by Jane Bradley
Then she saw him, with that dog. Coming back down the sidewalk. She thought, You don’t even live on this street. If she could get the double-paned windows open, she’d lean out and give him the finger. But instead she moved back from the window, stood to the side so he couldn’t see her. He paused in front of her house, looked at her car. Lots of guys liked to look at her car—that was one reason she’d picked it. She knew she looked good in it, her red hair flying all around when she drove with the top down. He bent and spoke to his dog while he looked at the house, and Molly had a sudden urge to duck away from the window. She thought she really ought to listen more to her mother sometimes. Lock the door. Park the car inside the garage. Be a little more careful.
He gave the dog some quick, hard pats, then stood, walked on. Molly watched until he disappeared down the street. Geez, she thought, lighten up. He’s just another horny guy after your ass. He was a neighbor, just a neighbor. She’d seen him help his daddy, working out in their yard. Just a guy, she thought. Just a jerk. But there was something in the way he studied her house. She felt a chill, pulled on her sweat-pants over her shorts. The guy with the dog was gone, but something made her walk downstairs and lock the door. She glanced at the blinking lights of the security system she and her mother never used. Her mother was from rural Pennsylvania, where no one locked doors, where no one had anything worth stealing. Her daddy used to yell about their indifference to security: “I work my ass off to buy all these things, and you two don’t care enough to lock them up.” Her mother would just shrug and respond: “We live in a gated community. We have a security guard by the road who keeps an eye on every license plate that goes in and out of this place. What can happen here?”
Dubious Designs
Ominous, you might say, if you believed in things like portentous events, connections between random things. Let’s say you pull into the post office parking lot to pick up a certified check, a donation in honor of a dead boy named Jimmy Reed. Okay, you’re not likely to get a check in honor of a dead boy you found—this is my story. So let’s say you get out of your car at the post office to do any of those mundane things you do and you step straight into a pile of bones. Rib bones, but bones nonetheless, baby-back pork ribs to be precise. So let’s say you bend to look at them, gnawed, sucked clean, and you think—well, first you think yuck or shit or what the fuck or something like that. And then, especially if it’s your first event of the day and you’re still digesting your cup of coffee and toast, my guess is most of you couldn’t help but think that stepping into a pile of bones first thing in the morning has to be a sign of something bad. It can’t be good. And it wasn’t good for me, with my foot pretty much bare in strappy flat sandals, my skin getting poked by the bones of some pig raised for slaughter. Nothing good in that, except maybe for the person who sat in that car at God knew what hour and ate those ribs, threw the bones to the pavement. I looked around, saw a paper plate and a wad of napkins blown against the chain-link fence along with leaves and all kinds of fast-food trash at the edge of the parking lot. And I was thinking if this were New Orleans, some old black woman might bend over to read those bones the way they read cards and palms and cat bones collected in a little leather pouch to be shaken loose to tell someone’s fortune in the moonlight.
People believe in all kinds of things. Me, I see bones on pavement and I just think, How rude. I think about the indifference of appetite, especially when it comes to humans and pigs. I mean some animals eat with delicacy—raccoons, squirrels, gorillas, and birds; I love the birds. But humans, we’re right there with the jackals and the crocodiles and the pigs. So I was standing in the hot morning sun, thinking about how someone ate the back meat of a pig, no doubt drizzled with hot sauce, then just dropped the remains out the window of a car. Then, satisfied, the careless carnivore drove off, leaving the bones for the ants, or flies, or rats, or me, the skin of my instep.
