Maybe I’d better do something different for breakfast, not just eggs and cereal. When Elizabeth and Michael were little they liked French toast with homemade syrup. I’ll try that out on them. If they don’t like it, what the heck, I do!
A knock on her door startled her. Despite the fact she’d been working out how to solve the problem of breakfast for her guests she’d somehow forgotten she wasn’t alone in the house.
“Yes, just a minute!” Lilly put the journal in her nightstand and closed the drawer firmly. She slipped a robe over her flannel gown. “Who is it?”
“Marie, Mrs., can I come in?
Lilly hurried to the door and swung it open a couple of inches looking down into the angelic face that was both foreign and achingly familiar.
“What on this earth are you doing up?”
“I’m scared.”
Lilly pushed her glasses up with her index finger and twitched her nose.
“Nonsense, there’s not a thing to be scared about. You get yourself to bed.”
“Mama’s crying.”
Lilly’s stomach turned over. She opened the door wider and the girl slipped through.
“Marie?” Annie’s tremulous voice preceded her down the hall. When the light from Lilly’s bedroom caught her face Annie blinked her red swollen eyes and cringed.
“I’m sorry Mrs. Irish. She told me she was going to the bathroom, I didn’t mean for her to disturb you.”
“That’s all right.”
Mrs. Irish. They all called her that, only when they’d first arrived had Annie called her Aunt Lilly.
“No, it isn’t. We’re imposing on you and…” Silent tears streamed down Annie’s cheeks.
Lilly hadn’t been a preacher’s wife for nothing, albeit a pretty lousy one.
“Come in and sit down. Let me get you some water.”
“No, I…”
“Sit. Marie and I will get you a glass of water while you compose yourself.” Sometimes straight talk was the best thing. Coddling people with sweet words just made them feel worse, or at least it did her.
“Come, child, let’s allow your mother a moment.”
Marie looked searchingly at her mother then took Lilly’s hand. “Yes’m.”
As she feared, the moment she walked into the kitchen and turned the lights on the dog began to howl and bark.
“Be QUIET Krank!” Marie commanded in a surprisingly powerful voice for such a little thing.
The noise ceased immediately.
Lilly stared at the child. “Why didn’t you do that earlier, when he was carrying on so?”
Marie shrugged. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.”
A testament to life, Lilly thought.
“Would you like water, too?”
“Sometimes I pee the bed.”
“Oh, well then.” Lilly cleared her throat at a loss for what to say to this forward and bright replica of her sister.
“My Daddy’s dead.”
“Oh, Marie, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“I think he got runned over by a truck.”
Lilly choked on a combination of surprise and dismay.
“Marie.” The boy was in the same clothes he’d had on earlier. If he’d slept it wasn’t evident. By the set of his mouth she could tell he was angry. “Get to bed. Mom is in there waiting for you.”
Marie dropped her head and toed the hardwood floor. “I didn’t mean nothing.”
“I didn’t say you did, but it’s time you were in bed.”
“G’nite, Mrs.” Marie scurried away, her slapping bare feet going silent when she went from the hardwood floor onto the carpet in the hallway.
“He isn’t dead, we just don’t know where he is or anything about him,” Caleb said and took the water from Lilly’s nerveless fingers. “And we don’t care.” He turned and followed Marie.
“What in this world have I gotten myself into,” Lilly thought. “What in this world.”
Chapter Three — A New Day
Lilly was frantic. She had overslept and was fretting about breakfast for her guests the whole time she was in the shower and getting dressed. She needn’t have worried. Annie was at the stove scrambling eggs when she entered the kitchen. Marie was chattering, Alex was barely awake and Caleb was looking disgruntled. It was as if the tears and nocturnal wanderings of the night before had never happened.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Annie said. “I don’t want you to think we expect you to wait on us. We can do for ourselves. Right kids?”
The “kids” were gathered around the kitchen table and had gone silent the second Lilly walked in. Caleb was the first to speak.
“I was rude to you last night. I am sorry.”
Lilly noted that he’d cleaned up a little but he still wore the garbage dump garb from the previous day.
“You were tired; we all were.” It was the best she could do in the way of forgiveness. She was sure his mother had forced him to make the apology.
“Would you like eggs?” Annie asked.
“Thank you, but, no, I’m late for work.”
“She looks too old to work.” It was the first fully formed sentence Alex had voiced and after a startled moment Lilly smiled tightly.
“I feeltoo old, by golly, but off to work it is.” She turned to Annie trying hard not to show how nervous it made her to leave these strangers alone in her house. It would only be for five hours, the length of her shift, but a lot of bad things could happen in five hours. “You don’t mind, do you? I tried to change my schedule so I could help you get settled in (and establish a few house rules),but…”
“We’ll be fine,” Annie said. “Won’t we?” She cast a glance at her three children.
Lilly didn’t expect a response from the silent audience and wasn’t surprised when none was forthcoming.
“Well, I’ll be on my way. I can’t take calls at the store unless it’s an emergency, but I’ll write the number down in case you need to reach me.”
When she went to get a piece of paper from the pad by the phone, she saw the note she’d written to herself about the names of the children and their ages. For no reason she could think of, heat rose up her neck.
“Why, I can leave notes to myself all over the place and it wouldn’t be anybody’s business!” she thought.
Still she felt uncomfortable that other people could look at the orderliness of her life and find something about it to criticize. She stuffed the page in the pocket of her ShopMart smock, and then wrote down the store number hoping Annie wasn’t the type to think everything was an emergency.
“Don’t you got a cell phone?” Marie asked. “We hadda cell phone but we couldn’t pay the bill.”
Annie closed her eyes and shook her head, not in denial, Lilly thought, but in resignation.
Lilly pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Well, child, it is a consideration, but I don’t have a cell phone because I don’t want one. Never could see the use of the doggone things.”
Marie