Follow Me (48 page)

It wasn’t hard for Sally to imagine what her sister’s life must have been like in that crumbling farmhouse. She pictured their
mother sitting on the frayed sofa, maybe with dentures in a glass beside her and one of the barn cats who’d found refuge in
the house dozing on her lap. The old woman would have been in a sour mood by the time Tru put dinner on the table, railing
at her daughter in German, the pitch of her voice expressing better than the words that Tru didn’t understand the rage her
mother must have believed was the best way to honor her righteous husband.

How do you say in German,
Woe to the forsaken, they shall be bruised with a rod of iron and broken into pieces like a potter’s vessel?

Or,
O come hither, and behold the works of the Lord, what destruction He hath brought upon the earth?

What Sally heard in her sister’s description of their mother’s last years was that she herself was to blame. Tru didn’t say
it, not aloud, but Sally could guess that it was the shared opinion among the Werners that the oldest daughter had ruined
the family. Sally Werner had seduced her cousin and then refused to marry him. Sally Werner had saddled her parents with an
extra mouth to feed and then gone off to enjoy herself. Now her parents were both dead, and there was no chance of ever reconciling
with them.

“I wrote to Mama and Pop,” she said. The words sounded pathetic to her. She tried to explain: “I wrote to them, to all of
you, year after year.” But Tru couldn’t have known that Sally had written to the family. If she had known, she would have
written Sally back.

“I know,” Tru said.

“You knew?” Sally must have sent more than one hundred letters over the years. Her sister had chosen, along with the rest
of their family, to ignore them.

The sense of betrayal was so overwhelming to her that Sally stopped hearing what her sister was telling her. And when she
stopped hearing the words with their separate meanings, she began making up her own story — she told it to herself in a rush
— about how Tru never had a chance to read her letters because they were never opened. They were saved, yes, they were saved
and shoved in a drawer and periodically the bundle of them was produced by her parents and burned ceremoniously in front of
the rest of the family, thrown into the fireplace because
we must rise up against the wicked and wipe them out for their iniquity, yes, with the help of the Lord our God we will wipe
them out.

She could guess what her mother and father had to say about their eldest daughter. Sally Werner was nobody’s fool. Though
she wrote to them regularly for several years, she hadn’t expected to be reconciled. Say what you will. Even while they burned
her letters, she’d been living the high life. Oh yes, they were right about her. While they were sitting around watching her
unopened letters burn, she’d been making friends and making money, raising a child, falling in love. She’d done all right.
She didn’t need nothing.
Anything.
How could she make a mistake like that?

“How much money did you send, Sally?”

“What?”

“How much money was in those letters?”

“What letters?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, you said, what? Could you repeat that?”

“I was talking about your letters. You did write those letters, didn’t you? I’m not mistaken, am I?”

Sally gave up trying to hide her confusion. “Please, start from the beginning, Tru.”

“You poor dear. It must be hard to hear it all at once.” With more pity in her voice this time, Tru explained again: Their
mother had been taken by the good Lord on the day after Christmas in 1972. The following October, while Tru was cleaning up
the house and getting it ready to sell, she’d been sorting the linens in her mother’s cedar trunk and had found the letters.
“Your letters, right? You did write those letters.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” She was following Tru’s version now, and she felt a new urgent worry in response. “There was money,”
she said. “I sent money for my son.”

“I know, I know. I read the letters. I don’t know what happened to the money, Sally. I’m sorry, I just don’t know.”

If the money had disappeared, what had become of the child? It was possible that the child had died. Suddenly it seemed that
her sister was preparing to announce the fact, and Sally, in anticipation, briefly pictured the infant’s waxen, lifeless face.
She wished that the means had been available to her back then so she could have ended the pregnancy. But the means hadn’t
been available, and the pregnancy had resulted in a child, and she’d abandoned the child to a fate that revealed itself to
her in a flash of a possibility that was too intolerable for her to ponder at length, so she cast it from her mind, and all
that was left was a powerful unwillingness ever to consider it again, along with the residue of guilt.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Tru said.

Sally felt herself flinch. It struck her as inevitable — unbelievable but inevitable — that her sister could read her mind.

