Tending to Grace (2 page)

9

My mother does not believe in complicated goodbyes.

We pack and load the car by ten. My favorite books are stacked to the brim of a plastic milk crate. My mother leaves no time to return the library's copy of
Oliver Twist,
so I lay it on top. She doesn't bother to call the high school.

“They'll figure it out soon enough, Corns.”

She leaves the kitchen table, the vinyl chair in the living room that I like to read on, all the heavy stuff. She puts the electric bill and the telephone bill on the counter and leaves no forwarding address. She leaves the door open.

“There ain't no room for all those books,” the boyfriend says when I carry them out.

I ignore him and put the crate under my feet and look out the window as we drive away.

10

“Agatha's a little peculiar, you know.” My mother turns around in the front seat and tries to catch my eye. “But you'll get along just fine. Here, have one of these little cakes.”

I don't look up from my book. I'm wearing my black dress from the Salvation Army just because my mother hates it. I like the way the lace skips along the top of my boots, softening the meanness of everything somehow.

“Corns?” My mother's voice catches somewhere between her throat and her teeth. I wonder if she is having second thoughts. She should be having second thoughts. When you have a daughter, you don't dump her off somewhere. Parenting 101.

11

Turning to stone is hard work. First you have to let the anger climb up from deep within you and as it turns over and over and rises up through your chest, you have to clamp your teeth over it and push it back down. Then you sort of imagine yourself getting real heavy, folding over onto yourself, getting thick so nothing can reach the spot far inside that hasn't turned hard yet. And you know that if you get it right, you're not so afraid.

12

A few hours later the boyfriend pulls up in front of a house with clapboards looser than old skin.

“This it?” he says, rolling down his window and whistling a bit through his teeth. “You got the wrong place, Lenore.”

I'm surprised by his concern. I'm wondering about my mother's memory, too. From the back of the car, I look out at windows set with tiny panes that bubble in the afternoon sun and at ivy growing up past a cracked front door and onto the roof. A bird swoops into the gutter.

“Come on, Corns,” my mother says, opening the car door for me. “Bring your stuff.” The boyfriend shrugs and turns up the radio.

I wonder when a Girl Scout last sold cookies here. Not for a while, apparently, because the hem on my dress catches the grass as we trek to the front door.

“It's not going to be for that long, Corns. Just till Joe and me get settled.” My mother pushes some of the ivy aside and taps at the door. The skin on her hand is thin, translucent, like china held up to the light. I can hardly hear her knocks.

I watch another bird fly across the yard and land on the roof and then an old woman walks around from the back of the house. She is tall and straight, pale as vanilla pudding, with gray hair twisted into a braid and roped around her head. Binoculars thump against her chest. My mother jumps a little when she sees her. “Agatha.”

“Tell him to turn that noise off.” The old woman nods to the car, but her eyes are on me.

My mother looks unsure about what she should do. She takes a few steps forward (is she thinking of hugging the old woman?), then changes her mind and turns toward the car, leaving me standing with my crate of books at my feet.

I hold my breath and hope the old woman doesn't talk. I watch another bird fly to the chimney. The boyfriend turns the radio down. “Your phone isn't working,” my mother says as she walks back to us. Then she giggles in her nervous little way that's nails on a blackboard to me. “I need someone to take her for a while.”

The old woman doesn't say anything, and my mother, who trembles like a skinny sapling against this tall oak, stumbles on. “It ain't easy for me. Her father's gone. Joe says we can make a better start in Vegas. But it ain't no place for a kid.”

My mother has run out of things to say. No one says anything for a very long time. I am comfortable with long pauses because I have turned myself to stone. Otherwise my knees would be buckling. I count eleven birdhouses nailed to trees all around the yard.

The old woman stares at my mother. “Something the matter with your brain, Lenore?” she says finally.

My mother puts her hand on my arm. I can feel her shudder through the sleeve of my dress.

“Me and Joe, we'll come get her quick as we can.”

The old woman looks out at the Buick. Thick smoke pours out the exhaust pipe. Joe drums his fingers against the edge of the steering wheel. “You ain't pickin' them no better, are you?”

My mother looks down. The old woman looks over at me. I turn and look out at the fields behind her house that rise to pine-covered hills and then to a mountain in the distance. A church bell rings.

