The Kindest Lie
Page 7
Lena had to be at least twenty years younger than Mama, but the two had been fast friends for a long time. Ruth paused outside the door. Did Lena know Ruth’s secret? In a town like Ganton, where gossiping was as natural as breathing, you couldn’t tell people to mind their own business. You had no business that wasn’t theirs, too. But she couldn’t bring herself to go to Mama’s house just yet. They hadn’t seen each other in four years and only spoke by phone every couple of months. What would she and her grandmother talk about? How would she get Mama to tell her who her son was?
The chimes jingled when she walked in the store. A few customers were milling about fingering knickknacks and comparing Christmas shopping lists. A young woman with eyes the color of blueberries and legs like twigs stepped from behind the counter.
“Hi. You’re not from around here. Visiting someone?” Her bony fingers stroked beads on a necklace.
“I was born and raised here, but it’s been a while since I’ve been back.” Ruth heard the defensiveness in her own tone.
The girl bounced when she talked, like a wind-up toy. “Can I help you find something? By the way, your bag is really cool.”
Ruth rubbed the leather of her Kate Spade bag and chastised herself silently for not traveling with something more generic and nondescript. Less expensive.
“Thanks. I need two jars of blackberry preserves.” Mama always spread preserves on her buttermilk biscuits Sunday mornings before church.
While the girl went to get the preserves, Ruth noticed a collage of photos on poster board near the cash register: a man, woman, and three kids who had to be theirs, judging by the similar wide faces, pale skin, and wheat-colored hair. Each set of children’s eyes an exact duplicate of the others and their parents’. She marveled at the way the threads of their chromosomes were woven together in a quilt of connection. Somewhere was a child with Ruth’s genes, her DNA running through him like a river.
“Those are the Wagners,” the girl said over her shoulder. “It’s terrible what happened.” When Ruth looked confused, she continued. “They were using a space heater to keep warm and their house caught on fire. That’s J.B. and Gabe right there.” She pointed to two round-faced boys with big smiles.
“They were in the hospital for a few days, but they made it, thank God. So did Mr. and Mrs. Wagner. Polly, the little girl, was the youngest. She got out alive but ended up dying a couple hours later.”
There were often news stories in Chicago about people tragically dying like that, too poor to afford heat. On a few winter nights back in the day, Ruth’s family had gathered around the open oven to stay warm.
The cashier said, “They came in here all the time and Polly would sit by the register and punch in the numbers for me. My little helper.”
“She liked fishing, too, I see.” Ruth eyed a photo of Polly posing in a pink jumper in front of her dad with an openmouthed striper that was almost as big as she was.
“She sure did. Don’t let the pink fool you. She caught that one herself, from what I hear tell of it.”
Polly had, no doubt, like Ruth, learned patience from her father, the hours of waiting until that rod twitched in your hands. And she’d likely known the reassuring voice of a father who made you believe you could do anything. A Folger’s coffee can sat next to the photos of the Wagners, with the label ripped off and lined notebook paper wrapped around it, taped, with the word donations scrawled in heavy black marker.
Ruth looked again at this mother and father in the photo and thought of how they walked through the world now with limp and idle arms, empty arms that had once held their Polly.
She never carried large amounts of cash except when she traveled, so she pulled a fifty-dollar bill from her purse and stuffed it in the can, ignoring the wide eyes of the girl behind the register as she handed over the jars of preserves.
“Is Lena here?” Ruth asked.
The blue-eyed girl gestured with her head. “I think she may be in the stockroom doing inventory. You can go on back.” In Ganton, people seldom met a stranger, and they were trusting almost to a fault. Ruth missed that trust, living in a big city.
Stepping through the doorway into the dark back room, Ruth ran her fingers along the wall searching for a light switch. Nothing. The sharp edges of peeling paint nicked her fingertips. A heater hummed, but there was no other sound.
Something rolled across the floor and bumped up against her boot. A small scream slipped from Ruth’s lips and that’s when she saw a shadow move silently against the lower half of the wall in the darkness.
