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.April moved in and took the other arm.“Don’t know why you’d want to help the likes of this old man.I’ve made such an awful mess of things.”“I’d deny that, Daddy, but after having chased you through two states only to end up staring at a headstone with Mama’s name on it, I don’t see how I can.” Sadie hoped he heard acceptance, not accusation, in her tone.Moonie patted Hannah on the cheek, then April on the hand as he extricated himself from their aid.Bending down, he reached out and rubbed his fingers over the chiseled name on the stone.Teresa Owens.Sadie’s eye was drawn to the dates below the name.“She was so young.”“Thirty-one,” April murmured.“Yes.Almost the number of years since she passed.” Daddy ran his weathered fingers under the final date.“How long have you known, Daddy?” Sadie had to ask.“So young.” He shook his head.“Daddy?” Hannah lurched forward.Sadie put her hand out to stop her younger sister from prying further.There was too much pain here now.The grief in their father was as fresh as if it had all just happened.Moonie would tell them everything, but they could not force it from him.Sadie understood that now, and despite all they had suspected he had done, she still trusted her father.She bent and picked up the familiar gray hat from where it lay in the thick green grass.“Let’s go, Daddy.There’s nothing more for us here.”“Now…now that I’ve found her again after all these years…” He folded his hands and bowed his head.“I hate to leave her.”“It’s all right, Daddy,” April said, her voice hushed.“She’s not here now.”“And besides—” Hannah stood over the grave, her face emotionless but her eyes filled with tears “—she left us a long time ago, even before she died.”“Your mama didn’t abandon you.I left her.”“What?”He looked at the grave.“Your mother insisted.”“Daddy, all my life you’ve told that story of how Mama ran off in the night.” Hannah stepped backward and crossed her arms as if to hold back the inevitable ache inside her as she added, “With me just three weeks home from the hospital.”April and Sadie closed ranks around their sister.Sadie looked at their father and went into her role to speak for them all.“We’ve heard it a thousand times, Daddy.Mama ran off.Now you say you left her, taking along her blood child, a toddler and a newborn? That doesn’t make any sense.”“Sadly that’s about all it did make, was sense.It sure didn’t make us happy.”April took a step toward Moonie.“I don’t recall Mama as ever being happy.”His head snapped up.His gaze searched his stepchild’s.“She was, April, sugar.” Then he looked away.“At times.But…your mama was what we called back in those days ‘fragile.’”“She suffered from depression, didn’t she, Daddy?” April persisted.“I don’t know the right term for what had a grip on her, but suffer with it she did.Merciful heavens, girls—how your sweet mama did suffer.”Silence enveloped the shaded plot.Beyond them the sun shone in almost blinding light on the abandoned buildings and empty, weed-infested lots.“The baby blues,” Moonie finally whispered.“What, Daddy?” April leaned in to better hear.“I recall that’s what Phiz called it when she came to help out.” Daddy nodded as he spoke, his head cocked slightly.“Said your mama had a bad case of the baby blues.”“Postpartum depression, like Sadie…” Hannah started to point to her older sister, then froze midgesture and let her hand fall to her side.“That’s what it’s called, Daddy.”Moonie looked to his middle daughter and nodded knowingly.“Phiz claimed Teresa might have fared better if she hadn’t had you two girls, Hannah and Sadie, so close together.”Sadie tried to remember how she had felt after giving birth to Ryan and Olivia, desperate to find a pattern that might bring the answers she had sought for so long.“So are you saying it all started when I was born?”“Pretty soon after.Yes, I think so.” Moonie glanced down again, then motioned toward the old convertible waiting beyond the side entrance.“I always carried some guilt over that, but back then, we didn’t know.We just thought she needed to perk up.”“Or pray harder.Or put it behind you.” Sadie knew all the suggestions by heart.And she knew the greatest fear she had felt when she could not live up to the simplistic, well-intentioned suggestions.The all-encompassing sense of failure.Her greatest fear that those she loved the most would finally see her for what she was: flawed and ineffectual, a waste of time.Worthless and then…She shut her eyes and pulled the warm summer air deep into her lungs.She asked the Lord again not to desert her and in that same instant asked her father the one thing that she now had to know from him.“But if she suffered so much, if she was that ‘fragile,’ as you put it, why would you leave her?”Their father edged close to Sadie and, extricating his beloved hat from her white-knuckled grip, said calmly, “Like I said, she insisted.”“Why?”“For the sake of you girls [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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