The Ada Decades

by Paula Martinac

  That was one place she had not thought to look when she was on the hunt for cigarettes. The shed was his space. She hadn’t set foot in it in over forty years, not since the day as a girl when she’d gone to fetch a wrench for him and found the photographs. Ada approached the shed with trepidation and poked her head through the door.

  “You okay, Daddy?” she called, without really looking. A circle of light from a single work lamp illuminated the center of the space. She heard the dragging of his shoes across wood as he navigated around the workbench and into the light.

  “Looks like you caught me, gal,” he said. An unlit cigarette hung from his lips. He tucked something away in the pocket of his trousers.

  “Can’t believe you made it all the way out here on your own. That’s what’s called pure determination.”

  “You threw out all my smokes.”

  “Good thing you didn’t fall.” She helped him down the one deep step to the yard. “You hiding more Camels in your pocket there?”

  “Nah,” he said, clutching onto the walker, but she didn’t believe him.

  His secret was in the trash the next evening, covered in coffee grounds and scraps from supper. She recognized the envelope as if her first encounter with it had happened just days before, not decades. Ada lifted it out of the trash, brushed it off, and stood holding it gingerly by one corner.

  The sound of wheels on linoleum made her drop the thing like a hot skillet. It fell to the floor between them, and her daddy stared at it first, then at her.

  “What’re you doing, Ada Jane?” He rarely called her, or anyone for that matter, by name. It was always gal or sugar for her, son or buddy for her brothers.

  “I put that in there for a reason,” he said, leaning forward to retrieve the soiled envelope. “It’s trash, plain and simple.”

  “I know what it is, Daddy.”

  “You looked inside?” he asked, his eyes cast down like a child caught doing something he shouldn’t.

  “Not today. But . . . way back when I was a girl.” She had only told two people about the discovery—when it happened, Miss Ruthie, the public librarian whom she idolized; and then many years later, Cam.

  The acknowledgment brought his blazing eyes up to meet hers. “What were you doing in my tool box?”

  “I used to fetch your tools, remember? When Clay Junior didn’t want to help anymore.”

  “You were too young to see this,” he said, slapping the envelope against his thigh.

  The naked women or the lynched blacks? she wondered.

  “I ain’t a bigot,” he said. “You never seen me treating the coloreds at the mill any different . . .” A coughing fit cut off his explanation.

  Ada brought him a glass of water, which he dismissed with a scowl. He slid the postcard of the lynching from the envelope and examined it, his fingers tracing the worn edges.

  “My Uncle Rupert give this to me,” he said. “My daddy’s youngest brother. I was five, I reckon, maybe younger. That’s me, right there.” He pointed at a blurry figure in the foreground, one of several small children who appeared to be scooting past a tree where three blacks had been lynched. The men’s bodies didn’t even look human anymore. “Folks acted like the carny’d come to town. I didn’t know no better, so I went along. But it seemed right gruesome to get your photo taken with some dead coloreds, so me and your aunt Nan—that’s her—was trying to get away.”

  “But you didn’t have to keep it,” she said, her voice so hoarse she had to sip the water he had refused. “Why didn’t you just throw it out?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, acting peeved, as if he’d never cared to think about it. He tucked the photo into the envelope again. “Rupert got hit by a train a few years later. Out walking on the tracks after midnight, drunk as a skunk. He liked to take me places, like I was his kid brother.” What a show of affection, she thought, taking a child to a lynching, but Ada held her tongue.

  Her father thumbed through the other postcards in the envelope. “The rest of these pictures . . .”—he pronounced it pitchers—“. . . hell, that’s just stuff boys like to look at.” He shot her a look she couldn’t read. “Some girls, too, I reckon.”

  Ada’s hands felt sweaty in the pockets of her dungarees, and she forced herself to hold one out for the envelope.

  “You want that in the trash, then?”

  “That’s where I put it, ain’t it?” His chair squealed a little as he turned.

