When the Morning Glory Blooms (42 page)

Excellent grandmother was enough of a goal. Jackson already had a mother.

“Oh, sick!” Lauren held her son at arm’s length. “He peed on me!”

She left the room to change both of them.

Gil called after her, “Love that son of yours and lean on God.” Becky raised her hand for an across-the-room fist bump.

30

Ivy—1952

You going to be okay if I’m gone for the day?”

Her dad’s words landed somewhere just beyond his bowl of corn flakes, but she knew they were meant for her. “We’ll be fine. I’m feeling stronger every day. Anna’s holding her own. You know Joy. She’s always fine.”

One corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Sleeps a lot.”

“That won’t last forever. We should enjoy it while we have it. But are you sure you want to go out in this? Snow piled up overnight.” She nabbed her dad’s second piece of toast—not his norm—from the toaster and glanced out the window while she buttered it. “Doesn’t look like it’s letting up, either.”

He slurped his coffee, then adjusted the bow tie at his throat. “I’ve driven in snow before.”

“Where are you going?” She set the toast plate in front of him and sat to peel her hard-boiled egg. A breakfast without protein was unacceptable for a nursing mother, Anna would say.

“I have an errand to run.” His words were tight and sober. Anything but casual.

An errand? Dress shirt and tie? “Can’t it wait until the—?” She stopped herself before his look did. Dad was still Dad.

“Be back before dark. You call Gert and Roy if you need anything.”

Ivy couldn’t imagine how neighbors older than Anna would be much help if any of the women in the household—a newborn, a new mom, and a near invalid—faced something they couldn’t handle, but nodded. “We will. But—”

He ran his tongue over his top teeth, as he often did when thinking too hard. “We’ll talk about it later. Please, Ivy. Just stay put and lay low today. Okay?”

“Dad?”

“I don’t want to worry about you while I’m  . . .  out running errands.”

“I thought it was just one errand.”

“Don’t get mouthy.”

Ivy never pressed, never poked at the hornet’s nest of conversation with her father. He’d been quiet for the last day or two, reminiscent of the days before, when he struggled to look her in the eye. She didn’t want to go back to that season in their relationship. “It’s your business. We’ll ‘lay low’ and have chicken and dumplings waiting for you when you get home. From that Betty Crocker cookbook you got me for my birthday.”

He lifted his head. The line of his jaw was still lumpy and cementlike, but a tear caught in his lashes. What was going on?

“That’d be nice, Ivy. I like your chicken and dumplings.” Flat, even words.

“Then pray your granddaughter behaves herself today.”

He left the crust of his toast—another first—and stood. “I already did.”

Stormy days crawl forward. The wind turned the new snow into a blizzard. Never too late in the season for a blizzard in the upper Midwest. Watching the frozen white swirl around the house and down the street fascinated all but the youngest of them, but the hours slogged along anyway for Ivy and Anna.

The cold always made life harder for Anna. Her joints. Her breathing. Ivy warmed a blanket on the radiator and tucked it around her, shoulders to toes. Anna rested uneasily, seemingly as worried about Ornell as any mother would be.

An ideal day for storytelling. But Anna and Ivy had formed a silent covenant to wait until the baby didn’t need so much of Ivy’s time.

The typewriter sat silent on the desk in the bedroom. Someday, someday like this molasses-slow one in the future, she’d commit Anna’s stories to typewritten form. Preserving them might turn out to be Ivy’s life’s work. Someday.

Her father’s promise to get home before dark sneaked under the wire like a teen getting home thirty seconds before curfew. The streetlights glowed, creating an eerie backdrop for the still-blowing snow, when the Oldsmobile crept down the street and stopped near the curb. Ivy watched from the front window as her father drudged up the driveway, then headed back to the curb with his snow shovel. An hour later, he’d cleared enough of a path to drive the car into the driveway.

“Wicked cold out there,” he said, stomping his boots on the mat inside the kitchen and shaking drifts from the shoulders of his gray wool coat and hat.

Anna called from the living room, “About time you got home.”

Ivy’s dad looked at his feet. His socks made damp marks on the linoleum. He stripped them off and laid them near
his boots, then picked up a small brown bundle wrapped in string, the size of a pound of hamburger from the butcher.

“Supper’s almost ready,” Ivy offered.

“I need to get into some dry clothes first. Then, you and I need to talk. Can supper wait?”

“Sure.”

When he returned from his room, slippered and sweatered and still rosy-cheeked, Ivy was still standing in the same spot.

“Where’s Joy?” he asked as he dragged his chair away from the table and motioned for her to sit.

“Sleeping in her crib. Anna’s sleeping in her chair. I think maybe we need to have Dr. Simons take a look at her one of these days.”

He raised his chin as if acknowledging what she said but not interested in pursuing that subject. “Ivy, I got some news. About your Drew.” He set the brown bundle on the table and nudged it toward her.

