Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [40]
In the light she sees that Tammy is wearing blue eye shadow. “It makes you look holler-eyed,” Cleo tells her, but Tammy shrugs.
When Tammy and Davey are asleep, Cleo gets out her family picture album. It has few pictures, compared to the way people take pictures nowadays, she thinks. The little black corners are coming loose, and some of the pictures are lying at crazy angles. She tries to put them back in place, knowing they won’t stay. She looks through the pictures of her parents’ wedding trip to Biloxi. Her parents look so young. Her mother looks like Linda in the picture. She is wearing a long baggy dress in style at the time. Cleo’s father is a slim, dark-haired man in the picture. He is smiling. He always smiled. Cleo’s parents are both dead. She turns the pages to her own honeymoon pictures. One, in which she and Jake look like children, was taken by a stranger in front of the Jefferson Davis monument. She looks carefully at Jake’s face, realizing that the memory of the snapshots is more real than the memory of his actual face. As she turns the pages she sees herself and Jake get slightly older. A picture of Linda shows a stubborn child with bangs.
Cleo looks at a picture of Jake on the tractor. He is grinning into the sun. That was Jake when he was happy. He was a quiet man. Cleo studies a picture taken the year he died, and she wonders suddenly if Jake had ever cheated on her. He could have that time he went to the state fair, she thinks. When he returned he acted strangely, bringing back a red ribbon he had won, and talking in a peculiar way about the future of the family farm. Jake would never forgive her for selling the farm. It was surely her way of cheating on him, she thinks uncomfortably, but she never would have thought of divorcing him, just as she has not been able later to think of remarrying.
On the last pages of the album she sees a surprise, a picture she does not recognize at first. It is dim figures on a television screen. Then she remembers. Tammy took pictures of Charlie’s Angels the night Linda missed it.
“Here, Mama, that’s you.” Tammy had pointed to the dark-haired actress, whose face was no bigger than a pencil eraser and hard to make out.
“Just give me her money and I’ll do without her looks,” Linda had replied.
Tammy has put this picture in Cleo’s family album. Cleo cannot think why Tammy would do this. Then she sees on the next page that Tammy has also put in the picture she took of Cleo. The picture is the last one in the scrapbook. Again, Cleo sees herself, looking scared and old.
—
“The roof fell in,” Cleo tells Rita Jean the next day. “Linda says she’s not going back to Bob. She says she wants a separation and he’s agreed to move out. Them children will be packed from pillar to post. I didn’t sleep a wink all night last night.”
Cleo is at Rita Jean’s. Cleo has driven over, skipping the Today show and her morning phone conversation. Now she feels more comfortable at Rita Jean’s than at home. The house is brightly decorated with handmade objects. Rita belongs to a mail-order craft club which sends a kit every month. She has made a new embroidered wall hanging of an Arizona sunset. Cleo admires it and says, as she gazes at a whipstitch, “What I don’t understand is how my daughter can carry on like she does. She chirps like a bird!”
“I just don’t know,” says Rita Jean. “Don’t look at this mess,” she says as she leads Cleo to the back room, where Dexter is sleeping in a box. “The vet said there