Color the Sidewalk for Me

by Brandilyn Collins

  “Let’s try the vowels first,” I suggested. “Now, we know you can say ‘ah.’ How about ‘ee’? Don’t worry about moving your tongue; make the sound at the back of your mouth.”

  He tried, the sound closer to that of a short i.

  “That’s very good. Now make an ‘ah,’ then an ‘ee.’”

  He obeyed.

  “Good.”

  We continued through vowel sounds, then progressed slowly through the alphabet. Consonants like band m that required the lips to meet were impossible; others like t or s were muddled but understandable. By the time we reached z, Daddy was exhausted, holding up his right hand to gesture, “Enough.”

  “You’ve done great.” I bent down to hug him. “I’ll put you back to bed so you can rest now, but eventually you’ll have to learn to sit up. And”—I tapped his nose with a finger—“we get to do this all over again once more today.”

  He affected a convincing groan.

  chapter 20

  Celia!” Mrs. B. clasped her misshapen hands as she greeted me. “I’m so glad to see ya!”

  Her appearance shocked me. Her red hair had turned completely white, her freckles faded to near nonexistence. Her nose had widened, small blue veins at the end, and I couldn’t help but notice the dentures. Her fingers were awkwardly bent, their joints gnarled like an ancient dwarf tree. I thought of her years of processing mail and was sorry for her crippling.

  “Hi, Mrs. B.” My smile was wide enough to satisfy both her and Mama. I had willed myself to be gracious. “Mr. B.” I took his outstretched hand with pleasure. Even now, years after he’d retired as foreman at the sawmill, his fingers showed the wear of hard physical labor. “It’s really good to see you.”

  His watery eyes traveled over my face, the expanse of years in their trail. He had aged, too, but not as dramatically as Mrs. B. His jowls had fattened and hung below his chin, reminding me of Jake Lewellyn. The rounding of his shoulders lent him a stooped, worn stance. Patches of scalp shone through thin gray hair.

  “Lord love ya, chil’,” he said in a trembling voice, “it’s wonderful a you to come back. Your daddy was so happy to hear it.”

  “Thank you.” I released his hand, feeling suddenly exposed. It occurred to me that Mr. B. would understand the pain of a man who had lost his children, for he and Mrs. B. had lost their only son, Henry, in the Korean War. I had heard little of the story. I did know that Henry had just turned eighteen when he and Granddad enlisted together. Henry, I’d imagined, must have had dreams of glory in his head as he was ushered out of Bradleyville by Granddad, who’d already been decorated twice for his bravery. If Henry had lived, he wouldn’t be much older than Mama.

  Hiding my self-consciousness, I busied myself playing hostess, serving iced tea, explaining to Mr. B. that Daddy was too tired to visit at the moment. At Mrs. B.’s insistence I went over in detail our exercise and speech routine. She oohed and aahed numerous times, shaking her head. “How wonderful. Ain’t you a sweet thing.” Once we finished that topic of conversation, I longed for a reason to excuse myself but could think of none. I answered a few questions from Mrs. B. about my work in Little Rock, but my responses were brief and did not invite further investigation. With a little sigh she gave up and launched into talk of the town. We heard all about old Mrs. Zimmerman’s hernia operation and how a teacher at school planned to marry a man from the mill. “But they’re Baptists,” she added, “so the weddin’ won’t be at our church.” The IGA had the biggest tomatoes she’d ever seen. And did I remember Mrs. Pennyweather? That lady who used to sing so loud in church? Well, she died years ago, of course, but her daughter in Albertsville was still living and she’d up and left her husband.

  “Mrs. B.,” I prompted, “tell me about Jessie and Lee.”

  “Oh, they’re fine, fine.” She waved a hand. “Kids all married, and with kids a their own. Gretchen and Grant live in Albertsville. Gretchen stays home with her two little ones, a course, and Grant works in construction. Kim’s here in town. She’s got three children, and when the littlest starts first grade next year, Kim’s gonna start workin’ in her mama’s sewing shop. Right good seamstress she is herself.”

  “Who did she marry?” I wondered. “Someone from town?”

  “Why yes! You remember Reid Brown, don’t you?”

