Ardell read the list back to them. When she was done, the twins stared at her as if waiting for Ardell to speak. When she didn’t, the sisters looked at each other, then turned back to Ardell. “Make that thirty pounds of butter,” they said in unison.
“That sure is a lot of butter,” Blanche said.
The sisters locked Blanche in their sights. “Well, that’s why they…” began Seventeen.
“Call ’em butter cakes!” her sister added.
Blanche ducked her head and bit her lip to keep from howling with laughter. Ardell was right about something being up with these two but they were more crafty than weird. Blanche wondered if the twins were simply stocking their own larder with the extras collected from Ardell, or did they have a little grocery business on the side?
When they were back in the car, Blanche explained what she thought was going on.
“I knew it!” Ardell shouted. “I knew something was up with those two witches! But I never thought they was outright thieves, not two upstanding old colored ladies like them! I’m gonna have to do something about those two! You really can’t trust nobody no more. What about Mr. Broadnax? You think maybe he’s ripping me off, too? I know you remember him and his smoked turkey and that smoked fish he does! Melts on the way to your mouth! He’s another character. I’ll swing by his place on the way back to town.”
Blanche shook her head. “Unh-unh. I got to get some groceries and…” She hesitated for a few seconds. “And I want to go out to the mall to get an answering machine.”
Ardell grinned when she dropped Blanche off at the mall. “Get a good one, now. Y’all don’t want to miss none of them new-boyfriend calls.”
“Go on, girl!” Blanche flipped Ardell a wave and walked away.
She bought an answering machine and some groceries, stopped by the hardware store, and caught the bus. As soon as she got home, she hooked up her new machine. She could hear Ardell teasing her as she worked. It was a pleasure to have someone to be teased about.
The out-of-doors was loudly calling her name by the time she’d finished with the answering machine. It was time she walked her street anyway, mingle with her surroundings, maybe meet her neighbors.
There were only three other houses along Rush Road—the formal name of Blanche’s street, although everybody called it Miz Alice Way. The other three houses were all larger than the Miz Alice, two on Blanche’s side and one across the street, next to the weedy lot that was directly across the street from Blanche.
Blanche spoke and introduced herself to the woman sweeping her porch next door.
“You Miz Cora’s girl,” the woman said. She looked older than Blanche but, depending upon how many kids she’d had and what kind of other work she did, could have been ten years younger. “I’m Gwennie Borran, useta be Greeley. My oldest sister, Loretta, and your sister, Rosalie, God rest her soul, was girlfriends.”
Blanche didn’t pretend she remembered Gwennie but she was pleased to be already known on her street. She knew Miz Mary and Miz Rayna had lived in the next house until they’d died within days of each other. They were supposed to have been cousins, but Blanche, and pretty much everyone else, had assumed their relationship was a more intimate one. The curtains at the window and an open carton on the porch said someone else lived in the house now, but no one seemed to be at home. Blanche walked beyond the houses to where the street met some woods, then turned around and walked back on the other side of the road. There was no sign of life at the house on that side, but the bad vibe she got from the house nearly knocked her to her knees. She hurried across the road to where Gwennie was pulling weeds out front and asked who lived there.
“No-count Negro from Mobile or somewhere. Got a wife and three sweet girls. He ain’t shit. I know you heard him the other night.” Blanche reheard the wail that had pierced the air while she was on Palmer alert. She rubbed at the goose bumps on her arms and felt a tug on the chain of harmed women she’d imagined earlier.
“…makes me sick,” Gwennie said. “Gets drunk and…” The phone rang in Gwennie’s house. As she turned to go inside, she motioned for Blanche to wait, but Blanche decided not to. She’d heard all she wanted to know about that house and the people in it. She walked back toward the Miz Alice.
