Once through the front door, my mother dropped her keys into the blue bowl and plopped her handbag down beside it. She pulled in a long breath through her nose, catching the scent of home, and then released it in a long, satisfied sigh. Her spine straightened, her chin came up, and all at once she bloomed into her vivid self, her presence palpably filling the room.
Can you call and check on Genny? I think I’ll make orange pound
cake,
she signed. She headed briskly toward her kitchen, one hand trailing along the wall. I followed her, passing through the dining room. As soon as she reached the kitchen counter, I tapped at her shoulder. I suggested that since we had spent the last twenty minutes creeping home like wounded mice, it might be better if she went to bed.
But you didn’t get me any dessert. Go call about Genny and quit
worrying.
There was no stopping her, so I picked up the kitchen phone and called Loganville General. The charge nurse said Genny was doing fine, and that Dr. Crow had come by earlier to check on her. I didn’t get to talk to Genny, who was asleep again.
I sat at the kitchen table and succumbed to the pleasure of watching my mother baking in her own house. She got four sticks of butter out of the fridge and chose her midsize mixing bowl. She unwrapped the butter sticks and dropped them in, then set the bowl in her microwave. She ran her fingers lightly along the Braille buttons, programmed it to run for a minute on a low setting, and hit start.
I loved watching the surety of her movements as she rambled about, sifting flour and salt together and humming. She often hummed when she was home with no one but family. She said the vibrations in her chest felt good. High-pitched, coming in tiny random spurts, her humming was a noise that might startle a stranger, but it gave me a feeling of peace because it meant my mother was home and happy and at ease in the middle of her world.
She’d made this cake for me every year, for my birthday. One of my first memories was of her making it when she was still sighted. She missed only one year, the year I turned eight. That was the year she stopped working in porcelain. Her vision was failing, and she left Genny and me for seven months to stay at the Helen Keller National Center in New York and learn how to live blind.
I hadn’t wanted her to go, and Genny had been in a state of nervous prostration. We’d both wept and clung and fussed and tried to keep her, but she left us anyway. She said to me,
I can
leave you now for half a year, and come back knowing how to be your
mama, or I can stay here and never know, and very soon you’ll have
to be mine.
She poured the batter and put the Bundt pan in the oven, wincing as she bent. She stood up and leaned on the counter, finished, so I gave her the update on Genny, and she nodded her hand, satisfied.
Then she added,
This week I am going to start a new piece. I’ve
had it in my head, but I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. It came
clear while I was mixing. It’s going to be called
The Bones of Dogs,
and I will make it in many pieces, very smooth, very long, each one
knobbed on the end. I’ll fire them separately, and each piece will be
so smooth it will be like butter, firm and cool. After they are fired, I’ll
take a hammer, and I’ll hit some of them in places. Not exactly in
half, although some will go in half. Some will need the ends smashed
off into powder, and some will be in three or four pieces. They’ll have
to be fitted together in a way that feels right to me, I think upward,
leaning against each other like the spines of a tepee. So to feel it properly, you start at the base and follow the long pieces up with your
hands, and it will be very smooth and beautiful, inviting you higher,
but then it will become sharp, jagged, and that will happen mostly
where the pieces intersect. Although some shorter pieces won’t make it
up to the main intersection. They will lean on taller ones. It is going
to be a very angry piece. You’ll like it.
I knew better than to try and talk her out of working until her shoulder had more time to heal. When Mama was ready to sculpt, you couldn’t stop her if you tied her to the bed.
It sounds
wonderful,
I said.
But you are going to wear yourself out. Why won’t
you go to bed? I’ll get your cake out for you when it’s done.
Because I want cake now,
she said.
Why are you so cussed and strong-willed?
For “cussed,” I used one of our home signs, shaping the letter B beside my right temple and then shooting it forward, fisting my hand with my index finger extended. A more perfect and literal interpretation was probably “Bernese-ish.”
Because my mama taught me I had to be,
she said. Her eyebrows knit together, and she tapped at my wrist three times with her index finger. After another pause, she added,
So did your mama.
