The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

times a day. How to conjure up a dream when the only hope she had was the Saint, and the only hope he had was the bottle.

      Then, later, the cocaine. Demons clawed at that man’s back, demons she’d never even seen till the jobs got scarce and the music started going sour.

      “Someday we’re gonna live on easy street, baby.”

      It was uneasy street she remembered. That and the long journey that finally brought her back home.

      Now she was on another journey, only this time the road she was traveling was fixing to peter out. Already she could glimpse the end. She’d praise the Lord if she was all by herself, but she’s not…

      She looked over to see Queen staring at her.

      “What’re you thinking, Mama?”

      “I’m just tryin to remember that recipe for molasses cookies. I’d make some if I had me some good black-strop molasses and half the sense God give a billy goat.”

      Need makes liars of us all.

      Still, she smiled at her mama’s white lie. And that was a good thing. It was hard these days to find something to smile about, any little thing to take her mind off the future.

      For Betty Jewel time had become a pink damask rose, the petals dropping one by one, the fragrance fading till the sweet rich smell of living was only memory. Sometimes an urgency ripped through her like a tornado, and she’d go to the bathroom and stuff a rag in her mouth so Billie and Queen wouldn’t hear her scream.

      She eased out of her chair and walked over to the window. It was too dark to see the bus, let alone a stick-figure child sitting on the rooftop.

      “Maybe I ought to go out there and get her, Mama.”

      “Leave her be, chile. She’s gotta mourn.”

      Betty Jewel left the window, went to the chest freezer in the kitchen and got this week’s Bugle from its hiding place under the frozen peas. The last sentence leaped out at her. Loving heart required.

      There was no way on God’s green earth she’d let her child live with somebody who didn’t love her. If Queen went before Betty Jewel—God forbid—and Sudie couldn’t take Billie, she wasn’t going to die. Period. And she’d fight anybody who told her different.

      She slid the paper under the peas, then went back to sit down in the rocking chair. Queen was snoring with her mouth wide open. The sound of the clock on the TV came to Betty Jewel, magnified, and she shut her ears to the loud ticktock of time. Her breath sawed through her lungs, and she reached into her pocket for pain pills.

      “Lord, if you’re going to send me a miracle, you’d better hurry.”

      Four

      THE EMPTY ROOM YAWNED before Cassie, a graveyard filled with ghosts. There, underneath the window facing the east, was the spot where Joe had put the crib.

      “The first thing I want our baby to see is the morning sun.” He’d slipped his arms around Cassie and kissed her behind the ear where he knew it tickled and would make her giggle. “The second thing is my beautiful wife.”

      She’d lost their first child that night, lying in their bed in a puddle of blood while Joe cried.

      She’d been farther along with the second pregnancy, almost three months. Convinced they were having a boy, Joe had bought a tiny catcher’s mitt to put on the new walnut bookcase opposite the crib. Baseball, his first love. Then he’d added a harmonica. Music, his second love.

      Afterward, they’d toasted each other with Pinot Grigio, sitting on the patio surrounded by the fragrance from Cassie’s Gertrude Jekyll roses. He pulled a blues harp from his pocket and serenaded her with the Jerome Kern ballad he’d sung for her at their wedding—“All the Things You Are.”

      “You give me roses,” he said. “I give you music.”

      The next day while he was on a road trip with his baseball team, she painted a pink rose on his B-flat blues harp. She never got a chance to give it to him. By the time he returned, she was in the hospital fighting a losing battle to save their baby.

      When she got home, the harmonica with the rose was gone. She never knew what happened to it.

      The baby crib, the bookshelves, the miniature baseball mitt and every other hopeful item they’d purchased were up in the attic, consigned to gather dust after her third failed pregnancy. Was that when her relationship with Joe started gathering dust?

      Startled, Cassie wondered where in the world that thought had come from.

      “Cassie? Did you hear me?” Fay Dean, who had dragged her straight from the soda fountain to the Empty Room, was standing with her hands on her hips and a take-no-prisoners look in her eyes.

      “I was just remembering.”

      “Stop looking back. We’re going to fill this room with everything you love. By the time we finish, it will be your favorite retreat.”

      “I don’t know where to start.”

      “I do. Follow me.” Fay Dean whizzed past, marched into the living room and grabbed a rocking chair that Mike had given them as a wedding gift. It had belonged to Joe’s mother.

      “Wait a minute. I like the chair where it is.”

      “You’re going to like it better where I put it.”

      Fay Dean sailed out, a ship under full steam, leaving Cassie searching the bookshelves for the photographs she loved best: the one of Joe sitting in the boat on Moon Lake, a harmonica in his hand and his fishing pole in the water; Fay Dean and Cassie, arms linked, Fay Dean in her mortar board when she’d graduated from Vanderbilt School of Law and Cassie in her favorite pink hat, never mind that her mother always said pink clashed with her red hair; Cassie’s famous mother, Gwendolyn, and her beloved daddy, John, the year they’d gone to Paris to hear Gwendolyn sing at the opera. It had been the best year of Cassie’s childhood. Normally, she and her daddy were left behind while her mother trekked the world.

      All these years later—her mother and daddy both long gone—she still remembered wondering why she wasn’t good enough to go with her mother. If she’d had children, Cassie would never have left them behind.

      As she carried the photos into the Empty Room that no longer qualified for its title, she wondered what her child would have looked like. She’d wanted a girl with Joe’s easy smile.

      “Cassie? What’s wrong?”

      “She would have been ten years old.” The last baby Cassie had miscarried had been a little girl. “I wonder if she’d have been a tomboy or if she’d enjoy sitting on the bed with me reading poetry.”

      “Don’t do this to yourself.”

      “After I lost her, I dreamed she was standing in a field of Queen Anne’s Lace on Mike’s farm, and I was doing a watercolor of her.”

      “Cassie, if you want to talk about this, I’ll listen, but I really think you ought to focus on something else. Maybe you ought to take up painting again.”

      “Maybe Sean was right about making another appointment to see him.” Cassie looked at the pictures in her hand. “I don’t know where to put these.”

      “Leave it to me.”

      “Don’t I always, Napoleon the Second?”

      “Yeah, well, without me, you’d never get across the Rubicon.”

      “As I recall, neither did Napoleon.”

      Fay Dean had already swept from the room, a woman on a mission.

      Cassie set the rocking chair in motion, and Joe stared at her from the picture frame, his smile both comforting and heartbreaking. Had their marriage really been made of stars and fairy dust, or had goblins crept through the cracks?