Her pulse no longer a soft thud barely noticeable, it now banged like hardheaded mallets on a bass drum in an erratic marching band. “What’s this?” She reached toward the packet, then drew her hand back. “What is this?”

Her father laid his hand over hers. “Your unopened letters to Drew. His half-written, undelivered letters to you. Some of them.”

“W-where did you get them?”

“His folks had them.”

“How did they—? Why would they have—?” Worms of bile crawled up her throat.

“Ivy, since the middle of October, Drew’s been missing in action.”

“Put a cold compress on the back of her neck!”

Anna’s orders broke through the fog. The room hadn’t gone black, but it had faded to gray flannel. The color crept back into Ivy’s vision, hesitant as a Minnesota spring. Their kitchen. Supper on the stove. The table set. Anna leaning on the arms of her wheelchair. Her dad folding a damp washcloth this way and that. And a tightly swaddled brown paper bundle on the table.

“Why wouldn’t they have told me? Why would his family keep that from me?”

Ivy traced back through the months since mid-October. All that had happened. Always with a sense of foreboding. She thought his love had disappeared. But
he
had.

“Was he captured?”

“He’s not on the P.O.W. list. The army doesn’t know what happened. We may never know.
Missing in action. Whereabouts unknown
.”

Ivy twisted the hem of her blouse. “That’s not what the government said, is it? ‘Missing in action. Presumed dead.’ ” Anna pressed her hands to her lips. Ivy’s father scooted his chair closer and laid his arm across Ivy’s shoulders.

“Not you, nor me, nor the military, nor the president knows the answer to that. And we can’t speculate.”

“How did you find out?”

Ornell tugged at a thread in his shirt cuff. “I called around. Talked to some people in Westbrook who knew Drew’s folks.”

“They’ve known all this  . . .  all this time?”

The thread gave way and his cuff button spurted onto the floor. He kicked at it with his foot. “Didn’t know right away. But knew too long.”

She still hadn’t touched the bundle. “How’d you get the letters?”

“I planted myself in their front room and told them I intended to camp there until they let loose of any information that rightfully belonged to my daughter.” He cleared his throat. “I aimed for persuasive, but it might have come across as intimidating.”

Oh, Daddy!

“I told them how sorry we all were for their loss, but that you and his little girl deserved to have them letters back—and any he meant to send you if he could have  . . .  before  . . . ”

“I can’t read them right now.”

“There’s time.”

Anna cupped her hand around her ear. “Do I hear the little one squirming? She’ll work herself up into a fit if someone doesn’t go get her as soon as she’s awake. Ornell?”

The ploy was too obvious for words. Ivy thawed a degree or two inside. “Thanks, Dad.”

Anna’s gaze followed him as he left the room. Then she stretched out a beautiful, gnarled hand and cradled Ivy’s chin. “Look me in the eye, child.”

She obeyed.

“You hear me. This story isn’t over yet. All we know is that we don’t know anything.”

A sniff replaced the words Ivy wanted to speak.

“Hear me. This isn’t the end of it. Ends come. They do for all of us.” Anna paused long enough to draw a deeper breath. “But this can’t be it. It can’t be the end of it.”

Biblical “fountains of the deep” opened, with both women feeding the stream with their tears.

More than once, over the next few hours and days, Ivy thanked the Lord for the gift of Joy Elizabeth. Someone needed Ivy to
be strong. The child snuggled into her neck as if the world were a safe and peaceful place. She fed and slept and learned how to coo. The weight of her in Ivy’s arms comforted like a hot-water bottle wrapped in lamb’s wool.

Ivy changed the baby’s blankets more frequently than normal because they were dampened with a mother’s grief.

Her father changed the television channel when the news came on. No one in that household wanted to hear how the peace talks were going, what was taking so long, or the clever name of the most recent battle. Heartbreak Hill had been enough.

The paper bundle held only two unsent letters from Drew. The rest were Ivy’s—he’d saved them all, it appeared—and the undeliverables, packaged by some army clerk to return to the soldier’s parents along with any other mail. Her dad said Drew’s family had waited months for his possessions to be returned—everything except his dog tags and the fatigues and boots he was wearing when the hill exploded. She wanted to feel sorry for his family. She had to. She did.

Drew’s two letters took up permanent residence on Ivy’s nightstand, tucked into her Bible, as if the book of holy words could influence the words he’d written. She’d not opened them. Was it pure foolishness to leave them unread and let her imagination invent what they held?

His understanding. His forgiveness. His excitement about the baby he hadn’t even known had been born already—a girl with his thick hair and chin dimple. Sketches of the house he’d build them on a shady street with a big backyard that linked to others peppered with children. A place where they could blend in like any other family, the past a matter of record but not regret.

In time, she’d be strong enough to read what must have been his response to her confession. Not now. Ignorance allowed her a wisp of hope that he’d loved her anyway.