***
Lilly had thanksgiving week off, and as much as we hated to leave Rodney, we flew to Louisiana to spend her vacation on Gravier Road. She was pensive during the cab ride to the airport. After we were checked in and waiting at our gate, I noticed how fidgety she was and knew there was something on her mind, something she needed to talk about but didn't know how to start.
"You okay, sweetheart?" I patted her leg and left my hand on her knee. "Want to talk about something?"
"I was just wondering about you and Rodney. I mean, I don't want to be nosey, but how long have you known him. When was I born? Where was he?"
Let's see, how do I begin? Hmmmm.
A Love Story
1963-present
I'll start when I was almost thirteen years old and my dad pulled into the Esso station in Jean Ville and I was sitting shotgun in his car. The most gorgeous boy I'd ever seen came to the car and started washing the windshield while my dad was in the office with the owner. I tried to ignore the boy but my eyes seemed to be part of a magnetic field that pulled me towards him. I knew everyone at school around my own age so I wondered how I could have missed him.
When he told me he went to the colored school I didn't believe him. I mean, he didn't look colored and anyway, he had such refined manners and seemed so, I don't know, dignified, intelligent, sophisticated—not that there aren't Negroes who have all those qualities, it's just that the only colored people I knew at the time were Catfish and Tootsie and well, you know Tootsie. She's just down to earth, as was Catfish.
Anyway, the boy started talking to me and even though I was too young to understand, I was attracted to him way back then. It was about two years later, when I was around your age, that I really fell in love with Rodney. I'll never forget it.
Over the next two years I saw him whenever I went with my dad to the Esso station, and we’d talk.
One afternoon, Marianne and I were in the hayloft in the Quarters and he showed up, just swung his long leg onto the loft from the ladder and scooted towards me on his knees. He reached his arms out when he saw me and I didn't know what to do at first, but when I looked at him and he smiled the most genuine smile, I moved towards him. He touched one of my hands and I shivered. He let his fingers walk up my arm while he scooted closer to me, until he could grip my shoulder. His other hand found mine and he took it into his as if he'd just asked me to dance.
All the time he stared at me and I looked over his shoulder at Marianne who mouthed, "What are you doing?" I shrugged and looked back at Rodney and thought, he's so gorgeous and the look on his face was indescribable. I can still see it today, all these years later.
He held my hand and we sat with our backs to the wall, our legs in front of us and our thighs and shoulders touching. He started to talk. I don't remember what he said, but I loved the sound of his voice. It was deep and raspy with just a hint of Cajun-ness in the twang. He wore a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap and looked masculine, handsome, and gentle all at the same time. Later I learned the dictionary has a word to describe him: mansuetude, which I translated to mean, gentle masculinity.
He had broad shoulders and seemed so big next to me, and I wasn't small at five-feet, seven-inches. I remember he told me I was beautiful. It was the first time anyone had ever told me that. I felt prickly pins run up and down my spine and was speechless. It was stifling hot and humid in the hayloft and where our shoulders touched, our skin stuck together.
He asked me to go for a walk and we climbed down the ladder and walked toward the cane fields. He held my hand and pulled me along until we got to the rows. He dropped my hand, took out his pocketknife, pulled on one of the stalks, and then cut off a rod of cane. He sliced it into three pieces and handed one to me and the other to Marianne. I'd never had a piece of fresh sugar cane so I didn't know what to do with it. I watched them suck the sugar out, but I just held mine.
A little later we sat on the ground outside the barn and talked about what we liked such as our favorite subjects in school, books we'd read. We found out we had a lot in common, especially that we loved books—high-brow stuff like Chaucer and Cheever. We agreed that our favorite place was the library.
He told me that the colored kids at his school didn't have textbooks, and it seemed outrageous to me that schools didn't provide learning materials based on skin color. Over the next few years Rodney, Marianne, and I devised a project where I would confiscate discarded books from my school for their school.
I got a volunteer position in the school library and I'd box up old discarded books, especially textbooks Rodney identified as ones they needed, and I'd leave a window unlocked on certain evenings. We'd meet behind the school and Rodney would use his uncle's pickup truck and drive under the unlocked window, then climb from the bed of the truck into the library and hand the boxes to me and Marianne.
I remember how we used to drive away with the lights off on the truck and he and Marianne would drop me off two blocks from my house. I'd walk home and say I'd been at the library—which wasn't an actual lie.
