by Lisa Wingate
But all I could hear the first day I was alone in our little yellow house was my mother whispering in my ear. I lay down on the mattress in the boys’ room just long enough to get them to take a nap, and Mama pointed out right away that the ceiling had a big spot in the middle where the plaster dipped like a bubble about to burst. Someone’d painted over it, but it was there. Big cracks fanned out from it like spider legs, and ran down the walls. Lying on a mattress on the floor, I couldn’t miss it.
How could you even walk into the room and not see it? the invisible Mama in my head wanted to know. Nana Jo Reid was right beside her, making a tsk-tsk through her teeth, and saying, That’ll cost a bundle to fix. You’ll have to chip the plaster off way down to the edge, Shasta Marie. There’ll be plaster everyplace.
Cody’s mom was one step behind the other two with her nose in the air, saying, It smells like mold in here. Black mold, most likely. It’ll ruin the boys’ lungs. For heaven’s sake, Shasta, you can’t raise the boys in a house full of mold. What were you thinking?
My heart started racing, and I clamped my hands over my ears to shut them up. It didn’t work. I should’ve known it wouldn’t. Cody’s mom just kept on comparing our house to the one Cody’s sister, Randi, just built on ten acres off the back side of the folks’ place. Randi’s house had a porch all the way across the front and around one side, a bay window in the kitchen, a whirlpool master bath, and ceramic tile all through. I could of described every square inch of it by heart, I’d heard about it so many times. Randi did things just right—college degree up at East Central in Ardmore, big wedding with a huge white tent and the whole deal, good job doing accounting at the headquarters of the Tribe. If you’re from southeastern Oklahoma and you’re Choctaw, that’s what you do: get whatever education you’re gonna get, then take a good job with the Choctaw Nation, the school district, or the highway department, build a nice house, live the good life. Cody’s sister did it. My brother did it. My cousins did it. Everybody with half a brain did it.
If you haven’t got half a brain, you fall for somebody in high school, get pregnant and married, get pregnant again and buy a dumb, overpriced trailer house you’ll be paying on for the next twenty years; then you run up some credit card bills to put new furniture in it. Finally at some point you realize that really was stupid, and you’ve got to do something drastic if you’re ever gonna dig your way out.
“This is our house,” I whispered, staring out the window into the backyard, where roses and crape myrtles grew around the edges, and a gorgeous stand of hollyhocks made a big square in the middle, and pecan trees were so huge you couldn’t reach both arms all the way around them. Randi’s new place didn’t have anything as incredible as those trees. “This is our place. Ours.” My voice echoed off the walls, and Benjamin twitched on the mattress; then Tyler rolled over and pushed his fist up into his mouth. I sat looking at them for a minute, watching Tyler smack his lips in his sleep, and the tips of Benji’s black, burr-cut hair touching the sunlight on the pillow, and I thought, Randi doesn’t have anything like them. She doesn’t have anything as great as my boys.
I got up and left the room, because there was stuff I needed to do while the kids were down for their nap—wash out the kitchen cabinets and unpack all the dishes, for one thing. After the big celebration at Chuck E. Cheese’s yesterday, we needed to start cooking at home. Our first supper in our new place. I’d have to think of something special. Something that wouldn’t cost much. Between buying the new truck, and moving into the house, and paying to get the electricity, the cable, and the water turned on, the checkbook was thin as a banker’s smile. There wasn’t money left for anything else. Luckily, someone nearby had Wi-Fi, and it wasn’t password protected, so we could connect up with Cody’s old laptop and use the Internet for free. Altogether, we had two hundred and forty-eight dollars left to make it for the month, which would be tight, but we could do it. Back home, we’d come through the month with less money than that lots of times.
The cell phone rang in the kitchen, while I was walking down the hall noticing that the light fixture there was old and pretty, but it was hanging out of the ceiling a couple inches, like the bolts were coming loose. The wires above it looked dusty and ragged. While I passed by, the mind-Mama pointed out that it’d probably burn the house down.
