The Reading Lessons (38 page)

“You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?” Hadley muttered as he tossed away the map. 

Nina sat in the backseat, looking smug as sin. “Don’t be so full of yourself. Pleasanton is a very good catch. I know plenty of girls who would drive weeks to see him.”

“You like this boy?”

“Not as much as I like you, but he almost never fights me, and I find that highly refreshing.”

There were times when Hadley wondered if it would be so terrible if Nina discovered the truth. Sure, she might be embarrassed after all the silliness, but wouldn’t she like to know that Hadley loved her more than anything else in his whole entire life? Hadley thought she might.

“Father thinks I should marry Pleasanton. What do you think?”

Hadley started the engine. “I think that’s a fine idea, but only if you love him.” It occurred to him that he’d spent the majority of Nina’s life sneaking peeks at her from the front seat of a car. He stole a peek now. 

The mule races were a big social event in these parts, and Nina was wearing a black skirt with little white dots and a hat shaped like a plate. He noticed, with a pang of sorrow, that she looked more like a woman than a child. 

“Do you think my mother loves my father?”

“She’s told me so many times herself.”

Nina sighed a Lucinda-sized sigh. “I don’t think she does. I think Mother loves Mother and no one else. Not even you.”

“Me?” 

“Miriam Dewberry says that you and Mother are the worst kept secret in all of Madison County.”

“You shouldn’t listen to rumors, Miss Nina.”

And there it was. Inevitable as death. Hadley couldn’t spend five minutes with the girl without setting her off. “Quit treating me like I’m ten!” she shouted. “For Christ sake, do you think I’m stupid? I’ve know about the two of you for years.”

It was a struggle to keep his eyes on the road. Hadley couldn’t decide if she really knew anything, or if she was only fishing. He hit the curb and swerved back in the lane.

“How old were you the first time you made love to a woman?” she asked.

Hadley gripped the wheel so hard, he actually heard the stitches popping on his driving gloves. 

“My first lover might be Pleasanton,” she said. “Tonight.”

Hadley ran the LaSalle into a Silverbell tree. 

If there was one thing that was certain in all the world, it was the indisputable fact that Dickie loved his new LaSalle. “I love my new LaSalle!” he shouted when he first brought it home. He kissed the hood quite tenderly, that’s how much he loved that car. Dickie was sure to kill Hadley now. 

Hadley didn’t care. As Silverbell pods rained on the roof, he whipped around to face her in the back seat. “I’ll knock his lights out if he lays a finger on you.”

Nina’s lips curved with a smile. 

When she was a little baby, he was constantly scared—scared that Lucinda would try and keep her from him, scared that clumsy Dickie would drop her on her head, but mostly scared that something bad was going to happen to her if he let her grow up at Wisteria Walk. One time, he actually ran in her room, grabbed her out of her scarlet red cradle, and started to leave with her. Luckily, the new nanny came in just then or Hadley might have had to add kidnapping to the list of nefarious things he’d done. 

For the most part, his fears were irrational. Lucinda wasn’t the most attentive mother, but she always made sure Nina was taken care of. Once he’d said goodbye to Flora forever, Lucinda never threatened to keep Nina from him again. More amazing than all this was Dickie. Nina was crazy about him. She actually shot guns with the man! Nina and Dickie were two peas in a pod. Yet Hadley had been tempted to steal her away for eighteen years, and he was already wishing that, instead of smashing Dickie’s car, he’d taken off with Nina for good. He was of a mind to take her far away from Beatties Bluff and the slippery clutches of Pleasanton Nabb.

“You’ve broken Father’s car,” Nina said.

Hadley jabbed a finger in her face. “You need to be a good girl, Miss Nina. You deserve a wedding ring and a white dress before you start talking like you’re talking.”

“You’re just jealous because Pleasanton might have the nerve to do what you won’t.”

There were tears prickling at the back of his eyes. He wanted to shake the life out of her. He wanted to hug her until he grew old. If she knew about his relationship with Lucinda, there seemed no reason not to tell her the rest. “Do things right, Nina. I wish I had.”

“You called me Nina again. I like that.”

Hadley squeezed her face so tight, he pinched off her words. “Stop it! Stop it right now!”

