by Gwen Florio
Nora reached for it. ‘May I?’
‘All yours.’
She nodded her thanks without looking directly at him. She wasn’t sure if she could handle another unexpectedly fraught encounter with yet one more person who might be from her past.
She shook open the newspaper. There, in slightly off-register color, was a photo of the green Kia that had nearly clipped her truck’s bumper the night before, with the police car beside it, a knot of officers standing nearby, and off to one side, nearly out of the frame, a white cover concealing what was obviously a body.
A headline in outsize type stretched across the front page:
Officer-Involved Shooting Claims Teen’s Life.
Nora skimmed the story once, twice, three times, without success. The officer was unnamed.
It didn’t matter. The stricken looks on the faces of those who’d greeted Alden suddenly made sense.
Nora had come home – the endless hours of hard driving, oblivious to everything but the dashed white highway lines by day, the stream of oncoming headlights by night – seeking the balm of the familiar, a respite from the multiple traumas of the past weeks, only to realize the one person in town she’d really hoped to see was the white cop accused of killing a black youth.
FIVE
Two other photos accompanied the story, one likely from a yearbook, showing a soft-faced youth with close-cut hair and a smile that seemed to be trying to break free of the disciplined expression befitting a high school senior; the other, similar, but years – decades – older, in black and white.
Nora read the story a fourth time. Words jumped out at her. Robert Evans – the youth’s name. And a curious detail.
The motorist, Robert Evans, 19, of Baltimore, is the nephew of Bobby Evans, shot to death during a time of civil unrest in Chateau in 1967. That would explain the older photo.
Nora puzzled over the mention of civil unrest – it had occurred before she was born, but she couldn’t remember hearing about it – and especially the name: Evans.
The woman who’d been helping her mother and who’d worked for the family since Penelope was a teenager was called Grace Evans. A common name in Chateau and up and down the Eastern Shore. Still …
‘I’d know that face anywhere. You look just like your mother.’
They stood four strong by her stool, blocking any escape, faces alight with scandalized curiosity. ‘The biddy brigade,’ Penelope called certain of her acquaintances in a rare exception to the unspoken rule against unpleasantness of any sort, including verbal. But these women had pushed her past courtesy when they appointed themselves the most caring of Penelope’s friends after Nora’s troubles in Wyoming became newsworthy.
Penelope told her daughter they’d showed up at the house along the river with baked goods in their hands and newspaper clippings in their purses, all folded carefully so as not to obscure the photo of Nora in handcuffs, or Nora’s mugshot or, in the less reputable publications, headlines such as Ax-Wielding Socialite Fends Off Attacker.
Nora wondered when she’d become a socialite. Her mother was the one with the boarding-school background.
Now they jostled for position, twittering in delight at an encounter in the flesh. Penelope had wielded accuracy along with irritation when she’d applied the biddy moniker, the women like so many hens with their puffed-out bosoms, their clucking voices, their heads bobbing as they scratched about for scraps of information. Nora wondered how they’d ask what they really wanted to know.
‘When did you get into town, dear?’ And did you really come across your husband in an intimate encounter with his best friend’s wife?
‘How long are you staying? Such a delightful surprise to see you.’ Almost as much of a surprise as it must have been to all your friends when you flashed a photo of said encounter on a big screen at your own party.
‘And how is Penelope? We miss her at church. She must be so happy to have you here to help her. A terrible thing, a broken ankle. So debilitating.’ Not nearly so debilitating as an ax sunk deep into a man’s shoulder …
They pushed close, resting shiny faux-leather purses (no casual shoulder bags for these women) on the counter. Daubs of pink on their cheeks, blue on their eyelids, but never eyeliner. Lipstick applied with increasingly unsteady hands, red creeping into the cruel vertical lines between lip and nostril. And, even on a muggy August morning, when the heat had wrapped Nora in a second skin of sweat in the block-long walk to the coffee shop, pantyhose – an abomination Nora had abandoned with relief a decade earlier. Despite husbands long dead, children fled to jobs in Baltimore and homes in its suburbs, Social Security checks buying a little less every year, and the world changing so fast – tattoos and piercings apparently no passing fad, girls turned boy and the other way around, and now the occasional father staying home with the baby instead of supporting his family – they still took care. Kept up.
