A Long Time Comin'

by Robin W. Pearson

  “Now, don’t show all your teeth, girl. You know how your eyes close when you smile too big.”

  “Darn if you didn’t show all those pearly whites during that first dance.”

  Lis’s words plucked Evelyn from her reverie.

  “That was because Daddy told me, ‘Evelyn, you’re the most beautiful girl in the world’ when we danced that night.”

  “And you were.”

  Evelyn felt her forbidden, yet familiar smile stretch toward her earlobes. “Why, Ma—”

  “Miss Lis, you asked me to stop in when I was through?” Laurie peeked in. She made the shortened version of Elisabeth’s name sound like a z.

  Evelyn whirled toward the door. This time her mama, too, looked unsettled, like she was caught between a rock and a hard place. Or maybe it irked her to hear her name mispronounced.

  “Did you still want to see me?” The stylist stepped deeper into the office.

  Lis looked from her daughter to her employee and seemingly opted for the hard place. “Laurie, why don’t you throw a load of towels in, unpack the new shampoo, and restock the shelves up front? I’ll catch up with you after my date.”

  Laurie swallowed the directive soaked in the syrup of Lis’s mellow drawl. “Yes, ma’am. Good to meet you, Evelyn.”

  “You, too.”

  Lis moved Evelyn’s photograph to a bookshelf and faced her baby girl.

  Evelyn itched beneath her once-over. “What?”

  “Nothing. Just admiring that color on you.”

  “Really? Actually, I thought of you when I bought this dress.”

  “Re-ally?” Lis’s right brow arched delicately as the word dripped from her mouth. “How so? And why don’t you come closer so I can see you properly.”

  The better to criticize you with, my dear. Evelyn crossed in front of the file cabinet and stepped around the desk. “Well, I know how much you like Carolina blue. And you told me A-line dresses complement my figure.” Actually, what you said was “They’re good at hiding what you don’t want people to see.”

  “Well, it won’t complement it for long if you keep popping those.” Lis nodded toward the Krispy Kreme box.

  “Do you dive this deep into Yolanda’s or Lionel’s business?” Evelyn perched a hip on the edge of the desk.

  “Why are you worried about Yolanda or Lionel?”

  “Why are you worried about me?”

  “Maybe I love you more.”

  Her employees might have mistaken Lis’s pursed lips for a smile, but Evelyn knew better. She snorted. “Maybe you need to love me a little bit less.” She plopped the box down where her picture had sat moments before. “Besides, I thought we could celebrate.” And I had a craving for a glazed doughnut.

  “Celebrate what?”

  “My visit, of course.”

  “Oh . . . of course.” Lis moved aside some paperwork and peeked into the box. She smiled sincerely and extracted a glazed lemon-filled doughnut. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Because you’re too busy thinking up ways to drive me nuts. Evelyn didn’t voice her thoughts but was sure her face spoke volumes, especially to her mother, who was extremely well-read in all things Evelyn.

  “Well, speaking of celebrations . . . what about mine? Is your aunt Sarah going to make it? I know they’ll have to work around her husband’s schedule at the hospital. And gracious, where will all those children sleep? She never goes anywhere without them. Maybe she’s afraid they’ll run away when she’s not looking, though it would serve her right. But don’t tell her I said so.” She chuckled wryly. “You know, even though she left Spring Hope as soon as she could, I don’t think Spring Hope ever left her. Maybe that’s why we get along.”

  Evelyn knew the family still referred to Sarah as the “knee baby”; Mama’s youngest sister was barely out of her cloth diapers when Milton arrived. Sarah’s husband, Samuel, headed the emergency department at a New York City hospital while she homeschooled their six children.

  Elisabeth used her pinkie finger to flick off a bit of glaze from the corner of her crimson mouth. “Yolanda says she can’t seem to pin you down these days, so you and Kevin must be trying to keep something big under wraps. What have you two cooked up for my birthday?”

  “Kevin?”

  “Yes. Kevin. Your husband?” Her eyes pored over her daughter’s face. “Is everything all right? Is his job okay? Believe me, I know how hard it can be to run your own business. Hard on the finances . . . and a marriage.”