When I got to the kitchen and picked up the phone, my brother’s number was on the screen. Jace never called out of the blue. He was probably doing recon for Mama. I had the weird feeling I used to get back in high school when I was someplace I wasn’t supposed to be, and she’d ring my cell, and I knew I’d gotten caught. My friends always thought I did something to give away all our secret plans, but they didn’t know my mama. She raised Jace and me by herself after my daddy took off, and at the same time, she finished up her nursing degree and moved all the way up in the hospital until she was a shift supervisor. My mama was like Superwoman, complete with X-ray vision, radar ears, and a nose that was into everything, all the time.
I set the phone to one side and let the call roll to voice mail. Later on, after the stuff was unpacked in the kitchen, and Cody was home from the academy, and we’d finished a nice first meal in our new house, I’d give Mama a call.
Or maybe tomorrow.
Or next week . . .
Maybe I’d just e-mail her and Jace and tell them that Cody was taking the phone to work with him every day. That way, we wouldn’t need to actually have a conversation.
“You’re so lame,” I muttered to myself, but then I went to the back door and stood looking out into the yard, and I felt better. This place was just right for us, and if we would of waited two weeks or two months to look for a house, this one would of been gone. Like the guy from Householders said, deals as good as this didn’t come along every day, especially with no money down and no closing costs. I’d never get Mama to see that, of course. She’d just say we shouldn’t’ve gotten ourselves any deeper in debt.
I went back to the kitchen and started on the boxes. Cody’d plugged in an old radio he found stuffed in the back of the hall closet, and I turned it on and let the music fill the kitchen and spill through the doors into the dining room and the utility room on the back end and the living room in the front. Even that felt like a serious victory. In the apartment, the walls were paper thin, and I couldn’t put the boys down for a nap without my noise or someone else’s waking them up. But here on Red Bird Lane, it was quiet, and I could dance in the kitchen without bothering somebody.
I danced all through the house while I was unpacking the boxes, just because I could. I caught a case of what we folks in the Reid family call the flappy happys. I felt so good, every once in a while I just had to stop and flap my hands in the air and squeal.
The phone rang again, and it was my fave long-distance girlfriend, Dell, so I picked up. “Guess what I’m doing?” I said.
“Ummm . . .” was the only answer she came up with. Dell knew that with me, Guess what I’m doing usually had an answer that would scare most people. “I don’t have a clue . . . what?”
“Guess.” Dell was such a stick-in-the-mud sometimes. She was, like, the most serious-minded person I knew. I liked her, but in the three years we’d been friends, I’d never, ever seen her do one single thing that was the least bit spontaneous. I guess I could of learned something from that. Dell was in music school at Juilliard, and I was . . . well, pregnant again.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start guessing,” she said.
“You are so not fun,” I complained, and then it seemed like I’d hurt her feelings, so I went ahead and spilled the beans. “I just picked up a big stack of boxes, and I’m carrying them . . .” I stretched out the sentence, giving the play-by-play while I headed to the front door. “. . . across the living room . . . out the door . . . over the porch . . . down the steps . . . across the . . . my yard. . . .”
“Oh, my gosh, you got a house!” Dell squealed. “Already? Three weeks ago you were just trying to figure o
ut how to get Cody to think about a house.”
Was that really just three weeks ago? “Well, you know us. We don’t think for long. We just jump right in.” If I said that to my mother or one of my aunts, they would of tried to hammer some sense into me, but Dell never judged anybody. She wasn’t like everyone back home, who thought that just because you were smart in high school, you had to go make some big-deal life to impress everyone. Dell understood why I wanted my own family and my own place. “I caught a TV commercial talking about these Householders deals, and they mentioned the Blue Sky Hill area, and I knew it was a sign.”
“Blue Sky Hill?” Dell chopped off the last word like she was holding her breath on it. I’d kind of expected her to react like that.
