Tiny Dancer (32 page)

“They’re from your trash barrel, aren’t they, Mrs. Curry?” said a booming voice. Reverend Theo
walked up beside me. “I rescued them for you, ma’am.”

Vesta was getting choked up, seeing each plant covered in new blooms

“They were dead, now made alive,” said Theo quietly. “Like your daughter, Siobhan. Like my Anton. They’re gone from here but on the other side, they’re blooming again.”

Vesta fell onto her knees, sobbing while still cradling the
potted daisies. “But why save the funeral flowers?”

“For her,” he said, holding up the red sash. He took a big wooden stake and tied the sash to it, and stood holding it where the garden touched both his property and the Curry’s.
He spoke so all of those gathered could hear. “One day a year ago in June I looked up and saw a little girl standing just inside my garden. I think she was hiding out. I came to see about her, but I found her crying. She didn’t want to dance, she told me. She wasn’t as good as the others, she said. So I invited her to show me, Let me be the judge. She was not what I would call shy. She just lifted right up onto her toes, humming, dancing, spinning. She seemed to bring nature to life for my garden had not come into itself, the seeds were only sprouting.”

Vesta could not speak upon sight of the red sash.
             

“I never forgot that tiny dancer giving me the best gift she could have ever given me, the beauty of her dancing soul.
But then when I heard what had happened later on that day, I drove straight to the hospital and there found her surviving sister, Flannery, in good shape. But the news about the younger child was grievous,” he said.

“I knew that was you,” I said.

“I went home and knelt right where Siobhan had danced, where she had sown tears into my garden. I realized then that I was living in a state of grace. He who sows in tears will reap joy.”

I
felt Dorothea’s fingers slip into mine.

“When I saw the dead plants in your trash barrel, Mrs. Curry, something said to me, save them. Now I know why.”

Vesta got up, backing somberly out of the garden. She approached Reverend Theo and said, “Please forgive me, I’m a sinful woman.” He held her for a good long while, her face in his shoulder. She sobbed, comforted by Dorothea’s hand on her back. Good thing they had experience holding people up.

HuiLin’s
friends joined hands, bowed their heads and did not move the whole time Vesta cried. They said she was sowing tears into the garden.

                                                                      * * * * *

It took two whole days to plant every potted plant. Some of them, Theo said, were cuttings, but there were nearly five hundred plantings in all.

I got up each morning to water one side. Theo watered the other and we met in the middle.

Saturday morning Daddy sat on the bac
k porch and watched Dorothea and I. We wove the water hoses in and around the stakes exercising care, for they were sacred in a sense.

HuiLin’s
friends had argued over the staking of the garden, but finally everyone had a say. There were a collection of garden stakes marking each row the entire width of the garden, some for ancestors, but in the middle of the garden’s edge, not far from the drooping cherry trees that forever preached of a time when both properties were joined, one stake went into the ground wrapped in the red sash. Next, Anton Miller’s stake held equal prominence, painted sunflower yellow and wrapped in blue hair ribbons that fluttered merrily in the wind—his daughters said he would have liked it.

While the garden did not feed peoples’ bellies, it was said it fed their souls, and that was just as good.

I joined Daddy in the shade of the porch where he poured my coffee and gave me a donut.

Fall turned to winter and then came spring. The garden had wintered over, but as each plant pushed its way back through the surface, past the stratum of scorched earth, pressing through the new gift of dirt to lift leaves to the sun, I breathed a sigh of jubilation. I should have faith, Reverend Theo told me on the cold days when it seemed the garden had died. A garden takes on a life all its own when many hands have laid aside differences to bind its wounds.

By May, I
tied with Claudia for top class rank. Claudia pretended she did not care. “Doesn’t matter,” she said and she was right. It did not matter to her, but I was exceedingly relieved to hear announced over the school’s public address system senior year—Flannery Curry will speak at graduation, class Valedictorian.

