Swan Place (20 page)

“No ma’am!” Crystal said, trying to hand back the jars.

“You have to take them,” Aunt Bett pushed the jars back to Crystal.

I was enjoying watching them, but I knew who was going to win. Crystal was simply no match for Aunt Bett’s iron will. Come to think of it, nobody was.

“After all you do for us?” Crystal insisted, trying to hand them back again. “All the work of mending and passing along the children’s clothes?”

Aunt Bett jutted her chin and pushed the jars back once again. “You’re a working woman now, Crystal. Or you soon will be. You have to get used to being paid for your work.” Crystal mouth opened and closed a few times, but finally, she cradled the jars and simply said, “Thank you.”

Aunt Bett said, “Crystal, you know, we could fix up that little beauty shop on your back porch, and that way, you could go ahead and start working for yourself. It could use some curtains, even though the air conditioner takes up most of the window. We could make a little flounce or something for the top.”

Crystal didn’t answer right away, but she glanced over at me and then cleared her throat. “I’ve found me a job in a salon out at the mall.”

“The mall?” we all chorused, for not one of us had ever seen the new mall that had been built just across the state line in South Carolina.

“The mall,” Crystal said again.

“You gonna drive that far every morning and back every evening?” Aunt Bett asked, with a deep furrow between her eyebrows.

“Yes, Bett,” Crystal answered. “It’s not too far.”

Well, I could tell Aunt Bett wasn’t entirely happy about that, but she didn’t say anything else.

“I sure wish I could get me a job in a mall!” Darlene said, with something bleak-sounding in her voice. “Then I could go to work every single day in a place where there are lots of people and things going on all the time.” Darlene pointed at the bedroom window. “And have something else to see besides weeds and a dirt road.” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Crystal had made a good decision. Crystal was so young and so pretty, and I hadn’t wanted to see her working all day every day in that tiny little beauty parlor on the back porch. Not at all.

On Crystal’s first day
of work, she couldn’t even finish her coffee, because she had a long way to drive to get to work. After she was gone, I started cleaning up the kitchen, but then I left the dishes in the sink and went out onto the back porch. I pushed open the door to the tiny beauty parlor my mama had worked in for so many hours.

“I’m sorry, Mama. I wish you could have worked in a mall, too. Or someplace a little bit bigger and brighter than this. And I’m glad you got to go honky-tonk dancing with Roy-Ellis. I don’t care what Aunt Bett says.”

When Crystal came home
after her first day of work, she was filled with all sorts of exciting things to tell us about. “Why, the mall is huge! It must have thirty or forty stores in it, and everything is all lit up so pretty. And the smells—I can hardly describe them to you! You can smell popcorn and perfume and then a real sweet smell I finally found out was candied apples. And I brought three of them home to you.” She opened the white bag she was carrying and gave us each a candied apple. Little Ellis wouldn’t try to bite his, but just licked it like a sucker. But Molly and I bit right into ours, and when I tasted it, I almost got dizzy, thinking about how wonderful the mall must be and how I wished I could see it for myself. Then I would have something new and exciting to write in my notebook. But of course, I knew better than to ask Crystal to take us there. For us, the mall had to be work, not play.

But I was sure that the mall was a place where the rich girls in our town could go, and that thought set me to thinking once again about wishing I could be rich and smell of perfumed soap and wear clothes that weren’t too short for me. And have smooth skin and no scabs on my too-big knees and socks that stayed up, like they were supposed to. But I knew not to say those things out loud. We were all doing the best we could, and if Crystal had known what I was thinking, she would have gotten her feelings hurt awful bad. And if Aunt Bett knew—goodness!—she would have given me a long, hard lecture about being grateful for what I had and told me to stop committing the sin of coveting. So I kept my mouth shut, but at the same time, I decided that there were some little things I could do to change the way I was feeling. A strange ache in my stomach that didn’t have a thing to do with anybody except
me
. And all of a sudden, I knew exactly what Darlene meant about wanting a window that looked out on something besides a dirt road.

And I could almost hear Darlene’s voice,
One of these days you’ll want nothing more in this world than to have some private time, just for yourself.

The next Monday, I decided I would change some things about the room I shared with Molly and Little Ellis. So Crystal helped me run a clothesline across the room right up against my cot, so I could hang some sheets over it and have me a little space of my very own.

“Why, Dove?” Molly asked, with tears in her eyes. “Me not see you!”

“That’s exactly why I’m doing it, Molly!” I said, impatiently. “But I’ll still
be
there.”

Molly didn’t like that, but she knew better than to carry on about it. The first night, she snuffled a bit, but I wouldn’t let myself feel guilty. Not one little bit. And by the second night, Molly didn’t fuss at all. So I had me a little space of my very own. When I told Darlene about my own space, she came over to see it and got me to help do the same thing for her, in the room she had to share with two of her sisters. Then we decorated our spaces. Darlene’s looked so pretty with a little lamp and bedside table, and I got Aunt Bett to lend me a little lace doily so I could fix up my own bedside table. I even moved my stack of precious notebooks to a shelf in the closet so I would have room for some of the things out of my treasure drawer and for a jar of sweet-smelling hand lotion Crystal had given me the money to buy. And when it would be time for me to go to bed, how I did love to turn on my little lamp and pull the sheets across and get into my own cot. Almost like sleeping in a beautiful, white tent out in the middle of the woods.

