by Terra Little
I sit across from her, stare into her crystal ball, and pass her a crisp fifty-dollar bill. I came alone this time because I am slightly embarrassed about being here and I’m unsure of where my head will be by the time I leave.
She says, “Phoenix rising,” and that is all.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that as one soul burns for an eternity, another rises from the ashes to live again. Who is Aaron?”
“A friend.”
“Do you love him?”
She catches me off guard, and I wonder what corner of my soul she finds Aaron in. “Does he love me?”
“Do you think I am like the motorcycle man?” She laughs. “I won’t play twenty questions with you. You know he does, but you spend too much time trying to figure out what he sees in you that is lovable. Ask him who Nettie is, and then you will begin to understand. The world is not simply black and white for everyone. Some people pay attention to the gray areas.”
She scribbles something on a piece of paper and pushes it across the table to me. When I don’t pick it up, she nods at the paper and lifts her eyebrows. “Are you afraid of what it says?”
“Should I be?”
“I don’t know. Depends on what it means to you. Read it and see.”
I read and then I frown. “Let sleeping dogs lie?”
“Stop calling your mother Ellie. You taint a relationship that should be healing. She can’t help what she’s been through any more than you can. You think she doesn’t understand you, but she does. Admitting she does is a whole other issue, though, and she won’t, so stop trying to make her. Just accept and move on.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Why is it easy for you to accept Victoria’s weaknesses and not your mother’s? Not your own? Do you think they hurt any less than you do?”
“She could’ve saved us.” This is the point I think I will always be stuck on.
“She couldn’t save herself any more than you thought you were saving Beige.”
She still pronounces my daughter’s name incorrectly, but this time I don’t waste my breath correcting her.
The phone rings three times and I get hung up on three times before I pick up the receiver and hear my mother’s voice.
“Helena? This is your mother.”
“Yes?” Ellie.
“I’m calling about Beige. She tells me that you won’t speak to her.”
I clamp the receiver between my head and shoulder and keep washing dishes. “If she would call and not hang up, I’d speak to her. What does this have to do with you?”
“Vicky is upset and so is Beige. Apparently, you lost control and said some things you probably shouldn’t have said.”
“I’m upset too. Do you care about that?”
She sighs disgustedly. “Why do you always attack me, Helena? This is why I never call. You always want to argue with me, and I don’t have the energy for it.”
“You never call because you think I want to argue with you, but I don’t. Just once you could call to see how I’m doing or just to say hello. That would be nice.”
“It works both ways, you know. You could call me too.”
“I suppose I could,” I say slowly.
We hold the phone for several seconds and then, “I heard you got a new job.”
“A couple of weeks ago, yeah. At a newspaper.”
“You like it better than the factory job?”
“Much.”
“Beige says you have a boyfriend. Eric, I think she said his name is.”
“Aaron. And he’s not my boyfriend.” Aaron moves up behind me at the sink and hangs his head over my shoulder. He makes an excuse me face and winks. I push him away and dry my hands on a dishtowel. “He thinks he is though.”
“They always do,” my mother says and chuckles. “I guess everything’s going okay for you then?”
“So far so good. You?”
“No sense in complaining. All this heat messes with my sinuses, but other than that, I guess I’ll make it. How long is this thing between you and Beige going to go on?”
“I don’t know. I’m tired of it though. I’ll have to figure something out.”
“Well, please do because I’m getting tired of listening to her whine every hour on the hour. And don’t even talk about what my phone bill is going to look like when it comes. Whatever it is you did, just say you’re sorry and let it be.”
I start to snap, start to say something that will end with me calling her Ellie in the ugliest tone I can manage, but I don’t. Instead, I count to ten, run a hand over my locks, and bring Aaron a glass of juice over to the futon. “Okay, Mama. I’ll do that, all right?”
“All right. Now, I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay.”
“And Helena?”
“Yes, Mama?”
“Vicky usually calls me on Sunday evenings, when the long distance rates are cheap. Just in case you didn’t know about the rates and everything.”
“Okay, Mama. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“It’d be all right if you did.”
I hang up the phone and look at Aaron. “Tell me about your mama,” I say.
He paints a picture for me. Describes a heavyset woman with two chins and a head full of thick hair. He says she reached back and got her hair from the Indian blood in their family. I smooth my palm over his head and tell him that he did too. Then he says she never made it past the eighth grade because his grandmother died young and she had to help take care of his aunts and uncles. She earned a living as a maid and she never missed a day of work for as long as he can remember. She beat his ass when his grades didn’t look good enough to her, and she never let him out of the house without clean underwear on his butt or without making sure his teeth were brushed.
She still lives in Mississippi, along with his sister and two brothers, and they all live within minutes of each other. They are close like I wouldn’t believe, and he misses them pretty much every day.
“Have you ever thought about moving back home?”
