Love Leaps

SOMETIMES I THINK of Sister Alma Rose as being God’s Lap on Earth. She is large, brown, and solid, like the earth itself. In her presence there is comfort, capaciousness, and embrace; and when she actually hugs you, physically, you feel a tsunami of love, peace, and hope – which makes her sound like a wave-borne Christmas card, but those feelings come with wings, and the energy surge lasts at least until the next time you are hugged by Sister Alma Rose, or until you learn to treasure yourself as God and Sister Alma Rose treasure you.

Me, Fanny McElroy

This is true for me, at least, and for everyone I know who has ever been hugged by Sister Alma Rose… though a Sister Alma Rose hug can literally leave you breathless, particularly if you are a certain height. No one, as far as I know, has ever collapsed during or after such an embrace, but I’d be lying if I said there’s never been some lightheadedness in the experience.

…All of which I put forth to explain why it is startling to see Sister Alma Rose weep. I’ve certainly known her to be angry, in brief but definitely daunting eruptions, but discovering tears on that face, which nearly always radiates the joy and serenity of a pure heart and a love-drenched soul, is… well, stunning – far more so than if James Bond, for example, were to break down sobbing when confronting Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. One thing Sister Alma Rose and James Bond have in common – and the only thing I can think of at the moment, apart from their being larger-than-life human beings (quasi-human, in the case of James Bond) – is the sense of authority and competence they exude.

Father Dooley and his friend

One October morning, unseasonably warm from a sun that seemed to still be straining summerward, Pablo and I (who were probably twelve at the time) were playing chess, dismally, I have to say, on Sister Alma Rose’s wonderful grass-green wraparound porch (a kind of metaphor for Sister Alma Rose herself, I often think). The little mutt, terrier mixed with mongrel, who had followed Pablo home from school the day before, was sleeping at our feet. Mr. Truman LaFollette had just brought out, in his silent, unobtrusive way, a pitcher of his incomparable lemonade and two big tumblers filled with ice. Sister Alma Rose was just inside the kitchen door, doing something culinary with butternut squash, I think. It was a sublimely peaceful moment, though the chess was desultory and we were ready to do something, anything, else – held in place by the sweet sunlight and the lively conversation of a pair of cardinals.

Thus bemused, we didn’t notice Father Dooley and a young woman I’d never met approaching until they were actually beside us on the porch. Mr. Truman LaFollette, with his spooky prescience, was already placing three more ice-filled tumblers on the big green table. Sister Alma Rose was right behind him. She and Father Dooley and the pretty stranger all sat down beside us at the same time, as if someone had called a meeting, although I know that they didn’t have an appointment, per se, because Sister Alma Rose had gleefully set aside the day for her “early harvest,” or it might have been her “late harvest.” I know next to nothing about butternut squash.

Father Dooley jovially introduced his companion as “Tina” and explained that they had formed a friendship through Alcoholics Anonymous and that he thought it was “a good idea” for Tina and Sister Alma Rose to meet. This surprised no one, because (a) we had known for years that Father Dooley was a recovering alcoholic, (b) Father Dooley gathers friends the way marmalade attracts bees, and (c) it’s always a good idea for anyone to become acquainted with Sister Alma Rose… nor did Pablo and I imagine for a moment that we should delicately depart and give the other three some privacy. It’s like we were part of Sister Alma Rose’s posse, you see, and people who came to visit Sister Alma Rose always seemed to understand that.

So the character of the gathering around Sister Alma Rose’s sturdy outdoor table wasn’t particularly unusual. What was extraordinary from the sitting-down moment was the vibes. To put it more elegantly, when Tina and I locked eyes there was a strange certainty – on my part and I was sure on hers as well – that we had been connected since time began. I don’t know how else to explain the electricity that flowed between us.

Tina’s story

On the surface, Tina’s background and mine could hardly have been less alike. I was born in a small, quiet town to parents who wanted me, loved and nurtured me, supported my interests, indulged my whims, and allowed my independence when it was wise to do so. Tina’s birth in an urban slum had scarcely been noticed by her alcoholic mother and heroin-addicted father. She was, almost literally, a throwaway.

