Beach Trip (51 page)

Annie followed her to the pond. Once out of earshot of Amanda and the young teacher, Agnes Grace opened up about her life. Her mother, Dee, was in prison for stabbing her drug dealer in the back. He didn’t die but he was “messed up,” and that’s why Dee was doing time. Agnes Grace was one of nine children.

“Nine
children?” Annie asked, aghast.

“She’s only thirty-six, and she’s got nine kids and all her teeth,” Agnes Grace said proudly. She walked beside Annie with a jaunty step, pulling the blooms off a mass of scarlet trumpet vine trailing along a fence, and crushing them in her tiny hands. Annie did her best to listen to Agnes Grace’s life story without appearing too shocked, which was hard to do considering that the child had a vocabulary that would make a Juarez drug dealer blush. By the time they got to the pond, Annie felt like she’d been beaten about the head with a blunt object. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore.

She put her hand up and said, “Don’t you know that young ladies aren’t supposed to talk like that?”

“Who says?” Agnes Grace asked suspiciously.

“Everybody says. Parents, teachers, the president. God.”

“Shit.” Agnes Grace hooted derisively. She tilted her head and looked up at Annie. “Hon, how old are you?” she said.

“That’s not a question you should ask a grown-up lady. How old are
you
?”

The child winked one eye slyly and said, “Old enough to know not to wet on an electric fence.” She poked Annie in the ribs with a skinny elbow. “Get it?” she said.

Annie didn’t know what was more disturbing, the child’s language or the fact that she acted like a thirty-five-year-old stuck in an eight-year-old’s body. (She was guessing about the age but she’d noted that on the inside of her book it read,
AGNES GRACE SIBLEY—THIRD GRADE.)
“Let’s get started on our reading, shall we?” Annie said, sitting down on the edge of the stone wall.

“Hell’s bells, woman, what’s your hurry?” The girl skipped a stone sidearm across the placid pond.

“You have to read if you want to learn. You have to learn if you want to go to college and get a good job.”

The girl did a couple of cartwheels and then came up in front of Annie and stood with her hands on her hips. “You got any kids?”

“Two. Two boys. They’re grown now and in college. I used to read to them.”

Agnes Grace winced to let Annie know that she wasn’t falling for this. “Huh,” she said. “Two? That’s all you got?”

Annie resettled herself on the wall. “Two’s all I ever needed.”

“Hey, what’s your name?”

“Mrs. Stites.”

“Sucks for you,” Agnes Grace said. Annie gave her a deadpan look and the child said, “No, really, what’s your other name?”

“It’s not proper for a child to call an adult by her first name.”

“Shit, lady, you sure got a lot of rules.”

“Rules are good. Without rules, civilization would crumble. And don’t say,
shit;
it isn’t nice.”

“Hey, you got any candy on you?”

“No. I’ll bring some next time.”

“Yeah, sure,” Agnes Grace said, scratching idly at her crotch. “I heard that before.”

•  •  •

Annie was so shook up by her afternoon with Agnes Grace that she forgot to cook dinner. She went home and poured herself a glass of white wine, and she was still sitting at the breakfast bar in the dark, drinking, when Mitchell got home.

“What’s the matter?” he said, when he saw her. “Are the boys okay?”

“The boys are fine,” she said, rapping her knuckles repeatedly against a wooden column just to be sure. “I didn’t feel like cooking is all.”

“Okay.” He’d never come home to a dark house and no dinner on the table, and he wondered if this might be a case of bad female hormones. He put his briefcase down on the counter, moving slowly and warily, like a man confronting a coiled snake. “No problemo. We can eat out. Let’s go out to dinner, what do you say, Punkin? Just the two of us for a romantic little dinner for two.”

Annie lifted her glass. “Don’t call me Punkin,” she said.