  Reid Brown. Kevy’s best childhood friend. Married to Kim Harding. I wanted time to sift this information as it deserved, to mentally separate the pleasant from the lost potential. But Mrs. B. rattled on, bragging about Miss Jessie’s grandchildren, how one sang like an angel and another was bound to be an artist. And did I know that Lee’s younger sister, Connie, had three children and two grandchildren? Thanks to God that he’d provided Connie with a husband so soon after the birth of her first child. Jason had been such a wonderful husband to her all these years. As for Lee, he was still managing the mill, and the owner, Dustin Taylor, still lived in that mansion out on Route 347. And speaking of houses, did I see them flimflam things on Route 622? “Some a those pretty farms between us and Albertsville are gone,” she sighed. “And we got outsiders livin’ in those tiny houses—with a bad influence on our town. Our kids’re runnin’ around, boys and girls together; it’s just awful.”

  “No more comin’ to call?” I’d hoped to suppress the bitterness in my voice but did not completely succeed.

  Mama threw me a sharp glance. “No, not much of that anymore, Celia,” she said tightly.

  Mrs. B. looked uncomfortable. She’d wandered too close to things no one wanted to discuss. “Well,” she muttered, “let’s see. I s’pose you heared the sad news about Melissa. Sometimes it’s just hard to understand the grief Christians go through. Her family lives next door to us, you know, have ever since she got married. The oldest is such a sweet thing, looks just like her mama at that age. She takes good care a her siblin’s, plus has supper waitin’ for her poor daddy every night.”

  A shift had occurred in the air around Mama, and I flicked my eyes to search her face. “What about Melissa?” I pressed.

  Mama hesitated. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you, Celia.”

  “Oh my,” Mrs. B. exclaimed as if she’d jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. “I didn’t mean to be the bearer of bad news!”

  “What about Melissa?” I said again, my voice tightening. No one wanted to answer. “Is something wrong with her? Is she sick?”

  “She died of stomach cancer six months ago,” Mama said finally. “She went in less than a year.”

  The unexpected news weighted me to the couch. No, I thought. Not Melissa. Dainty Melissa, bubbly, full of life and giggles and motion. How could such animation be stilled? When I found my voice, I could only ask more questions. “And she left three children?”

  Mrs. B. cast me a funny look. “That’s right. Jackie’s fifteen now, Robert’s eleven, and Clarissa’s eight.”

  Fifteen. That had been my age during my first summer with Danny. For a moment I tried to imagine myself on the other side of the fence. The mother of a fifteen-year-old, fighting with her daughter over a boyfriend. Then I realized Melissa would have had to marry soon after I left Bradleyville to have a daughter that old. “Who’s her husband?” I looked from Mrs. B. to Mama.

  “Land sakes, chil’, you don’t know that either? Estelle?” Mrs. B. looked to Mama with accusation, searching to displace the blame for the wrong turn the conversation had taken.

  Mama glanced at her sternly, her mouth set. Mrs. B. continued to ogle me. Mr. B. was examining his fingernails.

  “Melissa married Bobby Delham, Celia,” Mama said quietly. “Just like she wanted.”

  A bubble of air escaped my throat. It was too much to grasp at once. Melissa and Bobby, married so quickly after I left. Together all those years during which I berated myself for destroying them both. For me, the news brought joy and enormous relief. But now she was dead. I searched for meaning in that, wondering how God could ever let such a thing happen after he’d kept them together. How
unfair that Melissa, a wife and mother of three children, should die while I lived, childless.

  “I . . . I’m sorry,” I stuttered. “I didn’t know.”

  Suddenly I had to escape the cloying Mrs. B., who scrutinized my every reaction. Nothing I could say at that moment would satisfy her. Before I knew it, I had risen, mumbling, “Excuse me” with a tight smile as I hurried across the worn carpet to my bedroom.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I accosted Mama when the Bellinghams had gone.

  “There wasn’t time.” She was pulling meat out of the freezer to defrost for dinner. “I was goin’ to tell you.”

  “I don’t believe that!” I paced the kitchen, smoldering. “I swear, Mama, I think you wanted me to find out the hardest way, and I sure did, with Mrs. B. hanging on my every response.”

