“What’s up?” I said then, casually, my way of asking how I could help him without letting him know I knew he needed help. And my way of covering for the tightness in my own chest.
“So what do we do?” he asked me.
“We make like nothing happened.”
“Nothing better not have happened.”
“Likely nothing has, Em.”
He scowled as he drove through the parking lot. “Right. And Bo always takes a pair of little brown sandals with him when he blows us off and goes alone to the Hole, taking my truck without me.”
“I mean maybe it doesn’t mean anything. You know Jimbo. He’s Mr. Everyman’s Friend.”
“I’m not saying anything happened. I’m saying …” He didn’t finish running down that path. “It’s one thing for us all to run in a group. But you know as well as I do that in this town if word were to get out—”
“How would it get out? Nobody knows anything but you and me.”
He clubbed the words: “What’s there to know? What’s there to say?”
“Hey, I’m on our side, remember? That was my point: There’s nothing there to know.” I was beginning to sound convincing even to myself. Which was helpful to the well-being of my insides.
“Somebody’s got to talk to her.” He rolled down his window. “Somebody could get hurt.”
“What’s wrong? Don’t you like her?”
He shot his glance my way. “Who says I like her?”
“No, not like her. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you don’t like her. I mean just like, just think she’s all right. Look … nobody’s attacking you here. What’s the matter with you?”
Emerson stuck his arm out the window and waved it through the air. “Fine. So nothing has happened,” he said, without looking at me. “Nobody’s gonna get hurt.”
“Nothing.” I nodded. “And nobody.” Though for no good reason I pictured the size fourteen sneakers and the little brown sandals so close beside them.
“Roll down your window, Turtle. I need more air.”
I cranked the handle and did not say what I was thinking: Me too. Can you not see that? Me too.
10 A House Maybe Divided
All the way up the old logging camp trail, Emerson kept his head faced forward.
“Movie,” he said, and that was all.
“How ’bout if we stop first to eat?” We were just passing the turn onto Stonewall Jackson Pike, and I could smell hickory smoke. “I’m hungry, remember?”
“Popcorn,” he said.
“Really hungry.”
“Big bucket. With butter.”
“But—”
“I’ll buy.”
I sat back and sighed. Pisgah Ridge had no movie theaters, so we were committing ourselves to a trip down to the Valley and back before getting our barbecued beans.
“You think,” I ventured, “Momma’d mind our going down off the Ridge? I reckon if we stayed clear of downtown and Seventh and just stuck to the theaters. But has it been long enough after what happened?”
It was how the adults on our Ridge referred now in past tense to the Seventh Street shooting: “what happened.” No suspects had even yet been apprehended, and our father had written an eloquent editorial for the paper on how regrettable this was. But in general, the sentiment aired in hushed tones was a kind of dismayed clucking over the inadvisability of boys’ drinking themselves into misbehavior, as if naughty toddlers had Magic Markered the living room wallpaper.
Emerson made a sound deep in his throat. “I reckon the ‘disturbances’ are over. For now.” He whipped the car onto Falling Creek, a two-lane dirt road that dropped off the back side of our mountain like a bulldozer had lost its brakes and cut its own path, careening first right and then left and then back, plowing down pines on all sides as it went.
A few minutes later, we stood side by side, gazing up, before the theater marquee. Even the Valley’s choices were limited: one cinema, three screens, all second-run.
“The Good-bye Girl,” I read aloud. I turned to my brother. “Welp and somebody—was it Welp?—saw it and said the girl he was with liked it a lot. No … couldn’t have been Welp. Anyhow, supposed to be a sweet story. I’ve been wanting to see—”
His feet planted apart, his arms crossed over his chest, Emerson stood looking up—not at the marquee, though, but past it. Up toward the backside of our ridge.
“Or,” I read on down the marquee, “or then there’s The Deer Hunter.” I waited. I sighed. “Vietnam war flick. Every girl’s choice.”
