Born Under The Lone Star

“WHAT ARE YOU reading there, Sissy?”

Markie McBride jumped at the sound of her middle sister’s words, even though Robbie always spoke with the soothing lilt of a low violin. Not even the antics of her three little boys could make Robbie McBride Tellchick raise her voice.

“Nothing.” Markie closed the cover and tried to stuff the book back down in the dusty old cardboard box where she’d found it moments ago. It had been a physical shock to look down and see, wedged in between her yellowed first communion dress and her high school letter jacket, next to a flank of musty yearbooks, the faded mauve cover that was her Baby Diary, as she had come to call it many years ago. Eighteen years ago, to be exact. Her son would be eighteen by now. Correction. Her son was eighteen now—a bright, exceptional, eighteen-year-old young man. Only a few days ago, she had talked to him herself, in a phone conversation that had haunted her ever since.

As her hand struggled in the tangle of dry-cleaner bags encasing the cloth items in the box, she realized, not for the first time, that her mother was a totally conflicted human being.

Hot and cold. Love and hate. That was Marynell McBride. Mostly cold and mostly hate, Markie decided sadly, as her mind absorbed this latest in a long line of betrayals. Where was the photograph? Markie couldn’t risk looking for it now.

The box had been tightly packed and the diary refused to fit back into its appointed slot. Markie pushed harder. So weird. So, so weird that she’d stumbled on the thing now, when she’d been compelled to return to Five Points to attend her brother-in-law’s funeral. Now, at the very time that her son, Justin’s son, was actually preparing to come here, as well. It was almost like some kind of…eerie convergence. Like fate or something.

“It looked,” Robbie said as she leaned back with a grin and planted a palm on the saggy mattress of the twin bed where she’d been sorting old photographs, “like one of our old diaries.” She craned her neck in Markie’s direction. “Whose is it? Yours? Frankie’s?”

With their father’s encouragement, the three sisters had each faithfully kept journals in their teens.

“It’s in your blood,” P. J. McBride had explained quietly one Christmas as he passed each girl a ribbon-bound stack of blank journals, “like your pioneer grandmother and her mother before her.” Daddy had kept those old leather-bound journals, hardly legible now, but precious as ancient Egyptian scrolls to P.J.

The girls had decorated their plain cloth-bound versions so each could immediately recognize her own elaborate designs. Ever-sensible Robbie had likely disposed of her own foolish ramblings long ago.

Markie had gotten rid of her journals, too. All but this one. She could never bring herself to part with the record of her seventeenth year. The Baby Diary.

The last time she’d moved, the diary hadn’t shown up at her new town house with the rest of her stuff. Its disappearance had distressed her terribly. And, even more distressing was the loss of the photo. Her one picture. That broke her heart more than anything. She’d grieved, alone and in secret, over that loss especially. She should have had copies made instead of sticking it inside the diary cover. Where, she had fretted during many lonely evenings of unpacking, could her precious diary have disappeared to?

Now she knew.

She stared at the back of Marynell McBride’s graying head as her mother’s skinny arm furiously scrubbed at the panes of one of the high dormer windows as if it were the Queen Mother who was coming to stay instead of Marynell’s own three rambunctious grandsons.

She took my diary, Markie thought with a familiar sickness of heart. For heaven’s sake, Mother, what were you going to do? Blackmail me?

“Fess up.” Again, Robbie’s voice made Markie jump. “Whose is it?” Robbie was smiling pleasantly.

“Nobody’s. I mean, it’s nothing. Really.” Markie knew she sounded guilty, probably looked it, too.

Markie could see Marynell’s thin back stiffen high up on the ladder. The woman slowly turned her head and squinted down at her youngest daughter with an expression that was equal parts hostility and suspicion. “Margaret,” she demanded, “where did you get that box?”

Funny. Marynell never called Frankie “Frances,” or Robbie “Roberta.” And although Marynell had coined her daughter’s tomboy nicknames, she reserved the use of Markie’s full name for the times she was working herself into a slow-burning rage at her daughter.

“From under the bed.” Markie fixed challenging eyes on her mother’s face, willing her, daring her, to press the issue, especially here in front of Robbie, especially now.

Robbie, sensing the sudden shift in the atmosphere, frowned. As she stood and crossed the room, the taut silence seemed amplified by the scuffing of her house slippers and the measured ticking of their father’s antique mantel clock.

Markie turned her eyes from her mother’s scowl to her sister’s pallid face. Robbie didn’t look like herself these days. Instead of the family’s slender Irish rose, she looked like a puffy, used-up, freckled hag. Her long ginger-colored hair, usually bound in a neat French braid, was shoved behind her ears, limp and unbrushed. At ten o’clock in the morning, she wasn’t dressed, unthinkable for a farm wife. Her frayed pink terry-cloth robe accentuated her pale complexion and the girth of her expanding middle. As she waddled across the bare floorboards of the long attic room, Markie thought how Robbie even moved like an old woman now. So unlike the energetic sprite that had kept pace with a robust husband and three growing boys on their huge farm. But Robbie was doing a lot of uncharacteristic things lately—understandable under the circumstances—like now, for example, poking her nose in where it didn’t belong.

“It is one of the diaries.” Robbie’s teasing smile returned as she advanced, having no idea what she was about to do. “Nothing else could make you blush like that.” Her hand snaked out to grab at Markie’s, still submerged in the box, now sweating on the cloth covering that encased the most damaging secret of her life.

When Robbie’s hand tugged on her wrist, Markie pushed her sister away. “Stop it!” she snapped. “I said it’s nothing!”

“Ah, now,” Robbie wheedled, “we could use a little entertainment. Couldn’t we, Mother?”

