Tomato Girl

  The walk to the basement never seemed so long. I wanted to run, to get the baby into the freezer and be done, but my knees felt like rubber. Falling down scared me. I didn’t want to drop Mama’s baby. I hurried down the stairs and outside to the sidewalk.

  The cellar stairwell scared me more than ever now that Mama had fallen there. I’d never come here in the dark without Daddy. The shadows and cool brick seemed to close in around me. I hurried to open the door and flipped the switch to turn on the overhead bulb. Light filled the center of the room, chasing shadows to the edges. My legs shivered as I stood in the damp, dimly lit space. The single lightbulb flickered above my head. Please God, don’t let the bulb burn out and put me in blackness.

  Knowing the freezer lid was hard to open, I carefully placed the baby on the floor and pulled the lid up with both hands. A blast of cold air hit my face.

  Then as I had promised Mama, I tucked the dead baby between plastic bags of strawberries and a box of honey-glazed do-nuts. He would be happy there. It was silly to talk to the baby since dead things can’t hear. Still, it seemed the right thing to do. Mama would have said something to reassure the baby, so I did it for her. “Rest here, little one. We won’t be far away.”

  I closed the heavy freezer door and hurried back upstairs where my mother soaked in the tub, washing the blood from her hands and thighs. She looked up at me. “You put him in a good place?”

  “Yes, Mama.” I’d never watched my mother bathe. I noticed the scars across her belly, and wondered if the baby had stretched her skin somehow. Mama’s eyes looked glassy, but I didn’t want to stare or watch her cry. Afraid to upset her more, I looked away.

  “It’s so cold in the freezer, Ellie.”

  “I know.”

  “And so dark. He’ll be afraid, won’t he? I shouldn’t have sent him to the freezer. That’s not a good place.” Her voice broke as if she were going to cry again.

  “No, Mama. The baby won’t be afraid.”

  “How do you know?” Her eyes widened.

  I tried to think of something to say, anything to keep her from sending me back to the cellar to bring up the baby. If Daddy came home and saw her rocking it, he’d have the doctors take her away, maybe this time for good. Daddy might not care now that he had Tess. I couldn’t let that happen. I needed Mama.

  Using the sponge, I washed Mama’s bowed shoulders. “Because I told him. I told the baby not to be afraid.”

  Her face looked hopeful. “You did?”

  I kept talking. When you love somebody, the words you need come as sure and easy as rain.

  “Yes, I told him not to be afraid, that his mother loved him, and that he was in a safe place. I told him about Jellybean, and how the Easter bunny was coming soon.”

  Mama leaned back in the tub. “You did good, Ellie. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  After her bath, Mama dried off with a towel. While she went to her room to dress in a fresh gown and get into bed, I cleaned the rust-colored stains from the bathroom floor.

  I thought about my God promises, how I’d tried to be good and God still killed my mother’s baby. I figured all the talk in church about God being good and loving was just a lie. The truth is, God didn’t need Mama’s baby half as much as she did. Why couldn’t He do that one thing? Was it too much for God to spare a little baby? Maybe God’s like the rest of us, doing bad things sometimes just because we can. Only with God, it’s not little things like sneaking into the boys’ bathroom or stealing an extra cookie when your mother’s not watching. With God, it’s sending tomato girls to steal your father’s heart; it’s killing your mother’s baby to make her mind go.

  DADDY’S VOICE CAME from downstairs and startled me. He couldn’t learn about the baby, at least not yet. Mama wasn’t ready for him to know the baby died. Maybe Mama was right, that pretending the baby was still alive meant she could make things work again.

  I hurried to hide the Reynolds Wrap and Mama’s stained clothing, shoving them both to the bottom of the clothes hamper.

  A moment later, Daddy tapped on the bedroom door before he stepped inside. “Feeling better, Julia?” His voice was as even as butter. He tiptoed around Mama as he tested her mood. He didn’t mention Tess, which meant he wanted to make peace.

  Feeling grateful that he was trying, I walked over to my father and wrapped my arms around his waist. His strong body felt as solid as a tree. A bit of happiness washed over me.

