Queenie knelt down and ran a gentle hand over the dog’s head. “Hey, pretty girl. What we gone do with you while your human’s in the hospital, hmm?”
She sighed and clambered to her feet, then looked for a long minute at me and Mama, like she was weighing in her mind if she should ask us to take Clara with us. Please don’t, I tried to say with my eyes. Even if we could somehow keep a dog in our apartment for a few days without the manager figuring out, I had a feeling that asking Mama if we could watch Ray’s dog would be the thing that made her explode.
Queenie read my message right. “I expect I could come by for a few days and keep Clara fed and walked. I can’t take her home with me, ’cause my husband, Elijah, is allergic, but we can make it work for a short time.”
“Thanks,” I said, so quiet it was almost a whisper.
“Tell me,” Mama broke in, her voice knife-edge sharp even though there was a smile on her lips. “How do y’all know each other?”
Queenie stuck her hand out. “I’m Queenie Banks, Miz Fitzgerald. Me and Ray go back a long, long time. I was friends with his wife before she died. My salon is right near where Ray and Annie Lee play at Brightleaf. I’ve never had the privilege of listening in on her lessons, but Ray tells me she’s getting along real well, and what I can hear sounds pretty great.”
“Lessons,” Mama repeated.
Queenie nodded. “Ray says your girl has a real talent, Miz Fitzgerald. Says he hasn’t seen many kids who’ve made as much progress in such a little time. He’s real excited about that Durham Piano Teachers Association competition in December—he thinks Annie Lee has a shot at a prize.”
“Up at Brightleaf Square.”
“Uh-huh. Well, no, the competition’s at some church, I think. But Annie Lee’s lessons are at Brightleaf—of course, you know all that. Speaking of, I’ve got to run! I’ve got a long coloring appointment in a few minutes.” She fished a business card from her pocket. “But Miz Fitzgerald, you keep this card, all right? Maybe this isn’t the time to bring this up, but Annie Lee told me about her daddy. It’s not anywhere near the same, but ten years back my husband lost his job, and I had to go back to school to get my cosmetology license. I did well enough in those first few years I’ve got my own place now, and me and Mr. Banks are doing just fine.”
Queenie patted Mama’s hand gently as she handed her the business card. “I don’t know what your plans are moving forward, but if you ever decide to do something like that, you call me up, sugar. I don’t know how much help I can be, but I could talk you through the application and recommend some scholarships they’ve got.”
There were so many expressions on Mama’s face that it looked like the sky on one of those sun-rain-cloud days: irritation chased by surprise chased by something that looked suspiciously like a tiny glimmer of hope. I thought of her the day we’d learned that Daddy had never paid for the extra life insurance, saying she couldn’t even see a way forward for us, she was so stuck in the middle of getting by.
Right now, it looked like she was seeing that way forward.
Finally, Mama managed to close her fingers around Queenie’s business card. “Thank you, Mrs. Banks. That’s very generous. I—I’ll keep that in mind.”
Queenie smiled at Mama, wrapped her arm around my shoulders in a quick half hug, and hurried off to her car. As soon as she’d disappeared into the little red coupe, Mama turned to me.
“Car. Now.”
I swallowed hard and followed her to my doom.
Mama waited until we were both inside, doors closed behind us, before opening the floodgates.
“Let me get this straight.” Her fingers were white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “You’ve been sneaking out while I’m at work and just—riding your scooter all over downtown—for two months? Taking some kind of—lessons—from a strange old man I’ve never met?”
The last few words were punctuated with sharp little hits to the steering wheel, like firing the words themselves off hard as gunshots wasn’t enough on its own.
“Piano lessons,” I whispered. There wasn’t anything else I could say. Sun sparkled on the windshield in front of me; it was too bright, too pretty a day for all of this.
“Annie Lee Fitzgerald! Do you even realize what you’re telling me?” Mama gripped the wheel again, but even though her skin was white as flour, she couldn’t stop her hands and arms from shaking. She sniffed, hard and angry.
