A Soft Place to Land: A Novel

by Susan Rebecca White

  Plus, I just love spending time with my meemaw.

  Suddenly Hunter threw his arms up in the air like someone being saved on television, then fell to the ground. And before I could even wonder what had happened Daddy was rushing toward him like a football player charging the goalpost. Daddy scooped Hunter up in his arms and raced to the parking lot where our station wagon was parked. Mama followed, yelling along the way for someone to tell Meemaw that Troy and I were to go home with her and wait for them to call. Later Mama told us that Daddy drove pell-mell to the hospital, breaking about a dozen traffic laws along the way. Turned out Hunter fell over on the field cause he got stung by a bee and was allergic. At the hospital they shot Hunter up with this stuff called epinephrine and Benadryl, and sent him home with a bunch of it, that and a boxful of needles. And they gave Hunter a pair of dog tags like Mr. Morgan has from Vietnam, only Hunter’s tags say that he is allergic to bees.

  It probably doesn’t even matter whether or not Hunter wears those dog tags; everyone at church and school knows about his allergy, and every grown-up is prepared. There is epinephrine and a needle in the nurse’s office at school, put aside especially for Hunter, and there is some in the RAs’ meeting room, and in Mama and Daddy’s bedroom at our house, and at Meemaw’s house, and at the home of Hunter’s best friend, Dixon, who doesn’t seem to be so much a friend as he is a person for Hunter to trade punches in the arm with.

  Still, it bothers me that Hunter has a best friend and I do not.

  • • •

  I guess he doesn’t count as an actual friend, but I love spending time with Mr. Morgan. Unlike the other RA leaders, Mr. Morgan has all of his hair and he wears jeans to meetings instead of pleated khakis or Sansabelt slacks. And Mr. Morgan has green eyes and a dimple in each cheek when he smiles. He was in ROTC in college, just like my daddy. Later, Mr. Morgan served two tours of duty in Vietnam. He still does push-ups and sit-ups each morning. When he flexes his biceps it looks like there’s a tennis ball beneath his skin. He tells us it is important to remember that our bodies are our temples and we are to honor them by doing stuff like eating our vegetables, brushing our teeth, hugging our mamas, and exercising every single day.

  I always try to stand next to him during the closing prayer, when we gather in a circle. Sometimes I can’t help but grab his hand if it happens to be hanging by his side, idle. He’ll give my hand a little squeeze, but then he’ll pull away. But he never pulls away meanly. It’s just that his hands are busy: He has to clap to get our attention, or point to one of our craft projects hanging on the wall, or dig a Certs out of his pocket. Once Hunter noticed me reaching for Mr. Morgan’s hand and he started pointing and laughing all wild like a hyena. “Look at the little girl!” Hunter said, and I dropped Mr. Morgan’s hand, fast. But Mr. Morgan scolded Hunter, not me. “I’m ashamed of you,” he said. “Bobby is not only your brother by blood; he’s your brother in Christ. And we don’t make fun of our brothers in Christ, not here and not anywhere. Now who’s up for a game of Go Fish?”

  He wasn’t talking about Go Fish the card game. We were fishing for Bible verses. In the center of the room Mr. Morgan put a kiddie pool filled with water. In the pool were a bunch of sealed plastic Baggies, each with a Bible verse typed on a sheet of paper and a weight inside. On the outside of each Baggie was a bunch of metal paper clips. We took turns with a fishing pole made of bamboo with a magnet attached to the end of the line. We’d dip our line in the water, and whichever Baggie it pulled up, that was the verse we were to memorize for the week. Everybody was always hoping to get “Jesus wept,” but no one ever did. I figured Mr. Morgan didn’t even put that one in there—it was just too easy.