I told myself it was no sign of anything, but it didn’t feel good, I can tell you that. I had Katy Connor pressing on my mind. I was meeting her mother the next morning, and I had to get ready for that. And then there were those two kids stolen from Ohio; their mom’s boyfriend took them, and, being a fool, he was using her credit card to buy gas, so it was easy to track him. The mother said he was probably heading to Miami, and that would have him going down I-75, but they were tracking him on I-40 and heading south, which meant he could have been heading my way. So it was heads-up time to spot a blue van with Ohio plates. And that was just the top of my list for the moment—who knows what awful thing can rise up when my cell phone rings. There was a knot in my chest where a heart’s supposed to be, and my things-to-do list sat ready on the dash. I was thinking post office, bank, then Whitey’s Barbecue to get pulled-pork sandwiches for the staff. My crew deserved a treat after the case of Jimmy Reed. He was a good boy, handsome, a star on his high school track team. I remembered the flyer:
MISSING
from Wilmington, North Carolina:
Jimmy Reed.
19, blond hair, brown eyes.
Last seen in a red Honda Civic with a spoiler,
red running lights, mag wheels.
If you have any information, please . . .
We had found the wheels at a used-parts place, asked questions, and searched. It took a couple of weeks, but we found him dumped in the woods behind an abandoned garage, head bashed in with a tire iron, car stripped of anything the dealers could sell. He owed them money, so they felt justified. We found Jimmy, and the cops busted an oxycodone ring. One detective put it this way on the evening news: “It’s a tragedy but not a waste. Jimmy’s death lead to the arrest of . . . his death will help prevent . . . blah blah blah.” That was when I clicked off the TV. Cops love to grandstand on any dead body when the killer is caught. So REV made the news again, and we got this donation. But I didn’t really want the donation because I didn’t really want this business I’m in. I didn’t want anything but Jimmy Reed alive. I wanted to see a lot of things, not pig bones licked clean and left on the pavement. I still think sometimes why don’t I just go be a hairdresser like my momma wanted me to be? She said I’d always have a job doing hair. But you can also always have a job searching for the missing. Some days I’d give anything to have the peace of a hairdresser’s dreams. And I was thinking after this one, I’d quit. One more grieving momma was still about all I could stand.
So I got back in the car. That would be your instinct too. You step into a pile of bones and it’s only natural to think, Do not go forward, step back, get that check another day. I started the engine and sat thinking what to do next, and I decided I was in no mood for barbecue. I would take the staff Chinese. So I turned left at the light instead of right. Sometimes a left instead of a right can make all the difference in a day.
The traffic was backed up the way it always is on Oleander Boulevard. We were stopping and starting as the light let its little clumps of traffic through one bit at a time. I was in the right lane when I should have been in the left because just ahead I’d need to make that left, but no one would let me over because everyone always has someplace so important to go, and I looked over at the Calvary Cemetery there and thought of how a lot of bad shit goes in there once the sun goes down, and I’m not talking ghosts. Momma always said, “Don’t worry about the spirits of the dead, Shelby; it’s the living ones you’ve got to look out for.” I’ve always had a fondness for graveyards. The peace and the green and all those silent markers of lives gone by. I looked over, and I was glad for the green of that cemetery in a part of town all littered with strip malls, wig stores, pawnshops, and carryouts. It seemed a good thing to me.
While we were all sitting in traffic, crowding up on bumpers and honking our horns, I thought we could use a reminder of where were going in the end. I looked ahead to try to guess how many cars were between me and the stoplight, tried to figure how many rounds of that light changing it would take before I could get through, and I saw what I thought was a pile of rags on th
e side of the road, right there on the sidewalk. Then, moving up, I saw it was a woman, a little old black woman sitting on the sidewalk, and the cars were just going by. I punched my hazard lights on, knowing what I’d do and how it would piss off everybody behind me.
I got close and saw that she was propped against a light post, and she was staring out as if there wasn’t a thing she needed from this world. I got out, gave the finger to the car honking behind me. He went around me and yelled, but I just smiled and went to the woman sitting there. She was dark and gnarled as a tree blown down by a storm. I bent to her, said, “Ma’am, are you all right?”
She looked up at me with cloudy blue eyes, said, “Baby, I was praying you’d come back to me.”
