Chapter Four
When Tina was a little girl, she thought the land was so flat in the Texas Panhandle that she could see all the way to the end of the earth.
She would sneak into the attic of Mae’s house to peek through the tiny window at the end of the cluttered room.
In those days, she imagined walking out to where dirt and sky met and rolling off the edge.
She wouldn’t stop until she landed in another country, and every time she played the game, she wound up in a different place.
Her favorite was always France, where she would shop for pretty things to bring home to Gracie, Mae, and Cleo.
Or else Scotland, where she would hunt for a perfect kilt for Walker, because she thought it would be funny to see him try to climb the Tomorrow Tree in a skirt.
She had never been to either place, but she’d heard her parents talk about them when they had friends over. According to them, those had been the good days. The ones before I was born.
After a long week at the store, she went straight to her room after helping Cleo wash up the supper dishes.
She picked up a picture of the three of them in their graduation cap and gowns.
They’d posed under the tree, and Cleo took the photograph and had copies made for each of them.
She studied it for a while, then set it back.
Three things have been with me all these years, she thought. The picture, the little tree, and my treasures. They’ve brought me through tough times.
She touched the tree and then opened the drawer where she kept her little velvet drawstring bag. She took it out and gently dumped the things that Walker and Gracie had given her through the years on the bed.
She touched the eagle feather he’d given her the summer they were thirteen, and picked up the smooth rock he had painted her initials on back when they were about eleven.
There was a tiny turquoise pendant on a thin leather strip and a dried wild forget-me-not that he had laminated.
She picked up the friendship bracelet and faded bookmark with BFF’s written on them—both from Gracie.
“Memories,” she muttered as she put everything back into the bag. “These, and you”—she reached over and laid a hand on the small tree that sat beside the picture—“kept me going, and we are still friends. I’m grateful for that.”
She heard laughter and went to the window and saw a bunch of kids playing in the park.
She wondered if they ever begged their parents to take them to the tree as she left her room.
The giggles and bickering drew her across the street and to the old oak tree.
She sat down on the grass and leaned against the trunk’s rough bark.
Four children played on the equipment while their parents sat at one of the concrete picnic tables and argued.
Tina had seen those same expressions on her own parents’ faces when they were having a disagreement—most of the time about her.
She’d often wondered why they’d even kept her at birth if she was such a chore to raise.
Then, when she was older, she finally figured out that her mother had been past forty when she’d had Tina, and that if it hadn’t been totally against their morals, she probably would have terminated the pregnancy.
With a heavy sigh, she reminded herself that she couldn’t change the past and glanced over at the only place that had given her stability and peace in her lifetime.
Back when the three kids had been little, Mae and Cleo sat at those same picnic tables while Walker, Gracie, and Tina chased each other around the park.
Nowadays, like they were doing that night, the two old gals sat on the front porch and kept an eye on the park, even though Tina was the only one of the three there.
Their rocking chairs seemed to move in unison, but they stopped when Walker came out of the house and sat down on the steps. His mouth moved, but Tina couldn’t hear a single word. Too bad she had never learned to read lips or she might know what they were saying.
What Gracie had said about being thankful for Mae and Cleo came back to her mind. “Yes,” she muttered. “I shouldn’t have ghosted them or my two best friends all those years. They are all better than any therapist.”
A movement caught her eye and brought her back to the present when the smallest little girl squatted down behind the tree and put a finger over her lips. “They’ll never find me. Mama said for us to not bother you, but I’m just hiding, so I’m not being a pest.”
A rush of maternal instinct rushed over Tina, and she nodded. If the child had belonged to her, she would never let her know that her birth was not a joyous occasion. The little girl giggled under her breath, but for fear of giving her position away, Tina didn’t even look over at her or say a word.
Instead, she kept her eyes on Walker when he stood up and walked across the road.
He still moved with the grace of a deer, just like he had done in high school when he played basketball.
In those days, Tina had sat in the stands, watched him win game after game, and he never seemed to break a sweat.
He sat down beside her and leaned back against the tree trunk, mouthing a hello to the little girl. “Feel like you are still a kid?”
