Work in Progress

Everything We Used to Have is upmarket book club fiction that follows the journey of Jemma Jordan as she comes of age in the 1980s.

Fighting to keep a promise to her father, Jemma must protect her family’s secret gift from a dangerous grandfather who will stop at nothing to possess it in order to restore his corrupt, evangelical empire.

Chapter 10: I Bid You Farewell (excerpt)

When Mama approached she sat beside me in the dirt, Gabriel pressed against her. Asher stood over us. I gazed out over treetops with yellow leaves swaying in the afternoon breeze.

“We have an important duty.” Mama rocked gently to keep Gabriel content. “Promises to keep.” 

“What are you talking about?” I wiped snot away with the back of my arm. “Buck’s gift is gone.”

“Jemma. You saw what I saw. Gabriel has the gift. Now, there are a lot of specifics I don’t know about how it all works so we’ll have to be extra alert. Buck kept so many specifics to himself. That was our biggest mistake. Assuming he’d always be here.” 

Asher lowered to a knee on the other side of her. “Are you afraid, Mama?” 

She swallowed hard. The kind of swallow that answers the question without words.

“Tell us what you’re thinking,” he prodded.

“That we’ve lost the best man in the world.” Her words were heavy and deep in her throat. “And even though we outsmarted his father, Buck and I always knew our luck could change at any minute. I’ve never known a man so simultaneously loathed and admired as Robert Halliday. I need you both to remember, he will stop at nothing to rebuild what he used to have.”

I shuddered at her words. “What did he used to have?”

“Everything. And he’s been tracking us for sixteen years—at least trying to—just to reclaim it.”
“You mean the gift?” Asher asked. “But it’s Buck’s. It doesn’t belong to his family.” 

“It’s awfully difficult to change what people believe,” Mama said. “And what people like the Hallidays can get others to believe.” Her eyes darted back and forth from Asher to me. “Don’t trust any of them. Ever. You hear me? Not one.”

“What about Alma?” Asher asked.  

Mama looked surprised that he knew the name but not angry. I expected her to dodge the question, but she must have figured lying no longer served her. Not this lie, anyway. “We cannot let any of them find us. We must conceal the light.”

Conceal the light. Even as a child I saw the layers in that. When I spoke, my voice quivered. “They can’t take a baby from his mama. Isn’t it against the law or something?”

“These men don’t follow laws.” 

“What about your family?” Asher asked. “Can they help us?”

Mama’s lashes fluttered over mermaid eyes. “My mother’s dead.”

“But—”

“My mother is dead.”

Her punctuated words caused me to tense up more. I held my breath. Asher looked down at the toe of his shoe. Gabriel was asleep. Thank goodness for that. 

Mama broke the silence. “Asher, you are strong and capable and you know what you’re doing. You’re going to see us through this. And Jem?” She turned to me. Squeezed my arm the way Buck used to. “You were Buck’s honeybee. His sweetness. His light. Everything he used to see in himself he saw in you. His children are the best of him, you know that? The absolute best of him.”

The best of him? That might be true of Asher but not me. I was selfish. Impulsive. Didn’t she see? Buck was the sun that lit the world.
I was the moon who stole light to be seen.

“Folks are waiting.” Valdez addressed us, his back against the sun. “Will you be much longer?”

Asher rose, brushed dirt from his pants, and reached out to help Mama to her feet. Gabriel remained asleep and content. 

“Wait.” I scrambled to my feet. “If Buck was once Gideon Halliday, who were you?” 

“No one, Jemma.” Mama’s voice was small. “I was no one.”

*****

Wounds are like the heat of an iron. We can’t escape the mark once it’s branded into us. Buck’s death was a wound that branded me, a defining moment in my life. I had no idea how the loss would scar Asher or Mama, or me for that matter. Only time would tell. But one thing was for sure. I would never be the same. 

Buck was a man who was more than a man. He was a samaritan. A savior. The worker of miracles who could rescue just about everybody except himself. Soon, his light would be forever concealed. Buried in the dirt. Waiting for a resurrection. 

And that would come through Gabriel, I thought. My little brother who was about to become my whole world. How easy it is for a person to disregard their own strength and power in the presence of greatness. 

That day when I was nine, standing near the river facing the clouds, I noticed how still the air had become. Dragonflies were with me the night of the storm. One in my face. One near my ear. Two or three or more accompanied me on my journey home. Where were they now? Not even so much as a moth fluttered by. 

Who needs them, I thought. It was all a lie I told myself anyway. Dragonflies aren’t the best. If they were, they’d have a light. They’d be found everywhere but where I was. 

Willie’s stick cross was almost completely submerged in water. Not even his symbol of offering would survive now that the light was gone. Now that my father was gone. Taking my panache with him. 

Mama lied to me, I decided. Said if I was good and had faith, God would come through. I couldn’t remember a time that He did. 

So why believe?

Breaking up with faith hurts like hell. Like dried wax torn from your innards. But it felt so freeing to renounce it all. Buck and light and dragonflies. Most of all, the dragonflies. “I hate you, you know? I hate you!” I cried out, unsure who I was speaking to. 

A breeze rattled the leaves in the trees.

The release of misguided dogma was paradoxical in effect. For a moment I felt free, but then the weight of aloneness came crashing down. My heart imploded like one of Tía Raquel’s white dwarf stars. 

Chin up, I faced the clouds. Something besides faith laid ahead for me. Something dark. And unforgiving. Something murky and enveloping, like the clouds moving in from the west.