The Last Noel (30 page)

“No, Noni Tilden. And the baby's John Gordon Tilden. John's my dad's real name.”

“And Kaye's.”

“John Gordon, for my brother and my dad.”

Bunny studied her old friend. “So how does Roland fit into this?”

“I have sole custody of Johnny.”

“You do? That's strange.”

“But true. It's fine with him.” Noni excused herself to check with Austin about the delay in the luggage.

When she came back, Bunny asked her, “Your mom's not getting any better?”

“No. She hasn't walked since the fire. One of the London doctors thinks she ought to be able to, but she can't. Some doctors we've seen say it's one thing, some say it's another. It's a long, slow process.” Unconsciously, Noni clasped her wrist over the bracelet that Kaye had given her years ago; it still had only two gold charms, the piano and the telephone. “So you're in touch with Kaye? How's he doing?”

Bunny glanced puzzled at Noni. “He's fine. I saw him a few times in New York. It's great you're here for his party.”

“Kaye's having a birthday party?”

Bunny frowned, her mouth awkward. “Tonight. His… girl…He's seeing somebody pretty regularly and she's moving down here.”

“Oh.…Do you know her?” Noni bent to pull a sock back up on her baby's foot.

“No, I never met her. He's got a new house. You knew he'd bought this house?” Noni shook her head, smiling, embarrassed.
Bunny said she'd seen the place only once. “It's not that far from where I grew up, right on Glade Lake. Very modern, you know, lot of glass, lot of high tech, not much furniture. You two don't keep up?”

Noni was trying to imagine the house as she said, “I haven't heard from Kaye since the fire. I wrote him while we were traveling but, well, I guess he's been busy. That's Kaye.”

“He did tell me he'd been mad at you.”

“Did he tell you why?”

Bunny lifted her shoulders. “No, he didn't.”

Noni blushed, her pale skin splotching with red. “It doesn't matter.”

Stooping, Bunny began stuffing the scattered books and papers into the case. Noni bent to help her. “Come on to Kaye's party with me, Noni. We'll surprise him.”

“No, I don't think I will. Thank you though, Bunny.”

Then the buzzer sounded and bags began falling out onto the carousel.

“I don't know why you two won't admit you love each other.” Bunny kissed her friend and, puzzled, watched her walk away, pushing the stroller with the sleeping child.

Holy infant so tender and mild
,

Sleep in heavenly peace….

Amma thought she heard car tires on the white stone driveway but it wasn't the van, whose sound she would recognize. She suddenly wondered if maybe Kaye was dropping off an invitation at Heaven's Hill for Noni to come to his party tonight. A week ago Amma had told him that Noni would be flying home from England on Christmas Eve. Even if Noni was too tired to go, it still would have been a nice thought to ask her. But Amma hadn't seen any invitation in
the mail for Heaven's Hill; she'd have put it on the hall console by that blue jar where Judy Tilden had always collected her invitations.

The truth was, something bad had happened between Kaye and Noni around the night of the fire, and they'd never gotten past it. Something had closed them off from each other. Ever since they'd been seven years old, those two had had their ups and downs, the way friends do, but this was different, worse.

Amma took down the framed photograph on her kitchen shelf of the teenaged Noni and Kaye, arm in arm, wearing their Moors High School graduation gowns. She sat down at the table with the picture, took off her thick glasses, rubbed her eyes, put them back on. Look at those two, so young. Noni like ivory and Kaye like dark gold. Hugging and laughing.

Maybe somewhere along the way they had gotten closer than just friends, the way Judy Tilden had always been so scared they would do. No sense in denying Amma had thought it before, herself.

But who could tell what was going on with young people, even when they were under the same roof as you?

One thing she did know. Right after that fire, they'd had the worst fight she'd ever seen between them. Amma had heard Kaye yelling at Noni there in the hospital. It was the day they had released Judy, and Noni was taking her to California. Amma heard Kaye's voice in the hall outside Judy's room, and had stepped out to see what was wrong. What she saw was Noni throwing down all those flowers she'd carried from her mama's room, and then she'd ripped that little silver chain with the heart right off her own neck, the heart that Kaye had made out of a dime, and then she'd thrown it at him. Amma had shut the door so Judy wouldn't hear them fighting.

When Amma had opened that door back up, Kaye was sitting there on the floor of the hall, had just sunk right down there on the hospital floor, with his face as wet with tears as if
you'd thrown water in it. She'd never seen him like that before or since. He was holding that little broken chain. Amma had gone in the ladies' room to get him a paper towel, and there was Noni, leaning against the wall, crying too.

'Course, Noni and Kaye had fought before; Amma had heard them right here in this kitchen at Clayhome time after time, arguing and arguing. But nothing like this. And it seemed like this time Life had gotten in their way too, and messed up any chance for mending things.

Just a few weeks before Noni had brought her mother back to Heaven's Hill from California and Boston, Kaye had all of a sudden won some prize for some little thing he'd invented to use in heart surgery and he'd gone up to New York City for the ceremony. And that's where he'd met Shani Bouchard, a doctor herself, and he'd stayed up there to go out with her, and then had gotten himself invited to teach a course up there and had called Amma and said he wouldn't be back for six months.

