If My Heart Had Wings: A World War II Love Story(4)

“Now, where is that thing coming from?” she mumbled through the pins, frowning and pulling on an unwanted drape that crossed my left shoulder blade. I could see the determination on her face in the mirror.

Oh boy, here we go, I thought. I’ll be standing here forever because she’s going to figure this out even if it kills her. Bored and antsy, with no hope of relief in sight, I decided to amuse myself by asking a bold question to see how she’d answer it.

“So, what was your first husband’s name?”

Mom was concentrating so intently it seemed like she barely heard me.

“Hmpf?” she grunted through the pins.

“You know, your first husband. What was his name?”

She shot me a surprised and annoyed look through the mirror, lips tightly clamped around the pins.

“What brought that on?” she asked, from the side of her mouth.

“I don’t know,” I said nonchalantly. “Just curious.”

She pulled a pin from between her lips and used it to secure a tuck in the fabric, then stood back to survey the effect. Evidently, it looked okay because suddenly all of the pins seemed to have migrated from her mouth to the top of my dresser.

“It was Lyndon,” she said distractedly, continuing to analyze her work. “Lyndon Raff.” She frowned and tugged again, shaking her head.

“Raff?” I chortled, hoping to keep the conversation going. “Now, there’s a weird name! Never heard of that one.”

She ignored me, picking up another pin and deepening the shoulder seam.

I wasn’t going to be put off that easily.

“And did you meet him at a dance, or what?”

She sighed, put in a second pin, and said irritably, “You’re pretty darn nosy! Why do you want to know, anyway?”

“I don’t know, just curious. You’re the one who’s always telling me that family history is so important, and I should know my roots.”

This was usually a pretty good way to get to her. We come from a long line of family historians who wrote down not only names and dates but actual stories about themselves and their ancestors. As a result, we knew all kinds of stories about our relatives, some of whom dated back as far as the Salem witch trials.

“Well, this has nothing to do with your roots,” she said airily. “It’s part of my life, but not yours.”

I couldn’t see why she had to be so standoffish. She’d told me all kinds of stuff about people we were barely related to, including her crazy cousin Grace back on the farm who got pregnant by the hired hand. And then Grace’s sister went the same way with the same guy. Those people weren’t a part of my roots.

Maybe a better approach would be appealing to her vanity.

“Well, I like hearing about your life, especially back in the olden days. What’s the difference if it doesn’t involve me? It’s still you, and I think you’re interesting.”

She looked at me dubiously, and something between a chuckle and a snort erupted from the back of her throat. That’s what she did when she thought something was bunk.

She was right not to be taken in, of course; it wasn’t just family history I was after. What I really wanted was to hear everything I could on the subject of romance. In particular I was searching for answers to questions like: How do people find each other and get together? What do you say to a boy to make him really like you? And what’s expected of you after that? It was all a great mystery to me.

And there was another reason I wanted to hear about Mom’s hidden romance. I was enormously curious about what she had been like when she was my age. (Well, okay, maybe just a little older.) It was so hard for me to picture my practical, non-romantic, stay-at-home mom in the throes of some passionate love affair. Who was she back then?

I knew, of course, that she had been glamorous; I’d seen the old pictures. In one, she was as dazzling as a movie star, all done up in a fur coat with huge shoulder pads, a black cartwheel hat, and plenty of ruby red lipstick. She certainly wasn’t glamorous now. Not that she was ugly or even un-pretty; she was just plain, an average-looking middle-aged woman with no makeup and short dark hair brushed back from her face.

As for her clothes, they were about as far as you could get from fur coats and fancy hats. Around the house, she mostly wore a pair of black shorts and an old tattered white blouse. More than once she had told me, “You girls and Dad need clothes because you go out into the world. I don’t really need many clothes because I just stay at home.”

It was true. She and Dad almost never went out. Her life revolved around helping him with his home-based business and using her skills as a seamstress to make whatever the family needed—clothes, drapes, cushion covers, or whatever. She often said that sewing was her creative outlet. But how did the glamour girl in the fur coat and black cartwheel hat get to this point? That girl certainly hadn’t spent her life at the sewing machine.

After implanting one final pin into that troublesome shoulder seam, Mom grunted, “Okay, take this thing off and let me get to work on it.”

I pulled the dress over my head and handed it over.

“So anyway, are you gonna tell me how you met him?” I asked insistently, pulling on my shorts and top, then flopping expectantly on my fluffy yellow bed.

“Oh, Dene,” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “You slay me.”