Young as I was, I had visited Tina’s world, or one much like it. I’d been up close and personal with addicts and amorality and all manner of sordidness and uncompromising poverty. This is another story for another time. The important difference between Tina, at thirty, and me, at twelve, was that at the end of the day I always had a safe, cheerful dwelling to go home to. Tina, clean and sober for less than a year, had only recently found the comparative security of a shelter for the homeless.

Schooled in my family’s openness and Sister Alma Rose’s serenity and resilience, I am rarely horrified, but I was unprepared for the account of brutality I was about to hear. At Father Dooley’s invitation, Tina began her bleak narrative, but with an acceptance and a composure that seemed ever more remarkable as her story unfolded.

“I was an alcoholic by the time I was three,” she told us calmly. “I was younger than that when my father started raping me. Whenever he came around, I hid, but he found me. There was always alcohol in the house, even when there was no milk or bread. I learned very early that it dulled the pain and the fear.”

Mercifully, in my memory the details of Tina’s biography have dimmed. Trying to recall them is agonizing. I know that Tina and her siblings had lived among numerous relatives, each home more dysfunctional than the last. Her mother had routinely sold Tina’s “services” for crack cocaine. An aunt introduced her to a toxic array of street drugs.

What might have set Tina apart was an instinct to care for her younger brothers and sisters and, beginning in her early teens, for her own children. She didn’t say, but I suppose she went to school. I suppose there were ineffectual social-service interventions. Whatever the case, she learned to read and write. How she became so marvelously poised and articulate is a mystery. She spoke like Willa Cather writes. It astonished me.

At one point, I glanced at Sister Alma Rose. Her face was tranquil, but I saw the tears. She didn’t try to hide them. She didn’t even blot them with her apron. It occurred to me that she too had “recognized” Tina.

By the grace of God

When Tina could free herself and the children she protected the best she could, they became squatters, sleeping in abandoned buildings and eventually settling in a community of sorts, chronically homeless people making shift under a bridge. Worldly as I believed myself to be, I didn’t know that people actually live under bridges. Tina told us that, despite occasional attempts to roust them, the authorities pretty much looked the other way. Churches sometimes brought them food, blankets, and clothes.

An alcoholic and a drug addict, Tina managed to support her family by selling drugs. I don’t know how or where she met Craig, a thoroughly decent man who weaned her from the street and steered her to A.A. Father Dooley told us that Tina went to A.A. meetings every morning. At first, Craig drove her there directly from her job as a waitress at an all-night restaurant. At some point she got a driver’s license and a pickup truck and took charge of her transportation to work and meetings, never missing a day.

Ten months after she told us her story, Tina and Craig were married. Father Dooley says it remains “a solid marriage.

“They’re devoted to each other,” he told me not long ago.

I’ve never heard what became of Tina’s younger siblings or her children, some having been placed in foster care when Tina started rehab. It was her wish to reclaim them all, “by the grace of God.” Given her faith and determination, I’d be surprised if she didn’t succeed.

“Life throws all kinds of rubbish in your path, Fanny McElroy,” Sister Alma Rose once told me. “It puts up what looks like prison walls you can’t see over or around. Love leaps over them all.”

Walking into town

That enchanted sense of connection with Tina has never left me. As she and Father Dooley were saying their goodbyes on Sister Alma Rose’s magical grass-green porch, I took her aside. I’m not sure what words came to me, except that I “recognized” her.

“You’re an angel from Heaven,” I think I said, “or at least a very old soul. I know we’ll meet again.”

“Yes,” she said. “God is good.”

“Fanny McElroy,” I said to myself, “I believe you’re going to cry.”

It’s easy to say “God is good” when your life is rolling along like a wind-propelled tumbleweed and the worst thing you have to worry about is getting a below-average grade on a test you didn’t study for – which was pretty much the case for me when I was twelve. Coming from Tina, who had pretty much just landed on solid ground… whose yesterdays were grim and whose tomorrows were murkier than most… it was life-affirming. It was miraculous. It gave me strength and hope I would one day cling to.

