Chapter 1

Linda’s mother walked by the library and tapped on the window.

“Your crazy mother wants you,” one of the students yelled.

Linda pretended she didn’t hear the student and didn’t see her mother. Her mother tapped again.

All of the students sitting around her laughed.

Linda picked up her books and moved. Her mother walked away.

“I tapped on the window, didn’t you see me?” her mother asked that evening when they were cleaning up after supper.

“Sorry,” Linda said. “I didn’t recognize you.”

Linda’s comment nagged at Helen all night long. She couldn’t sleep. At 2 a.m. she got up, careful not to wake her husband, Richard, and walked from one room in the house to another, looking for some clue as to why her daughter didn’t recognize her. She felt lost. Perhaps there was a door ajar she had never noticed before, or a window she had carelessly left opened where her true spirit might have accidentally tumbled out.

Not finding anything, Helen carefully tiptoed down the hallway to Linda’s room and opened the door to see if her daughter was safe in bed and sleeping. Helen also checked to see if Tommy had come home. She was not surprised to discover he hadn’t. She went downstairs.

Except for the soft shuffle of her bare feet against the cold wooden floors, the house was quiet. Dead quiet. She had an urge to run outside and smoke a cigarette, as though holding something dangerous like a cigarette in her hand, lighting it, and drawing the sharp smoke into her lungs would magically overpower Linda’s niggling comment. Why didn’t her daughter recognize her? What had happened to her children? What had happened to her life?

She had found a pack of cigarettes in Tommy’s jacket pocket weeks ago, but never said anything to either Tommy or to Richard about finding them. Perhaps if Tommy were home, the two of them could go outside to share a cigarette and look at the stars together and talk. It had been a long time since she and Tommy had really talked to each other.

Lacking a cigarette, she went into the kitchen and lit matches, one after another, striking them against the box. Once lit, she threw the matches into the sink to watch them burn for a brief moment before going out. Each time she struck a new match, she marveled at how quickly the hot flare of sulfur filled the room then just as quickly faded as though the fire and the match had never found each other at all.

Helen fiddled with the spent matches in the sink, straightening them into a neat row like a garden fence. After she’d lit eleven matches she slid the cover off the “Strike Anywhere” box and counted how many were left. There were easily a hundred or more. Enough matches to stand there all night long, watching them burn. Fire and brimstone, sulfur and smoke: this is the smell of everything feeling so wrong and crazy your own daughter doesn’t even recognize you when you tap on a window. This is hell.

She pulled a twelfth match from the box and struck it. Just as the fire ignited, she heard Tommy’s car creep up the gravel driveway. She tossed the lit match into the sink and turned on the water. Scooping up the spent wet matches she threw them into the trash, pushing them to the bottom of the can. Scurrying up the stairs as quietly and quickly as she could, she disappeared into her room and closed the door. She took a slow deep breath trying to calm the pounding of her heart.

She heard Tommy open the refrigerator looking for something to eat. A minute later she heard him walk up the stairs to the bathroom, go to his room and shut the door. When he was in the bathroom she heard the toilet flush but didn’t hear him wash hishands or brush his teeth.

She sat on the edge of their bed for a long time listening, waiting to be sure Tommy had fallen asleep before she allowed herself to slip her cold feet under the covers and close her eyes. Luckily, Tommy’s clumsy drunken steps up the stairs hadn’t awoken either Linda or Richard.

Helen lay in bed a long time before she finally fell back to sleep. The next morning she waited until Richard got out of bed and dressed before she stirred. After she heard Richard go downstairs for breakfast and Linda finish showering in the bathroom, she slipped out of bed and walked down the hall.

Once safely inside the bathroom, she closed and locked the door. She opened the top drawer of the vanity and rummaged through the hair rollers, bobby pins and lipstick tubes until she found the pearl-handled straight razor that had once been her father-in-law’s and now belonged to Tommy.

Pulling the long sharp razor from its leather case, she opened it and held the blade in her right hand between her thumb and first finger the way her father-in-law had taught her to do when he could no longer shave himself and she had to shave him. The weight of the pearl handle of the blade balanced comfortably against her little finger and felt good. She put the razor down, ran water into the sink, and wet her hair. For the first time in a long time she felt sure of herself and what she now wanted to do.

Helen picked up a long lock of her shoulder-length auburn hair and twirled it in her fingers until it was pulled like a tight piece of rope anchored to her head. She picked up the razor. Laying the sharp blade against it, about one inch from her scalp, she pushed firmly until the blade cut through the twisted hair in one clean movement.

Once the first clean cut was made she proceeded with her handiwork, twisting, pulling and cutting as she moved from the front of her hair to the back. She worked quickly across the top of her head and down around her face by her right ear movingblindly over and around the nape of her neck to her left ear.

Her chest tightened. To keep herself from panicking, she started to hum that stupid song about God having the whole world in His hands. Tears streamed down her face. She couldn’t remember the last time Richard held her.