I crouched beside her, studied her face etched with deep lines, tried to remember if I knew her, how she knew me. She smelled like bread; she smelled like cotton sheets in hot sunlight. She smelled like heat and skin and leaves. She smelled like my mother. And for the first time in years the knot loosened in my chest and I wanted to cry. I remembered my tiny little mother, shrunken and weak with disease. She had said, “I’m leaving you this time, baby.” I felt like I’d found her in a little black woman leaning on a light post near the oldest cemetery in town. Strangers stared from their cars, and the traffic crept by.
Sweat was rolling down my face, and I saw that she was dry as, yes, a bone. “How did you get here?” I asked. “I don’t know, baby,” she said. “I’m just visiting.” I scanned through the “Missing” files in my brain. No one had reported an old black woman lost. I asked if she knew where she lived. And she gave me this surprised kind of look and said, “Why, baby, I live here.” I looked around, saw nothing but the graveyard and the Kwik Mart across the street. “I mean your home,” I said. “Your address, where you live.” She nodded, said, “Five oh nine Wabash Street. That’s where I live.” When I asked if she wanted me to take her home, she said her boy was coming to get her, that he had gone to get some bread. I looked around, knowing you didn’t buy bread in that part of town and you sure as hell didn’t dump your momma on the street. So I asked her would she mind sitting in my truck while I tried to figure out how to get her back to where she lived. And she blessed me and blessed me, the way they do back home. She let me help her into my truck, and she clutched this old shopping bag to her chest. I was thinking she was homeless. She watched me get my map and said again, “Five oh nine Wabash; that’s where I live.”
I doubted it, but still I found the street. I gave her a bottle of water from the cooler in the backseat, and she blessed me again. I thought maybe this day would have a happy ending, with some woman disoriented, lost, and I would get her home. I like a story with an ending like that. But Wabash Street was a good eight miles away in the worst part of town. All crack houses. So I asked her name, and she sat up all ladylike, said, “Patricia England, and five oh nine Wabash is where I live.” She reached in that plastic bag and gave me an old envelope that had her name and address written there in perfect handwriting, the way your grandmother writes, in the old-fashioned loops in all the right places kind of way.
I told her okay, and I was feeling hopeful as I opened it to see nothing inside. She looked in the backseat, smiled, said, “Oh, what pretty babies you have back there. Such good babies too.” She said it so real that I glanced back. There was nothing but the cooler, an atlas, a black umbrella, and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup. She was smiling and waving so happy that I wondered for a second if she was real, maybe a spirit being I’d found at the cemetery. I figured she was just crazy—not bad crazy, just confused. So I thanked her for complimenting my babies, and I said yes, they were very good babies. She kept smiling at them while I drove. Then I heard her singing in this creaky soft voice, “Jesus loves the little children.” She seemed too tired to finish the song. She straightened in her seat, leaned back, closed her eyes. I clicked my phone on silent so Patricia England could sleep.
When we got to 509 Wabash Street, there was a “Condemned” notice nailed to the door. The front porch was falling in. Paint blistered and peeling off the side of the house. A vase of pink plastic flowers sat in the window covered in yellow drapes. Whoever had lived there hadn’t gotten a chance to pack the flowers, that vase that must have meant something at some time.
I reached and touched her arm. “Miss England,” I said. “Miss England, you need to wake up now.” It took her a while. Then her eyes popped open, and she said it again: “Bless you, baby, I’ve been waiting for you.” I pointed to the house, asked if it was where she lived. She nodded, waved the envelope at me, said, “Five oh nine Wabash.” Then she pointed to the numbers nailed to the banister of the porch. I looked at the envelope. There was no return address in the corner, just the smudged remains of where a label had been. Whoever had written the letter could afford address labels, wrote neatly. I asked who had sent her the letter, and she said it was a Mother’s Day card from one of her babies, but all she had left was the envelope.