Why aren’t you?
I am,
I signed, and she chuckled at my irritation.
I know you are worried about what those Crabtrees might do. And
Bernese is giving you a hard time. But I hope you won’t use these
things as excuses and miss your court date on Friday. You need to get
your divorce. Then maybe you can go after the things you really want.
Or will you find some other bad thing to pin you down and keep you
busy so you can’t?
You’re making me angry,
I signed.
You say that like I know what
I want.
You know. And I know what I want, too.
What do you want?
I want to make glaze for this cake. It smells beautiful.
She gave my wrist a final tap, and I told her rather huffily that I was going to bed.
Without cake?
she asked, raising her eyebrows, mock-innocent.
I signed a terse good night and stomped upstairs, hard enough so she could feel the force of my footsteps through the floor. But the reverberations I felt came from her almost silent laughter following me up the stairs.
CHAPTER 11
MY EYES SPRANG open. I was breathing hard in the darkness, with the echoes of an unidentified noise dying in my ears. The digital alarm clock by my bed said 3:26. I lay in the dim light coming through the slats in the blinds, but the noise that had woken me up was not repeated. It took me a moment to orient.
A damp ridge of heat was pressed into the small of my back. I half sat to look. Fisher. She was sleeping in a curl with her arms up tight against her chest, and she had pressed her bowed spine into mine. Her bangs stuck up in two sweaty tufts.
I shifted, turning onto my side to face her and propping my head up on one arm, my elbow grinding a hole into the ancient feather pillow.
She was such a pretty thing, asleep. Her lashes were thick and dark on her faintly pinked cheek, and her mouth, relaxed, retained the rosebud pout of a baby’s. I leaned down close to smell her hair: Johnson’s baby shampoo, and under that, the cut-grass 144
angry scent that was Fisher. I leaned farther and dropped a kiss beside her mouth. She had one hand stuffed under her cheek, and her breath was as sweet as a cow’s. Apparently, her temper with me had shifted up a generation and sideways to Bernese.
Whenever Fisher got mad at Bernese, she went night-walking.
Sometimes she’d move down the hall to Bernese’s guest bedroom, sometimes to the sofa in the den. If she was really angry, she’d break into Mama’s house and sleep in her own toddler bed or climb in with one of us. Twice she had set off down Grace Street alone in the dead of night, all the way to the Dollhouse Store. She had let herself in with the spare key and gone to sleep upstairs in Bernese’s rental property.
Bernese would have a duck when she woke up and found Fisher had gone on another night walk. I was debating whether I should try to move her back to her own bed or simply go next door and leave a note for Bernese when I heard it again, the mystery thunk that had woken me up. It was coming from outside. I slipped out of bed and went to the window, which faced front. I could see a pickup truck I didn’t know parked across from Bernese’s house. It was facing away from the dead end; someone was planning a quick getaway.
Uncle Lou’s car was under the carport, and Bernese’s was pulled up behind his in the gravel drive. As my eyes adjusted to the moonlight, I saw the slight figure of a man or a boy slipping between Lou’s car and Bernese’s, bent low. I narrowed my eyes.
The moonlight was too dim to show me his face, but I could see he was built long and scrawny. I put my money on Ona’s youngest boy, Tucker Crabtree.
I was wearing nothing except my Braves T-shirt, so I picked up my folded jeans off the ottoman and pulled them on. I jammed 145
my feet into my Adidas sneakers without bothering with socks. I walked quietly out of my room and crept down the stairs to the front door. I slipped out into the night and padded silently across the lawn to Bernese’s gravel driveway.
The boy was on the other side of Bernese’s car now. He was still bent over, creeping, so I couldn’t see him. On the side of the car closest to me, I could see that both of Bernese’s tires had been slashed. Not just punctured but cut open in long slices, so that the side of each tire was now three or four connected ribbons. I glanced over at Lou’s car and saw that his tires had been deci-mated as well. I could hear the hiss of air as a knife plunged into one of the tires on the other side.