She was tired of waiting for God to make her life better.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand and leaned close to the mirror. She turned her head from side to side to look at her profile and her new short hair. She brushed her opened hand along the short curls around her face. When she found a long piece of hair by her left ear she twisted it in her fingers and cut it. Once she was satisfied she had found every stray bit of hair, she wiped the damp blade on a hand towel, flipped the razor closed, slipped it into its case and put it back into the drawer.

Pulling a length of toilet paper from the roll, she wet it in order to wipe up the pieces of hair that had fallen into the sink. She pushed the tissue and all the hair she’d cut into the bottom of the trashcan in an attempt to hide what she had done.

“You look good,” she said to her reflection. “It’s not your fault Tommy came home drunk again. You are a good mother…you have always been a good mother…you are not like your mother. You never left them.”

Taking a fresh towel from the stack under the bathroom sink she rubbed her hair until it was dry. She shook her head and ran her fingers through her short curls.

For the moment, her fresh short hair erased her feelings of anxiety about Tommy and Linda. For the moment, none of that mattered. She felt good about herself, and she thought she looked good.

She reached into the drawer for a tube of lipstick and quickly drew a streak of color on her lips. Calypso Crush: a pinkish coral bordering on bold. Smoothing the color by pressing her lips together, she took another piece of toilet paper, blotted, threw the tissue into the trash and applied a second coat, careful to bring the color all the way to the edges of her mouth. Pressing her lips together to blend the lipstick, she picked up the blood red garnet earrings she had taken off last night before she went to bed and slipped them back into her ears. She forced a smile.

Richard had brought the earrings to her from Italy when he came home from The War. She loved them and wore them everyday as though they were the only part of her soul she was willing to share with the world.

Her wedding ring, a thin gold band set with five tiny diamonds, was in a box in the top drawer of her dresser. It was too big. It had always been too big and would slip off her finger whenever she washed dishes or worked in the garden. It made Richard angry that she didn’t wear her wedding ring.

Helen heard Richard’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. She looked at her watch. It was getting late. She could hear Linda getting dressed in her room. Helen hadn’t heard a peep from Tommy.

“Linda,” she called out, taking one more look in the mirror at her handiwork before she opened the door. “Would you wake Tommy? We need to get going.”

Richard hit the top stair just as Helen opened the bathroom door.

“You cut your hair,” Richard said.

“Didn’t have time to go into town last week to get it done.”

“Guess it wouldn’t do any good to say I liked it long.”

“Let’s not be late for church,” Helen said, turning to go into the bedroom to finish getting dressed.

Linda could hear her parents talking in the hallway. She knew by the tone of the conversation it was going to be a quiet ride to church this morning and she had better light a fire under Tommy so the situation wouldn’t escalate.

She knocked once, then swung the door of Tommy’s room wide open and flipped on the bright ceiling light. Tommy’s long lanky body rolled lazily to one side of the bed. He dragged the covers over his head as he did. The room was sour with the smell of sweaty clothes and liquor. Linda pulled the door shut behind her and stepped closer.

“Tommy,” she said, shaking his shoulder. “Get up.”

“You should ’a come with us last night,” he smiled, turning his now uncovered head in her direction. He smelled of cigarette smoke. His pale blue eyes were ever so slightly bloodshot from drinking. His breath was stale and warm with sleep.

“Good idea, glad I didn’t, now get up before someone finds out.”

“Finds out what?”

“That you’ve been drinking.”

“What time?”

“Time.”

“What a time we had last night.”

“If I were you, I’d shower twice, just to be sure to get the smell out.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.”

“Larry and the guys, we were baaaad,” he said, laughing. “If coach ever caught us that drunk there’d be no high school baseball team.”

“I bet,” Linda said, snatching the covers off him. “Now get up before there’s a fight about being late for church. The two of them are already at each other.”

 

Lillian's Garden - When a brazen new preacher comes to town, one family finds their devils in the hidden silences of their lives.

978-1-78099-830-5 (Paperback) £10.99 $18.95

978-1-78099-829-9 (eBook) £2.99 $3.99

Just when Helen thinks she can take charge of her life, a devil hunting itinerant preacher upsets the delicate balance she has managed in a family locked in secrets and headed for trouble. When Helen breaks down, her husband, Richard, angry and ashamed, commits her to a mental institution without telling their children where their mother has gone. Lillian's Garden is a novel about failure and finding redemption through learning how to ask for what you want and accepting what love has given you.

...gorgeously rich and sensuous writing about home and garden, family and loss Peggy Payne, Author of Cobalt Blue

Guilt and redemption play a large role in all of our lives, and seldom has that story been better told D.E. Johnson, Author of Detroit Breakdown

Carrie Knowles was born in Detroit and raised in Wayne, Michigan.  Carrie's non-fiction book, The Last Childhood: A Family Story of Alzheimer's, Three Rivers Press 2000, has been noted as one of the top 100 books written about Alzheimer's.

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