Lena (7 page)

“Mama'd want us to take a bath tonight!” Dion jumped up in her seat. “And eat something hot.”

Miz Lily smiled. “I'd want the same thing for my children. Only I declare I wouldn't have them out all hours of the night trying to get to me. Where's your daddy?”

“Our daddy's dead,” Dion said quickly. “Tractor accident got him.”

I swear that child can lie when she wants to.

 

 

 

You lie long enough, you start believing your lies. Like the whole time I was fake-dialing the hospital from Miz Lily's living room I was believing, come tomorrow, I was gonna see Mama and her new baby. In the kitchen, Dion was helping Miz Lily cook and they were talking like old friends about some book Dion had read last summer. I ran my finger along the number in Miz Lily's yellow pages while the hospital phone rang. When a sweet-sounding woman answered, I pressed the receiver down and gave the dial tone a message for Mama. Then I hung up and walked slow around the living room. Miz Lily had one of those neat old-lady houses—the kind with tiny crocheted saucer-looking things laying across the back of her couch and over her table. She had a whole mantelpiece full of pictures—all kinds of pictures, color and black-and-white ones too. I went up to them to get a better look. We never had any pictures in our house—seems Daddy didn't really like looking at them. There's this one Dion carries around with her. It's from when she was a baby. Mama's holding her in her lap and I'm standing between Mama and Daddy. The picture is turning brown around the edges but every now and then I catch Dion taking it out and staring at it. I remember the day we went to have it taken. Mama had wanted it and Daddy hollered the whole morning about how we couldn't afford it. It was the first time I heard Mama say something about dying. She said,
“What if I die? What the children gonna have to remember me by?”
I stared at Miz Lily's pictures, wondering if any of the people in them had passed on. Nobody had ever really explained dying to me—where a person went to after they left this world.

I stood there and looked at Miz Lily's pictures. You stare at someone's pictures long enough, you can make believe the people in them is your own blood family.

When I walked into the kitchen, Miz Lily was rolling out biscuit dough and Dion was putting glasses down on the table. Miz Lily looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “You get a message to your mama?” she asked.

I nodded.

 

“You tell them to tell her you with Miz Lily Price on Redcliff Road?”

 

“Yes, ma'am.”

Miz Lily started cutting biscuits out with the rim of a glass. Me and Dion watched her, trying not to look too hungry. We hadn't eaten anything since noon and that was only a cold bologna and cheese sandwich we bought at Winn-Dixie. We were trying to hold on to our little bit of money and Dion wouldn't let me steal anything. She said it was too risky.

“I don't have a whole lot to offer but what I got, y'all welcome to. I'm just gonna put these biscuits in the oven and heat up some beef stew I made yesterday.” She smiled. “I never did get used to cooking for one.” She slid the pan of biscuits into the oven. A warm blast of air made its way over to me.

 

I walked over to the oven, trying to get as close as I could to the heat.

 

“You cold?” Miz Lily asked.

I shook my head, moving my toes around in my boots. I wanted to take them off and let my feet warm up but I didn't want Miz Lily to see my dirty socks.

Dion was pouring milk into the glasses. I tried not to stare at her. I could taste the milk making its way down my throat.

“Bathroom's at the top of the stairs there. Y'all get washed up, I have some cheese and crackers in the refrigerator if you want,” Miz Lily said.

I followed Dion up to the bathroom. The tub was long and clawfoot like the one in Marie's house. There was a pink rug on the floor beside it and pink and purple towels piled up on a shelf above it.

“I gotta go,” Dion said, dancing around to get her jeans down.

While she went, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair was sticking out past my ears now and it was a lighter brown from spending so much time outside. There were tiny wrinkles across my forehead. The rings around my eyes looked darker. I leaned over the sink and splashed warm water on my face. It felt good. Soothing.

Dion flushed and stuck her hands under the running water.

“Wonder if she got bubble bath,” she said. She lathered her hands and arms up, then rinsed and held them above the sink.

 

“What towel do we use?”

 

I handed her a small blue towel hanging above the bathtub.

 

“I ain't prejudice, you know,” she said, drying her hands and looking at herself in the mirror. “I just ain't used to some things. If we was riding with black people the whole way, I would've just got in that car no question.”

 

“Shouldn't get in
any
car no question,” I said. “Should always be careful. But don't be prejudice. Don't be like our daddy.”

Dion frowned at herself in the mirror, handed me the towel and bent over to splash water on her face.

“I like Miz Lily,” she said, reaching for the towel again without lifting her face up. “She say her husband died on her of a heart attack. Just up and left this world. Ain't that strange?”

“What's so strange about it?”

Dion pulled the towel away from her face and frowned. “The way there's so much dying in the world. You think it's only you but it ain't. It's everybody. Strange. Don't that beef stew smell good?”

She pressed the towel against her face again and held it there a moment. I smiled. When she pulled the towel away, she looked like a little kid.

“I don't want to be prejudice, Lena,” she said softly. “I don't want to be like Daddy.”

“Good.” I tapped her on the back of the head. “We all just people here. Me, you, Miz Lily, Larry, that waitress at Berta's. You keep that in your head, you'll be all right.”

Dion nodded. “I get something to eat, I probably be even better.”

 

 

 

When we got back downstairs, Dion tried to take small steps back to the refrigerator to make it seem like she could care less about the cheese and crackers. But I knew by the way her hand was shaking as she reached for everything that she was as hungry and excited as I was.

“How many kids you raised?” I asked, sitting down at the table and slowly making myself a cheese and cracker sandwich. Dion had already stuffed a whole chunk of cheese in her mouth and was following it up with a cracker.

“Oh, I guess about eleven, counting the ones that weren't my own.”

