Mine to Tell Read online

  “She did come back,” I insisted again. “The house, her little two-story house. That’s where she lived after that, right?”

  Mama made an effort to calm herself. “Yes, she came back. A couple of weeks later. Enough time for Isaac to get so hurt and angry that he divorced her in his heart. Simon said they were eating when she came in. It was night and late. She probably thought the boys would be in bed, but they hadn’t kept good schedules without her. So they were sitting there when the door opened. She looked at each of the boys, her face incredibly pale, whiter than the wall behind her. Little Levi jumped up to give her a hug but Isaac made him sit back down. She never looked at Isaac. Simon said she carried the little cloth bag she had with her into their bedroom and closed the door.”

  “Clearly she never intended to be gone for good,” I mused aloud.

  “Won’t know that without knowing why she left in the first place,” Mama answered rather tartly. “Whatever her reasons, Isaac kept them to himself if she ever told him, leaving us with his word and incidental evidence to come to our own conclusions. Anyway, I guess he got up from the table and went back to their room and closed the door after she’d gone in there. Simon said he and Levi couldn’t hear much, just the two of them talking, their voices raised but Julianne’s different than usual, her voice just wasn’t quite right. Then their door burst open and Isaac stormed back out. Not long after that, Isaac turned a shed they had into that little two-floor house and moved her into it.”

  “That must have been weird for her,” I said. “It makes me feel sorry for her.”

  “You can’t do that,” Mama snapped. “She clearly did wrong.”

  “But she left for a reason she said was important. Maybe it wasn’t wrong at all.”

  Mama was so quiet I couldn’t even hear her breathing. Finally she rested her hands on the edge of the sink and looked me in the eye. “Simon said there was another man.”

  “But how could he know that?” I cried.

  “Isaac never preached again. Does that tell you something?”

  “I still don’t believe it.” My heart wouldn’t believe it. I didn’t know my great-grandmother, yet I did. I’d felt her all my life. She was lingering like an unsolved mystery, an unfinished tale, an argument that needed to be resolved.

  “Simon said your grandpa’s the proof. He was born nine months after her disappearance,” Mama whispered.

  My mouth fell open, and the kitchen and the peas we’d shelled spun away into a sickening spiral. “He could still be Isaac’s,” I whispered, visualizing the ramifications of what Simon had said.

  Mama looked at me, a flicker of apology in her eyes as she shook her head.

  If this was true, we weren’t Crouses. We were something else, someone else, and this farm we were on was ours by squatter’s rights, not by inheritance. Now I understood why she insisted someone should burn that house down. Maybe Simon had left it there after he’d tried to tear it down to remind us we were bastards. Maybe Grandpa Samuel and my father had left it there in defiance, even after Simon was gone, trying to believe that we weren’t. And Mama. She’d given her adult years to seam this family together, to prove, to whoever cared, that her husband and her children truly were Crouses.

  “What happened to her? What happened to Isaac?” I asked, still reeling from my loss of identity, a cold hollowness settling inside.

  “Isaac died eventually.”

  “She was still alive when he died?” I asked.

  Mama nodded. “She was, but she stayed in her own house, even with him gone. The boys were pretty well grown by then, so it didn’t matter much where she stayed. Then, one day she disappeared again. She left another note that one of them found when they went to check on her. That time it just said, ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve written more for later. Love, Your mother, Julianne.’ Apparently that’s when Simon boarded up her house. Left everything the way it was when he realized she was gone.”

  “ ‘I’ve written more for later.’ What did she mean by that?”

  “Just more explanations she’d send later, I assume. In a letter or something.”

  The kitchen became quiet then, Mama and I lost in our thoughts. Finally I looked over at her. “I understand Great-Uncle Simon’s hurt,” I said. “His life is like a really bad farce of being left behind by women. His mother died, his stepmother left twice, and his wife took off.”

  Mama stared back at me. I couldn’t tell if she was upset about what I’d said, or just sad.