“God is good indeed,” I said, with little idea of the magnificent truth of it, and walked home with Pablo and his little dog.

♥

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Dancing with Angels

A Tim Tidwell (age 9) escapade: The tide was going out, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, and Tim and his little boat, which he'd taken without permission, were just a dot on the horizon, halfway to China

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Raising Tim

Terri Tidwell had gone completely gray by 40. To be fair, Tim Tidwell, Terri’s son, didn’t put all those gray hairs there, just most of them.

I, Fanny McElroy

Terri has three other children, now grown, and had two husbands: Chip, whom she divorced, and Arthur, Tim’s daddy, whom she buried. Arthur was dead at the time, as luck would have it. Three days earlier he’d been walking across the street and was run over by a drunk driver (who was uninjured), someone traveling on the highway who didn’t slow down when he reached the narrow brick street in downtown Hilltop.

It was sad, because Arthur was a fine fellow, but I think his untimely death kept Terri out of prison, because she was on the point of murdering his dreadful mother, who, after Arthur died, went to live with Arthur’s brother and his family. God bless ’em.

Everyone likes Tim…

Sister Alma Rose says Tim is 'too foxy for his own good'

…even the three mothers of his three children. He’s approaching 30, but since he’s been drinking since junior high as a way of dealing with pretty much everything, he’s emotionally stuck in junior high—at least that’s Sister Alma Rose’s assessment. So he’s kind of everybody’s little brother — handsome, funny, full of mischief, and, when he’s been drinking, either game for some escapade beyond mischief, or else just plain mean.

When Terri feels like she wants to run his life or else “enable” him in some way, she talks to Sister Alma Rose. “Y’all stay out of God’s way,” Sister Alma Rose tells her. “God has big plans for that boy.”

A recovering codependent

Terri, after her makeover that included collagen cheek implants; Sister Alma Rose says, "You go, Girl"

So, with Sister Alma Rose’s constant support, Terri doesn’t enable, and she doesn’t tell Tim what to do; she gives him calm advice when he asks for it and leaves it up to him whether or not to follow it. She doesn’t make appointments for him to see therapists (as she used to), and she doesn’t call him every day to make sure he’s not in jail. She has surrendered Tim and his fate to God, so she’s learned to stop worrying. And she doesn’t feel guilty or wonder what she might or might not have done during his childhood that could have made Tim happier and more well-adjusted.

And he’s not a happy guy, and Terri suffers with him. That’s a habit she hasn’t been able to shake.

Angels or hysteria?

Last week, Terri had a bizarre experience that she told Sister Alma Rose was either an encounter with angels or a very elaborate hallucination.  We were sitting at Sister Alma Rose’s grass-green wicker table on her grass-green wraparound porch, and Terri had made copies for each of us, which made me feel very grown up, of her poetic account of the incident:

“Sister Alma Rose,” I said, after Terri had left, whistling cheerfully as she walked toward the road, because Sister Alma Rose and I not only affirmed her experience but also shed a few tears with her, in the way of women, of sisters, which I am just beginning to understand —

Medieval rendering of angels; source unknown

“I mean, I know that Terri’s angels were real, she’s not crazy or making things up, and I know she’s feeling reassured about Tim being in their ‘custody,’ — and maybe it shouldn’t matter, but I just wonder where this all took place. In a room in her house, or in her mind, or a dream, or was she transported to heaven, or what?”

“Fanny, my love,” said Sister Alma Rose, placing her broad, brown forehead against my freckled one, “y’all’s training starts right now. There are many dimensions y’all have never experienced, or else you weren’t aware of it. Scientists, now, they work in dozens of dimensions, but only in the realm of math and physics.

The classic fantasy novel for kids AND grownups, A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle

“Y’all remember the experience in your daddy’s hospital room, when y’all saw your future self and you were standing above the room and walking down them stairs?”

