“When can I come live with you?” Ralph Angel had asked, flooded with longing. In those days, he lived with his mother, Emily, the girl his father had dated in high school, in a shabby little house in the back of town. But even then, at eight years old, while he didn’t have a name for it, Ralph Angel could see that his mother was fragile; sensed that something within her was always on the verge of breaking loose, like a handle from a teacup. It was never a question of intelligence. She’d been class valedictorian with a full scholarship to LSU and plans to go on to law school until her pregnancy made that impossible; had taught herself German, and read every Louisiana history book shelved at the local public library. But she never seemed able to keep a job. “The office manager doesn’t understand me,” she’d say when she was fired from another law office where she worked as a paralegal, or later, “The staff has it in for me,” after she cycled through every law firm from Saint Josephine to Baton Rouge, and worked as a file clerk.
“When you’re older,” his father had said.
“How much older?” The difference between months and years was still abstract and strange, but he had the sense that time was running out.
“We’ll see,” his father said. “Maybe next year. Right now I work all the time. I can’t take care of you. I know your mama’s a little different, but you’re still better off down here.” His father rolled over then, to nap in the sun, his legs crossed at the ankles, his flat feet dusted with sand.
But the next year, his father married a woman named Lorna, an ophthalmologist with her own practice, and a year after that, they had a baby girl named Charlotte, whom everyone called Charley for short, and who, merely by the fact of her presence, put an end to his father’s visits, so that by the time Ernest finally sent for him, three years had passed. Meanwhile, Ralph Angel’s mother, convinced the world was against her, stopped looking for work, grew paranoid (They don’t like me in that Winn-Dixie. They always make me wait. I’m not shopping there anymore.) and reclusive. She drank.
• • •
The stick Blue found was as tall as he was. He dragged it over the sand, all the way back to the Impala. “Look. I can draw my name,” he said, and gouged large letters at Ralph Angel’s feet.
“It’s time to go,” Ralph Angel said, his thoughts turning to his trip to California. “Come on. Dry off.”
“Can I bring it with me?”
“What do you need a stick for? You’re going to poke your eye out.” But he’d had a hundred sticks just like it when he was a kid. Sticks and antique marbles, buttons and civil war bullets he found when they plowed up the cane fields. He’d come home with pockets bulging, and Miss Honey gave him old Kerns jars for his collections. “On second thought, why not. Just be careful with it. Let’s go.”
“I need to do one more thing.”
“Okay, but hurry up.”
Funny how much he still remembered: the airline ticket arriving in the mail with his father’s handwritten instructions telling him what to do when he got to the New Orleans airport—how to check his suitcase at the counter, how to find his gate on the big TV screen, how the meal served on the plane would come on a small oval plate covered with foil, and he could pick what he wanted, chicken or beef. And if he behaved himself, the stewardess might pin a set of wings, just like the pilot wore, to his shirt.
“I’ve never been to California,” his mother, Emily, had admitted, tearfully, as the attendant announced his flight was boarding. “I’ve never even been on an airplane.” She’d pulled herself together long enough to see him off. “You be good out there. Mind your manners.” Then she stood up, reached to hug him. And maybe it was because they were at the airport, where people were rushing to catch their flights, but for the first time, he saw how slowly she moved, how she had to concentrate on every step, how she seemed pained to raise her arms.
Excited as he was to be leaving he said, “I don’t have to go. I could stay here with you.” She was the best mother she could be.
Emily’s lips trembled. “Boy,” she said, finally, “stop talking nonsense and get on that plane.” Her hands shook as she handed him his ticket.
