Saving CeeCee Honeycutt (22 page)

“Ride the bus?”

“Um-hmm. Every other Saturday I go visit my Aunt Sapphire. So, after I frost the brownies I baked last night, I’ve gotta get ready and catch the ten-twenty bus. But don’t you worry, Nadine’s gonna drive over and stay with you till I get back.”

I put down my fork and looked at her. “Can’t I go with you?”

“No, child. It’s a long ride, and you wouldn’t much like it once you got there. Just lots of old folks waitin’ for the Lord to call them home. You’re better off stayin’ here. Nadine said she’d bring her playin’ cards and teach you gin rummy. She loves that game. But make sure you pay attention,” Oletta said with a chuckle. “Nadine cheats.”

I leaned back in the chair. “Please take me with you.”

“You sure you don’t want to stay here and learn to play cards? Nadine said she’d bring over her jewelry-makin’ box, too. Said she’d make you a necklace.”

“I really want to go with you, Oletta.”

She was quiet for a moment, then looked at me thoughtfully. “Child, I been doin’ a lot of thinkin’. I know you’s scared ’cause of what that man did. It scared me too. I think it’s best we sit down with Miz Tootie when she gets home and tell her about—”

“No, Oletta.” The force of my words surprised me. I think it surprised Oletta too. “I’m not asking to go with you because I’m scared. I’m asking because I want to be with you. That’s all.”

She looked down at her plate and didn’t say anything more about it. We finished our breakfast, and after we did the dishes, she dried her hands and looked at me. “I’m tellin’ you, it’ll be hot as blazes on that bus. But if you wanna go, then you better put on the coolest sundress you got.”

I grinned. “Thank you, Oletta. I’ll go do it right now.” As I trotted down the hallway, Oletta called Nadine to tell her about the change in plans.

Oletta sure was right about the bus ride. It was so long and hot that the brownies she held in a plastic container melted to a lumpy, sweet-smelling mud. “Sapphire’s gonna need a spoon to eat these,” Oletta said, shaking her head.

Finally the bus rolled to a stop and we climbed off, fanning away a cloud of engine fumes as it pulled away. Shoved into the earth at the side of a long gravel driveway was a wooden sign. GREEN HILLS HOME was what it said, but I didn’t see any hills, and the only thing even close to the color green was a scraggly pine tree off in the distance.

“Well,” Oletta said, hoisting her handbag over her shoulder, “let’s go see how Sapphire is doin’ today.”

We trooped down the driveway, maneuvering over gravel the size of redskin potatoes. The white-hot sun beat down, searching for one more blade of grass to burn, one more flower to shrivel. A lone crow flew overhead, and I watched his shadow skitter over the parched earth like the remnant of a runaway dream. We walked around a bend, passed a dried-up pond, and then a two-story brick building came into view. Oletta told me it had once been a fine mansion surrounded by a pecan grove. A gentleman’s farm is what she called it. But that was a long time ago, and it now was a home for the aged.

The long, saggy front porch was dotted with people sitting in chairs. A spindly old man shuffled forward as we climbed the steps. He looked at Oletta with wide, hopeful eyes. “Mabel, I been waitin’ on you all day.”

Oletta patted his shoulder. “How you doin’, Mr. Higgins? Remember me? I’m Oletta. You know, Sapphire’s kin.”

His face collapsed into deep folds of sadness, and he turned away and whimpered, “You’re a mean woman, Mabel. Got the heart of a stone.”

An old woman reached out and shooed him away. “Now, you hush up,” she scolded. “You’ll wake the baby.”

But there was no baby.

I followed Oletta inside the building, feeling glad to be out of the sun. We walked through a room fi lled with lumpy-looking sofas and all sorts of mismatched chairs, then headed into an alcove where there was a drinking fountain. After taking long, cool drinks of water, she turned and led me down a dimly lit hallway.

A bare lightbulb flickered and buzzed near the ceiling, and the odors of old age and despair spilled from the open doorways. Though I tried to keep my eyes set on the floor in front of me, I couldn’t help taking a sideways glance into some of the rooms. One old lady with deep-suffering eyes reached her hand through the metal rails surrounding her bed, spread her bony fingers, and begged me to take her home. It was the saddest five seconds of my life.

We entered a room where two narrow beds sat side by side, neatly made up with pale yellow chenille bedspreads that were so old the tufts were worn smooth. In the window a rickety fan oscillated, sending a stream of air across the shadowy room. I stood in front of the fan for a minute and dried the sweat off my forehead.

