by Lisa Wingate
Fortunately no gathering could remain quiet with five young boys present. After they’d finished in the sand pile, Shasta’s kids wanted to pull out a croquet set they’d found in the shed. Shasta told them no at first, and I leaned close to her and whispered, “Why not? It’ll give us something to do.” We shared the slightly desperate silent exchange of people whose party was flopping, and then she set down the hot-dog platter and turned off the grill.
“Good idea,” she said. “Let’s have a little fun before we eat.” Mark, Landon, and Aunt Lute passed out the mallets, while Shasta, Tyler, and Benjamin pushed wire hoops into the ground. Tyler handed a mallet to Sesay, and she held it close to her face, smoothing a finger over the cracks in the old wood. When Mark took a mallet to Elsie, she frowned and pushed it away.
“I’m just gonna watch,” she grumbled. “I ain’t up for game playin’.”
Standing by the porch step with her arms crossed, Barbie seemed to echo those sentiments. She checked her watch, probably counting the minutes until we could go home. When Mark tried to hand her a mallet, she smiled indulgently, but didn’t reach for it. “I don’t need one, honey. You go ahead and play.”
Mark’s smile faded and his shoulders drooped, the mallet hanging loose at his side. He was used to being told that Mommy didn’t have time.
I was tempted to walk across the yard and smack Barbie. Couldn’t she see that all the kids really wanted was her attention? Would it kill her to play croquet?
Aunt Lute handed Landon a mallet and sent him back to Elsie’s chair. “Oh, but everyone must play,” she insisted. “The Queen of Hearts has decreed it. The game isn’t the least bit strenuous. You won’t muss your hair.” With a pointed look at Barbie, she motioned for Mark to return to the porch with the unwanted mallet. “Unless, of course, your hedgehog should run away, and then it’s off with your head! Hedgehogs are such mischievous little things. Alice’s hedgehog wouldn’t cooperate at all. And the mallet kissed her. Good heavens, what a sight that was!”
Barbie and Elsie grudgingly took possession of their croquet equipment. Aunt Lute explained the rules in terms of flamingos and hedgehogs, and the game of queen’s croquet began. After a few shots, Elsie was granted a reprieve from play, when she stumbled over an uneven spot in the yard. “I ain’t a invalid,” she argued, then laid a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “Go get my chair, there, little fella, and bring it out here where I can sit in it while I wait for my turn.” She reached for Jewel, whom Barbie had been carrying in one arm. “Here, let me hold that baby while you take your shot. You’re gonna need both hands to outplay me. I got that hedgehog goin’ right where I want it.”
The game continued from there, Aunt Lute directing the queen’s men, Jewel watching from Elsie’s lap, Sesay tucking her hair into the collar of her dress to keep it out of the way, and Barbie purposely missing shots, so as not to get ahead of the boys. Landon and Tyler, too young to navigate the game very well, eventually resorted to rolling their hedgehogs like bowling balls. Aunt Lute decreed a foul, pronounced a sentence of “Off with their heads!” and she and Barbie chased the boys around the yard.
While Shasta cooked the hot dogs after the croquet game, Sesay helped the boys find rocks from the flower bed and a small ball from the sandbox toys. “I will show you a game my mother teaches me when I am very young,” she said, moving to the porch with Aunt Lute following curiously behind. “The game is called oo-slay. When I am young, the children play this game everywhere they go.”
As Sesay explained the game, Elsie peered over the boys’ shoulders. “Well, that’s like jacks, except usin’ a ball and pebbles,” Elsie observed, scooting forward in her chair. “I used to win all the time at jacks. Let me see that ball.”
Barbie squatted down to watch, and Landon snuggled in beside her, his fingers toying with her hair. Giving him a tender look, she took his hand and kissed it. “You want to give it a try, Landon?” she asked. “Tell you what, I’ll bounce the ball and you grab the rocks. Get ready now. . . .”
From her post behind the hot-dog grill, Shasta caught my gaze, winked, and gave me the thumbs-up. Even she knew that this game of mother-son jacks was long overdue.
