When the Morning Glory Blooms (17 page)

Lord, my head is reeling with the weight of what these girls will need from me! How can I help them bring healthy babies into this world and make life-changing decisions and teach them about men and prepare them for an uncertain future and train them to care for themselves and
—

“Miss Morgan?”

“Yes?”

“Ain’t you gonna say something? Yell at me? Tell me how disappointed you are and that you wonder if my brains all leaked out?”

“You’ve probably heard that enough already, haven’t you?”

“Yes’m.”

We walked a few more paces, kicking at bits of rock and picking flowers that caught our interest. “Tell me what you know about God, Elizabeth.”

Her beautiful hazel eyes clouded over. She snapped petals off a blossom, then answered. “He’s the most disappointed with me of all. I done wrong. And I don’t blame Him for turning me away.”

“Where did you get the idea that God was turning His back on you?”

She didn’t answer, but covered her face with her hands.

“Elizabeth, look at me. You, my dear, are about to step into a world of discovery about the Lord God. You are going to learn about His grace and mercy. You’re going to learn how different His love is from the kinds we see around us sometimes. You’re going to be swept along in His grace like that leaf carried downstream. And I’ll consider it a privilege if you’ll let me accompany you while it happens.”

I didn’t sleep much at all that night. My mind churned with ideas that wouldn’t leave me alone. How could I have thought giving these girls a safe place to live would be enough? There was so much more. So much.

Their hurts needed tending. Their sins needed forgiveness. They would need education and training and encouragement. They would need skills—both parenting skills and job skills. Some, if not most, would need to support themselves after they left me.

They needed doctoring! I hadn’t even thought of that yet. I began to pray that night for a kindhearted doctor who would give his time to young girls with babies in their bellies and nothing with which to pay him. A doctor who didn’t mind waiting for payment until he reached heaven’s gates.

Close to dawn it struck me that I was making plans as if certain there would be more girls than Elizabeth. I had no guarantees of that. Only a gnawing sense that I believed had been planted in my heart by the hand of a God who cared.

12

Ivy—1951

You still believe that, Anna?” Ivy doodled in the corner of the notebook paper. “That God cares about  . . .  about people like Elizabeth?”

“More than ever.”

“Whether they deserve it or not?”

“That’s what’s so compelling—we don’t deserve it. Oh, honey, God wouldn’t have any friends at all if they were limited to only the deserving.”

“Only the deserving.” The phrase formed a rhythm for Ivy’s footsteps as she walked the hall toward her supervisor’s office. It changed the closer she drew to the blond wood door. “Oh, the undeserving. Oh, the undeserving.”

Jill must have snitched. She must have guessed the truth—someone had to be the first—and felt it her obligation to report to their supervisor that Ivy was pregnant and unmarried.

Mrs. Philemon—
Mrs
.—beckoned her to the aqua plastic chair across from her own. “Are the rumors true, Ivy?”

Truth or consequences. Truth
and
consequences.

“The rumors about  . . .  ?”

“Do I need to spell it out,
Miss
Carrington?”

“No, ma’am. I mean, yes, ma’am. What you’ve heard is true.” Ivy’s throat clenched then unclenched. The truth burned on the way out but left a strange, Alfred Hitchcock-like calm in the middle of chaos. She’d told the truth, for once.

“That’s unfortunate.”

Ivy watched the peroxide bouffant bounce as the woman’s ballpoint pen tapped divots into the desk blotter.

“Your application lists your status as married, Ivy, an application you signed as true to the best of your knowledge.”

The envelope in the pocket of Ivy’s uniform crinkled as she uncrossed her legs. Drew. “Wishful thinking, Mrs. Philemon.”

“You’re engaged, then?”

“No.”

Peggy Philemon leaned across her desk and dripped condemnation as she whispered, “Divorced?”

“Goodness, no!” What did she think Ivy was, a—Oh.
God, forgive me
.

“You admit that you lied on your application, Ivy?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The room shrank. Ivy smelled her own perspiration and felt it puddling in the center of her bra.

“Even if there weren’t the matter of your  . . .  indiscretion  . . .” —she glanced at Ivy’s stomach and let the word hover—“falsifying your application is automatic grounds for dismissal.”

No emotion linked the woman’s words. None, it seemed. Peggy “the Perfect” Philemon waited. For what? An explanation that would turn a lie into a simple misunderstanding? A blink that would erase the last several months and allow Ivy to make wiser choices and avoid moments like this?

Dismissal.

Discharge.

Disgrace.

How would she tell her father? How could she ever tell Drew?