  “There you go again. Are you as concerned about Lionel and Yolanda? Just because my sister and brother are such successful movers and shakers doesn’t mean that they’re doing any better—or worse—than I am.” Evelyn slowly extracted a slightly warm glazed doughnut and chewed hard to ignore the pangs of her conscience. Of course Kevin and I are doing worse than everybody else. Why else would I be sitting here in Mama’s office getting lectured about eating a doughnut? That is, of course, unless Yolanda’s husband is a philanderer, too. Or maybe Lionel’s wife is fighting some inner demons. Not that anyone would have ever thought Kevin had horns and a tail.

  “Evelyn . . . Evelyn . . . Evelyn. Why are you always comparing yourself? They’re my children, same as you.” Lis unlocked the bottom left drawer and withdrew a stack of receipts. She started arranging them in three piles on her desk. “I’m just as concerned about them as I am about you. Why wouldn’t I be? But I don’t have to go through these changes with Yolanda and Lionel. I just ask Lionel, ‘Baby, how’re things with your wife?’ and he says, ‘Mama, well, you know Muriel was mad at me last week because I was working too much . . .’” She added a receipt to the second stack and glared at Evelyn. “All you need to do is share with me every now and again—”

  At that moment, the door opened and Laurie—Lis’s rock—poked her head around the crack. “Uh, excuse me. I’m finished. Do you want me to take a client off the floor and—?”

  “No!” Lis rose, disturbing her neat rectangles.

  To Evelyn, Laurie looked as ruffled as the receipts on her mama’s desk.

  “Just take over the phone from Charlie, will you?”

  Laurie nodded silently, her brow furrowed, and backed out of the room.

  Evelyn faced her mother. “What’s going on with her?”

  “So we can talk about Laurie’s business, just not yours?”

  As Evelyn drew in a deep breath, she thought about Kevin and his big secret, Granny B, and what she herself was carrying around these days. “I don’t mean to sound defensive, Mama. I do appreciate your concern. If I needed your help . . . umm-hmm . . . If I had something to tell you, I would.” Now, that was closer to the truth. Oh, there was so much more than that. So much more that she would not, could not say to Mama. Her mother’s look told her she knew it, too. She conjured up a smile and wiggled the doughnut in the air. “Mama. Listen. I’m great. Kevin is great—everything’s great. Now why don’t we talk about something else? How does that sound?”

  “Great,” Mama muttered. She lowered herself to her chair and straightened her bundles. “But you’d probably better quit with the doughnuts while you’re ahead, Evelyn. We will be going out to dinner tonight after visiting your daddy’s grave.”

  “M—”

  “And speaking of visits . . . what about my mama, Evelyn? When are you planning to visit her?”

  So far, she’d sidestepped anything that might reveal last month’s Situation (and she’d forever use capital letters when she thought of It, kind of like “the Flood” or “the Fall”). But nothing was easy with Mama. Evelyn shifted from one cheek to the other on the corner of her desk.

  Lis licked her doughnut’s gooey lemon center. “You’ve been here almost a week, and you haven’t made it to Spring Hope yet.”

  “Umm . . .”

  “‘Umm’?”

  “Well . . .”

  “‘Well’ what?”

  “Well, I—”

  The office phone jangled. Lis held up a long finger. “Hold
that thought. Headquarters. This is Elisabeth.”

  Evelyn decided to walk through the door of opportunity and hopped off the desk. She wiggled her fingers good-bye and mouthed, “I’ll pick up the flowers.” If she left now, she’d have time to lie down for an hour or so before meeting her mother at Hillcrest Cemetery.

  She had a feeling she was going to need some reinforcements.

  Chapter Six

  EVELYN KNEW GRANNY B had buried her the moment she’d stumbled down her three concrete steps and slunk away in her car. Not six feet under the wiry Bermuda grass and a pile of sandy North Carolina soil, but deep down in the back of her mind where she cataloged and closely monitored all the hurts and wrongs done to her. When Evelyn left Headquarters, she knew she’d have to find some way to explain to her mama why Granny B definitely wouldn’t attend her birthday party this fall. Why she wouldn’t see Granny B anytime soon.

  But Lis beat her to it.

  “She’s dying, Evelyn. Mama is going to die.”

