No One Is Coming to Save Us

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  “Here, baby, put me a little of that chicken on a plate, a few of them greens too. I might be able to keep a little of it down.” Ava started with a spoonful for Uncle Skip’s plate but he kept nodding for her to add more. She handed Uncle Skip his full plate. He pulled his eyebrows up, leaned his face close to hers.

  “I seen your mama at the grocery store with James Martin,” he whispered. “She needs to stay away from him, from any Martins. I ain’t never liked none of them. You know he just got out of county.”

  “I know.”

  “Well if you know, tell her. People see you. You better know,” Skip said as he stuffed a forkful of casserole into his mouth.

  “All she was doing was standing in the parking lot.”

  “You keep thinking that.”

  Ava finished up the dishes while Skip ate and his girls leaned their heads on their hands as they wished for rapture or death outright. “You want some more potatoes, girls?” Ava asked as she reached for Jessica’s plate, revealing to anyone with eyes the clearest picture of profoundest despair. Ava scraped off most of the turnip greens into the trash and all but a bite of her casserole. She did the same for Joslyn. Ava couldn’t have been more loved if she had saved them from a burning building. Now to save herself. She rushed as fast as she could through the remaining dishes.

  “I’m going out on the porch to wait for Mama,” Ava said to nobody and everybody.

  “The dishes done?” Mama Lora yelled.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ava called as she rushed past the table. It would be years, decades later when Ava was wallowing in middle age herself before she thought to wonder if Mama Lora ever wanted to run like hell out of her living room, crank up her rattling car, and never look back on the dark little rooms.

  The girls looked up at her from their places at the table, longed for her, the pardoning governor for their ruined Sunday. “Bye, girls,” she said not without some shame. She had done all she could, the last bites of food they would have to negotiate on their own. Ava had lived through her own shameful days of five-fingering food from her plate. There were many a scoop of palmed green peas, slivers of crispy ends of fried eggs thrown into closets, stuffed into socks, slimy okra thrust into pockets. But every child must find her own path. It is the way of their people. “I won’t be far,” Ava said, but what she meant was you might see her body on the porch, poised to run as fast as her mama’s car could get there, but her mind would be gone, gone, gone.

  Behind the house was Ava’s great-aunt Teen’s trailer. Sad little wormy apples in a tiny grove blocked the trailer from view, but Ava thought if she could get down to the trailer and back before anybody noticed she was gone she might survive having forgotten her book. She was the bookworm, always your nose in a book type. Everyone says that reading is a good thing, but Ava had started to wonder. People look at you with suspicion if they see you reading, like the reading itself shames or indicts them, like it is a plot against them. But worse than that, Ava was starting to believe that books were ruining her for real life. Life was duller and less interesting than what she read. The girls in her books were doers, who always knew the right way. Seldom had she gotten that role in life. All she seemed to manage was the good, quiet girl who caused few problems. She wouldn’t even rate as a sidekick in most of her books. The characters she read would look at her as inevitable and dull as a fire hydrant, her life unfit somehow to be on the page.

  Ava started down the hill. From the back of her grandmother’s house, she could see a long stretch of the valley, small houses of people she knew or her family knew in every direction. In a few years, many of these houses would be gone—too old, too old-fashioned for young people, too damaged to renovate, at least that’s what the kids think. By the time Ava is grown and home, graduated from college, the kids in her generation will be scattered. Some will be dead, some in jail, many others miles and miles away from this valley and this starting point. The anchors that kept them in the community, grandmothers like Mama Lora, family land, or remaining family were gone too. Back then nobody had ever heard of Chinese places like Dalingshan or Guangdong province. Back then jobs that were never glamourous were at least plentiful. Some of the stronger and more industrious among them had two. This happens everywhere. Of course it does. But more so in places that people are more than eager to put behind them. Having too little in life, being the underdog, is only good as backstory, not the constant every day of your breathing. Ava was years from knowing any of that. Ava followed the trail down the hill to her aunt’s trailer to kill some time. Teen got picked up every Sunday morning by one of the deacons at the church. She wouldn’t be back home until nearly dark.

