Breathing (22 page)

I lay down in the sand behind the dune where we kissed on Sunday and close my eyes. After a while, a shadow crosses in front of me.

“I been out looking for you everywhere,” Mama says.

I don’t open my eyes or show any sign I’m listening. But I feel all closed up tight inside, afraid to hear what’s coming.

“I’m real sorry for what I said,” she starts. “You sure made me mad, but I didn’t mean none of that. You and Dog are the only things that matter to me in this whole world.” She sits down beside me. “I like Denny a whole lot—I may even be starting to love him. But he ain’t nothing compared to y’all. And I don’t give a rat’s ass about losing them jobs, don’t blame you for your asthma. I was just p.o.’d by your attitude is all.”

I sense her stretching out in the sand.

“Lord, I hadn’t been out to lay in the sun in eons. Sometimes I forget we live by the beach a-tall.”

“I thought you came to live down here ’cause you hated being away from the ocean,” I say, letting the rest of it all slide by.

“It’s true,” she says. “I couldn’t stand being landlocked. And even though I don’t spend much time out here, it’s like I got an umbilical cord stretching from me to the ocean and every time I get too far, it just don’t feel right.”

I reckon it’s the reference to the umbilical cord that puts me in the mind of wondering about my grandma, ’cause next thing I know I’m asking her, “How come you don’t talk to your mama? Why won’t you tell us about her?”

Mama heaves a real big sigh. “Things had been bad between me and Mama for years. I suppose I held our poverty against her. We were poor as dirt when I was coming up. And I just couldn’t rightly stand how she seemed to soak up all the pity the church folk gave us, bringing by used toys at the holidays and bags of groceries for Christmas dinner. I hated those donations, hated the uppity girls from school what delivered ’em. Guess I was ashamed.”

She sits quiet, thinking, I reckon. I wait her out, hoping she’ll say more. “She had a bum leg, my ma.” She squints up at the sun, looking like it hurts her just to think about it. “She had polio as a child, and one leg never quite recovered. She used it, though, that handicap, used it to milk the church folk for pity, to get ’em to help her out and all. I hated the way she did that.”

I can’t hardly believe she never told me one lick of this before now. I ain’t about to do anything that might cause her to stop talking.

“My mama hated your daddy something fierce,” she goes on. “I reckon she knew he’d run off on me someday. I couldn’t forgive her for that. I brought him home from Cary to meet her one summer, and she tried to stop me seeing him. She actually went and forbid me to go out with him a-tall. You can bet we cleared out of there pretty quick. When I was twenty, we ran off and eloped. I didn’t talk to her again till after your daddy left us.”

“What happened then?” I ask, too impatient to wait.

“She tore into me, telling me how she knew he was a no-count good-for-nothing piece of work, that she wadn’t the least little bit surprised that he cut out. Then she told me I ought rightly move back home and raise y’all by her in her stinky old run-down double-wide trailer. And then she said the worst thing she coulda said to me. She said, ‘Least we can count on the church to always be here for us.’” Mama shudders for real. “I got a piture in my mind of you and Dog getting them crappy hand-me-down gifts, me having to thank those same folks whose faces, full of pity, I’d been forced to thank for their broken games all those years and I said, ‘Hell no! He-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ll no!’ I slammed that phone down and promised myself we wouldn’t never take a handout or let nobody drown us in their pity ever again, not so long as there’s air in my lungs. And I hope to God I’ve kept my word.”

Lordy. I ain’t never heard Mama go on like that. To think she never told us how she grew up, never shared one thing about what her mama was like. No wonder she didn’t want to have the church folk come out to help us build on a room for Dog. And that’s why she wouldn’t tell her bosses about my asthma, why she’d ruther go on and lose the jobs than risk their pity.

I give her my biggest hug. “I’m sorry for everything I said, for every time I made you worry.” I feel like I’m about to bust out in tears.

But she pulls me back and says, “Don’t be sorry. And don’t feel like you’re some kind of burden. You are the light of my life.”

And then she starts in to bawling! Can you imagine?

She wipes her eyes and says, “You did inherit one thing from my mama, though—thankfully just the one.”

“What’s that?” I ask, afraid to hear what she might say.

