The New Moon's Arms (26 page)

Colin had come up behind Riddell. He nodded to me. “Sorry for your loss, Miz Lambkin.”

“Thank you.” I released Riddell’s hand. The three of us stood there for a second in uncomfortable silence. “Well,” I said to them, “I talk to you later, okay?”

“Okay.” They returned to their work, and I scurried away.
I’ll talk to you later.
People say that all the time. Half the time it’s an untruth. We promise to come back so people won’t carry on bad when we leave.

You know how it is when you go back to your old school as an adult? How everything looks the same, but different? Children in the hallways and the classrooms, but not the faces you expect to see? The staff workroom was like someplace that I used to know. That clack-clack sound: Myrtle in her ever-present high heels. She wore them even more than me. David Stowar waved at me as he rushed for the elevator. He mouthed the word
late
. As usual. And he was sneaking a coffee up to the information desk, as always. I checked the schedule tacked up on the bulletin board. I had a workroom period for the first part of the morning. On the checkout desk after break. Good; I could ease into being back at work.

Mrs. Winter sat at her desk, her chair angled away from it. She had her foot up on one of the library’s wheeled stepstools, with a cushion from the Children’s Department under her ankle. She was pencilling names into a blank schedule grid. She gave me a look as frosty as her name.

My desk was a mess. Piled high with computer printouts of reserves that hadn’t been filled. I threw the strap of my purse over the back of my chair and got to work sorting.

“You still looking after that little boy?” asked Mrs. Winter.

“Last I checked, yes.”

“You didn’t leave him alone for the day?”

“He can’t be more than three, Mrs. Winter. You think I would leave a toddler home alone?” I started in on the other pile on my desk: damaged books and CDs that couldn’t be given to the patrons who’d reserved them.

“Beg pardon. It’s just that your mothering days gone so long now. Easy to forget how to do it.”

“Nope. Like riding a bicycle.” One CD case looked like somebody had dropped it into a mug of Ovaltine. “Or falling out of a tree.” I hoped Mrs. Soledad had remembered not to sugar Agway’s breakfast.

“Too besides,” said Mrs. Winter, “you had Ifeoma so young!”

“Mm.” I was sixteen when I brought Ife to Auntie Pearl and Uncle Edward’s house from the hospital. The first time I had to change her diaper by myself, I cried for my mother. In those days, I had cried as much as baby Ife.

Now I was at the pile of sticky notes fringing my inbox. Most of them were reserves questions that staff members had taken from patrons.

Mrs. Winter scowled at her schedule, turned her pencil over, and erased something she’d written there. “It’s like the two of you raised each other,” she said.

“Mm.” Mr. Bailey wanted to know why his book on World War One heroes hadn’t come in. He was a war vet. He read only nonfiction books about soldiers. He’d been through every book we had on every war going, and was on his second go-round. I looked up his card number on my terminal, reserved that new biography on Desert Storm for him. He wouldn’t have read it yet. Millie Marshall wanted to know when we’d be getting the new Laurelle Silver novel. Laurelle Silver had died five years ago and there was now a team of six writers churning out breathless novels of sex and scandal amongst the rich and infamous under her name, yet they still couldn’t produce new titles quickly enough for Millie. I reserved a Kelly Sheldon and that new Carrie Jason novel for her; that’d hold her until Ms. Silver posthumously committed bad prose again.

Mrs. Winter held the completed schedule sheet out to me. “Chastity, pin this up on the board for me, nuh?”

“Calamity.” I stood and took it from her.

That chilly smile again. “You know how my head small, my dear. Can’t get my mind around everything you young people get up to nowadays. Changing your God-given names.”

The phone at my desk rang. It was David Stowar, calling from the information desk. “We need you up here, please.” There was a smile in his voice.

“Why?” Only librarians worked at the info desk.

“Just come, nuh? And make sure you don’t have any crumbs from breakfast on your shirt.”

“I had cocoa-tea for breakfast.”

“Well, no cocoa stains, then. Those don’t wash out for nothing. And come up here. Now.”

Mystified, I took the elevator up to the main floor. As I stepped out, I just had time to hear David say, “That’s her,” before I was surrounded by reporters. Camera flashes started to go off. I tried to put my hand up in front of my face. Someone took the hand and shook it.