After supper, we sat together on Shasta’s back porch while the boys chased fireflies. Shasta flipped on the porch lights, and Sesay pulled out an art pad Terence had given her. On the pad, she’d drawn familiar objects—a paintbrush, a leaf, a flower, a lizard, a toad, a hummingbird, and dozens of others. She’d planned to have Terence help her write the words, the line pictures, she called them, but we sat at Shasta’s picnic table and filled in the blanks instead. When the yard grew too dark, the boys wandered to the porch and sounded out the letters as we wrote. Even Elsie participated, leaning forward and tapping a finger to the pad. “That ain’t a flower; it’s an iris,” she said, pointing to Sesay’s drawing. “You oughta write iris, not flower.”
“Let’s make both kind,” Mark suggested, and Barbie tousled his hair.
“Good idea,” she agreed. “They’re both nice words to know.” By the end of the evening, we’d achieved a strange but comfortable group harmony, in which we ignored the difficult issues—Elsie’s fall in the garage, Barbie’s recent behavior, the fact that Sesay was homeless—and we focused on reading instead.
Our time together was quiet, pleasant, relaxing.
“That was nice,” Barbie said, as we walked home. Shifting Jewel’s droopy body from one shoulder to the other, she turned to watch Sesay disappear down the street. Sesay hadn’t said good-bye. She’d simply tucked her pad into her backpack and walked away as we were picking up the dishes. “Where do you think she’s going?”
“I think she stays at the mission some.” The truth was that I’d tried not to consider it in too much detail. Sesay’s life was hard to imagine.
A shiver ran across Barbie’s shoulders. “That must be awful.”
“Shasta said she’s working for the guy who has the studio behind Book Basket, and she might be staying there some. To tell you the truth, she seems more worried about learning words than she does about where she’s living.”
Barbie sighed, cuddling Jewel under her chin as the boys ran ahead to catch up with Aunt Lute. “I can’t imagine what that would be like—to be so old and not know how to read.”
“Me, either,” I admitted. Watching Sesay struggle over words tonight, I’d tried to imagine being surrounded by words whose meanings were a mystery. Suddenly I realized that the reading class was more than a way for me to pass time. It gave purpose to my stay here on Red Bird Lane. It was something important for which I didn’t need money, or nice clothes, or a big house, or a golf scholarship. All I needed was time. Time, I had.
Barbie climbed our porch steps with a resolute sigh, as if she had to steel herself to go inside. “I guess I shouldn’t be complaining.” It was hard to tell whether she was talking to herself or to me. “At least we have a place.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, but the words were halfhearted. Even though I knew I should be grateful, it was hard to properly appreciate our overstuffed mess of a house. Right now, the boys were climbing the burglar bars on the front windows, making monkey sounds, and Aunt Lute was pretending to be a zookeeper. Getting them bathed and in bed would be insane tonight, as usual.
Barbie slipped around them and stuck the key in the dead bolt. “I still hate this house, though.”
“Me, too,” I admitted, and both of us laughed. For once Barbie and I were on the same page, and there wasn’t any point trying to hide it. This house was too small for lies, anyway.
Pausing with her hand on the door, Barbie squinted toward the street. “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she said out of the blue. “Maybe we should get up and go to church. Not our old one—the little white one where you do the reading class.”
I backed up a step, surprised. Shasta had been after me to go to service with her this Sunday, but I’d been putting her off. Attending seemed pointless when it felt like our family was totally off God’s radar
right now. “Maybe,” I muttered.
Barbie shrugged as she pushed open the door. “I guess we can see how we feel tomorrow.”
“I guess,” I agreed, secure in the knowledge that after such a busy night, Barbie and the kids would sleep way too late to make it to the service at ten a.m. Whenever I saw Shasta tomorrow, I’d apologize and say we overslept. I just wasn’t ready to sit in church and sing all the same old songs, and pray the same old prayers. If God hadn’t answered by now, He wasn’t going to. I was better off not focusing my hopes on divine intervention.