Oh, wow, did I ever. “That’s something I’m never likely to forget,” I said.

“Well, now, I’ve been in that hospital room dozens of times, and I’ve never seen it with the ceiling gone out of it and a flight of steps leading up to nowhere.”

“Oh!” I said, understanding. “It was really us, and it was really happening, but it was in another dimension. Like we slipped through a tessaract,” I added, thinking of Madeleine L’Engle‘s book A Wrinkle in Time, one of my favorites.

“Sort of like that,” Sister Alma Rose agreed. “And Fanny, do y’all remember the young man who was standing beside your grownup self?” she asked with a twinkle.

“Oh, sure,” I said, “because I remember it flashed through my mind that he looked a lot like Matthew McCon— Well, I’ll be a flat rabbit on toast,” I said, looking with wonder, and a little embarrassment, at Sister Alma Rose.

“It was Henry,” I whispered in awe. “The man in my future is Henry.”

* * *

Lost and Found

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Hafez (or Hafiz) the Persian

You are healed when you can say to yourself, “I matter, I belong, I am worthy, I am safe, I can express myself, I am loved. —Deepak Chopra, The Deeper Wound: Recovering the Soul from Fear and Suffering, 100 Days of Healing

While I am sleeping, you silently carry off all my suffering and my sordid past in your beautiful hands. —Hafiz

The Suicide Note

“God is good,” says Pastor Alexis.

Me, Fanny McElroy

Sister Alma Rose’s dear friend Pastor Alexis got ordained as a minister online and started her own church, Pilgrim Chapel, five years ago. Anybody can go there, it doesn’t matter what religion they are or what they believe about God.

Before she became a minister, Pastor Alexis thought constantly about suicide. “I once was lost,” she says with a grin, “but now I’m found.”

She wrote a long suicide note ahead of time, in case she ever did take the plunge, so to speak. This (below) is it… in all its sadness and beauty….

My name is Alexis, and I am sitting on the balcony of my apartment, twenty-three stories above a narrow red-brick street in a quiet residential neighborhood. My art-deco-era building is an anomaly among the tidy old frame and stucco houses with their privet hedges and children’s swing sets.

The wall that encloses my balcony is three feet high and about eighteen inches wide. I have sat on the wall many times, next to the pots of thriving geraniums and trailing lime-green ivy, my bare legs and feet dangling — half-hoping, half-fearing that someone will come along and give me a small shove. That’s all it would take: just a slight, accidental bump. I believe in reincarnation, and I am ready to be a child again.But I always swing my legs back over the wall, plant my feet on the warm concrete, sit at the pretty white wicker table, and drink the lemonade I have brought out in a large Thermos. I have remembered that there is something left undone. Perhaps I have not dusted, or finished a crossword puzzle, or called my niece this week. If my life is going to end, I want what I leave behind to be tidy.

Potted geraniums, http://www.rockwellfarms.com

I am 59 years old, and I am superfluous.

* * *

I had what most people would consider a happy childhood in a happy home. My parents were proud of me (I was an eager learner) and told me I could be anything I wanted to be – a minister, a U.S. senator, an arc welder — anything, as long as it made me happy. They were warm and affectionate, and I knew that I was loved.

Screen door, http://www.vintagerosecollection.com

That’s the way I see it when I look back, but there’s a layer of fear, like gray film, over it, as if I’m looking outside through a screen door. The fear began with my mother’s “nervous breakdowns” and my dad’s frequent business trips… with the times Mom spent a couple of weeks in the hospital, or when she’d check into a hotel for the sole purpose of drinking herself as near to death as she dared to go. She was sick for two years, when I was 4 and 5.

Sometimes, when Dad was out of town and Mom was sitting in the darkened living room, in the overstuffed chair, her legs splayed on the ottoman… drinking red wine, which turned her tongue and lips blue and carried her into oblivion… I pulled a blanket and a pillow out of the linen cupboard on the second-floor landing, dragged them downstairs and into the living room, covered Mom with the blanket, and tried to arrange her limp torso so that her head rested on the pillow. Then I put her cigarettes and lighter in a kitchen cabinet, so that she wouldn’t burn the house down.

