When the Morning Glory Blooms (11 page)

Puff swept back a corner of one of the tarps, revealing a beautiful wine-colored velvet settee. His smile was that of a
confident salesman proclaiming, “I think you’ll enjoy this little number.”

The way my heart stirred at the sight of the settee, one would think I could see into the future, that I could see how much of my life would be lived out on that piece of furniture. The tears spent, the hours of waiting, the wrestling with God, with my own fearful and rebellious thoughts, with the residents of my home.

I mark that moment in the barn as
The Beginning
. But its genesis was much earlier, not in a cobweb-draped barn or stable, but in the love-draped heart of God.

Ivy—1951

“That’s beautiful, Miss Anna.”

Silence.

Ivy looked up from the steno pad in her lap. Anna Grissom’s knobby hands rested on the faded cardigan draped across her chest, one hand over the other, as if placed just so by a mortician.

Whose hands rest naturally in that awkward arch?

“Miss Anna?”

“Did I doze off? I apologize. Where were we?”

Ivy’s breaths resumed a rate closer to normal. “Would you like to take a break? Rest a bit?”

“Why don’t you fill me in on life south of the thirty-eighth parallel.”

“What?”

“I can hear news about the war from the gossips in the hall or when Bernard next door has his radio cranked so loud Tokyo can hear it. But that’s not the real story. It’s far more
interesting to hear about it from the soldiers on the ground, from the men walking that sour soil and facing the enemy.”

Ivy could bear Drew’s circumstances if she kept the enemy out of focus, fuzzy, like when her dad’s television antennae wasn’t adjusted right and the picture looked snowy, indistinct. Or when the horizontal hold went crazy and the picture lost intensity. She shook her head, but the encroaching thoughts remained.

“No? You won’t tell me?” Anna’s face expressed mock shock.

Training her mind back to the question at hand, Ivy forced the edges of her mouth into what she hoped passed for a smile. “I don’t know much news that you haven’t heard, Anna. Drew—” Saying his name stopped her for a second. “Drew doesn’t share many details about the war itself, the ‘police action,’ as the government calls it.”

“Some say the fighting’s been different since MacArthur lost his job.”

Ivy buttoned her uniform bodice where it had popped open. “Wouldn’t know about that.”

“It won’t be a long war, Ivy. Can’t be.”

“You’ve known a few.”

“Too many. You have to dig through a lot of debris in war to find the good things worth hanging onto—the songs, the ingenuity, the heroes.”

“This war has no songs.”

Anna cocked her head. “I wonder why that is.”

Ivy tapped her pencil against the notebook in her lap. “Nothing to sing about.”

“Does your Drew talk about battles he’s been in, acts of heroism he’s witnessed? Or is he the hero everyone else is writing home about?” Anna’s eyes twinkled.

“He doesn’t share those things.”

The older woman winked. “So he only writes about his love for you?”

Warmth crept up her neck and ears. “He talks about the men in his platoon.”

“Has he made friends there?”

“Brothers. He’s met brothers. He talks about how devoted they are. They look out for one another.”

“That’s comforting, isn’t it? How many men in his platoon?”

Ivy smiled genuinely this time. “I know the answer to that one. Thirty-six. Twelve soldiers, foot soldiers, per squad. Three squads per platoon. Three platoons per company  . . .”

“Such romantic letters he’s writing!”

“I asked him. My dad isn’t a veteran. Neither were my uncles. Flat feet deferment. So I didn’t know much about the military before I met Drew.”

Anna’s eyes misted. “This is a hard way to learn, isn’t it? With someone you love on the front lines?”

“With all the talk about a stalemate, he says there’s still combat. The worst are the night raids, he says. No one in Korea sleeps with both eyes closed if they’re close to the action.”

“You’re blessed he writes so often.”

“Sometimes it’s old news by the time it reaches me. And my letters to him arrive in clumps, he says. Nothing for weeks. Then three or four in one day.”

The tears tumbled down Anna’s cheeks now. “I can imagine him waiting for mail call and not hearing his name.”

Don’t, Anna. Don’t add to my guilt. I’m an expert at applying it
. “I’ll say hi from you in my next letter to him.”

“You haven’t heard, then?”

“Heard what, Anna?”

“About my discharge?”

Ivy jumped up and did a quick search of the bedclothes. What kind of discharge was she talking about? The longer
Ivy worked here, the more sure she was that nursing duties couldn’t feel as awkward and unpleasant to others as they did to her.

“My discharge!” Anna repeated, as if Ivy were hard of hearing. “I’m being discharged, of all things.”

“You’re not happy about that?”

Anna’s gaze traveled the perimeter of the room at ceiling height then returned to hold Ivy’s in its magnet-strong, pillow-soft grip. “Ivy, have you ever been homeless?”

Counting my senior year of high school, two years ago, and a few weeks from now, three times
. “Why?”

“My insurance ran out. That’s what they tell me. I don’t remember having bucket insurance.”