  Mama sat up in bed and smiled. “Yes, Rupert. I’m just a little tired.”

  Daddy tousled my hair and moved closer to Mama’s bed. He sat down beside her. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to a bulge under the cover next to her.

  Mama smiled again. “It’s for the baby, Rupert.”

  She pulled out a skein of pale blue yarn and knitting needles. A half-knitted bootie dangled in her hand.

  TESS STOOD IN THE kitchen and scrubbed the red soup stains. I remembered how she’d done the same thing the morning after Mama’s accident, cleaning the stove and floor where the stew had burned.

  “Let me do that,” I said. “I’m the one who made a mess.” Really, I felt so tired and sad that I wanted to curl up on the sofa, and yet something in me made me take the sponge from Tess’s hand. I wanted to clean up the spill myself. Maybe to show Tess I didn’t need her, that I could clean my own messes. We could manage fine if she just went away.

  While I cleaned, Tess set plates for the sandwiches and macaroni salad she and Daddy bought. She tried to make the table look nice, arranging napkins under each wrapped sandwich and piling chips and pickle slices to the side. I hated her for trying to make my mother’s place her own.

  Daddy had decided some things. He explained at the table how he thought we needed a schedule, a routine. He said he would sleep on it, and tomorrow give us each a schedule and chore list. There was plenty for everyone to do, and we would all pull together and make this work. Tess would do most of the cooking and laundry. I would do the sweeping, dusting, and washing dishes. Daddy would tend to Mama, but I’d be expected to take her food up to her room and spend some time each day reading to her. He’d spell it out in black and white sometime tomorrow, post a schedule right on the refrigerator where everyone could see.

  The rest of the evening was like standing outside someone’s house and looking in through the window. You see what goes on: the meals being cooked, eaten, dishes cleared away; the father watching television while the mother darns socks; the children fighting over marbles or playing Old Maid. But you aren’t a part of it, you can’t taste the lemon cookies or feel the cool, blue marbles in the palm of your hand. You are an outsider, looking in on a world that isn’t yours. That’s how I felt watching Daddy and Tess. I didn’t belong.

  At the kitchen table, I bit off pieces of crusty bread and spooned macaroni into my mouth.

  Tess and Daddy talked. Their voices sounded so ordinary, as if they’d always drifted across the kitchen table and I just hadn’t noticed before this day. Daddy was at ease with Tess in a way he never seemed with Mama.

  After dinner, Daddy played the radio low and set up the Scrabble board on the coffee table. Tess twirled her pale hair around her fingers and made words from tiles.

  They asked me to join them, and I declined, but I don’t remember what excuse I gave. I do remember feeding Jellybean his bedtime gruel and trying hard not to think about the dead baby in the cellar.

  No matter how hard I tried, though, I could think of nothing else.

  SIXTEEN

  PANSIES

  MARY ROBERTS CAME BY the next day with a coffee cake covered in golden crumbs and bits of buttered brown sugar. “A get-well gift for your Mama,” she said. “My mother wanted to come herself, but she has to finish making coconut cream pies for the church bazaar.”

  Mrs. Roberts made award-winning pies and had a wall covered with blue and red ribbons from county fairs. I wondered if Mama would be happier if she had something people admired the way they did Mrs. Robert
s’s pies. Mama had plenty of talent, but her ideas came from places no pie judge would understand.

  I thanked Mary for the cake and invited her inside. Tess and Daddy had already finished their morning coffee and gone outside. The smell of coffee hung in the kitchen a long time because Tess used more beans, fixing it the way she said Europeans drink their coffee. She told us she planned to vacation in Paris when she made it big selling Avon. Daddy had smiled, nodded, and said that would be just grand.

  “Could we buy you a ticket now?” I’d asked in a tone so smart even Mary Roberts would have been impressed.

  “Ellie!” Daddy had scolded me, his voice so disapproving I left the room.

  “We should make a special tray for your mama,” Mary said as she followed me around the kitchen.

  “That’s a good idea.”

  Mary fixed a cup of tea by using hot water from the tap. You’re supposed to boil the water on the stove, but tap water works when you are in a hurry, and doesn’t taste so bad if you don’t mind weak tea.

