The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,103

I hope never to again. Hurt so bad I thought my chest would burst. If it had been anyone but Adam, I’d’ve run out of the church and never come back. I’ve heard of people speaking in tongues, but I’ve never heard of anything like that—and how it hurt! It was a peculiar thing.” She pressed one hand against her ear.

I nodded my agreement.

Then she told me her news: “A doctor’s appointment.”

I should have paid attention to that phrase. Momma, like most in her generation, rarely went to see a doctor, only if she was very sick. But when I asked her what was wrong, she waved her hand, dismissing my concern. “I’m bleeding like it’s my monthly. It doesn’t come regular. You know I went through the change years ago, before Sarah was born. Now it’s back. I feel fine. I just want to know if I should be keeping your father on his side of the bed.”

We laughed.

Jennie’s death overshadowed everything then. Grief gutted me, and I relied on Momma.

I was erratic, hugging the girls, afraid to let them out of the house one minute and oblivious to their presence the next. Adam was the same. Momma became our anchor, our consistency. She spent as much time as she could on the farm, and, when she was not there, I knew I could call her. The girls were reluctant to go home when we were at her house and to see her leave when she visited the farm.

So, that day, months after Jennie’s funeral, when we sat on the porch shelling peas and Momma announced that she’d decided to see the doctor, I took little notice and felt no alarm. She’d always been there. My fears were centered on the girls and Adam and what I could not say about or to them. I didn’t look further for more to fear or grieve.

I heard nothing else about her doctor’s visit until the evening Daddy called to tell me that the doctor had sent Momma straight to the hospital. “Female troubles,” he said. “A tumor. They’re taking everything out.”

During the week after her surgery, Momma spent most days in a painful stupor on the couch in front of the TV. But after her bath one day, she asked me to help her into her newly made bed.

Rita had stopped by earlier with clean bed linens and a pot roast for Momma and Daddy’s dinner. Daddy’s shift at the mill would not end for hours. Momma and I were alone. To pass the time and distract her from her pain, she wanted to organize an old shoe box of photos.

She studied a black-and-white photo of me and Addie, taken not long before Addie left with Roy and came back to be my husband. Joe had been the first to arrive one morning to help pull a field of corn. He’d shot the photo to finish off a roll of film he wanted to get developed. In the snapshot, Addie and I stood shoulder to shoulder, smiling into the early morning sun and leaning back against the garden fence by the barn. Addie’s hat threw a shadow across her right eye. My hair hung down past my shoulders.

I’d not seen the picture in years. I remembered Joe corralling us out of the barn, the morning dew still a web of diamonds on the grass, and the press of Addie’s warm arm at my side. Longing streaked through me, not so much for Addie but for that time of simplicity and innocence, a time when there was just the land, the seasons, and inexplicable Addie to reckon with—no babies, no death. Behind us in the photograph, between our two heads, the old apple tree and the place where I found her were visible.

Momma handed the picture to me. “You were like two peas in a pod. It was uncanny. I wonder if she ever found out who her daddy was. I sure couldn’t figure which of my brothers or cousins your aunt Doris had been with. Never a peep out of the men. That poor Hardin boy must have been surprised when Addie popped out with all that red hair.” She gave me a wry smile. “The women on both sides of the family were a little too inclined to follow their hearts instead of using common sense . . . or maybe they—we—were following some other organ.” She laughed at her insinuation and patted my hand. “I’m glad I never saw