No One Is Coming to Save Us

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  Sylvia had long ago understood that she would never be one of those pulled together women.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I want to find that girlfriend of Marcus’s.”

  “What! That woman might be blind, crippled, or crazy. No wonder you didn’t tell me. I’m not going. I thought you were going to Hickory.”

  “Come on and go with me. I need some help.”

  “For what? To get cussed out? I don’t need a stranger cussing me. I’ve got you for that.”

  “Marcus says she’s a nice girl.”

  “What’s he going to say?” Lana said. “This is not a good idea. That is an understatement. Do you understand what understatement means?”

  Sylvia hadn’t talked to Marcus for a few days, but she would find his girlfriend. Maybe the girl could be convinced to send Marcus a letter or maybe even go see him. Her visit was bound to take some pressure off Marcus and give him enough energy to do his time out. It was worth trying to find out.

  “We won’t be a minute. She’s just on Main Street in one of those houses you like. Don’t you want to see what one of them looks like inside?” Charlotte and their daughter, Dena, lived just off Main Street. Those old houses were now mostly rentals, a few of them had been turned into apartments. All of them showed their age. Still the luster of long ago money was there in the high ceilings, fireplaces (not functioning anymore, but still lovely to see), hardwood floors, and charming features that made a body feel rich, like pocket doors and leaded glass windows. Nothing that would keep you warm or safe, but there was more to life than warmth.

  “What if she won’t let us in? Then what do I get?”

  “How many times have I helped you? Do you always have to get something?”

  “Yes, I always do,” Lana said. “Otherwise this is all just ridiculous. What are you talking me into? Drive then.”

  Charlotte’s house was a small Colonial, a charmer in its heyday. Pink azaleas were at the end of their flower in the curved beds on either side of the door. The houses in the neighborhood had been some of the best in the town—the homes of factory bosses and line managers. These were places that people had cared about that wouldn’t take too much to set right again. Sylvia passed by slowly in her car.

  “Is that it?” Lana said.

  “I think so, but I don’t see any toys or anything”

  “Well, she could be neat. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?”

  “Maybe this should be a silent trip,” Sylvia said.

  There was a car in the driveway, but she didn’t know what kind of car Charlotte drove. Sylvia passed by the house fully intending to turn around and go back. Instead she pointed the car back to Church Street.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Sylvia said. “I’m not sure.”

  “Well you better get back to the house. I didn’t come out for nothing.”

  Sylvia turned the car onto Highway 18, speeding in the opposite direction of the street.

  “Are you turning around?”

  “Yes,” Sylvia said, but she continued down the road.

  “Stop up there at Teague’s Meats,” Lana said. Past the light was the butcher they all went to for special occasions. “I need some ham,” Lana said. “Gus loves their ham and I live to make him happy as you well know.”

  Sylvia pulled into the parking lot. “There’s a lot of things I well know, but that’s not one of them.”

  “You coming in?” Lana asked.

  “You go ahead.” Teague’s Meats was at the south end of town. About this time of year every year she used to go there to get her ten-gallon bucket of chitterlings. The kids would complain at the cooking and hold their noses like they were being gassed, roll on the floor in agony, especially Devon. He was the worst. And no matter how many times it happened, Sylvia thought it was hilarious, though she pretended to be offended. “You all don’t know what good eating is,” she’d say, but neither one of the children would touch the finished product, the grayish mush like scrambled breakfast eggs on the plate. “Try just a bite,” she’d offer. “You can’t even smell anything,” she’d say. “The secret is to cook them with a potato,” she’d offer to Ava, like her child was taking notes about how to feed her future family. The smell of pig intestines cooking for hours on a stove meant celebration to Sylvia. It meant everybody was home. For many years she had passed by Teague’s Meats and never stopped. She didn’t care how good the ham was.

  Lana came back swinging her plastic bag from her wrist. “Nothing happier to a black woman than a bag full of ham,” she said.

  Sylvia pulled onto the road past Teague’s. She cracked her window for a little breeze. The stores became much more spread apart, the parking lots turned to fields with crooked old houses peeling toxic paint set up right next to the road. One of the houses had become a thrift store Sylvia always meant to visit, though she couldn’t image what she would do with a butter churn, dangerous-looking wooden chairs, or a rusted wheelbarrow with a flower pot sitting in the middle. Save them for her own yard sale probably. She should turn around and go buy a knickknack to make her apartment feel like someone lived there rather than like someone forgot a few things on her hasty move out. But Sylvia couldn’t stop and let the town be still around her, her thoughts darting like gnats.

  She had gotten up in a bad state of mind. Something was wrong with Ava. Something was happening and she didn’t know why. Sylvia had checked her e-mail and wandered the Web. She could enlarge her penis, meet for a discreet affair, get to know some horny Russian girls who were already hot for her. All this technology and that’s the best people could come up with was passing dirty notes to each other. She knew she shouldn’t but she began to search the Web to read about the families of the children killed at the school up north. She navigated through pages and pages of links, memorials, the parents’ memories, the notes of surviving children. She couldn’t stop the flood of thoughts of her son: Devon found a story in his schoolbook I Heard the Owl Call My Name and said the title fifty times if he said it once, an incantation they both found strangely soothing. In the mornings, Devon always a large boy, hovered over her in the kitchen, his cereal bowl close up to his lips, the shadow of his bulk on the table. Can’t you sit down? Stop hovering. A flash of giant shoes in the hall. Legs hung over the shabby couch, slow swinging as the blue flicker of the television lit his face. Ordinary things. Days and years of the everyday, ordinary thing. Every passing day was more empty of the living proof of him, the sounds of his voice and movement, the sweaty funky boy smell of him.