“Eleven?” Dion said, spraying cracker crumbs.

Miz Lily checked a pot on the stove, then turned the heat off beneath it. “My own and fosters. I'm sure your mama would do the same thing.”

“Do what?” I asked.

 

“Take in children that needed warm meals,” Miz Lily said. “Give them a bed and a safe evening.”

Dion nodded but I just sat there staring at her, the cracker going dry in my mouth. I didn't know Mama anymore. Even the memory of her was starting to fade away. And if she was so good, why hadn't she left Daddy when he yelled at her and was mean to us? And why hadn't she found some free or cheap doctor somewhere who could've saved her from the cancer?

“I don't know—”

 

“Yes she would've!” Dion said, glaring at me. “She would've taken people in.”

I shot her a look, hoping Miz Lily hadn't caught what she'd just said.

Miz Lily looked from me to Dion, then bent down to the oven and took the biscuits out.

 

“If she wasn't in the hospital right now,” Dion said quickly, catching herself. “With a new baby and all.”

“What'd she have anyway?” Miz Lily asked.

“A little boy,” I said. “She named him Jacob.”

“That's a fine name. My grandbaby's name is Luther. Prettiest little boy you'd ever like to see.” She used a cup to scoop the beef stew into bowls. I watched the steam rise from it.

 

“Can I have some more milk . . . please, ma'am?” Dion asked.

 

“Help yourself, child. If it's in that refrigerator, you can have it.” Miz Lily finished bringing the bowls of beef stew and the plate of biscuits to the table and sat down.

“Dion,” she said. “Since you're the youngest, how about you thanking the Lord for us tonight?”

Dion looked at me, then back at Miz Lily. Dion had her own set of beliefs about God. I shot her a look but she was already opening her mouth to talk.

“God's inside of us,” she said, looking a bit frightened.

We had never prayed. Daddy thought it was a waste of time and Mama thought the Lord knew we were thankful, that He could look into our hearts and see it. Ever since she was a real little kid, Dion would talk about God being inside of us rather than up in some heaven somewhere. Once, this woman living next door to us heard Dion say it and told Mama Dion was blaspheming the Lord's Holy Name. But Mama just smiled and told the woman it was what Dion believed in, so let it be.

Miz Lily looked surprised for a moment. “Well, then I guess your grace will thank the God inside of us, won't it?”

 

Dion was thoughtful for a moment, then she nodded and we all bowed our heads.

 

“Thank you, God,” she said, talking so low I had to strain to hear her. “For being inside of us and showing us our own way.” She stopped for a moment. I lifted my head but Dion and Miz Lily were still bowing theirs so I put mine back down. Steam from the beef stew was rising up, making my mouth water. “Thank you for birds and other peepers keeping us company at night and being inside Miz Lily and me and Lena . . . and all the other people . . . and thank you for food and poetry. Amen.”

Miz Lily raised her head and smiled. “That was a fine blessing,” she said.

Dion blushed, a tiny smile turning up the corners of her lips. I winked at her, too proud to say anything.

Eight

After dinner, me and Dion did the dishes while Miz Lily sat out on the porch. She kept a small radio propping the outside storm window open above the sink and had music playing—classical music, Dion said, humming along to one of the songs as she dried. The inside window was closed against the cold and I could barely hear the music, but through the window I could see Miz Lily's white head moving slowly like maybe she was humming along too. It looked so nice and peaceful, I made myself a plan to draw it later—Miz Lily's white head with the dim gold light of the kitchen melting over it.

“What are you humming to?” I asked Dion. “You can't even hear that song.”

Dion smiled. “I can hear pieces of it and I know the rest. It's Chopin. We studied him in music class this year.” She went back to humming.

I washed the dishes slowly, my mind in a million places at once but mostly it was on Dion. She was too smart to be on the road, needed to be back in school. She could go to college if she wanted. Could be anything she wanted if she set her mind to it.

She stopped humming. “I guess maybe a college professor like Marie's daddy. Teach poetry. I'd want to teach all kinds of things about poetry.” Her eyes lit up suddenly. “Like that music playing. That's poetry without no words in it. And if you was reading a poem, you could read it in the same way.”

I frowned. Sometimes it felt bad not to understand Dion—like she was telling me something real obvious and I couldn't get it.

“You could read it like it was—like the words was notes floating on paper. Floating all around the paper.” She smiled and went back to humming.

I turned off the water for a moment and strained to hear the music through the glass but I couldn't see words in it. Just music. Music, and places where there wasn't music, then more music. Dion's brain worked different from mine. My brain just saw everything in a straight line but hers moved all around, looked at stuff from different angles.

I turned the water back on so Miz Lily wouldn't hear us. “How come you didn't say nothing when Miz Lily was asking about Owensboro?” I whispered. The question had been riding me the whole night but I hadn't had a chance to ask it.

 

Dion looked at me. “Because I didn't know the answers,” she whispered back.

“You could have thought up something.”

She shook her head, picked up a glass and started drying it. “I was too tired to lie some more.”

I turned back to the sink and started scrubbing out a pot. I was tired too. Since we'd left Chauncey, we'd met a whole lot of different people and seen a whole lot of places. I knew what the sun looked like now—when it rose up in the morning and right before it set itself down at night. I knew the way the ending day faded the road to blue then black then made it disappear. And the way the cold could come in and turn the whole world winter-brown. I knew too what it felt like to wake up inside of that cold, your clothes damp, your body so frozen it felt like your
bones
was shivering. I closed my eyes a moment. And on warm days, after a breakfast like the one at Berta's, our bellies full and the sun coming down on our faces as we walked, I knew what it felt like to be free.