Her turn. They waited. But Nora had learned a few things in her five decades as the daughter of Penelope Best.
She scanned faces, retrieved names. ‘Miss Jayne. Miss Alice. Miss Anne. Miss Mary Ellen. It is so wonderful to see you again.’ Was she gushing? Or at least competently imitating a gush? ‘How have you all been? How are things in Chateau these days? It’s been so long.’ Turning it back on them, inviting their expertise about all matters Chateau.
Right move.
Chins dipped. Lips pursed. Heads shook. Agreement all around.
‘Oh, honey, it’s bad.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ she said, choosing to misunderstand. ‘It’s just a hairline fracture. It could have been worse. A hip.’
They nodded agreement, but exchanged worried glances, whispering among themselves.
‘Maybe she doesn’t know. She just got into town, after all.’
Alice leaned in close to Mary Ellen. ‘She knows. She’s got the paper right there.’
Nora sipped at coffee grown cold, tilting the mug so it nearly obscured her face. She held it there until Mary Ellen acknowledged defeat. A lengthier probing of Nora’s past would have to wait. ‘You take care, dear. We’ll have to come visit. Give you a rest from taking care of your mother. Such a lovely thing you’re doing.’
And for just a moment, she saw the flash of fear behind the unearned credit accorded her involuntary caretaking. Would their own daughters drop everything, rush across the country to tend to the women who’d raised them? Or would there be a hurried visit, just long enough to shuffle them off into the living coffin the rest of the world had come to call a care facility but here in Chateau remained a nursing home?
Nora lowered her mug. The women repositioned purses on arms, clucked their goodbyes and began to move off. But Jayne Townsend lingered, leaning so close Nora could smell the coffee on her breath and the Jean Nate dusting powder tracing spiderweb lines along the creases of her throat. ‘You’ll want to explore town. See how things have changed. But be careful, especially now. Make sure you get home before dark. You’re too young to remember how things were here for a while, but your mother could tell you. Not everyone here was like your Grace Evans. Look how Baltimore went crazy, riots and all, after they said police killed that Freddie Gray. No telling what might happen here now that they are all stirred up again.’
Except she didn’t say they, instead dropping a word that Nora hadn’t heard used by an acquaintance since she’d left Chateau for good all those decades earlier.
SIX
1963
The Corner Boys hurled the same word at Grace Evans when she walked by, saying it just loud enough to guarantee she’d hear.
They’d halt their endless game on the baseball diamond at the corner of Commerce and Oak, next to the construction site where the new bank was going up, and watch, bats and gloves dangling. Sometimes Todd Burris, the one who always talked the loudest, would hold his bat in front of his crotch and thrust it back and forth, and they’d all laugh like a bunch of motherfucking hyenas.
Words that would have brought
Davita Evans’s hand crashing across her daughter’s mouth had Grace ever spoken them aloud. She aimed them silently as she walked past, shoulders stiff with resentment, head held high, because no way was she going to duck and hunch and scurry away, giving them the satisfaction of knowing they’d gotten to her.
The corner was on her route to work and, given that Quail House lay three miles out of town, Grace was not inclined to take a detour just because of some damn fool boys. The thing about the Corner Boys was, four days out of five, they’d leave her alone, intent upon their game, hollering encouragement to one another after the crack of bat against ball, and she passed blessedly unremarked.
But other days – she never knew why; maybe she came upon them between innings, or in the midst of some dispute that had paused the game – they turned as one to watch her pass and to speculate aloud as to what they’d like to do to her.
‘Make her holler, yes, I would.’ Todd, of course, was answered by a chorus of moans and yelps she supposed was meant to imply sexual ecstasy.
