Love Comes Home (36 page)

Jay drove past the house. At the corner, he pulled into an empty church parking lot and turned off the motor. Everything sounded too quiet then.

He twisted around to look at Birdie behind him. “Okay, Birdie. What next?”

Kate reached over the seat to touch Birdie’s knee. “Whatever you want to do is what we’ll do.”

“It was a long drive up here.” Birdie sounded hesitant.

“The drive home is the same distance whether we go back to the house or not,” Jay said. “We can stop at that ice cream place we saw down the road. I bet they have fudge ripple.”

Birdie smiled then the way he intended, but the smile didn’t last. She slipped her eyes from him to Kate. “I’m afraid.”

“I know.” Kate grabbed her hand. “It’s okay.”

Birdie stared at Kate for a minute. “Miss Myrtle’s relative can’t be my mother.”

“No, she can’t,” Kate said gently.

Birdie blinked a couple of times. “He might not want to see me.”

“If that happens, then we’ll go get that ice cream.” Kate squeezed Birdie’s hand. “But I think if we don’t go back to the house, you’ll end up wishing you had.”

“It could not go well,” Jay said.

Kate shot a frown toward him, but a person needed to be prepared.

“I know that, Tanner.” Birdie blew out a long sigh. “But Kate’s right. I want to know. If he slams the door in my face, that can’t be any worse than leaving me on the church steps when I was five.”

“He won’t slam the door in your face. You’ll stay in the car while I go to the door to check the lay of the land.” Jay started up the car. “If any door slamming happens, it’ll be in my face.”

He didn’t know whether to hope the man would slam the door in his face or open it wide to let them in. Maybe Jay would just knock on the door and punch the man right in the nose and get it over with. Then maybe he’d drive on down to Gaffney on the Tennessee border and knock on his father’s door and punch him in the nose too. Surely the Lord didn’t mean a kid had to always turn the other cheek.

At the house, Jay knocked on the screen door. After a minute, he knocked again, harder this time, rattling the door.

“Hold your horses.” A woman shuffled up the hallway, drying her hands on the apron tied around her ample middle. Gray perm-set curls circled the plump face that peered through the screen at him. She shifted on her feet as though they were hurting and with reason. Her fleshy ankles lapped over the edges of well-worn house shoes.

“Mrs. Birdsong?” Jay did his best to sound nonthreatening.

“Who wants to know?” The skin around the woman’s eyes tightened.

“My name’s Jay Tanner. I’m looking for Andy Birdsong. Does he live here?”

“You the police?”

That surprised Jay. “Police? Why would you think that? Is your husband wanted for something?”

She lowered her voice. “I don’t know. But the man hasn’t ever told me one thing about what he did before we got married.”

“How long ago was that?” Jay decided it wasn’t all bad to be suspected of being the law.

“Eight years this August.”

Jay did quick math in his head. Birdie had been with the Merritts since she was five and she would be fifteen in June. That was all she knew for sure from her past. Her name and her birth date. “Happily, I hope.” Jay gave the woman his most convincing smile.

“Happy enough, if it’s any of your business. But I want you to know that if he done anything illegal before we married, I didn’t know nothing about it. Nothing at all.”

“Ma’am, I assure you I’m not the police.”

“You look like some kind of police.” Her hand was on the doorknob. “But I listen to radio programs. I know you can’t come in if I don’t let you.”

Jay shot her another smile and moved to the side so she could see past him to the car. “I’m not police. See, my wife and her sister are out there in my car. We just need to speak to Mr. Birdsong about a family matter. If he’s here.”

“Family matter?” Her frown grew fiercer. “The man don’t have no family.”

A door slammed somewhere inside the house and then a man’s voice called out. “Who’s at the door, Juanita?”

“Just some salesman.” The woman stepped back to close the door.

Jay was tempted to turn back toward the car. He could say the woman let him know this Birdsong man was not Birdie’s father. But instead he opened the screen and put his hand against the door to keep it open. She shrieked and jumped back.

“Mr. Birdsong?” Jay called. “I’m not selling anything. We just need a little information.”

“Information about what?” The man came up the hallway.

The woman shrank away from the door. “Make him go away, Andy.”

Jay took his hand off the door, but kept the screen door open. The man was tall and thin, but his scoop-neck undershirt revealed the muscles of a working man. His hair was streaked with gray, but it was easy to see it had once been as black as Jay’s. As Birdie’s.

“She’s worried I’m the police,” Jay said. “But I’m not.”

“So not police and not a salesman. What are you then?”

“Just a friend and brother to a girl called Lorena Birdsong.”

The man recoiled as though Jay had actually given him that punch in the nose.

“You told me your wife died,” the woman said.

The man didn’t take his eyes off Jay as he told the woman, “She did, Juanita. You go on out to the kitchen and let me handle this.”

When she didn’t move, he gave her a hard look. “Go on. Do as I say. None of this has anything to do with you.”

The woman huffed out a breath and muttered as she shuffled
back down the hallway. Birdsong stepped through the screen door and pulled the inside door firmly shut behind him. “I never saw any need telling the woman about Lorena. Still don’t.”

“She’s here.” Jay nodded toward the car. He couldn’t see anything except the very top of Birdie’s black curls.

“Here?” Birdsong looked like Jay had punched him again.

“She wants to know if you’re her father.”

“Where is she? I don’t see her.” There was a timbre of longing in his voice as he stared out at the car. “That girl in the front can’t be Lorena.”

“She’s in the back. Feeling a little unsure, I guess.”

The man sank down on the porch step. “You’re thinking I’m some kind of scoundrel and you’re right. But I did what I thought best for the girl. It was best. I went back there once after Iris died. Poor Iris. The woman grieved herself to death after we lost the kids. She couldn’t even bring herself back for the baby. A sweet little girl, but every time she looked at her she saw Lorena. She died before the baby was six months old.”

