The thought made me shiver. I hated when she said it. I couldn’t think of much worse than being trapped inside your body like that, aware of what was going on but unable to interact, thoughts cruising through your mind like always but unable to get off at the port of your mouth.
“Sally,” Lauren, who was my feistiest child, scolded, “Momma hates when you say that.”
Louise shrugged her shoulders, a perfect fourth child. She waved her hand. “He doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. And he’s just perfectly content to sit in that chair and watch his black and whites.”
I nodded, not sure if I agreed. But I had to convince myself that was true to chase away the nightmares of being trapped inside myself, screaming and screaming with no one able to hear me or help. “He’s such a good patient,” I said. “And that’s something to be thankful for.”
“Yeah.” Jean laughed. “Because I think we all know it could easily have gone the other way.”
She grabbed a handful of Hershey’s Kisses and placed them in front of her feet, where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Then she handed the bowl to Martha, who was sitting beside her in the semicircle, flanking the chairs where Dan and I were sitting.
“Hey, Daddy,” Martha said, like he was going to answer. “Do you remember that time that Bobby Franco came to pick me up in his T-Bird convertible and didn’t get out of the car to open my door?’
“Oh, yeah,” Lauren said. “He beeped the horn, didn’t he?”
Martha nodded. “And Daddy flew out of that house and told him he better get the hell out of his driveway and never come around his daughters again until he had learned some damn manners.”
We all laughed, and I felt that familiar mix of pride and sorrow that so often filled me these days. We had had so much life together. It burned like turpentine for it to be gone, but I was so grateful it had happened. My Dan had been a lot of things in his life, but, without fail, the constant was that he was a complete gentleman. From our first date to the last time I saw him on his feet, he opened my door, pulled out my chair, stood when I left the table and always treated me with respect. Well, almost always.
“Could we please stay on task, girls?”
Jean exhaled sharply. “Momma, none of us cares what we get. Just pick who you want to give everything to.”
“I call the ring!” Sally and Louise shouted at the same time.
Then Sally added, “For sentimental reasons, of course.”
Dan had bought me a five-carat diamond after Jean was born, one carat for each daughter. It was a mea culpa for putting me through so much.
And I well, well deserved it.
I wouldn’t say to them that day—or any day—that Jean was getting that ring. It symbolized so much more than she would ever realize, and, as much as it had been a carat for each girl, that ring was really about Jean. And I wanted her to have it.
Jean shook her head. “I’m not talking about this anymore, so let’s talk about something else or let me get back to writing campaign contribution thank-you notes.”
I smiled at her, internally musing at the irony that she was by far the most attached to me, the most horrified by the thoughts of my being gone.
Trying to change the subject, never wanting these family moments to be too fleeting, Louise said, “Can you imagine if you had married Ernest Wake, Momma? None of this would be happening right now.”
Lauren looked up at Dan, who had been fiddling for ten minutes with an old letter we had handed him. I had no idea what he was doing, but I would have bet the cases of gold coins he kept in the credenza beside him that it wasn’t reading.
“Daddy, you made short work of that old Ernest, didn’t you?”
To my surprise, he looked at her, smiled and said, “Yeah.”
I put my head in my hands. “Oh, girls, if you could have been on a dinner date with him.” I rolled my eyes. “The way he sent his food back, and talked down to the waiters. I was beyond mortified. It was so dreadful.”
“So why didn’t you just refuse to go?” Lauren asked.
I smiled and shrugged, thinking of my parents, of how hard they worked for everything they had, of the way they scrimped and saved and sacrificed to make sure that my sister and I had as many advantages as we could. I would wrap myself in my bedclothes during the most frigid winter nights, huddling by the roaring fire in my room, the heat rising rapidly through the tall ceilings that were our only reprieve from the scalding summer heat. “It made my momma and daddy so proud that I was dating Ernest Wake. Plus,” I added, looking over in Dan’s direction, “Dan had been called back to the service, and it wasn’t like we had e-mail and cell phones. I didn’t have any good way of knowing where he was going or when or if he was coming back.” I swallowed hard, realizing that it wasn’t all that different now. “At my age, I didn’t have too many good prospects, and I knew that Ernest and I would have a nice life together if, God forbid, Dan didn’t come back.”
“God, that’s depressing,” Louise said. “Hence the reason I’m not married.”
“Well, it was a different time, Louise,” I said. “You know that. An unmarried woman didn’t have a lot of good options. Sometimes marrying for love wasn’t in the cards.”
“So you may as well marry for money,” Martha said, laughing.
I made all my girls smile with one of my trademark phrases: “It’s as easy to love a rich man as it is a poor one.”
