The Sweetest Thing (32 page)

One day, Parthenia found me in the darkroom, staring again at that photograph of me with my sisters from the summer. She curtsied, holding her hands behind her back, and approached me cautiously. “Ya know Miz Chandler done let me keep a good bit of the jars of peaches and jams and otha' things that we canned this summer for my family, and I hope you won't think it's wrong, but Dellareen had a sale for Coobie ova' at Johnson Town, and I done took all those jars that was left and then some of the women baked things and we had a fine turnout and sold jus' 'bout everything.” She brought her hands from behind her back and handed me a handkerchief that she'd gathered into a pouch. “It's plum full of nickels and dimes, Miz Mary Dobbs. Ain't a lot, but it's all for Miz Coobie's treatment.”

“Oh, Parthie! Thank you so much.” I could not get out another word. She let me hug her, and I just held her for the longest time.

Then she turned her dark face up and pleaded, “I know there's no way I kin go an' see Miz Coobie, but I's written her this letter. Kin you please take it to her? I miss her awfully much.”

“Of course, Parthie. Of course.” And I hugged her again.

———

They stopped the treatments for five days, and we were thrilled when Coobie gained enough strength to talk again. I was alone with her one afternoon when she asked me, “Am I dying, Dobbsy? Is that what's happenin' to me?”

Taken aback, I tried to make my voice sound light and unconcerned. “Of course not, Coobs. The doctors are giving you a treatment to make you well.”

“It's jus' making me real sick. Feels like I'm dying.”

“I'm so sorry. Sometimes we feel worse before we feel better. But it's a treatment to cure you.”

“Only it might not work.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Just seems like that might be the case, is all.”

“You don't need to think that way, Coobs.”

She reached over her little hand and covered mine and said, “You don't need to pretend I'm getting better. I know I'm not. I can feel it way down in my bones.”

I swallowed hard and could not make my mouth open to pronounce some reassuring word.

“But don't worry, Sis. If I die, I'll go be with Jesus. It's just like Father always says, ‘For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.' ”

Tears puddled in my eyes, but I refused to let them slip out. I mashed my lips together and turned my head to look at the blank wall. But my spirit was screaming for all it was worth.
No! No, no, no, no, no! It won't happen like that. No!

———

The payment for the treatment was due on March 30. The day before, Perri had grabbed me at school and reported all the money that had been raised in the course of five weeks. I was overwhelmed at the generosity and ingenuity of these girls. And the sacrifice. I knew what Perri had done, even though she never breathed a word to me. I thought of her years of saving pennies and of the countless photos she'd taken in Atlanta. I knew all about her tin of pennies and her dreams to buy back her house, and here it was being spent on my little sister.

My little sister who wasn't responding well to the treatments. My little sister staring hollow-eyed at the blank white walls.

I took the slip of paper that Perri had given me up to my room and looked at the carefully scrawled figures.

Below the final figure, Perri had written
God has provided again!

My heart started beating hard, hurting, cramping. I got out Parthenia's handkerchief of loose change and dumped it on the bed. I began to count the coins, slowly, methodically, almost resignedly. I knew what the amount would be, and I was right.

$18.48.

A God who provides down to the last stinking penny.

“God showed up in a way I could understand—through a photograph. Just what I needed.”

“And you're showing up for me in a sack filled with pennies.”

I tore the paper with the figures on it into tiny bits and scattered them on the floor, and I let the hatred in my heart all come flooding out at once. Not a warm stream of love and provision but of hate.

I screamed into the room, “You didn't provide! It's all a lie. Everyone's worked so hard, and Mother's worked her fingers to the bone, and we don't sleep, and people pray and Father and Frances call every day with worry in their voices, and we're going to pay all this money for nothing.”

Now I was sobbing. “For nothing, Lord, because she's dying! Why! Why in the world would you let this happen? Why would you bring in the exact amount of money, only to let her die?”

“Don't ask
why
, ask
what
.”

Mother.