• • •
Los Angeles was just like his father described—the bright blue sky, more cars than he’d ever seen—and he’d pressed his face to the window while his father drove to his new house, where Lorna and baby Charley waited. For the first month, things were easy as pie. He had his own room with a brand-new bed, new clothes, and a shiny new bike. But being with his father in California was different from their time together in Saint Josephine. Jealousy sprouted quick as rye grass as Ralph Angel watched his father lavish attention on his new family, especially on baby Charley, just two and learning to talk. Charley, Charley, Charley. All anyone ever talked about was Charley. His plays for attention, minor offenses at first—his father’s wallet swiped from the nightstand and tucked between the couch cushions, Charley’s pacifier stuffed in the garbage disposal—became more serious: outbursts in class, schoolyard brawls, arguments with Lorna, until finally, claiming he was only trying to feed her, he filled a baby food jar with water and forced Charley to drink. The water flooded her mouth, bubbled from her little nose, and for a few terrifying seconds, even he was convinced she was drowning. “That’s it,” Lorna declared, and his father had no choice but to send him home. Back to the shabby house. Back to a mother whose condition had worsened.
Blue dropped to his knees, rolled in the sand, lay on his back and moved his arms and legs up and down like he was doing jumping jacks.
“What are you doing?” Ralph Angel said.
“Making an angel.”
“This isn’t snow.”
“That’s okay.”
“Well, get up. You’ve got sand in your hair.”
Blue stood and Ralph Angel brushed him off. Sand on Blue’s neck. Sand down his shirt and in the waistband of his briefs. Sand in the folds of his pant legs.
Back on the road now, the stick poking through the back window, Ralph Angel said, “Stop scratching.”
“But my hair itches.”
“That’s what I tried to tell you. We’ll wash it when we get there.”
“But it itches bad.”
The sign outside the roadside café read LOST DOG: BLIND IN ONE EYE, MISSING RIGHT EAR. TAIL BROKEN. RECENTLY CASTRATED. ANSWERS TO THE NAME “LUCKY.”
Ralph Angel laughed, thought: I know the feeling.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
In the bathroom, Ralph Angel turned on the faucet, lay Blue faceup on the counter so his head hung over the sink. He pressed the dispenser till a half-dollar-size dollop of soap filled his palm.
“Close your eyes.” A halo of lather surrounded Blue’s face, his hair like the burrs caught on one’s pant hem. Ralph Angel scrubbed till he felt the sand loosen.
“Ouch,” Blue said. “That hurts.”
Ralph Angel wiped soap away from Blue’s eyes, out of his ears, then cupped his hand under the faucet so the warm water ran over Blue’s scalp. “How’s that?”
Blue smiled. “Better.”
He dried Blue’s hair with a paper towel, then looked into his son’s face again, feeling the weight of Blue’s head in his hand as the boy relaxed.
“I like being on this trip with you, Pop,” Blue said. He yawned.
How would his life have been different if his father hadn’t sent him back? If Charley had never been born? He couldn’t say. How much of his mother was in him? He’d never know. But he could do everything he could think of for his boy. He could do that. “Thanks, buddy,” Ralph Angel said, and sat Blue up on the counter. He wiped a drop of water that snaked down the boy’s neck. “I do too. I like that it’s just you and me.”
6
It had been a week since Denton said no, and Charley still hadn’t found a manager. She spent days scouring barbersho
ps and roadside bars, oily garages and smoky pool halls—the places men gathered after work or on weekends to tell jokes, talk about their trouble on the job or with their wives; the places they went to feel like men, and where, if a desperate young woman who was trying to make her father proud happened to wander in, they wouldn’t mind coming to her assistance. But no luck.
Now, exhausted and even more discouraged, Charley rolled over the railroad tracks into the Quarters. On the corner, a group of young men stood on the sidewalk: XXL plaid shirts and baggy jeans like gangsta rappers, hair braided in zigzag cornrows that made their hair look like puzzle pieces. They smoked pot and drank from brown paper bags, and as Charley rolled past and waved, they jerked their chins a tiny bit, like guards at a security checkpoint, and she debated whether to pull over and ask if any of them wanted a job.
Miss Honey’s house was quiet. Must be at church, Charley thought, and went to her room to change out of her farm clothes—jeans, a plain short-sleeve blouse, and work boots—which made her look older and possibly a little butch, but which she believed helped make a good first impression, showed that she was serious, responsible, and not just some kid playing in the dirt. After a long day like today, it would feel good to sit out on the porch and watch the people pass, and maybe, for a minute, let her mind wander.