The man looked up at Jay with fierce eyes. “What was I going to do with a baby? A man without a wife and no family. I had to work. There were doctor bills to pay. So I gave her up for adoption. Tried to get her back after I married Juanita in there, but it was too late. They wouldn’t even tell me where she was, so I could go see her.”

The man stared down at his hands hanging loose from his wrists, propped on his knees. Jay didn’t say anything, but the man needed no encouragement to keep talking. The words must have been building inside him all these years and now they had to come out.

“Guess that was best too. Juanita never had any desire to be a mother. Told me that before we married. But I would have still brought my baby home if they’d let me. We named her Melanie. Iris had a fondness for fancy names.” He looked back out toward the car. “Is she going to get out?”

“Do you want her to?” Jay asked.

The man’s face was set, frown lines deep between his eyes, his jaw clenched. He slid his eyes across Jay’s face and then out to the car where more of Birdie’s head was visible now. “You can’t imagine how much.” The man’s voice was barely above a whisper.

“Then why didn’t you ever come back for her?”

The man shot Jay a hard look. “I already told you. I did go back. After Iris died.” He dropped his head down and was silent a few seconds. “I didn’t have anything then. Nothing except a baby I couldn’t take care of. I’d found a job sweeping floors at a warehouse, but they fired me when I missed too many days while Iris was dying. I begged enough money to get the gas to drive back down there to Kentucky. I loaded up the baby and took to the road. It was the summer after we left her there at that church. The day was hot and the baby cried the whole way. I shouldn’t have took her, but I didn’t have anybody to leave her with.”

“Couldn’t find any church steps?”

The man pushed up off the step and balled up his fists. “You think I wanted to leave her there? Is that what you think?”

Jay took a step back from him. “I don’t know what to think.”

The fight drained out of the man and he sank back down on the step. When he started talking again, his voice was devoid of feeling. “You’re right. You don’t know nothing
about it. I doubt you know a thing about going hungry. About watching your wife go down to skin and bones because you couldn’t find work. Or hearing your babies cry because you can’t get them any food.”

“I’m sorry.” Jay sat down beside the man. He didn’t look at the car.

“I didn’t want to leave her, but I couldn’t watch her starve. That little town had gardens and fruit trees. Food. And I did go back. Not soon enough for Iris, but I went back.”

“Couldn’t you find her?” Jay asked.

“No, I found her.” Birdsong looked up at the sky. “I drove down the road and there she was. In this yard, swinging high in the air. A girl was pushing her and they were laughing. I think that was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. Her laughing.” A smile touched the man’s face. “She looked so happy. I wanted to stop the car in the middle of the road and just listen. I drove by real slow and parked down at the church where we’d left her and carried the baby up toward where I’d seen her. There wasn’t much traffic that day and Melanie stopped crying while I was walking with her. I stayed back in the shadows and watched Lorena while I tried to think about how I could tell her about her mother being gone.”

“But you never told her that.”

“No.” The man looked out toward the car. “Not yet.”

“What happened?”

Birdsong dropped his eyes back to the ground. “A man came down the road from the other direction. I stepped back behind some bushes. I don’t know why. I just wasn’t ready for anybody to see me. My little girl jumped out of the swing and ran to him. He lifted her up in his arms and he was smiling to beat the band.” A tear slid out of the man’s left eye and
traced a path through the hard lines of his face. “And then she called him Daddy.”

The man stopped talking and stared down at the concrete step. Jay waited for him to say more, but when he didn’t, Jay asked, “So what did you do?”

“The right thing. I turned around and left her there.” The man looked at Jay with eyes that had seen too many troubles. “It’s what Iris would have told me to do. Let her keep swinging high. She’d found a new daddy. One who could feed her and make her laugh.”

In spite of himself, Jay felt sorry for the man. “You never went back to Rosey Corner again?”

“Wasn’t no use. I figured she’d forget all about me anyway. And that would be for the best.”

“But she didn’t. Every night she says her name. Lorena Birdsong.”

“Her mother used to do that too before she died. She’d whisper Lorena’s name like a prayer and then she’d cry. She wanted me to say it and the boy’s name too, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. Just so much pain a man can bear.”

“The boy. Birdie said she had a brother.”

“Birdie?” The man frowned at Jay.

“A nickname I gave her,” Jay explained. “But where’s the boy? Is he here?”

“No.” The man blew out a long breath. “We left him in Rosey Corner too. Buried him in the woods there after we left Lorena at the church.” The man rubbed his hand across his eyes. “She did evermore love her big brother. It about broke my heart the way she cried when the boy wouldn’t wake up to tell her goodbye. But the boy couldn’t wake up. He’d gone on.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“No need heaping sadness on the little thing. She was barely five years old.”

They were silent for a minute, both of them thinking about things that couldn’t be changed. Finally Jay looked out at the car where Birdie was waiting and then back at her father who was sitting like stone. “Are you ready to see her?”

“I never thought about her coming to find me.” The man raised his head and stared toward the car. “I’ve never been afraid of much, but I got to admit I’m scared now.”

“Of what?” Jay asked.

“What if she hates me?” His voice was low. “She’s got every right.”

“True, but she won’t. Not Birdie.” Jay got to his feet and motioned for Kate and Birdie to get out. He wondered if he should go tell them the man’s story first, but then it wasn’t his story to tell.

The man stood up beside him, straight and stiff. His hands trembled as he waited for Birdie to get out of the car.

35

I
t was hard to stay in the car while Jay talked to the man. She wanted to know what was being said, but at the same time, she had to stay with Lorena, who was so nervous she slid practically down into the floorboard.

“I can’t look.” Lorena hid her eyes. “Tell me what’s happening.”