Deborah gritted her teeth, pushed air through them. “You’re not supposed to be doing that.”
“Plants must have water. Your mother loved her plants. Am I to let them die?”
“I told you, the new cleaning lady will take care of the upstairs and water the plants every Monday when she comes. You don’t need to worry about them. You shouldn’t be on the stairs. What if you fall again? What if nobody happens to come by this time?” She wagged a finger at me and then swung it in the general direction of the house. This was Deborah’s revenge for all the years I wasn’t the father she wanted, for all the times I was on the other side of the world, missing school plays and orchestra performances and birthday parties. This was my penance for not noticing that Annalee was pale and tired the day she died—for not insisting she leave the laundry alone, for letting her lie down on the sofa when she felt poorly after lunch, rather than taking her to the doctor. It was my fault she was gone, and Deborah would never forgive me for that. In truth, Deborah wished it were me, rather than her mother. For two years we’d been prepared for my heart to give out suddenly, but we hadn’t been prepared to lose Annalee.
“Mondays aren’t enough for the plants,” I said.
Deborah’s face reddened, the angry flush traveling down her neck. “That’s all Mother ever watered them—once a week.”
“You can’t trust someone who’s just been hired, some housekeeper. What will this . . . this woman know about your mother’s plants?”
Deborah lifted her palms with a jerk, turned, and walked to the window, stood with her hands on her hips, gathering fistfuls of her clothing. “I’ll move every stupid plant in the house downstairs. How about that? Better yet, I’ll take the plants home with me.”
“They’re Annalee’s plants. They’re not yours.” My back stiffened, the hairs bristling against the hospital gown. “I don’t want anyone in my house, either. You tell that housekeeper not to come. What’s to stop her from stealing something—Annalee’s jewelry, or the silver? I can’t watch her every moment she’s there.”
“You don’t need to
watch
her, Dad. She isn’t going to steal anything. She’s there to clean.”
“How would you know?” It was hard to say why Deborah and I continually butted heads. Even as a child she was difficult for me, determined to have her way, to have the last word. Her brother was much more pliable, with an easy, relaxed nature that made him more like Annalee. Deborah would argue just for the sake of argument. The characteristic was valuable in a researcher, frustrating in a daughter, infuriating in a caretaker. I didn’t want to be taken care of, to be told what to do in my own home. “Look at what happened to Edward and Hanna Beth Parker, just next door to me. That housekeeper of theirs got into their bank accounts and almost robbed them blind. She tried to take their house while Hanna Beth was in the hospital after a stroke. That was just a year ago. You can’t trust people.”
Deborah turned around, her chin set in a firm line. Snatching her purse off the night table, she indicated that our conversation was at an end. “She isn’t some
person
I hired off the street. She works for the service that cleans the university offices at night, for heaven’s sake.”
Bracing my knuckles against the mattress, I pushed higher in the bed. “If she already has a job, why does she need to clean my house?”
Deborah’s hand flipped through the air. “What does it matter? Why do you care? Can’t you, for once, just be happy with something I’ve done?”
I turned my face away, staring out the window at the Dallas skyline. “You can’t trust people. You never know what motives they might have.”
Deborah’s heels tapped the floor as she crossed the room. There was a loose tile somewhere near the door. It made a hollow sound. “The housekeeper doesn’t have any motives other than to do the job I hired her for. We’re all just trying to take care of
you
.” She yanked the door open, and it collided with the wall, sending sound waves through the room. “Whether you want us to or not.”
Quiet overtook the room as her parting shot faded, and I lay there letting my mind drift slowly through the day, and then farther back. Back, and back, and back, all the way to a place I hadn’t visited in years, before today. The house with the seven chairs. Now it was as clear in my mind as it had always been. Was it merely something I’d imagined from a storybook, or was it real, with all its sounds and smells—the woman singing, the clattering of pans in the kitchen, the musty, pine-scented air?