Crystal never offered to take us to the mall with her, and that was fine with me. It would probably just have showed me a lot of things I didn’t have and probably never would have—and people I would never be like. Still, I made up some good stories about it for my notebooks, about a whole other world apart from our little house and Aunt Bett and a little town with only one drugstore in it.

But pretty soon, I got my mind off of those things, a little bit at least. Because one morning when Crystal got up and started getting ready to go to work, I heard her in the bathroom—being sick.

“You okay?” I asked through the door.

“Must’ve eaten something that didn’t agree with me.”

Then she was sick every single morning for over a week, and she just wasn’t herself at all. Didn’t seem to laugh anymore, just picked at her supper, and then went to bed. Maybe she really had a disease or something. I thought about telling Aunt Bett, but something or other stopped me. So finally, I went to see Aunt Mee.

“You all doing okay?” Aunt Mee asked when she saw me at her door.

“Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you about.”

“Somebody sick?”

“Crystal is sick almost every single morning,” I told her.

“Sick? How is she sick?”

“Sick to her stomach. Every morning.”

“H-m-m-m.” Aunt Mee pondered about it for a few minutes. Then she asked, “Only in the morning? Never at any other time?”

“That’s right.”

“How long has Roy-Ellis been gone now?” Aunt Mee asked.

“Almost a month,” I answered, suddenly able to see Roy-Ellis all dressed up and with his cowboy hat and boots on but wondering what that had to do with Crystal being sick. I watched Aunt Mee and saw her eyebrows move up on her forehead.

“Your Aunt Bett know about Crystal being sick?”

“No. I haven’t told her. Do you know what’s wrong with Crystal?”

“H-m-m-m,” she said again. “I’m not sure, but if it keeps up, you’re going to have to tell your Aunt Bett.”

“Yes. I think you’re right. Thanks, Aunt Mee. And how is Savannah?” I added. “Do you hear from her?”

“I expect she’s doing just fine. Told me before she left that you and her was going to write letters to each other.”

“That’s right. But I don’t know an address for her.”

“I’ll write it down for you,” Aunt Mee said, and she took a used envelope and painstakingly wrote the address on the back of it. I was happy to have Savannah’s address, and it certainly did make me feel better that somebody besides me knew about this strange sickness of Crystal’s.

Later, I tried to talk to Crystal about her being so sick, but when I brought up the subject, she turned white as a sheet and went into her room and locked the door. Poor Crystal! She stayed quiet as a ghost for two or three days, but she never missed a single day at work, and after that, she seemed to be trying to get her old self back. But that never really happened. Still, she did stop being sick in the mornings, so maybe
 . . .
just maybe
 . . .
she was getting better.

“I heard about your mama,” he said. “And now your stepdaddy.” The voice went on. “I’m sorry to hear about that.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, Dove,” he hesitated and I guess I thought he was going to say good-bye then. But he took a deep breath and added, “I want to come and get you and Molly and bring you out here to California to live with me.” And what flashed in front of my eyes then was Mama’s face—the way it looked after my daddy ran off and flat-out left her all alone.

“What about that woman you ran off with?” I asked. And I was surprised to hear how gruff-like my voice sounded. Made me think of Aunt Bett.

“She’s not with me anymore,” he said.

“Why not?” I couldn’t help myself from asking, and I truly enjoyed the way he hesitated. “Did she run off with somebody else?” I asked, and finally, he said, “Yes.”

“Then she just did to you what you did to my mama,” I pronounced and took the receiver away from my ear.

“Dove?” The voice was far away and tin-sounding. “Listen, Dove, I had an old friend of mine keep an eye out for you children, to see if you were being taken care of all right, after your mama died.”

I put the receiver back to my ear.

“He said he found you all playing all the way over to the school yard and without a single adult around to watch after you.”

The man in the truck!
The one who asked if we had a grown-up with us!

“And he says that your stepmama’s just a child herself, and he doesn’t think she’s taking very good care of you children. Now that your stepdaddy’s gone, as well, I want my two girls to come live with me.”

“Maybe you’ll change your mind and leave us, like you left Mama,” I said. “And what about Little Ellis?” I asked, hating myself right away for asking my real daddy anything.

“He’s not mine,” my real daddy said. And when I didn’t say anything else, he repeated the words: “He’s not mine.” And I hung up the phone. I didn’t slam it down, but I just let the receiver drop back into the cradle. It rang again right away, but I walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table. The phone rang for a very long time before it finally stopped. Molly and Little Ellis were both staring at me. And I knew right then and there that Crystal and us were a family, and we’d got to stay together.

“Eat your supper,” I said, and both Molly and Little Ellis went back to spooning SpaghettiOs into their mouths. When Crystal came home, I waited until she got her clothes changed and sat down at the table. Crystal still looked pretty bad, and she seemed to be awful tired. But I knew what it was like to lose somebody you love, and so I knew how bad she was hurting.