When the Morning Glory Blooms (35 page)

“So I thought, of course, he meant the jewelry store, but we headed to the Skin Art Gallery.”

“Oh, lovely.”

“Do you know how much money we saved? Once the redness and swelling go down, you’ll see how gorgeous this ring is. I’ll have to go back for the wedding band part after the wedding. It wraps right around the diamond over on one side like a vine. Kind of like your morning glory vines. See how it sparkles? They put a special additive in the pigment to make it glisten like that. Kind of like glitter. Look.” Lauren held her hand out flat under the lamp on the end table and wiggled her hand back and forth so the “diamond” could catch the light.

Blinded by its brilliance, Becky turned away, blinked, and called out, “Gil? Gil, come on out here.”

“Noah proposed right there in the store. It was so sweet. I mean, we’d talked about it, but I thought he’d wait until we graduated.”

“At least.”

Lauren sank onto the couch beside her mother, causing a tidal wave of cushions and emotions. “But, then, we realized that we both turn eighteen before the end of the school year, so  . . . ”

“So  . . .  ?”

“Legal age.”

“I realize that. I wasn’t making the connection between the number eighteen and the wisdom of getting married the next day.”

“That would be dumb.”

Becky allowed herself a tiny, controlled exhale.

“That’s a Thursday. Who wants to get married on a Thursday?”

“Gil, honey? This is important.”
Blood pressure, somewhere in the two hundreds
. “Lauren, let me go get your father. He’ll want to hear all this.”

“We can talk later. Noah’s picking me up in a few minutes. His aunt has a cupcake shop—SweetCheeks. She runs it out of her house. He thinks he can get her to give us a cupcake tower wedding cake for our present. See how financially responsible we’re being?”

The speed of Lauren’s recitation—well beyond warp speed—didn’t allow Becky to think in sync, much less form a response.

“But, Mom, we can’t take Jackson with us to a place like that, so, could you, like, watch him for a few more hours? Thanks a bunch.”

“No.”

Now on her feet, rezipping her coat and gingerly pulling on her mittens as she left the room, Lauren turned. “What did you say?”

“Can’t watch your son tonight.”
I have a nervous breakdown scheduled in five, four, three, two . . 
.

Gil padded into the family room, staring down at his cell phone then up at his wife. “Did you just text me? My phone started to vibrate and the text said, ‘Come here. I need you.’ That was you, right? Not a Watson/Alexander Graham Bell thing?” He grinned as if considering making a living as a stand-up comic.

Becky’s eyeballs throbbed in synch with her heartbeat. She opened her mouth, but nothing flew out.

“Hey, you’ll get a kick out of this. While Jackson was trying to find a good position for his nap, I flipped through my
Learn a New Word Every Day
paperback. Today’s word is
mammothrept
: ‘n. a spoiled child raised by its grandmother.’ Great word, huh?
Mammothrept
. Not that  . . .  not that it applies here  . . .  at all  . . .  because you’re not  . . .  spoiling—Becky? What’s wrong?”

Becky raised a robotic left hand. “What do you see here?”

“Your wedding ring?”

“No. This one.”

“Your engagement ring.”

“Right. Lauren has one, too.”

“What?” He sank to the couch beside her. “No.”

“Oh, yes. Only hers is—” Becky gulped like melodramatic actors did in the 1950s when they were acting scared. “Hers is tattoed.”

“Have you been sniffing too much ammonia on your cleaning job?”

She punched him in the arm with the back of her non-ringed hand. “Gil, I’m absolutely serious. She’s in her room calling Noah to tell him they can’t go look at cupcake towers because I refused to watch Jackson for them so they could perpetuate this ridiculous—”

“Wait. Noah? Is he the father of—?”

“She didn’t say.”

“What’s a cupcake tower?”

Becky swiveled to face him more directly. “That is not the main issue here, Gil. They’re planning to be
married
.”

“When?”

“About ten seconds after they both turn eighteen.”

Gil leaned into the drooping couch back. “And we feel horrible about that, right? I mean, Noah’s a nice kid  . . . ”

“The operative word is
kid
.”

“But if he’s Jackson’s father, wouldn’t the best thing be for them to be married and to raise him together?”

Becky bent over until her chin touched her knees. “I don’t know. You’d think so. But they’re so immature. That’s no way to start a marriage.”

“That’s how
we
did it.” Gil rubbed her turtle-shell back. “We got married pretty young.”

“That was different.”

“And immature.”

“Only one of us.” She nudged his foot with hers.

“And we survived.”

“By the grace of God.”

The phrase laid a blanket of silence over the room, interrupted by a squawk down the hall. The door to Lauren’s room opened, then the door to the master bedroom—different hinge sounds. In less than a minute, Lauren and a Jackson-shaped hip attachment headed for the kitchen and a premade bottle in the fridge.

Becky stood. “Want me to get that? So you can show  . . .  your dad your ring?”

“Stupid ring.”

“What?”

“Noah can’t go look at cakes tonight,” she said in what could only be described as her snottiest tone. “He’s grounded. His parents are so strict, it’s sickening!”

