Calling Me Home: A Novel

by Julie Kibler

  Four fingers pointing back at me, of course.

  But at least I paid my own way, no matter what. No matter how long or how much I allowed a man to mooch off me, I kept things under control. At least the things that mattered. My kids had decent clothes and full bellies, always. They could sign up for most of the extracurricular activities they wanted to. Our house wasn’t fancy, but nice enough—clean and neat, so they could bring their friends inside whenever they wanted. I encouraged that, in fact. I wanted to know what kind of kids they hung out with and how they behaved around their peers.

  “What made her happy, then, your mother?” asked Miss Isabelle.

  “Momma? She was happy when she had a man—and twice as happy when I found somewhere else to be when they came around. She loved me; I know she did. But back then, she preferred not having to deal with me more than necessary. I think she regrets it now. She complains I work too much. Gripes about how the kids don’t spend any time with her.”

  A smile crossed my face. Momma was getting her wagon fixed this week. Finally, I was getting a little return on my financial investment. She’d been headed for the government high-rise, where the county basically stored poor old folks until they died, and as much as Momma frustrated me, I wouldn’t wish that place on anyone. I helped her out as much as I could so she could stay in a decent little apartment in a safe neighborhood.

  Now, Miss Isabelle’s mother, she sounded more hands-on than was strictly good sense. Of course, things were different then, but I don’t believe Miss Isabelle had even been given room to breathe.

  We’d left the rain in East Texas. Up ahead was a sign for a rest area, and the iced tea I’d downed every time Susan Willis stopped by to refill my glass at the Pitt had come back to haunt me. If there was one thing Arkansas did well, it was public rest stops; obviously, the state spent all their money on those instead of the roads.

  As Miss Isabelle and I approached the building, waves of nostalgia surprised me. Yes, it was a public rest room. But it was constructed of the same rustic, Pine-Sol-smelling materials as the buildings at the government-funded summer camp I’d attended as a kid. I’d been glad to get away from home for those two weeks each summer. In a bunkhouse crowded with squealing girls—even when there were mean ones, and there were always mean ones—I could drop off to sleep mostly without worry. Being pranked in my sleep didn’t bother me much. It usually made me laugh.

  At home, my mother was wise to try to keep me away from her boyfriends. When she was flush with a new man—fairly often, as they never lasted long—I jammed an old metal folding chair I’d rescued from a trash pile up under my doorknob. It didn’t always stick, but at least the falling chair gave me a warning. And usually the clatter woke my mother. “Jimmmmy?” she’d call down the hallway. Or Joe or Jake or whoever he happened to be. “Is that you, honey? You coming back to bed?” The footsteps would recede—if we were both lucky, and Momma was good and awake. But more than one man learned not to mess with me the harder way. I was thankful Momma seemed to avoid the worst ones—ones who wouldn’t have been intimidated by a scrappy girl with a good set of lungs and a pair of sharp scissors in hand.

  I’d been careful with my kids. My daughter knew she was safe at home. My son knew no matter how many of his so-called friends tried to talk him into stupid, all he had to do was come home to be talked back around to smart. Even so, he had me worried.

  Miss Isabelle and I took a moment to stretch after we toured the facilities, then sat at a bench out front so I could clear my head from the three hundred or so miles we’d already come.

  “You seem like a good mom, Dorrie. But do you think it’s working? Doing things differently from how your mother did them?”

  Miss Isabelle’s forthright question startled me. But after I considered a second, I knew she wasn’t trying to put me on the defensive, and I could have asked her the same question. She’d outlived her son. She rarely mentioned him, but kept his photo on her dresser, next to that tiny thimble, as well as a family portrait of her and her husband and the boy when he was a teenager. He’d died before I met her. Maybe it was just too painful to talk about.

  I took my time thinking through my answer, though.

