Jess slid a thick white envelope toward me.
“What’s that?” I was afraid to touch it. I was only getting bad news today.
“Don’t know but it’s from your favorite person.”
H
AYWARD
-S
MITH
, I
NTERNATIONAL
L
TD
.
NEW YORK SAN FRANCISCO LONDON NAIROBI
My already-sinking stomach dropped to my knees. Hayward-Smith and Bertie were tied for my Least Favorite Person Award.
“It’s probably a letter bomb,” I told Jess. I had no desire to open the envelope—ever.
“Maybe he’s withdrawing the will contest.”
He wasn’t.
Once I got past all the where-asses and fourth-wits, the letter was very clear: Broderick T. Hayward-Smith “was prepared” (boy, that sounded just like him) to pay me a “substantial sum” to deed the inn to him. “Substantial” is a good word. It makes you think of things or people that are sturdy, reliable, conservative. But “substantial” did not come close to the dollar figure that Hayward-Smith was “prepared” to offer. I counted the zeros twice then asked Jess for his reading glasses. Hayward-Smith was offering enough pennies to buy into Nina’s business—three or four times. What could I do with
that
kind of money?
Jess whistled.
“That’s a hell of an offer.”
According to the letter, I had ten days to make up my mind. Ten days.
I threw my coat over my shoulders, pulled a cigarette from a pack that Peaches had left a hundred years ago, and went out onto the porch. I didn’t feel the cold. Jess raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything even though he knew I’d quit smoking. He probably figured that I was having a hot flash and needed to cool off.
Questions, questions, and more questions. Where were the answers?
I looked out across the lake into the north forest where it’s green and brown. But spring had put on boxing gloves and was fighting her way into Montana. I heard the voices of birds that I hadn’t heard in a while. I wondered, if they’re singing to keep warm, that maybe they’re thinking they came back too soon. A flash of burgundy from the road, the Ram truck of one of the families that lives farther up the ridge. A roar and the smell of diesel fuel, then silence and clean, cold air.
There is a poem about a road not taken. I think that it’s really about the road that
was
taken. I, of course, had never taken any roads anywhere in my life so when my time came, I just picked a road out of the atlas. I was not poetic about it at all. I think the poet was saving the other road for another day. I wasn’t sure there’d ever be another road for me. I had only two—the road out and the road back in.
Chapter Twelve
J
ust like a bad-luck charm, the situation with Bertie brought back everything in my life that I didn’t want back, most of the garbage that I thought I had left behind when I caught that Greyhound. All of the anger, the helplessness, and the screaming and fighting. I had fought with each of my ex-husbands, sometimes just yelling and screaming. Sometimes more than that.
I just never thought I’d get into an argument with Jess. At that time, of course, I thought it was a real fight. When the fog finally cleared, I realized that it wasn’t. But at that time, I was so upset, confused, and tired that I couldn’t tell my head from a hole in the ground.
And Jess, who always seemed to know just what could make me feel good, also had the talent for saying just the right words to make me want to rip his face off.
The bad part about it was, I knew that he was right.
He kept saying it over and over again.
“You’re making a mistake.”
My jaw was set tighter than the vault doors at Fort Knox. I turned my head away and looked at the few scraggly-looking elk grazing in a field off in the distance. Jess and I had already had this conversation over and over.
I was going back to Columbus and that was that.
“You’re making a mistake,” Jess said again, louder, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.
“I heard you. And I’ve said all I’m gonna say. I’m going.”
“I think she’s puttin’ you on, Juanita. I don’t think that Teishia’s sick. Randy would have called. KayRita would have called. I really think . . .”
“I don’t care what you think,” I yelled back.
“Little kids get sick, Juanita. You’ve had three of ’em, you know that,” Jess countered.
“Yeah? And you’ve had none so you don’t know anything. They get sick, those fevers spike, what you think is just a little head cold turns into God-knows-what overnight. I’ve seen it happen. She said T’s fever wasn’t coming down and she’s taking her to Children’s. And she said to come and I’m coming. She’s my daughter; T’s my granddaughter. That is the end of it.”
Jess’s hands tightened on the wheel.
“What’d your sister say?” he changed direction on me.
KayRita was at a hair show in Cleveland. I finally reached her on her cell phone, screaming in her ear because she was on the main exhibition floor and couldn’t hear. She’d told me that she would get her oldest girl, Marlena, to check in with Bertie. Marlena had called me. But the news didn’t make me feel good.
“Aunt Juanita? I’ve called the apartment, Bertie’s cell, and Lee’s cell. There’s no answer. I even went by there. No one’s home.”
Randy’s phone had the voice mail on but I knew that he was out of town, too. He was on a cooking team and there was a competition in New York. I’d talked with him just before he left. He said T was fussy and that her head was a little warm but that she seemed all right and that Bertie wasn’t that worried about it. She and Lee had got a sitter and were going out.
