Free Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy Page B

Every time she got to crying hard enough that she coughed and choked, he yanked her up by the forearm, let her rest until she stopped spitting out water, and then let go. It was not a pleasing thing to watch, but Caroline is a strong swimmer now. It occurs to Annie as she lunges to the right in hopes of taking cover again that this is her deep, murky pond, and sure enough, Daddy wraps his two large hands around her shoulders and makes her face the rocking chair square on.
    “Chair ain’t going nowhere,” he says. “I don’t know what’s got you two riled, but you stop all this damn foolishness.”
    Mama exhales long and loud. There is nothing Mama hates more than language defiling her home. It’ll root itself, she always says. If one of us takes liberties, other forms of nastiness will follow and then what’ll we have?
    “I’ll see to it,” Grandma says, grabbing the rocker by its wooden headrest and dragging it toward the door that leads onto the front porch. “It’s my doing, so I should set it right.”
    “Enough,” Mama says. The tone of her voice stills everyone in the room.
    Mama’s eyes have taken on a blurry look like she’s near to tears, and she doesn’t bother brushing away the strands of hair that hang in her face. Mama doesn’t think much of the know-how, but she must know enough, remember enough from all her years growing up with Aunt Juna, to know what that empty rocking chair means.
    “That chair is just fine where it is,” she says. “Go on, all of you. I want every one of you out right now.”
    “Sarah,” Daddy says. That’s Mama’s name. Grandma gave it to Mama before she was even born and it means princess. Daddy’s usually the only one in the house to use it. She’s mostly Mama to everyone else. Daddy says it again in his deep, scratchy voice. At the sound of her name, Mama, Sarah, takes a deep breath and blows it out long and slow.
    “My apologies,” Mama says. “Mother, why don’t we see to some breakfast for everyone, and then let’s us mix up a cake for Annie’s day.”
    The sizzle in the air was Annie’s first inkling something was lurking. First inklings aren’t so troublesome, and for a week, she’d labored to convince herself Grandma was right. The charge in the air was the lavender coming into bloom. But that empty rocking chair is a second inkling. Second inklings are more dependable still. That chair was rocking forward and backward. Forward and backward. Coming and going. Someone is coming. Someone is going. When an empty rocking chair rocks, someone is coming home again and someone is going to die.
    Every Christmas, a card comes, a handwritten letter tucked inside. They arrive in mid-December. Mama keeps the letters to herself and hangs the cards from the refrigerator with a magnet. The signature inside each card is always penned in the same flattened-out, slanted letters. As a child, before she learned her cursive alphabet, Annie couldn’t read the name written inside the colorful cards, but always she knew they had come from Aunt Juna. Annie had hoped when they moved from the north side of town to Grandma’s house that the cards and letters wouldn’t follow. But they did.
    While the cards from Aunt Juna hung on the refrigerator for several days, not until Christmas Eve did Mama read the letters. Over supper, after grace was said and before the first fork was raised, Mama would pull the most recent letter from her apron pocket and read it aloud to the rest of the family. These letters grew longer as the years passed. Aunt Juna wrote of her life. She wrote of living in California, where the sun always shone, and of oranges hanging from a tree where a person could pick them and eat them right where she stood. She wrote of pasturelands in the middle of the country that stretched to the horizon and farther still, so far they looked to roll right off the edge of the earth. She wrote of trains and cars and of streets in the northeast where buildings rose up