“Real nice.” Her face was finely wrinkled like a piece of thin white tissue paper that’s been crumpled around a Christmas present and then smoothed out by careful hands. “Jack and Caroline were down with then-new baby, and he’s the spitting image of his great-granddaddy. They named him after Jed, you know.”
The driver behind us tapped his horn. Not ugly. Just letting us know the light was green and he couldn’t get by with us in the middle of the lane, so if we didn’t mind . . .
It was nobody I knew, but Miss Sallie thought he was saying hello and she waved to him abstractedly. “I better not hold y’all up,” she said. “I just wanted you to tell Zell that we sure did appreciate that fruitcake. It was so moist and sweet, just the best I’ve had since your mother died, honey.”
“I’ll tell her,” I promised, easing off the brake. “And that reminds me,” I told Marnolla as she closed the window and we drove on. “Aunt Zell sent you a fruitcake, too.”
“That’s mighty nice of her. She still making them like your mama used to?”
“Far as I know.”
Slyness needled
Marnolla’s
chuckle. “No wonder
Miz
Sallie thought it was so good.”
She always knew how to zing me.
“Never mind Aunt Zell’s fruitcakes,” I told her. “We were talking about you stealing baby diapers for ‘nobody.’ Nobody who?”
“Nobody you ever met.”
Her face took on a stubborn set and I knew there was no point trying to pry a name. Didn’t matter anyhow. Whoever the mother was, she wasn’t the one who tried to walk out of Billy Tyson’s
Bigg
Shopp
with a brand-new layette. It wasn’t that Marnolla
wanted
to steal or even
meant
to steal; it’s that her heart was bigger than her weekly paycheck from the towel factory and sometimes she got impulsive. With her daughter Avis engrossed in a fancy job out in California and nobody of her own to provide for, she tried to mother every stray that wandered in off the road.
“What’s Avis going to think when she hears about this?” I scolded.
“She
ain’t
never going to hear,” Marnolla said firmly.
Avis was a little younger than me, born when Marnolla was only fourteen. She was the first baby I’d had much to do with and I’d hung over her crib every chance I got, gently holding her tiny hands in mine, marveling over every detail, right down to the little finger on her left hand that crooked at the tip just like
Marnolla’s
. I really mourned when Marnolla and Sid moved into Dobbs while Avis was still just a toddler. Sid split to California a few years later; and when Avis was fifteen and going through a wild stage in school, she took thirty dollars from
Marnolla’s
purse and hitchhiked out to live with him.
Marnolla grieved over it at first, but eventually reckoned that Avis needed her daddy’s stronger hand to keep her in line. Every time I saw Marnolla and remembered to ask, she had only good things to say about the way Avis had turned her life around: Avis was finishing high school; Avis was taking courses at a community college; Avis had landed a real good job doing something with computers, Marnolla wasn’t quite clear what.
“Not married yet,” Marnolla kept reporting. “She’s just like you,
Deb’rah
. Working too hard and having too much fun to bog herself down with
menfolk
and babies.”
I was glad Avis was doing so good, but it was too bad she couldn’t find the time to come visit her own mother. Not that I’d ever said that to Marnolla, she being so proud of Avis and all. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that if Marnolla had somebody she was special to, she might not keep trying to help more people than she could afford. Loneliness is a big hole that takes a lot of filling sometimes.
I pulled up and parked in front of her little shotgun, three rooms lined up one behind the other so that if you fired through the front door, the pellets would go straight out through the back screen. The wood frame house was old and needed paint, but the yard was raked and tidy and the porch railing was strung with cheerful Christmas lights. A wreath of silver tinsel hung on. the door.
“I’d ask you in,” Marnolla said, “but you’re probably in a hurry.”
“You got that right,” I agreed. “I need to get up with Billy Tyson before all his Christmas spirit evaporates. Maybe I can talk him out of it one more time, but I swear, Marnolla, you can’t blame him for being so ill about this after you
promised
on a stack of Bibles you’d never take another penny’s worth from his store.”
“Tell him I’m sorry,” she said as she stood with the car door open. A gust of chill December wind caught the gold bells pinned to her coat and they twinkled in the afternoon sunlight. “Tell him I won’t do it never again, honest”
She didn’t look all that repentant to me and Billy Tyson didn’t look to be all that full of Christmas spirit when I entered his office back of the cash registers at the
Bigg
Shopp
. He gave me a sour glance and went on punching numbers on his calculator.
“You here about Marnolla Faison?”
“Well, your ad did say bargains so good they’re practically a steal.”
It didn’t get the grin I’d hoped for.
“Forget it,
Deb’rah
. I’m not dropping charges this time.”
He’d gained even more weight than Marnolla over the years, and the bald spot on the top of his head had grown bigger since the first time I’d stood in his office and talked him out of prosecuting Marnolla for shoplifting.
“How come she always steals from me anyhow?” he growled. “How come she don’t go to K mart or Rose’s?”
“You’re homefolks,” I said. “She wouldn’t steal from strangers.”
“That’s because strangers would’ve put her in jail the first time she tried it with them. That’s what I should’ve done.” He glared at me. “What I
would’ve
done, too, if you hadn’t talked me out of it. Well, no more, missy. This time when the judge asks me if I’ve got anything to say, you’re not going to hear me ask him to let her off with some
piddly
little fine. This time she gets to see the inside of a jail, if I have anything to say about it. And I will, by damn! As president of the Merchants’ Association, I’ve got an example to set.”