“If she’s going out, then you don’t need to be going out there,” Jess said flatly. “She’s putting you on, Juanita. She’s been calling you for weeks, trying to get you to come back. And now she’s finally found the one thing, the bait, if you want to put it that way, that she knows will work like a voodoo spell.”
My jaw was so tight that I could feel my teeth grinding into each other until my temples and my jaw hurt. My fists were balled up and my shoulders tightened until it felt as if I had a band of steel across my back climbing toward my ears. I don’t like fighting with Jess. Maybe because he doesn’t fight dirty. He just tells you what he thinks. No posturing, no mind games, no bring-you-down-on-your-knees remarks, just the truth, whether you see it or not.
For a few seconds, I wouldn’t say anything. I couldn’t. The thought that Bertie would use her own daughter to manipulate me in this way . . . no, she wouldn’t do that. Those other situations? They were small potatoes. But this, this was major, this was hard-core. Bertie was a lot of things: selfish, sometimes lazy, and almost always looking out for her own interests. But I never would think . . . no, I would not admit to myself that that girl would stoop so low. When I could finally speak, I said, “Bertie wouldn’t do that.” It was all that I could get out because my throat was so tight. I didn’t look at Jess when I said it.
We drove the rest of the way to Missoula International without speaking. As we approached the lane for “Departing Flights,” Jess said, “Looks like security took the meters out, so I can’t park. I’ll drop you right here.”
“OK,” I said. My fingers were wound like steel cord around the handle of my duffel bag.
Jess pulled behind a black Yukon and put the truck in “Park” then got out.
“You don’t have to . . .”
The door slammed.
He came around to the curb side and opened the truck door and held my elbow as I stumbled down. I did look at him then. His eyes were even blacker than I remembered, if that was possible.
“When you finish with this nonsense, Miz Louis, you come home, you understand? And if Northwest won’t fly you, I’ll come and get you.”
It wasn’t until I felt the lift of the plane in the pit of my stomach that I realized that Jess had said something to me that he’d never said before. On all of my wanderings, he’d always said, “Come back, Juanita,” or “Don’t forget to come back.” And in our conversations, Columbus was always “back home.” But not this time.
This time, he’d said, “You come home.”
After I’d waited an hour for Bertie to pick me up from the airport, I began to wonder if Jess wasn’t right.
“I’ll pick you up, Momma,” she’d told me in a message she left on the answering machine. “Just tell me what time.” We’d played phone tag but I had left her a message with that information.
But she wasn’t there.
So I took a cab and watched the flags of many countries flapping in the wind as the car made its way down Port Columbus International Boulevard. There were so many new buildings built since I’d left; even the McDonald’s looked different! The airport had been built up, of course, although even when I lived in Columbus, I was hardly ever at the airport. I mean, when was I ever going anywhere? The cab turned onto I-670 and the skyline of the city came into view. Despite the fact that I was as mad as a hornet because Bertie hadn’t been there to meet me and worried sick to my stomach over what might be wrong with Teishia, I smiled. The county jail, the Nationwide Center, the bank building that looked like a granite tombstone, the monolithic state office tower: All of those buildings stood like fortresses from future time, their squared-off tops disappearing into the haze of the early spring day. And there, off to the side, dwarfed by the cold-looking, glitter-and-glass wonders, stood the little Leveque Tower, the tallest building I’d ever seen when I was a kid. And, now, its gargoyles and Art Deco curlicues sneered at accountants on the sixteenth floor of this building or lawyers on the twenty-first floor of that one.
The cabdriver let me off in front of the apartment and his tires peeled as he left the driveway. I still had my key. And it still worked. But I barely recognized the place I’d left over a year ago.
For one thing, it was clean. Not what I would have expected from my daughter, who was never going to win a happy homemaker award. And yet, what could I say? The apartment was neat. For another, it had been completely redecorated. There was a wall full of sleek silver-and-black sound equipment and a television large enough to carry a family of four down the Scioto River on a Sunday afternoon. The couch was new, the end tables were new, and the kitchen (Lord Almighty!) was spotless. Then I had another thought: Maybe Bertie had moved and they hadn’t changed the locks? But, no, there were pictures of Teishia on the shelf next to one of the black electronic whatchamacallits, and some of my pictures were still on the walls.
But the apartment was empty. The bed was made in my old room, and the room that Rashawn had used, Bertie had given over to T because it was furnished with a pretty white daybed and a toy box of stuffed animals set in the corner.
And no one was there. No notes on the refrigerator. No messages blinking on the answering machine. Had I missed her? No. I had called her cell phone. Only the voice mail. I had called her boyfriend. Only the voice mail. With shaking fingers, I punched out the number for Children’s Hospital but the friendly voice on the other end informed me that, “for privacy reasons,” she could tell me if Teishia was not there, but she wouldn’t be able to give me much information if she was. “No Teishia Jackson, ma’am.”
Well, that was a relief. Or was it?
I heard Jess’s words in my head again: “She’s putting you on . . . it’s all a head game.”
