Matrimony pulled me from the quicksand of non-belonging , a thing I’d not fully recognized until I stepped into my own house. And I thought how here, I would keep my own homefires a’burning. My very own.

Here, I belonged.

For though Anne and I developed a close friendship during those last two years under Daddy’s roof, I’d never regressed to my former assured dug-in self. It wasn’t her fault nor Daddy’s; it was simply something altered in me by God only knows what all but, most certainly, what began with Mama’s early death.

I’ll never know if things would’ve been different had Kirk not come along because he did and he gave me the greatest of all gifts: strong arms to hold me and this home called ours.

I blinked my eyes, irritated at Kirk’s fingers snapping at the end of my nose as I gazed mistily through our window into a dusky blue-gray sky whose horizon slowly oozed peach and crimson. I jerked the venetian blind string to, first, close out the world and second, to vent my annoyance at his fingers’ abrupt snap that always exploded over me, setting off my high-strung nerves.

“Where were you just now?” he asked, taking off his black tux coat, his heavy-lidded eyes glimmering with what I thought was amusement but suddenly realized was more. We’d chosen to forgo other choices to spend our honeymoon here, in our little village dwelling, only a couple of blocks from Daddy and Anne.

“Hmm?” he persisted in his velvety roughness and began to undress me with fumbling gentleness. I promptly assisted him.

“I was thinking about the wedding – ” My voice caught when his hands boldly touched my skin in formerly forbidden places. Next thing I knew, we were between new white sheets, naked together for the first time, glorying in freedom, in the rightness of it all and we began to laugh, hugging and rocking back and forth, side to side, kissing and laughing and kissing... until the laughter stopped and primitive urges, long, long denied, emerged.

Kirk stopped and gazed down at me. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

In answer, I pulled his head down and kissed him. The discomfort I felt soon gave way to the excitement of unfolding wonders and because of Kirk’s tender concern, the consummation would not be completed until later that evening.

Instead, he playfully tugged me from the bed. “Get dressed, woman. Cook me some dinner.”

We quickly pulled on cut-off shorts and matching white and Crimson Chapowee High pullovers and, excited as three-year-olds, invaded our sparkling, sunny-colored kitchen with its free-standing white cabinet and chrome and yellow dinette set, pulled out shiny new pots and pans and commenced cooking a fantastic dinner.

Kirk peeled potatoes and sliced them for potato salad, his first cooking venture. I showed off my fluffy buttermilk biscuits, lumpless gravy – learned at age nine from MawMaw – and crispy, juicy Southern fried chicken, compliments of Anne’s tutelage. We topped off the meal with Kirk’s favorite dessert, Banana Pudding with golden toasted meringue icing.

As I put dishes in a sink full of hot soapy water, I felt Kirk move to stand behind me, wrapping me in his arms, his hands doing magical things to my bosom. “Kirk!” My breath caught in my throat as he smoothly turned me into his arms and up against his arousal.

He kissed me deeply, leaving me breathless and clutching at him.

“I never knew,” he muttered huskily, “that flour on your nose could be so sexy.”

“Mmmm.” I rubbed against him. “That move is pretty sexy, too.”

He looked into my eyes, his turning dark as the night. “Let’s go see,” his voice was raspy as a corn cob, “what we can do about it.”

The kitchen became our home’s hub, where we relaxed and chatted, listening to Fats or Johnny Mathis while delectable aromas wafted from the oven and frying pan. It was during those lingering intimate moments that we began to delve past yet another layer of self.

Each day brought surprises. Kirk gazed at my bowl across the dinette, clearly shocked. “You mean you eat sugar and cream on your oatmeal?”

“You mean you don’t?” I shot back, equally astonished at his mound topped only with butter. After a moment of silent impasse, we burst into laughter. Kirk later divulged that the Crenshaw’s plain oatmeal was to spare the expense of sugar. Nor did they drink milk in their coffee for the same reason. I began to really see the Crenshaw’s poverty level.