Lilly and I laughed at how I justified my whereabouts to my parents when I was in high school. She said, "Oh, Susie, you were bad." I said it was for a good cause and we laughed some more. Then we were quiet.
"Well, what happened next? I mean with you and Rodney?"
Not much until I went to LSU. Rodney was two years older than me but we graduated from our separate high schools the same year because, I guess you could say my mother had me on an accelerated program. He was eighteen and I was sixteen and we both went to college in Baton Rouge, although I was at LSU and he was at Southern. Even colleges were segregated in those days. Anyway, that's when we dated seriously. Those were the best four months of my life, even though we had to sneak and couldn't go out in public. We saw each other every chance we had.
Somehow, my dad found out I was seeing someone, although I don't think he knew who. So he shipped me off to Sarah Lawrence in New York. By then I was seventeen. The next year, Rodney saved enough money to come to New York for a week at Thanksgiving and we had the most glorious week of visiting the library, sitting in coffee houses, going to concerts. No one seemed to notice we were not the same race.
We made lots of casual friends and felt accepted everywhere we went. Until that week I don't think we ever thought there was a chance we'd ever be able to be together, but we started to believe and dream that we could be married one day and live in New York.
We both needed to finish college and he wanted to go to law school. We felt we could wait. It would be worth it.
About six weeks after Rodney's visit to New York, I found out I was going to have a baby. Josh was my doctor. That's how we met. I knew if I told Rodney about the baby—about you—he would quit school and come to New York to marry me.
It was too dangerous for his family. It's hard for me to describe the things they would do in those days to colored people who dared to even speak to a white person. Anyway, I thought about how he'd have to get a job as a janitor and would end up resenting me and…
“Well, Lilly, I can't explain all the reasons I didn't tell him or the reasons I chose to give you a better life with a couple who would be great parents,” I tried not to look at her sitting next to me in the airport. “I was eighteen, scared, stupid, far away from any family support. I'm not making excuses, but I made the decision I made; if it was wrong I am so sorry. This will sound trite and you might find it hard to believe, but I made those decisions because I loved you so much.”
Lilly grabbed my hand and squeezed it. She held it on the armrest between our two chairs. "Go on," she said.
"I'm not sure what else to tell you…"
Josh was my constant companion during my pregnancy and he fell in love with me, but I loved Rodney too much to even notice Josh. When you were born and I went through with the adoption, Josh thought I couldn’t love him and he moved on.
When I look back, I think Josh was hoping I’d keep you and marry him, but, like I said, I didn’t love him. I loved Rodney.
Josh stayed in your life. He always felt he was your surrogate dad because he had nurtured you for seven and a-half months while I was pregnant, and he delivered you.
Rodney and I reconnected at Catfish's funeral just after he'd completed law school and I'd finished grad school. We decided to get married; he would move to New York. I came back and waited for him but he never arrived. So many things happened and, in order to keep his family safe, we had to give up on our dream to be together.
I was devastated.
About six months later I met you. You were four and I fell in love with you the first time I saw your auburn curls bounce as you jumped up and down behind your mom's skirt. Finding you was the best decision of my life.
It took a while for me to learn to live without the hope of marrying Rodney. He went to Vietnam, met someone, and was engaged to be married. You were about five when Josh came back into my life. It was inevitable. He was a big part of your life with your parents, and I had become part of your lives, too. We took it slow, and as I healed from Rodney I fell in love with Josh. He was a great man and I'll always be grateful we had him for the time we did.
I stopped talking because when I thought about Josh, I still felt empty inside and missed him. Lilly had tears in her eyes, too. "I loved him, too, you know."
"Yes, I know sweetheart. And you were his little girl. He adored you. He knew you in the womb. He was the first person to see you when you came into this world. He remained in your life, the one constant person… I'm so sorry we lost him." She put her head on my chest, folded her arms around me, and sobbed. I didn't have the guts to tell her Josh's death was all my fault.
I felt her nod her head on my chest and her tears soaked through my blouse.
A couple of days after we arrived in Jean Ville, I went to see my dad. I'd made it a habit of going by every other day when I was in town. If he was hateful I left, but if he was civil I would sit and visit with him. He eventually realized that his words could run me off and he tried harder to be nice to me.