“To Mississippi? I don’t think so. It’s a nice place to visit though.” He takes my hand and lays it on his thigh, runs the pad of his thumb over my fingernails one by one. “I was thinking about maybe going down for a visit later in the summer. Have you ever been to Mississippi, Lena?” I shake my head. “Would you like to go?”
“With you?”
Aaron makes a show of looking around the room, checking out the space surrounding him and then the space behind me. “You see somebody else in here wanting you to meet their mama? We can pack Beige up and throw her in the car with us. She needs to go ahead and start liking me anyway.”
“I’m on parole, Aaron. I can’t just leave the state whenever I feel like it.”
“How much longer do you have? What, three or four months?”
“Three, I think. But . . .”
“Like I said, the end of the summer.” He makes it sound so easy. Like a definite plan.
Chapter Eighteen
Vicky winces as I grab her hand and squeeze it like my life depends on it. She starts to say something, but I slap a hand over her mouth and tell her to hush. I pull her into the household cleaners aisle and stick my head around the end display of Tide so I can see without being seen.
“What are we hiding from?” she wants to know.
“Not what, but who.”
I watch Kimmick separate a shopping cart from a line of carts and push it in the opposite direction. He walks slowly, as if he has all the time in the world, looking at everything he passes and scanning price tags. He drops a bundle of toilet paper in his cart and turns down an aisle, out of sight. I drag Vicky with me as I go after him.
“Who are we following, Leenie?” She jerks her sleeve from my grasp and refuses to budge.
I think about slapping her, but she would probably make too much noise. Give me away before I can find out what I want to find out. “This guy I’ve been seeing. I just want to see
what he’s up to.”
“Did he come in here with another woman or something?”
“No, he’s alone.” I peek around another corner and the coast is clear. “I’m just being nosy.”
“If he’s alone, then what’s the—”
I wave my hands in front of her face like a thousand swarming bees. “Would you just come on? There you go, thinking everything to death. Shut up and come on.”
“What about my cart?”
She has two things in her cart: tampons and dissolving dishwasher tabs. Things she can live without or pick up again, but she wants to work my nerves. “Bring the flipping cart, Vicky, damn. We might need it for distraction anyway.”
I send her down one aisle and up another one, give her explicit instructions for the information I need her to bring back to me. I pretend to be looking through stacks of throw rugs while she pushes her cart down the aisle where Kimmick is and then comes to find me.
“What?” I ask as soon as her cart squeaks to a stop in front of me.
“Preparation H, some of those socks old men wear, and toothbrushes.”
“That’s it?”
“Wait, I think I saw some women’s underwear in his cart too, and they looked big enough for him to wear.”
I gasp and my eyes bug out. “Seriously?”
She rolls her eyes and looks like she is tired of my foolishness. “No, Leenie. Why are we following this dude again?”
“I want to see if he is who he says he is. If he’s for real. Come on.”
I pick up Kimmick’s scent near the electronics department and follow him from there. He takes ten minutes selecting a cell phone case, and he eventually chooses the first one he picked up, the cheapest one. He flips through country-Western CDs and debates with himself over whether or not to buy Faith Hill’s latest. He decides against buying a CD and tosses a DVD movie in his cart. After he gets ink refills for his inkjet printer, he leads the way to the shoe department.
I leave Vicky trying on a pair of house slippers that look like ballet shoes and peek around a corner at him as he slides a size eleven men’s shoe from a shelf. They are boxy-looking corduroy slippers, the kind old men in nursing homes wear, and I mentally tell him that I like the red pair better than I do the black pair he is holding.
Vicky taps me on my shoulder and scares the shit out of me. “What do you think? Pink or blue?” She holds out two pairs of slippers and waits for me to pick one. I roll my eyes and pick blue. Kimmick circles around my orbit and I snatch her in front of me, hiding from him and breathing a sigh of relief when he doesn’t even look up.
He picks up Rembrandt toothpaste, so I know his teeth aren’t false. He passes right by the adult diapers, so I know he doesn’t shit or piss in his pants. He picks up two bricks of Irish Spring soap and a stick of Old Spice anti-perspirant, so I know he washes his ass, even if he does smell like a mixed-up French whore afterward. I drop a brick of Dove soap in Vicky’s cart, add a tub of coconut-mango body butter for Beige, and continue on my quest.
“Where do you know this dude from?” Vicky eyes the body butter, and then she gets a tub for herself.
“He’s a motorcycle freak.” We follow him to the men’s clothing department.
“Since when do you care about motorcycles?”
I motion for her to be quiet, and then I tiptoe to the other end of the clothing floor. I end up in the misses department, flipping through a rack of pajamas to have something to do with my hands. He searches through stacks of folded khaki pants until he finds his size, and then he chooses a tan pair and a gray pair. I choose a mint green pajama set for Beige and a matching robe, and follow him when he is done.
Vicky is all over my nerves. “Stop being Sherlock Holmes and tell me who this dude is, Leenie. What’s he got on you that we have to trail him around Target?”
“He doesn’t have anything on me, and please lower your voice.” I see Kimmick get in line at the checkout. “Do we have everything we need?”
