Tender Graces (4 page)

Outside, my favorite sugar maple looked like a picture on the wall. The leaves waved at me, but I didn’t wave back with Momma there. She set up her tipped-over birds, patted her bedspread, and hit the throw pillows until they were big and fluffy. “Last time the creek flooded bad, I found Mrs. Mendel’s cat floating in the backyard, drowned dead.”

Sometimes Momma said creek like
crick
, and said other things in ways that Daddy made her say another way until she had it right. He did that with us kids, too.

“Your Daddy picked the kitty up and dried it with a towel before he carried it on over to her. Pitiful. Mrs. Mendel cried and cried.” She sat back down, picked up her silver brush, and pulled it through her hair. Pieces flew away, as if her hair wanted to run off from her head. She asked me, “What’re you staring at?” But she already knew. Everyone stared at Momma. She put down her brush and held my chin in her hand. Her cool fingers made me feel sleepy. “You look like my momma and your daddy. I was hoping you’d look like me.”

She patted the bench. I climbed up beside her. “Did I tell you how you come to be named?”

I nodded.

She dipped her finger in the Pond’s jar, and then rubbed a dab of cream into her face. “Well, I expect I can tell you again, can’t I?”

I leaned against her, hoping she wouldn’t scoot away from me. She picked up her tube of lipstick and twisted the bottom until a bit of the color poked up. She liked to keep the tip nice and round. She dabbed the color on one side of her top lip, then the other side, and then pressed her lips to let the red bleed onto the bottom. She patted with her pinkie finger to make it all evened up. I put my lips together—was her lipstick cool and smooth, or sticky and warm? I wished she’d kiss me on the cheek so I could find out.

“You came in the heat of summer. Lord, I thought I’d die.” She held up her hair while she opened a dresser drawer and dug around. Momma showed me the picture where she held baby me in one arm. Her lips were open and she looked straight at the camera. “If it’d been up to your daddy, your name would be Laudine Kate. Lord help you.” Momma shook her head back and forth. “I decided on Virginia Kate Carey after your grandma Virginia Faith, and me. It’s a part of my family bush.”

I liked being named after both of them. I grinned and prissed at myself in the mirror.

“Your great grandma named your grandma Virginia Faith after West Virginia and Jesus. Isn’t that the silliest thing you ever heard?” She sipped her drink with the lemon slice bobbing around, rolled her eyes and said, “We won’t talk about your grandma.” She put the photo back in the drawer.

I wanted to say how Grandma smelled like fresh-baked bread and apples. She had puppies under her smokehouse I petted, and she let me pound up the bread dough for supper. I loved her best of all and wished she wasn’t so dead, even if she did come visit me when nobody else was around.

“Your daddy called you Baby Bug.” Momma patted herself with her powder puff and little clouds of Shalimar tickled my nose. “You’re not supposed to be named after a creepy crawly.”

I touched some of the powder on my leg and rubbed it in good so I’d smell like Momma.

“If it weren’t for babies, I might have gone on back to school and your daddy could’ve finished college—but we don’t regret our kids.”

Daddy came into the room, squeezed Momma’s arms, and then kissed me on the top of my head. He asked, “What are you so talkative about?”

“How we came to name Virginia Kate a classical name instead of a barnyard name.”

“I do believe that’s the incorrect use of the word ‘classical’.”

“Well la tee dah, Mr. Smarty Britches.”

Daddy winked at me. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.”

“That’s the stupidest shit I ever heard.”

“Shakespeare? The greatest writer ever?” Daddy’s smile fell away.

Momma pushed me with her shoulder. “So you say.”

“Your mother loved to hear me quote him.”

“Whoop de doo-eth. You and your Shakesbeard. And what does my momma got to do with anything?” She dipped out more cream and rubbed it on her legs. “Leave her be.”

“Your mother was a fine woman, and you know it, Katie.”

“Yeah, that’s why she burned herself up. Argument’s over, oh husbandeth of mineth. Zip zippo endo, curtain’s closed, Mr. Shakeybaby.”

Daddy walked out. Momma stood up and put on the blue-and-white sundress and white sandals Daddy bought for her.

