“Vetta, we all want better for our children. At least she ain’t on drugs. My Wendell left here never knowing what Hope was up to. I guess I’m glad for that. Thankful for the small things.”
“Wendell sure was a good man,” Yvetta said.
She went for coffee, poured two cups, and set out some cream and sugar. The women traded more stories about their children’s misdeeds. Grace remembered when the trouble started with Thandy when she was fourteen. The whole neighborhood heard her screaming for mercy. No need in beating no child like that, she’d thought to herself at the time. Ain’t no good gone come of that. Silently, she was glad Thandy found a way out and wondered if Yvetta had any hard feelings about it. Nobody, herself included, would ever have thought to intervene. She wondered now if that cut on Thandy’s face ever healed good.
As she sipped her coffee, which she took drowned in sugar and heavy cream, she remembered the night she had heard Yvetta yelling from clear across the street.
“God don’t like ugly!” Yvetta had shrieked. “You bring evil into your house, then you deserve every piece of sorrow you get. You got to go to the Lord first, ask His forgiveness, and then you can come to me.”
Grace had sat tight-lipped out on her stoop across the street and watched Yvetta throw clothes onto the front lawn. Thandy had taken up with a man she hardly knew, a man ten years her senior who had a pocket full of money and promised her the world. Anything was better than a sleepy life in Winston-Salem, she’d thought at the time.
“You are dead to me! You hear that, girl?” her mother shouted down the driveway. “You are dead to me!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In the early years, Grace knew life for the Malone family was mostly unremarkable. Simon came home every day at six, just in time for dinner. After an invariably hearty and rib-sticking meal, he always took to his easy chair for the evening news. They went to dinner at the Ponderosa Steakhouse every Wednesday night after church services. The girls were expected to have the chores done and their homework ready for inspection each evening.
The rules were clear: Be selective about your friends, focus on your studies, keep your legs closed, and clean your room like an army barracks. The house smelled like lemon furniture polish and pine cleaner. The weekends were saved for more chores and more churching. Thandy’s grandparents, Cump and Myrtle, always made it by for Sunday supper.
“A good education will take you anywhere you want to go,” Cump often told Thandy. “An idle mind is the devil’s playground. Don’t you get on his swing set.”
Always prone to please, Thandy’s sister, Yvonne, who was two years older and the most average-looking girl on the planet, took heed and later won a full scholarship to Duke University. Living in her sister’s perfect shadow, Thandy had been rebellious from the start. She craved her parents’ attention, which seemed reserved for Yvonne. By the time she was a freshman she was bored to tears with her class work and defied her father’s nightly curfew. On Friday nights, she frequented the parking lot of a local fast-food restaurant and smoked marijuana with less-than-desirable friends. At fourteen, she was arrested on assorted charges including violating the city-mandated curfew for minors and drug possession. The family posted bond and awaited a court date.
Embarrassed and angry, that night Simon beat Thandy with a leather strap until he was dog tired. Beads of sweat rained down like black pearls, but he kept swinging until the metal belt buckle caught her in the temple. Blood gushed and ran down the side of her face.
“Mama, make him stop! Please make him stop,” she pleaded.
Her mother looked on in silence. “You earned every lick,” she told her daughter that night. “We ain’t raised you to get out there like that. You got to get your mind right, child. Your daddy works too hard for you to throw it away like this. I’ll eat dirt before I let a child of mine disrespect this house. Get some peroxide on that cut and wrap it up. It’ll heal.”
Thandy went to her room and started packing her clothes, first folding, then throwing in anything that would fit. She bounced up and down on the plastic red Samsonite cases until she could latch the locks.
“Those are my suitcases,” Yvetta protested. “If you leave here tonight, you ain’t leaving with nothing that’s mine. You better get yourself some paper bags.” Yvetta dumped out the suitcases and started hauling her daughter’s clothes out the front door.
