All for a Song (34 page)

Dorothy Lynn hadn’t heard Ma’s voice since she left Heron’s Nest to visit Darlene, except for the imagined chastisement of just about every choice she’d made since embarking on that fateful trip. She stretched a single breath over the intervening seconds, placing the mouthpiece to her forehead as she exhaled, ridding herself of everything too dangerous to say. The earpiece, however, she kept in place, which proved an unfortunate decision as the brief, silent interlude was broken by her name, shouted, from a miraculous two thousand miles away.

“Honey-cub!”

“Hello, Ma.”

“Are you there?”

“I’m here, Ma. And you don’t need to shout.”

“You can hear me? I hear you just fine!”

“Yes, Ma. We can hear each other. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Jessup says you’re in California. Is that right?”

“Yes, Los Angeles. And, Ma—I have wonderful news.”

“Your sister had the baby! A little girl!”

“I know—” she started before thinking that her mother might have been delighted at the opportunity to break the news. “She must be so excited to have a girl at last. What did they name her?”

“Margaret!”

“Two boys and a girl. The opposite of us.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, Ma. Never mind. I have good news too. Donny’s here.”

She heard her mother gasp and could picture the work-worn hand pressing up against her mouth. She’d never been a woman to express any extreme emotion, be it joy or sorrow; rather, she’d “hold her words” until the right ones came. So with the crackling on the line to hold them together, Dorothy Lynn waited.

“Is he—” Ma started, then lowered her voice. “Is he there with you now?”

“No,” Dorothy Lynn said, immediately wishing she hadn’t made this call. Geography aside, she wasn’t any closer to Donny today than she’d been before she left home.

“Oh,” Ma said, her disappointment making a sad, slow journey across the country.

Dorothy Lynn stumbled over her words, trying to make
amends. “I just today found out where he works, and we’re planning to visit him tomorrow. I wanted to call you and tell you, and see if you had a message for me to give to him.”

“‘We’?”

How to explain Roland Lundi? “He’s an older gentleman, Ma. Here at the hotel where I’m staying.” She walked through the story like tiptoeing through thistles. “I told him everything I knew, and, well, he’s been a tremendous help.”

“I’m sure he has,” Ma said, her suspicions unmistakable.

“He’s an older man.” True enough, but Dorothy Lynn had no desire to defend him. “What matters is I’ll be seeing Donny tomorrow, and I hope he’ll be coming home with me for the wedding.”

“God willing.” The edge around Ma’s prayer seemed to encompass more than her wayward brother, and Dorothy Lynn gripped the phone tighter.

“There’s going to be a wedding, Ma.”

“Well, I hope so. Lord knows you need someone to keep you in line.”

A dozen retorts rested on the edge of her tongue, but Dorothy Lynn held them inside, lest her mother learn just how far from the line she’d strayed. Instead, she said no man short of Pa would be able to do that, but Brent was about the best they could hopefor.

“How is he, by the way?” she asked, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt.

“He preached this mornin’, powerful sermon, but I can tell his heart’s hurtin’. It’s him you should be talkin’ to, not me.”

“He wants to see me face-to-face.”

“And when’s that gonna be?”

“Soon, Ma. I promise.”

“It’s two weeks away, honey-cub.”

“I’ll be there.”

The vow settled between them. Vague as it was, it brought new, hopeful vigor to Ma’s voice. “I got a package from your sister the other day. Great big box.”

“What was it?” Dorothy Lynn tried to match her mother’s enthusiasm.

“Why, your dress, of course.”

For a single, honest second, Dorothy Lynn wondered,
What dress?
before she realized—her wedding dress. And then she couldn’t speak at all.

“It’s beautiful,” Ma said, rushing to the rescue with conversation. “So modern, not like anythin’ I’ve ever seen before.”

Dorothy Lynn’s eyes came to rest on the red silk dress hanging from a hook on the closet door. She’d left it in a pile on the floor this morning. The housekeeper had taken pity and shown it more respect.

“But I don’t think your pa would approve.”

Illogically, Dorothy Lynn repositioned herself, blocking the view of the dress from the phone.

“It’s too modern,” Ma continued. “He would’ve wanted you to wear my dress. Maybe that’s what we shoulda done.”

“I still can, if you’d rather.”

“I’d be fine if you wore a flour sack. I just hope there’ll be a weddin’.”

“Ma—please. Aren’t you excited about seeing Donny?”

“Haven’t seen him yet. And I worry you’ve set yourself on a fool’s errand.”

“How can you say that? He’s your son—my brother! I’m just trying to bring our family together.”

“By tearin’ your new family apart.” Suddenly, the plush hotel
room became the kitchen of Dorothy Lynn’s childhood. She could almost smell the aroma of fresh biscuits and bacon as her mother toiled at the stove, chastising over her shoulder. “Stuff and nonsense, this fetchin’ your brother. You’ve been lookin’ for an excuse to get yourself away ever since that young man asked you to marry him. First runnin’ off to St. Louis, then this mess I don’t even know what to call.”

“Ma—”

“You just better hope that Brent’s the forgivin’ sort, and I’m prayin’ that you’re gettin’ this wanderlust knocked out of your system.”

“I’ll be home by the end of the week,” Dorothy Lynn said, affixing a deadline without a clue as to its feasibility. Still, she followed with a promise.

“Don’t you promise nothin’. Your brother was all for promises. Sayin’ he’d be home by Christmas, then my birthday, then next summer. And never showed.”