  “My little girl, she makes me so proud,” I finally said. “Middle school is the pits, but she’s keeping up her grades and doesn’t let the other girls influence how she acts. Yet.” I smiled, thinking of Bebe, with her awkward eyeglasses and her refusal to wear trampy clothes like so many other girls her age did. Sometimes, she still let me do her hair in ponytails and little natural poofs, and I’d do it as long as she didn’t complain. She was like me, except smarter. I prayed she’d be able to stand stronger, too. It was damn hard these days. “Stevie Junior, though, he’s too much like his daddy. A ladies’ man. He’s a good boy, but Steve hasn’t set much of an example.”

  My boy was so close to graduation, I could taste it. In half a semester plus a few days, he was supposed to walk the stage in his cap and gown with lots of pomp and circumstance—a second-generation high school graduate. But lately, I’d been getting automated calls from the school, saying he’d skipped this class or that. I also got reminders about tutoring sessions for kids who weren’t expected to do well on their exit exams. Those calls were made by a computer, too, but they were tailored to those who needed them. I checked.

  And his latest little girlfriend, Bailey, who was always hanging out at the house with him, she seemed sweet, polite—always Mrs. Curtis this and Mrs. Curtis that, even after I told her she should call me Dorrie. But lately, she’d been dragging in behind Stevie Junior with a long face. I recognized the look. They’d been planning to go to the prom together, but it had been weeks since I’d heard her gush about a dress she’d seen or pester Stevie to go for a tux fitting.

  “I think my son’s girlfriend might be pregnant,” I blurted out to Miss Isabelle, and a big, ugly sigh rattled me to the core. There. I’d said it out loud for the first time. And now I saw it clearly: my biggest reason for wanting to run away.

  “Oh, Dorrie. I’m sorry.” She gazed across the parking lot, where a family emerged from an economy car like a clown troupe. The little ones ran so fast, I couldn’t count them, and they screeched so loud, it appeared they’d been trapped in that thing for days. The momma and daddy looked like they might fall over with exhaustion, yet they soldiered on, rationing drinks and chip bags and rounding up the ones who needed to pee before they could settle down to eat their roadside picnic. “Sometimes babies come at the wrong times, but they can still be blessings if they are welcomed and loved.”

  “Don’t I know, Miss Isabelle,” I said. I’d be furious if my son confirmed my hunch, but who was I to talk? I couldn’t imagine my life without him—a child who’d showed up two or three years before I ever dreamed I’d be a mother. “I don’t know if I’d survive losing him. You must miss your boy so much.”

  She answered after a time. “You’d think the pain of losing someone would go away after a while, but it doesn’t.”

  We pushed ourselves up from the bench and headed back to the car, settled in, and pulled our seat belts tight around us. Then she said, “You love that boy of yours, Dorrie. And you’ll love any child he brings into this world, no matter how or when it happens, you hear?”

  The thought of being a grandmother at age thirty-six was almost more than I could take. But Miss Isabelle said it as if I had any choice about whether I’d love my own grandchild.

  7

  Isabelle, 1939

  THE DAY AFTER the storm, I was helping Mother sort household linens, pulling worn ones for the charity box at church. I suggested we ask Cora if she could use them. Robert’s comment about the meat still bothered me.

  “Oh, no, dear. Cora has plenty for her family. We pay her good wages. You should see how some of the other people in our area live. It’s a shame, really.” Mother’s voice faded as she resumed counting napkins. It was true. Decrepit shacks at the edges of Newport looked like the ones that app
eared on magazine covers from time to time, worn-out mothers sitting on sagging porches with sickly, skinny babies. But I honestly couldn’t comprehend how a set of snowy white napkins or a hand-embroidered tablecloth could help folks who mightn’t even have bread to put on the table, much less meat. I figured Cora would be pleased to have pretty things to set hers—especially ones she or her daughter had laundered and pressed with care for years.

  But perhaps she’d be too proud to take them. Everything had become confusing since I’d spent time alone with Robert. Things I’d been sure of before, I questioned now.

  Mother sent me to the kitchen for glasses of milk over ice. The day was sultry again, and there was no escaping the house this time. I didn’t mean to do it, but when a girl neared a door and heard mumbled conversation, she naturally slowed and tuned her ears to it. Especially a girl who’d had the kinds of feelings I’d had in recent days. Especially when the conversation might have something to do with the object of her interest.

