No One Is Coming to Save Us

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  6

  Henry remembered to take his shoes off at the door, but he would never change and shower first thing like Ava wanted. She didn’t want the shavings and sawdust he shed from his clothes and hair through the house. Once upon a time she liked the taste of sawdust on his skin. They’d meet at lunchtime in whatever darkness they could find. Back then she couldn’t get enough of the smell of him and she kept some part of her body touching some part of his. He thought many times she kept him grounded with her damp palm and short little fingers. Now if Ava touched him it was by accident or during their joyless baby-making days.

  “Ava, I’m here. Where you at?”

  Henry passed through a maze of thrift store finds to the back of the house. Ava watched too many home improvement television shows and took too many of the ideas to heart. He’d made the mistake of calling her a hoarder one day and she’d cried like he’d hit her, though anybody who knew him would tell you he would never hit a woman. After that he let it go, stopped mentioning any new thing she brought in the house.

  Sylvia’s car was outside for what seemed like the thousandth day in a row. He warned Ava of the hazards of buying from family—nothing good can come from it—but whether that was actual wisdom or reality judge show wisdom Henry couldn’t be entirely sure. He should have insisted that they find their own place, even if it had to be a rented house or an apartment or a basement somewhere. He had been opposed to that house on Development Drive from the get-go. Not that what he felt mattered. Both Ava and Sylvia had their minds set.

  “Hey Henry,” Sylvia said as she caught his eye. The sight of her pretty-faced son-in-law often startled her. She never remembered him that pretty. He was lean without looking drug-addicted or starved. He was brown and smooth, like leather, not milk chocolate or caramel. Food descriptions for black people made her crazy. Black people were not delicious. Henry had a vacant look like he was seeing everything for the first time. He was dumb, that’s all there was to it. Pretty didn’t keep him from being a dumb ass.

  Henry took off his hat and scratched his head. Like Don he probably had a handful of sawdust in the kinky coils of his close fro. He better not let Ava see him scratching.

  “You doing all right, Sylvia?” Henry had never had any inclination to call his mother-in-law, Mother. His wife was not his sister. When he and Ava told Sylvia they were getting married, she’d told him to call her by her name. She’d had enough children.

  “Tired. I’m okay. You?” Henry thought Sylvia looked disappointed. Her mouth in a sad turn or worse she looked at him sideways like she couldn’t stand to see his whole face.

  “Are you cooking, Ava?” Henry asked the question, but he knew what the answer had to be. When Ava was trying to get pregnant she ate very little and cooked even less. What was worse than the sex by the clock or Ava’s pretend seductions was the lack of hot food. “I’m going to get fish, if you’re not cooking.”

  “Go ahead. Just get me hush puppies.”

  Henry nodded but he knew he’d see those greasy hush puppies later in the trash. “I’m going on then.” Henry turned to go back into the house but swiveled back around to Ava. “I saw your boyfriend in town,” Henry said.

  Ava looked up at Henry to see the expression on his face. “Funny,” Ava said, though he saw a spark on her face. “Where’d you see him?”

  “Standing at the car wash beside Food Lion. He looked like hell. I almost stopped to say something to him.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Ava asked.

  What would Henry look like, slapping JJ’s back, like they were friends, like they had ever been friends?

  “You been up there yet?” Henry directed his question to Sylvia but he hoped Ava would answer.

  “No, but I expect to.” Sylvia glanced in Henry’s direction in time to see the softness of his expression, the vulnerability that she usually interpreted as weakness. She felt sorry for him for a fleeting moment.

  “I’m outta here. You want something, Sylvia?”

  “No, I won’t be here when you get back. I’ve got to get ready for work. Tomorrow’s my last day this week.”

  “I’ve only got thirty years to retirement. How many days is that?” Ava laughed.

