Chapter 52
Impossibly, the Suffolk housekeeper arrives with a tray of afternoon tea and sandwiches and slides it onto the small coffee
table between us. Ned and Delta nod awkwardly in appreciation and inside I cringe. Usually we’d all sit in the sunroom on
a nice day like this, and surely the housekeeper thinks she’s beating them to the punch with her delivery.
“Thank you, Marcy,” Delta says. “Why don’t you take off early today?”
With the housekeeper on her way, Magnolia turns an icy but tired gaze at her friend.
“So you figured it out, huh?” Delta says to Magnolia. Her eyes have doubled in size and are misty.
“I have a good idea, but I need to hear you tell me.”
“It was me,” Delta says. “I was the one who told your parents about Theo and the baby. I thought I was doing the right thing.
You were so much better than him, Mags, so much better than a shotgun wedding and all those broken dreams.”
“I knew it,” Magnolia says. “He never went to my parents. It was my own mother and father who masterminded keeping us apart.”
“I guess so.” Delta stares into her lap.
“You were jealous of us, weren’t you?” Magnolia asks.
Delta sighs. “Sure, maybe a bit, but that’s not why I told them. You had so much potential. You could’ve married so much better.” She fans her hands out to gesture at her surroundings. “I wanted something like this for you, and I just knew you’d want the same once you got back to your right mind. I knew— thought , I guess—you’d thank me eventually.”
“I’ve always had my own money,” Magnolia says.
“You really think your folks would’ve kept you in the will if you chose Theo? Come on, Mags, you know they wouldn’t have accepted
him. And can I be brutally honest?”
“I’m not sure there’s a better day for it.” Magnolia lifts her hands and lets them drop back on the arms of her chair.
Delta leans in and lowers her voice. “I honestly didn’t think you’d keep the pregnancy.”
She shoots me a pinched smile that looks like sorry , and I look away.
Delta keeps going. “I thought your folks would take you to the clinic before school went back so we could go to the University
of South Carolina together and do everything else we planned.”
Ned darts his eyes between the two women and me like he’s playing catch-up. “Delta, honey, you really shouldn’t... Mack’s
sitting right—”
“Ned,” Magnolia cuts in. “Just so you’re up to speed—Theo Hartman? He’s Mack’s father. It seems Delta told on us to my parents,
who then turned around and chased him off and barred me from contact. They told me he’d changed his mind and taken off. Maybe
he did change his mind—both could be true. Or maybe they convinced him to change his mind. All three of them are dead now.”
Delta lets out a quiet sob. “I was too stupid to see what might happen. I thought they’d ground you and get you an appointment, and then life would go on. But then it went so differently. Your folks made things worse when I thought they’d help.”
Ned offers a crisp handkerchief to his wife, then says, “Theo and I were something of pals there by the end, and he was never
anything but an upstanding guy. What did your folks tell you about Theo, Magnolia?” His eyes pinch with sadness.
Magnolia’s mouth begins to shake, but she pulls in a determined breath. “My parents said Theo had approached them and told
them everything—about the relationship, the pregnancy, our plan to keep the baby together—and that he wanted out. They said
he wanted nothing to do with me or the child— Mack— that it was all too much for a kid like him, without a way to support us.” She turns to me, takes my hand, and squeezes. “That
Theo wanted a career and to better his circumstances, and he couldn’t be a father at the time. They said he didn’t want to
tell me himself in case I tried to change his mind.”
Delta’s voice is shaky. “And once I started it in motion, I couldn’t see a way out. If I told you the truth, and you ran off
to Theo, your parents would’ve disowned you. You would have been homeless and broke, and they wouldn’t have cared to save
you unless you cut Theo off. Somehow it seemed like the best way to keep you from getting hurt again. Not to mention, I couldn’t
be sure he wasn’t after your money, considering your status,” Delta says. “I didn’t trust him with you, Mags.”
“ You didn’t want to play the roommate shuffle everyone else does for college—or stick around here and go to junior college,” Magnolia
barks back. “So instead of letting your best friend do things her own way and have a father for her child, you took him away
from me.”
“You were my only friend, Magnolia. And when you and Theo started running around, I was all alone. I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I was too young and dumb to realize how ugly it would get.” Delta covers her eyes with the handkerchief. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I am sorry. I never imagined it would get this bad.”
“I had time to think on the way over,” Magnolia says. “And honestly, we all made questionable decisions back then, early on—hell,
even now—but there’s one thing I can’t get over. I cannot understand how every day that we lived here in parallel you had
a chance to make it right. Of course, I’d have been mad, but if you had come clean, maybe we could’ve gotten past it. You
had so many chances, Delta. You had all those years to fess up, and then for months he was here on your property, and I was
a phone call away, and you never spoke up. Not until you were found out. Not until it was too late.”