Food made togetherness ours. The morning hours, before Kirk went to his second-shift mill job, passed swiftly because we slept late and ate brunches concocted with creative zeal, anything from sausage and pancakes to pot roast and potatoes, didn’t matter, it was all fun and adventure.

Today was beef stew we’d cooked from a Good Housekeeping cookbook, a shower present of mine. “It’s delicious,” I spooned the last bite from my plate.

“It’s great,” Kirk agreed, sipping his ever-present coffee contentedly. “Though I’d like to let it simmer for another twenty minutes next time.”

“Think so?”

“Yeah. Needs to tenderize just a mite more.”

“Mmm.” I smiled at him.

He leaned forward on his elbows, gazing at me as though seeing something for the first time. “What’s behind that smile?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“Oh…just that everything is so perfect.” I drew on my iced tea glass and sighed. “You’ll never know how much it means to me to have a place that’s truly mine. It’s hard to explain.”

Kirk reached across the table and took my hands in his. “I love you so much, honey,” he murmured, frowning with the effort to verbalize his feelings. “The fact that you didn’t have a mother to care for you made me love you even more.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, growing a tad uncomfortable with the pity I heard in his voice. “I guess I did okay, considering.” I thought of sad-eyed Trish – then pushed away the thought.

Kirk’s laser turquoise eyes pinned me with a look I’d seen sporadically – an unreadable, dissecting gaze that did not let up simply because I grew fidgety. “Anne…” he hesitated, uncertain, then forged ahead, “Anne’s okay – least she’s been nice to me. But she doesn’t treat you and Trish like she does her own kid.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said, desperate to dispel his claim. “Cole’s a baby and – ”

“Look,” Kirk held up a hand. “Let’s just drop the subject. You don’t want to see…”

“I think we should drop the subject.” I gave Kirk an appealing look and reached for his hand.

His large, beautiful square fingers curled with mine. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “I don’t mean to hurt you. Ever.”

“It’s just that – Kirk, family is so important to me. And it seems that those most important to me – I lose them.” I shrugged awkwardly, fighting back tears

“What if you had a family like mine?” Kirk’s eyes glimmered suddenly with dark humor. “A sot for a daddy and a mama who doesn’t see anything but her misery? And brothers and sisters who wouldn’t spit on each other if they were all on fire. Living in a house where Christmas went by unnoticed.” He chortled. “I’d have died for just a box of chocolate-covered cherries, y’know? God a’mighty, I love those things. And there were never any hugs or ‘I love yous.’ We just survived. Yanked up by the hair o’the head. You want to talk about mess, we’ll talk about mess.”

We both cracked up. That always did it when I got soppy and sentimental about things I couldn’t change. Kirk could always dredge up down-dirty real scenarios from his life, which were infinitely more desperate than anything I’d ever experienced.

“Anyway,” he spoke as he moved around the table, took my hand and pulled me up and into his arms, “this – us – we’re family now. And I won’t leave you. I’ll always be here for you, Neecy,”

“And I’ll always be here for you, Kirk. You’ll never have another Christmas without chocolate-covered cherries. That’s a promise.”

On most Sundays now, Kirk and I attended worship services at Chapowee Methodist Church, along with Daddy, Anne, Trish and little Cole. My feelings for my stepmother Anne remained ambivalent, at once affectionate yet vigilant. Vigilant because of Trish’s ongoing quandary. Nothing blatantly obvious. Just a feeling I got. And things Trish, on rare occasions, hinted at.

Before Dad and Anne’s marriage ceremony, everything was bliss, quite backward from fabled versions. Afterward, all hell broke loose. Daddy’s homefront sovereignty hit big potholes when he and Anne toed off. The same take control Mama had found romantic and masculine, his new bride found archaic and intolerable and many’s a skirmish Trish and I stumbled into. I fended okay, but Trish, little Trish who crooned to any creature hurt, found herself wandering about a bloody minefield, dazed and indefensible to what the next step might set off.