My plan would have worked nicely if Shasta hadn’t shown up at eight a.m. with a tray of homemade cinnamon rolls. “We were up early,” she chirped, as I answered our door with a serious case of bed head. “We baked.” She gave me a big, sheepish smile that was as transparent as a Caribbean sea. She was just making sure we were up. With Cody going to work again today, she didn’t want to attend church alone. “See you in a bit.” She headed back across the street with an annoying little finger wave. I could already hear Barbie and the kids beginning to stir in the bedrooms. Sunday was off and running, whether I wanted it to be or not.
As it turned out, though, Sunday wasn’t all that bad. The congregation members at the old white church were welcoming enough. Elsie greeted us with a curt wave as we came in. Pastor Al acted as if we were visiting celebrities. The choir sang off-key. A homeless man wandered through the door ten minutes into the service and sat in the back among the empty pews. I caught myself looking around for Sesay, but there was no sign of her.
The service was traditional and quiet—no giant projection screens or Christian rock bands like our old church. No call for anyone to come down front and offer up dramatic testimony. Just a simple sermon, a few songs, and a short time of meditation while ushers collected the offering. Barbie dropped a fifty in the basket, and I watched in shock. Not only did the fifty stand out amid the ones and fives, but we couldn’t afford it.
When we left, Barbie was in a good mood, and if the fifty-dollar donation bothered her at all, she hid it well. She offered to buy Happy Meals all the way around, and we ended up driving down to McDonald’s in the Escalade and Elsie’s car. While we ate and talked, the kids played on the playscape, and then we headed home and spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to hook the television to the TV antenna on our roof, so the kids could watch PBS. By the time we were finished, we’d been down to Walmart three times and over to Elsie’s twice to look at her television attachment, and then finally concluded that we needed a digital converter box. After it was all said and done, the group of us ended up in our living room, cheering as Antiques Roadshow came on the screen. It seemed as if someone were missing from the gathering, and as I glanced out the window, it occurred to me that I was looking for Sesay.
By Monday night, we still hadn’t seen her. Shasta and I dropped Shasta’s boys at the children’s building early and walked to reading class with a sense of anticipation.
“What if something happened to her?” Shasta asked, as we entered from the back.
“It’s early still,” I whispered, motioning to the room, which was empty except for Elsie and an elderly Hispanic man. “There’s hardly anybody here yet.”
“Where do you think she was yesterday?”
“No idea, I . . .” I let the sentence trail off as the side entrance creaked open, the gap empty at first, then filled as Sesay shuffled silently through and took her place against the wall.
“She’s here early,” Shasta whispered, and then cracked a sideways smile.
In her seat up front, Elsie straightened. “If you’re gonna be here, you oughta sit down like a normal person,” she barked, without looking at Sesay. Reaching under the table, Elsie pushed a chair outward. “There’s empty seats here.” It wasn’t a soft, friendly invitation, but it was an invitation—as close as Elsie was likely to come to repaying Sesay for saving her life.
Sesay moved toward the chair, her gaze darting around the room, her backpack clutched in front of her as if she were sheltering it, or it was sheltering her.
“You got as much right here as anybody. You can set that bag down.” Elsie motioned to the floor, the gesture more of a command than a request. Tapping the table with a stiff finger, she added, “Let me see what you got in that drawin’ pad of yours today. I might know some of them words. I been workin’ with my book. If it kills me and if it don’t, I’m gonna get where I can read my Bible for my own self before I meet the author.”
The rest of the class and finally our instructor filed in while Sesay and Elsie were studying the notepad. I sat watching, thinking that two days ago I would never have believed they would be huddled together, sounding out words. But you couldn’t tell what was possible on the inside just by looking at the outside. These past weeks with Barbie had taught me that much. I’d never imagined she would descend into madness with Fawn, or come out again and take on the Four. But she was trying. We’d sat up talking after the TV fiasco, and I was coming to understand who Barbie really was. She knew what it was like to be a kid bounced in and out of her parents’ homes, and farmed out to relatives, and when it came right down to it, she was willing to do whatever it took to keep history from repeating itself. Tonight, she and Aunt Lute were home alone with the Four. “Baby steps,” she’d said when I was getting ready to go. “I’m trying.”
