A Million Little Lies Read online

  “Well, I guess I could take time for a quick bite.”

  “There’s no hurry; sit down and relax.” Ida filled a mug with coffee and handed it to Suzanna. “Rushing through meals is what gives people indigestion. I know, because your granddaddy suffered with it for years. Every time I saw him, he was chewing on one of those antacid tablets. Finally, I laid down the law and told him there’d be no more hurrying dinner, and in no time at all he stopped needing those tablets.”

  Suzanna pulled a chair out and sat. “I’ve not been bothered with indigestion.”

  “That’s because you’re still young. But start scarfing down meals now, and sooner or later it will catch up with you.” Ida set the biscuits on the table, then lowered herself into the chair next to Annie.

  “Grandma, are we still gonna make cookies this afternoon?” she asked.

  “Yes, dear, but first we’ll clean out the closet in your mama’s room so she’ll have a place for her clothes.”

  “Don’t bother about me,” Suzanna said. “I didn’t bring that much.”

  “Didn’t you say you had luggage?”

  “Just the suitcase I brought back from the bus station.”

  “Oh. Well, then, we can start in Annie’s room. That used to be my sewing room, and the closet is stuffed full of remnants, buttons, bits of trim…”

  As Ida rambled on about how she once loved to sew but had gotten away from it over the last few years, Suzanna noticed the way she named things. Annie’s room, Darla Jean’s closet, the bed in your mama’s room. It had such a sound of permanence that she had to remind herself they were leaving in two days, three at the most.

  Knowing those few days would fly by all too quickly, Suzanna tried to hurry things along but it was impossible. Following the bacon and eggs, Ida downed several cups of coffee and then insisted Suzanna try a biscuit with her homemade peach jam. With one thing and another, it was after ten when they finally trudged upstairs and began digging through the closet. Before a single shelf had been cleared, Ida began rummaging through a box of scraps, suggesting they were the perfect size for making some doll dresses.

  Turning to Annie, she said, “You have a doll, don’t you?”

  Annie shook her head. “Un-uh, just Bobo.”

  “Bobo’s a dog. I mean a doll that’s like a baby or a little girl.”

  Annie shook her head again.

  Squatted down inside the closet, Suzanna pulled a paper bag filled with buttons from the back of the bottom shelf. “Do you have a box for buttons?”

  Ignoring Suzanna, Ida focused on Annie. “No doll at all? None?”

  “Earl said I’m too big for dolls.”

  “Earl? Who’s Earl?”

  Hearing the name, Suzanna cringed. She backed out of the closet and glared at Annie.

  “Earl’s the reason we left Florida,” she said. “I moved in with him after my daddy—”

  Hit with the realization that as Darla Jean her daddy was supposed to be William’s son Tommy, she stopped smack in the middle of the sentence, buried her face in her hands, and turned away.

  “I’m sorry. So sorry. I just can’t…”

  Her voice was thick and wobbly, filled with the weight of tears that threatened to break free. Without turning to face Ida, she said, “We can’t stay here, we’ve got to—”

  Before Suzanna could finish, Ida pulled her into a hug. “You’re not going anywhere. Don’t you think I already know how terrible Tommy was? He turned his back on his own daddy, and I’ll bet he did the same to you. He was as mean a man as ever lived.”

  “No, you don’t understand—”

  “I understand more than you might think. But what’s done is done. Over with. History. We’re never going to talk about this Earl or your daddy again. Not ever. Not you. Not me. As far as I’m concerned, the past is dead and buried.”

  “But there’s more, I’m not—”

  “Hush. There’s nothing else to talk about. Leave it be. The important thing is that you’re here now, and that’s all that counts.”

  Feeling the warmth of Ida’s arms, Suzanna knew she wanted to stay. She wanted it for Annie and for herself. It had been years since she’d put her head on someone’s shoulder and allowed the tears to come, but she did it now. Shamelessly, the way she’d done when her mama was still alive. As they stood there, one woman comforting another, no words were necessary. The only sound was the soft snuffle of her sobs.

  Annie waited for a while then cautiously asked, “Why is Mama crying?”

