Faith, Hope, and Ivy June (15 page)

“So what do you want me to say?”

“Heck! Didn’t they teach you any manners up in Lexington?” Jimmy said. “Polite conversation?”

Ivy June gave him a broad smile. “Why, Jimmy Harris, what a pleasure seeing you here this morning. I surely hope you enjoy my grandmother’s biscuits,” she said sweetly.

“Now, that’s better,” he told her.

“So what’s she like?” Shirl asked on the bus Monday, when Ivy June climbed on with one of Mammaw’s ham sandwiches in her lunch bag with some jelly beans that Ezra had been given at Sunday school.

“Same as us, not so different,” said Ivy June.

“Fancy clothes, I’ll bet. Brand-name underpants and all,” Shirl prodded.

“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t peek. What did
you
do on vacation?”

“Went to Earl’s store three nights!” Shirl said, her eyes twinkling. “You should have been there. Jimmy Harris kept looking around for you.”

“He did not. He knew I was away.”

“He was looking just the same.”

“Looking at
you
, probably!” Ivy June teased. “Bet you wore that sweater with two baseballs in your bra.”

Shirley’s lips stretched into a wide smile. “Danced with Fred Mason,” she said. “And we sat out behind Earl’s with a Mountain Dew and I let him kiss me. A
kiss
kiss, not the skim-milk kind.”

“I
said
that’s what you’d be doing,” Ivy June laughed as the bus stopped at Devil’s Branch Road, and three kids with their collars turned up climbed aboard.

“Bet they don’t do much kissing in Lexington, everything so prim and proper,” said Shirl, and glanced over at Ivy June. “Catherine have a boyfriend?”

“You’d have to ask
her,”
said Ivy June. “She goes to a girls’ school, remember.”

“Wonder who thought
that
one up! The whole point of getting out of bed in the morning is to flirt with the boys in your class,” Shirl said.

The teachers welcomed Ivy June back into their classes, but no one asked what she thought or felt about Lexington people or the way they lived. When Miss Dixon had first explained the program, she had told them that this discussion would come later, after Catherine had come to Thunder Creek. Instead, friends asked Ivy June about her teachers, her classes, her homework, what they were studying, and whether it was easy or hard.

“Did you take any of your drawings to show their art teacher?” Mrs. Sullivan asked.

“No, ma’am. Didn’t think to do it,” Ivy June replied, glad she had not.

But in music, she sang the Annie song for the class and wrote the words on the board. After rehearsing it a bit, the students divided into two groups and attempted to sing it. With hesitant male voices coming in too loud or too low, it didn’t sound as good as it had in Lexington, but it was something Ivy June had brought back, as an ambassador should.

At Mammaw’s later, Ivy June worked to make the house more presentable for Catherine. Papaw had put up the old army cot in the small room that served as Ivy June’s bedroom, the room the girls would share. Of course Catherine would get the bed. But Ivy June began to worry how Catherine would feel about washing up at the kitchen sink in the mornings, or taking a bath in the tin washtub out on the back porch. How she might feel about tramping across wet grass mornings and evenings to use the outhouse or—worse yet—pulling the chamber pot (the slop jar, Mammaw called it) out from under the bed in the middle of the night, removing its white enameled lid, and squatting down over the pot to save a walk to the outhouse in the dark. Perhaps Ivy June should have warned her.

Strange, she thought, how you can be so used to something you just accept it. Used to washing up under your arms and around your neck while a teakettle whistled on the big iron stove to one side and the aromas of soap and oatmeal and flapjacks filled the room.

She wondered how Catherine would feel about the worn, food-stained pot holders Mammaw hung on one side of the stove. The coal-darkened fingernails of Papaw, his missing tooth, the sounds of his scrubbing or belching or sometimes cussing about something out on the back porch. In Lexington everything seemed so tidy, so formal, so clean, so perfect…. Then she remembered Peter’s antics and Claire’s curiosity and Rosemary’s biting comments and knew that it wasn’t—that families were imperfect in different ways.

“Missed you, granddaughter,” Papaw said one evening when Ivy June was singing as she washed the stew pan. “That Lexington girl—she sing like you?”

“She sings at school. I didn’t hear her much around the house,” said Ivy June.

“You get a taste of life you can’t forget?” her grandfather asked, giving her a sideways glance.

“You don’t have to work at forgetting something if you don’t want it in the first place,” she answered, and that seemed to make him happy.

But there were things she did want, Ivy June discovered as she lay in bed listening to the distant sound of the creek. She sure wouldn’t fight an indoor bathroom, for one. A pretty pair of shoes to wear with a dress. She’d like to have a class with as many computers as they had at Buckner, and she would love a ride to school in a car each morning instead of walking a mile or so to a bus stop, then waiting fifteen or twenty minutes for the bus to get there.