Thandy went to school the day after the beating wearing long sleeves and pants to hide the whelps and bruises. Nothing could cover the open wound on her face.
“I gotta get out of here,” she told her sister as they walked to the school yard. “I can’t go back, but I ain’t got nowhere to go.”
“It’s your fault,” Yvonne dismissed. “You keep cutting up like that and he’ll keep giving it to you.”
Thandy was too scared to go home and too scared not to. So she returned. She laid awake at night, too terrified to close her eyes, trying to hold on to better days when her daddy would take her to the park and push her in the swings. She remembered how he used to wait at the bottom of the metal slide when she came barreling down. She wanted to make homemade chocolate ice cream with her mother and stay up watching black-and-white John Wayne movies while her mother braided her hair.
She didn’t know the people who slept in the bedroom down the hall. Thandy couldn’t stand to look up at the framed picture of Jesus that hung in the living room over the floor-model Zenith television set.
The following week, Thandy was back in the same parking lot with the same load of friends. They laughed about the court dates. The group grew quiet when Thandy pulled back her hair and showed them the gash. She pulled up her shirt, revealing the whelps left by her father’s thrashing. Molly Fiveashe, a pot-smoking whore who showed up to school only once or twice a week and who everybody knew had been in and out of foster care three times already, advised Thandy to call the welfare office.
“They’ll lock him up,” Molly said as she rolled another one between her bony fingers.
Monty Boykins shoved his hands in the front pockets of his washed-out Levi’s, leaned against the hood of his car, and said, “You can come and stay with me.”
Thandy left home for good that night. She was fifteen. She liked his small apartment. She felt free with him and told him so. Monty was tall, with generous looks, and twenty-five. He worked double shifts at his father’s Quik Wash, a job that paid well, and took classes three nights a week at Wake Forest.
Thandy was jailbait and Monty knew the crazy African would waste no time pressing charges. So he didn’t touch her for weeks. Not for the lack of wanting, but out of fear. He watched the beautiful young girl with long raven hair sleep peacefully. She seemed to need every moment of solace he could give her.
Each morning, he would change the bandage on her face and smooth peroxide and cocoa butter on her back and arms, and tell her everything would be okay. He was gentle, and his hands loving.
“Don’t you want me?” she asked one morning.
“I do, but . . .”
“But what?”
“You’re on the pill, right?”
“Yeah,” she lied.
He pulled her in close, taking her face into his hands. She’d never been kissed like that before. She felt his excitement rubbing against her belly. Monty abruptly pulled away.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing. As long as you’re sure you want to do it.”
Their relationship was the worst-kept secret in Winston-Salem. Yvetta was furious. Her daughter’s storied sex life of shacking up with a grown man was being casually tossed around the teachers’ lounge. She stormed out and went straight down to the Quik Wash. She threatened to send Monty to jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, kidnapping, and anything else she could think of. She looked the young man square in the eye and promised to bring him up on rape charges. Simon Malone went to the high school and dragged his daughter out of a classroom. He beat her with his
fists all the way to the car.
“You’re a drug addict! You won’t go whoring around here and soil my family name like that!”
Thandy fell to the pavement. Her father picked her up by the hair and threw her into the passenger seat of his Buick. The gash tore open. Blood spilled onto the floorboard.
“I’m going to send that bastard to jail,” Simon told his daughter.
The juvenile court judge ordered counseling and probation for running away and truancy. She was four months pregnant and desperately trying to hide it. Rather than face her parents with the news, Monty and Thandy decided to run away to Atlanta, where he had family.
Monty emptied his savings account, put a down payment on a new Chevrolet Cavalier, and headed off south with his new family. He would do anything for Thandy. Everything they owned was in the U-Haul hitched to the bumper. It was dark when they arrived in the city of hills. The Atlanta skyline was more beautiful than any she’d ever seen. Black people drove fancy cars and lived in fine houses. Even the mayor was black.
