When Sparrows Fall (14 page)

Thursday had flown by in a whirl that left her shaky on the inside. Unsettled, disoriented. Like a stranger in her own home, she’d watched Jack supervise the children’s work, settle their quarrels, and answer their questions.

Today, she saw even more of his influence. Here in the kitchen, it was Frosted Flakes and frozen pizzas. In the living room, it was his books and papers. And the Dr. Seuss book he’d given to Martha.

Miranda hadn’t seen a Seuss book in years, but now, every time she glanced at the silly illustration on the cover, the jaunty rhymes popped into her head. Not that there was anything wrong with Seuss. Or with Shakespeare, Jack’s other favorite.

He was full of contradictions. His southern accent and folksy sayings betrayed his mountain roots, but then he would quote a line from
Hamlet
or
throw a ridiculously long word into a simple conversation. Even if she hadn’t had a concussion, he would have made her dizzy.

For now, all the commotion was in the backyard, where Jack was teaching the children a variety of raucous outdoor games. Carl wouldn’t have allowed them to play before they’d even started their schoolwork, but she saw no harm in it. They sounded happy.

The glass carafe of Jack’s coffee maker still held a few inches of cold coffee. Its very blackness was enticing.

She couldn’t use her right arm, still in the sling. With her left hand, she lifted the carafe to her nose and inhaled. She hadn’t tasted coffee since she was nearly nineteen. She’d owned a bright blue mug, personalized with white letters.

Nobody was watching her for once. Nobody would know. Nobody but God, and somehow she doubted He would care.

She could have reheated the coffee easily enough if Carl hadn’t forbidden microwaves. As it was, though, she’d have to pull out a pot and heat it on the stove. She was too wobbly to accomplish even that simple task. It was too much.

The carafe suddenly seemed to weigh ten pounds. Afraid she would drop it, she clattered it back down and gripped the edge of the countertop so she wouldn’t fall.

She couldn’t stand up to a fruit fly. She would never be able to stand against Mason. It would be far easier to give up. To move to McCabe.

God might have arranged her fall to humble her and show her He was on Mason’s side. The Bible said God sided with widows and orphans, but maybe she wasn’t godly enough.

“Please, God,” she said softly. “Tell me what to do. Speak to me. Speak.”

It sounded like a command given to a dog. She made a silent apology to the Lord, then strained to hear His inaudible reply.

Nothing.

Her prayers never went anywhere. They were locked inside her skull, never escaping to fresh air, much less going all the way to heaven.

Still gripping the countertop, Miranda looked up at the homemade wedding gift she’d grown to hate.

A wife who’s always neat and sweet.…

Being “sweet” had been her undoing. If she’d stood up to her husband, she wouldn’t have found herself under Mason’s thumb.

Moving slowly, she reached for the plaque and curled her fingers around the edge of it. With one upward yank, she pulled it from the nail. She dropped the plaque into the trash. It landed, hard, on an empty juice bottle, but neither of them cracked.

She wouldn’t crack either. She couldn’t afford to.

Outside, Martha shrieked. “Ollie-ollie over, I’m home free!” she screamed.

Miranda’s breath caught in her throat.
Home. Free
.

To be both home and free—that would be heaven. That was what she wanted for her children. No matter what Mason threatened, she couldn’t uproot them from her land.

Jack walked into the kitchen, breathing hard from running races with the archangels, and started a fresh pot of coffee. The last one in, he wasn’t in the mood to “do school,” as the kids called it, but he didn’t buy Miranda’s claim that she was up to handling it. She only wanted to take charge again because she didn’t trust him with her children’s education. And no wonder.

Her tidy domain showed the gulf between their lives. The children’s penmanship-practice scriptures decorated the fridge; earlier, he’d proofread an article for publication that would have curled Miranda’s hair right out of its braid. Chaucer wasn’t for prudes.

She limped into the room with Martha tagging along, gave Jack a wan smile, and settled into her chair. “Time for school.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to wait until Monday?” he asked. “What’s one more day?”

“It’s one more day toward meeting the state’s requirements for the year. Martha, love, would you like to ring the bell?”

“Yessss!” Martha fetched a fist-size brass bell from one of the lower bookshelves. Holding its clapper still with one hand, she tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs, then shook the bell into a clangor that sent Jack’s blood pressure skyrocketing.

“School!” she screeched. “Time for school!”

“Holy smokin’ Moses,” Jack said, his ears still ringing after the bell had quieted. “Miranda, please tell me y’all don’t start every day with that racket.”

“Only when everybody scatters right after breakfast. I’m sorry. Our house must be much noisier than yours.”

Her anxious expression prodded him into a little white lie. “I don’t mind.”

The other children popped out of nowhere to assemble around the table. Jack huddled over his coffee while Miranda drafted Timothy to open his Bible and read aloud from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

With only half his mind on the familiar verses, Jack pulled Miranda’s dog-eared Bible from the center of the table. He’d flipped through it once before and perused the neat notes in the margins. None of them appeared to be the ravings of a religious fanatic.

On the flyleaf, she’d written
Randi Ellison
in a schoolgirl version of her beautiful penmanship. She’d run out of room, crowding the name into the margin. The lack of planning revealed an endearing youthfulness, as did the tiny hearts that dotted the
i
’s.

The Presented By line said
To Randi from Auntie Lou
in different writing.

Timothy stopped reading, midsentence, and glared at Jack. Jack closed the Bible and returned it to the center of the table, and Timothy resumed reading.