When I peeked at her out of the corner of my eye, her eyes glittered.
“Honey,” she said a minute later, and I could hear in her voice how hard she was working to keep those tears back. “Annie Lee. You know how much I love you, right? You know it would rip my heart into pieces if anything happened to you, right? What if you’d gotten hurt off by yourself? What if you’d been in an accident, or gotten kidnapped! What if Mr. Owens hadn’t been a nice old man who’d wanted to teach you piano, but . . .”
Mama stopped, her breathing fast. I didn’t know if I’d ever seen her this angry in my whole life.
“It near about broke me in two when your daddy died this summer, Annie Lee. What would I do if something happened to you, too?”
I stared straight ahead, my teeth set so hard my jaw ached with it. “You aren’t the only one who’s sad.”
It was what I had wanted to say every day for nearly five months, every morning when I woke up to the sound of Mama crying as she washed the shaving cream down the bathroom sink, every single time her face went white when the TV would mysteriously flip on or the record player would spin through phantom songs.
In the seat next to me, Mama deflated, sinking in on herself, a balloon leaking air.
“You’re right,” she said. “You’re right, honey. Sometimes, I guess I forget I’m not the only one who’s broken by all this.”
We sat in silence for a minute, both of us looking out at the cold late-morning sun hanging over Ray’s house.
“It was wrong, you lying and sneaking out,” said Mama quietly after a minute. “But it was wrong, too, for me to hold myself away from you the way I’ve been doing. I should’ve known things weren’t all right, Annie Lee. I should’ve seen that before—before—” She waved her hand, sweeping the whole world up in the gesture. “Before I got a call saying you were skipping school and found you across town, chasing a strange man through the forest by Maplewood.”
“Mom. It’s not like that. Ray’s my friend.”
“I know he is. And I know you aren’t going to believe this, but I’m really trying to take your word for it that he’s the kind of man you say he is. But still,” she added, rubbing at her eyes with the heels of her hands, “you have to realize, this is the kind of thing every mother in the world fears.”
“I know,” I said, and closed my eyes. There, in the darkness, I could see every good thing the last two months had brought me—those afternoons at Brightleaf, Ray’s music, his smile, my fingers on the piano keys—slipping away into nothing.
Mama wrapped a stiff arm around my shoulders and pulled me toward her, kissing the top of my head. “I’m sorry, Annie Lee,” she whispered into my hair. “I think we need to make each other some rules, okay? No more sneaking around, and no more lying. I don’t know what they’re going to be yet, but I’m going to have to come up with some kind of consequences for the way you’ve been behaving. But also—no more of me trying to hold all this grief inside myself and forgetting how much there is inside you, too.”
She took a deep breath. “Let’s go home now, honey. I’ll take the rest of the day off work, and we’ll spend some time together. Maybe . . . maybe I’ll think about Mrs. Banks’s offer. There’s a couple beauty colleges not too far from here—maybe I’ll see about applying to one of them. It would sure be a lot better than Mary’s Maids.
“None of this is going to be easy, but we’ll get through it together, you and me.”
“Could we visit Ray tomorrow?” I knew it was pushing it, but I couldn’t not ask. I couldn’t get it out of my head, the
way Ray had looked, getting carted off in that ambulance. I wished I had Daddy’s two-headed quarter with me.
Mama hesitated. I could see the worry she’d carried around with her since Daddy died, wrestling with the softness that was trying hard to come out.
“Not tomorrow,” she said finally. “But I’ll think about it. How about . . . you can tell me the whole story of what you’ve been doing and what your friend Ray is like. And maybe . . . maybe we’ll think about going to the hospital on Sunday. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and when she turned the key in the ignition and backed out of Ray’s driveway, the rumble of that engine somehow sounded a whole lot like hope.
41.
It was quiet the next morning when I woke up, like a hush had fallen over our whole apartment. No bathroom fan, no sounds of Mama crying or stomping off to change into her Mary’s Maids polo. The light filtering through my bedroom window was silvery; when I pulled open the blinds, rain sparkled on the parking lot outside and frost beaded the window glass.
