Home to Big Stone Gap (20 page)

“Well, set down.” Iva Lou motions for me to sit across from her. “How was your Christmas?”

“Good. Fleeta and Otto and Worley came. And Pete Rutledge brought my family over.”

“Pete. How’s old Pete?”

“Older. But every bit as scrumptious.”

“I figgered. Some men age like rat poison. A box of that stuff can be a hundred years old and it still works.”

I laugh. “You’re right about that.”

We sit in silence. I am so happy when the waitress comes with menus, to give me something to do. I study the menu like it’s the Magna Carta and I’m an Oxford historian.

“The shrimp stir fry is good,” Iva Lou says nervously.

“Is that what you’re having?” I ask her.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, then, that’s what I’ll have.” I put the menu down. I may stink at confrontation, but perhaps the fact that Iva Lou agreed to this means she wants to talk. You never know with her. She might be doing this just because Theodore asked her to. Iva Lou could never say no to him.

“How was your Christmas?” I ask.

“Amazing. I met my grandkids—Lovely brought them over. Brandy is fourteen, she’s a looker. Emma is eleven, she’s a clown. Penny is seven, and she’s a spoiled brat.” Iva Lou fishes in her purse and hands me the pictures. The photo album says
Number One Grandma,
which I find odd, because she just met these kids. “Emma picked out the album.”

“Oh.”

Iva Lou laughs. “I think it ought to say
Brand-New Grandma
or
Newly Found Mamaw.
Though the idea of actually being a grandma makes me physically ill. Lyle says I’ll get over it, and I’m starting to.”

“They’re beautiful kids,” I tell her.

“It’s funny. They resemble me a little, don’t they?”

“Penny is a dead ringer for you.”

“That’s what I think!”

“Well, why not? It’s in the genes,” I tell her. “I’m happy for you. This is really wonderful.”

“It’s a goddamn shock is what it is. I love her already—my daughter. Lovely. What a name for a daughter of mine, right?”

“It’s perfect.”

“I think so. I mean, I’ve spent my whole life working at bein’ lovely. Of course, I’ve also worked at other things that might not have been appropriate names for a Baptist girl growing up in Kentucky.”

I laugh. I’m amazed that even with the big freeze that happened between the two of us, we can sit here and chat like nothing terrible happened. This is one of the things I always valued about Iva Lou. She had a way of making the worst things seem fleeting. “Don’t get yourself all bollixed up,” she’d say. “Tumult is bad for the complexion” was another of her favorites. She could draw me out like no one else. Iva Lou would get me talking, and soon I’d be unburdened by whatever the trauma of the day was.

At that moment I make a decision. I’m going to tell her what she means to me. What have I got to lose?

“I’ve missed you for a lot of reasons, Iva Lou, but mostly because you always put my life in perspective. I could always count on you to be honest with me. Which is why, I guess, I was so hurt by your reaction to me at the library.”

“Well…” She sits up straight and breathes in so deeply, I think she might sing an aria, except she just exhales. “I was hellfire mad at you. And I didn’t know what to say. I felt like you were angry at me for giving up my baby when she was born.”

“What?” I’m stunned.

“Yes, you
were
angry at me. In all the years, and all the things I’ve done—you know my conquests and my reputation and my approach to full living via the delicious gift of men in my life, including my engagement and marriage—I never once felt anything but understanding coming from you. But when you came to see me about my daughter that day, you judged me. Now, God knows, I’m not a particularly good Christian, so I sure as hell don’t care if you think I’ve done something to keep my ass out of heaven. But what broke my heart—and trust me, it broke—was that you looked at me like ‘How could you? How could you give up your own baby?’ And I couldn’t take that, Ave Maria.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking that. I really wasn’t.”

“Well, that’s why I’m here. I wanted to give you a chance to explain, and maybe, hopefully, you’d give me a chance to explain why I did what I did so many years ago.”

“I’d like to hear that.” I lean back in the booth. I feel under attack, but I don’t want to respond in anger. Instead, I listen.

“I was twenty-five years old…”

I’ve never once heard Iva Lou allude to having an age at all, at any point in her life—I think she likes to create the illusion that times does not apply to her. So this in itself is a revelation. She continues.

“I was raised in a strict home; you know that. And I had the one brother—his name was Cortland—who joined the army and went to Korea and never came home.”

