Shiloh was out of bed when Melinda and Jeremy came into the room. Sitting on the couch under the window watching the seagulls, she looked like the vivacious preteen she was. “I’m sprung,” she said to Jeremy, holding her arms wide as she got up and crossed the room.
He wrapped her in a bear hug, propping his chin on the top of her head. “Nice try.”
She tilted her head back to look at him. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not leaving until morning, which is a whole day early as it is.”
She shrugged and looked over to Melinda. “I tried,” she said.
“And it was an admirable effort,” Melinda said.
Jeremy stood with his arm around Shiloh and looked at Melinda. “Don’t you have to get going? I thought you said something about needing to take care of Heidi.”
Shiloh gave him a frustrated look. “Heidi is with Cheryl and Bobby.”
With a quick glance at Jeremy in acknowledgment, she said, “I don’t want to take advantage of Cheryl and Bobby. And Heidi is probably wondering what happened to me.”
“Are you going to be here in the morning? It takes forever to get all the papers signed and we could talk while I’m waiting.”
Before Jeremy could come up with a reason for her to stay home, Melinda said, “Yes. I’ll be here.”
Melinda stopped at the doorway, put two fingers against her lips and blew Shiloh a kiss. She turned to leave and even when tempted, never looked back. It was a lesson she learned in the most painful way possible. For more years than she wanted to remember she’d carried a mental picture of her father sending her and her mother out of his room with a smile that barely moved his lips. He’d talked them into getting a cup of coffee, insisted, actually, as if he knew what was coming. Minutes after they left, he died alone, the way he wanted. It was his last gift to the women he loved, that they would go through life without the burden of remembering the moment he drew his last breath.
Melinda was alone on her elevator ride down to the main floor. In the silence her thoughts drifted to feelings as powerful as if they were days old and not years.
Harold Clyde Campbell died on Valentine’s Day. Somehow during the week before, he’d gathered the strength to draw a heart on the backside of the menu that came with every meal. The writing was indecipherable to Melinda, but not Mary Ann. When she saw what he had written, she leaned forward, kissed him, and whispered in his ear. Melinda was too far away to hear what her mother said, but she would never forget the intimate smile they exchanged.
Her mother understood the gift her father had given them but never accepted not being by his side. Through the weary tears that followed, she pressed his skeletal hand to her wet cheek and made a promise that she would never leave him again. Years passed before Melinda fully understood the depth of that promise.
Melinda was at the funeral home making arrangements for her father’s cremation when the Reverend Jefferson Davis Riggins arrived at the hospital. It took him less than ten minutes to convince her mother he’d been visited by an angel delivering a revelation. The one and only way to keep her husband from forever looking up at her through the fires of hell was to guide him to Jesus with a church full of the faithful singing the Lord’s praises.
How could her mother say no?
Unlike the normal Sunday church service, where Reverend Riggins worked himself into a hellfire-and-damnation frenzy with his diminishing flock of followers, he looked at funerals as a God-given opportunity to grow the fold. He had a rhythm, start slow and build until he was shouting and beating his chest, warning that the hard times in the valley were nothing more than fodder for the devil, a devil who laid in wait at the bottom of every liquor bottle, gleefully encouraging fornication—and worse.
The road to salvation could be attained only by faithfully attending Sunday service, as if their very souls depended on it. Which they did, he assured them. And it must not be forgotten that Sunday service went hand in hand with tithing, even if it meant going without a meal or two from week to week. Sacrifice showed God you were serious. As would walking to work, the greater the distance the better. With less money put into their gas-guzzling cars, there would be more for the collection plate come Sunday service. When it came to the church spreading the word of God, every dime, every dollar, dropped in the collection plate provided the preacher with the means to pave the road to heaven God had reserved for the great people of Walker County.
Melinda kept track of the time the Reverend Riggins harangued the people who’d come to honor her father. He was five minutes shy of an hour before he mentioned Harold Clyde Campbell by name. Melinda glanced at her mother. She gave her daughter an almost imperceptible nod before slipping into her coat and walking down the center aisle, her head held high, her tears unheeded.
A flash of panic crossed the preacher’s face when he saw the look in Melinda’s eyes. In a practiced, impressive segue he switched from fire and brimstone to, “What brings us together on this Saturday morning—our need to say a collective good-bye to a man who was a friend, a father, and a husband, Harold Campbell.”
Melinda followed her mother, striving to demonstrate a grace equal to the one displayed by her exit. When they were outside, Mary Ann took her daughter’s hand and gave it a gentle, grateful squeeze. Melinda leaned into her mother’s shoulder, closed her eyes and tried to picture her father as the young man who had swept her mother off her feet and into a life of enduring, albeit bittersweet love.
She wasn’t sure she believed her father’s spirit had lingered to comfort her mother, but she liked thinking it was possible. What she did know, what she never doubted, was that they were not alone as they silently walked through the unnaturally quiet forest on their way home.
“How do you think you will remember him?” Mary Ann asked as they reached the peak of the hill behind their house.
Memories tumbled over each other in her mind. There were so many . . . “How he cried when I came home from Mississippi without my baby.”
“He knew there wasn’t a miracle to be had that would let you keep her, but he never stopped praying for one.”
“I don’t think God listens when you pray for someone to die,” Melinda said. “Even someone like Evert Lee.”
“You’re saying you think I’m wasting my time?” Mary Ann said.