  Sylvia turned the car around at the Run In convenience store. “You want a snack?”

  “No, I want to do what we set out to do.” Lana pulled out her phone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “Harriet Tubman. I am being kidnapped ain’t I? Who you think? Ava,” Lana said into the receiver, “your mama has finally gone off the deep end.”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. Tell her I’m fine,” Sylvia said.

  “I’m just saying hey. Are you okay, honey? Talk to your mama, hear? Okay, don’t let me interrupt high finance. Okay. See you.”

  “What did you call her for?” Sylvia asked.

  “You need to talk to her.”

  “What do you know, Lana? I’m not playing with you.”

  “I know you need to talk to her. Don’t put me in the middle. You need to talk to her. Right now or sooner,” Lana said.

  Sylvia turned the car to home. Charlotte. All these young people with old-timey names. Sylvia would not go see that woman like she was some kind of fixer, like she’d ever solved a single problem in her own life. That woman was not her business.

  23

  Ava was twelve when James Martin came into their lives. Some people are constants like the soil, always with you, never an arrival date or a beginning to recount. But with James she knew the second he became part of them. In the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie grocery store, Sylvia pushed a rusted cart, A
va trailed behind her mother, her attention shifted from the quaking wheel on the buggy and her mother’s swaying hips in her polyester maxi. James materialized from the thick, humid air.

  “Ree Ree,” they heard behind them, her mother’s nickname. Nobody but family and people Sylvia knew when she was a child knew to call her Renee, and only a very few had any idea that once upon a time she had been called Ree Ree—a nickname, a name from Sylvia’s girlhood—a country name Sylvia resented for being what it was.

  Sylvia jerked her head up, recognition on her face. “James Martin?” A question, though she was sure her mother knew the sound.

  Her mother was lonely. Even she could see that. But she wore alone poorly, always hoped that the buffer of people would save her from having to navigate the world with just her own counsel.

  “Little Ree. Is that you?”

  “Yeah, every bit of it.” Sylvia smoothed the front of her top to hide the bulges her fat belly made, hoping to look a little slimmer, but only emphasizing her bulk.

  “You look good, girl. Real good. Let me see you,” James said, pulling her mother’s body into his. I can’t believe I just run into you like this.”

  Sylvia grinned. Ava could tell she wanted to believe James. Believe that she looked real good, even if she knew it had to be a lie. Her mother thought her days of looking good were over and she’d entered into the phase that women fear, of sinking into the background, becoming the silent feature while the young women and girls took center stage, had their babies, wore their high heels, laughed too loud because men liked to hear them. Ava thought her mother was a pretty woman. She was also fat. Ava wasn’t blind.

  “You been in town long?” Her mother said softly like she was shy. Sylvia Ross was nobody’s shy. Nobody who knew her would ever think so.

  “I just got out. Two days. And here you are.”

  Her mother giggled, sounded younger than Ava liked. Ava got in the car and didn’t hear the rest of their conversation, but she was sure that her mother was pleased. If she’d had the keys she would’ve turned on the radio. If she’d had a notebook, she would have written something witty or drawn high-heeled shoes, her newest drawing project. But there she was by herself and unprepared.

  Sylvia and James put the groceries in the trunk.

  “I’m gonna call you, girl,” James said as he opened the car door for Sylvia.

  Sylvia positioned herself into the plush seat, arranged herself behind the wheel.

  “Good to see you. Don’t be a stranger.”

  James waved to her mother from the other side of the glass. Ava waved back to him from the backseat until he finally looked in her direction.

  “Don’t mention Jamie to your daddy, hear?”

  “Who is Jamie?”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” her mother said as she pulled the car out of the parking lot. “Just keep this to ourselves.”

  Ava nodded. She had no intention of saying anything to her daddy and it wasn’t until that very minute that she thought she had anything to tell.

  Ava’s grandmother’s house was too small for a Sunday dinner with everybody, children of her own, and their many children, so everyone showed up throughout the day, in shifts with one group coming just as the last left. Usually Ava and her father came together, but today Don stayed in bed.

  “Come in here, Ava,” Don had yelled to her from his bed.

  Ava stopped at the doorway. She could not remember when her father had ever been in bed in the middle of the day. He was never a sick man, never a layabout. It made her nervous to see him red-eyed and wrapped up in the sheets. “Go get me some water, baby, with plenty of ice,” Don said from his bed.

  Ava cracked open a rack of ice cubes from a metal pan and brought Don a glass of water and a glass of ice, like he liked. Her father’s eyes were red, puffy, and he had slept in his clothes. “Just set it down on the table,” Don had said and rolled over to face the wall.