  Before she got to the apple trees behind Teen’s Ava saw her mother’s car parked on the gravel driveway, but close to the trailer, impossible to see from the road. Sylvia sat in the passenger’s seat while James Martin opened the driver’s side door with a large Styrofoam cup in his hand as he sipped from a bendy straw. James rushed around the front of the car and opened the car door for Sylvia like he was her butler. Sylvia got out, laughed like she was in a commercial, like she was getting paid to laugh and waited like an obedient child as James kissed the top of Sylvia’s head. She was a precious thing, a flower, a tiny animal you fear frightening in your palm. Ava didn’t dare move. The inside and secret places of another person’s life are never palatable, especially your mother’s life.

  James walked away from the car and down the rutted driveway to the blacktop. Ava couldn’t see her mother or what she was doing behind the wheel, but she didn’t start the car right away, the radio buzzed, the car idled. Both she and her mother waited.

  Ava wasn’t sure what to do. She wanted to run down the hill to the car and reveal herself to her mother. She wanted to say, I know what you did. I know who you are. But she didn’t dare. Besides, she knew so little, her knowledge of either of her parents tangential and elliptical. All she knew for sure was that her mother wore a shroud of mournfulness that she tried to accessorize but was obvious if anyone cared to see. If nobody cared about your pain, like that fallen forest tree, did it matter if you felt it? Ava sat on the ground on the path out of her mother’s sight. She waited as her mother started the car and nosed it onto the road. In no time her mother would be in Mama Lora’s driveway, looking for her, waiting in the car so she could scoop Ava up and take her home. Her mother’s face would be so bright and glad for a few seconds when Ava appeared, but just as quickly would tighten again with sadness that no sight in the world could remove for more than a few seconds. Ava would walk the difficult steps back up the hill, to her grandmother’s porch, and with any luck see her mother for the first time.

  24

  Burkson Municipal Park wasn’t exactly on the way to the house, but Don was in the mood to see it. When he was a kid none of the town parks had been open to black people except for Mondays—one day a week—but they all made the most of that day. You wouldn’t dare be sick on a Monday, the only day to swing, or run in the large expanse of grass, play on the monkey bars, or catch snippets of the women’s conversations about each other, their husbands, or the sheer folly that they all experienced in having children in the first place. A generation would come before fathers would be at the park alone with children. For Don, being at the park meant having the sure gravity of his mother somewhere in sight. He had tried to sneak away from her many times, but she was on him in a second. One of the tricks of time is that your own ordinary life took on a sweetness in the retelling. Like all kids, they didn’t experience joy then, just the immediacy of the life they were living. Only time made it rich.

  The park looked much the same as it had back then. The swing sets and monkey bars had been replaced a couple of times since Don’s time, but the layout was just the same. Don had been many times as an adult with a woman or two foolish enough to think it romantic to have sex out in the open in the grass. But there was nobody at the park yet. Don walked to the swings and he considered for a second or two sitting down on
the rubber seat. The thought quickly evaporated. He wasn’t about to be caught swinging alone in a park, an indignity he would not contemplate. Nothing new to see. He had nowhere to go but home.