He was sitting on the front porch when I pulled up in the driveway. I stopped my car in front rather than drive to the back where I usually entered. I walked through the yard and up the front steps, went over to him, kissed the top of his head and sat in the rocker next to him.
"How are you feeling today, Daddy?"
"I'm okay. I wish I could move around better. I wish I had something to do. I'm bored." He rocked and stared straight ahead. He didn't look at me and I couldn't remember the last time he had. I stood up and faced him. I put the toes of my shoe on one of the rocker legs to stop the motion.
"Look at me, Daddy." I had my hands on my hips. He looked up, then looked immediately over my shoulder, almost like he was staring at my earlobe. "Look. I need to tell you something. It's important and I need to look you in the eye when I say it." I couldn't believe I was bold enough to talk to my dad that way. I'd always been so frightened of him. Those days were over.
"I'm getting married again." That got his attention.
"You're what?" He looked at me and his body language said he wanted to spring out of his chair and choke me, but he couldn't physically spring, or jump, or barely walk without being winded.
"I'm getting married, which shouldn't be a big deal. It's who I'm marrying that you need to come to terms with." I still had my toes on the rocker, preventing him from moving and he was gripping both arms of the chair so tightly his knuckles were white.
"Not that nigga"
"Rodney Thibault." I didn't flinch.
"Not in my town. You can't embarrass me here. Go back to New York if you want to marry a ni__er."
"You hypocrite. You had a thirty-year affair with a black woman and you have the nerve…?"
"I never married her!"
"But you had a child with her. A beautiful young woman who is my sister whom you’ve never acknowledged.” I took my foot off the rocker and it lurched forward as if it was going to throw him out. I pushed on both his shoulders to steady him and he sat back as if the air had been sucked out of him. "Maybe you should think about that." I turned and went down the steps to the front yard and walked across the warm grass to my car.
When I walked back into the house on Gravier Road, the sweet smell of lilies from the always-arriving white flowers filled the air and I thought of how good it felt to be honest and brave.
*
Sissy and I talked about how to tell our mother about my engagement and decided that I should break the news to her in person. We drove to Houston together the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Although we'd spoken on the phone a few times since Dad's illness began, I hadn't seen Mama in ten years and wondered how she would handle our reunion.
"Look. We forgave her and have been trying to rebuild our relationships. Surely she won't judge you." Sissy was measuring the windows in the apartment I'd had built over the new garage and I was sitting on the floor turning the pages of magazines that had examples of draperies.
"Don't be so sure, Sissy. Mama is as prejudiced as the day is long. She can take up with a Mafia man, but a colored man? I don't know whether she'll be able to swallow it."
"I can't wait to meet Rodney. Lilly is really taken with him." She dropped the tape measure and it rolled over to where I was sitting on the floor. She stooped to pick it up and my ring caught her eye. "When did you get that rock?"
"Last week." I put my hand in hers and she examined my engagement ring. "I haven't been wearing it. Waiting until I've broken the news to certain people."
"Whew! It's really something."
"He's wonderful, Sissy. You'll love him." I knew I was beaming but couldn't help myself. When I thought about Rodney I smiled with my whole face. Sissy started laughing at me.
"I hope I meet someone one day who makes me glow like Rodney makes you glow." She hugged me and I hugged her back.
"I hope so, too. I really do. And I hope he's white because this is hard."
"But worth it, right?"
"I guess we'll see whether we can make it work in Jean Ville or whether we'll have to live somewhere else."
"Oh. Are ya'll thinking about living here? Are you crazy?"
"Rodney wants to come back and go into practice with his brother when he gets out of the army in May. I don't want to be so far away from him again."
“You need to think long and hard about that.” Sissy turned around and didn’t say any more.
*
It was about noon when Sissy and I pulled into a semicircular driveway in front of a two-story brick house in a subdivision on the north side of Houston, the address James had given us. Sissy double-checked the map and said, "This is it."
"She does know we are coming, right?"
"Yes, I talked to her on the phone last night." We drove under a portico. A doorman approached the car and opened the door for Sissy to get out, then came around to my side. I was already standing on the concrete, the car keys in my hand.
"May I have your keys so I can park your car, ma'am?" I handed him the keys and Sissy and I stepped up to the double wood-stained doors under a long veranda with white columns that reached to the roof of the second story. Six tall windows spanned the front of the house on the lower level and above us were four sets of French doors with individual terraces. The house had a regal appearance with its topiaries and massive flowerbeds filled with azaleas, camellias, holly and oak trees, and huge pecan trees that lined the driveway. Wisteria vines grew up two of the columns and made the air smell fragrant and fresh even in the hundred-degree heat.
