The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (17 page)

Technically, it was his and always had been—his grandmother had willed it to his future wife—but I bet he never expected that he would really have any use for such an object. His mother, however, had had other ideas. She’d barged into his room just as he was waking up, handed him the little green velvet box, and said, “You take this ring, and you make everything right.” Bob Bob had looked at the emphatic line of her lips—a line no one ever dared to cross—and hadn’t said a word. He’d merely stretched out his arm and accepted the box.

After she’d left, he’d opened the lid and peered at the luminescent gem. It reminded him of the glass pebbles his mother used in her flower vases, and his heart had suddenly contracted in panic as he’d realized that Serena Jane would most likely insist on similar niceties. Linen napkins for eight, crystal vials of perfume, beveled picture frames filled with flaxen-haired children, not to mention that damn quilt his parents had—Serena Jane would no doubt demand her fair share of household loot.

Or would she? The thing was, in spite of his years of scrutiny of my sister, Bob Bob actually knew little to nothing about her. He had no idea that her favorite flowers were pansies, no clue that she snored like a truck driver, that she ate popcorn and not candy at the movies, and that her favorite chocolates were filled with lavender cream. As far as Bob Bob was concerned, girls shouldn’t eat, smoke, sweat, swear, or shit. And if they did, he didn’t want to know about it. Of course, that was about to change. As soon as he put his grandmother’s ring on Serena Jane’s finger, I knew, she’d begin her offensive. She would nag him to change his socks. She would throw away his favorite baseball cap. She would insist he wear proper shoes instead of sneakers, drink beer from a glass, and mow the lawn on Saturday. Bob Bob may have thought he was the one holding the prize as he dangled that ring between his forefinger and thumb inside his pocket, but soon enough, Serena Jane was going to be the one pulling the strings.

I thought Bob Bob might have had more finesse in choosing his moment, but he caught my sister just as she was descending the dais steps, her arms full of thorny, uncomfortable roses, her kitten heels skittering on the plywood. He didn’t bother to kneel. “Here,” he said, thrusting the ring out at her.

My sister blinked at the diamond blazing in front of her like an accusing eye. She reached out a languid, bare arm and plucked the jewel from Robert Morgan’s fingers. “What’s this?”

The ill will of the moment flushed Bob Bob’s cheeks a mild crimson. “It was my grandmother’s. My mother thinks you should have it.”

Serena Jane exhaled, her breath tinted with the cloves she was chewing to keep nausea at bay. “Oh,” she whispered. She wondered who had told Mrs. Morgan or if she’d just figured it out on her own. Bob Bob’s mother was spooky that way. She always could tell which kids had been out drinking over the weekend and who had taken up smoking, even if it was only one or two a day, and everyone knew it wasn’t Bob Bob who was telling her. He barely even spoke to his parents. She watched him prop an elbow on the dais’s banister.

“So, is it true?” he demanded.

Serena Jane nodded, unaware that her yellow hair, capped with its faux tiara, cast off little sparks of its own in the afternoon sun. “Yes.”

Bob Bob clamped his jaw tight.
One time
, you could tell he was thinking.
It was only one time.
For a physician’s son, I thought he might have been a little better at grasping the basics of human biology. He pulled in his stomach. “I guess my mother’s right, then.” My sister didn’t answer him, so Bob Bob thrust his chin toward her. “Go ahead. Put it on.” He watched as Serena Jane slid the narrow platinum band over her fourth knuckle. The ring was a little big on her hand. It teetered on her finger. Bob Bob sighed. “So.” The word reverberated between the two of them like a note strummed on a warped guitar.

The wooden seats emptied. On the green, people started packing up their picnics and children, wrapping dog leashes around their wrists, and bidding farewell to their friends. The afternoon was coming to a close, and the party was over for another year. Estelle Crane was tugging Dick away from the vicinity of Priscilla Sparrow. Cally Hind was badgering her son about the amount of beer he’d consumed, and Amanda Pickerton was methodically sealing her leftovers in appropriately sized Tupperware containers. One by one, blankets were folded and wicker hampers closed. Soon, I was the only one left slumped behind a dogwood tree on the edge of the lawn. Through its budding leaves, I watched Bob Bob block my sister on the steps. I watched Serena Jane hold up her hand and tilt it, then bury her face in her two palms as if telling herself a secret.