“And you set a fine example, Billy,” I wheedled. “Everybody says so, but it’s Christmas and a little baby needed a few things and—”
“
Dammit
,
Deb’rah
, you can’t talk about Christmas like the Merchants’ Association don’t do their part.
We’re civic-minded as hell and we give and we give and—”
“And everybody appreciates it, too,” I assured him. “But you know how Marnolla is.”
“What Marnolla is
is
a common thief and she’s
gonna
go to jail like one! Every time she wants to act like a big shot with some poor soul, she comes in here and steals something from
me
to give to
them”
“Oh, come on, Billy. How much did she actually try to take? Thirty dollars’ worth? Forty?” I reached for my wallet, but he waved me off.
“Don’t matter if it
wa’n’t
but a nickel. It’s the principle of the thing.”
“Principle or not, you know she won’t get more than a couple of weekends at the most.”
“Not if Perry Byrd hears the case,” he said shrewdly.
He had me there. Judge Perry Byrd adores the principle of things. Especially if the defendants are black or Hispanic.
“I expect you’re just tired out with too much Christmas,” I said. “You have a nice New Year’s and we’ll talk some more next week.”
“You can talk all you want” He had a mule-stubborn look on his face. “You’re not
gonna
get around me this time.”
I made a quick walk through
Bigg
Shopp’s
shoe racks before leaving just in case something nice had been marked down. There was a darling pair of green
slingbacks
. I didn’t have a single winter thing to go with them at the moment, but Aunt Zell had made me several floral-print sundresses last summer and they’d match those dresses.
Besides, they were only $18.50.
Billy had come out of his office to help out at the express lane. I smiled at him sweetly as I gave him the shoes and a twenty. “Unless you’d rather I shopped at K mart or Rose’s?”
“Paying
customers are always welcome at
Bigg
Shopp
,” he said and handed me my change.
But at least he finally smiled. I dropped the change into the crippled children’s jar beside the cash register and went out to the parking lot with a happier heart, figuring if I kept working on him, I could maybe soften him up before
Marnolla’s
case was called.
As I put my new shoes in the trunk, I saw the fruitcake Aunt Zell had sent Marnolla.
For just a minute, I thought about running back in the store and giving it to Billy. In his mood, though, he’d probably consider it a bribe instead of a present in keeping with the holidays.
For some reason, people like to poke fun at Christmas fruitcake and joke about how there’s really probably only a hundred or so in the whole United States and they just get passed around from one year to the next.
Those people never tasted Aunt Zell’s.
For starters, she uses Colleton County nuts. Not those puny dried-up English walnuts you get in the grocery store, but thick, meaty pecans and rich black walnuts. She goes easy on the citron and heavy on her home-dried apples and figs. When the dark dense loaves come out of the oven in late October, the first thing Aunt Zell does, before they’re even cool, is wrap them up in cheesecloth and slosh on a generous splash of what she euphemistically calls “
Kezzie’s
special apple juice.” They get basted like that every week till Christmas.
(She says
Kezzie
hasn’t run any white whiskey since Mother died and he moved back to the main farm. The applejack he brings her every fall is some private stock he’s had stashed back somewhere aging all these years. Or so he tells her.)
I live in town with Aunt Zell, my mother’s sister, and I’m touchy about discussing my daddy, but it
is
the best fruitcake in Colleton County and that’s not idle bragging. The one time she entered it at the state fair ten years ago, they gave her a blue ribbon.
Dusk was falling when I got back to
Marnolla’s
. The lights on her porch blinked colorfully in the twilight and the calico cat curled on the railing came over to meet me as I mounted the two steps and knocked on the door.
When Marnolla opened it, the cat twined around and through her ankles. She scooped it up and stood in the doorway stroking its sleek body.
Her own body was encased in a long woolly red robe that looked warm and Christmassy. “What’d he say?” she asked.
It was cold on the porch and I could smell hot coffee and cornbread inside. “Let’s go in the kitchen and I’ll tell you.”
“No.”
I thought she was joking. “Come on, Marnolla. I’m freezing out here.”
“I let you in, you’ll start asking questions and fussing,” she said.
“What’s to fuss about?”
“See? Asking questions already,” she grumbled, but she stood aside and let me step into her living room. It was dark except for the multicolored glow of her Christmas tree. Normally the room was neat as a pin; that night, in addition to the expected clutter of opened presents at the base of the tree, there was a stack of quilts folded at the end of the couch and a pillow on top.
“You got somebody staying here?” I asked, as the cat trotted from the living room on through her bedroom and out to the kitchen.
Before she could answer, I heard someone speak to it. The next minute, a young girl stepped into view and I suddenly knew why Marnolla had tried to steal baby items.
She didn’t look a day over twelve. (I later learned she was fifteen.) Except for her swollen abdomen, she was slender and delicately formed, with a childish face. But her lovely almond-shaped eyes were the eyes of a fearful adult, as if she’d already seen things no child in America should have had to see.
“Her name’s Lynette and she’s going to be staying with me awhile,” said Marnolla in a voice that warned me off any nosy questions. “Lynette, this here’s Miss Deborah Knott My daddy used to sharecrop with hers.”
She nodded at me shyly from the kitchen, but neither joined us nor spoke as she picked up the cat and moved out of my sight Marnolla was giving off such odd vibes that I briefly described Billy Tyson’s determination to see her in jail, handed over the fruitcake, and edged my way out the front door again.