Jacob’s regret over what I considered everyday (or at least every week) action hit me hard. He’s really serious about God. Bayford must have something in the water because both he and Cassandra, who were both in my age bracket, seemed to have this holy thing all worked out.
“So, to clarify, you’re celibate?”
“Yes.”
“And you have no desire to . . . you know?”
“I didn’t say all that,” he corrected me. “But this isn’t about sex. Everyone has their own struggles. Some people struggle with gambling, drinking, overeating, lying. The list of human vices goes on and on.”
I clamped and unclamped my teeth. “I thought we were supposed to be free from our wicked selves when we accepted Jesus. What’s the song the choir sang last week? ‘You will never be the same again.’”
Jacob raised one brow. “We are new creatures in Christ. Most of us just don’t believe it.”
Chapter 21
Just when we’d gotten our weekly schedule down pat, DeAndre’s school dismissed for spring break. Back in the day, the second week of March meant much-needed relaxation. Now, from the guardian’s angle on the school calendar, this five-day recess signaled double duty.
The first few days passed uneventfully. DeAndre stayed at home with Aunt Dottie while I kept all my plates spinning, popping in between stops to make sure they ate and Aunt Dottie got to use the restroom. When I really thought about it, I don’t know what I would have done without DeAndre’s help. Most of the time, he played outside with Chase and the other boys. But he checked on Aunt Dottie regularly (at least through the screen door) and called me when he wasn’t sure about something.
“Can me and Chase make a cake?”
“No, you may not.”
Next day. “Mike-Mike’s pit bull big brother dog had puppies. Can I have one?”
“What?”
“Mike-Mike big brother Phillip dog.”
I slowed him down. “Mike-Mike has an older brother named Phillip?”
“Yes.”
“And Phillip’s pit bull has given birth to puppies.”
“Yes.” DeAndre begged impatiently. “So may I please have one?” He probably thought using proper English would strengthen his case.
“No.”
I guess by Wednesday, DeAndre decided he wasn’t going to ask me if he could do anything else because the answer was always negative. Rain limited his entertainment options. I asked him if he wanted to hang with me at the store and at the library, but he declined on the grounds that Elgin might make him work too hard and the library bored him when there was no puppet show. Deep down inside, I knew I should have made him come anyway. The only reason I didn’t was because I didn’t feel like hearing him whine the whole day. “Are you ready to go yet?” and “How much longer?”
The blabbering howls on the other end of the phone line later cut my extended library time short. “Ooooow, Cousin Tori! It hurts! It hurts!”
“DeAndre, what’s going on?”
“My leg.”
“What happened to your leg?”
“Waaaaaw!”
I asked again. He screamed again. We weren’t getting anywhere. “Where’s Aunt Dottie?”
He hollered, “She’s right here.”
“Put the phone up to her ear.”
I waited a moment, then directed her. “Aunt Dottie, if I really need to come home, press a button one time.”
Beep.
“I’m on my way,” I said, hanging up. A million terrifying images scrambled through my mental camera. Was his leg cut? Broken? Burned? Bitten? Should I have called 9-1-1?
In the interim, I placed a call to Joenetta. “Can you get over to Aunt Dottie’s? DeAndre hurt himself.”
“Who’s watching him?” she barked.
“He’s with Aunt Dottie.”
She hmphed me. “Like I said, who’s watching him?”
“You know, either you or his father is more than welcome to come get DeAndre any day of the week—especially this week since school is out.”
“I’m just sayin’ little boys have a tendency to get in trouble when left to their own imaginations. You should have asked someone to come sit with Dottie while you ran your errands,” she accused, as though she were incapable of pitching in with her own grandson.
I wondered whom she thought that someone should be. Nevertheless, her words teamed up with the guilt already simmering inside me. I had no rebuttal. “Just meet me there. Bye.”
“Mmmm hmmm. That’s what I thought.”
She beat me to the house and rallied at the door with dramatics worthy of an Oscar nomination. “Good Lord, this boy’s leg is almost clear gone in the front.”
Never having heard such an inept description, I threw my purse on the couch next to Aunt Dottie and braced myself for the worst. Joenetta led me to my own bedroom, an odd triage for someone who had no business in my room in the first place.