Five, four, three, two . . 
. “What was the offense?”

“Get this. He’s grounded because he spaced on picking up his little sister from school. So his dad had to leave work early, and his mom was all freaked out wondering if Noah’s sister had been kidnapped or something, and Noah wasn’t answering his phone because we were, like, in the middle of something.”

Becky caught the twitch in the skin around Gil’s right eye, even from across the open-concept great room/kitchen.

Lauren looked from one parent to the other. “Oh, get your minds out of the gutter. We were in the tattoo parlor!”

Gil stood then. “Lauren, watch your tone.”

“Why can’t anything ever be simple?”

Becky handed her the warmed bottle and warmed her voice to match. “Honey, you gave up simple about nine months before Jackson was born.”

Lauren stumbled into the kitchen the next morning with evidence of a night of crying all over her face. She poured herself a bowl of cereal and told her mother that she couldn’t go to school that day. Would Becky call it in to the school office?

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“You’ll laugh.”

Becky thought back to all the reasons not to laugh in the last year or so. “No, I won’t.”

Lauren sniffed then grabbed a paper towel on which to blow her nose. “Promise?”

“I promise. What is it?” Becky stuck her coffee mug into the microwave for a reheat, pulling off nonchalance as well as she could under the circumstances.

“I think my ring’s infected.” Lauren held out her delicate left hand, which had a swollen, beet-red, blistered ring finger.

For the first time she could recall, Becky broke a promise to her child.

“It’s not funny!”

Becky choked. “Oh, I know. I’m s-sorry, honey. Not funny at all. Here, let me get a closer look. This isn’t good. We need to get you to the doctor to check this out.”

“It really hurts.”

“Don’t touch it! I’ll call the clinic.”
And thank the Lord Gil’s work insurance still has a few more weeks on it
. “Your dad has a job interview today, so we’ll have to take Jackson with us.”

“Yeah, uh, the baby’s awake, but  . . . ”

“But what?” Becky pulled open the cupboard door on which was tacked a list of important phone numbers.

Lauren brandished her infected hand. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to change a dirty diaper right now.”

Becky considered suggesting latex gloves but instead tapped the spot of the clinic number on the list and handed Lauren the phone while she headed down the hall to the messy diaper.

Will there be a time, Lord, when things aren’t this complicated? Now we’re in perpetual survival mode
.

She followed the sound of her sweet grandson waking to the day, burbling and chatting in an indecipherable baby language despite the foul odor he gave off. “Oh, Jackson!”

Oh, Lauren!
What had she done? She wasn’t just crying all night. She must have also been cleaning by flashlight while Jackson slept. Cleaning while crying was a trick Becky might have passed on to Lauren without knowing.

“Come on, baby boy. Let’s get you ready for the day.” He reached for her and smiled as if he’d reserved a batch of joy just for her. It was a scene Becky wouldn’t experience if Lauren were twenty-five, married, and living in Wichita.

As she worked to make Jackson smell good again and tugged him into an outfit he’d soon outgrow, she focused on enjoying the opportunity while she had it.

Sprawled across Lauren’s unmade—
some things never change
—bed was the latest issue of
Brides
magazine.

26

Anna—1890s

I feel the press of time, the relentless ticking of the clock, the exhausted beating of my heart, surely using up its allotment of pulses like a sieve with too-large holes.

So, yes. I’ll tell you more about my Josiah.

It wasn’t Josiah’s words as much as the timbre of his voice that I found soothing, as comforting as a fire-warmed brick at the foot of my bed midwinter. His voice was silken, yet wakened within me a sweet quickening of life, as I imagined the first flutters of a babe’s womb movements must feel within a grateful mother-to-be.

The subject of his conversation didn’t matter. The rhythm of it, the rise and fall, the gentleness and gentility stirred within me an emotion I hadn’t known. Truthfully, I’d never experienced the gently lapping waves of soul peace that washed over me when Josiah spoke.

And when he breathed my name! The pace of my heartbeat responded like a horse to the tap of a whip.

I read respect in his eyes and voice. And affection. Who could want more?

It was by firelight that he first broached the subject of my past, a past that carved my future as surely as rivers carve
canyons. I was confident enough of his friendship by then to risk telling him the truth about my beginnings. He listened attentively, as he always did, but uncharacteristically dropped his gaze mid-story. I don’t know why, but I was led to push past his discomfort and tell it all. I gambled that Josiah would flinch but not crumble, that he would accept what he was hearing without finding it necessary to distance himself from me, the unsophisticated, uneducated, too often ungrateful.

My few residents at the time were in their rooms upstairs trying to recapture some of the sleep they’d lost the night before in false labor or caring for a newborn. The sound of Josiah’s carriage wasn’t uncommon. And not unwelcome.

He stood in my doorway that evening with a sheaf of papers. “This,” he said, waving the stack, “is a pretence, I must admit. There’s no hurry to get them signed. I confess I made the trip purely for the pleasure of your company, Anna.”