“He didn’t have anything to come home to,” Dorothy Lynn said, instantly regretting having done so. She might as well have slapped her mother in the face.

“I’m just sayin’,” Ma said, clearly hurt, “that I don’t want to hear promises. I don’t want to hang my heart on a day, then be disappointed when it blows by.”

“Then as soon as I can, Ma. As soon as I can fix it with Donny, we’ll be home.”

“Well, then. That’ll be fine.”

“One more thing? The sermon this morning? Since I wasn’t there . . . what was the text?”

“Well, now, honey-cub, you haven’t been here in a while.”

“Please, it’ll make me feel like home.”

She could hear Ma’s sigh from two thousand miles away.
“He’s been talkin’ on the vanity of vanities. Would do you well to read it.”

Ecclesiastes.
Her eyes searched out the Gideon Bible on the other side of the room. “I will.”

“Today it was the rivers all runnin’ into the ocean, and the ocean never fillin’ up. All that runnin’. Useless. He was talkin’ about you, honey-cub, wearin’ his heart right there on the pulpit. There was weepin’ in the pews.”

She could picture him, standing before the church family who—no matter their flaws—made up the only family he could claim. Except, of course, for the Dunbars. And of them, only her mother remained.

“Will you tell him? That I called? Or do you think . . . Ma, do you think he’ll still want me?”

Another bout of silence. “The announcement’s still hangin’ in the entry. But the Lord knows people are talkin’.”

“I can’t imagine they have anything useful to say.”

“They have enough, girl. You get yourself home.”

In a note delivered the night before by a bellboy, Roland had written
early
as his only detail as to when they would be leaving, so she was grateful to have woken so fully rested long before the jangling alarm clock was due to rouse her. She splashed cold water on her face to wash away the memory of Ma’s foreboding tone and forced a smile onto the smooth, pink reflection.

“We get to see Donny today.”

The words brought out the dryness of her mouth, and she quickly drank two full glasses of water while standing at the sink. Refreshed without and within, she took another look in the mirror. “You were a child the last time he saw you. Just fourteen years old.”

In that moment, she knew she couldn’t face Donny with eyes lined with kohl and cheeks covered with rouge. Instead, she plaited her hair into one long braid, which she wound around her head in the style she’d worn before he went away to war. Folded neatly at the bottom of her trunk was the dress she’d worn when she left Heron’s Nest. The soft cotton was faded, muting the calico print into nothing more than smudges of color.

She held it close, inhaling the familiar scent, suddenly longing for its comfort. This was a dress that had leaned up against
trees as she sat on the forest floor, scribbling messy songs in her notebook. It had been washed in the tub on her own front porch. Brent had touched her in this dress—his broad, warm hand splayed against her back as he held her. What would he have thought of the red dress, where he could have put his hand in the same place and touched her skin?

“God, forgive me,” she said aloud. Each thought of that night seemed to uncover a new sin.

She put the dress on, along with dark stockings and her familiar, sturdy shoes, thinking Donny would probably recognize her bare feet long before her face.

Now, not knowing exactly what Roland’s definition of
early
meant, she settled in to wait.

“I thought you’d be ready,” Roland said thirty minutes later, holding himself back from his customary rush across her threshold.

“I am ready.”

His eyes, an even richer brown in complementing his houndstooth jacket, traveled every inch of her, and he made no attempt to hide his disappointment in the journey. “What is that?”

“This is my dress. From home.”

“You look like you should be in one of those cowboy movies. Like your landlord is going to defile you for the rent money or tie you to the railroad tracks.”

“Stop it.” She ran her hands along the front of the dress, wishing she’d at least had an opportunity to press it. “I want Donny to recognize me. I thought if I wore something familiar—”

“He’d think someone conked him on the head and he woke up back on the farm?”

“I’m not a flapper, Roland.”

“Sweetheart, in that dress you’re hardly even a woman. Aw, there you go. . . .”

Every moment she’d lived from the first taste of champagne to this very one erupted, and tears flowed once again—this time into the comforting, coarse material of Roland’s lapel. “Ma said this was a fool’s errand. That I was just trying to run—run away like Donny—and that Brent might not even want to m-marry me because everybody back home is talking. And I—I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

This last word came out more like a wail, but if she’d been seeking any sympathy from Roland, she found it wanting as he abruptly pushed her away, back to her own side of the threshold.

“Wrong. You know exactly who you are, and you’re more than some backwoods preacher’s daughter. You’ve got talent and potential and—when you work at it—style. You’re just too terrified to enjoy it. And now you think that if you put on some dishrag of a dress and do your hair up like some milkmaid you can snuff out all those inconvenient desires.”

“I don’t have any desires except to go home.”

“I believe you, sweetheart. And who knows? Maybe it’s the best thing. But not like this. Not in the same dress you wore when you left.”

“You’re right,” she said, feeling every fiber of the dress recoil from the task of covering her sin. “I’m not the same girl.”

“No, you’re not. You’ve sung in front of twenty thousand people. Plus dozens in the park. You were part of something that changed lives, a voice for Jesus in a way Sister Aimee could never be. This—” he captured her in a single, dismissive gesture—“throws all of that away.”

“No.” She stormed to the wardrobe, grabbed the red dress, and threw it in a heap at his feet. “
This
threw it all away.”

Roland bent down and picked it up, turning the dress into nothing more than a silk scrap in his hand. “This is a dress. It isn’t you, and I was hoping you’d forgiven me for . . . well, for everything.”