Life After Life A Novel - By Jill McCorkle Page 0,122
they are all so wonderful about calling and checking in on her. Paul wants her to come live closer to him, Lynnette wants that, too, but of course she has told them that she likes living right there where she has always lived. Horace is right next door and she has so many friends. She has too many friends to name and of course she has her own mother to think about. She has spent some time today cutting out a picture of herself that someone took just recently and now she and her mother are going up to New Hampshire where someone was talking about some time yesterday or today. Toby, maybe. Toby is so funny; it is like it is her job to make everybody laugh. And that Benjamin, she is so upset about him it makes her chest ache, what he is doing to that precious sweet child of his. A child is to be treasured. A child should always come before everything else.
Abby was here just a minute ago and she said something about her mother’s pants. She said she wished her mother would wear pants like other mothers. “High-waisted stretch pants and not cut to her crack like what a teenager would wear.” Sadie told her she couldn’t even imagine that and Toby said well she could. “And underwear up the crack like dental floss.” That Toby is something and it made Sadie laugh even though she didn’t want Abby to see her laugh. She told Toby she needed some time alone with Abby and that’s when they just sat side by side and watched some television.
“My sweet mother,” she told Abby. “I could have taught her so much.” She held Abby’s hand and squeezed it. She loves the feel of a child’s hand in her own; there is nothing better than that. “You might have to teach your mother,” she said, but then when Abby asked how she realized she had no idea at all.
“I was in a school show one time,” Sadie told her, and then she told all about being in a show with Grover Fowler and they laughed and laughed. She always really liked Grover Fowler but she didn’t tell that part. Harley feels good there on her lap and he likes to put his nose up against hers and kind of bump. Yes, the children want her to move, but she can’t move. She has a whole business and people who would be so disappointed if they couldn’t come see her and have her make them up a picture. And Horace. When Horace was gone, she slept on his side of the bed so that instead of missing him, she was only missing herself and where she used to be. And she misses her bathtub, too. She might say she never knew until lately just what a comfort a good hot bath could be, but that would not be true. She knew as soon as she was without Horace that nothing could be taken for granted. She loved to lie there in the heat—her body not young but certainly younger than it is now—and she watched the light and in it the mimosa tree in the sideyard. Some call that a trash tree, but she said a trashy beauty with its little pink puffs and long seedpods she liked to shell as a child pretending she was shelling butter beans like she remembers seeing her mother doing. She heard kids and skates and car radios and yard sprinklers like a beautiful symphony. Call it July. And there could be a recording of each and every month and each and every day and that would be so nice, recording the days. She always wanted some day of the week underwear, but that seemed so extravagant, especially for someone who was married and taught school. But then she got Lynnette some and Lynnette never wore the right day at the right time, but that was okay. Lynnette was a child who hears that different drummer and Sadie is proud of the fact that she never tried to change what the child was hearing but instead encouraged her to do her best and be happy. In the middle of a dark night she liked to plant her open palm on Horace’s back and draw in the heat and then she would move her hand in slow steady circles. He will call soon. He always calls and she is always right ready to answer.