  She plunked a package of pork chops on the tile counter and placed her hands on her hips. “That’s not true and you know it. I didn’t bring you here to hurt you; I brought you here for your daddy—who, by the way, will hear you if you don’t keep your voice down.”

  I stopped, gathering control. “I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me.” My voice caught. “How could you not remember something as big as that?”

  She regarded me coolly. “Are you talking about Melissa dyin’, or are you talking about her having a happy life with Bobby after you threw him away?”

  I reeled from her words, reaching toward the counter for support. “I’m talking about Melissa, Mama.” The words shook. “She was my best friend.”

  Mama’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t treat her like a best friend, did you? And after you dragged her in the dirt, you ran away from her, just like you ran away from the rest of us.”

  There it was, the anger that had been threatening to boil over on me since I returned. Apparently, it had been simmering for seventeen years. No matter that we’d been speaking of Melissa’s death; somehow she had twisted the conversation. “Yes, Mama,” I managed, “I ran away. Now I’m back because you asked me to come. It wasn’t easy coming back, believe me; I spent a lot of time while driving here thinking about the people I would have to face, including Melissa. Now I’ll never have the chance to tell her I’m sorry. Or that I’m happy she married Bobby.” She eyed me as if my words held not one kernel of truth. “Why do you always have to think everything is about you?” she burst. “Your first thought about Melissa’s death is that you can’t ease your own guilt. There’s more to life than you, Celia, and as much as this town’s never forgotten the things you did, there’s more to Bradleyville than you!”

  “I don’t think everything’s about me!” I retorted, flinging out my hands. “I’m sorry for Bobby; I’m sorry for her children and her parents. Why can’t you believe that? Why can’t you believe I have hurts and feelings like everybody else?”

  Her voice flattened. “Why couldn’t you ever believe the same about me?”

  I stared at her. She had once again changed courses midstream, this time riding a current I couldn’t begin to follow. I felt my anger drain away, replaced with sadness, an emptiness that bore testimony to the chasm separating mother and daughter. How could two people live together for eighteen years, I wondered, and not know each other?

  Why were the cycles of life so immense that years, sometimes entire lifetimes, passed by before events rotated back to where they should have been in the first place? I had lived with my daddy until I was grown yet had never really talked to him. I’d lived with Mama all that time yet had never heard her confront me with such vulnerability. I knew I had done horrible things. But I’d always sensed that the rift between Mama and me had been firmly in place before I was ever born and that what was fractured I had neither broken nor could mend.

  For the second time since I returned, I heard God’s confident but quiet voice within me urge a gentle response to Mama’s obvious hurt. I wanted to listen to it. Really I did. Briefly I thought of Carrie, what she would have done. But I wasn’t Carrie. And after the emotions of thirty-five years, after the past two days, I couldn’t begin to do what God asked.

  “Because, Mama,” I threw back at her coldly, “if you ever showed any feeling at all, it certainly wasn’t to me.”

  I retreated to my room, shut the door, and heaved myself upon my bed, just as I had done as a teenager. A childish part of me never wanted to see Mama’s face again. Another part listened for her knock on the door, wished for her to come after me just this once. I dropped my face in my hands, knowing I was foolish to even imagine such a thing.

  Twenty years ago I’d sobbed on this very bed, cut to the core over Danny’s harsh treatment. How I had needed a mother’s love and consolation. But Mama never once knocked on my door. It was Granddad, as usual, who had reached out to help. . . .

  ~ 1977 ~

  chapter 21

  For three days after I witnessed Danny’s fight with his daddy, I sat in my room, barely eating, refusing to take phone calls from my friends. “Tell ’em I’m sick,” I’d mumble to Granddad through the door when he knocked with a message. On the second day he stuck his head in my room and cast a surprised look at the bare walls. My ocean drawings, their hues recently growing ever deeper, had practically covered the walls until the day before, when I’d ripped them down in sobbing fury.

  “I got tired of ’em,” I explained with a shrug.

  Granddad regarded me intently, then stepped inside and closed the door. “Can an ol’ man set down?”