  Don hadn’t meant to go to his trailer but found himself on the Antioch Church road anyway, pulling into his drive. He knew there was a chance, maybe even a big chance, that Jonnie would be there, but somewhere on the road he had decided to take it. Jonnie would be tired after spending most of the morning at the restaurant, but she was never so tired that she couldn’t keep going and doing. Energy the gift to the young. Jonnie was a tough girl. When her time was up she would make it fine. She wasn’t a summer woman, like some men he knew had. Women they tricked into thinking they’d be around forever. Let her nest. Let her spend her little money on a house, decorations on a man they wouldn’t be speaking to six months in the future. Don tried to be as straight up as he could. Besides that, Jonnie had a good mother, a big asset in the world. Something to bank on. Jonnie told the story about her mother going to their basement and seeing wires hanging from the ceiling. Something told her not to touch those wires but go back up the stairs and get the broom to stuff them back into place. As soon as the broom bristles pushed the wires together, sparks flew in every direction. Sure enough it was a trap set by her husband. “Weren’t you afraid, Mama?” Jonnie had asked her mother, trying not to picture the wires’ quick combustion and those inevitable sparkles on her mother’s slick skin. “Naw, honey, your daddy’s too stupid to do the job right and too sorry to kill me his own self.” Jonnie had laughed with her mother, tried to get Don to find the funny in the long-ago incident. Don couldn’t get it. But Jonnie laughed, feeling sure that if her mother believed it, there was nothing to fear.

  Don hadn’t gotten out of the car before Jonnie opened the trailer door.

  “I missed you today,” she said as she held the door open for Don.

  “I’m fine,” Don said, only vaguely aware that he was responding to the wrong question. He crossed the threshold to the little trailer. “The place looks good,” he said as he tried to avoid Jonnie’s eyes. She had cleaned, picked up their litter and discarded clothes. They lived like teenagers.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “It looks nice in here,” Don said, appraising the tiny rooms.

  “I was hoping we might make something good for dinner. I can go to the grocery store.”

  “Been a lot going on, Jonnie. I don’t want to think about that. I just want to rest.”

  “Am I bothering you, Don?” Jonnie sounded hurt, though she tried to keep her face unworried.

  “My eyes are tired, that’s all. You go on doing what you was doing. I’m just going to sit awhile.”

  Don lifted his eyebrows and the side of his mouth, hoped he looked lighthearted, but he couldn’t make his eyes interested. “Thank you for cleaning up.”

  “You already said that.”

  “I’m old.”

  “Why are you thanking me anyway?”

  “Let me rest my eyes a minute, Jonnie.”

  Jonnie pulled at Don’s arm tried to coax him off the couch. “You don’t have to say anything. You can keep your eyes closed.”

  Don pulled her beside him on the couch. The odor of cooking grease from her work was still on her skin. He stroked her hair, soft as cotton on his fingers, ran his coarse thumb along the silky skin on the back of her neck. She was a pretty thing. He felt nothing for her at all. “When I was coming up we all worked for some white people. Did your mama tell you that? This lady I worked for used to fry chicken and give me the wings. ‘I love the wings the best, but I can’t eat a wing.’ You believe she said that to me? ‘I can’t eat a wing.’”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I ate the wings. What do you think? Worked all day for a dollar or two.” Don remembered once the woman’s grown daughter had come home. “Why do you cook for them?” she’d asked. Like he was a horde instead of one narrow-tailed young boy. “I don’t know why that came to my mind. Just let me rest here right now.”

  “I know you went to see her. You think I don’t know.” Jonnie sat up and looked at his face, her expression unreadable to Don. Jonnie waited for Don to speak, but he didn’t. Instead he closed his eyes and put back his head, like he might sleep. She wanted to scream at him, but instead she studied his old face in the full light of day. He had thick lines in his forehead and beside his nose like war paint. Instead of being a uniform brown his skin was a dozen colors of brown merged together like the thousand dots in a painting. He was still pretty to her though he could easily be someone’s grandfather. She had thought that the age difference didn’t matter, but she’d been wrong. She would always be superior to him. She would see a world (because she would outlive him by decades) that he would never see.