Following our
graduation ceremony that seemed to come as swift as lightning, I walked away from Claudia and the girls giggling and excited for the all-night parties that lay ahead. For I wanted to thank the Millers who waited out in the corridor.

Dorothea made me promise,
“Send me letters, tell me how you’re doing in college. Or when you meet, you know,
the one
.”

I resolved I
had yet to meet “the one.” Even the hope of Billy Thornton seemed far off. He left for Europe, like he said he would. We had not seen him since.

Then there was one more summer stretching
before us and a return to Lake Sequoia. It would be our last summer as girls, it was said of us. Claudia had once asked me if we would look back on that summer as the worst tragedy ever. But now both Claudia and I knew the truth—our womanhood had been shaped by that long, hot sunflower summer.

“Full scholarship,” I
said the day the letter arrived. I showed the letter to Daddy who had settled happily back into his job as bank guard. Vesta was happy to know that I had decided not to evict her. She and Daddy could live in Periwinkle House as long as they lived—and kept up the mortgage payments. After all, the house was their obligation.

In August,
Claudia drove us away in her new convertible, out of town, aimed toward campus. Much to Dwight Johnson’s dismay, though, not to Yale. Nor was it off to Chapel Hill. Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach had become embedded in our sophomore souls. Neither Claudia nor I had ever been able to shake its spell from our memories of that one summer spent along its shores.

“Have you realized
, Claudia, after class each day, we put down the top on your car and it’s off to the beach?”

“And boys,” said Claudia, “Lots of boys with tans.”

“Oh, I nearly forgot! Let’s drop by the Dollar Warehouse,” I said.

“For school supplies?” asked Claudia.

“I promised to say good-bye,” I said.

“Oh, yes, that’s right,” said Claudia.

We drove past classmates parked at the Twistee Treat. I thought about a day coming when Theo’s children would buy ice cream at the take-out window, no questions asked. Of course, The Friendship Nine had changed the course of the Civil Rights Movement. That’s what they came to be called, those young men who dared to order a burger at the lunch counter in Rockingham. Of course, much was still left to be done. Lost City would still be denied civil rights well into the next century. First hamburgers and then the vote, I guess.

Claudia
pulled into the parking lot of the little chain discount store, the trunk and back seat packed to capacity.

“I’ll pick us up extra pencils and notebook paper,”
I promised, making short work of our stop. “Much cheaper here, family discount.”

Claudia followed me inside and then
gasped. “Look!”

I
had not visited the store since Vesta was promoted to store manager, moving quickly from check-out clerk to manager in only a year. But then Vesta was always organized and ambitious.

Decorating each wall
, and prominently displayed, hung large store posters of privileged employees selected to model for the company publicity advertisements. Hung above a display of sunflower seeds was an enormous poster of Vesta. She was wearing the company’s dollar-green smock, her name embroidered permanently on the pocket,
Vesta, Store Manager.
Vesta Curry was voted “Manager Most Likely to Succeed.”  If that were true, then it was right to assume her face smiled down from Dollar Warehouse posters all across the country. Funny, she had not mentioned it.

“She’s fa
mous,” said Claudia.

“I hadn’t thought of that
,” I said. “I guess we all got what we wanted.” Vesta finally got. her wish for fame.

Claudia went off down the aisle with a shop
ping basket on her arm. I stood for a while looking up at Vesta’s poster. I could not stop smiling.

PATRICIA HICKMAN is an awar
d‐
winning novelist whose works receive consistently good reviews from national reviewers like
Publishers’ Weekly.
She has written seventeen published books including fifteen works of fiction, one collaborative non-fiction book, and two chapter books for children. TINY DANCER  is her eighteenth book. She first studied creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and then went on to receive her MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. PATRICIA writes for major publishers and two of her novels,
The Pirate Queen
and
Painted Dresses
, were on a SIBA bestseller list. She enjoys hiking, fishing, and traveling.

http://www.patriciahickman.com

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