Nina’s eyes simmered with anger and confusion, and Hadley couldn’t take one more minute of it. He got out of the car and tried to clear his head by focusing on a different sort of damage. “Damn it to hell.”

The back door opened, but Hadley was checking under the hood, and it took him a while to notice that Nina had taken off down the road. 

She’s as big a pain as her mother,
he thought as he started after her. “Come back here, Nina,” he pleaded. “Please don’t run away.”

Nina started running the minute he said
don’t
, but she had on platform shoes and a narrow skirt, and she wobbled as she went.

“I’m sorry,” Hadley called after her. “Slow down.”

Nina looked back over her shoulder. “You’re a coward, Hadley. A coward and a fraud!” Her eyes were glassy with tears. 

Hadley saw the tears first. Then he saw the Ford flatbed that was barreling around the same bend that had spelled trouble for the LaSalle.

The driver was a stupid kid, you could tell that much even at a speeding glance. He had rotten reflexes, too. For instance, Hadley made out the kid’s mouth taking the Lord’s name in vain long before the truck jerked away.

“Nina!” Hadley screamed as the tires screeched, and Nina’s eyes grew big and round, and the boy said
Lordy Lorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd!

Hadley and Nina tumbled on the shoulder of the road and the Ford whizzed past, tearing off a piece of polka-dotted skirt along with a piece of skin. 

“Oh God. Oh God. Oh God,” Hadley said, grabbing Nina and checking her face, her elbows, her knees.

The driver came to a screeching halt in the middle of the road and sprang out of the truck. “Are you okay?”

The kid was stupid all right, he had to be. He’d come around the bend way too fast for a fellow who wasn’t even in the middle of a fight with a girl who thought she was in love with him because she didn’t know she was his daughter. He was stupid, but he took one look at Dickie’s smashed-up car and the way Hadley was gripping Nina, and he flexed his stringy muscles and said, “You giving this girl a hard time, Mister?”

Nina ignored the boy. She put her hands on Hadley’s cheeks. “Tears?”

“Just say the word, Miss,” the kid said. “I’ll knock his block right off fer you.”

“I don’t want you to knock his block off,” Nina growled. “Look at the man. Can’t you see he loves me?”

Hadley was shaking like a seizure. What if she’d been killed? He could have lost her forever, quick as that. It was just like the day she fell through that stupid wooden stage. Hadley still had nightmares about that stage.

“Oh, I get it!” the kid said. “You’re her daddy, ain’t you? I should have knowed it right off. Anyone can see you got the same eyes.”

Nina laughed at that. People always said she had Grandma Browning’s eyes, but Hadley knew that wasn’t right. Nina Worther-Holmes had the gardener’s eyes. 

Sadly, Nina failed to see any resemblance between their eyes or anything else. “You really do love me, don’t you?”

Hadley took a deep breath.
Tell her the truth, you idiot.
He pictured Dickie aiming a pistol between his eyeballs after Nina went into hysterics and told the whole world she was his daughter. He didn’t want to die, but this particular outcome might have offered some minimal form of relief after all the years of lies if not for the fact that he pictured something else too: He pictured the orange leather chairs Nina sat in every day after school with her friends at Ruffio’s coffee shop. He pictured the Colored Counter where Mr. Ruffio let the black teenagers sit. If Hadley were suddenly to become her father, the orange chairs wouldn’t want her. The Colored Counter, neither.

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

“It’s Mother, isn’t it?” Nina said. “She’s what’s keeping us apart.”

It was there on the tip of his tongue. Like salvation. Like damnation. “I can’t,” he finally said.

“Can’t what?” Nina asked.

Spit it out, man!

“Can’t what?” she snarled.

“Can’t help how I feel about her.” 

There it was, the only truth he could give her. After all these years, Hadley still loved Lucinda too much to destroy the phony existence that was so important to her. 

There were other truths, too, and maybe they were even more important truths. He didn’t want Dickie to murder him. That was a biggie. And he hated like hell to let his Mama down. The Crump Curse was no small thing to her. A full five lives stood to be ruined if Nina found out he was her daddy. Even so, he might have been willing to risk them all if only he hadn’t lived the life he’d lived. To unburden his soul and set things straight, he’d have to turn Nina’s skin from white to black and white, the distinction of which could best be determined through the use of an ordinary grocery sack. 