  That night, after she helped him to bed, the scene in the kitchen played in her head like a skipping record. She should have left the photos in the trash; she should never have asked him why he’d kept them. It would be just like the old man to spite her and call off the trip to the lawyer later that week. And why had he added that remark about women who liked to look at dirty pictures? She hadn’t acknowledged her relationship with Cam to anybody in the family but Foster, and then only because he had guessed.

  Ada lay awake reading, but kept losing her place and having to start whole paragraphs over. Around eleven, Cam phoned. She’d gotten her five-year chip from AA that evening and was all rambunctious energy, monologuing in double-time about the meeting. Later, she’d gone with AA buddies for ice cream sundaes. “I just love those folks!” she said.

  Ada was quiet on the other end, her feelings morphing into rage. She needed to talk about what had happened with her father, but she couldn’t get a word in.

  “Sorry I’m rambling, darlin’,” Cam said into the silence. “Must be on a sugar high.”

  She didn’t mean to say it, but the thought jumped out anyway. “Sounds like a drunk high to me.”

  Cam took a couple of audible breaths. “I just got my chip, Ada Jane. I am going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

  Ada was about to retract the remark and explain what happened with her father, but across the hall, the old man sounded like he was coughing up a lung. “I have to go,” she said, but Cam hung up before she could explain.

  The bloody phlegm was what made her call emergency services. “He’s really sick,” she explained. “Please hurry.” She stood over him until they arrived, every prayer she had ever memorized

  coming to her lips.

  § § §

  The next morning, Ada lugged her suitcase up the flight of stairs to their apartment and fumbled with the key. Cam was standing on the other side of the door looking like someone who had seen too many scary movies. In one hand she held a steaming mug of coffee while in the other she brandished her Swiss army knife, the long blade and corkscrew extended in Ada’s direction.

  “Sweet Jesus, what are you doing here?”

  “I still live here, far as I know,” Ada said, plopping her bag down just inside the door. To take the sting out, she quipped, “Were you going to scald me to death, or just corkscrew me?”

  “Is he . . . ?”

  Ada shook her head. “Admitted to the hospital. Last night. That’s why I had to get off the phone so quick. Looks like

  pneumonia.”

  The three feet between them was a chasm Ada needed to bridge. She went to Cam, took her mug, and set it down so she could hug her.

  “I am so sorry,” she said. “I was going to say so last night, but the old man started coughing like you wouldn’t believe. I thought he was going to die on me right then and there.” Cam usually welcomed hugs, could be almost greedy about them, but she remained stiff in Ada’s arms, as if unready to forgive.

  “Can I see your chip?”

  “It’s around, somewhere.” Cam pulled away.

  “Honey, I said I’m sorry. You had a great evening, and I had a rotten one. I took it out on you. Please forgive me.”

  “You were the one who asked me to stop drinking,” Cam said, as if she’d quit immediately and not two years after Ada made the request. “And I did it, hard as it was, because you are the

  single most important thing in my life and I was afraid I’d lose you. I could never face that.” She reached into the pocket of her
cotton robe, withdrew the chip and held it out to Ada. “Then you go and slap me down. I did this for you, darlin’.”

  “Honey, you did it for yourself,” Ada said. She turned the chip over and over in the palm of her hand, feeling its satisfying heft. To Thine Own Self Be True was stamped above the Roman numeral V.

  “Bronze,” Cam pointed out, and Ada nodded. Their eyes met as she slid it gently back into Cam’s pocket.

  § § §

  Clay Shook Senior passed two days later. This time the call came directly to her. “I understand. Yes. Thank you,” she heard herself saying dully, as if on autopilot.

  The death certificate read pneumonia, but the doctor targeted emphysema as the root cause. “His lungs got him in the end, no matter how you look at it,” was how Ada delivered the news to both Clay Junior and Foster.

  The trip to the lawyer never happened, so the house was lost to her. What would happen to it, without a will or any other paperwork? “Good thing you believe in eternal life,” Cam said. “You’ll be rewarded in heaven for being the good daughter, even if you didn’t get the house.”