  “You see that pile of soaking wet clothes your brother left out last night?” Cora said.

  “Ugh. No. What excuse did he give?” Nell asked.

  “Says he got caught in the rain. Down by the creek.”

  The silence swelled like bread dough rising. My feet felt mired in it. “I told that boy he better stay away from foolish. I said he better watch himself, or could make things bad for us all again. I’m happy he finished school, thrilled he’s going off to college, but I’ll swan, some days I fear he’s grown out of his britches. Forgot his place. People round here won’t cotton with that, no more than they ever did.”

  “Oh, Momma, he ain’t gonna do something stupid. He knows better.” Nell’s faint voice wavered, as though she was unconvinced of the certainty of her own statement, as if she needed persuading, too.

  “Let’s hope, Nell. Let’s hope. Finding other jobs like this, these times. It’d be near impossible. We’ve been lucky so far.”

  What could Robert do that was so dangerous it could threaten Cora’s standing with my family? The brief meetings between the two of us had been pure coincidence—unless my theory that something bigger had brought us together was true. And innocent. Sure, I’d been bold, behaved in ways that surprised even me, but it seemed harmless enough.…

  Flirtation.

  That’s what it was. I was flirting with Robert, and his mother and sister could lose their jobs over it. It could cost all three more than I was able to comprehend in my own little insulated cocoon.

  I sagged against the wall, torn by my ambivalence, and the floorboards squawked with my shifting weight, setting off a flurry of activity in the kitchen. Nell hurried through the doorway but stopped short at the sight of me in the hall.

  “Nell. I…”

  The words died on my lips. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to assure her I wouldn’t do anything to cause trouble for her family. But to do so would be to admit there was even the possibility. For once, loudmouth that I was, words failed me.

  Nell simply cast me a look of contempt, then lowered her eyes and went on, leaving me adrift in the wake of our growing distance. I wanted to sneak into the sitting room, wind the clock in reverse, back it up to that last night she’d helped me with my hair. I would hold my tongue with her. I would stay at the party. I would not be foolish. I would not be selfish.

  And Robert would be nothing more than a boy I’d once tickled in the rain.

  * * *

  THE HEART IS a demanding tenant; it frequently makes a strong argument against common sense. The very next week, with my nerves soothed by time and having tucked my misgivings away as only a sixteen-year-old can, my selfishness resurfaced. I spied Robert leaving our house. I raced upstairs, grabbed my recently finished library books, and slammed out of the house, shouting as I went, “Off to the library!”

  The library was one place I could still go without Mother asking endless questions about my every potential move, even if she thought I read too much. I’d intended to go that day, so my leaving wasn’t unexpected. My method might have raised eyebrows, however, had anyone been watching—and noticed who else left the house.

  I scurried downhill. At the end of our street, I covered my eyes to peer through the sun’s glare; my pupils hadn’t adjusted fully after rushing away from my home, which was kept as dim and cool as possible with drawn curtains and lowered shades each day now until dusk lumbered in like a relief worker who was already spent.

  Robert’s receding figure was still visible, and I breathed more easily, turning to follow him toward Main Street. I hurried to keep him in sight, but at the library, I rushed inside and dropped my books at the returns counter. I turned to dash out again.

  “No new ones today, Isabelle?”

  “Afraid not. Be back later. Or tomorrow. Sorry, Miss Pearce, I have to go.” I was afraid by the time I made it back outside, I’d have lost Robert’s trail, but there was no way I could lug seven heavy books up and down the hills in this heat.

  Miss Pearce wrinkled her nose and harrumphed. “Always a first time for everything.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I called, slamming back out the door, imagining her pressing a finger to her pursed lips at the noise, though I was already gone and it was too late to mind her warning.

  I gazed in the direction I’d last seen Robert, spotting only a few businessmen smoking in doorways. I picked up my pace, nearly breaking into a run. Eventually, I slowed. I’d lost him.

  Only then, he emerged from the hardware store. He pushed a small paper bag into his pocket once he cleared the storefront and continued toward the edge of town. I fell into step again, twenty yards or so behind, though I needed to take three steps to match his every two.

