The Sweet by and By (11 page)

The wife buries her head in the closet. “I would give you this navy blue one, but it looks like something is spilled all over the front of it. It needs to go to the cleaners.” She wads it up and throws it on the bed. “All these sweaters do. They all have an odor.” She throws another pile on the bed.

“We’ll take care of that, Mama,” the son says. He has stopped jan- gling. The wife stares at him, somehow disappointed.

“This old red one is the only one that’s even fitting to wear. We’ve got to go.”

Bernice looks at me. “We’re going to the restaurant! You come too, okay?”

“No, honey, Ann’s going to be back to visit with me after while. She’s showing a house. Y’all go on.” I smile at the wife even though she isn’t the one who invited me.

She hands the sweater to her husband. “Here Mama, let’s get this on you so you’ll be warm enough,” he says. Bernice hesitates, then lays Mister Benny down on top of the pile of sweaters. It looks like a little nest made especially for him. He is resting peacefully.

The wife picks up her purse and waits in the doorway. “Are you all coming any time soon?”

The son sticks out his hand to shake. “Very nice to meet you. Or meet you again I guess,” he wheezes a laugh. “You have a happy Mother’s Day. Let’s go to the car, Mama.”

Bernice picks up Mister Benny from his bed, and the son almost for- gets to take the pile of clothes until the wife gestures with her chin.

When she speaks this time, it is in a little girl’s voice. “Now Miss

Bernice, you know you’re not going to take Mister Benny to the res- taurant. He’ll be just fine right here, and he’ll be right here when you get back.”

Bernice is silent. Her grip tightens on Mister Benny and she looks at her son, who grins and starts the metallic jangling in his pocket again with his free hand.

“Miss Bernice?” the wife continues. “If we don’t go ahead, we’re not going to have time to have lunch. We have to get back to the babysitter and then go to church.”

The son starts to speak. “Greta . . .” he says, but she cuts him off. “Don’t even suggest it, Cameron. I can see it in your eyes and don’t even suggest it. It’s Mother’s Day, and I am not going to sit at a table in public with that worn-out doll and pretend like that’s all right. It’s not.”

Bernice says, “Mister Benny’s going to the restaurant too, okay?” “No. No, it is not okay. You can leave him for one hour, that’s

all we’ll be gone. One hour.” The wife raises a finger to point at the son, and several gold bracelets clank together against a large sparkling wristwatch with a pink crocodile strap. “You have spoiled her. That’s what this is about and I don’t know how many times I’ve told you. She’s spoiled.”

The son leans into Bernice. “Mama, can you please leave Mister Benny this once?”

Bernice looks at me. Her eyes are red and pleading. “He has to stay with me.”

“This is ridiculous.” The wife turns to me. “Have you ever in your life?”

“She’s real tenderhearted. Maybe . . .” She doesn’t let me finish, it’s clear she never intended to.

Cameron tries once more with Bernice, looking down at the f loor and shuffling again. “Mama, it won’t be for long.”

“No!” Bernice screams. “No, no, no, no!” She is slapping the air with her hands, like waving smoke away.

The wife jumps in. “Stop making a scene. I mean it, Mrs. Stokes.

That’s enough, I mean it.”

Bernice is sobbing. She staggers back and slumps in the chair. “Should I go get Lorraine?” I ask.

The son puts a hand on Bernice’s shoulder. “Mama, I think we’re going to go on. You don’t feel like going to a restaurant today. Just sit here and get some rest ’til you’re feeling better. We’re going to go on now. We’ll come back though.”

“I’ll pull the car around.” The wife reaches out an open palm for the keys, but he doesn’t offer them.

Someone makes a gagging sound in the hall. From a distance, Lor- raine calls out, “I need Alvin to clean this up, please. Mr. Evans has got sick all over creation.”

“Good Lord,” the wife hisses and turns on her heels.

“Bye-bye, Mama. I’ll see you later, I promise.” Cameron Stokes turns in the doorway back to me. “Y’all have a good Mother’s Day. I’ll see you again soon, okay Mama?” His jangle fades down the hall along with the sound of leather shoes on linoleum.

