Free The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd Page B

onto the seat of the mermaid chair, for some reason that being the most honored spot. It was my funeral game, a solemn play I’d indulged in after my father died. The petals were his ashes, and I’d thought what I was doing was saying good-bye, but it may have been just the opposite—that I was trying to hold on to him, tuck him in private places only I knew. I would find the petals weeks later, lumps of brown, dried rose chips.
    The night seemed paler now, as if the wind had blown some of the darkness out of it. I stood still, letting my eyes roam across the tops of the rosebushes, along the paths plowed with moonlight. There was no sign of my mother.
    I wished then I’d called Hepzibah and Kat instead of dashing t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r
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    over here, wasting all this time. I’d just been so sure she would be here, much surer than I’d been about Dee and the shoe store.
    Mother had made herself the Keeper of the Statue about the same time she’d started to work in the kitchen. She often trudged out here with a bucket of soapy water to wash the bird shit off it, and four times a year she waxed it with a paste that smelled like orange peel and limes. She came here to pour out the various and sundry torments of her life instead of going into the church and telling them to God. Senara was practically a nobody in the hierarchical world of saints, but Mother believed in her.
    She loved to recount the story of my birth as proof of Senara’s potency, how I was turned backward in her womb and became stuck during the delivery. She’d prayed to Senara, who’d promptly flipped me upside down, and I’d wriggled headfirst into the world.
    Out here in the middle of the garden, the statue appeared like a stamen protruding from the center of a huge, winter-blighted flower. It occurred to me that the saint had presided the same way over my childhood, her shadow hovering above the emptiness that had come when I was nine.
    The worst punishment Mike and I had ever received had come because we’d dressed the statue in a two-piece swimsuit, sunglasses, and a blond wig. We’d cut the bottom of the suit in half and pinned it together around Senara’s hips. Some monks had thought the getup was funny, but Mother had cried over our disrespect and sentenced us to write the Agnus Dei five hundred times a day for a solid week: Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Instead of being contrite, I’d merely felt confused about it all, as if I’d betrayed Senara and liberated her at the same time.
    As I stood near the back of the garden, trying to think what 62
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    to do now that Mother plainly wasn’t here, I heard a thin scratching sound drift from the general vicinity of Senara’s statue, like a small bird raking the ground for grubs and insects.
    I came up behind the statue, and there was Mother sitting on the ground with the mayonnaise jar, her white hair a neon splotch in the dark.
    She wore her practical navy coat over a long chenille bathrobe and sat with her legs splayed out in front her, the way a child might sit in a sandbox. She was digging in the dirt with her left hand, using what looked like a stainless-steel soup ladle. The bandage on her right hand appeared the size of a child’s baseball glove and was speckled with dirt.
    She didn’t see me; she was utterly absorbed in what she was doing. I stared at her silhouette for several seconds, my relief at finding her shifting into some fresh new dread. I said, “Mother, it’s me, Jessie.”
    She reared back with a sudden jerk, and the ladle fell into her lap. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she cried. “You scared me to death!
    What are you doing here?”
    I sank down beside her. “I’m out here looking for you,” I replied, trying to sound natural and unalarmed. I even tried to smile.
    “Well, you found me,” she said, then picked up the ladle and resumed work on the mouse hole she’d made at the base of the