Anna Rose raised her voice. “Taryn has baby fever, and we can’t take Zoe into the bar. So it’s up to you. If you’re worried about me, then you can be my driver next weekend. If you don’t care if I live or die, then that’s on you.”
A streak of lightning zigzagged through the dark sky, and then thunder rolled. Jorja dropped the wreath she was carrying and covered her head with her hands. “I know it’s childish,” she said, “but I can’t seem to shake this feeling.”
Taryn picked up the wreath and then wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “We’re here for you, darlin’. Let’s get this job done, and then we’ll go home. We can make popcorn and hot chocolate and close all the blinds so the lightning can’t come through.”
Jorja nodded, took the flowers from Taryn, read the small tag on the tripod, and headed toward the grave where it belonged. When she got there, she placed it in front of the gravestone and whispered the name: “Esther Elizabeth O’Malley. The poor little baby was born and died the same day. I didn’t even think about a name for my baby.” She slid downon the ground, braced her back against the heart-shaped tombstone, and laid her hand on her stomach. “I’m so sorry for not wanting you and for praying that God would just take you.”
Anna Rose dropped down beside her. “Are you okay? I’m not interrupting your prayers, am I?”
Before she could answer, Taryn was on the other side of her. “Why are you crying? It looks like the storm is going south of us.”
“My poor baby,” Jorja sobbed. “Nobody wanted her.”
“It was a girl?” Anna Rose asked.
“I have no idea—but when I dream about her, she has blonde pigtails and big green eyes, and she loves kittens.” Just admitting that she saw her baby in her dreams made her sob even harder. “I don’t ever deserve to have a child after what I did.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Anna Rose said. “Miscarriages happen to women all the time. You can talk about your feelings to us anytime you want, but you are a strong woman, and you can get through this.”
“How do I ever get over it?” Jorja asked.
“I said getthroughit, not getoverit,” Anna Rose told her.
“You don’t ever really get over the loss of a child,” Taryn said. “You were a mother for almost three months, whether you wanted to be or not. If you really believe in God and Jesus, then you know that they won’t put more on you than they’ll give you the strength to get through.”
Jorja had buried the pain so deeply that when it surfaced, she could hardly breathe for the ache. She had been the good cousin, the one who never got into trouble and always went to church.
“It’s not fair,” she groaned.
“What?” Taryn asked. “That you had to endure a horrible experience? Do you think you’re the only one who had something terrible in her background? Do you really believe that you were singled out to have to live through something terrible? That you are this generation’s equivalent of Job in the Bible?” Taryn’s voice had an edge to it.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” Jorja snapped. “I trusted you and Anna Rose to help me, not to be hateful.”
“Sometimes you don’t need to be mollycoddled, but you need someone to jerk you up by the bootstraps and tell you how it is,” Anna Rose told her. “Bad things happen to good people, and we have to deal with it. Sometimes bad things happen to bad people. Either way, you don’t have to let it control the rest of your life. If you want a family, you need to work through what happened and move on.”
“What happened to the two of you that makes you understand?” Jorja asked.
“That’s a conversation for another day,” Taryn answered. “Today, we’re helping you move on. Tomorrow, we may need help ourselves, but not now. You’re not even thirty yet, so your biological clock isn’t ticking.”
“I don’t know what I want,” Jorja whispered, “but I know I don’t like feeling like this.”
Two huge drops of rain fell on her face, and she wondered if the angels were weeping with her or if maybe her baby daughter had sent them to tell her that she was fine in heaven with little Esther Elizabeth O’Malley. Either one, or both, brought a little measure of peace to her heart—something that she hadn’t known or felt in years.
Taryn jumped up and headed toward the van. “Guess we’d better take this party home or else to the McDonald’s for some breakfast.”
“I could eat a couple of sausage biscuits.” Anna Rose held out a hand to Jorja. “Come on, girl. You can’t sit here in the rain—and besides, we’re under a big old oak tree. Lightning could get us both, and you’d never get to be my designated driver.”
Jorja put her hand into her cousin’s and let her pull her up. “I’m never going to a bar, and the lightning has ...”
A flash crackled through the air so close that Jorja could have sworn it parted her hair.
“You were saying?” Anna Rose took off jogging toward the van.
“I was about to say that the lightning had stopped,” Jorja yelled above the thunder and beat Anna Rose to the van. “In this weather, we’ll wait until another day to clean the tombstones. We’ll be lucky if we can get the flowers put out before the storm.”
“How can you eat sausage with a hangover?” Jorja asked with a shiver.
“I’ve got my own hangover cure,” Taryn piped up. “That’s a banana, soft scrambled eggs, and a cup of black coffee, in that order. Daddy told me about it before he retired from the military, and it works—almost all the time.”
