Birthday Dinner

by Jeffrey Anderson

Chapter 9

  On Saturday morning Becca sat cross-legged on the worn planks of Mrs. Brackett’s living-room floor as Jonah brought his art supplies out from the bedroom. He probably could’ve carried the modest inventory in one or two full-armed trips, and Becca had offered to help with the task. But he’d gestured for Becca to sit and then proceeded to make a half-dozen slow circuits, each time bringing only an individual item—forty-eight crayons still stored in their pristine carrier, ten colored markers in a metal cigar box, modeling clay neatly wrapped in wax paper, a home-made sketch pad of clean cardboard sheets with holes punched and twist-tie binders, safety scissors with a light cooking-oil coating, and a fountain pen still in its display case that appeared to have never been filled. He set each carefully in front of Becca.

  With the Summer Learning Program starting next week, Becca had two specific goals in mind for this weekend visit. She hoped to prepare Jonah, as much as possible, for the new type of school experience he’d be entering, and also wanted to see the extent of his art supplies so that she might raid her church closet (or her piggy bank) to fill any gaps. But she had a larger purpose behind this visit—she wished to observe Jonah’s behavior in a familiar and secure (at least as secure as he knew) setting, in hopes of noting his core behavioral strengths and weaknesses. She had every intention of being an active advocate for Jonah as he went through the learning program, establishing communication with his teacher and following up often. But to lobby for him, she had to first feel confident that she understood his needs—needs beyond the obvious ones of a stable home and a supportive family. So even as she cooed praise (all of it sincere) at his well-kept supplies, she was also noting his manner and movements, documenting such subtle characteristics as his deference (even to her), his tendency to constantly check behind him, and his dexterity when handling anything small or fragile.

  Jonah completed bringing out the last of his supplies and sat cross-legged opposite her, his wares spread before him like some frontier trader or an heiress showing her jewels—or an impoverished child sharing his most cherished possessions. His skittish eyes finally settled on hers and stayed there, calm and steady above a proud grin.

  Becca said, “You drew that wonderful mural with these?” She pointed at the crayons and the markers.

  Jonah nodded. “Markers best, crayon for more color. I don’t like the crayons—they get dull too quick.”

  Becca nodded. “And this?” She pointed at the fountain pen.

  “Me-maw give me that when I turn five. She never show me how to use it. Now she in jail.”

  “It’s a fountain pen. You need to fill it with special ink from a well. I’ve only used one a few times.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “Makes pretty letters or designs. You have to let the ink dry, though; or it will smear.”

  “Sound messy. Me-me-maw don’t like no mess.”

  “You the neatest child I ever see, Jonah,” Mrs. Brackett said from her armchair without looking up from her knitting. “Wish my James was half as neat as you—would’ve saved my back a world of ache.”

  Becca said. “I’ll bring some ink for the pen. We can teach each other how to use it.”

  Jonah said, “No mess.”

  Becca nodded. “No mess.”

  There was a loud pop outside in the street. Becca flinched then jumped up and raced to the front window and pulled the shade aside enough to peek out into the bright hot day. Zach was across the street sawing a board on the makeshift sawhorses he’d brought in his truck. The two of them had come to the neighborhood at the same time but in separate vehicles, as Zach would be working on his repairs longer than Becca planned to stay with Jonah. Becca looked up and down the street to try to determine the origin of the noise.

  Jonah stood beside her and noticed her hand trembling by her side. “That nothing,” he said quietly, not even looking out the window but gazing up at her.

  Becca peered out the window

  “Them noises happen all the time. They nothing.”

  “I wonder if Zach even heard it above his saw,” she said.

  Jonah looked out the window. “Soldier safe.”

  “You sure?”

  “Snake gone.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Window shade, right side. If it up, he gone.”

  Becca looked. Sure enough, the shade on the front right-hand window was halfway raised. “Always?”

  Jonah nodded. “Always.”

  Becca let Mrs. Brackett’s shade—always drawn—fall shut. She smiled down at Jonah. “Thanks for making me feel better.”