“Sister Lambkin,” said the woman, “I’m so pleased to meet you. Such a selfless act on your part.” The woman looked a little younger than me. Probably dougla, with that flowing black hair and those full African lips. Speaky-spokey, too. Come from money. And wasn’t that a Chanel suit? In this heat?

Oh, shit. It was Caroline Sookdeo-Grant. Shaking my hand. “What selfless act?” I asked.

“You plucked that little boy from the waves in the middle of a storm—”

“Agway? But the storm was over by then. And he had already washed up onto—”

“You kept him alive until the ambulance arrived—”

“When I got to him, he wasn’t in any danger of being anything but alive.”

“And now that his family has perished in that tragic accident, you’ve taken him into your home. Such generosity, Sister.”

“How you even come to hear about me?” I asked her.

“Mrs. Sookdeo-Grant, Mrs. Lambkin, look this way, please.”

We looked that way. Sookdeo-Grant grabbed my hand again in one of those disturbingly firm handshakes. We smiled. “Your daughter told me,” she said. “Wonderful person. You must be very proud of her.”

The flash went off. By the time my dazzled eyes could see again, Sookdeo-Grant was being escorted out of the library. Passers-by were calling out her name. She stopped, shook a few hands, smiled a lot. Then she stepped into the back of a nondescript beige car and was driven away.

More flashes popped, and someone stuck a microphone that had the CNT logo on it in front of my face. “Just look at me, not the camera,” said the camera man. So of course, after that, I couldn’t see anything
but
the camera. It was a very big camera.

“Look this way, please,” said the reporter. She had that glamour that people get on them when they live their lives on television. “That’s good, Mizziz Lambkin. Now, tell the audience; how does Mr. Lambkin feel about you bringing an orphan into your home?”

“Mr. Lambkin’s dead,” I replied. “The funeral was last Saturday.” My cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my skirt pocket. “Hello?”

“Grandma?”

“Stanley?”

“Well, there you have it, folks,” said the reporter into her microphone. The big camera was pointed at her now. “Not only did this brave woman throw herself into a raging sea to save a child she didn’t know—”

“Grandma, you really think a kite would work?”

“—she did so on the way home from burying her husband, who had tragically passed away that same day.”

“The day before,” I said. “Only he wasn’t my—”

“For my science fair project, I mean? Remember?”

“Just a minute, Stanley.”

“For Cayaba National Television, this is Jane Goodright, reporting live from the main branch of the Cayaba Public Library.”

“But he wasn’t my husba—”

“Maybe I could tie a camera to a kite?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, eyeing the very large camera in front of me. “A camera’s much too big.”

“Thank you so much, Mizziz Lambkin. Please sign this release. It just says that you’re okay with us putting this little interview on the air.”

I took the pen she handed me, and struggled to sign the release and juggle the cell phone at the same time.

“A small camera, Grandma. A disposable. Only I don’t know how to make it take the pictures from up in the air… Grandma?”

“Stanley, I call you back later, okay?” I handed the reporter back the piece of paper.

“But I need to decide now! I have to tell my teacher by next period what my project is!”

“All right, all right. I think a kite would work fine. Wonderful idea. Call me tonight and we’ll figure out how to do it. Okay?”

“I can come to the library tomorrow?”

“Yes. I’ll be here. I have to go, Stanley.”

I snapped the phone shut and turned to tell the reporter the real story. She and the camera man were gone.

“I’m going to kill my daughter,” I said to David.

He looked like he’d had a vision. “That was Jane Goodright,” he whispered. “Standing not two yards from me.”

The info desk phone rang. David answered it. “It’s for you,” he said. I took the receiver from him.

“Calamity?”

“It just might be a calamity. For my wretched girl child, anyway.”

“Pardon?” It was Gene’s voice.

“Long story. Look, I not supposed to take personal calls at work. You could make this quick?”

“Okay. You know that rusty cutlass I had the other day?”

“Yes?”

“Well, I told you a little untruth.”

“Gene, I need to get off the phone.”

“I found it in the cashew grove. It has Mr. Lambkin’s name on the handle.”

Ah, shit. How to explain that? No, it was okay. I had Gene half-convinced the cashews had always been there. “And?”

David said, “You think I should have asked Jane Goodright out? I hear she not seeing anybody.”