  “That’s why he tried to tear down Julianne’s house when I was little.” My voice rose a notch, I matched its intensity with my eyes as I gazed at Mama. “He wanted to get back at his wife and both of his mothers. That didn’t work, so then he tried destroying Julianne in person by claiming she was a bad woman. And even though he’s gone, he’s still doing it to you and me, too.” He was a hurt little boy in an angry old man’s body, and he wanted someone to atone for it. Someone like my mother or me, since his wife hadn’t. And Great-Uncle Levi was no better. He hadn’t stuck around and made everyone miserable all these years, but his absence was akin to a judgment. He’d left all of us behind and left my grandpa Samuel, Julianne’s only son, the natural heir to her disgrace, with all of the shame.

  I turned back to the sink and picked up a fat green pod and snapped it open. Three healthy round peas glistened as I shoved them out with my thumb.

  “Annabelle.” Mama’s voice was strong. “Promise me you’ll honor your family in everything you do, especially for your father and Grandpa Samuel’s sakes.”

  I looked at her, beyond her, actually, to the faces of my father and grandfather. Their staid demeanors, the crinkles that eroded the skin beside their eyes from years of empty smiles, their expressions going through the motions while their hearts never did. Then my focus returned to her, my mother, the perfect woman for them, one who had committed herself to a flawless existence, a noble effort that still had never eased their shame or Simon’s anger. They were passing the mantle to me now, a tightrope of ceremonial right living, one that demanded I become invisible so the Crouses could try to forget their shame and hang onto their identity.

  I dropped the peapod and turned to my mother. The tired desperation in her eyes was too severe for me to say what I wanted. I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her instead, assuring her I would guard my ways. But in the back of my mind was that voice that had been there all my life. It sounded like me, but I knew it was Julianne. I needed to listen to it. I needed to hear what it said, and somehow so did they.

  Chapter 2

  “And your desire shall be toward your husband…”

  “And that’s Isaac.” I pointed out my great-grandfather’s picture to Trevor. “He was a preacher…for awhile. When I was little I referred to him as ‘the old man in the picture, with the big eyebrows and angry eyes.’ Mama’d get so mad at me! You should have heard her shriek.” I looked up at Trevor, his face so handsome that my heart fluttered just like it had the first time I’d seen him. I stopped talking and admired his nearly black hair, his angular features, and the boyish gaiety that lightened his dark eyes. I wanted to reach up and touch him, run my hand over the hollow of his cheek, take a momentary break from telling him about my family.

  I was home for the weekend from Cincinnati, where the two of us went to college, and he’d come with me. He was officially my fiancé now, a proposal that had burned a permanent smile onto my face. We’d just announced our engagement to my parents, and I’d followed that by dragging him to the family room to explain the menagerie of ancestral photos on the wall, the one of Julianne in my hand.

  “And this is my great-grandmother, Julianne,” I said raising her picture so he could see. I held it close to my face so he would catch the resemblance. He nodded and glanced away. “You know those two old houses down the road? Hers and Isaac’s? I’ve pointed them out to you before. I thought we’d go down there later and really look hers over.”

  It had taken years for me to brave
the overgrown jungle around Julianne’s house after Mama’s promise of snakes. But then with puberty came an unexplained impetus to see inside that house, and one day I’d suddenly crossed it, high quick strides taking me through the deep grass to the small sagging porch that framed her white wooden door. I remember standing there at her front door and lifting my hand to touch it. I ran my fingers over the places where the paint had chipped, over boards that were nailed across it, acknowledging it as the last physical barrier between her life and mine. I felt close to her, standing there, but I never went farther. I’d turned around and looked across the deep grass I’d just passed through, approving the weeds that had parted like the Red Sea where I’d crossed. But then I saw what I could never have seen from outside the fence. A path. A real path. Grass flattened and parted by someone other than me. Someone who walked near the house fairly often. Julianne? A shudder trickled up my spine, and I bounded off the porch and across the yard faster than I’d come into it. I didn’t look back. My impetus was gone.

