Tiny Dancer (26 page)

“She knows, Mother. Flannery saw Daddy at the strip club too. Tell her, Flannery.”

I could not breathe. I
glanced through the patio glass and saw Dwight’s back to us as he fumbled, stirring the bowl of icing.

“
You know too?” Irene looked horrified.

“I don’t know, Mrs. Johnson, and neither does Claudia,”
I said. “Yes, we went to the club on a tip that Claudia would catch her father there with a woman. He was there but we didn’t see him with a woman.” I stared in disbelief at Claudia who, by now, looked betrayed.

“But you saw him at the strip club?” Irene
repeated herself.

“We did,” said Claudia. “I told you everything, about
the phone call, Drake driving us there, but Flannery was in on it. She gave me the courage to follow Daddy there. Tell her, Flannery, how you went inside and saw Daddy while I only saw him park and go inside. It’s okay, you can tell her.”

“I know this is hard for you
,” Irene said to me. “You like Dwight and I know that. But if you saw my husband with another woman, I want you to tell me,” she said, her voice shaky.

“I didn’t, ma’am.”

Claudia was beyond angry with me. She glared at me. “Why are you protecting him?”

Irene was elated.
“Then we don’t know he’s seeing someone for certain. Just that he’s visiting a dance club after work when he’s told me he’s working late after hours,” she said. “A lie, but. . . what a relief!”

“That’s all we know, Claudia,”
I said. I was feeling pressure              to tell the truth, the real reason I went to the strip club. But I could not tell either of them about Alice or my ulterior motive. Nor could I bring myself to confess I had not seen Dwight inside either, although I let Claudia believe I had. It would sound as if I was on a mad mission to ruin Dwight Johnson. The truth was, I had manipulated Claudia from my own desperation to prove my mother was not working in that sleazy place. Words failed me. Claudia saw what she saw and I had no choice but to let the facts lie there unquestioned.

“Girls, unless there’s further proof, we’re going to have to keep this conversation under wraps.”

“Agreed,” said Claudia dismally, but now she wouldn’t look at me.

Dwight Johnson threw open the patio doo
r holding up the found cake server and four dessert plates. “Anyone for sweets?” he asked, waiting as if he expected us to applaud his meager endeavor.

He served me first but I corrected the
faux pas
, sliding the plate across to Irene.

“You all look as if you’ve not been invited to the party.
Smile, everyone!” He sat across from Irene again whose face was finally filling with color.

As I had learned of late, avoiding the worst news was often the only thing holding a family together. Perhaps the Johnsons were like us, after all.

The relief of r
eturning home to Periwinkle House was soon swept aside. For Vesta had formally filed charges against Theo Miller for arson.

She
sat in a dining room chair she had pulled up next to the kitchen telephone. She sucked on a fresh cherry while answering questions fed to her by Winston Grooms’ legal assistant.

Daddy
had gone off to work. I doubted anyway his opinion would have held much sway over Vesta. In spite of his assurances that she would not carry out the scheme orchestrated by Grooms and his partners in land development, she not only did it, she seemed to gloat over it.

She repeatedly asked the legal aid to thank Grooms for all of his support. He would surely rise from Mayor to Senator and beyond, she predicted
under a blanket of flattery.

I shook my head at her in disappointment. But trying to make Vesta feel guilty was as futile as drawing a confession out of Dwight Johnson.

“I’ve said all along the Millers don’t belong in this neighborhood,” she said, turning her back to me. “There’s Lost City or Taylortown,” she said, speaking of the segregated neighborhoods where the Miller’s relations all lived.

I stayed in my bedroom, not even coming out when I heard Daddy’s car in the drive.

Eventually he knocked on my door. He sat on Siobhan’s bed not talking for a while. Then he said, “I didn’t know all of Vesta’s plans until now. I thought we had talked through it all and that she would drop the charges.”

“You don’t have to sign the papers, do you?” I asked.

“Vesta’s name is on our mortgage, same as me.”

“I don’t understand how prosecuting Theo Miller’s going to change anything for Vesta. They’ll still live here.”

That was when he nearly disappeared inside himself. “Grooms is arranging a plea bargain with the Millers. They must agree to sell their land and move at once.”

“They won’t do it,” I said. “Besides, Grooms won’t offer him near what it’s worth.”

“If they don’t, Miller will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They’re claiming criminal intent, that he had provoked a feud with Vesta. This was his way of punishing her.”

