“No, Papa.” Penny turned on him. “I mean it. All this time I’ve been here, not once did I ask anything of you. Just this day that I want perfect. But she—” she lifted a trembling hand at me—“she takes your money, uses it for God knows what, and then comes back like...that.” She huffed. “She took Mama’s ring. The one I should have today. She... ruined... everything.”
Papa didn’t say anything, but he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
“I’m sorry” was all I could say. I slipped through the kitchen and up the stairs. I’d just stay up there until it was all over. It was the least I could do for her. Penny was hurt, I told myself. And she had a right to be. She’d done everything she was supposed to do, beena good daughter—no, a perfect daughter. She deserved a wedding day without me.
Her going-away clothes were laid out on her bed. I found a run in one of her stockings and mended it for her, then checked her valise one more time to make sure she had everything she needed for the short honeymoon trip to St. Paul—a honeymoon that included looking for a place to rent when Robert’s new job started. The two of them were nothing if not practical.
I could hear Maura Fischer, who’d offered to play the wedding march on our old piano, begin to warm up with a few discordant notes. The minister’s voice floated up the stairs. Robert answered with a nervous laugh.
I sat on the corner of Penny’s bed and thought about what she had said. I’d done everything wrong, made so many mistakes. Hurt so many people I loved. Papa, Penny, Max.
Did I wish I could take it all back?
Yes, part of me wished I’d never left Odessa. But the thing is, if I hadn’t run to that far-off land, if I hadn’t ended up lost and broken, if I hadn’t done everything wrong and come back with nothing... would I know about real love? About mercy and forgiveness? The thing I learned—after everything that happened—was you don’t deserve mercy. And you can’t earn forgiveness. If you deserved it—if you earned it—well, I guess then they’d call it something else.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but all that bad I did? The side of the ledger that weighs against me? I can’t change it one jot. But it can change me. And even those horrid things I did can work good in my life if I let them. If I accept Papa’s forgiveness and let that forgiveness and love change me into the daughter I want to be—the daughter Papa had known was there all along.
It’s a tall order, but I’m trying. I’m really trying.
The strains of the wedding march sounded downstairs. It was starting, and the wedding spotlight would be on Penny. I hoped it would be as beautiful as she ever imagined. I smoothed Penny’s chenille bedspread, following the pile and running my fingers in the ridges as if following a map across the country. The piano stopped, midchord. I heard the snap of heels on the stairs and the door behind me clicked open.
“What are you doing?” I asked as Penny came in and closed the door behind her. Did she have more to say to me? She sat down on the bed, right on top of her carefully pressed traveling suit, and burst into tears. She leaned into me, sobbing into my shoulder. She was ruining her makeup. She blubbered something about lilacs and Mama and how she couldn’t walk down the aisle feeling like she did. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I put my arms around her.
A long minute later, she gave a shuddering breath. “I tried,” she said, her voice muffled in my shoulder. “I really tried, Minnie. I said to myself,I forgive her.” She pulled away but didn’t look at me. “I’ve said to God,I forgive her. Then I see Papa. And I think of those days, after you left, and how he—” She shook her head like she couldn’t get the words out.
My own throat closed. I knew what I’d done to Papa.
“And now, he’s so...” Penny pressed her lips together.
Happy. Every day he smiled at the breakfast table. Every day he kissed the top of my head on his way to the barn and said, “I’m glad you’re home,Liebchen.” I hadn’t thought how that must hurt her. To see how much my coming back meant to him when she’d been here all the time.
She leaned back, picking up a corner of the bedspread and wiping her eyes. “Iwantto forgive you.” She hiccupped. “Is that enough?”
I felt my own tears welling up and spilling over. “It is for me.”
She held on to me tight, both of us snuffling like old hound dogs. A knock on the door broke us apart, and Robert’s low voice was urgent and worried. “Penny, you in there?”
Penny glanced at the door, rubbed her red nose, and smiled. “Let him wait.”
That was the sister I knew. I called out to him that she’d be down in a minute, then grabbed the powder and comb from her bureau. “Let’s get you fixed up.”
The wedding was beautiful. The minister said all the right words; Maura hit only a few wrong notes. I stood beside Penny, and if tongues wagged, then they could keep on wagging all the way back to town.
Now, I stood in the kitchen, making sure the cake was perfect, the chicken ready. Not exactly hiding, just staying out of the way. I didn’t want to push things with Penny. We had a ways to go, and I wasn’t so daft I didn’t know it. It would take time—work—to get us back to what we had been.
Forgiveness is a tricky business. Maybe for some it’s simple, like with Papa. And like Papa says it is with God. Papa says God never stopped listening to me and never stopped loving me, even when I was at my worst. All that time, he was just waiting for me to come back to him and tell him how sorry I was. Waiting to forgive me. But maybe for others, it’s not so easy. Some people have to work on forgiveness for a long time, like Penny. As for me, I have to accept it and try to forgive myself at the same time. And maybe that will be the hardest part of all.
MAX
The roadster was running on fumes when I pulled into a lonely filling station south of nowhere. Dust covered the shiny paint job, andthe tires were worn as smooth as Stan Laurel’s forehead. I pushed open the door and stretched as I got out, bone-weary from two long days driving across Wyoming and Nebraska, with a six-hour stop to sleep on the side of the road when I crossed the border into South Dakota. The kid who ambled out of the tiny shack next to the pumps gave my wrinkled suit and coffee-stained shirt a long look.
“Fill her up.” I handed him a dollar that was close to my last. “Where am I?” I spread a map on the hot hood. It was torn and falling apart from too many struggles against its folds.
He raised his brows and set his dirty finger down close to a place called Pierre.
“Town around here called Odessa?”
He twitched the finger. “Sure. ’Bout here. Not much to speak of.”