We paid for our tickets. The black couple in front of us in the line turned to look at us—and the girl’s gaze dropped to my shorts. I was wearing the cutoffs, my favorites, and they weren’t overly clean. She had on French-cut jeans, an avocado shirt that covered only one shoulder, a chain belt, and platform sandals, every inch of her sleek and well heeled, straight out of Seventeen magazine. I waited until she turned back to her date to wrinkle my nose at her.
We’d already missed the previews, and also the opening scenes. Not that I cared. I closed my eyes and kept them closed mostly—peeking only to reach for the popcorn and Coke, and occasionally, unintentionally, see a man’s forehead blown open. For the most part, I sat in the dark, and sometimes covered my ears. I opened one eye for the closing credits.
“Hey, Turtle.” Em rose and stretched. “Thanks.”
“Hey, Em, you’re welcome.” I slipped an arm around his waist as we left the theater. “You owe me big-time.”
Squeals speared us from behind. Haley Foreman and Neesa Nell Helms were hailing us from across the parking lot. Hailing Emerson, I should say. They waved and bounced over to us—to him.
Neesa ran her fingers along his shoulder and bicep. “You are so sweet to bring your sister to the movies. So sweet.” In a white peasant blouse that she wore off the shoulder, she looked sweet herself—in that way of a milkmaid bent on seduction. She blinked her blue eyes, made so big behind navy mascara that they’d overtaken her face.
Em glanced at his watch. “Awfully late, isn’t it, for you girls to be running loose down here in the Valley?”
“Loose,” I muttered close to his ear, “would be the operative word.”
Neesa answered my brother by shifting her shoulders and ever so slightly brushing against him. “Must’ve lost all track of time,” she purred.
Swinging her attention to me, Haley pivoted on one heel of the spiked red Candies she wore with her jeans. “Where’s your friend, Shelby Lenoir?”
It might have been a question; it might have been a taunt.
I just shrugged.
Neesa dropped a hand onto Emerson’s forearm. “Bless her heart, that Shelby. I think it’s awful sweet of her.” She shifted her weight from one hip to the next and back again.
“What?” Emerson asked, not looking too much at her—at her face. The rest got his attention just fine.
“Making new friends. Your sweet little sister.” Neesa’s hand brushed down his arm. She rolled her hips into reverse, signaling their exit. Both girls waved.
“Call me,” Neesa shouted from the little MGB whose top she kept rolled down most of the year round.
Emerson waved back.
He opened the sedan door for me—a first. And, come to think of it, last. “You know, Turtle, you’re not half bad.”
“As girls go,” I added for him.
“As girls go.”
11 Coming to Blows
“Shelby! Shelby Lenoir!” It was Momma’s voice, which was usually sweet and soft as moss, except when she cranked up the volume—then the sweetness grew serrated edges.
Our house was old and graceful and large: the only inheritance—along with a sizable stash of sterling silver platters and pickle forks—from my mother�
��s mother’s side of the old Carolina aristocracy. Or that was how Momma’s family was billed to us—by Momma. Besides the front porch, which wrapped three-quarters of the way around, my favorite feature of the house was its ceilings, ten feet high and crowned with crenellated molding and carved ceiling medallions above crystal and brass chandeliers. If I wanted to imagine myself a misplaced princess of the plantation South, I had only to look up. Looking down was less helpful, the wood floors having been covered eight years ago in a long gold and green shag that snagged Momma’s high heels.
From a top floor window, my mother was calling, stopping me cold mid-leap into the back of my brother’s truck.
“Shelby Lenoir, sugar, a phone call for you!” She smoothed her voice back to its purr. She had visitors that morning, the Pisgah Ridge Garden Club ladies. Taking stock of how many of the ladies might have seen me leap in and back out of the bed of the truck, she called less loudly, “Honey, you’re not going with your brother to work again, are you?”
“Wait for me?” I begged Emerson.