  Ida looked down with a smile. “Because she’s happy that you’re both going to be staying here with me for a good long time.”

  “I’m happy too, but I’m not crying.”

  “Only grown-ups cry when they’re happy.”

  Ida laughed, then Suzanna pushed back the last of her tears and laughed with her.

  ——————

  THAT NIGHT WHEN SUZANNA TUCKED Annie into bed, she sat beside her and told the biggest lie of her life. A lie she swore was truth.

  “You really are Annie Parker,” she said. “Duff was Earl’s name, and he wanted us to use it while we were living with him.”

  “But, Mama, he never called you Darla Jean, how come?”

  Suzanna forced a thin splintery laugh. “You know how I sometimes call you nicknames like Pumpkin or Sweet Potato?”

  Annie nodded.

  “Well, Suzanna was Earl’s nickname for me.”

  Making up the story as she went along, Suzanna told of an old guitar Earl had long before Annie was born.

  “He didn’t know how to play a lot of songs, but he knew this one called Oh Susanna, so he used to play it all the time and sing along. He said I was his Suzanna.”

  “I never heard—”

  “It was before you were born. He sold that guitar when you were just a baby, so you couldn’t possibly remember. And now that we’re not living with Earl anymore, you’re big enough to understand the truth, so I thought you should know.”

  “Can you sing it for me, Mama?”

  Suzanna leaned over, kissed Annie’s cheek, and tucked the lightweight blanket around her shoulders. “Okay, just this one time, but then like Grandma said, you’re never to talk of it again. Now that we’re here I’m going back to using Darla Jean, my real name, and you are Annie Parker, period. No questions asked. Nothing more to discuss. Get it?”

  Annie gave a sleepy nod. “Sing the song, Mama.”

  Before Suzanna finished the first verse, Annie was fast asleep.

  That night Suzanna tossed and turned for hours, thinking of how she’d lied to her own child, lied about the very truth of who she was. As despicable as that might be, there’d been no alternative. If she and Annie were to live a life of lies, then Suzanna alone had to carry the burden of guilt.

  Annie could never know of it. She would grow up believing she was a true Parker. She would be free to both give and take Ida’s love. She could walk tall and be proud of who she was, and that above all else was what Suzanna wanted for her daughter.

  A sliver of light was edging its way onto the horizon when Suzanna finally climbed from the bed and knelt beside it.

  “Please, God,” she prayed. “Let me do this one thing for my daughter. Up until now, Annie’s life has been filled with anger and resentment and I have stood aside, unable to make a change. Lord, let me no longer be powerless. Let me give her a grandmother to love and a life unlike the one I knew. I ask nothing for myself, Lord, only that You allow me to do this one thing for my child.”

  Suzanna

  Becoming Darla Jean

  DAYS TURNED INTO WEEKS, AND they never finished cleaning out a single closet. Suzanna pruned the hydrangeas, cut the grass, and painted the back porch while Ida sat at the sewing machine making dresses for Annie’s new doll.

  At first, Suzanna lived in constant fear of being discovered. She jumped when the telephone rang, peeked from behind the curtains before answering a knock on the door, and looked over her shoulder as she mo
ved through the aisles of Piggly Wiggly. When the fear swelled to the size of a melon and felt as though it would cause her chest to split open, she went in search of something that needed to be done. In time that busyness pushed the fear back. Although it remained a part of her, it ceased to be the whole of who she was.

  The change was something she neither saw nor felt. As the days grew longer and the evenings warmer, little pieces of Suzanna began to disappear and were replaced by pieces of Darla Jean. Since there was little to go by, she crafted the image as she went. Hours were spent browsing through the old family album, lingering over the photos of Tommy and Caroline, searching for similarities between them and her parents.

  With her daddy, it was the slicked-back hair and the sneer, the right edge of his lip hiked up as if he were about to lay into someone. But Caroline was far more difficult; she had the soft blond curls Suzanna remembered her own mama having, but it had been over fifteen years and the memory of her mama’s features had faded. Sometimes she could find the edge of a smile or the sound of her laughter, but that was it. Without realizing it, Suzanna had begun to remake herself into the woman who was Caroline’s daughter.

