Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [125]
I leaned my face against the screen door. It creaked slightly, and they all looked over toward me. I must have been silhouetted against the kitchen light like some ghostly night creature, because they all jumped. Earle’s face went stiff.
“Bone,” he said, “you better get back in there with your mama. She might need your help.” Grey stood there quietly beside Earle, his hand still holding a beer can. I waited a minute, looking at him, remembering when he swore he would never forget what we had done. He lifted the beer can, drank deeply. He looked so proud to be standing on that porch drinking with Uncle Earle.
“Didn’t you hear Earle?” Garvey’s tone was harsh. I looked at him directly and snorted. Little boy pretending to be a man didn’t scare me, but I backed into the kitchen anyway. I remembered that Nashville girl perfectly well. She had been so shy she stuttered whenever she tried to answer a question, and she was terrified of bugs of any kind. We’d teased her until she cried and went running to Earle like he was her father, not her supposed-to-be husband. She hadn’t looked to me like the kind that could do any damage at all, or even think about it. Not like Aunt Alma, who was, after all, a Boatwright, and dangerous as any man even when she wasn’t crazy.
But you can’t tell with women, I thought. I looked down at my hands in the dim light of the lamp Mama had set up on the counter near the sink. My hands were small, the tendons blue and fine under pale skin, like Alma’s and Mama’s. We all had small hands. I looked back down the hall to the bedroom. I could just see the smashed and tumbled bed frame.
No, I thought, you just can’t tell with women. Might be you can’t even tell with girls.
“I never realized before how much you look like Alma.” It was so late it was almost morning. Mama’s voice came out of the darkness from the direction of the doorway. “But when we were sitting on those steps together and you were standing in the yard, I saw it so clear. I saw what you’re gonna look like when you’re full-grown. You’re gonna be as pretty as Alma was when she was a girl, prettier than you can imagine.”
I said nothing. I was wrapped in a blanket, sitting on Little Earle’s mattress up against the wall where we had dragged it earlier in the evening. Aunt Alma had finally gone to sleep, and Mama had decided it was safe for us to try to get some rest. But for an hour she had been sitting propped up on her pillow, smoking, and I had been staring into the dark, listening to the cows move around in the pasture near the house.
Mama shifted restlessly, turning toward me. “Bone,” she said softly. “What is it you think about all the time?”
“Nothing much.” I looked at the cigarette’s burning tip. My eyes had adjusted to the dark so that I could make out the shape of her body, her shoulders pushed up on the pile of old pillows, her arms lying on top of the blanket. “Nothing I could explain. ”
“You’re always so quiet, always watching,” Mama’s voice was soft, and sounded more relaxed than I had heard in a long time. “I can tell when you’re mad, you know. You get that storm-cloud look on your face, and you’ve had that enough lately.” She shifted in her blanket, put the cigarette out in a saucer on the floor.
“The thing is, if you’re not mad, I can’t tell what’s happening inside you. You never look happy. You look like you’re waiting. What are you waiting for, Bone?”
For you to go back to Daddy Glen, I thought, and hugged my blanket tighter around my shoulders.
“Bone?”
I touched the backs of my fingers to my throat, felt the warmth there, the pulse in the hollow beneath my chin.
“Bone? You’re not asleep?”
“No.”
“You don’t want to talk to me?”
My fingers were wet, my chin, the edge of the blanket. I remembered Aunt Alma’s direct look this afternoon when she’d talked about loving Wade, about wanting to kill him. I didn’t understand that kind of love. I didn’t understand anything. I swallowed and tried not to make a sound.
“You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?” Mama sounded like she wanted to cry. I bent forward and pressed