Calling Me Home

by Julie Kibler

  His brief silence acknowledged my subtle reference to his own birth, but he went right on. “Okay, Mom, but you have to let me use that money. Her dad might kill me or something. I’ll pay you back. I promise. First job I find, I’m there. Mom. Please.”

  “‘Have to’?” Fuming was a mild way to describe me by then. I considered pulling over before I caused an accident, but I wanted badly to get to Cincinnati so we could settle in for the night. We were road-weary, and there was no telling what we’d need to deal with before the funeral activities started the next day. So I kept driving, only semiconscious of the speedometer inching up. “Son. That was my money. I earned it. And you stole it from me. You think I’m going to pat you on the back and let you keep it?”

  He went off on me, screeching what a horrible mother I was for endangering his life and how it was probably my fault in the first place he was in trouble because all I ever did was work, work, work and ignore him and spoil Bebe, while he just tried to find someone to love him and …

  A cop car merged onto the road, pulling behind me. The flashing lights served only to enhance the red I was already seeing.

  I stretched my hand toward Miss Isabelle, my phone flat on my palm. She took it, then studied it, wrinkling her forehead at the angry sounds still spewing forth. I should have disconnected before I handed it over—I’d already seen her in action once that day—but it was too late.

  “Young man?” she said. The noise from the phone stopped abruptly. I eased over to the side of the road, trying my hardest not to sling a string of my own expletives.

  “Your mother is an angel,” she said. “An angel of mercy. All your yelling and carrying on is unproductive. Now, your mother’s done you a favor by not letting the police drag you off to jail for taking her money. You think about that and speak to her after you’ve cooled down. She has something else to deal with right now.”

  I’d pulled onto the shoulder by then. I kept one eye on the patrolman approaching my window while watching Miss Isabelle search for the way to end the call. “The red one,” I said, then lowered my window and dropped my head against the headrest.

  “In a hurry, ma’am?” the officer said.

  “Oh, you have no idea.” I shook my head. A model of restraint.

  “May I see your driver’s license and proof of insurance?”

  I pulled my license from my wallet while Miss Isabelle located the little scrap of paper from State Farm. We waited in silence while he returned to his car to check my rap sheet. Finally, he reappeared at my window.

  “I’m citing you for excessive speed. You were doing almost ninety in a seventy-mile-per-hour zone.” He eyeballed me, like speeding was an uncommon offense. “Also, I’m issuing a warning because your driver’s license expired two weeks ago. You need to handle that right away. Maybe over in Texas, you get a grace period, but here in Kentucky, I could haul you in.” He glanced past me to Miss Isabelle, as if she were the only reason he’d decided not to.

  My face went hot and the backs of my hands tingled as if they’d been spanked. I glared at the little plastic card I mainly used for a good laugh at the picture. My birthday had passed with a minimum of fuss, and thanks to debit cards, I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked to see my ID. The state of Texas sent reminders for everything else—why the hell not an expiring license? Officer Shocked and Appalled passed me the electronic clipboard so I could acknowledge my exponential stupidity. (One can guess where I found exponential, though I have no memory of whether it was down or across.) He wished us a good evening—ugh!—and I groaned after he walked away.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Isabelle. I can’t believe I’ve been driving you with an expired license. And damn Stevie Junior. He’s going to pay for this ticket, too, as soon as he finds that job he probably won’t bother to look for.” I glanced over at her. “What do we do here? You gonna drive?”

  Miss Isabelle sighed. “Oh, honey, my license expired three years before yours, so I expect we’re better off with you at the wheel. Take it easy, and we’ll be fine.” She patted my hand. “By the way? In case you wondered? I’m not sorry for what I said to Stevie Junior.”

  I shook my head and growled low in my throat. “Somebody needed to say it.”