  Jonah shrugged. “Soldier watch us, we watch him.”

  Becca nodded. “Everybody watch out for everybody.”

  “God watch over us all,” Mrs. Brackett said from her armchair, the words sounding rather like God’s with their calm resonance and authority.

  Becca took Zach a large glass of Mrs. Brackett’s home-made lemonade—made from the juice of a bag of lemons the old woman had swapped two pints of strawberry jam for at the corner market then spent a good part of the morning squeezing by hand into a metal strainer—and three large chocolate-chip cookies on a plate from the batch Becca’d made last night and brought along to share. She’d avoided going near Snake’s house when they’d first arrived and Zach was unloading his truck; but with Jonah’s assurance that Snake wasn’t home, she decided to brave a stroll across the hot, dry road with this snack.

  Zach set his power saw on the ground beside the sawhorses and watched his girlfriend approach in the pounding noonday sun. In that glaring light, her hair was radiant and her fair skin—just starting to show a honey-colored tan—almost too perfect for this world. He never wavered in his love for her, a love that had originated in her captivating beauty the moment he first saw her nearly a year ago, and had broadened and deepened through their shared life since. But in moments like this, moments when her transcendent beauty passed through his eyes and heart to the very depth of his soul, the very core of all he was or ever hoped to be—at moments like this he couldn’t imagine being apart from her, couldn’t imagine anything he wouldn’t do to make her happy.

  She smiled at him the whole way, able to somehow keep the glass steady and the plate of cookies level without ever looking at the uneven ground.

  He laughed and shook his head in disbelief when she finally made it safely across the road and the weedy front path littered with liquor bottles and scraps of rotten wood without a misstep or glance down. “They teach you that in Southern Charm School?”

  “What?”

  “How to navigate a minefield without looking down or stumbling or spilling your drink?”

  “Piece of cake compared to descending a curved staircase in a deb gown and heels with a book on your head while under the withering gaze of Mrs. Conroy.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  She handed him the glass of lemonade, its sides slick with condensation though none of its contents had sloshed out. “You don’t think we’re born this way, do you?”

  “I guess I never contemplated the origins of the grace that stole my heart.”

  “Well, don’t let anyone know I told you—trade secret.” She winked and held out the plate of cookies. “Petit four, Mr. Butler?” she said in a thick drawl while batting her eyes.

  “Why Scarlett, I don’t mind if I do,” he replied in gruff working-class tones.

  “Let us repair to the settee,” she said and walked toward the porch’s steps.

  “Repair is the word, Miss Scarlett—repair and repair and repair.” He stepped ahead of her and brushed away the sawdust from the new porch decking.

  “Why thank you, Mr. Butler,” she said before sitting with exaggerated flair while holding the hem of her loose-fitting shorts out to one side like a hoop skirt.

  Zach sat beside her in the shade of the porch roof while looking out into the bright and desolate neighborhood. “The world of Tara could hardly be more foreign than this one,” h
e said with a sigh.

  “Both their own form of prison.”

  “Imposed from within or without?”

  Becca considered that for a minute. “Both, I guess. Can’t veer this far from hope without help from all sides.”

  “A vicious cycle.”

  “That can be broken—people accomplish that every day.”

  “Or fail.”

  “Then try again.”

  “How are Jonah and Mrs. Brackett?”

  “They’re fine. Jonah wanted to come with me, but she forbid him to set foot on this side of the street and I agreed. He didn’t fight us, just said ‘Tell Soldier thanks.’”

  “Soldier?”

  Becca laughed. “That’s his name for you, comes from when I told him he could come out of his room because my real-life soldier would keep him safe.”

  “Might’ve oversold my abilities.”

  “Too late to take it back now.”

  Zach nodded and ate another cookie.

  “They understand what you’ve done, Zach. They’re as scared for you as I am, but also very grateful.”

  “They said that?”

  “No, but I can see it in their faces. When they saw you setting up to work over here, they both knew why Latonya had brought Jonah home.”

  “I worried that Mrs. Brackett might be angry that I’m keeping this place open for business.”