Sissy used the brass doorknocker and laughed at the lion's head embossed on it. A Hispanic housekeeper in a starched black dress with a white pinafore opened the door and asked our names. Sissy said, "Abigail and Susanna Burton." We both giggled but it didn't escape me that Sissy didn't say Susanna Ryan.
The maid ushered us down a hall and into a solarium on the side of the house, through double glass doors that opened to a terrace that extended into a colorful garden. Mama was wearing a blue silk flowing kaftan. Her formerly mousey brown hair, now with golden highlights, had obviously been "coiffed" at an exclusive salon, swept up on one side into a flip, the other tucked behind her ear, a bit of a bang across one half of her forehead. She had on huge diamond earrings and another brilliant stone on her left hand that had to be six or eight carats. On her feet were what looked like glass slippers with one-inch heels, but they were probably some sort of plastic. Sticking out of the ends were pink toenails, recently pedicured. She wore make-up, something she'd never done, nor did I remember her having her hair done or wearing jewelry of any kind except her simple gold wedding band.
She was sitting in a wing-backed chair in front of an unlit fireplace reading a book. She looked up at us as though it were normal for me and Sissy to walk into her house, and she said, "Hello, girls. Have a seat." She asked the housekeeper if she had offered us refreshments and Sissy and I looked at each other and giggled, thinking, when did Mama get so highfalutin?
We didn't hug or kiss or touch. It was as though we were strangers who had come to interview her for a high-fashion Houston magazine. The maid returned with a tray of sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea. We sat at a round marble-topped table with high-backed chairs set inside a huge bay window, picked at our food, and tried to make casual conversation.
When you've had real tragedies like I'd had, you don't have the time or patience for surface talk and suppressed truths. After an hour of conversation about the weather, Houston's politics, decorating ideas, and fashion, I became impatient.
"Did Daddy ever hit you?" I looked directly at Mama who sat back in her chair as if she'd been struck. The expression on her face went from pretend happiness to utter pain for just a second. I witnessed the curtain fall and retract before her face returned to something akin to nonchalance.
"Susanna! Why would you ask a question like that?" She took a sip of her iced tea and looked at the long, manicured fingernails on her left hand as if examining them for any sharp cuticles left behind by a negligent salon assistant. Her hands looked strange to me as I remembered her nails bitten to the quick and cuticles torn and sometimes bleeding.
"We all know what he was capable of," I said. "He beat me up so bad I had to be hospitalized, and that was just one of the many times. What about you?"
"Let's say we had disagreements that didn't turn out so well." Mama stood up and walked across the huge room to the fireplace.
"Yes, well, I happen to know that you are the one who made him beat me up the time he almost killed me." There was dead silence and her stare was blank. "What kind of mother does that to her child?"
She put both hands on the mantle and bent her head so that her forehead rested on top of the ornate, marble fireplace. Sissy got up and went to her. She wrapped her arms around Mama's waist and lay her head on Mama's back. Mama turned around and they hugged.
I watched them as if I was observing a movie. It didn't seem real, they didn't seem real, nothing seemed real. But the ice was broken and we sat down to some serious conversation where we learned of the mental, physical, and emotional abuse Mama had endured for twenty-five years.
We heard about her desperate escape from Jean Ville when Daddy was ill because it was the first time she felt he could not follow her and force her to come back. She talked about how she hid out in a small rental house that her sister, Betty, helped her pay for. Mama said she met John, the man who owned the mansion where she now lived, at a restaurant. He was introduced by a friend of Aunt Betty's husband, Rick, a shady character I didn't trust.
"Mama, I have something to tell you." I took her shaking hand in mine and held it on top of the table. She looked at me then looked at our hands. "I'm getting married."
"Again?" she pulled her hand away and reached for her iced tea.
"Yes. What you need to know is who I'm marrying." I tried to get her to meet my eyes but hers darted from Sissy to her tea to her plate and back to Sissy. We were all quiet. "Rodney Thibault. Ray Thibault's son."
