Mama Cracks a Mask of Innocence (9 page)

Mama served the cake and iced tea then she went to check on Agatha, who had evidently gotten up, made her own lunch, and had gone back to bed because when Mama came back to the kitchen, she carried a tray with dirty dishes on it.

Sarah, Annie Mae, and Carrie ate the cake and drank the iced tea in absolute quiet, no more sniping at Mama.

I made myself a sandwich, then offered to make Mama one. She accepted.

As soon as the three women finished, Mama left her own food to cut them another piece of pound cake.

Annie Mae spoke first, since her plate was the first to be emptied. “Candi, ain’t no use asking you for your recipe, is it?”

Mama smiled. “If you’d like it, Annie Mae, I’ll give it to you.”

Sarah looked into her now emptied plate. “No use getting it, Annie Mae. You ain’t about to put flour, eggs, sugar, and butter together like Candi!”

Mama smiled, flattered by compliments of her cooking. Then she glanced up at the clock. “I really have to get supper started for James,” she said to the women.

“When are you going to come to the center to get those clothes separated so we can help Ray deliver them?” Carrie snapped, remembering why she had come to our house.

“Tomorrow morning,” Mama answered. “First thing tomorrow morning.”

Mama had good intentions, but sometimes unanticipated things can come upon you so quickly that they can change the best of plans. What happened to my mother and me a few hours after dinner was just such an unnerving event.

A
fter our visitors had departed, Agatha came out of her room. “Old man Elliott Woods stopped by not too long ago,” she told us as she entered. “He left a mess of okra, said he was sure you would’ve wanted him to. I thought you’d want them cooked for supper so I washed them, cut them up, and put them in the refrigerator.”

“You sit down,” Mama insisted, cleaning off the table. “You’re not well yet.”

Agatha obeyed, pulled a chair from the kitchen table and sat down. “Elliott is a talker, isn’t he?” she told us.

“Elliott does have the gift of gab.”

“He liked to talk my head off, going on about the women who buy his vegetables because they are so good. You’d think he was trying to get me to be one of his customers.”

Mama laughed. “I suppose he was prospecting, seeing as you don’t buy his vegetables.”

Agatha didn’t say anything.

“I was thinking about cooking some new potatoes and roast chicken,” Mama told her. “You think that will suit you, Agatha?”

Agatha smiled and nodded.

“It’ll suit me,” I cut in, as I thought of the succulence of Mama’s roast chicken. “I don’t remember Elliott bringing fresh vegetables before this.” The truth was that I knew very little about this vegetable man.

“Elliott is an old-timer,” Agatha told me, her voice slightly breathy, soft. “His daddy and my daddy used to share farmworkers together to harvest their watermelon crops.”

“Sarah, Carrie, and Annie Mae told me,” Mama added, “that Elliott used to run a big, productive farm.”

“That was years ago,” Agatha told us. “Besides, the big farmers with company backing are the only ones that make money today in farming.”

“Well, according to Sarah, Elliott wouldn’t give up digging in the soil. He plants a very productive garden.”

“Not that good,” Agatha muttered.

Mama smiled. “He used to sell his vegetables directly to the Winn-Dixie. Then he had some kind of run-in with the manager. So he decided to take his wares directly to the customers, to women like me who buy fresh vegetables several times a week.”

“If all the women who buy Elliott’s vegetables
buy as many as Mama does,” I said, “Elliott has a very good business.”

Agatha coughed. “I don’t buy his stuff—I’ve got my own garden.”

I couldn’t help but think that it was in her garden that she’d had the heart attack, and I opened my big mouth and said, “It might be a good idea for you to cut back on planting a garden.”

In one split second Mama and Agatha exchanged looks, and I could see that I’d said the wrong thing. After a few seconds of awkward silence, Agatha yawned.

“I’d better go back to bed,” she finally said, standing. “Doctor said I needed lots of rest.”

Once she was back in her room, Mama whispered, “Agatha is clearly not interested in talking about cutting back on anything she does, Simone. But it’s clear that the day is fast approaching when she’ll have to cut back on some things if she plans to continue to live alone.”

“I won’t be the one to talk to her about rethinking anything,” I told her.

Mama’s eyebrows rose, but she didn’t respond. She was pulling out a chicken, getting it ready for its roasting. I helped Mama prepare dinner. Don’t get me wrong, Mama is the head chef and I’m perfectly satisfied just sitting and watching her. But you didn’t have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to see that she had a little more than enough to handle at the moment. Not only was she under the gun to get
results for her boss, she had a community center full of clothes to be distributed, and the care of a cousin who wasn’t used to being taken care of.

I’d made the right call when I decided to help with dinner because when my mother had everything either on the stove, or ready to go into the oven, she sighed deeply. Then, without saying much more, she made herself a cup of peppermint tea and headed to a chair in the family room. The look on her face was clear—she needed downtime.

I decided to give Mama some space: I’d go ask Agatha why she treated the handsome Ray Raisin like he carried the plague.

The room where Mama had put Agatha is the one that Cliff usually stays in when he comes home with me. And it’s the room where Will’s basketball trophies and a wall lined with pictures of his team’s successes are kept. There are also the five certificates of achievement that Rodney stacked up during the many selling contests he entered.

When I entered the room, Agatha, who was propped on a pillow and thumbing through a magazine, looked up as if she knew what was on my mind. “Don’t ask me anything about Ray Raisin,” she mumbled.