Nina swatted at her tears. “To hell with you.”

These were the last words Hadley heard before a black DeSoto came along, spotted the flatbed parked in the middle of the road and, veering sharply, ran him over instead.

###

When Hadley woke up, he was in a ward in Saint Jo hospital, and he was all alone. 

“Hello?” he yelled. 

He yelled several times before anyone heard him, the ward being utterly empty and dark. It was the middle of the night, he was soon to learn. Miss Casey, the hefty colored woman who was the night nurse for the empty ward, informed him that his family had left two hours earlier. 

“Family?”

“The negro lady and the white people.”

The memory of the black DeSoto came screeching back to him. “There was a girl with me when I was hurt,” Hadley said. “I need to know what happened to her.”

“Don’t choo wanna know what happened to you, honey?”

“Nina first,” he said.

“Oh she jest fine. A lil banged up is all. You the one with skid marks acrost your belly.”

His belly did hurt, now that she mentioned it. He touched his hospital gown and felt lumpy layers of gauze wrapped around his ribs.

“Partial splenectomy,” Miss Casey said. She shrugged her big shoulders. “There’s worser things. Better things, too.”

“They took out my spleen?” Hadley said. “Don’t I need that?’

“They took out part of it. A spleen helps keep a body well so it’s a good thing to have, but you kin live without it if you take care not to go around sick people. Recovering is no picnic. Good thing you got so many peoples looking after you.”

Hadley was lucky to be alive, everyone said so. Number One, he’d gotten pretty torn up on the inside after the De Soto ran him over. The doctors had seen a lot of bleeding going on in there and they were worried he would catch an infection. Number Two, Dickie was still cussing and weeping over his car. If ever there was a sign that a man ought to be making big changes in his life, it seemed as though this were it.

Because Mama had been such a faithful servant to Mr. Browning and had never even taken a day off sick, he gave her two weeks leave so she could nurse Hadley after he got out of the hospital. This was a lucky thing. Lucinda was terrible when people were sick and tended to make things worse. Nina had been nothing but hostile and distant since their fight. When it was all said and done, Mama and Dickie were the only
peoples
Hadley really had. And, while it was true that Dickie read the funny paper to Hadley every morning before he left for work, it was also true that the man never could seem to take his leave without saying, “I can’t believe you wrecked it.”

It took a long time for Hadley to see any improvement and, even after he was better, the doctors cautioned that he would get sick a lot easier with part of his spleen gone. It would be more dangerous if he got sick, too. They said he might want to take on a less rigorous career for a while. In the weeks it took for him to recover, Hadley had a lot of time to think, and he started toying with the idea of leaving Wisteria Walk. Much as he loved gardening, he was in a lot of pain if he bent over. If he was down on the ground doing something, he wanted to stay there for a while. It was the getting up and down that made him hurt so bad. 

One morning, he was kneeling down pulling weeds in the petunia bed when Lucinda dropped a book on the ground in front of him.
As I Lay Dying
, the cover said. “I need your eyes, dear.”

Hadley looked up from the petunias. “Are you out of your mind?”

They had managed to steer clear of each other while Hadley was healing, and Dickie seemed as though he was finally getting over his suspicions. It even looked as if he might get over his car. 

Lucinda nudged the book with her toe. “I want to read this. Come up after lunch so we can look at it together.”

Hadley wiped his hands on his pants. “Forget it, Lucinda. ‘Reading’ with you is the last thing I need.”

“Oh fiddle. First you go and tear up your insides and almost croak, and now you won’t even read with me. I hate Dickie for playing these stupid games. If he was a real man, he’d just go on and shoot you and have his daddy hire him a good attorney.”

“Maybe you ought to suggest that to him, Lucinda.”

“Do you know what he said the other night? Nina was waltzing around in the other room singing
It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie
, and Dickie looked me square in the eye and told me that sometimes he’d swear that girl was part nigger.”

Hadley swallowed. “Is it true you fired Narcissa yesterday?”

“Narcissa?” Lucinda said, like she didn’t know who Narcissa was. “Why are you asking about her?”

“Because I had burrs in my pants this morning.”