  Sylvia brought her fingers to her lips. For years she’d kept a coat of clear polish on the tiny little nails, the slick feel of the polish gross on her tongue probably slowly poisoning her to death. When she was a child, she had sucked her thumb unless her mother was anywhere around. Her mother tried everything from hot pepper to castor oil to get her to stop. And she did stop in public, but at night she’d pop her thumb in her mouth. After all those years the urge had changed but had not left.

  “Don’t rush it. It’ll come soon enough,” Sylvia said.

  Henry hesitated between the two women and as usual he was not sure what else there was to say. “Be right back.”

  7

  Henry knew Pinewood like the back of his hand. Most of it anyway. He had spent too many teenage nights drinking in cars, riding with other boys until the cars moved on gas fumes or didn’t run at all because they’d flipped them into ditches. Many of them lived to stand around the overturned cars, trying not to look like drowned rats. Ava had been in Raleigh at school, a day trip easy, but that distance had given her other scenes in her head, other stories that Henry had listened to with eagerness, with jealousy like she was talking about walking on the moon.

  A big old-fashioned sign shaped like a fifties atomic triangle announced your arrival to the center of town. The big red letters, missing the final S but everybody knew what you meant, the place was an institution. Simmy’s burgers and fries, home of the big burger, had been in business since just after the Second World War. The mess of a cheeseburger with a bun as big as a baby’s head came (for the past sixty years) in a paper checkered basket. Simmy’s was a place that did not change. Going there was an event.

  When Henry’s father was young if he ate at Simmy’s he ordered his food from a sliding door in the back of the restaurant. There was no colored entrance or sign that marked a separate space, but the blacks in town knew they would not be welcome at the front door. To this day some blacks preferred the pickup window to going in the restaurant. Others loved the idea that the times had changed enough, the wounds healed enough that they could walk proudly through the front door on their own terms. But not Henry’s father. Once the place was integrated he still wouldn’t go in. It was Henry’s Uncle Buddy’s favorite place. He would bring in king burgers or barbecue for them in bags so damp and heavy, he’d had to keep his meaty hand underneath the bag to keep the sloppy food from falling out the bottom. Uncle Buddy would cut a burger in half for Henry and his brother Sean, and though they protested about who got the larger piece, neither of them ever finished their share.

  The town was bisected by a main street and divided into four sections. All four corners had changed only slightly in Henry’s lifetime. A KFC had replaced a family restaurant on one corner and a McDonald’s opened in the early eighties. Back then his family swung their boats of cars into the parking lot running out their little bit of gas as they waited for a parking space. Gone were his elementary school teachers’ names, the address of his grandmother’s house, his first day of school, when he was told his mother almost lost her job at the cafeteria because she sat in their station wagon in the school’s parking lot until noon. All of that gone, but the Big Mac jingle he learned from the commercial abideth.

  Henry turned right on Main Street away from the center of town. He’d wanted fish but he found himself behind Simmy’s in the back parking lot. A few years before, a woman had gotten killed by her boyfriend in a struggle for the night’s receipts. He took the money she was supposed to deposit and paid his light bill, his water bill, put gas in his car. What a relief he must have felt to have those bills paid, no more creditors on his back, free for one quick minute. Dear God why are we such fools?

  Since then none of the employees was allowed to go out alone, even to take out the
garbage, even to smoke. But the years had softened them all, dulled them to the unpredictable possibilities of mean in the world. Instead of worry, if they thought about it at all, they reasoned that there was little harm in ten short minutes in the evening air.

  Henry turned off the ignition. As usual, the car was a mess. He flipped the visor in front of him as dust floated into the air and he reached to pick up the solitary dime in among the litter of napkins and dried clay on the soiled carpets. He used to care about a car and was at the Crossroads Carwash and Laundry every Sunday morning, coaxing crinkled dollars into the change machine. There were times he even got there before the Jehovah’s Witnesses who were replacing or adding to the Watchtowers on the tables, a blur in long skirts and sensible shoes. He meant to take one of the magazines, but he was afraid of what they would mean to him. That he was a man so easily bought by images of wholesome children and the promise of good love in paradise. In those days he kept a bucket in his trunk with Turtle Wax, chamois, and dishwashing liquid (preferably lemon fresh Joy, nothing made better lather than that), a stiff bristle brush for scrubbing the tires. The cars he owned were never special, but the sparkle of his, all his, even on the roof where nobody would look, gave him a satisfaction that to the untrained eye looked like happiness.

