The Baby Sister I Prayed Forty Years For
I was carrying an empty casserole dish across the gravel behind the fellowship hall at Alder Grove First Baptist when somebody said a name I had not heard in sixty years.
“Nonie?”
It was the third Sunday of September. Service had let out at ten past eleven and the lot was full of after-church business: Wanda Bartlett hollering at her grandson to put his shoes back on, the Hendersons’ minivan idling with the sliding door open, a round-baler grinding along the highway past the ball diamond. I had my purse on one arm and the dish against my hip. Arlis was across the lot at the pickup, loading folding chairs into the bed for the Tuesday quilting group, humming the way he does when he lifts.
Nobody calls me Nonie. Not Arlis, not our daughter, not one living soul in Alder Grove, Arkansas. The last person who said it was two years old and could not get her mouth around Noreen. She got as far as Nonie and stayed there.
I turned around slowly. Part of me already knew better than to hurry.
A woman about my own age stood beside a gray Mercury, both hands folded over the clasp of her purse. Silver hair cut short. A good wool coat, buttoned to the throat though the day was mild. Her eyes were red around the edges, the way a person’s get when she has been crying in a car for a while and then washed her face with a wet napkin and come out anyway.
I did not know her. I looked at her the way you go through a drawer for a key, and she was nobody I had ever met.
“Noreen Whitlow?” she said. Her voice shook on the last syllable. “Noreen Tackett, once?”
My knees went soft. I put a palm on the fender of the car beside me.
Nobody has said Tackett to me since the spring of 1976, when I stood in the front of this same church in a borrowed dress and became a Whitlow.
“I’m sorry to come at you like this,” the woman said. “I wasn’t sure you’d open your door to a stranger. I thought it might be easier if you were standing with your own people.”
Behind me a folding chair was set down in the bed of a truck. Not dropped. Set down, carefully. Arlis had seen my face from forty feet away. He did not come closer. Fifty years married, and he still knows when a woman needs room around her.
“Who are you?” I said.
“My name is Fern,” she said. “That won’t mean anything yet.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the Mercury. The back window on the passenger side was down two inches. Someone sat back there in the shade. All I could make out was one pale hand pressed flat against the glass.
“Somebody asked me to come over first,” Fern said, very gently.
A round-baler was still grinding along the highway, and I remember thinking it was the wrong sound for this.
The back door handle clicked.
I should tell you how I came to be standing in that lot, because nobody can know what a name like Nonie weighs unless she knows where it was carried.
In October of 1967 my mother died at the state sanatorium in Booneville, of the lung sickness that had taken half the hollow in her mother’s day and a good deal of it in hers. Her name was Velma. She had a laugh like a screen door and she sang alto in this very church. She was thirty-six.