“Oh. My. Goodness.” Miss Janie had gotten up and was standing in the kitchen door. “Do I hear my girls being nice to each other?”
Teresa headed on into the living room. “Don’t worry. It won’t last long, Miss Janie.”
Miss Janie raised her chin a notch and looked down her nose at Teresa. “I told you to call me Mama. We don’t have to pretend anymore. I’m claiming you and Kayla as my daughters. I’ve been sitting here thinking about whether you would have been Mary Jane or Maddy. I think maybe Mary Jane fits you better.”
Teresa took her bony, spider-veined hand in her own and led her back to the kitchen table. “Tell me about my daddy. Was he a good man, or did he run off and leave you without even looking back?”
“Jesus was a good boy, but he was only a kid like me. He was sixteen that summer and I was fifteen.” Miss Janie smiled. “I thought it was funny that his name was spelled like the Jesus in the Bible but pronounced different. I shouldn’t have laughed about it, but when I wrote it in my diary, it looked like Jesus had gotten me pregnant.”
“Did you tell your parents who your babies’ father was?” Teresa asked.
“Yes I did, and Daddy was mad at me.” Miss Janie’s smile faded at the memory. “But Mama was even worse. You’d have thought that Jesus was the devil. If it had been a nice white boy, things might have been different.”
“What did they do?” Teresa asked.
“He’d already gone back to Mexico when I found out I was pregnant. Daddy would never have let me marry Jesus, and besides, I didn’t want to marry him.” She lowered her voice. “Daddy was a little bit prejudiced, and Mama was a whole lot. They were mad enough at me when they thought it was a boy from my school, but they wouldn’t even look at me when they found out who he was.”
“Did you want to have sex with Jesus, or did he force you?” Teresa thought about the times she’d hidden under the porch or in the backyard to keep from having to fight off her mother’s boyfriends.
“Jesus would have never forced me to do anything. He was too sweet for that. I think you got that from him. Kayla got my strong will,” Miss Janie said, and then in the blink of an eye, her expression changed. “I’d like to go take a nap now. I’ll get my nails done later.”
“You can hold on to my arm so you don’t fall.” Teresa led her back to the bedroom. Lately, she’d been sleeping more and more. Noah said the doctor told him to expect that, but Teresa loved the precious moments when Miss Janie was lucid enough to recognize her as Teresa, the child she’d saved from a group home.
Miss Janie looped her arm into Teresa’s and sighed. “How long does it take for the stitches in my bottom to heal up?”
“Quite a while, but I’ll check and see if you can have some more pain medicine for that,” Teresa answered.
“You better let me make a bathroom stop on the way,” Miss Janie said.
Teresa helped her with that, and when she’d taken off her slippers and covered her feet with a throw, Miss Janie latched on to her arm.
“I’m glad you girls came back to help me,” she whispered. “I didn’t want to go to a nursing home. I hate that I’m a burden, but when I’m gone, I fixed things for all of you.”
“All of us?” Teresa asked.
“You and Kayla and Noah, the loves of my life.” Miss Janie’s eyes fluttered shut and she began to snore.
The last five words that she’d said played through Teresa’s mind as if they were on a loop. The loves of my life. Teresa wondered who or what were the loves of her life.
She’d thought that Luis was and had endured his cheating because she had loved him. She’d learned that indifference was the opposite of love, not hate. When the time came for her to sign the divorce papers, she flat-out didn’t care anymore. She even felt sorry for the woman he was already living with. That poor soul had children with him, so they would be connected forever.
Getting back her self-esteem had been a long and rugged road, and from where she stood, that light at the end of