When the Morning Glory Blooms (37 page)

It took him hours to give birth to the rest of the story—a difficult labor. The women waited as the words crowned, then retreated, to crown again.

“You weren’t meant to be an only child, Ivy.”

And after a few more contractions, “Your mother would have had dozens, if she could have.”

With the next wave, “Instead, she had dozens of miscarriages.”

“Dad, I never knew.”

“Some of them, even I didn’t know about. But I guessed. She’d slip into her own world and I couldn’t reach her, couldn’t stop the pain.”

Ivy splayed her palms over her live, hiccupping child, cradling it. “I only knew she was sadder than other mothers. Until now, I thought it was her disappointment with me.”

“It was the others—the sons and daughters who refused to stay with her long enough to be born. With each one, she moved a few more inches away from me, until we lost sight of each other.” He inhaled a labored breath. “Then, that night, with you losing a child you hadn’t longed for, hadn’t prayed for, hadn’t begged the heavens for the privilege of holding  . . . ”

No more.

“What happened to her, Mr. Carrington?” Anna braved the breach of speechlessness.

Ivy watched her father’s whiskered chin quiver. Then he turned and left the room.

Anna and Ivy sat in silence, the evening deepening around them, though a splinter of light had dawned.

Inhale and exhale. Breathing in the slivers of truth. Breathing out the shards of pain. A cricket in the basement sang a rusty tune with no meaning. Then her father stepped back into the room.

“She asked me to take her to the bus depot. So I did. Helped her purchase a ticket to Des Moines, where her grandmother lived. She got lost somewhere along the way.”

The slap of metal on metal signaled the mailman had tucked something into the narrow black box that hung near the doorbell, letting the lid drop shut.

Ivy made a pretense of taking time to dry her hands on the dish towel before racing to the mailbox. Nothing looked, smelled, or felt like Korea.

It was possible, she reasoned, that her letter had fallen on the floor of a mail room between here and there. So she wrote another, saying all she’d said in the first one and more, sketching a poor representation of the bungalow and of the crib she’d found at a late-season rummage sale. Ivy hand delivered it to the postmaster at the iron-barred window downtown and stood sentry while he postmarked it and slid it into the proper canvas mailbag along the wall behind the counter.

She asked again if her mail—all her mail—were being forwarded to the new address. No new mail carriers who hadn’t heard of the change? No stockpile of undelivered letters? No news?

How desperate she must have looked.

How desperate she was.

The fire of Anna’s life once roared and snapped, from what her stories revealed. Ivy watched now as the flames grew mellow and sparks became embers. If anything, her spirit glowed brighter, but Ivy found herself pausing at Anna’s door each morning. Would she find Anna smiling? Or gone? She adopted the habit of whispering, “Lord, help me accept whatever I find behind this door today.”

Anna would call that a habit worth keeping.

“Good morning, Ivy. How are you and the little one today? Did you sleep well?”

“I was up three times to the bathroom.”

Anna used her fingers to fluff her sleep-matted hair. “I am happy to have lived long enough to see the introduction of indoor plumbing for occasions such as this.”

Who would make Ivy laugh like that when Anna had drawn her last breath?

“Let’s get your morning routine done as quickly as we can. You left the story unfinished last night.”

“Which one?”

“Anna, you know very well which one.”

“My beloved  . . .  on the night he wasn’t. Or so I thought.”

“Let’s get some breakfast in us. The little one is especially hungry this morning. Then we’ll talk.”

When Anna finally felt up to talking, Ivy risked asking, “Where was he? Where was Josiah that night?”

Anna smoothed the blanket on her lap. “He was detained.”

“I suspected that. I couldn’t for a minute believe he stood you up. What detained him?”

“Not what. Who.”

Ivy set her dust rag aside and picked up the notebook, the third one since she’d started writing midsummer. “Who?”

Anna smirked. “The local law enforcement.”

“Josiah was arrested? For what?”

“Not arrested. Detained. They weren’t sure what to do with him, prominent attorney and all.”