“Little bit,” she answered. “Did we really have as much energy as this bunch of children at the end of a day?”
“I believe we did.”
“Okay, kids,” the mother yelled. “It’s time to go home now, so head for the vehicle. If you don’t argue, we’ll go for ice cream.”
The little girl jumped up from behind the tree and shouted, “Nobody found me, so I win! I call the seat right behind Mama.” She took off in a dead run toward the SUV. The other three kids tried to overtake her, but she won the race.
“That’s my seat. I’m the oldest,” her brother argued.
“Is not!” The girl’s voice cut through the air, but she didn’t even turn around. By the time the boy made it to the vehicle, she was already buckled in.
“Mama!” he whined.
“She beat you fair and square,” the father said.
“The way her short legs churned made me think of Gracie,” Walker chuckled.
“She could never outrun us, but when we played tag, you let her catch you a lot of the time,” Tina said.
“Yep, I did, but don’t tell her. Everyone needs to be a winner sometimes. It builds confidence.”
“Where is she?” Tina asked.
“She’s getting everything ready to go tomorrow, but she’ll be over here soon. She told me to tell you not to leave. Since this is our last night for a couple of weeks, she wants us to spend some time together under the tree. She thinks it’s our good luck charm.”
“It kind of is.” Call it an act of God, the universe, fate, the tree, or luck, something had worked in her favor to bring her back to Benson, and for her people—Cleo, Mae, Gracie, and Walker—to accept her again.
A movement caught her eye, and she looked up to see Gracie pushing open the front door and saying a few words to the women before she started across the road.
“Do you think they can read lips?” Tina looked into Walker’s blue eyes.
“I used to think they had superpowers, like eyes in the back of their head and hearing like a bat,” Walker answered.
“But now that I’m older, I realize that they simply read our expressions.
They knew us from babies. You and Gracie even more than me.
Mama didn’t hire them to babysit me until I was a little more than a year old. ”
Gracie sat down under the shade of the tree between Walker and Tina. “Mae said that I just missed seeing a bunch of kids playing like we used to do.”
“Yep, you did. One little girl reminded us of you when we played tag,” Walker said.
“Oh, really? You mean when you let me win when we raced?” Gracie asked.
“Whatever gave you that idea?” Tina teased.
“I was the smart one, remember?” Gracie said with a short giggle.
“All that aside, I have a confession. I love kids, but when summer arrives, I’m ready for adult conversations and less noise and bickering.
It blows me away that little girls in kindergarten are fighting—and I mean pulling hair and scratching—over a boy. ”
“Are you kidding?” Walker asked. “Do the boys know that?”
“Oh, yeah.” Gracie nodded. “The days of chasing girls around the playground is in the past. Now they want to walk about holding hands.”
“That’s horrible,” Tina said. “They should be children at least until they hit puberty.”
“Amen!” Gracie said with a nod.
“Of course, according to what I see in Mae and Cleo, you still get the arguments,” Tina said.
“Yes, but not the fights. In today’s world, kids grow up faster than we did.”
“Boys are going to do that,” Walker said. “It’s hardwired into them.”
“Yes, but not usually girls. Like I said, there was hairpulling and screaming words that I didn’t even know until I was a teenager, and it took me and another teacher to pull them apart.
Another time, two of the girls got into it over the issue of the color of their fingernail polish.
One said that the other one wasn’t supposed to wear purple because that was her signature color. Honest to God, she said signature.”
Tina shook her head. “That’s funny, but it’s not. Kids that age shouldn’t be acting like high schoolers.”
Walker picked up a small rock roughly shaped like a star and handed it to Tina. “And then when those kids get old . . .”
“They act like Reesa and her little gang,” Tina finished the sentence for him and tucked the rock into her pocket to add to her treasure bag.
“Yep, but what do we know?” Gracie added. “On another note, I’m all packed and ready to leave as soon as the ladies go to church in the morning.”
Tina laid a hand on Gracie’s arm. “What if one or both of them don’t go to church?”
“I’ll go to plan B,” she said.
“And that is?” Walker asked.