“Daddy, you know Theo
was beside himself over losing Anton.”

My father had never won a fight in his life. He walked out of the room and disappeared. Patsy Cline’s sultry voice was all that was heard until sundown.

I could do nothing but sleep. That was until a distant song woke me. It wasn’t Daddy’s record player either. I woke up with a start, like daybreak had tapped on my window. But it was still dark outside. At first the sound of banjo strings seemed like a distant player on the shore of a black swamp, where mists became dreams, like where Dorothea’s ancestors’ ghosts roamed. I moved, not breathing, toward the sound outside my window. The sky was so black it seemed hardened and mad. But then the old thunderhead split in two rolling over town and past our roof. There was the moon. The moonlight, like water trickling over rocks, poured right down into Theo Miller’s backyard. Smack in the middle of his burned out sunflower garden stood a circle of dark figures. They were singing at full volume, like people in the wilderness might do, no worry that anyone might hear, but mournful, women’s voices unsteady, a dissonant harmony.

I had fallen asleep in the same blouse I had worn home from the Johnsons. I pulled on the shorts dropped by my
closet door and slipped into my sandals. If Vesta heard Theo’s relatives out singing past midnight, she would for sure call the cops on the whole lot of them. The Millers did not need the wrath of hurricane Vesta coming down on them at four in the morning.

When our
old porch door squeaked open, Soomy heard me coming out of the house and ran out of the midst of the aunts. She was sobbing and wiping her eyes with the hem of her skirt. “Flannery, come see,” she said, grabbing my hand and pulling me toward the circle of women.

I
followed her, my heart climbing up my throat and pounding so hard I thought my whole neck would come apart. “What’s wrong?” I whispered to Soomy.

“
Bad people are trying to take Uncle Theo’s land.”

I was
reticent to step onto the charred soil or interrupt the aunt’s ritual. No matter the facts, I could not bring myself to confess the shame coming from the general direction of Periwinkle House. I already knew.

Soomy told me how
Dorothea was beside herself saying the world was coming to an end, so Aunt Rosetta drove around picking up the aunts, so many they had to sit in laps to get them all into the car. “They drove all the way out here to sing down the pain.”

I
had heard stories of drawing down the fever from a child’s body wracked with disease, but I had not heard tell of singing down the pain. Nor did I believe Dorothea sanctioned their circle for she had never been one to indulge the aunts in their rituals.

I
crept quietly onto the blackened ground, the moonlight still whispering softly overhead. Aunt Rosetta started the next song, plucking an old banjo and singing a hymn about a river. Her whole throat seemed to open up and then spill out all over the women who joined her on the chorus. Sure enough, Dorothea appeared. She stood next to me holding the hand of the aunt next to her and singing so robust it seemed her vocal chords were reaching beyond mortal power.

Then
I remembered Daddy picking up a new bottle of sleeping pills for Vesta. I relaxed. She’d be in a deep sleep until sunup.

I
held tightly to Soomy while the women sang song after song. Soomy had always been a strong girl but the little girl full out comforted me. Come to think of it, Soomy was strong for a girl child in a way that shamed me for feeling sorry for myself.

Here the patriarch of their family sat
helpless, about to lose the one thing that made him different from the rest of the black men in our county, and the women turned the pain to music. All of the women in the Miller’s family were strong beyond words, same as Dorothea.

The women continued
in an unbreakable circle, singing down the pain.

I imagined
their prayers reaching the ears of God. Theo’s jailers would try to lock him away and then the doors would fly open. Out he would walk, and here he would live.

The
thought of it made me laugh. Dogged if it did not land on the women. They started laughing too, and then they cried. We held onto each other while the sun blazed up from beyond the ocean and turned us all sunflower gold.

                                                                      * * * * *

I slept until nearly noon.

Vesta
worked out on the porch. She was was flush with excitement, snapping beans so fast she was missing the bowl as she tossed them down. “A talent scout called,” she said. She said the agent was the very one at the Celtic festival spying out talent the year prior. “The rumors were right, of this I’m certain.”

I
took over snapping the beans since it was evident she was not going to finish with any orderliness.

“This agent is grooming a singing act of brothers, said bands will soon be all the rage. They’re going on tour this fall. They expect they’ll be a big hit with teenagers. But the good news for us is that they want dancers in
the act. They want you.”

“But school,” I said
.

