“I know.”
“Well if you know, tell her. People see you. You better know,” Skip said as he stuffed a forkful of casserole into his mouth.
“All she was doing was standing in the parking lot.”
“You keep thinking that.”
Ava finished up the dishes while Skip ate and his girls leaned their heads on their hands as they wished for rapture or death outright. “You want some more potatoes, girls?” Ava asked as she reached for Jessica’s plate, revealing to anyone with eyes the clearest picture of profoundest despair. Ava scraped off most of the turnip greens into the trash and all but a bite of her casserole. She did the same for Joslyn. Ava couldn’t have been more loved if she had saved them from a burning building. Now to save herself. She rushed as fast as she could through the remaining dishes.
“I’m going out on the porch to wait for Mama,” Ava said to nobody and everybody.
“The dishes done?” Mama Lora yelled.
“Yes, ma’am,” Ava called as she rushed past the table. It would be years, decades later when Ava was wallowing in middle age herself before she thought to wonder if Mama Lora ever wanted to run like hell out of her living room, crank up her rattling car, and never look back on the dark little rooms.
The girls looked up at her from their places at the table, longed for her, the pardoning governor for their ruined Sunday. “Bye, girls,” she said not without some shame. She had done all she could, the last bites of food they would have to negotiate on their own. Ava had lived through her own shameful days of five-fingering food from her plate. There were many a scoop of palmed green peas, slivers of crispy ends of fried eggs thrown into closets, stuffed into socks, slimy okra thrust into pockets. But every child must find her own path. It is the way of their people. “I won’t be far,” Ava said, but what she meant was you might see her body on the porch, poised to run as fast as her mama’s car could get there, but her mind would be gone, gone, gone.
Behind the house was Ava’s great-aunt Teen’s trailer. Sad little wormy apples in a tiny grove blocked the trailer from view, but Ava thought if she could get down to the trailer and back before anybody noticed she was gone she might survive having forgotten her book. She was the bookworm, always your nose in a book type. Everyone says that reading is a good thing, but Ava had started to wonder. People look at you with suspicion if they see you reading, like the reading itself shames or indicts them, like it is a plot against them. But worse than that, Ava was starting to believe that books were ruining her for real life. Life was duller and less interesting than what she read. The girls in her books were doers, who always knew the right way. Seldom had she gotten that role in life. All she seemed to manage was the good, quiet girl who caused few problems. She wouldn’t even rate as a sidekick in most of her books. The characters she read would look at her as inevitable and dull as a fire hydrant, her life unfit somehow to be on the page.
Ava started down the hill. From the back of her grandmother’s house, she could see a long stretch of the valley, small houses of people she knew or her family knew in every direction. In a few years, many of these houses would be gone—too old, too old-fashioned for young people, too damaged to renovate, at least that’s what the kids think. By the time Ava is grown and home, graduated from college, the kids in her generation will be scattered. Some will be dead, some in jail, many others miles and miles away from this valley and this starting point. The anchors that kept them in the community, grandmothers like Mama Lora, family land, or remaining family were gone too. Back then nobody had ever heard of Chinese places like Dalingshan or Guangdong province. Back then jobs that were never glamourous were at least plentiful. Some of the stronger and more industrious among them had two. This happens everywhere. Of course it does. But more so in places that people are more than eager to put behind them. Having too little in life, being the underdog, is only good as backstory, not the constant every day of your breathing. Ava was years from knowing any of that. Ava followed the trail down the hill to her aunt’s trailer to kill some time. Teen got picked up every Sunday morning by one of the deacons at the church. She wouldn’t be back home until nearly dark.
Before she got to the apple trees behind Teen’s Ava saw her mother’s car parked on the gravel driveway, but close to the trailer, impossible to see from the road. Sylvia sat in the passenger’s seat while James Martin opened the driver’s side door with a large Styrofoam cup in his hand as he sipped from a bendy straw. James rushed around the front of the car and opened the car door for Sylvia like he was her butler. Sylvia got out, laughed like she was in a commercial, like she was getting paid to laugh and waited like an obedient child as James kissed the top of Sylvia’s head. She was a precious thing, a flower, a tiny animal you fear frightening in your palm. Ava didn’t dare move. The inside and secret places of another person’s life are never palatable, especially your mother’s life.
James walked away from the car and down the rutted driveway to the blacktop. Ava couldn’t see her mother or what she was doing behind the wheel, but she didn’t start the car right away, the radio buzzed, the car idled. Both she and her mother waited.
Ava wasn’t sure what to do. She wanted to run down the hill to the car and reveal herself to her mother. She wanted to say, I know what you did. I know who you are. But she didn’t dare. Besides, she knew so little, her knowledge of either of her parents tangential and elliptical. All she knew for sure was that her mother wore a shroud of mournfulness that she tried to accessorize but was obvious if anyone cared to see. If nobody cared about your pain, like that fallen forest tree, did it matter if you felt it? Ava sat on the ground on the path out of her mother’s sight. She waited as her mother started the car and nosed it onto the road. In no time her mother would be in Mama Lora’s driveway, looking for her, waiting in the car so she could scoop Ava up and take her home. Her mother’s face would be so bright and glad for a few seconds when Ava appeared, but just as quickly would tighten again with sadness that no sight in the world could remove for more than a few seconds. Ava would walk the difficult steps back up the hill, to her grandmother’s porch, and with any luck see her mother for the first time.
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