Orchard of Hope (18 page)

And each time Stephanie Grace did a little somersault inside her womb, Tabitha knew it was true. She could hardly wait until she could hold the baby in her arms. Her father kept reminding her that she couldn’t be sure she was having a girl and not a boy, but Tabitha knew. She was sure. She wanted a girl. She had to have a girl.

A boy might look like Jerome, and Jerome didn’t deserve any part of this baby. Before he had split without saying so much as boo to Tabitha, he’d given DeeDee money to “take care of the problem” and make the baby disappear.

Tabitha supposed that had worked. Maybe not the way Jerome had planned and the way DeeDee had advised, but it had made the baby disappear from California. Tabitha had used Jerome’s money to buy a bus ticket home to Hollyhill. Now there were other reasons to hope her baby had no part of Jerome. In California it hadn’t mattered all that much that Jerome had black skin and she had white, but Hollyhill wasn’t California.

A long way from it. People here held tight to the same old-fashioned ideas they’d always had. Still, the church people out at Mt. Pleasant hadn’t fired her father as preacher when they found out Tabitha was expecting a baby without benefit of matrimony. That had been a surprise. And a relief. So maybe a few things had changed.

But probably not the black and white race stuff. Of course, who knew if she would even stay in Hollyhill after Stephanie Grace was born? Tabitha couldn’t see herself living there cocooned in her father’s house forever, but for now it felt good to be where she was safe and loved.

That’s what she wanted for little Stephanie Grace after she was born. Love and security. If Tabitha didn’t think her baby could have that in Hollyhill, then she’d take her where she could be loved and accepted no matter what color her skin turned out to be. Even if that was all the way back across the country to California.

Not that she could look to DeeDee for any help. Tabitha had written to her mother, but she hadn’t heard the first word back from her. DeeDee didn’t want to hear about being a grandmother. She hadn’t even wanted to be a mother.

Tabitha had never thought that much about whether she wanted to be a mother or not. She certainly hadn’t planned on being a mother this soon. She’d just been carried away by the moment with no thought about the future. But once she’d realized the baby was growing inside her, all her thoughts changed. She not only wanted to be a mother, she was a mother from the first moment of awareness of the baby inside her.

And as a mother, she’d do whatever she had to in order to give Stephanie Grace the best chance of a happy life. Her own happiness didn’t matter, even though she did sometimes dream of meeting someone who would love not only her but her baby as well. She didn’t let herself think about that very often. She wasn’t sure she deserved to find love. But she couldn’t deny that her heart yearned for it.

At the bottom of the stairs, Tabitha took a peek over toward where Wes slept. She was surprised to see him sitting up in his chair drinking coffee. And he wasn’t alone. Jocie was sitting on his cot, her lap full of curlers and her hair sticking out in odd angles. Tabitha stopped moving. “Oh, I guess I can quit tiptoeing now.”

“Never no need in tiptoeing,” Wes said. “I told you it don’t bother me none for you to come down to the toilet.”

“Morning, Tabitha,” Jocie said. “I didn’t know you ever got up this early.”

“This isn’t early. It’s the middle of the night,” Tabitha said.

“It’s daylight,” Jocie said.

“What’s daylight got to do with it? And I’m not up. I’ve just got some urgent business to take care of.”

Wes held up his coffee cup toward her. “After you take care of that business, come join us for some middle-of-the-night coffee.”

“The doctor says I shouldn’t drink coffee,” Tabitha said with a look at Jocie. “And you shouldn’t either, Jocie. You’re not old enough for coffee.”

Jocie held up her cup. “Iced tea.”

“In a cup?”

“Why not?” Jocie took a sip.

“Okay. Whatever,” Tabitha said as she hurried on to the bathroom. “Bring me some saltines to go with it so maybe I can keep from flipping it.”

When Tabitha came back from the bathroom, a cup of iced tea and a package of crackers were waiting for her. Tabitha lowered herself on the cot beside Jocie.

“Thanks,” she said as she pulled one of the big square crackers out, then passed the package to Wes and Jocie who both took one too. “You guys have these middle-of-the-night tea parties often?”

Wes broke his cracker up into four smaller squares. “Not often. Just on the nights Jo here starts high school.”

Tabitha looked over at Jocie, who shrugged and said, “Too excited to sleep, I guess.”

