How to Knock a Bravebird from Her Perch : The First Novel in the Morrow Girls Series (9780985751616) (15 page)

“No.”

“Yeah you is. I ain’t gonna be like that no more. Okay? You hear me? You believe me, right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Then everything’s gonna be alright. We’ll be okay.”

I shook my head and glanced over my shoulder to the door. They were just down the hall. “I gotta go, Ricky.”

“Wait—”

“I CAN’T DO IT NO MORE! I can’t.” My words sucked all the air out the room. But it ain’t seem to affect Ricky none. He just kept right on staring at me. Then his eyes got real small and I backed up out of his reach.
 

“You leaving me? You come up in this here hospital to tell me that? Huh? I’m lying up here in a goddamn paper dress!”

“It ain’t good for nobody. You and me.”

“It because of how I was. I ain’t gonna be that way no more. I ain’t. Stay. Come on. Gimme a chance to prove it to you. I ain’t always been like that. You know that.”

“Mama?”

“I’m they daddy. Kids need they daddy.”

I put on a fake smile for their benefit and Ricky looked at me as mad as ever. Mya and Nikki went up to him and gave him hugs but even that ain’t wipe away the hard look on his face.
 

“Daddy, when you coming home?”

“Tomorrow. But your mama not gonna be around for too much longer.”

“Ricky don’t—”

“N’all, you wanna runaway? You go on and tell them! Tell them how you trying to break up our family! You wanna leave? Go ahead! See if I care. But you ain’t going nowhere with my kids! They mine! They belong to me!”

“Come on y’all, time to go. Say bye-bye to your daddy.” Another glance over my shoulder told me the nurse was standing in the doorway gawking at us. She must have thought I was a cruel sorta woman. Show up just to tell my sick husband I’m leaving him. But my girls ain’t think that. They knew better. Half of them felt bad about it, I could see, but even they knew it was how things had to be. “Y’all say bye.”

“Bye, daddy...” Mya wrapped her arms around his neck again and he whispered something in her ear until she nodded.

“Jackie. Nat. Say bye.”

“Bye,” Jackie waved from her position at my side. “We can go now?”

I nodded. The nurse looked horrified as we passed by her on the way to the elevators. Wasn’t my fault I wanted to say. But the only way for her to understand was for me to spill my guts right there on the floor.

The elevator doors closed and Nikki pressed the button for the lobby. “You going somewhere?”

“No, baby. I just don’t think your daddy should be living with us no more.” Jackie opened her mouth to say something but I pinched her right quick so she’d think twice about it.
 

“Oww mama.”

“Shh. You don’t gotta say everything you think. It ain’t a good thing. Daddies supposed to be good to they families and live with them. It ain’t a good thing when they can’t. You hear me?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Mya, what your daddy tell you?”

The doors opened up and a bunch of folks were waiting to get on so we had to hurry. But by the time we made it to the big glass doors, Mya turned to me and said, “What if daddy don’t wanna go? What happens if he wanna stay?”

I ain’t have an answer for that.

I was dreading the walk down our block something serious. I knew what I’d be getting before we even left the hospital. I was gonna feel folks eyes on me as we passed one house then another. Ricky’s brand new Cadillac would be parked out front as a reminder of all that he owned. The car. The house. Everything. I had a good idea how the car worked but I’d never tested it. Ricky said was no point in me learning how to drive since I never went anywhere without him.
 

Before we could get to the bus stop the sky opened up and unleashed all this rain. I only had two coats, a winter one and another one I wore for most a the year. I was wearing the other one because it wasn’t cold enough yet. The rain tore through my coat in a few minutes. Ten minutes later, my fine outfit was drenched too. What kinda justice was that? Ricky was healthy as an ox and I was drowning in rain. I ain’t deserve that—rain clouds and thunder and puddles made of mud that just had to leap up to greet me. It wasn’t fair. I ain’t never did nothing to nobody. I stood there for a minute, glaring at the sky and cussing it in my head. Wherever Heziah was I bet it was shining. That’s the way things went with him. I needed to be near him, to feel that sunshine.