  To join the RAs you have to memorize 2 Corinthians 5:20: “We are Ambassadors for Christ.” And that is just the start of all the scripture you have to learn. Each year we get medals depending on how many Bible verses we memorize: Twenty-five gets you a bronze medal, fifty gets you silver, and seventy-five gets you gold. Troy received a gold medal and the RA Bible Award during his final year, when he was not only a Crusader but also a Knight. I am a good memorizer, like Troy, but Hunter is terrible at it. He can’t see his letters right. He’ll just stare and stare at the little slip of white paper until Mr. Morgan comes over and reads it for him. Then Hunter tries to repeat whatever Mr. Morgan said. Usually he gets the words wrong. Like the time his quote was “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” Hunter said, “Iron sharpens man and one man irons another.” Everybody got a good laugh out of that and Hunter’s face turned red, but Mr. Morgan gave him his M&M anyway and said weren’t we lucky that we all had mamas at home to do the ironing for us.

  • • •

  My favorite part of RAs is making craft projects for Christ. Today we are making testimonial license plates for our bikes. Mr. Morgan gives us all rectangles made out of plywood with two holes punched out of the top. On the crafts table, covered in old newspapers, he spreads out smelly markers and little cups of paint and paintbrushes and glue and glitter. Then he passes around a sheet of animal stickers and tells us we can each choose two. I choose a giraffe and a zebra. Mama has a zebra print top that she wore on her anniversary date with Daddy, which made Daddy widen his eyes and say Mama looked wild! Mr. Morgan tells us to mark “JLMTIK” on our pieces of plywood. Once our tags are decorated, we’ll attach them to the fronts of our bikes with two pipe cleaners each. Then when our unsaved friends ask, “What do those letters on your bike stand for?” we can witness just by answering their question. “Why, they stand for ‘Jesus Loves Me This I Know.’ ”

  The official colors of the RAs are gold and blue. I paint my tag all over with the darkest blue I can find. Hunter glances at it and snorts. “How you gonna write on top of that?” he asks. I don’t tell him, but I have a plan. Instead of writing my letters with markers, I form them with Elmer’s glue, then shake glitter all over them so that the letters sparkle and shine. I figure this will attract attention from miles away, plus I just love the way those sparkly letters look, all gold and glittery. When I finish, Mr. Morgan is so impressed he holds my tag up for everyone to see. He wants to know where on the tag I am planning to put the animal stickers and I tell him I think I might save them for something else, cause I don’t want to mess up the color scheme. Mr. Morgan says he guesses that will be okay.

  After we clean up everything, Mr. Morgan gives us a “straight talk” about witnessing. When witnessing, he says, you have to make sure not to act all superior and know-it-all-y. “God loves every single one of us,” Mr. Morgan says. “Even the lost. Especially the lost. And it is our job to coax lost souls to us, so they too can know God’s love. Think about the smell that comes out of the kitchen when your mama is baking cookies. Makes you want to go in there, doesn’t it? Well, that’s exactly how we need to present God’s love, as something warm and sweet and inviting. So when your friends ask about your license tag, tell them what it stands for, yes, but also make sure to tell them that you made it at this really neat club where you get to build race cars and have turkey shoots and play Go Fish and eat M&M’s.

  “Now, if you are talking to a friend and he asks specifically about Jesus, by all means keep talking. Let him know that Jesus loves you and will never let you down. Let him know that with Jesus in your life, you don’t ever have to be afraid, because even when you’re scared—especially when you’re scared!—the Lord is right there with you. But if he doesn’t ask about the Lord, just invite him to come to a meeting. Once he’s here, he’ll see what it means to be part of a Christian community, and he’ll want to keep coming back for more!”

  Mr. Morgan tells us that our challenge for the next week is to talk with three unsaved friends about our relationship with Christ. The problem is everyone I know goes to Clairmont Avenue Baptist and is already a Christian.

  I determine to cast my net far and wide and find someone new.

  And then I realize just what I need to do: take my bike over to Meemaw’s this upcoming Frida
y when I go to her house for a spend-the-night. I spend the night with her once a month, so the two of us can have some QT—which means “quality time.” This Friday is going to be especially fun, because not only will we do the usual stuff—watch animal shows, decorate a cake, pull out the box from her closet that holds the pair of chopped-off braids from when she was a little girl—Meemaw has a new kitten named Moses and I am going to meet him and maybe even hold him if I am extra careful.