“I know.” I felt a seed of tenderness toward Barbie, which in itself was a minor miracle, considering where we’d started. It occurred to me that if my father could see it, he’d be amazed. I banished the thought as quickly as it came. He wasn’t here. He’d left both of us behind, and perhaps Barbie’s finally facing that fact was what had created the newfound bond between us.
We were both angry with him. We were both hurt. We were both alone. All we had left was each other and a too-small house that wasn’t even ours.
I had no idea where we should go from here. I turned over the problem in my mind as the instructional part of the class proceeded. When we partnered with our clients for tutorials, Demarla had another children’s book with her. “They keep givin’ my kids these things in the stinkin’ children’s building here while I’m sittin’ in class,” she complained. “Soon’s I get where I can read one, the kids’ve got another. I don’ know where them people get off, tryin’ to make me look dumb in front’a my kids. Like I got time for all this. That judge oughta have his kid bring . . .”
As usual, I waited while Demarla ranted on. Eventually, she gave me a dirty look, smacked the book down on the table, and grumbled, “You gonna help me read this thang, or not, Hannah Montana? That’s who you look like, you know? Daggum Hannah Montana.”
“Somebody told me that once,” I muttered. “Let’s do the lesson first, and then we’ll read the book.”
“We ain’t got time for all that.”
“We’ll make it.”
“It’s fifteen after already.”
“If we’d started right in, instead of you complaining about the judge, we’d have more time.”
“Ffff!” Demarla rolled her eyes, and we proceeded with the lesson. When we were done, the college tutors were gone, and the classroom had emptied except for Elsie, Shasta, and Sesay in the front. Demarla beelined through the back door as I gathered my things and moved to the corner of Shasta’s table, listening as they finished the lesson. Sesay looked ahead at tomorrow’s lesson, while Elsie and Shasta leaned close together, engaged in a conversation I couldn’t quite hear. I scooted closer to Sesay to help her with some of the words.
“You’re doing really well,” I said, when she finally closed the book.
Her eyes lifted from the page, slowly met mine, and she smiled at the compliment. One of her front teeth was rotted or cracked halfway off, and the rest were brown around the edges. She seemed to realize that I’d noticed, and quickly hid her smile behind a wrinkled hand, the knuckles knobby and calloused from some sort of repetitive labor. Obviously, she hadn’t always been homeless. “I have known t
hese words before, some of them. My mother teaches me when I am very young, I think.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re doing so well,” I suggested. “Maybe you’re remembering.”
Sesay considered the idea, her eyes cloudy behind a haze of cataracts. “My mother, she is dead when I am very young. I do not know the way she looked, but she is a good mother, I think.”
I slid from the table into a chair, trying to imagine not knowing what your mother looked like, not knowing your family. “Where did you come from before you were here, Sesay?”
She studied me intently, as if deciding whether or not she should answer. “This is not good to speak.”
Elsie abruptly tuned in to our conversation and scooted away from Shasta. “Why? It a secret?”
Checking the room, Sesay leaned closer, her hand slipping under the table, settling on her backpack. “If he finds you, he tells the police to bring you back again.”
Apprehension tingled under my skin, like gooseflesh rising. Maybe she was running from an abusive husband. Maybe Shasta and I were inadvertently involving ourselves in something that could become dangerous. “Who does?” Around us, the old building creaked and settled, making the conversation seem more ominous.
“Him. He brings you back to work if he finds you.”
My mind grasped for possibilities—sweatshop employee, prostitute, shill in some kind of illegal drug trade. . . .
“Can’t nobody force you to work. It’s a free country.” Elsie jumped into the discussion again. Beside her, Shasta had turned away, her head in her hand, as if she wasn’t feeling well.