Orphea Proud (11 page)

I’m the one who started it, that afternoon in the kitchen. If she hadn’t come to my house that day, she’d still be alive. It wasn’t Rupert or Ruby’s fault that she died. It was mine.

Proud Road is
good sleeping country. I slept for a week when I first got there, snuggled in a bed too small for me beneath Aunt Cleo’s quilts. The room where Aunt Minnie put me was a loft overlooking the front of the house; the view across the road was a big field and a tilted mobile home. Other than getting up from time to time to grab a cold biscuit from the kitchen downstairs or take a trip to the bathroom, I was pretty much in a coma. On the day I finally woke up, for a minute I felt like I was in Heaven. Cozier than a sleeping bee—that’s how I felt, breathing in the fragrance of woodsmoke, wiggling my toes beneath the fat covers,
running my hand across the grate on the floor to feel the heat floating up from below. I lay there listening to the sounds that had already become familiar: the
clomp-clomp
of Aunt Minnie’s boots as she paced, the creak of Aunt Cleo’s wheelchair as she went off to the bathroom, the heavy thud of a new log on the fire, the clank of the woodstove when its door was shut. On top of that, outside it was snowing hard as a torn feather pillow. Perfect, except that Lissa wasn’t there. She would have loved all that coziness, I thought. She would have gotten a kick out of the Aunts; the way Aunt Minnie chewed tobacco and spit out the juice in an old coffee can—I’d seen that the very first morning—and Aunt Cleo counting the money in the register over and over, making sure the books were balanced, I guess. Of course, there weren’t any customers. A good thing, since there didn’t seem to be much to sell. It was almost as if time had stopped for the Aunts; so I let time stop for me. One thing I couldn’t stop, though, was the pain. Lissa was gone.

“Welcome back,” Aunt Cleo said when I appeared downstairs.

I smoothed my overalls. They were even more rumpled than usual.

“Sorry I slept for so long.”

“You needed it. Bed fit all right?”

“If I curl up my legs.”

Her eyes twinkled. “Same bed you slept in when you were little.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Don’t you, now?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.” She wheeled across the room to the table. “Minnie is getting your breakfast. We heard you stirring.”

I sat down and she placed herself across from me.

“Arthritis,” she said. I’d been staring at the wheelchair.

“Sorry.”

She smiled. “Wasn’t your fault.”

I let out a nervous laugh. “I know that. I just meant that it’s too bad.”

“Oh, I get by. Lucky I’m a storekeeper. My sister, Minnie, thinks the store is too confining. But it works out fine for me.”

I glanced at the half-empty shelves. “Where are the groceries?”

“They’ll come in the spring. In winter we don’t get too many customers. And what with the canning Minnie does in summer, there’s plenty for the two of us to eat.”

“Hope my visit is … okay … with you,” I half-stammered.

She patted my hand. “More than okay. You’re family.”

Then we just sat there. Have you ever just sat with somebody without saying a word? Lissa is the only one I could ever be quiet with, and that was never for more than five minutes. That kind of quiet can be unnerving. I was glad when Aunt Minnie clomped into the
room. She was more the noisy type with her clomping and spitting. She grunted an awful lot, too. In fact, a grunt accompanied almost everything she did. She walked into the room and stood by the table. She put down my plate with a grunt.

“So, Lazarus has finally made an entrance.”

“Lazarus?” I was confused.

“Fella who got raised from the dead,” she explained. “A story from the Bible.” She grunted again.

“Oh.”

My stomach growled. I tried not to wolf down my eggs.

The Aunts sat across from me staring.

Aunt Cleo smiled.

“Looks just like her, for the world,” Aunt Minnie growled.

“ ’Deed and trust, she does,” Aunt Cleo cooed.

I cleared my throat. “Who?”

“Nadine, of course,” Aunt Minnie said. She put a log on the fire.

“You’ve got her face,” Aunt Cleo told me. “You’ve got her smile.”

I put down my fork. “I don’t look anything like her. Nadine wore lipstick.”

Aunt Minnie chuckled. “Yes, she did like to make herself fancy.”

“I’m not like that,” I protested. “I mean … my mother was beautiful.”

Aunt Cleo nodded. “Yes, she was.”

I gulped down my coffee. Why had they brought
up Nadine right away? I was already too sad about Lissa.

