Dust

by Eva Marie Everson

  Westley’s eyes narrowed as he studied me. “You look like you’re going to throw up …”

  I bolted from the bed. “I am,” I said around a gag. I stumbled into the small bathroom, my knees barely reaching the cold tile before I vomited into the toilet.

  The wave had crashed.

  Michelle woke shortly after Westley left. By then the nausea had passed and I’d managed a shower and getting dressed. I ate a slice of toast with butter and even started a load of clothes. In the sudden rush, Westley had failed to tell me—assure me—if he planned to meet Cindie somewhere other than our home. So, just in case …

  The baby and I arrived at Miss Justine’s a little after ten. Rose Beth—now referred to lovingly as Ro-Bay by Michelle and, subsequently, Westley and me—opened the door with admonishment on her lips. “’Bout time,” she said as the door swung wide. “Miss Justine,” she hollered over her shoulder, “they’re here and one of ’em looks like death warmed over.”

  I stepped over the threshold and into a foyer that continued to impress, but no longer intimidat me. “I take it you mean me,” I said wryly.

  “Well, I don’t mean that sweet chile …” She stretched her arms for Michelle, who struggled to be free of me, the irony striking harder than expected. “Come on to Ro-Bay,” she said as Miss Justine’s house shoes slapped against the floor in rhythm to her walk from the back of the house. “What’s kept you so …” She stopped and stared at me with her fists planted on her hips. “Good land of the living, what’s happened?”

  “I woke up sick and then Westley …” I didn’t continue. At twenty-one months, Michelle had begun repeating my words, sometimes to my delight. Often to my chagrin. “I feel fine now though.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Ro-Bay said with a knowing look toward Miss Justine as she closed the front door and Michelle reached for one of her large-hoop gold-filled earrings. “You thinking what I’m thinking, Miss Justine?”

  “What are you thinking?” I asked them both.

  “Auntie Flo come to see you in a while?” she asked.

  “Auntie who?”

  Miss Justine chuckled as she reached me. “Come on, darling. Let’s go have a talk. Rose Beth, bring us a little hot tea, will you? We’ll leave you in charge of Little Bit for a while.”

  “Ain’t I always …”

  Miss Justine and I walked arm in arm toward the back of the house, Michelle’s giggles becoming more distant. “Cindie’s coming into town this Friday,” I said both confidentially and quickly.

  We stopped and Miss Justine looked up at me. “Oh, dear. I reckon I’d hoped … but of course not. She’s the baby’s mother.” Her face grew firm. “How did Westley take it?”

  “Like you,” I answered with a grimace. “She’s …” I couldn’t say the word. I wanted to, but right then, I couldn’t.

  We continued toward the sunroom. “Westley is in a tough place.” She tapped the center of her chest. “In his heart, he’d like nothing better than for you and him to be all the family that child needs. But he made a deal with Cindie and he’s trying to keep it. Can’t fault a man for being a man of his word.”

  “No, and I don’t, but is this the way it will always be?”

  We reached the sunroom then, its comfort and light welcoming me as it did most weekday mornings. “Until Cindie gets tired of the game and simply goes her own way … makes another life for herself … or …”

  “Or she comes back and takes Michelle for good.”

  “Is that what made you sick? The thought of losing that baby?”

  “No, but it didn’t help any. I woke up sick.” We sat on one of the wicker sofas and I sighed. “I felt so bad when I woke up that I thought a truck had run over me during the night and left me for half dead … but I-I really do feel better now.”

  Miss Justine raised her chin as Ro-Bay ambled in carrying a tea set kissed with tiny rosebuds and green leaves and all on a silver tray. Michelle waddled behind her, her Tommee Tippee cup clasped between both hands, the morning’s sun casting an angelic halo over silky blond curls. “We come up with a date yet?” Ro-Bay asked as she placed the tray on the coffee table.

  “A date for what?” I asked.

  “The last time Auntie Flo came to visit.” I scrunched my brow as Ro-Bay poured the tea and Michelle leaned her weight against my knee. “Honey, didn’t your mama ever teach you nothing ’bout Auntie Flo?” She handed first one cup of tea to Miss Justine and then one to me.

