Dandelion Summer

by Lisa Wingate

  Mama stood in the doorway, her hands shaking as she yanked her dark hair up in a ponytail and grabbed a rubber band from the pile of mail, newspaper ads, and other junk on the end table. Her face was wicked red from her cheeks on down, all the way to where her skin disappeared into the neck of her T-shirt. Her eyelids were droopy and slow. She’d probably calmed herself with a whiskey sour or two when she couldn’t find me. But whatever. Anything she wanted to do was her business.

  “Stop giving me that dirty look.” She lifted a hand like she was gonna smack me. It wouldn’t have been the first time, but if she tried it again, she was in for a shock. I was tired of taking crap off her. All I ever did was try to make Mama like me, and all she ever did was tell me how much trouble I was and how hard it was to keep a roof over our heads and buy everything we needed. Every once in a while, she’d add that things weren’t supposed to end up like this. This wasn’t the life she’d wanted. “You’re just lucky I’ve got to get to work, or I swear . . .” She let the threat die in a growl.

  I took a step back and tried to make her yelling roll right off. What choice was there, really? I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have come home. I would’ve told that police officer I was a runaway or something. It wasn’t like Mama would miss me. I was the worst thing that ever happened to her. If she hadn’t gotten herself pregnant with me, her life would’ve been totally different. Better. She’d be down the road helping to run that fine Italian restaurant.

  It hurt to know that—to finally really understand. I didn’t want it to hurt. I wanted to be as cold as ice to her, but there was still some part of me that couldn’t. There was still some of Epiphany in there with Epie.

  “Don’t even know if I can get the classrooms finished tonight,” she grumbled, picking up Russ’s keys. “You think this is easy, after cleaning houses all day? I hope you know how much you screwed up, Epiphany. You selfish little . . . And for what? Because you want to go run around like some . . . like some . . . back-alley trash? You get yourself knocked up, Epiphany, and you’re outta here. You’re not staying in my house. You hear me?”

  I wanted to say, You know what? I won’t. But I couldn’t say anything. I just stood there with a big ol’ lump gathering in my throat. I wasn’t gonna cry where she could see it, so I closed my mouth tight over the sound and watched her grab her cleaning company smock and head out the door. For half a second, the room felt better without her in it. After that, it just felt empty. I looked around at the matteddown sofa, and the end table somebody’s dog must’ve chewed on before we moved in, and the gold-colored carpet that was probably three times as old as I was, and I thought there had to be more to life than this. There had to be something else out there. I sank down onto the sofa and just thought about it for a long time.

  I hated it here. I hated her. I hated me. I hated who I was. I hated what I looked like. I hated the color of my skin, and my stupid, long, kinky hair. All that hate was like a slow burn, eating me up from the inside. Wasn’t there anybody in this world who wanted me?

  What if I tomorrow night I got looking superfine, and then took the bus to Greenville? The street would be lousy with people partying at the clubs. Guys would give me looks and stuff, and I’d smile right back. When I made it to that restaurant, I’d walk on in like I belonged there, right past the dudes in their white shirts and black ties, parking high-class cars out front. I’d stroll to the counter and find the people who owned the place and make them tell me what’d happened when I was born. I’d make them tell me all the secrets Mama kept.

  Her secrets . . .

  I knew where she hid her secrets. She’d crammed two boxes in the back of her closet at every place we’d ever lived. The one time I’d messed with the boxes, she’d caught me with her closet torn apart and yanked me up by the arm so quick I felt my shoulder pop. “Did you open these? Did you?” She pointed at the boxes, her finger shaking.

  “I didn’t!” I said, and tried to pull away. The way she was holding me hurt a little in my arm, and a lot inside. “Mama, stop!”

  She let go of me finally, shoved the boxes back in the closet, and shut the door hard. “You leave my things alone,” she hissed, and dragged me out of the room. “You stay out of here. Stay out of my room!” She headed back to the sofa to watch a movie with some guy from next door.