“Your mama’s old room is next to the back door,” said Aunt Minnie. She stood up and pulled out her tobacco. “You sleep there if you want to. We just put you upstairs so you wouldn’t be bothered by all our noise.”

“Thanks. I’m okay where I am.”

Aunt Minnie crossed to the soda fountain and spit in her old coffee can. The quiet in the room turned tense.

“Those quilts you gave me are good and warm,” I said, trying to make conversation.

Aunt Cleo nodded. “Made them myself. But this here’s my favorite,” she said, fingering the quilt across her lap. “It’s a story quilt.”

“It reminds me of a map.”

“Every square has a story of somebody in the family.”

“My mother, too?”

She nodded. “That’s your mama’s hand right there,” she said, pointing out a square. “Traced her hand in school when she first came to live with us.”

I touched the spot with my finger. It felt odd to see the shape of my mother’s hand when she was a child. My own hand was so much bigger. I turned away.

“Do you remember the time you visited?” Aunt Cleo asked.

“Once … I remember it was snowing.”

“We made snow ice cream with maple syrup,” she told me. “Your mama and daddy took you and Rupert in a horse-drawn sled.”

“Rupert and Daddy were here?”

“Why, sure. That bad boy Rupert tried to kill my kitty cat.”

My head felt heavy. “I don’t remember.”

“You don’t have to,” Aunt Minnie said briskly. “Those times are long gone. Ain’t that right, Cleo? It’s Orphea that we’re interested in.”

I fidgeted in my chair.

Aunt Minnie peered into my face. “Rupert told us you had a problem.”

“I flunked out of math.”

“Is that all?” said Aunt Cleo. “That’s not so bad. Boy across the road has a reading problem.”

Aunt Minnie grunted. “Ain’t a reason to drop out of school.”

“I needed a break,” I said quickly. “There were some other things, but …”

“Don’t feel you have to tell,” said Aunt Minnie. “You don’t need a reason to stay with Cleo and me. You’re Nadine’s girl.”

A lump in my throat made me scoot up from the table. Why did they keep bringing her up?

“Can I help with the dishes?”

“You can do more than help,” said Aunt Minnie. “That’ll be one of your chores from now on.”

“And you can thread my needles for me,” Aunt Cleo said cheerfully.

Aunt Minnie grunted. “And keep the fire going and split some logs.”

“Split logs?” I squeaked.

“I’ll teach you.” She followed me into the kitchen. “Know how to make a bed?”

“Everybody knows how to make a bed.”

“Everybody
thinks
they know how to make a bed. Few folks really do.”

“Maybe you’d better teach me that, too.”

So that’s how life began for me on Proud Road. That very day I had a log-splitting lesson. I could hardly swing the ax. But Aunt Minnie did a clean cut every time, hitting the wood right on its sweet spot. I tried to guess how old she was—she was Nadine’s aunt, which meant she was my great, which probably meant … she was in her seventies. A lady in her seventies like that, splitting wood! I was inspired. I couldn’t manage to split one, but Aunt Minnie made me keep trying. My muscles were tired at the end of the afternoon, but my mind felt a little bit better. That is, until Aunt Cleo brought up Nadine again. I came through the back door, carrying the wood Aunt Minnie had split. I placed it next to the stove. Then I washed my face at the sink behind the counter. Even though it was freezing outside, I’d been sweating. Aunt Cleo watched me from her place at the register.

“You know she’s right out there,” she said quietly.

“Who?”

“Your mama, of course. The graveyard is in the trees right next to where you were splitting wood.
Can’t see the stones, because the snow is covering them.”

“Nadine is buried back there?”

“You were still a tyke, so I reckon you forgot.”

“Oh, I remember being in a little church. But besides that it’s only the coffin and the flowers I remember.”

“I was the one who picked you up that day,” said Aunt Cleo. “I picked you up when you threw yourself on the roses.”

A lump rose in my throat. A lump I could hardly swallow.

“Come here,” said my aunt. I crossed the room. She took my hand.

“I didn’t mean to make you sad. I only thought you’d want to know that if you need her, your mama’s here.”

I darted away to the kitchen, biting my lip. I wasn’t going to cry! I stopped in the narrow hallway under the stairs. Nadine’s room was open. There were childhood pictures of her on the wall. I wanted to go in, but I couldn’t.