“Thank you, Grandma.”
“Henry!” she yelled. “He’s such a slowpoke. Move, dog, I can’t get in the house. Diane, I brought you a newspaper article. I know you don’t like us to bring you articles, but your father thinks you need to read this one. Henry, bring that quilt!”
Papa finally squeezed in the door behind her, grinning. His eyes were shining because he was so happy to see us. He hugged me and Max and then held us at arm’s length to get a better look. “My goodness!” he exclaimed. “You are both growing like weeds!” He bent down to pet Lucky and Hiroshima. “How are my grandpups?” He told them they were fine dogs, so good and smart and well behaved. “Arf-arf-arf,” he called out while they hopped around his feet.
“Henry!” Grandma yelled, even though he was only a few feet away from her. “Did you get my quilt out of the car? Henry! The story quilt I made for Aris. Do you have your hearing aid on?”
“Arf,” Papa said quietly to Hiroshima, and then he looked up with wide blue eyes, as if coming out of a dream, and saw his wife of sixty years.
“Henry, where’s that newspaper article?” she demanded.
“You have it,” he said.
“No, I don’t. Oh, here it is, in my hand. Diane, take this.” She walked over to the stove, waving the newspaper, and tried to give it to Diane, who was now wearing oven mitts.
“Put it on the table,” said Diane. Her words were clipped, as they usually are with Grandma, but she was looking at me. When Diane is angry, her eyes blaze into a supernatural green glow. In a horror movie, people would scream when she looked at them, but we were used to it.
“Your father and I want you to read the article,” Grandma was saying. I know we’re in trouble when she includes Papa in her directive; it gives her more clout. “It’s about your student, and it mentions your name. That black boy they arrested. They don’t know what all he did. It mentions your name, as his teacher. I know you don’t get the paper, so you might not know about it. They’re saying you tried to help him write something to get him out of trouble. Henry doesn’t think you should get involved.”
“What black boy?” asked Max.
“Honey,” said Grandma. “That black boy in Diane’s class. He was speeding in a BMW. An expensive car.”
“Oh, you mean Charles,” said Max. “He’s not a boy. He’s a man.”
“Don’t you start on me too! I can’t take much more criticism.”
“It doesn’t matter what color he is,” said Papa. “You don’t want to do anything to jeopardize your job. You’ve got a family to support.”
“Henry!” Grandma slammed the newspaper on top of the salad and glared at Papa.
“What?”
“Don’t you do that.” Papa didn’t ask what he had done; he knew she would tell him. “You are just as racist as you can be,” Grandma said. “Don’t pretend it’s all my fault.”
“Why don’t you go sit down,” said Diane. “Dinner isn’t ready.”
“Aris, please go comb your hair. You look just like your mother.” I glanced at Diane to see if she appreciated my messy-hair solidarity, but she was good and mad. When she opened the oven door, smoke poured out.
“You burned something,” Grandma announced, as Papa went to look for one of the three fire extinguishers he had installed in our house. Luckily, it was too dark outside for him to see that Penn was turning the shed into a playhouse, which would make him ask about the future home of the lawn mower, and that potential fire hazard.
“There’s not a fire,” Diane called after him.
“That’s not the point,” he said when he came back. “There could be a fire, and you don’t want to go all over the house looking for a fire extinguisher. You might not have time. Why, if this kitchen caught on fire—”
Diane dropped the blackened soufflé in the sink, removed her oven mitts, and took the newspaper article, “Kanuga Christian College Teacher Helps Student Write Defense for Arrest,” from Grandma’s outstretched hand. Then she wadded it up and threw it in the trash can. There was a sudden, rare moment of silence in our house.
“Well, I never!” said Grandma.
Diane stood firmly in front of the trash can, arms crossed over her chest.
That day my grandparents had officially endured each other for sixty years, but none of us could stay in the same room together another minute. I spread the new quilt on my bed. There, in Grandma’s taut, angry stitches, was the story of my life. I had watched her sew while wearing her big reading glasses, sitting directly under the lamp. She frowned while she worked, and sometimes she drew the thread up and snapped it in two with her teeth. When she got to a hard part, she’d say, “I give up! I can’t do this! I am going to throw this thing in the trash!” Then she would keep on working.