I stood up and did a twirl. “Did you fuss all the time with Daddy before I got born?”

“What kind of question is that? Go brush your hair.” She gave me a little shove. “I want all of us looking good when that woman gets here. She picks apart worse than a vulture.”

I went hunting for Micah. He was always doing something interesting. When I passed the kitchen, I watched Daddy put ice cubes and a hunk of booze in a glass. After a long swallow, his face turned happy. While he looked out the window, he drank the rest down.

I went in and tugged on his sleeve. Sometimes I felt shy around him since he was bigger than everything.

He smiled down at me, said, “There you are. Want to come outside with me and the boys?”

I nodded.

He picked me up and swung me around. He was the strongest man in the world. I snuggled my face in his chest and smelled Old Spice and that smell shirts get when they’ve been on the line. He said, “Let’s go, Bitty Bug.”

Outside, the wind blew my hair behind me. I sniffed the air for Mrs. Mendel’s flowers. Mrs. Mendel was our only neighbor in our holler. She had wild hair she tried to keep piled in a bun on top her head. The bun was big enough for her cat to sleep in. The hill on one side of us had an empty house on it, and on the other far side of the hill, an old lady lived alone with her million parakeets. The front of our house faced the long road going out of our holler and the back faced my mountain. My mountain was giant-tall where I couldn’t see what was on the other side.

I saw all this while not really seeing it because Micah chased me around the house. The wind kept pushing me back, and my big brother was right on my heels, hollering, “I’m going to catch you!”

I ran until I thought my lungs would bust.

Daddy held Andy on his shoulders and they laughed at us when we fell on the grass, our feet burning from running so fast. A slow rain came and it felt good, until Daddy said, “That’s it children, time to go inside.” I wanted to stay and let the rain fall on me, see the clouds on the mountains like a fairy story, but I knew Momma wouldn’t let me.

When Grandmother Laudine drove up in her shiny black Chevrolet pickup truck with her umpteenth husband she’d asked us to call Uncle Runt, the rain had turned into the skinny stinging kind. I watched out the open door as Grandmother blobbered towards me. She hollered back to Runt and the storm took her words out of her mouth and scattered them to far away places. Runt went back to the truck while Grandmother barreled into our living room. We kids lined up to get a good look at her.

She wore a pink pantsuit with pockets the size of my head, tissues sticking up in one and a bottle of Milk of Magnesia in the other. Her britches stopped above her ankles, and she had on pink bobby socks with lace, and white tenny shoes with pink shoelaces. Her hair wasn’t hers at all, but a big poofy wig that held raindrops like sparkly diamonds. When she hugged on me, she smelled like Vicks VapoRub.

When Runt came in looking like a wet chihuahua, holding on to more bags and suitcases, she said, “Don’t you look a sight, Uncle Runt.” He set their things on the floor and stood there like the rest of us, waiting to see what Grandmother would do next.

Daddy grinned as if he thought she was as cute as a two-hundred-pound kitten.

Grandmother put her hand to her ear. “Don’t y’all have some bluegrass playing? Isn’t this West By Gawd-damned Virginia?”

Momma put her hands on her hips. “What’re you talking about, Laudine?”

“Well, I come near across the world and y’all aren’t playing bluegrass music. Isn’t that what y’all West Virginians do in the mountains?”

Grandmother turned her back on Momma’s eye-rolling. We kids were hypnotized by her, like in the movies where the vampire makes people do whatever he wants just by looking at them. She grunted, and stooped over to open the wet bags while my brothers and I crowded in. In the bags were plates with outlines of the states, snow-globes, cedar boxes with the towns written on top, pecan rolls, and other doodads. She gave each of us a snow globe from Kentucky and a cedar box from Tennessee.

Daddy said, “Glad you could come, Mother.”

“You are too far from home, son.”

Daddy was born in Plano, Texas. Momma called it Plain-Old-Texas, but Grandmother Laudine didn’t think so. Texas was where she lived and always would, she said with every breath.

To rile Grandmother Laudine, Momma interrupted her stories about Texas by singing a line from our state song, “Oh, the West Virginia hills, how majestic and how grand!”