He rolled his eyes, but shifted the truck to idle.
Taking the stairs three at a time, I panted into the phone: “Hello?”
“This is Farsanna Moulavi.”
That was like her, adding her last name. How many Farsannas did she think we kept on the Ridge?
“Hey,” I said. “We’re just leaving for work. We’ll swing by for you later on the way to the Hole.”
“Yes. However—”
“Okay, then, see you—”
“I am asking if you would like at my house to spend Wednesday night.”
Her house. I pictured the warehouse-brick rectangle. And the mother, heavily draped in her hijab and fear, and the father, dark and short-statured and somber, whom I’d only seen from a distance through the plate-glass window. And I smelled the curry, wafting on hot currents of air. Wednesday night—tomorrow night!—was still hours away. Maybe I’d find myself accountably stricken with a temporarily incurable disease.
“Hold on,” I said, and I covered the mouthpiece. “Momma!”
She appeared at the door of the kitchen. “You needn’t shout so, dear. I wasn’t in the Congo.”
“Can I spend tomorrow night with … someone?” I prayed she would say no if I were just vague enough.
She looked startled—but not so startled she couldn’t ride herd on my grammar: “May I.”
“Yes, ma’am. May I. I reckon that’s probably not a very good time, being …”
But Momma looked pleased. I never had sleepovers. Except when Emerson and I had Jimbo sleep over—that happened lots. But that didn’t count, my being a girl. “Why, of course, Shelby, honey. Of course. And do come out and say hello to the ladies.”
“I, um,” I stalled into the phone, then sighed. “Great. Sounds great.” It wasn’t true, not really, but it had to be said.
“Great,” said the new girl.
“Great,” I said again, and wrinkled my nose. “So, then … so I guess I’ll see you later today. Bye.”
I dropped the phone in its cradle and grabbed the screen door handle.
“Shelby, sugar?” Momma called. It was the kind of sugar that works like a yank to a leash.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Who is it? Which of your girlfriends asked you to sleep over?”
Bless Momma. She said this as if there were legions of girls waiting to ask me to their houses, and as if I got calls every day from girls with exotic accents. I caught the screen door before it slammed shut behind me, which Momma could not stand—the slamming, I mean. “The, um, the new girl,” I said, not quite meeting her eye. Though I could feel the Garden Club—Mrs. Regina Lee Riggs at its center—listening intently.
“The new girl,” Momma repeated.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You don’t mean the sweet little girl from … where is she from, dear?”
“Yes, ma’am. Sri Lanka.”
Now, all white Southern women keep as a weapon against an uncouth world a certain smile that can be whipped out of storage and tacked up in an instant, covering over a multitude of too-candid moments. My mother’s face, whose upturned mouth never moved, registered confusion, then fear—then landed where I expected: that steely, doggedly cheerful resolve of a smile.
She was at least quick with her calculations, and I watched her face, its sweetness thickening, hardening, like warmed syrup cooling: She was considering, I knew, that the Garden Club ladies were gripping sweet tea beside her, but also what Jesus would do. “Well, now,” she murmured. “‘Turn ye not away strangers, lest ye entertain angels unawares.’ Isn’t that right?” Momma looked to the wife of the good Reverend Riggs.
Regina Lee Riggs had been poorly assigned, I’d always thought, as a small mountain town’s Baptist preacher’s wife. Slender and sleek, she wore her brown, shoulder-length hair in a ribbon headband that each day matched her dress and her shoes. She was blue-blooded—and Virginian-First-Family-blue at that, which runs several shades deeper. Besides the Beauregard she’d passed down to Jimbo, she had the Lee in her name, as in Robert E.
But besides Regina Lee Riggs being more elegant, there was something else about her presence, always so gracious, always so tense, something high-strung and caged there, like a white tiger pacing behind her smile. I sometimes wondered if she secretly hated going to church or had some private gripe with her husband or God.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, though Momma still wasn’t looking at me. “Yes, ma’am.” I stuffed my hands deep within the pockets of my cutoffs. The pockets were full of holes too. “May I go now?”