"I know who he is. He's a niggra. Maybe a high yellow. A mulatto. But he's still a n__gra." She stood up and her chair almost fell over backwards, teetered, then sat upright with a thud. Mama walked out of the solarium, through the glass doors, into the flower garden outside. Sissy followed her and closed the door behind them.
Drama, I thought; always, drama.
I watched them talk and argue; Mama cried, wrung her hands, then walked away from Sissy. Sissy followed and grabbed Mama's shoulders. Finally, they hugged and stood in an embrace for a long time. I could tell they were whispering to each other.
When they came back inside I was sitting on the divan thumbing through Home and Garden magazine.
Mama rang a bell that was sitting on the table and asked the maid to set up the bar in the solarium. A few minutes later, the unnamed, un-introduced Hispanic lady rolled a glass-shelved cart with a crystal ice bucket and glasses on a mirrored tray into the room. Behind her was the butler, who carried an additional tray with six or eight decanters full of brown and clear liquids.
"Gerald, I'll have a dry Martini, two olives." Mama turned to Sissy and winked. It was the first time she resembled the mother I'd known as a child. "What will you girls have?"
"Oh, I'm not drinking. I'm driving back to Jean Ville tonight."
"Oh, Susie, please stay the night. I want you and Sissy to meet John. We'll have a lovely dinner to celebrate your engagement. You can drive back tomorrow." She looked at me as though pleading; something I'd never known my mother to do. I glanced at Sissy and she nodded. When mother turned around Sissy mouthed, "lovely," and we both cracked up.
"It's up to you, of course," Sissy finally said. "But I'd like to stay."
"May I use your phone? I need to make sure it's okay to leave Lilly."
"Who's Lilly?" Mama asked, but I was ushered to the phone in John's study by the maid, who actually had a name: Hannah.
I called and spoke with Tootsie who said the girls were fine and I should stay as long as I liked. I wanted to talk to Lilly, but she was in town with Tom's wife, Gloria, and Anna and Chrissy. Tootsie promised to have her call me when she returned to the Quarters. I gave her my mother's phone number and hung up.
"Sissy was just telling me about the little girl you adopted."
"I didn't adopt her. I have custody."
"Oh. What's the difference?"
"Mama, let me tell you the truth. She's Rodney's daughter. Rodney's and mine." I had to catch her as she collapsed, very dramatically. Her Martini hit the marble floor and the glass broke into a million tiny shards. Hannah and Gerald came running in and started to clean the mess while I helped Mama into her chair where she swooned, then came around, but we didn’t talk about Lilly again.
When John Maceo came into the solarium, the mess was cleaned up and Mama was half-way through her second Martini. He kissed her on the forehead and she introduced us. He shook our hands and repeated our names as Mama said them.
"Abigail, so nice to meet you. You look like your mother. That's a compliment." Sissy did look like Mama and she could imitate anyone. Behind John's back, she pretended to shake an invisible hand and mouthed words, "Abigail, it's so nice to meet you."
Sissy is fairly short and petite with a perfect figure. I'm tall and lanky with almost no figure compared to her and we look nothing alike. My eyes are blue-grey, a dull color and are shapeless, and too big.
Sissy drew attention when she walked into a room. She had brown hair that she highlighted to a rich, honey blond and blue-green eyes shaped like sideways teardrops. Back then she wore outrageous clothes, like hip-hugger bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts. She had two pierced earrings in each earlobe and one in the top of her right ear from which she wore a dangling rhinestone thing. She went to college for a couple years but didn't like it; her forte was music and she could play the piano like a concert artist.
"Susanna, it's a pleasure." John shook my hand and looked at my ear, as if he couldn't make eye-to-eye contact. He was a handsome Italian man with dark wavy hair and a large nose, late fifties or early sixties, not an old man like James described him. He said he was a businessman with offices in downtown Houston, which sounded important but a bit nebulous, and his demeanor was akin to Mafia types I'd read about. His eyes gave him a Cary Grant look; long thick eyelashes that were about a quarter of the way closed. He seemed to be peering at you out of only two-thirds of his lower eyes, as if just awakened from a deep sleep.
"The pleasure is mine." I can keep pace with him, I thought and act formal and highbrowed. It occurred to me that I might be as wealthy as John Maceo and probably more educated. It was a fleeting thought, though, because I didn't care one whit about the money Josh left me and Lilly. I was, however, proud of my education.
