So B. It (12 page)

Even though my grandmother and my mother died almost thirteen years apart, it felt as if I had lost them both on the same day.

After Ruby hugged me, she took me inside. Bernie had called her and asked her to be there with me when I heard about Mama. She dialed the number for me, and I held the phone to my ear and listened.

“Your mama went in her sleep, baby. I thought she was just sleeping off that awful headache. The one I told you about that was so bad. But after a while when she didn’t wake up, I went to check on her and she was…”

“Dead? Mama is dead?”

As soon as I said it, I couldn’t stand being inside my own skin anymore. I wanted to turn myself inside out, shake the feelings off like
fire ants. It was all my fault. I’d been so wrapped up in what was happening to me, I hadn’t even asked about Mama that morning. Bernadette knew she was getting worse.

Your mama and I need you to come home.

But I hadn’t listened.

Bernie tried to comfort me. She told me I couldn’t have made it there in time to say good-bye anyway. Ruby held me and patted my back, and Roy wrapped his big, strong arms around us both like string around a package.

We drove back to the house, where Ruby ran me a bath and tucked me into bed even though it was still afternoon. She brought me soup, which I couldn’t eat, and sat by me until finally I managed to fall asleep. It was dark out when I woke up, and the house was quiet. I lay there for a while, trying not to think, trying not to feel. I wished it would all go away. I closed my eyes and pulled the pillow over my head. Something cold and smooth touched my cheek, and I realized it was the notebook I’d put under the pillow the night before.

I sat up and turned on the light. How could I have thought it was so important? So
important to know. None of it mattered. Knowing didn’t change what was. One by one I ripped the pages out of the notebook, crumpling them and throwing them on the floor until there was nothing left between the worn red covers.

I turned the light out and lay back down on my side with my arms crossed tightly over my chest. Holding myself like that, I rocked. “Done, done, done,” I whispered as the cold damp mist swirled around me in the dark. “Done, done, done, Heidi. Shh…”

“Don’t be late tonight, Roy. I’m making a pot roast,” Ruby called from the porch.

“
Pot roast?
Be still my heart. You haven’t made that in ages,” Roy called back.

“Poor thing’s nothing but skin and bones,” Ruby said.

“Oh, the pot roast is for Heidi, huh? If it was just going to be me tonight, we’d be having Pop-Tarts in front of the TV,” Roy said.

“I’ve never served you Pop-Tarts for dinner and you know it, Roy Franklin. Get out of here now before I change my mind about cooking for you at all.”

Roy took off his hat, ducked his head, and got into the car. He turned the car around, and as he drove past me, he rolled down his window and called out—“You haven’t lived
until you’ve had Ruby’s pot roast, Heidi.”

They were trying to make it seem normal, but nothing was normal anymore. I was out in the hammock, where I’d taken to spending my days curled up in a quilt in my nightgown and a pair of thick wool socks. Ruby sometimes came out and sat beside me in a chair, but we didn’t talk. I didn’t have anything to say. Bernie called a lot, but I didn’t feel like talking to her either. I knew she and Roy were trying to figure out what to do about Mama and the funeral, but I really didn’t want to hear about that.

A little while later Ruby came out of the house carrying a stack of magazines in her arms. She pulled the chair up beside the hammock, but I turned my face away from her.

“I know you don’t want to think about it, Heidi, but we have to talk about tomorrow. Roy’s going down to Sullivan County Airport this afternoon, to pick up the casket. There are some important things we need to decide.”

I loosened one foot from the tangle of quilt and hung it over the edge of the hammock so I could push off from the ground and swing.

“I was thinking maybe you’d like me to cut your hair,” she said.

I hooked my foot around the leg of her chair to stop myself in mid swing.

“Why do you want to cut my hair?” I asked.

“I thought maybe you’d like to fix yourself up a little tomorrow before the service,” she said.

“What service?” I asked.

“The pastor from the Methodist church is going to speak,” she told me.

“What’s he going to say? He didn’t know Mama,” I said.

“Someone has to say a few words, Heidi,” she said.

Roy had told me that he and Bernie had talked and that she’ d decided that it would be best for Mama to be buried in Liberty, where she’d been born and raised. They talked about burying her in Reno, too, next to her mother. Roy made some calls and found out Diane DeMuth was in a potter’s field on the west side of town, but in the end Bernie thought Liberty would be better. They’d asked me what I thought, of course, but I told them that I didn’t care.

“I want you to look at these magazines,” Ruby said, “just to give you an idea. I’m pretty good at it. I cut Roy’s hair and some of the neighbors’, too.”

She left the magazines on the chair and went inside. After a while I reached out and pulled them into my nest. On every cover was a different beautiful woman with red lips and shiny hair and teeth so white and square and perfect, they reminded me of Chicklets.