  I was nine then, old enough to finally get it through my stupid head that I was better off keeping my distance—from Mama and her things. It was easier to stay clear of whatever was in the closet, keep my head down when Mama and me were home together, and try not to be a bother to her. It never even crossed my mind that those boxes in the closet might be hiding secrets about me.

  My heart started pumping as I headed down the hall, went into her room, opened the closet door, and looked inside. The boxes were still there, a big one with a picture of a tomato can on the side, and a shoe box, stuffed in the corner behind a pile of dirty laundry and junk. I studied all of it, memorized how it looked, then knelt down and started moving things one at a time, making sure I’d know how to piece it all back together. Even though I told myself I didn’t care what Mama thought anymore, a part of me remembered what it felt like to be yanked up by the arm and thrown through the doorway.

  I set each box on the bedroom floor, leaving tiny trails in the dust. My heart hiccuped into my neck. What if even that was enough for Mama to notice? What if she finally decided she was sick of me and kicked me out on the street? But I had to know. If there was something about me in those boxes, I had a right to it, didn’t I?

  I slid my fingers around the lid on the shoe box, worked it upward. It popped loose, and I set it to the side, my eyes following it to the floor, then tracking back to the box real slow. I was afraid to look, but I wanted to see.

  There was a plain white paper on the top, folded in half. I lifted it out, opened it, read it—the rental agreement for some trailer house we lived in before Mrs. Lora’s.

  I set down the paper and took out an envelope that was underneath it. My birth certificate was inside, and a few other things—vaccination records and stuff. My father’s name was on there, Jaylon Jones. It wasn’t J. Lon Jones, like I’d always thought. It was Jaylon, all one word. I tried to picture him in my mind, but I couldn’t anymore. The hero soldier daddy, who was tall like me and looked a little like Will Smith, had walked right out the door with the nasty lady at school. Jaylon was just some lines on paper. A man I’d had all wrong, just like the name.

  A man who didn’t want me.

  I pushed everything back into the envelope, set it aside, and dug down deeper. There was a Valentine’s card—one of the sappy kind you pick out when you’re just falling in love with somebody. There was no way to tell whether it was from Mama or to her. The envelope was yellowed, but the flap had never been stuck down and torn open, and in the spot where it should’ve been signed, it just said, Me. Why’d she saved it all these years?

  I dug deeper, jumping every time the house settled or creaked, even though I knew that once Russ headed off on his bike, he usually hooked up with some friends and partied for hours.

  There were more papers in the box—some medical stuff, the payment book for the car that’d been gone forever, a few of my old report cards and some school papers where teachers wrote notes and said I was smart, a Mother’s Day card I’d probably made in day care or Head Start someplace. There was a little gold handprint inside a paper heart on the front of it. It was hard to picture my mama putting that card away in a safe place, like it mattered. Maybe it’d ended up in here by accident. Underneath it was a sheet of school pictures from back in middle school. Only one was cut out. It was probably still on the wall in Mrs. Lora’s classroom.

  Underneath the school pictures were a few from the Christmas pageant at Mrs. Lora’s church, where I got to wear an angel suit, because I was tall. The pastor, Brother Ben, gave me the pictures when he took them off the bulletin board at the end of the year. I liked Brother Ben’s church. Pe
ople were nice there. I got saved and everything.

  I lifted a stack of bills, and under those was a little handmade book with a blue paper cover. I knew what it was without even pulling it out—the Someday Book from Mrs. Lora’s seventh-grade class. She gave us ten sheets of blue paper that were blank, except for three words: Someday I will . . . We had to fill in the rest and draw pictures. She told us to think hard, to dream big, to put down the things we most wanted to do. To make ten promises to ourselves, and when we were done, she’d bind them into a book. We were supposed to keep the book where we could look at it again and again. When you look at a promise over and over, it becomes part of who you are, she said.

  Guess I’d lost track of my promises at some point, just like I’d lost track of the book. Now I couldn’t even remember what those promises were.