DeAndre lay still on his backside with a scantly reddened hand towel covering the lower portion of his right leg. The lack of major blood loss lowered my anxiety level significantly.
His crying picked up again the moment our eyes met. “You’re all right, DeAndre,” I assured him, rubbing his head. He covered his face with a forearm, his body jerking with each fresh whimper.
“He wouldn’t let me touch it. Said he only wanted you.” She murmured, “I don’t know why, since you’re the one who let him get into this mess.”
No mood for an argument. Time for the great reveal. With Joenetta literally looking over my shoulder, I gently lifted the towel. She gasped, I breathed a sigh of relief. About six inches of skin covering DeAndre’s shin had somehow been . . . rubbed off? Scraped off, maybe, but he’d survive. How on earth had he managed to engineer this freak accident? “What happened?”
He squealed between huffs. “I was . . . on your . . . treadmill . . . and then it . . . started going real fast . . . and I fell . . . and my leg got caught on the machine.”
“He’s lucky he didn’t break his neck,” Joenetta pointed out.
“Why were you on my treadmill?”
Joenetta answered for him. “Because he’s eight years old and unsupervised, that’s why.”
Guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
She added, “Both of y’all need a whippin’.”
“Don’t get carried away,” I warned.
Save DeAndre’s lecture for later. Joenetta and I coaxed him into allowing us to douse the wound with water. We agreed that he could test the water temperature before we positioned his leg under the bathtub faucet. No one would touch the wound itself.
“Okay,” he finally consented.
Next came the big peroxide scene.
“We have to kill any possible bacteria, DeAndre,” I tried to reason with him.
“How do you know there’s bacteria on a treadmill?” he retorted tearfully, keeping his eyes on my hands.
I set the brown peroxide bottle on the rim of the tub so he could focus on the words that were coming out of my mouth. “The belt on that treadmill is covered with germs from the bottoms of my shoes. You don’t want spit and smashed up bugs and dog poop getting inside your body, do you?”
He needed a moment to deliberate.
All of a sudden, Joenetta seized him, grabbed the peroxide and upturned the bottle, sending a river of liquid down his leg.
It all happened so fast, DeAndre barely had time to shriek, “Noooo!”
I yelled, “Joenetta!” and tried to jerk DeAndre from her clutch, but it was too late. White bubbles fizzed under the clamor of DeAndre’s heart-wrenching protest.
After the initial oxidizing sting had visibly and audibly subsided, Joenetta loosed her grip on the child. He immediately wrapped himself around my waist and buried his face in my neck. The tone of his weeping altered now to include the pain of betrayal.
I stammered with rage, “How could you be so evil, Joenetta?”
She tsked. “I ain’t got time to sit up here and talk
through all this nonsense.”
“What else do you have to do, Joenetta? I mean, you don’t work, you’re not helping with Aunt Dottie, and you’ve been relinquished of your store . . . pilfering duties.” I’d wanted to pick a synonym for robbery so DeAndre wouldn’t realize I’d accused his grandmother of being a thief. Turns out Joenetta didn’t know the word, either.
“What you mean by store piftering?”
Conscious of DeAndre’s attentive ears, I asked him to go in the other room with Aunt Dottie because his granny and I needed to talk privately.
“I ain’t got nothin’ to say to you,” Joenetta declared, stomping out of the bathroom ahead of DeAndre.
I remained on the tub’s edge for a moment, collecting myself. Ten. Nine. Eight. Was this my fault? Seven. Six. Five. Four. Did we need to put DeAndre in day care? Three. Two. One. Why was I even raising him to begin with?
Joenetta had already hopped her broom and flown away by the time I joined DeAndre and Aunt Dottie in the living room. Peace abounded. DeAndre had propped his leg across Aunt Dottie’s lap, and she’d used her left arm to blot wetness from the abrasion. She motioned for me to stand near her. She grabbed DeAndre’s hand. He took mine, and I stooped down to take hold of her weaker hand. She tipped her head toward me.