I couldn’t believe how many different ways there were for a person to wear her hair. The pages were filled with words like
upswept
and
feathered
and
windblown
, and over and over again
natural
. Wouldn’t the most natural thing be not to cut your hair at all? I wondered.

I gathered the quilt cocoon around me and went inside, through the house, and into the bathroom. I opened the medicine cabinet and found what I was looking for. A pair of silver nail scissors. Standing in front of the mirror, I began to cut the tangles out of my hair, carefully at first, and then with angry chopping motions that hurt and pulled so much that I began to cry for the first time since Mama had died.

Ruby heard me and came and took the scissors away. She held me while I cried, and when I was through, she pressed a cool washcloth against my face. Then she ran warm water in the sink and gently washed my hair. Afterward I followed her out to the kitchen, still wrapped in the quilt, and sat on the tall kitchen stool while she cut my hair.

She turned the radio on and hummed along with the music while she worked, turning my head from side to side, steering me by the chin to make sure it was even. When she was finished, she dried it with a hair dryer and a big round brush; then she blew on my face and neck to get rid of any little hairs that might be sticking to my skin.

“Do you want to see?” she asked me.

I pulled the quilt tighter around my shoulders and started to stand up. A shower of curls and tiny brown prickles fell through the air and onto the floor.

“Leave the quilt here, Heidi. It’s covered with hair,” Ruby said. “No sense dragging it through the house. I’ll sweep up in here later.”

Reluctantly I shed the quilt, and Ruby led
me back into the bathroom, where she stood behind me, fluffing my hair with her fingertips while I looked at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t me anymore. I was some other girl. Some girl with short brown curly hair. Some girl with a new haircut and no mama.

“What do you think?” said Ruby.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s okay,” she told me. “You don’t have to know.”

We buried Mama the next day in a small cemetery near an apple orchard, only a mile or so from Hilltop. Roy and Ruby were there, and Thurman Hill, too, though he stood apart from us, over near the gate where we first came in. I had spoken to Bernie on the phone the night before and told her I didn’t want the pastor to speak at Mama’s funeral.

“I think I should do it,” I said.

Bernie tried to help me come up with the right words to say.

“When people die, we usually talk about the things we’ll miss about that person,” she said, “or the worthwhile things they did while they were alive.”

“Who the person was?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Bernie said. “Who the person was.”

That night, after Bernie and I hung up, I took a square of paper from a pad next to the phone and made a list. I planned to read it out loud the next day at Mama’s funeral.

“Did you remember to bring it?” I asked Ruby as we walked across the wet grass to where Mama’s casket lay next to a pile of freshly dug brown earth.

“Yes, sweetie, I have it,” she said, patting her pocketbook.

We stood there for a minute quietly, and then I unfolded the little square of paper I’d been holding in my hand since we’d left the house.

Who She Was

Sophia Lynne DeMuth
So B. It Precious Bouquet
Mama
Soof

I had planned to read the list out loud and not say anything more than that. But when I
looked at Mama’s word written there at the bottom of the page, suddenly something turned inside me like a key. I looked over at Thurman Hill, standing quietly by the gate, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his eyes cast downward.

“I always knew that Mama loved me,” I began. “I just thought she didn’t have a word for it. But I was wrong. All along she had a word for love—it was just different from the one everyone else was using. We all had names for Mama—Precious Bouquet, Sophia Lynne DeMuth, Mama—but she didn’t call herself by any of those. She called herself So B. It, and it didn’t matter that no one else ever called her that; it was still who she was. A long time ago, somebody else who loved Mama gave her another name,
Soof
. But when she said that word, she wasn’t talking about herself.
Soof
wasn’t Mama’s name;
soof
was Mama’s name for love.”

Then it was time for Mama to be lowered into the ground. Ruby opened her pocketbook and handed me a small package wrapped in tissue. Bernie had sent it from Reno, and I had asked Ruby to carry it for me, to keep it safe.
Unwrapping the layers, I gently set Mama’s white tea cup with the gold rim on top of the casket. Next to that I put the big box of Jujyfruits I’d bought at the gas station where I’d asked Roy to stop on the way. One end of it was opened, because I’d taken out all the green ones and thrown them away.

I closed my eyes and thought about Mama. About the way she had looked the last time I saw her. Leaning out the window with Bernadette, waving good-bye to me as I set off on my journey.

“Tea, Heidi?” I heard her voice say in my head.

“Yes, Mama. Tea,” I answered.

Then I sat next to her on the couch one last time and tasted the sweet hot milky tea. I saw Mama’s smile. I felt Mama’s hand patting my knee. I looked into her pale, wide-set blue eyes.