“Who’s there?” she asked, willing her voice to stay steady.
No answer.
“Lena, are you in here?”
“Lena’s gone.”
The whisper ricocheted off the corner wall. Unsure where the voice came from, she backed up to leave the room and slipped on the wet floor, grabbing the side of a table to steady herself. Suddenly, the yellow light from a single bulb in the ceiling flooded the room.
She looked down to see a thin white boy holding a long light cord. He sat against the wall, his feet propped up on a box. He looked no more than twelve in his thick black-rimmed glasses that were too big for his narrow face. He wore an Indiana University sweatshirt that swallowed him. Patches of brown dirt coated the knees of his jeans, and Ruth noticed the rubber heels of his boots peeling away.
A ceramic jar lay at her feet. Her revelation turned on a giggle switch in the boy and he doubled over from the sheer force of it.
“That was not funny,” she said, her voice squeaking like a bike chain that needed oiling.
“It was an experiment. I was trying to see how fast a cylinder would roll,” he said, gesturing at the slight slant in the linoleum floor, “if there’s no friction to stop it.” He glanced at her boots and rolled his eyes as if she were a child slow to understand.
She knew that smug smile, or at least she knew the type. He probably peed in the neighbors’ flowerpots for sport and in a few years would be smoking weed and car surfing in the school parking lot on weekends. He was pushing her buttons all right, but she evened her tone to let him know his tactics didn’t work on her.
“What’s your name?”
“Midnight.”
Ruth twisted a thread from a loose button on her peacoat and wound it around her finger until it pinched her skin. “Sounds like a time of day to me, not a name.”
The boy’s face was the color of alabaster, a sharp contrast to his dirty dishwater hair. “Fat boys, they call Tiny. Me, I’m Midnight.”
The tenor of his voice hung somewhere between boy and man, a tug-of-war between who he was and who he’d someday become. His small shoulders pulled back and he lifted his head, thrusting his jaw forward as if challenging her to doubt him.
“Well, I’m Ruth. Miss Ruth.” She quickly added the title before her name. This kid needed to learn some respect. She couldn’t be sure he’d heard her. He kept his eyes on the floor and hid the bottom half of his face in the collar of his sweatshirt.
Mama would say a boy like this was feeling himself, and she’d be right. A smart mouth wormed its way into boys, both Black and white, before their voices deepened or they grew peach fuzz. The Black ones wore their defiance like armor, weaponized against the slings and arrows of a world they couldn’t control. But white boys entered the world carrying that arrogance inside them like a birthright.
“Does your mother know you’re here?”
“What’s it to you?”
Midnight threw every word like a grenade, obviously hoping for an explosion or at least a small grease fire. He stuck one finger inside a packet of peanut butter and licked it.
“I could have you arrested for breaking and entering,” Ruth said.
Midnight’s eyes grew wide, then they narrowed again. “Do it. Here’s my phone.”
The peanut butter had turned his teeth brown and gummy. He held up a phone in a white case that had his prints smeared all over it. He was probably a street kid who�
�d wandered in looking for food and found mischief. Ruth’s son would be about the same age, and she hoped he’d turned out better than this kid.
Next, the boy picked up a pair of scissors and poked his right arm through his sweatshirt.
“Stop that before you hurt yourself.” Ruth snatched the scissors from his hand.
He laughed, holding up his arm as if it weren’t attached to his body. “I didn’t even feel it.”
Bumping his chair against a metal cabinet, Midnight kept his eyes on Ruth, his look daring her to reprimand him or call the cops. She wanted to tell him he’d never amount to anything with an attitude like that, but this kid wasn’t worth a warning he’d never listen to anyway. Besides, small-town cops wouldn’t take too kindly to a Black woman snitching on a little white boy.
“Where’s Lena? The lady working out front said I could find her back here.”
“I don’t know. Guess she’s out.” This Midnight kid seemed perfectly at ease stirring up trouble in Lena’s shop. It was Ruth who was on edge, and unfortunately, she could tell he knew this.