“His picture’s in your living room.”

“That’s him. Well, when he died over there, I was devastated. And it was right around then that I met a man named Tommy Miklos. He was Greek.”

“From Greece?”

“No, his parents were—he was born here. Anyhow, I fell madly in love with him, and I got pregnant. I went to him and told him what had happened, and he said he had to talk to his parents. So he went to them, and they told him that he couldn’t marry me. They had somebody in mind for him, and it didn’t matter whether or not I was having a baby, they were goin’ through with their original plan for him.” She pauses to collect herself, as if the memory still hurts.

“He came to me, and he cried and told me that he couldn’t marry me. I offered to talk to his parents. We even planned to run away together, but he couldn’t bear the thought of going against them.”

She takes another of her deep, deep breaths. “So I went to the doctor and asked for his help, and he told me about this place where Catholic girls went when they were in my situation. I didn’t know a single Catholic until I went there, but I always liked ’em on account of the fact that they took me in, no questions asked. It was far enough away so nobody’d know. I told my mama I was going to school to become a librarian, and I left. What was ironic was that when I got to the Sacred Heart Home, they got me some classes in library science that would help me later on. So it wasn’t a total lie I told my mother.”

“You must have been terrified.”

Iva Lou starts to cry. “I couldn’t hardly leave my mama. But she didn’t have much, and I couldn’t ask her to take a baby on, and there wasn’t a way for me to do it alone. I tried for nine months to figure out a way to do it—see, at the Sacred Heart Home, you didn’t have to decide until the end if you were gonna keep the baby or give it up for adoption. But I couldn’t. Not and give her a decent life. I didn’t know a single girl who kept her baby.”

I think of my children and can’t imagine having to make that sacrifice. “It’s horrible.”

“After I had Lovely and signed her away, I went home to Mama, and for a few months I worked in the county library there. But I needed a fresh start, so I started looking through the
Library Journal
for jobs, which is how I came to these parts. I took over the Bookmobile route from James Varner, ’cause he went off to study poetry and run another library.”

“I remember him well.”

“One day, almost a year and a half after I started the route, I was in the Bookmobile up in Norton. And this blue Cutlass Supreme pulls up. And out of the car comes Tommy Miklos. He was as handsome as a summer day. He came on the Bookmobile and asked if he could see me. Now, this was double-edged for me. I still loved him, but I also hated him for what his choices had forced me to do.

“Anyway, I agreed to talk to him. So he met me after my shift—I’ll never forget it, because he said he made dinner reservations at the Wise Inn. I wondered what the hell he could say that would make me agree to have dinner with him, so I made him tell me on the spot instead of going to the restaurant. He said, ‘I can’t live without you, and I want you back. I’m not going to murry whatever her name is over in Greece, I realize now that I want you.’”

Iva Lou’s face looks shattered. “Well, I have to tell you, I was never so angry then or since. I told him that he would never know what it did to me to give away my daughter and that I had no further interest in him or his family. He cried a bit, and then he left. We didn’t make it to the Wise Inn, needless to say. And I never saw him again, until a few days after Christmas, this year, when I drove up to Ohio with Lovely.”

“Lovely told me you were going to see him.”

“At first I wanted no part of it, but now I’m glad we went.”

“What happened?”

“Well, Tommy’s a widower. I doubt he’d of seen us if his wife were still alive. He has three children of his own. When I walked in with Lovely, he could hardly take it. I guess it hit him hard what he had done. It was funny, I didn’t shed a tear. Through all of this, I’ve wept and wept, but when I saw him, I wasn’t even tempted to cry. Not one tear.”

“What did he say?”

“He told Lovely that he abandoned me. That he forced me to make a terrible decision, and that if she was going to hate anybody, to please hate him because it was all his fault. He then told her the thing I think she longed to hear most. He said, ‘I loved your mother.’ See, no matter where you go or what you do, a child needs to know that. They need to know that you brought ’em into this world with the best intentions, that you came together for a divine purpose, no matter how misguided the results might be. That’s all anybody needs, really, to know they’re wanted. What I tried to say to Lovely was that she was wanted by me and the parents I gave her to. I trusted them. I read their application letters, and then a nun—Sister Julia, I don’t think I’ll ever forget her—came in and told me that if it was her baby, she would not hesitate. She would trust the Rosshirt family.

