Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [20]
“No, no, no. Of course she—we want the placement. It’s just when they’re so traumatized…and you know my mother won’t be back for a month—but no, of course we want the placement.”
“I mean, your mother is one of the best, darn near perfect record in foster care, oh, yes, she does. Her name stays at the top of the list, and your name too as her legal substitute.”
Ramona mashed her body harder into the chair and the plastic did a humph. She knew it wasn’t so much Mae’s perfect record in foster care that kept her name at the top of the list, but more Mae’s ability to get the vote out on election day and keep her ward leader drained and satisfied. “How long you think they’ll be here?” she asked.
Vie pushed against the coffee table to hoist herself up. “The mother’s under a court-imposed commitment, at least for forty-five days until she gets evaluated again.”
She went on to describe the girls, told Ramona she was going to love them, such pretty girls. “The oldest has eyes like a china doll, and the youngest, oh, Ramona, cutest little round face with a deep cleft in her chin. Plus they’re smart, nice, you know; they’re the type who’ll probably go to the library on Saturdays instead of sneaking under the el turn-stiles to go downtown to shoplift from McCrory’s, nothing like that last brew you-all had here that made all those phone calls long distance all over the country.”
“What you talking ’bout? Had to put a lock on the phone that I use to this day,” Ramona said, not really needing to know much else about the girls. She had already read about them in the Tribune when their daddy turned up missing. Knew they were raised privileged, lived in Chestnut Hill, thirteen, twelve, eleven. All she wanted to know right now was what kind of hair did the girls have; was it as long and thick as it looked in the newspaper picture? But she couldn’t ask Vie such a thing, was sure that Vie wouldn’t be even able to begin to fathom how many Saturday mornings she’d lost blistering her fingers in a smoke-filled kitchen while she pressed some foster girl’s thick-ass hair. Ramona patted her own hair along the sides of her blond-tinged French roll.
“That hair looking good,” Vie said as she stood, and Ramona could have sworn she heard the plastic covering sigh out a hallelujah. “Can’t nobody do a hard press like Miss D. Even though mine won’t hold a press these days, sweat too much with this personal summer I’m going through, but you won’t know nothing about that for at least the next twenty years.
“I’m having the girls’ former school send the paperwork over to Sayre Junior High so you won’t have to bother with that detail.” She lowered her voice. “Tuition seriously lapsed at their private school, oh, yes, it had, so they may not have been going back there even if this tragedy hadn’t befallen them.” She waved the air in front of her face again. “Let me show them in, Ramona, and start bringing in their things.” She looked around the living room, large for a row house on a small street, and Ramona followed her eyes, from the mantelpiece, where her prom pictures and high school diploma were nestled in the Woolworth’s gold-tone frames, to the magazine rack, where the Ebonys, Jets, and Philly Talks were arranged in sized order. Her Bible was perfectly centered on the speckless coffee table, and even the plastic runner covering the wall-to-wall carpet gleamed. She was glad she’d spent her morning cleaning, and with Mae out of town she’d had to do it only once and not two or three times picking up after the messes Mae left.
“I sure am grateful you and your mother keep such an orderly house,” Vie said as if she’d just heard Ramona’s thoughts. “Not many houses I could just show up at with three children