The red light on her new answering machine was already blinking when she went in. She took the instruction booklet out of the drawer and checked to make sure she wouldn’t Erase when she wanted to Playback. There was one message:
“Hey, Blanche. It’s Thelvin. I’m coming home tonight. You up for a little dinner and dancing tomorrow night? I’d sure like to see you. Leave me a message that says ‘Yes.’ ”
Blanche examined herself for remnants of the flash of distrust she’d felt when Thelvin had called last night. It was gone. In the light of day, she knew there were men and then there were David Palmers. She’d spent years relearning this distinction.
She called Thelvin’s number and left him the message he said he wanted to hear, adding that she’d look for him around six unless she heard otherwise.
She spent the rest of the afternoon putting a chain lock on her front door and hammering nails into the window frames so the windows couldn’t be raised high enough for a man to crawl inside. She put one of the foot-long lengths of pipe she’d bought beside her bed, and the other just inside the front door, in case she needed to bash somebody’s brains out. She put the hunting knife under her pillow. She felt a little safer when she was done, but not really better. Her fortifications reminded her of how women were told to stay off the streets after dark when a rapist was loose in the community. She always thought it was men who should be locked inside.
She turned on the radio, then turned it off when the newscaster began talking about Maybelle’s murder. Blanche didn’t know why this unknown young white woman’s death upset her so much. Was it the timing—waking up to hear about Maybelle’s murder the morning after seeing Palmer—that made this death seem so personal somehow? If so, her extra distress was just more proof that David Palmer was taking up too much space in her mind. Her current life seemed to be stepping aside to let the past run her: run her scared, with the little hits of flashback that had begun searing her nerves and making her heart race; run her paranoid, look what she was doing right now, with locks and nails; run her hateful, with fantasies of Palmer in pain. She knew rancor and fear were bad for her, not just for her mind, but her body as well—this was the kind of shit that made a person sick, the way she’d been after the rape: talking to herself on the street, moaning so loud in her sleep that she woke herself up. She thought of calling Ardell, to try to talk away some of the pressure she was feeling. But she didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to be relieved of the stress. She just wanted to be shed of David Palmer and the poison he poured into her life. I got to get rid of him, she told the Miz Alice. I got to.
She felt a surge of relief and pleasure when the phone rang. She already knew who it was as she always did when someone she cared about called her or was about to knock on her door.
“Hey, sweetie pie.”
“Hi, Mom,” Taifa said then yawned.
“Tired, hunh?”
“Am I ever! On top of working in the restaurant all day, we had a fire drill in the middle of the night, and I had to go into town for gel for my hair and…”
“But you’re okay?”
“Yeah. Hungry. We’re going out for pizza.” She yawned again.
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My roommate, Charlotte Boyd, and this other girl, Marcia Lamb. They’re both from Connecticut.”
“Tell me about your room.”
“Oh, wow, Moms! They’ve built this whole new part since we were here and all the girls that work here live in a bunch of rooms in the new part. It’s deeply cool.”
“Have you seen Christine Crowley, or anybody else you know?” The faces of people she�
�d met at Amber Cove flashed across Blanche’s mind. At least two of them brought a fillip of remembered pain—but only the memory of it.
“I saw Mrs. Crowley at lunch. She asked about you. And that older lady you liked was with her. I can’t remember her name.”
Blanche didn’t want to remember it, since the liking had all been on her side in the end. “What’s your work schedule?”
“I think it’s going to change a lot, but right now I’m waiting tables at breakfast and lunch and doing cleanup in between, so I work six-thirty to three, half-hour for lunch. I get Thursday and Monday off.”
Sweet Ancestors! The child would be worn to a frazzle. She’d never done any real physical work before. “You’re going to have to take care of yourself, Taifa. Eat right. Get enough sleep. Some exercise.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Taifa yawned again.
Blanche wanted to tell her not to be ashamed to say the work was too much if it came to that, but she knew Taifa was the Queen of Picking Up Vibes. She would know without being told that Blanche doubted she could handle the job.
“So you got your own place, hunh?”