I didn’t know that Mom drank because my sister had a serious heart condition and might die any minute, although she never did… and because my brother had barely survived polio… and because Mom’s own mother had died of pernicious anemia while Mom, too, was ill with polio… and because Dad traveled so much and was unavailable to share all the burdens. I just knew that I felt unprotected when Mom binged and Dad was out of town.

I started going to the Presbyterian church two blocks away, alone, when I was 5 — drawn, I think, by the glorious music and the grand old sanctuary with its elaborately carved oak and its sparkling, intricate stained-glass windows, and also by the reassurance of ritual and continuity. The Sunday-school teachers, on the other hand, made Jesus sound like a jail warden, and I was afraid of him, and of going to Hell. But when he came to me in dreams, he wore Levi’s and a plaid shirt, and he was kind and comforting.

One midsummer evening, my mother announced at the dinner table that she was under doctor’s orders to quit drinking. She smiled broadly, dazzlingly, and said, “I have had my last drink.” It was the happiest day of my life.

It lasted for a few months, this feeling of security, this belief in happy endings, this euphoria. And then, early one Sunday morning, after I had spent the night at my cousin Lucy’s house, Aunt Cecily dropped me off on her way to church. She watched as I climbed the forty-seven steps to the big tile-floored front porch, and she waved goodbye as I pushed open the gleaming mahogany door, which was never locked.

I closed the door and inhaled a miasma of cigarette smoke laced with stale beer and something ripe and pungent. I am sure that my heart stopped, and that when it started beating again I wanted more than anything to turn around, go back out the door, and run. Anywhere. Just away from there. Away from what I might find when I turned the corner into the living room.

In the end, there was nothing else to do, so I stepped into the living room and all but tripped over Mom’s feet. She was passed out, face down, on the ottoman, her toothpick legs sticking out on one side, her head and arms dangling from the other side, a pool of vomit between her hands where they brushed the floor.

Feelings whose names I didn’t know suffocated me: revulsion, disappointment, panic, and something worse. I think of it now, perhaps melodramatically, as a loss of innocence.

That summer morning, I had no time to rage or mourn. I knew that my older brother and sister would be of no help; they were still asleep, and in any case they were inured to Mom’s binges. Dad was somewhere in western Nebraska doing a bank audit. I was on my own.

Something in me pitied my mother and was terrified. When I tried to wake her, she rolled over onto the floor. Her arm landed in the vomit, which splashed onto my feet and my white cotton pants, covering most of one leg.

Dr. Prentice, Mom’s psychiatrist, lived two doors away with Mrs. Prentice and their son, Frankie, who was my best friend. I ran out of our house through the back door, up the alley, through the Prentices’ back yard, and into their kitchen. Dr. and Mrs. Prentice were sitting at their white-enamel table, reading the Sunday paper and drinking coffee. Vomit dripped off my pants onto the shiny red linoleum floor. I stood there panting, unable to speak.

“Is something wrong with your mom?” Dr. Prentice asked gently. I just nodded, and he got up, kissed the top of my head, and left the room. Mrs. Prentice took me upstairs and helped me wash my feet and gave me a clean pair of Frankie’s pants to wear. She said that I could play in the guest room until Frankie woke up and that I could eat lunch there and play with Frankie all day. I looked out one of the guest-room windows and watched Dr. Prentice, carrying his black doctor bag, walk across the front yard and down the street toward our house.

An old-fashioned kitchen on display in Dover, Delaware

Late that afternoon, Dad came to the Prentices’ to pick me up. Mom was in the hospital, he said. Thelma, our housekeeper, would stay with us until Mom came home. Thelma had worked two days a week for us since I was an infant. She was big and brown and solid and safe. She liked to refer to herself as my mammy. That’s the way things were back then.