“You
’ll do your schooling on the road, on the bus,” said Vesta. “I asked all of that and the agent, Shirley Flaherty, explained it. Show business kids take their lessons from a tutor on the road.”

“I’ve finished the beans,” I said, handing her the bowl.

“There you’ll be in the midst of celebrities networking and making a name for yourself,” she said.

A set of black shoeprints marked the porch’s floor. I
had walked it in from the blackened ground this morning before dawn. I grabbed a mop and set to cleaning before she saw it.

“Mopping
now? Are you listening?”

“I’m making plans for college.
I’ve got my application already,” I said stubbornly.

“Graduation is for average kid
s not gifted kids like you,” she said.

The telephone rang. I answered it hoping the Mother Ship calling to rescue me from my earthly alien
captors. “For you,” I said, handing her the phone.

It was Grooms
’ office again.

She
answered the questions asked of her. But once she finished that call, she immediately called Myrna Halcott. Her news about pressing charges against Theo Miller had apparently repaired her severed relationship with the bridge club. She was back in good standing.

News to me.

She told Myrna,
“Grooms says that once they develop the land behind us, our home will quadruple in value.”

When she
got off the phone, I said, “I guess this means you’re back in Myrna Halcott’s good graces.”

“No thanks to you,” she said.

“What difference does it make if our house goes up in value?”

“Let me spell it out,”
she said. “We’ll sell the house and buy a bigger one. Who knows but what we’ll all end up in California.”

“Why does everyone want to live in California?” I asked.
I thought of Alice’s infatuation with the West coast.

She
asked me, “Who else wants to live in California?”

I never answered.

             
                                                        * * * * *

I heard the milkman clinking up the sidewalk later than usual. I slipped downstairs to claim a bottle of chocolate milk for myself. But when I walked out onto the porch, a car was parked out in front of our house. I looked around, but seeing no visitor, prepared to tote the milk delivery inside.

Hui
Lin, also fetching her milk, waved me over. She greeted me cheerily and then said, “I know you’re friends with the Millers. What has happened to them, could happen to me? Yes?”

“Oh, no. It won’t.”

“Who can stop them?” she asked.

I had no answer, so I asked her, “Do you know who parked in front of our house?”

“A surveyor. He is measuring for the sale of the Miller’s land.”

I assumed he was too afraid to park on Battalion Street so he chose our street instead.

“I saw the authorities come and take Theo Miller that day,” she said, “handcuffs, police looking like the Chinese authorities coming into his house and taking him away. I followed behind in my car. Ms. Dorothea fell to her knees, weeping inside the police station. I sat with her while she wept bitterly.”

I dropped
the whole basket of milk bottles.

“I’ve sent him with a grocery list,” said Vesta. “You’re going back on your special diet. This is real, Flannery,” she said, but it seemed more like it was happening for her.

I shut myself in my
room. Turning on my lamp, I noticed Vesta had pulled out my leotards and laundered them. They lay in a stack on the foot of the bed including a new set, the tags still dangling from the neck and waist. She had scrawled a note in a note card and left it for me. It read,
I’ve never been more proud of you, Flannery. Love, Vesta.

Finally by nightfall
the door opened downstairs. Daddy had been gone all day. I dressed for bed half-expecting he would come upstairs to knock on my door. We would commiserate, and he would tell me that Vesta was just in a tailspin, give her time and she would forget the whole idea of signing me away to some show business act, like a performing poodle.

Wh
en he didn’t come upstairs, I climbed into bed and pulled out my book of colleges. I thumbed through the pages reading my notations—I’d made them by the hundreds.

On the Wilmington page, there in Claudia’s scrawled handwriting was penned “Our first dorm room” with an arrow pointing down at one of the campus halls.
“School at the beach!” She wrote at the bottom of my page. I half-smiled, not realizing until now that Claudia had left the note behind for me to find.

I made a new page for Chapel Hill.

Fate did seem to close a door in one place only to open in another. Theo had said that, I was certain. But I was firmly resistant to the one opening downstairs. I was a lot like the lost seagull that had flapped outside my window. Surely I would only circle California and then fly back home again. But what if this was one of those strange twisted turns, what if fate was dictating to me—
pay close attention to the goodness about to return to you, Flannery Curry
. Was I only resisting because it was Vesta bearing the good tidings? What if my real mother and I were both being drawn to the same place for a reason?

I wanted to summon Theo from his poetry or Siobhan from heaven. I would ask either of them how I might know that any of this was the right path?