In a nutshell, it was Daddy’s excessive protectiveness that set his baby up for rejection, for that’s the way he viewed Trish: my baby. Just as he related to me and, earlier, to Chuck as mine. Possessive. Subjugated. For in those days, one side of my father knew only absolutes. The more he insisted Anne heap affection on Trish, the more he sequestered the two. I’ve thought many a time how, had he left it alone, it might have healed itself sooner.

“Do you want the kids to call you ‘Mama’?” he asked one day during a rare truce.

Anne looked at him for long moments pondering, measuring. I held my breath, finding that, surprisingly, I missed calling someone “Mama.” I did not like being half-orphan. I’d never, ever forget my precious mother, but at the same time, I didn’t like the pity being motherless brings. In fact, I detested pity.

Anne’s fair brow, set below flaming titian hair, furrowed. “No, that wouldn’t be right.”

My heart plunged and a new, sharp ache formed inside me.

Something flickered in Daddy’s face, a shade of grief. “Okay.” He gave a limp shrug, that in itself uncharacteristic. But I knew, it was not okay. And Daddy could – would hold a grudge as long as he breathed.

“Blood’s thicker’n water,” sprang Grandma Whitman’s litany to mind, one she’d always muttered during family loyalty tests. Now, the implication smacked me broadside as I dealt, again, with the changes inaugurated by Mama’s sudden death. I had, until now, attained a measure of continuity in my life, a sense of me. I’d desperately convinced myself that I remained intact, despite that the pain of losing her still sat heavily upon me. Youthful resilience had mimed healing, using other things to help divert me from the immediacy of loss.

Until that moment, when Anne said, “No.”

That’s all I heard. No. Rejection. It proved one thing I’d suspected for some time now.

I was unlovable.

Everything flooded in on me in that moment, transporting me back to a day or two after Mama’s burial. We’d remained at the home of my mother’s parents, Daddy and the three of us, nurturing and grieving through the difficult raw days following death. That May day was incredibly bright and sunny, deriding our sorrow and sending Daddy out alone for a drive.

It was while Daddy was gone that Chuck, Trish and I overheard MawMaw’s weepy version of my mother’s crisis when birthing me years earlier. Seems the inexperienced intern who delivered me had overlooked the afterbirth, then sent Mama home.

“Joe let her lay there and nearly die,” MawMaw’s quiet sobs wafted through her open bedroom window to where we huddled together on her small front porch. “If you’n me hadn’t a’ gone to see her when we did, she’d a’died. You could smell the infection when we walked in. Poor lil’ thing was a’burnin’ up with fever, all alone. Joe was nowhere around.” I heard Papa trying to hush her.

Her jaded view shocked and disappointed me but knowing MawMaw’s propensity to being swept away with emotion made me tolerant. Besides, I knew with eleven-year-old logic that her venting was for Papa’s ears alone, was not about Daddy at all but about her dead child, about loss. MawMaw was not known for tact when passion seized her, but that same passion, flavored differently, propelled her to love a grandchild as offspring.

And when my brother Chuck, for reasons known only to him, later that afternoon took Daddy aside to repeat MawMaw’s comments, my father’s face had emptied before he whisked us away from loving grandparents whose worst sin was loosedtongue ignorance.

The betrayal devastated Daddy because he’d loved Mama more than life itself and had endured MawMaw’s pprrkking through early honeymoon days and on through the years, respecting her still for Mama’s sake.

Now, Mama was gone. Daddy’s resolution was simple. “I don’t have to put up with it anymore. I didn’t neglect your Mama. I’d gone to the store the day her folks came a’visiting. I was only eighteen years old, for heaven’s sake. Didn’t know nothing about afterbirths and such.” He grew quiet as the car hummed us away from MawMaw’s house. “That old battleaxe’s had her last go at me” was his final comment as he drove us to Grandma Whitman’s, who hated MawMaw, a mutual thing generated when their offspring married, both certain all the newlywed’s trouble spawned from the other in-law.

Daddy proceeded to excise my grandparents from our lives as succinctly as a surgeon’s knife and reinforced with every stubborn gene at his dispatch. Within a week, the genetic validating forces of my life – namely those who loved me unconditionally – all but vanished.