  “Aunt Flo,” Miss Justine whispered, her tone filled with dignity. “Your period.”

  “My—”

  “When was the last one?”

  I paused a moment. Thinking. Calculating. “I’ve been so busy with Little Bit …” I rubbed her back and she grinned at me, her clear green eyes smiling.

  Ro-Bay scooped Michelle into her arms. “Y’all let me know what you work out. Me and Missy here are gon’ color a pretty picture.” She kissed Michelle’s neck and the child giggled. “Aren’t we, sweet thing?”

  “Yes!” Michelle sang out.

  I smiled at the child who had stolen my heart, a smile that fell when I turned back to Miss Justine. “Well?” she asked.

  “Six weeks? No … eight. Yes, eight.”

  “And you and Westley … what kind of birth control are you using?”

  Flames ignited in my cheeks.

  “Never mind. That is 100 percent none of my business.” She nodded toward my cup. “Drink up. I’m going to make a phone call … see if we can’t get you in to see Dr. Sharpe this afternoon.” She was halfway to the telephone bench that sat angled in the corner of the room.

  I took a sip of tea, then set the cup and saucer back on the tray. “You don’t think …”

  “Only one way to find out.” She picked up the handset and dialed a number she apparently knew by heart. “We need to see—as we used to say back in the day—if the rabbit dies or not.”

  I reached again for my tea, my hand shaking. A baby … a baby of my own. Not that I didn’t love Michelle enough to call my own … but a baby … formed from the love Westley and I shared. Purely and wholly ours.

  Another thought hit me … a baby … and a toddler. Not that it hadn’t been done before. Hillie … Hillie had five of her husband’s children when she gave birth a year into the marriage. Which meant that Hillie and I were nearly on the same schedule.

  “We’re set,” Miss Justine said. “Two o’clock this afternoon.” She plopped down on the sofa. “Now, tell me. Have you ever had your feet in a doctor’s stirrups before?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Cindie

  She stood in front of her mother, hands on her hips, fingers splayed wide. Shoulders back. Breasts jutted forward. Chin up. “What do you think, Mama?” she asked the woman who filled the occasional chair in the corner of the room. A cigarette dangled between her lips and her eyes narrowed before she took a long drag, then exhaled slowly.

  “What do I think about what?”

  “How do I look? I’m picking up Michelle from Westley this morning.”

  “And since when do you care what I think about anything?”

  Cindie’s shoulders dropped. “Come on, Mama. Don’t start this again. For the love of all that is holy, do not start this nonsense again.”

  Lettie Mae pulled another drag into her lungs. Held it for a few seconds before exhaling. The distance between them filled with smoke, adding to the overall dinginess of the place. If she looked hard enough, long enough, Cindie would swear she saw it clinging to the walls, adding a coat of gray to what used to be pure white. “Well, aren’t you just all high and mighty? Talking to me about what’s holy.” From somewhere near the middle of the house, a door opened, then closed, followed by another door shutting. “Your brother’s up, I reckon,” Lettie Mae added. “Leticia sleeps to near noon on days she ain’t working.”

  “Mama …” Cindie took a deep breath. “Are we going to go at each other all week? Because if we are, I am not bringing Michelle here. I can
tell you that much.”

  Lettie Mae hoisted herself up, sliding to the end of a cushion that had seen better days years prior, the center of it concave. Unsupportive. Even the flowers in the pattern looked wilted and forlorn. “And just where do you think you’ll go, Priss?”

  “I’ll go to Velma’s.” Cindie waltzed over to the end table next to Lettie Mae’s chair, grabbed up the pack of Salems, then pulled one out and lit it with her mother’s Bic. She blew a thin line of smoke before sashaying to the sofa. “She told me I could,” she said, then plopped on it.

  “She ain’t said no such a thing.”

  Cindie nodded. “Yes, she did.”

  “When?”

  “Thursday night, when I talked to her on the phone. Told her I was coming home and that I was concerned about how you were going to behave—”

  “Me behave?”

