The Other Half of My Heart (14 page)

Minni shifted her weight back and forth, trying to figure out what, if anything, she was supposed to be doing. After several torturous minutes, Grandmother Johnson plunked the same note a few times. Minni stared at her grandmother’s jawline, set and firm. “I can’t sing.”

“Of course you can. It’s in your genes.”

“Really, music is my worst subject in school. I don’t even know this song.”

“Your mother hasn’t taught you ‘His Eye Is on the Sparrow’?” Grandmother Johnson removed her glasses and stared at them.

The girls shook their heads.

Grandmother Johnson looked aghast. “But she loves this song! She used to perform it all the time in church. Women would faint in the aisles as if we were Pentecostals. Even grown men were known to shed a tear or two.”

“Our mama?” Minni couldn’t imagine it. Mama had taken them to a church exactly one time, and the only thing anyone would have fainted from there was boredom.

“I always felt some of the women were being unnecessarily emotional and histrionic, but nonetheless, my girl could sing. So I’m sure you can, too. You just don’t know it yet.” Grandmother Johnson turned back to the keys and played the opening again.

Minni couldn’t sing—she was as sure of that as Grandmother Johnson was of the opposite—but she knew Mama could. She often sang them to sleep at night. Still, Minni had a hard time imagining her in front of a big, swooning crowd. Mama didn’t like being up in front of people any more than Minni did. If she had gotten any genes from Mama, the not-liking-crowds gene was definitely one of them.

In the end, Grandmother Johnson plucked out the melody and made Minni follow along. Minni slid from note to note like a fish trying to swim on ice.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

It was horrible
, Minni thought.

“You sing as sweetly as a bird, just like your mama.”

Was the woman deaf?

“But I don’t want to sing in front of a bunch of people.”

“You don’t have a choice.” Their grandmother placed her glasses in their case and closed the piano. “Now, go upstairs and get out what you plan to wear for your talent. We may need to do some shopping if what you’ve brought is less than satisfactory.” Her stare followed them to the attic door.

Minni felt sorry for all the children who had ever had Mrs. Johnson-Payne-in-the-Butt as their teacher. And how in the world would she get out of having to sing before hundreds of strangers?

T
hat night in the attic, Minni had a flash of inspiration. She sat up in bed. “I’ve got it!”

“What?” Keira sat on her own bed, tying the satin scarf she slept in to keep her hair from frizzing.

“You can break my leg!”

“What?”
Keira finished the knot and dropped her hands.

“I
have
to get out of this contest.”

Keira’s eyelids lowered. “You made a deal with Dad. Remember?”

Minni forced breath through her nose. “I know. But I
can’t
. I can’t walk around in a long dress and talk and sing in front of a bunch of people. Don’t you think a broken leg is a lot better than having a heart attack?” She knelt next to Keira, grabbed her sister’s knee and begged with her eyes. “You’ve got to help me.”

“You’re not going to die of a heart attack, and you can’t quit. Besides, Grandmother Johnson already put down the money.”

Minni plopped beside Keira on the bed. The springs squeaked. She looked at her bare shins crossed in front of her. “It wouldn’t be very hard.” She stretched out her legs, holding her feet in the air.

“I’m not going to break a single one of your skinny bones—not even your pinky.”

“I know.” Minni pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped herself around them. She had a sudden urge to jump under her covers and hide. Why had she ever agreed to this? “Speaking of making deals, we should probably do some reading.”

Now it was Keira’s turn to huff.

Minni got her backpack from under her bed. She pulled out the book she’d picked for them to read together and handed it to Keira, then climbed onto Keira’s bed again and scooted back against the wall.

“Black Be-a
—” Keira tried to sound out the word. “I can’t even read the title,” she moaned.

“Beauty,” Minni said. “Don’t worry. I don’t mind going slow.”

“You told me about this one, didn’t you? Doesn’t the horse tell the story?”

Minni nodded. “The author wrote it to make people more aware of the need to be kind to animals.”

“Thanks for picking out a book about horses, at least.” Keira loved horses. She’d even taken riding lessons at a stable outside Port Townsend.

Minni liked horses, too, and had tried one lesson, but when the dopey horse kept dropping to the ground to roll in the dust she’d decided to stick with smaller animals. “I think you’ll really like it. Ready?”

“I guess.”

“I’ll read the first chapter, just to get us into it.”

Keira listened to Minni read. When the master caught the plowboy, Dick, throwing sticks and stones at the horses, and clocked him on the ear as punishment, Keira cheered. “Serves him right, the little brat!”

Minni smiled. Her plan had worked. Keira was now wrapped up in the story, rooting for the horses and booing the bad guys. She handed a bookmark and the book to Keira for chapter two. “Use the bookmark to follow the lines, instead of your finger.”

Keira exhaled loudly. She placed the guide under the first line of text. “‘Be-fore I was two ye-ars—years—old a’…I have no idea what that word is.”

“Try to sound it out. I’ll help you.”

“Kur—”

“Sur—” Minni corrected.

“See, that’s the problem.” Keira tossed the bookmark in the air. “Why is the English language so complicated? Why does the letter ‘c’ sometimes sound like ‘k’ and sometimes sound like ‘s’ and how in the world are you supposed to know when it does what?”