“I’d no idea you all were such … chums. You and the new girl.”
“We just go swimming together is all.”
“Go swimming? You mean at that place you all go?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You mean all of you all?” Momma asked.
Regina Lee Riggs lowered her tea.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You mean you and this new girl and—?”
“Just Emerson and them. Nobody special.”
Regina Lee Riggs watched my face.
I grasped for a distraction: “And Welp, most of the time.”
Regina Lee Riggs followed that path: “That little Bobby Welpler, you mean?” She and Momma exchanged glances. “Bless his heart,” Mrs. Riggs said, “is his mother still drinking, do you know, Shelby Lenoir?”
“Yes, ma’am. I reckon.”
“Well.” Momma concluded the interrogation in just those two syllables—two when Momma pronounced it.
But Regina Lee Riggs followed me past the screen door to the front steps. “I suppose, Shelby, that my James goes too. ’Course I know he goes swimming. And you all run together, of course?” It was a question.
For once Momma fussed over my hair, smoothing a lump and tucking a lock of straw behind my right ear. “You could run fetch a barrette, Shelby Lenoir,” she began.
“That’s all right, Momma. I need to go—”
“You know you could try just a little, Shelby Lenoir, honey.”
I motioned with my head back toward Emerson. “I’m sorry, Momma. Emerson’s been waiting for me. You know how men are when we’re late.”
And with that I was down the front steps.
Momma did know men, and knew they must not be kept waiting. She let me go. “Your Jim,” I heard her say to Mrs. Riggs, and loud enough too for the Garden Club ladies in general, “is just the sweetest thing this town ever did see. Regina, you must surely be proud.” Momma waved to her own boy there in the truck, and then even tossed out an extra wave to Big Dog, whom Momma’d never cared much for, her shedding too much on the carpet.
Emerson had propped a Sports Illustrated on the steering wheel and appeared to be reading it�
�though there was no telling what kind of steamy, seventeenth-century seduction one-liners hid underneath.
I leapt into the back of the truck and snapped open the cab window.
“What the heck took you so long?” Emerson growled at me as he slammed the truck into reverse.
“Well, now,” I said in a voice low and sweet, just like our momma’s, “guess whose kid sister is bunking up in foreign territory tomorrow night?” I held up my right palm, my left fist right beside it.
_________
Jimbo was waiting at the end of the parsonage drive when we pulled up. I was certain he showed no signs of being anything but the Jimbo he’d always been—and I told myself this over and over that morning, to make sure it stuck. The good Reverend Riggs was there too, one leg already inside the cab of the beige El Camino that carted him around to his flock.
He beamed at Emerson and me. “You children off to work bright and early?”
“Yes, sir,” we said together.
“That’s nice. So you can be done early. Big believer in that myself. Early to bed, early to rise.” He wobbled, one foot still inside the El Camino, one foot on the street, his tentative smile balanced above them—precarious, as if he were asking us to like him.
“Except,” I couldn’t help adding, “I reckon you have to work some nights.” I pictured that knot of men emerging from the Riggs’ screen porch door, the men whose faces we couldn’t see. But whose voices had been demanding, some kind of threat behind the studied calm of the words. “Some nights maybe real late.”
Emerson mouthed from behind Jimbo’s head, “Cut it out, Turtle.”
But the good Reverend Riggs only looked pleased, “Well, now. I reckon I do, when I’m needed.” He patted his boy on the shoulder.
“Well now, you children take care of each other, you hear?”
Bo slung an arm around both of our shoulders with such force, Emerson’s and my forehead slammed together. “That’s what mangy packers do best,” Jimbo assured his daddy.
“And … son?”
“Yes, sir?”
“You don’t go … don’t go looking for trouble, you hear?”
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