The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [113]
The next morning, Iona wakes up to the sight of two inches of snow on the ground, not unheard of so early in the season, but not common, either. It seems like a benediction. By the time she pulls on her boots and ventures outside, the younger children are already out in force, bored with their new indoor toys and anxious for sledding and snowmen and snowball fights.
Iona walks around Hazelwood Way and the full length of Brightwood Circle and is still too full of energy to go inside. She climbs the hill to Lindenwood Court, trespasses through the Honeywells’ yard, and stands in the field behind it. As always after a snowstorm, the landscape has been transformed. A long, white, pristine snowfield glistens where yesterday there had been an unbroken vista of drab, brown, dormant weeds and grass. After more than ten years, Iona’s feet know the field by heart, its small crests and valleys left by a plow before Iona’s time, the round sinkhole no wider than a yardstick and about a foot deep, treacherous if you don’t know where it is in summer, when it gets so overgrown. Iona walks under the bare sycamores, around the perimeter of the field. She stops briefly at the place where all those years ago she spotted Paisley and Eddie Logan having sex under the sugar maple, which had just turned a gorgeous yellow-edged-with-orange, and was idly dropping leaves onto the scene below it, as if it were part of a movie set. There they were, Eddie stretched out on a blanket and a naked Paisley straddling him, Eddie’s hands reaching up to cup her fine round breasts. The remains of a picnic lunch were strewn around the blanket, and Paisley’s clothes were in a jumbled pile next to it. Eddie was busy doing what he was doing and never saw Iona. But Paisley did. She gazed at Iona not with the panicky expression of someone caught having illicit sex, but with the wild-eyed zeal of a missionary driven to complete a conversion. Iona would have bet money that the act was never repeated again.
Iona had never held it against her, though she’d always thought a little less of Eddie. She could not admire a man who would have sex with a pregnant woman who was not his wife. Or at least she thinks Paisley was pregnant with Melody by then. The timing was a little iffy. But Melody looks so much like Mason, it’s hard to question her parentage. Even so, there’s some mystery here. Iona is never going to know the half of it. She supposes it’s none of her business.
At the end of her circle of the field, Iona passes the Lamms’ backyard, where Melody is building a snowman while her little dog paws the snow. The back door opens and Brynne calls out, arms crossed over her thin sweater against the cold. “Want some help?”
“No. Me and Mom always do this,” Melody says.
“Okay.” Brynne closes the door.
Melody keeps packing snow onto what is surely the belly of the snowman, chattering either to the dog or to her mother, Iona can’t tell which. She’s too far away to make out the words. A kid, eight years old, talking to her dead mother in the backyard—it makes her sick.
What galls her is that she can’t imagine any good coming of Paisley’s death, for the children who’ve lost their mother or the husband who’s lost his wife. How can this possibly make sense?
But when she tries to pursue this line of thinking, she is stopped by the memory of whatever it was that happened at that prayer meeting in Marie Coleman’s kitchen. That unmistakable sense of a presence moving among them. The warmth in the cold room. The something. She still loves Richard and mourns for him, but if he hadn’t died she would have had a different life she can no longer imagine. She never would have had Jeffrey and Lori and Rosalie the way she has them now, and they would never have had her. You never know how being a grandmother