These were the small things, however. She would love a daddy like Catherine’s, who asked about her day, inspected her homework. A ma who reached over to rub her back or kiss her good night, as Catherine’s mom did. A family who encouraged her to broaden herself and told her how well she was doing when she tried something new. Being at Catherine’s house had made her even more grateful to be living with Papaw and Mammaw, but it pointed out all the more clearly just what she had been missing back at the house with Ma and Daddy. It made her feel guilty that she was special to Mammaw and Papaw, and sad for Howard and Ezra and Danny.

For the next few days, when Ivy June stopped by her ma’s after school, she stayed an hour or more and made herself useful, hemming up a pair of Howard’s outgrown pants for Ezra, scrubbing the worn linoleum in the kitchen, pushing Danny on the bag swing hanging from the beech tree, or—most hated job—breaking open the hardened lima bean pods that the family had picked the summer before and let dry in the sun. Even though she had put batches of them in an old pillowcase and stomped on it, many of the pods hadn’t split open. Their sharp points pricked her fingers as she tried to extract the beans, but she managed to shell half a bag before it was time to go back to Mammaw’s and read to Grandmommy.

On this particular day, however, Grandmommy wanted to talk, not to be read to. Not even her birthday message. She was holding one of the postcards Ivy June had sent instead.

“They nice to you, Ivy June … in the city?” she asked. “Or they … goin’ s’fast… they ain’t got time … to take up with you?”

“Most of the time they were nice,” Ivy June told her. “Had plenty of time for me.”

“I hear … you knock on a city folk’s door … they don’t even ask you … to come in,” Grandmommy wheezed. “You got to … stand right there … and tell ’em what you want. And goodbye? They come to visit … and they take it in their minds to go … they jus’ up and say goodbye … no ifs, ands, or buts. Why … you say goodbye to me … it’d be a while ’fore I let you … out the door. But those city folk … they value their time more’n … they value their neighbor.”

Ivy June smiled. “Well, they treated me fine, Grandmommy. And I know you’ll be nice to Catherine when she comes.”

“She don’t quarrel us out … I ’spect we’ll git along,” said Grandmommy.

The following afternoon, as Ivy June was dusting the windowsill above Ma’s sink, lifting the accumulated bric-a-brac and wiping off the collected dirt and grime, her mother asked, “Why are you after every little speck? Don’t know why you’re beautifying our place. Not as though that Catherine girl was staying here.”

“No, but we’ll be coming by now and then,” Ivy June said. “I want you all to meet her.”

“Well, don’t think I’ll be changin’ my clothes and sittin’ down for a chat. There’s some of us don’t have maids and kitchen help, and if I got time to blow my nose, I’m doin’ good,” her ma said.

“I don’t expect you to be anything other than you are,” Ivy June told her. “I know you work hard.”

“Huh!” said her ma. “Had to go all the way to Lexington to find
that
out?” She clunked a pan on the stove and dropped some hamburger meat in it.

Ivy June dusted off a little ceramic cat and set it back on the windowsill. More cheerfully, she asked, “What were you like when you were twelve, Ma?”

Ruth Mosley paused a moment, surprised at the change of subject. “Oh, like everybody else, I suppose,” she said, jabbing at the meat with a fork as it began to sizzle in the pan. “We looked at movie-star magazines and thought maybe someday that would be us.”

Ivy June smiled. “I sure never thought of
me
as a movie star,” she said, half hoping her mother would disagree, but she didn’t.

“Well,” her mother continued, “most of us didn’t have the sense we were born with. Figured things like that just happened. No thought at all of how to make it real.”

“Yeah, who would?”

“Then Russell, he comes along—I was fifteen, he was going on twenty. He’s a shy sort, see, and once I could tell he was sweet on me … why, what girl wouldn’t go for a young man already out in the world? By then, I suppose I figured that me being a movie star wasn’t about to happen, but we could still be in love like in the movies. And at fifteen, I figured that was as good as it was going to get.”

Ivy June remained silent, knowing her Mother would say more.

“Day I reached sixteen, Russell and me just off and got ourselves married. Jessie come along about a year later, and that’s the story of my life.” She picked up the shaker and generously salted the hamburger.

“I don’t know about
that,”
Ivy June said. “There’s a few more kids to account for.” She pulled out a chair then and sat down, waiting for the rest of the story.

Her mother sighed. “And one I lost between you and Jessie. Never knew that, did you? Miscarriage. But once your children come along, you can kiss your other plans goodbye.” She stopped suddenly when she noticed Ivy June’s startled face. “You know,” she said, “those are the same exact words my ma said to me after my three sisters were born.”