“That box wasn’t supposed to go in this room.” Marynell acted as if Robbie hadn’t even spoken. Her brow was creased and her voice grew vehement as she started to descend the ladder. “I told P.J. to put it across the hall with my things. I swear, that man never does anything right.”

The McBride farmhouse had a high converted attic, cleaved in two by a dark hallway illuminated by a single bare bulb at one end and a tiny window at the other. Right now, at midmorning, a thin shaft of light poured down the steep-pitched stairs that led to the kitchen. On either side of the hall, two enormous rooms stretched the length of the Victorian-era frame structure, with dormers poking out along the front and back planes of the roof.

Those two rooms had been rigidly appointed when the sisters were growing up. Their bedroom was at the front of the house, arranged like a dormitory with three twin beds evenly spaced between the two dormers and three scratched and dented dressers standing at attention on the opposite wall. The mantel clock on top of the center dresser had been the only decoration allowed during their childhoods. The long room on the other side of the hall was the playroom, later the study. Three identical desks, three plain bookshelves, three metal footlockers. No rugs. No curtains. No pictures. Marynell was nothing if not tidy. She despised clutter, her husband P.J.’s most especially.

Both attic rooms had grown fallow and musty since the girls had grown and gone. The one they were cleaning now had devolved into a repository for P.J.’s projects and memorabilia. Tucked in among the three beds were boxes of old photos and papers, childhood keepsakes from his daughters, magazines, sheet music, hunting and fishing equipment, anything that “offended” Marynell’s aseptic sense of order.

The other room, dedicated to Marynell’s sewing and paperwork, remained as bleak and sterile as an operating room. Marynell liked it that way—their belongings strictly divided.

Today the three women had been mucking out this room so Robbie’s three boys could stay here until she could get her life sorted out. The move back to the McBride farm had been Marynell’s idea. She adored her grandsons—the sons she never had.

Marynell was scrambling down the ladder faster than a spider backing down its web. “I’ll take that box across the hall myself.”

“I’d like to look through it first,” Markie said evenly while she kept one hand on the cardboard edge and the other inside…on the diary.

“Those are my things,” Marynell protested.

“Not exactly, Mother. This is my letter jacket, these are my yearbooks, and this is my diary.” Markie flipped her hand.

“Ha! So it is one of yours.” Robbie succeeded in snatching it from Markie’s grip. “Full of dreadful teenage secrets, I bet.” In fact, except for the one hidden in these pages, Markie couldn’t think of a single secret between the sisters. Her heart hammered and her stomach sank as her sister started flipping pages.

“Anything about me and Danny in here?” Robbie flopped on the nearest bed as she skimmed page after page of Markie’s teenage scrawl. In recent days Robbie’s whole world had come down to this obsessive quest—the desire for one more word, one more photograph, one more memory of Danny.

Robbie’s face lit with an expectant smile as she scanned the early pages, the first genuine smile Markie had seen in days. For the moment, her beleaguered sister looked vaguely like a teenager in love, instead of a devastated widow. “Here we go.” She read aloud with obvious delight, “Ohmigosh!!!! Robbie and Danny are getting married. With four exclamation points—isn’t that cute?”

Markie’s heart contracted. This diary contained precious few entries about Robbie’s youthful romance with Danny. In only a few pages Robbie would see the secret Markie was in no mood to reveal, certainly not now.

“There’s nothing else. Now, give it back to me.” Markie grabbed at her sister’s arm, but Robbie swung away saucily as Marynell inserted her tall frame between the girls.

Markie’s mother’s thin face had turned as gray as the cleaning rag compressed in her bony fingers. “This is my house,” she said to Markie quietly, ominously, “and you have no right to go through my things.”

“Your things?” Markie spun to face her mother squarely.

In these last few days since she’d returned to the farm, she had finally given up hope of even the pretense of a decent relationship with Marynell, even for Robbie’s sake. Truth be told, Markie had given up that hope a long time ago. Truth be told, she was never going to please her mother no matter what she did. And truth be told, if it weren’t for her father and Robbie, she would never have set foot in this house again, not after… It was certainly too late now. Recently, fate—kindly or not, Markie couldn’t decide—had engineered it so that she now knew exactly how much her long-ago decision had cost. It had cost her the beautiful young man who was her son, or rather, the son of a very fortunate family in Dallas.

“I will not be disrespected this way.” Marynell’s crepe-paper cheeks grew mottled, but for once her mother’s distress inspired no mercy in her youngest daughter. “This is my home and I… I…” Marynell stammered before her lips clamped shut and her chin went up, her old defiant gesture.

“Oh, there has never been any question about that.” Markie couldn’t help her sarcasm. “That’s why it’s okay for us to go through Daddy’s stuff like a wrecking crew, but your precious things must not be touched. But that happens to be my diary.” She pointed at the volume still in Robbie’s hands. “And you took it, didn’t you, Mother?” The accusation made tears spring to her eyes. “Back when you and Daddy were helping me move from Dallas to Austin.” Markie had moved a few times early in her career, but since the move to Austin a few years ago she felt settled at last. High time. She was thirty-five.

“I did it for your own good.” Marynell’s compressed lips were turning white.

Robbie’s head came up. The sappy smile was gone, replaced by a worried frown. “Hey, you two,” she chided in her musical voice. “What’s this all about?”

“Your sister’s husband,” Marynell hissed, “has just been killed in a tragic accident.” She emphasized each word as if Markie had somehow forgotten why they were all assembled here. “And she does not need any of your foolish drama.”

“This isn’t about me, mother. It’s about you, stealing my diary. And not just any diary. This diary.” Markie jabbed a finger at it.

“What in the world is going on here?” Robbie looked puzzled…and deeply disturbed.