  I cut two cake squares and placed them side by side on Mama’s plate, then looked through the cabinets for the silver tray. Maybe using something pretty to serve Mama’s food would make her feel a little better.

  Mary, who had learned origami at church camp, folded the paper napkin into the shape of a bird, and I hurried to the garden to clip pansies from Mama’s flower bed. We found a bud vase for the flowers and carried the finished tray upstairs.

  “I’ll take it in myself,” I told Mary. “You could go get Jellybean ready to play outside. He’s in my room, on the bed.” The idea of Mary talking to Mama scared me. The dead baby was an awful secret.

  “Oh, we have all day. I’m in no hurry. Besides, my mother will want to know if she liked her cake. It’s made from a new recipe; this one has walnuts in it.”

  My forehead dampened. My knees felt like hinges ready to fold.

  Mary knocked lightly on Mama’s door.

  No answer. Good. Maybe Mama was in the bathroom. We could leave the tray and slip out before she noticed.

  Mary cracked the door, a little at first, then a bit wider, and we both stepped inside. Mary first, then me.

  Mama was sound asleep, her arm curled around her head. Her eyelids looked pink and swollen, which told me she’d been crying.

  “Let’s not wake her,” I said, trying not to cry myself.

  We left the tray by her bed and tiptoed away.

  Mary and I went across the hall to get Jellybean. He’d tipped over his box and sat on the middle of the bed. I scooped him up in my hands and nuzzled his soft head.

  “So these are her things?” Mary asked as she walked around my room looking at Tess’s clothes and belongings. Mary opened the lid to the small suitcase where Tess kept all her Avon and other cosmetics. She pulled the lid from one of the small white sample tubes and traced her lips in a deep plum color. “My mother still can’t believe that the tomato girl is living with you,” Mary said, rubbing her lips together the way women do. Without a tissue to blot the excess, the dark color smeared outside the lines of her lips.

  “Yes? What did she say?” I knew Mrs. Roberts would have an opinion.

  “My mother said she didn’t want to pry or make your Daddy mad, but she said opening your home to that girl will bring more trouble than you ever dreamed. She said the whole Reed family has bred nothing but drunks and whores.”

  “Let’s go,” I said and headed for the door with Jellybean cupped in my hands. I didn’t want to talk about Tess and her drunk father.

  IN THE KITCHEN, Mary and I cut ourselves thick slices of cake and poured glasses of cold milk. Mary took the tray to the crab apple tree. I carried Jellybean.

  Settled in the grass, Mary fed Jellybean yellow crumbs from her cake. “I wish I could hold my mother’s finches,” Mary said, “but they are so fast they get away, and so small that if you squeeze them too hard, all their bones will break.”

  The mention of tiny bones breaking made me feel sick. I tried to get my mind off the dead baby and onto something else. It felt good just to sit cross-legged in the tall grass. So much had happened in the past few days, happy times seemed far away. I missed being in school, passing notes to Mary Roberts, or listening to Miss Wilder read. But I missed times after school most of all, going to the store to help Daddy, or visiting Mary Roberts’s house.

  I suggested we play a game, but then we couldn’t decide which one. Mary wanted to play catalogs, but with all the trouble over Tess and Mama’s dead baby, picking husbands and babies didn’t seem like so much fun now.

  “I’m tired of catalogs,” I said, brushing the cake crumbs from my lap. “What about checkers?”

  Mary stroked Jellybean’s head. “Nah, checkers are boring.”

  “We could play store. I could bring out some Jell-O boxes and cans. You can be the grocer.”

  “You left your Monopoly game at my house, remember? We can’t play store without money.”

  Mary Roberts thinks of everything.

  “Well, let’s just walk around until we get an idea.”

  Mary agreed. She carried Jellybean while I ran our plates and glasses back the kitchen. I almost went upstairs to check on Mama, but didn’t want to risk waking her.

  I hurried back outside to find Mary walking toward my father’s shed, where he and Tess stood watering tomato plants on Mr. Morgan’s truck bed. I ran to catch up.

  “You girls want to help us set out these tomatoes in the garden?” Daddy asked, smoothing his hair back with his hands. His nails were black with dirt.