Secretly I hoped that Mom would stay in the hospital forever. With Thelma, there were cheerfulness and peace and order. She ironed our sheets, and they felt smooth and smelled wonderful. She baked homemade bread and sweet-potato pie. My clothes were always clean and pressed and folded neatly in my dresser drawer. Thelma vacuumed and dusted, and she scrubbed the blue-linoleum kitchen floor and waxed it by hand, then polished it until it shone. And in the evenings, she sat me on her ample lap and held me tight and told true stories that her grandmother had told her about life in the Old South.

Mom was in the hospital for a month, and when she came home she’d gained a few pounds and her cheeks had some color that had been missing before. She had medicine she could take if she felt overwhelmed, but she didn’t use it very often. I knew, because when she had taken the medicine she slept late and we had to fix our own breakfast. She didn’t quit drinking, but she kept to her daily limit of two glasses of wine. Dad went to work at a different CPA firm, where the head partner promised that there would be no out-of-town travel.

At last, when I was about to start school, there was beginning to be an atmosphere of normalcy and predictability in our home. I buried my fear, but it never went away. I was always steeling myself against the next disappointment.

Our house was a gathering place, as some houses tend to be and no one is sure why. Mom enjoyed a houseful of kids — my sister’s friends, my brother’s, mine. Everyone loved her. She had become strong and healthy and competent. And still I was afraid.

It wasn’t until I was a wife and mother myself that I understood Mom’s despair. When I suffered my own breakdown at 22, Dr. Prentice and Mom helped me through it. Some time during my high-school years, Mom had become my hero, my role model. Dad had always been my rock.

Once, when I was in my early 20s, I heard Mom tell Aunt Cecily that, if anything happened to Dad, she knew that I would take care of her. I never had to. Mom died of a stroke when she was 59. Dad had a fatal heart attack five years later.

* * *

I married Lou when I was 24, four years before Mom died. Together Lou and I raised three happy, healthy children. Lou was a philanderer, and I knew it, but he was also a wise and loving father and we made a fine parenting team. We needed each other for that, and the kids needed us both, and, for me, that was enough.

Lou died of cancer five years ago, and I grieved. The children are married, with families and careers. They are scattered throughout the country, and I see them twice a year. My grandchildren are always shy with me at first; they don’t know me, and they certainly don’t need me.

I am 59 years old, and I am superfluous.

Almost every day I take my coffee or my lemonade onto the balcony. I sit on the little wall and wonder, with some detachment, what it would be like to just push off with my feet and go sailing into the air. Maybe tomorrow, I think. Today I need to launder the bedding.

* * *

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Sister Alma Rose Prays for Ben

Finding Joy in the Middle

All kinds of people find their way to Sister Alma Rose’s farmhouse on the hill above the little town of Hilltop. If the day is fine, she sits in her green wicker rocking chair on the big wraparound porch with the pine floor painted grass-green, and Mr. Truman LaFollette, who’s seven feet tall if he’s an inch, serves real lemonade, fresh-squeezed and cooked with beet sugar, then mixed with the purest, coldest well water on Planet Earth. Something about the hill and the house and the porch and the lemonade and Sister Alma Rose, who is serenity itself, draws people who need to tell their stories, and if there’s anything Sister Alma Rose knows how to do, it’s listen to people’s stories.

So she listens. Maybe she asks a few questions. Usually she doesn’t have to. She crochets, or she sews tiny hem stitches on one of the long, silky dresses she makes, and if the needle stops moving, it’s like a question, and then the person goes on talking and the needle starts moving again.

Sister Alma Rose has been around for a long, long time, and there isn’t much that she hasn’t heard. But it’s always a mistake, she says, to jump to conclusions. No two people are alike, she says, and you can’t put them into clumps. Betty’s story might be like Ellen’s story except for one tiny detail, and it’s the tiny detail that makes all the difference.

“Heaven ain’t a factory,” she says. “Human beings don’t have interchangeable parts.”