And if it was real, why would my mother have felt the need to convince me that the place never existed?
Chapter 2
Epiphany Jones
“Ode to Weeds . . .”
A title like that isn’t what a teacher wants after she drags a bunch of high school kids to the Dallas Arboretum and then tells them to write about it. She wants you to get all poetic about roses and daffodils and stuff. Guess I had to learn that the hard way.
You write about weeds and you’ll get used as a bad example, while she slings your paper around in the air and says stuff like, “Y’all think this is some kind of joke? You know what I had to go through to get that field trip approved? Huh? I try to do something extra. Try to help the ones who
might
want something in life, and
this
is what I get? It’s supposed to be
free-verse poetry
about a public attraction in Dallas, not some gibberish you scribbled down and ripped out of a spiral notebook. Every one of you go home and do the assignment again!” She gave me a dirty look, and I sank down in my chair, sweat dampening my clothes. The rest of the kids were gonna know I was the one that set her off, and then I’d have more than just getting jumped in the bathroom to worry about. As soon as she let us go, I needed to beat it out of there and get down the street before anybody could catch me.
The teacher went on talking about how she never should’ve bothered to take losers like us off campus. All we ever did was cause her grief and get in trouble, anyway.
She did have a point, sort of. This school did stink. I’d been here just a few weeks, and I’d already figured out that much. Most of the kids here were on their way to jail or the welfare line, or, if they were lucky and good at sports, maybe college someplace for a little while. But the teacher could’ve seen
my
point, too. There was a reason I wrote about the weeds in the parking lot instead of the flowers in the gardens. But to her, I was just one more face in a toffee shade of brown, transferred in for the last couple months of the year. She didn’t want to know my story. If she would’ve actually
read
the poem, she would’ve seen why I thought weeds deserved an ode.
I was one. I always had been.
That teacher’d probably never been a weed in her life.
She didn’t know how it was to be someplace you’re not wanted. Weeds don’t care, is the good thing. They don’t need a fancy garden, or somebody petting on them, covering them when it’s cold, sprinkling them with drops of Miracle-Gro, or loving all over them. You give a weed a little crack in a sidewalk, and it’ll put down roots, and suck up water, and do its thing no matter what else happens. Weeds don’t need much from anybody. They can look after themselves.
When you’re a weed, you can either die or you can push your way through the concrete and try to survive.
The second bell rang, and I was halfway to the door before that teacher hollered my name. I started to act like I didn’t hear her, but someone side-slammed me, and I smashed against the doorframe, and my stuff flew everywhere. A couple girls drop-kicked it on their way out, laughing and cussing and calling me things you’re not supposed to say in school, but everybody does. DeRon Lee passed by in the hall with a couple of his homeboys. He laughed and shoulder-butted somebody out of the way so he could grab my backpack. “Now, how you gon’ do new girl that way?” he asked the others, and flashed me a big, toothy grin. “Don’t you know she my lab partner in science? We gon’ get us a A-plus-plus.”
I couldn’t help it: I laughed. It’d probably be the only A-plus-plus DeRon ever got.
From across the hall, DeRon’s sorta girlfriend gave me a look that would’ve been against the law, if looks could kill. She started in my direction, but the English teacher came out and told DeRon to move on. Then the teacher got ahold of me and pulled me back in the classroom so she could vent on me, saying things like, “I don’t know
what
you learned at whatever podunk school you came from, but in
this
room,
I
run things. You think you’re gonna make a joke out of
my
class? Huh? Come in here with your little attitude . . .”