Jack turned his attention to the red, spiral-bound notebook that held attendance records, but he didn’t open it. No need to; he’d already examined it at his leisure.

Someone—Miranda?—had drawn on the cover. Quite artistically too. Flowers. Trees. Stairsteps and zigzags and overlapping circles or squares. Most of the doodles were in sets of seven. The number of completion. The mark of a perfectionist.

Timothy droned through the verse about wifely submission. Jack wanted to argue that it didn’t say a woman had to give up her right to vote—or drive—or work—but he kept quiet.

Finished with the chapter, Timothy closed his Bible. Miranda said a brief prayer and told the kids to get busy. And they did. Timothy took himself off to the couch with a pile of books. In the kitchen, Gabriel searched a dictionary while Michael grumbled over a math problem. Martha colored in a phonics workbook and sang the alphabet song with the volume and enthusiasm of a professional cheerleader. Jonah hummed as he smacked a fist into red Play-Doh on the highchair tray, and Rebekah stood at the sink, filling her inkwell from a larger container of ink.

Jack couldn’t imagine teaching multiple grades simultaneously. Six basic subjects multiplied by five grades, plus one busy toddler, equaled countless headaches. He assumed that the archangels and Martha required the most help, but Timothy and Rebekah hadn’t outgrown needing their mother’s guidance either.

Miranda owned an impressive array of supplies. Worksheets, penmanship guides, maps, flashcards, posters, pens, pencils, paper. Games, puzzles, history time lines. The materials had overtaken a large freestanding storage unit. That didn’t count the shelves crammed with books—none of them fiction, of course.

“… E-F-G,” Martha sang at the top of her lungs, waving a fat blue crayon in the air.

“I can’t think,” Timothy said from his outpost on the couch. “Stop it, Martha.”

“Amen,” Jack said. “Pipe down, Miss Martha. Please.”

She lowered her volume, barely. “H-I-J-K …”

“There it is.” Gabriel underlined a word with his forefinger.

“L-M-N-O-P!”

Needles of pain pinched Jack’s temples. A noise-induced headache was coming on fast.

Miranda, though, seemed oblivious to the uproar as she faced Michael across the table. With her left hand, she rubbed the nape of her neck where delicate wisps of hair escaped her braid. “I can’t remember where we left off. What are you working on?”

“This.” Michael pointed to his math text as if she could read upside down.

“Refresh my memory,” she said.

Jack’s phone buzzed. Farnsworth. He retreated to the porch and dealt with her demands as swiftly as possible, but it was a good five minutes before he could return to the kitchen.

The archangels engaged in a spirited arm-wrestling match while Miranda sat with her eyes closed and listened to Rebekah’s quiet recitation of the Gettysburg Address. A challenging assignment for a ten-year-old, but she nailed it. Word perfect.

Unaware of her silent audience, Miranda smiled. “Very good, Rebekah.”

Martha resumed belting out the alphabet song, with Jonah joining her in a fair imitation. Michael whomped Gabriel’s skinny arm onto the table and crowed in victory.

“Hush up, y’all,” Jack hollered. The bedlam subsided. “Miranda, you’re trying to do too much, too soon. How about if I borrow a couple of your noisiest young ’uns to run errands this afternoon so you’ll have some peace?”

She opened her eyes but seemed very far away. “That sounds wonderful.”

Her wistful tone wrenched his heart.

Bless her, Lord
, he prayed.
Bless her, bless her, bless her
.

Slowly, it was dawning on him that he shared that job with the Almighty.

Opening his car door, Jack glanced back at the house and saw Martha scowling down from an upstairs window, her lips moving. No doubt she was repeating the same complaint she’d voiced when he chose the archangels for the trip to town.

It wasn’t fair, she’d said.
She
wanted a ride in his pretty car.

He waved. She pouted, then waved back and disappeared from view.

With some luck, Miranda would take advantage of the archangels’ absence and catch a nap. The two older kids were perfectly capable of watching over the two youngest.

Jack hoped he could handle Michael and Gabriel. They were in high spirits, as if they were headed for a circus instead of a boring round of errands.

“Don’t expect anything exciting,” Jack said. “We’ll just drop off your mom’s film and pick up a few groceries.”

The boys’ enthusiasm didn’t diminish as they climbed into the Audi. Gabriel sat in back, the sun making a halo of his buzzed blond hair as he pressed his nose to the window. Michael sat up front and played with the knobs of the stereo.

“Why doesn’t the stereo work?” he asked.

“It came that way. I bought it as-is through eBay.”

“What’s eBay?”

“You’ve never heard of eBay? It’s—” Jack stopped. Michael might not know the definitions of
online
or
emporium
either. “It’s a market for buying everything from books to cars.”

“Why don’t you fix the stereo?”

“Because stereos jangle my nerves. So do noisy fans, TVs, and inquisitive children.”

“Oh. Okay.” Michael opened the glove compartment and slammed it shut, then thudded his heel against something and bent over to investigate. He came up with the forgotten Glenlivet.

“Put it back, please.”

“What is it?” the boy asked.

“That’s, ah, an adult beverage.”

“Why do you keep it in your car?”

“I forgot it was there.”

“Why did you put it there?”

“I was bringing it from home.”

“But what
is
it?”

Jack was beginning to remember how to explain things to kids. The shorter, the better. “It’s Scotch. Put it back, please.”

Michael complied. Jack waited for yet another question—
What’s Scotch?—
but either Michael already knew, or he’d hit his quota of inquisitiveness.