Sadie-in-Waiting Read online

  “We interrupting something, sugar?” Sadie went on tiptoe trying to peer through the quickly closing doorway.

  “Just preparing for the next phase of my career.” Payt held his arms wide.

  April gave him a slow once-over. “Quitting medicine to go to clown college?”

  “Not at all.” He pulled off the bulbous nose, moved to the steps and waved to a passing neighbor, all with a sense of cool so liquid they could have bottled it. “Interviewing with a practice in Nashville that embraces the latest concept of healing humor.”

  “That’s hardly the latest concept, Payton.” April turned and tagged along after him right back down the walk they had just come up not five minutes earlier. “It does say in Proverbs that ‘laughter doeth good like a medicine.’”

  “Wait a minute!” Sadie did not budge from the porch. “Did you say Nashville?”

  “Yup. Tennessee. Actually, just outside Nashville. Murfreesboro,” he said casually, all Southern accent and subtle slyness. His deepset eyes blinked slowly, and though he did not smile outright, he wore an expression of affable enthusiasm. “Ever hear of it?”

  “Well, of course.” Sadie had visited there, in fact. “But—”

  “I have a map in the car. Let me show you where it is.” With that he hurried away, and before either April or Sadie could say another word, had stuck his whole upper body into the passenger side of his new—well, new to him—shiny blue Lexus.

  “What happened to staying close by?” April leaned in, ducking and weaving to get the best vantage point to continue the conversation.

  “Just a…” He whipped around and almost collided skulls with doe-eyed April. Gently, he took her by the shoulders and set her back a couple steps. “Just a four-hour drive. Maybe more if you go scenic.”

  “More?” April asked.

  He produced a stack of road maps and began shuffling through them. “You should, you know.”

  “Should what?” Sadie demanded. Something did not feel right about this whole thing.

  “Go scenic. It’s a gorgeous drive. Lots to see. Ever been to Cave City?”

  “Payton Bartlett, what are you trying to—”

  “Four hours?” April accepted each map after Payt examined the front covers then discarded them.

  “Okay, you got me. Might be more like five. But that’s still closer than the other group that showed interest in bringing me on—in Chicago.”

  “Chicago?” The maps crackled, sliding from April’s hands into her open arms.

  “Can’t find the map of Tennessee. I know I had one, because Moonie asked to see it and…Wait!” He interrupted himself a little too abruptly and began an almost frantic search back through the folded rectangles with pictures of states on the cover. “I do have a map of Illinois, if you want to see where that other practice is located.”

  “We didn’t come to admire your map collection, Payt.” Sadie cradled the candy box over her chest, her own sacred shield of chocolate to fend off whatever distraction her brother-in-law would next fling her way. “We came to see our family.”

  April scowled. “If you go to Chicago, we’ll never see Hannah.”

  “Hey, hop on a plane.” Payt tossed the maps into the car then clapped his hands together. “There before you know it.”

  “B-but I don’t fly well, Payt. And Sadie would have to arrange for four tickets for the family, and then we have to think about Daddy.”

  “Oh, don’t give your daddy another thought,” he said, and far too fast for Sadie’s liking moved again to another subject. “In fact, it’s entirely premature to worry about us moving away. All speculation at this point. Nothing set in stone.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Sadie narrowed her eyes. “Because this conversation is making me feel like I have rocks in my head.”

  “Always the kidder, eh, Sadie? Hey, are those chocolates?”

  “Yes, we brought them over for—”

  “Terrific.” He slid the box from Sadie’s grasp and planted a quick kiss on her cheek. “Really thoughtful, really.”

  “I didn’t bring them for you. I brought them for Daddy.”

  “And I’ll see that he gets them.” The words had hardly left his lips before he’d popped open April’s car door, waved to another neighbor, then swept his free hand toward the waiting front seat. “It sure was great to see you two. Come back again when you can stay longer.”

  “We haven’t stayed at all.” Sadie shut the door. She grabbed the chocolates from Payt and smacked him lightly across the arm with them, demanding, “What’s going on? Where’s Hannah? Where’s Daddy?”