“You’re thinking that I can tell you what happened to your baby. But I can’t. Daniel had him for a while. But that baby was
a handful. The cutest thing, but what a handful! Sometimes Daniel would leave him with us for a day or two, and I tell you,
that baby had more spirit — I mean, the way he could howl. Daniel couldn’t handle him. I would have raised him myself, Sally,
I swear I would have taken good care of him. But I thought Daniel was raising him. Daniel moved from Tauntonville, you know.
He traveled around for a while. I figured he had the baby with him. That’s what we were told. That’s what I thought. Daniel
didn’t even come home for his mother’s funeral. Aunt Lena died of cancer, you know, and Daniel didn’t come home for the funeral.
Our uncle sold the farm to Loden and moved away. I don’t know why, but none of those Werners have wanted to be in touch with
us. I haven’t seen any of them for years, not even our cousin Myra, though she still lives in the area. But I’ve worried about
that little boy, Sally. Daniel just couldn’t handle him. That’s the way it was. I’d have raised him myself. But I wasn’t given
the chance. Once I read your letters, I realized that you’d been sending money. Loden and Clem and Willy and Laura — I asked
them all, and none of them could say what happened to that money. Honestly, I’ve never been convinced that Daniel Werner raised
that boy on his own. He named him after himself, you know, but I only ever heard him call the boy with curses. He couldn’t
handle him. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he’d given the boy up for adoption. I like to think that some nice family
took him in and raised him. But I can’t find anyone who will tell me for sure one way or another.”

Tru the True. Bless her. She would never guess that despite the bleak news she was bearing, she’d given Sally reason to hope.
She could hope that her son had survived and found a good home with strangers. She might never know for certain what had happened
to him, but she could indulge herself imagining what he’d become: a handsome young man with a red scruff of a beard, not unlike
the young man who right then was opening the front door of his own accord and calling, “Hello? Hello, Penny?” into the house
after his gentle knocking had gone unanswered.

Though he hadn’t been involved with Sally’s daughter for long, he was already in the habit of letting himself in when no one
came to the door. Penelope encouraged it. And really, Sally didn’t mind. She liked knowing that she made it easy for her daughter’s
friends to feel at home. She remembered, long ago, being welcomed by the Campbell family in Tuskee, and she was proud to think
that she’d reached a point in her life when she could offer the same sort of welcome to others. Still, she was surprised when
he suddenly appeared like that, out of the blue.

“Tru, this is, this is…” Sally knew his name, but for some reason her memory of it went blank right then.

“Abe,” he offered. Before thrusting out his hand in greeting, he wiped it against his pants leg to blot the sweat from his
palm. His strained smile suggested that he realized too late that it was a crude thing to do. Sally’s surprise melted to amusement,
and she suppressed the urge to laugh.

“This is my sister,” Sally said.

Abe’s response was a jovial
howdy —
not a word Sally would have expected from him, and she wondered if she was right to sense that he regretted using it. And
now that she was paying attention to him, she noticed that his face, while mature with its beard following the line of his
strong jaw, had a striking childishness, with wide, relaxed eyes expressing a boyish lack of guile. She could see why her
daughter found him attractive. She herself was charmed by him, and puzzled at the same time, and embarrassed that she hadn’t
come up with his name on her own. If she’d been a more attentive mother, she’d have recalled the name of the fellow her daughter
was dating.

“Are you Jewish?” Tru asked abruptly.

“I’m nothing,” Abe replied. Well, he wasn’t just being awkward, he was revealing himself to be more awkward every time he
opened his mouth, and Sally appreciated him for it. He was nothing. Really? That’s correct. Abraham Boyle, Mr. Nothing.

Sally let out a chuckle, but it came out more like an exclamation of discovery: “Ha-ha!” Abe blinked back his startle.

“I only ask,” Tru continued, as if in response to a question, “because I was engaged to a Jewish man. I was preparing to convert.
If either of you know anything about the process of conversion —”

“Good God!” Sally’s shock was expressed in a whisper. “You were engaged?”

“For three days. Pop chased him away. I mean literally, he grabbed the knife Mama had been using to bone the chicken, and
he chased him from the house.”