  Underneath the blue paper promises was another book, an old one with a yellow satin cover that was stained brown around the edges. A baby book. The cloth felt dry and fragile under my fingers as I wiggled it from under the pile. It slid free, and something blue fell out, dropping into the side of the box. A plastic envelope—the kind that comes from Wal-Mart with photos in it. I picked it up, set it on the floor, then straightened the papers in the box so that they were flat again.

  Boots clomped up the porch steps, and I jerked my hands away from the box, listening. The sound of keys rattling sent an air ball into my throat. Russ was back. For some reason, he hadn’t stayed out partying, after all.

  Panic zipped through me. If Mama found out I’d been in here, I was dead. Shoving the photo envelope, the baby book, and the loose papers back in the shoe box, I hoisted the big box back into the closet, my hands sweating while I tried to wrestle stray shoes out from underneath, so it would sit flat. The locks on the front door were clicking now.

  “Come on, c’mon, c’mon,” I whispered, trying to lift the big box and push the junk from underneath. Finally, it plunked into place, and I capped the shoe box, set it on top, then piled the clothes and shoes into the closet. The front door fell open and thumped against the end table, and I slid the closet closed just as Russ was dropping his keys and cell phone on top of the newspapers.

  He started up the hall, and I checked the floor by the bed. Air caught in my throat. The Someday Book was still there. I kicked it under the bed, making sure nothing was showing before I moved toward the hall.

  “What’re you doin’ up?” Russ grumbled, swaying a little when he looked down the hallway. “You got someone here with you?” His eyes narrowed toward my bedroom.

  I yawned and stretched like I’d just woken up. “I heard a mouse.” It wasn’t until after I said it that I wished I hadn’t. Russ might look under the bed for the mouse. “I couldn’t find it, though.”

  On the way down the hall toward me, he slid his Harley jacket off, yawning as I backed away from their bedroom so he could get in the door. “Go to bed, already. That mouse ain’t gonna hurt anything.”

  “’Kay,” I said, watching the bed skirt shiver in the breeze as he passed by, the corner of a blue paper showing for just a second before the cloth fell into place and hid it again.

  Chapter 3

  J. Norman Alvord

  I was no sooner home from my incarceration at the hospital than someone came rapping on the front door and ringing the bell.

  “Be there in a minute,” Deborah called, guiding me toward the bedroom as one would an invalid or an inmate in chains.

  “Whoever it is, tell them to go away,” I said. “I don’t want anyone here burning incense and saying prayers over me.” Even though it had been four months since Annalee’s death, neighbors still insisted on dropping by with invitations to domino nights at the senior center, or with servings of casserole and bowls of soup for one. This was a street of old-money families, and Annalee had made it her business to know everyone on it—a bridge club here, a ladies’ tea there, a baby shower three houses down, an Avon party at another place. She also saw to renting out the studio apartment over our garage building near the street, often sharing dinners and baked goods with the tenants. She’d spent so much time alone as I traveled the world for my work that she’d learned to be good with the neighbors—a skill I’d never bothered to cultivate.

  “It’s the cleaning lady,” Deborah informed me flatly. “I told you she’d be coming on Monday.”

  Indignance swirled within me like the fumes from a chemical reaction, leaking quickly into the room. “I told you I didn’t want anyone.” The topic hadn’t come up since Friday afternoon, when I’d landed in the hospital. It had slipped my mind during the plethora of conversations with doctors recommending that we try an internally implanted defibrillator, a pacemaker of sorts, as a way of preventing further heart spells. The doctor could not guarantee that such a surgery would fix my problem, but he thought it was worth a try. I, of course, had no intention of submitting myself to any more surgeries. What would be the point of that, now that Annalee was gone?

  “Well, you’re having her,” Deborah said, bristling.

  “I haven’t time to watch her.” I imagined the woman handling Annalee’s things, perhaps moving them, even breaking something. Annalee would never have wanted some hired woman carousing through our home. Even when we lived overseas, where domestic help could be had for a pittance, Annalee tended the house herself. She preferred it that way. “She’s probably one of those illegals. If we end up with a fine for hiring her, I won’t pay it.”

