“Well, what you doing, just standing there like you is waiting for a bus? Go on out and get her!”
Doll would have done just about anything rather than deal with the little problem standing by the front gate. There’d been no overnight visitors to the house on Prytania Street for more than twelve years, not since Miss Fannie’s son, Graham, ran off with Miss Vidrine Crump from Dry Prong, Mississippi. Doll felt sure that bringing this little girl into the house was only going to stir things up. Don’t need no more trouble, got enough here already, Doll was thinking.
“You scared of a little girl can’t weigh more than ninety pounds?” Queenie squawked.
“No, Mama, I scared of what Miss Fannie gone do when she finds out her grandbaby already here. I overheard what Miss Vidrine say on the phone when she called to say Mr. Graham had passed. Miss Vidrine, she didn’t exactly ask Miss Fannie if it be all right for her daughter to come visit. She told Miss Fannie that she’d be dropping her off, without knowing when she’d be back to fetch her. Never seen such a look on Miss Fannie’s face, like she don’t know what to say. And you know Miss Fannie.” Doll shook her head. “She always knows what to say.”
Queenie crossed her arms and rocked back onto her heels. “You listen here. We ain’t got no choice. She’s here, and we got to deal with it. Miss Fannie ain’t in a good humor this morning. Be best if I break the news to her. You go and bring the little missy inside.”
“What’s all that fussing about out there?” Fannie’s voice ripped through the air.
Doll and Queenie gave each other a knowing glance. It wasn’t going to be an ordinary day in the Bell household.
Then again, as Doll knew all too well, no day in the Bell household was ever ordinary.
Chapter Three
Ibby wasn’t sure what to make of the tall slender woman standing on the porch by the front door with her hair piled high on her head in a beehive hairdo. Her big eyes were all aflutter, and she was swinging her hips from side to side as she talked. Ibby couldn’t make out a word the woman was saying, but one thing she did know for sure. There was something peculiar about her.
She came down from the porch and started walking toward Ibby, waving her hand. “Come on now.”
The woman made her way to the gate and opened it, then bent over until she was eye level with Ibby. That’s when Ibby noticed she had one eye as dark as obsidian, and another as light as a washed-out sky, a combination that made her pretty face seem off-balance somehow. Ibby stared unabashedly. The woman didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn’t seem to mind.
“You Miss Fannie’s granddaughter?” The woman blinked several times, then smiled a big smile.
Ibby kept staring, not quite sure what to make of her.
“Girl, you deaf? What you got there?” she asked.
The woman tugged at the urn in Ibby’s arms. Ibby took a step back and shook her head. Her mother had given her strict instructions to hand the urn over to her grandmother and not some fast-talking woman waving her arms all over the place.
“Okay then.” The woman tapped her foot as if she were thinking. “You hungry?”
Ibby had barely eaten in over a week, not since her daddy died. Suddenly, she felt as if fire ants were trying to eat their way out of her stomach.
The cockeyed woman stood up. “Well, come on.”
Before Ibby knew it, she’d grabbed her hand and was pulling her along as if she were a small child. Ibby tried to yank her hand away, but the woman held on tight. The warmth of her hand somehow made Ibby feel at ease. Ibby let go a smile without really meaning to.
“Well, that’s what I like to see,” the woman said as they picked their way past the gnarly branches of the boxwoods and walked up the brick walkway toward the house. “My name’s Dollbaby, by the way. But you can call me Doll.”
Ibby tried to hide the expression on her face at the funny-sounding name.
“Got a daughter about your age. Call her Birdelia,” Doll went on.
Another name Ibby had never heard before.
Doll stopped short. “You got a birthday coming up, from what Miss Fannie tells me. That right?”
Ibby drew her hand away. Birthdays weren’t celebrated in the Bell household. No use making a fuss over something everybody has, Vidrine reminded Ibby every year on her birthday.
“How old you gonna be?”
“Twelve.”
“I knew it!”
Ibby looked up, startled.
“I knew you could talk.” Doll took Ibby by the shoulders and guided her up the front steps onto the porch.