Mama was in the bathroom when I got there. Not washing the sink or getting ready for work—she was sitting on the bathroom floor in her pajamas with her knees drawn up, a photo album spread across her lap.
The scent of aftershave was still strong in the air, the stubble still there.
Hello, Daddy, I thought.
In the other room, the record player whirred to life. “Annie’s Song” hummed its way through the apartment.
Mama touched one of the pictures in the photo book, her finger soft and slow as she traced it. “He was so handsome,” she murmured.
I sank down onto the floor next to her. She lifted her arm up and wrapped it around me, pulling me close to her, like she’d done when I was little and came into her bed with a bad dream. We hadn’t sat like that in a long, long time.
The picture was one of Daddy and me the day I was born—white hospital walls in the background, little baby me wrapped in a white flannel blanket covered in elephants. Daddy held me like I was made out of glass, like if he breathed wrong, I’d shatter. Like I was the most precious thing the world had ever seen.
I couldn’t say anything past the thickness in my throat.
Mama turned the page. More pictures of Daddy, of the three of us together—Daddy holding tiny toddler me on his lap at the piano, patiently helping me press down the keys. Daddy and Mama posing together on a trail at Eno River State Park, right where me and Mama had gone hiking last month. Daddy with a group of his English students, one of them holding up a stuffed raven with a speech bubble coming out of its mouth that said Nevermore.
“You know,” said Mama, so quiet I had to lean even closer to hear her. “All these months, I’ve wished so hard that all of this”—she waved her hand at the sink filled with shaving cream— “would just go away. It makes it so much harder, some days, feeling like he’s so close still.
“But in other ways, I think I’ve been holding on to all those little things. Because the only thing scarier than feeling like we’ll never be free of that closeness is the idea of him being all the way gone.”
“I know,” I said, just as quiet. I thought of the rainbow umbrella dreams, of the way it felt to have Daddy so near, so reach-out-and-touch-able, and not be able to do anything at all about it. “Me too.”
I thought of the pro-con list I’d made all those weeks ago. PRO: With the ghost in the house, it was like a tiny piece of Daddy still lived there. Had I been clutching that tiny little piece of Daddy all this time, even more afraid to let it go than I was to have it stay?
Mama sighed, a long, slow, sad sigh that wrapped its way around the bathroom and felt, strangely, like a hug.
“Sometimes I wonder if your daddy’s had just as hard a time letting go as we have, Annie Lee.”
“Me too.”
Maybe all three of us were wrong to hold on like that. For months, I’d felt like letting go of Daddy—figuring out how to move on and live a life without him in it, figuring out how to be happy without him around—would be a kind of betrayal. Like if I let go of him, it meant the love between us had never been as strong as I’d thought.
But maybe I’d gotten things backward. Maybe love was a little like that missing quarter: heads up either way you flipped it.
Maybe sometimes love meant holding on to somebody, but other times love meant letting them go.
“I think maybe it’s time we all learned to move on,” said Mama, like she’d read my thoughts. She rubbed my shoulder. “We’re never going to stop loving your daddy, Annie Lee. But maybe it’s time you and I figured out how to hold on to him a little less, and each other a little more.”
“I’d like that,” I said, and snuggled closer, breathing in Mama’s cleaning-lady smell.
“I went on the computer this morning before you woke up,” Mama said. “There’s a new term that starts up at one of the beauty colleges right after New Year’s. It’s expensive, and it’s a little longer than the other programs, but it’s the kind of place that sets its students up to work in fancy salons and spas. The kind of job that could really help us make ends meet. It would mean tightening our belts even further for a couple months, honey. But I think if I could get one of those scholarships Mrs. Banks was talking about, we could really make it work.”
I thought of Mama in a salon like Queenie’s, wearing a black apron and calling her clients honey and sugar.
“You should do it,” I said.