  “And that’s when she said for me and Michelle to just go out to her and Vernon’s house.”

  “I reckon now that you got your own car you think you can just up and do whatever.”

  Cindie tapped her cigarette against the edge of a nearby ashtray. The gray-white ashes crumbled over the edge. Part of her deal with Westley was that in addition to getting her set up in Atlanta, he would provide a decent car. Something that wouldn’t break down every five miles. He’d done better than that. “It’s a fine car,” she said, now taunting her mother.

  “Ain’t a new one.”

  The Fairlane was a few years old, that much was true, but it had barely been used and Westley had insisted that a mechanic give it the okay before he purchased it. Cindie hated the color—some putrid yellow—but the radio and the air conditioner worked so she kept that much of her opinion to herself. “It’s better than anything you ever drove.”

  Jacko shuffled in on bare feet. He hadn’t bothered to pull on a shirt or button the rumpled pair of jeans that hung low on his narrow hips. A line of dark hair ran from the opening to his navel. Another formed a V between his breast bones while the hair on his head stuck out in all directions. Chocolate eyes bore the telltale signs of a night of drinking. “Could y’all keep it down, please?” he mumbled. “You could wake the dang dead with all this carrying on.”

  Cindie stood and walked over to the young man who had grown at least two, maybe three inches since she’d seen him last. She slipped her hand under his chin as she strained to make eye contact. “You sure tied one on last night, didn’t you, baby brother?”

  He jerked away from her. “I need coffee,” he said before ambling to the back of the house.

  “Bring me a cup,” Lettie Mae hollered. She ground out the nub of her cigarette. “And you,” she said to Cindie, “leave him alone. He works hard over to the plant. If on a Friday night he wants to go out with his friends, then there ain’t nothing wrong with it.”

  Cindie crushed her half-smoked cigarette before stalking after her brother. She found him in the kitchen, two mugs in front of him, pouring coffee from the percolator into the empty one. “Hey,” she said, keeping her voice soft. “Wanna go with me to Velma’s this weekend?” Because, for sure, she wasn’t going to be able to tolerate a whole week at Lettie Mae’s. She hadn’t learned a whole lot in Atlanta yet, but she’d at least learned that much.

  He eyed her. “For what?”

  “I thought maybe you and Leticia and me and the baby could spend some time with our big sister.” She looked around the room, frowning at the previous night’s dishes still piled in both sinks. The trash overflowing from the can. The Formica table that needed a scrubbing in the worst way. “Don’t you want to get out of this rat trap for a couple of days?” Obviously, since she’d left, the house had gone to the dogs.

  Jacko chuckled as he took a sip of black coffee. “You mean get away from Lettie Mae.”

  “Come on,” she coaxed. “We’ll have a sibling weekend. We’ll cook out and enjoy Mother Nature and on Sunday we can go listen to Vernon preach. I bet Velma will make a big Sunday dinner afterward … fried chicken … fried okra … you know how much you love her fried okra …”

  Jacko’s face lit up as much as humanly possible considering the hangover Cindie felt sure he must be nursing. “Makes Vernon’s hellfire and damnation stuff worth listening to.”

  Cindie reached for the second mug of coffee and began fixing it to her mother’s liking. “So, you’ll do it?”

  “I think Leticia’s working this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, well … I’ve got my own car now. I’ll just drive back to town and pick her up from the café.”

  He took another sip as their mother called from the front of the house. “Is someone bringing me my coffee?”

  Cindie rolled her eyes and Jacko chuckled again. “I’m coming,” she hollered back. Then, to Jacko, “I’m meeting Westley at the drugstore in about a half hour and then I’ll be back here about a half hour after that … if I’m lucky. That gives you a whole hour to throw some things in a sack so we can get out of here as quick as possible.”

  Her brother nodded. “All right … Let’s go on out to Velma’s.”

  Cindie started for the door, then turned. “And get a shower. You’re too cute to go around looking and smelling like the something the dog drug into the yard.”