“Yeah, guess who helped us move in?” She didn’t answer, but I didn’t wait for her to, either. “Your biological daddy-o. Mr. Terence Clay. We just looked him up when we drove over here to hunt houses. He was actually kinda helpful about it. He showed us around the neighborhood. Our house is, like, five or six blocks from his house, and his studio is, like, right around the corner from here in the back end of what used to be a gas station, but there’s some kind of used bookstore in the front part. You’d think a guy who’s had art in the Amon Carter Museum and his face on D magazine would have a fancier office than that, but that’s where he works—in this big old garage building with the doors open and no air-conditioning.”
“You called him?” Dell was about a half mile behind me. Most people are.
“Yeah, I figured, why not? We don’t know anybody else in Dallas. He’s from Pushmataha County; we’re from Pushmataha County. He’s Choctaw; we’re Choctaw. Him and Cody are cousins way back. You’ve got to network where you can, right? If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t’ve found this house. They’d just finished the paint job on it, and there wasn’t even a sign up yet.”
“I don’t even call him.”
“Maybe you ought to. He’s not a bad guy.” Dell had found out about her biological dad, like, three years ago, and in all that time, all she’d done was trade a few e-mails and send him a card at Christmas. If my daddy left a door wide open, wanting to be in touch with me, I’d of been through it so fast the hinges would of been swinging like the front of a saloon. “Terence came over and helped us move in. I said that already, didn’t I? He just showed up. He’s kind of . . . quiet, like he doesn’t say much about anything, but he’s nice. He let me put my pottery stuff in his studio. He said it could stay there for however long we needed—until we were ready for it, which’ll be a while. There’s a ton to do on this house, and, of course, Cody’s gone, and if he’s not gone, he’s studying or crashed out. You know who’s going to be the one unpacking all this junk, and kid-proofing all the plugs, and tying up all the cords on the window blinds? Me. Yesterday, I showed Cody this big old oleander bush by the porch, and, so I’m, like, telling him those are poisonous, and we’ve got to rip it out because of the kids, and he’s, like, ‘Well, duh, just tell them not to eat it.’ Like you can count on little kids to do what you say, and . . .”
It hit me that I was standing on the curb holding the boxes and blabbering on, and Dell wasn’t making a sound on her end. I had the feeling that always came right before my mama would say, Shasta Marie, don’t you ever think?
Maybe getting in touch with the biological dad your friend hadn’t really warmed up to in three years wasn’t such a good idea.
Since someone had to say something, I went with the obvious. “You’re not mad at me, are you?” Dropping the boxes on the curb, I started back toward the house.
Dell had to think about how to answer . . . which isn’t usually a good sign. “No . . . it’s just . . . I’m in shock. I didn’t think you’d . . . be . . . living right around the corner from Terence. It’s kind of weird.”
I felt my face going hot, which for me is saying something, because I don’t embarrass easy. “Oh, geez, I’m sorry. I stepped in it, didn’t I? You know how I am. It didn’t even cross my mind how you’d feel about it. I just . . .”
“It’s all right,” Dell said, and I caught my breath. “I really just called to tell you I’m coming to town. I didn’t think you’d be living down the road from my . . . from Terence, that’s all. I was kind of thinking of getting in touch with him while I’m in Dallas, but I guess now I’ll have to.”
“You’re coming to town? When? Why?”
“August. There’s a symposium on Native American studies, and I’m coming for the music sessions as part of one of my Juilliard classes. Then I’m driving up to Oklahoma. There’s some research I want to do for a presentation about Choctaw flute-making traditions. It’s a multimedia thing, so I’m combining photos and recordings of traditional Native American flute music. Your brother’s going to hook me up with some flute makers and flute players around Push County. He came up here a couple weeks ago and helped me lay out the whole project.”