I sank to my knees and buried my head in my hands and in a whisper, I said out loud, “Okay, then. I give up. You win. You're bigger; you're stronger; you can do whatever you want. So
what
am I supposed to do, Lord? If you can provide exactly two thousand dollars for my little sister's treatment, surely you can let me know what I'm supposed to do next.”

I stayed on my knees for a long time, until all the hate and disappointment and fury had finally leaked out. I felt like Jacob, wrestling with God's angel, and at the end of the night, there was only one word from God Almighty.
Believe.

CHAPTER

26

Perri

There's something about new faith that makes everything seem easy. After God showed up and provided for me, and then for Coobie, I floated into April on a cloud of fluffy optimism. Coobie was going to be fine, and Dobbs was going to be fine, and somehow Spalding would be found out, and God would even get our house back in a way I could not imagine.

It seemed to work that way in all of Dobbs's stories.

I guess God gives us naïve belief at first so that we'll march ahead in our fresh trust. The adrenalin that pumped through all the Phi Pis after the success of raising money for Coobie made us feel powerful and indestructible.

So when Dobbs greeted me in the hallway of Washington Seminary on April 2 looking pale and sunken, I couldn't understand her. God had showed her through Parthenia's pennies that everything was going to be all right.

“Coobie knows she's dying,” she whispered to me after English class. “She keeps talking to me about it. At first, I reassured her that the treatments might make her feel worse, but they would ultimately make her better. But now . . .” Her face was all drawn and hollow, and I felt alarmed, a little prick of fear, like when a siren screamed too close to home, and my heart took a little leap and then twittered inside for a moment.

“No, but God's going to heal her, Dobbs. He's shown you that.”

She gathered up her books and held them tight against her chest, and we walked outside, squinting in the brilliant sun. “He didn't show me that He'd heal Coobie, Perri. He just reminded me that He is God, and I am not.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised by the squeak in my voice.

“I can't do this, Perri. It's too hard to watch her waste away. It's just too hard.”

I felt this deep, piercing dread, like a bolt of lightning stabbing through the clouds, and just as quickly, I saw Daddy's dangling legs. Then we both dropped our books on the manicured lawn of Washington Seminary, fell into each other's arms, and wept.

Dobbs

It was a horrible thing to watch someone I loved dying and to know that it was in part my fault. Atlanta was killing Hank. He'd been working at Coke for just over a month when I realized something. He wasn't smiling anymore. He wasn't teasing Parthenia or picking on Irvin and Barbara when we went over to the Singletons'. He wrote notes to Coobie and had me deliver them to her, but they weren't silly like I would have expected. He talked at dinner with Uncle Robert about Coca-Cola, but there was no passion in his voice, no excitement, and when he looked at me, I felt a horrible longing in his eyes, but something else too. Something like death.

At first, I reasoned that with him getting used to his new job and me spending so much time with Coobie, it was no wonder things with Hank seemed a little strained. But gradually I admitted the ugly truth. I was a selfish, prideful girl who wanted Hank to take a job for me and my happiness and to fit into my plans. Me, me, me. When I finally got up the nerve to ask him about it, his honesty cut me to the quick.

We were walking down by the lake on an afternoon in early April. There were three little ducklings, tiny, squawking as they followed their mother, making miniscule waves on the smooth water. A weeping willow hung over the water, the big gnarled roots twisting up and around, and the willow's leaves made a perfect canopy over the bench where I stopped. I squinted up at Hank through the kaleidoscope of colors the sun made in the leaves.

“You don't like your job, do you, Hank?”

Hank stood opposite me, his legs braced against the back of the stone bench. “No.” He turned his blue eyes toward mine. “But I want you, Mary Dobbs, and I guess I'd be willing to do just about anything to get you. I thought I wouldn't. I thought I'd be able to live okay without you.”

I guess his words should have made my heart soar. Instead, it plummeted, and as it hit the ground, I saw the truth. “You'd give up your calling for me? Even if it went against all you felt God was asking you to do?”

“Love is a mighty powerful force, isn't it, Dobbs? People sacrifice all kinds of things for love.” Then he whispered, “Love is strong as death.”