“I’ll get in touch with Mrs. Banks later today.”
“I want to show you something,” I said, and flipped my phone open. The recording from that day at Brightleaf was still there, five minutes of my heart on the piano keyboard, and I pressed play.
This is for you, too, I thought, and hoped that somehow, my daddy could hear it.
I let it play all the way until it stopped—the little snatch of “Annie’s Song,” the laughing sound of “You Can Call Me Al.” One tentative, hopeful note after another, holding the memory of the golden light they’d conjured up.
When it finished, Mama’s eyes were wet. “Did you write that yourself?”
I nodded.
“That was really beautiful, honey,” she said.
The bathroom light flickered off and back on, just once, like the ghost was nodding agreement.
42.
The first thing I noticed when we walked through the doors Sunday morning was the smell, that sharp too-clean smell that brought back every moment of the horrible June day when Daddy died. Mama and I had followed the ambulance to the hospital, but by the time we’d rushed in through the glass doors that swooshed closed behind us and swept us into the antiseptic sorrow of the emergency department, the only thing we’d been able to do was identify the body.
Male. Thirty-eight years old. Time of death: Seven forty-two, June 8. Cause of death: unsuspected hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
The doctor who’d read the chart had had black hipster glasses and a goatee and a voice like a stapler: cold, hard, abrupt. It had been the nurse, dressed in purple scrubs and carrying the scent of a summer evening with her like a cloud, who had spoken gently and folded Mama and then me into a hug.
Mama gave Ray’s name at the lobby information desk, and the receptionist pointed us toward the elevators: fifth floor, west wing, general medicine specialties. As we rode the elevator up, Mama took my hand and squeezed it.
“It’s hard, being back here, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
Mama took a breath. “But maybe it’s good for us, too. I know I’ve avoided a lot of things these last few months, Annie Lee. Things that seem hard, or scary. Things that remind me of your daddy.”
“Me too.”
“I don’t think I want to live like that anymore,” Mama said.
When Mama had called Queenie last night to ask about scholarships, they’d ended up talking for a long time about Ray, too. Mama had asked so many questions it had sounded like she was training to be a detective, but I’d watched her face relax a lit
tle more with every answer Queenie gave. After she’d gotten off the phone, Mama had come over and given me a hug and said we could go see Ray in the morning. She didn’t have to say it in words for me to understand what that meant: Mama trusted Queenie, and Queenie trusted Ray. And for now, that was enough for us both.
Queenie had told Mama on the phone that Ray had been admitted with multiple fractures in his leg and advanced pneumonia in his lungs. He’d be in for at least a week, with the possibility of discharge to a rehabilitation care center for up to two months after that while his body healed. The nurse had told Queenie that Ray was in stable but critical condition.
The general medicine specialties ward was flanked by heavy double doors that opened with clicks and whirs at the touch of a button. Ray was in a room right by the nurses’ station, his door just the littlest bit open as we came to it.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom inside. When I did, I saw Ray, lying in a bed with rails, an oxygen tube snaking its way across his face. Beside his bed a bunch of machines blinked, tracking just about everything that could be tracked.
“Y’all checking up on Mr. Owens?” An aide with tan skin and a blue ponytail that swished when she walked paused by us. “He’s been sleeping off and on ever since they brought him in. Poor man. You the little girl who found him?”
I nodded.
“Way I heard it, you saved his life, honey. You should be real proud of yourself.”
I didn’t feel proud, though. The hospital scent was thick in my nose so that I wanted to turn on my heel and run away into the fresh air.
Mama put her hand on my shoulder. “We’re gonna be okay,” she whispered, the way she had yesterday morning, and that was enough to remind my lungs how to breathe in just a little bit. I thought of what she’d said in the elevator: I don’t want to live like that anymore.
I didn’t, either. I stepped forward and sat down on the edge of a chair beside Ray’s bed.
After I’d been watching him a minute, Ray’s eyelids fluttered open. “Annie Lee?”
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