  What she hadn’t counted on was that she would always be a few steps behind him, never knowledgeable enough about the good music, a stranger to the lean and hungry times that sounded like an all-night party in the retelling. That past life she had access to only through the tales from her mother. Girls far less beautiful than she was had much more. Jonnie knew this. She understood the unfairness of it all in every direction. To have to rely on a nice face was one burden. Worse still was to be constantly disappointed by it. But she had found a little bit, not much, but a little bit of a life that felt like it could be a regular one, with regular cares—dinner and dirty clothes, a schedule, the annoying routines of living with a man. The idea that someone could take this little bit from her was suffocating. Before Jonnie had come home to live, before the baby, she had worked in a restaurant in Charlotte—an upscale place—where groups of young people her age would order drinks and finger food, spend what amounted to her grocery money for a week, for a meal that wasn’t even a meal, but bits of a meal. She served them, smiled at them. The men glanced at her, watched her walk from the table, but she was to them as important as the basket of pita bread.

  Don opened his eyes like he was a little surprised to find Jonnie still staring at him. He recovered quickly, but she saw the guilt in his face. She had been guessing that Don had gone to see Sylvia, but his reaction confirmed to her that she was right.

  “I’ve had a lot of life before you, Jonnie. It doesn’t just go away.”

  “And you’ll have a lot after me too, is that it?” Jonnie got up from the couch to the bedroom, clicked the door behind her.

  Don was tempted to follow her to start a train of lies Jonnie would believe because she wanted to, but he didn’t have the heart for it. He was tired. Had it finally happened that women had worried the hell out of him? He picked up his keys and went out the door. His relationship with Jonnie would not end this easily. These things never do. But both of them were on notice that their days together were short.

  25

  Mommies2B.com

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  Hey everybody! I am in my fifth week of pregnancy. At the doctor’s office today I had my blood taken and just checked my weight for the heck of it. I weigh the same, but it will come, I hope. Who would have thought I’d ever be waiting for the scale to go up! Life, right?

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  This is not my first time as I told you. Maybe it’s the hormones or maybe I’m just an idiot—that is a distinct possibility—but I’m feeling good about it. My marriage is falling apart. Actually that’s a lie, it cracked open a long time ago, but we are finally at the point where we can tell each other how much we hate the other. I’m kind of looking forward to that. LOL. I feel relief like I just crawled out from under something heavy! Don’t get me wrong, I’m hurt. It is all too dramatic to tell you about here, but I know I’ll make it. Does that make sense? I feel lighter. Anyway, I know this isn’t a divorce site!

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  Let me tell you about my doctor’s visit. I sat beside a girl in the waiting room, she had to be twenty, twenty-two at the most. She was practically naked with these tiny little shorts, flip-flops, and
a halter. In May for God’s sake. She looked like she couldn’t wait to get her clothes off. You know it’s not that damn hot LOL! Of course if I had her body I might take any excuse to go around naked too. She was perfect, everybody. She looked like those pregnant women you see on television—a size two except for the baby, perfect glossy hair that she had in a doughnut on top of her head, and I’m talking young. I was sitting to the right of her and I couldn’t help but feel like the after shot. You know what I mean? I’m not that old in ordinary life, pretty young, but not at the OBGYN’s office. This girl was at least fifteen years younger than me. But who knows. When you get in your thirties you can’t tell how old anybody is anymore. Women look eighteen or thirty-one. I just can’t tell unless it is really obvious. You know what I mean? Anyway, this girl was all by herself like I was, but no mother with her, no ring, no boyfriend. I hope she’ll be okay. I felt for her. You know? I hope she’s not going through all this alone. But man, if I was a baby, I’m much rather ride around in that package. Ha, ha! Do you know my chart says elderly and geriatric maternal age? Elderly! Can you believe that? Despite the fact that all my sentences end in exclamations! Would an elderly person do that? If you met me, you would have no idea I was the same person as on this site. Keep your fingers crossed! Ava2WW

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  Right on! Ava2WW! Baby dust! Baby Luv Jon

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  So happy for you! Katie’sMom

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  Sorry about your husband. I’ve had one of those, but I cut that ZERO and traded up! Don’t worry about it. I’m so excited for you! Just concentrate on the baby. Great news! BellasMOM