The Sweet by and By (20 page)

I turn off the ignition. “Y’all sleeping beauties gon wake up or you want me to go to the wedding and tell you about it later?”

Margaret stirs beside me and is the first one to say something. “Lord God, are we already here? That sun coming in the window puts me to sleep every time, I can’t help it to save my life.”

I don’t realize Bernice is awake until she hollers from the backseat, “Is the bride here yet?”

“We thought you might fill in for her if she can’t make it,” Marga- ret says. She nudges me. It goes right over Bernice’s head.

I get out and start the preparations of movin these ladies from car to church. I’ve parked as close as I can, but I still think I better take em one at the time, Bernice first cause she’s a little bit easier to handle. She can still walk all right even though she’s had one heart attack and they think she might have had a mild stroke too. She’s fine if she don’t get in a hurry, then she can’t get her breath. I’ve got a walker for Marga- ret and a wheelchair in the trunk of the car cause I don’t never know which one she might need and neither does she. When I ask her some days if she wants to take a walk, she says, “It depends on how long a trip you’re planning.” Today she’s feelin all right. When I open the boot of the car, she snaps, “Don’t start hauling out any of that artillery, Lorraine. I plan to walk into that church, but I want to hold onto your arm.”

Bernice is at the door already. I told her to walk up the ramp to the side of the porch. There are only three shallow steps but she’s not sup- posed to climb any stairs with her heart, and she knows I mean busi- ness. I learned a long time ago that the best way for me to help Bernice is to treat her like a bighearted, free-spirited child, and it’s that much more important now that she’s not well. “Bernice, wait there, we’re all gon go in together.” An usher opens the front door. He’s a big man, probably at least 250 pounds, and has got a red face like it’s sunburned in October and a reddish-blond bushy mustache. He claps his hands and rubs them together like he’s gettin ready to roll dice. “Let me help y’all, take your time, they’re not starting yet.”

“Thank you, I ’preciate it,” I say, coming up the ramp real slow with Miss Margaret. I can see from the way he takes Bernice’s arm that he’s got a grandmother who loves him. Margaret sees it too. “That’s a sweet boy right there,” she says.

“You feelin all right?” I ask her when we get to the top of the walkway.

“If I’m not you’ll be the first to know.” “I don’t doubt that.”

I take three programs and we follow the big usher down the aisle. Bernice is waving to some people, and I know she don’t know one soul at this wedding. Most of em are waving back like they think they’re s’posed to know who in the world she is. I hope he don’t put us too close to the front cause I might have to take one of the ladies out if they need to go to the bathroom, and I need to figure out soon where exactly it might be. We get ourselves situated on a long pew with nobody else on it even though the rest of the little church looks like it’s full. I put myself between Margaret and Bernice so I can do whatever I need to for either one of em. A side door opens up front and a girl and two boys come out, all of em in their thirties or somewhere around there, a few years younger than Rhonda by what I can tell.

“Is the bride here yet?” Bernice asks me again. “I sure do want to meet her.”

Margaret leans out around me. “Honey, it’s Rhonda. She fixes your hair.” Then Margaret starts to read her program out loud, and she doesn’t know how loud her voice is. “Stairway . . . to . . . Heaven,” she says, like she’s making an announcement. “That’s a song?” She turns to me and I tell her yes, and I know it is, but maybe I’m thinking of the wrong one cause I never heard it at a wedding.

Bernice sticks her head out around me to Margaret. “I’m going to get a hairdo. You want one too?” she says. “Later on,” Margaret says. I like the way she talks to Bernice real matter-of-fact. I learn a lot from her.

The wedding party is gathering in the back of the church, people around us are turning and whispering to each other. There are a lot of people crammed into these pews. I hear a woman’s high voice from

the back, as loud as if she was standing beside us. I can’t make out all of what she says, but I hear real clear: “She works with Rhonda, and Rhonda wants em all here. You got a problem?” I know I’ve heard that voice before. There’s some scuff ling around in the bridesmaids, a lot of activity. I can see they’ve got on peach-colored dresses with wide white ribbons around the waist.