I waited until they left, walking side by side, but without touching, and crept over to the dais. On the bottom step, I found Serena Jane’s May Queen sash, wilted and speckled with spatters of seasonal mud. Every year that happened to the girls. They romped over the lawn, and climbed in and out of boys’ convertibles, and then realized too late that they were freckled with Aberdeen’s dark soil. It was stupid. I could have told them what would happen, but they never thought to ask.

I glanced around, but no one was paying any attention, so I reached down and picked up the sash, draping it over my neck and one shoulder. I didn’t care if the sash was muddy—in my eyes, it was still a prize, something you might hang on a Christmas tree or tie around a present. I thought to run after my sister with it, but Serena Jane was already gone, shuffled off by Bob Bob into her new life. It was a lonely feeling, watching her hobble off with him, like watching a movie that ends badly.
Oh well,
I thought. At least she’d get to be a bride. She’d like that.

I lingered at the little dais for a moment more, one foot poised on the bottom step, contemplating climbing the stage and assuming my sister’s throne. But I could imagine the jeers and taunts that would receive. I pulled my foot down and removed the sash— a cheap piece of ribbon that crumpled in my square hands. All along its edges, I saw that little pieces of thread were fraying and that its ends were simply glued together. Just like anything else in life.

I jammed the sash in the pocket of my blue jeans and went on my way, amazed at the elegance of the early evening sky opening up above me. One by one, tiny stars appeared and then the slimmest arc of the moon, transforming Aberdeen from a weedy, upstate town to a twilit garden. I reminded myself that things were not always what they seemed, large or small, beautiful or rough. I resolved to pay more careful attention to the things around me. No matter how they appeared, I reasoned, things could always change, sometimes maybe even for the better.

Chapter Eleven

S
erena Jane managed to last eight years with Bob Bob, which, if you think about it, is a long time to do penance for anything, never mind for an evening that wasn’t your fault. In all of that time, I saw her only twice. The first time was right after her wedding in mid-June. I wasn’t invited—no one was. It was just Bob Bob, and Serena Jane, and his parents, all of them grim-jawed and quaking in Judge Warson’s office. Serena Jane wore an aquamarine dress the same color as her eyes, and even from my vantage point in August’s truck across the street, the effect was unsettling, making her milk white skin jump out like a ghost’s. She carried a half-wilted nosegay of roses and had tied her hair in a severe knot at the back of her neck.

“I’m sorry, Truly, but I don’t want anyone there,” she insisted when I offered to be her maid of honor. “It’s just going to be a quick ceremony, and then we’re moving to Buffalo while Bob Bob’s in medical school.”

“Where are you having the baby?”

Serena Jane drummed lightly on her belly with her fingers. “Why, Buffalo, of course. That’s where everything will happen from now on, I guess.”

I tried to imagine my sister alone in a strange city with no one for company but Bob Bob. Then I tried to imagine myself without Serena Jane in Aberdeen. Maybe we weren’t sisters like those girls in
Little Women
or any of the other books I’d read, but she was all I had of kin. Of the two of us, I figured, she probably had it worse, and I have to admit, a little part of me was glad.
That’s what she gets
, I thought,
for going off and leaving me again.
I turned my eyes to her, hoping she couldn’t see the tears swimming in them. “When will I see you next?”

“I don’t know, Truly.” Serena Jane blew a wisp of hair off her face. “Christmas, maybe? I imagine we’ll be back for the holidays, after the baby’s born.”

But they weren’t, not for Thanksgiving and not for Christmas, either. The Thanksgiving break was going to be too short, Serena Jane explained in a quick note she sent me in early November, Bob Bob had exams, and the baby was due any minute. They would be home in December, though, for certain.

“What’s the matter?” Amelia asked as she watched me fold the letter up and slide it back in its envelope. She had grown tall and thin over the past few years, but her skin was still as pale as ever, and even though her speech had improved to the point where she would sometimes talk to people outside her family, I could always still hear the trouble her tongue had with certain letters. “Bad news?” Her voice, when it arrived, still had the stubborn and rough quality of a tree stump planted in the ground. People were often surprised that her voice was deeper than mine.