“That’s how we are going to live,” Monty promised, pointing to a passing young black couple driving a new Mercedes. “I don’t want my wife to worry about anything.”
He hadn’t proposed marriage before, but Thandy immediately thought it was a good idea. She wanted her baby to have its father’s name. They married two weeks later, partly because they were in love, but mostly because Monty didn’t want to face charges in North Carolina.
Her parents learned of the union when Simon Malone tried to swear out a warrant. The sheriff told them that he couldn’t list Thandy as a runaway because, according to Georgia law, once married she was no longer a minor. Simon Malone pressed the issue. He went down to the sheriff’s office for three days straight. But the sheriff refused to file for a warrant. He and everybody else had heard the stories about Simon Malone’s public floggings of his daughter and were silently glad the little girl had run away.
Montana was born five months later.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It wasn’t long before Grace and Yvetta were belly laughing again. This time it was about Eunice Rivers’s new boyfriend.
“He ain’t there for the long haul. He’s after her insurance check,” Yvetta commented like she knew firsthand.
“He’ll be long gone when it dries up,” Grace chortled. “That’s what short money will get you.”
Seems Eunice was too busy now to play cards to notice. The young buck couldn’t be more than thirty, they decided with a giggle.
“They say he’s working hard for that money. You don’t ever see a frown on Eunice’s face.”
“I guess she deserves a little something in return,” Grace said. “I see Fields is making his way around here.”
“He don’t want nothing,” Yvetta dismissed. “Ain’t nothing to it. Just talking mess, that’s all.”
“Fields is good-looking for a man his age.”
“He ain’t good-looking enough to get in your fence.”
Grace pulled herself out of the crack in the sofa, straightened her floral-print skirt, and said, “He can come in my fence anytime.”
She was well into her sixties, but Grace still had a set of firm breasts and a big smile, both of which she left wide open so any available man might see the welcome mat.
“Shoot, you can have him. I ain’t nothing about no seventy-two-year-old.”
“Seventy-one,” Grace corrected.
“Don’t make no difference. He’s got a hump in his back! Dirty old men will give you worms!” Yvetta teased.
“Ain’t nothing dirty about Jesse Fields. He sure does have eyes for you, and you ain’t no spring chicken yourself.”
Yvetta sighed.
Sixty-five was right around the corner. She’d make her way down to the Social Security office to fill out the paperwork.
“Every woman has her needs,” Grace said. “Including you.”
“My Simon saw after every need, want, and desire I might ever have.”
“Don’t take offense, Vetta, but Simon is gone now. Wendell, too. They’d want us to have a little piece of sunshine in our lives.”
“Ain’t no sun shining out of Jesse Fields.”
“You just let him in that there fence first. Then you tell me how much sun he’s got left in him,” Grace said. She rose up from the chair a bit, straightened her dress beneath her generous behind, and sat back down.
“I will do no such thing,” Yvetta said. “This is still Simon Malone’s house.”
“This here is your house, Vetta. I’m just saying Simon would want you to have something for yourself.” Grace paused for a moment, then said, “You ought to go on up to Chicago and see after Thandy. I bet she needs her mama right now.”
Yvetta let her words fall on the floor. She hadn’t told her friend about the call from Jack. She wouldn’t admit that Thandy hadn’t called or been home since her father’s funeral five years ago. She didn’t have to tell Grace anything she didn’t already know.
“Did you see that story in the paper about the colored boy running for governor down in Georgia?”
“I did,” Yvetta said. “He can’t win.”
“Too close to call.”
“They call up white folks and ask ’um how they’ll vote. They ain’t got to tell the truth. Ain’t no white man gonna let a colored boy be his governor.”
“That Osaka boy won that race up in Illinois. That’s saying something, ain’t it?”
“Obama,” Yvetta corrected. “He ain’t no Chinaman.”
