“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” Kit said, her voice cool. She stood, tucked her chair under the table, and hoisted her backpack on her shoulders.
Eleanor looked stricken. She made no move, only watched as Kit left and let the screen door clap behind her. Too little, too late, Kit repeated to herself, and she marched away. Eleanor hadn’t even gone after her. Again. A trio of hens skittered out of her path.
She was halfway to the cattle guard when something thumped her between the shoulder blades. She stumbled forward and spun around.
“The fuck!” Kit shouted, searching for the thing that had hit her. It was an orange, split and seeping juice.
Eleanor marched down the steps in her house slippers.
“Now listen here, girl,” she said, shaking her finger at Kit. “I don’t know how you appeared here out of thin air and why you have barely more than the shirt on your back. But I’m not letting you walk away. You can’t have come all this way to leave now. I don’t know what all’s happened to you . . .” More tears. Kit wished for her not to cry. “Well, dammit,” Eleanor said. “What’s it gonna be?”
Kit toed divots in the dirt. Maybe the Mustang hadn’t been found yet, maybe she could drive to Mexico and learn Spanish and raise her baby near the beach somewhere. Or peel off to New Orleans, like Manny had suggested. Things were crooked there, he’d told her, freaks like them would blend. A swell of nausea rose to her throat and she remembered, again, that she could not afford to keep her pride.
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said. “I need somewhere to stay for a bit.”
“A baby?” Eleanor said. Her fingers fanned open and she looked at Kit’s belly, as if she very much wanted to caress it, but instead she fingered the collar of her housecoat. “That’s . . . just wonderful, dear! Of course you can stay here. As long as you need.” She nudged a tear from the corner of her eye. “I feel a bit sheepish to ask you this, dear,” she said and held a trembling hand to her breast. “But, can you remind me of your name?”
Kit shook Eleanor’s hand, which was stronger than it looked. “Call me Kit.”
Eleanor kept hold of her hand, then drew her toward the front door.
“Kit, why don’t I show you around the house.”
Kit followed Eleanor back inside. It had been ages since she had been in a home since none of her foster assignments had been a home to her. Looking around properly now, she saw that the place was shabby, but tidy. It felt like a set from a 1940s movie. Florals everywhere, on wallpaper, drapes, and upholstery; cross-stitch pillows and lace draped over the chairbacks.
Eleanor pointed to a few framed photos clustered on the wall above a dresser in the living room.
“Here,” she said to Kit. “Who do you think that is?”
In an oval brass frame, a young woman dressed in a fringed flapper dress kicked a long leg high by her ear. Her eyes were defiant, the little black heart of her lips pursed in direct provocation.
“I was a dancer, not very good, but well loved by the gentlemen.”
Kit smiled.
“Not that kind of a dancer, of course,” Eleanor said, hand over heart. “But I was pretty wild; I was lucky to be young in the twenties. Being a woman was just beginning to get interesting.”
“Is that your husband?” Kit pointed to a photo of Eleanor in a white skirt suit and a tall, Nordic-looking man in his army best, clutching each other in front of a waterfall, soaking wet.
“My Amos,” she said, her voice catching on the sound of his name. “That’s us on our wedding day in ’thirty-nine, a few months before he shipped off to France. I was an ancient bride, nearly forty, but we had Emily a year later, my little wartime miracle. Am I boring you with all this?”
“No, no, please. Tell me,” Kit said. “I never knew anything about my family.”
Eleanor’s eyes fogged up again. She cleared her throat. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, dear.”
Kit squinted at the next photo, a tiny daguerreotype of a man and a woman in shabby Victorian dress. The man looked too small for his suit, but the woman had a proud beauty, and her cheekbones, high and round, looked like Kit’s. To see herself in another’s face gave Kit a shock, an alertness. She leaned in, studying this woman, overwhelmed.
“What’s her name?” Kit asked.
“Her name was Charlotte. That’s my mother—your great-grandmother.”
Tears rose to Kit’s eyes. She sniffed and blotted her face with her T-shirt.
Eleanor let out a sympathetic laugh. “Oh, dear, oh my goodness, I hope those tears are happy.”
Kit’s throat was all closed up. She blinked and forced half a smile to show that she was all right.
“And that grumpy fella is your great-grandfather Patrick. Believe it or not, that’s their wedding day, November first, 1899. I was born in 1900,” she said proudly. “That was the year of the great Galveston hurricane. It killed thousands, bodies floating everywhere, just awful. But somehow, we survived. They said I came out during the eerie silence in the eye of the storm. My mother would say it was because God wanted to hear me cry, but that’s a load of bullshit, don’t you think? She always insisted my being born in a church, alive and well, in a deadly storm, should have made a believer out of me. But I had never had the imagination to rely on the promise of something I couldn’t experience for myself. I go to church to keep social, of course, but no one could convince me that there is anything other than this. Right here, right now.”
Kit listened and nodded. She liked the way Eleanor told stories and the music in her voice, the way it swept you along, dipping here, rising there. Kit’s voice was raspy and low, a stiff broom on a hard wood floor. There was no music in it.
“So,” Kit said. “How is it we’re related then?”
Eleanor paused and looked serious, as if removed from the pleasures of her storytelling to a more sober world.
“My only sister, Ruth, was your grandmother.”
“My grandmother,” Kit repeated.
“Marie’s mother, bless her heart.”
Kit braced herself against the wall. Marie. Her mother’s name. It sounded like an exhale in her mind. “Marie? Is she still alive?”
Eleanor shook her head. “I wish I knew. Your mother was always wandering, never checking in. As a child she was disobedient, brilliant, stormy. Taught herself to read before she was five but wouldn’t read nothing but comics. She could have been something.”
Kit’s skin goosed at the phrasing and she remembered her mother’s note. She will be something. Was that a refrain her mother had been told often? What had she been thinking when she had written it? Eleanor carried on. It seemed like she hadn’t spoken or maybe even thought of her niece in a long time.
“She was stuck being raised by your granddaddy, poor thing. Honestly, I feel sorry for the both of them. Lloyd was an old cattleman, as dry and dusty as they come.”