I guess that’s why people come to Sister Alma Rose. She knows who they are, how they’re different, where they fit in the universe. She hardly ever gives advice. Usually, when they’re done telling their stories, she’ll tell a story back, and it doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything, but everybody who finds his way to Sister Alma Rose’s wraparound porch comes away a little wiser, a little more sure where he’s headed and how to read the signs.

One warm July afternoon, when I was 12 years old and needing some of Mr. Truman LaFollette’s lemonade and the coolness of Sister Alma Rose’s front porch, I sat down on the top step with my frosty glass and watched Sister Alma Rose crochet for a while, and then I looked up into the big old cottonwood tree that shaded the porch, and marveled, as I always do, at the way even a small breeze makes the leaves quiver and show their silver sides. Green, yellow, silver, shimmering in the sun and a breath of wind, and whispering—that’s what cottonwoods do.

I don’t know how long we sat there, comfortable and content, before Sister Alma Rose said, “Miss Fanny, we need to pray for Ben.”

You know Mr. Clean, the big muscular bald guy on the bottle of yellow goop you wash your kitchen with? Ben looks like Mr. Clean, except Ben is dark brown. And much better-looking. I was there, on Sister Alma Rose’s porch, when Ben showed up the first time.

If I’m sitting with Sister Alma Rose when someone appears, desperate to tell his story, she always lets me stay and listen. Whoever it is doesn’t seem to notice me anyway—I used to think Sister Alma Rose made me invisible—and he just talks away, and Sister Alma Rose knows I won’t tell anybody.

So when Ben walked up the long gravel drive that first time—it was early November, just cool enough so you needed a sweater and jeans instead of a T-shirt and shorts, and the cottonwood leaves were turning bright yellow and crisp—I just stayed put on the porch step while Sister Alma Rose smiled at Ben, that smile that makes the rain stop and the sun come out, and he sat down in a green wicker chair at the green wicker table, and Mr. Truman LaFollette appeared out of nowhere with a pitcher of lemonade.

Ben and Sister Alma Rose started out talking about what a fine day it was for November and how long the late-summer roses were lasting and filling the air with their sweetness, and somehow, without seeming to change the subject, Ben was telling Sister Alma Rose about how he’d just been passing through LaMesa, which is a bigger town than Hilltop and several miles down the road—it takes me half an hour to get there on my bicycle—and he’d fallen in love with a crazy woman there in LaMesa, and he’d stayed on, and now the crazy woman was pregnant, and Ben thought he was going crazy himself.

During this conversation, and several others, I learned that Ben had grown up in Philadelphia; that his father was a dark-brown man and his mama was a white woman; that his mama’s family was ashamed of having a dark-brown grandbaby and had made her ashamed too, and so she had up and left her husband and her baby and had gone back to her family in Texas.

Ben told Sister Alma Rose how his daddy, who is dead, had been a good man, a recovering alcoholic, while Ben was growing up. Ben had a bunch of older brothers and sisters who had a different mama, and the brothers and sisters were all “crackheads.” Sister Alma Rose told me later what that meant (I was only 8 then, and the only drug I knew about was penicillin).

Ben didn’t take drugs and he wasn’t supposed to drink liquor because he lost part of his stomach in a drive-by shooting that was meant for somebody else, but sometimes he drank anyway, for days at a time, and at first when he was drinking he’d get crazy mean and then he’d just get sick. And he’d been drinking a lot lately, he said, because of his crazy girlfriend, who either clung to him like he was the only lifeboat in a big scary ocean or else screamed at him and told him if he didn’t go away and leave her alone she’d call the cops and he’d go to jail. And she would have, and he would have, because she’d already told the cops that he was abusive, and as a result of her lies, he was on probation.

Here’s the thing about Ben: He’s big and handsome and has a beautiful smile and a beautiful heart, and God talks to him, direct, in dreams. I told Sister Alma Rose I’d do anything to have God talk to me in dreams, and Sister Alma Rose only smiled and said God talks to me other ways. She said God talks to people in their own language, and Ben is a dreamer so God talks to him in dreams.