  “What do you think?” I asked, tugging on Trevor’s sleeve. “I’ve never been in Julianne’s house, but I’ve always wanted to. You want to go with me?” I’d told him some of our family history while we were dating but not the whole of it. In fact, being away at college had swept my history into the past, and the prompts I’d always felt to know my great-grandmother had waned. But now I was here again, standing next to the man who’d asked me to marry him, and my heritage was important once more. I needed to know it. Trevor needed to understand it. He needed to hear as much as I knew, and my great-grandparents’ photos were a good way to break him in.

  “Maybe later,” he said, looking around. “Where’s your brother?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll go find him pretty soon.” I threaded my fingers through his and tugged his hand in the direction of the wall, hoping it would draw his attention back to my tale. “The Crouses take marriage extremely seriously,” I teased, hoping to gain his attention. He squeezed my fingers. “It will sound kind of silly at first, but it’s been vexing enough to my family that I thought if we…”

  “Let’s go find him, okay? I’ve got something I want to talk to him about, and then we can do this other stuff later. Maybe tomorrow,” he said. I looked up at him, his face alight with the desire to find Paul Junior.

  “Is there a ballgame on or something?” I squeezed my fingers around his, trying to hold on, remind him we were supposed to be one and this was our special weekend.

  “This afternoon,” he said, his fingers loosening as he craned his neck to look behind him into the next room. Trevor and my brother had become fast friends the first time I’d brought him home from college with me, shortly after we’d begun dating seriously. They’d bonded over some baseball team, and at the time I’d been ecstatic over their easy interaction. Even my parents had taken to him, so much so that I’d have gotten a more explosive reaction if I’d announced we weren’t getting married than that we were.

  “Go on,” I said, smiling away my disappointment. “This can wait.” Excitement lit up his dark eyes, and I let him go, uncoiling my fingers from his. “He’s probably outside waiting for you.”

  Trevor bounded off like a child, careening around the stand with the family Bible as he went to look for my brother. I watched his back until he rounded a corner, and then I turned to the wall of faces and the photo in my hand, their countenances an array of expressions frozen in time—fire, ice, and sorrow forever in their eyes. I thought of Trevor’s boyish expression. Our picture wouldn’t be like these. He and I were happy, and in ours we’d be all smiles.

  “What in the world are you doing with that picture?” Mama asked from behind me.

  I turned around, pressing my great-grandmother’s photo against my stomach. “Just showing Trevor some of the family,” I said, hoping she’d say no more.

  “Well, go put it back under my bed.” She nodded toward the picture I was protecting. “You don’t want to scare your fiancé off with stories about her. He’ll think the worst of us, and you’ll get off on the wrong foot.”

  “We’ll be fine.” I warded off a lecture about the bad gene pool I was from and my responsibilities as a wife. I turned and marched to Mama’s bedroom, wishing Trevor had just said yes and we’d gone to Julianne’s house before Mama spotted us.

  “Marriage is hard enough.” Mama’s voice came from the doorway of her room. I tucked Julianne’s picture back into the box where it was kept and slipped out from under my parents’ bed. I stood up, raking my eyes down the front of me looking for dust bunnies I knew wouldn’t be there, while Mama raked her eyes all over me looking for immoral spots she could fix. “Trevor’s a good man, and you’ve got to do everything you can to hang onto him and keep him happy. If he thinks you’re proud of your great-grandmother, he’ll assume you won’t make a good wife. Just like the local boys here probably thought. Good boys, like Carl, or Kyle, and Wayne, who are all looking for respectable wives.”

  I thought of Carl, who’d tried to kiss me in the sixth grade. He’d yanked me between two parked school buses and leaned over me with lips puckered out like a toadstool. I’d resisted him then and did it again when we were in high school. He would come by our house to see Paul Junior, but he watched to see when I was alone and he’d tell me he’d date me if I’d just let him, his eyes on fire. I never did. And Kyle? I’d forgotten he even existed. He was a quiet, private boy no one ever noticed.