Two hours and three chardonnays later, Annie had made up her mind. She did not need to feel guilty about not going back to the Baptist Children’s Home. She had heard the clear challenge in the girl’s voice,
Yeah, sure, I heard that before
, but she was under no obligation to respond. The girl was someone else’s responsibility. She was someone else’s problem. She was damaged goods, tainted irreparably by an insidious drug culture and a broken social system that spit out tens of thousands of hopeless children every year. Agnes Grace was a problem beyond Annie’s ability to fix. She was a bright-eyed Lolita, a pornographer’s dream. There was absolutely nothing Annie could do.

She went to bed that night, for the first time, without
tick-tock
ringing in her head. In its place was the drumming refrain,
Yeah-sure-yeah-sure-yeah-sure.
She finally managed to fall asleep around three o’clock, and dreamed she had a wart on the bottom of her foot, a plumy growth like a scarlet trumpet bloom that she couldn’t get rid of, no matter how hard she tried. She tried burning it off, but it grew back. She tried cutting it off, but it reappeared even larger. Each attempt to uproot it only drove its roots deeper into her foot until they wound like a thorny vine up through her leg, growing inexorably and lethally toward her heart.

The next morning she called Mildred Dodd and volunteered to spend Tuesday and Thursday afternoons out at the Baptist Children’s Home.

Agnes Grace wasn’t really as bad as she appeared on first impression. Over the next eighteen months Annie got to know her better and discovered
many admirable qualities in the girl’s personality. Or maybe she just got used to her headstrong ways. Anyway, they developed a kind of friendship that grew into something deeper over the months they spent together. Annie began to look forward to her Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Baptist Children’s Home, and after a while she set it up so that on Wednesdays she and Agnes Grace spent time together away from the home, shopping for school clothes, attending a museum, or (Agnes Grace’s favorite thing) visiting the Nashville Zoo.

She had a way with animals. They seemed to bring out her gentler nature. When a nest of baby starlings was found in the chimney of one of the cottages, she took them home with her in a cardboard box and nursed them with an eyedropper. Abandoned by the mother and refused by the zoo, the baby birds were not given much chance to live. But Agnes Grace fed them a pureed insect concoction she made herself, and the birds not only lived, they thrived. They developed plump gray-feathered bodies and bright beady eyes. Annie would pull up some afternoons to find Agnes Grace sitting on the concrete stoop outside her cottage like a female St. Francis of Assisi, the birds resting on her outstretched arms or fluttering gaily around her head. When it came time for the birds to fly, Agnes Grace took each one out into the yard, and with gentle hands, threw it high into the sky, and watched as it sailed above the trees, circled twice around the yard, and then flew off forever.

Annie didn’t tell Mitchell about Agnes Grace. He knew she spent afternoons volunteering out at the Baptist Children’s Home, and he knew there was one child in particular, a little girl, that Annie spent a lot of time with. But Annie kept most of it to herself. Agnes Grace was her own pet project, Eliza Doolittle to Annie’s Professor Higgins. She bought her new clothes, taught her how to speak correctly and how to use good table manners
(Eatin’ regulations
, Agnes Grace called them), and encouraged her in her schoolwork. Agnes Grace was a voracious reader, although she’d had little enough to read before she came to the home. But Annie bought her a complete set of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy mysteries, as well as the classics,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, and
Treasure Island. Black Beauty
was her favorite. When Agnes Grace read that book, it was the only time Annie had ever seen her cry.

Still, despite her improvements, Agnes Grace clung stubbornly to some of her old ways. She still cursed like a sailor, and she was prone to episodes of physical violence. (One of the big boys had stomped a toad and Agnes
Grace hit him in the head with a metal chair.) And she was clumsy, too. She was always breaking things, always knocking over iced tea glasses or dropping plates on the floor or leaning against chairs that toppled over. If there was a crash anywhere in the recreation hall everyone always said in unison “Agnes Grace!” Also she was stubborn and had a tendency to cling to her own opinions, even when she was wrong, an attitude that often landed her in the time-out chair.

