Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [56]
I grinned at her and shook my head. Her face relaxed a little, and she smiled back at me. “You are so stubborn.” Her fingers trailed lightly across my brow, smoothing back a few loose strands of hair. “Even more stubborn than your mama, I think. ”
Aunt Ruth had changed in ways I had not imagined possible. Her hair, once thick and dark red, was almost all gone. What remained had paled to orange straw that she covered with a green-checked cotton scarf when she went out. She had grown so thin that I probably could have lifted her all by myself, though she would never allow me to try. But the greatest change was in how she moved and talked. She had always been the slow, soft-spoken aunt, the quiet one who thought a lot and said little. Now she talked continuously, moving her fingers in constant little jerking motions and shifting her eyes around all the time as if she were afraid she might miss something. Birdlike, she lifted her head and craned to see out the windows while her fingers picked at the afghan she kept across her lap no matter how hot it was. She lived on the couch now, with occasional forays to her rocker on the porch, and had made Travis take down the curtains so that nothing blocked her view. She watched the sunrise and the sunset and napped whenever she chose, and between naps she talked. After the first few days of refilling her juice glass and watching her make her slow, careful way to the bathroom, I began to suspect that my main purpose was to provide Aunt Ruth with an audience, someone who would nod at appropriate moments and not interrupt.
“When we were kids, we pretty much never saw our daddy,” she told me one afternoon. “He was always off working or drinking or traveling somewhere. I got the idea that men weren’t expected to hang around much. Now, when Travis is too much with me, he gets on my nerves, even when I’d almost like to have him here to help. It’s good I’ve got you to stay with me, Bone. You don’t get on my nerves at all.”
Aunt Ruth lay back on the couch, hugging her belly with both arms, her eyes narrowing as her cheekbones caught the light pouring in the open door. The bones in her face stood out sharp and high. Propped on the couch with her legs drawn up so that her bare feet were against my thigh, she looked almost like a girl, a witch girl with a narrow gray face. Nobody should be that thin, so thin the pulse in her throat made the skin over her collarbones vibrate. She shaded her eyes for a moment, looking down the couch at me.
“You know, when you close your eyes, you look just like your mama when she was a girl.”
I nodded. I wasn’t paying much attention. Aunt Ruth had been talking a lot about Travis for the two weeks I’d been staying with her—about Travis and her daddy, about Uncle Earle and her brothers and sisters, about things that had happened long before I was born and she imagined no one had told me yet. I should have been glad to hear it all, finally, and to ask all the questions I had saved up for years. But for the first time in my life, I couldn’t think about all those old stories. All I could think about was going home. When was Mama going to take me home? Did I want to go home?
I bit my lips, took a careful breath before I let what I had been thinking come out of me. Aunt Ruth looked over at me expectantly.
“Daddy Glen hates me.” There, it was said. I drew my knees up and wrapped my arms around them, just waiting for her to say it wasn’t so. She was looking directly at me, her face still, calm, open. I knotted my hands into fists.
“Tell me, Bone.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “You think I’m dying?”
My stomach lurched. I looked out the door. Of course she was dying. I looked back at her and then away again. “Naah, you’re just awful damn sick.”
“Bone.”
I shook my head.