“How old is your aunt?”

“Sapphire’s ninety-one,” Oletta said, setting the container of melted brownies on top of a chest of drawers and peering out the window. “She must be out back.”

We exited the room as a tiny, bow-legged woman in a floral housedress shuffled from the doorway across the hall. A strand of plastic pop beads hung around her neck, and rhinestone earrings as big as quarters tugged at her thin earlobes. “Y’all better hurry,” she said with a wide, denture-clicking smile. “Louis Armstrong is here. We’re gonna sing a duet together in the dinin’ room.”

Oletta nodded. “Thank you kindly for tellin’ us, Miz Pearson. We’ll be along shortly.”

As the woman scuttled down the hall in a pair of green terry-cloth slippers, I turned to Oletta. “Wow. Louis Armstrong is here? Mrs. Odell and I saw him on TV. Can we listen to him sing?”

Oletta leaned close and whispered, “Louis Armstrong ain’t here. He’s only here in poor Miz Pearson’s mind. But the nurses let her believe he’s here ’cause that’s the only way they can get her to take a bath.”

I followed Oletta to the end of the hallway, where she pushed open a screen door and stepped onto a low-roofed porch. Sitting around a small table were two women and one painfully frail-looking man. In the center of the table was a Chinese checkers game.

The smaller woman scowled at the man sitting across from her. “Well, Virgil, maybe you’d rather play pin the tail on the jackass.”

A look of utter insult registered on the old man’s face. He rose from the table, and with a refined, gentlemanly gesture, he tipped his misshapen straw hat and spoke in a slow, dignified tone. “All right, Sapphire. I’ll go see if I can find me a pin, and when you’s ready to wear your tail, you just let me know.”

The old woman’s eyes grew huge behind the lenses of her glasses. “Don’t you talk like that to
me
. Who’s callin’
who
a jackass?” With fingers knotted like the roots of ancient trees, she picked up a marble and threw it, hitting the old man in the center of his back. As he shuffled away with a wry smile on his face, the other old woman at the table grabbed a marble from the game board and dropped it down the front of her baggy floral dress.

Oletta turned toward the woman who had pilfered the marble. “How you doin’ today, Miz Obee? That dress you’re wearin’ sure is pretty.”

The old lady, who had round dumpling cheeks, offered a shy smile. Sapphire, who was a tiny bucket of bones with wild gray hair that resembled full-blown dandelion fuzz, turned toward us. The instant she laid eyes on me, her eyes sparked. “Who the Sam Hill are
you
?”

Oletta put her arm around my shoulders. “This here child is Cecelia Honeycutt, and she’s—”

“
White!
Why’d you bring a white girl here?”

I thought Oletta’s eyes would pop clean out of her head. “Sapphire June Wilson! Where on
earth
are your manners? Now, you apologize.”

A nearly imperceptible smile flashed across Sapphire’s lips as she leaned back in her chair. “Apologize? For what? Ain’t my fault she’s white.”

Oletta was appalled, but I laughed out loud. Though Sapphire continued to scald me with her stare, she pointed a bony finger at a chair and said, “Lawd, you’re white. But if you’ve gotta be here, then sit in the shade so you don’t hurt my eyes.”

I sat next to the angelic-faced Miz Obee, while Oletta dragged over a chair from the far side of the porch and lowered herself down. She inquired how Sapphire was doing and if she needed anything.

Sapphire wouldn’t take her eyes off me. “I’m doin’ just fine. But I want to know who
she
is and why you brought her here.”

Miz Obee watched me with the inquisitive eyes of a child, but she never uttered a word.

Oletta explained that I was kin of Aunt Tootie’s and had come to live in Savannah because my mother unexpectedly passed away. Miz Obee’s face grew sad, and she looked down at her hands, but Sapphire continued to give me the evil eye and interrupted Oletta by saying, “I don’t want to hear any of that boo-hoo stuff. Death don’t mean a bag o’ beans to me. People dyin’ every day, so what?”

Sapphire leaned toward me and narrowed her eyes, but her voice was full of mischief when she said, “What I want to know is, can she play Chinese checkers?”

I grinned. “Yes, ma’am. Mrs. Odell taught me.”

She slapped the table and squawked, “I don’t give a chicken’s sorry ass who taught you. I just want to play.”

Oletta flashed Sapphire a dangerous look, but Sapphire ignored her, leaned back in her chair, and pointed to the game board. “Well, don’t just sit there starin’ at me like you ain’t got nuthin’ but cotton between your ears. Rack ’em up.”