Our state
was
grand, except maybe in the coal mines. In Daddy’s books, I saw the pictures of men blacked up with coal dust. Their lungs were blacked with it, too. I wanted to go down with a wash rag and wipe the coal off their faces, give them a drink of water and a sandwich. Momma said they’d be too proud.

Grandmother settled in my room. I had to stay on a pallet between Micah and Andy’s beds with their rootin’ tootin’ cowboy bedspreads. Before we fell asleep, Grandmother sneaked in and tacked up a picture of Jesus, but the next morning, Momma took it down and stuck Jesus in the junk drawer.

From the start, Grandmother Laudine took over things. She was set to get Momma’s goat, especially in the kitchen. She whumped her rear against the table so many times, it scratched up Momma’s wall.

“You, daughter-in-law, listen to Laudine. This here’s how you make a man happy—” She eagle-eyed Momma up and down. “—in his stomach area.” Using a big wood spoon, she pushed around the onions and garlic cooking in the skillet. “Right, Uncle Runt? I taught him everything he knows.”

Runt didn’t say a thing.

“You see here what I’m doing, little Virginia Kate?” Grandmother stopped and put her hand on her hip. “Now, you know, Katie, I still don’t understand why this girl wasn’t named after me. Got my feelings in a world of hurt for a while.”

“You’ll get over it,” Momma said.

Grandmother cut her eyes to me. “See how things are done in the kitchen, Laudine Kate Virginia?”

I nodded, but real slow.

“I know how to cook, Laudine.” Momma fetched her pink-and-black circle glass.

“You people up here in the mountains don’t season! Right, Uncle Runt? Y’all can’t taste your food. Tastes all the same, like nothing.”

Momma slammed the cabinet door, rattling the bottles she’d hid before Grandmother came.

“My son is slurping up good old Texas cooking like he’s starved.” She poked the potato salad, then slopped in mustard. She stirred it around and the potatoes turned a pretty yellow. She said, “I think we’ll need more taters, Uncle Runt, this salad is too gold.”

Runt picked up a potato and peeled. He looked over at me and crossed his eyes.

“You’re so full of
it
, with an
s-h
, Laudine.” Momma poured herself a glass of tea with extra help splashed in it, and went off into the living room. Grandmother followed Momma out, her mouth a straight line of ornery.

I was about to follow, when Runt stopped me with a grin that wrinkled up the whole left side of his face. He asked, “Want to taste my secret barbeque sauce?”

I waited, even though I was itchy with want to see Momma and Grandmother fight like two cats in a bag. He gave me a big spoon of it and I smacked my lips.

“It’s good stuff, ain’t it?”

I smiled and nodded, then ran to the living room.

“ . . . jealous of Mee Maw, Katie Ivene,” Grandmother was saying.

“Mee Maw? Who in lord’s name is that?”

She pulled herself up tall. “I am now Mee Maw.”

Momma huffed out a breath, then said, “I’m calling you Laudine. Zip Zippo Endo.”

“You’re so dang-burned stubborn. How my son puts up with that stubborn mouth—” she sniffed—“is beyond me.”

Momma hiked up her dress, just to peeve Mee Maw who was formerly Grandmother Laudine, and said, “I think your onions are burning, Mee Mee.”

“Uncle Runt’ll take care of it.” She flopped on the couch and pulled down Momma’s hem. “I see why my son’s so smitten. Food’s the last thing on his mind.”

Momma’s mouth fell as far as it could, since her mouth had turned-up ends that were always up even when she wasn’t happy. She said, “Virginia Kate, go outside and call your daddy and brothers to supper.”

I walked slow so I could hear the rest of the fussing, but when I turned around to see what they were doing, Momma gave me That Look. I hightailed it out the back door.

Outside, Daddy pushed Andy on the swing, and Andy’s skinny legs went up and down to try to get the swing to go higher. Micah drew his pictures with his back resting against the maple. My daddy and brothers looked so good it made me happy. I broke the magic by yelling, “Come to supper. Grandmother Laudine is Mee Maw now.”