  I signaled to get back on the road, feeling paranoia tighten my chest like it always did right after a cop pulled you over, like there was a hidden camera on the car, watching your every move to be sure you were doing it right—even worse when you didn’t fit the system’s ideal picture of a good citizen. And why did I open my mouth just then? No telling. “Only reason that cop didn’t take me to jail was because I had a white woman sitting next to me, Miss Isabelle. I guarantee.”

  Miss Isabelle looked at me. All she did was look at me. But her look spoke those words uttered too many times before, by too many people, in too many places: You people. Always thinking we’re out to get you.

  I thought I might lose it again. I knew if I didn’t leave the car, I might do something I’d really regret later. I pulled over, and Miss Isabelle gaped as I grabbed my purse from the console and bolted out, slamming the car door behind me as hard as I could slam the heavy hunk of metal. I walked off along the breakdown lane, dragging my cigarette pack and lighter from my purse as I went. I couldn’t fire up that thing fast enough, and I took a big drag as soon as the flame caught. I threw my purse over my shoulder and kept walking until the Buick’s license plate was a tiny dot behind me. Then I walked some more, replaying those unspoken words over and over in my mind.

  When I was a kid, this one security guard worked late afternoons or evenings at the public housing project where my mother and I lived—an off-duty Texarkana police officer who’d grown up in my little town and still lived there. He befriended the kids in the complex—the ones who didn’t already mistrust the cops, who hadn’t already had run-ins with the law for stupid stuff like graffiti on trash bins or keying cars. Or much worse. I liked him. I trusted him. He’d stop me when I trudged back in from school, my backpack dragging at my shoulder. I was always wondering what shape my mother would be in when I walked through the door. Happy and in love? Depressed and asleep? Or cooking dinner for the first time in a week?

  “How was school, young lady?” he’d ask. “Got a lot of studying to do today? Your teachers working you hard enough?” He asked questions a parent would, though more often than not these would have been the last thing on my mother’s mind. She was usually concerned with whether I had a plan to meet up with a friend to do homework—not whether I actually had homework, but whether I’d be preoccupied so she could go out. Hoping the friend’s mother would offer me supper.

  “I’ve always got homework,” I’d say.

  He’d nod. “What’s your favorite? I hated science, but I was a whiz at math.”

  I groaned. Math was never my specialty. “You’re crazy. I guess I like social studies. I like to learn about how other people live in other places?” I made it a question, then checked his reaction. Most of the men I knew—except the few at school, who were mostly gym teachers or administrators—were my mother’s boyfriends or the other losers who hung around the single women in our complex. They weren’t much interested in me before that year, when suddenly I’d sprouted breasts and curvy hips like my mother’s, and now I mostly wanted to get away from them as fast as I could find an excuse.

  But Officer Kevin wasn’t like that. He seemed genuinely interested in what I thought. And I never caught him looking me up and down, judging my chest and hips like I was a berry ripe for picking. “Social studies was fun. Now, when you get to high school and start really learning history, it gets trickier. You have to study hard then. You planning to study hard in high school, Miss Dorrie?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, not in the way I said “Yes, sir” to get the stalker managers at the dollar store off my back—the ones who followed me around, asked if I was doing okay, looked at me as if I already had merchandise stuffed down the back of my jeans. I said it to Officer Kev
in like I meant it. Yes, sir, I planned to study hard. Yes, sir, I planned to get the heck out of my hometown at the earliest opportunity. And yes, sir, if studying hard would get me there, I was on it. Like all the other girls in my complex when we were ten, eleven, twelve. Until the boys started playing with our hearts. I’d held out longer than some so far.

  Officer Kevin told me once how he was saving the extra money he made doing security to make a down payment on a nicer house for him and his wife and kids. I liked picturing that. They lived over on the white side of town, of course, but the house was just a crummy little starter thing. He had four kids of his own, and I imagined they were spilling out the windows with all their toys and activity. He wanted to build them a nice big place in the country—where they’d have room to play, maybe even a real swimming pool instead of the little molded plastic or blow-up things they bought every summer at Wal-Mart. I kind of wished I’d had one of those, but I didn’t say so out loud. Officer Kevin was nice and I liked that he talked to me—like I was a real person, not a delinquent in training. I suspected he didn’t like whiners.