The sound of a sharp crack rises above the rumbling, sounds like skin on skin to me. Margaret says, “Somebody got slapped back there, Lorraine. I heard it, didn’t you hear her yell?” There’s still music play- ing but it don’t cover the noise. Bernice turns all the way around and sounds shocked. “She’s crying!” she tries to whisper but it’s way too loud to be a whisper. The people around us look like they want to ignore what’s goin on even though you’d have to be deaf not to know there was a fight back in that vestibule. I feel like I’m gon die if I don’t turn and see for myself. The usher who took us in is holding onto a tall girl with long hair and moves her off to one side. Her makeup is smeared all over her face. Somebody says, “Okay, Connie! Shhh!” and the first pair of the wedding party is ready to start walking in. The music changes and it’s a little bit livelier, I know it from the radio. My program says, “You Are the Wind Beneath My Wigs” but somebody has gone through and crossed out the last word with a blue marker and wrote in “Wings” on top of it. That mistake had to be a joke on Rhonda; if not, then God does have more of a sense of humor than I give Him credit for. The first couple starts down the aisle, followed by four or five more. The congregation is smiling the same as all wedding guests do, but they look as uncomfortable as a spell of bad indigestion.

The tall girl who was crying is the last bridesmaid out, drooping on the arm of the big usher. She looks like she had time to wipe off her face but her eyes are still red. Margaret has forgotten the fight and already moved on to the next thing in her mind. You can’t never tell about somebody old, sometimes they’ll hang onto the littlest thing

that doesn’t matter and can’t let it go for nothing, then something that might seem big to most people, they don’t care about it over a minute or two. She taps my hand and says, “I’m surprised to see that color on bridesmaids in October, I don’t care if it
is
warm.” She clucks her tongue. “Bless her heart, that’s what she wanted and that’s what she got.” I’m glad to be in between the two of them because side by side they could get on a roll about something. The usher who brought us in smiles my way when he passes while the tall girl looks straight ahead with a smirk on her face.

Now that everybody’s up front who’s supposed to be there, I rec- ognize Rhonda’s friend Connie, she delivers packages to the nursing home once in a while. Rhonda told me it was her best friend and asked wasn’t it something that we were on her delivery route out of all the UPS drivers in the county? Connie nods at me and the ladies like she’s saying, “Don’t you worry, I took care of the problem,” and I realize she’s the one who slapped that tall girl, and at the same time that I’m in the middle of a roomful of white faces. I know this story all too well, but whenever I forget, something like this happens to remind me that there’s no end to it. I’ve been angry before, every black person has been, but now I feel less angry than I do like a pretty balloon has popped in front of my face. I am here with my two friends, they are here because I brought em, and they want to be here. That’s the only reason I don’t get up and leave.

I thank God when “Here Comes the Bride” starts. It’s the most fa- miliar thing to me so far at this wedding and it has got to mean we’re gettin close to the reason we’re here. I tell Margaret and Bernice they don’t have to stand up if they don’t feel like it, but they both surprise me and get on their feet by holding onto the pew in front of us and pulling up. I’m grateful they can. Rising up when you’re weak makes a person stronger. By standing, they’re saying that Rhonda matters and they matter too. I feel better when I think about how showing

respect to one person makes every person worth more. Standing in this crowd makes the ladies as much a part of life as anybody else. Bernice jabs me hard on the shoulder with a bony f inger. “Here comes the bride!” She can barely stand it she’s so excited. Holding on, I rise up too.

ch a p t e r ninet e e n

Margaret

M

y mouth is cotton. The oversized red numbers on the dig- ital alarm clock beside my bed read 9:42
p.m
. The colon between the 9 and the 42 f lashes all the time, marking the sec- onds, which could make me lose my mind if I stare at it. I have got to have something to drink, and I don’t want water. I don’t know who’s on duty at this time of night but it won’t be Lor- raine, and she’s the only one who’ll bring me Co-Cola because it has caffeine in it. I’ll have to take my chances and ring the buzzer. The only other light in the room besides the alarm clock is an electric jack-o’-lantern plugged in on top of my bookshelf. I don’t know where it came from, I guess Ann brought it, although plug-in plastic is not usually her style. I know they wouldn’t let us have a real pumpkin because it would start to rot and bugs would get in it, and it’s probably against the law to have a real candle inside. This one’s eyes are upside down triangles with upturned eyebrows like he’s surprised. I don’t care if it’s plastic; I like it. I

like the glow.