When Amma told Noni all this the day she got home, and told her how she'd missed Kaye by only a few weeks, the girl just fell apart. She'd said he hadn't answered her letters or called her or left her a message the whole time she'd been out in California. Amma couldn't get her calmed down.

That night when Amma was helping Judy get to bed, Judy told her Noni was “emotionally overwrought” because she was pregnant. Then Judy got all upset herself, talking about how Noni was going ahead with divorcing Roland even though she was having his baby.

The week after that, Roland flew to Moors and Amma heard him telling Judy he was going to fight the divorce. But then Roland and Noni went out to the pool for a long talk, and when they came back inside, Roland stormed up to his room, packed his bag, and flew off to Texas. He married somebody else as soon as his divorce papers came through.

By the time Kaye got home from New York, Noni had already left with her mama to take Judy to see that doctor in London. When Kaye heard Noni was having a baby, he'd looked disgusted in that nasty way he had, and said he was amazed she hadn't canceled her divorce, but figured she'd be happy with two babies to take care of, Roland's and her mother. He said she'd never stop throwing away her life on people that didn't deserve her. “Maybe Jesus told you to walk the extra mile, but when did even Jesus say you had to fly across the ocean with a woman who'd done nothing but make you feel lousy about yourself for the whole first half of your life! When did your friend Jesus say that, Grandma?”

“What Jesus said was, you don't quit on people you love. You never do. And, Kaye King, you ought to listen to Him. All Noni's trying to do is get her mama walking again.”

That's when Kaye said the scary thing. “Well then she ought to take her mother to a good psychiatrist because I've seen her charts, I checked them out, I even called Jack Hurd out in California, and I don't think Judy Tilden's legs are the problem. As long as she can't walk, Noni can't walk out on her.”

It was right after that when Shani Bouchard flew down for the first time to visit Kaye. Then Kaye started flying up to New York to visit her. And now Shani was moving in with him.

Kaye and Noni. Amma looked around her kitchen. Kaye and Noni. There were so many memories of those two in this room. All that dancing they used to do in here. All their schoolwork at this table. Making those election posters. Playing those violins. Filling out the college applications. Arguing about anything and everything. Laughing.

But, oh, who knew with young people? Maybe it was all for the best.

That Shani Bouchard was something. Long-legged and strong, just beautiful, like she'd walked right out of a red-clay country road, or out of the hills of Africa with her robes flying
and her dark feet bare, not a fear in her face. But Shani had grown up her whole life a city girl. Born in Harlem with public school teacher parents and with sisters and brothers that still lived there. They were all so proud of her, a doctor, young as she was.

Shani would sit here in the kitchen for hours asking you about “Colored” water fountains and bathroom doors that said “Women” for blacks and “Ladies” for whites. Ask you about having to give up your seat on the bus to a white person, and not sitting at the lunch counter or having to go up to the balcony in the movie theater or the courthouse or the church. And you could tell it was like you were telling Shani something about Ancient China.

But the past wasn't that long ago. Amma's own grandmother Clay had been brought a slave child to Moors, North Carolina, by E.D.R. Gordon. That's how close the old times snuffle along at our heels.

Oh deep in her soul how Amma wished that Deborah could have held on to see her son Kaye grown into a fine doctor. Fine and free. With all that education and all that confidence so nobody could turn him around.

Just amazing how when you figure the world's never gonna change, it hurries on so fast. The longer Amma lived, the more change she'd seen coming, seen everything racing along faster and faster, doing good in the world, that was certain, but leaving folks behind, and losing things along the way.

From the van window, with her baby asleep in her lap, Noni watched the dark pines and the gray trees rush by in the night. The red-clay earth was the right color now and she was going home to Heaven's Hill. From behind her came the soft murmur of her mother's unending complaints to Uncle Tat,
who encouraged her to sue all her hospitals.

Noni closed her eyes, thinking back to the last time she'd seen Kaye, nearly two years ago, the day she'd taken her mother out of the hospital.

That day her arms had felt so heavy holding the flowers from her mother's room. Kaye in his long white doctor's jacket was pacing up and down the hospital corridor in a fury at her for going to California with her mother. “You're picking her. You're fucking picking her over yourself!” And he'd whirled around on Noni. “You're never going to
really
reach out for me. You're never going to use that dime for anything real. So why don't you just give it back? You're a coward!”

Noni had torn the chain right off her own neck, breaking it, burning her skin like a sharp cut in her flesh.

“It's not that I'm choosing my mother over myself, it's that you think I'm choosing her over
you!”
she shouted. “You sound like Roland!”

“That's right! You are choosing her over me. Just like you chose Roland over me! I told you not to marry him!”

“You never said it was because you loved me!
If I'm a coward, so are you, goddamn it. All I'm asking you to do is just wait. Let me try to help her get well first. I can't just barge ahead with my own life now, not the way she is. Can't you just wait?”

He shook his head at her. “No I can't,” he said. “I've been waiting four hundred years.” And Kaye had turned his back on her.

Noni had run down the hall into the restroom, and when she came back out with Amma, Kaye was gone.