I sit down with Bernice. She lays Mister Benny’s head in my lap while she massages his legs. “Sometimes they hurt,” she says through tears. “I can’t stand it when he’s hurting. I’ll rub them a little while, and he’ll be all right.”

c h a p te r te n

Rhonda

T

he first time I did Mrs. Stokes’s hair she didn’t say a word, but the second time, a couple weeks later, she pulled out

a wrinkled picture of someone in a deep burgundy cap and gown. She f lashed it so quick that I couldn’t see it clear at first. “His name’s Wade. That’s my boy Wade.” Bernice held onto the creased and worn picture like she thought I might take it. She was showing it to me, but definitely not giving it to me. I wanted to tell her, “I was there. I heard him give a speech. I’m so sorry for you.” But from the way she said what she did, he might still be alive in her mind, I couldn’t tell. I said, “He looks like a real good guy,” and let it go at that.

We all guessed in high school that Wade was his mama’s fa- vorite. He was everybody’s favorite. He was smart and made all the grades and honors, but he was real nice, and I mean to any- body, not just the ones that everybody liked. Wade spoke to me every single time he saw me in the hall or outside. Didn’t matter to him that we didn’t have a thing in common. I was all the time trying to find a corner to smoke a cigarette, and shoot, I bet he never tasted tobacco in his life. I’d say “hey” back, take a puff off my cigarette, and blow smoke straight up in the air like a chim- ney, the way I still do when I’m feeling nervous or f lirting.

We came from two different worlds. That much was drilled into me before I was old enough to start school. Mama and me

lived with my Grandma in her house, the only house I remember. Grandma told us that somebody needed to teach me about the way of the world and it was going to have to be her because my mama was too sorry. She said, “You might as well get used to doing for other people, Rhonda, because that’s how you’re goin to survive in this world. That’s what we do, what other people need done, and no use thinking you’re different. You’re not. Your fool Mama can’t get that through her head, but I be damned if I’m not goin to get it through yours.”

Mama got out of that house cause it’s the only thing she could do to take care of herself. If she thought she coulda done that and take care of me too, she’d have took me with her. I know that. She didn’t listen to Grandma; she did what she pleased, and I made up my mind to be like that too. At least I didn’t
think
I was listening to her, but I was, and it’s taken me all this time to know that I never did what I wanted to back then. I never could just listen to what my heart was saying and believe it. “Look before you leap” was one of Grandma’s favorite things to say, and I got the idea that whatever I might want to do, that if I looked first, I’d see a huge bottomless black pit so deep that I’d know better than to leap. Ever.

When I was in high school, my best friend Tammy Moore got a white-and-black horse, not a f ield horse either, a regular riding horse. The man in Sanford who sold it to Tammy’s daddy said her name was Wyndfield Girl, but we always called her plain Wendy. Actually her daddy got it because I think he liked the way she looked out in his pasture. He said she had been in rodeos, but none of us really believed that, including him. Mr. Moore said I was a natural. He said I could ride her a hell of a lot better than Tammy, like I could read Wendy’s mind. I loved to ride that horse, I think I loved her more than Tammy did.

When you’re a kid, sometimes things hit like lightning bolts, not everything has to be thought through forever. Think about movie

stars. They’re young and they get in their head they want to be an actress, and nothing, not their family or not having any money or anything else can stop them. They go after what they want no matter what, and it’s like the rest of the world stops getting in their way and finally starts cooperating, going along with their plan, like the world’s a trained circus.

I decided that if I could help Mr. Moore with Wendy, I would learn everything there was to know about horses, and then I could have a farm one day and raise them in a pasture with a wide-plank fence around it and a house sitting on a hill. I could sit out on the porch with a cup of coffee in the morning and look out at all my land and horses as far as I could see. It would be the kind of perfect square green pasture that you’d drive by in your car and say, “Have you ever seen a prettier farm in your life?” And that would be my farm and I would make a living on it, and besides my own horses, I would take care of other people’s horses and teach children how to ride. When you can see something that clear, it’s not right that you can’t do something to get it.