  Ada blinked back tears. Heaven was small comfort. Would she even see him there, a man who didn’t recognize his own sins? Yes, she had wanted the house. But she’d wanted something less

  tangible, too, something a man like her father couldn’t give.

  Foster told her about the will when they were climbing back up the hill from their parents’ graves. Clay Junior was farther ahead with Big Junie and their daughter, exchanging words with the preacher, while Cam walked with Foster’s wife, Bobbie Ann, and their boys. Unaccustomed to wearing heels after a summer in flip-flops, Ada tripped and grabbed a hold of Foster’s arm.

  He said he had typed it for their father a year earlier, relying on a template from a how-to book, then drove him to have the thing notarized. Foster kept the original in his safe deposit box in Charleston. “He didn’t want me to tell you or Clay,” her brother said. “I have the dubious honor of being his executor.”

  “He let me plan the whole lawyer trip, but he had already made up his mind?” She had a stream of unchristian thoughts she kept to herself. “Tell me now, Foss—just get it over with. He left the house to Clay, didn’t he?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you before we’ve officially read the thing, but he left you the house, big sister. Not that it’s worth a hell of a lot. It’ll be more a burden than anything else, unless you actually live in it.”

  Ada stared at her brother, her lips parted, unable to form words.

  “He said we both had houses, but you didn’t,” Foster continued. “Said you didn’t have a husband and could use the help.”

  He’s a good man, when you dig down.

  Days later, when she was sorting through her father’s things, bagging up a donation for Goodwill, Ada found a baseball mounted on a polished wooden base. It had once sat on the mantle in the living room of their house, but at some point had migrated to a shelf in the closet. “Your daddy played for the Carolina League ’fore I met him,” her mother said when Ada was old enough to be curious about the ball. “The Mercury Mill boys. Scored the winning home run against High Point in the ’24 finals.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “Yes indeed, missy. He’s too humble to talk about it, but he could have been another Shoeless Joe if he hadn’t hurt his hand at the mill the next year.”

  She didn’t know who Shoeless Joe was, but the way her mother said the name made him sound important. Ada took to sitting on the screened porch with a fat book when her daddy was throwing pitches to Clay Junior in the back yard. She sneaked looks at him like he was a stranger, somebody else’s father, encouraging his oldest son with “Attaboy” and “That one tricked ya, didn’t it, son?”

  Once and only once, after Clay had abandoned the bat and gone inside, her daddy had called out to her, “Gal, you want to take a swing?” Ada was graceless when it came to sports, always the last picked for teams, and she worried she might spoil her daddy’s good mood. So instead of admitting, “I don’t think I’d be any good at it, Daddy,” she said, “I’m busy,” and shoved her nose back into her book.

  The memory reran in her head now, along with one of the last clear things he’d said to her: Some girls, too, I reckon. He’d said it with a sharp glance that made her wonder. In his own way, maybe he was just trying to tell her he knew her secrets as well as she knew his.

  Eclipse

  2003

  Ada

  “There’s going to be a lunar eclipse November 9th,” Cam said. “You can see it at 1:19, paper says.”

  Ada turned from the counter and placed a plate of scrambled eggs and grits on the table in front of Cam. “Don’t you get any ideas.”

  Cam calculated with her fingers. “Eight days from today. I should be feeling okay. Maybe we could invite a few folks over?” In years past, they had always stayed up, and had even hosted a few eclipse-watching parties for their circle of friends.

  “We’ll talk about it. Just eat now. Twig’ll be here any minute.”

  She watched until Cam picked up her fork and took a first bite, then a second. Nausea always ruled the first days after treatment, and Cam could only keep the blandest foods down. Her stomach stabilized by the end of the week, and Ada immediately set out to fatten her up with her favorite meals. Still, Cam had to use a plastic fork so the food didn’t taste like it came from the scrap metal yard. In weeks two and three, she could eat with something resembling her usual gusto. And then it was back to square one. Today was the final round of chemo following her recurrence—unless her scan didn’t look good and the doctor ordered more rounds.