  In the visor in a stretchy band was the cracked plastic window of a yellowed bill. He had forgotten the light bill again. Ava would scream when she saw it, or worse, cry, like some real tragedy had struck. People get folded up in the creases of their lives.

  Carrie was thick through the middle, her face rounded out, but she was a beautiful girl. The pouch below her belly button, the apron some women get who’ve had babies, was never concealed by the long shirts she wore. Nobody cared about her flabby belly. Carrie opened the passenger door and leaned in to Henry as he kissed her lightly on the lips. “I’m glad to see you, baby,” he said. He held her shoulders afraid of the long blondish brown strands of her hair that might find their way to his clothes. Ava had pulled a strand of it from him one day, pinched it between her fingers, and dropped it in the trash. She’d said nothing, but Henry knew her well enough to know she had stored the information for later.

  “What are you doing here? Jerri told me she saw your car or I’d have missed you.” Carrie slipped the apron over her head and positioned herself in the passenger seat to face Henry.

  Carrie and Henry had met in high school, though Carrie didn’t know him then. She knew few of the black people at the school and was friends with none of them. A lot had happened to the world in twenty years. Back then no black kids dated white kids, not in public. Nobody Henry or Carrie knew was interested in making that public stand. What would be the point? And at that age there had to be a point. The mission of high school was to come from money and have great hair, but blend in and be invisible and envied by everyone.

  “I can’t stay. I just got off from work.”

  “Look at you? You’ve got sawdust in your hair.” Carrie brushed Henry’s hair with her hand. Henry stopped her and rested his face in her palm. “Baby are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, just listening to the radio.”

  “You depressed?”

  “No I don’t get depressed. Just bored.” Henry took Carrie’s hand and placed it on her lap. “Don’t make everything so serious.”

  Carrie searched Henry’s face for deceit. Not that she needed proof, he was obviously sad. “I miss you, Henry. We don’t get to see you anymore. When are you coming to the house? Zeke asks about you all the time.”

  “I don’t know.” Henry rubbed the back of his head. “Maybe Thursday. Are you working? I’ll be off. I’ll bring him something.” Henry wished he could be more like Zeke with no need to name and define his life, no time for a one-eyed squint at the world trying to really see it. He just took things as they came. Five-year-olds have it made. “Ava’s going to be with Sylvia. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

  “Are you coming in?”

  “I’ll just do the drive-through.”

  “Come on in a few minutes. If you sit in my station we can talk as long as we want to.”

  Henry was shaking his head no.

  “She’s not going to notice you gone for a few minutes,” Carrie snapped.

  “Look, don’t get mad. I’m tired. I came straight from the shop.” Henry reached for his wallet in his back pocket, the tight fit of his jeans and his position behind the wheel making him squirm to reach it. He lifted his hips to get a better hold. He knew he looked ridiculous but he couldn’t quit.

  “Stop struggling, Henry. Just get out of the car.” Carrie knew as soon as she said for Henry to do the most obvious logical thing there was no way he would do it.

  “Maybe I don’t want to get out the car. I don’t have to.” He gripped the wallet pinched it with his two fingers until he squeezed it out of the tight pocket. “Dammit!” he said and tried again.

  Carrie tried not to watch Henry wrestle with his pants. He would get that wallet his own way or die. He lifted two tens and handed them to Carrie. He didn’t want her to see that there were only three or four ones still left in the leather folds. “Give this to Zeke and tell him I’ll come on Thursday okay? We’re only working three days this week.”

  “You give it to him. Come here and give it to him.”

  “Why can’t you just do it,” Henry said, but he was aware he sounded whiny. “I’m not asking for much.”