Finally I find my own voice. “And because of you, I won’t know my father.” Delta’s gaze jumps to me like she’s forgotten I’m
even here. “And Hallie won’t know her grandfather. Did that ever click? You and Theo share a grandchild.”
“I thought about it a lot,” Delta tells me. “It was the worst part, knowing you wouldn’t meet your father, but I guess I always
hoped our family could make it up to you. That once you and Grady married, you’d be a part of all this. Ned and I would be
extra parents to cover the gap. You’d never want for anything. I guess that was why I was always so hung up on y’all being
together—my own guilt.”
Ned pats at the corners of his eyes. “He was such a good man. Goodness, this is a wreck.”
“And I lost out on that,” I say. “And more so, Magnolia did. Delta, I don’t know how you live with yourself.”
Delta nods intently. “I take responsibility, but Magnolia, Theo never came to find you either. That’s why I never decided to tell you in the years that’ve passed. You wrote him off because of what your folks said, but even if he thought you hated him, he should’ve come to find his child. At the end of the day, whatever they offered him or threatened him with won out over his child.”
A sadness shadows Magnolia’s face, and it looks like she’s thought the same before.
Even I’ve thought it.
Finally the shakiness that has gripped each of them in this conversation rolls over me. His child is what Delta said, what she called me. I pull in a breath.
“Theo didn’t choose me, that’s not news. It’s something I’ve known my whole entire life, and it has always stung. Even more
so now that I find out he was just down the street all along. But my mother did.” My voice cracks. “She chose me, and she
gave me her name too. I’m proud to be a Magnolia.”
Ned cautiously extends a hand to touch mine, and he looks so meek that I let him. “I’m sorry, Mack. I can’t imagine how hard
it must be to hear all this. For what it’s worth, my life wouldn’t be the same without you. Even if things have changed between
you and Grady, your Hallie is the best thing to come along since we had our boy. And regarding your father—I didn’t know Theo
was anyone but just him, but I do remember something that you might want to hear.”
“Of course,” I say. “I want to know all of it.”
Ned shuffles to the edge of his seat. “Now that I’m hearing the story, I remember. I mentioned y’all having the chance to
go for the Charleston fellowship and how excited we all were. I told him to look you up, Bishop Builds, mainly because I was
proud as heck and wanted to brag a little. Well, Theo found your site, and he bustled in the next day insisting he take the
crew out to prep your grounds for the big day.
“At the time I poked fun at him for being hungry for his fifteen minutes of fame, hoping to land a fancy house project. That man hated to drive more than ten miles to a job. Even that was a stretch. He loved keeping our business because we had a ton for him to do in a few square miles. It struck me as odd—both him wanting to go and such a low-key guy being interested in notoriety or prizes—but now I’m wondering if he saw your picture and something clicked. At the time I just chalked it up to the fact that he always spoke fondly of Charleston and the college years he spent there.”
“You’ve always been the spitting image of your mother,” Delta says but doesn’t make eye contact.
“We’ll never know what my folks told him to keep him away,” Magnolia says. “Not now that he’s gone.”
Delta sobs. “I’m so sorry. I’m terrible. This is all my fault. No one was supposed to die.”
None of us rush to comfort her.
She’s right.
And now there’s so much lost.
Magnolia sits back in the chair, her head tipped back, eyes closed. She is weathered and betrayed. Her best friend, her parents,
her lover—all lost to her in one swoop. None of these things were her choosing, and she didn’t ask for any of these people
to interfere.
It makes me think of Lincoln, and in the face of the painful secrets that have been kept from my mother, our past looks like
no more than an anthill to step over.
The secrets and the withholdings have slowly killed off branches of my mother’s life all these years, and only now with the
truth brought to light does it seem so obvious that this is what should’ve been done all along: Delta should have told the
truth. Only now that Theo is dead does it seem so obvious how simple the solutions were. To come forward, to repair the breaks,
to say sorry.
Lincoln and I are so mendable. If nothing else comes from today, from the searing pain of seeing my mother betrayed twofold and losing my father once and for all, it will be that I won’t keep secrets. I won’t recede and assume and let them guess.
Magnolia begins to shift in her chair and pulls herself to stand. “I think I’ve heard enough.”
I stand, and together we walk out without pleasantries. When we’re halfway down the front steps, Delta opens the door behind
us. She says, “I’m so sorry, again. Give Hallie a squeeze for me.”
Her mentioning Hallie feels like a reminder that we’re still attached, that she won’t ever be severed completely. Heavens,
if she isn’t strangely consumed with Magnolia.
But we don’t turn back.
We get in the car and leave.