Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [23]
“Oh, shit, damn,” Ramona said when she saw it. “Run, go to the kitchen sink, hurry up, and try to stay on the plastic runner. My mother just had this overpriced carpet installed. Shit!”
Shern ran back to the kitchen with Bliss and Victoria at her heels. She spit and gagged into the sink, and her sisters patted her back, and Victoria was crying, “I want Mommie.” Then they all three were crying and moaning, “Mommie, Mommie,” and hugging one another in a circle.
Ramona stood in the kitchen doorway, just watching them. For the thousandth time that day she wished Mae were here, and she never wished for Mae to be here. Most of her wishing had to do with Mae not being here, sometimes even wishing Mae dead. But at least Mae would know how to respond to this kind of outpouring. Ramona didn’t. She only knew what to do or say with the fosters when they misstepped, when she had to threaten to kick ass. She couldn’t even playact a response to girls crying because they missed their mother.
“Wash your hands good, and rinse your mouth out with warm water,” she called into their circle. “I’ll look through your many bags and find you a top to change into. Your room is the one in the back, the three of you sharing the one room, of course.”
They quieted down and now were just whimpering.
“After you clean yourself up,” Ramona went on, “you and your sisters might want to put your coats and hats back on and go outside, there a few kids your ages live on the block, or you might want to just go for a walk, see what the neighborhood’s like. Fresh air might do you all some good.”
That was it, the best Ramona could do in the here and now. She went to the shed kitchen to get the mop and bucket so she could clean up Shern’s grief trailing from the living room into the kitchen. She pulled on her rubber gloves and walked back through the kitchen, where the girls were sniffing and making the air in the kitchen heavy with their sighs. She hurried through the kitchen back into the living room. She sighed now too and knelt to start cleaning the plastic runner. At least this part she understood.
3
They didn’t hold Til long. She begged the pardon of the sheriff. Told him what she’d been through that morning seeing her niece’s bedroom bloodied like that. The threats to the case manager were idle, she said. Just a temporary fit of madness caused by her trauma. She’d just wanted to watch over her niece’s babies, is all.
So the sheriff let her go, told her a sitting judge would have to hear her plea to overturn the case manager’s decision. She should get a lawyer, he said, and she should make sure she adhered to the restraining order and not try to make contact with the children because that order had been signed by a judge and a judge would never reverse a case manager’s call in favor of someone who violated one of his rulings. Not that Til could try to see them. She had no idea where they’d been placed. Right now she thanked God that she at least knew where Clarise was; at least she and Ness and Blue and Show had the powerful motivator of rushing to the bedside of the niece they had raised to force them to pull themselves together.
Clarise knew it was the aunts and uncles even before they turned the corner into her room. She could smell the honey and coconut soap that Til and Ness made by hand and sold mail order four times a year. She wanted to be able to smile, to blow them