Annie brought Agnes Grace over to the house several times to swim, but only when Mitchell wasn’t home. Despite the girl’s improvements, Annie still couldn’t imagine introducing her to the naive Mitchell. Mitchell still labored under the old-fashioned impression that little girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice; what would he think of Agnes Grace? She’d be likely to give him a stroke, or a massive coronary. Nor could she imagine introducing Agnes Grace to the boys when they were home from college. They’d been raised like princes; they’d grown up with debutantes and cotillion queens, and were unlikely to have much knowledge of girls like Agnes Grace (or at least Annie hoped they didn’t; she hoped their expensive educations hadn’t gone to waste).

No, the cultural differences between the girl and her own family were just too wide; bringing Agnes Grace into the bosom of the Stites family would be like introducing a pit bull pup into a family of poodles.

And then, two and a half years after Annie and Agnes Grace first established their odd but mutually satisfying friendship, everything changed.

They got word that Agnes Grace’s mother, Dee, was getting out of prison. She’d been released early for “good behavior,” which apparently, in prison, meant that she hadn’t stabbed anyone with a homemade knife. She was being released to a halfway house, and expected to see the girls in a few weeks. Agnes Grace and her older sister, Loretta Lynn, set about making themselves ready. They were the only two Sibley children being housed at the Baptist Children’s Home. Dee’s children had arrived in two distinct shifts, with the first five being born between Dee’s sixteenth and twenty-first birthdays. Thereafter occurred a five-year period of government-imposed birth control when Dee spent time in prison on a series of unrelated drug charges. When she got out, babies six through nine were born over a period of eight years. By the time Dee went to prison the second time, the older five children were either incarcerated themselves or
trying to make it on their own, the youngest two were turned over to Dee’s mother, and that left only Agnes Grace and Loretta Lynn, who wound up at the home.

Annie bought both of the girls new dresses for the occasion. She took them to the beauty parlor and had their hair cut and their nails done. The whole time Annie watched them excitedly getting ready for their mother’s arrival, she had a slight queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. A wobbly nauseous feeling, like morning sickness that lasted all day.

She sat out front with the girls on the concrete stoop, waiting for Dee. Annie had offered to pick her up and drive her to the home but Dee had asked instead for taxi fare, which Annie had dutifully sent. She was supposed to arrive by two o’clock.

It was a bright sunny day in late February. A cool breeze blew from the north but there was a hint of spring in the air. The trees were budding, and the forsythia along the edge of the yard had begun to sport green buds.

At two-fifteen, Agnes Grace said jovially, “Mama never could be nowhere on time.”

At two-thirty, she said, “Remind me to buy her a wristwatch.”

At three o’clock, she said, “Maybe they got lost.” Loretta Lynn sat with her chin resting glumly on her knees. She was two years older, and she knew her mother better. She wasn’t going to get excited until she saw the taxi pull in to the yard.

By now Annie’s queasy feeling had turned to anguish and then to outrage. It was hard to imagine a mother abandoning her own children this way.
(But then, who was she to judge?)

At three-thirty, Agnes Grace said, “I hope she wasn’t in a car crash.”

At four, she said, “Ain’t this typical?”

At five, she said, “Well, what do you expect? She’s nothing but a meth-head,” and got up and stomped into the house. Loretta Lynn sighed and got up to go after her. From the door she turned to look at Annie.

“Hey, lady,” she asked. “Can we keep the dresses?” and Annie said, “Sure, honey, of course you can,” and wished now that she’d bought them complete wardrobes with rows and rows of matching shoes.

That night, Annie had a dream.

She’d found a baby in a basket floating in the rushes, like Moses, only this baby was a girl with ten sweet little fingers and toes, and a small, delicate face like a seashell. Annie reached down to pick the baby up but as
she did, a sudden current plucked the basket and sent it floating toward the sea. Annie tried desperately to reach it, splashing through weeds that wrapped around her legs and pulled her down like hands. She struggled and cried out but each time they caught her more firmly. She awoke when the baby reached the sea, a tiny speck disappearing on the horizon.