“When will she be back?”
Midnight shrugged, making a popping sound with his finger on the inside of his cheek. His indifference toward her cemented her fear that she knew nothing about how to relate to children.
Wanting nothing more than to get away from this obnoxious kid, she considered leaving the shop. But she wanted to see Lena and buy some time until she was ready to face Mama, so she hung around. Since she was getting nowhere fast in this conversation with Midnight, she tried the polite line of questions she used for her coworkers’ kids on Take Your Child to Work Day. How old are you? What’s your favorite subject in school? What do you want to be when you grow up?
Midnight sat up straighter in response to her last question.
“A microbiologist.”
Tiny bubbles of spit popped up around his lips when he said the word, slow and careful to enunciate each syllable. She smiled. Kids in Ganton grew up to work at the plant during the week, bowl at Pete’s one weekend, raid the junkyard the next. Something solid and resolute shone in his face, as if to convince her that if he sold you a dream, he was good for it.
A child’s dreams could easily wilt and die on the vine. Ruth had learned this firsthand in Mrs. Thornton’s third-grade class at Driscoll Elementary School. If you were Black and lived on the Grundy side of town, where Ruth had grown up, you went to Driscoll or the other public school a few miles away. The public schools in Ganton didn’t require uniforms, but Mama had bought her granddaughter a navy-blue-and-white pleated skirt Ruth had begged for after seeing it on a long-legged white mannequin in a store window. Somehow, she got it in her head that smart girls wore plaid skirts with white ankle socks and black patent leather shoes. She never told Mama, but that skirt in the window was the closest she could come to the uniforms she’d seen the Mother Mary Catholic school girls wear on the other side of town.
Ruth loved the knee-length skirt so much she wore it to school at least three days a week, ignoring the taunts of the other kids that she only had one outfit. Many of those children wore hand-me-downs from older siblings or Goodwill rejects, but that didn’t stop their teasing. Papa said it had more to do with their envying Ruth’s mind than her clothing.
At eight years old, Ruth cracked the spines of old science books held together precariously by Scotch tape, memorizing every obscure fact, which must have impressed the other kids, including Natasha Turnbull, her childhood best friend, who was a mediocre student at best. You are soooo smart, her friend said, making Ruth stand even taller with pride, especially having the most beautiful girl as her friend. Natasha had light skin and long wavy hair and wowed in anything she wore, so pretty she didn’t need to wear pleats. And she knew it, too.
After Natasha received a string of failing grades, Ruth asked, “Did you get in trouble with your mom?” But Natasha just shrugged and said, “She’s not home a lot, so she doesn’t really notice. It’s cool, though. She’s always saying when you’re pretty, you don’t have to be smart.”
Ruth thought about that for a long time and looked at herself in the school’s bathroom mirror. Staring at her wide eyes that were too big for her long face, and her arms and legs that resembled skinny noodles, she knew then she’d have to focus on being smart. The good thing was she didn’t have to work hard at it, as she was eager to learn about the life cycles of butterflies and frogs, and the five layers of the earth’s soil. It was her research about soil that got her in trouble with Mrs. Thornton.
Ten minutes before the bell rang for recess one day, Mrs. Thornton told the class they would learn about soil layers that afternoon. Ruth had skipped ahead four chapters in her science book, reading at night by flashlight under her bedcovers long after everyone in her house had gone to sleep.
Anxious with excitement, Ruth stood up and blurted, “I can name the five layers of soil.” Closing her eyes to focus on her memory and avoid the distraction of her classmates’ faces, she recited, “Humus, topsoil, subsoil, parent material, and bedrock.” Proud of herself for getting through the list without flubbing anything, she exhaled. Smoothing the pleats of her skirt, she smiled and waited for praise that never came.
Instead, her classmates looked from her to Mrs. Thornton, their mouths agape, expecting something Ruth had been too naïve to anticipate. Even Natasha buried her face in her hands as if Ruth had committed a crime. Their teacher’s face flushed red and it took her a moment to speak. When she did, she pointed her knotty index finger at Ruth. “I’m the teacher, not you. Stop showing off and being disruptive.”