I swallowed hard. Hank loved me enough to give up the very thing God had called him to do. So I could have everything I wanted: not the opportunity to tell others about God, nothing lofty like that anymore. I just wanted comfort and Hank. Was that right?

Perri's words came back to me then. “
That doesn't seem like love. It seems calculated.”

“You can't do that, Hank. I won't let you give up what you really love, for me. You love God; you love preaching His Word; you love explaining truth to needy kids.”

“Can't imagine any of it without you beside me, Dobbs. That's the thing. That's the bare truth.”

I thought of that photograph of Perri in her father's lap and of little Parthenia handing me a handkerchief filled with coins and of the voice of the Lord last week that whispered to me,
Believe
. And I knew. I knew it as much as I had known that Atlanta would change me, and that Perri and I would become best friends.

“This isn't where you belong, Hank. I was wrong to encourage you to take this job. I've been so horribly selfish.”

The look he gave me was one of profound sadness and intense relief. “It wasn't just you being selfish, Mary Dobbs. I was the one who decided to stay. I wanted you back, so I went against my good sense, went against what my Lord was saying.”

“You belong in Chicago.”

He nodded, very slowly. “You're right, Dobbs. This isn't my place. I need to be back at Moody, back at the church.”

I had a huge knot in my throat, and I couldn't swallow. It seemed like every spark between us had fizzled and died in Atlanta.

“I 'spect there's a whole lotta fine young men in Atlanta looking for a job at Coke. And your uncle says I can most likely get on with them again up at the World's Fair in Chicago in May.”

“You've already talked to Uncle Robert?”

“He's not blind, Mary Dobbs. He knows this job's not for me, and if you know it too . . .” He shrugged. “Well, you can't blame a fellow for trying as hard as he could.”

Wait for me, Hank! Wait!
I wanted to scream, my heart beating so hard it hurt. “It's Coobie. It's everything. I'm so confused.”

“I know it. It'll be better for me to be gone. One less thing on your mind.”

And despite his many declarations of love for me, I knew what he meant. He was letting me go, and it was right. Horribly right.

He left on the train for Chicago a few days later, and no one tried to talk him out of it. “His heart wasn't in the job here,” Mother said. “His place is in Chicago.”

“He tried it for me,” I said numbly.

“I know. And then he saw that you weren't ready.”

“I've been awful to him, wanting him to wait until I made up my mind about so many things.”

“One thing at a time,” said Mother. “One thing at a time.”

———

Father wrote to us almost every day. We received thick envelopes in which he included a letter for Mother, one for Coobie, and one for me. Often Frances had written a letter too. Father was different on paper than in real life. I guess I would have expected his letters to be filled with bold, brash statements about God's power and punctuated with exclamation points. But it wasn't that way at all. He wrote to me about how Aunt Josie dressed him up and dragged him around the property in a wagon when he was a little kid, and then about ramblings of his life as a boy, and about how beautiful Mother was—“like a mirage,” he wrote—the first time he laid eyes on her. And he said his five women—that's what he called us—had made his life the happiest, richest in the world.

He never preached a sermon to me, never mentioned how horrible I'd been to him, or asked repeatedly for forgiveness for his past; in fact, I don't think he said much about God at all. What I read was a man reflecting on his life and family, but not in that penitent way that became overbearing and pity-filled. And he didn't sound worried for Coobie—those thoughts I'm sure he saved for Mother. But he did tell me that as soon as Frances's school was out, they were coming to Atlanta to stay indefinitely.

Up until then,
indefinitely
did not seem to be a word in Father's vocabulary. He was a man of action and purpose and planning, and he stuck inexorably to his schedule. But not now. He was impatient to come, impatient to see Coobie. He did not say this, but I knew—he wanted to be with his daughter before she died.

———

Coobie's questions about death broke my heart, but they also plunged me into action, action I desperately needed to keep my mind from hopping around between Hank and Andrew and college and stolen things and Coobie's fate. Determined to give my little sister something better to look at than drab blank walls, I got Cornelius to make a big wooden board onto which I thumbtacked all kinds of photographs—ones taken during the summer of Frances and Coobie and me, several that Parthenia had taken recently, and one that Perri had clicked of Hank with Coobie on his back when Hank first came to Atlanta last year. When I tacked it on, I just stared and stared at the photo—Hank's back hunched up and his arms in the air, and Coobie giggling, her arms thrown around his neck.
Hank.