Years later, Anne’s “no” drove home the significance of those genetic ties and echoed the losses of a short life. Why get close to anybody if it only ended in separation and pain? So I distanced myself from Anne, as I did from anyone who seemed not to value me. I decided then and there I would have to work extra hard to be loveable – to be accepted. No longer would it be a natural, flowing result of being loved.

Thanks, Chucky boy, I thought as I spun on my heel and fled the room, for stripping away all I had left. You didn’t even hang around to help me pick up the pieces.

I passed the long afternoon hours, while Kirk worked, scrubbing and hunting things to clean, glorying in ironing sheets and pillow cases and at first, even Kirk’s briefs and tee-shirts.

Occasionally, Trish got away to come over to visit. Not often. Because Anne kept her busy baby-sitting Cole and helping in the house. I didn’t, at the time, consider the latter abusive, since the same duties fell to me up till I married. Callie, my pal, however, thought it most abusive and often vehemently told me so. I brushed it off because Prima Donna Cal led a princess’ existence with her mother waiting on her hand and foot. What did bother me was the fact that mine and Trish’s time together was so restricted. And it wasn’t Daddy this time. It was Anne.

Trish, so soft-spoken and kind-hearted, rarely complained.

Today was different. “I can’t seem to get things right, y’ know? She doesn’t like me, Sis,” she said with infinite sadness, blaming herself, for cryin’ out loud. “She just doesn’t. She never has.”

I didn’t want to believe it. Fought against it. “Are you sure, honey? Couldn’t you be – ”

“No,” her head moved firmly from side to side. “Annedoes-not-like-me. I don’t know why. Maybe she’s jealous because Daddy steps in sometimes and reminds her that she’s not really my Mama.”

“Oh no. I’d hoped he’d stopped that. Doggone!” Daddy’s way of getting back at her for refusing to let us call her “Mom.”

“Uh hmm.” Trish sighed. “Well, it’s usually when he thinks she oversteps her bounds. You know Daddy. He’s – ”

“Iron-Hand-Houdini.”

Trish chuckled. “That, too. But. …” She grew solemn. “I feel guilty all the time because most of their fights revolve around me. I mean – if I wasn’t in the picture, they wouldn’t fight as much.”

“Hah! Daddy and Anne will never run out of things to fight about. Trust me, Trish. It’s not you. It’s them.” I pondered a moment. “’Course, Daddy is awfully protective over us. Thinks we’re pitiful.” I snorted. “Law, how I hate that idea. We’re not pathetic things.”

“Yeah.” Trish smiled sadly. “I appreciate his caring – but that only makes things worse for me.” We sat quietly, contemplating Daddy’s role in our lives.

“Remember how Daddy made me and Kirk stop going on our Sunday mountain drives?” I shook my head. “So unfair. ‘Too much time alone,’ he said.” I recalled Daddy’s dissecting gaze stalking Kirk those early courtship days. I laughed suddenly. “Daddy thought if he ignored it – it would go away.” I sighed. “But Kirk remained as polite and accommodatin’ as you please.” I chuckled. “Smart. Knew that to get to me, he had to go through Daddy.” I shrugged. “It worked. Daddy thinks Kirk can hang the moon and stars now.”

“To be fair – Daddy really did worry that I needed lots of rest.” I crossed my eyes. “Thinks I’m so fragiiiile.”

“Yeah,” Trish slanted me a mock-sassy look, “unlike ol’ fatso me, you’re a bit frail.”

“You’re not fatso,” I said, ignoring her rolled back eyes, “Heck, I only look frail to Daddy ‘cause most of the Whitman women are hefty as oxes.”

“But you do get hay fever and bronchitis, Sis,” Trish insisted.

“Yeah,” I conceded. “Many’s a night he woke me spooning that awful whiskey-lemon-sugar crap down my throat.” I shuddered and screwed up my face, then admitted, “But it did stop the cough.”