“Father, we thank You for watching over DeAndre. This injury could have been worse, but we thank You that he’ll recover nicely. God, help us all continue to work through Aunt Dottie’s recovery and with the store.” There was too much on my plate to even start listing my needs. “Just help us with everything, God. Amen.”
“Amen,” from DeAndre, nodding from Aunt Dottie.
DeAndre and I had our after-the-fact discussion with Aunt Dottie sitting between us, participating via hand and head motions. My treadmill was off limits. DeAndre was not to stick a toe in my room. He apologized profusely. “I hear ya, Cousin Tori. I’m not goin’ in your room ever again without permission.”
That settled, he and I made a trip to the nearest pharmacy, ten minutes away, to purchase gauze, tape, and a huge tube of ointment. We came back to the house and plotted an elaborate scrape-care plan.
“Do I have to use peroxide again?”
“Probably so, but it won’t be as bad as the first time,” I explained. “You’ve toughed through the worst part already.”
Pride bloated his chest as he dabbed Neosporin with latex-gloved hands. The gloves were his addition—he’d found them in Aunt Dottie’s bathroom next to the hair dye.
Soon after his leg was properly medicated and covered, Wendy, the physical therapist, arrived for Aunt Dottie’s session. I needed to get back to the store but, truth be told, I was too afraid to leave DeAndre home again. He’d have to stick with me during the last two days of this ridiculously unnecessary spring break.
A flash of horrifying magnitude barged through my head. What’s going to happen over summer break? Really, I couldn’t even allow my mind to go there. Aunt Dottie’s right side grew stronger daily. She’d even begun muttering vowel sounds lately, weeks ahead of the speech therapist’s prediction. Her brain had already begun to reroute some of her verbal functions. Hopefully, prayerfully, Aunt Dottie would be in much better shape by the time DeAndre finished third grade.
DeAndre and I returned to the store after Wendy left. The bandage, his new source of honor, sparked several sympathetic conversations with customers. “It hurt real bad,” he recounted.
Virgie pumped him up, reminding him to give each customer the whole story. “Tell ’em about the blood,” she’d yell from across the store. “You forgot about the peroxide part.”
By the store’s closing hour, DeAndre’s humble narrative about the accident had turned into a full-blown, harrowing tall tale worthy of a war hero.
Cassandra laughed, saying I should take a picture of the wound and put it in his baby book.
“I don’t know if he has one.” I tidied the cashier area
“Have you tried to get in touch with the Simpsons?”
“Not yet, but I will soon. DeAndre wants to visit his mother in prison.”
Cassandra’s lips compressed. She glanced around the store, obviously checking for DeAndre’s location. “If you knew Z like I knew Z, you’d think twice about taking him to see her—unless the power of God z-zapped her prison cell and changed her permanently.”
“Changed how?”
“She came in here a few times with DeAndre before Aunt Dottie took over his care. I never liked how Z treated him. She’d cuss and yell at him, tell him he was stupid. Pop him way too hard, in my opinion.”
This news coming from the speedy poppin’ queen herself.
“I see.”
“All I’m saying is if you decide to go, be prepared to snatch him out of the booth at a moment’s notice. Aunt Dottie’s is the best place for DeAndre. She’s the best thing to happen to him. Well, her and you.”
“Thanks.”
Cassandra switched gears. “Hey, check this out.” She reached into the side pocket of her jeans. “Behold. My new cell phone.” She showcased a simple flip-style phone in the palm of her hand. “What do you think?”
“Nice, nice.” I surveyed the phone for her sake. I probably had one just like it . . . three years ago. Alas, things were ’a changing in Bayford. “What kind of calling plan did you get?”
“I got a thousand minutes a month, though I doubt I’ll use ’em all.”
I disagreed, “You say that now, but once you get used to calling for the least little conversation, a thousand minutes won’t be nearly enough. What about texting?”
“Unlimited,” she replied. “Came with the plan, but I really don’t get how you type words with all these numbers.”
“Let me see your phone.” I changed her text settings to T9 and showed her how to use the phone’s intuitive features advantageously.
“Wacka wacka wacka!”
Eighties children’s television. “Come on now, Sandra, the Muppets?”