  Mornings when they sat at the breakfast table, Ida would tell of the grandfather Suzanna had never known, of how he so often spoke of her, wondering where she was and if she was happy. On a day that was drizzling rain and not well-suited for sitting on the porch or running errands, they stayed at the kitchen table sipping a third cup of coffee.

  “Did you know that you’re your granddaddy’s namesake?” Ida asked.

  Suzanna shook her head. “I don’t see how.”

  “Bill’s middle name was Gene, spelled with a G, not a J.” Ida hesitated a moment, gave a soulful sigh, then added, “It was one of the few nice things Tommy did for his daddy; that was before he found out we were planning to be married.”

  She went on to tell of how, early on, William had plans to build a playhouse in the back yard and buy a canopied bed so that as soon as his Darling Jean was out of the crib, she’d have her own room at the house.

  “Darling Jean, that’s what he called you, and every time he did it Tommy got madder than a wet hen. By then he’d grown quite testy with his daddy; if it wasn’t one thing, then it was another. Bill had a million lovable qualities, but Tommy apparently didn’t inherit a single one of them. Such a shame. If he’d have been more like his daddy, we would have all had a happier life.”

  Hearing that, Suzanna felt Darla Jean’s anger rise up.

  “Isn’t that the God’s honest truth!” she said, echoing Ida’s regret.

  She never tired of listening to Ida’s stories, and it seemed Ida never tired of telling them. Later that day when she told of how William had dearly loved her Bananas Foster, Suzanna suggested they make a batch right then and there.

  “Granddaddy would have loved this,” she said, sensing the presence of her legendary grandfather as she set the dishes on the table.

  Afterward, as they sat licking the last of the buttery rum sauce from their spoons, Ida looked across at Suzanna and Annie.

  “This was a wonderful idea,” she said and smiled. “Having you girls here is like having a piece of your granddaddy to hold onto.”

  With each story, each hug, each shared cup of coffee, Suzanna grew fonder of Ida. Late at night, when the house was quiet and everyone else asleep, she would lie awake, reliving the stories of that day, imagining herself growing up in that house, loved and respected, the kind of girl Bobby Doherty would have married. The kind of girl who would never in a thousand years have moved in with a man like Earl Fagan.

  In those few short months, a new kind of happiness crept into the house. Rooms that had been darkened for nearly a year suddenly had the windows flung open and were flooded with sunlight, and the stillness that followed William’s death was replaced by the sound of barks and giggles as Annie and Scout ran from room to room. Suzanna began singing as she went about her tasks, and instead of fretting about the closets that needed to be emptied out or the baseboard that needed repairs Ida sewed doll clothes. She also made Annie a gingham apron with her initial appliqued on the pocket.

  “Now you can help me make cookies,” she said, and that’s what they did.

  Working side by side, the two of them mixed, measured, and baked a fresh batch of cookies every day. At first Suzanna thought such an overabundance of sweets would spoil Annie’s appetite, but it never happened. At suppertime, she cleaned her plate. Before long her bony little arms and legs grew plumper, and her cheeks took on a rosy glow.

  That summer as Annie ran barefoot across the back yard, ducking in and out of the sprinklers and chasing after Scout, Suzanna sat in the lounge chair listening to Ida’s stories and feeling happier than she could have ever imagined possible.

  In the first week of September, after Ida set a pot of yellow chrysanthemums on the front porch and a handful of leaves had begun changing color, Annie asked if she could take Scout for his evening walk.

  “That would lovely,” Ida said, “but put your shoes on first so your feet don’t get scraped on the cement.”

  Annie wrinkled her nose. “Do I have to? They hurt.”

  “What hurts? Your shoes?”

  Annie nodded. “They squish my toes, see?” She pointed to a red spot on her big toe.

  Ida laughed. “Well, seeing as how you’ve grown, I’d say it’s time for some new shoes. You’ll need them before school starts.”

