Reclaiming Lily by Patti Lacy

Author:Patti Lacy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-01T06:43:50+00:00

15

She’s with her sister . . . and on cloud nine. Gloria pretended to reapply lipstick but instead used the vanity mirror to study Joy and Kai, huddled together in the backseat studying the framed family pictures Kai had given Joy. The two looked like best friends. Something I never had. Or sisters. Ditto.

“That’s Ling? She’s beautiful!” Joy squealed.

“She has the round face of Southern Chinese. Much admired in our village.”

Photos and family members crowded in with Kai and Joy, filling the car with old stories, laughter; filling Gloria with the sense of being an outsider in a reunion. Joy has the family she’s yearned for, at some level, all her life.

Tears blurred Gloria’s vision. Joy’s peace. I’ve been on my knees, begging for this. Gloria hand-combed her hair. She was happy for Joy. So why did the sisters’ laughs set off an internal barometer?

Because she’s connecting with the sister she’s known for one day better than she’s connected with me for years.

A scene flashed in Joy’s mind: Ten-year-old Joy, begging to dye blond the hair of the Asian doll she’d received as a birthday present. “So everyone will like her.” Joy had stroked the doll’s plump plastic cheek, such a yearning in her eyes that Gloria had turned her head. An hour later, pink balloons, tied to dining room chairs, nodded listlessly. Not Gloria, who fumed as she fussed and pretended to busy herself with Joy’s hair ribbons. In homes where folks shelved Emily Post’s Etiquette next to Junior League handbooks, not one of the mothers of the invited girls had bothered to RSVP.

Gloria, fearing something like this, had urged Joy to invite church friends. Even then—years before the fire—an inexplicable, indefinable divide existed between Joy and her church peers. Joy had refused to include several deacons’ daughters who would’ve attended—if for no other reason than their parents told them it was the Christian thing to do. I should’ve made Joy invite them. Gloria berated herself for the thousandth time. I should have told Joy that was the Christian thing to do. Back then, she’d have listened.

Old Mrs. Browning, their next-door neighbor, and her pug, Charlie, had rushed over with a nosegay of roses. A frozen smile remained on Joy during the singing of “Happy Birthday” and the blowing out of candles.

Though they’d piped, “It doesn’t matter,” and “Surely a misunderstanding,” though Gloria had pampered a stiff and sullen Joy, not a tear was shed.

Until the next day.

Gloria found the doll they’d scrimped and saved to buy stuffed under Joy’s bed. Scissored hair exposed a pink scalp.

Sobbing, Gloria had lain on the floor, pounding Joy’s braided rug, stroking that doll’s bristly hair. Though her daughter had not cried, Gloria wailed for the shunning by Joy’s peers, the loneliness that would lead Joy to destroy an innocent doll. She understood how her daughter felt. She’d experienced similar feelings when her daddy had walked out the door.

Joy never said a word about the incident. Neither did they. Andrew thought it might send Joy “over the edge.

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