  Meemaw lives on the other side of the railroad tracks from us, kind of near Agnes Scott College, where Mama went for two years before transferring to the University of Georgia. In Meemaw’s neighborhood, the houses are older and more run-down and there are a lot of colored families living there. Daddy says the neighborhood was nicer when he was growing up, but times they are a-changing! He just hopes his mama doesn’t lose all the money in her house as the whites move out and the Negroes move in. But Meemaw says there is no way she is moving. No sir. She raised her babies and buried a husband while living in that house and she isn’t about to move away from her memories just because some of her white neighbors aren’t able to see that we are all precious children of God.

  • • •

  I bring my bike, freshly christened with the JLMTIK license tag, to my spend-the-night at Meemaw’s. She is waiting on the front porch swing, dressed in a pair of pink shorts and the T-shirt I gave her last year for her birthday, which says: “World’s Best Grandma.” Her legs are crisscrossed with purple and blue veins.

  “You planning on riding away from me?” she asks as I walk my bike up to the house.

  “I wanted to show you the license tag I made.”

  She makes her way down the front porch steps to get close enough to examine it. “Well, if that ain’t the prettiest thing! What’s it mean, though, I wonder?”

  I have a feeling she knows, but I answer anyway. “Jesus Loves Me This I Know.”

  “For the Bible tells me so! That’s wonderful, precious. I just love it. And I love the way it glitters! Weren’t you smart to make it all shiny like that so people would take notice. Now why don’t you leave your bike on the porch for now and you can come in and meet my new kitty. And later I’ve got a chocolate cake for us to decorate. I’d already fixed a pound cake, but then I got this fierce hankering for a slice of chocolate cake with milk.”

  Meemaw always ices her chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. It’s my favorite kind because Meemaw and me can dye it whatever color we want. I like pink, but I can only color it that way if it’s just Meemaw and me eating it. One time I brought home a batch of pink cupcakes for my family. Hunter asked, “Why’d you choose that sissy color?” Daddy said he bet I’d tried to make them red for the Georgia Bulldogs but just hadn’t added enough food coloring. “Isn’t that right, son?” Daddy asked, and I answered, “Yes, sir,” knowing that was what he wanted to hear.

  Meemaw’s house is a lot smaller than ours. You walk right into the living room, where there is an old-fashioned fireplace where we sometimes roast marshmallows for s’mores during the winter. You can’t even see the wall over the mantel, it is so covered in pictures of family, including every school picture Troy, Hunter, and me have ever taken and a picture of Meemaw’s husband, Daddy Banks, in uniform. He died a hero, but Daddy always said Meemaw was a hero, too, the way she raised him and his sister, June, all by herself. Meemaw always corrects Daddy when he says that. She says she didn’t do it all by herself, she did it with the help of her church family at Second Avenue Baptist, where Meemaw still goes. Meemaw told Daddy she was mighty proud of him for being senior preacher at Clairmont, but she’d been going to Second Avenue for forty-something years and quitting them now would be like quitting her beloved husband. Daddy pretends to understand, but I know it hurts him that his own mama isn’t a member at our church.

  I ask Meemaw where that new kitten is and she says probably hiding under the bed somewhere. So we tiptoe into Meemaw’s room and peek beneath the bed skirt. I see a shiny set of yellow eyes but can’t really make out the cat’s body. It’s awfully dark under there, and Meemaw says Moses is jet-black. I reach out my hand to see if he will come to it, but he backs away.

  “He’s shy,” says Meemaw. “He’ll probably come out later if we just leave him be.”

  “Maybe we should frost that cake,” I say.

  She says that’s a fine idea, but the cake layers are still a little warm so why don’t I take a bike ride while they cool down? I say, “Yes, ma’am,” and go outside where I left my bike on the front porch. The license plate, attached to the handlebars with pipe cleaners, looks good. Real good. “JLMTIK” glitters like the golden treasure it stands for. I walk the bike down the porch steps and then I get on it and start riding down the street. I don’t see anyone out in their yards until I get to the house at the end of the road, where Jefferson Place dead-ends into Ansley. There is a Negro family out front. Two women sit on folding chairs on the porch while the kids run all over. Off to the side a man wearing shorts and a Braves T-shirt is moving hot dogs around a hibachi grill.