  She worried that Michelle wouldn’t recognize her. After all, she’d been gone for months. And while she thought of her baby every day of the world, she was smart enough to know the same wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—true for Michelle.

  She talked to Westley often enough. Knew the day-in-day-out of their daughter’s life. Knew she was adjusting. That she wasn’t sleeping through the night, but that she had stopped crying for her mama in the daytime. He never said much about his little wifey … how she and Michelle might be getting along, but he didn’t sound strained over the relationship either. Whether that gave Cindie any comfort or grief, she couldn’t say. What he had done was assure her that she—Cindie—would always be Michelle’s mother. The one who had brought her into the world. The one she would always call Mommy.

  “You got that right,” Cindie now said under her breath as she pulled her car into the wide and vacant space in front of the drugstore. She slid the gearshift to Park, then looked through the windshield stained with bug guts from her trip, to the flapping green- and white-striped awning over the store’s front door. Nostalgia washed over her, and she smiled at the arched lettering of the store’s name, painted across the width of one of the wide pane windows. The advertisements welcoming folks to come inside for an ice-cold Coca-Cola at the fountain … or to pick up a box of Goody’s headache powder in case the kids get too loud during summer vacation. Another showed the face of a beautiful woman, her eyes downcast, lids deeply shadowed in baby blue by Maybelline’s powder-twist invention. The poster startled her; the model looking so much like the young woman she’d seen on Westley’s front porch. The one who now raised her child. Held her. Fed her. Tucked her in at night. “Stop it,” she admonished herself and not for the first time either. She had a plan. One she had to stick with. Because if she didn’t, all would be lost. Not just for a couple of years. For a lifetime.

  Cindie popped open the door and got out, made quick steps on weak legs to the store’s front doors. She jerked the right open wide and stepped through to see the old woman behind the cash register looking over the rim of her cat glasses and down her nose. Cindie stopped short. Had she spied her outside? Thought that she could persuade her to turn around and go back to Lettie Mae’s without Michelle?

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  Cindie shook her head. “Pharmacy,” she answered, then made her way to the back. Her stomach turned into knots and she wondered when—if ever—she’d feel like she was as good as someone else. Or better than. Knowing she’d settle for half as good.

  Anxiety kicked at her. She was about to see Michelle again. What if her daughter cried? What if she ran from her? What if—

  “There’s Mommy.” Westley’s voice cut through the cacophony of her though
ts a split second before she saw him standing at the end of the row, holding their daughter—a glorious sight of blond curls and large green eyes and rolls of baby fat that had thinned out considerably. The wide hem of her pink-and-white gingham dress lay draped over her father’s protective arm, the one that held her close—his face nestled against hers.

  Hers against his.

  Cindie stopped. “Baby girl,” she cooed.

  Michelle squirmed for release and Westley gave it. Cindie squatted as her little one waddled toward her—half running, half walking … all smiles and giggles. The overhead light reflected joy in her eyes, a clear indication that Cindie had not bargained and lost. Cindie caught her as soon as she neared. Stood. Tightened her hold. Breathed in the baby shampoo and powdery goodness of her. The light scent of her father’s aftershave. She dipped her lips between her child’s shoulder and neck and kissed it over and over, repeating the same words again and again. “Baby girl … baby girl … Mommy missed you so much.”

  “See,” Westley now said as he drew close. “I told you she would remember you.”

  “Westley,” Cindie breathed out. “I missed her so much.” And you, she wanted to say, but stopped herself.

  “She missed you, too.”

  Cindie kissed her daughter again before adding, “Not too much, I hope. I couldn’t bear it if I thought she was miserable.”

  “She’s not. I promise you, she’s not.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “How’s it going up there?”

  “It’s going. Job’s working out … school is good.” She tossed her laughter into the air. “I forgot how hard it can be, but it’s good.”

  He rubbed their daughter’s back who turned to him before clinging again to her mother. “And your housing situation? Still good?”

  “I have two roommates now … Karen works long hours downtown, goes out most evenings with her officemates. And then there’s Kyle.”

  Westley’s brow shot upward. “Karen and Kyle?”