Assholes. Pencil-dick crackers. Pea-brained, ball-scratching bastards. She’d like to grab that bat out of Todd Burris’s hand and go right upside his head with it. Smash it across the no-lip mouth that spewed those ugly words. Shove it up his …
But on this day the abuse unaccountably stopped.
At the sudden silence, Grace cut her eyes sideways. Todd dropped his bat, a smile spreading across the face, not the eyetooth-showing leer he directed her way, but wide and guileless. She looked past him and saw why. Penelope Smythe had shucked the babydoll pajamas that she wore well into every afternoon at Quail House and donned a yellow sundress and red Keds for a trip into town. She raised an arm high in greeting. The sun flamed her auburn hair. ‘Todd, hey! Gonna hit a home run for me?’
Grace listened for the double entendre that would surely follow something served up on the most obvious of silver platters – Lord knows he’d made enough remarks about rounding the bases with her – but he merely bowed low in the girl’s direction and called, ‘Your wish is my command, Penelope.’
Grace wanted to run to the white girl, grab her by her freckled shoulders, shake her. Shout, ‘What’s your wish, Penelope? Would you like it up the ass, the way he says he wants to do me? Wanna suck his dick? Want him and his friends to pull a train?’
A sour taste filled her mouth at the memory of the way the Corner Boys had hollered ‘choo-choo’ after Todd had called to them to ‘Fall in line for your turn, boys. Here comes that gal with the fine black ass, right on time.’
Federal education officials had come to Chateau that year, brought in by surreptitious reports that Brown vs Board of Education had had zero effect in their town. Chateau Elementary, Middle and High Schools remained all white; while all the black students attended the Smythe Grove school across town, first through twelfth grades crammed into a single low building, its brick walls crumbling with age, its wooden floorboards warped and worn. The officials had come before and been sent away with promises and stacks of paper that showed a bullshit integration plan, but now they were back and more insistent than ever that a century-old system be undone in a single school year.
Grace knew it never would. The powers that be in Chateau had perfected the art of solemn agreement to plans they had no intention of ever putting into effect. And although she knew she should wish it, that she and every other student in Smythe Grove deserved the just-off-the-presses textbooks and gleaming chemistry labs and sports fields of clipped green grass rather than pounded dirt, she thought she’d kill Todd Burris with her own bare hands before she’d endure sitting next to him for even two minutes in school.
SEVEN
Nora Best locked eyes with Jayne Townsend.
‘What did you just say?’
The other biddies took a step or two toward the door, edging away, looking anxiously for Jayne to follow.
Jayne repositioned her purse on her arm. A pinprick of dread flared in her eyes. Nora wouldn’t. Would she? She made as though to follow them.
But Nora would. ‘Watch out for whom?’
‘You know …’ Jayne had enough self-awareness to blush, not a pretty pink tint but an angry, patchy scarlet that crept up the wattles of her throat. ‘People.’
‘What kind of people, Jayne?’ Nora’s voice went low and dangerous, the omission of the standard honorific, Miss, as deliberate as a slap. Daring her to drop the word again into the renewed hush around them.
‘I think you must have misheard something.’ Giving Nora an out from the scene she was about to create.
‘You said …’ Nora’s voice refused her. She swallowed and tried again. ‘The n-word. I think you owe me, and everyone here, an apology.’
She didn’t get one. Because she never said one goddamn word of that.
Instead, Jayne issued her warning, saw Nora stiffen. The defensiveness in Jayne’s eyes – that was real. She’d made an assumption, forgetting that Nora had been gone for years, decades. No telling what notions she’d picked up in her time far away.
But the apprehension died, replaced by mingled relief and approval. Yes, Nora was still one of them, could be counted on to follow the old norms. Some things never changed. She actually gave Nora’s arm a solicitous pat as she left.
Nora’s forearm burned as she drove toward home, the do-the-right-thing scene – the thing that didn’t get done – playing out in her head, persistent and painful as a throbbing molar, everything she should have said. Could have said. Wished she’d said.