“Why didn’t you go after him, Tru?” Sally asked, but she knew why, and she knew that it wasn’t worth explaining.

In the weighty silence that followed, Abe looked from one sister to the other and then examined with fake interest a ceramic
frog on the mantel. He looked grateful when Penelope breezed into the room. He looked more than grateful. He looked as though
he’d forgotten everything else and was melting with infatuation for his girlfriend.

“Cute frog, huh?” Penelope gave him a kiss on the cheek. She was wearing a sack of a blue linen halter dress that reached
to her ankles, and she paused to retie the straps as she stood facing him.

“Shall we go?” She hooked her arm through his and said to her mother and aunt, “See you later.”

“When’s later?” Sally asked.

“The movie ends at eleven,” Abe said.

“Midnight, then.”

Penelope hadn’t had a curfew for years, but Sally wanted to give her sister the impression that she had instilled in her daughter
a sense of limits. Fortunately, Penelope didn’t bother to protest.

In the lull that followed their departure, Sally gathered the cups and carried them into the kitchen. She hoped that her sister
was convinced that she’d made a good life for herself here in Rondo. She had a pleasant, welcoming home and a lovely daughter
who came home by midnight.

At the sink, she found herself watching with odd fascination as bubbles from the dish soap swelled and popped beneath the
pressure of the running water. Tru, standing nearby, leaning against the counter to rest her weak leg, said something in a
murmur.

“What’s that?” Sally asked, setting a saucer to dry in the dish rack.

“Wouldn’t you say he looks like a younger version of Loden?”

“Who?” Sally didn’t look up from the sink.

“Your brother. He’s the spitting image.”

Of course Loden was her brother. But who was his spitting image? Why, Abe was. You could say that Abe resembled Clem Werner,
too, and Willy when they were young, but most of all he looked like Loden.

Tru didn’t say,
It’s obvious.

Sally didn’t say,
Dear Lord in heaven.

Instead, she coughed lightly into her fist before she said in the flattest voice possible, “Oh, that’s because they’re redheads.
All redheads look alike.”

Penelope had chosen Abe by chance, yet with the intuitive confidence that she was right. It was as easy as deciding on a favorite
color. She just recognized him as the right man when she saw him, even before she knew him. They belonged together. They were
destined to move along the paving stones to the driveway, both of them practically skipping, so happy to be with each other
that it was hard to summon the desire for anything else. They certainly didn’t want to waste their time in a movie theater,
and so Abe drove directly to the house where he was renting a room on the third floor. They tried to climb up the rickety
back staircase side by side, but the space was too narrow, so Penelope slipped in front and catapulted up the stairs two at
a time while Abe scrambled to keep up and at one point used his hands, leapfrogging to the landing. He couldn’t wait. She
couldn’t wait. They started kissing even before Abe had unlocked the door, and they kept kissing while he fumbled in his pocket
for his keys.

Penelope had been around enough to know that the era’s promotion of free love was not as much of a bargain as it first appeared.
In her experiences so far, the boys she’d been intimate with were unreliable. While they didn’t try to buy her off with the
promise of commitment, neither did they want to limit themselves to just one girl. It was taken for granted that they would
play around,
as they put it, and they didn’t want to be held accountable. Penelope thought she’d learned to expect nothing more than frivolity
from love — until Abe Boyle came along, and then she realized that she could let herself expect more.

There was more
good
to be felt with him than she’d ever allowed herself to hope for. And with more good came the wish for more
time
to spend together. When she was with him, she’d let herself believe that the hours would last forever, but it was always
over before she was ready to go home. When they were apart she would lose herself in an elaborate mix of fantasies and memories
of him, reliving and imagining intimacy in daydreams that would absorb her so completely that she failed to notice when someone
was trying to gain her attention. The phone would ring repeatedly before she heard it. Her mother would have to ask her a
question at least twice before receiving an answer. And once when she was in the lifeguard chair at the pool, she didn’t see
the boy in the deep end splashing and flailing and calling for help, so his mother had to jump in to save him. It turned out
that the boy had only been pretending to drown to impress his friends, but it was enough for the club manager to put Penelope
on probation for a week.