Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?

Mrs. Nora didn’t pretend to be interested in baking anymore; she sold BabyCakes, and Hazel overheard her laugh with guests, hating how easily she lied. The last thing I ever want to do again is sift flour and cut butter.

The exception didn’t soften Hazel. It was a weak acknowledgment of Mary’s existence, but Hazel, believing the world needed more spoiled little Negro girls, carried the pink box home, punctured the three-tiered confection with the exorbitant number of candles provided, lit them, and sang her daughter “Happy Birthday.” Mary’s eyes shone with wonder at the candlelight as she clapped her hands.

After the third September of this, Hazel began to dread the day when Mary would ask where the tiered cakes in the petal-pink boxes came from. The truth was hard to voice. She could have left the Lakeses but would have had to move to another city, alone, to find another job. Besides, having ties, however complicated, was comforting.

When Bessie died, Hazel started having nightmares again, dreading Teddy’s return for her funeral.

“He won’t come,” Adelaide said.

Hazel, knowing how much the Lakes boys adored Bessie, skipped the funeral, unsure. It was a decision she soon regretted, as it all happened without Teddy, just as Adelaide said.

That night, Adelaide took Hazel to Bessie’s grave, dug into the edge of the Lakeses’ land underneath one of the peach trees in the orchard. Staring down at the mound, Hazel couldn’t help but think about how Bessie’s decaying flesh would dissolve into the roots of the tree and help nourish the juicy fruit they’d eat all year. Now she would be the one to make the preserves and Christmas jam. Instead of tears, gruesome thoughts about the other bodies that may have been buried beneath these trees rose up and turned her stomach, until Hazel felt her dinner coming up her esophagus. Adelaide started patting her back, and Hazel sank to rest her hands on her knees.

“You was a daughter to her.”

Hazel wanted to say what she felt but couldn’t, feeling a sense of betrayal against her own mother. Adelaide took her hand as they wound through the grove, in and out of the web-like shadows created by the branches under the moonlight. Hazel turned back before the main street and thought she saw someone duck back behind a tree.

Hazel’s heart was a slow-to-scab wound that continued to ooze, desperate to seal any exposure, but losing Bessie scraped what little scab was there clean off. In her will, left in Nora Lakes’s possession, Bessie left Hazel her house. Hazel refused to move in, instead offering it to Adelaide and Lefred, who could use a larger yard for their vegetable garden.

“We don’t need to live there to do that,” Lefred said. He liked the view from his porch, which allowed him to see an entire 180 degrees around Cottonwood. “Girl, what’s wrong with you? Why you actin’ funny about the house?”

Hazel began to cry. “I never even told her I loved her.”

“Doll baby.” He reached for her hand. “She knew.”

Months later, after Hazel and Mary moved in, Hazel found a drop floor in their one closet. Inside a tin box was a family Bible, Bessie’s BabyCakes recipes, and her will, bequeathing everything to her son, William. Hazel knew then it was Mrs. Lakes who had intervened and made sure Hazel got the house that would have otherwise been left empty. Hazel softened on Mrs. Lakes a bit after that. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something different about Mrs. Lakes, a speck of something to like.



* * *



The summer before Mary’s fourth birthday, Teddy and Lanie returned to the Lakes manor. Their daughter, Shirley Claire, was almost three and old enough to spend summers with her grandparents while her parents vacationed.

Mary fell ill with a chest cold days before they were due to arrive. Adelaide and Lefred were visiting family, and her backup couldn’t take a sick child, so Hazel snuck Mary into the maid’s quarters. To ensure the child stayed asleep, Hazel rubbed Vicks on her chest and gave her a taste of brandy, molasses, and lemon. Hazel panicked later that afternoon when she returned to find Mary had disappeared. She found her in Shirley Claire’s room, on the third floor of the four-story house.

Hazel peered through the doorway crack as the sisters played on the rug among stuffed animals, books, and wooden blocks. They looked nothing alike, save for their father’s widow’s peak and the red tones of their hair. Shirley Claire was a bright redhead with orange wisps flickering at her edges; the inherited trait on Mary was hidden, like her parentage, and only showed up in sunlight. Hazel wouldn’t have known what other qualities Mary had inherited from her father. Teddy, Hazel assumed, had been told to stay largely out of sight that trip; Hazel only caught a glimpse of him arriving. He and Lanie had eaten all their meals out.

Still sick, Mary curled up atop a stuffed giraffe and closed her eyes. Shirley Claire, still eager to play, snatched the toy. Mary pulled at it, causing Shirley Claire to fall back. A thudding smack sounded against Mary’s arm, and her murderous scream sent Hazel running in to scoop her into her arms. A hardback book lay open on the floor where Mary had been, launched, Hazel now realized with a jolt, by Lanie Lakes seated in a rocking chair in the left corner of the room. Mary nestled her face, wet with tears and mucus, into Hazel’s neck, worming her tiny arm between their bodies. Shirley Claire, equally startled, started crying and pulling on the bottom of Hazel’s dress, reaching for her playmate.

Lanie was even colder than when Hazel had first met her, having settled into the grim reality of her arranged marriage. For a split second, she looked ashamed of her cruelty, but then her mouth snarled as she realized Hazel was her only witness. “She shouldn’t even be here.”

“She’s sick, ma’am. I had no one to keep her.”

“And so you brought her here to infect us?” Lanie brushed past her own child to shake a finger at Hazel. “You know we’re going away. You were trying to ruin our trip.”

Hazel began to back out of the room. “No, ma’am,” she said, patting Mary’s back faster. The girl’s sobs showed no sign of ceasing. Lanie followed them and watched from the top of the staircase, ignoring her own daughter wriggling in a fit across the floor, until Hazel disappeared with Mary around the bend.



* * *



The doctor said Mary’s arm wasn’t broken, but it was so swollen she couldn’t raise it for two weeks after Lanie’s assault. Fantasies of harming Lanie dominated Hazel’s thoughts: a fall down the eighteen-step wooden staircase, a slip on a newly waxed floor, the slamming of her fingers in a door.

Unsure of how much longer she could resist after a ten-minute contemplation about grinding glass into Lanie’s soup, Hazel praised God upon arriving, one morning, to learn that Teddy and Lanie were gone. Mrs. Nora met Hazel at the kitchen door with their traumatized daughter, who was screaming and throwing her body against her grandmother’s restraint. “She screams louder when I put her down. Won’t let Mr. Lakes even look at her.” She gave Hazel a pleading look as she handed the child over.

Shirley Claire stopped crying and clutched the shoulders of Hazel’s uniform with her wet hands. She looked back at her grandmother with an expression of relief.

Mrs. Nora chuckled. “Babies know where they’re safest.” A hand went to her forehead. “I’ll need your help this summer. I haven’t had a baby in almost thirty years.”

Mrs. Nora didn’t consider Hazel’s feelings about caring for the second child of the monstrous man who had violently fathered her daughter. Hazel decided that Mrs. Nora either wholeheartedly trusted or completely underestimated her. But Hazel didn’t have the capacity for cruelty to a child. The overwhelming emotion she felt for the little girl was sympathy.

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