Today, the end of the story.
*
It's December now. We decided that I'd spend some time alone with my parents when the semester ended and before we all head out to California for the wedding. So I'm back home now in my bedroom, where the pennants are still tacked to the wall because Mom won't let that bedroom belong to anyone other than her little boy.
Yesterday, when Dad was at the store, I told Mom what Sally had told me, how she'd claimed she wrote her about Light and Life. I didn't want to hurt her, but I felt like I needed to know. We talked about what Sally had said. "How is it you can't tell Dad?" I said. "I'd think he'd be just plain thrilled."
She'd been sitting at the table with both arms up, but they dropped right away. Then she looked up at the chandelier as if an angel might just then descend from all the light. Her hands came back up to her eyes. "If you would know the hurt that girl gave us," she said. Then she breathes in deeply, as if what was coming would take more than words. "You can't ever know how much we cried. You wouldn't believe it, Brian. You wouldn't."
I reached for the radio and turned down the volume. "I don't understand how you can keep that from him. It ought to give him hope," I said.
She breathed in deeply again. "Who knows what goes on in the corners of his mind? I don't doubt your father prays fifty times a day for that girl. I don't doubt right at this moment, when some guy is buying a new hammer or whatever in your father's store, paying for it at the counter--I don't doubt he's thinking about two grandsons he's never seen."
"And his daughter?" I said.
"And his daughter," she said. "Praying."
She pulled her hands down around her coffee cup. "We can't talk about all of that anymore. We just can't. There's only so much hurt somebody can take and that's it. Something else has got to break through the silence."
"Do you love him, Mom, or are you scared of him?" I said.
She took off her glasses, laid them beside her toast. "You get to be one flesh," she said, "and you know exactly how he's going to react to anything and everything, because you know how he's part of you." She sipped her coffee. "I'm not afraid of him. But I'm afraid of all that pain." She closed her eyes tightly. "He once swore he didn't have that daughter--that that's the way it was going to be."
My mother keeps her letters in a little, shiny cedar box that resembles, in a way, her own hope chest. It has a key somewhere, but it's been lost for years. When I was little I used to look in it because it had two pink bracelets that my sisters wore when they came home from the hospital, fresh from God--and mine, a blue one, P-0-S-T printed in the beads, the family name. Jewelry, and other stuff--birth certificates and my grandpa sent my grandma during the war.
I don't think Sally writes often, because I didn't find many letters. Mom keeps what she gets in there. She wouldn't throw them away. I'm sure my father knows too about her secret place.
When I checked it yesterday, I found the one about Light and Life Christian School. There it was, just like Sally said.
I think he has to read It. Besides, he taught me himself to believe in miracles. So I'm going to the store this afternoon. Place will be full of Christmas shoppers, but he's got enough holiday help so I can sit him down in the back at his old roll-top, take out the letter, and put it in front of him.
She took off her glasses, laid them beside her toast. "You get to be one flesh," she said, "and you know exactly how he's going to react to anything and everything, because you know how he's part of you." She sipped her coffee. "I'm not afraid of him. But I'm afraid of all that pain." She closed her eyes tightly. "He once swore he didn't have that daughter--that that's the way it was going to be."
*
My mother keeps her letters in a little, shiny cedar box that resembles, in a way, her own hope chest. It has a key somewhere, but it's been lost for years. When I was little I used to look in it because it had two pink bracelets that my sisters wore when they came home from the hospital, fresh from God--and mine, a blue one, P-0-S-T printed in the beads, the family name. Jewelry, and other stuff--birth certificates and my grandpa sent my grandma during the war.
I don't think Sally writes often, because I didn't find many letters. Mom keeps what she gets in there. She wouldn't throw them away. I'm sure my father knows too about her secret place.
When I checked it yesterday, I found the one about Light and Life Christian School. There it was, just like Sally said.
I think he has to read It. Besides, he taught me himself to believe in miracles. So I'm going to the store this afternoon. Place will be full of Christmas shoppers, but he's got enough holiday help so I can sit him down in the back at his old roll-top, take out the letter, and put it in front of him.
I want peace at our wedding, when all of us together go over those vows. If we can't have joy, we can at least have hope. Besides, I know my father needs an answer to a a thousand prayers he never spoke out loud, and I know from the way Sally turned her eyes away that the Lord of rubber cement hasn't finished with her either. One way or another, the God I worship, the one my father respects and fears, the God who brightens Shari's family's faces, the Wonderful Counselor the two us want right there at our wedding in two short weeks, that God, the super-glue God, is going to have His way with my sister, just as I can't help but believe He will with Dad.
Faith itself, I want to believe, is its own kind of miracle.
I've got that letter here with me right now. It's in my billfold, along with two school pictures of Mark and Bryant, pictures he's going to see. They're perfectly darling kids, and his daughter is a good mom. He's going to know.
Maybe I am naive. Maybe I am. But I believe.
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