But when Charley stepped out of her bedroom into the living room, she saw Micah on the sofa. Micah's back was turned, her bare feet drawn up under her so that when she moved, the plastic slipcovers crackled. Micah pressed her ear to Miss Honey’s phone, wrapped the cord around her finger, and at first Charley thought she was talking to a friend back home. But then she heard Micah say, “Hello, Lorna? Are you there?” Charley froze.
“It’s me,” Micah said. “Please pick up . . .” She waited, and when no one answered, her shoulders slumped with disappointment. “I’m just calling to tell you we made it. It’s okay so far. Miss Honey says I can have a Coke anytime I want. She gave me Grandpa Ernest’s old camera and is teaching me how to cook.” Another pause. Thinking. “Mom went a little psycho the other day, but it wasn’t her fault.” Micah stopped talking, pushed the prongs on the cradle. “Merde.” Hung up and redialed.
Charley held still. Last night after she bid Micah good night, her breath caught when the phone rang. She thought it might be Lorna. She waited for Miss Honey to call, heard Miss Honey’s voice over the canned television laughter followed by the sound of the receiver being returned to the cradle. Charley had not spoken to her mother in two months, not since she stopped by her mother’s house to outline her final plans, and the fact of not having her mother to consult felt like losing a limb.
“But it’s the South,” Lorna had said, as though moving to Louisiana were the same as moving to Siberia.
They stood in Lorna’s newly remodeled kitchen. Charley looked around at the glistening travertine floors and polished marble countertops, the imported Italian tiles arranged in a swirling pattern behind the stove, the refrigerator large enough to store a whole side of beef, and she thought it was a kitchen she could never cook in. She took a sterling spoon from the drawer, stared into its silvery bowl at her upside-down face. “What’s wrong with the South?” Her mother gave a little laugh that made Charley feel stupid for asking. Of course, she knew what was wrong. She had followed news coverage of the man dragged to his death behind a pickup truck in Texas, and the six black teenagers jailed in Louisiana on trumped-up charges.
“Come home,” her mother had said. “Micah can take your old room. She can go to your old school. Fine, if you insist on circling around that hellhole, but it’s not fair to Micah.”
“It’s not a hellhole, Mother. It’s an art program. And if I didn’t work with those kids, no one would.”
“I’m touched, but I’m not amused. I know your father thought it was noble, but I don’t see anything noble about it. You’ve wasted enough time doing good for other people at your own expense.”
“We’re fine.”
“You’re not fine,” her mother said. “You’re a tenant. A tenant with a disconnected phone—don’t even bother, I heard the recording. You drive a car I can hear two blocks away. How late is your rent? One month? Two? Fine, don’t answer. But send Micah to me. I’ll pay off those loans. I’ll even buy you a new car. But only if she lives here.”
Charley considered what Lorna could show Micah—the Louvre, the Met, safaris in Kenya. She considered the one thing, perhaps the only thing, she could now give her daughter, who was aching to stay in Los Angeles: the chance to see that even a woman in desperate straits could pull her own survival out of the ruddy earth.
“It’s a generous offer, Mother, but we’re going to Saint Josephine. I’m not changing my mind.”
“How can you be so selfish?” Lorna grabbed the spoon from Charley and returned it to the drawer.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s time to grow up, Charlotte. The child has been scarred once. Why drag her away from everyone she loves? Why drag her down to Louisiana, where she’ll only suffer again?”
“That’s not fair.”
Now Charley waited to see if Lorna would answer the telephone.
“It’s me again,” Micah said. “I’d send you an e-mail, but Miss Honey doesn’t have a computer. Anyway, I just wanted to say hi. I miss you. I don’t have any friends yet. Okay, I think that’s all. I love you.” She replaced the receiver.