“Yeah, it’s great,” Blanche said. “I’ll tell you all about it next time. You need to get some food and some rest.”
Taifa gave her the number at Amber Cove. “It’s in the hall, so let it ring a long time.”
“Okay, honey. You take care of yourself and…” Blanche caught herself about to launch into the kind of wear-clean-underwear-wash-well-and-don’t-talk-to-bad-boys kind of mother-talk that she’d hated and hardly heeded as a teen. “And have fun,” she said instead.
“Are you okay, Mama Blanche? You seem kinda, I don’t know, your voice sounds…”
Speaking of picking up vibes. The girl was so focused on herself—her hair, her clothes, her future and plans—that she hardly seemed to have room for a thought about anyone else. Yet some part of her was always on duty, listening, watching, feeling people like a thermometer taking their temperature. Had she thought Taifa wouldn’t notice the tightness in her voice? Blanche could hear it herself, like a scream caught in her throat since the night she saw David Palmer.
“Oh, I’m tired, too,” she said. It wasn’t all the truth, but at least it wasn’t a lie. “A good night’s sleep’ll do us both good. I’ll call you on Thursday.”
“Okay, Moms. See ya.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too, Moms. Go to bed!”
“Good idea.”
In her dreams, Mr. Broadnax and the Hasting twins were in bed together in pretzel formation. Mama was walking around the bed trying to get them to put money in the collection plate, and Taifa was flipping through the whorls of Blanche’s brain as though leafing through a book. Outside of it all and everywhere in it, like bad-smelling fog, was the presence of David Palmer.
SIX
HIGH TEA AND HOT DATE
It was the kind of rainy morning that turned her bed into a cocoon of comfort, an island of coziness against the damp. But her alarm clock said, Get up and get ready for work. Blanche rolled over and stretched. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about running into Palmer on today’s job. She headed for the bathroom.
She was ready when Ardell came to pick her up. They were serving high tea to ten of Farleigh’s wealthier old girls—which meant spending most of the day making scones in Ardell’s industrial-sized oven and assembling watercress, smoked-salmon, and deviled-egg sandwiches while Ardell drove out to the Hasting twins’ house. She was going to deliver the ingredients for those much-buttered cakes. But the order only included half the requested butter, so Ardell had another job to do there as well.
Blanche watched her fingering the stem of her spectacles—something Ardell only did when she was uneasy. Ardell wanted Blanche to come along with her to see the twins, but Blanche thought it would be embarrassing enough for the old girls to be confronted by one person about their thievery. Now she wondered if that one person was up to it.
“Ardell, it ain’t disrespectful to call people on cheating you, even if they are old.”
“But they’re the best cooks around. Carolina Catering couldn’t…Suppose they get mad and won’t cook for me no more? Even if you wanted to stay, you got to go back to Boston till your kids are gone. What’ll I do if they…”
“Ain’t nobody else beating down their door to cook for them, Ardell, or they wouldn’t have time to cook for you. It ain’t their quitting you need to be worrying about, but whether you can get them to stop stealing you blind.”
“Oh sweet Jesus, why me?!”
“ ’Cause you’re just what you said you wanted to be. The boss.” Blanche didn’t try to hide her glee. Ardell returned to playing with her eyeglasses.
“Watch your pocketbook!” Blanche called as Ardell headed out.
“Knowing those two, I’d better hang on to my liver. They may have a little transplant business on the side, too.”
Blanche breezed through the baking and sandwich-making and was ready for Ardell when she got back—looking as though she’d been rolled down a hill. Even her hair was rumpled.
“Damn! What did they do to you?” Blanche pulled out a chair for Ardell to sit down.
“Girl! Those two old biddies is a mess! I hope I’m half as sharp as they are when I’m their age! Wouldn’t admit a thing, of course. Although they did do a real nice little-old-ladies-who-get-confused number.”
“Well, they know you’re on to them. That might at least slow them down.”