“Them special feelings you get sometimes, when you just seem to know what’s coming? Your grandma got ’em too.”

“She did?” I ask, all surprised. I can’t even believe she never told me this.

“Spells, she called ’em. ‘Havin’ one of my spells,’ she’d say. And then she’d go on about the feeling she had that this or that was fixing to happen. And sure enough, they were too true. Used to get her all worked up, like she was scared it was the devil’s work or some such nonsense. I never understood why she couldn’t just take them for the gift they were.

“When you were a little bitty thing and telling me what you sensed coming, I tried my best to make it seem like no big deal, hoping you’d learn to trust it as your very own guide, no fancy hocus-pocus, just a part of nature.”

I had no idea. I never even thought about my special feelings being a gift or what-have-you or about Mama putting any effort into making me see them one way or another.

She hugs me real tight. “I may not have the gift of sight like you and your grandma, but I can tell you this, shug, everything’s gonn’ be all right.”

I slump into her arms and just let myself believe it.

I
n the evening I sit on my bed, staring at the beautiful painting Jackson gave me that’s hanging on my wall (covering up a few of those marks I made throwing my hairbrush), and call him, anxious to tell him all about what Mama told me at the beach. He sounds kind of down.

“Something wrong?” I ask him.

“Naw,” he says. “You take care of that letter yet?”

“Not yet,” I say. Then I change the subject by telling him what all Mama said about my grandma. I go on and on. “Can you imagine?” I say to end my little monologue.

“Hm,” is all he says!

“Jackson, what is wrong with you, boy? I been waiting all day to tell you this and all you got to say is ‘hm’?”

“I got some stuff goin’ on I’m tryin’ to figure out, is all.”

“What stuff?” I beg. “Share it with me. That’s what I’m here for.”

He’s real quiet. Then he goes, “I ain’t exactly ready to talk about it yet.”

Now it’s all turning sour. “Do you not trust me to share your secrets with?” I say.

“Don’t be like ’at,” he says. “That ain’t what I mean.”

“Well, what do you mean, Jackson? Huh? Maybe you mean I’m too young to understand, or too naïve, or too dumb. Which is it?”

I hate when he goes all silent.

Finally he says, sounding put out, “I believe we best go on and hang up ’fore we say sump’n we gonn’ regret. Talk to you soon.” And then he clicks off! Damn!

I’ve got half a mind to call him right back, but I believe I’m going to let him stew in his own juices awhile. See how he likes that. Course none of this is helping my breathing none, which seems to have moved to a permanent state of raggediness. Mama’s got me a doctor’s appointment set up with my regular doctor, Dr. Tamblin, but it ain’t for a couple more weeks. By then the summer will be near about fixing to end. I sure don’t want to think about that.

I roam on out to the kitchen and pick at the tuna salad Mama’s fixing for supper.

“It is just too hot out for cooked food,” she says. “We gonn’ have to make do with tuna salad sandwiches, pickles, chips, and some ice-cool lemonade—just like when we used to go on picnics when y’all were little.”

I don’t say nothing. I ain’t feeling too chipper.

“That acceptance letter is near about due,” she says.

“I know.”

“What’s wrong now, sad sack?” she teases.

“I just don’t get why Jackson won’t share his feelings with me. I tell him everything!”

Mama starts laughing.

“I’m glad you find my pain so funny.”

“Now, now,” she consoles. “You got to realize that guys are different than us. Lord, can you imagine Dog telling his feelings to some girl?” She shakes her head. “If they can’t work everything out on their own, they just don’t feel like men.”

“You mean DC don’t talk to you about things?”

“Some things,” she says, mixing up the creamy tuna salad and spreading it onto the white bread. “Mostly, though, it’s after he’s got it all figured out. You set your expectations too high. It’s not realistic, hon.” She laughs. “You’re hopeless.”

Hope
ful
, I think
.
What’s wrong with that? I wander back to my room, thoroughly dissatisfied by the conversation. Maybe I’ve been reading too many romance novels this summer. Or maybe I’m the crazy lady in the attic tying Jackson down, not his Jane Eyre at all.

I feel all raw and oozy like a rotten sore.