  His destination wasn’t foremost in my mind. All I knew for certain was I wanted to speak to him again, to be lulled again by his flannel voice, to be amused by his wry humor.

  Beyond that, I had no plan.

  Robert crossed the city limit, me sneaking behind like a poor imitation of a private investigator. After a half mile or so, he turned into a dirt lane leading to the steps of an old building. Faded lettering on the whitewashed sign posted out front identified it as Mount Zion Baptist Church. Below the name, the sign read ALL WELCOME HERE.

  Yet I hung back, sheltered behind a huge yellow buckeye tree, watching until Robert climbed the sagging steps and entered the church.

  I pressed my forehead against the knotted tree trunk, then plucked a piece of fruit from a low branch. I rolled the husk, flexible and green and unlikely to split open in the middle of summer, between my palms. I yearned to discover what business Robert had in a lonely church on a sweltering July afternoon. But in spite of the sign’s promise, I knew following Robert inside would be a blunt invasion of privacy. I stepped back and tossed the buckeye fruit against the tree trunk, the earlier nerve I’d felt so keenly now lost, and started back toward the road. But then I heard a creaking and glanced back over my shoulder. Robert emerged from a side door, carrying ungainly wooden and metal tools. His back was already to me; he’d obviously not seen me on the path, and he headed around the building. I plucked up all the courage I’d believed gone and followed. Behind the faded clapboard structure stood a brush arbor, its original frame hidden within the twisted and gnarled fingers of overgrown vines. Robert ducked under them to enter the arbor. Presently, I heard vigorous clicks and snaps, and the vines quivered.

  I gathered a breath and went the last few yards toward the arbor, ducking under at the same spot he’d entered. He startled when he saw me, his arms frozen high in the process of hacking away a particularly thick branch that had wormed its way through the arbor roof and hung so low in the space, it scraped the dirt floor.

  “My God, Miss … Isabelle!” He released the stubborn branch from the clippers and dropped the tool at his feet, then clutched his chest and backed away from me. “You about gave me a heart attack. I thought maybe I saw a ghost.”

  I covered my mouth, trying not to giggle at the shock on R
obert’s face. “I’m sorry. I should have … made noise?”

  “Or something.” He mopped sweat away from his forehead and reached for a jar of water resting on the rustic wooden pulpit. A jar that could have held preserves put up by his mother at my house. He turned his chin to the side and studied me. “You follow me from town? Oh, Lordy, why am I asking dumb questions? Course you followed me. How else would you end up in the middle of nowhere, trying to kill me off early?”

  I raised a palm in the air. “Guilty. As charged.”

  “And why? What on earth were you thinking? Oh, yeah, I remember now. You don’t think ahead much, do you, Isabelle?” It was the first time he’d managed my name without the infernal “Miss” in front of it, or even the slightest hesitation, but I wasn’t flattered.

  “Guilty on count two also.” I dropped onto one of the weatherworn benches that lined the arbor.

  “Watch for splinters, now.”

  I smoothed my skirt under my legs. “I’m not scared of splinters. And I followed you because I wanted to talk to you. I like talking to you. I like watching you do things.”

  Robert shook his head and took another swig from his water jar, then retrieved the clippers and resumed hacking at the branch. “Don’t know what you want with me. Your folks would be hysterical if they knew you followed me out here. Well, your momma. Your daddy, he’d be concerned, wondering what you’re thinking, talking to a colored boy, even if that colored boy is me. Not the wisest proposition.”

  “Daddy talks to you all the time. Why can’t I?” We hadn’t been tutored together in years—my mother had put an abrupt end to those joint sessions long before Robert entered high school—but I still saw my father and Robert together frequently. Daddy quizzed him while they worked side by side, to be sure Robert knew all the basic math and science he’d need to declare a major in biology at college. While they painted house trim together, laid a walkway to our backyard gazebo, dug limestone from the earth to create a retaining wall in the soft, steep slope to our front porch, Daddy groomed Robert, too. He had hopes Robert would follow in his footsteps. Northern Kentucky needed Negro doctors. The few in practice—added to the small number of white doctors who would consent to treat colored folks—were never enough.