The quilt was beautiful. On a black background, a swoosh of green light from the aurora borealis in Alaska celebrated my birth. My stories were told in symbols: an angel for Joe, a heart for Max’s birth, a cross for my baptism, and a star for my engagement to Billy Starr III. Diane was a white snowman on a square of black. Inside her snow-belly was a baby snowman, Max. A small snowman, me, stood beside her, and we held hands. Our helpless little hands were made of twigs. “Don’t wallow on it,” Grandma had warned me. “I wouldn’t even put it out unless you have company.”
When Diane came in my room, I was standing in front of the quilt like a visitor in a museum.
“I’ve ordered a pizza,” she said, closing the door behind her. “Now, tell me what’s going on.” Then she sat on my bed, right smack down on the quilt. “Where are my journals?”
“Well, let me think … ,” I said. I didn’t know where to sit. Standing in front of her, I shifted my weight on my feet as she looked anxiously around my room.
“Sit down,” she said.
Gingerly, I sat down beside her on the quilt.
“I mailed them to people,” I said.
“People? Which people?” I can’t describe her face, but I know that’s my job, as the author, so—imagine a clown who has just stepped in a bucket of dead squirrels. Okay, I know that’s gross. But her face was all stretched out and sort of caught between expressions.
“I put them in the mailers,” I said, “to the people you were selling books to. When I filled the orders, I put a journal in each one.” Quickly, I added, “I sent the books too.”
“Okay,” she said, staring at me with her mouth open. “You did that.” She took a deep breath. “That’s what you did. You mailed my most personal possessions to utter strangers.”
I nodded, working on my breathing: Breathing in, I calm my body, breathing out, I smile. Breathing in, I dwell in the present moment—
“I suppose you read them,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good God.” Leaning forward so that her elbows rested on her knees, she put her head in her hands.
“There’s something else,” I said.
“No,” she said. “There can’t be something else, Aris. This is it. This is enough.” She took a few more deep breaths. “Okay, what is it?”
I tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out. I felt myself walking through the cold that morning: Plum Lane, Peach Street, Muscadine Circle, Apple Lane, seeing Diane’s child molester pushpins on the map as I switched the blade in my hands to keep one hand warm in the pocket where that damn phone shook and buzzed …
“What’s going on here, Aris?”
“I dunno,” I said. I looked down at our hands. We have pretty hands. She had one age spot on her left thumb, and she still wore Joe’s ring. Finally, I confessed.
“I read ‘Greensleeves.’ ”
“The song?”
“Your story. About Dad and Mr. Lafontaine, the child molester.”
“Greensleeves,” she said slowly. “Joe’s story? Oh no!” She rolled over onto the quilt and pressed her face into it, holding her hands over her ears. Her feet (shoes on) were touching the aurora borealis.
“Merm?”
In the hallway, Grandma’s voice rang out, “We did not order a pizza! You are mistaken.”
Suddenly, she was rapping on the door, demanding to know why Diane was holed up in there with me when she needed to come out and make a decision about the pizza.
“I can’t handle this,” Diane said. She kicked her feet on Grandma’s quilted heaven and punched the pillow. When Grandma knocked again, Diane sat up. In a cold, level voice, she said, “Mother. Go away.” Grandma went nah nah nah, but Diane was determined. She put her arm around me and whispered, “Until you see an ax come through that door, we are safe.”
“We aren’t safe, Diane. The world is not a safe place.”
“Because of Mr. Lafontaine?”
“Joe thought he was safe. Everybody thought Mr. Lafontaine was normal.”
“I know. Maybe they still do.”
“He should die!”
“Aris,” said Diane, laying her hands over my tight fists. “Aris, what did you do?”
“I told you. I read your journals and mailed them to people.”
“What else?” She stared me dead in the eye.
