“If you’re up to coming downstairs again later, we can see the Water Festival’s opening-day fireworks tonight. Gibbes said they’re really spectacular.”
She wasn’t sure whether she could find the strength, but she nodded anyway, determined to be there. Gibbes would carry her if she asked. “Owen loves fireworks. I swear that’s the only reason we took him to Disney World—because he’d heard those were the best in the world and he wanted to see for himself.”
A large delivery truck slowed as it approached the front of the house, then carefully pulled into the driveway. Merritt stood, and it appeared for a moment that she might start clapping. “It’s my new refrigerator. Finally! I’ve run out of room to store all those casseroles people keep bringing over.”
She walked down the steps to greet the driver and his passenger, her face as animated as most women’s would be at a shoe sale. Loralee sat back in her chair and watched as the men loaded up the refrigerator on a dolly and wheeled it toward the house before hauling it carefully up the front steps and into the kitchen.
It was the first time she’d been completely alone since her trip to the hospital, and while the men and Merritt were busy unloading the new refrigerator and packing up the old one, Loralee kicked off her slippers and pressed her bare feet onto the floorboards of the porch. It had been too long since she’d gone barefoot. Back in Gulf Shores she’d mostly run around barefoot, not because she didn’t have shoes, but just because it felt so good.
She remembered nighttime games of Kick the Can and Monkey in the Middle, the hot nights and sticky mornings just happy memories now. She wanted to make sure that Owen knew how to play those childhood games and could teach them to the new friends he would make there. Loralee would have to tell Merritt the rules, since she was running out of space in her journal, but, knowing Merritt, she’d take notes.
She breathed deeply, smelling the wet air that was a part of any coastal town just as much as the sand and water were, and she was reminded again of her girlhood. She stopped rocking, and after deciding that she felt strong enough to stand and walk, she moved slowly down the steps, holding on tightly to the railing, and into the front yard until she was beneath the ancient oak tree. Bracing one hand on the solid trunk, she tilted her head to see the silver-white leaf bottoms that always seemed to be winking when the wind blew. The tree had probably been there long before any of those houses, and maybe even before the river had decided to burrow into that corner of the world. And it would definitely still be there long after Loralee had passed from this earth. It was comforting, somehow, the permanence of it that was so much like the love between a mother and child.
The cool grass in the shade of the tree felt good on her bare feet, so good that it didn’t bother her that passersby in cars thought she must be crazy, hanging out like that in front of the big house, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and yoga pants, her hair dull and lifeless but still long. She didn’t consider herself a vain person, but her hair had always been her crowning glory, and she was bound and determined that she would meet her Maker with long hair.
She really wanted to cross the street to the marsh, to put her feet in the water one last time. Except she knew she’d already used up any extra reserves of strength and would most likely collapse in the middle of the road, giving Merritt a heart attack wondering where she was.
I’m ready. The thought was so loud in her head that she imagined for a moment she’d spoken. Since Robert’s death and her diagnosis, she’d had one singular goal, one singular prayer. She’d even sworn that it would be her last and only prayer, asking that she could hold it together until she’d put Owen in a place where he would be loved and happy and well cared for. She’d taken a huge risk coming there, her only hope being that the little girl in the pictures and stories Robert kept close to his heart still existed in the broken woman she’d met on the porch of that house.
“I’m ready,” she said softly to the tree and the air and to the place prayers went. She quickly said one more prayer, which technically didn’t break any promises, because it was for somebody else, then pushed off the tree and waited for a moment until she felt steady enough to walk back to the porch.
She’d barely made it to her chair when the men reappeared with the old refrigerator strapped to the dolly, Merritt following closely behind and muttering something about her wood floors. Loralee tried to catch her breath, to fill her lungs with air so she could ask one of those men to carry her back up the stairs.
The round-edged refrigerator looked even more antique in the bright light of day, much as she imagined the old countertops and cabinets looked against the brand-new stainless-steel model now in the kitchen.
One of the men tilted the dolly back as far as it could go, preparing to lower it onto the first step.