“Ave, git the ladder! Git the ladder!”
The ladder is propped against the far side of the roof. I’m frozen, thinking I can catch Etta if she falls. But I know this isn’t possible. The drop is almost twenty feet, time is passing, and the fabric on her jacket is tearing away as she slides. I heave the ladder from the side of the house to the front gutter, where her feet are dangling dangerously over the edge. Worley has thrown his body sideways across the roof and has grabbed one of Etta’s hands, which stops her from falling.
“Come up, Ave. Come up and git her,” Worley says, panting. Otto attempts to crawl closer to Etta, but he is afraid to disrupt the precarious balance of their weight on the roof, so he stops. I dig the feet of the ladder into the soft earth and climb up quickly. I feel more confident when I get to Etta’s feet and can get a grip on her legs. She feels so small in my arms; I remember what it was like when I could control everything to keep her safe. I carefully pull her to me. Worley lets go when I have a good hold on her. I hold Etta by her waist and slide her onto the first step of the ladder, shielding her with my body.
“Do you think you can climb down?” I ask her. Etta barely whispers a reply, and we descend the ladder one step at a time. I try not to look to the ground, it seems so far away. With each step I take, and each one Etta takes, I breathe a little easier. By the time we reach the ground, Otto and Worley have come through the house and are waiting to help us off the ladder.
“Sorry about that, Miss Ave. We thought she was safe up ’ere with us,” Otto says.
“That’s okay,” I tell him. Then I turn to my daughter, who examines the palms of her hands, streaked with a little blood where the shingles burned them during her downward slide. I wince. I have never been able to stand it when she bleeds.
“Come on, let’s wash up.” I take Etta into the house and hold back until we are out of Otto and Worley’s earshot.
“What in the hell were you thinking, Etta?” She has never heard me yell this loudly, so she backs up several steps. “You are not allowed on the roof. You know that. I don’t care who is here doing what, you know the rules. You could’ve fallen and broken your neck.”
“But I didn’t!” She turns on me.
“What?”
“I didn’t!”
“Because you’re lucky. Lucky I was there to catch you!”
“Yeah, I’m lucky you were there,” Etta says sarcastically.
“Are you mocking me?”
“What do you care, anyway?”
Etta has never spoken to me in anger, and I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know whether to admonish her for sassing me or to answer the question.
Etta looks me in the eye. “You don’t care about me.”
“Where do you get that idea?”
“All the time.” Etta storms off and up the stairs.
I follow her. “Stop right there!”
She turns and faces me.
“That’s a very cruel thing to say to me. Of course I care about you. But when you do something stupid, something you know you’re not supposed to do, you can’t turn around and blame me for it. You’re the one who’s wrong here. Not me.”
“That’s all that matters to you. Who’s right and who’s wrong.”
“Watch your tone.”
“You just don’t want me to die like Joe. That’s all.” Etta slams her bedroom door shut.
For a moment, I think I might honor her privacy, but my anger gets the best of me. I throw the door open. “What is the matter with you?”
Etta is on her bed. My heart breaks, and I go to sit beside her. She pulls away.
“We need to talk about this.”
“I don’t want to talk to you. I want Daddy.”
When I attempt to reach out to her again, she gets up off the bed, goes to the old easy chair with the broken arm, and throws herself into it and away from me. I have never seen this sort of emotion from my daughter, and I am stunned. But I am also so hurt that I don’t know what to say. So I rely on my rule about being consistent in my discipline. I’m not going to let her off the hook. “Dad is not going to bail you out of this one. You need to think about what you did this afternoon. And about the way you talked to me.”
I leave the room and close the door quietly behind me. I walk down the front stairs and go through the screen door to the porch. I sit down on the steps as I have done so many times at twilight. Otto and Worley pack up their truck without saying a word. They take full responsibility for Etta being on the roof, and I don’t want to say anything more. They get into their truck and wave somberly as they descend the hill.