  “She knows the scourge is here whether you fix this house or not. She’s seen too much to think that a few handyman repairs will change anything, for better or worse. Besides, in six months this place will be falling down again.”

  “And we’ll be gone.”

  “Maybe, but not her.”

  “Jonah?”

  “I don’t know, Zach. We can hope.”

  “A powerful force.”

  “Up against some more powerful ones.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “We can hope it’s not.”

  They gazed in silence across a landscape that seemed devoid of hope—devoid, really, of life and its resolute reach toward hope—in the blistering heat and the signs of intractable poverty: the burned-out hulk of a car farther down the road, discarded appliances rusting in an overgrown lot, a house with boarded up windows and doors where even those boards were hanging at odd angles or rotting away. But opposite these abject images was the neatly maintained porch and home of Mrs. Brackett, the indomitable woman behind those drawn shades, the house and the woman sheltering the irrepressible spirit of an eight-year-old with God’s gift of creativity and a determination to express it. Without a word, Becca and Zach simultaneously understood their calling to nurture the seed of hope harbored in that house, planted here in this blasted-out landscape—nurture it at any cost, at all costs.

  Becca sat across the kitchen table from Jonah and went over the schedule for Monday a third time—she’d pick him up in front of the house (no need to walk to the paved road) at 7:40, drop him off at the school by 8, pick him up at the school at 4:30 to get him back to his great-grandmother by 5. If she could get away from the church, she’d stop by the school to have lunch with him; but even if she didn’t get there, she’d leave him with a lunch of fried chicken, potato salad, and devilled eggs to be stored in the classroom’s fridge (she’d already got approval from his teacher).

  “And banana pudding?” Jonah asked with a playful smile.

  “Of course, banana pudding.”

  Jonah nodded. “Thank you, Me-bec.”

  “Me-bec?”

  “I have a Me-me-maw and Me-maw but no Me-bec. You my Me-bec.”

  Becca nodded. “I’m honored.”

  “No, you Me-bec.”

  “Me-bec,” she said again, trying out the title. “Why don’t you show me what you plan to wear on Monday, then I’m going to head on.”

  Jonah raced off to his room.

  Mrs. Brackett turned from her task of shelling hard-boiled eggs at the sink, wiped her hands on a towel, and came to sit across the table from Becca in the chair Jonah had just vacated. She fixed Becca with her powerful stare. “You going to spoil that child.”

  Becca ventured a smile—her most powerful expression—against that stare. “I wanted him to have a special lunch his first day. I hope you’ll make the rest after that, or we can share the task.”

  “I don’t mean the lunch.”

  “Then what?”

  “Spoil him with love.”

  The smile drained from Becca’s face. “How’s that possible?”

  “He don’t know how to handle it. He won’t know what to do once it gone.”

  “Maybe it won’t ever be gone.”

  “You going to care for him now on?”

  “Me or someone. You’re here.”

  “I be gone before he be grown. He know how to live without me—been doing it all his life.”

  “He’ll be able to live without me if he has to.”

  “Not if he get used to you. He almost already there.”

  Becca stared back at the old woman with neither determination nor contrition but with genuine uncertainty and doubt. In her open-hearted rush to make up for Jonah’s years of neglect she’d never contemplated the potential harm of her gifts. “What should I do?”

  “Be careful,” the woman said. “Or be ready to take him with you far from here and for good.”

  Becca winced as if slapped—not at the short-term challenge but at Mrs. Brackett’s last two words.

  Jonah ran out of the bedroom and up to Becca, not carrying his Monday outfit as she’d anticipated but wearing it—neatly pressed jeans, a sparkling white crew-neck shirt, and a pair of basketball shoes with a Dr. J logo on the side. “I’m ready, Me-bec,” he said with glee.

  “Don’t you look sharp,” Becca said with a broad smile of pure pride. Then she leaned over and—despite the warnings, despite the risks—gave him a light kiss on the dark skin of his forehead. Slave to her heart and this child’s grasp of it, she was powerless to resist.

  Across the table, Mrs. Brackett stared on in mute inscrutability.