  “Get up from there, Don, and stop scaring Ava,” Sylvia said as she brought a snack for herself to watch television. “Don’t let him bother you, Ava,” she said.

  “Is Daddy sick?” Ava whispered to her mother.

  “Oh he’s sick, but there’s no help for him,” Sylvia yelled loudly enough for Don to hear. “Don’t worry. He’s just a fool. There’s no cure for that. He’ll get his sorry tail up by evening,” Sylvia had said.

  Ava had nodded, strangely comforted.

  “Avery, wash up those few dishes before everybody gets here,” her grandmother yelled.

  Ava knew that her grandmother knew her name was not Avery. Calling her Avery was her idea of protest against her daughter-in-law, Sylvia.

  “I’ve already started, ma’am,” she yelled from the kitchen. Her grandmother hated anybody to yell in her house, unless it was her.

  “Come in here if you have anything to say to me.”

  In the fifteen or so steps it took to get to the den where her grandmother watched her movie Ava got her mind right and her face cheerful.

  “I’m already doing the dishes, Mama Lora.”

  “What are you standing around for?” Mama Lora had not looked up from the television screen. “You need to see this woman play. This is a good movie.”

  Ava hated the movies her grandmother watched. Always black-and-white, the people too grand and too dramatic for her taste. Why she wanted to see a screen full of hysterical white people was beyond her understanding.

  “I’m going back to the kitchen.”

  “You should already been done with the dishes.”

  The greasy water in the sink had grown slimy and cold. She would have to start again. There had been a time, she vaguely remembered it, when she thought washing dishes would be fun and begged to stand on a chair beside her grandmother to watch her work. “One of these days you’ll be begging me to get away from these dishes,” her grandmother had said.

  “I can’t wait to wash,” Ava’d said.

  “Remember you said that.”

  That was back when she and Mama Lora had spent a lot of time together. Ava’s mother had left the house with her and Devon and stayed with their Grandma Mabe. Sylvia had fled to her mother’s house thinking that maybe life had passed her by on the bus, though it would not wave. What looked so much like life had hidden behind her, crept in the house and yard for years, persistent as a shadow, but she couldn’t whirl around quick enough to see it. Her mother had never planned to actually leave Don, but she hadn’t told Don that. Ava had not even remembered the week and would know nothing about it if Mama Lora hadn’t mentioned it. Don had not been worried about Sylvia’s absence and it took five days for him to call. Sylvia was in the middle of making dinner, chopping onions for the salmon patties, the fishy smell of the canned meat all over the kitchen. Whatever it was Don said was not inspired. Sylvia saw the chipped plate her mother used as a cutting board as she watched herself chopping at the same counter. The fact that she hadn’t moved, not one inch of progress in all those years, made her sad. It was time to go back home.

  Maybe they had looked pitiful and dispirited and Mama Lora had felt sorry for them then. Whatever came over her then was past tense now and she was just as direct with Ava and Devon as any other of the grandkids. Mama Lora never forgave Sylvia.

  Even during the comparatively sweet time with her grandmother, Mama Lora was natured nothing like her son Don. She was not fun, not easily amused. She could never see the good side of a situation. She didn’t believe a situation could have a good side. Don was always a good time. Even when Ava had not wanted to love her father, she couldn’t help it.

  Ava hardly had time to fill the chipped plastic bowl her grandmother made the older kids wash the dishes in before her daddy’s brother Skip and his two little girls showed up. Skip’s wife Gina came to visit exactly twice a year—Easter and Christmas, both times in honor of a past when loving Jesus had been a part of her life. She was like a comet that way. Skip was not his real name, but he hated the awkward depressi
on of the name Earl and renamed himself in high school. Too bad there was never a name that fit a body better than Earl fit her sad uncle Skip.

  “Y’all doing all right?” Skip lowered himself into the chair like he was in his eighties instead of the forty-six-year-old man he was.

  “You want to eat. There’s supper in the oven. If you get here earlier it might not be cold as a rock,” Mama Lora said as she took plates out of the cabinets for Skip and his girls. The two little girls watched from either side of their daddy. They were cute and dressed alike as usual, though they were not twins.

  “You hungry girls?” Mama Lora said.

  The girls looked afraid to commit. “Yes ma’am,” Jessica said.

  “Just give the girls something. I’m too sick to eat today,” Uncle Skip said as he rubbed his round little stomach. Her grandmother spooned sweet potatoes and chicken casserole, collard greens and a square of corn bread.

  Mama Lora handed each girl a plate.

  “Avery, give them some milk in plastic cups.”

  The girls glanced at their plates and then at their father. “Go on and eat all you can. Go on,” Skip said.

  The girls took small bites that might register under a microscope. It was clear to anyone who had ever been a child that they hated everything on their plates. Uncle Skip and Mama Lora were apparently too far away from those wonder years to remember. Don, Ava’s daddy, was the opposite of Mama Lora, but Skip she spit out identical to her and slapped a big porn star-approved mustache on. Never have you seen two separate people more alike. Both happiness killers. If they came close to a flicker, a spark of happiness, they’d stamp it out quick before it spread.