“Oh, they promised to be more careful with their measuring and recipes in the future. That was after I told them I was cutting back using them this summer. Give them time to think about what kinda relationship they want to have with me. Then they asked about you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Um-humm. Just as soon as I started talking about the extra ingredients they’re ripping me off for.”
“That means they know I dimed on ’em.”
“Yep. Good thing you didn’t come along. Both of us liable to be buried in their vegetable garden by now.”
The tea party was held in a big old house that looked as though nothing had been changed in it since 1880. The ten women at the tea party were advertisements for shades of blue: slightly blued hair, watery blue eyes, blue-tinted bifocals, blue-veined hands hungrily clutching plates of sandwiches. They spoke in voices brittle as water crackers and heavy on wistful sighs. Blanche barely heard them. She was seeing Thelvin tonight. She was as excited as a sixteen-year-old. This was not only her first date with Thelvin, it was the first one she’d had in longer than she chose to remember. And it was a real date: dinner, dancing, the whole kit and caboodle, as her grandmother used to say. And she needed it. She needed to see herself in the center of a forward-moving life. There was much more to her than what had happened to her one day in one bathroom. Thelvin was a part of where she was going, not where she’d been. He reminded her that she was still her whole self.
After work, Blanche showered, then ran herself a bath into which she dropped four glycerin balls of sandalwood-scented bath oil and slipped into the tub. She wanted to feel soft and smooth and smell like more. She’d decided to wear her green dress that buttoned down the front, her brown-and-green sandals and straw bag. She liked the way the skirt of the dress swung when she walked. She had earrings almost the exact color of that dress, too. She lay back in the tub and let her legs float to the surface while she wondered how this evening would go and whether she would like Thelvin less or more when it was over. She cautioned herself not to expect too much. Thelvin was just a real man, not a dream one. She also cautioned herself not to treat him like she suspected him of being guilty of everything she was afraid of in a man—something she’d struggled through after she was raped. She could still remember the day when she’d healed enough to seek male company.
She went to the door when she saw Thel
vin driving up. The earlier rain had washed the evening to a sparkling sheen. She didn’t invite him in; she had her purse and jacket on her arm when she opened the door. The luscious smell of him leapt across the threshold and made her want to touch him. They grinned at each other.
“I missed you.” Thelvin looked serious.
Blanche lowered her eyes. She’d been thinking about him, too, but wasn’t sure it was such a good idea at this point.
“I’m looking forward to this,” she said. “Jimmy’s Place was still a farm when I lived here.”
Jimmy’s was twenty miles outside of Farleigh, which put it close enough to Hancock, Larkstone, and Dolly Point to draw customers from those towns as well as from Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham. The building was born a barn—one of the farm buildings where Jimmy’s daddy and granddaddy had housed their mules, cows, pigs, and chickens. The year Blanche left for Boston, Jimmy had come home from Chicago to take care of his ailing daddy, who had somehow managed to hang on to the land. When his father died, Jimmy leased out the fields and opened the club. None of the customers knew if the place was legal, and no one cared. What mattered was that black folks had a place to go to eat, drink, and, more important, to dance—not hip-hopping, house-music-loving youngsters, but people for whom the blues was the listening and dancing music of choice. Thelvin told her blues groups from all over the South came to Jimmy’s. Tonight, Little Sister and the Bad Boys from Charlotte were playing.
Inside Jimmy’s there were no traces of the former manure gutters, troughs, and feed passages. A dense cloud of cigarette smoke seemed to be holding up the loft. The air beneath the cloud smelled of fried chicken and greens.
It was early when Blanche and Thelvin arrived. The band wouldn’t start for at least another hour. Even so, the place was already more than half full. Blanche and Thelvin snagged one of the last small tables that ringed the dance space. Behind the tiny bandstand, wide swinging doors led to the kitchen. A bucktoothed waitress with serious hips and a sweet voice came to take their order.
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