I asked if I could look in her bag to see if anything could help me get her home. She said firmly that this house was home, and I had to explain that it wasn’t her home anymore, that it was condemned. She nodded and quoted, “‘In my father’s house are many mansions, if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’” She said I’d understand one day, and then I’d find peace.
When I looked in her bag I found a pink sweater, a clean dish towel, a green satin–covered cardboard jewelry box with broken strings of beads, a brooch in the shape of a Christmas tree, and an embroidered handkerchief all knotted up to hide a dollar and some change. I asked if that was all she had. While she sat nodding, I took a twenty from my purse and put it with the dollar, knotted it all up tight, and told her to be careful with who she trusted to go through her things.
She said, “Bless you, baby,” and turned back toward the house like she was happy just to sit there and look at it. I speed-dialed Bitsy the research queen, told her to look up Patricia England, anything and everything about the woman and the address. I clicked the phone off, looked in the rearview mirror, and saw a couple of thugs standing at the corner watching us, nothing but trouble on their minds. I put the car in gear and headed for the police station, hoping maybe she was in a system that could tell us where she was supposed to be. I told her I wanted to get her back to her own babies, and she just gave a little sigh, said her babies were with Jesus now.
I was thinking she was crazy with grief and age and just being worn out by the world, and I was thinking what a sad place this world can be. Then she laughed a soft sound and said, “I can see you are a troubled child. In the name of Jesus, baby, I’m blessing you. You will find what you’re looking for in this world.”
The light turned green. I told her thank you and drove. She asked if I was a believer, if I had found the Lord, and I told her I tried. When I saw the police station, I told her I had great faith that we’d get her home. She just nodded and said with great certainty that she was going home.
At the station she looked around the parking lot. She shook her head and said it wasn’t the right place. I told her we had to find where she lived, and she gave a little shrug. She said, “You won’t find what you think you’re gonna find.” She looked up as if hearing a voice. Then she smiled and said, “One day, baby, you’ll know what I mean.”
Helping her out of the truck, I saw her tuck her white blouse into her big floral skirt. She was clean. Once out of the truck, she went weak, and I saw that the weight of standing pained her. Her ankles were so swollen, it seemed as if her legs had been stuffed into her shoes. Her skin was ashy, flaky. I thought of sycamores, the way the bark lightens, sheds as it grows. She leaned on me, and I walked her toward the door.
We walked in, and the cop behind the counter rolled his eyes. He didn’t see me, just saw a hard-looking little woman in tight jeans and a tank top, big hair gone wild from the humidity. He saw some useless old black woman. He didn’t give a shit.
I sett
led her in a chair and headed straight to him. When I told him who I was, he gave me a look like I was a stray dog just peed on his floor, said he knew who I was, the one who thinks cops can’t do their job. I told him I’d never said that, but I was thinking, Little Cub Scout cop, you don’t know a thing about me. But I played polite and admitted that on occasion I’d criticized the police work in town, but I always came around to the fact that we all work best when we work together. That was when Patricia England leaned forward and looked up to the ceiling and quoted, “‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love the Lord, to them who are the called according to his purpose.’” Then she sat back and closed her eyes like she was resting for the next little speech.
He shrugged and said, “Where’d you find this?” I looked past him to a guy at a desk who was pretending to be reading something, but I could tell by the little tilt of his head that his mind was on me. I said, so he’d hear it, Patricia England’s name and where I’d found her and where she was supposed to live.
The cop at the back desk came over, gave a little tap to Cub Scout cop’s shoulder. “This is Shelby Waters,” he said. “Give her whatever she needs.” Then he gave me a grin, said, “My name’s Jack Walker. I’ll see to your friend over there.”
I handed the envelope to the Cub Scout. He took it, made a what-the-hell face, turned to his monitor, fingers pecking at the keyboard. I looked over, saw Walker offering the old woman a Coke, asking when was the last time she’d had a meal.