“And though money’s short,” added Trish, “he always took us to the doctor at the first sign of sickness.” She looked directly at me. “He’s a good Daddy.”

“The best,” I agreed whole-heartedly. “Despite his heavy-handedness.” I grinned wickedly. “One battle Anne won – she got pregnant, in spite of Daddy’s objections that he didn’t want more kids to raise. He roared and kicked up a fuss about feeling used like a ‘stud bull.’”

The phone rang, interrupting our belly laughter. It was Anne.

“Neece, is Trish over there?”

“Yeah. She is.” I handed the receiver to Trish, who listened and quietly hung up.

“What did she say?” I dreaded the answer.

Trish looked bleakly at me. “Said to come home. I had no right to sneak off like that.” Tears sprang to her stricken eyes. “Why, Sis? Why can’t I spend time with you? It’s not fair.”

“No,” I said quickly and hugged her at the door. “No, it’s not. But I’ll tell you like MawMaw told me. When you get old enough, you can come see me when you dadgum well please.”

I sent her off with a smile. When I closed the door, I cried.

“Hey, sweetheart, I’m home!” was Kirk’s nightly greeting when he burst through the door near midnight, carrying his empty lunch box and coffee thermos. I always said if Kirk couldn’t get to coffee, it would be apocalypse. Having cut his baby teeth on a coffee cup, he is novocained to caffeine’s effects. I always met him at the door with a kiss and had food on the table.

“Any pickles?” he asked as he munched into a ham and cheese sandwich. I went to the fridge and pulled out a dill to slice in two for us to share. This nightly snack ended our day on a sweet, mellow note.

In bed, Kirk and I grew more adventuresome, exploring new erogenous anatomy. Recently, my mammary glands in particular, fascinated him. Then me. Wow!

“Gosh, honey,” he murmured one night while driving me mad, “If only I’d known about this while we dated.” He lifted his head and peered dazedly at me. “I could’ve gotten anything from you I wanted.”

“True. We probably would’ve had a shotgun wedding,” I gasped, pulling him back for more.

“Yeah,” he rasped, burying his face in my bosom, “Good thing I was so innocent.”

That Kirk’s weekly Chapowee Mill paycheck was fifty-two dollars and our expenses were fifty, failed to dampen our sense of adventure. I shopped frugally for foods that stretched, like hamburger at thirty-nine cents a pound. Five pounds served three to four meals, ranging from spaghetti to grilled hamburgers cooked over open grills at Spartanburg’s Cleveland Park, where we’d use our two extra dollars for gas to take us on our one weekend outing.

Heck, we had it all worked out. Kirk handled the money, the little we had, which pleased me because overseeing finances was infinitely foreign to me, and I managed the food purchasing with my ten-to-fifteen dollars allowance.

Laughter propelled us through the days and titillating discoveries through the nights. How abandoned we were to each other and to the sheer joy of being. Kirk’s blundering quest for cooking skills gave me hilarious tidbits to jot down in my writing tablet and many a laugh to share.

How I embraced that period of sterling trust and openness.

“You look so pretty, Callie.” I buttoned her red silk blouse up the back and turned her around for a hug. “But you always do.”

Late afternoon sunlight painted Chapowee First Baptist Church’s Sunday School room walls golden and shimmered across heartland pine floor, where Mollie Pleasant, Cal’s mom, devoutly attended, tugging at and praying for Cal and her Dad

Callie’s folks, like mine, worked the mill’s second-shift, only difference being I had baby-sat Trish while Cal, an only child, had been virtually unaccountable for her time. That gal could lie with the purest face among saints and Mollie and Ed Pleasant, seemingly intelligent folk, took everything she said as gospel.

I’d always espied Cal’s mastery with a blend of awe and horror because me, I couldn’t even carry off a half-truth because Daddy’s all-seeing gray eyes could arrest and x-ray me without him uttering a sound and he always knew. Oh, yes, he knew. His wordless condemnation made my insides squirm like a stuck caterpillar, my eyes unable to hold his gaze, and his discipline, usually a rumbling baritone diatribe of disappointment, reduced me to a shredded, smoldering heap of shame.

