The Year the Swallows Came Early (2 page)

“M
ama!” I stood outside the open door of the hair salon where Mama worked and waved to get her attention.

She turned quickly and held up her finger. I knew she liked to give her clients all of her attention while they sat in her chair. But with Daddy being taken away, I was going to have to talk to her right in the middle of an appointment.

I ran to the open windows where she stood in front of her station so she could see I was there about something real important this time. The smell of hair dye, melons, and damp towels drifted out.

“I
need
to talk to you,” I whispered loudly to her.

“I'm almost done, Groovy.”

“But it's really
important
.”

“You'll have to wait a minute. Please don't be so impulsive. You know you do that.” She said it politely, but looked at me a second longer than normal, like an exclamation mark in code. Because according to her, with me being a Leo, I had tendencies toward impulsiveness.

“You sure are a genius, Lilliana!” said the lady sitting in Mama's chair. She stared at herself in the big mirror. “I think dyeing my hair blond looks really good. Can I wash it tomorrow, or should it rest another day?”

Mama unsnapped the black cape around the lady's neck and swung the chair around to look her in the face. “You can wash it tomorrow, honey,” she told her. “I only use professional products that hold up to the elements.”

If there was one thing Mama knew about, it was bleach. Her own hair was bleached, but she
always denied it, saying she was a natural blond like I was. Mama said she had to keep herself looking good. After all, she was in the business of looking good.

She was sort of famous around town. Once she even did an old-time movie star's hair. The story goes that while the movie star was on vacation, she had some kind of hair emergency, and her usual hairdresser couldn't be reached on such short notice. Well, because the Secret Styling Hair and Nail Salon is listed in the phone book as taking walk-ins, she'd rushed right over wearing a hat and sunglasses so no one would recognize her. Mama had a picture of herself standing next to the woman framed in gold, hanging on the wall by her mirror. She said she'd been expecting that great things would happen to her that day because her horoscope had predicted it.

Mama's client admired herself once more and then stood up to say good-bye.

I ran back to the front door and made my way inside. I knew this was the kind of thing Mama
would say was nobody's business but ours.

“Thank you, Lilliana,” the client told my mama. “By the way, where did you get that extraordinary wood carving of the mermaid by your mirror? Is it for sale?”

“No,” I told her as I stomped toward Mama. “It's not.”

Mama glared at me like I'd thrown a water balloon at her, soaking her hair and clothes. “I'll be right with you,” she told me. Then she smiled real big at her client, as though I hadn't interrupted.

“Oh, no,” she told her. “This used to be a piece of driftwood that came from the waters of Mexico, where the humpback whales mate every January. For hundreds of years those whales have been going back every winter to that same protected bay. And they always know the way. I don't suppose they have maps on the bottom of the ocean.”

“Excuse me,” I said, as polite as possible, aiming my words at her client. “I'm
very
sorry to
keep interrupting, but I really need to talk to my mama.”

“Of course, dear.” She smiled nice and packed up her purse to leave, her new blond hair shining as she walked out the door.

Mama gave me a look that said,
Haven't I taught you any manners?
Then she arranged the mermaid on her table next to a purple quartzite rock.

As long as I'd been coming to see her at work, these two things were always around her station. She was more apt to believe in superstition and her signs rather than Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. She said it was the Louisiana in her.

“All right, Groovy.” She unplugged her blow-dryer and quickly swept up the stray pieces of hair around her chair. “What is so important?”

“I think we should talk outside,” I told her, feeling tears start in my eyes again. And for a second, it was like I couldn't talk.

She stopped sweeping and wrapped me in her arms while her perfume, a mixture of rain and
sea salt, settled over me. “Let's go,” she said.

We walked outside and stood on the street that led to our house. The sun sparkled off the ocean in tiny bursts of light.

“Mama.” I made my voice as still as I could.

She looked at me carefully, up and down, and then put on her sunglasses.

“Mama, something awful just happened, something that might upset you.” My hands started to sweat again, and I wiped them on my skirt. I knew I had to tell her, but at the same time, I thought she would be mad at Daddy because the police had taken him.

Mama turned, looking up the street.

“Mama!” I said louder. “Do you hear me? I need to tell you something awful.”

She breathed in deep, the way she does when she is about to tell her opinion on why roses should be sprayed with Listerine mouthwash rather than pesticides because not only did the Listerine keep the aphids off better, it helped grow more flowers.

“Today I saw Daddy being taken away in a police car to jail.” I waited to see what she had to say. I thought,
Any minute now and she's gonna roll her eyes and start her speech about always having to fix everything.
But Mama didn't say anything. She just kept looking up the street. I heard her let out a loud sigh, the same one she does after she's read her horoscope for the day and doesn't like what it says. Like she wishes she were a Gemini instead of a Cancer because Gemini is expecting faraway travel or a call from a long-lost friend.

“I don't know what's going on,” I said, thinking this was not how she would normally act. “I'm sure it's all a big mistake. We need to help him.”

She turned to look at me and took my hands in hers, holding them. I could feel her silver rings on her fingers, and the one aquamarine stone she always wore for good luck. “I know, Groovy,” she said finally.

“You know?” I took a step backward, letting her hands drop from mine. I couldn't decide if
I felt surprised, or confused. I hadn't seen her anywhere near the shop where Frankie and I had been sitting when Daddy was driven away in the police car. “How do you know?” I asked.

“Because, baby,” she said, “I was the one who called the police.”

H
ere's the thing about Mama. She does things when she's good and ready. And only
she
decides when she's ready. It didn't matter that I was all wound up and couldn't sit down or breathe normally. Or that she hadn't told me she'd actually had a
plan
to call the police about Daddy.