  But then one afternoon, I came home from school, and he was standing next to a local police cruiser. My mom sat in the backseat. I ran to the car, dropping my backpack on the sidewalk.

  “See what your so-called friend went and did?” my mother screamed through the window of the police car as I approached. “See what happens when you trust white people?”

  Officer Kevin leaned up against the car while the local cop took his statement, his back to me, hands deep in his pockets, like he was embarrassed for me. And maybe for him, too.

  Momma kept ranting, and I hushed her. “Momma, please don’t yell.” All the neighbors gawked over their railings. This kind of thing was nothing new around our complex, but she had never been the source of entertainment before. She kept her nose fairly clean when it came to the law, even if she wasn’t the most attentive parent. “What happened?” I asked.

  “Officer Kevin, here,” she said, nodding toward the man I thought had been my friend all this time but who now acted like he didn’t even know me, “he called the cops on me—said I was in possession of an illegal substance. I told him it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t mine, Dorrie. I promise.”

  “Marijuana smoke comes drifting from your windows, it’s as good as yours, ma’am,” the local officer said, and my mother snorted through her nose.

  “It was my boyfriend’s. What was I going to do? I can’t control what he does.”

  “Oh, Momma, I told you not to let him do that in the house.” I wasn’t sure which of them to be angrier with—my mother, for letting another idiot come in our house and do something stupid, or Officer Kevin. Sure, it was his job, but what was I supposed to do if they carted my mom off to jail? How was I going to study hard if I had no idea what was going to happen next? I had visions of foster homes. My mom was probably telling the truth—the pot probably was her boyfriend’s. She couldn’t afford it. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d taken a hit off it, too.

  And where was that boyfriend now? “Where’s Tyrone?”

  “Gone. Lit out not five minutes before Deputy Dog here called the police and they came for me. Wouldn’t be surprised if your Officer Kevin timed it that way. He’s just been looking for a reason to get me in trouble, get me kicked out of this place. He’s been using you to watch me. Trust me.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Why had Officer Kevin blown the whistle on my mom, of all people, not even giving her a chance to explain? There was illegal drug activity in our complex every single day, and it wasn’t like my mom was wandering outside in a heroin daze. So maybe she took a little hit of reefer. A rule is a rule, sure, but why my mother and not one of the real criminals? Maybe he needed brownie points that day and she was an easy target.

  My mother pleaded down to a minor offense. She spent three nights in jail because she couldn’t pay the fine. But we were also booted out of public housing for a year. You couldn’t live on government hospitality with a documented drug problem. Momma had to attend a supervised rehab program, and we had to live with her drunk old pop—my grandfather, though I never really thought of him that way, because there wasn’t much affection wasted between us—in a falling-down shack on the edge of town until we got our eligibility back.

  The day she got out of jail, Momma told me Officer Kevin had waited until Tyrone left, then knocked on the door and said he’d trade a little something for not turning her in. She refused and he called the police.

  My face burned like fire. My Officer Kevin? The one I’d trusted? The one who’d left me alone when the other creepy men leered at me? The one I’d pictured at home with his nice wife and four cute kids?

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. But she was my mother. There had to be at least a grain of truth in what she said. I learned this: not to trust someone just because they treated me nice. They were probably waiting like a snake in the grass to strike me down. That was the year I started studying only enough to get by.

  So okay, maybe I lied when I said I never judged someone based on the color of their skin. I tried not to—most days, I convinced myself I couldn’t judge a whole race by one person’s actions. But sometimes, something triggered that old memory. It came bubbling up, and suddenly, all I saw was Officer Kevin when I looked at another white face. My heart told me to watch it. My heart told me that white face would go only so far for me. My heart told me I couldn’t trust men or people with white faces.

