Isabella always told me three things: I love you, your momma loves you, and God loves you.
She lied about my momma. My daddy was gone by the time I was three years old and my momma was a tall, proud woman who wouldn’t have nothing to do with her baby girl. She’d pass through the house like a ghost through the night, her dress flowing behind her. She always wore those dresses--pink, blue, tangerine, pearl…That woman was in love with color. I remember being dressed up on many an occasion, myself. Dressed in the cheap little girls’ skirts and tights Isabella favored. If not that, a clean white shirt. I sure missed my momma often, but it didn’t seem to matter.
I never cried for her.
Isabella lied about loving me, too. I seen her with her own kids a couple times, when my momma was staying out with one of her adult friends or another. The look in her eyes when she held her own baby or caressed her son’s cheek was like nothing anybody’d ever looked at me. There was a sparkle about her that I simply didn’t recognize. Her children were real brats, too. Always running around and screaming about who pulled their hair and who put peanut butter on the dog’s head, and whatnot. When I saw those people together, it was quite clear to me who Isabella belonged to.
Isabella told me a lot of tall tales in her time, it’s true. Told me about the boogeyman under my bed to make me go to sleep at night, told me about how I’d waste away to death if I didn’t eat my vegetables at dinner each night, old me about the snakes in the pond that would eat my toes off of my feet if I went swimming. There was one thing I never forgot though, that Isabella told me truer than anything else she ever said.
When times got tough, I didn’t always know who to turn to, but I learned. When I fell down and couldn’t get up again, God showed me how. When nobody’d give me the love I wanted, I was comforted ’cause I knew that God loved me. Through thick and thin, I was never alone. Years passed, and Isabella left our home to work for another family. After all that time had passed though, I became a grown woman with my own family. My children grew up with two strong, loving parents. They had what I never did, but above all, they had what I did have.
The love of God.