  “Dad, really.”

  Looping a finger around the bedroom curtain, I peeked outside, looking past our garage building, where an artist, Terrence Clay, was living now. There was no vehicle in the driveway or at the curb. Apparently, the housekeeper had come on foot or by city bus. What sort of a shady housekeeper didn’t own a vehicle? A ne’er-do-well. The sort with a dismal credit rating, the sort who spent all her money on alcohol, drugs, or lottery tickets.

  The bell rang again.

  I pushed my cheek to the glass in an effort to see who was on the front porch. “Tell her to go away and come back next week. By then I’ll have had time to put away the valuables.” The housekeeper stepped off the porch, shading her eyes against the late March sunshine and checking the house number. She hardly looked honest to me—a slight, small woman with dark, curly hair bound haphazardly in a clip. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, from which protruded the thin, leather-skinned arms of a lifetime cigarette smoker. She had the appearance of someone who might wait on your table at some out-of-the-way truck stop—not the sort you’d want roaming through your home. Not at all. “I don’t like her. Your mother would never have let a woman like that in this house.”

  “How would you know?” Deborah muttered, then turned to leave the room. “You were never here.” Even now, Deborah faulted me for the fact that I had continued to take consulting jobs during my retirement years. Had I stayed home more, been more attentive, Deborah felt that I might have noticed Annalee’s dizzy spells and become aware that something was wrong.

  “Well, tell her not to come in my room,” I called after her, and then moved to the bedroom door with the intention of closing it. “I’ll be resting.” Deborah didn’t reply, and so I added, as she disappeared up the hallway, “I certainly hope you’ll be staying around to supervise her.” Then I pushed the door to, shutting out the remainder of the house and the rest of the world.

  I turned on the bedroom television, stripped off the clothing Deborah had brought to the hospital—a sweltering jogging suit that had probably been hanging unused in my closet for twenty years—and climbed into bed, suddenly weary of everything. If I couldn’t have sway over my home any longer, at least I could maintain control of my person. I could sleep away the afternoon, and let Deborah deal with this . . . this housewoman she’d hired. Surely Deborah wouldn’t leave her alone here if she knew I wasn’t supervising.

  Lying in bed, I turned an ear toward the wall. I could hear the hum of conversation, but not the words. What were they talking about? Wha
t was Deborah telling her? I scooted across the bed, strained toward the sound, tried to make it out. Finally, I rose and put an ear to the wall. The words still weren’t clear. Deborah and the woman were in the foyer or the front parlor talking; I could tell that much. No work was being done so far. Perhaps they wouldn’t be able to settle on a price. Perhaps they hadn’t discussed the details previously.

  What were they saying? Was Deborah telling her things about me? Untrue things? Making me sound like a dotty old man? I moved toward the door, turned the handle silently, stuck my head into the hallway, then crept out a few steps, pressing close to the wall like a Soviet spy gathering trade secrets in enemy territory. Perhaps Deborah’s bringing in the housekeeper was just one more way of building the evidence she would need to oust me from my home and force me into some warehouse for the criminally old.

  “. . . isten to him,” Deborah was saying. “He’ll give you trouble, if he can. Just go ahead and do your work. I would say that he’s having a difficult time with the death of my mother, but he’s always been impossible to deal with.”

  “I’m used to it.” The woman’s voice was listless, disinterested. “I clean for a lotta old people. I don’t let it bother me.”

  “Perfect.” Deborah seemed delighted, disgustingly so. “I’d be willing to pay extra if you could cook supper for him on Mondays and make sure he eats a good meal. That would give me a night off.” The sentence ended in a dramatic sigh, indicating the breadth and depth of the daily burden I’d become. “Eventually, we need to work out something more . . . permanent, but for now I’m just trying to get through a day at a time.”

  The woman sucked air past her teeth, the hesitant sound one makes in order to up the ante while bargaining in an open-air market on the far side of the world. “I go into work with the janitorial service at four thirty . . . or I’d do it. I could use the money.”