I zoned out and thought about Mrs. Lora at my last school—the school in the nice, friendly little town where people didn’t cuss me out just because they didn’t like the way I looked, or knock my stuff across the hall, or get in the bathroom stall next to mine and tell me I oughta go somewhere and die, or make fun of my English paper in front of the whole class. Mrs. Lora was the kind of teacher who loved every kid the same, even the weeds. She showed me how she felt, one time when we were walking home together. She stopped to look at a little purple flower growing from the road stripe in the middle of the street. “Well, isn’t that something, Epie?” she said. “Look how it’s blooming right there with the cars driving by. Just goes to prove that life doesn’t have to be perfect for something beautiful to grow.” Then she hugged me around the shoulders and pulled me close to her big, sweaty body.
I liked Mrs. Lora. She rented a room to Mama and me in her tall white house three blocks down from the school. Those two years at Mrs. Lora’s were the best in my whole life, but like everything with Mama, it had to end.
Mama came across Russ at a flea market. She knew him from way back when she was in high school. Pretty soon, that old flame was burning just like in the country songs Mrs. Lora liked. Mama quit her job at the processing plant and moved to Dallas to be with Russ. I stayed back with Mrs. Lora for a while, dreaming that maybe I’d get to live with her all the way through high school. She told me I was welcome to. She liked having me help with her house and the apartments she rented. For the first time ever, it felt like somebody really wanted me around. But before I was even through my freshman year, Mrs. Lora went from teaching in that little white school to the hospital to a big funeral I never got to see. I was in Dallas with Mama and Russ, trying to find another crack in the sidewalk.
It was harder than I thought it would be. A big-city school is different from the backwater places Mama and me had been before. The neighborhoods off Blue Sky Hill were mostly run-down and rough. The kids ran in packs, and if you got yourself on the wrong side of them, you could end up in a world of hurt. I didn’t even have to do anything for that to happen. When you’re half Italian and half black, and you talk like you grew up in some hick town, you’re just some weird chick nobody wants to know.
By the time that English teacher finished chewing on me, the halls were full of kids and noise, and I pretty much knew what my trip to the front door was gonna be like. Once the teachers went back in their rooms, you were fair game for anyone in the hallway. But it never crossed my mind that it wasn’t the kids I needed to worry about; it was the mamas. I ran into one of them right inside the school door, and she about yanked my arm out of the socket.
“You all high-tone, Miss Creamy Caramel,” she said. “You think you better’n us, ’cuz yo’ mama’s a wop? You prance ’round here, think you gon’ get my daughter’s boyfriend? You all smilin’ at DeRon and stuff. Yeah, she seen you doin’ that ever since you been here. You think you gon’ take DeRon from Lesha? Huh?”
I froze up right there in the doorway, which was dumb, because I should’ve told her to move her big, fat self out of my path. I wasn’t the one looking at her daughter’s boyfriend, either. DeRon Lee had been into me since the minute I showed up in this school—something new, I guess. The nicer he was to me, the more the other girls got on my case. Now it looked like I’d have their mamas to deal with, too.
“You jus’ like yo’ old lady.” She pointed a finger right up in my face. “Yeah, I know yo’ mama. She all runnin’ around here like she own the place, ’cause she live here back in the day. Well, she a shame befo’ God. Go gettin’ herself wit’ other women’s men. That’s how she ended up with you. She tell you that? She got a lotta nerve, movin’ back to this neighborhood after she took my cousin’s man. Yeah, yo’ daddy was my cousin’s sorry boyfriend. Yo’ mama tell you that, either?” She stuck her chin out and got so close I could smell her nasty cigarette-smellin’ breath.
“My daddy died before I was born. In the army.” It was rolling around in my head that what she was saying couldn’t be true. Mama never wanted to talk about my daddy, but a long time ago I’d heard her tell the registration lady in some school office that he was sent to Somalia before they could get married, which was why she had Salerno for her last name and I had Jones, his name, for mine. This lady
and
her sleazy daughter probably couldn’t even spell Somalia, much less figure out where it was or know anything about my daddy. She was just some high-school-dropout, low-rent loser, up here trying to help her daughter nail down DeRon Lee, because he was so good at basketball everybody figured he’d end up in the NBA—if he didn’t land in jail first.