“What did he do?”

“Speeding.”

“Speeding? A hot-rodder?”

Laughter filled the small room. “Hardly. Josiah’s motorcar was one of the few on the roads in those days. It was to be my
first ride in it. He was  . . .  he was in a hurry to reach me that evening. Clairmont had a speed limit for horse-drawn vehicles but had yet to implement one for motorized vehicles.”

Ivy made a note in the margin of the page. “How fast was he going?”

“Ten.”

“Ten miles an hour over the speed limit?”

“Oh, no, dear. The speed limit was six miles an hour. He raced along at ten, the law enforcement officer estimated, and spent the night in the hoosegow, although we didn’t call it that at the time. No charges were filed because no one knew what to do without an adopted motorcar speed limit.”

“Anna! You forgave him, I hope. That’s so romantic. Racing to see you.”

She clutched the locket at her neck. “Eventually. I forgave him eventually. The law was in a greater hurry to do so than I was.”

Anna—1890s

So many of the young women sent to me arrived because they’d taken their relationships too far too fast. As Josiah and I grew to consider each other more than business partners, we talked about our responsibility to present an example to the residents. Patience. Self-restraint. Decorum. Purity. We were not children. But we lived our relationship under the scrutiny of those who had made unwise choices in their relationships. That put an additional restraint on our growing affection for each other.

The affection nearly flamed out before we gave it voice.

The conversation began innocently. Josiah and I walked in the orchard, under pretense of checking on the harvest readiness of the Yellow Transparents, as if Puff were not daily on the case. Truth be told, it was togetherness that drew us to the top of the hill. That and the impeccably blue canopy overhead, the autumn freshness and intoxicating fragrance in the air, and the joy of feeling comfortable and appreciated whether speaking or silent.

“This is a good place.”

I assumed he meant the property as a whole, not just the tiny square of it on which we stood. “Yes. I’m grateful.”

“Anna, have you ever considered having a family of your own?”

A bolt of lightning skittered recklessly through my body, exiting through my toes, though the sky remained cloudless and unthreatening.

“I have a family, Josiah. So many daughters and grandchildren that I find it increasingly difficult to name them all accurately.”

Did his silence mean he was considering the validity of my answer or constructing a response?

“Have you  . . .  thought about  . . .  marriage? About sharing your life and your future and your passion for this work  . . .  with a man who would love and cherish you and meld his efforts and his heart with yours?”

He had not specified
which
man.

“The work is so consuming,” I said. “It takes all my energies to love and care for these girls, to teach them how to be good mothers and godly women.”

“But, Anna, it’s also important to show them what godly husbands and wives are like, how a man and woman can build a relationship that knows His blessing. Don’t they also need to
be taught what pure love looks like when it stumbles, when it grows?”

My inability to answer became a wedge between us. At least, that’s how I saw it. And felt it. I would have longed to tell him point-blank that his was not a new thought, that I’d heard the murmurings crescendo. But to admit so would have been to confess that I needed him. Josiah Grissom. Not
a
man or
a
husband. Those I felt no need for. It was Josiah with whom I longed to share life.

Was it fair of me to obligate his heart with my admission? And if he were merely speculating, merely proposing a theory rather than proposing, I couldn’t bear the humiliation. I knew I’d collapse from the inside, piece by piece, until the shell of my body lay shriveled on the ground, limp and lifeless and worthless as the too-far-gone windfall apples at our feet.

“I’m grateful,” I finally managed to respond, “for the Kinneys’ example. We would be hard-pressed to find a stronger testimony to the wonder of God-pleasing love.”

He lifted his chin, as if freeing an obstruction from his throat. How his countenance reacted after that point, I don’t know. The grass at our feet drew and held my attention.

“That is true, Anna. But they have only occasional contact with the young women. Sunday services. Afternoon visits to Morning Glory. Community activities. Hardly the realities of day-to-day living, the constant give-and-take of compromise, the tender moments between a husband and wife as they sit by the fire, the wrestling with crises  . . .”