“Where we going?” Nikki asked when we got on the thirty-nine bus instead of the fifteen. “Where we going?”

“Shh.”

Heziah lived on the first floor of his building. I could see it from the street. The lights were on in the apartment on the right but his was pitch black. When we got to the door of the building people were coming and going so we just slipped in with them. I knocked on the door to his apartment and the woman across the hall opened hers, just to see what was going on. Nosy people. I knocked again. He wasn’t at the carpet store. I’d called there already and they said he wasn’t on the schedule. I knocked again, this time harder. Still no answer.

“Mama, where we is?”

“Shh! Let me think.” A million things ran through my head. I’d just seen him two days before. It wasn’t like Heziah to just disappear.
 

“Mama, who live here?”

“Heziah.”

“Where he at?”

“I don’t know—he’ll be back soon, though. Okay? So...” The floor was made of diamond-shaped black and white tiles and they looked so friendly I just sat right down. Mya was first to do the same. Studying me like she was about learn something just from my face. “He’ll be here soon. We just gone wait a little bit.”

“But the floor dirty.”

“Then keep standing, Nikki.”

Whatever Nikki wanted to do, Jackie wanted to do the opposite so I wasn’t surprised when she said, “I’ll sit with you, Mama.”

“Thank you, baby.”

I just knew he’d see us and wanna know what was going on. I’d tell him and he’d listen real hard then tell me he loved me and that he wanted me and the girls to be with him. That we could start over, be a family. Heziah was a good man, the kind that would take care of us. I just knew it. Looking at them I figured they knew it too. So we waited. We waited a long time. So long, the sun had gone down and we were all dry and smelling like dew.

“I’m hungry. Can I get some money to go to the store? It’s just across the street.”

Searching through my pocketbook, the truth was staring me in the face. By the time Heziah came home somebody might have locked me up for being a crazy mama. My girls had to eat. I was crazy with a capital C. “We all gonna go. Y’all get a couple bags of chips to share because what I got might have to last us a while.”

Walking across the street I thought I saw the curtains move in the apartment across the hall. The old woman was probably watching us the whole time. Maybe she’d done that before. Watch to see what happened at Heziah’s apartment. Maybe she’d seen women come and go. Maybe she knew all their faces. I tried not to think about it. Just called Helen from the payphone at the corner to pick us up.
 

When she got to us, it was raining so hard that I got drenched again just running from the corner store to her car. She was just getting off work, or so I thought. She had on a brown and pink uniform that I’d never seen before.

“What happened?” she asked, not wasting time.

“Nothing.”

“I heard about Ricky.”

“He okay.”

“So that’s what you doing out here? Hmm? Celebrating?” She reached in the backseat and then wiped Nat’s face with a towel before handing it over to Mya. “Girl, you sure making a mess of things.”

“I’m leaving Ricky.”

Helen’s mouth dropped open and she looked from the girls to me. My mouth was growing drier by the second but I wasn’t about to take it back. I had made up my mind. It was time. If Ricky really had changed then he couldn’t be mad at me. He’d just have to deal with it.

“You okay with that?”

“I just gotta find Heziah. He disappeared.”

“Oh, girl...” Helen shook her head like she was thinking something too awful for words but I wasn’t trying to hear that.

“He got a sister up in Wisconsin. Will you take me up there?”

“Pecan—”

“Just take me up there! It gotta be tonight because Ricky’s getting out tomorrow. Please, Helen!”

 
“I can’t be going all the way to Wisconsin! I gotta work. And you can’t be dragging these kids all over God’s creation looking for this man!”

“You just got off work. We can be back before your shift starts tomorrow.”