Tabitha took a sip of her tea and then a nibble off her cracker. Usually crackers stayed down even in the mornings. “What have you done to your hair?”

Jocie touched her hair gingerly. “I rolled it up.”

“She has to have curls,” Wes said. “All high school girls have to have curls. It’s an established fact.”

“Not in California.” Tabitha pulled a strand of her long honey brown hair over her shoulder. “There everybody wanted long, straight hair. I knew this one girl who even ironed her hair every morning. But not me. I didn’t mind a few waves.”

“I may have to iron mine to get it to lay down.” Jocie made a face as she combed through her hair with her fingers. “I don’t think it curled.”

“It looks like it might have rebelled a little instead,” Tabitha agreed.

Jocie looked down at her cracker. “Maybe I’ll just be sick and not go to school.”

“It doesn’t look that bad,” Tabitha said. “Go get a brush and we’ll work on it. And if we can’t comb it out, you’ve still got plenty of time. You can just wet it and start fresh. Trust me, everybody won’t have curly hair.”

“For sure, if I don’t.” Jocie didn’t look happy, but she got up and went to get a brush.

When she came back, she sat on the floor in front of Tabitha and let her brush her hair. “You didn’t bring a mirror,” Tabitha said.

“I’ll just look at Wes and tell by the look on his face how bad it is.”

“It looks better now that you’ve got them wire contraptions out of it, but I can’t really say I’m much of a judge on hairstyles. I just sort of let mine go where it wants, Jupiter style.”

“What is Jupiter style?” Tabitha asked. She’d gotten used to hearing Wes and Jocie’s Jupiter stories since Wes had been at the house. It was sort of fun to go along with them. Maybe that’s what she’d tell people about Stephanie Grace’s daddy. That he was from Saturn or somewhere. She hadn’t come up with a very good story yet. Her father said she didn’t owe anybody an explanation, and that was okay for most people. But someday she’d have to tell Stephanie Grace something.

“The kind of style where you just let your hair grow whichever way it wants without bothering it with combs and such,” Wes said.

“Well, Jocie might rather have an Earth style.” Tabitha combed Jocie’s hair back and to the side. There were a few humps where the curlers had been, but no real curls. “A little more brushing and you’ll be good as new.”

“You mean just like always.” Jocie sighed as she leaned back against Tabitha’s stomach.

“Better than Jupiter style,” Tabitha said with a laugh. The baby jumped inside her and pushed with her feet against the front of Tabitha’s belly.

“Hey, she kicked me,” Jocie said, leaning forward. She turned around and put her hand on Tabitha’s stomach. “She’s getting really strong.”

“Swimming around in there like crazy,” Tabitha said. “She must like tea parties in the middle of the night. That doesn’t bode well for the future.”

“You want to feel her, Wes? She’s really kicking.” Jocie looked at Wes and then Tabitha. “You don’t mind, do you? I mean, if Wes is my granddaddy, that makes him Stephanie’s great-granddaddy.”

“Now hold on there,” Wes said. “I ain’t going with this great-granddaddy stuff. I may be old, but I ain’t that old.”

Tabitha laughed. “You can be the favorite uncle. So go ahead and tell her hello, Uncle Wes.”

Wes hesitated, then reached out his hand and laid it flat on the front of Tabitha’s stomach. Stephanie Grace performed right on cue and bounced her feet off his hand. “I think she’s dancing,” he said. He took his hand away and leaned back. “Thank you, Tabby. There ain’t nothing like a new baby.”

Tabitha looked at him. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

“I wasn’t in a spaceship all my life.” An odd look passed over his face.

Jocie was staring at Wes. “You’ve never told me anything about babies, Wes.”

“Nobody ever knows anybody else’s whole story, Jo,” Wes said as he held up his hand to stop her before she could say anything else. “And you ain’t going to find it out today, so don’t start in with your questions. You got plenty enough to worry about with having to be the no-curl trendsetter this morning.”

“There aren’t any curls then?” Jocie said, looking first at Wes and then at Tabitha. “I slept on those rollers for no good reason?”

“Sorry, kid. No curls.” Tabitha patted Jocie’s shoulder.

“But look on the bright side,” Wes said. “We got to have a middle-of-the-night tea party. Now I think I hear your daddy stirring upstairs, so you’d better go put on another pot of coffee.”

