Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [43]
“Where’d you get them?”
“Uncle Earle,” I suggested.
“No.” Mama dropped down a little so her face was close to mine.
“Aunt Alma.” Carefully, I made my face a mask.
“Don’t lie too.” The lines in her face looked as deep as the rivers that flowed south toward Charleston. “Tell me the truth.”
I started to cry. “Downtown with Grey and Garvey this morning, at the Woolworth’s counter.”
Mama used her forefinger to wipe the tears off my cheeks. She wiped her own. “Is this all of it? How many did you take?”
“Two others, Mama. I ate one, gave Reese one.”
Mama leaned back in her chair, dropping my hands. She shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it carefully. I sat still, watching her, waiting. Tears kept collecting in the corners of my eyes, and I had to turn to wipe them away on my shoulder, but I kept watching Mama’s face as she sat and smoked without looking at me. The fingers of her right hand rubbed together steadily like the legs of grasshoppers I had seen climbing up the long grass at Aunt Raylene’s place. Her lips moved steadily too, as if she were sucking on her teeth or about to speak, but she was quiet a long time, just sitting there looking off through the open window smoking her cigarette.
“You know your cousin Tommy Lee? Aunt Ruth’s oldest boy?”
I frowned, trying to remember their names. There was Dwight, I knew, Lucius, D.W., Graham, yeah, Tommy Lee, and Butch. Aunt Ruth had only two daughters and six boys, most of them married with boys of their own. All of them were so alike that I never could keep track of anyone but Butch, and I rarely saw him anymore since he had gone to live with Ruth’s oldest girl, Mollie, in Oklahoma. The younger boys turned up occasionally to wrestle Reese and me, give us candy, or tell us stories. The older ones had the sunken eyes and planed faces of men, and they never gave us anything except nasty looks. I couldn’t have said which of the older ones was Tommy Lee, though I’d heard people talk about him enough—about what a hardass he was, about his girlfriends and his dirty mouth, his stints in the county jail and the fights he got into.
“He’s bad,” Mama said, her eyes still looking out the window. “He’s just bad all the way through. He steals from his mama. He’s stolen from me. Don’t dare leave your pocketbook around him, or any of your stuff that he could sell. He even took Deedee’s green stamp books one time and traded them off for some useless thing.” Her eyes drifted back to my face, the stunned brown of the pupils shining like mossy rocks under water.
“I remember when we were just kids and he was always stealing candy to give away. Thought people would like him if he gave them stuff, I suppose. Now he’s always saying how he’s been robbed, and he’s got a story to account for everything he does. Beats his girlfriends up ‘cause they cheat on him. Can’t keep a job ’cause people tell lies about him. Steals ’cause the world’s been so cruel to him. So much nonsense. He’s just bad, that’s all, just bad. Steals from his mama and sisters, steals from his own.”
I dropped my head. I remembered Grey telling me how he learned to break locks from Tommy Lee, that Tommy Lee was the slickest piece of goods in Greenville. “Boy knows how to take care of himself for sure. Never owes nobody nothing.” Grey’s face had flushed with respect and envy when he said it, and I had felt a little of the same—wishing I too knew how to take care of myself and could break locks or start cars without a key or palm stuff off a counter so smoothly that no one would know I had done it. But to steal from your mama! My face felt stiff with shame and anger. I wasn’t like that. I would never steal from Mama.
Mama’s hand touched my chin, trailed along my cheek, and stroked my hair. “You’re my pride. Do you know? You and your sister are all I really have, all I ever will have. You think I could let you grow up to be