“I guess what I’m really saying is we should think twice about what we ask for. If God has anything to do with Evert Lee dying, it will be done and over with. I’d prefer it be a long, slow process with plenty of time to suffer and think about what he did to his children.”
“And the children of all the men he drove from their homes.” Mary Ann stopped so fast Melinda ran into her, almost knocking them both into the creek. She was staring at her house and the number of cars parked out front. “I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t abide one more person telling me your father’s dying was a blessing because he’s not suffering anymore. I never heard such nonsense. It’s like saying all those years we had with him in the end were a waste.”
“Then just keep walking,” Melinda told her. “I’ll see to what needs to be done at the house.”
Mary Ann pulled herself up to her full five feet four inches. “If I don’t go down there your father will be the talk of the county from now ’til next summer. I’d rather give them what they came to see and hear and be done with it.”
Later that night as Melinda lay in bed, curled on her side and staring at the moon drifting by her window, image after image of her parents skipped across her mind like a flat rock on a broad lake. She saw them sitting next to each other on the chintz-covered couch, her mother knitting a vest out of yarn she’d rescued from a sweater worn through at the elbows. Her father watched her work, never expressing his embarrassment that the ambition-filled promises he’d made to take care of her had become as empty as the freezer he’d bought to hold the fish that no longer swam in the streams.
She heard them discussing the funeral service as if they were actually in the next room. Her father grumbled over Reverend Riggins’s intimidating pitch for money from men laid so low since the mine closed that they bent arthritic knees to retrieve a penny stuck in asphalt. It mortified him that some poor soul might be coerced into a contribution when his only reason for being there was to partake in the food provided by church members after the service.
He’d chosen cremation over burial in the century-and-a-half-old family plot, believing the cost of dying was an obscenity they should forgo. He left the where and when of scattering his ashes up to Mary Ann, telling her to choose a place where they would both rest easy. She chose early summer when the mountain laurel was in full bloom and left the rest to Melinda.
On a morning she couldn’t sleep, she took off an hour before sunrise, guided by a faint dawn. She wandered without conscious thought or direction but wasn’t surprised when she wound up at the cabin. It was the first time she’d been there since the week Daniel died. That was the day she realized there were multilevels and intricate facets to grief, something she’d never fully understood. Her losses would be with her the rest of her life, surfacing on different levels, always there.
She didn’t have to look for Daniel. He was everywhere, from a song to a shadow seen out of the corner of her eye. She heard leaves rustle when there was nothing to disturb them. Once she felt him calling her, his voice carried on a breeze, insisting she hurry or they would miss the sunset.
When falling leaves gave way to snow, Melinda put her head back, closed her eyes, and told herself the flakes that landed on her lips were directed there by Daniel. He was always with her and yet she was always alone.
She finally chose a northern red oak on the highest peak in the McElroy Nature Conservancy Preserve, believing her father’s ashes would be a gift to the soil that would nurture the tree for a hundred years.
The last of her father’s ashes caught in a sudden wind and circled the tree. Her mother said a final good-bye that ended with an ominous foreshadowing. “Don’t wander too far, my love. I need to know you’re waiting for me.”
The elevator door slid open and Melinda was back in a world filled with plans and decisions.
She felt weighed down as she crossed the lobby. Would the pain over her father’s loss ever lessen? Would there be a day when her first memories were his quick wit and intelligence and not his long, slow death?
Her mother knew she was dying and prepared Melinda for the inevitable. Chemotherapy and radiation didn’t frighten her—she just wanted to die on her own terms.
Melinda read medical reports, did research on the latest treatments, and built a case to present to her mother to convince her there were solid reasons to hope. Women survived breast cancer all the time, more and more every year.
Her mother was asleep when Melinda arrived at the hospital, armed with arguments befitting a brilliant John Grisham attorney. She looked frighteningly shrunken and pale. Melinda pulled the folding chair provided for visitors closer, snaked her hand through the bars, and clasped her mother’s needle-bruised hand. There was bone and skin, but no cushioning fat. She stared at the monitors and listened to the steady labored breathing escaping her mother’s parched throat.
Slowly, a drop at a time, Melinda released the tears she’d been fighting for months. She buried her face against her arm as her tears turned to sobs.
Her mother ran her fingers through Melinda’s glossy hair. “Please don’t be sad,” she said. “I’m ready to leave this place. Every dream I have I’m with your father. He’s strong and happy and young again.” Tears formed that she made no effort to wipe away. “There hasn’t been a day since he died that I haven’t longed to see him, Melinda. The pain never goes away and it never gets better.”
“I’m going to wish you were here every day for the rest of my life,” Melinda whispered.
“I’m sorry, Melinda. For so many things. Most of all, that we couldn’t find a way for you to keep your baby. I have lived with that regret every hour of every day.”
Melinda stayed with her mother until she took her last breath. For days after the cremation friends stopped by the house to bring baked goods and to visit over a cup of coffee. They used different approaches, but to a woman they told her how wrong it was to let her mother go without a church service. No one listened when Melinda told them her mother had made her own arrangements and that she’d distinctly forbidden Melinda to let Reverend Riggins so much as offer a prayer at Sunday service. They insisted they were fighting for their friend’s soul.
She put a stop to the food and visits three days after her mother’s cremation when she sneaked off one morning before the good women of Walker County were up and about. Word that Mary Ann no longer resided in her grandmother’s jewelry box spread like moonshine at a Fourth of July picnic, and by suppertime, Melinda was alone again.