Free One Mountain Away by Emilie Richards Page B

remember how it went,” she said. “We’d broken up. He was already dating somebody else when I realized I was going to have his baby. Later he told me he thought I was just making up a pregnancy to get even with him.”
    “I can see that.”
    “Really? I can’t. He knew me better than that.”
    “Maybe not. He was the class bad boy. Your mother wouldn’t let you date him, right? Whenever you saw him you were sneaking behind her back. How well could you know him? How much time could you spend together? “
    “Enough to make a baby.” Taylor shook her head. “I guess we’ve worked things out well enough, considering our start. There’s no love lost between us, but both of us love Maddie. Now, everything’s going to change.”
    “Particularly if you don’t lose the attitude.”
    Samantha had been her friend for so long that Taylor couldn’t be offended. She just reached over and socked her on the arm.
    “I don’t think it’s Jeremy,” Samantha said, unperturbed. “I don’t think you want to share Maddie. And you’re wondering what you’ll do without her for two weeks. Part of you wants her to have a closer relationship to her daddy, and part of you probably hopes she’ll get along with her new stepmother. But another part of you hopes the whole thing will blow up, and she’ll never want to leave you again.”
    “If that’s true it sounds pretty squirrely.”
    “No, it sounds pretty natural. I don’t have that problem, since Edna’s father was never in the picture. But if he showed up tomorrow and said he’d been searching for us all this time, I’d probably feel the same way you do. Like he was the enemy clambering over my castle walls, an invader trying to stake a claim to a piece of my daughter.”
    “And people think the hard part of being a single parent is not having anybody to share childrearing with.”
    “The hard part of being a mother is knowing when to let go and when to hang on.”
    For no good reason, Taylor thought of her own mother. As always, she was sorry she had.

Chapter Seven
     
    First Day Journal: April 29
     
    I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to forget my past. Maybe I thought if I changed myself into someone else, the past would fade away with my Appalachian accent and one day a country girl named Lottie Lou Hale would cease to exist.
    Now I know how much time I wasted. No matter how hard we try to lock memories away, they break free, sometimes taking on new life because we witness others with the same struggles, like the young woman sleeping in my guest room this morning. Just like Harmony Stoddard, I was once nearly homeless, with no one to help me and nothing to fall back on.
    It’s not a memory I recall with fondness. But this morning, while I wait for my guest to wake up, I’ll take it out again and examine it here.
    Almost exactly seven years after Hearty’s Sunday morning appearance at the Trust Independent Baptist Church, I am sitting beside him on a bench in front of the pulpit, and this time no one is trying to persuade him to leave.
    In the past year someone has donated screens, and someone else convinced the county to run an electric line so that now floor fans blow channels of steamy air over the mourners lucky enough to be sitting close to them.
    I’m not one of those. I’m sitting in the front row, close enough to my grandmother’s coffin to wish I could hop up and brush away the flies that entered the church with the mourners. I know better than to make a scene. I am seventeen, newly graduated from high school, and now I’m a woman. None of my grandmother’s friends gathered today would appreciate even a pause in Preacher Pittman’s words. Those attending came out of respect, but I know that no one wants to sit in the heat a moment longer than necessary. Fans or not, the temperature has to be close to ninety and climbing as the sun rises higher in the sky.
    “Would anybody out there like to speak?” the preacher asks at last.
    I turn