I tried not to smile as I gathered the marbles. After counting them out by color and placing them into the holes, I looked at Sapphire and shrugged. “There aren’t enough.”

Miz Obee’s faced tensed, but Sapphire looked at her friend kindly, patted the table, and said, “Just set up the board as best you can. We’ll play with whatever we got.”

I thought that was one of the wisest things I’d ever heard anyone say.

Through an open window the scratchy sound of a worn-out record began, and a moment later Louis Armstrong, accompanied by Miz Pearson, began singing “What a Wonderful World.”

Sapphire, Miz Obee, and Oletta swayed in their chairs, each with a smile blooming on her face. I couldn’t help but smile myself. And as I leaned back in the chair and looked into the sky, I thought,
Yes, this really is a wonderful world.

When the song ended, Miz Pearson shuffled out to the porch, blowing kisses like a celebrity. “How’d I sound?” she asked.

“Olive, you was great,” Sapphire said. “Ella Fitzgerald ain’t got nothin’ on you.”

Miz Pearson beamed, we all clapped, and then a nurse came and gently led her back inside.

It was such a small thing, letting Miz Pearson sing along to an old record. It caused no harm and made her so happy. I thought about Momma, how she was happiest when she could live in her imaginary world of beauty pageants. And as crazy as that world was, I knew that if my father would have listened to me and taken her to a special hospital, she’d still be alive.

Oletta went inside and returned with an armful of Sapphire’s clothes that needed mending. She sat quietly and stitched a torn hem, while Sapphire and I played a game that, as far as I could tell, didn’t have any rules. It pretty much goes without saying that Sapphire always won. When Miz Obee thought nobody was looking, she’d sneak a marble off the board and drop it down the front of her dress. After a while, she had more marbles in her dress than we had on the board.

Sapphire knew full well what Miz Obee was doing, but she always looked at her friend with tenderness in her eyes and pretended not to notice. As I watched this silent exchange between Sapphire and Miz Obee, it occurred to me that that’s what friends should do: cherish the good and pretend not to notice the harmless rest.

“Well, Sapphire,” Oletta said, returning her needle and thread to her handbag and pulling out a bottle of bright red nail polish, “now that I’ve got your mendin’ done, how ’bout I paint your nails? I’ve got a brand-new color here. They call it Flames of Passion.”

Sapphire grinned like a schoolgirl, and when she placed her gnarled old hands on the table, I could see the gray shadow of her bones through her tissue-thin skin.

Oletta shook the bottle of polish and said, “Miz Obee, I bet Cecelia would like to see your secrets.”

Miz Obee’s face lit up like a 300-watt bulb. She pushed herself up from the chair and motioned for me to join her. As I followed her down the porch steps and around the side of the building, it occurred to me that Miz Obee hadn’t uttered a single word since we’d arrived.

Her pace quickened when a small patch of sunflowers came into view. Dozens of tall stalks topped with heavy golden flower heads swayed in the hot breeze. From a distance they looked like a group of ladies with their heads hung low, as if embarrassed that they’d arrived at a party wearing identical hats.

Miz Obee led me beyond the sunflowers toward a beat-up old car that sat low to the ground. Dappled with rust and stripped of its tires, it was little more than a shell. Even the seats and the steering wheel were missing. But all of its windows were sparkling clean and had been lowered halfway down. A sharp, rusty squeak sounded when Miz Obee pulled open a door and gestured for me to look inside.

For a moment I was dumbstruck. The interior of the car was fi lled with orchids—each one more dazzling than the one before it. There were yellow ones splashed with bright orange dots, purple and pale green ones striped like zebras, and red ones tinged with delicate pink. There must have been at least twenty pots of orchids in all.

I leaned farther into the car. “Wow. You grow these? They’re the most amazing flowers I’ve ever seen.” From over my shoulder I looked at Miz Obee and grinned. “So this old car is like a greenhouse. Rolling the windows up and down is how you control the humidity, right?”

She nodded furiously, seeming beside herself with joy that I understood the valuable use of the old car. She went from one side to the other, opening the doors and showing me her living treasures. I took my time and admired each one. Gently I touched a petal of a vivid purple bloom that had a speckled yellow throat, then I turned to Miz Obee. “I have a friend, her name’s Mrs. Odell. She always had an orchid on her windowsill back in Ohio, but she never had anything like these. I sure wish she was here to see them. They’re the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen.”