“Back soon, Heidi?” she said. “Back soon?”

“Good-bye, Mama,” I whispered.

That night I was sitting with Roy and Ruby in their living room, still wearing the same clothes I’d worn to the cemetery. Ruby had put
out plates of leftover pot roast, but nobody seemed to be very hungry.

“I just can’t get over that haircut,” Roy said, looking at me. “She looks so much older, doesn’t she, Rube?”

He’d said that same thing three times already, just while we’d been sitting there. I think we all knew there was something we needed to talk about.

“We were thinking maybe you might like to stay with us for a while,” Ruby said. “You could enroll at the junior high school in town and live right here with us.”

“Give you a chance to get to know Elliot…and your grandfather,” said Roy.

“We could paint your room. Wallpaper it. Whatever you like,” said Ruby.

I looked at them sitting there side by side on the couch and thought about the Memory game. I wished the rules could be different, that there could be more than one match for every card. But Ruby had been right—sometimes life just isn’t fair.

A few days later we stopped at Hilltop on the way to the airport. I stood with Elliot in the
rec room in front of the big stone fireplace so Ruby could take a picture of us to show to Bernie. He didn’t call me
soof
this time. Maybe I didn’t look like Mama anymore with my hair cut short. Thurman Hill stayed away until we were about to leave. Then he came over and handed me an envelope.

“This is everything from the files about your mother. I’ve included some photographs, too, from the year she was here with us, and also of the rest of the”—he hesitated over the next word—“family. I think you’ll find you look a great deal like the late Mrs. Hill, especially now with your hair that way. She was a lovely woman, Elliot’s mother.” I could tell that it wasn’t easy for him, talking to me like that. After all, he’d paid a small fortune not to have to know I even existed. Before I left, he said one more thing to me.

“I know this is probably impossible after all that’s happened, but someday I would like to know you.”

Later I was glad I hadn’t said what had been right on the tip of my tongue: “There are some things in life a person just can’t know.”

A lot of things changed after Mama died. At first I was sad all the time, but Bernie told me to feel whatever I felt until I was done feeling it, and even though I still haven’t gotten over it, after a while I was pretty much okay. Ruby and Roy had planted a seed in my head, and I enrolled in the local junior high school in Reno, where everyone knew me as Heidi DeMuth. Zander and I still hung out in the afternoons, and we took turns baby-sitting for the Chudacoff twins. Bernie quit drinking coffee, because she read somewhere that caffeine makes anxious people more anxious, and she also decided to try to learn how to cook.

Another thing that was different was that after I came back from Liberty, my lucky streak, at least when it came to gambling, disappeared for good. Bernadette flipped coins for me sometimes just to check, but I only guessed right about the same amount a normal person would.

I did go back to visit Liberty. The first time was the fall after Mama died, when we put the
stone on her grave. It was made of pink marble with the list of Mama’s names carved on it in script. That, and the one that we’d kept taped to the inside of the kitchen cabinet in the apartment in Reno, are the only lists that remain from that time in my life.

Ruby’s belly was big as a basketball that fall. Her baby was born a few months later. A little girl they named Aurora at my suggestion.

“We’d given up hope of ever having a family,” Roy told me when he called from the hospital the day she was born. “Ruby’s convinced you passed that good luck of yours onto her, you know.”

I hoped she was right.

I didn’t see Elliot or my grandfather that first time I went back. Roy offered to drive me over to Hilltop, but I just wasn’t ready. It would take some time.

A few days after I returned home, I was waiting in line at the Double D in Reno when I spotted a box of Jujyfruits in the candy rack and tossed it onto the counter. Later, back at the apartment, I took it into my room and sat there staring at the familiar yellow box with the
picture of the colorful candies on the front. I thought about Mama and Bernie and me and the life we’d had before I went to Liberty.

Suddenly I noticed something I’d never seen before. The name of the company that makes Jujyfruits is written on the side in small black letters inside a red diamond.
Heide.
It’s not spelled the same, ending with an
e
instead of an
i
, but even so I’m pretty sure it would sound the same if you said it out loud.
Heidi.

I wondered if my grandmother Diane DeMuth used Jujyfruits to coax Mama to do things the way Bernadette and I used to. I wondered if maybe she saw that word on the side of the box the day I was born and thought what a nice name it would make for a little girl. I sat there wondering those things until I heard Bernie calling from the kitchen.

“Come here a second, will you, Heidi-Ho? I’m trying to follow this recipe Ruby sent for pot roast and I’m making a mess of things. I need you to look up the word
braise
for me in M.B.F.”

I tossed the yellow box aside.

“Coming, Bernie!” I called.

And I walked across the room past all that was missing, through the door, and into the light that shone like a sweet wide smile over all that was actually there.