  “Mama, I didn’t want any of the boys around here. It’s not that they didn’t want me. But I want Trevor and he wants me. Being married won’t be that hard for us.”

  There was a shout outside, a loud grunt, and some laughter. Those boys—my brother and my fiancé—were playing something, some sort of game two can play if they change the rules enough to suit them. I knew those sounds well, and I looked toward the bedroom window as I listened to their happy yells penetrating the wall.

  In all honesty, it hurt sharing Trevor with my brother on our special weekend. Almost as much as having Mama cast doubt on my ability to be a good wife. The weekend wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Trevor was supposed to be sitting by my side, holding my hand, helping me toss out answers to the multitude of questions my parents were supposed to have asked. Like when will the wedding be? Where will it be? Have you chosen your colors, your flowers, your caterer, and all of the other important details a wedding entails? I looked away from the window and back at my mother, promising myself it wouldn’t always be this way. Trevor and I would be fine, and my family would eventually get over their fears that history was someday going to repeat itself. Trevor cared and would never draw silly conclusions like they did. And as for today, he was just busy, a little bit distracted while he waited for the ballgame.

  “I’m not going to be a bad wife, Mama.”

  Mama’s eyes were dark under brows gathered in a stormy warning. I shifted uneasily as she silently measured me for this heavy yoke I was supposed to wear, the one my great-grandmother’s disappearance had created in everyone’s psyche but mine.

  “Just be happy for us. Okay?”

  Mama’s shoulders dropped a little, but the worry of disgrace stayed in her eyes. “You’re the first female truly related to Julianne,” she reminded me. “I don’t want you to be like her. I don’t want your father and grandfather to have to go through any more than they already have.”

  “We don’t know what she was really like,” I said too loudly, “so how do we know if I’m like her or not?”

  “We know what she did, and that’s enough. You don’t want to be like that.”

  Male voices reaching for octaves they normally would be ashamed to hit pealed in excited laughter outdoors. Good-natured challenges and barrel-chested guffaws were announced in unmanly shrieks. I glanced toward the window again, imagining Trevor racing across the yard, escaping my brother’s grasp. Trevor was tall and athletic. Paul Junior was husky, portly if I were to be precise. I’d always laughed at them before, but today it wasn’t
funny. I fought tears from my eyes as I wished we’d called to tell them we were engaged instead of coming here.

  I batted the tears away and pulled myself up straight. “No woman would do something like that without a good reason, and Julianne should at least have the chance to explain herself before she’s judged. I’m ready for marriage, and everything will turn out fine. You’ll see.”

  Chapter 3

  “My beloved is dazzling and ruddy,

  outstanding among ten thousand.”

  “You ready to go Christmas shopping?” I asked gaily as Trevor opened the door of his apartment to me. I was bundled in all of the festive colors I could find to match my mood, my excitement, my celebration of being a couple at Christmas. He wrapped his arms around me and we did a two-body shiver, both of us jiggling up and down until I squealed. He let me go, laughing, and I stood back to admire him, to relish the fact that he was fun and handsome, and he was mine.

  “Sure thing,” he said, winding a scarf around his neck so wildly I laughed even harder. He raised his eyebrows at me and reached for the hunting jacket my brother, Paul Junior, had given him.

  “Not that,” I blurted, wanting our day to be perfect. “Wear that long coat that I love. The one that makes you look like a spy.”

  He frowned as he laid the hunting jacket aside, but then he shrugged and put on the long coat instead.

  I snuggled in close to him as we left his apartment, establishing my place with him, near him, as much under his being as I could be. It felt good to be there. It tickled my heart, made me bubble inside and talk like a child while I chattered away as he tried to step around me, not complaining I was actually in his way.

  “Mind if we stop for a newspaper?” he asked as we started down the sidewalk toward Cincinnati’s downtown blocks of stores. I looked up from beneath his armpit. “I just need to check last night’s scores.” It was there in his eyes, that unique sort of boyish excitement over sweaty competition that a woman could never create in a man.