I even wrote out several Bible verses that were happy and hopeful and tacked them to the board too.

When Aunt Josie saw the board, she said, “Why, Mary Dobbs, what a marvelous idea! And that gives me an idea too.” Then Aunt Josie cut flowers from the garden so that Coobie would no longer stare at the bare white walls but at vases brimming with gardenias and roses and hydrangeas, white and blue and deep, bright pink.

The nurse balked at first when I arrived with the vases and photo board. She went to find the doctor and returned with a startled look on her face. “The doctor says she can have flowers now.”

“You seem surprised.”

She shrugged. “It's not normal protocol for this treatment.” She cleared her throat, gave me a sympathetic smile, and added, “But it's all experimental. Take her flowers. And the photos.”

I put the vases on the windowsill in Coobie's hospital room and propped the photo board on a chair right by the bed, and I would have given anything to have a photo of the expression on Coobie's face. For just a second, she got her wonderfully mischievous look in those dark eyes, eyes that sparkled in that magical moment. A smile twittered on her lips, and she brought her skinny little arm out from under the sheets and pointed to the photo of her on Hank's back and said, “He's the best bucking bronco ever!”

And then she said something that made me want to twirl around like Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire. “Dobbsy, I can't wait to go out in the backyard with Parthenia, down by the lake, and count the fireflies when the sky gets dark. She says it's just about as delicious as ice cream.”

I gave her hand a quick squeeze and said, “Won't that be swell? In no time at all, I'll bet you'll be down there together.”

Before I left, she asked me to tack up her letter from Parthenia along with three she'd received from Father. As I waved good-bye, she was staring at the board with a soft expression on her face. I think it was a look of faith, hope, and love, all mixed in together.

That evening Aunt Josie came into my room, and in her way of immediately getting down to business, said, “Uncle Robert and I want to give you a party for your graduation.”

I had been fiddling with my hair—which desperately needed trimming—and staring out the window toward the barn, thinking of Coobie. I turned from the window. “A party for me?”

“Yes. It's the custom for all the Washington Seminary senior girls. It would bring me great pleasure.”

“But the money!” Those were the first words out of my mouth. Then, “You and Uncle Robert have already helped so incredibly much—letting me stay here, buying me clothes, paying for Washington Seminary. And now you're helping with Coobie's hospital expenses and keeping practically the whole family here and—”

“We would be honored to do it.” The way she said it made me slow way down in my argument. She pronounced those words as if they were really important. “Mary Dobbs, you've become like a daughter to me. You are so full of life and hope and goodness, and you've just spilt it all over the house. Your uncle and I think a party would liven things up a bit for everyone, and we mentioned it to Ginnie. She likes the idea.” Aunt Josie smiled and added, “As I knew she would.”

I gave a half smile, imagining very well Mother becoming enthusiastic about a party.

I said, “Okay, Aunt Josie. I would be delighted for you and Uncle Robert to give me a graduation party.”

———

The next day, as soon as I returned from school, Parthenia came galloping up to me, all excited, her little bare black legs sticking out from her dress and a whole bunch of wildflowers in her hand. “She's done put on her spring frock, she has!” she announced to me gaily.

“Who, Parthie?”

“The pretty little hill down by the lake! She's all dressed in violets, and it's the most beautiful thing you could ever hope to see.”

She grabbed my hand, and I found myself traipsing beside her, past the barn and the servants' quarters and down the little hill to the lake, and then she said, “Turn around and look for yourself.”

Sure enough, the hill was covered with tiny delicate purple flowers and a smattering of bright yellow dandelions and bluebonnets. From a distance, it did look like an enormous skirt, billowed out over the green backdrop.

Parthenia started twirling around and giggling and saying, “She's all decked out in her finery, and we're giving a party! It's been so long since there's been a party here. Ever since they accused poor Mama. But now . . . ! Now we gonna decorate and make it all so lovely.”