Dion closed her book and looked down at the cover.
“ ‘. . . and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within . . .’ ” I stopped reciting, not remembering any more.
“I used to know the whole thing,” I said. “Me and Marie memorized it. There was something in it about life and love and work and power that only girls and women got. And something else about a river—the Missisquoi River. She said something about how beautiful it was to fish there and how it was real quiet. . . . That the quiet was sweet and green.”
I pulled my knees up to my chin, remembering how peaceful it was in Marie’s bathroom, the way the light came in through the windows and turned everything gold. And Marie’s soft voice drifting over to me while I played with the tubful of bubbles. It felt like there would always be Saturdays at her house—bubble baths followed by hot chocolate.
“You ever heard of Audre Lorde?”
“No.”
I picked the book of maps up and held it close to my face to feel the breeze of the pages. “How far you figure we are from Pine Mountain?”
“It’s southeast of here—near Virginia.” She exhaled. “Take a look at it instead of fanning yourself with it!”
“Just want to walk the land Mama walked,” I said softly.
Dion closed her book. “Bowling Green got a hospital and it’s headed in the right direction. We get ourselves there we could head straight east then.” She stopped talking and looked at me. “Then we done, Lena? We get to Pine Mountain, we find a place we could stay, go back to school. Huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “In Pine Mountain, we can probably hook up with some of Mama’s people. They’ll take us in.”
Dion smiled. “I’d like that.” She came over to the shed and sat down, leaning her head against my shoulder. “I’d like it a whole lot.”
Seven
You walk long enough, you get to dreaming about things—the sound of chicken grease popping hot on the stove, the taste of fried chicken when you pull the crispy skin back, the way the steam rises up from the tender meat underneath. And other things too. Like the feel of a nice pillow under your head and sheets when they’re fresh out of the wash, smelling like detergent. Windows and doors and hardwood floors underneath your feet.
It was near dark when Dion and me got out to the highway the next evening. We weren’t standing on the side of the road two minutes before this Lincoln pulled up and a black woman leaned over asking where we was going. Dion stepped back. We hadn’t taken any rides from black people. Not because we didn’t want them, just ’cause nobody was offering. Ladies were always a better bet than riding with men but Dion’s face scrunched up a bit, the way Daddy’s used to when he saw black people. I felt heat rise up to my head and had to put my hand in my pocket to keep from decking her with it.
“Y’all climb on into the back where it’s safe,” the woman said.
“Get in,” I whispered.
Dion looked at me and shook her head.
“Get in that car or I’ll leave you standing right here!”
She glared at me a moment, then climbed into the backseat. I climbed in beside her. The woman gave us a strange look, then pulled the car back onto the highway.
“Hi, ma’am,” I said. “My name’s Lena and that’s my sister, Dion.” I leaned back against the seat and rolled my window down a bit, hoping me and Dion didn’t stink up the car too bad.
“Fine to meet you. I’m Lily.”
“Fine to meet you too, Miz Lily.”
The woman glanced at me in the rearview and smiled. She had a nice smile. She was old enough to be somebody’s grandmother, heavyset with white hair. “Where you girls headed?”
“We live up in Owensboro but our mama just had herself a baby down in Bowling Green. We lost the money she left for bus fare and now we trying to get to the hospital. There was complications so she’s going to be there longer than we can be alone. She say come down there.”
“How come your mama didn’t have her baby closer to home?” Miz Lily asked.
Dion gave me a big elbow in the side. She was pretending to be asleep.
“ ’Cause of her complications,” I said real fast.
Miz Lily nodded. “Well, my daughter, Rona, lives up there near Owensboro—in Thruston. Used to live in Paris.”
“France?”
Miz Lily smiled. “She wishes. Paris, Kentucky, girl. You from Owensboro and you don’t know Paris, Kentucky?”
I swallowed. “Yes, ma’am, I know it. I just thought maybe you meant Paris, France.”
Miz Lily nodded. “Kentucky people like to say Pay-ris but not me.”
I nodded.
After a moment, she asked, “Where y’all planning on staying tonight?”
I looked at Dion. She opened one eye, then closed it and gave a fake snore.
“Our mama say it’s okay to stay in the hospital waiting room. If you drop us off at the hospital, we can—”
“Uh-uh.” Miz Lily was shaking her head. “That hospital don’t allow children in there after hours. My friend Betty works there. You better call your mama and see if she can make y’all”—she changed lanes before she started talking again—“see if she can make y’all some other arrangements.”
“I figure we best not bother her until the morning—being she just had a baby and all.”
Miz Lily turned full round and gave us a look. Her driving made me kind of nervous.
“You-all have any people here?”
“No, ma’am.”
Miz Lily didn’t say anything for a while.
“You say you lost your money back where?”
“Owensboro, ma’am—on our way to the bus, I guess. Fell right out of Dion’s pocket.”
Dion elbowed me.
“And how’d you get to be in Munfordville?”
