Graceland

by Lynne Hugo

• ISBN13: 9780373881130
• ISBN10: 0373881134
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-10-01
• Publisher: Harlequin

Summary

Everyone knows sisters like the Sams girls--three women trying their best to be good daughters, mothers and wives.

Lydia, married to Wayne, worked a dead-end job to make sure her daughter, Anna Claire, had the best in life. Madaline, the mother of

Excerpts

Even though I am the oldest, I've always been in the middle, stuck between my sisters like the fulcrum of a teeter-totter, keeping each safely balanced. Perhaps it became a habit, and in the years since I escaped home I've brought the role on myself, rather than what it seems: the noose of the inescapable circle of fate. The thing is, I never see it coming. I always believe that I am on the cusp of being able to live out in the open, and say what I really mean. Twenty-one years ago, when I was a breath under eighteen, I got married to change everything. I had to get out from between Madalaine, born after me, and Ellie, the youngest, who's like a fern frond that withered unaccountably before it ever unfurled. I also got married to get out from between Mama and Daddy, who needed a full-time mediator to decide who had failed to pay the electric bill on time, whose fault it was that the Dodge on the street was slumped over a flat tire or the butcher had given Mama a soup bone with no meat on it again. I thought it would all be different, that I could make life be different. I was fourth in my class. I could have found a way to college or at least to work in some faraway city, instead of marrying Wayne in such a misguided hurry, and my life would have turned on a different dime. In fairness, nobody told me I couldn't, but nobody said I could, and nobody from my family ever had. The idea was as likely as a rosebush springing up in the desert on its own. So I've worked as a secretary for Dr. Hays for the whole of my married life, and watched his patients grow up or grow old, be newly born or newly dying. Of course, I tend to hear the suffering parts of their lives, and I remind myself that surely they have ice-cream sundaes and birthdays and Christmas mornings, too. "Toughen up, Lydia," Dr. Hays said to me when he found me crying over Mrs. Kinsey's spina bifida baby the same day Mr. Davis, who was a bird-watcher, had a stroke that took away his vision. He has a point. I know what life can dish up for breakfast: my own brother, the real oldest child, is retarded. I call myself the oldest, because I was expected to be in charge and to take care of my sisters and Charles. Someone might think that Charles was what I wanted to escape, but that's not true. He is the nicest and happiest member of our family. Mama fusses about him, and Ellie fussesathim every hour of the day while she carries her basset hound around and mourns for Elvis, but Charles just gives everyone his lolling smile and lets them go on. He claps with Vanna for every letter ofWheel of Fortune.Of course, Mama does, too, so maybe that doesn't prove anything about Charles. Madalaine married early, like me, but Mama and Daddy have their oldest and youngest living with them forever in their eye-blink of a house in the part of Maysfield for people who are poor but white. The truth is, I have no idea who takes care of whom: Ellie complains like a squeaky door; Mama hardly budges from her chair; and Daddy disappears to the Toyota plant--Kentucky's notion of hope--while Charles watches television. They all live in the same house we grew up in and have canned soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches for supper every night. There's nothing I can do about it except feel bad, but I do that really well. I should have climbed on happiness's coattails and stayed on them when I had the chance even though Wayne Merrill was a good man when I married him, and still is. No woman in her right mind could take that away from him. So what if he parks himself in a La-Z-Boy and falls asleep holding the remote control every night after supper? I started taking some classes when Claire got into high school, and I read in our bedroom at night while Wayne flips between channels in the living room. He's never said a harsh word to me. He deserves to be loved. When I first got this same fifteen-point diamond that I've worn ever since on my left hand, God gave me as cl