“Sadie! She a skinny thing turning mousy!”
“Well, it’s really bout Roy Tupkin.”
Marris stops to put a big spoon of pie in her mouth and chews, and I gotta wait. She swallows.
“The girl gone missing—Darla, Doreen, or Deena, nobody knows for sure—somebody says she was hooked up with Roy Tupkin for nigh on a month.”
? ? ?
What a day. All my tied-up worries that pulled me down this morning got let loose with that gossip Marris brought in my house like chicken shit on shoes, and my Sadie’s all caught up in it. At the end of the day, I sit on the porch glider, washed in a different kind of sadness from the morning. I sip sassafras tonic and smoke dried ginseng root Marris give me to ease my disposition and let the evening chill seep deeper in my bones. Like usual, I ponder disappointments.
It won’t Sadie I ponder, cause to do that scares me with a foreboding with this latest talk. It’s her mama—my girl, Carly—what comes to mind.
Carly is the only piece of me strong enough to make it into the world. I ain’t laid eyes on her since she left her baby, Sadie, behind with her husband, Otis Blue, and took off with a fancy man full of flashy promises and little else. Don’t need to hear what happened. Carly woulda delivered good news if she had any. Thought she was special that girl. Said we shamed her with our homespun ways.
Lord, she had a mouth on her. Could sass you with the cut of her eyes. What I saw when I looked at Carly was hungry. Won’t a thing in this place that could fill her up. Like she was starved for different and won’t settle for usual.
She’d laugh mean-like now. Point her finger at me, jab the air, and say, “You got what you deserve, Mama. A Big. Fat. Zero. And Sadie, left in your care after Otis died…look what you done to her. She’s in danger cause you won’t fit to be a mama or a granny. You a Big Fat Nothing.”
Truth always hurts and it’s extra hard to look at late in life.
What if Carly’s right about me being a big fat zero? Is she something so special? Or just a different kind of nothing?
I say out loud, “You still hungry, Carly girl? You ever find different? Do it taste as good as you hoped it would?”
I lay my head back against the metal glider, tired from a day with a new worry bout Sadie and old worries bout secrets that time don’t change. In a long-ago thought, I see Carly marching cross my yard, and she takes over my thinking cause she’s a bossy thing. Always was.
“What’s your skinny ass doing in my yard?” I stand on the porch, my young self, with hands on smaller hips and pissed as usual.
“Daddy here?”
“What’s it matter to you?”
“Is he or ain’t he?”
“Don’t use that tone, girlie.”
Carly marches right up to the porch, brushes past, and bumps my shoulder hard. She says in passing, “Need a place to stay, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s not gonna be here!” I say and half believe my words. “You breeze in here like you belong when you don’t. You done made your bed, girlie, and it won’t here.”
I raise my voice and follow after my only child, who heads straight back to the kitchen and noses around for something to eat. She finds a fried chicken leg on a plate under a drying rag. Leans against the corner of the table and eats it. She looks everywhere cept at me. The air between us is flinty.
When Carly finishes, she throws the bone in the sink, wipes her fingers on the rag, and says soft-like, “Mama, don’t jump all over me. I be gone by morning,” and heads upstairs to her room, and I hear the door close. She won’t say bout that belly up against her dress. Won’t say bout the muddy mark on her cheek or knot on her forehead at the edge of her hair.
Otis Blue don’t do that. Gotta be somebody else. Otis got a tender spot for Carly, and he loves her like a blind fool, though he’s twelve years older. I never seen a man push to please a woman like he does Carly. Maybe if he stood up against her strong will she’d settle down for a bit. That won’t likely happen cause Otis is a soft man who loves in all the wrong ways. The bruises on my girl came from somebody hard.
No mama wants to see signs like these. Fear grows behind green eyes. Only got the clothes on her back and a backbone that won’t bend.
I whisper, “Anybody can tell you about broke in two, Baby Girl. Nineteen years on this earth with promise already trampled down. You can starve in a world when you’re hungry and won’t settle for crumbs.”
I don’t follow her. I fix a pan of biscuits for supper to go with leftovers. Walter’s gone for two days at the still. Mash is bout ready to bottle and money will come in soon, so it’s me and Carly tonight. While the biscuits bake, I go upstairs. Stand outside Carly’s closed door. Reach for the doorknob.
“Leave me be, Mama,” Carly says strong, like she can see through the door. “You can’t fix it, so leave me be.”
I let my hand drop by my side. I don’t go where I ain’t wanted. Ungrateful girl, who looks for more when there won’t no more. She’s got lessons to learn, and life’s one bugger of a teacher.
I call out as I head downstairs. “Supper’s ready, girlie. Come if you want. Don’t matter to me if you don’t.”
? ? ?
I musta dozed cause I wake up in the glider in the dark with a nasty crick in my neck, light-headed. I’m chilled clean through, and I struggle to my feet when my knees forget how to help. Then I remember this morning’s nasty spill down the stairs. I clutch the doorframe and heave myself over the threshold and inch my way up the stairs, careful of the top broke step.
Carly’s a puzzle. She wanted more than was her right to have. I tried to tell her. Tried to ease her road the way a mama should. I told her a woman’s gotta learn to settle, stay in the middle, know her place. Carly never learned to settle, and it got her nowhere but gone. Now, after seventeen years, she forgot how to get home.
I settled for the middle all my life, swallowed my grief and kept it inside…and it got me nowhere but lonely. Marris is the only soul who tends to me, and for the life of me I don’t know why I throw vinegar on her every chance I find. Maybe I want her brought to her knees once and the cheer slapped clear outta her. Maybe I wanna know she feels just once where I live all the day long.
And Carly’s child, Sadie, is a different puzzle. She stayed close and settled too quick, and it got her nowhere but here. She had promise a while back, a sweetness she don’t get from her mama, then it all dried up and blew away when she tied her tomorrows to a devil of a man.
Sadie’s more like me than I wanna know. Like me, she got her a shitty man, but I did something bout my shit and keep the truth from the law. Don’t blab to nobody.
Sadie won’t made that way. She turns coward when Roy takes her down. Her weak will’s gonna get her killed. She needs her own perfect storm…and a piece of tin.
Marris Jones