The word disruptive was new to Ruth, but she knew immediately it had negative connotations based on the way Mrs. Thornton snarled when she said it.
“Another thing,” her teacher added. “That skirt is in violation of the dress code. It’s too short for school. I’ll be sending a note home to your mother to let her know you can’t continue to wear it.”
Heat burned Ruth’s face. She grabbed a fistful of her skirt and squeezed, suddenly self-conscious about her bare, skinny legs, feeling every eye in the class on them. With her long legs, skirts that fell below the knee on other girls were shorter on her. And besides, she’d seen some girls wear skirts midthigh. Why had Mrs. Thornton singled her out? Ruth ran from the classroom and hid under a staircase until the janitor found her and summoned the principal, who called Mama to come pick her up.
At home, Ruth stood outside her grandparents’ bedroom, listening to them agonize over what to do.
Papa’s baritone voice carried even when he tried to whisper. “She ain’t learning a damn thing in that school.”
Mama agreed. “Don’t get yourself worked up. We both know these teachers don’t care about educating our kids. They just babysit for the year and pass them on to the next grade. But what can we do about it?”
The next morning, Mama and Papa sat her down in the kitchen, both of them looking serious. “We need to talk,” Mama said. “That school suspended you for a week for walking out of class without permission.”
The punishment of not being able to learn for an entire week made Ruth physically ill. “I won’t do it again, I promise. I won’t talk about the soil, ever. Please let me go back to school.”
Neither of them answered her right away. Finally, Papa said, “We’re going to work it out, your grandmother and me. You’re not going back there for long anyhow. You’re going to Mother Mary next year.” He glanced across the table at Mama, who looked as stunned as Ruth.
“Hezekiah, what on earth? You know we can’t afford . . .”
Papa held up one hand that had begun to tremble slightly in recent months. “I said we’d find a way and we will.”
And they did. The next school year, they enrolled her in Mother Mary, where the students were just a little less poor than the ones at Driscoll. A mostly white school where she didn’t get in trouble for being smart. A school where every girl wore a pleated plaid skirt that skimmed her knees.
“I got it.” Midnight ran toward her and wrapped one arm around the box.
“You’ll hurt yourself. You can’t carry this,” she said.
With his knees buckling, he awkwardly tried to grasp it, putting the weight of the box on one arm while the other hung at his side.
“I told you to let go.” Finally, the woman let the box drop to the floor. Her hair had grayed and thinned, and lines creased her face now, but Ruth recognized this was Lena. She looked the same, but worse, still wheezing and coughing, probably eating more casseroles than she should and smoking too many Newports. Never Camel or Virginia Slims or Lucky Strike. Always a Newport.
“Lena, it’s me.” Ruth waited as the older woman pulled her gloves off slowly and frowned, obviously scanning her memory for something familiar, but coming up short. “Ruth Tuttle, Ernestine’s Ruth.” She unwrapped her knit scarf and removed her hat. Ruth hadn’t seen Lena since she’d come home that one time on summer break from Yale. And no one but family had been invited to the small wedding ceremony, not even Lena, who had become a good friend to her grandmother.
Lena said, “Well, I’ll be . . . you sure are little Ruth Tuttle. Ernestine didn’t say a word about you being back in town.”
“She doesn’t know I’m here. I want to surprise her.”
Lena pulled her in for a hug and Ruth almost choked on the smoke smell that penetrated the woman’s skin. Then Lena began pulling packs of Cobalt 5 gum from the box, plopping them on a table. As she moved about the small space in the back room, she wheezed, her breathing sounding like the whistle of a novice blowing into a clarinet.
The floor shone wet—likely from water that had spilled from the bucket sitting in the middle of the floor. Ruth realized that was why she’d slipped when she first walked in. Midnight slid on the floor now, his arms outstretched like he was riding a big wave of California surf.