  I wave when I ride past and the fat woman sitting on the porch lifts her hand to wave back. I turn around on Ansley so I can ride by them again, only it’s uphill, so I have to stand to pedal.

  “Hey!” I yell.

  “Hay’s for horses!” yells one of the girls from the yard. She is tall and thin and dark. She wears a bun on the very tippy top of her head with a bright pink ribbon tied around it.

  I try to slow down so someone will ask about my license tag, but it’s nearly impossible to do that when you are pedaling uphill. You’re pushing hard against gravity as it is; any less speed and you might start wobbling.

  I figure I ought to look for other new kids around the neighborhood to show my tag to, since no one but Pink Ribbon has paid any attention to me and all she did was tease. I ride past several houses, passing Meemaw’s little brick bungalow, but the front yards are deserted, which is strange considering it’s a perfect spring night, warm enough to sit outside but too cool for mosquitoes. But then I smell meat cooking and I realize most folks are probably having a real barbecue out back, not just cooking wieners on a hibachi grill. Meemaw said we might even grill up some hamburgers for our supper and put chili on them like they do at The Varsity.

  I decide to try the colored family once more. I turn around and head their way. Maybe they haven’t seen my license tag. Because if they did, wouldn’t they ask about it or at least say it’s nice looking? Smack in front of their house, I turn my handles toward them so they can see the glittery letters. But I turn too fast and run into the fence. Pink Ribbon says, “That fool cain’t ride within an inch of his life,” and everyone laughs, though the fat woman on the porch tells Pink Ribbon to quit acting ugly.

  “I can ride. I can ride real good. I just wanted y’all to see my license tag.”

  “Well, come on over here and show it to us, then,” says the fat woman. She wears a sleeveless top with little strings that tie at her shoulders. Her arms are the biggest I’ve ever seen. They are bigger even than Daddy’s thighs, and Daddy was a football player in high school.

  I hop off my bike and walk it up the path that cuts through the middle of their yard. Pink Ribbon comes over and studies the letters. She stands with her legs apart and her hands on her hips. “So? Jesus love me too,” she says. “I was baptized in holy waters when I was a baby.”

  “How’d you know that’s what it says?” I ask.

  She taps her finger against the side of her head. “Cause I got a big ol’ brain in here.”

  “Keisha, you stop showing off,” says the woman on the porch.

  “Ain’t showing off when it true,” she says.

  “I got a big ol’ hand that can knock some manners into you,” the woman says, but she’s settled so deep into her folding chair, it doesn’t look like she is going to get up to knock anything into anyone anytime soon.

  I know I should be happy that Keisha is saved, but I can’t help but be disappo
inted. I wanted to bring a heathen to Jesus. “You know the ABCs of salvation and all that?” I ask.

  “I’m in the third grade. You think I cain’t read?”

  “That’s not what I mean! I mean, A) accept that you are a sinner. B) believe that Christ died for your sins. C) confess that you need Christ Jesus.”

  “I like that, smart boy. I’m gonna tell it to my daddy next time he come visit. He a preacher at Emmanuel Missionary Church in Birmingham, Alabama.”

  “There she go telling lies again,” says one of the other boys.

  “You shut up. He too a preacher.”

  “Maybe so, but he ain’t visiting you.”

  Keisha pounces on the boy, knocking him to the ground and pounding on his arms and shoulders with her fists.

  The big woman stands up faster than you would have believed possible and charges over to Keisha, plucking her off the boy by the back of her shirt and then turning Keisha around to face her. “Girl, you better watch yourself! Cain’t go knocking down everyone that hurt your feelings. Now you better start acting like a lady, or I’m gonna whup you till you do. You hear?”

  “Yes,” mutters Keisha.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now you sit yourself on the porch with me and behave.”

  Keisha’s head is bent as she trudges over to the porch and sits down on its top step. I follow, sitting next to her.

  “You sure you’re saved?” I ask.

  Her eyes are wet. She looks away. I have the sudden urge to touch her, to pet her arm and tell her things are going to be okay. But I keep still. After a minute she turns and looks at me. “They just jealous cause I’m a prophet,” she whispers. “I got a secret church to show you. Don’t you tell no one. You stay in that red house three doors up?”