“You have two weeks, Ivy. I should send you packing immediately. But I’m not heartless.” The word echoed unnaturally in the small room. “Besides, we can’t afford to be any more shorthanded than we already are. Two weeks. I hope you have some savings.”

Ivy peeled herself out of the sticky plastic chair and staggered down the concrete and linoleum hall to Anna’s room to begin the trail of her good-byes.

“Two weeks?” Anna smiled. “We have time, then.”

“For what?”

“Imagine what God can do with two weeks if He could make the world and everything in it in half that time!”

“Anna, it’s hopeless.”

“When you’re done with your shift today, you be sure and stop in, okay? My story’s getting to a part you need to hear.”

If she survived her shift, if she didn’t split before the day was over, if she didn’t throw her name badge at her locker—or at Jill—and vow never to set foot in the place again, Ivy didn’t intend to hang around after hours for another installment of Anna’s drama. It was doing funny things to her heart.

“We’ll see.” A noncommittal response appropriate for dealing with children and the elderly.

But at the end of the day—a miserable, uncomfortable day—going to the apartment held less appeal than spending time with someone who cared. So she pulled up a chair, flipped open the stenographer’s pad, and laid her sharpened pencil to the paper just as Anna began to reminisce.

Anna—1890s

My Elizabeth was as round as a Rome Beauty by the time apple harvest began. Her back bothered her, I knew, so Puff and I tried to give her chores that would keep her busy without taxing her unbalanced body.

She sat at a battered old table in the backyard, coring and slicing apples for drying from the bushels Puff laid at our feet.

I helped in the orchard as much as I could and still keep up with running the house and Elizabeth’s lessons. Some days we hardly spoke over supper, we were so tired.

“Tired’s got my tongue,” Puff was fond of explaining.

Delighted as a Spanish explorer with a new find to report, Puff unearthed a root cellar near the springhouse. Its entrance once hidden by a tangle of blackberry bushes, the root cellar’s cool interior now boasted crates of our beautiful red and yellow apples  . . .  far more than we would need to sustain us through the winter. It pleased me to think about hauling a crate of apples to the mercantile midwinter to trade for necessities. God was providing as only He could  . . .  although I noted that He got considerable help from Puff.

Puff taught us how to string dried apples on cotton thread and store them in the attic for safekeeping. He advised that I hang a sheet a few inches above the garlands of apples to keep dust or mice from settling on them.

Apple perfume scented our work clothes. Our hands were stained rust-brown from apple acid, and stayed that way until wash day, when hours of scrubbing clothes in hot soapy water bleached our hands clean.

Elizabeth’s lessons stuttered at first. I jumped from one thought to another, one discipline to another. One minute we
talked about diaper care, the next about grammar, the next about baking bread, the next about home remedies for childhood ailments and how to watch for infection, the next about understanding men  . . .  as if I knew a lot on that subject. I marveled that Elizabeth was so patient with me.

She didn’t seem to mind that we were learning as we went along.

Sweet-tempered, Elizabeth was easy to love. She soaked up Scripture as if she’d been living in a desert. As her baby grew within, so did her understanding of grace. It registered on her face and in the timbre of her voice.

But she was just a child. We had to discuss her plans for the future.

“Elizabeth, as much as I would like to, I cannot let you stay here forever.”

“I know.”

“You and your baby will have to find a place of your own, lives of your own, not long after he or she is born.”

“I know.”

“Or  . . .”

“Or what?”

“Or you will have to decide if you should let the child be raised by another family.”

Silence stretched halfway to town. I knew she had considered the thought.

“My wanting this baby isn’t enough, is it?”

I weighed my reply. “It is very hard for me to counsel you on this issue. My heart has a tendency to run ahead of wisdom at times. But we have to think carefully about this. Talk to Pastor and Mrs. Kinney  . . .  and to Dr. Noel. But ultimately you need to follow what God tells you to do.”

“He isn’t being very clear about it.”

“He will be.”

She laced her fingers under the roundness of her belly. “I’m not sure my parents will take me back  . . .  or if I want to go.”

“I understand.”

“I could go live with my Aunt Rhoda, I think. But she’s too old to have me and a baby underfoot. I couldn’t ask that of her.”

“A lot to be considered in the next couple of months.”

But it wasn’t months. It was days. And it was almost more than I could bear.

Elizabeth’s screams woke me from a deep cavern of sleep. I clawed my way to the surface and found her standing doubled over in the hall, holding her swollen belly with both hands while a river of blood and water flowed down her legs and between the floorboards.