the age of telephones.”

“You talk as though it doesn’t matter to you that we’re leaving.” Sierra bit her lip and looked away. “I thought you’d understand.”

“Of course, I’d rather you were here. And I do understand. Your grandparents were far from overjoyed when I moved from Fresno to San Francisco.” She smiled. “It was a ten-hour drive in those days, but you’d have thought I’d moved to the moon.”

Sierra smiled wanly. “It’s hard for me to see you as a hippy living on Haight and Ashbury, Mom.”

“No less hard than it is for me to see you as a young woman with a wonderful husband and two children already in school.”

Sierra blew her nose. “Wonderful husband,” she muttered. “He’s a male chauvinist pig! Alex probably hasn’t even bothered to mention this to his parents.”

“Luis will understand. Just as your father would have. I think Alex has stayed here for ten years because of you. It’s time you allow him to do what he needs to do to make full use of the talents he has.”

It was the last thing Sierra wanted to hear. She didn’t reply as she ran her hand along the books on an old shelf. She knew what her mother said had merit, but that didn’t mean she wanted to listen. Alex had received other offers and turned each down after discussing them with her. She had thought the decisions were mutual, but now she wondered. He had sounded so excited and happy when he talked to her about this job.

She plucked
Winnie the Pooh
off the shelf and blew dust off the top. Stroking the front of the book, she remembered sitting in her mother’s lap as the story was read to her. How many times had she heard it? Four, five, six? The cover was worn from handling.

Just thinking about leaving and not being able to see her mother or talk with her every few days made her feel bereft. Tears blurred Sierra’s vision.

Her mother rose and came to her. Sierra felt some comfort when her mother’s arms came around her.

“It’ll be all right, honey. You’ll see.” Her mother stroked her back as though she were a child. “Things have a way of working out for the best, Sierra. The Lord has plans for you and for Alex, plans for your good, not your destruction. Trust him.”

The Lord! Why did her mother always have to bring up
the Lord?
What sort of plan was it to tear people’s lives apart?

She withdrew from her mother’s arms.

Her mother smiled understandingly. “Alex has known what he wanted to do since he went to college, but he’s never had the opportunity to do it. The greatest gift you can give him is the freedom to spread his wings, Sierra.”

It wasn’t what Sierra wanted to hear. Emotions raged and warred within her: anger and resentment that Alex could make such a decision without talking to her beforehand; fear that if she fought him, she’d lose him; terror of leaving a life she loved and found so comfortable.

“What am I going to do, Mom?”

“That’s up to you, honey,” her mother said gently, tears of compassion in her eyes.

“I need your advice.”

“The second greatest commandment is that we love one another as we love ourselves, Sierra. Forget yourself for now, and think about what Alex needs. Love him accordingly.”

“If I do that, he’ll walk all over me!” She knew she was being unfair even as she said it. Over the past ten years, Alex had married her, given her two beautiful children and a nice three-bedroom home in Windsor. Their life had been so smooth—she never suspected the turmoil within him. Realizing that frightened her. It made her feel she didn’t know Alex’s heart or mind as well as she thought she did.

Part of her wanted to pick up the children from school and come back here to the Mathieson Street home and let Alex face the real estate woman alone. He couldn’t sell the house if she didn’t sign. But she knew if she did that, he’d be furious.

“It might help to take your mind off the matter for a few hours and then try to think about it later,” her mother said.

Heart aching, Sierra sat down on the sofa again. She looked at the open trunk and piles of boxes. “Why’re you doing all this now, Mom?”

Something flickered in her mother’s eyes. “It’s a good winter activity, don’t you think?” She glanced around. “It’s such a mess. Your father and I meant to go through all this stuff years ago, but then . . .” Sadness crossed her face. “Time has a habit of getting away from us.” She looked around the room at the odd assortment of treasures. “I don’t want to leave all this for you and Skeet to have to figure out.”

She rose and walked around the attic, brushing her hand lightly over an old rocking chair, a bookshelf, a baby’s pram. “I’m going to sort and put all of Skeet’s and your things over there in the north corner. You two can decide what you want to keep and what you want to throw away. Special things from your father’s family and mine I’ll repack. Most of your father’s papers from the business can be tossed. There’s no point in keeping them. And Grandpa’s paintings. Some of them are disintegrating.”

“Some of them are really bad,” Sierra said, grinning.

“That, too,” her mother agreed with a laugh. “It kept him occupied.” She came back and sat down on the old flowered sofa. “This trunk belonged to Mary Kathryn McMurray. She was one of your relatives. She came across the plains in a wagon in 1847. I was just glancing through her journal when you came,” she said, taking up a leather-bound volume from the trunk and brushing her hand over it. “I hadn’t gotten very far. Apparently, this started out as an assignment book, and then it became her diary.”

She set the old book between them on the couch. Sierra picked it up and opened it, reading the childish scrawl on the first page:

Mama says livin in the wildurnes aint no reesun to bee ignurant. Her papa wuz a larnud man and wud not want foolz in his famlee.

“The trunk was part of Grandpa Clanton’s estate,” her mother said. “I haven’t gone through these things in years.” She took out an old tintype in an oval frame. The couple was dressed in wedding clothes, their expressions solemn rather than joyful. The groom was handsome in his dark suit and starched shirt, his dark hair brushed back cleanly from his chiseled features and intense pale eyes.

Blue,
Sierra decided. They would have had to be blue to be so pale in the picture. The bride was very young and lovely. She was wearing a gorgeous Victorian white wedding dress with lace and a high neck. She sat while her husband stood, his hand firmly planted upon her shoulder.

“Look at this old Bible,” her mother said. As she opened it, a section slipped free and fell onto the floor. Her mother picked it up and placed it in her lap. She thumbed through the black, cracked leather book. “Look at how worn the pages are.” She smiled. “Mary Kathryn favored the Gospels,” she said, replacing the loose pages in the Bible. She set it carefully beside the journal.

Sierra took out a decaying flowered hatbox. She found a note on top saying simply in beautiful black calligraphy, “Save for Micah McMurray.” The box was full of animals, carved of wood, each wrapped carefully in a scrap of flowered or checked gingham. She unwrapped a fierce-looking wolf, a majestic buffalo, a coiled rattlesnake, a prairie dog standing on its hind legs, a comical jackrabbit, a beautiful antelope, two mountain goats locked together in fierce battle, and a grizzly bear standing on its hind legs ready to attack.

At the bottom of the trunk was a large package wrapped in butcher paper and tied with string.

“I don’t remember this,” her mother said and slipped the string off so she could remove the wrapping.
“Oh!”
she said in wonder and excitement. “I think it’s a crazy quilt.” She unfolded it enough so that Sierra could take one end of it and then stood, spreading the folds to reveal the full pattern.