Here I am, I thought, still having to remind myself I’m married. Out from under Daddy’s rule. The abrupt transition still, at times, made my head reel.

As though reading my mind, Callie murmured, “C’mon, now, aren’t you glad to get away from your bossy Dad? Don’t know how you ever stood being watched all the time. Ssshsuzzzz.” She shuddered hugely.

I laughed and ignored the question. She knew I adored Daddy.

Callie and Rog’s wedding ceremony had ended more than an hour and a half ago.

Outside, friends and buddies bedecked the getaway car while the bride dressed for a honeymoon trek to the mountains. Callie slid stockinged feet into black pumps. “Was the wedding – you know, really nice?” Large amber eyes implored me for reassurance.

“Beautiful.” It had been. “Pigeon Forge will be great, Cal. Cool nights but,” I wiggled my brows wickedly, “hot between the sheets.”

“You ol’ hussy, you.” A lusty belly laugh tumbled from her throat. “One week from now and I’ll be leavin’ this place.”

I folded the white veil and placed it carefully between tissue padding in the box. “Sure gonna miss you, Cal.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“We’ll have to write often. You will keep in touch, won’t you?”

“’Course I will.” We bear-hugged for long moments. “Gotta take off. Rog sure looked handsome, didn’t he?”

“Oh, yeah.” I reassured her, strangely moved by her need for it. “You’re one lucky couple, like me and Kirk. Bye, Cal.”

I stared after her as she bounded from the room to the excitement of leave-taking and grieved that behind Callie’s dark whiskey irises stretched an endless Mojave Desert.

“I brought you some tomatoes.” Tom Crenshaw, Kirk’s father, stood on our front porch, holding a paper grocery bag brimming with vivid red tomatoes he’d grown in his bountiful garden. A disheveled, blood-shot eyed, graying version of Kirk, he blushed and shuffled his feet awkwardly, embarrassed at having caught us still in bed on a Saturday morning at ten a.m. “I won’t come in, I’m dirty,” he handed Kirk the bag.

“Come on in, Dad,” Kirk insisted gruffly. “At least have a cup of coffee.” The magic word. Docilely, Tom followed him to the kitchen where Kirk’s pot still offered up another brimming cup. I’ve never, before nor since, seen a family who devoured java so ecstatically as the Crenshaws.

I quietly moved to the bathroom to bathe and dress, giving them private moments together. As I soaked in the bath tub, I thought how difficult it is to believe this man’s the same one Kirk described as monstrous, one who drank liquor steadily from Friday after work until Sunday night of each week. A man who raged and pursued his kids like a fiend, chasing them into the woods with his car, where they migrated to thickly wooded areas where he couldn’t follow. Who’d dangled a young Kirk by his ankles above a well over some trivial matter. Today, he seemed okay, though I’d whiffed something foreign before escaping to the bathroom.

Moments later, I heard the front door shut and knew he’d left. Kirk joined me and lounged on the commode. Seemed to just want to be near me. As though I could dispel something. Was being with his father traumatic?

“He can be so – nice,” I said. We rarely visited them. Tom always drank on weekends and Kirk refused to go after the one time we’d happened up on him stinking drunk and on a wild rampage. It scared me spitless. I’d never seen a raging drunk and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Oh, there’s not a better man than Dad when he’s sober. Has one of the prettiest gardens in these parts,” he said proudly, then lapsed into stony silence. I got out of the tub and dried off, leaving Kirk still sitting and mulling when I went into the bedroom and dressed in cutoffs and pullover.

“I’m going to gas up the car,” he muttered as he breezed past the bedroom.

“Wait up, I’ll go with you,” I called as his hand hit the front door knob.

“I’m just ridin’ to the gas station.”

I approached him and searched his unreadable features. Did he mean no, I don’t want you to go? But it was so at odds with the can’t stay away from you Kirk. It just didn’t – fit.

If anything, his face registered bland impatience.