Her car sat parked in the lot, the windshield wipers swishing back and forth. Helen sighed and looked toward the stoplight that was changing colors for the cars that were actually going some place. “I got a second job at this diner. I’m supposed to be there in half an hour.”

A second job. I hadn’t heard of nobody needing more than one job. And Helen was single. She only had herself to worry about. It ain’t make sense.

“Stop looking at me like that. Nobody’s buying furniture in this economy. Folks worried about paying the electric bill, not buying a brand new sofa.”

“Oh.”

“What you gonna do, Pecan?”

“I’m gone be with Heziah. He loves me—loves us. He loves us.”

“Yeah but that don’t mean he wanna go from being a bachelor to having a wife and four kids. Girl, that’s a lot.”

“No, you don’t know him. He loves me and he loves the girls. He better to them than their own daddy is!”

“Don’t he have kids of his own?”

“Why don’t you want me to be happy? If you don’t wanna take me to Wisconsin then fine!” I threw open the car door and I yanked back the seat. “Get out. Come on, let’s go.”

“Pecan, it’s raining! Don’t make these kids walk in the rain!”

Least the rain ain’t tell me what I was feeling was stupid. I heard Helen calling after me but I was already looking in my purse for bus fare.

“I got a quarter. I found it in the hospital.”

“Thank you, baby.”

We all had raindrops hanging off our eyelashes. Our best clothes were drenched but nobody said a peep about it. Nat let out a sneeze and I dug around my purse for tissues. Every mama supposed to have tissues and candy in her purse but I couldn’t find one. It was like a dream. I was walking through my own dream. None of it was real. Ricky ain’t get hurt. We ain’t go to the hospital. We wasn’t standing in the rain, waiting on the CTA. It wasn’t real.

“Mama,” Nat lifted both arms, reaching for me so I picked her up, hoping what was left of my body heat might warm her up.
 

“Mama?” Jackie whispered. “Heziah’s our daddy now?”

“Yeah, baby. Heziah’s gone be your daddy now. I just gotta find him and let him know.”

"M
AMA
,
WHAT
’
S
WRONG
?” J
ACKIE
climbed into bed next to me. Put her tiny hand on my forehead like I did to her when she was sick. “You got a fever?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Want me to sing it away?”

“Okay, baby. Go ahead and sing to me.”
 

She sat cross-legged on Ricky’s side of the bed, eyes closed, swaying from side to side. Was a song I’d heard before but couldn’t name the singer. Must’ve come from one of Clara’s records. When she’d worn it out real good, her eyes flew open, and she was smiling at me. “Feel better, Mama?”

“Yeah. I’m all better now.”

Jackie fell back on his pillow and whispered, “I know what it is. You thinking Daddy gone show up before Heziah can get to us.”

“No—”

“It’s okay, Mama. I protect you.” She was just a kid but she’d learned to read me just as good as anybody. I’d been held up in my bedroom since the night before, trying not to infect everybody else with what I was dealing with but I guess it ain’t work.

“Mama. We could go away. Go to a great big island where it’s pretty and it’s just us. No boys.”

“Jackie, ain’t no place like that.”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded, determined to make me see it her way. “It be just you and me, and Auntie come back, and Mya and Nat and I guess Nikki could come. And Heziah!” She grinned so big I wanted to laugh. “He’s not a girl but that’s okay. We could make us a great big house made of cakes and we’d eat it all day long.”

“That’s sweet, baby.”

“So come on. You gotta get up so we can go.” She pulled at the sleeve of my robe and my arm stretched across the bed. “Come on, Mama.”
 

The doorbell rang and the panic gripped my insides. But Ricky wouldn’t be ringing no bell. He had a key. I heard voices downstairs, grown voices, polite and curious. And then I heard them asking how things were. A few minutes later, I heard feet rushing up the stairs. Nikki ran around to my side, her eyes all big and round.

“Them ladies back again. They say they wanna help get things ready for Daddy.”

“What things?”