“Yes ma’am?” There’s a young woman with jet-black hair at the door. “Did you want something?”

“Are you a nurse?”

“No ma’am I’m not. Do you need a nurse?” She is not smiling. “No ma’am, I need a Co-Cola if you could spare one, please.

I’m about to thirst to death.”

She walks away. “I’ll be back,” she says.

I look back at the jack-o’-lantern. I’m going to call him Ole Jim. When we were little, Callie and I loved ghost stories. I think what we really loved is that Mother could make up tales that were as good as any you could read in a book. She used to tell one about a man named Ole Jim, who lost his mind and threw two children, brother and sister, down a well where they drowned on Halloween night. Mother said Ole Jim’s soul was punished by roaming the earth until he could hold a little child’s hand and say he was sorry. She told us if we were ever lying in bed and got a chill out of nowhere, that was Ole Jim trying to snuggle up beside us and say he was sorry. That might sound like a scary thing to say to a child, but Callie and I ate it up like sugar. Mother had a hundred stories she learned from her grandmother, who had a touch of Lumbee Indian in her. Mother may not have believed in ghosts, but she definitely allowed for things in this world that cannot be explained by anyone. That, combined with the fact that she taught Sunday school every week of her life that I remember, made her a most interesting minister’s wife. She called herself religious, but she didn’t have any problem also saying that she didn’t think it was possible to know everything there was to know about God from the Bible or a church or a preacher.

The girl with the black hair is back. She looks like she could be part Indian herself, her cheeks are so high and proud. Her hair is shiny in the f luorescent hall light.

“I’ve got a Sprite here for you. Can you drink it by yourself?” “Have you got a straw?” I ask. She’s already gone.

I take a good long sip of Sprite even though it’s not what I asked for. It burns the back of my throat a little, but in that lovely way an ice- cold drink does when you’re parched. I feel the TV remote under my left hip and retrieve it. I’m wide-awake, might as well see if anything is on.

“Boo!”

I look at the doorway and no one is there.

A single hand reaches around the door like a claw, and I hear a wicked laugh. “Boo!” again. Bernice is looking in now, pointing at me and laughing. “I got you!” she says. “I scared you!”

“What do you want in the middle of the night?” “You’ve got the TV on. Are you having a pajama party?”

“I’m having insomnia,” I say, thankfully feeling a little tired again already.

“Let’s watch TV.” She pulls up the visitor chair. It makes a scraping sound on the f loor that makes me cringe slightly. Before sitting down, she snatches one of the blankets off my bed. “You don’t need two, do you?” she says, “You don’t look cold.”

She takes the remote and starts clicking. She f lies past CNN, MTV, and the Food Network, which I have loved ever since being in here where nothing tastes like anything you’ve had before in your life, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. She lingers for a moment on a nature program about snakes but keeps going until she lands on a black-and- white movie with Vincent Price. “This is scary like Halloween. Let’s be scared, okay?” She is trying to edge up into the bed with me, and I let her.

“Trick or Treat’s coming,” she continued. “We’re gonna have to get some candy.”

“Well you’re not going to find a thing in here. All I’ve got is peanut brittle somebody brought, and please tell me who in here has the teeth for peanut brittle.”

“Trick or Treat is his favorite day because he loves sweets.” “Are we going to watch this or not, Bernice?”

“He didn’t want to dress up at all but I said he couldn’t go to peo- ple’s doors without a costume.”

I am accustomed to Bernice not making sense, but I feel annoyed,

I can’t help it. “Stop talking and moving around before one of us falls out of the bed,” I tell her.

“You can dress up like a monkey if you want to but that’s not very scary, sweetheart. How about a green goblin with a big hook nose?”

“Who?” I ask tersely.

“Why are you acting like you don’t know my boy when you’ve met him a hundred times?”

“You’re talking about Cameron’s children? I’m sure they’re long in bed by now.” She practically disregards me.

“No, Cameron’s too old for Trick or Treat. He won’t go. Don’t make him, his daddy said.”

A woman screams on TV. A wax museum figure has just reached out and tried to strangle her. It is blood-curdling. I take the remote from Bernice and turn the volume down. It occurs to me that Vincent Price looked dead even when he was alive. He is young in this movie but he still looks like a corpse. I feel sorry for him. I wonder if he ever got married.