  Evelyn stared, struck dumb. It would’ve been a picture-perfect moment—Lis, clad in the heather-green frock, perched on the edge of the wooden bench, the sun a golden halo—if not for the silent stream of tears dripping unchecked into the pot of gardenias in her lap. The tears . . . and the headstones that dotted the Hillcrest Cemetery hillside.

  A chattering blue jay broke the silence. Lis swiped at her cheeks, replacing the tears with streaks of dirt. Evelyn swallowed her rising panic and tried not to choke on the news.

  “Wait a minute, Mama. Back up. Start over.”

  Lis took a breath. “You remember Ruby Tagle?” Her voice was deeper, the words spoken more slowly, her accent more pronounced.

  “Mama, why—?”

  “Girl, just answer the question.”

  Memories of warm molasses cookies, butter-frosted pound cakes, collard greens and salt pork, and honey-glazed ham washed over her. “Of course I know Ruby Tagle. My friend Maxine’s grandmother. Oh, you mean, she’s dying? But you said—”

  “I got a call from her this morning at the shop. Remember? Right before you left. You know, they’re pretty close—well, as close as Mama is to anybody, other than you—”

  “Are you doing this on purpose?”

  “Anyway, Mrs. Tagle is Mama’s emergency contact. After Dr. Hedgepeth talked to her, she immediately called me.”

  “Emergency.” She rolled the word around on her tongue. “What emergency?” Crusty people don’t get sick. They just get crustier until God says, “Enough.” Right?

  “Thank God he’s known our family for so long and is willing to break that hippo law thing.”

  HIPAA, Evelyn thought automatically but figured this wasn’t the time to correct her. And Evelyn sure wasn’t ready to thank God for anything yet. “What’s wrong with Granny B? Is it a heart problem? You can’t just tell me she’s dying without telling me what the doctor said. Is this a second opinion? What do we need to do?” Resolve crumbled as panic snowballed and gathered momentum.

  “Evelyn, I told you practically all that I know! Mama is . . . she has . . .”

  “Cancer?”

  “Yes! I mean . . . no. It’s . . . She has something called acute myeloid leukemia.”

  Boy, that’s a mouthful. Sounds deadly. “What is that exactly? What do we do now?”

  Lis jumped to her feet. The pot hit the ground and rolled against the headstone. Graham Willis. Son. Husband. Father. Child of God. “‘We? What do we do?’ And just who is ‘we,’ Evelyn?”

  “You, Granny B, me—you know, we. What’s with that look? If there isn’t a ‘we,’ then why are you telling me? You know I love Granny B, that I want to do whatever I can—”

  “And why do I know that, Evelyn? ‘We’ haven’t given a whit about her, not enough to go see her once the last month or so. You’ve been ‘just too busy,’ ‘so booked up,’ ‘had a full itinerary.’” As Lis elucidated all her daughter’s excuses, she stepped closer, crushing a white blossom underfoot. “You’ve been home for a week, and you have not so much as said one word about her. Where was this great love of yours for Mama that you now sit here telling me about? Hmmph, ‘What do we do now?’”

  Now was not the time for Evelyn to explain the Reason she hadn’t gone to see her elderly grandmother—for all of a sudden that was what Granny B was: her elderly grandmother, an infirm person, not the strapping, healthful, ice-crunching old lady who’d turned her from her home without blinking. No, that terrible Incident had been wiped away with just the whisper of the word dying. Now she needed to add sugar cubes to the trough so her mama would drink.

  “Okay, listen. No matter what happened in the past, that is exactly what and where it is: the past. You know that people say and do a lot of things . . . things that really don’t mean much in the long run or in the short run either. What will mean a lot more is what I—we—do right now. You just said yourself that I’m the closest person to her, so it makes sense for me to reach out to her, especially now.”

  Lis looked away. Evelyn admired her beautiful, dirt-smudged profile before she started searching her pockets. She considered cleaning her mama’s face with a slightly crumpled, sugar-crusted napkin from Krispy Kreme, but she handed it to her so she could do it herself.

  Lis retrieved a handkerchief from her own pocket. She dabbed at her cheeks and smoothed her ever-perfect coiffure. “You know what makes sense? If you had shown her these past few weeks even a tenth of the concern you’re showing now, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Mama probably would have confided in you, and we would have known how to help her. We could have saved her, Evelyn.”