“Excuse me?” Somehow I had lost track. We’d had rides, then walked some. I swallowed. I was the one supposed to be keeping track of things. I’d even gotten lazy about writing in the book Marie’d given me. Too busy trying to get me and Dion to the next place.
“How’d you get from Owensboro to Munfordville?”
“We found a ride,” I whispered.
“Seems you’d have to be mighty lucky to get this far in one ride. When’d y’all leave?”
“This morning, ma’am.”
Miz Lily glanced at me in the rearview.
“I mean . . . we left last night but we stayed with friends . . . up in Elizabethtown.”
“So you went across to Elizabethtown then came on down here to Munfordville? That’s quite a ways.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I glanced at Dion and she was looking scared. She shut her eyes again.
“And your people didn’t have a couple dollars to give you to take a bus?”
I looked down at my hands. My heart was beating fast and my mind felt like it was racing it. I elbowed Dion but she just went on pretending to sleep.
After a moment, I said, “No, ma’am. They didn’t . . . have any.”
Miz Lily got quiet again. I breathed in real slow and stared out the window. Poor is poor. My people didn’t have any money. I bit my bottom lip. I knew Miz Lily was thinking up a way to get us out of her car. Maybe she knew I was lying. Maybe, even in the dark, she could see it in my eyes. I wanted Pine Mountain to appear out of the darkness like Oz, all full of rainbows and little dancing people.
A truck passed us, lighting the car up. I could see Miz Lily frowning. She looked at me.
“Y’all didn’t get scared out on the road?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I would think somebody as young as you would get scared . . . being out on the road for the first time.”
“It wasn’t—I mean, yes, ma’am . . . it got a little scary.”
Miz Lily nodded. “I would think so,” she said slowly. “How long you say your mama been down in Bowling Green?”
“Since . . . yesterday.” I elbowed Dion again. I felt
so tired of lying. The lies weren’t coming fast enough. Nobody’d asked us this many questions in all our time on the road. I was messing up—stuttering and not remembering what I said two minutes before.
“Yesterday,” Miz Lily said. She said it to herself, like she was trying to make herself believe it was true. Then she said it again, real soft. “Yesterday.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You ever heard that saying, ‘There’s a hundred days in yesterday’?”
I turned back toward the window. “No. But it’s real pretty.”
“And sad too,” Miz Lily said.
We drove awhile with nobody saying anything. I wanted to pinch Dion, tell her we should make a run for it. But maybe I was imagining Miz Lily knew we was lying and I didn’t want to worry Dion over nothing.
“Being I live so close to the hospital,” Miz Lily said, “I figure I could put you up for the night, but you need to call, leave word with the hospital about your whereabouts . . .”
I looked down at my hands again and tried not to start bawling. Not from sadness. Just from feeling tired and . . . ’cause the thought of sleeping in a real bed at Miz Lily’s house sounded so good. Even if it was just for one night, it was something.
“Mama’d want us to take a bath tonight!” Dion jumped up in her seat. “And eat something hot.”
Miz Lily smiled. “I’d want the same thing for my children. Only I declare I wouldn’t have them out all hours of the night trying to get to me. Where’s your daddy?”
“Our daddy’s dead,” Dion said quickly. “Tractor accident got him.”
I swear that child can lie when she wants to.
You lie long enough, you start believing your lies. Like the whole time I was fake-dialing the hospital from Miz Lily’s living room I was believing, come tomorrow, I was gonna see Mama and her new baby. In the kitchen, Dion was helping Miz Lily cook and they were talking like old friends about some book Dion had read last summer. I ran my finger along the number in Miz Lily’s yellow pages while the hospital phone rang. When a sweet-sounding woman answered, I pressed the receiver down and gave the dial tone a message for Mama. Then I hung up and walked slow around the living room. Miz Lily had one of those neat old-lady houses—the kind with tiny crocheted saucer-looking things laying across the back of her couch and over her table. She had a whole mantelpiece full of pictures—all kinds of pictures, color and black-and-white ones too. I went up to them to get a better look. We never had any pictures in our house—seems Daddy didn’t really like looking at them. There’s this one Dion carries around with her. It’s from when she was a baby. Mama’s holding her in her lap and I’m standing between Mama and Daddy. The picture is turning brown around the edges but every now and then I catch Dion taking it out and staring at it. I remember the day we went to have it taken. Mama had wanted it and Daddy hollered the whole morning about how we couldn’t afford it. It was the first time I heard Mama say something about dying. She said, “What if I die? What the children gonna have to remember me by?” I stared at Miz Lily’s pictures, wondering if any of the people in them had passed on. Nobody had ever really explained dying to me—where a person went to after they left this world.
I stood there and looked at Miz Lily’s pictures. You stare at someone’s pictures long enough, you can make believe the people in them is your own blood family.
When I walked into the kitchen, Miz Lily was rolling out biscuit dough and Dion was putting glasses down on the table. Miz Lily looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “You get a message to your mama?” she asked.
I nodded.