  “I’m right here.” Hannah stood in the doorway, the usually flawless waves of her auburn hair caught up in a slapdash topknot that had already begun to slide to the right side of her head. “Daddy…isn’t.”

  April moved slowly to the front of her car. “Daddy isn’t what?”

  Sadie didn’t have to ask. She’d sensed it from the moment Payt had gone into his routine.

  In two bounding steps Payt reached his wife and, giving her a peck on the cheek, said, “Sorry, sweetie. I tried. I’ll go inside and start making calls to try to track Moonie down and let you and your sisters, um, discuss the situation.”

  “Situation?” Sadie plunked the boxed candy onto the car’s hood, then crooked her finger, motioning Hannah to leave the sanctuary of her front porch. “Why don’t you come closer, little sister, and tell us all about it.”

  “I’m fine where I am, thank you very much.”

  “Okey-dokey, then we’ll just stand in your driveway and shout the family’s business back and forth at the top of our lungs for all of Wileyville to hear. Lollie Muldoon lives in this neck of the woods, doesn’t she?”

  That did the trick. Hannah shot off the front porch and dragged her sisters, each by one arm, under the nearest shade tree faster than someone could say, “What would the neighbors think?” “Before either of you say a word, I want it known that I did everything imaginable to make Daddy comfortable in my home.”

  “Nobody suggested otherwise,” Sadie said.

  “I made concessions to him, compromises in every single facet of my life—and didn’t mind doing it.”

  “Preaching to the choir, little sister.” April held her hands up in surrender. “I slept, ate and scratched my nose on ‘Moonie time’ the whole while he stayed with me.”

  “I ran him on a dozen little errands a day.” Hannah’s hand trembled as she fiddled with her hair.

  “Did he make you go to the post office and scan the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ photos?” April turned to Sadie. “We did that twice a week. I never could get him to say if he expected to apprehend one of those people on the wall or if he thought he might be among them.”

  Hannah closed her eyes, sighing. “I changed all the lightbulbs in freestanding lamps to sixty watts because he thought anything higher wasted money and—”

  “‘Might well set off a rogue electrical fire that’d spread through the place like that.’” April snapped her fingers. “He quoted all the statistics about every conceivable catastrophe just waiting to happen in the common American household to me, too.”

  “‘Old insurance salesmen never die, they just become a pain in the actuary,’” Sadie muttered her father’s favorite lousy joke about his lifelong profession and propensity toward spouting anxiety-inducing statistics.

  April’s shapeless shirt bunched up around her shoulders as she laced her arms over her chest and patted her foot on the soft dirt beneath them. “Did he try to make you vacuum out your dryer vent hose, too?”

  “Try? I did it!” Hannah stuck the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and mimed poking the vacuum attachment into whatever dangerous nook or cranny her father pointed out. “Gladly. Whatever it took to please him.”

  “Pleasing Daddy?” Sadie rolled her eyes. “Who in her right mind would even attempt it? Placating him, maybe. Or perplexing him long enough that he forgets whatever had him on a tea
r to begin with, but what could any of us do to really please the old man?”

  “Sadie.” Hannah clamped her hands on her slender hips, her expression positively grim. “I cooked for him.”

  Sadie feigned a tiny gasp, then nudged her younger sister’s bent arm with her elbow. “I don’t know who to feel more sorry for over that, sugar, you or Daddy.”

  “Pity poor Payt on that score. He had to eat the outcome and pretend it wasn’t absolutely awful.”

  “From what I saw of his performing skills a few minutes ago, he’s slick enough to pull that off without straining any major muscle groups.” Sadie smiled.

  “We’re all agreed, Payt’s a regular dreamboat.” April raised her head, her gaze on the lovely home Hannah shared with her adorable doctor hubby. She twisted one finger in her long, straight ponytail and heaved a sigh. “But let’s not forget about Daddy.”

  “I refuse to accept the blame for his erratic behavior.”

  “Blame? Who said anything about blame?”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my fault. Let’s get that clear from the start.”