Pulling the damn acceptance letter off my dresser, I stare it down. I look at the curlicues of Mama’s signature and at the blank line just above that. Then I jab my pen on the page, signing my name, sniffling away my tears. But then I dump the whole thing on the floor and crawl under the covers.

At supper I just pick at my food and try to keep my raggedy breathing under wraps so Mama doesn’t go off the deep end. I sit and watch her and DC flirting. He eats with us nearly every night now.

“Y’all make me sick,” Dog snaps. “Savannah, how can you stand to be around them? I’ma go stay over at Dave’s. Between all this moping on one side and kissy kissy on the other, it’s enough to choke a horse.”

“Son,” DC says, “don’t be rude to your mama, now. I can’t have that.”

Dog looks at me and rolls his eyes.

“I suggest you apoleegize to her,” DC insists.

“Denny, come on now, just let it go,” Mama urges. “He didn’t mean no disrespect.” But she gives Dog that look that says,
You best behave.

He’s squirming under the pressure, not wanting to lose face. He looks just at Mama and mumbles, “I didn’t mean nothing by it.” Then he gets up and clears his plate.

“Course you didn’t. He was just teasing,” Mama says.

DC grunts.

“I’ll phone Gina and tell her you’re on your way,” Mama calls after Dog.

“You don’t got to do that,” he snaps, turning back. “Don’t treat me like a baby. Why can’t you—”

“Fine,” Mama interrupts, sounding stiff and seriously p.o.’d to be talked to like that in front of her guest. “You go on. We’ll talk about this tomorra.”

“So you ain’t gonn’ call her, right? ’Cause that’s just embarrassing, having your mama call like that when you’re twelve years old.”

“All right, go on then, Mr. All-Grown-Up.”

Dog takes off and Mama winks at me. “I’ll try and remember to call her later on about something else. You want to watch a movie with us?”

I shake my head and go hide in my room, not wanting to have to listen to her and DC giggling and being dopey the rest of the evening. I don’t think Jackson and me act that dumb around each other. Missing him, I pick up that acceptance letter and hold it in my hands like I’m fixing to tear it in two. But then I just shove it back on my dresser and pull out my journal instead.

 

 

I don’t sleep too good. Between my breathing and my bad dreams, I just wish the dang night would go on and end. As I get up about seven o’clock, I promise myself I will not call Jackson Channing again till he calls me first.

 

 

It’s story time at the library again. Only today it’s a bunch of rowdy preschoolers. The moms hang out at the back of the room chatting, while I try to keep their kids sitting on their butts and listening to the book. They’re bouncing around and making noise, giving me a headache. I fear I may soon find myself with another shoe fight on my hands, so I scrap the standard choices in the story time basket and pull one of Dog’s old favorites off the shelf,
What! Cried Granny.
The kids finally quiet down and even join in, just yelling on the refrain. By the end, they’re all laughing, and of course, every one of them wants to check it out for the week.

As they scatter, Miss Patsy comes over and puts her hand on my shoulder. “Nice job there,” she says. “You really held their attention.”

“Dog always liked that one when he was little,” I say.

“Your mama told me about that program you were invited to at UNC-Asheville. I’m real proud of you.”

“Thanks,” I say, knowing that my time is nearly up to decide what I’m going to do about that durn thing. The deadline is nearing and I still haven’t sent it in. I wanted that invitation so bad earlier on. Why can’t I figure out what I want now?

 

 

On Thursday morning, I take Jackson’s painting off the wall and walk all the way over to the junior college. It’s killing me that he hasn’t called. I reckon I’m secretly hoping this will give me a reason to phone him. When I poke my head into the art gallery, I’m disappointed to find a young woman at the desk.

“Can I help you?” she says.

“I was looking for someone else,” I reply.

Just then, the man I met before with the wild gray hair pokes his head out of a back room. “Well now,” he says. “I remember you. I had a notion it was your own work you were speaking of.”

Smiling, I say, “No, sir. I’m not this talented. My friend is just shy about showing off his work, so I thought I’d give him a head start.”

“Well, let’s see then.” He takes Jackson’s painting from me and examines it carefully, looking down his nose through his granny glasses.