Between, Georgia (11 page)

Bernese said, “Well, if you’re going, you might as well take Ona a message. Tell her she better get those other two dogs put down. They’re a menace.” She stared down into the dishwater, implacable, running the sponge around and around the half-cup’s edge. “If Ona won’t do it, I’ll get Isaac to get me a court order, and Thig can. And if Isaac and Thig can’t get it done, I will shoot those dogs myself. Fisher, are you eating?”

“My dinner is sad,” said Fisher, and Bernese wheeled around on her.

“Eat it,” she yelled. “You have to eat this list of food exactly for the book to work.”

Fisher looked mutinous. Her hands stayed in her lap.

“Pick. Up. Your. Fork,” said Bernese.

Fisher shoved her hands under her thighs and slumped. “It’s too sad for eating.”

Bernese came roaring down the length of the kitchen looking murderous. I hurried around and got in between them, leaning over the table by Fisher. “It’s not sad,” I said to Fisher. I picked up the cantaloupe and turned it over so its points curved upward in a cheerful arch. “It’s happy. See?”

Fisher stared down at the plate for another moment. “Okay,”

she said. She picked up her fork and dutifully stabbed some beans.

I turned around to Bernese, who was standing behind me, blowing like a bull. “Are you all right?” I said to her. Bernese had a temper, but I’d never seen her loose it upon Fisher so quickly.

“You riled me,” she said.

I held up my hands. “I’m sorry I brought it up. We can talk about Ona later. I need to get on to see Mama now.”

Bernese moved her tongue around inside her mouth, shifting her jaw as if sucking on something nasty. “All right then.” She went deliberately back to her dishes.

I kissed the top of Fisher’s head. “See you tomorrow.” She kept her head lowered, mechanically forking up food. “I’ll let myself out, Bernese.”

I was almost into the hall when Bernese added in an oddly formal tone, “Thank you for coming.”

I paused, surprised, and said, “You don’t have to thank me.

She’s my mother.”

Bernese said, “It’s hard to know how seriously you take your family these days. Technically, a husband is family, and look what you’re doing to yours.”

Hot blood rushed to heat my face, and I found myself clutching my purse, with the nails of my other hand digging hard into my palm. But Fisher was between us, sitting with her head bent earnestly over her supper, and there was nothing I could say.

CHAPTER 7

ISTOPPED AT the nurses’ station to find out Mama and Genny’s room number. They were up on the second floor. As I came out of the elevator, I could hear Genny’s piping voice coming down the hall. She was yammering in spurts, and as I got closer to her room, I heard a calm male voice speaking soothingly in the pauses. I followed the sound to room 214. The door was open, so I went in without knocking.

Mama was tucked into the bed by the window. She was still sound asleep. The curtains between the beds were open. Genny was in the closer bed, her shoulder and neck swathed in bandages. She had the blanket pulled over her legs. Her mouth looked tiny and puckered in her round face, and it took me a moment to realize this was probably the first time in years I had seen her without a cheerful slash of pink lipstick. Her long white hair was down, thick and still streaked liberally with black.

Henry Crabtree was sitting in a visitor’s chair, pulled up close beside her bed. As I came in, Genny saw me over his shoulder, and her eyes lit up as she squawked, “Oh, Nonny, you came!”

Henry stood immediately and turned toward me, smiling. He was built low, close to the bone, and his unbandaged forearm, corded with muscle and prominent dark veins, looked incongruous emerging from the rolled cuff of his shirt as he held one hand out to me.

I took it and squeezed, saying, “I’m so glad you’re here.” Then I bent down and dropped a kiss on Genny’s forehead. “Of course I came, silly widget.” To Henry I added, “Has Mama stirred at all?”

He shook his head.

Genny blinked, so long and slow I thought she had dropped into sleep, but then her eyes sprang open, and her hands came fluttering up like drunken birds. “Oh, Lordy, Nonny, why isn’t Stacia awake? Is it a coma?”

My eyes met Henry’s, and he mouthed, “Morphine,” tilting his head slightly to indicate the IV drip.

“It’s not a coma. She’s sleeping.”

“You don’t know,” Genny said. “It might be a coma.” I caught her hands and set them gently back down on her stomach, but the moment I took my hands away, she bent her arms at the elbow again, lifting her palms toward the ceiling. “Is she breathing? Poke her a little.”

