“You think I don’t know that?”
“But you can’t help wishing—?”
“That they were mine?” She turned to me with a low moan. “Oh, God, Deborah, I’m such a horrible person!”
“No, you’re not,” I said, trying to comfort her. “You didn’t mean to fall in love with Ralph. You didn’t set out to snare him or anything. It just happened.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What then?”
She was silent for a long moment and when she finally did speak, her voice was so hushed I had to strain to hear her.
“When I heard that she was hurt—in a coma—I thought, What if she never wakes up? What if she just goes ahead and dies?” She looked at me and her eyes were dark pools of despair in the dim light. “What kind of a monster could wish for something like that?”
“You’re no monster,” I said. “You’re only human.”
“I thought that . . . in the end, he’d choose love,” she whispered. “Our love. But now she’s hurt so bad. It could take her months, years, to recover. He’ll never leave her like that. He couldn’t do it to his children.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“And neither could I.”
“What will you do?”
She shook her head helplessly. “All I know is that I can’t stay here. I can give him up, but not if I stay here.”
She began to cry and her muffled sobs tore at my heart.
I felt movement at the end of the couch, then Lashanda was there between us on the sofa bed. She patted Cyl’s cheek tenderly.
“Don’t cry, Miss Cyl. It’ll soon be morning.”
CHAPTER | 17
Is it at all wonderful that, after the strain was over and all danger gone, reason should finally be unseated and men and women break into the unmeaning gayety of the maniac?
We awoke on Friday morning to sunshine, dead still mugginess and the sound of chain saws and tractors. Trees were down all around the house. We’d had so much rain these last few weeks and the ground was so saturated that roots had pulled right out of the earth in Fran’s high sustained winds. The children were already outdoors and Cyl and I got a cup of coffee and went out to survey the damage more closely. Lashanda immediately ran to greet us.
Mother’s magnolias still stood tall and proud, although one had been skinned the full length of its trunk when a neighboring pine fell over.
“We’ll prune it up. See if we can save it,” said my brother Seth, giving me a sweaty morning hug.
His mother, Daddy’s first wife, hadn’t found the time to worry about landscaping, so it was my mother who planted azaleas and dogwoods and magnolias with the help of her stepsons who came to love her as their own. Seth could remember the first year the magnolias bloomed and how their fragrance drifted through the bedroom windows at night, bewitching their dreams.
He, Robert and Haywood were there to help Daddy clear the drive so we could get in and out. The tree across the porch looked awful, but the actual damage was minimal and would have to wait in line since there was worse to be taken care of on the farm.
Reese’s place was the hardest hit. Two sixty-foot pines had crashed down on the trailer he was renting from Seth and everything he owned was either smashed or waterlogged. Seth had insurance on the trailer itself, but Reese had nothing on the contents. “First my truck, now my trailer,” he said gloomily.
He’d already been over to the wreckage this morning and the back of his pickup was loaded with wet clothes, tapes and CDs, and other odds and ends that were salvageable. Daddy’d told him to come stay at the homeplace till he could figure out what he wanted to do.
Andrew and April were hard hit, too. A huge oak had taken out the whole northwest side of their house, shearing off the kitchen and dining room wall.
“You know April, though,” said Seth with a grin. “She’s already talking about how she’s been wanting to get more light into that part of the house and now the insurance money will help her do it.”
(April moves walls in that house like other women move furniture.)
In addition to Reese’s trailer, Seth was mourning four mature pecans. Haywood said he had nineteen trees down in his yard, but none of them hit the house. Robert hadn’t counted his downed trees, “but the yard’s full of ’em,” and they said that the farm’s biggest potato house had lost three sheets of tin off the roof.
(“I’ve heard of being three sheets in the wind,” Haywood chuckled, “but I didn’t know they was talking about tin sheets.”)
Other than a little water damage, most of the other houses on the farm, including my own, were pretty much unscathed.
The roads were blocked all around, they said, but neighbors were out, working on getting at least one lane cleared.
Power was still off and phones were out over most of the county. Even cell phones were spotty, depending on which company you were with. Dwight had already used his car radio to send word to Ralph Freeman at the hospital that Stan and Lashanda were fine, and word had come back that Ralph would try to get home to Cotton