She walked ten thousand miles an hour up the hill to our house, went right to her room, lit a lavender candle, and pulled her curtains closed.

I stood in her doorway while she lay in bed. The hum of her ceiling fan filled the room, sending
drifts of lavender smell in every direction and lifting the bottom of the curtains slightly, as if they were breathing.

“Mama, please,
tell
me what's going on.” I waited. “Why would you call the police about Daddy?”

“Shhh, baby,” she whispered. “Be quiet. I need to rest.” She tucked cucumber slices between the folds of a wet washcloth and then pressed it over her eyes.

“But Mama—”

She held up her hand. “Not now.”

“But, Mama, I don't see how
this
is a good time for a beauty treatment. And those cucumbers were for the salad tonight!” I practically yelled the words.

“This is
not
a beauty treatment. This is a stress reliever, for headaches.” She breathed deeply, letting out air through her mouth.

“Daddy would never do this,” I announced. “He would tell me what's going on.”

Mama sat up in bed, the cucumbers spilling
into a pile of green. Her face tightened, and she stared hard into my eyes.

I stepped back into the hallway, sensing her anger. But it didn't stop me from pushing further, and saying the very thing I'd spent months trying not to say. “Like the time he took me to the dog races,” I heard myself tell her. “When he told me you were
serious
about wanting him to move out. He told me
everything.
He told me how
you
wanted it and
he
didn't.”

Mama pressed her lips tight, like she was trying to control the words that were about to burst out. Then she calmly said, “Like he did today, baby? Like he told you why the police came?”

Tears covered my eyes, making her look blurry.

“As usual, I'm going to have to fix everything,” she said. “I'll tell you why I called the police. But not right this second. I don't feel well, and talking makes it worse.” She closed her eyes and lay down again.

I watched her inhale and exhale slowly, think
ing she would say something else.

Nothing.

I walked to the kitchen, leaving her words behind, and sat at the table. My cooking notebook lay open to the chocolate-covered strawberry recipe I'd made the night before to celebrate Daddy getting his new job at the hardware store. Fifteen perfectly coated strawberries waited on a glass plate for someone to eat them. You could see where two had once been stuck to the plate—the two Daddy and I had taste-tested to make sure I got the recipe right.

“You just might have an aptitude for cooking,” he'd told me as he ate the strawberry. “This is good.”

“Really?” I'd felt proud.

“Really. I could eat them all.” Daddy smiled his smile. The one that said,
You are my favorite girl.

“The thing about chocolate-covered strawberries is that everyone thinks they're really fancy,” I said. “But they're not. They just
look
fancy. So people think they're special.”

Daddy inspected his strawberry carefully. “I see what you mean.”

“In cooking school, they teach you the exact temperature that chocolate melts. They use a candy thermometer,” I told him.

“Well,” he said, “these are pretty special.”

After he'd left, I'd drawn five stars in my cooking notebook next to my secret recipe of two parts dark chocolate and one part milk chocolate. My personal food critic had said they were the best.

Mama almost never tasted the cakes I made. Not even the extra-moist ones. She said her diets didn't allow for the calories. Plus, she was always in a hurry and didn't have time to sit down the way Daddy and I did.

She'd dash through the kitchen on her way out. It was always the same conversation.

“I see you made another cake,” she'd say.

“Chocolate with chocolate frosting,” I'd tell her. I truly admired Betty Crocker, all she'd done
for cakes, how easy she'd made baking them from a box.

“I wonder what sign Betty Crocker is,” Mama said one day. “I bet she's a Pisces.”

“Betty Crocker is not a real person, Mama,” I told her. “They made her up just so people could write to someone with their baking questions. Somebody even drew a picture of what she would look like. I have it in my cooking notebook.” I reached over to my notebook and flipped to the first page, which was where I'd taped her picture.

Mama studied the drawing. “No…,” she said after a minute. “She wouldn't have
brown
hair. If she
was
real, she'd look like Barbara Bush.”

“More like Martha Washington,” I told her.

“Same thing,” Mama said. Then she ran her finger across the top of the cake, and licked the frosting off before I could tell her not to.

Sitting in our kitchen with the leftover heat from the oven filling the room, and eating chocolate cake, I would tell Daddy everything. Like my favorite color being white, and how I was going
to write a cookbook one day that listed all of my perfect menus for every possible situation—which I was good at coming up with. And even how I was going to be trained at the cooking school in San Francisco when I got older.

I decided on going to cooking school because of what started happening in third grade during lunch recess. Every day kids at my lunch table would look over what I'd brought to eat like it was some new discovery. “What'd you bring today, Groovy?” “You wanna trade your sandwich for my two chocolate cupcakes and one cinnamon applesauce?” “Here, I'll give you all my milk money, plus a bag of chips, and a cookie for that sandwich.”

Well, this amazed me because the sandwich isn't even the
good
part of a lunch. It gets eaten last, after the drink and the chips and the pretzels. After the dessert. And then it gets eaten only if people are still really hungry.

But
my
sandwiches became famous that year.
Famous.

So after Mama told me how good luck really had found me with my great-grandmother leaving a savings account for my future, I'd planned on becoming a real chef. I'd planned on it so much it felt like my true destiny.

And with my favorite color being white, the actual color real chefs wore: It was meant to be.

But Mama said she already knew all those things about me. That mothers had instincts that allowed matters of the heart to transfer automatically without speaking.

Well, why couldn't she understand now why I was so upset?

I finally decided to leave her a note.

Then I headed for the Swallow. Because at least Frankie would be there. And I could tell him what Mama had done. How she had had my daddy
arrested
. And how at any second, one of those stars that Mama consulted in her horoscope each day might come undone from its place in the universe and fall from the sky.