“Life is not doled out by chance. I know that sounds crazy, coming from a woman who accidentally got pregnant, but it’s true. You don’t have a choice about when a child comes into the world or when they go—I don’t care how much science they fool with. Nope, there’s destiny involved. There is purpose in all of it, and Lovely needed to know that as crazy as this was, it was her story. She needed to stop looking at her origins like a mistake, to own them like they’re her glory.”

“And did she?”

“The three of us, awkward as it was, left it on a very friendly note. Lovely told Tommy that she didn’t want anything from him, she just needed to know the truth. She showed him pictures of her parents; her husband, Sam Carter; and her daughters. Tommy seemed relieved that she had a happy life and that she had turned out well.

“Now, that there is my cross. I can’t claim what must be the most satisfying knowledge in the world, which is to know that you gave someone life and then all the things they needed to grow into a good person. I’ll never know what it would have been to make my daughter a home, to give her a place in this world, and then, once she was grown and confident, to set her free to have her own life. I knew when I gave her up that I was giving her up to a world of chance and uncertainty. What I couldn’t know was whether I did the right thing. Was it the right decision for her? That part of it haunted me. I know for sure she was raised in love by good people, and that’s more than most folks get, even from their own parents. All I can do now is be her friend.”

“You’re great at that,” I say.

Iva Lou starts to cry. “I’ll never know if I would have been a good mother. After I had her, I swore I’d never have another baby or get murried, which is why I was so drunk the day Lyle and me got hitched. I couldn’t believe I was going back on my word to myself. But at that point, children were out of the question, so I only went back on half of my promise.”

“You did the right thing in giving her up. It was the only thing you could do.”

Iva Lou dries her tears. “I don’t know. If it was right, why did Lovely come lookin’ for me?”

“She wanted to know you. I know what that feels like. It’s hard to live with pieces missing from the story of your life. It’s almost unbearable. And then when you get the pieces, you have to sort it all out.”

Iva Lou nods. “So, that’s the story of Lovely,” she says, and looks down at her hands.

We sit in silence for a moment, until I confess quietly, “I did judge you.” Iva Lou looks at me, and for the first time in months, I see the old fire in my friend. Nothing pleases her more than honesty. I go on, “I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. I couldn’t believe that someone I was so close to and relied upon could keep such an important event in her life a secret from me.”

“There was never a good time to tell you, Ave Maria.”

“I understand that now. You couldn’t have told me when I was a spinster, because it might have driven me farther back into the cave of fear I was living in. And when Etta was born, I was so happy, you wouldn’t have ruined it for me, because that’s the kind of person you are. And then when my son died, you couldn’t tell me, because you probably thought my loss was worse than yours—at least you could think of your baby in a good home with loving parents. And let’s face it, since Joe, I judge anybody who gets a choice in life when I didn’t get to choose the fate of my son. But what I know now”—my voice breaks, and the tears come—“is that you’re a better mother than me because you knew what your daughter needed, and you let her go when you most wanted to keep her.”

“It was a different time then. I can’t hardly even explain it. Nowadays it’s all changed; hell, the world spins differently. I grew up believing that a child needed a mother and a father. Now I’ve seen every incarnation of family life, and I know that there are many ways to do it. But at the time, in London, Kentucky, I was trapped by the way the world was. I was alone. I couldn’t take on the world.”

“Does Lovely understand that?”

“She tries. But you know something—I’ve learned this in my life and in my job—everybody has a hole in them that can’t be filled. It might be better when you can give it a name, but everybody’s got one. Hers—Lovely’s—was me. Me and Lovely talked about it on the ride back from Ohio. I’d rather been her hero, or her teacher, or her everyday mother, but what I got is where we are now. And I think the world, and the way things are now, helped her find me. Families are put together every which way these days, so she felt comfortable enough to come looking for me. She didn’t feel alone when she was looking; there are lots of people in the same boat. And I guess I wanted to be found, because when I signed her away, I checked the box that said
unseal with adoptee’s consent.
I don’t know another girl in the Sacred Heart Home who did that. They all wanted to put it behind them. But I wanted my girl to know if she ever needed me, she’d just have to look.”