  “Fine. You didn’t do anything wrong, Hannah. I think we can all concede that from the onset. Nothing you did could possibly be construed as at fault in any way. You are one hundred percent beyond reproach. Without culpability.” Sadie really had to work on her tendency to go a bit overboard on the old sarcasm. But she didn’t want to spend the next ten minutes dancing around trying to reassure her sister that they understood that she had done nothing to cause their father to pull another silly stunt. “Now, just tell us what happened.”

  “I scared Daddy off.”

  April’s jaw set. She shifted her feet in the dirt. “You didn’t do anything, but you scared Daddy off?”

  “Maybe it was her cooking,” Sadie said out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Ha-ha, you two. Maybe you should borrow Payt’s clown nose and take your comedy act on the road.” Hannah’s eyes narrowed to slits. “This is not funny. I’m telling you, I scared Daddy away.”

  “Oh, honey, I think maybe you’re being too hard on yourself.” Being too hard on yourself—and on those you loved—was an infamous Shelnutt trait, after all. Sadie stroked her sister’s tensed-up back. “What on earth could any of us mere mortals do to scare away the likes of Moonie Shelnutt?”

  Hannah took a deep breath, like someone about to bungee jump off a ten-story platform with eleven stories worth of rope, then said, quite softly, “I asked him about Mom.”

  “You what?” Sadie’s hand clenched instantly into a fist against her sister’s spine.

  “Oh, no.” April stepped backward. “No.”

  “Why, Hannah?” Sadie’s mind was spinning. In a family where so little of any consequence ever seemed spoken, asking about Mom remained the ultimate taboo. No one spoke of her, not even fearless Aunt Phiz. Well, Aunt Phiz had spoken of her once and Moonie promptly sent her away and they didn’t see her again for a very long time. That’s how powerful a prohibition it was. “Why would you do that?”

  “Why? Because she’s our mother. Because we don’t know one single thing about her. Because I am facing some serious fertility issues, and I don’t have even a hint of medical history to give to the doctors to help them help me. How about that for why?”

  “How about respecting Daddy’s feelings on this?” April asked quietly.

  “What about our feelings? I think about Mom all the time, y’all. I wonder why she left and if she ever thinks of us. Don’t tell me you two don’t have any questions about her, that you don’t harbor a bittersweet fantasy of maybe even finding her and—”

  “Finding her?” The words pushed at Sadie. Her knees went weak. She all but staggered at the sheer force of them coming at her. “You didn’t mention that kind of wild impossible notion to Daddy, did you?”

  “I…I don’t know.” Hannah cleared her throat. “Maybe. Would it be so wrong if I did?”

  “You can ask Daddy for money. You can ask Daddy for advice. You could even ask Daddy to donate a vital organ, and he’d do it without needing to know why.” The summer breeze fanned Sadie’s face, but that did nothing to cool her passion as she gritted her teeth, took her younger sister by the shoulders and looked her square in the eye. “But you cannot ask him, after all these years, to just open himself up and talk to you about the woman who ran off and left him with three tiny children to raise all on his own.”

  “But that’s not fair.”

  “Fair has nothing to do with it. I gave up on life being fair a long time ago.” Sadie’s cheeks stung. “It just is, Hannah.”

  “But if he’d only—”

  “‘If only’ are two of the most destructive words known to man, Hannah.” Sadie knew whereof she spoke on that. She had wasted the better part of this last year lost in ‘if only,’ and it still dogged her so closely that she didn’t dare let her sister speak another word about it. “You cannot force Daddy to feel differently about this just because you expect it of him. And you should know by now you are never going to make him act the way you think he should.”

  “But she’s our mother, and he alone can tell us about her.”

  “For all he has done and all his struggles and sacrifices on our behalf, if he chooses never to speak of our mother again, we have to respect that choice,” Sadie insisted. “Right, April? Tell her.”

  April hung her head.