Part of Charley wanted to pounce on Micah for reporting back, wanted to grab her by the collar and shake her. But part of her understood how her daughter felt, so far from home. So, instead of scolding Micah about the call, Charley stepped into the room, said, “Hey there,” brightly, as though she’d just ridden in on a Carolina breeze. She cleared a space next to Micah on the couch. “You get enough to eat? Because I can fix you something if you’re hungry.”
“I’m okay.”
Miss Honey’s couch was cluttered with cheap plush stuffed animals, the kind you won at a carnival. Charley picked up Tweety Bird, whose orange feet had faded and whose yellow plush rubbed off on her fingers. “I look at you sometimes and I can’t believe how much you’ve grown,” she said.
Micah shrugged.
For a minute, Charley struggled to think of more to say. Then, thankfully, she heard steps on the porch, the screen door squeaking open.
“Mother? Is anybody there?”
It was Violet, Charley’s aunt, her father’s only sister. Charley hadn’t seen Violet since her dad’s funeral.
“Well, it’s about time,” Charley said, going to the door. “I’d started thinking you were avoiding me.”
Taller than Miss Honey, though not by much, hair slicked back into a cluster of lacquered curls more glamorous than Miss Honey’s well-oiled ringlets; the same full figure and smooth butterscotch complexion. There was no mistaking Violet was Miss Honey’s daughter.
“I’ve been helping out with Vacation Bible School,” Violet said. She kicked off her shoes. “Rev’s been working overtime since we got the new church. It’s been all hands on deck. I haven’t gotten a full night’s sleep in weeks.” She took a breath. “But look at you! Turn around, girl. Let me get a good look.”
Charley spun in a small circle, happy to let Violet examine every inch of her. For the last ten months, she had lived almost entirely in her head, making plans, weighing her options, without anyone to act as a sounding board or confidante.
They embraced, and when they parted, Violet took Charley’s face in her hands. “And your hair,” she said, turning Charley’s head to the side. “Girl, I love it.”
“Miss Honey hates it,” Micah said from the sofa.
“Well, I think it’s wonderful. I say, good for you.” Violet fingered her curls self-consciously. “I’d cut mine off if I had the face for it.”
“God, I’m glad you’re here,” Charley said.
“And you,”
Violet said, pulling Micah to her feet. “Like a little woman. I think you’ve grown a foot taller. You like Saint Josephine so far?”
“I like Miss Honey’s movies.”
There were plenty of modern conveniences Miss Honey didn’t have. She didn’t have a computer. She didn’t have a cell phone, or call waiting, or caller ID. She didn’t have a coffeemaker or a blender, or cable or a satellite dish. But she did have a DVD player and enough old movies to fill the Library of Congress: war pictures (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Battle of the Bulge), westerns (Escape from Fort Bravo, Saddle in the Wind, The Alamo), and the deluxe twelve-pack box set of Shirley Temple classics.
Violet winked at Micah. “Well, she’s got enough of them, that’s for sure. But you can’t stay inside all the time. Why don’t you come to Vacation Bible School with me next week?”
Micah glanced at Charley. “No, thanks. I’m making a garden.”
“A garden?” said Charley, and thought, This from the kid who didn’t like the feeling of Play-Doh between her fingers in preschool. This from the kid who won’t squeeze toothpaste from the middle of the tube. “Where did you get that idea?
“Miss Honey,” Micah said. “She said I can use part of the empty lot next door.”
“Well, that’s creative,” Violet said. “But I warn you, folks down here take their gardens very seriously.”
Micah beamed.
“It’s a terrific idea,” Charley said, wishing she’d been the first one to offer encouragement. On warm summer evenings when she was a girl, she gardened for hours beside her father in the small yard behind his condo. There was nothing finer than the smell of fresh dirt and the feel of her bare feet in the warm grass. Sometimes, they gardened till it got dark, and Charley held the heavy-duty flashlight with its car-size battery and beam like a Broadway spotlight, while he bent over clay pots and raised beds. “Marigolds are on sale down at the hardware store,” Charley said, remembering the ad in the morning’s paper.
“I don’t want flowers,” Micah said. Her tone was matter-of-fact but she averted her eyes. “I’m having vegetables.”
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