“She’s fine. Your Nonny’s here, and you can sleep now, widget.

I’m going to fix it all.” I caught her hands again and pushed them gently down, and her eyelids lowered with them.

“Those dogs,” she said. Her words were slurred. “I smell their breathing. My shoulder hurts.”

“You need to sleep now,” I said, soothing and soft. “Does this button make the morphine come? Let’s push it.” I put the box in her hands, and she gave it a tap.

“I can’t sleep because of those doctors. Who knows. And those dogs. What if they get loose? They could track me. They could track me to here, and I’d be sleeping, so I wouldn’t know to run,”

Genny said.

“I won’t let them,” I said.

“Uh-oh, am I falling down?” Genny said, and her hands relaxed under mine. I eased backwards. I thought she was asleep, but then she said, “What if I’d died, Nonny? What would happen to dear Stacia? You mustn’t let me die, because what would Stacia do?”

“You didn’t die, and you won’t die,” I said.

Genny didn’t say anything else, and after a moment even her pursed mouth relaxed and she was truly out.

I turned to Henry. “Did they admit you, too?”

“Not at all. That dog took out a chunk of me, but all I needed was a stitch job and a shot of antibiotics that they kindly put right into my ass. I went back home to clean up and make sure the store was locked, then came back here to check on Genny and your mother.”

“Has Genny been picking?” I asked.

“No. Fluttering and fighting sleep, but she hasn’t tried to hurt herself,” he said.

As I straightened up, Henry and I were exactly eye to eye. He was wearing one of his millions of white button-down shirts. This one looked buttery soft and expensive, a leftover from his stint as a software developer in New York. It was tucked neatly into khaki pants that had a crisp seam running sharp to his oxblood loafers.

His shoulder-length hair, something else he’d brought back from New York, was gathered and bound into a neat ponytail behind him.

“Do you think you’ll be able to open up your store tomorrow?”

“I think so. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone has ever died from not getting a book,” Henry said.

“Thanks for coming back and sitting with Genny and Mama.

You didn’t have to do that.”

He raised his eyebrows and looked at me over the lenses of his small round glasses. “Sure I did, Nonny Jane. We’re almost not unrelated.”

I grinned back at him. This was our running joke. Henry was a transplant from the Louisiana branch of the Crabtree family tree. A couple of years ago, while Fisher and I were hanging out with him at the bookstore, we had tried to work out exactly how we were connected to each other. We’d ended up pulling out a long string of register tape so we could make a flowchart. The Georgia Crabtrees often had babies before they had high school diplomas, and after tracing our way back through their short generations and his family’s longer ones, we figured out we were fourth cousins, three times removed. On paper, anyway.

I’d never said it out loud to him, but I didn’t think we were related at all. Henry’s father, Reau, was your typical Crabtree: red-haired, freckled, tall, pale. When he was a young buck in Lafayette, Reau got into trouble and was given the choice of jail or the army. He took the army, which was an odd choice for a Crabtree. The general Crabtree consensus was that you got better drugs in prison.

The army turned him into a mechanic, and he liked it. On pass in Lafayette, he fell in love with a young woman who already had two divorces behind her. He married her a month after their first date. She came with a lot of baggage, including a world-class case of manic depression and a reputation for taking her marriage vows lightly. She was a sloe-eyed Cajun with a junk-French accent so thick it had to be at least partially fake. She never lost it, and even Henry had retained a bit of a Cajun slur to his S’s.

Henry, half a head shorter than any Crabtree ever born, looked like her if she’d been painted one shade darker. She’d been sallow, but he was olive-skinned. Her eyes had been milk chocolate, but his were almost black. His younger sister was as redheaded and weedy as her daddy, though there wasn’t even a lick of Reau visible in Henry. But since Reau had buckets of the legendary Crabtree rage and a gun collection, folks didn’t exactly line up to point that out.

Henry had been seven when Reau opted out and moved the family to Between. Reau worked for Ona as a mechanic, and Henry’s mother bought space on the square for her bookstore.