The Moores moved the next winter, before the spring we grad- uated. They shut up the barn and put the whole farm up for sale. Tammy Moore cried her eyes out when Mr. Moore said he might need to sell Wendy since they didn’t have as much land at the new place. She cried so much she got sick and stopped going to school, so he gave in, but I think he would have anyway because he was nice and would do anything in the world for his only daughter. I had my hopes up at first because they didn’t go that far, just to Sampson County, but that might as well be Atlanta when you don’t have a car. If I could have figured out a way, I would have gone over there and rode Wendy, groomed her and all, but Grandma said that this was exactly what she was talking about, wasting my time on something that I didn’t have one bit of control over, and she said once I graduated I better be able to help with some money around there because she was getting too

old to work double shifts waitressing. I listened to her. I had signed up for cosmetology a long time ago because the guidance counselor said it might be suited to me. As long as I went to class for three hours, three times a week, I could be on my way to getting a license. I would just need to do the rest of the course work at the community college and pass an exam. By the end of the next hellish Carolina summer, I was finished and licensed and cutting and teasing up hair at Evelyn’s Beauty Shop on East Main Street. Grandma was as happy as she knew how to be, which wasn’t much. At least there was some more money. The day I walked in with my state license, I don’t know what I was expecting but I felt like showing it to her. Without looking up from her
TV Guide
she said, “About time we got some more money coming in here. Hope you weren’t expecting a twenty-one gun salute.”

The summer went slowly into fall like it almost always does here, and then finally winter, mild but not without a few cold snaps. Grandma had a stroke and then a second one, and it affected her walk- ing and talking. Then she got sick with pneumonia, and even though it lingered, it looked like she might get better, but she died right about the time of the first spring dogwoods. I kept on working at Evelyn’s. She’d always been nice to me, and the job had finally paid for me to buy a falling-apart used car. Johnny Greenan gave me a good deal at the Chevrolet place. We’d dated once or twice. I remember feeling like the whole thing was a big joke on me, finally having a way to get out. A car of my own. I could do exactly what my Mama did, leave Grandma, but the hell of it was I didn’t need to because that bitch was dead and out of my life. Sometimes I wish she woulda lived at least a little while longer so I coulda done what I had thought about a thou- sand times. I would have loved to look in my rearview mirror and see her standing on the porch in a cloud of dirt while I pulled off down the driveway and onto the asphalt with everything I owned. Then I bet I’d know what Mama felt like.

A lot of people said, “Why don’t you leave now, Rhonda? You

can sell that house and do anything you want to.” I thought about it, I even got a Realtor to come and look at it, but that’s as far as it went. I decided that’s not what I wanted. That would have been giving up for good. Grandma wasn’t the only thing in that house. Mama was in there too. And me—I was in that house, in the walls, in the f loors, up underneath the porch. Everywhere where air could go in and out had some of me in it, and it was mine now to do exactly as I pleased. Most of the time, I stayed home.

We were real busy at the shop too. Close to Memorial Day, Evelyn told everybody that came in that she was sorry but she was going to have to close for high school graduation. She said she wanted to tell everybody early so they could have plenty of time to reschedule, even though the graduation wasn’t until June 10.

“Why don’t you put up a sign,” Twiny Allen asked her, “so you don’t have to think about it?”

“I don’t know,” Evelyn said, “I never have liked too many signs in a place of business,” but the real reason was that unless she spoke the news personally, she wouldn’t have the chance to tell everybody that her niece Becky had been picked out of the whole ninth grade to sing the graduation solo in front of the school.

It was fine with me cause I had started doing some work fixing up the house and I could have used a day off, that is until Evelyn asked me to go to graduation with her. I meant to tell her thank you but no, but before I could get it out of my mouth, the look on her face made me say, “That’s sweet, Evelyn, I’d love to go with y’all.” I would have never gone back to a graduation at my own school, I was barely out of there myself. I don’t have nothing against it, I guess a lot of recent graduates go back because they still know other people or whatever, but it seems like they’re usually more of the perfect cheerleader Honor Society I’ve-never-smelled-shit-in-my-life type. Turns out I knew almost everybody walking across the stage in caps and gowns, at least by sight. Hell, a lot of em would end up coming to me to get their hair

done in a few years, after they went off somewhere to college and then came back home to where they started from in the first place.