Ben told Sister Alma Rose that he wanted to go home to his people in Philadelphia—I didn’t understand that, either, but Sister Alma Rose did—but he was afraid for the baby. He was afraid to leave the baby with a crazy mama.

Sister Alma Rose stopped crocheting and looked at him, and he looked back at her, and what those looks said was that God looks after his own and hadn’t Ben been left with no mama and a bunch of crackheads and come out of it sweet and strong and innocent?

Well, so Ben went back to Philadelphia and stayed with one of his crackhead sisters until he got a job and saved a little money and moved into his own place. Every so often he came back to LaMesa to see his beautiful little boy, who has skin like honey and soft hair in silky black curls, and he brought the child to visit us.

In Philadelphia he went through several jobs and girlfriends and apartments, restless, looking for something, not sure what it was. Sister Alma Rose said he was “struggling with his roots,” resisting the pull of his family and his old friends and their way of life. She was very proud of him, and when he came to visit she would tell him some story or another that helped him see a destination, I think.

He was becoming wise. He once said to me, “Fanny, life is simple mathematics. It’s as simple as one plus one equals two. If something is positive—if it makes you feel strong and healthy and good about yourself—then you follow that thing. If something is negative—if it makes you feel weak or sick, if it’s hurtful to you or somebody else—then you stay away from that thing.”

Just the week before, I had sat silently in the shadow of the cottonwood and listened to a little girl not much older than I was tell Sister Alma Rose how her stepfather beat on her and her baby brother and her mama, and her mama wouldn’t leave him or call the police, even when the little boy had to be taken to the hospital, and then the children’s real daddy came to the house with a gun, and when the man came at him with a knife, he shot the man dead. Sister Alma Rose’s eyes gleamed—sadness and anger mixed with satisfaction, I think, that the stepfather wouldn’t hurt any more women or children. Usually Sister Alma Rose just listens, but she put the little girl to bed in her cozy pink attic bedroom and called Cousin Dulcie, who came to “see to” the family, and magical things happened, as they always seem to do whenever Cousin Dulcie is involved.

Anyway, I could understand what Ben was talking about because I knew that some people can’t pull themselves away from the “negatives.” Sister Alma Rose says that a lot of folks can’t accept the good in life because they feel like they don’t deserve it. They don’t understand, Sister Alma Rose says, about Grace.

“We always pray for Ben,” I said to Sister Alma Rose on that warm July afternoon. And, I thought, God had answered our prayers. Ben had found a good job and a steady girlfriend who helped him stay grounded, he had told us. “Do we need to pray extra hard today?”

“Close your eyes, Fanny McElroy, and think of Jesus,” Sister Alma Rose said, and then she prayed out loud for a long time. “God in Heaven, you’ve watched over that boy and lifted him time and time again as he was falling, and kept his heart pure and his spirit strong. Now he’s going to be a daddy again, and that’s scarier and more wonderful than anything that’s ever happened in his life.” She prayed for Ben to be a father like her own Daddy Pete—firm and gentle, wise and humble and willing to learn, and always watching for God to show him the way, “with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. And grant him peace, and rest for his spirit, and a light heart. Amen.”

We sat quiet for a while, and then I asked Sister Alma Rose if we’d always have to pray for Ben, or would there be a time when we would know he’d be okay. “Do stories ever have happy endings?” I asked.

Sister Alma Rose chuckled. “Honey, real-life stories don’t have endings, so we have to learn to find joy in the middle. Look there,” she said, pointing to the oak grassland that stretches from her garden to the road. “There’s poppies bloomin’ in the woods.”

Sure enough, a bright red-orange patch had erupted in the shade of the oaks, where poppies have no business growing. I had seen them there before, twice, and I knew them for what they were—a badge of love… a promise of Grace….

And I took a deep breath and drank in the bliss of thick summer air heavy with the smell of roses, and of cold lemonade and clear well water and whispering cottonwood leaves, and it filled me completely, and I thought that if life never got any better than right here, right now, it would be okay with me….