“I’m really sorry,” said Gene. “The lab found traces of blood and tissue on the blade.”

I dropped the receiver.

A
ND WHAT A PIECE OF BUSINESS
trying to find someone to watch Agway for me for a few hours on Thursday so I could spend time with Gene! Three days a week was all Mrs. Soledad could spare. Ifeoma was going to a meditation class, or something like that; Clifton and Stanley were going to Stanley’s weekly karate practice. When I had lived in the little apartment building on Lucy Street, and Ifeoma had wanted watching, my neighbour Maxine was more than willing to do it, especially if I kept her up to date on my adventures with my latest boyfriend. What had happened to Maxine? I had lost touch with her when I got the library job and moved into a bigger apartment.

I knew Ev wasn’t free. Wasn’t going to ask Hector. I didn’t know him well enough. And besides, I kind of had my eye on both him and Gene, so it didn’t seem right to ask him to babysit for me so I could go and pitch woo with the other guy. Oh, so lovely to have prospects again!

But I had to eat dirt to get Agway a babysitter, and I knew it. I dialled the phone.

“Hello?”

“Michael?”

“Yes, Calamity.”

Uh-oh. I knew that flat tone. He was going to milk my blow-up for every drop of juice he could wring out of it. “How you doing, Michael? Things good?”

“You have a reason to call me?”

Fuck. He was going to make this hard. I swallowed. “Well, yes.” Shit, this was like spitting out nails. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Michael, cut me some slack, nuh? I’m sorry I said those things to you, okay?”

“You said them to Orso, too.”

“Okay. My apologies to him, too. Michael, I need your help.”

“Ah. So you’re sorry because you need my help.”

“Yes, I… No! I just need someone to babysit Agway for a few hours.” Damn. That didn’t sound too good, either.

“Calamity, you can’t try to make it up to us just because you need a babysitter!”

I expected him to sound angry. I hadn’t expected him to sound hurt.

“I didn’t mean it,” I mumbled. “You know how my temper stay.”

“True that. And I have to tell you; five years without having to deal with your temper was five peaceful years.”

Now he was exasperating me. “You’re really so sensitive, Michael?”

“Of course. Don’t you know, that’s what we faggots are like?” he said bitterly.

I heard someone speaking to him. “Wait,” he said to me. “Hold on.”

I could hear the conversation, but I couldn’t make out the words. I could only sit there and feel bad.

Michael came back on the line. “When you need the sitter?”

I brightened up. “Six p.m.,” I replied. “I’ll probably be back home around eleven.”

More conversation with the other voice.

“Okay,” said Michael. “You’ll have a sitter.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. You always come through for me.”

“I’m not coming.”

“But, Michael, you just said—”

“
I’m
not coming. Orso says he can babysit for you.”

Michael’s fancy man? Alone with Agway? “But I don’t—”

“Don’t start with me, Calamity. You should thank your lucky stars he’s willing to help you after how you treated us.”

I had to ask. “Orso…he’s okay with children?”

“I don’t even want to think about what you getting at with that little piece of veiled contempt. So I going to pretend I don’t understand you. If you had ever made the time to get to know him, you would know that Orso is the eldest of six brothers and sisters. When his parents were working, it’s he looked after them.”

“He did?”

“Orso know about feeding times and reading bed-time stories and wiping runny noses. He know all that that I didn’t have no chance to learn.”

Ifeoma had never spent a single night in her father’s care. I wouldn’t allow it. Who knew what kinda carousing he was getting up to? I wasn’t going to put my baby into the middle of that.

“Orso say he will see you five-thirty sharp. And now I’m hanging up this phone. Good day, Calamity.”

The phone went dead. I put the receiver into its cradle. Back in the day, Michael and me could never stay on the outs for long. He would probably get over being upset. Probably.

G
ENE WAS COMING AT SIX
. At five-fifteen, I still wasn’t ready. I had showered and bathed both me and Agway. I was powdered and perfumed, and I had tried on one outfit after the other, and none of them worked. The green blouse made my belly look too fat. The lavender dress with the roses on it was too dressy, plus I had to wear panty hose with it or my legs would chafe, and I wasn’t wearing no blasted panty hose in this heat. My arms looked too flabby in the striped t-shirt. And the black slacks just made me look old, old, old.