  At the mention of school, Suzanna felt a twinge of apprehension slither down her spine, but before she had time to give it much consideration Ida suggested they get Annie registered the next morning.

  “We’ll stop by the school then drive over to Main Street to shop. She could use a few new dresses and some sturdy shoes.” Raising her hand with the palm facing Suzanna, she warned, “Before you say anything, I want you to know this is my treat. A grandmother is entitled to spoil her great-granddaughter if she wants.”

  Suzanna started to protest, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was picturing the birth certificate still stuffed in the side pocket of the suitcase: “Annie Duff” written in the scrawled hand of Dr. Melrose. Duff. She’d hoped to never see the name again, but she’d forgotten about the birth certificate.

  Early on, when she was still Suzanna, she’d plotted and schemed, sweeping away any last remaining traces of the name Duff. She’d made Annie a Parker, merged Tommy and her daddy into the same ill-tempered person, and etched the word “grandma” on the inside of her heart, but she’d neglected this one thing.

  Now, Suzanna couldn’t dismiss the thought of what was to come. No matter how hard she tried to ignore the problem, her thoughts kept jumping back to that first day when Ida told Annie, We’re Parkers, all three of us. Family. But Annie wasn’t a Parker, and neither was she.

  Not a Parker.

  Not even a Parker whose name had been changed by marriage. She was a fraud, a phony, a con artist about to be found out. Before she tucked Annie into bed, the happiness she’d felt for weeks was gone. Her heart was heavy as a sack of stones and devoid of hope.

  That night Suzanna pulled her suitcase from beneath the bed and took out Annie’s birth certificate, hoping against hope that the ink was blurred or the paper too worn to be legible, but neither was true. Sitting at the tiny desk in her room, she held the paper one way and then the other, squinting at it, trying to see if there wasn’t some way the name Duff could be mistaken for Parker. Minutes ticked by and as she came to realize the impossibility of it, her eyes filled and streams of tears began to roll down her cheeks. The future she’d tried so hard to believe in was one she had no right to. Tomorrow it would be gone. Vanished, just like all the other hopes and dreams she’d nurtured. Just like Bobby Doherty. She would be forced to leave here, and Annie would suffer the shame of her lies.

  A single tear plopped onto the birth certificate, and Suzanna grabbed a tissue to blot it away. As she did so, the first F in Duff smudged; it was just the tiniest bit, barely no
ticeable, but enough to brighten her hopes. Searching through the desk, she found two blue ink ballpoint pens and one black one, similar to the one Dr. Melrose had used when he wrote Annie’s name on the birth certificate.

  The clock ticked off one hour, then two, then three as she sat there trying to replicate his handwriting, heavy in some areas, lighter in others, letters not fully formed and sliding into one another. She practiced writing Annie Duff over and over again, until she at last had it perfect, then she added a tail onto the back of the D making it appear to be a P. Holding the paper out and scrutinizing it, she felt reasonably satisfied. Moving on, she closed the top of the u and made it look more like a small a, then she moistened the tip of her finger and ever so gently smudged the bottom half of the first f so that it was less readable. After adding a leg to the second f to make it appear more like a k, she finalized the process by sliding an illegible er onto the end of what had been Duff. She repeated this process fourteen times on the scratch pad, then when she deemed it almost believable, she made the same changes to Annie’s birth certificate.

  In the blank space where there’d been no father’s name, she wrote “Earl Duff.” If the worst that could happen happened and they challenged the forgery, she would say Dr. Melrose had mistakenly given Annie Earl’s last name and then tried to correct it. If they refused to accept the altered birth certificate, Suzanna had no idea what she would do. Leaving here, the thing she’d once thought imminent, now seemed unthinkable.

  The pale pink of morning was lighting the sky when she finally crawled into bed.

  A short while later, when she sat down at the breakfast table, Ida looked over and asked, “Are you feeling okay?”

  Knowing her eyes were rimmed with red, Suzanna gave a weary nod. “I’m just tired. Last night I had trouble falling asleep.” In a last-ditch effort to stave off the inevitable, she said, “Perhaps we should hold off on going to register Annie for school. We could do it next—”