“You tell them to tell her you with Miz Lily Price on Redcliff Road?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Miz Lily started cutting biscuits out with the rim of a glass. Me and Dion watched her, trying not to look too hungry. We hadn’t eaten anything since noon and that was only a cold bologna and cheese sandwich we bought at Winn-Dixie. We were trying to hold on to our little bit of money and Dion wouldn’t let me steal anything. She said it was too risky.
“I don’t have a whole lot to offer but what I got, y’all welcome to. I’m just gonna put these biscuits in the oven and heat up some beef stew I made yesterday.” She smiled. “I never did get used to cooking for one.” She slid the pan of biscuits into the oven. A warm blast of air made its way over to me.
I walked over to the oven, trying to get as close as I could to the heat.
“You cold?” Miz Lily asked.
I shook my head, moving my toes around in my boots. I wanted to take them off and let my feet warm up but I didn’t want Miz Lily to see my dirty socks.
Dion was pouring milk into the glasses. I tried not to stare at her. I could taste the milk making its way down my throat.
“Bathroom’s at the top of the stairs there. Y’all get washed up, I have some cheese and crackers in the refrigerator if you want,” Miz Lily said.
I followed Dion up to the bathroom. The tub was long and clawfoot like the one in Marie’s house. There was a pink rug on the floor beside it and pink and purple towels piled up on a shelf above it.
“I gotta go,” Dion said, dancing around to get her jeans down.
While she went, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair was sticking out past my ears now and it was a lighter brown from spending so much time outside. There were tiny wrinkles across my forehead. The rings around my eyes looked darker. I leaned over the sink and splashed warm water on my face. It felt good. Soothing.
Dion flushed and stuck her hands under the running water.
“Wonder if she got bubble bath,” she said. She lathered her hands and arms up, then rinsed and held them above the sink.
“What towel do we use?”
I handed her a small blue towel hanging above the bathtub.
“I ain’t prejudice, you know,” she said, drying her hands and looking at herself in the mirror. “I just ain’t used to some things. If we was riding with black people the whole way, I would’ve just got in that car no question.”
“Shouldn’t get in any car no question,” I said. “Should always be careful. But don’t be prejudice. Don’t be like our daddy.”
Dion frowned at herself in the mirror, handed me the towel and bent over to splash water on her face.
“I like Miz Lily,” she said, reaching for the towel again without lifting her face up. “She say her husband died on her of a heart attack. Just up and left this world. Ain’t that strange?”
“What’s so strange about it?”
Dion pulled the towel away from her face and frowned. “The way there’s so much dying in the world. You think it’s only you but it ain’t. It’s everybody. Strange. Don’t that beef stew smell good?”
She pressed the towel against her face again and held it there a moment. I smiled. When she pulled the towel away, she looked like a little kid.
“I don’t want to be prejudice, Lena,” she said softly. “I don’t want to be like Daddy.”
“Good.” I tapped her on the back of the head. “We all just people here. Me, you, Miz Lily, Larry, that waitress at Berta’s. You keep that in your head, you’ll be all right.”
Dion nodded. “I get something to eat, I probably be even better.”
When we got back downstairs, Dion tried to take small steps back to the refrigerator to make it seem like she could care less about the cheese and crackers. But I knew by the way her hand was shaking as she reached for everything that she was as hungry and excited as I was.
“How many kids you raised?” I asked, sitting down at the table and slowly making myself a cheese and cracker sandwich. Dion had already stuffed a whole chunk of cheese in her mouth and was following it up with a cracker.
“Oh, I guess about eleven, counting the ones that weren’t my own.”
“Eleven?” Dion said, spraying cracker crumbs.
Miz Lily checked a pot on the stove, then turned the heat off beneath it. “My own and fosters. I’m sure your mama would do the same t
hing.”
“Do what?” I asked.
“Take in children that needed warm meals,” Miz Lily said. “Give them a bed and a safe evening.”
Dion nodded but I just sat there staring at her, the cracker going dry in my mouth. I didn’t know Mama anymore. Even the memory of her was starting to fade away. And if she was so good, why hadn’t she left Daddy when he yelled at her and was mean to us? And why hadn’t she found some free or cheap doctor somewhere who could’ve saved her from the cancer?
“I don’t know—”
“Yes she would’ve!” Dion said, glaring at me. “She would’ve taken people in.”
I shot her a look, hoping Miz Lily hadn’t caught what she’d just said.
Miz Lily looked from me to Dion, then bent down to the oven and took the biscuits out.
“If she wasn’t in the hospital right now,” Dion said quickly, catching herself. “With a new baby and all.”
“What’d she have anyway?” Miz Lily asked.
“A little boy,” I said. “She named him Jacob.”
“That’s a fine name. My grandbaby’s name is Luther. Prettiest little boy you’d ever like to see.” She used a cup to scoop the beef stew into bowls. I watched the steam rise from it.
“Can I have some more milk . . . please, ma’am?” Dion asked.
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