  “April?” Sadie tugged at the hem of her sister’s church-camp T-shirt. “Tell her.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t, Sadie.” She met Sadie’s gaze, her eyes anxious and filled with unspoken aching. “Because while he stayed with me, I did the same thing.”

  “You what?”

  “See? It wasn’t just me,” Hannah said. “April understands how I feel. April understands.”

  “I understand that of the three of us, I am the lone one who has any memories at all of Mama,” April said softly. “It’s been so long, and I’ve tried to preserve them, but they’ve begun to fade and get all jumbled up. I wanted Daddy to come stay with me because I had hoped…”

  Hannah placed her hand on April’s arm. “To get your answers?”

  April looked from Sadie to Hannah to Sadie again, her eyes moist. “You don’t know how hard it is to keep it all inside.”

  “Did you get your answers?” Sadie asked, her voice clipped but not void of compassion. When April did not respond, Sadie looked to the ground and sighed. “You could always talk to us, sugar.”

  “And tell you what? A bunch of hazy impressions about people and places I can’t rightly recall? That would be cruel to you two.”

  Hannah tucked a stray hair in place and in doing so set off a cascade of red waves on the other side of her head. “Because it would be so awful for us to hear?”

  “Because it might be wrong. I might be telling you something as fact that was just a dream or moment where I confused Mama with Aunt Phiz—the way I confused the park here in Wileyville with one I think I went to before Mama left.”

  Sadie could understand that. It did not comfort her, but she had learned to deal with things that could only be allowed, not embraced, this past year. Sadly, she realized Hannah, who liked everything tied up in neat little bundles, would never accept the way things had to be.

  “No.” April sniffled and drew her shoulders up. “Uh-uh. Talking to you two about that is a pointless exercise. Daddy’s the only living person who could confirm for me what was real and what I’d just wanted to be real about Mama.”

  “April, you don’t have to give us details. I just want to know if you found some measure of peace,” Sadie said. All this would be worth it if someone in their family at least got that. “So did you get your answers?”

  “I got…”

  Hannah hunched forward, the fading sunlight through the trees obscuring her expression.

  Sadie inched closer, though whether out of an instinct to protect April or to try to better read even the smallest nuance in her words and bod
y language, Sadie didn’t know.

  April’s hands slapped against her sides. She hung her head. “I got left in the dust when Daddy hopped on the lawn mower and ran away from me.”

  Hannah shut her eyes. “I know that feeling.”

  “He didn’t take off on your lawn mower, too, did he?” Suddenly Sadie was Miss Pragmatic, aware that she had no idea of the aftermath of Hannah’s self-professed scaring off of Moonie Shelnutt.

  “I only wish he had. We’d have caught up with him pretty quick, since we have an old walk-behind electric mower.” Hannah pantomimed pushing the machine, then raised her open hands to her sides. “No, apparently he talked a friend into giving him a lift while Payt and I were at work.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “How could we know for sure? Daddy only knows three-quarters of all the people in town. Could’ve been his café cronies, or his insurance-roundtable pals or even one of the willing widows at the seniors circle at church.”

  Just then Payt appeared at the door, the phone practically glued to his ear, and shouted, “Found him!”

  Hannah spun around. “Where is he?”

  “Sitting on Sadie’s front porch,” came the reply through a relaxed and ready smile.

  “My…?” Sadie tried to make sense of it all.

  Her sisters didn’t seem burdened with that problem.

  “Well.” Hannah laced her arms over her chest.

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself, little sister.” April cocked her hip and mirrored Hannah’s pose. “Well.”

  Being totally devoid of anything remotely appropriate, witty or wise to say about this unexpected turn of events, Sadie managed a weak smile and asked, “Well, what?”

  “Well, it looks like the decision worthy of King Solomon has been decided and you have been chosen.” April gave a quick nod of her head as if to sanction her own decree. Her pony tail followed suit half a second behind.

  “Yep.” Hannah sighed and, in a tone that wasn’t quite smug and wasn’t quite sympathetic, summed it all up, “Looks like Daddy has chosen his favorite home away from home, and—no surprise—it’s Sadie’s.”