Suddenly, I felt childish and awkward, like when Daddy’d refused to let me go off in a car. I shrugged. “I just...wanted to ride with you. It gets kinda lonely being by myself so much. But just go on without me....” I fought a rising indignation.

He shifted, averting his eyes, and opened the door. “I don’t care. Come on.”

“No. I have things to do.” I marched stiffly to the kitchen and began puttering, hearing the front door slam and the car leave the drive. Anger battered me for long moments before I realized Kirk’s frustration had nothing to do with me.

Or did it?

My busy hands stilled as I recalled the times I’d heard Kirk’s Mom’s questions go unanswered, ignored by her husband. Few were the times I’d known Tom Crenshaw to take his wife anywhere with him, even on rare sober occasions, no more than I’d known him to show her respect or affection. I felt sorry for the poor soul, who’d one time, in her early days, been pretty and full of life and love and enjoyed movies, a diversion denied since she’d married. Perhaps by naming her children after her favorite stars, she reclaimed some of the magic of those carefree, bygone days and so she’d called her first son Roy Rogers Crenshaw. Then, in two-year intervals, they stairtripped downward: John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Mitzi Gaynor, Randoph Scott, Lana-Ava and Rex Allen.

Tom’s indulgence for his wife’s frivolity sprouted and died there in the birthing bed. Betty’s fun and free-spiritedness had early on taken flight. By the time I met her, she was a wispy shadow of a woman whose focus seemed affixed to sheer survival. From the time I first saw her standing behind her screen door to welcome me into the clean but shabby Crenshaw dwelling, my heart lurched in sympathy, something in me recognizing her aloneness.

Kirk’s love for his parents was solid while his view of them was confused and at times, paradoxical. He spoke of his father in terms of when he’s sober this and when he’s drinking that, his features bounding twixt pride and sadness. With his mom, his estimation blurred more – the fact that Betty had hung in there and kept the family intact during all the desolation brought both pain and sorrow.

No wonder Kirk’s love signals got muddled. He had lousy role models.

Today, I heard him return and acted busy at the sink. He came up behind me and put his arms around me. Then he laid his head over on my shoulder, gently burrowing, as a child would – agesture of need.

I turned and gathered him in my arms, hugged him for long moments, then took his hand and went to the den to sprawl on the sofa and talk. Today, Betty was the underdog.

“Mama cried at the drop of a hat, over nothing – over everything. I never believed the tears were real. Y’know? Like something out of her danged movies. Felt they were manipulative – to gain sympathy. Mama loved being a martyr.” Kirk’s vehement stance shocked me, but I kept silent. It was his life and at last, he was opening up to me. I refused to analyze too deeply.

“She shoulda left him years ago, got us kids out of all that misery,” Kirk added during the dark moment and I wondered about the times he’d praised her for the same tenacity. I wondered, too, why it was that not only he, but his siblings as well, seemed much more tolerant of their dad’s drunken railings than of their mother’s passiveness. Seemed that, to the Crenshaws, earning power established one’s worth and despite Tom Crenshaw’s creation of havoc – Hell, his children valued him – the bread winner – more than they did their stay-athome mother. That mystified me. So did the influence the man had on Kirk, a thing Kirk would stoutly deny, to this very day.

Like today, Kirk’s abrupt pivot from let’s be together to I need time alone reeked of Tom Crenshaw. Of course, I realized the senselessness in attributing Kirk’s genetic quirks to his father. I dared not give voice to my fears. For though he aired his frustrations with me, he remained, during our early married days, fiercely loyal to his parents.

In the end, I reasoned that this was but one of the potholes all newlyweds faced. Adjustments.

I also reasoned that even with all my family mess, I still had it a hundred and ten per cent better than Kirk. I rededicated myself to making it all up to him.

The whole deal left me feeling that a part of the girl in me vacated to make room for more woman.

“Why, you ain’t grown a bit, Sis. Still lighter’n a Gypsy Dandelion.” Chuck had popped in today out of the blue, temporarily evaporating my anger at him.