  “If I take this,” Carrie began, she hated making him promise like they were children themselves. “You promise you’ll come. You promise?”

  “Why don’t you let Zeke stay home? How much can they do in kindergarten? I’ll take him to the park. We’ll spend the whole day.”

  “He needs to go to school. Just get in a few hours with him before we start talking about the whole day.” Carrie sighed hard and rolled her apron between her hands. “I’m tired too. Bethany had a birthday party for Sam, and Zeke didn’t get invited.”

  “She’s a bitch.”

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “You know it.” Henry held his mouth with his hand until the terrible sensation to cry washed over him. Maybe Carrie didn’t see. He couldn’t stand it if she saw that. “Do you want me to come?”

  “I shouldn’t have told you.” Carrie sighed and reached for the door handle; the smooth handle cool in her hand, a different temperature and texture than she had expected. She faced Henry. “Why can’t you understand this?” She hadn’t wanted to scream, but as soon as she pulled up her anger it dissolved. Their time together was so short that she didn’t want to waste it. It occurred to Carrie that Henry probably never made that kind of emotional adjustment for her, he wouldn’t even think of it. Carrie tried to calm herself, but she could feel the emotion rising in her chest. She would not cry. “She’s my sister, Henry. Do you understand any of that? She’s not a stranger or some girl I work with. She’s the only family I’ve got speaking to me.” Carries stifled the urge to shake Henry’s shoulders. “She the best one out of all of them. You know that.”

  “You see how good she is, don’t you?” Henry asked, but Carrie could see the doubt on his face.

  “Why do you make this harder for me?”

  “I can’t help it your people are racists.”

  Carrie shook her head. “I could throw up. You know that? That’s how sick I am.”

  “Ah shit, Carrie. Why are we going to do this now?”

  “You aren’t being for real. I know you understand.”

  “All they know is who they think I am.”

  “She said she couldn’t have Mama and me in the same place. She always used to invite us to everything. Where does that leave me, Henry? You know what it feels like not to have any family?”

  Henry shook his head. He did know. His father was as good as dead. His brother locked up. The mother who loved him, the one person he could say that about with full confidence, was long dead. He couldn’t make himself think about Ava right now. Yes, he understood being alone.
He knew very well. Henry stopped before he held his head in his hands the way he craved. “Does Zeke know?”

  “Know what?”

  “About the party? Any of it.”

  “I don’t think so, but kids see things. They put it together. You know that.” Carrie was embarrassed not to have considered that her son might know about the situation. He had not asked her anything, but kids know things.

  “I will beat the shit out of other kids,” Henry said.

  “You make me sick.” Carrie laughed. “You suck.” Carrie punched Henry lightly in his arm.

  “I can beat just about any five-year-old in the world.”

  “Probably so.”

  “Probably! That’s cold. You don’t think I could beat a toddler? I’m not much of a man am I?” Henry laughed. Carrie hesitated but let a laugh escape too. Henry could tell the air in the car had grown stale again and one wrong word would ruin the calm moment they’d just found.

  “I’ll bring something. I’ll be here right after school,” Henry said and held Carrie’s two hands between his.

  “Okay, Henry. He’ll be so excited.”

  “Don’t make me feel bad. I told you I’d be there.”

  “I’m not trying to make you feel bad.” Carrie sighed.

  Henry looked out the window at the restaurant, not sure what to say but not wanting to say the wrong things again. “Did you ever think we’d be living like this?” Carrie said.

  Henry looked into Carrie’s light brown eyes, at her romantic face, with its turned-down mouth. “We aren’t going to start this. Let’s don’t start. Please. Okay?”

  “You have ideas about your life. This is it?” Carrie snorted.

  “I can’t do this today.” Henry made coffee in the morning on his break. He poured coffee into the Styrofoam cup, tore three packets of sugar, and let the particles swirl into the mix. It could have been any one of a hundred days. A thousand days dissolving in front of his eyes. “Did I ever tell you about my Uncle Buddy? Big guy. He used to love this place.”