But the words caught in her throat, snagged there on generations of unspoken rules. Don’t talk back. Don’t make a scene. Don’t embarrass someone in public – the minor offense of causing discomfort somehow judged far more harshly than the oozing, festering sore of racism. Always better, in the case of the latter, to look away. Pretend not to hear. To, as Nora did, stammer her way through a goodbye and flee the coffee shop a few minutes later, the aroma of fresh-ground coffee in the bag on the passenger seat beside her suddenly nauseating as it permeated the truck’s cab, mingling with the stench of her guilt.
In her gauzy expectations of slipping into the warm, healing bath of home, how had she forgotten the casual racism that had permeated her childhood, simmering just below the surface courtesies? The jokes featuring watermelons, hos, welfare moms, at which she’d laughed uncomfortably, or at best looked away, but to which she’d never verbally objected? The rowdy kids on her school bus shouting ‘spook’ out the window at a black man walking along the side of the road? The n-word dropped into what otherwise passed for polite conversation, reserved, to be sure, for black people deemed unsavory in some way. Not, for instance, Miss Grace or any other of the legions of domestic workers and yard men deemed, in the queasy-making phrase, ‘almost a member of the family.’
Every place has some version of the same, she told herself. How often in Denver had she heard references to Mexican time? And during her brief time in Wyoming, while she heard passing references to the state’s lone Indian reservation, no one had ever mentioned the people who lived there, as though once relegated to a place safely away from the state’s few cities, they no longer existed.
But that word, issued through the primly pursed lips of a matron with a careful perm, a purse and pantyhose, somehow fell with extra weight, a blow that left a bruise of guilt, one carrying the weight of generations, increasing rather than dissipating over the years.
The crawling sense of shame persisted until she walked into the kitchen at Quail House, where she found Penelope seated stiffly at the table, Murph by her side, both of them facing an orange kitten on the tabletop, back arched, ears flat against its head, hissing, holding them both at bay despite its diminutive size.
‘What the hell?’
‘Language,’ Penelope said automatically, never taking her eyes off the kitten. It turned when it saw Nora. Its back relaxed. Its ears perked up. It sauntered the length of the table, rubbing up against the hand she’d automatically extended.
; ‘What is this?’
Penelope, now that the thing was no longer inches from her face, strove to impose her characteristic ironic dignity. ‘It appears to be a cat.’
‘Where did it come from? Is it a stray? How did it get into the house?’
‘Your friend Emerson brought it. He said you told him we have mice. Which we don’t. When did you see Emerson?’
Nora ignored the questions about Em and scooped the kitten into her arms. It nestled under her chin and kneaded its paws against her collarbone, its entire body vibrating contentment. ‘We do have them. You yourself said so.’
‘I said no such thing. I said one came in from the fields. I’m sure it’s gone back to its home.’
Penelope’s green eyes went hard as sea glass. She brooked no criticism of Quail House: not of the windows that admitted winter drafts that set the heavy draperies billowing, nor of the way the floorboards had warped over the centuries, slanting at odd angles as the house settled, nor of the centipedes that emerged each spring to skitter along the windowsills, the crickets that somehow found their way indoors and chirped maddeningly in hidden crannies, the silverfish that chewed slowly and methodically through the books in the library, leaving their pages lacy with holes.
Those things had always been part of Quail House, the inevitable toll of centuries and the home’s location in a humid climate, but Nora had noticed more in her first hours back – the Aubusson worn through to its backing in some spots, the wooden sashes in the twelve-over-twelve windows gone soft and splintery, paint peeling on the doors and trim. Not to mention the seed-like mouse droppings that scattered from the cupboard during her futile search for coffee that morning.
She’d always assumed that the proceeds of the sale of the cannery had been wisely invested, affording Penelope the twice-yearly trips to Baltimore and Washington to update her wardrobe in Hutzler’s and Woodward & Lothrop, the new Lincoln every few years, the month-long rental of a cottage in Bethany Beach – never Rehoboth, even then beginning to be overrun by those fleeing Washington’s swampy summer heat – and, of course, Nora’s college tuition.