  “It’s the first lunar eclipse of the century,” Cam said as Ada plopped down across from her with a cup of coffee. “Seems like it calls for something. Want some grits, darlin’?”

  Ada waved the food off, disgusted by the idea of it. She forced herself to make meals for Cam, although she herself had no appetite and had lost weight, too; her heart-shaped face was now chiseled to a point. Their friend Shirley Ann, a retired obstetric nurse, gave a name to her sympathetic nausea: “It’s like Couvade syndrome. That’s when a woman’s pregnant, and her husband feels the symptoms.”

  Cam nudged her plate toward Ada. “Come on, have a bite. You got to stay strong so you can push my wheelchair around.”

  “You’re not in a wheelchair.”

  “Not yet.” Cam held the paper out, showing the progressive photographs of what a lunar eclipse looked like. “Wonder if it’ll be one of those blood moons. This could be my last.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Well, it could be your last, too. We just never know what’s down the road.”

  Cam closed the paper and turned her full attention to her meal. “These grits are so silky it’s like I don’t even have to chew,” she said.

  Ada drained her cup and fetched the carafe; she needed not to look at the grits.

  “You think I could have some, just half a cup?” Cam asked. “Green tea doesn’t do it for me.”

  Ada pulled out a mug with a perfect red apple and World’s Best Teacher printed on the side. They’d had it for years, along with an assortment of appreciative gifts from Cam’s students, a veritable “who’s who” of folks who had first read To Kill a Mockingbird and A Raisin in the Sun in her English classes. There were two men who were now in the state legislature, a woman who’d penned a hit song in the ’80s, the mayor of a small town in eastern North Carolina, a best-selling mystery writer, a prominent Charlotte banker, the dean at a historically black college. Until she got sick, Cam had answered letters and emails from quite a few.

  “The article I read said you need three or four cups of green tea a day for it to work.”

  “What’s it do?” Cam said, finishing her plate.

  “I don’t know. Halts the cancer, shrinks the tumors. Something good. I’m not a doctor.” As she poured the coffee, Ada splashed a puddle of liquid from the carafe onto the table, and she sna
pped at no one in particular: “Dang!”

  “Darlin’, it’s okay,” Cam said.

  Ada rubbed the dishcloth over her mother’s old maple table, again and again, until there were no traces of coffee and the wood shone.

  “Sounds like Twig’s out front,” she said.

  Their closest friend didn’t have to knock. Ada heard the screen door slam behind him and then his long strides toward the kitchen, where he filled the doorframe with his height.

  “Morning, ladies,” he said. “Nice hat.” The baseball cap, one of the many Cam owned and wore to keep her bald pate warm,

  featured a white palmetto tree and crescent moon on an indigo field—the South Carolina flag, a present from Foster.

  “Have a seat, Twig, grab some coffee,” Cam said. “Say, would you come if we have an eclipse get-together? November 9th.”

  “Don’t know as I’m doing anything else.”

  “You two should get going, in case there’s traffic,” Ada said.

  “What’re you going to do with your free time?” Twig asked Ada when Cam went to the closet to fetch her jacket.

  “Errands,” she said immediately. “Nothing exciting at all.” She’d practiced the casualness of her response in the bathroom mirror; she didn’t want either of them to guess her actual plans.

  “‘Errands,’ ” Cam said, with a roll of her eyes. “That’s probably code for a secret lover.”

  Cam

  “You look right smart in that cap,” Bettina said with a wink.

  “I’m looking forward to the day when I don’t have to wear it,” Cam replied.

  The chemo nurse was brawny, with power in her brown arms, enough to lift women too sick to do it themselves. Cam envied the ripple of her muscles. She was well over forty, but she wore no wedding band and never mentioned children or grandbabies; never mentioned anybody, really. She kept her nails and hair short, unlike the other nurse, whose blonde ponytail bounced behind her and whose manicure looked like it could snag some patient’s delicate skin. Cam recognized the telltale signs of being “in the life,” but if she was a kindred spirit, Bettina had never let on.