I lean back on the stairs and take a deep breath. The mountains, still green at the end of summer, seem to intersect like those in a pop-up book. This old stone house is hidden in their folds like an abandoned castle, with me its wizened housekeeper, taken for granted and obsolete. I feel myself hitting the wall common to all mothers: the day your daughter turns on you. And it happened on such an ordinary day in Cracker’s Neck Holler. Nothing strange or different or particularly dramatic in the weather or the wind. The sky meets the top of the mountains in a ruffle of deep blue. The sun sets in streaks of golden pink as it slips behind Skeens Ridge. I get lost in the quiet, the color, and the breeze, and I’m back in simpler days, the brief time before Jack and I had children, when this house was a place where we made love and ate good food and tended the garden.
The cool air soothes the throbbing in my head. I am making a mess of motherhood. What do I know about children, really? I was an only child. Maybe I baby-sat here and there, but I never had a grand plan that included children. When I found out I was pregnant, I made Iva Lou order me every book on parenthood from the county library. I read each one, choosing concepts that made sense and figuring out how to implement them. When my kids came along, I thought everything would fall into place. But my daughter isn’t who I expected her to be. I thought she’d be like me, like my side of the family, marooned Eye-talians in Southwest Virginia who made a good life and fit in. But she’s pure MacChesney, freckled and fearless. My kid has no dark corners, no Italian temper or Mediterranean largesse. And I know that I have disappointed her too—she needs an outdoorsy, athletic mom, one who encourages her to take risks. I do the opposite; I encourage her to stop and think. My goal is to keep her safe, and she resents that. Sometimes I am filled with dread at what lies ahead. How do I stop fearing the future? No book can tell me that.
The high beams on Jack’s pickup truck light up the field as he takes the turn up the holler road. He slows down to check the mailbox, and I see him throw a few envelopes on the front seat. Then he guns the engine again, spitting gravel under his wheels. Soon I hear my daughter’s footsteps as she runs down the stairs. The screen door flies open and she jumps down the steps two at a time, ignoring me, and over the path to meet her father as he parks. I hear the muffled start to her version of the Roof Disaster and wish briefly that I weren’t the mother but the wizened housekeeper after all, so I wouldn’t have to rat her out. But I know that I have to be unwavering so that at some point when she must make hard decisions, she will remember these days, find the wisdom born of experience, and make the right choice (yeah, right). I have to be the bad guy. Jack puts his arm around Etta as they walk up the path. I stand up. Etta passes by in a businesslike huff without looking at me. She bangs the screen door behind her.
“Are you okay?” Jack gives me a kiss.
“My nerves are shot,” I tell him with a nice teaspoon of self-pity.
“We’re going to have to come up with a doozy of a punishment,” he promises.
“Great.” My carefully rehearsed Sex Talk is ruined for now, another plan gone awry.
“Kids taking chances, taking risks, it’s all a part of life, Ave.” Jack sighs.
As we walk up the stairs, I want to tell my husband that I’m scared. It is one thing to parent a helpless infant and then a child, but when that child develops a will, the future becomes clear—I won’t b
e in charge anymore, and I won’t be able to protect her. My husband will have to guide us through these rough patches, since parenting seems to come so naturally to him. I have to learn how to calm down and lead my family. And then I have to find a way to love my job as a mother as the requirements change, and I’m going to need Jack to help me do it.
CHAPTER TWO
It’s been three weeks since Etta almost fell off the roof. She survived two weeks of being grounded, which was pretty terrible for her because she missed all the end-of-summer barbecues and the picnic trip with her friends to the Natural Bridge. She moped around for days, and then at the one-week mark, things began to get a little better between us. She made French toast for us on Sunday morning and did her laundry without my asking. Since things are back to normal, Jack has taken her over to Kingsport for their annual father-daughter shopping trip for the first day of school. Etta wants a backpack she saw at Miller and Rhodes.
