Wattie looked to her, and the naked sorrow on her face undid me. This was hard, and horrible.
“It’s not fair. I know there’s nothing fair about it,” I said, but I had seen enough to know that Rachel was right. As usual. I knew what I had to do, and I owed Wattie the truth of it, right then. She had given it to me, and so I gave it back. “I’m going to talk to her doctor, but I think you have a good idea of what he’ll tell me. You and Birchie can’t stay here. The closest hospital is thirty miles away.” Wattie’s heavy lids shuttered down over her eyes. For the first time, she couldn’t meet my gaze; Dr. Pettery must have told her this already. “There’s hard change coming, Wattie. And it is coming fast.” I hated my own tone. I sounded like Rachel talking to Lavender, that time Lav announced that she was going to dye her hair hot pink. Wattie tried to exchange a look with Birchie, but Birchie wasn’t looking back. As I had spoken, Birchie had checked out. She slumped in her seat, staring blankly past my head into the garden. I went on. “You need to talk to your sons, Wattie. I can talk to Sam and Stephen, too. If you and Birchie want to stay together, we can work that out. You get to have a say.”
Wattie wasn’t quite done yet.
“You want my say? You move down here. We can make the sewing room into a bedroom for her. So no stairs.” Except the seven on the front porch and the long, steep flight down from the back door, I thought, but Wattie was still talking. “Move to Alabama.” It was so matter-of-fact that I knew it was not a spur-of-the-moment idea. I had a spur-of-the-moment answer, though, and it was a resounding, No. Hell no. Wattie must have seen it on my face, because she got louder and more urgent. “Hear me out, now! You aren’t married, and you don’t even have a fella. Not for serious. You can draw your pictures any old place. You only got yourself to think about, so why not think of Birchie?”
Her dismissal of my whole life hurt. She spoke as if work for me meant lolling in a cushy chair, scribbling and hooking back bonbons, not a real career with deadlines and travel. As if Mom and Keith and Lavender and Rachel didn’t count as family and my Tuesday gamers and my church community were nothing. But even if I wanted to uproot myself, now there was Digby. I could feel him fluttering and flexing, a second heartbeat at my very center. I had to think of him first.
Pee-poo are like dis, Rachel had told me once, putting the peachy-pink Crayola that used to be called Flesh into my hand. As if all the flesh that mattered was that color. That crayon was called Peach now, but the ideas behind its old name were still alive and present. Present everywhere, all across the country, but more overt in Birchville.
I wouldn’t raise Digby in the small-town South, even though there was a lot of good here. Kids still ran free in packs unafraid, unscheduled, still called home for supper by bells, only now the bells were kept inside their phones. We had good neighbors who made me caramel cakes when I visited and kept me in the Facebook group and on the phone tree even when I was seven hundred miles away. Birchie and my father and I had all been born here, and to me there was no prettier country than the deep greens and black-browns and sunny blues of rural Alabama.
But it was 1987 here in more ways than a movie-rental store. I didn’t want my biracial son growing up in a town where Wattie was the only black face ever seen in the crowd down at First Baptist, especially since half the folks there pretended that she was the Help. Birchie had the only white face ever seen on the regular at Redemption. Here the white families with means sent their kids to a small, lily-colored private school one town over. The county’s public schools were poorly rated, and the black kids and the white kids sat at different lunch tables.
I didn’t want to bring my pregnancy up now, though. This conversation was hard enough to keep on track without the ultimate derailment my Digby news would bring. Plus, I wanted Birchie to hear it first, and as good news, not blurted in anger. I would not use Digby as my trump card in an ugly argument. Right now Birchie wasn’t fully present, even though her eyes were fixed on me. Her body sat in her chair, listing more and more toward Wattie every minute.
“I’m sorry. Wattie, call your sons in the morning. We need to plan a trip to Norfolk soon, so you can look at options. You two are going to have to move.”
Wattie stared me down, silent, as sturdy and impassive as a wall. “We’ll see,” she said, and in the foyer the big grandfather clock began chiming seven. At the sound Birchie pushed back her chair and stood up as if on autopilot, her eyes fixed on the middle distance. Wattie stood, too. “I have to start doing her bedtime things now.” I came around the table to kiss Birchie’s powdery, soft cheek. She did not respond. I usually kissed Wattie, too, but she did not seem kissable just now. Her eyes on me were hard and dark as chips of onyx. Her pointed chin was tilted up at me.
“Let me help put her to bed,” I said, propitiating.
She shook her head, no, and then, to my surprise, she kissed me. Her lips on my cheek were as cool as stones from the back garden.
“I do this every night, and she needs everything to stay just the same. You hear me? Leave things the way they are. You leave things lie,” the stone lips said, and by the end it didn’t sound like she was talking about putting Birchie to bed. It sounded like a warning.
6
A rustling thump from above woke me, way too early. I scrubbed at my eyes and checked the clock. Six-thirty in the morning, God help me. Just over my head, pattery footsteps ran across the ceiling, quick and light. So Lavender was actually rooting about in the attic. She’d spent the last couple of days roaming the town with the Darian boys or playing on my old laptop, but this morning was her last chance. It sounded to me like she was taking it.