  Tess hardly noticed us as she traced her fingers along each green leaf, checking the pale undersides for aphids. She pinched off yellow leaves and tossed them to the ground.

  Normally, I loved working in the garden. Knowing seeds would take root and send up tiny green tendrils was the closest thing to magic I knew. But I didn’t want to help plant a garden for Tess.

  Lined up on the back of Mr. Morgan’s truck, the potted plants covered two thirds of the bed. This would take up most of our small garden. I didn’t understand why Tess needed so many or why they had to be planted at all. She didn’t live with us and had her own home. “Why do you need to set the plants in the garden if Tess is only going to be here until Mama is well?”

  Daddy picked up a plant in each hand. “This is Tess’s home for as long as she wants to stay. Besides, we have no idea how long your mother may need help. While Tess is living here, I want her to have a garden.”

  “Well, I don’t want to help,” I said.

  “Me neither,” Mary agreed.

  Daddy frowned and shrugged his shoulders. “Suit yourselves.”

  MARY AND I CLIMBED into my tree house and sat on the braided rug my mother had given me to cover the rough wood floor. We played Go Fish while Jellybean napped. My hands began to fill with cards, and I knew I’d soon lose the game.

  Mary peeked through the pink curtains. “Looks like your Daddy’s planning to keep that tomato girl around for a long time.”

  After losing, I dealt us both a new hand. “I don’t know, Mary. I’ve seen Daddy kiss her.” I felt ashamed to tell the secret, but needed someone to give me advice. “What if that means he loves her?”

  “Well, don’t worry.” Mary picked up her cards. “He can’t leave your mother with a baby on the way.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell Mary how the baby had been born dead. She was my best friend and knew many secrets, but I just couldn’t tell Mary we had a dead baby in the freezer. I couldn’t tell anyone.

  “Besides,” Mary added, “once your daddy sees that girl have a seizure, foaming at the mouth like a mad dog, he’s not going to want her.”

  A little reassured, I picked up my cards and waited for Mary to arrange hers the way she wanted. While she spread her cards into a fan, I looked out my tree house window into the yard. I saw Daddy grab his hoe. He walked to the garden and drew long furrows in the ground, then plowed through Mama’s blue pansies as if they weren�
��t there.

  SEVENTEEN

  MAMA’S ROOM

  BLACK CROWS PICKED at bits of blue flowers. Their oily feathers shone as they tossed around Mama’s pansies in search of food.

  “I think you should go now,” I said to Mary Roberts.

  She leaned across my lap to look through the window. She gasped before dropping her handful of cards. They swirled in a current of wind and fell to the ground like small kites. Startled, the crows cawed, flapped their wings, then continued to chew on Mama’s plowed flowers.

  I’m not a superstitious girl. My ears don’t burn when somebody talks about me. I’ve never been afraid to walk under ladders and don’t fret over broken mirrors. The only superstitions I ever believed were ones about luck: rabbits’ feet, four-leaf clover, found pennies, and first stars. But as more black crows gathered, a strange feeling came over me. The dark feathers, the eyes that looked like stones: these were bad signs.

  A few crows waited in the trees while others flocked on the ground to peck at the flowers. Three times they cawed to each other, then grew still. My skin prickled at their silence.

  TESS DIDN’T WANT me to move into Mama’s room. She threw herself on my bed and stretched out on her stomach. “Why don’t you like me?” she asked, her lower lip poked out as if she could make me feel sorry for her.

  I folded my nightgown and shoved it inside a grocery bag. “It isn’t that, Tess. It’s just … well, I need to go.”

  “If you liked me, you’d stay.”

  “I just want to be with Mama.”

  “It’s because of the pansies, isn’t it? Your daddy already explained they were going to die anyway. Mites had gotten into them. We had to spray my tomato plants just to plant them in the same bed. Besides, your mama needs rest. She won’t be able to tend to a garden this spring.”

  “I could have watered Mama’s pansies for her. And there are sprays to kill mites. Daddy sells them at the store.”

  “Your daddy just didn’t think of that, Ellie. He’s had a lot on his mind.” Tess frowned again.