I go through the house with a laundry basket, loading it up with things that need to be put away. Etta’s shoes, comic books, notebooks, pencils, and gear fill the basket. As I go up to her room, Shoo the Cat bounds up the stairs next to me. He charges into Etta’s room, and I follow him.
Last summer we let Etta paint her room. She chose periwinkle with white trim. Her iron bed, painted antique beige, is covered with one of her grandma MacChesney’s quilts, a pattern called “Drunkard’s Path.” She has a poster of Black Beauty over her bed (does every preteen girl in America love purple and horses?).
Etta has a map of the world on her far wall. In red she’s circled where she’s been, and in pencil the places she wants to go someday. (I’m surprised to see locations in India and New Zealand circled in pencil.) I trace my finger from the United States to Italy and find my father’s hometown of Schilpario, north of my mother’s: the city of Bergamo, high in the Italian Alps. Etta has written the names of her relatives next to the dots that mark the mountain villages. South on the Mediterranean coast she has circled Sestri Levante and written her cousin Chiara’s name enclosed in a heart. Since I took Etta to Italy, she and Chiara have been faithful pen pals, and in many ways, Chiara, who is fifteen, is like a big sister to Etta. Chiara wants to come to the States one day. Judging by the length of her letters, she will have a lot to say when she gets here.
Etta’s toy chest, only a year ago filled with dolls and stuffed animals, is now filled with equipment. There’s a fishing basket, Rollerblades, a basketball, and several small branches (what she uses them for, I have no idea). She should have been a boy, I think as I prick my finger on a fishhook. I gather up some loose pencils from the bottom of the trunk and return them to the cup on her desk.
The top of the desk is covered in butcher paper, on which she has drawn a map of the heavens and written STARS OVER CRACKER’S NECK HOLLER in calligraphy along the top. She has made diagrams of the constellations and labeled each one. This pencil drawing was done with a ruler; it is so precise, I’m surprised it’s hers. Granted, there are many places where the paper is worn thin from erasures, but for the most part, her work is sure-handed. Etta loves astronomy—she points out the Milky Way on clear nights, or a planet when she recognizes it sparkling in the sky—but I didn’t know she was so passionate about the subject that she would take time to study the night sky in such detail. Evidently, Etta has an inner life that I know very little about.
When I was a girl, I spent a lot of time thinking about why I’d been born in Big Stone Gap, of all the places in the world. I would look up at the sky and wonder where it ended. I had such longing to explore that I couldn’t make the connection that my fate was somehow tied to a mountain town in the hills of Southwest Virginia. I thought a girl like me, who loved to read big adventure stories from centuries long ago, should have been from a more exciting place, a magical place. So when I found out that my mother had in fact left Italy pregnant with me and without a husband, I had my exotic point of origin at last. Etta might be very different, but she has my longing for the Big World deep in her bones. These mountains may protect us from the outside world, but they won’t hold us. We can see our way through them and over them, something lots of folks around here could never imagine.
At the bottom of the butcher paper is a very detailed drawing of our stone house, square and rustic, with its four chimneys and the front door painted pale blue. Etta has drawn the windows and their filmy lace sheers rustling in the wind. She has penciled in the roof shingle by shingle (now she knows the shingles firsthand), and her bedroom window, which overlooks the roof. Sitting in the window is Etta herself, with huge eyes and caterpillar eyelashes. In her hands, she holds a small telescope through which she gazes up to the stars above. She must have been out on the roof plenty before I caught her.
The phone rings. One of Etta’s punishments was the removal of her phone, so I have to run downstairs to answer it. I pick up on the third ring.
“Ave!” When I hear the voice of my closest friend of twenty years, I become the woman I used to be—young and trouble-free. The worst problem I had when I was single, a hole in the roof of my house, seems silly in comparison to my daughter falling off one.
“Theodore! How are you?”
“Moving.”
“Finally, you’ve come to your senses and you’re moving back to Big Stone Gap.”