John picked up a crystal highball glass and filled it halfway with bourbon—no ice, no water—that he gulped; then he poured another half-glass and sipped it. Mama was in her cups and asked Sissy to play the piano. There was a baby grand in the huge hallway between the solarium and the dining room, but all the rooms were connected because there were huge openings, no doors, and continuous marble floors.
Sissy sat down and began playing Fur Elise, Daddy's favorite. Mama made a face and asked her to play Me and My Shadow. Mama and John danced and followed each other around the room like one was the leader, the other the shadow. It was cute and I could tell they were happy together. And a little drunk.
We all sat at one end of a dining table that seated twenty people and ate steaks, au gratin potatoes, and salad. It was the first time I could remember seeing my mother laugh. John played straight man to Sissy's comedic routines and they were hysterical.
Sissy and I were ushered upstairs to adjoining bedrooms, each with en-suite bathrooms. We pretended to be queens and ended up sleeping together in the same bed, in silk pajamas Hannah brought us from our mother's closet. She took our clothes to launder, promising they'd be outside our bedroom doors in the morning.
We took showers and wrapped ourselves in robes that were terry cloth on the inside and silk on the outside and we danced around the huge bedroom like school girls.
Breakfast was pleasant. John had already gone off to work so it was Mama, Sissy, and me. I told Mama it was good to see her happy and that I didn't have any hard feelings that she left Daddy. Mama apologized, sort of, for complaining about me to Daddy.
"I had to do something to divert his anger. And you've always been so strong." She looked embarrassed, not sorry, but I took what I could get at the time.
Sissy agreed that it was nice to see Mama happy but said she was still angry at the way Mama left because Sissy became responsible for a mean, sick man when she was only fifteen.
"I'm not going to try to explain and I don't need absolution, but I will say I had no choice about how or when I left." Mama picked at her eggs and took a long gulp of tomato juice, which I thought might be laced with vodka because there were two olives and a celery stalk in the glass.
"You haven't asked about Albert or the older boys." Sissy looked at Mama but Mama was busy stirring her grits absent-mindedly.
"Albert calls me every week. I talk to James regularly and he comes here a couple times a year. He brings Albert with him. Will and Robby aren't interested in talking to me and I can't force it." She looked sad and it was the first time I considered that she might love her children; something she'd never shown. I could see the pain in her body language—the dropped shoulders, downcast eyes, fidgety fingers, shuffling feet under the table.
"Can I call you sometime?" I reached over and took one of her shaking hands. Her fingers were cold and sharp, but she cupped them around my wrist.
"I'd like that Susanna Christine." She only called me by my full name when she was angry, but I didn't see anger on her face this time, only pain. "And I'd like to meet Lilly. She's my first, my only grandchild, you know."
“Would you like to come to the wedding?”
“I might. When is it?”
“We haven’t set a date or place yet, but I’ll let you know.” I squeezed her hand.
I got up and hugged Mama and I felt a surge of forgiveness and understanding.
"I want you to be happy, Mama. You deserve it." I was getting in the car and she was standing beside me.
"Thank you. I am happy." She kissed me on the cheek and hugged me extra long. "And don't forget to send me pictures of my granddaughter."
Sissy and I didn't talk much until we drove across the state line into Louisiana on Interstate 10 and were about two hours from Jean Ville. She said she was glad we'd gone to see Mama and that she would stay in touch, maybe even go back for a visit sometime. I told her that Emalene said, "Love your mother, you only get one."
"She also said that about Daddy," I told Sissy. "If you can accept what Mama did to you, maybe I should try to accept what Daddy did to me." It was starting to drizzle and I turned on the windshield wipers. The swish-thump of the back and forth rhythm was hypnotic.
"Mama seems to have accepted your engagement to Rodney. How does that make you feel?" Sissy asked.
"I'm glad, but I didn't need her approval. After all, she didn't care if we approved of what she did." I drove slowly through the rain that had started coming down harder. It sounded like it would break the windows. Sissy used a Kleenex to wipe the inside of the windshield where it was fogging up and I slowed down as the rain came down harder.
"And she wants to meet Lilly." Sissy was talking just above a whisper.
"That makes me happy. Lilly needs as many people who love her as possible."
"Anyway. It's good to see Mama happy. Don't you think?" Sissy said, her face peering out the window of the car at the rain.
"Sure." The cool water hit the hot surface of the highway and created steam that smelled musty and damp.