“He did?” Getting my brother to travel someplace outside southeastern Oklahoma practically took an act of Congress. Jace was rooted in the hometown like a stump. He and Dell had kept up a weird long-distance thing for the past three years, but both of them were too busy with their own lives to do anything serious about it. They were always saying they were just friends. Just friends, my rear. If I was in love with somebody, I’d admit it and quit wasting time, but then, that was me. “Awesome,” I said, then looked at the house and thought, Oh, shoot. Dell’s symposium meant that, like it or not, the family reality was gonna come crashing down on our little yellow house. As soon as Dell saw the place, my brother’d know about it, and then when she got to Oklahoma, everyone else would know, too.
Once Mama and Cody’s folks heard, they’d hit the road and head for Dallas to see what kind of a mess we’d dug ourselves into now. I had until sometime next month to get this place in shape. “What day did you say you were coming?”
“The sixth of August. Is that okay? Will you be there?”
The sixth . . . I had four weeks and a few days to make the house look respectable, get the boys signed up for Head Start and kindergarten at their new school, put safety caps on the plugs, get locks on the cabinets, and cut down the oleander. Maybe Cody’s mom didn’t care if her kids ate oleander leaves, but my mother would be all over it like mayflies on a streetlight.
My stomach rolled over, and I rubbed it while I crossed the porch. By next month, I’d be having morning sickness like crazy. Not much chance Mama would miss that . . .
“Is something wrong?” Dell’s voice was like a fuzzy little puppy hopping around the dust devil of a dogfight. I couldn’t even hear her, at first.
“Huh? No . . . why?”
“You’re quiet all of a sudden.”
“I was just thinking.” The bubble in the ceiling, the hanging-down light fixture, the oleander bush, check the backyard fence for holes, put the safety things on the hot-water faucets, paint everything, hang pictures so the place looks homey, fix the cracks around the window frames, repair the bathroom tile, weed the flower beds, scrape the dried paint off the window glass, maybe put something cute on the boys’ walls. Maybe get them some new sheets. Something colorful. No, Mama will notice they’re new. She’ll think you’re out blowing money again. . . .
“You never get quiet.”
“Thanks a lot.” If she could of heard the inside of my head, she wouldn’t’ve thought it was quiet. The panic voice was so loud in there, I couldn’t hear myself think. Mama was gonna have a fit about the burglar bars on the windows and the front door. She’d think we’d bought into the worst neighborhood ever. She’d never believe that just a few blocks away, upscale new condos were going in, and in a year or two, these neighborhoods would be the place to be for people who didn’t want a long commute into Dallas. “Listen, whenever you talk to Jace again, don’t mention anything about the house, all right?”
“All right.” Dell sounded suspicious. “Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t sound normal.”
“I don’t
feel so good this morning. Too much Chuck E. Cheese’s last night, I think.” I couldn’t exactly start telling friends about the pregnancy until I’d figured out a way to let Cody in on it. Actually, I didn’t want to tell anybody. The picture of that news spreading through the family made the house situation seem like a little side story. News flash, Shasta’s pregnant again. It’s the end of the world!
Dell chuckled. “Well, listen, I’d better go. I have to get to rehearsal.” I pictured her skipping off to Juilliard with her violin in hand, sunlight bouncing off her dark hair and slipping around her skinny body in the cute latest-thing clothes her adopted parents could afford to buy for her, and I felt like a loser. A stupid, stretch-marked, tired loser trying to make something good out of a dumpy little house nobody would be impressed with anyway. They’d all think buying this house was one more dumb move in a line of dumb moves. Typical Shasta stuff.
I said good-bye to Dell and headed inside, but the house didn’t feel the same. I saw all the things wrong with it again, and even though I was unpacking boxes as fast as I could and carrying the trash out to the curb, I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was in the middle of a mess, and I always would be.
No one in my family would ever understand the house, or the pregnancy. They’d never get it that, now that we had health insurance, Cody had his mind set on a vasectomy, and even though Benjamin and Tyler were perfect, I didn’t want to go through the rest of my life without a baby girl. I wanted a daughter, and Cody wouldn’t even talk about it, and I had to do something before it was too late.
“It’ll be all right,” I whispered, cupping my hands around the baby that wasn’t even big enough to see yet, though I could picture her already. “We’ll figure it out.”