Theodore laughs. “Not likely.”
“Come on. We got killer majorettes, and our horn section is the best in the county.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“You’re not going far, are you?” I have loved having my best friend so close in Knoxville. Many weekends, I jump in the Jeep and ride down to see his theatrical halftime shows at the University of Tennessee.
“It’s a dream move.”
“No. You didn’t get a job in—”
“Yep. New York City!”
“No!” Theodore used to talk about New York City as though it lay between heaven and Oz, a place of perfection and possibility. Now he’ll see for himself.
“I’ve only wanted this all of my life, and now it’s actually happening,” Theodore says gratefully.
“What school?”
“Not a school.”
“Not a school? Are you switching careers?” I can’t imagine Theodore giving up the life of a band director. He’s just too brilliant at it.
“No. I’m just going pro. I’ve been offered the job of associate artistic director at Radio City Music Hall.”
“Oh my God! The Rockettes!”
“The Christmas show, the Easter show, the concerts. All of it. I’m going to be working with the great director Joe Layton. He directed The Lost Colony, that outdoor drama. Remember when we drove down to North Carolina to see it?”
“One of our better road trips,” I remind him.
“Who would have thought playing Preacher Red Fox in your drama would have gotten me in the door?”
“That’s hardly what got you the job. You’re a theatrical genius, and now everyone will know it. You’re going to the big city! New York City!” I hope I’m not yelling, but I’m so excited for him.
“Now all we have to do is figure out when you’re coming up.”
Etta and Jack get home around suppertime carrying her new backpack, a three-ring binder with Halley’s comet on the cover, a hot-pink down vest, and more. I meet them outside to tell them Theodore’s news.
“When can we go?” Etta asks excitedly.
“He’d like us to come up for Columbus Day weekend in October.”
“Dad’s coming too, right?”
“I’m not slick enough for New York City, Etta.” Jack winks at me.
“You don’t have to be slick. You just need to move fast and cuss and push people out of your way,” Etta tells him with great authority.
“Etta knows all about New York. She’s read Harriet the Spy about seventeen times.”
“You and your mama will do fine without me.”
I’ve made Etta’s favorite dinner: spaghetti in fresh tomato sa
uce with meatballs, a big salad, and brownies with vanilla ice cream for dessert. She clears the dishes without a fuss.
“You girls got mail.” Jack comes in from the hallway with the familiar blue airmail envelopes. Etta practically dives on her father for her letter. “I forgot about them in my pocket, they’re so thin,” Jack apologizes.
“It’s from Chiara!” Etta shrieks. “Here, Ma. You got one from Grandpop.”
“Those two keep the Italian mail service in business.” My husband takes the newspaper and goes into the living room.
“No kidding.” I rip into my father’s letter. It is full of news. Papa and his new wife, Giacomina, are getting along great, but his mother is causing her share of agita. Nonna is having a hard time letting Giacomina take over the household. Papa says the negotiations continue; I guess Jack isn’t the only man in the world who plays referee to two women. Papa has been down to Bergamo quite a bit and over to see my mother’s family, the Vilminores, on Via Davide. There’s even an update on Stefano Grassi, an orphan my zia Antonietta cared for as though he were her son. After she died, the rest of the Vilminore family began to look out for him. He’d come for dinner and help Zio Pietro in the wood shop, though he continued to live at the nearby orphanage. He is a few years older than Etta, and she developed a big crush on him during our last visit. Evidently, the Barbari family has as well: Papa took Stefano to the opera with Giacomina and has included a picture of the three of them on the steps of Teatro alla Scala in Milan.
“Stefano Grassi sure is cute.” I give Etta the picture.
“Ma, he is Major Cute,” Etta corrects me. And she’s right. He’s lanky with a great face, a straight prominent nose, dark eyes, and blond curls that make him look like a Renaissance poet. “Stefano is way more mature than the boys around here.”
Milk Glass Moon Page 3