“I wanted to get some Special K and some soda,” Vicky says, consulting her list.
“All right.” I check the basket. “Get the cereal and soda, grab a pack of disposable razors, and meet me at the checkout.”
He is in lane three, so I get in line in lane twelve, which is a safe distance away. He can’t possibly see me from where he is standing, and he has no reason to look my way as he leaves the store. I stick my face in a magazine and bump the cart forward with my hip as the line moves up.
Vicky and I are tossing our bags into the backseat of her car when a horn blows nearby. She looks up first and then calls my name. I back out and look at her across the roof of the car. She points and wiggles her eyebrows.
Kimmick sits in his car, holding up traffic and smiling at me. “I thought that was you, Lena. How’s it going?”
For a second, I can’t speak. I clear my throat and nod stupidly. “It’s going okay. Thanks for asking.”
“Funny running into you here, huh?”
“I guess so. Kind of funny.”
“Did you find everything okay?” His smile disappears so suddenly that I’m not sure it was ever there. We stare at each other, and I see that he is not angry about being spied on, but curious. “Find out everything you needed?”
I don’t pretend to misunderstand. “For the time being, I guess.”
“Good. See you around?”
“Maybe.”
He drives away, and then I have to deal with Vicky. “What the hell was that all about, Leenie? That guy gave me the creeps. All that gray hair and that beard. Ugh. You think he spills food in it and carries it around with him without even knowing it?”
“He’s a therapist, Vicky. And nobody says the word ‘creep’ anymore.” I snap on my seat belt and pretend I don’t see her staring a hole into the side of my head.
“I thought you weren’t going to do that.”
“I have to.”
She slams the car into gear and backs out of the parking space without looking first. Almost crashes into the car across the lane from us because the driver of that car has the same idea. “You could’ve at least picked someone who doesn’t have hemorrhoids,” she says.
“Sometimes I have them, from giving birth to Beige,” I point out, and she pops me on the back of my head.
“Shut up, Leenie.”
Stella calls me, needs me, and I come running. Her piece of shit truck is in the shop and she needs a ride to work. I don’t even let her finish telling me why she is calling me before I am sitting in front of the apartment building where she lives, blowing the horn for her to bring her ass.
She gets in the passenger seat eating fried rice right out of the carton and offers me a forkful of MSG. “Thanks, but I’m laying off clogging my arteries this week. You need to stop off anywhere else before work? You got cigarettes and all that?”
“Think I got everything I need,” she says. “What’s your deal, miss thang?”
I pull into traffic and glance at her. She is staring at me and grinning from ear to ear. “What?”
“Look at you.”
“Look at what?” She makes me blush.
“Something’s different about you, Lucky. You look good, girl. Peaceful.”
“I’ve been meeting with this guy. He’s . . .”
“So you do like dick.”
“I’m not talking about dick, Stella. I’m talking about meeting with someone.” I chance taking my eyes off the road and catching hers. “You know, talking to someone. Like you told me to.”
“Oh.”
“It helps.”
She sits back in her seat and folds the box of rice closed. Bounces it on her lap like it is a fretful baby. “I’m glad for you, Lucky. I was worried about you for a while there.”
“I owe you for that,” I say.
“You don’t owe me shit. I knew you was gone get it together for yourself. Got yourself a good job and everything. Got a decent man friend, even if you ain’t giving the poor sucker none.” She c
ackles like intimacy without sex is inconceivable. “I’m proud of you, girl. Real proud.” She hears me sniffle and curses under her breath. “Don’t start that shit, hear? You just pay attention to the damn road. All I need is the police pulling us over and I got me some MD 20/20 in my purse.”
We ride in silence until the factory’s sign pops up on the horizon. I feel time slipping through my fingers and I clear my throat. “Stella?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you ever think about looking for your daughter again?”
“Can’t lie and say I don’t. Sometimes. But after so much time goes by, Lucky, you figure it’s best just to leave well enough alone. I don’t think I could stand to see her strung out on that shit anyway. I’m already half dead, and seeing her like that would kill me dead, for sure. I told you, you reminds me of her, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you told me. What’s her name again?”
“Crystal.” Pride rolls off her tongue along with the name. “Crystal Sanchez.”
“Sanchez? You had you a Mexican man?”
“Girl, had two or three of them smooth-talking devils. I got a whole ’nother reason for why they call ’em wetbacks, too. Lord forgive me, ’cause that wasn’t nice. Don’t nobody hate that stereotyping bullshit worse than I do, and you know that, Lucky. But still, the truth don’t need no support.” She gathers up her stuff and gets ready to climb out of the car. “Lord knows I don’t feel like it tonight.”
“You behave yourself, all right?” She waves my words away and lights a cigarette. “I mean it, Stella. And you call me if you need me too.”
“I need you to quit talking to me like I’m the kid and you the old head, ’stead of the other way around. That’s what I need. Can you get me tomorrow night?”