“Eventually you’ll know, just by looking at the word. In this case, the ‘c’ is soft before the ‘i’ and hard before the ‘u’—as in ‘circus.’” Minni picked up the marker and handed it back to her sister.

“I can barely keep the letters from flipping and flopping around on the page, let alone remember a bunch of rules for when I finally get them to stand still.”

“Try again. Think ‘circus.’”

Keira placed the bookmark and squinted at the word. “Sur-kum-stan-seh. Circumstance?”

“Exactly!” Minni held up her palm and they slapped high five.

Keira smiled. “One line down. How many to go?”

“Don’t think about that. How do you run a marathon?”

“I
wouldn’t
. Those people are crazy.”

“One step at a time.” Minni pointed to the next word in the story.

Keira plugged along, slowly, and after about fifteen minutes or so, they had gotten through four or five good-sized paragraphs. Minni leaned into her sister. “You’re doing great,” she said.

Keira leaned back, pushing Minni in the other direction. “Thanks, Skinny.”

After a little while longer, Minni took the book and finished the chapter, a harrowing account of a rabbit hunt with yelping hounds and galloping horses. In the end, a horse, being driven too hard, tripped and tumbled, throwing its rider to the ground, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. The horse ended up no better off. It broke its leg. A man came with a gun and put him out of his misery.

“That was so
sad
,” Keira said. “I don’t think I can take any more tonight.”

Minni closed the book and put it on the nightstand at
the head of Keira’s bed. She pulled the cord on the lightbulb and got under her covers. They were quiet for a while.

Minni turned her face toward Keira. “It doesn’t matter how fast you can read. You’ll always be the only sister I’d ever want.”

“Me too.”

“Good night, Sun.”

“Good night, Moon.”

Minni sighed and looked out the window at the few stars she could see from where she lay. The sheets might be stiff and smell sort of like bleach, but she was still falling asleep in the same room with her favorite person in the world, and that was all that mattered.

“W
e’re going to the beauty parlor this morning,” Grandmother Johnson said at the table the next day. “Normally, we wouldn’t have been able to get in on a Saturday, but they had a cancellation.”

Minni stopped and thought about this announcement. Grandmother Johnson was old. And “beauty parlor” sounded suspiciously like a place where old ladies went to get their hair done. Would she and Keira leave there with old-lady hairdos?

“Will they know what to do with our hair?” she asked.

“They’re not doing anything with yours. The appointment is for Keira.”

Keira’s eyebrows pulled together. “I don’t need help with my hair. I can do it myself just fine.”

“Can you give yourself a relaxer?”

Keira dropped her spoon in her cereal. “Really?” Her smile took up half her face.

“Mama doesn’t let Keira get relaxers,” Minni said.

Keira’s lips were suddenly doing a backbend. She gave Minni a stink-eye so fierce Mama and Daddy could probably smell it all the way out in Port Townsend.

“I mean, she told her she couldn’t get her hair texturized until she was eleven,” Minni said, trying to get her sister’s mouth to flip. “And we’re eleven now, so I guess…”

Keira grinned, nodding.

“She said no such thing.”

Keira’s smile went south again. Her lips were getting a serious workout today.

“I am fully aware that your mother is committed to this natural nonsense, but as I told her, God wouldn’t have given Madam C. J. Walker the wisdom and knowledge to create products to smooth out our hair if he didn’t want us to use them.”

“You talked to her about it?” Keira asked.

“I spoke with her last night. She’s agreed to let you try it.”

Keira jumped up from the table and bounced around the living room, pulling at her pompon ponytails and letting the tight curls snap back toward her head. Her voice rose up and down with her springing body and hair. “I’m getting a relaxer! I’m getting a relaxer!”

“You’ll get yourself a bad case of trouble if you don’t stop that nonsense. Get back in here and clean up your dishes.”

Keira came back, still smiling in spite of being bossed around by the Wicked Witch of the South.

Grandmother Johnson had done it again—worked her strange magic on Mama. They must have talked after Mama returned Minni’s call yesterday. Mama had asked Minni several times if things were going okay, and although Minni had wanted to tell her what had happened at the Black Pearls of America office with Dr. Hogg-Graff seeing her but not seeing her, in the end she didn’t want Mama to worry or be mad, so she kept it to herself.

“You can thank your father this time. In spite of his severe
lack
of education, he helped me convince your mother that you should be allowed to make your own decision about this. Perhaps he’s smarter than I perceived.”

Minni ignored the dig on Daddy. “What about me?” she asked.

“Your hair is too delicate for those harsh chemicals. No, child, you don’t need all that. Just thank the Lord for sparing you the trouble.”

Instead, she thanked the Lord that Grandmother Johnson had drunk all the buttermilk last night and hadn’t gone to the store for more before this morning.

They washed their dishes, then headed downtown. Minni brought her MLK book, since according to Grandmother Johnson the procedure would take at least three hours. She had actually called it a “procedure,” as if Keira were having her appendix removed or some other problem fixed.

Salon D’Vine was one of several businesses inside an old brick building that had been fixed up. They walked through an indoor courtyard with lush green plants growing everywhere.

Right before they stepped into the salon, Minni pulled her sister back. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been begging Mom for years to get a relaxer.”

“What if the chemicals ruin your hair?”

“They won’t. Mom just says that.”

“But your hair is beautiful!” Minni suddenly felt like crying.