“I loved Miss Piggy. She made chubbiness acceptable.”
“She was a pig.”
“Still, she was the prettiest muppet. Everyone wanted a piece of Miss Piggie.”
“For breakfast, maybe.”
She held the time-out sign. “Zinch! Flink! Stop and think. Okay, back to my phone. I was thinking. Remember the throwback sale I mentioned? Okay, everybody and their momma has gone to the barbershop and gotten a phone. And I do mean everybody from all sides of the track. So, if we send out Dottie’s throwback deal in a text every day at the same time—say ten o’clock, before people have a chance to get up and drive to Henrytown—we could get their money first, before they sprinkle and prinkle on over to Walmart.”
With a hopeful look at me, she prodded, “What you think?”
Truth was, I hadn’t given her proposal much thought at all. I was so busy running daily operations, there was no occasion to analyze an entire marketing strategy. I barely had enough time to cover my NetMarketing plans without adding this to my spinning plate routine.
Plus, the store was constantly full of talk about the new Walmart. People wanted to know if we intended to stay open. Rumors circulated that some of Bayford’s oldest family-owned businesses had already planned their exit strategies. From Red’s Tire Shop to Macie’s Craft Closet, owners who feared the worst were closing on their own terms rather than facing uncertainty.
With those circumstances in mind, I couldn’t possibly impart false hope. “I have to think about it some more, Cassandra.”
She returned to the quarters, counting all the way to six seventy-five before she addressed me again. “You need to make some decisions soon. I know you have to get back to your real world in Houston, but the rest of us will still be here in Bayford doing life as usual.” She motioned for Elgin to join our conversation.
“Elgin, tell Tori what you said earlier about our customers.” She put one hand on my shoulder.
He withdrew a small piece of paper from a hidden compartment in his apron. �
�Well, I’ve been keeping track of our traffic. Seems like we get a lot of folks in here from three till five, getting stuff for dinner and such. Plus the kids are getting out of school. But that’s only for now. When it gets hot outside, people get out early in the morning or they’ll wait until closer to sundown.”
Cassandra grabbed my hand and Elgin’s, and led us to the back office, where she literally unrolled an elaborate chart detailing store trends, best-selling items, and other factors to consider with the throwback plan.
“You’ve really thought this through, huh?”
“Had to. I’ve been watching you and”—finger quotes—“overhearing. When you talk to the people at your job in Houston, y’all talk numbers. I do numbers, too.”
“Clearly.”
Elgin remarked, “Looks like a real professional put this chart together.”
“Shazaam! I am a real professional!”
We laughed at her antics. That Cassandra was something else.
Chapter 22
DeAndre’s baseball practices consumed Tuesday and Thursday evenings. True to his word, Jacob taxied a vanload of little boys to and from the middle school diamond. The brisk spring air, still clutching remnants of cooler days gone by, beckoned Bayford occupants outside to enjoy the last round of tolerable outdoor activity. It was simply too pleasant to spend time indoors.
I packed up Aunt Dottie and her wheelchair, and we trailed the van across town to watch DeAndre and his poorly coordinated teammates practice. They were supposed to be the Yellow Jackets, but they looked more like the Bad News Bears out there on the field. Dropping fly balls, running bases at a snail’s pace. Jacob and the father of one of the boys, assumably an assistant coach, could barely keep straight faces watching the team train.
Our first game against the Longhorns forecasted a miserable season. Of course, the boys didn’t really care so much whether they won or lost so long as they got their after-game snacks. Sometimes I wondered if they even realized how badly we’d been pounded by almost every team we faced. Jacob always praised them for their effort no matter the score. The boys were oblivious.
Joenetta and Ray-Ray came to a few of DeAndre’s games. DeAndre was absolutely beside himself when his father sat in the stands. However, I think I scared them off when I asked Ray-Ray if he could contribute to the cost of DeAndre playing baseball. My exact words were, “Is there any way you can put twenty dollars toward his registration fee? Not right away, just whenever you get the chance.” I give him some credit. He didn’t lie and say he would when he knew he wouldn’t.
Someone to Watch Over Me Page 19
