Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [29]
“Hey, Katie.” He looks down at the ground, fuels up, turns toward me. “I heard y’all were moving.”
“Yeah. To Missouri.”
“Well, I just wanted to tell you, you know, it wasn’t you or nothing. I can’t stand my sister, is all. That’s why I was … you know.”
I nod.
“But you’re all right, Katie.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He stands up, socks his hand with his fist. “Okay. Well, I hope you like Montana.”
“Missouri.”
“Oh, yeah.” He walks away, his strides long and loping. Sod-buster walk, Cherylanne calls it.
Cherylanne bangs the door shut, walks past Bubba without acknowledging him. “Gnats out, huh?” she asks and points at Bubba, makes big-eyes at me. She sits down, leans against me, sighs. “Your sister back yet?”
“Nope.”
“It’s been over twenty-four hours.”
“I know.”
“Well, didn’t he call the MPs or anything?”
I look at her. “He’s waiting.”
“For what?”
This is too hard to explain. And so I just say, “For her to come back.”
“Oh.” Cherylanne rubs alongside of her neck, leans her head far back, and shakes her hair. A girl can add fullness simply by tossing her curls gently behind her. She rights her head, gives it one more shake, turns toward me. She really is quite pretty. She has a mole on her cheek in just the right place. “Want to eat over?” she asks.
“Sure.” This is it, my normal life, evaporating.
Belle passes me the fried chicken, slaps Bubba’s hand for taking a piece off the platter before I get it. “I’ll tell you something, Katie,” she says. “You’re really going to make something of yourself. Your mother and I both always said so.”
I smile, shrug.
“Oh, yes,” she says. “You mark my words.”
From now on until the day I leave, I will be like the birthday girl.
I need to talk to her. I go under the bed to call her. I close my eyes, try to bring back the vision I had last, the blue robe, the throne. She appears, but there is no throne. She is the only thing in a background of soft blackness. I think, well, now it’s Missouri, and she nods her head. I think, this will be a new place, where you’ve never been. She nods again, kindness. Out loud, I say, “That’s what bothers me, that you will never have been there.” And out loud, I hear her voice answer, “But I will still be with you.” I gasp, open my eyes, and see her still. She is floating above me. “Oh,” I say. “Is this real?”
“I am only your mother and I love you,” she says.
“Oh,” I say again. I am so afraid, I can’t move, even to blink. She reaches out a hand and lays it along my cheek. Her touch is cool and light.
“You’ll be all right,” she says softly, and I feel tears come the way they always do when something is too true, when something is named by another that you felt only by yourself before. “You’ll be fine, Katie, I promise you.”
I close my eyes and when I open them again she is gone. I climb out from under my bed, lie on top of it. I think, I will never tell anyone this. But I will know it for the rest of my life. I understand suddenly that everywhere in the world are people with secrets too much to be told: a man in China; a woman in India, bending down at the river; a baby too young to speak. I see that things get delivered, invisible and long-lasting and created for reasons felt but never said.
Once a bunch of us went to see a man who was supposed to be a mind reader. He was old and a little crazy, dressed in layers of things that didn’t go together, gray whiskers roughing up his face, stick-out ears, long uncombed hair. He lived in a falling-down house at the edge of the army post. After we knocked at his door and asked him to show us something, he came outside with a greasy deck of cards. We sat in his backyard, in high grass, in a nervous circle. He looked at each one of us full in the face, nodded. We were scared, tittering a little. He held the deck of cards up in the air. “Now,” he said. “Which one will I pull out?” We all guessed, one by one. I said, “An ace. A black one,” full of an odd kind of sureness, and suddenly very