When the old woman takes her eyes off me and looks at my mother, I feel the temperature drop. “Get the hell out of here, Lenore,” she says.

I step toward my mother, reaching for her. But she pushes me away and hurries to the car.

The old woman looks down at me with eyes as hard and gray as nickels. I don't feel them, though, because I am a stone.

13

“What's your name?” The old woman waits for me to answer, but I turn away.

I watch a dragonfly on a daisy, a beetle on a cobblestone. I think about the Yodels we bought when we stopped at the gas station and how the cream leaked out of the plastic package and I threw mine away after the first bite. I think about how I wanted a coffee but my mother said no. Think about anything,
anything else,
I tell myself.

“Don't you talk?”

I look away. My stomach rises to my chest. I know what's coming and tears puddle in my eyes. I swat at them, pretending a gnat has flown too close.

The old woman pulls what looks like a sugar cube from deep within the pocket of her overalls. She doesn't bother to pull off the blue lint, just pops it in her mouth. “Want one?”

I shake my head. I want coffee. But I don't say anything.

“There are those who'd say a girl who don't talk is a dimwit. Are you a dimwit?”

I shake my head angrily and look at my crate of books and think about heading for the road. Or straight up that mountain.

“You know what I say?” the old woman asks. “I say that when you got a voice, you damn well better tell the world who you are. Or somebody else will.”

I take a deep breath and that's all it takes for my throat to lock and I'm caught in the lonely place between what I want to say and what I can't.

“C-c-c-c-c...”

I stop and turn away. My heart is a truck skidding crazily inside my chest. I gulp air, trying to loosen the silent knot that pulls tighter, tighter. The old woman does nothing but pull another sugar cube from her pocket and crunch noisily. “We'll be bored as two pigs in a pen if I do all the talkin' round here.”

Let her see my voice, then. Let her see my colors. Let her see the awful wound in my throat. “C-c-c-c... C-c-cornelia.”

My legs shake and I don't bother to check if the old woman is a look-away because tears fall in front of my eyes now and I'm looking at my feet.

14

“Only God's perfect,” the old woman says after a bit. “And sometimes I'm not sure about even that.” She chomps another sugar cube, then hoists my crate of books onto her hip, carries it up to her front step, and kicks the door open with a bang.

“Come on in. I'll get supper on.”

The door latch swings dizzily on one nail as I walk into the house, first into a small hall and then into a kitchen, long and narrow, with beams on the ceiling and wide boards on the floor.

“Sit down and rest a bit.” She points to a kitchen table in the middle of the room, hidden beneath an assortment of lunch dishes and breakfast dishes and probably the meal before that. I stack some of the dishes and push them to one side and wipe off a chair with the back of my hand and sit down and notice enough cobwebs on the ceiling to string a kite.

“Well, let's see now,” she says, unwrapping the binoculars from her neck and flopping them onto the table. “How 'bout some tea?”

I don't want tea, of course. I want coffee. But I don't say anything.

She fills a pot with water and sets it on an old white stove, twice the size of the one in our apartment. “You can call me Agatha.” She pulls a root from a pot on the counter and begins shaving slices from it with a large knife.

“I'm the sister of your grandmother. I guess that's right. But I don't bother too much with relatives. Most of them bore me to death. My sister, she's dead now, but when she was livin', she couldn't tell the upside of a turnip. How 'bout you?”

I shrug, unsure if I've ever even seen a turnip.

“Later on, if you decide on stayin', I could use some gardenin' help.” She puts the root slices into the pot on the stove.

I don't know what to say to that, not that I would say it anyway, so I watch her slice a round loaf of dark bread. She cuts three fat slices and puts them in front of me along with a jar of something brown and sticky. I wipe the dust off the edge of the plate with my thumb as she pulls a wheel of cheese from the refrigerator and cuts a pie-shaped slice and hands it to me. I slather the bread with a quarter inch of the sticky spread. I close my eyes and bite.

Yeast and whole wheat flour mingle in my mouth with something sweet, heavy, and slightly bitter—not honey, but pretty good. The old woman looks over at me.

“Molasses,” she says. “Ever had it before?”

I shake my head.