My feet touched the floor and I clung to my brother, steadying myself, laughing and peering through tears into the good-looking face whose blue eyes crinkled with laughter lines. He would be twenty-three now. “Chuck, you’re just about the best lookin’ guy I’ve ever seen. A blond John Saxon.

“Just about?” he mimicked, wide grin framing perfectly even white teeth, knowing I’d paid him my highest compliment.

“Why isn’t – is her name Connie? Did she come with – ”

“No. Actually, Honey, Connie ain’t with me anymore. Gettin’ a divorce,” he stated calmly, succinctly flipping a fleck from his shirtsleeve with his fingertip, a gesture that spoke more than words.

“But – ” I sucked in a shocked breath. “What happened, Chuck?”

“Oh,” he shrugged. “Differences. Just couldn’t be helped. What about you? Things goin’ okay with yours?”

“Oh – great. Great.” I did not pursue why his marriage ended. My heart felt a peculiar heaviness as he plopped down on my turquoise sofa, but he soon had me diverted again, laughing and cutting the fool. Fact was, I was the yo-yo and he pulled the string. He tossed me away and pulled me back. Tossed me away when I mentioned Daddy and pulled me back when I appeased him.

When in his favor, I thought of bygone days when we siblings were the “Three Musketeers,” one for all and all for one. It hurt, the change, especially when I knew Chuck had been a Mama’s boy. I knew the pain of his loss.

I didn’t then and still don’t today know what murky trick of genetics caused the disintegration of trust between Daddy and Chuck except that they were both bullheaded and both plagued with tunnel-vision once their minds were made up. I knew Daddy loved Chuck, just as I knew Chuck loved him, but they just couldn’t get it together. Unforgiveness and pride eroded their chances of reconciliation.

“How’s Trish, by the way?” he asked.

I filled him in on how Trish’s weight problem seemed to be escalating, leaving out that the tension between her and Anne still existed. Chuck had locked horns with Anne aplenty on his own before he split – in his case, it was his own smart-aleck rebellion at doing chores he felt beneath him. Like cleaning the bathroom commode. And I’d thought does he think that should fall to us mere females? And though Trish’s pudgy tendency began long before Anne entered the picture, I was convinced the stress of Trish’s position magnified things. I told Chuck Anne had spent a few days in the hospital recently.

“Ulcerative colitis.” Anne still fought her own emotional battles with Daddy.

Chuck’s eyes glimmered when he looked up from the wedding pictures we were going through. “Ol’ man still giving her a hard time?”

“They just don’t always – see eye to eye on things is all, Chuck.” I tried not to sound prim, but Chuck’s nostrils reacted to my defensiveness.

“Tell me somethin’ new, why doncha?” He tossed a picture aside and, whistling through his teeth, opened another album. I bit my tongue, determined not to say anything to drive him away. Why? Why did I so tenaciously carry this virtual one-sided commitment.

All I knew was that this was my brother. That had to mean something.

I didn’t share my disappointment that our grandparents moved away so soon after I was free to visit them without Daddy’s permission. Despite his animosity toward Daddy, Chuck sympathized to the point of shunning MawMaw and Papa, augmenting their grief.

The vicious cycle spun on. Chuck’s anger roiled restless and indiscriminate, settling in senseless ways.

My brother left as abruptly as he came, his hostility lingering like a dank gray, choking fog. That he could turn off his love for Daddy and MawMaw and Papa – and now, Connie – baffled and terrorized me. Was it only a matter of time before I displeased him and he stopped loving me?

A chill rippled up my spine. I rushed to get the tablet I wrote in when things built up.

Later that night in bed, I shared my fears with Kirk.

“Chuck’s got a lot of junk to get rid of,” Chuck said grimly then kissed my forehead. “ I’ll take you to see MawMaw and Papa, honey, any time you want. Kirk will take care of his girl,” he murmured against my temple, ruffling my hair as I spooned back against him. “ Didn’t I promise?”

“Mm hm.” My lids drooped as his strong arms closed around me, securing me to him.

I was safe.