I had no choice. In the calmest voice I could muster, with as few details as possible, I related the events of my very short hitchhike. “We only went about two miles,” I said. “Penn was on his way over here when he saw me get in the truck, so he followed us. First he cut the red flag off the back, so the guy would get stopped by the police.”
“A logging truck?” She looked at me the way I have seen Papa look at her sometimes, and said what he says to her: “Honey, you just don’t have good sense.”
It was strange, seeing Diane morph into Papa like that. We had entered into a time warp. I was Diane as a little girl. Diane was Papa. Everything was happening over and over, and in some weird way, we were all the same person, splitting and merging back together and splitting again.
“Where were you going?” asked Diane, suddenly herself again.
“I dunno,” I said.
“Were you trying to go to Boston to see Billy?”
“At first, but then he broke up with me. He has another girlfriend, I think. Maybe. It’s messy, okay?”
“You were going to find Mr. Lafontaine, weren’t you? You were going to Houma, Louisiana, to find that man. You wanted to kill him.”
“I’m sorry!” I cried, and I began to sob. “The world is evil, and I’m evil.”
“Hush,” she said, pulling me close.
“I wanted to kill him!”
“Aris—I wanted to kill him when I found out. I saw that dark side of myself—relishing the death of another human being.”
“Maybe he’ll go to hell,” I said. “Do you believe in hell?”
She thought for a minute, chewing on her lip. “Hell is hating people,” she said finally. Sighing, she stroked my hair. “I wish you didn’t know about this.”
“Maybe I’ll forget about it?”
“Some people would,” she said, pressing me tightly against her. We were so close that our hearts began to beat together. “Some people would refuse to see it in the first place. You’re like me, though. We don’t have thick filters. For a while, I thought I could drink to keep the world away from me—but that doesn’t work very well.”
“What can I do?” I asked, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “How can I stand it, Merm?”
“I don’t really know what to tell you,” she said, and her shoulders slumped. Her voice grew faint, and somehow, even though she still had her arm around me, she seemed further away. I saw the familiar confusion in her eyes, a harried, scared look—I am a single mother I don’t know what to do there is too much going on I can’t handle this by myself—
“Tell me something,” I said. “You’re my mother. You have to tell me something.”
She blew her bangs out of her eyes. Then she sat up straighter, faced me squarely, and said, “Don’t hitchhike.” She pressed her hand firmly against my head as if she could speed my mental development along, perhaps shape my future. Softly, she added, “Please stay alive, Aris. I couldn’t stand it if you died.”
We leaned into each other, breathing together. Our thoughts were spiders scrabbling to build a new web. In the spaces between the thoughts, I tried to pray. Our Father, who art in heaven, I began, but I didn’t want to think about fathers, and heaven seemed far away. When Diane got sober she was an atheist, so she prayed to a pink elephant. She said it worked. I imagined a medium-sized pink elephant in the corner where my dollhouse used to be and prayed, Hello.
Suddenly, I felt a cool current around me, as if I had hit a cold spot while swimming. When I opened my eyes, Joe was leaning against the bedroom door with his arms crossed over his chest, looking down at us with a mixture of exasperation and love. No, he wasn’t gone forever.
“Well, there you are,” said Grandma when Diane and I came back into the kitchen. “I thought this was supposed to be my anniversary party; I didn’t know I was going to have to do everything.”
Max, whose bangs were pinned back with a clothespin, had already opened the pizza boxes on the table. “Aris, Mom ordered us Cokes!”
“Your father paid for everything,” said Grandma. “I thought you were cooking dinner for us, but I guess that didn’t work out.”
“I’ll pay for the pizzas,” said Diane.
“No!” cried Grandma and Papa at the same time.
“I don’t mind paying for the pizza,” said Papa. “I want to pay for it.”
When we were all seated at the table, Diane raised her glass of Diet Coke with a trembling arm and said, “A toast. To sixty years of grit.”
“Har-har,” said Papa, grinning. He kissed Grandma and launched into the old story of their romance. They had a class together in college, and she was the prettiest girl in it. She sat in the front and made As. He sat in the back until he started dating her, and then he made As too. He had dated another girl before Grandma, but she was too smart. That girl could just look at a book—
“I guess we’ll make it another day,” Grandma said, and we all clinked our glasses.
