Mending by Sallie Bingham

Author:Sallie Bingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2011-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Way It Is Now

AUGUST NINTH AT NATURAL BRIDGE

IT WAS THE HABIT IN THAT FAMILY TO CELEBRATE birthdays—all birthdays, the parents’ as well as the children’s—not with parties and paper hats and the bounty of friends, but with expeditions. For all of them, it was easier. To have invited friends to the house would have been embarrassing for the children; no one they knew could have avoided staring, or drinking out of the finger bowls. Their parents had many friends, but they were the same people who had posed beside them in their wedding photograph, and it seemed tactless to acknowledge the years that had passed since that first occasion, years that had disfigured everyone except the central characters.

Each of the children was allowed to choose the historic shrine or state park where he would spend his birthday. The list of possibilities within a day’s drive, although not long, was surprisingly varied. There were the limestone caves, Horse, Floyd Collins, and the Blue Grotto, which were patronized for the most part by ten-year-old Tom, who liked melodrama and fakery and admired the milk-white body of Floyd Collins, displayed in a glass coffin in the cave that had killed him. Then there was the marriage cabin of Abraham Lincoln’s parents, which none of them cared for anymore—tourists and school groups had begun to go there—and, farther east, the new federal lake and the park at Cumberland Gap. These were equally favored by Shelby, the youngest, who had remarked on his first visit to the concrete Roman powerhouse at the lake, “If this isn’t beautiful, nothing is.” Finally there were the horse farms, foreign-owned, corrupt and flourishing, which Vivian had chosen for the last three years because they were only an hour’s drive from home, meaning there was no excuse to spend the night.

The children chose independently, even unpredictably, according to the yearly change in their characters; but their parents, who for reasons of emotional economy only celebrated one of the two birthdays between them, always went on August ninth to Natural Bridge. By the time Vivian was sixteen, they had been to the bridge twelve times, and each time the drive up into the hills was the same, the Singing Pines Guest Lodge was the same; even the numbers on their rooms, which they carried around all weekend on keys jangling in their pockets, were never changed. The manager of the lodge had no trouble remembering how the Lysons wanted things done, but sometimes a new waitress, bringing in the cake with the single candle, would ask whether it was Mr. or Mrs. celebrating this time.

There was no reason to be afraid, and yet Vivian had been afraid for three years of the trip, as though each time she exposed more of herself by submitting to the routine. Yet it did not occur to her to find a reason for not going; her father would have been hurt, and she could never have stood that. He had a way of looking

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