Tabitha stood up and yawned. “Stephanie Grace is worn out from all that dancing. Me and her are going to get the rest of our beauty sleep.” She handed Jocie the brush. “Your hair looks fine the way it is, Jocie. Besides, it’s the eyes that really matter, and you have the best eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“I do?”

“You do.”

“But boys like curves,” Jocie said. “I don’t have any of those.”

“Who cares what boys like? That just gets girls like us in trouble. Look at me. I’m a prime example. The important thing is being true to yourself.”

“And to the Lord,” Tabitha’s father said as he came down the stairs to join them. “Did somebody forget to tell me we were having breakfast an hour earlier this morning?”

“Talk to these two.” Tabitha pointed at Wes and Jocie. “It must be some kind of Jupiter ritual on the first day of school.”

19

Walking into the high school wasn’t as scary as Jocie had imagined. Her heart was beating extra hard when she told her father good-bye and climbed out of the car in front of the school and the nervous ants were dancing around inside her skin, but she never once thought about not walking up the steps into the school. Instead, she practically ran up them to the door.

Right inside the door, a big sign directed all freshmen to the gym. A few teachers were standing around to point the way down the hall to the double doors that led out to the gym if freshman stupidity kept any of them from moving in the right direction.

As Jocie walked toward the gym, the nervous ants worn out from all that dancing fell asleep, and she forgot about being scared. It didn’t even bother her when she saw Ronnie Martin and some of his buddies leaning against the wall, giving the freshman girls the eye. She had acted as if Ronnie Martin was invisible for weeks at church. It wasn’t a bit hard to carry that over to school. So if he was invisible, the boys with him could be invisible too.

When she passed by them she thought she heard somebody say, “Hey, look, there’s the preacher’s kid. She looks more like a fourth grader than a freshman. Hey, little girl, you sure you’re not lost?”

She looked around, but since Ronnie and the others were invisible, she just stared straight through them at the wall.

“Where’s your darkie shadow, huh?”

For a second she almost saw Ronnie, but then his shape just sort of melted away in front of her eyes. She didn’t care what Ronnie Martin had to say. Her father and Ronnie’s father had forced them to face one another at Mt. Pleasant one Sunday after church while Ronnie pretended to apologize for the awful things he’d said to Jocie and she pretended to accept the apology, but they both knew they were pretending. Not a thing had changed in his heart. Or in hers. Some things were just too mean to forgive.

She didn’t really want to think about what her father was always preaching the Bible said about forgiveness. About how a person had to forgive to be forgiven. That was in the red-letter part of her Bible, which meant it was Jesus talking, but surely the Lord understood that some forgiving took longer than other forgiving. Sometimes Jocie thought about talking it out with her father, but there just hadn’t been the right time. And besides, her father thought she’d already forgiven Ronnie when she’d put on that big pretending act at church.

She pushed all that to the back of her mind. She didn’t have time to worry about that now. She had to think about being a freshman on her first day of high school as she moved along with the other kids toward the gym. She knew nearly all of them, so she supposed Tabitha had been right about starting high school with all the kids she’d always gone to school with not being all that hard. And Tabitha had been right about the curly hair too. Some other girls had hair just as straight as Jocie’s, and some looked sort of like Jocie had looked before Tabitha had brushed the weird kinks out of her hair that morning. At least Jocie had bra straps under her new blouse. She might not need them, but she had them.

What Jocie really needed was a camera. All around her she saw pictures that would be great on the front page of the
Banner
. One of Mr. Madison, the principal, handing out schedules to three or four black kids might have made the top fold. Jocie took a closer look to see if one of the boys was Noah, but it wasn’t. She idly wondered if he was there yet before she let her mind go back into picture mode. The back of the freshman kids in front of her moving toward the gym like so many lemmings to the sea would be another great shot. She could have gotten a good portrait study of Mr. Hardin, the basketball coach, checking out how much the boys had grown over the summer. His eyes really narrowed in on the new black boys. The black high school over in Grundy had a great team nearly every year.

But her father hadn’t let her bring her camera. He said she needed to think about her first day of high school and not about pictures for the
Banner
. He promised to take a few shots out front before he went over to the elementary school. Cute little first graders sold more papers than high schoolers.