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“Darling, what is it?” Mama’s brown eyes searched for answers in mine. I could not hide from her. She knew me, knew my heart. “Have you had a fight with your sister?”
“No, Mama.” It was just like her to guess that to be the reason. Delphia and I had squabbled often when we were children, but now we were as close as two sisters could be. Mama knew that a fight with her would devastate me.
She studied me for a long moment. I could not hide from her penetrating, knowing gaze. “Tell me, child, what ails you. Please, darling. It will help to tell your mother. No one understands like your mother.” A flicker of sadness crossed her face. After all this time, she still missed her own mother.
“It’s my heart, Mama. Broken into bits.” I sobbed into my lace handkerchief.
“Oh dear.” She went still for a second before her expression turned from confusion to discernment. “Is it James?”
I nodded, too shattered to acknowledge it with words.
“You’re in love with him?” Mama asked.
“Yes. I’m so ashamed.” I buried my face in my hands.
“Does he know?”
I looked over at her. “Yes. I told him this afternoon. Like a little idiot.”
“My poor baby. Don’t worry, this will pass. I’m sure it will.” Mama gathered me against her chest and stroked my hair. “Didn’t he propose to her before he came out here?”
“Not completely. She and her father simply announced it in the newspaper column without asking him.”
She gasped. “Why would they do such a thing?”
“To make sure they get what they want,” I said. “It forced him to follow through or risk scandal for all of them.”
“Very tricky, indeed,” Mama said.
“Her father is an ambitious man. James says he’s climbed over a lot of men to get to where he is. The only thing that’s eluded him is respectability, which James and his family’s titles bring to them.”
“I doubt it,” Mama said. “People who care about such things will not care about James’s titles. Not here in America.”
“The world James has told me about—this old and new money and who is who—it’s not anything we understand. Not here in the west. It must be awfully important for Mr. Masters to go to all this trouble.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” Her brows knitted together in worry.
“There was something in his eyes, Mama, that told me he might be able to love me someday if it weren’t for her.”
“Yes, she and her father have made it quite impossible for him to make his own choice. The announcement in the newspaper, the demand from his father—he hasn’t a chance, does he?” She said this matter-of-factly.
“None whatsoever,” I said, as if that weren’t obvious to my mother. We both understood the game the Masterses and James’s father were playing. He was the ball they batted back and forth, all of them wanting to win. The only one who wouldn’t win was our James.
Mama dabbed my cheeks, just as James had done earlier. “Too many tears for such beautiful eyes.” She folded the piece of lace into a square and set it on the windowsill. The seat cushions were new, soft and plump under me. One wall of my room had been wallpapered with a floral pattern of bright pink. White wainscoting underneath made the pink that much more vivid. A four-poster bed was the height of elegance. I’d loved the room when it had first been handed down to me after Fiona left. Now, however, it seemed like a prison I’d never leave. I would die here, an old maid who coveted another’s husband.
“Listen to me for a moment.” Mama placed her hand on my knee. Upon returning from our swim, I’d bathed and changed into a casual cotton dress to battle the heat of the afternoon. Usually I dressed for dinner in evening attire, but since I’d hidden in my room it had not been necessary. “If you and James are meant to be, something will make it possible for you to be together.”
“But it’s impossible.”
“If love is true, God makes the pathways possible. Don’t lose faith, dearest. Keep writing. That’s the most important thing for you to do. Pour your heart into those words on the page. Can you do this? If not for yourself, for me?”
“Why do you ask that of me?” I was genuinely curious. Did she truly think writing could save me?
“Because when we do the work we’re meant to do, other things in our life fall into the exact place they should be. Our only job is to stay faithful to God and ourselves.” She smiled her gentle smile, crinkling the fine lines at her eyes into crepe paper. “And to our mothers, who know us almost as well as God does.”
“I’ll do my very best, Mama. For you.”
She gestured toward my typewriter. The last page I’d written was still in there, waiting for a final sentence or two. “Right there. That is as much your destiny as anything or anyone will ever be. Stay true to that, and the right road will open up before you.”
