Stay Sweet(87)

“She said, Tiggy, I felt free.” Tiggy shakes her head wistfully. “I suppose it doesn’t matter what people thought of her. Molly certainly didn’t care. It’s just my pride in her, getting the better of me.” She looks down and touches her ice cream gently with her spoon. “Did you know she traveled the world? She took me on my first trip to New York. It was after my second son was born. All expenses paid, on her dime. For a week. We visited all the museums and sights. We went to the top of the Empire State Building. We saw Once Upon a Mattress on Broadway, and I got my Playbill signed by Carol Burnett about a month before she was nominated for the Tony. It got thrown out somewhere along the line, probably by one of my kids. But that was one of the best weeks in my life.”

“Wow.”

“And before I moved into the home, I was in Florida, and she came and stayed with me every winter.”

“We thought she was alone up at the house all those winters, mourning him,” Amelia admits, almost embarrassed.

Amelia feels dizzy, getting these glimpses of Molly’s life. For so long, she’s been immersed in Molly’s past. And that past is what defined what people thought of her.

Tiggy doesn’t appear at all surprised. “She didn’t care that people pitied her or thought Wayne was some hero.” Tiggy groans. “I just wish more people knew that. Molly lived exactly the life she wanted.”

Tiggy takes her last spoonful of ice cream and then gets up. Amelia helps her to the stand door, where Tiggy pauses, holding up a finger to tell the aides lingering at the picnic table that she’ll be a minute. “You said you forgot to wear the Head Girl pin today. But you do still have it, right?”

“Yes. Right here, actually.” Amelia fetches it from the desk drawer. She thinks of Cate when she holds it in her hands.

“Make sure you don’t lose track of that. It’s a real diamond in there, you know. Her engagement ring.”

Amelia reels as Tiggy hobbles over to the picnic table and, with the aides’ help, climbs back into the van.

Amelia heads up to the house.

Grady’s not there. She goes right inside and heads for Molly’s bedroom—not the childhood one, but the one Molly stayed in most recently, down the hall from the kitchen—the one where Grady looked on that first day for the recipes.

She has never gone into this room before.

Inside, there are pictures of Molly and Tiggy on a beach in what must be Florida, taken maybe twenty years ago, from the style of their bathing suits. Another of them at an outdoor café, stucco in Easter egg colors: Miami. Molly’s bookshelves are lined with travel books, books about places she’s been. Inside the travel books are receipts—for meals, for souvenirs, for hotel rooms.

It seems there were two Mollys: one before Wayne went off to war and one after.

Amelia takes the diary out of her tote bag and flips to the final entry, the announcement in the newspaper for Wayne’s memorial service.

The opposite blank page, she now realizes, has a ghostly impression of writing on it from someone pressing through the page before. Amelia sees that several sheets have been carefully torn out.

Using a pencil, she rubs the tip over the grooves and a missing entry appears.

December 29, 1945

Yesterday, sweet Mrs. Duncan broke into sobs when I passed her on my way out of Blauner’s. She melted into me when I hugged her, her head resting against my shoulder, her tears dampening my coat. What a tragedy, to have lost the barn. She promised to pray for my family, and especially for me and for Wayne, along with the other lost young men, and for the countless other girls in the same situation, forced to pick up the pieces of our shattered dreams and find something to keep living for.

When she said that last bit, I did well up out of sheer gratefulness that I escaped that fate. What would my life have been if I hadn’t figured out what I did? And just in the nick of time, too?

I played the part. I solemnly thanked her, and my mother thanked her too.

I can never tell Mother the truth. Now she thanks God for my ice cream. Without our dairy, my brothers will need to find work elsewhere and it will be left to me to care for Mother and Daddy.

This will be my life through winter, and I am resigned to it. Grieving someone lost to me. In some ways, I can do it honestly. I do miss Wayne. Or the man I hoped he was.

In spring, I can begin to smile again in public, delicately, modestly.

And then, next summer, I will bloom.

Molly didn’t stop living when she lost Wayne.

She started.

Ice cream didn’t save her.

Molly saved herself.

Everyone thought the stand was a way for Molly to hold on to Wayne, a way to avoid moving on with her life. But it was just the opposite. It wasn’t a consolation prize, a thing she settled for.

It gave her exactly what she’d wanted.

Amelia had hoped Grady would save the stand as desperately as she’d hoped Cate would be picked to be Head Girl. Why? Because she didn’t think she could do either on her own, couldn’t rise to those challenges, despite the fact that she desperately wanted to.

But maybe the only things stopping her were the limits she put on herself.

Amelia goes upstairs and returns the diary to its place under the mattress on Molly’s childhood bed. Now she understands why Molly left this room. Not for the reasons Amelia thought, but because the room belonged to the old Molly.