Oh. Kick-the-bucket insurance
. It unnerved Ivy a little that she’d started thinking with Anna’s logic. “Your insurance won’t let you stay here, Anna?”

“I’m too far from kicking the bucket, apparently. Not well enough to live alone. Not sick enough to live here.”

Who proposed that plan, I wonder?

“So—” she took a deep breath, “they’re kicking me out soon. I hoped we’d have more time with the stories. Can’t afford the luxury of a nap, my dear. Unless your baby needs one.”

“Anna!” Ivy shot to her feet from the vinyl chair. Her pencil clattered to the tile floor. She flew to the doorway and glanced in both directions down the hall, pushing aside how the fast movements reignited the nausea she still fought some days. All quiet on the western front and on the eastern front. The only people in the hall lived in wheelchairs, in other eras, and too seldom in their own minds. If they’d heard the word
baby
—unlikely—and remembered it to repeat it—unlikely—and connected it to her, would they be believed? Unlike—

Ivy, you’re no better than Jill. You judged those residents on the virtue of their memories, their hearing, and their mental function
. The way others treated, or rather mistreated, Miss Anna.

She leaned her back against the door frame and drew in a few stabilizing breaths. Was Anna about to become homeless? Where would she go, at her age?

No relatives? Hard to believe.

If Ivy’s father kept his promise, Ivy would be on the streets right beside her. Maybe they could share a bunk bed down at the mission. Wouldn’t that be a sight? Ivy and Anna arguing over who got the top bunk. Right now, Ivy could still take her, but in a few months neither of the women would create a pretty picture climbing a ladder. How long had it been since Anna’s scarred legs had moved more than to scoot her closer to the edge of her bed or chair? Why had Ivy never taken the time to ask about the scars or about Anna’s life shortly before becoming a resident?

Because Anna cherished only one topic of conversation—a story sixty years old.

Anna—1890s

The furniture crowding the tack room found more than enough elbow room once transferred to the house. We had to burn several pieces, their “innards” shredded by families of overly busy, nest-building mice. A few other pieces were salvageable but in need of sanding or paint or wood glue. Puff’s department. I was in charge of reupholstering, as money allowed, and cleaning, endless cleaning.

The sun and breeze cooperated, blowing away stale and musty odors. Puff tied a stiff rope between mature maples. On
it we hung two aged oriental carpets we found rolled up in a corner of the tack room. I beat them tentatively at first, unsure that their faded threads would endure the punishment, then more fiercely as great clouds of dust and airborne grit escaped from deep within their weft and warp.

Even as the Lord spread His grace-gift over the worn and tattered parts of my life, once the carpets were stretched over the floor, careful positioning of the furniture hid most of their scars, most of the broken places.

If I didn’t know about Puff’s kinship with his Maker, I would have wondered from what deep, secret, sweetly flowing spring he drew his patience. Not once—not once!—did he object or grumble or even sigh when I asked for his help moving a chair or table across a room or an inch to the left.

“This where you want it?”

“I  . . .  I don’t know, Puff. Maybe closer to the window.”

“Good idea.”

“No. No, that’s not right either.”

“Pick another spot, then.”

“You’re an angel, Puff, to be so tolerant.”

“If I ain’t working in here, I’m working out there in the hot sun. I ought to be grateful these things ain’t found their proper place yet. My other chores’ll wait for me. That’s the thing about work. It won’t disappear if you turn your back on it.”

Eventually, I stopped worrying about not being able to pay him. He seemed to derive such intense pleasure from serving that I feared robbing him of the joy! And I determined to be like him, because he was so obviously like Jesus.

Unashamedly, and without making a dent in the supply, I saturated the house with wildflowers. Promising myself that I would one day give them homes in worthy vases, I used whatever I could find—old food tins and broken-lipped glass jars
salvaged from the dump area behind the barn, hollowed-out chunks of wood, dented buckets  . . . 

The flowers—humble as they were—lent dignity to their even more humble containers, and filled the house with the beauty my soul craved.

I felt like the queen of England herself the first night I had a real bed beneath me, although I doubt that Queen Victoria was ever so grateful for such a simple pleasure. I let my tired body sink luxuriously into the mattress as if it were filled with pure goose down rather than stiff straw. It would have taken the feathers of almost a dozen good-sized geese to stuff a tick. Puff had two geese now on the property. They were a start.

Loss and lack are efficient, skilled teachers. At their knee, we learn to appreciate the smallest favors, the briefest joys, the crudest provisions, the simplest blessings. The wildflowers. A bed underneath me. A breeze on wash day. Stillness at sunset. A table in the kitchen. A chair by the window. A dead chicken on my back stoop. A friend  . . .  one friend.

Ivy—1951

While Anna took the nap she said they couldn’t afford, Ivy vowed to enter the apartment that night with a new appreciation for its doors, though scarred; its walls, though peeling; its floors, though scraped raw.

Moving to Clairmont had been easier than explaining to Ivy’s friends in Westbrook that she was in a family way with no family. Moving in with her dad almost guaranteed the absence of new friends.