Like I always do now when I need to sort things out, I took a walk. But this time, I wasn’t able to charge up a mountain road or meander down a path and look at a Montana lake. I put my bag and my purse in the back bedroom and headed out the door and down Mount Vernon Avenue. It was April, it was a little chilly, but the sun had come out and, as long as I kept moving, I didn’t feel cold. Shoot, I’d just come from a state that wouldn’t come out from under winter for another month. What was forty-five degrees to me?
Champion Middle School; it was junior high when I went. Union Grove Baptist, Reverend Hale’s church, the old Beatty Rec Center. I walked as far as where the old folks’ home used to be; what was it called? Looked at the skyline that had changed and the new houses, the marquee lights blinking brightly in the sunlight: the Lincoln Theatre and the old Knights of Pythias Hall—not old anymore—was now the King Center. The more I walked, the more I noticed what had changed. The more I walked, the more I noticed what had stayed the same. And, through it all, even though the memories came back, pushing, shoving, and sometimes, kicking their way into my brain, I didn’t feel homesick. I was able, without feeling bad, to remember my smiles as I jumped double-dutch with my friends when I was twelve. I was able to remember the apple crisp that we ate in the cafeteria at Champion; the black and orange of the cheerleaders’ uniforms going up and down at the football games at East; my joy when Rashawn was born at old St. Ann’s Hospital; the pain when I had my jaw set in the ER room at Grant. The little baby that I’d buried in Evergreen. It all came back, but as I walked back to the apartment, this time on Long Street, I didn’t feel sad about it. I didn’t feel like I had made a mistake. I thought that I had come back because of Bertie and because I thought Teishia was sick. But maybe, I also came back for me. You know me, I’m a slow learner, and it almost always takes me one more go-round before I catch on.
Bertie walked into the apartment at four o’clock that afternoon with an armful of sacks with logos from Lazarus and Kohl’s and Target. She didn’t seem surprised to see me. Teishia toddled in behind her, gave a big squeal, and ran into my arms, her legs now sturdy and straight.
Teishia, I recognized right away; I’d seen pictures. Boy, they do grow a lot when they’re little. She’d been a big toddler when I left. Now she was more like a little kid. She was acting shy, stuck her finger in her mouth and stared at me with huge dark eyes. As I scooped her up into my arms, she squirmed and tried to get away but I saw a tiny, half smile out of the corner of my eye. Then, she giggled and melted into me, wrapping her little arms around my neck as tight as she could.
“What’s my name, what’s my name?” I asked her as I kissed her cheek. “What’s my name, Teishia?”
“Nana,” Teishia said, clear as a bell.
I nuzzled that baby’s neck and smelled the sweet soft smell of baby powder. T giggled and shook her head from side to side and my face was lightly pelted with little taps from barrettes that looked like pink elephants, yellow ducklings, and green doggies.
“Nana, you home,” she said, still giggling. “Stop, Nana! Wet!” I’ll admit it, I can’t help it. I did lick the tip of her little earlobe.
“Hi, Momma.”
“Bertie,” I said to my daughter. It was really all that I could say, mainly because I was so pissed at her that I could hardly say anything decent in front of the baby and because, if I hadn’t known who she was, I wouldn’t have recognized her. She had slimmed down just like Randy had said, dressed like she was doing a Gap commercial. Her hair was cut short (it was real cute) and she’d cut off the one-inch-long nails, usually airbrushed with blue swirls, that she used to get done bootleg by a girl in the next building. Actually, she was a nice-looking girl. Scowl and all.
“I thought that you were going to pick me up at the airport,” I said in a calm voice. “That’s what you said in your message.” I was counting to myself already to keep from losing my temper.
My daughter shrugged her now-sleek shoulders and set her packages down on the love seat.
“Sorry, I was running late from the beauty parlor and I had to pick up T . . .”
“And go to . . . ah . . . Kohl’s and Lazarus and Target and . . . oh! Express. . . . Did you get by the pharmacy to pick up the prescription of amoxicillin for the baby? What about more Tylenol for her fever?” I nuzzled the child again, then let her go. Then I shrugged my shoulders. “No, why would you need to pick up more Tylenol? She doesn’t have a fever. In fact, she doesn’t seem sick at all.”
Bertie looked at me for a split second, then headed into the kitchen.
“She had a one-hundred-and-two fever overnight . . .”
“Over which night, Bertie?” I interrupted her and stood up. T grabbed something yellow, red, and blue out of a bag and ran down the hall to her room chattering to herself. “Over a night last week? Or was it the week before? Just when was it that you had to take this child to the ER? Yesterday? Over the weekend when you got the babysitter and went out?”
Bertie cracked her gum and put her hands on her hips.
“Look, Momma, I did what I had to. I told you months ago that I need you here, home where you belong, to help me with my life. I need somebody to keep T for me. You wouldn’t come. Acting like you lost your mind out there in Wyoming or wherever the shit you are. Probably got bears out there, too. Even Aunt KayRita said you needed to come to your senses.”