Twenty minutes later, the refined carbohydrates had sent Max into a tailspin. He sat in a sea of Legos on the living room floor, still determined to practice building Legos for the talent show. Grandma got the camera out.
“Don’t spread them out so much,” Papa said. “You’re going to lose those tiny little pieces.”
“Leave him alone, Henry,” said Grandma. “He’s creating. Max, what are you going to do for the talent show?”
“I’m doing it,” Max said.
“What are you doing, honey?”
“I’m building a starship.” He snapped on a Lego the size of my little finger.
“I can’t see anything,” said Grandma.
“Max,” said Diane gently. “Honey—”
“Oh Jesus,” I said. “Are we doing this again?”
“All right, that’s it!” screamed Max. “That’s final!” He jumped up and threw the Legos against the wall. “I don’t have a talent! See? I’m stupid. I’m dumb. I am not going to the stupid, dumb talent show.” Tears streamed down his face. He kicked the coffee table, then started slapping himself. Diane took a deep breath and did what Dr. Dhang has been telling her to do all along.
“Max, if you hit yourself again, I’m putting you in time-out.”
Max socked himself in the stomach.
“Eight minutes,” said Diane. She set the timer, one minute for every year of his life, and Max went to time-out in the laundry room, dragging Lucky and Hiroshima with him. After a couple of body slams to the closed laundry room door, he was quiet.
“Diane, I don’t think you should lock him up like that,” said Grandma. “He might hurt himself.”
“He doesn’t hit himself without an audience,” Diane said wearily.
In the laundry room, Max was saying, “Sit. Now, lie down. Roll over. No, Lucky, not like that. Roll over! No treat for you, Hiroshima. Try again.”
“Let him out
of there, Diane,” said Grandma. “I want to say goodbye.”
“The timer has to go off,” I said.
“Speak!” called Max from the laundry room. There was a sharp bark; then the timer went off, and Max was out on parole. He swaggered into the living room, pockets stuffed with Pup-Peroni treats, Lucky and Hiroshima at his heels.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Max, striding to the center of the rug. “You will now witness a miracle.” Holding out a Pup-Peroni, he issued an imperious command for Hiroshima to sit. “Now, shake,” said Max. Hiroshima, looking up at him with bright expectation, raised a paw to Max’s outstretched hand.
“Now, that’s a talent,” said Papa.
“Whose talent?” said Grandma. “His or the dog’s?”
“Ignore her,” said Diane. “You’ve got an act, buddy.”
“Don’t ignore me,” said Grandma. For a split second she looked stricken. Then she gathered her giant pocketbook, which is always spilling something out, and stood up. “Henry,” she said, “they’re tired of us. Let’s go. Hurry up.”
Papa did what he usually does when Grandma tells him to hurry. He killed time. While she shot him evil looks, he did this, and he did that, and then he took the trash outside. A few minutes later, he returned with the newspaper article he had retrieved from the trash. He smoothed it out and set it on the kitchen table. Then he wrote a check for eight hundred dollars, clipping it to the article so Diane would be sure to read it this time before she threw it out.
28 You win some, you lose some. Bye for now.
29 Who died and left you in charge?
30 Hyperbole #2. Sorry, but I have a deadline. Anyway, have you seen Diane’s hair?
The Chutiksee County courthouse sits in the middle of the cotton block in historic downtown Kanuga, a brick pavilion where cotton, slaves, and sometimes bad wives were once put up for auction. All that has changed now, of course. Except for the ten-foot statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who sits on a horse in front of the courthouse, you would never know that racism once existed in Kanuga.
Inside the thick walls of the courthouse, the cool, moist air smells of crumbling brick. A woman at the front desk, wearing glasses on a chain, was eating potato chips when the heavy doors closed behind us. Diane waited for her to finish chewing before she asked for directions. Meanwhile, Max and I were peering everywhere, looking for criminals.
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