“Tucker, you moron, is that you?” I whispered.
The boy straightened, looming up across the hood from me. I found myself staring into the face of a stranger, a skinny kid with greasy brown locks and dreadful acne. His mouth was hanging open.
“Shit!” he said, and I said it, too, at exactly the same time. We stared at each other, and even though he had the knife, I was uncertain who was more frightened.
He hissed, “Come on, come on, come on, let’s go!” and started sprinting for the pickup.
“Hey!” I said, but he didn’t stop.
Like an echo, another female voice said, “Hey!” in tones as softly outraged as my own. “You better not leave me!”
The kid’s accomplice was sitting on the ground, on the other side of the car. As the boy scrambled into the truck’s cab and slammed the door, she lumbered to her feet. She was a mountain of a woman, pale, gelatinous; her upper arms, as big as thighs, wobbled and trembled in the moonlight. Her head was bent so I couldn’t see her whole face, only a splash of smeared lipstick around her mouth.
“That dumb-ass,” she muttered, and I recognized the voice. It was Lori-Anne, Fisher’s mother. She weaved forward once and then back. The truck started and went zooming away with the lights still off. “I think I’m going to puke.”
I said, “Lori-Anne? Are you crazy?”
“Shut up, Nonny. You snot.” She had both her hands braced on the car, holding herself upright. I hadn’t seen her since Janu-ary, when she’d driven by to drop off a stuffed bear in a Target bag for Fisher’s birthday. She’d left her car parked at the curb with the engine running, and a strange man had been sitting in the passenger seat. Bernese had not asked her to stay. She had gained another twenty or thirty pounds since then, and her face was so puffy that I wasn’t sure she could get her eyes completely open.
“Lori-Anne, you know better! You cannot go crashing around out here, drunk, slashing tires. Your mama keeps guns. Do you think she’ll pause to see who it is that’s messing with her car before she opens fire?”
Lori-Anne bent double and disappeared behind the car again, and I heard the unmistakable sound of someone gagging up a solid quart of liquor. The smell of soured peach schnapps followed in a wave, and I took a step back. A few moments later, Lori-Anne reappeared.
“You caught me,” she said. A string of glossy saliva was hanging down from her lip. Lori-Anne had big eyes, Billy Joel eyes; she always looked sad to me even when she was smiling. Now streaks of smeared mascara accentuated their natural down-tilt, and she was so pale that she practically glowed green in the moonlight. Her hair was matted and frizzed into a high crest that had gone flat on one side.
“What were you thinking?” I asked.
She waved one hand, dismissing me, and then stomped pon-derously out from behind the car, crunching her way down the gravel drive toward the street. She muttered something about “damn nosy bitches” as she lurched past me in her high-heeled boots. I followed her.
“You better come over to Mama and Genny’s place and sleep a little. Or I can drive you home.”
She flapped that hand at me again and kept walking. At the end of the drive, she headed up Grace Street. I followed her.
“What are you going to do? Stagger all the way back to Loganville?”
She looked sideways at me and then briefly stuck out her thumb in hitchhiker position and jerked it back and forth.
“That’s a great idea, hitchhiking, if you want to get raped and killed.”
“Shut up. Run go wake my mother up and tattle on me.”
“Lori-Anne, who was that boy?”
She shrugged. “Just some good ol’ boy I hooked up with at this bar. I went out and got to drinking. I was feeling lowly, and I was telling him about Mama and what all, and he said he knew a way to fix her. It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She finally stopped walking, and we stood in the middle of the road, staring each other down.
Of all Bernese’s children, Lori-Anne was the one who looked the most like her. The boys all favored Lou, built slope-shouldered and hippy, just as ginger-haired and diffident as he was. They were spread out all over Georgia, busy leading what Bernese called “productive lives.” By which she meant they were married and working and spawning great herds of ginger-haired, diffident children. But Lori-Anne was female, tall for a Frett, and as black-haired and ornery as her mother.