* *
“Poor girl,” Odelia opined, tears glistening in her eyes. She glanced longingly at the door that connected the sisters’ sitting room to the suite she shared with Kent. Strangely, marriage had somehow enlarged Odelia. She was no less scatterbrained or flamboyant—indeed, she seemed rather more so, as Kent encouraged her shamelessly—yet, she had somehow grown more confident and knowing.
“Poor Brooks,” Hypatia said. “The last thing he needs, with Morgan now happily married, is a reminder of all he has lost.”
“This is true,” Magnolia admitted, “and yet, if we’ve learned anything over the years, we’ve learned that God has plans and reasons for what and whom He brings into this house.”
Her sisters murmured their agreement, nodding.
“Our first concern,” Magnolia went on, “must be Eva herself. Perhaps my fear that she is dying is unfounded, but her spiritual condition is not. She blatantly admitted her lack of faith.”
“Brooks originally stated that she would be staying only until her stitches could be removed,” Hypatia revealed, “so our time with her is limited, regardless of the true state of her health.”
“Then, there’s no time to lose,” Magnolia decided. “She won’t like it, but we need to get her to prayer meeting tomorrow night.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?” Hypatia asked, sounding tired. She tugged the collar of her navy blue silk robe closer about her throat. Magnolia noted idly that its white piping looked very like her skin, which seemed unusually pale tonight.
“Leave Eva to me,” Magnolia said, waving a hand. “Are you cold, sister?”
“This winter has seemed interminable,” Hypatia complained. “I’m off to my warm bed.” She heaved herself out of the armchair where she customarily sat for these late evening chats. The sisters routinely spoke and prayed together at the end of the day, and Magnolia was glad that hadn’t changed with Odelia’s marriage a couple years ago.
“Good night, dear,” Odelia said, uncurling from the corner of the sofa.
“Good night.”
“Kent thinks she needs a good multivitamin,” Odelia whispered as soon as the door closed behind their sister’s back.
Magnolia blinked. She hadn’t noticed that Hypatia needed anything, though perhaps she had seemed to suffer more from the cold this winter than in years past. Kent, being a pharmacist, would know about these things, though.
“Getting her the vitamins and getting her to take them are two different things,” Magnolia murmured. “Maybe we should speak to Brooks about it.”
“Hmm,” Odelia considered. “Perhaps so, though perhaps not just now.”
Magnolia smiled. “I suspect the right time will come.”
“It always does,” Odelia said with a giggle, hurrying toward her private suite and her waiting husband.
Magnolia sighed and shook her head. It had come for Odelia after fifty years, and the result seemed to be one long honeymoon. She prayed that Eva Russell’s time for joy would come before it was too late. Hers and dear Brooks’s.
She woke hungry. Nothing new in that. Eva rolled over, opening her eyes, and everything abruptly changed. The bed beneath her did not squeak and groan or smell of plastic. She was not locked, crammed, into the back of her funky old van. Instead, light and opulence flooded her senses. Memory rushed over her, beginning with the scrumptious doctor who had tended her the day before and ending with the wizened old gardening gnome who had delivered the pajamas that Eva currently wore. She thought of Magnolia pugnaciously standing up to her last night.
I blame your mother for your brain tumor. I blame her for your terrible taste in men. I could even blame her for your sister’s cancer. It’s often hereditary, after all...You blame God for the failures of His children and the problems of a fallen world...let Himself be crucified to pay the sin debt for the whole of humanity...and give that same humanity the free will to reject His sacrifice. I suspect your definition of cruel is simply not getting what you want when and how you want it.
Eva had to admit that she had a point. If people possessed free will, it didn’t seem quite fair to blame God for everything they did. And while Eva wasn’t completely sure what the “problems of a fallen world” meant, she’d never before thought of the crucifixion as payment for sin debt. She tried to square that with some of the things she’d heard her aunt say, but her stomach rumbled, so she quickly moved on. Throwing back the covers, she sat up and looked around her.
The stitches pulled on the back of her head and pain knocked on her skull, but the room didn’t tilt, so she threw her legs over the side of the bed and put her feet on the floor. After quickly dressing, she used a new toothbrush that she found in a drawer in the bathroom, then went out in search of a meal, leaving all but a single shawl behind. She met Magnolia, also dressed much as she had been the night before, on the landing at the head of the stairs.
“Good morning. Sleep well?”
“I did,” Eva answered, tying the shawl about her waist. “How about you, Penny Loafers?”
Magnolia lifted her eyebrows but answered sedately. “Always. Ready for breakfast?”
“Does a bear, uh, live in the woods?” And the doc said she had no internal monitor.
Magnolia blinked at her. “I would imagine so, yes.”
“Well, there you go, then.”
Blink, blink. “Ah. Hm. Let’s go down, then. I’ll show you the way to the sunroom where we breakfast.”
As they descended the broad staircase, which turned back on itself halfway down, Eva gazed upward at the ceiling. On second perusal, it did seem too ethereal for comic ducks.
“Maybe doves,” she murmured.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The ceiling.” She pointed upward. “Who painted it?”
“No one knows,” Magnolia told her. “The records were long since lost. It is a work of art, though. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s something, all right,” Eva muttered.
Still craning her neck to take it all in, she almost missed the bottom step and nearly pitched onto her face. Only Magnolia’s cry and Eva’s grasp on the curled banister saved her. Stumbling into the bottom post, Eva righted herself in the nick of time.
“Whoa!” she joked, swiping at her scarf. “Remind me not to go walking around looking up while my stomach’s empty and I have stitches in the back of my head.”
Magnolia set her pruned mouth and grasped Eva by the wrist, instructing, “This way.”
The old girl proved surprisingly strong as she towed Eva down one of