“Sounds too much like bin Laden for me, but you go on and say what you want. This is still the South. It wasn’t that long ago that my daddy and his daddy couldn’t get a glass of Coca-Cola at Gresham’s soda fountain. But they say it is close.”
“They always say that. It ain’t nothing but a setup. Ain’t no way they gonna let a black man run all of Georgia. Times ain’t changed that much,” Grace huffed definitively.
“He’s fool enough to run. They might be fool enough to elect him.”
Grace eyed her friend with concern. “Vetta,” she said, “you know it’s been a whole lot of years now. You can’t tell me you don’t want to see your grandbaby. I bet Montana is a beautiful young woman now.”
“She’s seventeen and probably just like her mama,” Yvetta dismissed. “A hard head makes for a soft behind. I see all the grandbabies I need to see right over there in Charlotte. Yvonne is teaching now, you know.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do. Don’t nothing happen around here that you don’t know about.”
“You’ve only told me eighty dozen times. And I ain’t no gossip.”
“I ain’t saying you are. I’m just saying you’re better than the Sunday paper they throw in the yard.”
“That’s some big job Thandy’s got herself. You should be real proud.”
“I hope she don’t go back to Atlanta. That man had a way with my child. I hope some knight in shining armor sweeps her off her feet and she don’t ever think about going back.”
“You know there ain’t no such thing as no knight,” Grace said. “Not today.”
“You’re right about that.”
“That Dr. Gabrielle sure was good-looking.”
“So is the devil before he shows himself.”
“I saw Milton Boykins the other day. You know he sold that old gas station and car wash? They’re going to tear it down and build a new drugstore.”
“We need another drugstore like we need a hole in the head. This town ain’t big enough for all of that. How much did he get for it?”
“Now, that I don’t know. If I can’t afford it then I don’t ask. But he got enough to buy him a house out on the beach and take that wife of his on a cruise.”
“I ain’t nothing ’bout no dern cruise boat. I read about all them people getting sick. He should be seeing after his boy Monty. He should’ve been busy keeping that son of his away from my Thandy. That boy ain’t never getting out of jai
l. All the money in the world can’t replace the rod. He should’ve whipped his behind the first time he got caught drinking out there on Sixth Street.”
Grace frowned, but Yvetta kept going.
“They gave him life with no parole and he deserves every day of it. That Boykins would have done good to keep that boy away from Thandy.”
“How long are you going to blame him for that?”
“Until they put him in the ground and throw dirt on his casket. Thandy got it in her to get out there with them. I don’t mind telling you that Simon took a strap to her behind.”
Grace was silent. Yvetta went on.
“She deserved every lick. I ain’t never had to worry about my Vonnie straying the path like that. But that Thandywaye, she did what she dern well pleased. But I told her not in this house. Not here.”
The Jesus hanging over the Zenith seemed to be frowning, too.
“That Bible of yours tells us to forgive one another. Don’t you have enough room in your heart for that? Besides, Thandy seems to be making her own way.”
“The Bible tells us not to be fools, Grace. To put on the full armor of God. That includes the Belt of Truth. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. I got plenty of forgiveness. But I ain’t no dern laundry mat. I ain’t got same-day service.”
“Even the dry cleaners don’t take more than a week.”
“See after what’s yours,” Yvetta shot back.
“Mercy me.” Grace was immediately disappointed. She finished the last spot of her coffee and left.
Yvetta closed and latched the screen door behind her. The gray metal frame shook. She had a stack of mostly unopened letters from Thandy somewhere deep in her closet. Every so often, Thandy had written home to tell her parents about the wonderful new life her husband had made for them. She had finished high school in Atlanta and enrolled in classes at Georgia State. She dutifully sent pictures of the baby to her mother. Her letters went unanswered. The embossed invitation to Thandy’s law school graduation went unopened. She had been home only once, when Yvonne had called with news that their father had suffered a heart attack. She’d brought Jack with her.
The January Girl Page 5