Reau, who had both enjoyed a stint in the army and married a book lover, was considered the Crabtree family loon. Which really, there’s so much irony there, you could mine it for years and never have the vein run out. But when Henry was about twelve, Reau proved he was a true Crabtree after all: He got drunk as a goat with some of his buddies, and they decided to hike out into the woods with twelve-gauge shotguns and vaporize some squirrels. Reau leaned his gun up against a fence post, and as he was climbing through the barbed wire, he knocked the gun over and blew a large and unforgiving hole in himself.

Henry’s mother moved her abbreviated family into the apartment over her store. That was after my aunt Bernese had opened her museum, and Between was becoming a must-stop spot for the kind of people who liked to pack up a camper and go see freakishly large balls of tinfoil and Mary statues that wept blood on Easter. The tourist traffic kept the bookstore alive, and since they lived over it, they managed to scrape by even without Reau’s salary. I think Ona may have helped them some.

Growing up, Henry and I weren’t close. He was a good four years older than me. But I spent my allowance at the bookstore and my afternoons at his house, playing with his sister, Lily.

Henry was a constant presence, reading or tinkering with one of the old computers he was always dragging home. I didn’t mind him being around, but I never crushed on him or anything, in spite of the fact that he looked like Johnny Depp. As a teenager and young man, he hadn’t quite grown into himself. He was quiet, introverted, and his face was so fine-boned he was almost beautiful. These things rendered him asexual to me.

When I went off to UGA, Henry was still living at home, taking care of his mother and working freelance as a computer programmer to keep the bookstore afloat. His income meant Lily could say yes to her partial-scholarship offer and escape to Sa-vannah State.

My junior year, Henry’s mother died. Her liver quit on her.

Next I heard, he’d left Between. Bernese was irritated because he wouldn’t sell her the bookstore so she could expand. He wouldn’t even sublet, although the move looked permanent. He had up and married a woman he met over the Internet, some kind of an art dealer who lived in New York City.

Bernese got to see her before I did. “Pretty thing, but weird-looking,” she told me.

“Like dressed weird?” I asked, curious.

“No. Dressed nice. I bet you her shoes cost more than my car.

But she was mutty-looking.” Then she added in hushed tones, as if telling me something dirty, “I’m not sure, to look at her, but I think she might be part black.”

“Good grief, Bernese, who cares,” I said.

“Well, none of
us
do. But how do you think that’s going to fly with Crabtrees?” Bernese said.

I saw her point.

Two years later, Henry came home pulling a small U-Haul trailer behind his car and quietly reopened the bookstore. He didn’t go back to New York, and his wife was never seen in town again. Rex Gentry, Between’s lone mailman, told me—told everyone, really—that letters and fat envelopes came and went between Isaac Davids’s law office and a practice in New York. Then the letters stopped, and then Henry took off his wedding band.

In the years after his divorce, Henry and I had drifted into a close friendship. We both were obsessed with good novels and good coffee. Fisher adored him, and I had come to depend on Henry’s companionship on my long weekends home. I should have known I would find him here, taking care of Mama and Genny.

Mama stirred, and I quickly moved to sit in the chair beside her bed. Her hands flew up into the air, exactly like Genny’s had.

I reached over and drew a heart on her shoulder. I always did that when I came into a room she was in, so she would know that I was there and it was me. She made my name sign, questioning, still half asleep, and I drew the heart again. She exhaled in obvious relief and said my name out loud.

My mother rarely spoke, and when she did, when she said my name in her high-pitched, scratchy voice with the vowels drawn out long so that it sounded like “Nah-ay-nay,” it flooded my stomach with immediate, visceral love.

Her hands were reaching to find mine, and so I gave them to her. My mother had lady-shaped hands, small with tapering fingers, but her nails were kept short and plain and her palms were callused. I signed, telling her everything I knew she’d want to know, first of all that Genny was going to be fine. I told her where she was and what had happened, and that I was here and Genny was in the next bed sleeping, and that Henry was here as well. As I signed, her quick hands skimmed over and around the shapes my hands and fingers made, reading me like Braille.

When I told her Bernese had shot the Bitch, she lifted one shoulder in an eloquent shrug and signed,
Good
.

She had questions, of course, so I gave her my hands and answered them, interpreting what both of us were saying for Henry as I signed, so that instead of thinking in English or ASL, I thought between them. Mama made me go through what had happened several times, reconstructing it from her experience and questioning Henry, who had witnessed it.