Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [21]
Ramona accepted the compliment with a nod. Then she said “shit” loudly, three times in a row after Vie was out of the front door. Once for each girl, because Mae wouldn’t be back for a month from Tuesday, and even though Ramona had always been the primary caretaker in terms of the cooking and cleaning, and laundry, and making sure the children stayed well groomed, it was Mae who did the sweet talking, who could calm down the most agitated of children by wrapping her words in honey like she was making pigs in a blanket. Ramona just didn’t have that sweet-talking part in her, would barely say good morning to the steady streams of children who’d floated in and out of here over the years. Wouldn’t know how to say a kind word to them if she wanted to. She’d never wanted to. She didn’t now.
“Look at all this. How we supposed to get this heavy-ass trunk up the stairs?” Ramona said to Shern, Victoria, and Bliss. But she actually said it to the trunk because she wasn’t even looking at the girls. Hadn’t looked at them really in the whole ten minutes they’d been here. That was always the hardest part for her, looking at the fosters when they walked through that door for the first time, when their faces were still coated with the hell they’d been delivered from, evenly spread and matte over their faces like fresh paint. So she looked all around their faces, concentrated on their bodies instead. She noticed that they were slight-built girls, even under the high-quality plaid wool coats. The older two starting to bud out a little, the youngest still round with baby fat, all three of them soft-figured, wouldn’t be much help with the trunk. She decided she’d wait for Tyrone to help her with the trunk.
She went to the closet and pulled out three hangers just so she could do something besides stand there and not look at them. “You the oldest, so you in charge of jackets and coats,” she said to Shern as she handed her the hangers. “Maybe you had live-in help or just day help where you came from, but I’m the only help around here, and my wages aren’t too damned good, so the least you can do is hang up your own coats.”
Ramona’s words fell on Shern’s unacclimated ears with a smashing sound, like glass milk bottles against a chain-link fence. Shern looked at her sisters to make sure they weren’t crying again, and then she scanned the living room, which was thimble-sized compared to their real home. She felt dizzy now when she thought about her real home. She took the hangers from Ramona and tried to tie her stomach like it was a kerchief, hoping it would contain the creamed corn she’d nibbled at when the social worker stopped them at Horn & Hardart’s and insisted that they put something in their stomachs.
“Put your hats in your pockets,” Ramona said as she watched the older two pull the hats from their heads. Odd-looking hats; she’d never seen a cross-stitch like that, all mixed up with no particular pattern, but it worked well in the hats. Now she was looking at their hair. “Damn,” she muttered under her breath; it was as thick as it looked in the Tribune photo.
“My mother tells us to put our hats in our sleeves, so our pockets won’t get stretched out of shape.” It was Bliss talking, pouting, looking up at Ramona like she was nobody she had to listen to.
Ramona looked at Bliss standing back on her heels, basing up at her as if she were her age. She had her mouth all formed to snap at Bliss, to say to Bliss, “Your mother’s in the crazy house, so what does she know?” But then she heard Mae’s voice in her head telling to mind her meanness. So she tucked what Mae called her meanness in the palm of her hand, closed her fist over it to keep it contained for now, and didn’t talk about their mother. She did stoop to Bliss’s eye level, though. “I don’t care where you stick them as long as I don’t see them all over the closet floor.” She pulled Bliss’s hat from her head. “Doesn’t this go in your sleeve?” She emphasized the “sleeve” and then shoved the hat in Bliss’s hand. She noticed Bliss