“You make it difficult for me not to want to know,” I told her.

“It isn’t anything that needs to be stirred.”

“Ray Raisin is an angel, what could possibly be wrong with him?”

Agatha’s eyelids fluttered, then she broke eye contact. “Angel!” She laughed. “I’ve seen more than one person with wings turn out to be an angel of darkness rather than an angel of light.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. “Come on, Agatha, tell me the dirt!”

Agatha was silent for a moment. Then she yawned, eased down against the pillows and gestured impatiently for me to leave the room. “I’m tired. Doctor says I need rest!”

I took a deep breath and did the only thing I could do—I left the room. Instead of going back into the family room with Mama, however, I turned left to my bedroom. I wanted to speak with Cliff. When I called his office he was still in, and I got right through to him. I told him about Mama’s boss, Hattie Russell’s, offer to pay her to find who killed the teenager she had mentored.

“Miss Candi is at it again,” Cliff said, “sleuthing out killers in little old Otis.”

“We’re going to visit one of the dead girl’s teachers after dinner. Mama got a tip that she may have something to do with drugs on the high school campus.”

“A murder and drugs—”

“And accusations of a young girl being molested by her stepfather.”

“Are you sure you’re in a small town? Sounds like
the city there, with all this crime. You and Miss Candi had better be careful.”

“We will,” I promised.

“Are you ready to come home?”

“I’m ready to see you.”

“You miss me?”

“You know it.”

“Well, say it—say, Cliff, baby, I
really
miss you!”

I laughed. “Cliff baby,” I repeated obediently, “I
really
miss you!”

“How much?”

“I think you’d better stop while you’re ahead.”

Now he laughed. “You know I love you,” he said slowly, like he was savoring his own words. It was words I’d heard before, but not with the same flavor.

“I love you too, Cliff,” I told him.

Then, as if he’d been snatched back from wherever he suspected our conversation was going, he said, “You and Miss Candi had better be careful. You remember the last time you went snooping. You both came very close to meeting your Maker in a ditch.”

“Do me a favor,” I said, deciding that we’d permanently veered off the romantic trail of our conversation. “Go to my apartment, get my mail out of the box, check my answering machine, water my plants.”

“Anything else your faithful and loyal servant can do for you, madam?” Cliff teased.

“Yes,” I shot back. “But I’ll give
that
order when you get here!”

After dinner Mama and I set out to visit Kitty Sharp, the person whose name Dolly had whispered in Mama’s ear. “You know what Agatha said when I tried to get her to tell me why she didn’t like that handsome Ray Raisin?” I asked Mama. We were passing Agatha’s empty house: Dolly had told us that Kitty lived several miles down the road.

Mama looked at me.

“She said that she knew more than one person who wore wings who turned out to be an angel of darkness rather than an angel of light.”

“I agree with Agatha,” Mama told me.

“I don’t care how many times she puts me off, I’m going to find out what went down between her and Ray Raisin. I can’t imagine a man that fine doing anything to deliberately hurt Agatha.”

The clock on the dashboard flashed nine-fifteen when we pulled up in front of Kitty Sharp’s house. My headlights shone on a dark-colored Jaguar parked in front of us.

“Boy,” I commented. “Who’d ever thought there would be somebody who made enough money in Otis to afford a Jaguar? There is at least one person in this town who is making some
serious
money!”

“Uh-um,” Mama said, then, “Simone, blow the horn.”

Nothing.

“What now?” I asked.

“If that’s Kitty Sharp’s car, she’s home. If she had a dog, he’d’ve been out here by now—I’m going to knock.”

I waited in the car, in case I needed to use my horn again. But Mama made it to the porch without any incident. She knocked on the open door. She called, “Miss Sharp!” After a few moments, she called me. “Simone, come on up. I hear footsteps. Somebody is inside, I’m sure of it.”

I got out of the car and walked up on the porch, all the while looking cautiously for any approaching canines. Mama knocked again, but still nobody came to the door.

Then my mother pushed the door open a little bit farther, at least wide enough to be able to look inside. It was dark, the house eerily quiet, the smoke and odor of some recently burned incense seized our nostrils.

“Miss Sharp,” Mama called again.

Nothing.

“There isn’t anybody home,” I told Mama.

“I heard footsteps,” she insisted, stepping across the threshold.

“Let’s not go inside,” I said, reaching to pull Mama back onto the porch with me, but only to see her disappear into the dark house.

After a second I followed her. A few steps inside, I found her, standing motionless in the dark hallway.
I grabbed her hand and tightened my grip. “Let’s stay together,” I whispered.

Mama took a few cautious steps forward, then halted. “Do you have a flashlight in your car?”

“Yes.”

“Go get it,” she told me.

“What about the light switch?” I asked her, puzzled.

“That was the first thing I tried. The lights didn’t come on.”

“Come with me,” I said, tugging her hand toward me.

We stepped back onto the front porch. The peaceful countryside, the silence of the area, had suddenly taken on an ominous feeling. Although the evening was warm, I shivered. I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that something—someone—was in that house watching, waiting.

I ran to my Honda, grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment, then ran back to Mama.

Once back on the porch, I handed Mama the light. She slipped inside again, shining the light around the darkness. The first thing we saw was a large black coffee table. We were in the living room. Small plastic bags were stacked on the table.