We were sitting on the beds in our shared room. I turned to her. When had Amelia’s face become more recognizable to me than my own sister’s? I wondered. I took in her wet brown eyes and half-bow mouth. If I’d closed my own eyes and grabbed a pencil, I probably could have sketched Amelia to the perfect likeness. Was familiarity as good as blood? I wondered. I laid the letter on my bed, missing my sister, my heart confused.

The baby was a boy named Robert, of course. “Look,” I breathed, showing off the three-by-three black-and-white photo to Amelia. He looked like a tiny warrior, with his fists bundled tightly underneath his chin and his eyes alert. “He was born at four-fifteen a.m.,” I read, “and weighed seven pounds three ounces. They’re calling him Bobbie.”

Amelia examined the photograph. “He looks like Serena Jane,” she said, “but with Robert Morgan’s mouth. That’ll be trouble later.”

But I thought Bobbie looked perfect—so perfect, I wished he were mine. I wondered what motherhood was like, if having a tiny sack of skin and air to hold every minute was a blessing or a burden. There were different kinds of mothers in this world, I knew. I’d watched the cats in the barn. Some of them lavished maternal pride over their offspring, ostentatiously purring and running their sandpaper tongues over the litter. And other mother cats just did the bare minimum, birthing their kittens, then turning tail and lighting out for the fields. I didn’t know what made a cat stay with her brood, nor could I identify what it was in the world that lured the bad ones back to the wild so soon or so hard, but I hoped my sister was more like the former.

I placed the photograph of Bobbie in the shoebox I kept hidden under my bed at the Dyersons’, which, in addition to my father’s old winnings from August’s horses and some more recent ones of my own, contained the single wedding photograph of my parents and a newspaper clipping of Serena Jane as May Queen. It was the closest thing to a family album that I possessed. I was about to place the lid on the box when I was seized by a terrible thought. What if Bobbie turned out to be like me? What if he grew fat and heavy as a melon? What would Bob Bob do with a baby like that? Would he turn all his medical charms on his son, trying to fix a soul that wasn’t broken? Or would he just ignore him, like a piece of dough left to rise too long?

I thought about all the comments I’d had to endure over the years:
Hey, Truly, you get any bigger, we’re going to cast you in bronze and stick you on the town green! Hey, Truly, my truck needs a push—to Mississippi!
After a while, it seemed as though I had those voices ringing inside me all the time, restless as church bells. It wasn’t a music I would wish on anyone, much less a brand-new infant. But you can’t worry about what life’s going to spit in your direction. Babies would grow up to be what they were, and the world would find a place for them. Spending time with August’s cockeyed horses had taught me that. Even the most hopelessly swaybacked among them could throw a race and pull in some cash. I put the lid back on the box and slid it under the worn springs of the bed.

Two years later, I received my diploma, and I even had a little crowd come watch me. Amelia sat in the very back of the audience with Brenda and August, who was smacking his lips, anticipating the special roast beef supper waiting at home. Amanda Pickerton sat front and center, her lips pinched, a gift-wrapped dictionary in her lap. But it was Marcus I missed most of all. Everything felt wrong without him. He would have clapped the loudest, I knew, and whistled when Miss Sparrow handed me the scrolled diploma, her lips stretched tight across her gums. To this day, she is still the only woman I ever knew who could take the act of smiling and make it painful.

“Two points lower, and you wouldn’t be receiving this,” she stated primly, referring to my final exams. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased about the outcome or not.

“Thank you,” I whispered, and Priscilla Sparrow surprised me by grabbing my wrist with the sudden fury of a bird of prey.

“Speak up for yourself,” she said, her little eyes glittering in the afternoon sun. “Always speak up for yourself, girl. Lord knows no one else is ever going to.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I whispered, somewhat louder, then snatched the rolled-up piece of paper and fled.

Dear Serena Jane
, I wrote later that evening,
here is the diploma I got today. I wish you’d have been here to see me get it, but I know you’re real busy now with Bobbie. But Brenda and August were there, and Amelia, too. Mrs. Pickerton gave me a dictionary. When are you coming home? I want to see Bobbie. Can you send more pictures?

Every week, I checked the mail religiously, waiting for some response, but there never was any. Who knows how long I would have kept running out to the rusty mailbox and peering into its empty mouth, convinced that it was my lucky day, if August hadn’t won the unluckiest horse of his life and taught me all over again that the world had different rules for the likes of us?