  And now I took all the hurt I’d balled up and hidden in the very back of my heart for so many years and spewed it into a million pieces behind me, at Miss Isabelle, as I walked.

  Finally, when my cigarette had burned down to a nub, I headed back. Angry as I still felt, I also felt cruel when I arrived at the car. Miss Isabelle sat there, her face pale, her heart beating so hard, it fluttered her blouse like a little bird hidden beneath the fabric.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as I pulled away from the shoulder. “I wasn’t going to leave you alone here. I just needed to get out so I wouldn’t do something stupid. Say something stupid.”

  “I didn’t think you’d leave me alone. I knew you needed a minute. But why were you so angry with me?”

  “You thought I was just saying that, Miss Isabelle. About being guilty just by existing—DWB, you know, driving while black. You have no idea what it’s like sometimes, always living under this cloud of suspicion, someone always ready to string you up for the least little thing, like you just proved what they thought to begin with.”

  “I didn’t think that, Dorrie. But you’re right. I don’t know what it’s like. And it makes me sad that in this world we still do this to each other.”

  My face burned again, all these years later. I thought back and pictured her look. I’d jumped the gun. Assumed. I was probably right about the cop, but maybe I’d misjudged Miss Isabelle. Maybe I really had.

  My shoulders finally began to relax again. We were thirty miles outside the town where we’d eaten, had skirted Louisville on a loop and passed a sign that said it was about a hundred miles to Cincinnati. A little more than an hour and we’d be there.

  Except …

  A clang and a squeal erupted from the front of the car; then a thumping started up and the steering column started to tremble like an earthquake in my hands.

  “Good Lord, what’s that noise? You’d better pull over,” Miss Isabelle said.

  I ignored my impulse to throw a sarcastic “Oh, really?” her way. I gingerly steered the car to the shoulder, shut the engine off, sniffed, listened, and watched for smoke or flames to erupt from beneath the hood.

  Nothing. At least we weren’t about to explode.

  I turned to her. “Now what?”

  27

  Isabelle, 1940

  I WAS FURIOUS with my mother—for the obvious reasons, but even more for watching so carefully to see if I was bleeding. I lied about needing the napkins. I carefully counted off days, timing my requests fo
r supplies at the proper intervals. Each time I made a trip to the bathroom I held my breath—certain I’d see what I didn’t want to see—then released it, both joyful and terrified. I wrapped the napkins carefully in toilet tissue, as though they really were soiled with the blood my mother believed would save her.

  The road would be perilous when she discovered the truth. But I was ecstatic to have one souvenir of my time with Robert. One tiny piece of him I could cradle in my soul, and eventually—when my abdomen refused to give easily—in my hands. One living, growing reminder that I had once freely loved the man I would carry in my heart always, whether we were ever together again.

  Mother informed me my marriage had been annulled. It was easy enough to prove I was underage, didn’t have permission to marry, and came from a place that wouldn’t recognize our marriage anyway.

  At first, I felt dead inside at her news. But she couldn’t steal my marriage, even if the paperwork had been destroyed. We’d made our vows. It was enough.

  And now I had something else she couldn’t undo. When the baby came, she would send me away. She would have no desire to keep me in her house, no wish to see the daily reminder of her failure. She would turn me out. Then I would find Robert, and we would begin again, this time with the precious product of our union to bind us together.

  Eventually, of course, she confronted me. Then the nausea I fought was less from my pregnancy and more from the thought of her examining the contents of the wastepaper basket. I said nothing, waiting, expressionless, for her wrath.

  Instead, she left.

  Later, they argued in the hallway, their voices hushed, but flowing under my door like oil and water, my mother’s rising, my father’s low.

  “You know people who can help us, John. People who will keep things quiet.”

  “I won’t do it, Marg. It’s no use beating me over the head.”

  “What will we do, then? What about when it’s time for her to deliver? This can’t continue.”