  She dropped to her knees and stabbed at the dirt with her spade. Lis was much like Granny B: everything had its place, and if it didn’t know where to go, she’d put it there, including Evelyn.

  Much as Kevin had controlled himself and merely offered her a glass of orange juice, Evelyn silently took the spade from her mama and gently used it to lower the trampled gardenias into the hole. Lis and Evelyn spent the next hour wordlessly planting and cleaning away the dead leaves, bits of trash, and old flowers from the family plots. When they finished, Evelyn distributed a few of the new plants to the graves of Grandpa and Grandma Willis. The tension in their heartstrings gradually loosened.

  When Lis moved to stand, Evelyn rose quickly and cupped her elbow. Lis pulled away and rose with little effort, but Evelyn looped her arm through her mama’s and edged closer. Together they returned to the bench under the Southern live oak tree. Its roots stretched unseen beneath the headstones.

  Lis’s eyes drifted far away from Hillcrest. “You know, your grandmother’s always watering those hydrangeas.”

  “She is?”

  “You thought she’d let them die, what with all that work planting them? You always seem to have a way with her. At least you used to.”

  “Mama—”

  “When I was down there digging, I thought back to when she used to send all of us out to Booker Perkins’s garden. Well, he called it a garden, but it was really this huge plot of land he owned where he grew corn, beans, peas, all kinds of vegetables. Every summer, he’d come by our house at the crack of dawn and load us all up in the back of his truck. Over a few weeks’ time, we’d clear that whole piece of land.”

  “How old were you?”

  “When we started going, Sarah wasn’t as tall as a tobacco leaf. I’d have the taller ones pick from the highest rows and the rest of us gather up what was left. Little Ed pushed the wagons.” She gazed into yesteryear’s fields, seemingly unmindful of her fresh flow of tears.

  Evelyn didn’t know if her mama was mourning what once was or what was to come.

  “Thomas was kinda fragile, so he didn’t help much. But he’d lead us all in singing or telling stories. He could imitate Mama or Mr. Perkins. Almost anybody. He’d have us all laughing about one thing or another before long, distracting Little Ed from worrying about messing up those pretty hands of his.”

  “Y’all could laugh in
that heat?”

  “Girl, that work kept us out of Mama’s sight. She would have had us doing something much worse, I know. Besides, we would have plenty enough time later to be around the house as we got the vegetables ready for canning and storing.”

  “I can see Ruthena out there now, praying for God to help her pick that corn.”

  Lis swatted a mosquito. “No, Ruthena wasn’t out there with us. At least, not after the first picking season or two. She kept her color most of the year ’cause you can’t get a whole lot of sun when it’s streaming through stained-glass windows.”

  “Come again?”

  “Ruthena spent most of her time in church. Personally, I think her preoccupation with the Lord began with her simple wish to beat the heat—mostly the kind Mama laid on us. Ruthena made friends with the missionary group from church, so they put her to work most days after school and during the summer. She’d be running around delivering plates of food and Bibles to the sick and shut-in. She took prayer cloths to folk, ran errands for the pastor—it was Pastor John back then—dusted off the pulpit and choir hymnals. Ruthena wouldn’t show up back at Mama’s until long after we were home.”

  “How did Granny B feel about that?”

  “Ruthena wasn’t quite as holy then as she is now, so she was much easier to live with. As long as Ruthena didn’t try to save everybody, Mama was fine with her work in the church. Besides, membership has its privileges, as they say. Mama got a few free plates of food in her time, and with us working in Mr. Perkins’s fields most of the summer and Ruthena doing the Lord’s work, all the bases were covered. We stayed out of trouble. Of course, Little Ed didn’t cooperate for long.”

  Lis stood and gracefully stretched her back and neck. “Mama didn’t look to God to provide, at least not to provide in the way you think. She didn’t believe in letting her burdens down. They kept her warm at night in a way none of us kids could. Mama believed God saved her, but her salvation gave her something to look forward to, not something she got to enjoy here on Earth. You wouldn’t find her in church, singing His praises. She stuck to doing His work at home. For her, we were the Lord’s work.”