Center Stage
I stepped onto my mother’s front porch for the first time in ten years. Typical of my mother not much had changed. Same red brick with white trim. Same black, steel-reinforced front door. Same silver knocker, the word STEELE etched into it in bold capital letters.
“Get it?”
my dad used to ask when I was a little girl.
“The door is made of steel, and our last name is Steele.”
I worshiped my father, so I always laughed even though I didn’t get it. I would have done anything to please him. Until he disappeared.
My mother put a lot of stock into the safety of that front door.
When I was younger, she would tell me it kept the boogeyman away. A month after my father left—when I was fourteen—fourteen—I heard my mother whispering with her best friend Tilly as they lay sprawled out on the patio chairs on the deck, drinking their third—or was it fourth?—white wine sangria.
“If only he’d been home that night,”
my mother drawled with a slur. She may have spent most of her adult life in Franklin, Tennessee, but you couldn’t remove her Sweet Briar, Alabama roots.
“Lila,”
Tilly groaned. “Not that again. The Good Lord has mysterious ways.
” My mother had bolted upright and pointed her finger at her best friend, swaying in her seat. “The Good Lord had nothin’ to do with it, Tilly Bartok. It was that good for nothin’—”
She looked up at me and her face went blank.
“Magnolia. How long have you been standin’ there?” “Not long. I just finished my homework.”
“Then go on upstairs and tell your brother to wash up for dinner.”
She gestured toward the house. I turned around to do as I was told, wondering if the Good Lord wasn’t to blame for my father’s absence, who actually was? But I knew better than to ask. Besides, I’d heard the whispered rumors.
“Magnolia!”
she called after me.
“Did you lock the front door?”
“Yes, Momma.”
“Good. You can never be too careful.”
A lesson learned too late. Perhaps if I’d been more careful after my high school graduation, the big bad thing wouldn’t have happened. But now I stood before her front door again, prepared to eat a heaping slice of humble pie, wearing the wrinkled clothes I’d worn to the theatre yesterday afternoon. Maybe the disheveled look would make my groveling more convincing.
While I had grown accustomed to the anxiety that slammed into me whenever I thought about coming home, I wasn’t prepared for the wave of fear that almost brought me to my knees.
I was nervous about my mother’s reaction, yes, but this was pure terror. I started to turn around, but the door swung open before my fist made contact with the wood.
My mother stood in the threshold, looking noticeably older. I counted backward to the last time we’d seen each other. Had three years really passed since that Christmas in New York City? She gaped at me in shock, her face turning pale. She looked like she was staring at a ghost.
I hadn’t haunted her house in ten years, so I could hardly blame her. It wasn’t as if I’d issued a warning. The sight of her quieted my fear. “Hello, Momma.”
“Magnolia.”
She blinked, taking in the sight of my two large suitcases. “You’ve come for a visit?”
I shifted my weight, fighting every instinct to flee.
“I’ve come home to stay.” “For how long?”
“But . . . what . . .”
My mother was speechless, but I was too nervous to truly bask at the moment. Maybe hell was freezing over. She finally regained her senses, wrapping her arms across her chest and squeezing tight.
“I thought you were making your big Broadway debut this week.”
I grimaced.
“I did.” Last night, actually.
“Then what are you doing here?”
Rather than answer her, I glanced over her shoulder into the entryway.
Like the exterior of the house, it appeared as unchanged as if it had emerged from a time capsule. But one thing was different: me. I was no longer the sheltered naïve girl my mother had raised. I was cynical and jaded, and it had nothing to do with the ten years I’d spent in the Big Apple, even if all the scraping by and trying to make a living in the theatre world had sharpened my edges.
“Oh,” she finally said.
“I see.”
She took a breath, still blocking the entrance, a true sign that I had thrown her off her game. She would never dream of keeping a guest standing on the front porch. Even me.
“Do you have a job?”
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