  I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, absently rubbing one of Cubby’s ragged ears. His fur was worn to a smooth velvet beneath my finger. “Sure,” I replied, scooting over and patting the quilt beside me.

  Granddad settled himself with a sigh, palms flattened over his bony knees. “Been missin’ you at mealtime,” he said. “Just finished a good lunch.”

  The memory of my retching was still vivid in my mind. A wash in the river after I stumbled in from the field hadn’t seemed to rid me of the bad taste in my mouth. I suppressed a shudder. “I haven’t been very hungry.”

  “You should eat; you’re a growin’ girl,” he said with feigned lightness.

  His comment sank like a stone into my blue carpet. Silently I rubbed Cubby’s ear.

  Granddad cleared his throat. “You want to tell me what’s wrong?” He lifted a blue-veined hand to rest it on my knee. “Never been a problem I couldn’t solve for my best grandgirl.”

  “You can’t solve this one,” I said quietly.

  “Try me.”

  I wanted to spill the whole story, but the words thickened in my throat. I wasn’t a kid anymore. He couldn’t dispel the hurt with a promise to walk me to Tull’s for a milk shake.

  “It’s Danny, isn’t it?”

  Cubby’s button nose blurred. “How’d you know?”

  He blew air lightly out of his nose. “I ain’t that old.”

  I blinked away sudden tears to stare across the room at the blue baseboard that disappeared behind my desk. Maybe I should paint my room a different color. Move the furniture around.

  “Your mama’s worried about you, you know.”

  I rolled my eyes. “She sure has a way of showin’ it. Why isn’t she in here tryin’ to talk to me?” I was surprised by the hurt in my voice.

  Granddad studied the weave of his brown pant leg. “Well, your mama’s been hurt enough that sometimes she can’t find the words to say. That’s my fault, I guess, and I ain’t never been able to make up for it.”

  I could find no response to such an incomprehensible remark.

  With more gentle wheedling, Granddad managed to extract from me the story about Danny. I couldn’t tell him everything, but I did explain that we’d become friends and that I didn’t care if people talked. I told Granddad about going to Danny’s house, like an idiot, and about my ambivalent feelings of anger over the way he’d treated me, and about my fear for his welfare. What if his daddy woke up after I’d left, and seriously hurt him? I’d begged God on my knees to protect him.
r />   Granddad’s face pinched with sadness. “God has protected him, missy. He’s answered my prayers for years to protect both Danny and his mama. But I don’t think even his daddy could hurt him as bad as you did.”

  I stared at him. His cheeks had sunk during the last few years, and I could see the white stubble of his shave. He took my hand in his paper-dry palms.

  “Seems to me Danny likes you right much. But he don’t think you’ll find him good enough. Put yourself in his place. Imagine tryin’ to impress someone, only to have them see you at your worst moment.”

  Fresh tears bit my eyes. “If I’m so important, then why wasn’t he at the river?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he had work to do; maybe his mama told him he couldn’t go.”

  “Maybe he just didn’t want to see me.”

  “No, that ain’t possible. You’re too purty a girl.”

  A rueful smile flitted across my lips.

  “You need to go back next Saturday and try again.”

  “He won’t come.” My chin trembled. “You didn’t see his face. You didn’t hear what he sounded like when he yelled at me. Even if you’re right, he’ll never forgive me for bein’ there, never.”

  “Well,” Granddad said matter-of-factly, “if you don’t try, you’ll never know. I bet Danny’ll be there and he’ll explain his reason for not showin’ up. He’s an honest boy; he won’t lie to you. But be easy with him, Celia. Any pride he has’ll be lyin’ in the dust.”

  After Granddad left my room, I lay upon my bed, hugging Cubby, wondering at his words about Danny and Mama. Mama. I’d been so wrapped up in thoughts of Danny, I had barely considered why she was letting me go to the river at all. Particularly since her legendary unwillingness to let me go to Albertsville was due to her fear that I’d meet boys. “Well, you did it!” I’d yelled at her once. “You met Daddy in Albertsville, and it didn’t seem to hurt you any!”

  “Celia,” she’d shot back, her lips tight, “I was twenty-five years old.”