“Only one way to eat homemade bread—smothered in molasses.” She dips her finger in the jar and scoops out a lump of molasses and plunks it in her mouth.

I check the cheese for mold and place a sliver on my tongue. A sharp, dry taste fills my mouth, much better than Velveeta.

She pours two cups of tea and sits one down beside me. She slurps at hers like a child eating soup. I watch her and then, daring myself, take a slow sip. The tea tastes the way it smells, very close to root beer.

“That's sassafras,” she says. “It's good for you.”

It's not coffee, though, I think. Agatha stops talking and we eat in silence. As dusk comes and the temperature drops, she drags two rocking chairs over to the fireplace and lights a fire. She sits down and watches the flames. I think about my mother and try to rock my anger out.

15

She has no toilet.

How can anyone have no toilet? Is it legal to have no toilet?

“I turned the pipes off,” Agatha says. “I can't afford no plumber.”

In the backyard, behind a chicken coop with several clucking chickens, sits an outhouse surrounded by a thicket of weedy lilacs. It has a plank door and a window that faces east. It tips to the left.

“This is my old girl, Esther. She's near a hundred, you know. Imagine her tippin' over with me sittin' inside. Now that would be a sight, wouldn't it? So I treat her real nice, give her a name and everything, so she holds herself up proper.”

She laughs at the way I'm looking at her. “Never used an outhouse before?”

I shake my head.

“The only problem is late at night when it's real cold and you want to get out there and back in bed real quick. Other than that, it's pretty good. Lots of fresh air, anyway.”

I can't imagine why anyone would want a window in an outhouse. Anyone could peek in. And worse, I see as soon as Agatha opens the door, are the two seats, side by side. Who would want company in there?

At least she has a roll of toilet paper on the wall. It sits under a narrow strip of golden flypaper, nearly covered with a pepper shaking of dead flies.

16

As night falls, something cries out from under the refrigerator.

“Don't be worryin' none,” she says when I jump up from my rocking chair. “That be the cricket. Keep you up at night, I 'spect, if you're not used to hearin' critters.”

She walks over to the refrigerator and kneels down. “I ain't figured how it knows when it's dark. Crickets chirp at night. It must be dark all the time under that icebox, but he knows just when night comes because that's when he starts singin' for me. Quite amazin', if you ask me.”

She laughs and stands up and refills our tea.

“Any c-c-coffee?” I ask.

“Never drink the stuff,” she says, sitting back in the rocker. I bring my tea back to my chair and listen to the cricket and the sounds of our rocking.

Mostly, I want my mother. I want to run after the boyfriend's car and tell her I'd be no trouble in Vegas, no trouble at all. The boyfriend wouldn't even know I was there. I picture myself running after them. I'm so close, I'm reaching out to my mother. But she is looking away.

17

Agatha hoists the window open in the tiny room that is to be my bedroom. A hole stretches across a quarter of the screen.

A full moon rises and I can see a slight outline of the mountain in the distance. I wonder, how far away is it? How long will it take to climb? I've always wanted to climb something that high, but could I?

A bed covered with a faded quilt straddles three wide and uneven floorboards. It tips off one leg when I drop my milk crate near the pillow. Agatha looks at the books. “You read all those?”

When I nod, she snorts. “No time for much of that around here.” She pulls an army blanket from under the bed and throws it on top, causing the bed to rock.

“Do you like mushrooms?”

I shake my head no, absolutely not.

“Too bad. I eat 'em for breakfast, more often than not. Right good on toast, they are.”

We are quiet for a few minutes while she tries to get the light switch to work. “Don't know why your mother brought you here,” she says finally. “I don't know nothin' about livin' with a young girl.” She looks at me for a minute, waiting for me to answer, but I don't, so she points to a dresser. “Put your stuff in there if you want,” she says as she leaves the room.

I look past her to the window. My mother will be back for my birthday; she always remembers my birthday, even when I have to bake the cake myself and wake her up to celebrate. She'll be back for my birthday; my fifteenth birthday, I tell myself. “It's in October,” I whisper to the mountain in the distance.

I pull the quilt back, sending dust flying about my head. I notice a cobweb fluttering at the top of the window like a curtain.

That's when the loneliness settles deep. I open
Oliver Twist
and lose myself in its pages. Oliver survived without his mother. I wonder how.